Archive for the 'Mexico' Category

While we readily admit that today we’re taking a sarcastic sort of swipe at the pretty dumb practice of stating the sodding obvious, we ourselves wish to make it perfectly obvious that we are in no way “having a go” at Ireland’s excellent ex President, Mary Robinson.

Since the sad truth is that there are still millions of westerners convinced that bums like George Bush and Tony Blair, to mention just a pair, always told us all the truth.

Just take a look at this.

GENEVA (Reuters)

Washington’s “war on terror” after the September 11 attacks has eroded human rights worldwide, creating lingering cynicism that the United Nations must now combat, international law experts said on Monday.

Mary Robinson, who was the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights when al Qaeda militants flew hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001, said the United States caused harm with some of the ways it responded.

“Seven years after 9/11 it is time to take stock and repeal abusive laws and policies,” the former Irish president said, warning that harsh U.S. detentions and interrogations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba gave a dangerous signal to other countries that could easily follow suit.

While new U.S. President Barack Obama has announced he will close Guantanamo to break from the practices of his predecessor George W. Bush, Robinson said sweeping changes needed to take place to ensure Washington abandons its “war paradigm.”

“There has been severe damage and it needs to be addressed,” she told a news conference in Geneva. “We are not more secure. We are more divided, and people are more cynical about the operation of laws.”

Arthur Chaskalson, former chief justice of South Africa, said that the United States should launch an inquiry into its counter-terrorism practices, including acts of torture by individual security and intelligence agents.

Although counter-terrorism issues have faded from the front pages since the change of government in Washington, Chaskalson said such practices have shifted around the world and could keep restricting liberties if they are not confronted head-on.

“We all have less rights today than we had five or 10 years ago, and if nothing happens, we will have even less,”

So here’s to you, Mrs Robinson, we have to say that we like your style. Like it a lot, in fact. Truth be told, maybe we even love it.

Now read the rest of this Reuters’report.

(Cross posted from How This Old Brit Sees It)

Now, please read some of these seriously salient messages being sent from the wider world.

(Cross posted from How This Old Brit Sees It)

Now the cartels are sending out kids on bikes to warn police against confrontation.

Edgar Millan Gomez, acting chief of Mexico’s federal police, was murdered by assassins who were undoubtedly in the pay of one of Mexico’s drug cartels.

I think this is the beginning of the end of Mexico’s drug cartels. This is like gunning down the director of the FBI. I think that the ongoing drug war is exposing just how powerful the cartels were allowed to become, and the next few presidential elections will turn mostly on the question of which candidate the public trusts to effectively fight them. In the long run, the gangsters’ ruthlessness, greed, and arrogance will prove to be their undoing.

21 were killed yesterday, and the toll for the year is already up to 1,100.

Right now, I’m at my dad’s condo in San Carlos. Yesterday, we got a visit from Sylvia, a 40-50 year old woman from Guaymas, and her daughter America.

For a couple of decades, Sylvia has sustained herself and America by giving haircuts, manicures, and massages to a high-end clientelle. Even today, after building her client list over a period of 2 decades, she will happily spend 4-5 hours of travel and work time to earn $25.

America grew up in Sylvia’s world, but she will live in another. This winter, she will graduate with a degree in marine biology, and will begin a life of economic self-sufficiency. In many ways, the transition that Sylvia’s family made is the transition that all of Mexico will have to make. Unfortunately, for most Mexicans the transition from an economy based on extraction, tourism, and farming to a knowledge-based economy will be much more difficult than it was for America and her mother.

Sylvia understands this, and she understands that her daughter would have very little opportunity if it weren’t for her publicly-financed college education. America’s generation of salon workers, miners, and farmers will fare poorly compared to those of Sylvia’s generation. Sylvia also understands that Mexico’s economy is being forced into a transition for which it is unready.

Unlike most people in this region, Sylvia is opposed to the PAN prescription of forcing an uneducated populace into an economy that rewards only inherited wealth and education. To be truly successful, she realizes, Mexico must make the transition to the new economy the same way that she and America did: first provide the food, education, and health care to the next generation, then transform the economy to make the best use of the Mexicans’ skills and talents.
The US, Western Europe, Japan, and a few other economies were able to make the transition to the modern economy because the national infrastructure and workforce were devoloped and educated enough to sieze the opportunity. But elsewhere — in Africa, East Europe, and most of Latin America — attempts to force the transition prematurely has brought only misery and instability.

This is not to say that expanding trade and direct investment in economies like Mexico’s should be halted or discouraged. But the transition to the modern economy is one that must be tempered until the population is made ready, in order to prevent the forces of anti-modernity and reaction from derailing the process entirely.

If some of our key institutions — the WTO, the IMF, USAID, and others — act in good faith to bring about a sustainable transition to a new economy, then the transition need not take very long. In Taiwan and South Korea, the transition took only a single generation, once those nations were ready to make the leap. In Mexico, the physical and financial infrastructure are nearly present, and great strides toward sufficiency in the area of literacy are being made in many regions.

But a premature leap forward threatens to undermine the entire enterprise.

Felipe Calderon, the candidate of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), has taken a slight lead as ballots are recounted in Mexico’s presidential election. The initial count had favored Calderon, but 2.5 million ballots had not been included in that total.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, running for the liberal Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), won most of those ballots, and led through most of the recount. But late in the recount, Calderon surged ahead. Calderon’s supporters say that the votes from regions in which their candidate was most popular are being counted last. Officials from the PRD have demanded a recount of all votes cast, but federal election officials refuse to recount ballots that have been certified by local election supervisors.

In the past, Mexican elections were tainted by massive fraud, and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ensured that its candidates won virtually every election. In fact, the PRI presidential candidate this year, Roberto Madrazo, stole an election for governor of Tabasco from Lopez Obrador in 1994. But this year, much of the election machinery was in the hands of the PAN, and international observers have been supervising the elections.

Even so, a lot of fraud has occurred, especially in areas still controlled by the PRI. Obrador’s supporters claim that in 18,000 polling places, more votes were counted than there were ballots provided. And at nearly 800 locations, more votes were cast than there were registered voters. Most of the ballots from those places will not be included in the recount.

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Mexico goes to the polls July 2

Mexicans will elect a new president on July 2, and polls are showing a dead heat between Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and Felipe Calderon. The outcome of the election is likely to have a profound impact on Mexican immigration to the US, but few American media outlets have succeeded in communicating the importance of the contest to the American public.

Obrador is the populist former mayor of Mexico City, and he is running under the banner of the center-left Democratic Revolution Party (PRD). He squares off against Felipe Calderon, former Secretary of Energy. Calderon is endorsed by the conservative National Action Party (PAN). The Revolutionary Institutional Party’s (PRI) candidate, Roberto Madrazo, is running a distant third. But his party holds the key to the election.

The PRI ran Mexico’s politics from 1929 until the 1990s, using election fraud and intimidation to keep their hold on power. The corrupt rule of the PRI turned Mexico into an economic backwater, and over time the party transformed from a faux-populist oligarchy into a free-market oriented oligarchy.

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How can Bush regain the upper hand on the immigration issue?

The Onion has some suggestions for the president.

On a more serious note, Phronesisaical has some good analysis about the Mexican presidential election, to be held July 2. Leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has now closed to within 4 points in the latest poll.

(Thanks to reader Stewart)