Mexico

In 2006, Mexico’s newly elected president, Felipe Calderón, declared war on his country’s drug cartels. He militarized and intensified a conflict that had been managed by his predecessors through an opaque strategy of accommodation, payoffs, assigned trafficking routes, and periodic takedowns of uncoöperative capos.

Last Friday morning, the second most powerful man in Mexico’s government, the cabinet member leading the war against the drug cartels, died in a helicopter crash. Mexicans were stunned: Francisco Blake Mora was President Felipe Calderón’s second interior secretary to die in an air crash in three years.

On June 8, 2005, Alejandro Dominguez, the head of the chamber of commerce in Nuevo Laredo—a busy Mexican city on the Texas border—took office as the city’s chief of police. He was an outsider to law enforcement, brought in by the mayor as an honest broker. Six hours later, he was dead, shot 40 times as he walked to his car. Five days later, Mexico’s then-president, Vicente Fox, sent in the army and national investigative police, who arrested the city police force en masse, taking all 700 of them into custody, pending investigation.

Yesterday in the Mexican municipality of Batopilas, President Felipe Calderon announced “the largest banking access program in the world that is targeted at the poorest people.” More than 6 million families, all current participants in Mexico’s government public benefit program Oportunidades, would benefit from the Calderon’s efforts, which he explained would help reduce the gap between the rich and the poor.

USAID and the Assets and Market Access Collaborative Research Support Program (AMA CRSP) recently invited the New America Foundation’s Global Assets Project to present its research on how to improve the impact and reach of social protection programs around the world. The event, entitled “Building Resilience and Assets for Food Security: Evidence and Implications for Feed the Future,” was attended by experts from the World Bank, United Nations and Oxfam, in addition to leading universities across the country.

This action undertaken by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation at the UN is not taken in the context of strategy, but because it has stumbled into it and is trying to reclaim some political ground. I think the bid is taking place in a strategic vacuum, and therefore my analysis of what might happen at the UN is based on this being a consequence of political frustration and anxiety, rather than intentionality.
 

The Woodrow Wilson Center Mexico Institute & the New America Foundation cordially invite
you to the latest installment in the ongoing series Dialogues with Mexico/Diálogos con México, featuring the launch of a new book, Mañana Forever?:Mexico and the Mexicans, by noted Mexican scholar and opinion leader Jorge Castañeda.

Breakfast will be provided.

Throughout the developing world, money is heaved onto trucks and transported by governments to delivery points scattered across countries. Citizens come to these drop-offs, where the delivered cash is broken down into smaller sums and distributed. This is essentially the process for more than half of the almost 170 million poor people who receive social welfare cash payments on a regular basis from their governments. The other half receives e-money, which involves no trucks or hard cash, just electronic payments using smartcards, debit cards, and mobile phones.

My hotel on the outskirts of Puebla, a city of 1.3 million in central Mexico, looks out over a rolling golf course lined with palm trees and beyond that a busy highway flanked by Mazda and Mercedes car dealerships. The historic downtown has colonial Spanish architecture. Newer areas of the city boast gated subdivisions, Home Depot outlets, and strip malls. I came to attend a technology conference, "Ciudad de las Ideas," now in its third year and featuring such international luminaries as Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Anderson as speakers.

Writing from Mexico City