Mexico

May 29, 2012
Narco violence gets most of the headlines in Mexico, but state violence continues to be just as deadly, and the high degree of criminal infiltration into the institutions of the Mexican state sometimes makes it difficult to tell the difference. The recent murders of a courageous investigative reporter and an outspoken sociology professor drive home this difficulty.
May 29, 2012
Considering that the human toll now tops 50,000 fatalities, Mexico's War on Drugs could more accurately be described as a civil war. Nor is it an accident that Colombia’s new Patriotic March in Colombia echoes the voice of the Movement for Peace With Justice and Dignity in Mexico, identifying peace and social justice as the only rational approach to settling its own civil war.
May 21, 2012
Alejandro Solalinde is a Catholic priest who runs the Hermanos en el Camino shelter in southern Mexico for migrants who are crossing the country on their way to the United States. For his efforts he has received both plaudits and death threats. Last week, at the suggestion of Mexican Bishops, international human rights organizations, and many of his political supporters, he decided to leave the country for at least six weeks. 
May 8, 2012
Mexico’s Senate and Chamber of Deputies unanimous approval of a law to alleviate the damage and suffering experienced by victims of state and criminal violence may turn out to be of enormous importance. It officially recognizes victims who have heretofore been seen simply as collateral damage in the war against illicit drugs, and official and organized crime. 
May 1, 2012
In Mexico, it is not only Mexican institutions that play the impunity game. While it has become commonplace to argue that the most important U.S. export is “the rule of law,” U.S. institutions have played an important role in reinforcing a transnational culture of impunity. And Mexicans have been paying attention.
April 24, 2012
Just a year ago the indigenous Purépecha community of Cherán established a self-imposed “state of siege” to protect itself from the illegal logging that was decimating the community’s forests. This past Wednesday, April 18, the communal council of Cherán reported that a group of 20 comuneros engaged in a project of reforestation were ambushed by an armed group, leaving two dead and two others seriously wounded.
April 3, 2012
In what at first appears to be a contradiction, the fulsome praise lavished by U.S. officials on Mexico’s militarized “drug war” has long been accompanied by warnings issued by many of those same officials that President Felipe Calderón’s militarized offensive against trafficking and organized crime was spinning out of control.
March 27, 2012
Six years after being denied Mexico’s presidency in a disputed vote count, the presidential candidate of Mexico’s “lefts,” Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), says he is a “man without resentments.” Well, maybe, but when he formally registered his candidacy last week before the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), the non-partisan authority that organizes and oversees the country’s federal elections, he told the group that he still holds it responsible for his 2006 defeat. 
March 20, 2012
As Mexico’s presidential campaign moves into high gear, the left-of-center candidate for the presidency, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) sketched a plan to combat the country’s high levels of violent crime by gradually removing the out-of-place military from the streets and replacing it with a professional force that would be drawn from the citizenry. 
March 15, 2012
On a visit to Mexico last month Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she greatly admired President Felipe Calderón for the offensive he had unleashed against organized crime, and was proud of its results. On the other hand, the consulting firm Strategic Forecast, Inc. (Stratfor) issued an alert last week, warning that spring-breaking U.S. college kids faced risks in virtually all the Mexican hotspots typically visited over their spring vacations. 

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