Week in Review - Monday edition
-
The news story of the week last week was certainly WikiLeaks. The Washington Post's Juan Forero offers a quick summary of many of the Latin America-related cables here. Or you can find links to extended coverage of the leaked cables on Just the Facts. One cable about Mexico suggests that the United States has lost a great deal of confidence in the Mexican military and its ability to take on the country's drug cartels:
Calderon has aggressively attacked Mexico's drug trafficking organizations but has struggled with an unwieldy and uncoordinated interagency and spiraling rates of violence that have made him vulnerable to criticism that his anti-crime strategy has failed. Indeed, the GOM's inability to halt the escalating numbers of narco-related homicides in places like Ciudad Juarez and elsewhere - the nationwide total topped 7,700 in 2009 - has become one of Calderon's principal political liabilities as the general public has grown more concerned about citizen security. Mexican security institutions are often locked in a zero-sum competition in which one agency's success is viewed as another's failure, information is closely guarded, and joint operations are all but unheard of. Official corruption is widespread, leading to a compartmentalized siege mentality among "clean" law enforcement leaders and their lieutenants. Prosecution rates for organized crime-related offenses are dismal; two percent of those detained are brought to trail. Only 2 percent of those arrested in Ciudad Juarez have even been charged with a crime.
- Haiti's presidential elections on Sunday, November 28th, resulted in calls of fraud, violence and voter confusion. Official election results are not expected until tomorrow, but the joint Organization of American States-Caribbean Community observer mission noted that despite serious irregularities, the results should stand.
- A leaked memo by former U.S. Ambassador Janet Sanderson to Haiti said that President René Préval's primary concern ahead of the election was to ensure the winner would not force him into exile. The memo, dated seven months before the earthquake destroyed Port-au-Prince, read President Préval's "overriding goal is to orchestrate the 2011 presidential transition in such a way as to ensure that whoever is elected will allow him to go home unimpeded. Based on our conversations, this is indeed a matter that looms large for Préval."
- At least four of the nineteen Haitian presidential contenders marched with demonstrators in a protest in Port-au-Prince on Thursday to demand a rerun of the elections. The two front-runners, Michel "Sweet Mickey" Martelly and Mirlande Manigat, as well as current President René Préval's candidate, Jude Célestin, are calling for the vote to stand.
- Paul Farmer had a good piece in Foreign Policy last week on "5 lessons from Haiti's Disaster: What the earthquake taught us about foreign aid."
- After a weeklong battle in the Rio favela of Alemao, Brazilian security forces seized the shantytown and announced that 2,000 troops will stay in the "re-conquered" favela for at least six months. IPS's report on the seizures argues that human rights abuses committed during the raids "are jeopardizing local residents' newfound support for security forces."
- On Tuesday, the Uruguayan Senate voted to officially ratify the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) charter, giving the organization "full legal effectiveness." The three nations that have yet to ratify are Brazil, Colombia and Paraguay.
- A must-have reference and free download: RESDAL released its new Comparative Atlas of Defense in Latin America and the Caribbean.
- Colombia's Supreme Court elected Viviane Morales as the country's first female attorney general. Soon after the Supreme Court's vote, Morales announced that "the first thing we’ll do is meet to learn the real legal situation of the (illegal spying cases)." This ends 16 months of vacancy of this key post.
- Reuters published a series looking at the narcotrafficking and public security crisis in Michoacán, Mexico. In December 2006, President Felipe Calderón launched his war on drug cartels in the western state of Michoacán. Yet, "despite heavily armed patrols, hundreds of drug lab busts and thousands of arrests, locals say gangs in the president's home state wield huge power, ramping up drug output while using terror and bribes to control towns mired in poverty."
- Peter Kornbluh and Marian Schlotterbeck write in the Santiago Times, "How U.S. President Reagan Broke With Chile's Pinochet." Using declassified White House documents, recently obtained by the National Security Archive, the two authors shed light on "how the conservative Reagan Administration concluded that Pinochet no longer served U.S. national interests and should be forced from power."
-
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on Latin America in 2010 last week. On Haiti, Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) remarked that "political uncertainty now threatens to exacerbate human suffering" in the country. Senator Lugar continued, "But our willingness to direct funds through the Haitian government depends on the fair, transparent, and legal resolution of the current political crisis." In his opening remarks, Senator Lugar called for the passage of the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, more coordination to help Mexico fight drug cartels, placing more attention on the situation in Venezuela, and the elections in Haiti. According to Senator Lugar,
Our foreign policy in Latin America continues to struggle with perceptions that the United States has neglected the region in the past. These perceptions often have been inaccurate or incomplete, but there is little doubt that U.S. engagement with Latin America over a period of decades has been crisis driven.
If you missed the hearing, you can watch it online.
- We posted the Department of Defense's FY2009 Humanitarian and Civic Assistance report to Just the Facts last week. Download the PDF here. This report includes U.S. military activities in foreign countries that involve providing medical, dental and veterinary care, constructing roads, bridges, schools, clinics and other public buildings, drilling wells and constructing basic sanitation facilities. Soon, we'll post the FY2009 totals to the Humanitarian and Civic Assistance program page on Just the Facts.
- The Mexican army discovered several mass graves holding at least 20 bodies in the northern state of Chihuahua. The 20 bodies, which had been buried for between four and eight months, were distributed in 12 graves in the town of Puerto Palomas.