At the end of last month, the Merida Initiative -- a $400 million aid package for Mexico aimed at helping the country fight its powerful drug cartels and organized crime networks -- was approved by the United States Congress.
The Merida Bill faced stiff opposition across the political spectrum and from both sides of the border. Detractors in the United States worry that the funding will put more resources into already corrupt law enforcement agencies in Mexico. Here in Mexico, critics are concerned that the help from the U.S. administration signals American interference in the country's affairs.
Here on La Plaza, we receive many comments and questions in response to posts on the issue of what is also known as Plan Mexico, which we have covered extensively. So today, we put questions about the aid package to two specialists on the subject.
Laura Carlsen is the director of the Americas program for the Center for International Policy, which advocates foreign policy based on demilitarization and a respect for human rights. She writes extensively on Mexico.
Senator Patrick Leahy is a Vermont Democrat who heads the foreign operations subcommittee and is an advocate of the package.
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 "In case decapitating their victims and dumping the heads in picnic coolers didn't make the point, the killers left a note," writes the Times' Ken Ellingwood in Mexico City.
" 'This is a warning,' " it said, listing an alphabet soup of Mexican police agencies and the noms de guerre of several well-known drug figures. "' You get what you deserve.' "
"Amid a wave of drug-related violence across Mexico, the dead these days are frequently accompanied by macabre calling cards known popularly as 'narco-messages.' "
"Part threat and part boast, the messages have multiplied as drug killings have risen to record levels amid a government crackdown on organized crime and deadly turf wars among traffickers."
Read on....
Photo: A forensic expert lifts a human head from the scene where two decapitated heads were found in the city of Ciudad Juarez, northern Mexico, June 2, 2008. Credit: David Cruz, Associated Press
-- Reed Johnson in Mexico City
 The leader of the Minuteman U.S. border security group is proposing that the U.S. deploy its Army to Mexico to deal with criminal drug cartels and rising violence along the border. Speaking to radio stations in Southern California and Oregon, Minuteman Project President Jim Gilchrist suggested that the U.S. give Mexico 12 months to put an end to drug cartels before sending U.S. soldiers to do the job.
Referring to his belief that there is widespread corruption among Mexican politicians and law enforcement officials, Gilchrist said he was skeptical about how money from a proposed U.S. aid plan to battle the cartels would be spent.
The key, he said, was for the U.S. give Mexico an ultimatum. "Either terminate the criminal empires that influence your nation, and threaten to cripple the United States, or risk the incursion of U.S. soldiers to do the job for you," Gilchrist said. "I'm not talking about just any soldiers," Gilchrist added. "I'm talking about some heavyweight U.S. Army airborne brigades."
He added that his comments should not be seen as a proposal to wage war against Mexico or its people, but only against the criminal drug dealers there.
Photo: Minute Man statue at Minute Man National Historic Park, Massachusetts. Credit: U.S. National Park Service
-- Nicole Gaouette in Washington
House lawmakers voted 311-106 on Tuesday to authorize the Merida Initiative, a $1.6 billion plan to help fight drug cartels in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
“Either we can go after these cartels in Ensenada, or we can fight them in Escondido,” said Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Carlsbad), who voted for the plan. “I’d prefer that we move now and take care of this problem south of the border. The drug wars in Mexico and in other regions have grown horrendously violent, and their destructive ways must be quashed.”
Bilbray was one of several U.S. lawmakers who went to Monterrey, Mexico, over the weekend to discuss the initiative with Mexican officials. Mexico has objected to human rights conditions that Congress attached to the aid. The State Department has identified Mexico as a major supplier of marijuana and methamphetamine to the U.S. Escalating violence between rival Mexican drug cartels has fueled increasing violence along the U.S.-Mexico border.
-- Nicole Gaouette in Washington
 Drug-related killings have soared in Mexico recently, but U.S. and Mexican legislators are still at odds over how to cooperate to stop the violence and the free flow of arms and narcotics across the border.
"U.S. lawmakers will review the language of an anti-drug plan that Mexican officials contend infringes on their nation's sovereignty by conditioning aid to performance on human rights, a senior U.S. senator said Sunday." Read about it here.
"Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., said that a visiting delegation of U.S. lawmakers will take concerns expressed to them by Mexican legislators this weekend back to the U.S. Congress, which has been considering the aid plan, known as the Merida Initiative."
"The plan, proposed in October by U.S. President George Bush, would give Mexico and other Latin American countries US$1.4 billion over several years to fight drug trafficking."
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"Real estate agents, business owners and victims groups estimate that more than 1,000 Tijuana families -- including those of doctors, lawyers, law enforcement officials, Lucha Libre wrestlers and business owners -- have [moved from Tijuana to San Diego County] in recent years as the drug-fueled violence has worsened," writes the Times' Richard Marosi in this story.
"People have arrived in south San Diego County with only the clothes on their back. Kidnapping victims released after lengthy captivities have shown up long-haired and disheveled, sometimes with fresh wounds."
"Real estate agents tell of clients with fingers missing, sliced off by kidnappers who sent them to relatives as proof the victims were alive."
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Photo: Erik Hernandez washes the car of a Tijuana businessman in Eastlake. Hernandez, who commutes daily from a poor area of Tijuana, says he works all day for Mexicans who demand anonymity and pay well. Credit: Don Bartletti, Los Angeles Times
A majority of Mexicans believe the government is losing its escalating battle against drug gangs, according to a poll published Sunday, writes the Associated Press. "Some 53% of Mexicans surveyed by the Mexico City newspaper Reforma said cartels are defeating security forces engaged in a nationwide crackdown. Only 24% said the government is winning, and 23% had no opinion."
And the New York Times asks whether President Felipe Calderon, currently waging a military campaign against the powerful drug trafficking cartels in Mexico, couldn't pick up a tip or two from the past: "Is there something in the way the Americans and Italians worked together that could be applied to a partnership with the Mexicans? Certainly it is in the interest of the United States to seek such an alliance to stop the flow of drugs, guns and crime across the border, just as the Italian alliance helped stop that flow across the Atlantic," writes the NYT.
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-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
A Dallas suburb's ban on apartment rentals to illegal immigrants is unconstitutional, a federal judge decided Wednesday.
Only the federal government can regulate immigration, U.S. District Judge Sam A. Lindsay concluded.
The ordinance, passed by Farmers Branch city officials last year and endorsed by a citizen referendum, didn't defer to the federal government, Lindsay said, which is in violation of the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution.
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-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
In Mexico, the drug violence continues. This dispatch from The Times' Ken Ellingwood reports that seven Mexican federal agents looking for an arms cache were killed early Tuesday in a shootout in the western state of Sinaloa.
The agents came under fire when they went to search a home in Culiacan, the state capital. Four agents were wounded. "The state has registered more than 200 killings this year, mainly as a result of a vicious power struggle within one of Mexico's biggest drug gangs, the so-called Sinaloa cartel.
"Mexican President Felipe Calderon dispatched 2,000 soldiers and federal agents to Sinaloa two weeks ago, the latest major deployment in his government's 18-month-old drive against organized crime."
Read the full report.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Citing evidence gleaned from a dead rebel's computers, Colombia's chief prosecutor announced Thursday that he was investigating suspected illegal links between Colombia's largest guerrilla group and several prominent Colombians and foreigners, including a U.S. consultant, writes the Times' Chris Kraul.
The investigations are based on evidence taken from laptops recovered from the camp of Raul Reyes, second-ranking commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
Colombian forces killed Reyes in a March 1 bombing raid in Ecuador, setting off a regional crisis.
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-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Hoy's immigration blog this morning quotes figures from the distinguished Texas economist Ray Perryman. He concludes that the expulsion of the 8 million undocumented workers in the United States would provoke an annual loss of $1.7 billion a year: "Los datos que concluye, lejos de asombrar, alarman, e indican que si se produce una expulsión del país de los 8.1 millones de trabajadores indocumentados, provocaría un pérdida de 1.7 billones de dólares al año para la economía nacional y 652,000 millones de dólares en relación con el PIB anual."
"The data...indicate that if there were an expulsion from the country of the 8.1 million undocumented workers, it would provoke a loss of $1.7 billion per year for the national economy and $6.52 billion in relation to the gross domestic product."
The figures show, says the Hoy blog post, that the contribution of undocumented migrants to the economy is not a virtual one - that the losses the country is facing should they be expelled will be very real.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
 Sen. John McCain on Tuesday laid out his plans for strengthening democracy and U.S. influence in Latin America, Carol J. Willams writes.
Speaking in Miami, McCain vowed to extend free-trade pacts throughout the region and to continue isolating Cuba until the communist-ruled island frees political prisoners and allows multiparty elections. "The promises to uphold a hard line against the regime of Fidel and Raul Castro earned the presumptive Republican Party presidential nominee cheers from the mostly Cuban American crowd at a town hall meeting in southwest Miami."
McCain laid into Democratic rival Barack Obama, according to the Miami Herald:
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The sexual harassment of female farmworkers has long been a dirty secret of migrant labor, says this Los Angeles Times editorial. Studies are sparse, but one by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that 90% of female farmworkers in California surveyed in 1993 said sexual harassment was a serious problem. Vulnerable because of their poverty, their limited English skills and often their immigration status, these women are easy prey. Harassers sometimes threaten to report illegal immigrants or their relatives if victims do not remain silent, advocates say.
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Immigrants are dying in U.S. detention. This Los Angeles Times editorial, which outlines the death of Joseph Dantica, an elderly Haitian pastor, in an American detention center, says: "Such callousness reflects a neglect that is shockingly permissible against immigrants nationwide. The country's 300 immigrant detention centers, including facilities in Los Angeles, have voluntary healthcare standards, not mandatory ones. Because of that, immigrants who are detained at the centers -- some are in the country illegally; others are held because of clerical errors or while they wait for their asylum claims to be heard -- often are subjected to indifference, even cruelty."
Read the editorial here, and for reporting on the effect of America's jails on illegal immigrants, take a look at this recent Washington Post series titled "Careless Detention" by Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
The U.S. Border Patrol is installing razor-sharp concertina wire atop border fencing between San Diego and Tijuana, marking a major shift in approach along a frequently violent stretch of the frontier, writes Richard Marosi.
The triple-strand wire, meant to keep smugglers from attacking agents, will stretch five miles when completed this summer -- the longest expanse of this type of wire ever used on the Southwest border.
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Meanwhile, United States residents who live on the border with Mexico are continuing to oppose the border wall project that is meant to curb illegal immigration. The Dallas Morning News is reporting that a group of Texas cities and business groups is suing the Department of Homeland Security to stop the construction of a fence along the border with Mexico. "The Texas Border Coalition, which includes the mayors of Eagle Pass, Brownsville, El Paso, Laredo and Hidalgo, filed the suit in federal court in Washington on Friday, asking a judge to block construction of 70 miles of border fences and walls in the Rio Grande Valley."
Read the story here......
Photo: U.S. Border Patrol agent Richard Smith drives along a section of the border fence in San Ysidro that was recently topped with razor wire. Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Colombia is being backed up by Interpol on its accusation that Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez offered to help the FARC rebel group, report Chris Kraul and Josh Meyer.
The International Crime Police Organization found no evidence of tampering on a laptop that was recovered after a raid on a rebel camp by Colombian forces in March, which sparked the biggest diplomatic crisis that the region has seen for years. A high-ranking Colombian Defense Ministry official charged that taken together, the e-mails show a willingness by Venezuela to "give support to the FARC on all relevant fronts -- arms, finances, sanctuary and political support," says the story.
The Associated Press said that the find promises to increase pressure on Chavez to explain his relationship with the FARC rebel group. Chavez had called the documents found by Colombia fakes. According to the Miami Herald, the Venezuelan President called the head of Interpol, Ronald K. Noble, a "gringo policeman" and has rejected the report from the agency. Chávez called the Interpol finding ''a new act of aggression'' by Colombian President Alvaro Uribe during a four-hour press conference in Caracas and added: "Once again I am required to put relations with Colombia in deep review.''
Some of the data retrieved from the computer showed e-mails from the FARC's commander, Manuel Marulanda, directly to Chávez, says the Washington Post.
You can read the statement by Interpol secretary general Ronald K. Noble here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Three Mexican police chiefs have requested political asylum in the U.S. as violence escalates in the Mexican drug wars and spills across the U.S. border, a top Department of Homeland Security official told the Associated Press.
In the last few months, the police officials have shown up at the U.S. border, fearing for their lives, according to Jayson Ahern, deputy commissioner at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency. "It's almost like a military fight," Ahern said Tuesday. "I don't think that generally the American public has any sense of the level of violence that occurs on the border."
Read the story above here, and the latest post from La Plaza on the ongoing drug violence in Mexico against the police here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
 Victim and human rights groups in Colombia say that the surprise extradition of 14 imprisoned paramilitary leaders to the United States on Tuesday will deny them justice for the crimes the warlords committed against their loved ones. Could it also be an attempt to distract attention from the president's cousin, who is under arrest on suspicion of dealing under the table with right-wing paramilitary groups?
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 A police officer and four other people with suspected ties to a powerful drug cartel have been arrested in the assassination of Mexico's acting federal police chief, authorities said Monday. Read the Associated Press report here.
Photo: Edgar Millan Gomez, 42, slain Thursday at his Mexico City
home, was the third-ranking member of Mexico's Public Safety
Secretariat, which oversees law enforcement. (Omar Torres AFP/Getty
Images)
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Los Angeles Times Opinion blogger Swati Pandey highlights an interview with Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Bill O'Reilly's show, in which O'Reilly' raises the question of sanctuary cities.
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After a bloody week here in Mexico, the weekend held little reprieve for the nation's police force.
The second-highest-ranking police officer in the border city of Juarez, across the frontier from El Paso, Texas, was shot dead on Saturday, adding to the string of killings that took place last week.
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 This has been a bad week for Mexico's police. Edgar Millan Gomez, the national coordinator of Mexico's battle against organized crime, was shot dead Thursday in the country's capital.
The assassin was hiding in his home, and according to this story by Héctor Tobar, Gomez is the third policeman to be killed this week. Read more here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
In an extraordinary public airing of alleged police corruption, a Mexican general has identified several law enforcement officers whose criminal activities include kidnapping, drug smuggling and operating protection rackets.
Corruption accusations are nothing new in Mexico, but Gen. Sergio Aponte Polito offered details of specific cases and named more than one dozen officers, some of them high-ranking officials.
Aponte, who heads the anti-drug offensive in Baja California, made the revelations in a letter published Wednesday in the Tijuana newspaper Frontera.
The accusations, which cover two pages in the paper, touched off a firestorm of controversy. Legislators demanded the firing of every named officer, a business leader called for the resignation of the state attorney general, and Tijuana Mayor Jorge Ramos appealed for calm.
Among Aponte's charges: Baja California's anti-kidnapping squad is actually a kidnapping team working in league with organized crime; police double as bodyguards for drug cartel leaders; and former federal agents have coordinated the landing of airplane drug shipments outside Mexicali.
The general lists several recent incidents, including some high-profile kidnapping cases and the attempted murder in December of Rosarito Beach's new police chief. Aponte says the attempt was carried out by an assassination squad of more than one dozen officers from Rosarito Beach and Tijuana.
Aponte said corruption existed in every major Baja California city and extended from municipal departments to federal agencies. There were many more corruption examples, Aponte wrote, but he couldn't fit them all in the newspaper.
"What a shame for the society of Baja California," Aponte wrote.
-- Richard Marosi in San Diego
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Laura Carlsen is the director of the Americas program for the Center for International Policy, which advocates foreign policy based on demilitarization and a respect for human rights. She writes extensively on Mexico.
Senator Patrick Leahy is a Vermont Democrat who heads the foreign operations subcommittee and is an advocate of the package.
Chris Kraul
Buenos Aires:
Patrick McDonnell
Caribbean:
Carol Williams
Mexico City:
Hector Tobar
Deborah Bonello
Marla Dickerson
Ken Ellingwood
Reed Johnson
San Diego:
Richard Marosi
Washington:
Nicole Gaouette