A little over one week ago Argentine Foreign Minister Hector Timerman took a shot at US security policy in the region, criticizing the Buenos Aires municipal government for sending a group of Argentine police officers to a training course at the US-run International Law Enforcement Academy in El Salvador. Timerman suggested the ILEA to be a low-rent School of the Americas. His question: why did Argentine security officials need “anti-terrorism” training? “In the past, [the US] was dedicated to training the military in coup techniques and courses in torture and persecution of political enemies,” he argued. “It seems to me that these are limits that we shouldn't cross.”
The comments were interpreted – and correctly I would argue – as part of early domestic politicking – a foreign minister going after his boss’s possible opponent in next year’s presidential race, Buenos Aires mayor, Mauricio Macri. But if Timermans’s words were only tangentially about the US and its role regional security, a new and quite strange imbroglio this week has the makings of a more significant “bump” in US-Argentine relations.
As the New York Times reports, last Thursday a US Air Force C-17 cargo plane landed at Argentina’s Ezeiza international airport. The plane’s arrival was not unexpected. An American military team had been invited to participate in a training course with Argentina’s federal police. What had not been invited, according to Argentine officials, were some plane’s contents: what customs officials described as machine guns, spy equipment, and drugs including morphine (Página 12 has a photo of the Argentine custom’s report).
Argentine Foreign Minister, Hector Timerman, says he will file an official protest calling for a joint investigation into why the US Air Force attempted to violate Argentine law by sending “material camouflaged inside an official shipment from the United States.” State Dept. spokeswoman Virginia Stabb, has responded calling the actions of Argentine officials “puzzling and disturbing.” According to DOS, the military trainers on-board, as well as the equipment, had been “fully coordinated with and approved by” Argentina’s government before its arrival last Thursday. The department’s spokeswoman added that searching the aircraft’s cargo was both “unusual and unannounced.”
DOS’s description of the cargo also differs significantly from that of Argentina. On-board was a rifle, a first-aid kit, ready to eat meals, a secure communications device similar to a GPS, encrypted communications equipment, tables and personnel foot lockers that contained helmets. A State Dept. official tells the AP that some extra gun barrels brought to replace barrels that overheat during live-fire exercises; the individual contents of each first-aid kit; and some satellite phones were the only items that did not make it on to the plane’s manifest.
The initial result of the scandal is a cancelled police training course. For their part, the trainers who arrived in Buenos Aires were allowed to fly home, along with their C-17 aircraft. The items in question, however, remain in Argentine possession for now.
Further reporting and commentary on the matter from La Nación, as well as journalist and CELS president Horacio Verbitsky (here and here), at Página 12. The latter calls the spat the most serious diplomatic row with the US since 2004 when a group of 250 US marines came ashore in Buenos Aires without proper Argentine authorization. The former, meanwhile, has a quote from Foreign Minister Timerman which suggests that, at least from Argentina’s perspective, the case is the latest demand for equality among sovereign nations by a South American country. Timerman: “Just as Argentina complies with the laws of the US, the US should comply with ours.”
From South to North:
· In Mexico, the AP reports on the assassination of a top police commander in the border state of Nuevo Leon. Bullet-ridden and charred, the body of Homero Salcido, the director of the state’s intelligence and security center, was found in his still smoldering car in downtown Monterrey late Sunday. The Wall Street Journal calls the murder “a major blow to the federal and state governments' efforts to re-establish control over Monterrey” – a city in which the Zetas have become particularly active of late. The C-5 intelligence center which Salcido ran has been called the “the eyes and ears” of security authorities in Nuevo Leon. Meanwhile, further north in Tamaulipas, an on-going turf war between the Zetas and the Gulf cartel is believed to have been responsible for the death of at least 18 in the town of Padilla. The AP describes the carnage:
“Seven bodies were dumped in Padilla's main square on Monday, a further five people were shot to death inside their car, and another person was killed in an attack on a passenger bus. Five other inhabitants of the town were also killed.”
In the New York Times, Damien Cave with an interesting comparative report on two sides of the Rio Grande – Juarez and El Paso – and their differing realities. The leader of the EZLN-Zapatistas, Subcomandante Marcos, has made his public comments about Calderon’s militarization drug wars that I can remember. In an essay sent to philosopher Luis Villoro, Marcos says Calderon’s war on organized crime was doomed to fail because it was “conceived, not as a solution to a problem of security, but to a problem of legitimacy, and it is destroying the last redoubt left to a nation: the social fabric.” Three more essays from the Zapatista leader are expected to be released shortly. And also commenting critically on Calderon’s prosecution of the drug wars is Brookings Kevin Casas-Zamora, in Costa Rica’s La Nación. To pull out one quote from a useful piece:
“The incapacity of the Mexican government to reduce in a sustainable way the levels of violence in any part of the country over the last four years does not look like the inevitable price of success in the struggle against organized crime but rather the symptom of a strategy in urgent need of a profound revision.”
· Mexican author Carlos Fuentes speaks about one such possible revision – that of drug legalization – In an interview with Colombia’s El Tiempo. Fuentes, with Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Ernesto Zedillo, Cesar Gaviria, and others, recently joined the “Global Commission on Drug Policy” to advocate for legalization.
· More reports from the Financial Times, the UK’s Telegraph, and BBC Mundo about a Chinese proposal to build an Atlantic-Pacific railroad through Colombia – a so-called “dry canal” that would challenge the primacy of the Panama Canal. According to BBC Mundo and FT, the Chinese (and apparently Indian) interest in the project stems from a burning desire for Colombian coal (no pun intended). FT:
“Colombia is the world’s fifth biggest producer. It has high quality coal in easily-worked surface mines close to the Caribbean end of the proposed route. Coal can be carried in bulk in automated trains – a lot cheaper than loading and unloading containers (it can also be carried long distances on conveyor belts). China and India both need vast quantities of thermal coal for power stations, and coking coal for their steel industries. Colombia has both – and would offer a chance to reduce dependence on traditional suppliers such as Mozambique.”
· Another FT piece looks at the soaring popularity of Juan Manuel Santos. With Lula no longer in office, the paper suggests another Latin American leader may be the “world’s most popular president.” Santos’s approval ratings currently hover around 90%.
· In neighboring Ecuador, the Wall Street Journal and New York Times today on an Ecuadorian court decision Monday, forcing oil giant Chevron to pay $8.6 billion to clean up oil pollution in the Ecuadorian rain forest. The decision appears to be one of the largest ever in an environmental clean-up case – and closes one chapter on a two-decade long case. Interestingly, the Journal adds that if the U.S. oil giant doesn't also publicly apologize to Ecuador in the next 15 days, the judge ordered the company to pay twice that amount. However, the paper adds that “the victory could be short-lived.” WSJ: “Last week a panel of international arbitrators in The Hague granted Chevron a preliminary injunction that could block the plaintiffs' efforts to enforce the judgment.” Months or perhaps years of appeals could should be expected, the Times says.
· EFE says Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom has proposed that the Mexican government grant temporary visas to Central American migrants upon entry into Mexico so as to lessen the power of organized criminal groups active in migrant trafficking. The proposal is the latest in on-going migration cooperation talks between Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Mexico. The case of Ecuador, however, may show some of the difficulties with the Guatemalan proposal. The Ecuadorian constitution, as IPS reports this week, outlines a notion of “universal citizenship” -- meaning that “everyone in a country should enjoy the same rights as citizens -- the free movement of all people on the planet, and the gradual elimination of the status of alien or foreigner.” Easier said than done, according to IPS.
· Tim Rogers for TIME on the little discussed economic prosperity of Nicaragua – the reason why TIME says Daniel Ortega can be expected to continue in power for some time:
“Nicaragua is suddenly the fastest-growing economy among the five traditional countries of Central America. It's leading the region with double-digit investment and export growth and setting national records for tourism revenue. Last year's inflation rate, 7%, was Central America's highest — but a miniscule fraction of the 33,000% Ortega presided over in 1988. COSEP, Nicaragua's main business chamber, says government-private sector relations are better than ever. And so is Ortega's approval rating, about 45%.”
· Interesting economic news from Brazil as EFE reports on new economic numbers from Sao Paulo’s Federation of Industries (FIESP). According to the group, Brazil’s imports totaled 21.8% of national consumption in 2010 – a record high for Brazilian – and a number which is raising new worries about Brazilian “de-industrialization.”
· The New York Times reports on the arrest of 30 police officers working with drug traffickers in Rio.
· Boz with a round-up of new poll numbers from Mexico, Venezuela, Peru, and Argentina.
· BBC Mundo on a divided labor movement in Venezuela.
· Mary Anastasia O’Grady praises the (dystopian?) idea of “free market” cities being pushed in Honduras, with the help of NYU economist Paul Romer. Belén Fernandez with a critique.
· The Miami Herald’s Cuba Colada blog says freshman congressman Marco Rubio (R-FL) has introduced his first piece of major legislation: an amendment to a Federal Aviation Administration bill that would “prevent the expansion of commerce through direct flights with state sponsors of terrorism.” Little surprise that Cuba is the target of the Rubio bill, (co-sponsored with Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ)). Reporters Without Borders moves the other way, suggesting that the most recent prisoner releases, along with the unblocking of 40 dissident blogs, may signal a new era in Cuba.
· And finally, Greg Weeks on why Chile of 1990 is not Egypt of 2011. This after the Washington Post reported Monday that the White House is “focusing on revolutions against U.S.-backed dictatorships, including the 1986 popular revolt against Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, the Chilean transition from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet to democracy in 1990, and the 1998 uprising in Indonesia that drove out President Suharto” to understand what might occur next in Egypt.
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