(Ottawa/Toronto) Two years after filing a complaint with the RCMP for corruption allegations against Calgary-based Blackfire Resources, a group of Canadian civil society organizations would like to know where Canadian authorities stand on the company’s controversial operations in Chiapas, Mexico. But, after an eighteen-month wait, a request for information to the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade under the Access to Information Act is still unanswered.

For the rest of this article, please click here.

An excellent overview of Latin American political landscape and US government interests and actions against democracy under President Obama.

Quote: “The US’s agenda in Latin America is regaining hegemony. But US allies have been lacking political personalities capable of garnering strong support in their home countries. Openness to dialog or even limited reform on drug policy, which appears to challenge Uncle Sam’s agenda, could go a long way in gaining popular support, generating an apparently ‘independent’ block of right leaning political figures to challenge the South American lineup, while continuing security operations to impose transnational business interests through repression and criminalization.”
To read more, go here.

. . .

Plans by local government to develop the coastline for tourism have stirred up old rivalries in the area. A land dispute going back to the early1900s has once again reared its head. And this time, the stakes are high. Around 1,300 hectors of unspoilt land running from the coast up into the mountains is being targeted for development.

The Nahua people say that their community owns the rights to the land and have the legal papers to prove it. This claim is disputed by a group of local businessmen, who say the land was privatized in 1911 and that it belongs to them.

A piece to show how corrupt local government in Mexico and USG-provided (Bush and Obama) lethal aid are combining to murder and dispossess indigenous peoples in Mexico.
Here’s the rest.

The following graphs come from putting together four streams of data, by country and region, from 2000 through 2011 (through 2010 for arms sales).

For entire piece with links to charts, go here.

And still no public statement by our government on behalf of US journalist, Brad Will, murdered by Mexican Government paramilitaries in broad daylight 5 and a half years ago. We see where the Bush and Obama government’s loyalties lie.

Mexico: Another Activist Murdered for Resisting a Canadian Mine
Written by Vancouver Media Co-op and Proyecto Ambulante
Published Friday, 16 March 2012 08:12

Bernardo Vásquez Sánchez was murdered this evening, and Rosalinda Dionicio Sánchez is in hospital with a bullet wound. Both have been outspoken anti-mining activists in Oaxaca, Mexico. Photo by Dawn PaleyBernardo Vásquez killed in Oaxaca, two others wounded

Source: Vancouver Media Co-op and Proyecto Ambulante

Tonight, we lost a comrade. Someone who understood very well that it was cheaper for Fortuna Silver to divide his people and for paramilitaries and police to repress them than it was for the company to consult with the community. Someone who could debunk “Corporate Social Responsibility” based on his own experience, and connect it to capitalism and the state. Someone who hadn’t yet had children, he told me when I met him in February, but who hoped to, some day.

Bernardo Vasquez Sanchez was a clear spoken Zapotec activist, a brother, son, and cousin, who dared to stand up against a mining project in the territory of his people. He was well aware that a paramilitary group was operating in San José Progreso, Oaxaca, and that it was organized to snuff out opposition to a gold mine, owned by Vancouver based Fortuna Silver.

Read the entirety of this touching and informative piece here.

U.S. Faces Challenge to “Drug War” as Latin American Countries Mull Decriminalization, Legalization

Ethan Nadelman of the Drug Policy Alliance provides a diplomatic and (to me what seems overly) praise-laden overview of the Obama Administration’s promotion of ‘drug war’ policy. He does declare Obama Administration has shown a failure of leadership in challenging the orthodoxy which is supporting a failed policy. And that “(t)he failure of the U.S. global prohibitionist policy goes back many, many decades. It’s wreaked havoc in the region. And people know it, and they’re finally getting the guts to say the emperor has no new clothes. . .that the U.S. policy cannot be defended on economic grounds, on security grounds, on scientific grounds, or on ethical grounds.”

Unfortunately, Obama is on the same side of the fence as Bush for militarized non-solutions that have spread suffering across the hemisphere. Let’s not support advocates of failed policies!

Yes, we can!

by LAURA CARLSEN

Vice President Joe Biden landed in Mexico City last night and he’s left little doubt about his mission—to lock in the regional drug war. His visit comes at a time of mounting calls to end prohibitionist laws and the drug war model.

Excellent piece by Laura Carlsen, Director of the Americas Program of the Center for International Policy. Read all of it published by Counterpunch here.

Earlier this year, prosecutors charged Julian P. Heicklen, a retired chemistry professor, with jury tampering because he stood outside the federal courthouse in Manhattan providing information about jury nullification to passers-by. Given that I have been recommending nullification for nonviolent drug cases since 1995 — in such forums as The Yale Law Journal, “60 Minutes” and YouTube — I guess I, too, have committed a crime.

The prosecutors who charged Mr. Heicklen said that “advocacy of jury nullification, directed as it is to jurors, would be both criminal and without constitutional protections no matter where it occurred.” The prosecutors in this case are wrong. The First Amendment exists to protect speech like this — honest information that the government prefers citizens not know.

Laws against jury tampering are intended to deter people from threatening or intimidating jurors. To contort these laws to justify punishing Mr. Heicklen, whose court-appointed counsel describe him as “a shabby old man distributing his silly leaflets from the sidewalk outside a courthouse,” is not only unconstitutional but unpatriotic. Jury nullification is not new; its proponents have included John Hancock and John Adams.

The doctrine is premised on the idea that ordinary citizens, not government officials, should have the final say as to whether a person should be punished. As Adams put it, it is each juror’s “duty” to vote based on his or her “own best understanding, judgment and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.”

In 1895, the Supreme Court ruled that jurors had no right, during trials, to be told about nullification. The court did not say that jurors didn’t have the power, or that they couldn’t be told about it, but only that judges were not required to instruct them on it during a trial. Since then, it’s been up to scholars like me, and activists like Mr. Heicklen, to get the word out.

Nullification has been credited with helping to end alcohol prohibition and laws that criminalized gay sex. Last year, Montana prosecutors were forced to offer a defendant in a marijuana case a favorable plea bargain after so many potential jurors said they would nullify that the judge didn’t think he could find enough jurors to hear the case. (Prosecutors now say they will remember the actions of those jurors when they consider whether to charge other people with marijuana crimes.)

There have been unfortunate instances of nullification. Racist juries in the South, for example, refused to convict people who committed violent acts against civil-rights activists, and nullification has been used in cases involving the use of excessive force by the police. But nullification is like any other democratic power; some people may try to misuse it, but that does not mean it should be taken away from everyone else.

How one feels about jury nullification ultimately depends on how much confidence one has in the jury system. Based on my experience, I trust jurors a lot. I first became interested in nullification when I prosecuted low-level drug crimes in Washington in 1990. Jurors here, who were predominantly African-American, nullified regularly because they were concerned about racially selective enforcement of the law.

Across the country, crime has fallen, but incarceration rates remain at near record levels. Last year, the New York City police made 50,000 arrests just for marijuana possession. Because prosecutors have discretion over whether to charge a suspect, and for what offense, they have more power than judges over the outcome of a case. They tend to throw the book at defendants, to compel them to plead guilty in return for less harsh sentences. In some jurisdictions, like Washington, prosecutors have responded to jurors who are fed up with their draconian tactics by lobbying lawmakers to take away the right to a jury trial in drug cases. That is precisely the kind of power grab that the Constitution’s framers were so concerned about.

In October, the Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, asked at a Senate hearing about the role of juries in checking governmental power, seemed open to the notion that jurors “can ignore the law” if the law “is producing a terrible result.” He added: “I’m a big fan of the jury.” I’m a big fan, too. I would respectfully suggest that if the prosecutors in New York bring fair cases, they won’t have to worry about jury nullification. Dropping the case against Mr. Heicklen would let citizens know that they are as committed to justice, and to free speech, as they are to locking people up.

Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor, is a professor of law at George Washington University and the author of “Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice.”

Excerpt:

The private and public sector promoters of war reap hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds. They grow stronger as their lobbyists buy off politicians with campaign donations and the Defense Department assures itself a lion’s share of taxpayer dollars.

Peace is their enemy.

. . .

In a recent article on the winners and losers in the war on terrorism, Gareth Porter put it succinctly,

“Aggressive U.S. wars are not merely the result of mistaken policies, but of the national security institutions pursuing their own interests at the expense of the interests of the American people. The ‘war on terror’ is a means for those institutions to maintain the present allocation of national resources and power to the national security sector for the indefinite future.”

Entire analysis here.

Quote from the article: In the 2009 cable, the U.S. Embassy official warns that funding for the Mérida Initiative, one of the U.S. “War on Drugs” initiatives in Mexico and Central America, would be “contingent upon guidance from Washington regarding how best to work around Melgar.”

According to the Salvadoran digital periodical El Faro, the US finally forced Melgar out by leveraging a second international program, Partnership for Growth; El Salvador is one of four countries worldwide handpicked by the US for the new program. El Faro’s sources in the Ministry of Security claim that Melgar’s removal was a U.S. condition for sealing the Partnership for Growth, officially signed just four days prior to Melgar’s resignation. The program’s initial report named violence and crime as El Salvador’s primary constraints to economic growth, quickly turning what the U.S. had publicly touted as an economic development program into another security initiative.

Editor’s note: Amazing that the President of El Salvador accepted as a USG condition for delivery of one neoliberal (’development’) program (Partnership for Growth) that another USG neoliberal ’security’ program (Plan Mexico) be implemented by a former Salvadorean General, in violation of El Salvadorean law (and likely to the dismay of most Americans informed about Plan Mexico or Partnership for Growth).

Ex-general Replaces Leftist Leader in El Salvador’s Security Cabinet as Washington Reasserts Influence in Central America

Yesterday, President of El Salvador Mauricio Funes swore in retired general David Munguía Payés as the country´s new Minister of Public Security and Justice, following the sudden resignation of Manuel Melgar from the position on November 8. The move prompted outspoken opposition from Salvadoran social organizations who view it as a violation of the 1992 Peace Accords that ended the country’s Civil War and transferred public security from military to civilian administration.

Rest of piece here.