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MEXICO | The economy. Local economists are downgrading their growth forecasts for 2010. The government is budgeting on GDP growth of 3%, but Marco Pérez Valtier, from a consultancy, Pérez Góngora y Asociados, argues that the rate will be between 1% and 2%. He is also forecasting significantly higher inflation than the government's forecast of 3.3%. He reckons that 5% is more likely. It is also worth noting that the official (Inegi) consumer confidence indicator fell again in October after a couple of months of rises. Local commentators say that the budget decision to increase income taxes is the most likely reason for the fall in confidence.

MEXICO | Demonstration.   On 11 November a demonstration by members of the Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas (SME) brought chaos to Mexico City. The SME is now likely to resort to more direct action after the supreme court rejected a legal challenge to the government's decision to wind up a hugely inefficient state electricity company, Luz y Fuerza del Centro, which was, effectively, run by the SME.

The SME and its supporters closed several main roads in and around Mexico City and had to be shifted from some roadblocks by police firing teargas. The main Mexico City demonstration was probably supported by fewer than 10,000 people but the disruption it caused was considerable. Martí­n Esparza, the leader of the SME is calling for a national strike to support the union's demands for the government to back down.

• SME

A big test for both the government and the Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas (SME) is how many SME members will have accepted the government's redundancy package by 14 November. So far just over 50% of SME members have signed up to the government's comparatively generous offer.

Relations between Ecuador and the US have been mending apace after the low point reached when President Rafael Correa refused to renew the base facilities enjoyed by Washington at Manta. The State Department's annual report on cooperation in the antidrugs effort has applauded Ecuador's efforts, and there has been an upturn in military cooperation, most recently with a donation of troop transports for use along the border with Colombia. Still, Washington would like to be allowed to go on using Manta.

The most visible sign that US attitudes had been changing came on 12 February when the US ambassador to Ecuador, Heather Hodges, described as impressive the reported seizure of 43.5 tonnes of cocaine by the Ecuadorean government in 2009 (almost twice as much as in 2008 and an all-time record). She said this in response to journalists seeking her comments on an article published days earlier by the Miami-based newspaper El Nuevo Herald that had said, “Ecuador is emerging as a key meeting place for many transnational criminal and terrorist organisations, and an important part of the conduit which moves not only cocaine but people trafficking, arms, precursor chemicals and hundreds of millions of dollars a year." Ambassador Hodges retorted that the data on drug seizures “are the figures we should be talking about; [the newspaper article] is not a report of the US government."

This attitude was borne out by the INCSR 2010 report released by the State Department on 1 March, which commended Ecuador on its performance (while suggesting that things would be better if the US were still able to base maritime antidrugs surveillance on Ecuadorean airfields). This last appeal was reiterated on 8 March by Drew Schufletowski, head of the US embassy's antidrugs office, who pointed to the “huge gap in the ocean" about which there is currently little information. This appears to be an indirect admission that the alternative base facilities to be provided by Colombia would not do the job as well.

Perhaps more eloquent was the 5 March delivery by the US embassy's Milgroup of 15 HINO trucks to the Ecuadorean army. Valued at US$783,000, they were handed over as a gift, to replace the aging vehicles currently in use to transport troops along Ecuador's border with Colombia. This was the second donation of military equipment this year: on 19 February the Milgroup made delivery of 12 Musclejon tactical boats, 24 trailers and three motorcycles, also for use on the northern border — a package valued at US$1m.

Earlier in the month the Milgroup inaugurated an infrastructure project valued at U$950,000 in the northern border area, which included the construction of barracks, a generator, maintenance of the water system and pumps, the construction of an advance refuelling station for helicopters and boats, and the construction of a floating dock, a ramp, and hangar for the 55th Jungle Battalion 'Putumayo', engaged in antidrug operations.

The increased activity by the Ecuadorean military appears to be having an effect on the other side of the border. Messages extracted from a computer seized from 'Edgar Tovar', commander of the Farc's 48th 'front', the unit that collects the cocaine along Colombia's borders with Ecuador and Peru. They are now shipping that cocaine overland, via Cauca and Chocó, then outward from Urabá.

The US State Department reckons that between 200 and 220 tonnes of cocaine a year were being funnelled from Colombia via Ecuador. Of this amount, about 60% is thought to be destined for the US, and the rest for Europe.

• Border post
  The US will invest US$1.5m in constructing a control post on the Ecuadorean side of the border with Peru for the use of Ecuador's counter-narcotics police, the US embassy in Quito announced this week. The post will be located in Catamayo, in the southern province of Loja.
  

MEXICO | Killings become political. A mayor in Oaxaca, another in Chihuahua, and the father of a mayor in Veracruz were all killed in shootouts on 19 June. In addition to these attacks, petrol bombs were thrown at political party offices in Sinaloa. So far this year, 5,299 people have been killed by gangsters: in the whole of 2009, 6,587 were killed. In 2008 the death toll was 5,208.

MEXICO | Household consumption. Figures from the official statistics agency, Inegi, show that in the first quarter of 2010 household consumption was still, marginally, below what it had been in the first quarter of 2008, before the global economic crisis struck. It is odd that although sales in department stores and from clothes shops are rising, supermarket sales and those from grocers are down. Even more of a concern to the government is that sales of goods such as PCs, mobile telephones and motorbikes are all still falling at a double digit annual rate. This is worrying because the government is boasting about having created 550,000 new jobs in the past 12 months.

MEXICO | China. Patricia Espinosa, the foreign minister, concluded her trip to China on 11 October with a meeting with the Chinese foreign minister, Yang Jiechi. The purpose of the visit was to try to ensure that the UN's Climate Change summit in Cancún in December achieves more than the previous effort in Copenhagen in 2009. The Cancún summit is scheduled to run from 29 November to 10 December. Espinosa had a lengthy meeting with China's chief negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, and also attended the last of the UN's preparatory meetings in Tianjin, which was attended by 3,100 delegates from 177 countries. Environmentalists said that the Tianjin meeting was hugely disappointing with little progress on a key issue, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (known as REDD+).

MEXICO | Immigration. President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa appointed Salvador Beltrán del Rí­o, a renowned Latin Americanist, as the new head of the national migration institute (INM) on 7 October. The previous head of the INM, Cecilia Romero, was forced to resign after the massacre of 72 Latin American migrants by Mexican gangsters in Tamaulipas in August 2010. Romero is now trying to become president of the ruling Partido Acción Nacional.
Beltrán del Rí­o is, like most of Calderón's appointments, a convinced Panista with close links to Calderón's inner circle. He was father-in-law to César Nava, the current PAN president, until Nava remarried a couple of weeks ago.
Del Rí­o was previously a deputy minister at the foreign ministry responsible for relations with Latin America.

MEXICO | Kidnapping. The lower chamber of congress approved a tough new anti-kidnapping law on 8 October. The law rules out the death penalty for kidnappers but allows the most brutal kidnappers to be sentenced to 70 years in jail. The vote was overwhelming: 353 in favour and only four against. The other 143 deputies were either absent or abstained. 
The vote took place in front of Isabel Wallace and Alejandro Martí­, the country's two most prominent anti-kidnapping campaigners. Both had family members killed by kidnappers who were in league with the police.
José Luis Ovando, from the ruling Partido Acción Nacional and president of the public security commission, claimed that the new law was urgently needed to deal with a quadrupling of kidnapping over the past two years. He added that 168 people had been kidnapped and killed since 2008.

BRAZIL | Growth at 20-year high. Preliminary calculations by the central bank put real GDP growth at a strong 7.81% year-on-year in 2010, rebounding from -0.2% in 2009. The result is the best in over 20 years. According to the bank's index of economic activity (IBC-Br), fourth quarter growth was 5% year-on-year and 1.0% quarter-on-quarter. However, the pace of growth is easing. In December, annual growth was 4.0%, the eighth consecutive decline in pace, while the month-on-month figure of 0.07% was the weakest since June. The finance minister Guido Mantega this week flagged up what he termed a strongly decelerating trend, noting that the gradual withdrawal of the government's fiscal stimulus over the second half of 2009, coupled with three interest rate increases between April and June 2010, were exerting downwards pressure on the economy.
Other December indicators appear to confirm this trend. Retail sales were flat on a monthly basis (though still posting strong overall growth of 10.9% in 2010), while state and non-state bank lending expanded 1.6% in the month (R$1.7trn), the slowest increase since July. Further measures towards the year's end, including an increase in bank reserve requirements in December, plus another Selic increase in January (to 11.25%), and the latest R$50bn (US$30bn) in budget cuts, will wind their way through the economy in the first half of 2011. The government is thereby hoping to steer Brazil to a soft landing, but for now inflation pressures remain very much at the fore.
In the latest 'Focus' consensus report compiled by the central bank, local economists raised their 2011 inflation forecast for a tenth straight week, to 5.75%, and also raised their 2012 forecast to 4.7%, up from 4.61% the previous week. This signals that inflation expectations are becoming entrenched, although it is worth noting that the IPC-Fipe index of consumer prices in Brazil's largest city, São Paulo, rose 0.95% in the second week of February compared with 1.12% in the first, on slower growth in food and transport costs. The Rousseff government is anxious that congress approves its minimum wage proposal for the year, so as to put a lid on inflation pressures and signal to the markets that it means business. And while Mantega talks of a deceleration, he still expects robust real annual GDP growth of 5.0% in 2011, making Brazil the envy of most developed countries.

CHILE | Energy rationing. President Sebastián Piñera has announced a decree rationing energy as a result of low water levels in the country's main reservoirs. Hydroelectricity supplies 40% of Chile's energy needs. The decree allows the government to adopt special measures to reduce energy demand by 5% to ensure that there are not widespread power cuts during the winter months of June and July, when demand is greatest. Energy rationing was last announced by former president Michelle Bachelet in 2008 to confront a drought and Argentina's reduction of gas exports. Piñera says that if Chile is to grow by 6% a year, as he plans, it must double its energy supply by 2020.

PARAGUAY | Budget cuts. The finance minister, Dionisio Borda, has called on congress to assist in cutting the G$42.8bn (US$9.31bn) budget for 2011. The budget deficit was initially estimated at 0.8% of GDP but congress pushed it up to 2.5% of GDP, some G$1.81bn (US$390m). Borda said that nearly half of the deficit increase was due to the creation by congress of 5,800 new government jobs. He said the executive would cut spending by 3.2% and would expect similar cuts by congress and the judiciary. Borda said he would send congress a bill in March to increase taxes on beef and soybean exports to help balance the books.

URUGUAY | Pulped out. President José Mujica told the national daily El Observador this week that there would be no further expansion of the pulp industry in Uruguay, because he felt a limit needed to be established. He gave maximum guarantees, however, to the companies presently operating in the country. Uruguay signed a deal in January with a Finnish-Chilean consortium Montes del Plata for the construction of a US$1.9bn pulp mill, the biggest investment in the country's history, narrowly eclipsing the US$1.8bn investment in the controversial Fray Bentos mill [WR-11-04].

Guatemala is emerging as the Central American country where the prospect of merging security and defence functions under 'national guards', following the model recommended by the US, is being most hotly debated. The region as a whole is pressing for the prompt deployment of its recently announced 'rapid deployment force', which many see as a prototype - but is likely to start out as a loosely coordinated collection of national units formally assigned to an as-yet undefined role.

Though Guatemalan officialdom emphatically denies it, since US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld visited the country in March it has been studying the possibility of transforming the army into a 'national guard', whose role would be to confront such 'new security threats' as organised crime, drug trafficking and terrorism. 

This dovetails with the recommendations made two years ago by the US State Department's Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Western Hemisphere, Daniel Fisk, who outlined Washington's view as follows: 'Nowadays there is a new set of clear and present dangers to national security, sovereignty, and public safety in Central America: transnational criminal networks of terrorists, narcotics and arms traffickers, alien smugglers, and traffickers in people.' The adequate response, he said, were small, lightly armed services devoted mainly to police duties and assistance in coping with natural disasters [SSR-03-01].

Guatemala has already been drastically streamlining its defence establishment. Last year it more than halved the number of military personnel, from 26,285 to 14,900 [SSR-04-04], but it still has the largest defence budget in Central America: US$236m (as against US$164 for El Salvador, US$115m for Honduras and US$33m for Nicaragua). Of the entire defence budget, just under half is allocated to the army, which spends 84% of its share on salaries. The army remains remarkably top-heavy, with one officer for every seven other ranks, and one general for every 168 officers.

Quite independently from the idea of changing the nature of the army, Guatemala has a problem with its national police (Policí­a Nacional Civil, PNC). Since the beginning of this year more than 700 officers have been purged, after being charged with offences such as kidnapping, extortion and homicide. In June the government appointed 15 retired military officers as special commissioners to oversee the functioning of police stations. This has enraged the PNC comisarios (station chiefs), who claim that they have become subordinates of the special commissioners, and fear that this is a first step towards 'militarising' the police.

In March Guatemala joined El Salvador in the first attempt to establish a 'joint' border security force; actually two separate units drawn from the police, operating within a 20-kilometre belt on either side of the common border; each within its own country, but in close coordination with the other. This force was set up specifically to deal with the street gangs known as maras. Each country has assigned 20 officers to this force. The Fuerza Binacional , as it is called, boasts that since its creation it has captured 11 smugglers, 16 suspected car thieves and 300 undocumented migrants - but make no mention of gang members or of suspected terrorists, the 'new security threats'.

Separately, Guatemala has since decided to deploy a joint army-police force, 1,500 strong, along its border with Mexico, where the mara problem has been growing in recent years.

Héctor Rosada, a Guatemalan sociologist and expert on defence matters, says that the change in the orientation of the army can already be perceived in such things as what they are purchasing, like rapid-deployment vehicles, and the SWAT-like uniforms they have adopted. He predicts that the army will be turned into a national guard within three years at most, no longer reporting to the defence ministry but to the ministry of the interior, which oversees the police. This prediction is shared by retired Colonel Mario Mérida, a former director of military intelligence. 'The army,' he says, 'is already making its own such missions as fighting the drugs trade and cooperating in internal security matters, adding them to the list of external threats, so as to retain US support.'

The view that the role of the army should be redefined is shared by many, but not all agree that turning it into a national guard is the right answer. For instance, Iduvina Hernández of the Asociación para el Estudio y la Promoción de la Seguridad en Democracia (Sedem), an NGO promoting civilian involvement in security matters, says that what is needed is not a 'facelift' for the army, but its abolition - the model adopted by Costa Rica and Panama, both of which have paramilitary security forces instead.

Meanwhile Central America's presidents have said they would like to see their new 'rapid reaction force' deployed as soon as possible, perhaps as early as August. Guatemalan President Oscar Berger announced last week that the rapid reaction force could be up to 1,000 strong. His Honduran peer, Ricardo Maduro, noted that in an initial phase each Central American country would separately establish a rapid reaction force, while governments worked on harmonising their legislations so as to allow them to operate jointly. Indeed, Honduran defence officials have said they already have units trained for that purpose, a claim that does not sound very convincing.

Initially conceived as a joint effort to combat the maras, the rapid deployment force's mission has since been redefined to include counternarcotics and counterterrorism, in a transparent bid to attract US assistance. In mid-April, Central America's military and security chiefs asked the US Southern Command to help them set up their regional force. General Bantz Craddock, head of the Southcom, was reported as having said he found the initiative 'interesting' and that he would convey it to the US authorities. 

Nothing more has been heard on the military front, but in mid-July President Berger said that the US, through the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), had offered to train the personnel assigned to the rapid reaction force and provide 'mobility' for counternarcotics operations.

The president's arguments regarding security risks have received a boost from Interpol. Jean Michel Louboutin, the organisation's executive director of police services, announced in late June that it was investigating the maras because of possible connections with international terrorist groups. This, however, sounds much like an unproven claim initially set rolling by Honduran officials, now on its second way round. Louboutin said that 'for now' there was no evidence of any such mara-terrorist links, but that there are 'strong suspicions that they do exist'.

Interpol has an anti-mara programme, drawn up by its office in El Salvador, and believes that the mara problem has been getting worse. It also has a programme codenamed Amazon which is looking out for signs of international terrorism in South and Central America.

It sounded like big news: in pursuance of a March agreement between presidents George Bush Jr and Felipe Calderón, the US is considering a big increase in assistance to Mexico, to help contain the growing drug-related violence - a 'Plan Mexico' somehow analogous to Plan Colombia. The matter was indeed discussed by the presidents when they last met, but they reached no agreement, and neither government is happy to draw comparisons with Plan Colombia. Right now the problem for Mexico is to get Washington to halt a downward slippage in its annual grants of military and police aid.

The news, which was accentuated by the Mexican press and carried by international news services, originated in a lengthy report published on 10 May by The Dallas Morning News, much of which is sourced to unnamed US and Mexican officials. One notable exception was Eduardo Medina Mora, Mexico's chief federal prosecutor, who confirmed from Madrid, where he was attending an international conference on drug enforcement, that Mexico was seeking more aid, noting, 'What we [now] get from the US doesn't correspond with the size of the challenge we face, and that has to change if we are to be more effective against a common enemy.' Medina Mora said he had been discussing the matter with US counterparts at the conference. He also said that the scale of the assistance being discussed was much lower than that of Plan Colombia; the report says other US and Mexican officials concurred.

The report says, 'During Mr Bush's brief visit to Mexico in March, the two presidents signed an agreement recognising that the fight against organised crime in Mexico could be boosted with sustained support from the United States.' This repeats almost verbatim what was reported in an early-April article by Larry Birns and Alex Sánchez of COHA. This appears to have come from the joint communiqué issued by both presidents, which says that they 'underlined that the important efforts of the Mexican government to confront organised crime head-on, as one of the most important priorities of its own domestic agenda, would benefit from increased support from and cooperation with the United States.' As many headlines reported at the time, no agreement was signed during Bush's visit.

As a target for security assistance, Mexico is certainly not in the same league as Colombia. In the Bush administration's budget requests for 2008, Mexico is to receive US$47.4m in military and police aid, 12 times less than Colombia. Nevertheless, Mexico still emerges as the second-biggest potential Latin American recipient of this kind of assistance. This calculation, made in a study by the Center for International Policy (CIP), the Latin American Working Group (LAWG) and the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), includes the assistance which is increasingly being channelled through the Pentagon.  

However, Mexican officialdom routinely bridles at any comparison with Colombia's plight; the US government is currently trying to get Congress to release blocked Plan Colombia funds.

In another perspective, based on 2007 requests for funding of the State Department's Foreign Operation Programs (that is, excluding defence-budget aid). Mexico appears further down the scale, with US$26.8m to Colombia's US$462m, ranking below Bolivia and Peru. It is worth noting that from this angle, Colombia ranks as the fifth-biggest recipient worldwide (after Iraq, Israel, Egypt and Afghanistan), and Mexico as the 12th biggest.  

As regards total military and police aid, the funds going to Mexico, after increasing almost fourfold to US$59.2m between 2000 and 2005, have been on a slow downslide. This roughly follows the pattern for the region as a whole, and if Mexico has risen in the ranking of recipients it is because others have seen their share decline even more markedly.

Mexican spending outlook

The Calderón administration has budgeted for a 19% increase in security spending this year. Overall outlays in this bracket have been estimated at about US$6.3bn, but this is hard to match with specific appropriations, as funds are being drawn from a variety of sources. The defence ministry (army and airforce) has been allocated just under US$3bn, up 19.7% on 2006; the navy ministry, US$1bn (up 16%). Both of these ministries contribute the bulk of the 'paramilitary' component of the Policí­a Federal Preventiva (PFP), the largest federal police force.  

The federal public security ministry has been allocated US$1.3bn, an increase of 43% on 2007. The interior ministry has about US$200m, almost 40% of its budget, earmarked for intelligence and national security purposes. The broad nationwide Programa Nacional de Seguridad Pública (PNSP) has been budgeted at US$1.8bn, the unified criminal information system known as Plataforma México, has been costed at about US$29m. Where US assistance is most sought is in connection with the high-tech components of the programme, such as aerial surveillance and telecommunications.  

The nature of Mexico's drugs wars — between the rival cartels and between them and the government — appears to be changing in two important ways. The first is that the number of armed confrontations between cartel gunmen and the security forces has been increasing, and the former seem more prone to engaging than to avoiding. The second is that the drug traffickers have begun to enlist the civilian population in political protest actions designed to achieve the withdrawal of the army from the antidrugs effort. The government, for its part, has been moving in the opposite direction, giving the military a greater role in law enforcement.

A string of recent episodes show the cartel gunmen more willing to engage the military head-on rather than, as hitherto, avoid engaging them whenever possible. In at least one case they went clearly on the offensive by mounting an ambush, in others they responded to the mere presence of security forces by opening fire first. There are still cases of attacks on members of the military (as of the police) which appear to be the settling of accounts with former accomplices, but apparent reprisals for government actions and intimidatory attacks are becoming more frequent and harsher.

The 3 February abduction, torture and 'execution', in the far eastern coastal state of Quintana Roo, of two recently retired army officers — a general and a lieutenant — together with a civilian, has been interpreted as either a cartel reprisal or a brutal act of intimidation designed to deter the spreading 'militarisation' of public security. General Mauro Enrique Tello Quiñones, formerly commander of the Michoacán military zone and, earlier, director of public security in Mexico city, had just been appointed security adviser to the mayor of Benito Juárez, the municipality which includes the popular seaside resort of Cancún. Lieutenant Gertulio César Román Zuñiga was his aide, and the third victim, a relative of a local politician. An army unit backed by two armoured vehicles was despatched to Cancún, where they took over the premises of the municipal police, ostensibly to check their weaponry. This force has 1,200 officers and about 800 civilian employees. Quintana Roo, entry point for drugs transiting the Caribbean route, has become one of the battlegrounds in the inter-cartel war.

On 7 February a group of gunmen ambushed a military-police patrol in Fresnillo, in the north-central state of Zacatecas. In the ensuing gunfight four of the attackers were killed and another seven were captured (one of whom was found to be an active-duty officer of the local municipal police). A follow-up sweep by the security forces led to another three arrests and the seizure of an undisclosed amount of drugs, military uniforms, cellphones and communications equipment.

On 10 February in Villa Ahumada, in the northern border state of Chihuahua, an army-police unit responded to a raid by gunmen wearing military uniforms who abducted nine people, then 'executed' six of them. The gunmen were intercepted as they were leaving the area, and a gunbattle ensued in which 15 people were killed (one of them a soldier). Three of the abductees were freed.

On 17 February in Reynosa, in the northern border state of Tamaulipas, an intense gunbattle lasting more than two hours began when an army-police unit intercepted a convoy of gunmen, who responded by opening fire. The fighting, which spread out over several parts of the city, left a toll of five gunmen dead and seven members of the security forces injured. The security forces seized a 60mm mortar, five rifle grenades, two fragmentation grenades, bulletproof vests and two vans.

On 20 February in Zihuatanejo, a resort area in the southern coastal state of Guerrero, an army unit captured nine suspected members of a drug gang. The following day the municipal police academy was attacked with grenades that injured two police officers and four civilians.

That same day in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, the public security secretary resigned after having received messages threatening to kill one police officer every 48 hours if he did not leave his post. Three days later in Chihuahua city the police vehicles escorting state governor José Reyes Baeza came under gunfire from another vehicle. In the ensuing exchange one of the attackers was injured: he was identified as a former employee of the federal defence ministry.

Going political
The drug traffickers have decided not only to confront the security forces in the field but also in the political arena. On 9 February, crowds led by masked youths took to the streets of Monterrey, Nuevo León, to demand the withdrawal of the military. Over the following ten days the demonstrations continued there with scant interruptions, and also spread to Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo in Tamaulipas, Ciudad Juárez in Chihuahua, and even as far south as the Caribbean coastal state of Veracruz, where seven cities were affected. Main arteries and even bridges crossing the Rí­o Bravo to the US were blocked, and increasingly the throngs of protesters began to include women, children and elderly people.

It did not take long to realise who was behind the demonstrations. On 14 February the army arrested in Monterrey a suspected member of Los Zetas, who confessed that, on the instructions of the Gulf cartel, he had been paying out the equivalent of US$14 to US$35 to people for them to attend the demonstrations, as well as handing out satchels with school utensils to youngsters for the same purpose. In his house the authorities seized 70 satchels, false federal police uniforms, assault rifles and an assortment of ammunition of diverse calibres.

Upon this realisation, the authorities banned further demonstrations. In Monterrey, about 50 people were arrested for persisting, among them a bus driver who stated that he had been paid to ferry the protesters to the town centre. Another detainee said that women were being paid US$70 to take part, and an extra US$35 if they took their children with them.

It was not the first time drug traffickers had hired street demonstrators (the Sinaloa cartel had done so in Culiacán in 2007). but it was the first time that it had been done on such a scale and in a coordinated fashion across four states. The impact was such that President Felipe Calderón felt compelled to call upon the population to discern clearly between the two sides in the conflict. 'The enemies of all Mexicans,' he said on 19 February at a ceremony celebrating Army Day in Monterrey, 'are those who attack the institutions, lay siege to society with threats and extortion, poison its children and betray its peace.' He went on to say that the army 'will only be able to devote itself to other and transcendental missions once the efforts to give the Mexicans professional and trustworthy police institutions bear fruit.'

His interpretation of the traffickers' resort to demonstrations was that 'those who see the operational, logistical and financial erosion of their criminal structure have tried to provoke the retreat of the Mexican army and the government.'

Among local commentators, the wave of demonstrations, added to the upswing in violence, caused considerable shock. José Reveles said that the demonstrations could only have taken place 'in a situation of weakness of the state' and thanks to the connivance between the drug cartels and local authorities. Jorge Chabat said they revealed 'a clear political intention'. José Luis Piñeiro warned, 'The most important thing we can't afford to ignore is that the drugs trade has a considerable social support base throughout the country [...] It would not be surprising if we discovered that among the marchers there were people who have felt aggrieved by the military operations.'

This last observation dovetailed with the comment made by Elena Huizar, mother of a beauty queen recently released after having been jailed for her connections with organised crime: 'One way or another everyone is feeding off what the narcos leave. Everyone, because there is nothing else.'

On 18 February in Paris, economy minister Gerardo Ruiz, in an attempt to highlight the virtues of the Calderón administration's policy, delivered a reading of the overall situation that was far more candid than anything high officials have so far said. The narcos, he pointed out, had 'built a state within a state: there are several cities in Mexico and a number of municipalities where they collect their taxes and impose their laws, where they impose local authorities and demand payment for protection [...] The problem is a serious one, so serious that we just had to go in. The easiest thing would have been, as many people say, to leave things as they were, but I can assure you that in that case the next president would have been a drug trafficker.'

Ruiz added, 'It is evident that we called out the army because we found a federal police that had been dismantled, and an intelligence service that had been totally dismounted. We had to go in and the only thing we had available was the army and the police we are rebuilding.'

Militarising public security
The government, far from withdrawing the military, is actually giving them a greater role in public security. This has entailed an undeclared policy shift. Public security minister Genaro Garcí­a Luna's blueprint for a new, single federal police has been shelved less than a year after it was devised, and Garcí­a Luna himself has found the military taking over much of his ministry, especially everything regarding the Policia Federal Preventiva (PFP), the 'preventive' federal police, which was under its wing.

In March 2008 Garcí­a Luna formally launched his plan for a 30,000-strong federal police which would merge the PFP and the investigative agency, the AFI, which operated under the chief federal prosecutor's office, the PGR. It was to have five divisions, each headed by a comisario general newly appointed by Garcí­a Luna: police intelligence, federal crimes, regional security, judicial & ministerial services, federal forces and counternarcotics.

The scheme stumbled on resistance from the AFI personnel and on revived opposition from the military to entrust Garcí­a Luna with so much power. The current defence minister, General Guillermo Galván, had been among the top-ranking military who most insisted that President Felipe Calderón should not appoint Garcí­a Luna to the public security ministry, because they suspected him of collusion with drug traffickers.

Its death knell was sounded when the mole hunt known as Operation Cleanup, launched in August, led to the jailing of two of Garcí­a Luna's appointees: the interim commissioner of the federal police, Ví­ctor Garay Cadena, and the acting head of the counternarcotics division, Francisco Navarro.

On 5 December, Calderón appointed General Javier del Real Magallanes, a serving officer, as deputy minister for police strategy and intelligence. General del Real has a long track record in intelligence and public security positions, and most recently, as commander of the army's 4th region, led the combined military-police anti-cartel operation codenamed Operativo Nuevo León-Tamaulipas

He replaced Garcí­a Luna's right-hand man, Facundo Rosas Rosas, who was moved to the less crucial undersecretariat of crime prevention & human rights. Two other Garcí­a Luna appointees were given less sensitive duties: Patricio Patiño was shunted from the undersecretariat of strategy to head the prison service, and Luis Cárdenas Palomino from the coordination of private security to the crime prevention directorate.

Del Real's appointment was followed by that of another general, Alfredo Fregoso Cortés, as the PFP's coordinator of regional security, and yet another, Carlos Enrique Adam Yabur, as director of the PFP's training academy at San Luis Potosí­. The only one of the comisarios appointed by Garcí­a Luna to have retained his post was Rodolfo Cruz, an army general who is in charge of the federal support forces (FFA). These are, in fact, army troops on secondment to the PFP, who account for 37.5% of the PFP's total strength. The navy's contribution (chiefly marines) is a more modest 3.5%, just under half of whom have been permanently transferred to the PFP.

The overall trend
Countrywide, by 23 February the benchmark tally of a newspaper El Universal had clocked up 973 killings attributed to the drugs war since the beginning of the year, or 146% more than in the comparable period of 2008. Should this rate continue, the annual total would overtake the 5,631 of 2008, a record for Mexico which overtook that of Medellí­n at the peak of the mayhem unleashed by Pablo Escobar in the 1980s.

If what has happened so far this year is an indication of what is in store for the rest of the year, the intercartel war appears to be spreading to parts of the country barely affected in 2008. The projected rates for the whole of 2009 suggest sharp increases of violence in Coahuila, Durango, Guanajuato, and Tabasco and, surprisingly, declines in Baja California and Sinaloa. There is, of course, no reason to assume that death tolls will evolve as if they were production trends — unless these early trends indicate that somebody is gaining the upper hand in important plazas such as the latter two and that the contest is shifting to other, minor ones where predominance remains uncertain. For the facts available so far, see the table below.

 The hotspots
	     

	Killings attributed to the drugs war

	State               Jan-Feb        All 2008
                       	          2009
	Chihuahua         477              2,206
	Durango            77               273
	Baja California    66               689
	Sinaloa             65               950
	Guerrero           62               241
	Guanajuato       37               53
	Coahuila           34               53
	Tabasco           17               17
	Rest                138              1,149
	Total               973              5,631

Source: Own presentation of data from El Universal & Efe

An increase in the number of kidnappings plus a wave of vandalism in Port-au-Prince, as well as concern about growing insecurity in the run-up to the forthcoming November elections has prompted UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to issue a warning, and the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (Minustah) to start boosting the presence of its police contingent in a high-profile hotspot in the capital.

Minustah reported on 1 September that in the first eight months of the year there had been 68 kidnappings in Haiti, an increase of 33% on the comparable period of 2009. The following day UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon sent a report to the Security Council warning that Haiti is entering a period of changes that could be critical for its future stability. He noted that the danger of social tensions is present and told the Security Council that it was 'absolutely crucial' to boost the reconstruction effort.

The main problem is that there are still 1.3m people distributed in 1,300 refugee camps without any prospect of being rehoused soon. This poses a major logistical challenge to the authorities preparing for the legislative and presidential elections scheduled for 28 November. Ban underlined that these elections must be 'credible and legitimate' and expressed   his fear that the refugees may be vulnerable to manipulation by opportunistic politicians and criminals.

His report notes that Minustah has detected an increase in the number of weapons in the hands of the public, as well as an increase in the shipments of drugs arriving on the country's southern coastline or at clandestine airstrips. Ban said that the revenues generated by the drugs trade continues to infiltrate the public administration, and that this has a 'corrosive' effect of public institutions.

The rise in the number of kidnappings has been highlighted by media attention to the late August murder of a Haitian-born US national, Ronald Chery, and the abduction of   a teenage member of his family. These events took place in Pétionville, the residential district in the east of the capital which has been harbouring commercial activities since the 12 January earthquake devastated   much of Port-au-Prince. Minustah reacted by increasing the number of UN police officers in Pétionville and adopting a new security plan for the area, which involves strict controls of vehicles and persons entering and leaving it. On 23 September Minustah announced the capture of the suspected ringleader of a kidnap gang, Pierre Gascov.

Flap over 'Dominican troops' report
On 27 September the Dominican newspaper El Dí­a rattled its readers with a report citing 'military sources' as having confided that Dominican troops were being trained to join Minustah in Haiti. Almost instantly Cardinal Nicolás de Jesús López Rodrí­guez called this a 'provocation', prominent jurist Vinicio Castillo Seman said it was 'madness' and former president Hipólito Mejí­a said that if he were in power he would send troops to Haiti much as he had done with Iraq. The very next day the armed forces minister, General Joaquin Virgilio Pérez Feliz denied the report and confirmed that, as Minustah police commissioner Gerardo Chaumont had said during an earlier visit to the Dominican Republic, in the wake of the January earthquake President Leonel Fernández had offered to send troops, but that this had been blocked as a result of domestic objections. Pérez Feliz noted that under Article 80 of the constitution, the President would require Senate approval to deploy troops abroad.

Iran's alleged involvement in a range of terrorist activities in Latin America has drawn accusations that Tehran is seeking to use its relationship to the Lebanese-based Shia radical movement Hezbollah, to build up a terrorist network designed to counter US and Israel.

It is the perception that Iran's policy under Ahmadinejad has been crafted to using Latin America as a strategic base for terrorist activity, executed via Hezbollah, that has drawn the attention of Washington and Tel Aviv.

The Bush administration's identification of Iran as its number one global enemy meant that Iranian military or strategic ambitions in Latin America were viewed as part of a grand strategy to foment terror as a tool of state policy in the region. This ideological prism remains in place, despite the change of guard in Washington.

The two large terrorist incidents in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994, allegedly the work of Hezbollah operatives, suggested to many that Iran was the mastermind behind the attacks. Though these attacks have not been repeated, Iran's enemies believe it has not ended its interest in the region.

According to Israel's Foreign Affairs Deputy Minister Daniel Ayalón, the close ties with Venezuela form part of a plan to create an Iranian forward base in the region. Concern that Iran is intent on using Venezuela to circumvent international financial restrictions on terrorist financing, and even planning to site weapons and exploit Venezuela's uranium reserves, are frequently aired.  

The accusations reflect a paranoia that is fed by the opaqueness of Iran's foreign policy making mechanisms, and the suspicion that Tehran is seeking to use its links to militant groups such as Hezbollah to assert itself in   theatres where Western interests have hitherto prevailed.

The US media in particular paints a dramatic picture of Iran as a font of terrorist financing, linked to guerilla groups and organised crime networks. The Washington Times reported in March 2009 that Hezbollah “is strengthening its ties to Mexican drug cartels". Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble said in April 2009 that cocaine trafficking in the Americas was being used to finance Hezbollah. In March 2009 congressional testimony, Admiral James G. Stavridis, then-commander of the US Southern Command, said that the main concern about Iran's increased activity in Latin America is its links to Hezbollah, maintaining that there was Hezbollah activity throughout South America and in the Caribbean Basin.

When evidence of malfeasance has been uncovered, the response from the US authorities has tended to be swift. In June 2008, the US Department of Treasury froze the assets of two Venezuelan nationals with suspected ties to Hezbollah. Fawzi Kanaan, who lived in Venezuela and operated two travel agencies, allegedly brought Hezbollah operatives to Venezuela and discussed kidnappings and terrorist attacks with senior Hezbollah officials in Lebanon.

Another Venezuelan national, Ghazi Nasr al-Din, a diplomat based in Lebanon, was alleged to have used his connections in the Middle East to raise funds for Hezbollah.  

However, the consistent theme within Iran's relationships with Latin American states - of reality failing to conform to the hype - is evident within the framework of the region's security relationship with Tehran. The wilder accusations levelled at Iran, of building a bridgehead for an anti-American terrorism effort, have foundered on the reality that Iran lacks the resources and wherewithal to mount such an operation - even accounting for the possibility that it should seek to achieve this ambition.

Reports that emerged in the US in 2009 about Iran building a massive embassy in Nicaragua, allegedly the largest diplomatic mission in the city, have, on closer inspection, been revealed to be unfounded. In reality, this mega embassy, which was said to have supported 400 Iranian agents acting as sleeper cells, appears to be the product of the fertile imaginations of Washington's anti-Iranian constituency. Journalists have failed to find a large building, and the Iranian ambassador continues to reside in a rented house.  

The gaps between myth and truth should not suggest that Iran does not seek to manipulate its connections to its Hezbollah proxy to its advantage. Rather, that Iran's critics may have misjudged the country's motives in supporting non-state actors like Hezbollah. In any case, since the Buenos Aires attacks of the early 1990s, Hezbollah priorities have moved away from attacks on Israeli or Jewish targets in overseas locations.

Concerns are not just isolated to the activities of Hezbollah. Official Iranian military cooperation has also come under the microscope. US officials suggest that Iranian military advisors have been embedded with selected Venezuelan army units since 2006, with Iranian Revolutionary Guards assisting in organising popular militias.

Iran's Defence Minister Mostafa Mohammed Najjar met Venezuela's vice president and acting defence minister Ramón Carrizález in March 2009 to discuss greater defence cooperation between the two states. Najjar toured Venezuelan defence centres, and explained that bilateral cooperation between Iran and Venezuela would strengthen their deterrent capabilities.

Iranian military manuals discussing asymmetric warfare - adopted as an official doctrine of the Venezuelan military - were also reported to have been uncovered in a Colombian army raid on a camp used by Raúl Reyes, of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (Farc) in 2008. Other press reports suggest that Venezuela has, at various points, indicated a willingness to re-sell its US-made F-16 fighter planes to Iran, though military analysts do not take this seriously.  

AMIA and after
The ballooning in Argentina's exports to Iran since 2008 highlights the many contradictions in the country's relationship with Iran. Formerly close, the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, in which 30 people were killed, and the 1994 bombing of a Jewish Community Center (AMIA) in the Argentine capital, in which 85 people were killed, undermined relations between Buenos Aires and Tehran. Investigations by Argentine judicial authorities concluded that the attacks were masterminded and orchestrated by Hezbollah with Iranian backing.

In October 2006, Dr Alberto Nisman, Argentina's attorney general, revealed the findings of the special team that investigated the terrorist attack that destroyed the AMIA community centre building in Buenos Aires, which said that the decision to attack the building was taken by the 'highest instances of the Iranian government', and that Iran has requested Hezbollah carry out the attack. The investigation concluded that the fundamental reason was the Buenos Aires government's unilateral decision to terminate the nuclear materials and technology supply agreements that had been concluded previously between Argentina and Iran.

International arrest warrants were duly issued for seven Iranians and one senior Hezbollah operative. In March 2007, Interpol's Executive Committee endorsed arrest notices for six individuals: Imad Mughiyeh (a Hezbollah military leader assassinated in Damascus in 2007), Ali Fallahijan, Mohsen Rabbani, Ahmad Reza Asghari, Ahmad Vahidi and Mohsen Rezai. But the Executive Committee withdrew warrants on the former president of Iran, Ali Rafsanjani, the former minister of foreign affairs, Ali Akbar Velayati, and the former Iranian ambassador to Buenos Aires, Hadi Soleimanpour.  

Iran has remained steadfast in its refusal to accept the verdict. In the wake of Ahmadinejad's election victory in June 2009, the president's appointment of the suspect Vahidi as defence minister caused outrage, particularly in Israel and Argentina. Vahidi, who has a background in the Revolutionary Guards, received more votes than any other nominee. Such an overwhelming endorsement drew heavy criticism from the US, which said the country was “taking a step backward". “We find today's action disturbing, and, for Iran, it is sending precisely the wrong message," said a US State Department official.

• Iran and Hezbollah  

Iran's relationship with Hezbollah dates back to the historic ties between Iranian Shiites and Lebanon's large Shiite community.   The formation of Hezbollah in 1982 came in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that year. Forces were trained and organized by a contingent of Iranian Revolutionary Guards, camped out in the Bekaa Valley. Iranian influence over Hezbollah is exercised through a variety of relationships, including senior Iranian clerics and most importantly, the Ministry of Intelligence & National Security, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and its elite unit, the Qods Force. The IRGC is largely responsible for arming and training Hezbollah's paramilitary forces.

Hezbollah allows Iran to apply pressure by proxy on its key global strategic enemies, the US and Israel, using both covert and overt means. According to the Jamestown Foundation, Iran uses Hezbollah as an instrument to pressure foreign elements that represent a national security threat, while giving Tehran plausible deniability. The relationship is not of puppet master and puppet, as is sometimes portrayed. Reports of coolness between Lebanese Hezbollah and Tehran emerged in 2008 as a result of regional policies adopted by the Ahmadinejad government which caused embarrassment for Hezbollah within Arab circles.  

The Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) appealed to the governor of Veracruz, Miguel Alemán Velasco, to overturn the result of the election for governor of 5 September. The PAN is also certain to lodge a formal appeal against the result.

The Veracruz election is the most important of this year's 14 state and municipal elections. Veracruz is the third most important state in Mexico in terms of congressional representation and thus will be a key battleground in the 2006 presidential and congressional elections. The virtual three-way split indicates that whoever is elected president in 2006 will not have obtained anything like a majority of the votes in the presidential election and will also have to face negotiating with a congress which will be divided between the three main parties. President Vicente Fox has faced this position throughout his tenure and it has flummoxed him.

The PRI, which has never lost control of the state, was expected to hold the state reasonably easily. This was not what happened. If it won, it won only narrowly. Such as result is a poor one for the president of the PRI, Roberto Madrazo, who is close to Fidel Herrera, the PRI senator who was the party's candidate. One factor in the election was the split in the PRI: Miguel Yunes, one of the chief lieutenants in the lower chamber of congress of Elba Esther Gordillo, the PRI's number two and declared rival to Madrazo, came out strongly against Herrera. Gordillo herself was more circumspect, unlike her behaviour in the Oaxaca and Aguascalientes elections where she supported the candidate most likely to beat the Prií­sta. Her caution was due to her political friendship with Herrera. 

The final results put Herrera, running for the Fidelidad por Veracruz alliance (essentially PRI-Partido Verde Ecologista de México combo) 26,000 votes ahead of the candidate for the Partido Acción Nacional, Gerardo Buganza. The worrying point is that spolit, and thus ineligible, ballot papers were over 80,000. This is more than three times the margin of victory. 

The third candidate was Dante Delgado, a former PRI governor, now the founder of a leftwing party, Convergencia, and candidate for an alliance (Unidos por Veracruz) composed of his party, the Partido de la Revolución Democrática and the Partido del Trabajo, running a reasonably close third.

Both the PAN and the PRD-Convergencia claim that the state electoral authority is in the pocket of the PRI, which has controlled the state since the Mexican Revolution. They point out that the Instituto Electoral Veracruzano (IEV) did nothing to stop Herrera himself, and the leader of his main ally, the Partido Verde Ecologista de Mexico, broadcasting appeals for support on the eve of the election. By law, all campaigns have to finish at least three days before polling day in order to promote a period of reflection. 

The count
As soon as the polls closed in Veracruz, both Herrera and Buganza claimed to have won. One of the two exit polls and the official count reported that the election was too close to call. Early opinion polls in the campaign had put Fidel Herrera, well ahead of his two challengers. As the election campaign wore on, the polls showed Buganza closing on Herrera. 

The state electoral authority had expected to produce results less than seven hours after the polls closed but did not produce a final preliminary result until 9 September. Yet as the count proceeded early on 6 September it became increasingly clear that Herrera had more votes than Buganza. Whether this reflected what the voters actually did is not as clear. Formally, Herrera is running for the Fidelidad por Veracruz alliance. This is composed of the PRI, the PVEM, and a local party, the Partido Revolucionario Veracruzano. 

Herrera said that that his party's polls had shown that it was four points ahead; the PAN claimed a two point advantage. The Televisa exit poll, which is particularly significant because Miguel Alemán, the current (PRI) governor of the state was a founding shareholder in the broadcasting company, also reported that the election was too close to call. The exit poll for the rival broadcaster, TV Azteca said that Herrera had won by 39% to 35% with Delgado on 26%. The TV Azteca exit poll came from Mendoza Blanco y Asociados, while Televisa's poll was from Mitofsky, generally reckoned to be the country's most reliable pollster.

Approximately 4.6m people were eligible to vote in the election. Eyewitnesses reported that the turnout was high; in fact it was over 60%, the highest for any state election this year. There were 8,766 ballot boxes to count. The PAN is already grumbling that the ballot may have been fiddled after polling closed: it claims that there is a close friendship between Herrera and the president of the Instituto Electoral Veracruzano, Salvador Martí­nez. Apart from the governor, voters were also electing 30 first-past-the-post congressional representatives and 212 mayors. 

The PAN claims to have won at least 14 of the 30 first past the post seats, though some of the races are subject to review. The PRI-PVEM alliance won 13 and Unidos por Veracruz three. The PAN will probably be the biggest single party in the state congress, though it will not have an absolute majority. The remaining 20 seats in the state congress will be awarded proportionally. The PAN will pick up a third of these seats, while the other seats will be split between the parties which went into the electoral alliances. It seems likely that Delgado's Convergencia will hold the balance of power in the state congress. 

The municipal elections were also a setback for Madrazo and the PRI. The party lost control of 41 municipalities, holding only 71. The PAN won 89 municipalities and was strongest in the oil zone in the south, Veracruz itself and in the ranching district in the north of the state. 

Unidos por Veracruz won 40 municipalities, notably the state capital, Xalapa and the PRI's ally the PRV 12.

• The loser of the equally close gubernatorial election for the neighbouring state of Oaxaca, Gabino Cué, from the PAN-PRD alliance, Todos Somos Oaxaca, appealed to the state authorities to overturn the result of the 1 August election. He claimed that the state electoral authorities took only two hours to investigate and reject 632 denunciations of irregularities. 
• If the elections in Veracruz and Oaxaca are ordered to be re-run it is likely that the PRI will win them. In the two previous cases during the Fox administration when state election results were annulled because of irregularities, in Tabasco and Colima, the PRI won the reruns: it had also won the original elections. 
• The PRD dropped the current governor's wife, Maricarmen Ramí­rez, as its candidate for the governorship of the state of Tlaxcala. It has picked Gelasio Montiel. Maricarmen maintains that she will still run. The current governor, Alfonso Sánchez Anaya, is a defector from the PRI and is not popular in the state. The election is in the next round of state elections in November. Montiel will also be running for Convergencia.

The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, made some strange observations about Mexico when she gave a tour d'horizon of US foreign policy to editors of the Wall Street Journal on 25 September. In her view, Mexico was emerging as a bipartisan democracy. This stunned most Mexican political analysts who see Mexican politics as a good deal more complicated with at least three major parties active at all three levels of Mexican politics: municipal, state and federal. 

President Fox's spokesman Rubén Aguilar said that the government welcomed Rice's comments praising the solidity of Mexican institutions, but did not agree with her comments about the emerging bipartisanship. Aguilar said that the government was very proud of the multiparty nature of Mexican democracy. 

What Rice actually said was: "Mexico has come through this crisis [post-election] and I think it has been a real vote of confidence in the Mexican democratic system, which after all, is_just now maturing in a kind of two-party system. And I think that that has come out in a way that, while President [Hugo]Chávez [of Venezuela] continues to say he'll support Andrés Manuel López Obrador [the losing, leftwing candidate in the presidential election] and all of that, the question is [:] will Mexicans. And it doesn't appear that they will. It appears that the Mexicans wish to get back to reality here, to a stable political environment." 

Rice then went on to discuss what the Central America Free Trade Agreement, which also includes the Dominican Republic (Cafta-DR) and the Andean Free Trade Agreements mean for Latin America before reverting to making general points about US policy towards Latin America that also apply to Mexico. "The US obviously cares about economic growth and cares about free trade, but we also do happen to care about the improvement in health and improvement in education and improvement in the lives of people. And_ some of our best allies in the region came to us and said: `But you never talk about that. It is always free trade and economic growth, as if it has no relationship to, but should have no relationship to, the lives of the people.' And we've been trying to make very clear, after Monterrey a few years ago, that this is also about improving the lives of people.

"And so we've tried to have a much more well-rounded, I will say, approach to Latin America that still starts with the importance of open economies and open trade but recognises the need to make those work for people, even for the most marginalised people. And we've tried to be disciplined about having a positive agenda for the region rather than constantly answering the Venezuelans," she concluded. Rice's intentions and principles may be honourable, but what the US actually does continues to rile Mexicans. The government was unhappy that the State Department issued a warning to all US travellers in early September on the dangers of visiting Mexico. Then, right at the end of the month, on 28 September, the Mexican foreign ministry issued a strongly worded attack on the US proposal to build a double wall along about a third of the border with Mexico. 

The Mexican foreign ministry statement came on the eve of a vote in the US Senate, on 29 September, to approve the building of a double wall along about a third of the total US-Mexico border. The Democrats did not dare vote against the proposal because of fears about the way the Republicans might spin that vote in the campaign for the mid-term elections which is now only six weeks away. 

The US House of Representatives voted in favour of the proposal on 14 September: all that will remain is approval by the US President. President Bush has said that he will sign it into law. The Mexican foreign ministry said that the construction of the wall would harm relations between the two countries. The foreign ministry accepted that the US had the right to build the walls, but argued that the issue of migration needed "a single focus based on the principle of shared responsibility." The ministry said that "partial measures determined by security considerations were more of a political response than a viable solution." 

The foreign minister, Luis Ernesto Derbez, went further in a press conference at the foreign ministry: "Walls will not solve the US's immigration problems in the best way; unfortunately, [the walls] will damage [our] relationship with the US." The senate voted on 28 September to cut short the debate on the issue of building the walls along about a third (1,126km) of the 3,200km border. This meant that a vote was on 29 September. The vote went the way expected. Democrats and moderate Republicans felt that they cannot vote against the proposal for fear of how their political opponents will stigmatise them in the forthcoming mid-term elections. 

The walls have come in for some strong criticism from commentators in the US. One argument is that the walls will keep illegal migrants, who would otherwise return home, inside the US. These migrants will not dare to return home, as usual, because they fear that they will be unable to get back into the US. Another argument against the walls is that they will actually encourage more illegal migration to the US. Migrants will bring their families because they are not sure that their families will be able to join them later. It is worth noting that, according to the Pew Research Center, 50% of all illegal migrants to the US arrive legally, with visas, at airports. They simply overstay their visas and become illegal. 

On 24 November Manuel Espino, the former president of the ruling Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), called for changes to Mexico's anti-drugs policy. Espino's call is, effectively, a demand to President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa to sack Genaro Garcí­a Luna, the minister of public security. Espino represents the hard right of Mexican politics and his attack suggests that Calderón's attempt to appease the traditionalist wing of the PAN by appointing Fernando Gómez-Mont as interior minister has failed. As the Left also has Garcí­a Luna in its sights, Calderón and his government are now under extreme pressure over their failure to stop the killings by gangsters.

Rashly, Calderón raised the stakes over Garcí­a Lima by declaring, from Lima, Peru, where he was attending the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit on 23 November, that if there was any doubt about Garcí­a Luna's honesty he would not be a minister. What is interesting about Calderón's defence of Garcí­a Luna is that it is isolated. None of the other law and order ministers have backed Garcí­a Luna as strongly as Calderón has. Equally, Calderón has not endorsed any of them as strongly as he endorsed Garcí­a Luna.

There is, however, considerable doubt about Garcí­a Luna on several counts.  These issues range from the highly-paid employment he has consistently given to his sister in a series of appointments in ministries and agencies he headed, to his attitude to the corruption that appears to have riddled the country's anti-organised crime unit, the Subprocuradurí­a de Investigación Especializada en Delincuencia Organizada (Siedo).

Garcí­a Luna is particularly vulnerable because the anti-corruption investigation, Operación Limpieza, has nabbed some people close to him, notably Mario Arturo Velarde Martí­nez, who was arrested on 20 November. Velarde worked as private secretary for Garcí­a Luna for six years when the latter ran the Agencia Federal de Investigación (AFI). Velarde is the fifth of Garcí­a Luna's close associates to have been arrested in Operación Limpieza, which is designed to purge senior ranks of the federal law enforcement agencies of people in the pay of drug gangsters.

It has now emerged that a lot of AFI agents seconded to the Siedo deserted when the anti-corruption investigation, Operación Limpieza, began to arrest senior members of the Siedo in July 2008. The exact numbers of desertions are unclear, but the government is being heavily criticised in the media for the Siedo scandal. The media is putting pressure on Garcí­a Luna to take responsibility for the scandal and go, even though the Siedo is actually answerable to Eduardo Medina Mora, the Procurador General de la República.

The scandal detonated on 20 November when officers from the Siedo detained Noé Ramí­rez Mandujano, who had been head of the Siedo for the first 20 months of President Calderón's administration.   Ramí­rez is accused of having taken US$450,000 a month from the Beltrán Leyva brothers, who run the main faction of the Sinaloa gang, now known as the Pacifico gang. In return, according to Medina Mora, Ramí­rez Mandujano gave his paymasters information about investigations and operations.

Ramí­rez, who was dismissed as head of the Siedo on 31 July, voluntarily came into the Siedo to answer questions but was then detained. Since leaving the Siedo he had been Mexico's representative to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. The Siedo is in the forefront of the war against organised crime and has been the subject of a series of investigations this year. The government claims to have found that the Siedo was riddled with corruption and took orders from the Beltrán Leyva brothers. On 24 November Ramí­rez Mandujano was remanded in custody, for further questioning, for 40 days.

Genaro Garcí­a Luna is vulnerable not only because of the accusations against his close colleagues but also because of the way he has dealt with accusations from Javier Herrera Valles, a senior police officer who wrote two letters to President Calderón accusing Garcí­a Luna of making questionable decisions.

Herrera
Garcí­a Luna's reaction to the two letters to President Calderón sent by Herrera puts a major questionmark against his judgment. The first letter was sent in February this year and the second in May. In both Herrera asked the president to investigate what he saw as questionable decisions by Garcí­a Luna.

Garcí­a Luna's apparent response to Herrera's accusations has been to sack and then arrest Herrera. On 24 November, the authorities confirmed that Herrera's brother, Arturo, a senior federal police officer in Tabasco, was also under arrest. There is no evidence that the authorities have bothered to investigate Javier Herrera's accusations.

Javier Herrera himself was arrested on 17 November. The official PGR press release claimed that Herrera had come in to answer questions. In fact he had been chased through the streets of Mexico City by unidentified officers from the Siedo and was beaten up before being arrested at gunpoint. Herrera's son, who was with him when he was arrested, said that none of the arresting officers, who claimed to have the authorisation of the Siedo, showed any identity papers.

Herrera is a former head of the Policia Federal Preventiva (PFP). He originally took leave of absence from the police after sending the letters to President Calderón denouncing Garcí­a Luna in February.  Ironically, he was sacked from the PFP  for failing to turn up for work on 10 October by the force's then acting head Ví­ctor Gerardo Garay. Garay was himself arrested, accused of being in the pay of the Beltrán Leyva brothers on 31 October, and is now also in jail.

Herrera had not hidden his unhappiness with Garcí­a Luna, who has been in office since President Calderón took power on 1 December 2006. Herrera has leaked documents which he said pointed to irregularities and potentially also corruption in the security ministry following Garcí­a Luna's arrival. Herrera has a solid reputation in Mexico: he ran the country's highway patrol and has been a police officer for 30 years. Meanwhile, Garcí­a Luna is widely seen as an ineffective placeman. 

Espino
Espino's attack on Garcí­a Luna was unusually deft. He said that it should not be a president's duty to launch a last-ditch defence of a senior minister. “Ministers," Espino said, “should be those people who are trusted by their fellow citizens not only for their record of achievement but also for their loyalty and honesty." On all Espino's points Garcí­a Luna is found wanting, the government's critics say.

Espino also called for a change in the government's security policy, which he said was simply not working. The government's line, spouted by Eduardo Medina Mora, the former secret policeman who now runs the Procuradurí­a General de la Republica, is that its policy is beginning to deliver. Medina Mora denied that the arrest Ramí­rez Mandujano had affected the fight against organised crime.

From 1 January to 21 November, 4,426 people have been killed by the gangs in Mexico. The death toll is considerably up on the 2,700 killed by the gangs in 2007.

Garay: On 31 October the government suspended the acting head of the main national police force, the Policia Federal Preventiva (PFP). The suspension was another embarrassment to the authorities. The police chief, Victor Gerardo Garay Cadena, announced that he was temporarily resigning so that the accusation that he was in the pay of the Sinaloa drug trafficking gang could be investigated. Garay Cadena is accused of being on payroll of a chieftain in the Sinaloa gang, Jesús “El Rey" Zambada, who allegedly controlled drug trafficking through Mexico City's international airport. Zambada was arrested on 20 October.

Interpol: On 18 November the anti-corruption squad, the Siedo, announced the arrest of a director of Interpol, Ricardo Gutiérrez Vargas. The Siedo arrested Gutiérrez as part of its Operación Limpieza, which is designed to catch police and other law enforcement officers in the pay of organised crime. Gutiérrez was seconded to Interpol from the Agencia Federal de Investigaciones (AFI). He was actually arrested on 16 November.

Chihuahua: On 16 November representatives of the business sector, religious leaders and 62 of the state's 67 mayors called on the national government of President Calderón to rethink its deployment of soldiers in Chihuahua. Chihuahua accounts for the vast majority of people killed in Mexico so far this year (1,368 of a total 4,281), according to the latest count by Reforma, a Mexico City newspaper. Sinaloa (548) and Baja California (434) ranked second and third. The Chihuahuan protest is the first sign that the government's failure to curb the killing by drug gangs is having a political effect: a torch-lit anti-crime march in Mexico City earlier this year was more focused on kidnapping than gang killings.

The Chihuahuans wrote an open letter to President Calderón saying that the murder rate was completely out of control. They called on the president to rethink the Operativo Conjunto Chihuahua. Aside from business leaders, Roman Catholic bishops and evangelical leaders also signed the letter, as did the rectors of all the universities in the state.

Tijuana: The federal government sent marines, soldiers and federal and state police officers onto the streets of Tijuana on 18 November. They replaced municipal policemen in over half of the city's nine boroughs. The mayor of Tijuana, Jorge Ramos, announced the move. Ramos said that the feds and state police would police half the city, which is on the border with the US, for a month. In the meantime the 2,000 municipal policemen, who have been unable to dampen down an increasingly gory gang war between factions in the Arellano Félix gang, will be purged and retrained. Ramos denied that Tijuana was now under martial law. Soldiers and marines will, however, patrol the streets rather than policemen. The feds will patrol four of the nine boroughs of the city and the state police one other.

So far this year 650 people have been murdered by gang members in Tijuana, according to the local press, though the Mexico City newspapers, which are also keeping a national score, say that this is an overestimate. It is significant that the government has moved in Tijuana, which is in Baja California, a state controlled by the PAN, rather than in Chihuahua where twice as many people have been killed by gangsters so far this year. Chihuahua has reverted to the PRI after being run by the PAN for only one sexenio in the 1990s. For years, the PAN won most votes in elections in Chihuahua but its candidates were never allowed to take office by the federal government.

• Sinaloa

On 19 November three members of the Agencia Federal de Investigación were killed in an ambush in Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa state. The three AFI agents were travelling in a car with four other state police officers when they were ambushed, two of whom were also killed. It is worth noting that most, if not all, of the 27 agricultural labourers who were working on an alleged drug gangster's estate in Sinaloa were released. They had been reported kidnapped on 10 November.

• César Nava

The rumour in Mexico City is that President Calderón's outgoing private secretary, César Nava, will take over the role the late José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos had of advising the interior ministry on security and law and order reform. Vasconcelos was killed in the plane crash on 4 November which also killed the then interior minister, Juan Camilo Mouriño.

President Felipe Calderón is due in Washington on 2 and 3 March. The climax of his trip will be a meeting with President Barack Obama on 3 March. Calderón's fifth bilateral meeting with Obama comes at an awkward time for US-Mexico relations.

One sign of the awkwardness is that the Mexican media is making a meal of the issue of whether President Calderón invited himself to the White House, as part of his Washington trip, or was asked to stop in by President Obama. What is clear is that both sides are finding it increasingly hard to keep their cool with each other and their policies in step.

Roberta Jackson, the US State Department's Deputy Assistant Undersecretary for Western Hemisphere affairs (and so the number two policymaker on Latin America), denied on 28 February that Calderón's visit was a crisis meeting. “There is a lot to talk about," she admitted, “and lots of things are going on."

The clearest sign of US irritation with Mexico came on 23 February, when Janet Napolitano, the US Homeland Security Secretary, criticised President Calderón for his harsh comments about the lack of coordination between US security agencies. Napolitano's strong comments (“disappointed" is officialese for angry) overshadowed the news that the Mexican army had arrested a gang member who conveniently confessed to murdering Jaime Zapata, an Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent killed in Mexico on 15 February.

Napolitano stressed that Calderón was wrong to say that there was little coordination between US agencies. She noted that there was good coordination between Mexico and US and that the US and Mexico were “all together in this_ and that coordination on border issues had never been better."

Mexico did not directly respond to Napolitano's comments and the emotionalism of Zapata's requiem Mass on 22 February, where there were eulogies of Zapata from Napolitano herself, John Morton, the head of the ICE and Eric Holder, the US attorney general.  

Zapata was the first US official to have been killed in Mexico since Enrique Camarena, an undercover Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent, who was kidnapped and killed in 1985. The DEA claimed that corrupt Mexican police officers and several influential figures, including a cousin of a former Mexican president, Luis Echeverrí­a, were involved in Camarena's killing. The US infuriated Mexico by allowing DEA agents to kidnap at least one suspect from Mexico and putting him on trial in the US. The highhanded US action made successive Mexican governments unwilling to cooperate with the US.

Current Mexican officials are also unhappy at what they see as provocative statements from US politicians (such as Representative Michael McCaul, R-Texas) demanding that Zapata's killers be extradited to the US to face prosecution there. Such demands are all too easily perceived by sensitive Mexicans as allegations that the Mexican justice system is not capable of trying Zapata's alleged killers. It is worth noting, however, that the US courts threw out the case against one of the Camarena suspects US officials had lured from Mexico before arresting him.

Calderón's outspoken comments on the lack of coordination between US security agencies (he named the DEA, FBI and CIA) were unfortunately timed: they were published in Mexico on the day of Zapata's funeral in Brownsville, Texas. In the interview, Calderón was scathing about the behaviour of the US ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual, as revealed by US embassy cables published by WikiLeaks.

What is not clear is whether Calderón intended to be so outspoken in the El Universal interview, which started with some gentle lobbed questions about the peaks and troughs of his presidency and a discussion of how he would like to be remembered. Calderón suddenly flared off into criticism of the US for failing to help Mexico enough against the violent drug trafficking gangs and this then led him to make some unflattering comments about Pascual.

Pascual, who was sent to Mexico by Obama, arrived with a questionmark against him, at least in the eyes of some Mexican officials, because of his professional expertise in dealing with failed states. Calderón, in his videoed interview with El Universal accused Pascual of “ignorance [that] has translated into a distortion of what is happening in Mexico_ [which has caused] an impact and an irritation in our own team." Calderón was referring to the WikiLeaks publication of US State Department cables which discuss the perceived shortcomings of Mexico's intelligence services, the conduct of its army in Calderón's anti-crime campaign and the inability of its security forces to work well with one another. Calderón's comments were the first official Mexican response to the WikiLeaks revelations.

Calderón's clear unhappiness at what Pascual has been reporting to the US suggests that over the final 18 months of his administration relations with the US are likely to be bumpy. Policymakers in both the US and Mexico are now beginning to think about what may happen in 2012 when a new Mexican (and perhaps also a new US) government will take office.

Calderón accused Pascual and other US officials of “exaggerating" (literally, 'over-saucing their tacos') for their own reasons the situation in Mexico. Calderón's language in his El Universal interview was unusually demotic. He also claimed that Pascual had never put to him (or to his security cabinet) the points he made in the leaked cables. Rather perplexingly, Calderón then added that Pascual had not included his answers in the [leaked] cables. This suggests that Pascual had at least put the questions to Calderón in their regular meetings.

Calderón argued that what was actually happening was that Mexican officials saw a deep lack of coordination on the US side. Calderón described US policy towards Mexico as 'Borondongo le dio a Bernabé' which is a line from a song by Celia Cruz, the famous Cuban singer. Calderón appeared to be suggesting that no-one is in overall charge or knows what they are (or should be) doing.

Calderón got into all this through a remark in which he accused the US of not doing enough to help Mexico in its war against the gangs. He noted that the US's main contribution was to try to reduce its domestic drug consumption but, he said, this had not been achieved. The second US policy goal was to reduce the flow of weapons from the US to Mexican gangs. Calderón said that the US had also failed to deliver on this.

On both counts, the data is difficult to interpret. There is some strong US evidence to suggest that its domestic drug consumption has changed over the past 10 years and may well have levelled off. On weapons, it is far from clear how big a source of weapons the US is for Mexican gangs. The Mexican government, however, has played up the fact that the gun that killed Jaime Zapata was traced back, by the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF), to a known arms dealer in Lancaster, Texas.

• What happened to Zapata?
  On 15 February a vehicle transporting two US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents was attacked and one of the agents, Jaime Zapata, was killed. The other, Ví­ctor Avila, was shot twice in the leg. The agents, who were based at the US embassy in Mexico City, were ambushed (though some investigators claim that they were stopped at a checkpoint because they wound down a window) in the increasingly violent state of San Luis Potosí­, as they drove to Monterrey, in Nuevo León, one of the most violent places in Mexico. On 23 February the army nabbed Julián Zapata Espinosa (no relation) who conveniently confessed to killing Jaime Zapata “by mistake." Zapata Espinosa and his colleagues, who claim to be members of Los Zetas, thought that they were attacking rival gangsters. The US Secretary for Homeland Security (DHS), Janet Napolitano, was outspoken in her condemnation of the attack. “Let me be clear: Any act of violence against our ICE personnel - or any DHS personnel - is an attack against all those who serve our nation and put their lives at risk for our safety," she said.  

Pascual's view of the incompetence of Mexican security agencies has clearly fed through from the State Department into other parts of the Washington administrative machine. On 10 February, James Clapper, the director of US National Intelligence, had warned, presciently, in his annual assessment of threats to the US that although there was no evidence that the drug trafficking gangs in Mexico had targeted US officials, he suggested that this could change if the Mexican government appears to be winning its battles against the gangs as a result of US support.

Mexico accounted for the biggest part of Clapper's assessment of Latin American threats. Clapper declared bluntly that Mexico's “military and police capabilities remain inadequate to break the trafficking organisations and contain criminal violence." Clapper stated that “the overwhelming majority of drugs now consumed in the US are produced in Mexico, Colombia, Canada and the US". This statement reflects changes in US drug consumption patterns (particularly the growing popularity of methamphetamines).  

Mexico under Calderón has become increasingly touchy about how the US perceives it. On 8 February, Joseph Westphal, the US Army undersecretary, retracted statements strongly critical of Mexico he had made a day earlier (7 February).

The furious reaction from Mexico and the speed with which Westphal retracted show how sensitive the issue of security in Mexico is on both sides of the border. Westphal initially claimed that he had said that the violence in Mexico was an insurgency and that US troops might be needed on or across the border. Westphal added that he had discussed these issues with the White House and that Latin America was a “blind spot" for US policymakers.

Westphal, who made his comment at the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics, said that his comments “were not and never have been the policy of the Department of Defense of the US towards Latin America." It is worth noting that the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, had referred to an insurgency in Mexico in September 2010, which triggered an equally strong response from the Mexican government.

Mexico's interior ministry issued a strong but brief statement criticising Westphal's Hinckley comments and said that there was no evidence that any of the gangs in Mexico have a political agenda.

The US has yet to react to clear signs from the main opposition party in Mexico, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), that it would abandon Calderón's security policies. The first sign of a PRI policy change intentions came on 15 February when senior figures in the PRI, which opinion polls show winning next year's presidential election, called for Mexico to pull out of the US-backed Merida Initiative.

The Prií­stas making the call are level-headed: Francisco Labastida, now a senator, was governor of Sinaloa (1987-1992), interior minister and secretary of agriculture during the Ernesto Zedillo administration (1994-2000) and the PRI's (losing) presidential candidate in 2000. He argues that that the Merida Initiative puts Mexico at the mercy of the US Senate yet does not ensure that Mexico gets the resources needed to defeat the drug-trafficking gangs.

Labastida's statement is a reaction to the US announcement of major budget cuts in aid to Mexico and Colombia. Aid to Mexico will drop by US$250m in the 2012 financial year to US$334m, of which US$282m is Merida Initiative money, according to US administration plans. What Labastida objects to is the conditionality of the Merida Initiative; he would prefer a joint commitment, by the US and Mexico, to combat violence in the two countries.

The PRI's call was backed by Carlos Navarrete, the leader of the left-wing Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) in the senate. He said that the Merida Initiative, launched by President George W. Bush in 2008, has not worked.

The second PRI shoe to drop fell on 23 February, when Socrates Rizzo Garcí­a, a former governor of Nuevo León (1991-1996), whose state is now one of the main battlegrounds between drug gangs, said that when (his party) the PRI ran Mexico (until 2000), “a strong presidency and a strong [federal] government" assigned the routes each drug gang could use so that there was no fighting between the gangs and ordinary people could live in peace.

Rizzo's comments suggest that if the PRI were to recover the presidency in 2012, it might revert to this former policy, which at least kept the death toll down in Mexico. Since President Calderón took office in December 2006, 35,000 people have been killed by drug gangs.

Rizzo's comments, made at a conference held at Coahuila state university's law faculty, were also aimed at Calderón. In his 22 February interview Calderón accused Mexico's state governors of failing to help the federal government. Rizzo's argument was that in his day the federal government handled the whole issue of the drug trade and kept state governments out of the loop.

Honduras has not been passed by in the latest bout of corruption allegations afflicting the political and judicial milieu across Central America. On 21 October, the chief prosecutor, Ovidio Navarro, dismissed ten public prosecutors and transferred six others who had criticized his controversial decision to shelve a number of corruption cases involving, among others, former President Rafael Callejas (1990-94). His action triggered a strike in the prosecution service and brought hundreds of demonstrators on to the streets.

Navarro has been accused of abusing his position to protect Callejas. A number of NGOs claim that his actions demonstrate how entrenched corruption is within the Honduran establishment. Along with demonstrators, they demanded Navarro's resignation and petitioned the supreme court to overturn the dismissals. The national press singled out the opposition Partido Liberal for criticism: the weekly current affairs magazine Hablemos Claro said that the PL had neglected its duty to take the government to task for the corruption within the politicised judiciary.

Navarro has staunchly defended his decision on both fronts. He says that the ten dismissed prosecutors masqueraded as crusaders against corruption while doing very little: 'What did they do against corruption over the past 10 years?' he asked. He also claims that the dismissals follow internal investigations which revealed myriad 'irregularities' ranging from breaches of the law to contempt, defamation and insults directed against the prosecution service and himself. Each case - including seven against Callejas - was shelved because it failed to stand up to close scrutiny, he said.  

Honduras fared particularly badly in the latest Corruption Perceptions Index released by Transparency International (see sidebar). In its 2004 report, TI placed Honduras at 114th out of 145 countries, above only Guatemala and Haiti in the region. TI said that there is a direct relationship between high levels of corruption and low levels of economic productivity. The lack of transparency that tends to go hand in hand with government corruption leads to a level of uncertainty that effectively discourages foreign investors, the report said.  

A scramble for alliances before legislative elections in May is underway. The efforts by the main opposition Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (PRD) to cling on to its dominance in the legislature at all costs looks like it might backfire as PRD members express disillusionment with the party's so-called "Pink alliance" with the second opposition party Partido Reformista Social Cristiano (PRSC).

Many PRD members have struggled to reconcile themselves to an alliance which they feel is unnecessary. The PRD has 29 of 32 seats in the senate and 73 of 150 seats in the chamber of deputies.

PRD members are questioning why, given this position of power, they should have to back PRSC candidates in a large number of seats in both chambers of congress when PRD candidates could probably win the seats on their own.

The PRD party leadership, however, is not so sanguine. It fears that voters will desert the PRD in droves as they did in the presidential elections in 2003 that saw Leonel Fernández of the Partido de la Liberación Dominicana (PLD) come to power.

Fernández used his state-of-the-nation address on 27 February to compare the impressive economic results registered by his government in 2005 with the disastrous economic management of the previous PRD administration.

The day after Fernández's address nine armed members of the PRD burst into the town hall in Haina, southwest of the capital, to protest against the decision by the PRD to allow a PRSC candidate to run for a seat in the municipal council rather than PRD candidate Reynaldo Aybar. Police duly arrived and endeavoured to dislodge the protesters with tear gas; they received a volley of fire in response. It took two hours to persuade the armed men to leave. Strangely there were no reports of casualties or arrests.

PRSC plays the game

PRD members are not the only ones looking doubtfully at the "Pink alliance". Alexandra Izquierdo, the first vice president of the PRSC, announced on 2 March that she would be running as deputy mayor in Santo Domingo to Roberto Salcedo, the PLD candidate. She justified her decision by accusing the PRSC of making a mistake in striking an alliance with the PRD.

During his election campaign President Daniel Ortega promised many things to many different sectors of Nicaraguan society. Four months into his mandate it is becoming increasingly clear that the declarations he made to business leaders about following the recommendations of the IMF are of a much lower priority than his promises to the Sandinista's traditional support base among the poor.

A delegation from the IMF arrived in Managua in late April for 10 days to discuss the terms of a new agreement; the last deal, which was negotiated under former president Enrique Bolaños, expired in December 2006. The government is budgeting on receiving US$115m of IMF money in 2007, but the talks were inconclusive and the IMF team returned to Washington on 11 May. According to local media reports further negotiations will be held in June. 

A statement released by the IMF on 12 May described the talks as "very productive". However, Ortega's attitude seems to have hardened towards the organisation, following the lead of his Venezuelan ally, President Hugo Chávez , who has been fulminating against Washington-based multilateral institutions and developing his idea of Latin America's own fund, the Banco del Sur. Speaking on 12 May at the government palace, Ortega publicly warned the IMF that he would continue with his plan to increase public sector salaries despite their recommendations to not increase public spending.

Wage rises
His strident rhetoric was aimed at pacifying both Sandinista and non-Sandinista trade unions which have been determinedly demanding higher wages; non-Sandinista trade unions, in the Congreso Permanente de los Trabajadores, are pushing for a 25% increase in the minimum wage while Sandinista unions want it to be doubled. The current minimum wage stands at US$77 a month. The canasta básica (the index of staples that a family needs to survive each month), which contains 53 products, currently costs US$169. 

Although the government had initially offered a minimum wage increase of 10.4%, Ortega said in his speech on 1 May, the International Day of the Worker, that he wanted to liberate the country from "this bourgeois empire of savage capitalism" and that he may increase the minimum wage by as much as 20%. He said that this will be financed by adjustments to the tax system which would mean that "those who earn more, pay more". 

Ortega launched his government's flagship "zero hunger" campaign on 5 May in the village of Raití­, in the northern department of Jinotega, on the banks of the River Coco near Honduras. The programme aims to lift 75,000 families out of poverty by 2012 through an investment of US$150m. Families will be granted a US$2,000 bond, including a cow and pig, poultry, seeds, fruit plants, and other agricultural supplies.

Perhaps these policies will shore up the support that Ortega seems to have been losing since coming to office. Although he won the election with 37% of the vote in November, a poll with a 2.5% margin of error carried out by M&R in April showed that only 27% of Nicaraguans thought his leadership to be good or very good. 51.5% of respondents said Ortega was an authoritarian leader who was prepared to disobey democratic rules. His decision to appoint his wife, Rosario Murillo, as the government spokesperson was unpopular, and those questioned also disliked the fact that Ortega runs the government from the headquarters of his party, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional. 

• Name change
  The leader of the Partido Liberal Constitucionalista (PLC), Arnoldo Alemán, announced that he wants the party's name to be changed to the Partido Liberal. He said he hoped the name change would unite "the liberal family and democratic forces". In last year's elections the liberals competed as two different parties, the dissident Alianza Liberal Nicaragüense led by Eduardo Montealegre and the PLC. Alemán hopes to unite the party in time for the municipal elections of 2008.
  

Following a resounding victory in Grenada's 8 July general election, National Democratic Congress (NDC) leader Tillman Thomas was sworn in as prime minister on 9 July, ending 13 years of New National Party (NNP) government. In his inauguration ceremony he pledged to “display the politics of inclusion by partnering with everyone. You can depend on us for openness and transparency". he said.  The NDC took 11 seats in the 15-seat parliament, leaving the NNP with four.

The most obvious conclusion to draw from the election result is that the outgoing prime minister, Dr Keith Mitchell, was just the latest in a growing list of Caribbean incumbents ejected by the electorate (joining his counterparts in Jamaica, Barbados, Belize also removed from power over the past year).  The NDC's election campaign was all about promoting change, and attacks on the party for harbouring former revolutionaries ultimately failed to have an impact, in part because Thomas was able to point to the fact that he was jailed under the Cuba-aligned government of Maurice Bishop and was in prison at the time of the 1983 US invasion.  Besides, as the NDC manifesto said, “they, like thousands of other Grenadians, were products of their age and deserve to participate in all the mainstream institutions of their country".

The campaign had been marked by some vitriolic exchanges.  Apart from the NNP's attempts to use opposition links to the revolutionary era to its advantage, it had ranted that “the very soul of the [NDC] is in the grip of the ugliness of authoritarianism", and that this “disposition towards an authoritarian temper in the NDC is Stalinist in character..."

Not to be outdone, the NDC compared Keith Mitchell to Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe.  In the NDC's manifesto, Thomas wrote that having lived through every political administration since independence, he had observed that “the longer [Grenada's] many promising leaders stay in office, and the more they are allowed to remove the political checks and balances, the more they become intoxicated with power and begin to behave like 'maximum leaders'".

Thomas followed this up with a national address on 7 July in which he said: “Our country is quickly becoming like Zimbabwe.  The similarities between Mitchell and Mugabe are clear. They are both desperate despots who do not have the support of their people_[and]_ are trying to use any means necessary to stay in power."

Mitchell's earlier tirade against the NDC as “Stalinist" had been prompted by some freelance road repairing done as a political stunt by the NDC.  Thomas's allegations of Mugabe-like tendencies on the part of Mitchell were in turn sparked by a decision to ban a planned NNP motorcade in the final stages of the election.  To outsiders the exaggerations seemed excessive, but there was no doubt that political tempers were running hot and Police Commissioner Winston James even felt compelled to threaten to request further help if political tensions got out of hand.  He said: “We believe whatever is happening we can handle it.  However, this situation can change easily and if this happens we would call for outside assistance."

The NDC's manifesto contained many promises of a better future but few concrete proposals.  However, one proposal that might have had an impact was the promise to reduce the cost of living by cutting import duties selected essential goods.  The provision of more affordable housing by identifying suitable land in every parish for housing projects was another popular pledge, as was that to increase the money spent on education to 15% of total government spending within the first year of an NDC government.

On health, the NDC promised to provide free health care for all children under the age of 18 and senior citizens over the age of 60 within its term of office and to develop a five-year strategic plan for hospital services. There was also a pledge to increase the old age pension from EC$130 (US$49.60) per month to “a more acceptable figure".   

Ottón Solí­s, the presidential candidate for the main opposition Partido Acción Ciudadana (PAC), was thrown a lifeline this month ahead of elections on 7 February 2010. It came in the form of the conviction of former president Rafael Angel Calderón Fournier (1990-94) to five years in prison for embezzlement by a San José court. Calderón pulled out of the running for the presidency. But, it was not this decision so much as the possible repercussions of his conviction that could benefit Solí­s. He will be hoping that support migrates away from the clear frontrunner, Laura Chinchilla, who represents a traditional party, to the PAC, which was established on a strong anti-corruption platform.

Solí­s is currently languishing in the opinion polls, with just 13% in the most recent La Nación survey last month. Calderón polled just 6% but his party, the Partido Unidad Social Cristiana (Pusc) is one of two traditional parties in Costa Rican politics along with the ruling Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN), for which Chinchilla is standing.

Chinchilla has carved out what appears to be a virtually unassailable lead, polling a huge 55% support. A big part of the reason for this is that the administration of President Oscar Arias has not been embroiled in corruption scandals. But, like the Pusc, the PLN has been tainted by corruption in the past, for instance, former president José Marí­a Figueres (1994-1998).

The Calderón conviction has at least given Solí­s the chance to return to his strengths and rail against corruption again, something which almost brought him to power in the last elections. The problem is his party is divided. It waged a long, and ultimately fruitless, battle against the approval of the US-Central America trade treaty (Cafta-DR), however, and emerged weakened after internal ructions.

Calderón was the first ex president to be imprisoned for corruption in Costa Rica. He was accused of taking an illegal commission during a purchase of medical equipment from the Finnish company, Instrumentarium Medko Medical by the Costa Rican social security system (CCSS). Six others, including the former head of the CCSS, were also found guilty of taking kickbacks.

• Arms
  “Arms and wars generate more environmental devastation and more pollution than any productive activity; the mere existence of military spending constitutes, in and of itself, the negation of resources to combat global warming," President Oscar Arias during a speech before the UN General Assembly last month. “I will never tire of repeating it," he went on, “in Latin America […] armies have not served any purpose other than to carry out a coup d'état." He added: “the greatest arsenal of genius in the world is, at this moment, working on perfecting the weaponry and defence systems of nations […] Its place is in the laboratories where medicines are being created that are accessible for all humankind."