Drug War news in Mexico focused this week on several debates about strategy.
•The first regards the presence of U.S. agents in Mexico and DEA use of Mexican informants to infiltrate the cartels. •The second is whether or not Mexico's shifting its armed forces from crop eradication--their traditional task--to attacking cartels in urban warfare has led to an increase in marijuana and opium production. •The third regards research showing that concentrating military and police in areas of violence results in the cartel battles moving to new territory.
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Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Federation of American Scientists' Arms Sales Monitoring Program, the Just the Facts database now includes information about weapons and equipment that the United States government sold to Latin America and the Caribbean through the Foreign Military Sales program in 2010. Foreign Military Sales (FMS) is one of two programs through...
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The image on the left, from the UN Development Program, shows areas of most unequal landholding in Colombia. The image on the right, from the |
In the drug war this week, in an interview with the New York Times, President Calderón asserted that his military strategy was the correct and only one. Calderón, who belongs to the National Action Party (PAN), also raised hackles in Mexico by suggesting that if an Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate wins the 2012 presidential election, the new president will make a deal with the drug cartels. Also, in a meeting with the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, led by Javier Sicilia, Calderón rejected two of its key demands. From Veracruz a report describes the chaos,...
This week continues with the debate on whether it is possible to distinguish "lesser evil" from "greater evil" cartels, to consider a strategy of leaving the "lesser evil" alone while going after the "greater". This relates to the emerging narrative that the drug war is boiling down to a confrontation between the "lesser evil" Sinaloa cartel and the "greater evil" Zetas.
Drug war news also includes: more on the struggle of teachers in Acapulco to obtain security from the state of Guerrero, how virtually unlimited ammunition shipments from the U.S. supply the cartels, how...