Daily Headlines: March 28, 2016 (Updated)

* El Salvador: “We have ordered all of our people . . . to halt all types of homicides nationwide,” said a masked figure purportedly representing the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 gangs in a video claiming that both groups will renew an anti-murder truce.

Update: El Salvador's police chief and a spokesman for President Salvador Sánchez Cerén each rejected the possibility of negotiating with the gangs.
 
* U.S.: Santiago Erevia, a former U.S. Army sergeant who in 2014 received the Medal of Honor after decades of racial discrimination, passed away last week at the age of 69.

* Cuba: Ex-Cuban leader Fidel Castro blasted U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to the island last week even though Obama held multiple talks with current Fidel’s brother and current Cuban President Raul Castro.

* Mexico: Authorities have reportedly arrested a man nicknamed “King Midas” who allegedly laundered up to $400 million yearly for Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel.

YouTube Source – Vice News (Video uploaded on December 2015).
 
Online Sources including Update – The Toronto Star, Fox News Latino, BBC News, CNN, ABC News

Daily Headlines: June 19, 2014

* Argentina: The Argentine government is in a race against time in order to repay billions of dollars of debt to creditors and avoid default before the end of this month.

* Venezuela: Outspoken opposition politico María Corina Machado has been barred from leaving Venezuela as authorities investigate her role in unrest following an anti-government march over four months ago.

* Mexico: A mass grave with at least twenty-eight bodies was found the Mexican Gulf state of Veracruz on Tuesday.

* Colombia: The U.S. Treasury Department removed economic sanctions on more than three hundred people and firms with ties to the formerly active Cali Cartel.

Video Source – euronews via YouTube

Online Sources – Reuters; El Universal; The Latin Americanist; Fox News Latino; NBC News

Daily Headlines: September 3, 2013

* Cuba: “You're never too old to chase your dreams,” exclaimed sixty-four-year old Diana Nyad on Monday after she became the first person to complete the 110-mile swim from Cuba to the U.S. without a shark cage.

* Argentina: A biographical film on the life of Pope Francis entitled “A Priest’s Tale” is reportedly being planned in the pontiff’s native Argentina.

* Venezuela: Finance Minister Nelson Merentes said that even though “the government…has had social achievements” the Venezuelan economy still has “structural problems” and needs to be reformed. 

* Mexico: Authorities in Mexico have allegedly detained Alberto Carrillo Fuentes, the suspected head of the New Juarez drug gang who was nicknamed “Ugly Betty.”

Video Source – YouTube via Associated Press
 
Online Sources- USA TODAY; BBC News; Variety; CNN

Daily Headlines: March 1, 2013

* Latin America: Will the Vatican agree with attendees at a recent Brazilian bishops' conference and elect a Pope from Latin America?

* U.S.: The sequestration cuts expected to go into effect today could hit Latin America’s economies hard and affect tourism into the region.

* Venezuela: A recent poll found that 57% of Venezuelans believe that President Hugo Chávez will recover and defeat the cancer hurting him.

* Guatemala: President Otto Perez Molina urged the U.S. government to grant Temporary Protected Status to about 700,000 undocumented Guatemalans.

Daily Headlines: August 28, 2012

* Nicaragua: Investigators believe that eighteen people arrested and posing as fake Mexican journalists may be part of a ‘vast network of drug criminals”.

* U.S.: Will the Republican National Convention help the GOP make serious inroads into a Latino electorate that seem to mostly support President Barack Obama?

* Argentina: Mexico filed a complaint at the World Trade Organization against Argentina’s economic “protectionist measures.”

* Caribbean: According to Bahamian officials sixteen Haitian migrants who disappeared when their boat capsized are presumed to be dead.

Video Source – YouTube via Milenio

Online Sources- The Guardian, Fox News Latino, Politico.com, Reuters, MSNBC

Daily Headlines: August 13, 2012

* Honduras: The U.S. government will withhold part of its funding to Honduran law enforcement due to human rights concerns regarding the Central American country’s police chief.

* Venezuela: Does President Hugo Chavez really have “proof” that rival Henrique Capriles belonged in his youth to a neo-Nazi group or is he slandering his opponent of Jewish background?

* U.S.: The MundoFox television network, owned by News Corporation and Colombia’s RCN, was officially launched this morning.

* Mexico: The country’s Navy reportedly captured a man linked to a drug gang and suspected of being involved in the May murders of four journalists.

Video Source – YouTube via videosproceso (Honduran police chief Juan Carlos Bonilla, seen here after being named to the post last May, may be linked to death squads that operated roughly a decade ago.)

Online Sources- Christian Science Monitor, Bloomberg, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald

Daily Headlines: January 24, 2012

* Haiti: Four months after Uruguayan peacekeepers where accused of raping a Haitian man, investigations have been launched into two new cases of alleged “sexual exploitation of children” by U.N. staff.

* U.S.: Media giant News Corp. and Colombian broadcaster RCN will reportedly cooperate in order to create a new Spanish-language broadcast network to rival Univision and Telemundo.

* Brazil: The computer hacker group Anonymous attacked websites of Brazil's federal district as part of its protest against the closure of the Megaupload website.

* Mexico: Police killed in a gunfight Luis Alberto Cabrera Sarabia, a “high-ranking aide” to waned Sinaloa drug gang leader Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman.

Image Source – Flickr via Embajada de EEUU en Paraguay (CC BY 2.0)

Online Sources- BBC News, Reuters, Times of India, NPR

Cribs: 'La Barbie' Edition

As we highlighted earlier, Edgar Valdez Villarreal, aka 'La Barbie', was arrested this week in Mexico, ending his run as one of the top capos in the business. This video (in Spanish) of Valdez speaking after his arrest shows La Barbie looking forlorn and dejected, a far cry from the high-flying lifestyle he led as a top drug boss in Mexico.

La Barbie was taken as the home pictured above - check out more pictures of the pad here. It wasn't exactly Pablo Escobar's famous "Hacienda Napolés," but with flat screens, Cartier and Gucci boxes, pool tables, and a decently stocked bar La Barbie certainly had a comfortable spot during his last free moments.

Even before his arrest, La Barbie couldn't exactly enjoy the huge profits from the reported ton of cocaine he sent into the US each month, as he was in a vicious struggle with Hector Beltrán Leyva for control of the Beltrán Leyva Cartel after the death last year of former boss Arturo Beltrán Leyva. The battle resulted in a grizzly internecine conflict that recently saw the headless bodies of four associates of La Barbie hung from a bridge in Cuernavaca with warning notes that the same fate awaited others who assisted him. A few months earlier one of his top 'enforces' was beheaded on camera in a grizzly assassination posted on the Blog del Narco.

Image Source: Huffington Post via AP

Online Sources: BBC Mundo, Huffington Post, BBC News, Reuters, Dallas Morning News, Yahoo! News, YouTube, Blog del Narco

Reefer Madness: Legalize Drugs in Mexico?

The violence stemming from Mexico's war on drug cartels is well known. Now, with a population growing ever more weary of the gruesome brutality of the cartels, former Mexican president Vicente Fox is adding his voice to the legalization debate, calling for broad legalization as a way to wrest money and power from the cartels.

"Legalization does not mean that drugs are good ... but we have to see (legalization of the production, sale and distribution of drugs) as a strategy to weaken and break the economic system that allows cartels to earn huge profits," Fox wrote in a posting over the weekend. "Radical prohibition strategies have never worked."

He might be referring to the US experience with Prohibition in the 1920s (let's hope because he caught a sneak peek of the new HBO drama Boardwalk Empire about liquor barons in Atlantic City during Prohibition).

But Fox has some work cut out for him when it comes to convincing current Mexican president Felipe Calderón to get on board with his ideas. Calderon recently called for an open debate on legalization, signaling a possible willingness to move to an even broader liberalization than already exists in Mexico. But Calderón remains publicly skeptical that full-on legalization would serve the broader good of weakening the drug trade's negative role in Mexican society:

'If you legalize, for example, the high price of drugs in the black market would go down, and that would reduce criminals' financial capacity, that may be right. But totally liberalizing the drug market, and even the price reduction itself, are two factors which will lead millions and millions of young people to use drugs,' Calderon said.

Fox's call follows the assertion by César Gaviria of Colombia, Fernando Cardoso of Brazil and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico to legalize marijuana across Latin America.

I imagine that any proposal to legalize would lead to howling from American politicians, who do after all hold the purse strings on significant parts of the anti-drug budget. But it would interesting to see to what extent, given that there's growing recognition that the 40-year-old "War on Drugs" hasn't produced many results for all the invested time, treasure and lives.

The turning of elite public opinion may give Mexico and other countries the political cover to take the drug fight in a new direction.

Image Source: New York Post

Online Sources: Reuters, YouTube, HBO, Yahoo! News, Reuters, Wikipedia, The Guardian, Wall Street Journal

Mexico: Weekend, bloody weekend

With apologies to U2, the past few days have seen an escalation of violence in Mexico including a novel act of brutality by drug gangs.

At least 18 people died in the northern city of Torreon after armed gunmen mowed down revelers celebrating a birthday party. “They shot anything that moved,” mentioned one police source to a local paper after the brazen attack yesterday. Thus far authorities have no known motive for the incident in the city that according to the New York Times “has become a battleground in the drug war as a transit point to the United States.”

The shooting comes on the heels of clashes between police and drug gangs that left twelve people dead. Late on Thursday a car bombing killed four people near police headquarters in Ciudad Juarez, reportedly the first of its kind. The bombing was said to be retaliation by traffickers against the recent arrest of a senior gang member.

These incidents have led to shock and indignation among Mexicans such as El Universal columnist Ricardo Aleman. “Not only have we run out of adjectives to describe the (Torreon) massacre…but in there is no antecedent in this world to explain and define this sort of violence,” he wrote. For others the spate in violence has brought more trauma and fear to a country struggling against increased lawlessness:

“We were already living with fear, but the kind of fear you have when living in a city that has a volcano or earthquake [risk], the kind of fear that is in the back of your mind,” says Jessica Peña, a sociology professor at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez. “But this is an extreme situation. I think this will change people's fears to the worst.… This is something we thought just happened in societies like Iran or Iraq.”

Image- Christian Science Monitor (“Chairs and others items are seen scattered at a house where a birthday party was interrupted by gunmen early Sunday in the town of Torreon, Sunday.”)
Online Sources- Christian Science Monitor, MSNBC, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, CNN, El Universal

Cartels Send Message to the United States Government

At around 11p.m. on Friday night, a small bomb was thrown over a wall of the U.S. Consulate in the Mexican border town of Nuevo Laredo. It is suspected that one of the drug cartels is responsible for hurling the device into the Consulate, though thankfully no one was hurt. This is the second time in the past two months that violence has been directed toward people linked with a U.S. Consulate. Three people were shot in the border town of Ciudad Juarez last month, leading people to believe that the cartels are now beginning to send a stronger message to the United States government regarding their involvement with combating drug violence. The United States has sent millions in aid to Mexico in order to assist President Felipe Calderon in combating Mexico's deadly drug cartel violence.

Image Source: Guillermo Batres/Reuters

Online Source: The New York Times