In a piece over the holiday break, AFP noted murders rose in both number and viciousness across Latin America in 2010. The primary perpetrators, according to the report: narcotraffickers and gangs who have made insecurity the “principal worry” in the region. Benjamin Cuéllar, director of the Human Rights Institute at the Universidad Centroamericana in El Salvador tells AFP that the region has become one in which both “slow and violent death” has been “transnationalized.” Over the last decade, he says, Latin America has registered homicide rates which are no less than double the figures seen on any other continent.
In the US, there’s little doubt that Mexico’s violence – often an indiscriminate corollary of the drug wars – has received the most significant coverage over the last year. And for good reason. 2010 was Mexico’s bloodiest since Felipe Calderon called in the military to combat drug cartels in 2006. According to official statistics, as many as 15,000 were murdered in 2010 (over 30,000 since 2006) – heinous deaths and the effects torture often captured on video and distributed on the internet. According to AFP’s Sofia Miselem, the late Nazario Moreno, the now former leader of the messianic drug gang La Familia Michoacana, had ritualized death by writing a “bible” for his followers that detailed how to decapitate and burn the bodies of victims while suggesting mangled body parts be left in public places. Following the killing of Moreno and a November letter purporting some in the group were even willing to disband completely, the AP this week reports that La Familia has declared a one-month halt to its violent operations. Mexican President Felipe Calderon took that news – and the beginning of a new year – to announce that his government’s security strategy has yielded “historic results.” So much successful has the administration been, the Government Secretariat, Defense Secretariat, Navy Secretariat, Public Safety Secretariat and Attorney General’s Office said in a joint statement released Sunday, that its strategy deserves to be expanded “with the participation of the state governments and municipalities.”
On Monday, the AP reports, the severed head of a young man – somewhere between 25 and 30 years old, investigators estimate – was found hanging from a bridge in Tijuana, a city which has been heralded by the Mexican government as illustrative of its “success.” A threatening message nearby suggested more violence could be expected.
Writing in the New York Times from Mexico City, Alma Guillermoprieto’s focus is Tamaulipas where the Zetas are believed to have murdered 72 migrants, most from Central America, last August. “Equipped with an alarming array of smuggled weapons and financed by illegal drug sales,” she says the Zetas are now a “nationwide organization.” The groups remains the primary suspects in the disappearance of another group of Central American migrants shortly before Christmas in Oaxaca. But given years of movement into Central America – only now drawing attention through a state of siege in Northern Guatemala – the Zetas “local franchises” now seem to extend well-beyond Mexico’s national borders.
In 2010, Violence also loomed large south of the Mesoamerican corridor. As Boz notes, Venezuela (with Honduras) – not Mexico – competed for the title of the region’s (if not the world’s) most violent country. According to the Observatorio de la Violence (OVV), Venezuela, with a ¼ the total population of Mexico, registered nearly 17,600 homicides in 2010. The significant difference, according to the OVV’s Roberto Briceno León: the “generalized nature” of violence in his country. “In other places, violence is linked to organized crime,” he says. In Venezuela it’s not the FARC or La Familia or the Comando Primero in Sao Paulo. Rather it’s “everyday, disorganized crime.”
If Latin America’s violence was once particular because of its “planned, deliberate” nature, as author Tina Rosenberg once suggested, violence Venezuela may represent something quite new.
To be sure, “planned” violence continues. The murder of journalists, for example, has become the quintessential example of “politically motivated” murder. In 2010, according to EFE, at least 35 journalists were killed around Latin America, making it the most dangerous region in the world to be practicing the profession. Mexico, with 14 journalist murders, led regional statistics. It was followed by Honduras with nine journalist killings, but before the year ended, a tenth was killed as 2010 came to a close. Many of those killings can be linked to a more “traditional” definition of politics, namely the 2009 coup. According to Human Rights Watch, if journalists, human rights defenders, and political activists are combined, the number of post coup, “politically motivated” murders jumps to 18 [19 if the murder of late December murder of La Ceiba journalist Henry Suazo is included].
As a point of comparison, there were nine journalists killed in Iraq in 2009.
Returning to Mexico:
· An alarming report from El Diario (with an English recap at All Voices) which seems to reveal a great deal more about the expanded role of the DEA in intelligence operations across the region. According to El Diario, DEA agents are working undercover in Juarez as “fortune tellers, peddlers, and city bus drivers,” conducting wiretaps, and sending intelligence gathered back to the US by way of Mexico City. The story comes from an anonymous source who claims to be one of many undercover spies planted in Juarez by the DEA. That source tells the paper that at least two agents have been murdered so far. The credibility of the source and his information, says El Diario, has been confirmed by agents and former agents from the DEA in El Paso and New Mexico. From the All Voices recap, which quotes from El Diario:
“Everything he [the informant says] is plausible, but what is amazing is that it’s very dangerous to be saying those things.”
· At the New York Review of Books blog, Lilia Schwarcz comments on violence in Brazil, particular its depiction in the media as unique to Rio’s favelas. According to Schwarcz, the problem may be much more pervasive; the struggle against it a longer, grimmer one than is usually discussed:
“[T]he prevailing black-and-white logic—according to which the drug trade is exclusive to favela life and doesn’t have implications for the police, politicians, or the population as a whole—is nonsense. It is now clear that drug-trafficking has been as omnipresent among certain corrupt police squads as it has in the favelas.”
· From TIME, John Otis on how land reform – and the extension of property rights to displaced Colombian farmers – may be one part of a broader resolution to the country’s on-going violence. Speaking to TIME, Colombian agriculture minister Juan Camilo Restrepo says the Santos government is now convinced that “if there's no rational and just solution to the land problem in Colombia we will never achieve a lasting peace.” To empower small farmers, Otis writes, “President Juan Manuel Santos launched a fast-track program in which government workers travel to isolated towns to hand out land titles.”
· The usual beginning of the year calls for finishing free trade agreements with Colombia and Panama from former White House National Drug Policy Office spokesman Robert Weiner, in the Miami Herald and the Inter-American Dialogue’s Michael Shifter, in El Colombiano.
· State Dept. spokesman PJ Crowley suggested Monday that ambassadorial nominee Larry Palmer would not be re-nominated to fill a vacancy in the US embassy in Caracas. The back and forth with reporters below, and more from the Latin American Herald Tribune:
QUESTION: Are you going to think in another possibility, I mean, that the – no Ambassador Palmer, but another possibility, another ambassador, another designee?
MR. CROWLEY: I mean, that – these are issues that we will be evaluating with the new year. I believe that Larry Palmer’s nomination formally expired with the end of the last Congress, so among the issues that we’ll be evaluating is what to do in light of that and the step that Venezuela unfortunately took.
QUESTION: So his status is that he’s no longer the nominee?
MR. CROWLEY: We will have to re-nominate an ambassador candidate.
· A new survey from Fundacion Progresa in Santiago de Chile, reveals the failures of anti-drug campaigns targeting young people in Chile. The full results of the survey – conducted at 19 universities around Chile – can be found here. The head of the recently formed left-of-center Partido Progresista, Marco Enríquez-Ominami, appears to have joined Fundación Progresa for the survey’s release. More from Eduardo Vergara Bolbarán, director of Fundación Progresa, in Chile’s La Tercera.
· Chile, along with Paraguay, will be the next two Latin American countries to offer diplomatic recognition to Palestine, says Haaretz. The two countries join Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia in making recent announcements on the matter. Ecuador and Venezuela preceded those countries. More from IPS on this most recent South American regional diplomatic effort.
· A series of opinions on the on-going electoral uncertainties in Haiti. In the Miami Herald, Nicole Philips of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, along with Nicolas Alberto Pascal, call on the Haitian government to replace the Provisional Electoral Council and hold new, open, and fair elections. At the end of December, the New York Times said an agreement between the Preval government and the OAS which would allow the OAS to re-examine Nov. 28 results provided the possibility of an exit to the crisis. Meanwhile, a series of Haiti dispatches in the new issue of Mother Jones, from journalist Mac McClelland.
· Finally, Lanny Davis, (in)famous amongst Latin Americanists for his representation of the Honduran coup regime in 2009, is back in the news as 2011 begins. In late December, Davis gave a priceless interview to Salon.com about his most recent client, the unsavory regime of Laurent Gbagbo in the Ivory Coast. Last Thursday, the New York Times Ginger Thompson followed that up with a report that the “front man for the dark side” (the Times words) had withdrawn from his $100,000-a-month contract with the Ivory Coast last Wednesday. And now Narco News brings us back to Honduras after getting its hands on a Nov. 2010 letter and memo from Lanny Davis to Honduran President Pepe Lobo and Honduran ambassador Jorge Ramón Hernández Alcerro, spelling out the terms of his new gig working for the Honduran embassy. His objectives, according to the memo, are two-fold: continued lobbying of the Obama administration and Congress on the Honduran government’s behalf and mounting a “communications strategy” targeting “US and global media” to get a “more positive narrative about Honduras” into “multiple media outlets.”
No comments:
Post a Comment