Central American Disorder — A Threat to Mexico’s Security

MEXIDATA.INFO, 11/23/09
The everyday realities of Mexico’s drug war are grisly and overwhelming. On a daily basis, both Mexican media outlets and U.S. news sources report the latest mass murders that have resulted from turf wars between Mexican cartels and internal organizational discord.
Security in Mexico is perceived as mostly an internal problem. But Mexico is not [...]

Program to Help Truckers Attracts Drug Smugglers

Associated Press, 11/23/09
A U.S. program that offers trusted trucking companies speedy passage across American borders has begun attracting just the sort of customers who place a premium on avoiding inspections: Mexican drug smugglers.
Most trucks enrolled in the program pause at the border for just 20 seconds before entering the United States. And nine out of [...]

Mexico’s Rural Mennonites Feel Impact of Drug Violence

BBC, 11/23/09
“They have murdered Mennonite people… the drug-traffickers,” says Abraham Peters, a 66-year-old retired rancher, who hails from the Protestant Mennonite sect in the agricultural heartland of Chihuahua state.
Their parents and grandparents came to Mexico in the 1920s from Canada after being promised religious freedom in return for resurrecting farmland devastated during the Mexican revolution.
Read [...]

Geopolitical Analysis of Mexico

Stratfor, 11/18/09
As the southernmost portion of North America, Mexico was dealt a difficult geographic hand. It has a small and limited core territory surrounded by mountains, deserts and jungles that are inherently hard to control and nearly impossible to defend against threats from within or without.
The country is funnel-shaped, its high plateau anchored in the [...]

Fixing Mexico Police Becomes a Priority

Los Angeles Times, 11/17/09
Reporting from San Luis Potosi, Mexico – The lie-detector team brought in by Mexico’s top cop was supposed to help clean up the country’s long-troubled police. There was just one problem: Most of its members themselves didn’t pass, and a supervisor was rigging results to make sure others did.
When public safety [...]

Mexico’s Juarez on Path to Anarchy

BBC, 11/17/09
The children of El Paso’s Glen Cove Elementary School have not been told that a gunman shot their classmate dead.
Nor have they been told that someone across the Rio Grande in Mexico thought nothing of killing the seven-year-old.
Or that the gunman left Jociel Ramierez alone to die, as the blood seeped out of [...]

Mexico Falls 17 Places in Transparency Rankings (in Spanish)

El Economista, 11/17/09
Corruption increased in Mexico last year, according to Transparency International. According to the Index of Corruption Perception 2009, the country dropped 17 places to number 89, a place Mexico shares with Malawi, Lesotho, Morocco and Moldova.
Since 1955, the organization has published the index annually ranging from a score of “10″ for a country [...]

15 killed in one day in cartel-plagued Ciudad Juarez

The Associated Press, 11/15/09
A 7-year-old boy, three women and a university professor were among 15 people who were killed in a single day in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez, across from El Paso, authorities said.
State prosecutor’s spokesman Arturo Sandoval said the child was traveling with his father in a pickup when gunmen opened [...]

Task Force Seeks Ban on Assault Weapons

Washington Post, 11/12/09
A binational task force on U.S.-Mexico border issues will call Friday on the Obama administration and Congress to reinstate an expired ban on assault weapons and for Mexico to overhaul its frontier police and customs agencies to mirror the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The recommendations are among a broad set of security, [...]

White House to Begin Push on Immigration Overhaul in 2010

The New York Times, 11/13/09
The Obama administration will insist on measures to give legal status to an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants as it pushes early next year for legislation to overhaul the immigration system, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on Friday.
In an address at the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group [...]