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Halfway Through His Term, Mexico's Calderon Vows to Stay Course


Mexican President Felipe Calderon gave his third State of the Union address today to a Congress newly dominated by the opposition. From the Washington Post:

With unprecedented U.S. support, including $1.4 billion in aid, Calderón has tripled spending on security in a struggle for law and order that has left almost 14,000 dead since he took office. The violence has turned border cities such as Ciudad Juarez into danger zones where a dozen people are shot dead a day and U.S. citizens are warned to stay away.

There are now military operations against drug cartels in 16 of Mexico's 32 states and its federal district. Human rights complaints against the Mexican military have soared 600 percent, but the U.S. State Department this month concluded that Mexico is working hard to improve.

As part of Calderón's state of the union report, his attorney general said that 80,000 drug suspects have been arrested, including 10 major cartel leaders -- among them so-called "narco-juniors" who are the money-laundering, designer-clad scions of big cartel families. Authorities have also arrested top government officials who were supposed to be fighting the cartels but were actually in their employ. Security forces have arrested 1,400 kidnappers and detained or dismissed 200 politicians and government agents accused of protecting the crime mafias, who are enriched by an estimated $14 billion in revenue generated by sales in the United States, the biggest drug market in the world.

The LA Times enumerates the litany of economic woes facing Calderon:

The U.S. recession has hit Mexico hard by drying up a market for automobiles and other manufactured goods. Economists project that the Mexican economy will shrink by 7% or so this year, a major drop.

The U.S. downturn has also cut cash transfers sent home by migrants north of the border, one of Mexico's biggest sources of foreign income.

Some Mexican business leaders have proposed closing the revenue gap by extending a value-added tax to food and medicine. But the PRI, which commands a majority of the lower chamber through its alliance with the smaller Green Party, has ruled out such a move.


Nat Wilson Turner September 2, 2009 - 6:53pm
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BP discovery brings deep water Gulf of Mexico into focus

MarketWatch

With close-to-the-surface oil mostly tapped out around the world, oil and gas giants and state-run oil majors are scrambling to find new deposits miles underground in offshore Brazil, the Gulf of Mexico, the North Sea, West Africa and elsewhere.

BP /quotes/comstock/13*!bp/quotes/nls/bp (BP 52.85, +0.32, +0.61%) said Wednesday it drilled 6 miles into its Tiber well via a semi-submersible rig operated by Transocean /quotes/comstock/13*!rig/quotes/nls/rig (RIG 74.41, +0.02, +0.03%) to a make a "giant" discovery.

A spokesman for the oil major compared the Keathley Canyon find to its Kaskida find, which had 3 billion barrels of oil equivalent and was drilled to a depth of 32,500 feet. See full story.

John Kingston, director of oil for Platts, said BP has been aggressively bidding for leases not far from the Tiber well.

"That's a signal that the whole area may become a very solid place for exploration," he said.

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Nat Wilson Turner September 2, 2009 - 7:48pm
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U.S. anti-drug aid to Mexico reaches $214 million

Reuters
The United States has written checks for $214 million of the $1.4 billion promised to Mexico in 2007 to help fight the country's powerful drug cartels, Washington's top anti-drug diplomat said on Tuesday.

The amount is a fraction of $1.12 billion authorized by the U.S. Congress since 2008, of which $700 million was part of funds promised under the 2007 Merida Initiative.

The money is intended to pay for equipment and training for Mexican security forces battling the violent drug gangs that send some $40 billion worth of illegal drugs into the United States every year.

A supplemental spending bill signed into law in June included an additional $420 million in aid for Mexico.

"We've had some deliveries during the summer of some of the non-intrusive detection equipment that is really at the heart of the material part of this (plan) which provides the sort of technology that is needed so that commerce can be inspected rapidly," U.S. Assistant Secretary of State David Johnson said at a briefing for journalists at the U.S. embassy in Mexico City.

The United States is also helping Mexican police set up internal affairs units to root out corrupt officers and improve recruiting procedures.

Johnson said five Bell helicopters built by Textron Inc (TXT.N) worth $50 million are due to be delivered in the fall to the Mexican army.

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Nat Wilson Turner September 2, 2009 - 7:53pm
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no better way

for a Latin American president to please the US military industrial complex than to take U.S. taxpayer dollars and buy American weapons with them.

Nat Wilson Turner September 2, 2009 - 7:53pm
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Mexico's Calderón still popular, despite brutal year

Christian Science Monitor

Mexico's President Felipe Calderón said it himself: it's been a tough year.

Historic levels of violence, the swine flu, dwindling oil production, an economic recession that is Mexico's worst in decades, and a devastating drought are but a few challenges this nation faces.

Still, during his annual "informe," or state-of-the-nation speech Wednesday, President Calderón heralded his government for carrying Mexico forward while other countries may have buckled under the challenges.

Mexicans seem to agree with the assessment. In a poll published in the daily newspaper Reforma, 68 percent of those surveyed approve of their president's leadership, even though economic woes and insecurity cost his conservative National Action Party (PAN) seats in mid-term elections in July.

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Nat Wilson Turner September 2, 2009 - 7:55pm
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