“After receiving a diplomatic request from the US Embassy, on July 1 the Costa Rican legislative assembly approved a measure to grant unprecedented access to a U.S. military fleet in Costa Rica’s waters. The vessels will arrive for at least six months to assist counter-narcotics operations by Costa Rican authorities. Costa Rica has long been used a stopping point of entry for drugs coming from Colombia and Panama on their way further north.
. . .
Critics say that a massive foreign military landing at their shores not only directly violates that constitution as it stands today, but tears at the moral fabric of a nation which constitutionally abolished its own army in 1949.”

Neither WOLA nor Adam Isaacson working with them have much meaningful to add other than obfuscation (which says plenty!).

Read full July 15, 2010, article, “Fear, Suspicion as US Military En Route to Costa Rica”, by Joseph Shansky here.

“Activists working on cases connected to the drug war are particularly vulnerable because drug trafficking organizations, and their many accomplices in police forces and governments, show little tolerance for criticism.”

is this the government with which the US is seeking law-enforcement cooperation in the so-called ‘drug war’?! Besides the complete impracticability of the ‘war on drugs’ as a narco-trafficking reduction method, the continued provision of lethal aid by the US Government (including the Obama Administration which is increasing it) is deeply immoral given the systemic abuses, corruption and impunity Mexicans face at the hands of their own government officials.

Contact your elected officials (Representatives and Senators) to let them know you oppose the Merida Initiative (Plan Mexico) and that you demand that the murder of Brad Will be resolved.

The author should have mentioned Brad Will.

Human Rights Defenders Seek Protection in Mexico
By MARC LACEY, Published: June 19, 2010

MEXICO CITY — With a drug war raging around them and an unreliable judicial system in place, Mexico’s human rights activists have their hands full as they grapple with a growing new class of victims: themselves.

“I’m not going to be silenced,” insisted Silvia Vázquez Camacho, an activist from Tijuana, who is now in hiding after receiving a series of threats on her life in recent months. Despite her bold declaration, the fear in her voice was palpable, and she acknowledged that she had been forced to take a respite from her activism.

Mexico has a long history of cases in which the authorities, whether they wear badges or business suits, trample on the rights of the powerless. Acknowledging that, the government 20 years ago created a formal commission to officially identify violations and recommend — but not order — remedies. Citizens groups also rose up, however, to level the playing field and represent victims of wrongful arrests, torture, illegal land grabs and numerous other transgressions.

But the system is being severely tested by what human rights activists say is a concerted attack on their rights. The new reality is that activists now devote a considerable portion of their time helping other activists, who have been threatened or far worse.

“No one is protecting us,” said Juan Carlos Gutiérrez Contreras, director of the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights. “Human rights activists should be able to do their jobs. And we don’t just want protection. We want the government to investigate the threats.”

Amnesty International, in a recent report, outlined 15 cases of threats against Mexican human rights activists in recent years scattered across the country. Although there are no precise tallies, human rights groups say that the number of activists who have been improperly singled out by the police, soldiers and government officials is in the dozens.

In one of numerous new cases on file with Mexican human rights organizations, Ms. Vázquez and another woman, Blanca Mesina Nevarez, recently fled Tijuana because they feared that their lives were in danger as a result of their work. The two activists had been representing 25 police officers who had accused Mexican security forces of torturing them in early 2009 to force them to sign confessions saying that they were taking bribes. The activists suspect that a group of rival Tijuana police officers are the ones threatening them.

The more vocal the activists were in raising the torture allegations, the more intense the response. First there were threatening phone calls. Then police cars began turning up outside their homes and trailing them around the city. After Ms. Mesina testified at a hearing in Washington last fall of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a man in a mask approached her and threatened to kill her.

Alarmed by the intimidation, the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights recently took on the case of the Tijuana activists, calling on the Mexican government to beef up its protection measures for the two women, before it is too late.

For some, like Raúl Lucas Lucía, it already is. Mr. Lucas defended the rights of indigenous people in the state of Guerrero until he was abducted by three men who claimed to be police officers in February 2009. “Keep quiet or we’ll kill your husband,” Mr. Lucas’s wife, Guadalupe Castro Morales, was told in a phone call from someone who reached her on her husband’s cellphone. “This is happening to you because you’re defending Indians.”

Mr. Lucas’s body and that of a colleague, Manuel Ponce Rosas, were found seven days later. The case remains unsolved.

“Do you think you’re so brave?” a man in a car yelled at Obtilia Eugenio Manuel, the founder of an indigenous rights organization, also in Guerrero, in another case compiled by Amnesty International. The man added, “If you don’t go to prison, we’ll kill you.”

She also received three death threats by text message on her cellphone, one of which warned her that no human rights group could save her. Responding to her case and those of other activists in Guerrero, the international human rights commission, which is part of the Organization of American States, called on the Mexican authorities to provide her and dozens of other activists with protection.

In another case, Cristina Auerbach Benavides, who campaigned on behalf of the families of 65 miners who died in a coal mine explosion in 2006, was confronted more than once at her home in Mexico City by men who claimed to be police officers. The incidents occurred when the bodyguard assigned to her by the Mexico City government was off duty.

“Mexico is a dangerous country in which to defend human rights,” said the Amnesty International report, which noted that there were many more cases in the files of the country’s numerous human rights groups.

Activists working on cases connected to the drug war are particularly vulnerable because drug trafficking organizations, and their many accomplices in police forces and governments, show little tolerance for criticism.

To be sure, human rights workers are by no means the sole targets. Crusading journalists have been silenced by shadowy gunmen. Politicians and police officers who dared confront organized crime have lost their lives over it.

President Felipe Calderón has defended his government’s human rights record and described his antidrug offensive as an effort to protect the human rights of all Mexicans against powerful criminals.

“Obviously we have a strong commitment to protect the human rights of everybody, the victims and even of the criminals themselves,” he said last August in Guadalajara, with President Obama at his side, when questioned about human rights. “And anyone who says the contrary certainly would have to prove this — any case, just one case, where the proper authority has not acted in the correct way.”

Human rights activists say they have stacks of cases. And they say that there is ample reason in Mexico to take death threats seriously.

In Ms. Mesina’s case, after she returned from Washington, she was followed by a mysterious black pickup truck with tinted windows and no license plates. She drove her car into a parking lot to get away, and that is when a man dressed in black got out, with his face covered, and approached her.

“ ‘This is the last time I’m going to warn you to stop filing complaints in Tijuana,’ ” she recalled him saying in a stern warning that was laced with expletives. “If I don’t kill you now it’s to avoid a scandal around the elections and because your case is already known internationally.”

Ms. Mesina, who became an activist to help free her father, who is one of the jailed Tijuana officers, and his colleagues, took the last part of that threat as form of encouragement. More attention on the case, she said, might make it harder to kill her.

But Nik Steinberg, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who does work in Mexico, expresses some doubt. “One wonders, if the government will not even protect defenders whose cases have attracted international intention, who will it protect?” he said.

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) published at Upside Down World.

It is hard to find words that quite describe U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s performance at the June 7 meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Lima, Peru. Cluelessness certainly comes to mind, but leavened with a goodly dash of arrogance and historical amnesia.

Clinton leaned on the 35-member grouping “to move forward and welcome Honduras back into the inter-American community,” urged the OAS to step up the fight against drug trafficking, and scolded the organization for a “proliferation of priorities and mandates that dilute its efforts, drain its budget, and diminish its capacity.” She added that the OAS should “refocus” on such tasks as monitoring elections.

Where does one begin? Well, Honduras and elections for starters.

While Clinton characterized the election that followed the coup against Manuel Zelaya “free and fair,” it was boycotted by 51 percent of the population. The U.S. has been silent about the fact that the new president, Porfirio Lobo, has overseen a reign of terror that, since the June 28, 2009 coup, has seen the assassination of some 130 anti-government activists, including seven journalists. The murders bear a close resemblance to death squad assassinations carried out under military dictator Policarpo Paz Garcia in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Reporters Without Borders recently designated Honduras “the world’s deadliest country for the media.”

“We are living in a state of terror,” says human rights activist Dr. Juan Almendares, a former director of research projects at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. Almendares currently runs a free clinic in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital.

Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino told the OAS meeting that the Honduras coup has put the “inter-American order at risk,” and that “My government cannot recognize the new government in Honduras while there are violations against human rights.”

In the old days, the U.S. would have steamrolled any opposition, but now-a-days supporting the Colossus of the North can be a lonely business. Only a handful of countries, including Canada, Columbia, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Peru, and Guatemala backed re-instating Honduras to the OAS.

Tone deaf was all you could call Clinton’s call for stepping up the war on drugs. A few months ago the 17-member Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, chaired by three former heads of state, concluded “The U.S.-style anti-drug strategy was putting the region’s fragile democratic institutions at risk, and corrupting the judiciary system, government, the political system, and especially the police force.” Former Brazilian president and Commission member Fernando Cardoso said, “The war on drugs is a failed war. We have to move from this approach to another.”

Several Latin American countries, including Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Uruguay have moved to legalize personal drug possession, and other countries in the region are considering how to move from punishment to treatment.

And what did Clinton mean by that phrase “proliferation of priorities”? There was no question as to how OAS members read it: “Keep your nose out of the Middle East,” not an instruction likely to be followed. Brazil and Turkey’s effort to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue peacefully has drawn widespread applause throughout the continent, and a number of Latin American countries have become increasingly critical of Israel over its treatment of the Palestinians. Argentina, El Salvador, Panama, Nicaragua, Peru, Venezuela, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Mexico, Chile, and Brazil were sharply critical of the Israeli attack on the recent Gaza flotilla, and many called for lifting the blockade of Gaza.

Clinton’s efforts to lobby Latin American nations to support sanctions against Iran fell flat.

What Clinton did not mention was why the Obama administration has not ended the blockade of Cuba, failed to tackle the immigration issue, and remained silent on a plan by Britain to drill for gas and oil in waters north of the Malvinas (Falkland Islands).

Back in February the newly minted Rio Group—which excludes the U.S. and Canada— held a Unity Summit in Cancun and endorsed an Argentinean document accusing Britain of violating international law by allowing the British oil company, Desire Petroleum, to drill near the islands. Geologists estimate that the area could hold up to 60 billion barrels of oil, not much smaller than Brazil’s vast offshore Salto Deposits.

“Our attitude is one of solidarity with Argentina,” said Brazilian President Luiz “Lula” da Silva, speaking for the 32-member group. “What is the geographical, political, and economic explanation for England to be in the Malvinas? Is it possible that Argentina is not the owner while England is, despite being 14,000 kilometers away?”

It increasingly looks as if the Rio Group—rumor is that its new name will be the “Latin American and Caribbean Community”—will eventually replace the OAS, which partly explains Clinton’s plea for the organization to “refocus.” The OAS is “refocusing,” but that means members no longer has to curtsy to the United States, that countries in the region should determine diplomatic priorities, and that Brasilia has as much right to become a player in the Middle East as Washington.

Just to show you how the world has turned upside down, the June 6 Financial Times told its readers that “the safest place to be” in a risky world was Latin America.

In her address to the delegates, Clinton complained that the OAS “has not always lived up to its founding ideals.” Now it is, and Washington is less than happy. All in all, a bad week for the Monroe Doctrine, and a very good week for Latin America.

And Plan Mexico is modeled on Plan Colombia except there are no benchmarks to allow the public (or the GAO) to measure its failure. Great.

Here’s a quote:

“If Colombians are victims of this regime, indeed of this State, one has to ask who the beneficiaries are. The answer has to be sought. This is an International Criminal Legal issue. Amongst many other facts that require volumes to be exposed, Colombia is the largest recipient of US military aid and cooperation in the continent. The Colombian regime is the closest ally of transnational corporate interests (pharmaceutical, tourism, mining, oil, agribusiness, food, energy, biopiracy, infrastructure projects such as dams, the arms trade and almost anyone involved in anything and everything from the legal and illegal organized global crime networks). Through FTAs, the Colombian regime has delivered national sovereignty, freedoms, resources, labour, nature and more to foreign interests at an intolerable expense for Colombians. Investors are attracted to put money into the Colombian economy for guaranteed profit in exchange for absolutely nothing for the Colombian population: No jobs, no transfer of technologies, no profit for the Colombian economy. The Colombian criminal regime promised Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, on November 21 2008, to deliver 50% of Colombian territory to mining and other transnational corporate interests [iii]. Every crime of the Colombian State revolves around corporate profit.”

The article describes how President Obama’s administration is in discussions with his right-wing PAN counterpart, Mexican President Calderon, to extend lethal aid package to Mexico with a new emphasis on corruption. Of course, this worked so clearly not the outcome of 11 years of support for rule of law under Plan Colombia that many are rightly skeptical. It certainly does not instill confidence that the Democratic Congress-drafted legislation for Plan Mexico did not include any benchmarks to determine if the 100s of millions of taxpayer dollars were achieving their goals. Again, perhaps, this is because Plan Colombia included such benchmarks which allowed the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) to determine it had failed.

by Jeremy Bigwood

Published in In These Times, May 13, 2009.

From the article: “Obama may not understand the dangerous waters his administration is drifting into by expanding “public safety” policing programs. If the history of the OPS and similar projects are any indication of what will come, U.S. policing initiatives in Latin America and elsewhere could result in violence and political repression.”
Read all of it, here.

In April, US President Barack Obama visited Mexico where he announced that the US needed to take some responsibility for Mexico’s ongoing Drug War. He also declared his support for a continuation and strengthening of free trade policies between the two countries. According to Miguel Tinker-Salas, it is the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the massive economic transition it precipitated, that has created such fertile ground for the drug economy. The result is that the Mexican government finds itself facing a decreasing level of control over entire regions of the country as the cartels provide the services that the central government no longer does.

May 10, 2009
Part II: US-funded militarization didn’t stop Colombian drug trade and won’t in Mexico either.

Pointing to the abject failure of a similar nine-year-old policy in Colombia – a country where the drug trade has actually expanded over the last decade of the heavily-funded drug war and US military aid has been turned against the social movement – this segment reveals a similar phenomenon that is already being observed in Mexico.

Written by Kristin Bricker for Narconews. Published May 9, 2009

Is the Mexican government planning to incarcerate 100s of thousands of casual drug users? Or does it only want to use the threat of draconian sentences to frighten many individuals so as to control and deploy them?

Read the whole piece here.

Two key passages of the article:

First, Dyncorp. . . :

‘The increase in the concentration of new personnel includes support from private companies that have been contracted by the State Department to bring their own specialists, known as private service contractors.

As of now, the Dyncorp company has contracted three employees to administrate its participation in the Merida Initiative, one of whom will be in Mexico City and will help the Narcotics Affairs Office in the Embassy to “maintain good contact with Mexican security agencies.”‘

Second, who are the ‘human rights organizations’ which might be bought with the Merida blood money (you’ll likely have to follow a paper trail to find out):

“The contracts PSC-09-010-INL and PSC-09-019-INL were offered to two specialists in training Mexican police and military personnel, particularly police, inspectors, judges, and prosecutors.”

When read together with Bill Conroy’s pieces exposing how the United States Government’s Direct Military Sales of lethal hardware and training are a key component of the supply-chain for the narco-cartels, this article offers a critical understanding of Plan Mexico.

Drug War Doublespeak

“Through late February and early March, a blitzkrieg of declarations from U.S. government and military officials and pundits hit the media, claiming that Mexico was alternately at risk of being a failed state, on the verge of civil war, losing control of its territory, and posing a threat to U.S. national security.”
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Available in translation: Doble discurso en guerra contra la droga