Mexico’s rough western state of Michoacan, producer of avocados and waves of migrants, is proving just as painful a thorn in the side of President Enrique Pena Nieto as it was for his predecessor, Felipe Calderon. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
By Nathaniel Parish Flannery, Contributor
A few weeks after Enrique Peña Nieto was elected as Mexico’s new president, I walked through the gate in the heavy metal security fence and into the modern, high-tech campus of Mexico’s Public Security Ministry in Mexico City. I watched Francisco Niembro González, who then served as former president Felipe Calderon‘s vice-secretary of Information Technology at the security ministry, or SSP for its initials in Spanish, enter into the federal government’s crisis-planning center inside a hermetically sealed bunker. He pulled up a map showing the flight trajectories of cocaine-carrying planes leaving Colombia. Curved red lines marked the flight paths of the smuggling routes between Colombia, one of the world’s top cocaine producers, and Guatemala and Honduras, two countries to the south of Mexico, the gateway country to the United States, the world’s number one cocaine consumer. “Planes with drugs no longer enter Mexico,” Niembro explained, aiming a laser pointer at one of the conference room’s massive display screens. Another room shows graphics of cartel hierarchies. “Evolution of the Michoacán Cartel,” said one poster. “La Familia Michoacána,” said another. The faces in the photos were marked with labels explaining which leaders had been killed or captured. “We’ve invested in technology and the results are there,” Niembro said. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
By Nathaniel Parish Flannery, Contributor
Mexico now has Thomas Friedman’s stamp of approval. Within the country, however, criticism of the prevailing economic model has not dissipated with the transition to a new government. Shortly after Mexico’s July, 2012 election, I took a trip to the Atlantic coast home state of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a charismatic and controversial candidate who lost the election and then staged a series of massive protests. While in Tabasco, I met with the local fishermen who venture out into the region’s lakes and lagoons in search of a frightening looking, slow-swimming fish that inspired the nickname “El Peje” for Lopez Obrador. As I explained in this article for The Atlantic, like a languid pejelagarto fish, Lopez Obrador struggles to keep up with the rapidly shifting currents of Mexico’s evolving political and economic environment. In an election in which voters called for an end to drugwar violence but also wanted to protect Mexico’s recent record of economic growth, Lopez Obrador became a polarizing candidate. Many voters from Mexico’s far left viewed him as the country’s only savior from a return to rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the front-running umbrella group that ruled Mexico for 71 years before being ousted from power in 2000. However, although some voters viewed Lopez Obrador as an important alternative to the centrist PRI and the right-of-center party of outgoing president Felipe Calderon, many Mexicans were also wary of his outdated economic views and anachronistic policy ideas. At his final rally in Mexico City, I watched as Lopez Obrador told the crowd that he’d deliver “a real change” and that during his administration Mexico “would produce what we consume.” …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
Mexico‘s new administration offered the first details on Tuesday of a long-touted shift in the country’s war on drugs, saying the government will spend $9.2 billion this year on social programs meant to keep young people from joining criminal organizations in the 251 most violent towns and neighborhoods across the country.
The government will flood those areas with spending on programs ranging from road-building to increasing school hours, President Enrique Pena Nieto and Interior Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong told an audience in the central state of Aguascalientes.
“It’s clear that we must put special emphasis on prevention, because we can’t only keep employing more sophisticated weapons, better equipment, more police, a higher presence of the armed forces in the country as the only form of combating organized crime,” Pena Nieto said.
The rhetoric of the announcement was a forceful rejection of Pena Nieto‘s predecessor, Felipe Calderon, who deployed thousands of troops to battle cartel gunmen and frequently boasted of the number of drug-gang leaders arrested and killed on his watch. But the speeches by Pena Nieto and Osorio Chong contained few specifics more than two months into a presidency marred by continuing violence in many states and a headline-grabbing series of horrifying crimes, including the kidnapping and slaying of an entire 17-member band near the northern city of Monterrey and the gang rape of six Spanish tourists in the resort city of Acapulco.
Analysts said the strategy, to be carried out by nine federal departments coordinated by a new Interagency Commission for the Prevention of Violence and Criminality, marked an important change in tone but not necessarily in the day-to-day reality of Mexico‘s battle against drug cartels.
“They’re going to throw a lot of money at a lot of programs. That is ground for skepticism,” said Alejandro Hope, a security analyst and former high-ranking official in Mexico‘s national intelligence agency. “The level of specificity is not there yet. I find this disconcerting.”
Officials released a partial list of the communities to be targeted by the program, which range from violent Acapulco to the relatively peaceful city of Oaxaca. It was unclear how much of the money was funding that had already been announced as part of other programs. Osorio Chong and Pena Nieto said the anti-crime program would overlap with a national anti-hunger initiative that was announced last month and is meant to aid more than 7 million hungry Mexicans in 400 of the country’s poorest municipalities.
By Nathaniel Parish Flannery, Contributor January, the first month of 2013 and the second month of Enrique Peña Nieto’s presidency, passed with a barrage of news about two topics: the health of the economy and drugwar violence. Both topics are themes with which Mexico’s previous president, Felipe Calderon, had become accustomed to talking about by the end of his term. As I explained in a recent article, “As part of Operation Winter 2012 Mexico’s federal government, under the leadership of newly-elected president Enrique Peña Nieto, sent 500 additional soldiers to Guerrero, the state where Acapulco is located.” In Acapulco and many other places in Mexico, the government is working to balance the tasks of improving security AND attracting investment and tourism. The “Mexican paradox” of economic growth in the context of cartel violence continues to be a major theme in at the start of 2013.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
