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"Santos is handing the military what Uribe never dared to give them," |
The Drug War and Mexico Politics are inextricably intertwined. How much they are tied together was especially clear this week. Francisco Blake Mora, Secretary of the Interior, was killed, along with seven others, in a helicopter crash near Mexico City. He was considered the number two man in the Calderon administration and the point man in its war on the Mexican cartels. While the crash investigation, using U.S. and European air crash...
Drug War: Three significant investigative reports were in the news.
•The New York Times revealed that the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is now operating military-style commando units in Latin America.
•Human Rights Watch presented President Calderón with a report on torture carried out by Mexican police and the army.
•In Washington, Attorney General Holder admitted to Congress that the 'Fast and Furious' gun-walking operation will cause long-lasting damage and should never have happened.
This week brought the...
We're proud to release "A Cautionary Tale: Plan Colombia's Lessons for U.S. Policy Toward Mexico and Beyond," the latest report from the Just the Facts project.
Here is the press release that went out this morning. Slides used in today's presentation are here (PDF).
Press Release
November 10, 2011
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First, apologies for our silence, on the blog and elsewhere. Abigail, WOLA's Anthony Dest and I spent the past 8 days in Colombia researching U.S.-supported "consolidation" programs, particularly in the northern part of the country. Second, tomorrow morning we will be posting to the website "A Cautionary Tale: Plan Colombia's Lessons for Mexico and Beyond," a big new report by LAWGEF's Lisa Haugaard and me. We'll be launching it with an event at 12:00PM tomorrow; the official announcement is below. If you're in Washington, please come and discuss with us the Colombian "model" of security...
Reporting on the drug war this week focused on the threat by the online hacking group, Anonymous, to expose members of the Zetas on Nov. 5. It seemed to be a serious threat, but then members of the informal group seemed to back off. We include two analytic articles: one analyzing the potential negative possibilities and the other a thought provoking column on the two-edged use of anonymity in the digital--and the real--world in Mexico.
Two other articles on the drug war address the very different issues of money laundering and the collateral damage done to children...