Year: 2007

ColombiaMexicoPress Releases
COHA

Does the Merida Initiative represent a New Direction for U.S.-Mexico Relations, or Does It Simply Refocus the Issue Elsewhere?

  • Help for Mexico: the U.S. plan to support Calderon’s counter-narcotic initiative criticized for its secrecy, its assumptions, and its questionable evidence.
  • Washington is encouraged to tackle the deadly magnitude of illicit U.S. weapons sales to Mexico and the mechanisms of supply and demand, as drug consumption rises in the country in spite of U.S. claims to the contrary.
  • A redirection in policy could lead to a potentially problematic future, with dire results produced by U.S. drug policy and featuring Washington’s politicalization of the issue and inventing facts where none exist.

The ‘Merida Initiative’ Proposal
In a nation where drug kingpins have infiltrated many state and local governments, and where infighting among drug traffickers has cost more than 4,000 lives in the past 22 months—most of them Mexican—the latter country’s drug cartels have been engaged in a brutal drug war at the very time that they were seeking new trade routes, competing over prices, and hunting down new markets. To tackle this growing ring of violence, Washington has announced a $500 million aid package for Mexico in 2008 (part of an overall 3 year program, all-told to be budgeted at $1.4 billion). Titled ‘Merida Initiative,’ the newly-minted campaign is meant to help combat the trans-border war on drugs, fight organized crime, and counter terrorism throughout Mexico and Central America.

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COHA

Sulfurous Fumes Detected over Guyana: Latin America’s Ominous New Geopolitical Scene Involving Georgetown, Washington and Caracas

To Our Readers

Today, December 14, 2007, from 12:45 to 2:00pm COHA Director, Larry Birns, will Appear on the Fox Business Channel from Washington to Discuss the Bank of the South and other U.S.-Latin American Trade Matters

With much of Latin America demonstrating a decisively distinct air of autonomous behavior when it comes to responding to U.S. regional policy initiatives, Guyana appears to want to emphasize that it should not be counted in their number. A high-level security conference between the U.S. and Guyana was kicked off on Tuesday December 11, just after the recent revival of a long simmering territorial dispute between Guyana and the Bush Administration’s arch nemesis, Venezuela. The conference was organized by the Guyana Defense Force and the U.S. Embassy’s Military Liaison Office, and is being held against a backdrop of heightened tension between Venezuela and Guyana over the November 15 incident in which the Guyanese government claims that Venezuelan soldiers used explosives and helicopters to destroy two dredges along the Cuyuni River. The Venezuelan government maintains that it was doing nothing more than expelling illegal miners from Venezuelan territory.

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