Obama offers to help Calderón in the war on drugs (in Spanish)

El Universal, 1/12/2009
President-elect Barack Obama emphasized his commitment to collaborating with Mexico on a wide range of issues, especially in the areas of security and Calderón’s fight against drugs, in their meeting Monday at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington, D.C.
Obama said that his government will be willing to help Mexico in its struggle against [...]

Obama and Calderon Talk Drugs, Trade and Immigration (Podcast)

To the Point, 1/12/2009
When most Americans think of Mexico, they’re likely to focus on immigration. But Mexico’s drug wars killed 5000 people last year, and the Department of Homeland Security has plans for a law-enforcement “surge” if bloodshed spreads across the border. That’s the background of today’s meeting between Mexican President Felipe Calderón and the [...]

Editorial: A Sense of Who We Are

Editorial, New York Times, 1/12/2009
A scene from the last days of the Bush administration: On a snowy afternoon last weekend, a church in New York City is filled to bursting with more than 1,000 people. Parents holding babies, teenagers, old men and women with heavy coats and canes. They murmur and shout in prayer, a [...]

Bingaman and Hutchison Renew Effort to Enact Southwest Border Violence Reduction Act

Office of Senator Jeff Bingaman, 1/12/2009
U.S. Senators Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) today renewed their push to enact legislation to reduce drug-related violence in the border region by cracking down on organizations smuggling weapons illegally from the United States into Mexico.  Senators Richard Durbin, Dianne Feinstein, Jon Kyl, and John McCain are [...]

Activists: US immigration reform could happen in September

AFP, 1/12/2009
After two failed attempts in 2006 and 2007, immigration reform could finally be pushed through both houses of the US Congress starting in September, civil rights activists said. “We are confident and very optimistic that there’s likely to be a big window of opportunity between September 2009 and March 2010,” America’s Voice pro-reform group [...]

More Latino immigrants seeking office back home

Associated Press, 1/12/2009
Immigration experts say a growing number of migrants, who have toiled in the United States as laborers, janitors and car mechanics, are being recruited to run for office in their homelands. Their working-class immigrant stories resonate in Latin America where many residents have family members in the United States, many of whom send [...]

Man accused of recruiting would-be cops for cartel

Associated Press, 1/12/2009
Criminals posing as police have become commonplace in Mexico, but prosecutors said they have uncovered an odd new twist. The Attorney General’s Office said a man has been charged with allegedly posing as a police recruiter and trying to get would-be police officers to unwittingly work for a drug cartel. Potential recruits in the [...]

Why is the United States backing Mexican drug gangs?

Shannon O’Neil, Foreign Policy, 1/12/2009
When President-elect Barack Obama is sworn in next week, he’ll become the proud owner of several wars. There is the familiar mayhem in Afghanistan and reluctant optimism in Iraq. And then there is America’s forgotten war: the war on drugs. That battle’s newest front is its southern neighbor Mexico, whose president, [...]

Bush Tells His Party To Be ‘Open-Minded’

MSNBC, 1/12/2009
President Bush called for a “compassionate” Republican Party and warned against the GOP becoming “anti-immigrant” in one of his last interviews as president, defending his vision of the party, which has become unpopular among some Republicans.
“We should be open-minded about big issues like immigration reform, because if we’re viewed as anti-somebody — in other [...]