Weekly Report - 18 August 2011 (WR-11-33)

MEXICO | Domestic drug consumption. The consumption of illegal drugs by Mexicans is increasing, according to Alejandro Poiré, the spokesman for the national security council, which brings together the federal government and the states in the war against gangs. This suggests that the government’s view of the drug issue is changing, with public health aspects now looming as large as the security problems posed by the gangs’ battles to control smuggling routes into the US. Poiré’s claim, which he did not illustrate with figures, does not tally with data from the PGR. In April, the Procuraduría General de la República (PGR) published a comparison of arrest statistics between 2007 and 2011. In 2007, the PGR arrested an average of 195 people a day for drugs possession and another 19 for pushing drugs. In the first quarter of 2011, 91 people were arrested every day for drug possession on average and seven for pushing.

MEXICO | China eyes Yucatán. On 15 August a delegation from the eastern Chinese province of Anhui met the governor of the south-eastern Mexican state of Yucatán. The Yucatán has little heavy industry but is the most peaceful state in the country: there has been only one registered gang murder there this year and there were none in 2009 and 2010. The most important company represented on the Chinese side was Anhui Jianghuai Automobile Company, one of China’s leading truck makers, which already exports to Brazil and Bolivia.
Jiao Hao, Anhui Jianghuai’s representative on the trip, said that the company wanted to set up in Mexico in order to access the US market. He claimed that the company’s Brazilian affiliate was now selling 50,000 vehicles (both trucks and cars) across South America. Anhui Jianghuai’s plan is to start with light trucks and then move into car manufacturing.
The governor of Yucatán, Ivonne Ortega, is pushing a site close to the state’s only port (really a jetty) at Progreso, close to the state capital, Mérida.
Politely, the Anhui delegation is also considering buying seafood and honey from the Yucatán, but geography is against the state becoming a major supplier to China.

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