Former Leaders Call for Paradigm Shift in Global Drug Policy

A group of former world leaders says current global anti-drug policies have “clearly failed” in their objective to curtail both supply and consumption of illegal drugs. In a 24-page report, available here and set to be officially unveiled later today in New York, the Global Commission on Drug Policy recommends new steps be taken toward the legalization of certain drugs while also demanding an end to the “criminalization, marginalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs but do no harm to others.”

In addition, the commission calls on governments around the world to be more willing to experiment with alternative drug policies and legislation.

The BBC notes that the report is particularly critical of the US, saying the country must abandon anti-crime approaches to drug policy and adopt strategies rooted in health treatment and human rights.

“We hope this country (the US) at least starts to think there are alternatives,” says Cesar Gaviria, adding that the report’s authors do not believe US polices have been evolving in a way that is “compatible with our (countries’) long-term interests.” Gaviria says countries like Mexico and Colombia have an important role to play in pushing for such a discussion to begin in the US.

Responding to the report, the office of US drug czar Gil Kerlikowske rejected those claims, as well as many of the commission’s recommendations about legalization. “Making drugs more available - as this report suggests - will make it harder to keep our communities healthy and safe,” the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy said in statement released Wednesday.

Among the 19-person commission are former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, Brazil's ex-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria. The group also includes former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, current Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, Latin American writers Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa, the EU's former foreign policy chief Javier Solana, and former US secretary of state George Schultz.

The Global Commission has been co-funded by Richard Branson of Virgin Group Ltd., George Soros's Open Society Foundation, the Instituto Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and the Centro Edelstein de Pesquisas Sociais in Brazil. It’s a continuation of the Latin American Commission on Drugs and published its report on drug policy in Latin America in 2009.

The Guardian notes that the release of the Global Commission’s report is accompanied in the UK today by an open letter from a variety of legal experts, academics, artists, performers, and politicians to PM David Cameron, urging Britain to undertake a “swift and transparent” review of its current drugs policies. The signatories call for new drug decriminalization policies similar to those implemented in Portugal in 2001. The letter comes on the 40th anniversary of Britain’s 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act.

Today’s bullet points:

· In a 32-1 vote in Washington, the OAS voted to restore Honduras to the inter-American organization Wednesday. The Miami Herald reports. Ecuador was the only country to vote against restoration at the present moment. With far-right opinions about Zelaya’s return over the weekend – a move which opened the door to Wednesday’s vote -- Roger Noriega and José Cardenas obsess over Hugo Chavez at Fox News and Foreign Policy, respectively. At Upside Down World, meanwhile, Chuck Kaufman of the Alliance for Global Justice writes on last week’s congressional briefing organized by the Americas Forum and entitled “How 21st Century Socialism Subverts Democracy in Latin America” – perhaps a sign of things to come, in Honduras or elsewhere, from the Latin Americanist Right.

· The Nation, in partnership with Haiti Liberté, has begun releasing stories from the Haiti archive of diplomatic cables obtained by Wikileaks. Dan Coughlin and Kim Ives report yesterday on the ultimately unsuccessful efforts of Washington and US petroleum companies to prevent then-President Rene Preval from joining Venezuela’s regional discount oil initiative, PetroCaribe. The full story is worth reading at The Nation.

· In Peru where the influence of Hugo Chavez has been much-written about in recent months, Jo-Marie Burt and Coletta Youngers profile left-leaning nationalist candidate, Ollanta Humala (See their profile of Keiko Fujimori here). The two authors highlight the coalition of intellectuals and former political figures who have lined up behind Humala, many out of fear over the possible return of fujimorismo. Last week former president Alejandro Toledo was the latest to come out publicly for Humala. Many figures in the country’s human rights community have made similar pronouncements. Perhaps the most unlikely Humala supporter has, of course, been Nobel Prize winning author Mario Vargas Llosa, who announced this week he will no longer allow Peru's El Comercio to reprint his biweekly column, calling the conservative paper “a propaganda machine” for Keiko Fujimori. El Comercio responds here. AFP, meanwhile, reports on a decision by indigenous activists in Peru’s Puno region to halt anti-mining protests against a Canadian silver company until after Sunday’s vote. The region, says the news agency, is considered to be a Humala stronghold.

· Lula da Silva is on a regional tour this week. After visits to Nicaragua, Panama, and the Bahamas, the former Brazilian president is meeting with Raul Castro today in Cuba before going on to Caracas. For his part, Hugo Chavez re-appeared in public Tuesday after being down for weeks with a bum knee. The Venezuelan president said he will be heading to Brasilia for his first official meeting with Dilma Rousseff on June 6 before going on to Ecuador and Cuba.

· The New York Times says final approval has been granted by Brazil’s top environmental agency for the construction of the huge Belo Monte hydroelectric dam. The Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (IACHR) has been among the dam’s critics. In mid-April Brazil withdrew the candidacy of the former Human Rights Minister Paulo Vannuchi for a seat on the IACHR because of the inter-American body’s request that the project be halted.

· CNN says a Spanish Court has approved the extradition of former Guatemalan interior minister Carlos Vielmann back to Guatemala to face murder charges stemming from incidents at two prisons in the country in 2005 and 2006. Vielmann will likely appeal the extradition ruling.

· Reuters with a long report on what drug wars in Monterrey could presage for the rest of Mexico.

· AP on the arrest of a top FARC commander, Guillermo Torres, alias "Julian Conrado," by Venezuelan authorities this week.

· Insight on the discovery of some 200 FARC “uniforms” in the possession of on-duty members of the Ecuadorean military. Three soldiers have been arrested.

· The Guardian says a Chilean judge will examine claims that agents of Augusto Pinochet injected poison into Neruda's stomach while he was treated in Santiago's Santa Maria clinic for prostate cancer less than two weeks after the Sept 11, 1973 coup against Salvador Allende. Chile's Communist Party called for the investigation after the poet's former driver said agents of the dictator injected the 69-year-old on the day he died.

· El Faro on Salvadoran Mauricio Funes’s proposal to implement a system of obligatory military service for “at risk” youth in his country.

· Colombia’s El Tiempo on the final approval of the Ley de Victimas. The bill now heads to the president’s desk for signing.

· Human Rights Watch’s Daniel Wilkinson pens an essay in the New York Review of Books reviewing Claudia Lopez’s new edited collection “And They Refounded the Nation” about parapolitics under Alvaro Uribe.

· And finally three human rights press releases: HRW condemns the imprisonment of six Cuban dissidents convicted in recent weeks for distributing pamphlets criticizing Raúl and Fidel Castro in Havana’s Revolutionary Square. Amnesty International calls on the Venezuelan government to investigate the murder of a seventh member of a single family killed over the weekend in Aragua. Aragua police officers are suspected to have been involved in each of the killings, says Amnesty. And the Committee to Protect Journalists condemns a grenade attack late Sunday on the offices of the Mexican newspaper Vanguardia in the Coahuila city of Saltillo.

Over 500 Migrants Discovered in Southern Mexico

Mexican authorities in the state of Chiapas discovered 513 migrants from Central and South America, as well as Asia, crammed inside two trailers traveling north on Tuesday. The AP says the trucks were headed for the Mexican city of Puebla when an X-ray scanner at a highway checkpoint near Tuxla Gutierrez revealed the truck’s contents. In Puebla, some migrants say they were told they would be transferred to another set of vehicles for the final leg of the journey to the US border.

The individuals say they were charged approx. $7000 for the journey. BBC says four individuals have been arrested for running the smuggling operation. A police spokesman says the number of individuals recovered from the trucks was the “largest ever” to be discovered by Mexican authorities. Al-Jazeera’s Frank Contreras also reports, by video, from Mexico City.

Meanwhile, in a separate case in Chiapas, two more migration agents from Mexico’s National Immigration Institute (INM) were detained Tuesday for their alleged role in prostituting young female migrants from Central America. According to AP, those detained include the ex-assistant director of a migrant holding facility and a former assistant head of immigration services in a Mexican town near the border with Guatemala. Both will face human trafficking charges, along with charges of “corrupting minors.”

Today’s bullet points:

· The Wall Street Journal reports this morning on what is, for now, the final day of a 48-hour state of siege in the Peten region of northern Guatemala. The decree was issued by President Alvaro Colom after Sunday’s gruesome massacre of 27 laborers at a remote Peten ranch. In the Guatemalan press, El Periódico reports on the arrest of Hugo Gomez Vasquez, a man Guatemalan prosecutors allege is linked to the kidnapping and murder of three relatives of Otto Salguero, the owner of the Los Cocos ranch and the apparent target of this weekend’s brutal attack. According to the paper, officials suspect a link between the killings of those three individuals and the murder of day laborers employed by Salguero – perhaps related to some sort of unpaid debt owed by Salguero to the Zetas. El Periodicio and Prensa Libre highlight what may end up being the most significant element of the story: possible links between the Zetas in Guatemala (specifically the Zetas “Z-200 cell” cell which has operated in Guatemala) and former Guatemalan military men, including ex-members of the elite “Kaibiles” special forces. El Periodico says Hugo Francisco Chávez Méndez, an ex- sergeant in the Guatemalan military was also among those detained in recent days. For his part, President Alvaro Colom spokoe this week of evidence that “a lot of migration of ex-officials from the 1980s” joined groups like the ‘Zetas’” after the 1996 Peace Accords. Prensa Libre says Mexican authorities made similar claims about Zeta-Kaibiles connections in 2005. More from Mexico’s Proceso.

· In other Guatemala-related news, US Trade Representative Ron Kirk has asked an international commission to investigate the country’s failure to enforce labor rights protections under the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). The investigation would be the first labor case brought by the US against a free trade partner, according to Bloomberg. In an email Monday, USTR Kirk said, “While Guatemala has taken some positive steps over the past several months, its actions and proposals have been insufficient to address what we view as systemic failures.” The AFL-CIO labor federation and six Guatemalan unions first asked the U.S. to investigate the Guatemalan government’s failure to enforce labor laws in April 2008. It only took the US three years to respond – a fact that doesn’t bode well for labor groups in Colombia where an FTA could be completed this summer and where similar concerns about labor rights have continue to exist.

· The Obama administration also announced Tuesday that it will extend temporary protected status by one and a half years to Haitian immigrants in the US after last year’s quake. The extension will allow Haitians who arrived in the US as late as Jan. 12, 2011, and have lived here continuously, to apply for TPS. AP reports.

· AP also reports that Sweden and the U.S. will provide $2.6 million in aid to Haiti, specifically aimed at preventing sexual assaults in the country’s numerous camps for the internally displaced. The monies will be administered by the International Organization for Migration.

· Prosecutors in Ecuador say they will pursue an investigation against President Rafael Correa over alleged evidence pulled from the Raul Reyes laptops and published last week by a British think tank, suggesting the Ecuadorean president accepted campaign funds from the FARC in 2006. Both Correa and his foreign minister Ricardo Patino, have strongly denied those charges. The former has said he is willing to take a lie-detector test to prove his innocence. BBC reports.

· In Venezuela, new economic numbers released this week show the country’s national economy expanding by 4.5% over the first quarter of 2011—more confirmation that the country has, in fact, pulled itself out of an economic recession. According to central bank figures, the public sector grew 3.3 percent while the private sector grew at a rate of 4.6 percent over the quarter. AP and Bloomberg report. For its part, the Washington Post this morning reports from Brazil on what it describes as Venezuela’s “waning” regional influence, both economically and politically. As evidence Post correspondent Juan Forero highlights a still-stalled joint oil refinery project that was to be built by Venezuela and Brazil in the latter’s historically impoverished Northeast.

· A group of Latin Americanist right-wingers, among them Roger Noriega and former US Florida Republican congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart, gathered this week to discuss Peru’s upcoming elections and denounce the “international conspiracy” in favor of the left-leaning candidate Ollanta Humala. A former assistant secretary of state under George W. Bush, Noriega says that of the two Peruvian candidates, it’s only Humala who is “trying to hide his past and his dangerous ideas” and it’s only Humala’s political career which is “due to the ‘caudillo’ Hugo Chavez.” La República has an entertaining photo from a 2000 conga line which suggests Noriega’s candidate, Keiko Fujimori, has also gotten close to the Venezuelan president in the past. Meanwhile, Peruvian writer and pundit Alvaro Vargas Llosa joined his father, novelist Mario Vargas Lllosa, this week, announcing that he is backing Humala’s candidacy. Humala needs all the help he can get right now as Fujimori’s lead has grown to six points according to most recent poll numbers.

· Mexican anti-drug war poet Javier Sicilia is this week’s interviewee on TeleSur. In Mexico, meanwhile, Sicilia received a somewhat strange endorsement from the Beltran Leyva gang, which unfurled a banner in Cuernavaca saying the poet can “count on their support.” Insight and Proceso report in English and Spanish.

· Former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe is interviewed this week by FP’s Elizabeth Dickinson about Plan Colombia, Twitter, and his decision to remain active in politics.

· Former congressman David Bonior (D-MI) speaks with WOLA on significant changes in Cuba after recently returning from the island. President Obama, on other hand, said this week he has not yet seen any “significant changes” in Cuba.

· Plaza Pública has a long report on the Alfonso Portillo embezzlement case in Guatemala. Portillo and a number of other former high ranking officials were acquitted last week, but the former president still faces possible extradition to the US in a separate money laundering case.

· And Colombia has quickly appointed a new ambassador to Caracas. Ricardo Montenegro, former business attaché at the Embassy, will take over for Jose Fernando Bautista who resigned at the beginning of the week because of his ties to a Bogotá construction company currently being investigated for offering bribes to Colombian politicians. Colombia Reports with more.

Colom Declares State of Siege in Peten

As details emerge, various reports this morning finger the Zetas as responsible for the late Saturday/early Sunday massacre of over two dozen rural laborers on a ranch in the Guatemalan province of Petén. In a nationally broadcast address Monday Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom suggested a drug cartel was behind the killings and said a state of siege would be declared in the province to root out the perpetrators.

According to AP, the president said he’d even personally travel to the Petén to “direct operations."

Meanwhile, the details of the gruesome killings were retold to journalists, including AP, on Monday by an individual who appears to have survived the massacre by pretending to have been killed. Another pregnant woman present at the ranch was also spared by what most now say were 30-50 assailants who arrived at the ranch by truck late Saturday. AP says the intended target of the attacks was the ranch’s owner, Otto Salguero. His whereabouts is currently unknown.

Mike Allison at Central American Politics has a good rundown of what is known about the massacre at the present moment, based on a variety of press reports. He notes that while the assassins did not identify themselves to their victims, there are some indications that the group's leader called himself “Kaibil,” the name of Guatemala’s notorious special forces unit during the country’s dirty wars of the 1980s.

Insight Crime also raises some interesting questions about who the Zetas in Guatemala actually are. El Periodico, on the other hand, looks at who the innocent victims killed Sunday were.

Today’s bullet points:

· Guatemala’s Plaza Pública reports on a new far right wing candidate in Guatemala’s election campaign, industrial magnate Ricardo Sagastume Morales, aligned with the Frente de Convergencia Nacional (FCN) of retired general José Luis Quilo Ayuso. The report suggests one of the Frente’s principal gripes has been the work of the UN-backed anti-impunity commission, the CICIG.

· In neighboring El Salvador, El Faro published yesterday its most significant investigative report to-date on organized crime in that country– an epic report on the so-called “Texis Cartel” operating in Salvador’s northwest and controlled by 62-year-old businessman José Adán Salazar Umaña, aka “Chepe Diablo.” El Faro’s report is based a series of intelligence reports obtained by the independent news site. The reports go back over a decade and give first-time details of perhaps the most important cocaine smuggling routes through El Salvador, connecting Honduras with Guatemala, and implicating numerous government officials and security officials.

· In Peru, Reuters with more on the addition of former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani to Keiko Fujimori’s list of informal advisers – an attempt, according to some, to distance herself from her father’s highly controversial security policies. A new issue of Revista Ideele also has a number of articles on the upcoming Peruvian second-round vote which look like they are worth reading, among them Jo-Marie Burt on the legacy of “Fujimorismo” and Gustavo Gorriti on Fujimori vs. Humala.

· AP reports that a new MINUSTAH chief in Haiti was named Monday. Replacing outgoing MINUSTAH chief Edmond Mulet will be former Chilean foreign minister Mariano Fernandez, UN Sec. General Ban Ki Moon announced yesterday.

· Colombia’s El Tiempo reports on the resignation of that country’s ambassador to Venezuela, José Fernando Bautista, because of apparent connections to the Nule group, currently being investigated in a major corruption scandal. More from Semana and Colombia Reports.

· BBC Mundo reports on the creation of a new presidential commission on gun control in Venezuela – an attempt to reduce the number of weapons in circulation in the country. According to BBC, the commission will be include officials from the Defense Ministry, the Interior Ministry, the Justice Ministry, the Supreme Court, the National Assembly, the Ministerio Público, the country’s customs administration, as well as civil society representatives from NGOs working on human rights and arms control issues.

· WOLA highlights an attack on labor rights lawyer Hernán Darío in the Colombian city of Cali late last week. Darío is currently the lead lawyer in a case defending sugarcane workers who participated in a strike in 2008 from criminal charges. As a US FTA with Colombia moves toward possible approval in the coming weeks, WOLA says the shooting “underscores the continuing and serious labor rights problems in Colombia” and “calls into question whether there has been real progress on the labor rights situation” in the country

· AP mentions the first reports of independent transportation workers in Cuba beginning to unionize as part of the country’s economic reform process.

· IPS reports on Amnesty International’s country report on Brazil, released as part of its annual report last week, and highlighting the serious problems of inequality which have persisted, despite important taken to reduce poverty.

· And on Honduras, the DC-based Center for Democracy in the Americas has released a new report on the need for a new social pact in Honduras to overcome serious problems of social exclusion in the Central American country. The report comes after CDA participated as an observer to the recent National Assembly of the Honduran Resistance (FNRP).

Massacre in El Peten

Officials now say at least 29 individuals were killed on a coconut ranch in the Northern Guatemalan province of Peten, their bound, decapitated, and tortured bodies discovered early Sunday. AP calls the mass killings “one of the worst massacres” since the country’s nearly four-decade long civil war came to an end in 1996. Similar comments from police spokesman Donald Gonzalez who referred to the murders Sunday as the “worst massacre we have seen in modern times.”

The LA Times says the killings were carried out by a “small army” of some 200 gunmen who, according to witnesses, arrived at the ranch on buses but have otherwise been unidentified.

The victims all appear to have been laborers on the Peten ranch where they were found. Police are investigating whether or not the mass killings are connected to the Saturday death of Haroldo Leon, the brother of late Guatemalan drug boss Juan Jose “Juancho” Leon, himself killed in 2008. The Zetas, have long been suspected of being involved in the latter’s murder, which is said to have allowed the Mexican drug gang to gain control over transshipment routes in neighboring Alta Verapaz.

Officials found one wounded survivor of the massacre – an individual who says he evaded murder by pretending to have been killed. No details have yet been released about what specifically that individual is said to have witnessed.

More Spanish-language coverage from Guatemala’s El Periódico, highlighting the suspected relationship between Sunday’s massacre and the recent killing of Heraldo León.

This weekend’s bullet points:

· In Port-au-Prince Saturday, former pop singer Michel Martelly was sworn in as Haiti’s next president. AP reports while the Miami Herald looks at the various challenges the new president faces. The outgoing head of Minustah, Edmond Mulet says Martelly inherits a “failed state,” adding that in the coming days Martelly is likely to discover that “the state institutions, ministries, government agencies that should implement the vision and plans of the new government cannot deliver.” On Sunday, those close to the new president said the first major personnel announcement would be nominating businessman Daniel-Gerard Rouzier as the country’s next prime minister. Haiti’s parliament must approve the nomination. The prime minister will also serve (with UN special envoy Bill Clinton) as co-chair of Haiti's Interim Recovery Commission.

· Mexican immigration officials said Sunday they are prepared to subject migration agents to psychological, drug, and lie detector tests as part of a new effort to combat corruption in the country’s National Immigration Institute (INM). At a press conference Sunday, National Immigration Institute Commissioner Salvador Beltran del Rio said 40 agents are currently being investigated for a variety of abuses – this after the dismissal of seven regional immigration directors late last week. AP reports.

· The number of bodies at a mass grave site in the northern Mexico state of Durango jumped again over the weekend to 218, making it the largest such grave to have been discovered thus far in the country, according to AP.

· In the Mexican state of Oaxaca, AP says violence “motivated by an electoral dispute between indigenous communities” has left at least eight dead. The incident occurred near the town of Santiago Choapan.

· The New York Times profiles Mexican poet and anti-drug war organizer Javier Sicilia. According to the Times, Sicilia has “achieved what others have failed to do” in provoking “serial public responses from the Calderón administration” about the government’s prosecution of the drug wars. Calderón met with Sicilia privately one week ago, the Times reports. According to Sicilia, the Mexican president admitted in the meeting that he had “made a mistake” while adding “I can’t go back now.” Meanwhile, CNN reports that Sicilia and others are now in the process of planning a follow-up demonstration to last week’s anti-drug war march from Cuernavaca to DF. The demonstration is set for June 10 in Ciudad Juarez. The plans come as the Calderon government announced Thursday it would be sending hundreds of new troops to the border state of Tamaulipas in the coming days.

· Major protests against a planned hydroelectric dam in Southern Chile brought some 30,000 demonstrators to the streets of the Chilean capital of Santiago over the weekend. BBC Mundo reports that as many as 70 individuals were arrested during the demonstrations. A new poll shows that nearly ¾ of Chileans oppose the dam project.

· AP reports that a new effort to declassify US intelligence documents related to Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship has failed in the US House. An amendment re-proposed by New York Democratic congressman Maurice Hinchey, calling for the U.S. intelligence agencies to declassify all of their files on Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship, was rejected in a 214-194 vote Friday. A similar bill proposed by Hinchey in 1999 aided in the release of similar intelligence files on the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, the wire reports.

· In Uruguay, the left-leaning Frente Amplio coalition decided during a party plenary Saturday that it would go ahead with a contentious parliamentary vote later this week about whether or not to annul the country’s 1986 amnesty law. The so-called “Ley de Caducidad” continues to protect human rights violators from prosecution for abuses committed during the country’s 1973-1985 dictatorship. Notably, the decision to hold the vote was opposed by the country’s President, José Mujica, vice president Danilo Astori, and former FA president Tabaré Vázquez, all of whom fear the issue could cause irreparable divisions in the coalition. Uruguay’s two opposition parties have long opposed annulling the law. Mercopress reports in English; Uruguay’s El País in Spanish.

· Amnesty International released its 2011 annual report last week. The Americas section can be linked to here.

· In Ecuador, it looks increasingly like all ten of the referendum questions voted on last week and supported by President Rafael Correa will be approved. Current vote tallies available here as vote totaling continues.

· Two new polls from Ipsos and CPI in Peru show Keiko Fujimori continuing to extend her slim lead over Ollanta Humala before a June 5 runoff. The former has Fujimori obtaining 51.1% against Humala’s 48.9% while the latter poll shows Fujimori at 52.9% compared to Humala’s 47.1%. AP also reports on the most recent addition to Ms. Fujimori’s campaign team: former NYC mayor and one-time Republican presidential contender, Rudy Giuliani. The wire says Fujimori announced over the weekend that Giuliani was advising the campaign on citizen security issues and would be coming to Peru briefly sometime over the next few days.

· Finally, the New York Times front-page report Sunday on Blackwater founder Erik Prince’s new mercenary army in the United Arab Emirates has Latin American implications. According to the Times, an unspecified number of Colombians are among the 800 or so mercenaries who have been trained by retired American soldiers and veterans of the German and British special operations units and the French Foreign Legion employed by Prince’s new company, “Reflex Responses,” or “R2.” More on the Colombia-specifics from Colombia Reports. For other articles in recent years on itinerant guns-for-hire from Colombia, see the AP and CNN on Colombian mercenaries appearing in post-coup Honduras, as well as US-trained Colombian military and police officials working for Blackwater in Iraq, as reported by the LA Times and Mother Jones in 2005 and 2008, respectively.

Mexico Dismisses Top Immigration Officials

Just days after a group of recently rescued Central American migrants identified six Mexican immigration officers as the perpetrators of their kidnappings and their eventual hand-off to criminal gangs in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas, Mexico’s National Immigration Institute (INM) announced Thursday it has fired seven top migration officials. The individuals include the director of migration operations in the state of Tamaulipas as well as individuals holding similar posts in six other Mexican states – Mexico state, Oaxaca, Quintana Roo, San Luis Potosi, Tabasco, and Veracruz.

The six lower-level agents fingered by the group of abductees rescued in Tamaulipas were also arrested earlier in the week.

In the state of Oaxaca, where many of the 40+ Central American migrants abducted last December remain missing, Alejandro Solalinde, a Catholic priest who runs a migrant shelter in there and helped organize last week’s anti-drug march from Cuernavaca to Mexico City, said Thursday’s dismissals were little more than a “Band-Aid” over more systemic problems. In an interview with Milenio Television yesterday (quoted in the AP’s coverage), Farther Solalinde said immigrant agents must be subject not only to dismissal but also criminal investigations.

A statement from Mexico’s Interior Ministry said the firings of state migration directors this week was just the beginning of a major immigration overhaul that would also include the removal of those migration agents believed to be involved in corruption. It looks like such decisions, however, will only be made after new state directors are appointed.

According to AP, at least 168 of the immigration institute's 5,000 employees have been fired or suspended since September for alleged abuse and corruption. At least 11,333 foreign migrants were reported kidnapped between April and September in 2010, most of them Central Americans, according to a recent report by Mexico's National Commission of Human Rights. More coverage of the Thursday announcement from the LA Times.

Today’s bullet points:

· After a number of reports from the IMF over the last two years praised Latin American governments for steps taken to prevent the Southern spread of an economic crisis, the Fund this week says the region could be on the brink a “full-blown crisis” if governments do not cut public spending and take measure to ensure monetary stability. At a conference of central bankers in Brazil, the IMF’s director for the Western Hemisphere, Nicolas Eyzaguirre, had particularly sharp words for Brazil, saying the government must act to “rein in the economy” or else its economic success “could end in tears.” Reuters calls the former Chilean finance minister’s words “some of the strongest warnings to date by a senior official of the near-term dangers posed by Latin America's recent run of prosperity.”

· In other economic news, Dow Jones reports on the World Trade Organization’s decision to accept a Brazilian proposal to begin a two-year study on the relationship between trade and currency valuation. According to Roberto Azevedo, Brazil's representative at the WTO, the decision is an historic one, as it’s apparently the first time the WTO has ever agreed to discuss the relationship between currency and trade. Brazil has blamed indirect and direct currency manipulation in both the US and China for the appreciation of the Brazilian real.

· Nation contributor Dave Zirin has a very critical up at The Nation’s website on Rio de Janeiro’s construction push ahead of the Olympic Games and World Cup. Meanwhile, ESPN publishes a long story on concerns over gangs and violence in the run-up to both international sporting events.

· Honduran President Pepe Lobo says he will order the Interior Ministry to investigate any potential assassination plots against former president Mel Zelaya. Just one day after an aide to Zelaya said the exiled former president was preparing to return home this month, Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro suggested her husband remained worried about his personal safety, should he return. The former president of Honduran Supreme Court, Jorge Rivera Avilés, called claims of an assassination plot “speculation.” In the Guardian, meanwhile, Viviana Krsticevic, executive director of the Center for Justice and Law has an opinion on Honduras worth reading today. Krsticevic criticizes the very judiciary Jorge Rivera Avilés once headed, arguing that Honduras’s readmission to the OAS should not occur until “an autonomous, unbiased and efficient judicial system” is installed which can “ensure that officials who took part in the coup are replaced” and “rule of law” restored.

· After being acquitted of embezzling $15 million in defense funds earlier this week, former Guatemalan president Alfonso Portillo has begun to fight his pending extradition to the US on a separate set of money laundering charges. AFP with coverage.

· In Chile, some 20,000 students and teachers marched Thursday in the capital of Santiago, demanding increased state funds and resources for public education. Similar protests were held in other major cities around the country. Nearly 70 individuals were arrested during the protests, some of the largest student demonstrations since President Sebastian Pinera took office. La Tercera reports.

· In Cuba, both a Cuban medical examiner and the family of Juan Wilfredo Soto say the late dissident showed no signs of physical beating after he was detained on May 5. Soto, who suffered from other health problems, including diabetes and heart issues, died shortly after his detention last week in the central city of Santa Clara. Dissidents continue to claim his death was the result of an excessive use of force by Cuban security officers, despite the statements from medical officials and Soto’s family. AP reports.

· Uruguay’s La República and El País report on alternatives being weighed by Frente Amplio lawmakers this week re: the country’s 1986 amnesty law, the Ley de Caducidad. After the Uruguayan Senate voted to overturn the law one month ago, the parliament’s lower chamber must decide next week whether it too will make a similar decision. The decision has divided the Broad Front ruling coalition, a number of whose members say voting to overturn the law would go against the will of voters. Uruguayans rejected annulling the law for a second time in a national plebiscite in 2009.

· The Miami Herald reports on this weekend’s inauguration of new Haitian President Michel Martelly while AP reports on the silence of Jean-Bertrand Aristide since his return back to Haiti in March.

· David Cole at The Nation on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives’ decision to give its first annual Human Rights Activism award to Baltasar Garzón, the Spanish judge who famously sought to hold Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet accountable for human rights abuses in Chile but has since come under serious fire for opening an investigation into human rights crimes committed by the Franco dictatorship in his native Spain. Garzón also speaks with Democracy Now.

· And finally, both Americas Quarterly and NACLA have new issues out, both looking at hemispheric power, Brazil. Among the highlights in the former, some “Reflections on Brazil’s Global Rise,” by former Brazilian foreign minister Celso Amorim and a roundtable on “The New Brazil in the Changing Hemisphere.” In the latter, commentary by and an interview with eminent Brazilian sociologist and CLACSO executive secretary, Emir Sader about current President Dilma Rousseff and the foreign policy of Lula da Silva.

Makled Extradited to Venezuela with "Guarantees"

Colombian authorities handed over Walid Makled (aka “el Turk”) to Venezuela early Monday morning, ending months of speculation about whether the accused drug kingpin would be sent to the US or back to his native Venezuela. The reasons for the extradition to Venezuela are many, among them the fact that Makled faces murder charges there, in addition to charges of money laundering and drug trafficking. In the US, he would have only been charged with cocaine trafficking. The case has also been central to a thaw in Colombia-Venezuela relations since Juan Manuel Santos took office last August.

As has been widely reported in recent months (the AP today being the most recent), much of the significance of the Makled case has come from the suspected trafficker’s claim that he colluded with and bribed dozens of officials in the Venezuelan military. (The Venezuelan officials Makled has accused unsurprisingly deny those allegations). As the Wall Street Journal discusses this morning, critics of Monday’s extradition contend Makled’s claims will be little-pursued by Venezuela’s judiciary. They also say the Venezuelan government will try to prevent Makled from speaking out publicly during his trial.

On those matters, it seems we’ll simply have to wait and see. What is known so far is that the Colombian government held off on Makled’s extradition until it received a diplomatic guarantee from Venezuela saying proceedings against Makled would respect basic human rights standards, most notably his right to a fair trial. According to statements made Monday by Venezuela’s deputy minister of Citizen Security, Néstor Reverol, Makled will be granted “due process” and “will also have the opportunity to be heard.”

While unrelated to the Makled case specifically, Monday’s extradition comes as another set of uncomfortable allegations reappear around the Chavez government. The International Institute for Strategic Studies in London is set to release a 240-page book on the FARC today, entitled “The FARC Files: Venezuela, Ecuador, and the Secret Archive of Raul Reyes.” The book is based on the files retrieved from the computer of the late FARC commander, killed by the Colombian military in a controversial cross-border airstrike into Ecuadorean territory in 2008. While many of the documents in the book (and accompanying CD) have already been cited, there is some history here that Venezuelan officials are probably uninterested in rehashing. This morning the New York Times has the first news coverage to come out of the new book and searchable CD, highlighting what it describes as an often “cooperative” but also “rocky and at times duplicitous” relationship between certain elements of the Venezuelan government and the FARC going back as early as the year 2000.

The revelations come just weeks after the Venezuelan government detained Joaquín Pérez, a man whom Colombian officials allege to be a close ally of the FARC living in exile in Sweden. Perez has since been deported to Colombia at the request of President Juan Manuel Santos.

Today’s bullet points:

· Continuing in Venezuela, a meeting between President Hugo Chavez and his Brazilian counterpart Dilma Rousseff was been cancelled Monday, almost as quickly as it was scheduled. Just one day after media reports about the trip were released – outlining an itinerary that was to take Chavez to Brasilia, Quito, and Havana – the Venezuelan president said he’d be forced to postpone, citing an all-too-bizarre “wounded knee.” While Chavez and Rousseff met at the latter’s January inauguration, the two leaders have yet to hold official bilateral talks as was the quarterly custom during Lula da Silva’s tenure. By my count this is the third meeting between Chavez and Rousseff that has been cancelled in the last four months. The most recent cancellation came in late March when Rousseff postponed so that she could join Lula in Portugal.

· In Ecuador, on-going vote tallying shows much tighter than expected balloting during Saturday’s 10-question referendum. According to Reuters: “with 40 percent of ballots counted by Monday afternoon, the range of ‘Yes’ votes for the 10 questions was 44 to 49 percent compared with 41 to 44 percent for ‘No’.” Analysts do note that Correa’s margin of victory will likely grow as votes in certain rural areas where Correa’s support is strong have yet to be counted. Up-to-date vote totals from Ecuador’s electoral council can be found here.

· A day after the culmination of a four-day anti-drug war march from Cuernavaca to Mexico City, President Felipe Calderon says he would be willing to meet with organizers of the protest movement. However, the president indicated once again that he has no plans to change his current military-backed strategy against Mexican cartels nor did he address one of Sunday’s principal demands: that public security secretary Genaro Garcia Luna be replaced. New poll numbers released this week show Calderon maintaining an approval rating over 50% (54% to be precise). On questions re: the drug wars, fifty percent of Mexicans say the president’s efforts in combating drug trafficking have been “good” or “very good,” up from 46% in November 2010. Reporting from the LA Times and CS Monitor.

· Meanwhile, at the US-Mexico border, a gun battle on Falcon Lake between Mexican marines and suspected Zetas traffickers left 13 individuals dead Monday. The violent encounter occurred after marines discovered a drug camp on an island in the border lake. In late September of last year U.S. citizen David Hartley is believed to have been gunned down on the lake. His body was never recovered. AP reports.

· A group of Central American migrants freed over the last month by Mexican authorities say immigration agents are responsible for pulling them off a bus in Tamaulipas and handing them over to criminal groups. According to reports the kidnapped individuals picked out the immigration officials from photos provided to them by federal investigators this week. AP reports. On a similar note in Juarez, controversial security chief Julian Leyzoala said this week that he believes ¼ of the city’s police are colluding with criminal organizations.

· The New York Times and Wall Street Journal both look at recent efforts of Mexican regulators to break up billionaire Carlos Slim’s Latin American telecom empire. Last month Mexico’s antitrust agency fined Slim’s wireless phone company, Telcel, $1 billion while the Mexican congress also recently approved new antimonopoly legislation that, according to the Times, “raises fines for monopolistic practices and permits prison terms for executives who have been found to engage in them.” Last week, Mexico’s Supreme Court continued the assault, closing a legal loophole that Slim had used to prevent lower tariffs.

· Colombia’s El Tiempo speaks with former Colombian foreign minister Maria Emma Mejía as she officially takes over as Secretary General of UNASUR this week.

· Competing claims from the Cuban government and Cuban rights groups regarding the weekend death of dissident Juan Wilfredo Soto in the city of Santa Clara.

· The Miami Herald with a fascinating look at how Baby Doc has settled back into a quite normal life in Haiti.

· BBC and the Wall Street Journal last week report on new regional foreign investment numbers released by the Economic Commission for Latin America last week. The new numbers show foreign investment growing by 40% in 2010, with China leading the pack, particularly in Brazil where 90% of the country’s foreign investment goes toward extractive industries.

· And finally, El Faro’s Carlos Dada sits down on the apparently quite damp front lawn of Julian Assange’s Ellingham Hall residence in the UK for an exclusive interview with the Wikileaks founder. El Faro will become the latest local media outlet to begin publishing US diplomatic cables obtained by the whistleblower website next week.

Mexico Lawmakers Debate Controversial Internal Security Measures

Note to Readers: I’ll be off from tomorrow April 29 through the end of next week. There may or may not be some intermittent posting from others during that time. I'll see you back on Monday May 9. JFS

AP reports this morning that the Mexican Senate has approved a constitutional reform measure that would both allow federal legislators to seek re-election and allow candidates at any level to pursue public office without the backing of a political party. The reforms passed in a 95-8 vote Wednesday (with eight abstentions), and now goes to Mexico’s lower house for consideration. If approver there it will continue on to Mexico’s 31 state legislatures where it must be approved by simple majority (16) before finally arriving on President Felipe Calderon’s desk.

According to supporters, the measure will increase accountability – the idea being that if one must face re-election he/she will somehow feel more beholden to the will of the voters.

Meanwhile, a second and perhaps even more controversial measure is currently being debated in Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies. The Latin America News Dispatch reports that the lower house has less than one week to decide whether or not it will alter the country’s National Security Law, granting the Mexico’s president the power to deploy Mexico’s Armed Forces against a new list of broadly defined “internal threats.” The Senate has already approved the measure, but the Mexican Left remains strongly opposed to the measure – originally submitted by President Felipe Calderon back in April 2009 – saying it would allow the military to conduct surveillance of private citizens in order to gather intelligence and increase the military’s role in security operations. Moreover, PT deputy Jaime Cardenas argues there are no stipulations in the current 83 page initiative about whether or not military abuses would be tried in civilian or military courts. “Here we are creating a fourth power,” Cardenas said. “Technically, this decree constitutes a coup.” More from CIP’s Americas Program.

Mexico analyst John Ackerman seems to concur with that assessment. In a damning opinion in Proceso (and reprinted elsewhere), Ackerman says the measure “seeks to open the door to creation of a military government” in Mexico. “Instead of listening to the popular demand of ‘No blood,’ starting to remove the Armed Forces from the streets and establish transparency and monitoring through civil courts, Felipe Calderon is determined to normalize and broaden the new role of the military in the directly controlling the country.” Most dangerous of all, Ackerman contends, is an article in the bill which would allow the military to be used against any “action related movements or conflicts of a political, electoral, or social nature” when those movements constitute a “challenge” or “threat” to the security of the country, as defined by the president.

The debate over the measure comes just days before what could be the largest mass mobilization ever against Calderon’s prosecution of the drug wars. Narco News has more on those demonstrations which will begin May 5 in Cuernavaca and end May 8 in Mexico City’s zocalo. Among the broad front of organizers leading those efforts are poet and journalist Javier Sicilia, the ex-president of the Mexico City Human Rights Commission Emilio Álvarez Icaza, priest and immigrant rights defender Alejandro Solalinde, president of Causa Común María Elena Morera, Chihuahua Mormon Julián LeBarón, and ex-president of Mexico United Against Crime Eduardo Gallo.

Today’s bullet points:

· In Mexico’s northern state of Durango, AP says the number of corpses found at two mass grave sites soared yesterday to 104. In the Tamaulipas city of San Fernando the number of bodies recovered stands at 183, meaning that this month alone the bodies of at least 287 individuals have been found in what are now considered to be the two largest mass grave sites found in Mexico to date.

· Also in Mexico this week was Honduran President Porfirio Lobo. Lobo met privately with a group of Mexican businessmen whom he is courting to invest Honduras. Among those involved in the meeting were the head of America Movil, Daniel Hagg; Carlos Peralta, of Grupo IUSA; Alonso Quintana of ICA and the director of the state-run Federal Electricity Commission, Antonio Vivanco, says EFE. Next week Lobo will host the “Honduran Is Open for Business” forum – an attempt to attract new foreign investment and will include the participation of, among other individuals, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim.

· In Costa Rica, former President and ex-Secretary General of the OAS Miguel Angel Rodriguez was sentenced to five years in prison Wednesday after being found guilty of corruption. According to AP, Rodriguez and other former government officials took bribes in exchange for giving the Latin American branch of the French telecom company Alcatel a $149 million cell phone contract with the Costa Rican Electricity Institute. Seven other individuals from Rodriguez’s government have been charged in the case as well and were sentenced to between five and 20 years in prison. An appeals process is expected to begin shortly.

· In neighboring Panama, AP looks at a constitutional reform push by President Ricardo Martinelli which officially under way this week. Martinelli appointed a commission of legal experts tasked with drafting a set of reforms early in the week. Martinelli says the objective is to make Panama’s constitution “an example in Latin America.” His political opposition, among them the Frente Nacional por los Derechos Económicos y Sociales, seems to disagree.

· In Venezuela’s El Universal, an interesting interview with Sara Carolina Diaz, Secretary General of the opposition PPT who says the MUD must broaden its social base beyond political parties and reject any shades of Venezuela’s old “puntofijismo” if it wants to defeat President Hugo Chavez in 2012 elections. Meanwhile, the CS Monitor has a critique of the minimum wage hikes announced by President Chavez last week, contending the 26.5% raise will not keep up with inflation, which is expected to be between 28% and 30% in 2011. It’s also interesting to note, as the CSM does, that Chavez has raised the minimum wage ahead of May Day every year since 1999. On the other major economic policy announcement made last week – the new taxes on oil producers in Venezuela – Setty has excellent analysis (here and here) on why the new “special contributions” were implemented and who will be affected by them (as well as who won’t).

· Regional election news: In Peru, BBC Mundo says Alejandro Toledo and his Peru Posible party will not be publicly endorsing either Ollanta Humala or Keiko Fujimori. The news would seem to be the biggest blow to Humala, who has been actively courting the former president and his supporters. More than not endorsing, Peru Posible says any member of its party who engages in active campaigning for either candidate will be “penalized with expulsion” from the party. In Guatemala, El Periódico publishes new poll numbers from Borge y Asociado showing Otto Perez Molina still in front of Sandra Torres, 34% to 21%. And in the DR, AQ says first lady Margarita Cedeno will not be making a run for president in 2012 to replace her husband Leonel Fernandez.

· In Haiti, TIME’s Tim Padgett on this week’s allegations of legislative vote fraud. In the Miami Herald, CSIS’s Johanna Mendelson Forman on why Michel Martelly should not resurrect and remobilize the Haitian military. Rather, she suggests, a “territorial civil defense force,” capable of acting as both a police force and national guard, be created, modeled, perhaps, after Costa Rica’s national police.

· The Guardian, earlier in the week, featured former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet in her new post at UN Women.

· And in Miami, the death of notorious anti-Castro militant Orlando Bosch yesterday. As the Miami Herald reports, Bosch – along with the recently acquitted Luis Posada Carriles – was the most identifiable face of the violent, anti-Castro counter-revolution in South Florida. He was 84.