Week's Top Articles: August 1 - 12, 2011

Here are the most important articles, in our judgment, from the past two weeks. They include four articles on the U.S. - Mexico drug war strategy:

• a frightening one on the U.S. expanding its role through the sending of CIA and private contractors into Mexico to work with Mexican government counter-parts,
• one on four possible policy choices that the next Mexican president will confront and the potential impact of each choice on Mexico's burgeoning cooperation with the U.S. military,
• one on human rights abuses by the Mexican military and police and 
• one on the hypocrisy of the Obama administration's weapons trafficking policy when placed against its political inaction on the issue in the face of pressure from the NRA. 

 Also included is an interview with Javier Sicilia, leader of the Mexican Movement for Peace and Justice.


Other articles present 

• the Department of Homeland Security's announcement that it does not need explicit agreements with states to implement the Secure Communities fingerprint sharing program, so it is therefore cancelling all agreements and will be implementing the program automatically across the nation. 
• a description of  the little observed phenomenon of internal migration within Mexico. 
• a detailed look at life on the border, in the linked cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

Rights agency says illegal searches by army, police are common in parts of Mexico


The Washington Post: "Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission says police and soldiers regularly burst into homes, plant evidence and take people’s possessions, and the problem has increased as Mexico’s war against drug cartels has heated up. The issue is drawing renewed attention in Mexico because police stormed into the home of a gray-bearded poet this week looking for an alleged cartel boss."


New Player in Mexico´s Drug War: The NRA

A good analysis of the hypocrisy of the Obama administration - talking about reducing gun running across the border, but unwilling to confront the NRA and seek the means to realize its stated goal. 

Wired.com: "There’s not just an out-of-control conflict on our border. There’s also the very much related battle of gun lobbyists against the Obama administration, which is grappling with a growing gun-running scandal of its own. ...It’s all part of a revamped White House strategy, revealed last month aimed and at combating organized crime. “The strategy says, ..., that the U.S. must stop the illicit flow of weapons to criminal gangs,”wrote Steven Dudley, co-director of InSight, a monitoring group focused on organized crime in the Americas. “However, the Obama administration has not empowered its own law enforcement agencies to do this, and does not have the political will to change the law to make this a reality.”

A Poet Rewrites the War on Drugs

Madhu Suri Prakash, a contributing editor to YES! Magazine, interviews Javier Sicilia on the power of poetry to confront people with reality and move them to action.

Straight Goods:  (Prakash) "Javier, people in the North know that they are implicated in the violence of Mexico's drug wars. Some of them are now talking of decriminalizing drugs. What would you say in response to that suggestion?

Javier Sicilia: I believe that something like that should have been done from the very beginning. The politicians are formulating the drug problem as an issue of national security, but it is an issue of public health. If from the very beginning drugs were decriminalized, drug lords would be subjected to the iron laws of the market. That would have controlled them. That would have allowed us to discover our drug addicts and offer them our love and our support. That would not have left us with 40,000 dead, 10,000 disappeared and 120,000 displaced...
The war is caused by puritan mentalities: like those of [Mexican President Felipe] Calderón and [former US President George] Bush. In the name of abstractions — the abstraction of saving youth from drug addiction — they have brutally assassinated thousands of young people, while transforming others into delinquents."

CritIcal Strategic Decisions - the Future of US/Mexican Defense Relations


An analytic paper on the options facing the next Mexican president in addressing the drug cartels and the consequences that his choice will have for U.S. - Mexico relations, particularly for the military relations that have deepened during the Calderon administration. The paper is from the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies of the National Defense University, U.S. Department of Defense. In other words, this is from the Department of Defense's think-tank.

Critical Strategic Decisions in Mexico: "

Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s decision in 2006 to use the military (vs. the police) in the lead role to combat transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) and to cooperate with the US in that effort resulted in the best US/Mexican military-to-military and defense relations in decades. In many ways, this positive defense interaction serves as a visible bellwether for the level of each nation’s commitment to jointly confronting the TCOs. Will this level of cooperation and collaboration continue? The answer depends on a critical strategic decision the next president of Mexico must make after taking office in December 2013--What strategy will Mexico adopt to address the TCO threat?

Despite State Concerns, U.S. Presses Ahead with Secure Communities


The federal government's crackdown on unauthorized immigrants expands with this announcement that Secure Communities will be implemented automatically througout the fifty states with or without state approval. The program transfers fingerprint records - gathered by local police and sent via their state police to the FBI, in the Department of Justice, for criminal record checks - on to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in the Dapartment of Homeland Security, for checks of immigration status. 


Three governors, in Illinois, New York and Massachusetts recently announced they would withdraw their states from participation. They and other local governments in California and other states have sought to withdraw from Secure Communites data sharing because of the over-use of the program to deport non-criminal, unauthorized immigrants despite the stated purpose of the program to focus on those with serious crimial records. 

Feet in 2 Worlds: "The Department of Homeland Security announced on Friday that it is not necessary for each state to sign an agreement (known as a Memorandum Of Understanding or MOA) with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for the Secure Communities program to operate. ...  DHS sent a letter signed by John Morton, director of ICE, addressed to the governor of Delaware, Jack Markell, dated August 5, that stated, “Once a state or local law enforcement agency voluntarily submits fingerprint data to the federal government, no agreement with the state is legally necessary for one part of the federal government to share it with another part. For this reason, ICE has decided to terminate all existing Secure Communities MOAs.”


U.S. Widens Its Role in the Battle Against Mexico's Drug Cartels

A frightening look into the growing"on the ground" military and intelligence involvement in Mexico that is part of the Obama administration's new Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime," the new goivernment-speak for the war on drugs. Further demonstration that the U.S. can only perceive the issue of drug use as one of police and military power versus another "evil empire."

NYTimes.com: "The United States is expanding its role in Mexico’s bloody fight against drug trafficking organizations, sending new C.I.A. operatives and retired military personnel to the country and considering plans to deploy private security contractors in hopes of turning around a multibillion-dollar effort that so far has shown few results.

Internal migration flows below the radar in Mexico

A look at the complex realities faced by ordinary Mexican families and how economic stress and the dangers of the drug war lead to migration inside Mexico

latimes.com:  " Contradictions abound in Mexico, especially when it comes to the country's current overall stability. Mexico's economy is growing at a healthier pace than that of the United States and has a lower official unemployment rate (5.3%) than its northern neighbor (9.2%), though the joblessness rate is deceptive because it doesn't include millions of Mexicans who work in the poorly paid informal economy as sidewalk vendors, day laborers and the like. Mexico is home to more than 52 million people living in poverty, nearly half the national population. That figure is up by 3 million from three years ago.... In other words, realities on the ground in Mexico are often more complicated and contradictory than the headlines or government propaganda can tell us. Take the matter of internal migration, a topic generally overshadowed by the issue of Mexican migration into the United States."

Understanding Obama's "War on Drugs"

A clear response, by Neill Franklin, Executive Director, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), to the White House's recent defense of its continuing war on drugs.


Neill Franklin:

The White House's published response to a CNN interview of Neil Franklin presents a rare and revealing window into the thinking behind the nation's drug policy at the beginning of the fifth decade of the "war on drugs." The transcript is of great interest to anyone who wants to understand why -- despite clear scientific evidence, real-world experience and political opportunity -- a policy that is so obviously failed and is so profoundly harmful is able to continue year after year.


Life on the Line Between El Paso and Juárez

An in-depth article from the New York Times Magazine about life in the borderland and how it has been changed by the "border security" war.

NYTimes.com: "El Paso and Ciudad Juárez lie together uncomfortably like an estranged couple, surrounded on all sides by mountains and desert. The cities are separated by the thin trickle of the Rio Grande, which flows through concrete channels, built to put an end to the river’s natural habit of changing course and muddying boundaries. One side is Texas; the other, Mexico. The border’s way of life — its business, legitimate and otherwise — has always relied upon the circumvention of this dividing line. ....