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.

more of this excellent piece on the role of USAID and NGOs they support in whitewashing coups by buying off ‘civil’ society here.

Consulate wires leaked by Wikileaks indicate that U.S. military grade weapons are in the hands of Mexican Drug Cartels. The attempt, by the Obama Administration to finger gun sellers in the U.S., as the source of our “Border War,” is challenged in the report from NarcoNews.

“The lot numbers of some of the grenades recovered, including the grenade used in the attack on Televisa, indicate that previously ordnance with these same lot numbers may have been sold by the USG [U.S. Government] to the El Salvadoran military in the early 1990s via the Foreign Military Sales program.”

To read this excellent piece, click here.

To the Editor:

Re “In Mexico, Scenes From Life in a Drug War: Monterrey’s Habit” (Op-Ed, Oct. 17):

Ricardo Elizondo Elizondo’s essay about the drug war in Mexico says that Mexico must take notice of its own drug use problems and that “there can be no solution until we come to terms with the truth.”

I am sure that is true, but there is a larger truth at work that trumps all others in the drug war: We must end the folly of prohibition — that is, end the drug war — or there will be no solution.

All of the harm and horror associated with the drug issue that Mr. Elizondo wrote of are really a function of prohibition.

The case has been incontrovertibly made elsewhere. The drug war must go. We all know it; only those with a stake in it want it to continue.

D. H. Michon
St. Paul, Oct. 18, 2010

Excerpt from this fascinating piece in the New York Review of Books which reaffirms the failure of the ‘war on drugs’ which we’ve been citing as a pretext for militarization of Latin America and the Caribbean:

“It’s not that Guzmán has influence whereas other traffickers do not; it’s that every trafficker has a great many appointed officials and elected politicians on his payroll but Guzmán has more than the rest. The most distressing conclusion one can draw from de Mauleón’s articles is not that President Calderón’s war on drugs is being lost but that it may not even be fought.”

MEXICO CITY — A debate about legalizing marijuana and possibly other drugs — once a taboo suggestion — is percolating in Mexico, a nation exhausted by runaway violence and a deadly drug war.

Read the entire article here.

Don’t miss some great comments on this article on the McClatchy site either.

(IPS) – The Jenpoj (”winds of fire) community radio station in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, which plays an important role in keeping the Mixe indigenous community informed, has had its equipment confiscated and has fought and won a court case to get a broadcast license.

“Things are still lagging, and freedom of expression continues to be violated,” Sócrates Vásquez, the director of the tiny 1000-watt radio station, which broadcasts from the Mixe indigenous community of Santa María Tlahuitoltepec, told IPS. “They treat us as if we were the same thing as a university or commercial station.”

The World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC) in Mexico delivered a report Monday to special rapporteurs on freedom of expression Frank La Rue, of the United Nations, and Catalina Botero, of the Organisation of American States (OAS), outlining the difficulties faced by community stations.

The two carried out an Aug. 9-24 visit to Mexico to investigate violence against journalists. Eight reporters have been killed in Mexico so far this year, and seven media outlets have been attacked.

See more here.

“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.”

WOLA nor Adam Isaacson working with them add wishy-washy comments (not condemnation) adding to their terrible record defending the ‘drug war’.

To learn more about expanded U.S. militarization (and WOLA’s nonchalant response to it), 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.