Tag Archives: Mexico

Senator Lugar is right–as he said in his speech, the United States should undertake a broad review of further steps the U.S. military and the intelligence community could take to help combat the Mexican cartels in association with the Mexican government.

And one of the first steps should be to review the Brownsville Agreement, and the NAFTA-induced, “hands-off” treaty that currently prevents the US, not just from initiating investigations into the debacle inside Mexico, but from investigating the murders of our own citizens on US soil.

Bug Out Now, says Obama…

All of this follows on the heels of revelations–more ‘leaks’– from Woodward’s soon to be published best-seller, “Obama’s Wars,” especially a specific and ‘bizarre,’ as Woodward calls it, statement by the President about the nation’s ability to ‘absorb’ another 9/11 type attack, and by inference, the inability of the US government (or any government for that matter) to safequard its citizens from the bombs, bullets, and bacteria that are terrorism’s stock-in-trade.

In the wake of journalists recently murdered in Mexico, the country’s president, Felipe Calderon met with two international press organizations last week for recommendations on how to stop the violence. The meeting with the Inter-American Press Association and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reportedly had a positive tone and Calderon promised to do what […]

This is the new face of global organized crime–a criminal smorgasbord in which players energized by shifting motives still cooperate at intersections in their operational journeys, ‘hooking up’ for a day or an extra dollar when there are benefits all around.

Human rights abuses have been making headlines almost daily in the burning hot battles of Mexico’s drug wars. From the horrific massacre of 72 migrants last week, to the gruesome display of four decapitated corpses strung from a bridge along with a warning sign, to human rights investigators gone MIA, the news is dark and […]

By Cordelia Rizzo In 2007, Mexico City’s legislature affirmed a woman’s right to choose to terminate her pregnancy during the first trimester. Today, this remains the only pro-choice law in the whole country. In response, conservative congresses in other parts of Mexico have toughened their own anti-abortion laws. But ordinary Mexicans are just beginning to […]

As newspapers continue their steady financial decline and the press is criticized for everything from false news reports to jeopardizing national security, those of us who live in the comfort of a democracy may start to say, Who needs them? There are plenty of blogs to fill the gap, and as tech-savvy critical thinkers trained […]

How much more of the $378 billion transmitted via the casa de cambios and inserted into Wachovia accounts represents criminal revenue is anyone’s guess, because no further inquiries into the origin of these funds has been undertaken.

The bank, now a unit of Wells Fargo, leads a list of firms that have moved dirty money for Mexico’s narcotics cartels–helping a $39 billion trade that has killed more than 22,000 people since 2006. –Michael Smith, Bloomberg Markets Magazine, July7, 2010

Antonio Maria Costa, the UN Drug Czar, is a modest man, so when he stands up, as he did on June 23, and tells an audience at Johns Hopkins-SAIS, in Washington, DC, that we have to start thinking about transnational crime in an entirely different way—it’s news. Costa, whose degrees, from UC-Berkeley and the University […]

Journalists in Mexico are facing an increasingly hostile environment. On Sunday, 13 journalists on a tour in the state of Michoacan were kidnapped at machete point by Nahua Indians. They had been mistaken for a crew in the area to film a beer commercial, and were released, but their equipment was confiscated. According to the […]

By Cordelia Rizzo We knew that something was wrong with Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, former leader of the Legionaires of Christ, and his order, long before he was openly accused of child abuse in the ’90s. Last month, two years after Maciel’s death, Vatican has finally officially condemned Maciel’s behavior and is effectively imposing martial […]

At this point, it is unlikely that anyone has missed word of Arizona’s new immigration law. SB 1070 was signed by Governor Jan Brewer on April 23 and is the nation’s toughest law on unauthorized immigration. For the month since its passing, the country and the hemisphere have been abuzz debating the controversial nature of […]

By Cordelia Rizzo The recent deaths of two graduate students from the Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (the “Tec”), caught in a fight between the Mexican armed forces and a drug cartel gang, challenged the traditional view of the human toll of the country’s war against drugs. They showcased a singular feeling […]

Socialism and energy have a peculiar relationship to each other.  In most countries, no matter who owns the surface land, the subsurface rights to the oil, gas, or (sometimes) minerals, belongs to the national government, and, in theory, the people of the country. The idea did not start with the 20th century: kings and rulers […]