Washington Watch - 04 March 2010
Central America: On 25 February the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Frank Mora, said that drug traffickers were increasingly moving operations to Central America. Mora's remarks, made in a talk at the US Brookings Institution, reflects growing concern in the US about the growing presence of drug gangs in the region, attributed to the success of anti-drug efforts in Mexico, Colombia and the Caribbean. The US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will visit Costa Rica and Guatemala tomorrow (5 March) as part of a “strategic evaluation" of Central America. Mora is also planning to visit both countries and El Salvador over the next few weeks. The US plans to assign US$100m in aid for fiscal year 2011 to combat drug trafficking in the region as part of the US$1.4bn Mérida Initiative, a multi-year programme to combat organized crime in Mexico and Central America.
Mexico: On 25 February the US announced that it was closing, temporarily, its consulate in Reynosa, because of the violence in the state of Tamaulipas. Tamaulipas has suffered a series of shootouts between drug-trafficking gangsters and the army this year. On 25 February, a group of gangsters attacked an army patrol on a road just outside Matamoros (another town in the state), where the US consulate still remains open. The army said it killed four of the attackers and took no casualties. In Tamaulipas and the neighbouring state of Nuevo León, at least 25 people were killed in shootouts in late February. Some of these shootouts were between gangs; others were between gangs and the police or the army.
Region: On 1 March the US State Department published its 2010 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR). Within Latin America, Venezuela, and more surprisingly, Peru, come in for implied criticism. The INCSR asserts that drug flows from Venezuela to the US, Europe and West Africa increased sharply in 2009. It notes that the Venezuelan national counternarcotics office (ONA) increased drug seizures from 40 metric tonnes (t) in 2008 to 60.2t in calendar 2009. The report points out that this is still way below the 152t seized in 2005, when the US and Venezuelan governments were still cooperating fully in anti-drugs operations. The INCSR pointed out that there is still some limited cooperation between Venezuela and the US, especially with the US Coast Guard. This cooperation led to three joint operations and the seizure of over 2t of cocaine last year.
The INCSR was unusually critical of Peru, which is the world's second largest producer of coca and cocaine. The report bluntly stated that “the government of Peru does not devote sufficient resources to implementing its counternarcotics plan or for counternarcotics operation [s]. Coca cultivation expanded in Peru, Peruvian authorities seized fewer drugs in 2009 than in 2008 and Peru's potential to manufacture and export cocaine increased in 2009." The INCSR notes that Colombia's domestic drug problem is rising, even though pure cocaine production apparently dropped from 485t in 2007 to 295t in 2008. This production figure seems unlikely, because Colombia's National Directorate for Dangerous Drugs (DNE) reported that local security forces seized 205.85t of cocaine in 2009.
Mexico: The US Department of Transport reported that the value of overland shipments (i.e. road and rail traffic) between the US, Mexico and Canada rose 10.5% year-on-year in December 2009. The total value in December 2009 was US$58.5bn. The value of the traffic between the US and Canada was US$35.4bn, up 7.8% year-on-year, while the value of traffic between Mexico and the US was up by 15% at US$23bn.
Mexico: In January 2010 remittances inflows to Mexico came to US$1.32bn. This was 15.7% down on January 2009. The January figure was also down on December 2009, when remittances came to US$1.56bn. Worryingly, January's fall is the biggest year-on-year drop since October 2009, when the flow dropped by 38%. Remittances have now been falling, year-on-year, for 15 consecutive months. This suggests that the employment prospects for Mexican migrants in the US is not even stabilising, let alone improving. BBVA-Bancomer, one of Mexico's biggest banks, recently calculated that 13% of all Mexican migrants in the US are jobless.