lo-de-alla.org

[Translation of an op-ed from La Jornada of Mexico City for March 1. See original here and the article by Felipe Calderón here.]

By Víctor M. Quintana S.

He will probably think that after reading his article published in Latin American Policy Journal they, like his entourage in Mexico, will say “Very well, Mr. President.” But what is certain is that only the indulgent professors, poorly informed concerning our beloved border, will swallow what Calderón claims about the success of his strategy against violence in Juárez.

In his article, “Todos Somos Juárez:  An Innovative Strategy to Tackle Violence and Crime,” Calderón relates that the strategy he put in place had three main components: sending in the army and the federal police; supporting local and state authorities in enforcing the law; and operating the Todos Somos Juárez program in order to reconstruct the battered social structure of the border. (more…)

The youth vote could change the election results

[Translation of an article from Página/12 of Buenos Aires, Argentina, for May 31, by writers from La Jornada of Mexico City. See original here.]

by Alonso Urrutia and Claudia Herrera

With a potential that could equal 30 percent of the electorate (if those up to 29 years of age are included), the uprising of the young in the midst of the electoral campaign could reverse the trends. The participation of the young is not only a criticism of Enrique Peña Nieto, the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) candidate, favored to win, but what he represents: corruption and impunity. Thus warns Enrique Cuna, a researcher for the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) who conducted a study financed by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) on youth participation in elections . (more…)

[Translation of an article from El Clarín of Santiago, Chile, for April 21. See original here.]

By Marcos Roitmann Rosenmann

Measures taken to nationalize and to recuperate basic riches in Latin America or Africa or Asia have always suffered the ire of colonial centers and the enterprises affected. There is no shortage of examples: Lázaro Cárdenas, Jacobo Arbenz, Fidel Castro, Omar Torrijos, Velasco Alvarado, Salvador Allende, Evo Morales, Hugo Chávez; the list is long.

Accustomed to ordering and to being in charge, arrogant empires are unfamiliar with the concepts of independence and sovereignty. They are reluctant to deal as equals. Paternalism, based on positions of strength, shapes the discourse of imperial haughtiness. To declare oneself opposed to paternal authority and the established order usually brings on exemplary punishment: blockades, destabilizing processes, economic strangulation, assassinations of leaders or coups d’état. These days, the expropriation of a private company, Repsol YPF, whose interests are those only of their stockholders and whose objective is to obtain profits at the cost of any ethical, judicial or environmental consideration, awakens the ire of the hegemonic powers, their institutions and principal political leaders. (more…)

Despite constitution, Calderón requested US involvement

[Translation of an article from La Jornada of Mexico City for March 16. See original here, related article here and cable in question, as released by Wikileaks, here.]

by Roberto González Amador

Mexico is on the verge of becoming an importer of petroleum. Production of crude oil in the country is declining rapidly. “Despite some optimistic GOM [government of Mexico] forecasts, there are no realistic options for reversing this decline in the short to medium term.” This from a February, 2010, report to the State Department by Carlos Pascual, United States ambassador to Mexico.

In the cable, the diplomat reports that at the request of the administration of Felipe Calderón Hinojosa the United States government has become “quietly” involved in areas related to the domestic energy sector. (more…)

((José Francisco Blake))

Second interior minister dies in suspicious plane crash

[Translation of an article from El Faro of San Salvador, El Salvador, for November 14. See original here.]

By Blanche Petrich

Important pieces of the puzzle that is Mexico these days have again fallen into place. Faced with a new calamity – a helicopter crashed on a hillside, the bodies of eight officials and military officers amid the twisted metal – the figure of President Felipe Calderón is weakened even more. In a period of three years, mourning has befallen his cabinet on two occasions. First a secretary of the interior, Juan Camilo Mouriño, dies in a plane crash (September 21, 2008) [sic. -- it was in fact on November 4, 2008] and now José Francisco Blake, his successor, dies in another airplane accident, last November 11.

But can lightning strike twice in the same place? Science and common sense would say that the probability is minimal. But nevertheless…

In fact we can speak of three bolts of lightning, three air “accidents” that kill three cabinet members in a period of only six years and leave strategic national security ministries leaderless during the past two Partido Acción Nacional administrations, if we include the helicopter crash in which José Ramón Huerta, the public security minister in the previous administration of Vicente Fox (September 21, 2005), died. (more…)

A demonstration against violence in Monterrey

[Translation of an editorial from El Faro of San Salvador for August 29. See original here. Atlántida is a state on the Caribbean coast of Honduras, best known as a luxury tourist attraction but recently also a center of drug trafficking and other organized crime, and of the violence that results.]

The recent attack on a casino in Monterrey, which left more than 50 dead, raised even higher the level of horror that drug trafficking gangs have unleashed in Mexico in their delivery of drugs to the United States.

President Felipe Calderón, besieged by a population fed up with so much bloodshed, pointed rightly toward the United States, asking that country to begin the task it has never been willing to take on: that of decreasing the drug use and toughening its control over the sale of fire arms. (more…)

[Translation of an interview from La Jornada of Mexico City for June 22. See original here.]

by Blanche Petrich

Two years as president and he has three to go. The first ruler of his country, El Salvador, not to come from the oligarchy. He defends his pragmatism as an indispensable attribute at this juncture. Mauricio Funes Cartagena, 53 years old, recognizes beforehand that in 2014, when he leaves the presidential residence, he will be “halfway done,” leaving unfulfilled many of the aspirations that led partisans of the leftist Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) and the popular sectors to vote for him in 2009.

“I am aware that people are going to be disappointed. I never thought in a utopian way; I knew I would diverge from the historical aspirations of the people. I understand that the unions are frustrated, I understand the frustration of the teachers, with whom I reached an agreement for an improvement in their salaries and now we are not going to achieve that in the terms we agreed on. It is just that I do not have any more resources to improve the hospitals, to improve the living standards for many. But despite it all, El Salvador has changed. (more…)

Caravan arrives in Chihuahua, an area torn apart by violence

[Translation of an article from La Jornada of Mexico City for June 10. See original here.]

By Alonso Urrutia

Chihuahua, Chihuahua, June 9 – Pained testimonies could be heard from the stage: the massacre in Creel, the descriptions of executions in the place with the most homicides in the country, the domination of the sierra by the assassins, the defenselessness of the indigenous, the abuse by the police and the military… With all the savagery described, there is one crime that generates a particular collective pain, the killing of Marisela Escobedo.

It has been seven months since the murder and the Caravana por la Paz con Jusiticia y Dignidad arrives at the capital of the state of Chihuahua to open a space for a heartfelt memorium: “Marisela Escobedo was murdered here on December 16, 2010, for demanding justice for the femicide of her daughter Rubí.” The poet Javier Sicilia and Julián LeBaron placed a plaque three meters from the government palace, exactly where she was killed. (more…)

Poet Sicilia demands resignation of public security minister

[Translation of an article from La Jornada of Mexico City for May 8. See original here.]

By Alonso Urrutia

Mexico City – The March for Peace with Justice and Dignity ended in the Zócalo in the capital city with a call for a national agreement to, among other things: put an end to Felipe Calderón’s military strategy against organized crime; to do away with impunity in the justice system by means of a thorough reform in the administration of justice; to clarify the cases that have most troubled society; to fight against the institutional corruption fostered by the violence the country is faced with. (more…)

“The president of my country controls absolutely nothing.”

[Translation of an article from La Jornada of Mexico City for March 22. See original here.]

By Arturo Cano

Without his hat, Zelaya doesn’t even look like Zelaya. But seeing his demeanor, that of a president without a presidency, will tell you this is the same man who in June, 2009, went from being an obscure Central American president to being an international figure, thanks to, and to the disgrace of, a coup d’état. This is Manuel Zelaya, and one sentence sums him up: “I arrived with the Right and governed with the Left.”

In Honduras, that statement would spark loud protests, but Zelaya is involved now in a leftist event – he came to Mexico at the invitation of the Partido del Trabajo [PT – Labor Party] – and he adapts to the setting: “I am a pro-socialist liberal.”

Ever since the new Honduran administration allowed him to leave the Brazilian embassy, Zelaya has lived in the Dominican Republic as a “distinguished guest.” The Dominicans, he himself states, take care of his expenses: a house, transportation and schooling for his children and grandchildren. “Chávez gave me a stipend but so far they haven’t paid me anything,” he says, without making it sound like a complaint. (more…)

[Translation of an article from La Jornada of Mexico City for February 24. See original article here and the Página/12 article quoted below, in English translation, here.  See US embassy cables on Argentina as released by Wikileaks here.]

by John Saxe-Fernández

An enormous C17 (Globemaster III) belonging to the United States air force, with equipment for police “training,” tried to bring into Buenos Aires an undeclared cargo of powerful long weapons, equipment for encrypted communications, secret information programs and narcotic and stupefacient drugs, “with no satisfactory explanation of what it would be used for” (Página 12, 13-II-2011). In view of the regime change operations against Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador and the Honduran putsch, the resumption of this type of operation with United States personnel, halted by Néstor Kirchner, is surprising; the secret cargo on the C-17 demonstrates the serious risk of these schemes in view of a diplomacy of power that is growing more intense: were they going to teach a course or stage a coup? (more…)

Commission meeting in Geneva proposes decriminalizing drug use

[Translation of an article from La Jornada of Mexico City for January 26, based on Notimex and Agence France Presse dispatches. See original here.]

Geneva, January 25 – The former presidents of Colombia and Brazil, César Gaviria and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, agreed today that the United States should curb its great demand for drugs in order to end the escalating violence it produces.

Within the framework of the Global Commision on Drug Policy, in which former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo also participated, Gaviria and Cardoso said separately that it is essential to ask the United States to demonstrate that it is reducing its consumption and that it is struggling to curtail the dimensions of the trade.
(more…)