Disclosures made in documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden
Felipe Calderon
Mexico’s Feared Narcos: A Brief History of the Zetas Drug Cartel
Mexican marines arrested the boss of the country’s cruelest drug cartel early Monday, a triumph for the Mexican government even as the bloody drug war shows few signs of slowing. Miguel Angel Treviño Morales, the notorious …
Obama’s Mexico Visit: Not Just About the Drug War Anymore
When former Mexican President Felipe Calderón waged his war on drug cartels, the media were guaranteed a crime photo op every few weeks. Alleged gangsters were thrust before the press along with heaps of guns, money and …
Must-Reads from Around the World
New Zealand legalizes gay marriage, the U.S. proposes a human rights monitor in Western Sahara and organized crime in East Asia is worth around $90 billion.
France Celebrates Return of Convicted Kidnapper From Mexican Prison
Mexico’s Supreme Court frees Florence Cassez after seven years in prison for a 2007 kidnapping conviction that justices ruled was flawed by rights violations. Could that be the start of deep judicial reform in Mexico?
Must-Reads from Around the World
India’s Prime Minister flees another crisis, Mexicans loose faith in police reform and China outlines its booming mineral resources-driven business in North Korea.
How Enrique Peña Nieto Won Himself and His Party the Mexican Presidency
Mexico’s President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto took up the centrist mantle of his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) — which once stood for little more than amassing power (and keeping it for over seven decades) — and …
Mexico’s Drug-Corruption Arrests: Why Soldiers Make Bad Narco Agents
When Mexican President Felipe Calderón sent his army after the country’s powerful drug cartels six years ago, we all understood the rationales. For starters, Calderón had won the 2006 presidential election by a razor-thin …
Can Mexico’s Presidential Hopefuls Stop the Bodies Piling Up?
Drug thugs dumped 49 bloodied and dismembered corpses on a northern Mexican highway on Sunday, May 13. We journalists are finding little new to say, few fresh insights to offer, about these all too frequent narco-massacres in …
Legalizing Marijuana: Why Joe Biden Should Listen to Latin America’s Case
It started last summer, when it seemed that Mexican President Felipe Calderón had understandably reached the end of his rope. After 52 innocent people were massacred in August by drug gangsters who set fire to a Monterrey casino …
Is the Party of Mexico’s Old Dictatorship Poised to Return to Power?
It’s rarely a good sign for the leader of any country when his party loses a governor’s election in his home state less than a year before the next presidential election — especially when that party’s candidate is the president’s own sister. So while I was in Mexico City this week it was hard not to notice Mexican President …
U.S. Drug Czar Responds to Global Spin: Legalization Is No “Silver Bullet”
In my Aug. 30 post, I posed two questions about the speech Mexican President Felipe Calderon gave on Aug. 26, a day after the massacre of 52 innocent people in a Monterrey casino set afire by drug-cartel gangsters. The first question: was Calderon, fed up with America’s “insatiable” demand for drugs, in effect telling the U.S. to …
Mexico’s Narco-Epiphany: Is Calderón Suggesting the U.S. Legalize Drugs?
The central statistic of Mexico’s violent drug war – 40,000 gangland murders in the past five years – is repeated so often it almost fails to alarm us anymore. But what happened last Thursday, Aug. 25, in the northern business capital of Monterrey – 52 innocent people massacred after gangsters set fire to a casino, presumably …