President Barack Obama [2] is backtracking from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's statement comparing Mexico and Colombia. "Mexico is a large and progressive democracy with a growing economy," Obama said in a Sept. 9 interview with La Opinion [3], a Spanish-language newspaper in Los Angeles. "As a result, you can’t compare what is happening in Mexico with what happened in Colombia 20 years ago."
Clinton said in response to a question after a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations [4] in Washington the previous day: "We face an increasing threat from a well-organized network, drug-trafficking threat that is, in some cases, morphing into, or making common cause with, what we would consider an insurgency." She added that Mexico is "looking more and more like Colombia looked 20 years ago," with drug traffickers controlling "parts of the country."
"In Colombia, it got to the point where...more than a third of the country—nearly 40% of the country at one time or another—was controlled by the insurgents, by FARC," Clinton said, referring to the Colombian guerilla army. She asserted that the US, Mexico and the Central American [5] countries need to cooperate on an "equivalent" of Plan Colombia—the multi-billion dollar military aid program that was launched 10 years ago. (LAT [6], Bloomberg [7], WP [8], Sept. 9
Mexico and Central America already have a multi-billion dollar US military aid program, the Merida Initiative [9]—which critics are already dubbing "Plan Mexico."
Another mayor killed
In the latest in a wave [10] of slayings of Mexican mayors, on Sept. 8, masked gunmen stormed the office of Alexander Lopez Garcia in El Nranjo, a village in San Luis Potosí on the border of the conflicted state of Tamaulipas [11]. (AlJazeera [12], Sept. 9)
Authorites in Tamaulipas say they have arrested seven suspects in last week's horrific massacre of 72 migrants on a ranch near the US border—all presumably members of Los Zetas [11] narco-gang. Police in Ecuador report that have also arrested a coyote (human trafficker) who was also involved in the incident. (EFE [13], Sept. 9; Prensa Latina [14], Sept. 6)
See our last posts on Mexico [5] and the narco wars [9].
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