Public confidence in the Mexican army and judiciary has declined considerably. Meanwhile, 73 percent of Latin Americans perceive corruption among public officials as a widespread problem.
If the Shining Path is permitted to reconstitute itself as either a political movement or a drug trafficking outfit, new Peruvian President Ollanta Humala will almost certainly guarantee himself a legacy of failure.
Conservative attempts to link the war on terror and the war on drugs in order to justify maintaining a global U.S. military presence.
The war against drugs is a manifestation of policies and international agreements that cast Mexico as the battlefield and where the poor of this country and Central America pay the staggering price of their lives so that drugs arrive at their destination and business empires thrive.
On March 3 of this year, Agent John Dodson of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) blew the whistle on a secret government project that allowed guns to be smuggled from U.S. merchants to Mexican drug cartels.
Mexico’s House of Deputies has brought the country to the cusp of a police state. The reform to the National Security Law now before the lower house would grant sweeping military powers to the executive and limit congressional oversight of domestic military activity.
A secret operation to run guns across the border to Mexican drug cartels — overseen by U.S. government agents — threatens to become a major scandal for the Obama administration. The operation, called “Fast and Furious,” was run out of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) office in Phoenix, Arizona. ATF sanctioned the purchase of weapons in U.S. gun shops and tracked the smuggling route to the Mexican border. Reportedly, more than 2,500 firearms were sold to straw buyers who then handed off the weapons to gunrunners under the nose of ATF.
The presidential meeting this week between Mexico’s Felipe Calderon and Barack Obama looked from the outside like a hastily arranged exercise in damage control. But while most analysts emphasized the tensions between the neighboring nations going into the meeting, the real crisis behind the visit was the failure of what the two leaders most strongly agree on: the war on drugs south of the border.
Much of the narco-trafficking violence comes from compromised local governments corrupted by drug money.
Marisela Escobedo’s life changed forever in August 2008 when her 16-year-old daughter Rubi failed to come home. What was left of Rubi’s body was found months later in a dump — 39 pieces of charred bone.