“Mexicans knew they shot US agents,” is the headline this morning at the New York Times regarding Tuesday’s roadside attack on two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in San Luis Potosí. Alonzo Pena, ICE’s representative in Mexico until 2009, tells the Times that law enforcement officials have told him the two US agents, Jaime Zapata and Victor Avila, were taking equipment to another team of agents in Mexico’s north when “they encountered the gunmen.” According to Pena, when the men rolled down a window to identify themselves, they were shot.
Veteran journalist Alfredo Corchado confirms much of that story in a long report for the Dallas Morning News, quoting Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), who called the Wednesday attack an “an intentional act” and confirmed what Narco News was the first to report on yesterday: that the dark SUV in which the men traveled did, in fact, have diplomatic plates. McCaul goes further contending the men were “run off the road” by their assailants before being attacked. “This tragic event is a game changer,” says the Texas representative – an event that “should be a long overdue wake-up call for the Obama administration that there is a war on our nation’s doorstep.”
While the Times and others say ICE has not yet made a public statement on the attack, Corchado says McCaul’s remarks came after he was briefed by ICE.
The Washington Post adds comments made by San Luis Potosí governor, Fernando Torzano, who late Wednesday told reports that the two ICE agents were “attacked by the same criminal organizations responsible for the unprecedented violence in his state” (the Post’s paraphrasing). Torzano was hesitant, however, to identify who such organizations were, although Alfredo Corchado says the US law enforcement community is pointing an initial finger at the Zetas – the notorious drug gang whose power has grown in Mexico and beyond in recent years.
The Post also offers a different account of what the men were doing in San Luis Potosí. Yesterdays reports said the agents were traveling between Monterrey and Mexico City – some maintaining from the latter, to the former and others vice versa. Today, something quite different from the Post which says the two agents were “returning from meetings with their U.S. counterparts in San Luis Potosi, where the Mexican federal police academy is located and where U.S. trainers teach.”
What everyone seems to agree on is the still unclear motivation for the attacks. Were the men killed because they were US agents? Or were they killed despite the fact they were US agents? As Corchado notes, it has become commonplace for drug traffickers to hijack SUVs and pickup trucks at checkpoints along Mexican highways, “particularly those leading to the U.S.-Mexico border.”
As for a possible US response to the incident, the LA Times says preliminary indications are that the Wednesday shootings will “not fundamentally alter” what the paper describes as “the US-Mexico alliance.” Again, the DMN spoke with Rep. Henry Cuellar of Laredo, Texas, the top Democrat on a Homeland Security subcommittee on border security on this issue. Cuellar says a “military response” is “not an option,” despite demands for such a move in some Republican quarters. Also to be considered here are reductions in the Obama administration’s 2012 budget request for police and military assistance to Mexico through the State Dept., announced this week and about which Just the Facts has more today. Specifically, Just the Facts notes that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's pledge of $500 million in aid during a recent visit to Mexico now appears not to have referred to any new aid for the country, but rather was a reference to old, still undelivered Mérida Initiative aid.
This said, a more worrisome (but as usual, speculative) prospect may emerge: a scenario in which Wednesday’s roadside attacks – or other future attacks on a growing US presence in Mexico, military or otherwise – triggers new calls for some form of US assistance to Mexico, to which a less than transparent Pentagon budgeting process is the only one capable of responding.
Other stories:
· In Guatemala, there are concerns this week that a state of siege in the department of Alta Verapaz may be extended to the Peten. Prensa Libre reports that Rudel Alvarez, governor of the Peten, has requested the government of Alvaro Colom do just that to fight organized crime in the region. As Mike at Central American Politics notes, the request comes after a judge, Eddy Caceres Rodriguez, was killed by “unidentified assailants” in the Peten Department – a province which covers nearly 1/3 of the country’s national territory. It also follows the Washington Post’s reporting last week which suggested the Alta Verapaz siege could be extended to other parts of the country to combat organized crime, specifically the Zetas.
· At the south end of what some have called a new “security corridor,” sits Colombia. Following the release of new State Dept. foreign assistance numbers for 2012, El Tiempo reports on the significant decline in US aid to Colombia, from $465.5 million in 2011 to $400 million in the new 2012 request (a drop of 15%). The paper says the request marks the fourth consecutive year that such funding has been reduced. What does not change, according to El Tiempo: intelligence collaboration between the US and Colombia, as well as, in the paper’s words “a continued US commitment to the objectives of Plan Colombia.” WOLA’s Adam Isacson with more in an opinion in El Espectador, arguing that continued reductions in military aid to Colombia mark the “end of the Plan Colombia era.” The other side of this story, as Honduras’s El Heraldo is the latest to report, is Colombia’s transformation into a regional security trainer, rather than trainee.
· Also in Colombia, news that the two FARC hostages whose releases were delayed over the weekend were finally freed Wednesday. In EFE’s words, the releases in Colombia’s southwest, “bring to a close a humanitarian mission coordinated by the International Red Cross and in which former Sen. Piedad Cordoba participated.” The Brazilians again coordinated transportation by helicopter.
· And the Wall Street Journal reports this morning on on-going trucker protests in Colombia which brought out anti-riot police to the country on Wednesday. For three days, truckers on strike have been setting up roadblocks on one of the main arteries into the capital, Bogotá. The paper again calls the protests the “toughest confrontational challenge yet for the six-month-old administration of President Juan Manuel Santos.”
· In Venezuela, the AP reports on a major cocaine bust carried out by French and Venezuelan authorities. Some 3.6 tons of cocaine were seized aboard a ship in the Caribbean, says the wire service, which highlights the growing counter-narcotics cooperation between Venezuela and France.
· In Colombia, In Sight Crime on the seizure of the country’s first true “narco sub” earlier in the week.
· The LA Times suggests trade between Venezuela and Colombia has not yet fully recovered since a rapprochement between the two countries began midway through 2010.
· Mercopress looks at Brazil’s plans to cut its overall defense budget by approx. $2.4 billion (a 26.5% cut) in 2012 while at the same time going ahead with plans to modernize its armed forces with the purchase of over 30 new fighter jets.
· In Rio de Janeiro, Martha Rocha is set to become the state’s first female police chief after a series of corruption scandals took down five others in five years. More from the New York Times.
· Also, Mercopress reports on what is being called Dilma Rousseff’s first major legislative “victory”: the successful passage of a proposal to limit minimum wage increases in Brazil’s lower house. Brazil’s Senate is expected to adopt the proposal next week.
· The Committee to Project Journalists looks at freedom of the press in the Americas in 2010, with a focus on censorship. The AP reports.
· In the Miami Herald, more on the Luis Posada Carriles trial and its current delays -- about which I mistakenly combined two separate issues in yesterday’s brief mention of the matter. As reported today, one of the defense’s claims – that the US government delayed delivery of important documents in the case – is being vigorously rejected by the prosecution. Posada’s attorney, Arturo Hernandez, has requested a mistrial because of those alleged “delays.” A separate issue also being raised by the defense is that the prosecution “failed to advise the jury” that a key Cuban government witness against Posada, state security Lt. Col. Roberto Hernandez Caballero, was also a counterintelligence agent in Havana. According to the Herald, federal prosecutors maintain the defense is “raising issues that have no direct bearing on the current case, which centers on whether Posada lied about his alleged role in the bombings and how he sneaked into the United States.” The US District Judge presiding over the case in El Paso has put the trial on hold until next Tuesday to consider the mistrial motion.
· Finally, the Inter-American Dialogue’s Michael Shifter from earlier in the week, in El Tiempo, on why he is optimistic about Latin America’s future. His claim: a regional shift toward the political “center” has led to an embrace of “pragmatic” policy making in much of Latin America.
No comments:
Post a Comment