Why do Canadians still vacation in Mexico?
By Michael Petrou with Erica Alini and Julia Belluz - Sunday, March 6, 2011 - 42 Comments
A staggering 35,000 people have been murdered in Mexico since December 2006
Mexican police keep a close watch on one of the beaches in Acapulco Pedro Pardo
The Plaza Sendero shopping mall on the outskirts of Acapulco has a fabric store, a shoe shop, and a movie complex, screening Tron: Legacy, The Tourist, and Gulliver’s Travels. A red-eyed dog lies asleep in the shade of the mall entrance, and nearby a man sits on his haunches, awake but equally motionless. The parking lot is scattered with bright orange shopping carts. Across the adjacent highway, shanties cling to an eroding hill, where the scorching sun has singed off almost all greenery. Smoke drifts upward from a cooking fire or burning rubbish.
A pedestrian bridge spans the highway. On it someone has pasted a flyer for a local church that promises salvation for those who suffer from vice, broken families, curses, or sicknesses with no known cause. Fifteen bodies were dumped here in January, most with their heads cut off and bodies mutilated. Six more were found stuffed into a nearby taxi. Their hands and feet had been bound. Two police were shot and killed the same day.
Handwritten posters at the crime scene link the murders to one of the drug cartels in the midst of a war for territory and export routes in Mexico. The victims almost certainly belonged to rival gangs. They are among more than 1,000 murdered over the past year in Acapulco, a popular vacation spot for Canadians.
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The end of North American trilaterism
By Luiza Ch. Savage - Tuesday, June 29, 2010 at 9:18 AM - 13 Comments
Harmonization was once all the rage, but under Obama the initiative appears dead
Chris Wattie/Reuters
On a sunny August morning in 2007, while protesters were cordoned off by a security perimeter and reporters corralled into a side room, a high-powered meeting took place inside Quebec’s woodsy Château Montebello. On one side of a square meeting table sat Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his aides. On another sat then-U.S. president George W. Bush and his entourage, and on a third, the delegation of Mexican President Felipe Calderón. On the fourth side, in a rare position to hold the simultaneous attention of all three leaders of North America, sat the CEOs of corporate titans like Wal-Mart, Lockheed Martin, the Campbell Soup Co. and Procter & Gamble—each armed with a wish list of ways to change economic and trade regulations to increase profit and efficiency.
The occasion was the annual “three amigos” summit, a ritual that had begun in 2005 when Bush invited his counterparts to meet and address concerns that security had trumped trade in the years since 9/11. The three leaders created 20 working groups of bureaucrats, hammering away on issues from harmonizing regulations to developing pandemic preparedness plans. The effort, called the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), was meant to continue North American economic integration where NAFTA had left off.
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'I don’t feel qualified to intervene in the debate'
By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 10, 2009 at 9:26 PM - 51 Comments
The Prime Minister sat down with ABC’s Jake Tapper today for a chat about continental relations, trade and health care.
Most interesting might be the exchange on health care, during which Stephen Harper proved rarely reticent. That portion of the conversation after the jump.
Those interested in what Stephen Harper might say if Stephen Harper had something to say about wait times in Canada might consult his party’s 2006 election platform. A report this June from the Wait Times Alliance—entitled Unfinished Business—noted slight improvement from 2004.
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Our bad
By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, August 9, 2009 at 11:00 PM - 35 Comments
The Prime Minister gives Mexico the It’s-Not-You-It’s-Me treatment.
“This is not the fault of the government of Mexico – let me be very clear about this,” Mr. Harper told reporters, explaining his mid-July decision to clamp down on soaring bogus refugee claims from Mexico by requiring Mexicans to obtain visas before entering Canada. “This is a problem in Canadian refugee law which encourages bogus claims.”
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Calderón's last stand
By Philippe Gohier - Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 3:00 PM - 1 Comment
Mexico takes extreme measures to crush its illegal drug trade
Mexico could soon become the first North American country to fully legalize the possession of illegal drugs for personal consumption. A bill proposed by President Felipe Calderón and passed earlier this month by Mexico’s congress would make it legal to carry up to five grams of marijuana, a half-gram of cocaine, and small amounts of heroin and methamphetamine. It’s expected to be signed into law within days.While efforts to loosen Mexico’s drug possession laws have proven controversial in the past, this latest attempt doesn’t represent a radical departure from Mexico’s current legislation. Mexican law currently allows for possession charges to be dropped if a person can prove they are an addict and the drugs found on them were for personal use. The new law simply drops the addiction requirement and sets out the maximum quantities permitted, effectively taking the arresting police officer’s judgment out of the equation.
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Mexico’s civil war
By Michael Petrou - Thursday, November 27, 2008 at 10:30 AM - 3 Comments
Powerful drug cartels are challenging the government’s control of parts of the nation
Silver or lead? It is an offer that is difficult, if not impossible, to refuse for thousands of Mexican police, judges, and politicians tasked with confronting Mexico’s powerful drug cartels. The silver is bribe money. Lead is a bullet to the head—if the victim is lucky. The murders of uncooperative justice officials, and others who cross the cartels, have become increasingly gruesome of late. Beheadings are common.
For decades, during the 70 years that Mexico was effectively a one-party state run by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, a tacit understanding existed between drug cartels and members of all levels of government and state institutions that it was better to choose the silver. This does not mean that everyone from the president on down was on the take. But there was a pervasive lack of political will to confront the cartels, and when drug lords could count on politicians staying in office regardless of how many elections they might face, it made sense to seek mutually beneficial arrangements. Continue…
