Front page of Washington post.....

It´s been a big week at our office..


Leahy Blocks Positive Report on Mexico's Rights Record
Skepticism About Conclusions Delays U.S. Anti-Drug Aid
By William Booth and Steve Fainaru
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 5, 2009

MEXICO CITY, Aug. 4 -- A key senator rejected a State Department plan to issue a report this week affirming that Mexico is respecting human rights in its war against drug traffickers, delaying the release of millions of dollars in U.S. anti-narcotics assistance, according to U.S. officials and congressional sources.

The State Department intended to send the favorable report on Mexico's human rights record to Congress in advance of President Obama's visit to Guadalajara for a summit of North American leaders this weekend, U.S. officials familiar with the report said.

That plan was scrapped after aides to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations foreign operations subcommittee, told State Department officials that the findings contradicted reports of human rights violations in Mexico, including torture and forced disappearances, in connection with the drug war.

At stake is more than $100 million in U.S. aid under the Merida Initiative, a three-year, $1.4 billion counternarcotics package begun by President George W. Bush in 2007. The law requires Congress to withhold 15 percent of most of the funds until the secretary of state reports that Mexico has made progress on human rights.

"Those requirements have not been met, so it is premature to send the report to Congress," Leahy said in a statement. "We had good faith discussions with Mexican and U.S. officials in reaching these requirements in the law, and I hope we can continue in that spirit."

Soaring Violence
The State Department's failure to push through the report is a setback for the U.S. and Mexican governments at a time when drug violence in Mexico continues to soar and President Felipe Calderón has come under growing pressure to revise his U.S.-backed anti-narcotics strategy, which relies heavily on the military to fight the cartels.

State Department officials said they are considering whether to rewrite the report before submitting it to Congress, probably after it reconvenes Sept. 7.

Mexico is likely to lose some of the money if it is not released by Sept. 30, U.S. officials said. U.S. aid under the Merida Initiative is used to buy helicopters and surveillance aircraft, train police, and improve intelligence-gathering in the fight against the drug cartels.

But congressional aides and human rights experts expressed doubt that the State Department would be able to make a compelling case that Mexico has made sufficient progress.

"In the area of prosecuting human rights abuses and ending the impunity, I don't believe we have seen any real progress," said Maureen Meyer, who oversees Mexico for the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group that opposes release of the funds. "There is no sign that people are being held accountable. Every major human rights group has opposed releasing the money."

Push for Transparency
Mexican officials acknowledge that human rights violations have occurred in the fight against traffickers but say the cases are isolated.

The Mexican government is sensitive to U.S. criticism about rights violations because the military is a respected institution -- and many Mexican leaders say the U.S. government has not done enough to reduce consumption of illegal drugs in the United States or stem the flow of weapons and cash heading south.

In recent weeks, frustrated U.S. officials have pressed the Mexican government, including Defense Secretary Guillermo Galván Galván, to provide additional information, according to three officials involved in the campaign.

Late last week, after the report was completed, Mexican officials disclosed details of a number of cases in which they said soldiers had been tried on charges of human rights violations, according to a U.S. official. He said the State Department is trying to verify whether the soldiers were prosecuted and has not decided whether to include the new information.

"We are looking for the Mexicans to be as transparent as possible," said a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions. "We are pushing them to be more transparent than they think they can be. What happens when complaints are lodged? What do they do with them? What processes do they go through? What happens to individuals accused of abuses?"

A spokesman for the Mexican military said it would be unable to comment. Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico's ambassador to Washington, said Tuesday: "Mexico is unequivocally committed to ensuring the protection of human rights in the fight against drug-trafficking organizations." He added, "We are confident that this will be recognized by Congress."

140 Complaints a Month
Since Calderón launched his war against the cartels after taking office in December 2006, human rights complaints against the military have soared 600 percent, rising to 140 a month this year, according to government statistics. The National Human Rights Commission has issued reports on 26 cases involving the military since the beginning of Calderón's term, and it found evidence of torture in 17 of the cases.

In April, Human Rights Watch issued a report highlighting 17 cases, including several from 2007 and 2008, involving what it said were military abuses of more than 70 victims. The alleged abuses include killings, torture, rapes and arbitrary detentions. According to that report, "not one of the military investigations into these crimes has led to a conviction for even a single soldier on human rights violations."

On July 9, The Washington Post reported that the Mexican army had carried out numerous acts of torture, forced disappearances and illegal raids in pursuit of traffickers, according to court documents, political leaders and human rights monitors in Mexico's most conflicted regions.

With the State Department report imminent, many prominent human rights organizations in the United States and Mexico released advance statements saying that Mexico had failed to meet the Merida Initiative requirements and urging the U.S. government to withhold the money.

"Why is this so important? Because Mexico cannot win this fight against drug cartels without human rights protections. Human rights provisions are not a headache. They are absolutely critical to the success of the whole initiative," said José Miguel Vivanco, director of the Americas program at Human Rights Watch.

Carlos Cepeda, of the Miguel Agustín Pro Juarez Human Rights Center, said: "Mexico is not fulfilling the human rights requirements of the initiative and the government does not seem close to fulfilling them, and so of course it is a bad idea to release the funds. It would be a green light for further human rights abuses and for continued impunity for the military."

A Case Not Yet Made
Under Merida, the State Department is required to report to Congress on Mexico's progress in four areas: improving transparency and accountability; establishing regular consultations with civil institutions; ensuring that civilian and judicial authorities are prosecuting police and military officers credibly accused of violations; and prohibiting the use of testimony obtained through torture.

The most controversial of the provisions is determining whether the Mexican government is prosecuting human rights offenders. To date, the military has handled all allegations of crimes under its own justice system. U.S. officials and Mexican and international human rights groups say the Mexican military is secretive and hostile to scrutiny by outsiders.

Last month, amid growing allegations of abuses, Gen. Jaime Antonio López Portillo, head of the military's human rights office, held a news conference and announced that the military had prosecuted seven human rights cases dating to 1996, in which 12 members of the armed forces were found guilty of crimes, including homicide and kidnapping.

Only one of the completed cases appeared to date from the Calderón term. An additional 14 cases involving 53 troops were working their way through the military's judicial process, according to López Portillo.

The State Department had still intended to argue for the release of the Merida funds this week, U.S. officials said. But officials with the department's bureau of Western Hemisphere affairs got a chilly reception from Leahy's foreign policy expert, Tim Rieser, at a meeting last week. According to people familiar with the meeting, Rieser told officials that they had not made the case on any of the four areas required under Merida.

After receiving the additional information from Mexico, State Department officials went back to Rieser over the weekend to find out whether Leahy would support the report. He said he would not.

Next week Mexico's Supreme Court will address whether it is unconstitutional to try cases of human rights violations in military courts. The legal challenge, brought by the Miguel Agustín center, involves four civilians who were shot dead in Sinaloa state last year, allegedly by Mexican soldiers. Mexico's attorney general declined to take the case, and the military investigated the deaths instead.

"¡Vacilón! ¡Vuelta! ¡Díle que no! ¡Peínala!"

After searching and trying different options, I have finally found the perfect salsa class. This may sound like a small thing but it really means a lot to me. I had been to some here and there, but I had became picky: one place taught Los Angeles style, which I don´t like (too showy, not enough feeling to it), another place was really basic in its level, or another place was just too incovenient. All great fun of course, but I began to get lazy, and before I knew it I hadn´t been to classes for many months, and that annoyed me. Well besides parties, which are the best learning experiences anyway.



Now I have finally found one which fits my level and above all, it is really Cuban salsa. The teacher is fantastic, and I am delighted at all the Cuban idiosynctratic names to their steps. A classic cross body turn is called "Díle que no!" or "tell him no!, because the girl has to kind of stop in her tracks like she is refusing the man, and then she retakes the floor once again to spin. Or, another favourite of the teacher is to call out the steps, and tell us to do a turn, and then he cries suddenly "MENTIRA", (lie!), which means you have to quickly stop your turn, clap twice, and then pivot back to your spot. If, like Simon Says, you dont do that and continue with your turn, the teacher makes fun of you and says "LIAR!" Of course he loves saying this to the girls. He says "ah women, of course, what do I expect". Its funny.
Last night in class we were doing a new step and I made a stuff-up and said to my partner "woops, sorry, that was me." The teacher jumped on my comment and said "No, it wasn´t your mistake, it is NEVER the woman´s mistake. The man is the one that carries and leads in salsa. It is men that make the mistakes". Interesting commentary there. This dance could only ever be Latin in origin.

http://www.esn.studorg.liu.se/~esn/files/images-news/42152D~Salsa-Posters.jpg

Mi Julieta

Here is a great Julieta Venegas song before she became pop. But I love all of her - before pop, now pop, everything. Love her voice, her dedication to the very Mexican accordian sound... And will always love her for helping me to learn so much Spanish through her songs.

New Strategy Urged in Mexico

Calderón's U.S.-Backed War Against Drug Cartels Losing Political Support

By William Booth and Steve Fainaru
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 28, 2009

MEXICO CITY -- President Felipe Calderón is under growing pressure to overhaul a U.S.-backed anti-narcotics strategy that many political leaders and analysts said is failing amid spectacular drug cartel assaults against the government.

Full article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/27/AR2009072703074_pf.html

This articles gives a good insight into the current situation of the drug war in Mexico: more deaths from drug-related violence daily than Afghanistan....

It misses the point of human rights violations by the military a bit, but we will forgive the reporters as they have, in previous articles, also covered that angle.

This one goes out to Mum and Dad

I had a lovely chat with Mum and Dad the other day on occasion of my Dad´s birthday. Here they are on skype webcam speaking to me. Just for the record, my parents are the best.
Thanks for always being there for me and giving me wise insight into all my life plans and decisions!

I came down with a yucky fever and diarrea in the last two days, I felt so lonely, and I am just getting back to myself now...I just wanted my mummy and daddy!! Mum, I got THREE pages of translation done in the end by the way, and am going to bed now. yeah.

Dad, this goes out to you! Happy birthday! It has never been a coincidence to me that your birthday is the same as Nelson Mandela´s. For me you are my role model for social justice.

su hija, Maddy.

Ya llegó! (She´s arrived!)

I´m very excited about the new addition to my house.
The painting of my Cuban piano player was extracted from me... but I had other ideas in mind.
I have enlarged and framed this photo of a Cuban salsa cabaret dancer that I took in March 2008 in Havana.
I was so excited to hang her on my wall, and she looks so wonderfully at home, that I didn´t even stop to move my sunday morning cleaning clutter on my couch and table to take this photo..
She accompanies me very nicely, as "la vida es un carnaval", after all.

So Far From God, So Close to Wall St.

Excellent analysis on Mexico´s bleak past, present and future.



By Jeff Faux
July 15, 2009
This past winter both the outgoing director of the CIA and a separate Pentagon report declared political instability in Mexico to be on a par with Pakistan and Iran as top-ranking threats to US national security. It was an exaggeration; Mexico is not yet a "failed state." On the other hand, it is certainly drifting in that direction.
A vicious war among narco-trafficking cartels last year killed at least 6,000 people, including public officials, police and journalists. The country leads the world in kidnappings (Pakistan is second). And with the global crisis, the chronically anemic economy is hemorrhaging jobs, businesses and hope.
Not surprisingly, voters turned against President Felipe Calderón's right-wing National Action Party (PAN) in the July 5 midterm elections. But the left-wing Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD)--which many believe was robbed of the presidency in the 2006 election--has ripped itself apart with factional infighting. So frustrated Mexicans gave their Congress back to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), whose decades of corrupt authoritarian rule were supposed to have permanently ended in 2000. At least, thought many voters, the PRI knows how to keep order.
Mexicans are of course responsible for their own country. But geography has always forced them to play out their history in the shadow of their northern neighbor. "Poor Mexico," goes the saying. "So far from God, so close to the United States." Today, Mexico is a prime example of the socially destructive effects of the neoliberal economics promoted throughout the world by the US governing class.
The North American Free Trade Agreement--proposed by Ronald Reagan, negotiated by George Bush I and pushed through Congress by Bill Clinton in 1993--is both symbol and substance of neoliberalism. It was sold to the citizens of the United States, Mexico and Canada with the promise that free trade in goods and money would transform Mexico into a booming middle-class economy, dramatically reducing illegal immigration and creating a vast market for US and, to a lesser extent, Canadian exports.
Fifteen years later, Mexico is still unable to create enough jobs to employ its people. Out-migration has doubled, and on both sides of the US-Mexico border labor-market competition has kept wages down. At the top, income and wealth have ballooned. It is no accident that among NAFTA's prominent godfathers were former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (Democrat) and former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan (Republican), whose fingerprints are all over the current global financial disaster.
I was an opponent of NAFTA. Still, I thought the best case for it was that efficiencies from economic integration could at least make US and Mexican businesses more internationally competitive. But even that argument turned out to be worth no more than a share of Bernie Madoff's hedge fund.
Several years ago I gave a speech to a group of businesspeople in Mexico City. Those from the multinational banks and corporations thought NAFTA was a great success, but smaller Mexican businessmen saw it differently. You Americans, said one, promised that with your technology and our cheap labor, we'd be partners in competing with Asia. Then you opened up your markets to China and invested there instead. "Sure," he said. "We can make TV parts for half what it costs in the United States. But the Chinese can make them, and ship them, for a tenth. So instead of closing the gap between Mexico and the United States by raising wages, we have to narrow the gap between Mexico and China by lowering them."
When I mentioned the conversation to a New York investment banker who had lobbied for NAFTA, he conceded that his side may have talked vaguely about partnership with Mexico. But he shrugged and added, "Things changed"--that is, profit opportunities in China dwarfed anything Mexico had to offer.
The Wall Streeters had little interest in making Mexico more competitive. They also had little interest in making the United States more competitive. Their purpose was just the opposite: to disconnect themselves and their corporate partners from the fate of any particular country. The World Trade Organization, the opening of the US market to China and a parade of bilateral trade agreements followed in NAFTA's wake.
In Mexico, the political and financial elite were willing collaborators. For example, NAFTA opened up Mexican banks to foreign ownership: political insiders who had bought the giant Banamex from the government for $3.2 billion and gotten the government to provide it with permanent subsidies then sold the firm, with the subsidies, to Citigroup for $12.5 billion. Today roughly 90 percent of the banking system is owned by US and other foreign investors, who do not have to recycle Mexicans' deposits, or the Mexican government's money, back into Mexico but can invest them anyplace in the world.
The Banamex deal was negotiated by Rubin after he became Citigroup's $17 million-a-year executive committee chair. In the late 1980s, when he was at Goldman Sachs, Rubin had midwifed the privatization of Mexico's phone system to Carlos Slim, a politically connected Mexican businessman. Slim then used the monopoly profits from his high phone rates to invest all over the globe--including a substantial ownership stake in the New York Times. The latest Forbes rating says he's the world's third-richest man.
Still, as long as the US economy was blowing dot-com and subprime bubbles, the neoliberal model seemed stable. US investors got Mexican bank deposits and cheaper labor on both sides of the border. Through out-migration to the States, Mexico's oligarchs got rid of frustrated workers who might otherwise have been politically troublesome. The economy also benefited from hard-currency remittances migrants sent back home.
Another infusion of cash to the Mexican economy, unacknowledged in the official statistics, is the roughly $25 billion in illegal drug exports to the States. Today, with remittances, oil prices and tourism depressed, the narco trade is probably Mexico's largest single earner of hard currency.
NAFTA and the neoliberal ideology it represents are certainly not the root causes of narco-trafficking. But they have been major factors in its recent monstrous growth. For starters, the trade agreement created a two-way overland superhighway for contraband; the Mexican drug lords use the dollars they have earned from their exports to import guns, aircraft and sophisticated military equipment from the United States to fight their territorial wars. By wiping out small Mexican farms that could not compete with heavily subsidized US agribusiness, NAFTA also expanded the pool of unemployed young people that provides the narco-traffickers with recruits. And banking integration under NAFTA made money laundering much easier.
Perhaps most important, NAFTA has helped maintain the corrupt network of Mexican oligarchs. The 1988 presidential election--which the then-ruling PRI had to steal from the PRD to win--shocked the establishment on both sides of the border. By opening up Mexico to US money and influence, NAFTA was a way, as the US Trade Representative said to me at the time, "to keep the Mexican left out of power."
Until the 1980s, Mexican drug (mostly marijuana) smuggling to the north was modest in scale and generally tolerated by successive PRI governments. Their message was: we don't care what you sell to the gringos, but no rough stuff here, keep it away from our kids and of course share a little of the profit under the table. But the US-backed neoliberals who took over the PRI in the 1980s had closer ties with the Mexican cartels. The brother and father of president and NAFTA champion Carlos Salinas--hailed in Washington as a good-government reformer--were widely accused of being connected to the drug business. In Salinas's first year in office his national police chief was found with $2.4 million in drug money in the trunk of his car.
In the 1990s, as the geographically better-positioned Mexican cartels muscled out the Colombians as chief cocaine retailers to the US market, their profits and political influence grew. But so did the rivalry among them and their allied government factions for control of trade routes. Bullet-riddled bodies began showing up on the streets, making the public nervous.
Seeking legitimacy after his 2006 election was tainted by charges of fraud, President Felipe Calderón declared war on the narco-traffickers. It was a popular gesture, but given that the police, the military and the legal system are heavily infiltrated by the gangs, it backfired. The narcos reacted with horrific violence--assassinations, beheadings and mutilations of police and soldiers as well as thugs, brazenly displayed on YouTube. Losing control, Calderón appealed to George Bush II for help. The result: the Mérida Initiative, a $400 million-per-year program to provide aircraft, military equipment and training to the Mexican police and military.
After decades of keeping its distance from the United States, the Mexican military--like the armed forces of Colombia, Honduras and other Latin American countries--is becoming a Pentagon client. In turn, Mexican society is itself becoming militarized. Corrupt local police are being replaced by soldiers who may be slightly less corrupt but who are a greater threat to human rights and democracy. An April Human Rights Watch report identified seventeen specific cases of abuse by the Mexican military, including "killings, torture, rapes, and arbitrary detentions."
To his credit, Barack Obama has acknowledged what his predecessors failed to: that the US demand for drugs and its supplying of arms makes it an enabler in the rise of narco warlords. But he has also made it clear that neither issue is on his administration's agenda. Moreover, just as Bill Clinton carried the water for George Bush I's NAFTA, Barack Obama has endorsed Bush II's Mérida Initiative.
Given the unwillingness of US politicians to deal with the demand side of the market, the Mérida Initiative is not likely to be any more successful in eradicating the drug trade than the $6 billion Plan Colombia has been. The best one can hope for is some sort of market-sharing deal among the cartels that would be implicitly endorsed by the Mexican government while Washington tactfully averts its eyes. Given that in many areas, drug money is the chief source of campaign financing, a PRI-dominated Mexican Congress might be just the right forum for a cynical, but welcome, end to the killings.
Meanwhile, the drug violence has frightened away tourists and investors, making Mexico's recession even worse. Most forecasters expect the economy to contract some 6 percent this year--a huge hit to a country in which 45 percent live on $2 a day or less. Calderón's response is to tread water--rescuing big businesses that speculated on Wall Street derivatives and dribbling out a bit more public spending--while waiting for the United States to once again suck up Mexico's surplus labor.
But even when the US economy recovers, it is unlikely to re-create the credit boom that kept the NAFTA deal afloat. In the post-crash era, the United States will finally be forced to address its trade deficits and its massive foreign debt. Americans will have to slow down consumer spending, increase savings and sell more to--and buy less from--the rest of the world. If Mexico could not prosper during fifteen years of exporting goods and people to a bloated US consumer market, it is hard to believe it will be able to do so when that market has slimmed down.
The entire relationship must be rethought. In this regard, Obama's abandonment of his campaign pledge to renegotiate NAFTA was a missed opportunity. A renewed debate over the trade deal could have spurred public discussion of the failure of neoliberal economics, the "war on drugs" and an immigration policy that ignores conditions in Mexico that drive people across the border. It could have been a forum to think through the question of how continental integration can work for working people rather than just investors. For example, what kind of cooperative transportation, energy and green industrial policies would make the people of three nations--now bound together in one market--globally competitive?
Obama's Wall Street advisers have no more interest in this sort of change than did Bush's. And without a new economic direction, life for the average Mexican will surely worsen and social tensions rise. Some Mexican friends point out that the revolution against Spain erupted in 1810 and the one against the US-backed dictator Porfirio Díaz in 1910. And in 2010... ?
In any event, Mexico's growing troubles will not stay conveniently on the other side of the Rio Grande. Build a ten-foot wall, and desperate people will find twelve-foot ladders. Free trade will, of course, continue to flourish; Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano estimates that Mexican drug cartels are now operating in 230 US cities.
So, thanks to the people who brought you the subprime mortgage disaster, the credit freeze and the Great Recession, the next Mexican revolution may come closer to home than you think.


This article appeared in the August 3, 2009 edition of The Nation.