POR GUSTAVO PALACIO

El Canciller de Correa,  con una larga lista de escándalos y Ministerios a cuestas, luego de su bochornosa participación,  intenta ahora en vano, en un acto casi desesperado, a través del poder mediático gubernamental, auto convencerse de que lo ocurrido no constituye una derrota.

Conforme lo pronosticaron el ex Secretario General de la OEA, César Gaviria y el Ex Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores de México, Jorge Castañeda, la reciente Asamblea General de la OEA será recordada como una de las más relevantes de la historia contemporánea.

A mi modo de ver, son varias y obvias las razones para tal valoración de la reunión del organismo político multilateral más importante de nuestro continente. Me permito comentar algunas de ellas.

Por un lado la Asamblea General significó una contundente derrota a la alevosa y mal intencionada propuesta de los regímenes de la ALBA, de limitar y controlar el accionar de la Comisión Interamericana ... Read More

BY TIM JOHNSON

MEXICO CITY – Voters in Colorado and Washington state who approved the recreational use of marijuana Tuesday sent a salvo from the ballot box that will ricochet around Latin America, a region that’s faced decades of bloodshed from the U.S.-led war on drugs.

Experts said the moves were likely to give momentum to countries such as Uruguay that are marching toward legalization, to undercut Mexican criminal gangs and to embolden those who demand greater debate about how to combat illegal substances.

“The trend is toward legalization,” said Jorge G. Castaneda, a former Mexican foreign minister who’s an advocate for decriminalization.

The decisions by voters in Colorado and Washington to legalize marijuana for recreational use puts those states — the first to approve outright legalization — at loggerheads not only with the federal government but also with global treaties that label marijuana a controlled substance.

Taking a lesser step, Massachusetts voters approved a measure ... Read More

BY WILLIAM BOOTH

MEXICO CITY — The decision by voters in Colorado and Washington state to legalize the recreational use of marijuana has left Mexican President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto and his team scrambling to reformulate their anti-drug strategies in light of what one senior aide said was a referendum that “changes the rules of the game.”

It is too early to know what Mexico’s response to the successful ballot measures will be, but a top aide said Peña Nieto and members of his incoming administration will discuss the issue with President Obama and congressional leaders in Washington this month. The legalization votes, however, are expected to spark a broad debate in Mexico about the direction and costs of the U.S.-backed drug war here.

Mexico spends billions of dollars each year confronting violent trafficking organizations that threaten the security of the country but whose main market is the United States, the largest consumer of ... Read More

BY JERRY BREWER

The removal of Paraguay’s leftist president, Fernando Lugo, last month* brought on the usual accusations and the propensity of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to interfere in Latin American neighborhood politics. Of course, Chavez’s lead was diligently followed by sharp criticism of the Paraguayan government from his left-leaning minions throughout the hemisphere.

The ritual two-step banter was quick to play out as the new government of Paraguay ordered home its ambassador in Venezuela, citing “the grave evidence of intervention by Venezuelan officials in the internal affairs of Paraguay.” And Hugo Chavez was quick to demonstrate his own weak upper hand, ordering his military attachés to leave the Venezuelan Embassy in Asuncion (reportedly sending them to Argentina).

Venezuela’s ambassador had left Paraguay a week earlier, when he was called home for consultations by Chavez amid accusations that Venezuela was “preparing a coup.” Chavez’s translation of the facts did not resemble Paraguay’s “new ... Read More

President Obama met with Mexican President Felipe Calderon Monday, and praised him for his courage to stand up to his country’s drug cartels. But former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda tells host Michel Martin that his country’s president has produced few results from a deadly war that has killed nearly 50,000 people.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

I’m Michel Martin and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. Coming up, it’s National Poetry Month, and just as we did last year, we want the celebration to include you, so once again we’re inviting you to send us your poems via Twitter. Poet Holly Bass kicks off our month-long tweet poetry series. We call it Muses and Metaphor. That’s in just a few minutes.

But first, a very different subject. We want to focus on a key nation in America’s foreign policy, Mexico. President Obama held a North American Leaders Summit Monday at the White ... Read More

BY MARIANO CASTILLO

Mexico has landed some hard punches against the drug cartels that have stirred violence in parts of the country — at least on paper.

In 2011, against just the notorious Zetas cartel, Mexico ended the reign of 16 leaders who ran cartel operations at the state or national level. Thugs with nicknames like “El Piolin,” “El Lucky” and “El Amarillo.”

But the violence attributed to the Zetas has not decreased even after these busts, and critics wonder if names are meaningless if they are so quickly replaced.

And a majority of Mexico’s most-wanted drug traffickers, 22 out of 37, have been put out of commission, but to what benefit? At what cost?

“Mexico has paid an enormous price: almost 50,000 dead, almost $50 billion in additional security costs, ever more numerous human rights violations, (and) a great discrediting of the country to the world,” wrote Jorge Castaneda, a former Mexican foreign minister ... Read More

BY BERND DEBUSMANN

There’s good news and bad news on the war on drugs in Mexico and the United States. The good news: cooperation between U.S. and Mexican security forces has rarely been closer. “Unprecedented,” President Barack Obama termed it in a message of sympathy for 52 people killed in an arson attack on a casino in northern Mexico.

The unprecedented cooperation he referred to ranges from the U.S. providing intelligence from wiretaps and aerial surveillance by U.S. drones to taking part in planning operations to capture drug lords.

American agents, according to accounts from both sides of the border, had a role in hunting down 21 of the 37 men on Mexico’s list of most-wanted organized crime chiefs.

The bad news is that closer cooperation in taking out the CEOs of illicit business enterprises has done little to curb violence in Mexico or throttle the flow of drugs north and the smuggling of ... Read More