| |  | | On Monday, hours before the start of a North American trade war, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum successfully negotiated a 30-day pause on the imposition by the Trump administration of 25 percent tariffs on goods from Mexico to the United States. She and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did so, according to analysts, by “providing relatively little in exchange.” The 30-day reprieve from tariffs involved commitments that Sheinbaum made to curb drug smuggling and unauthorized immigration that, though demanded by President Trump, were mostly part of pre-existing plans. As part of the deal, Sheinbaum set in motion on Tuesday the deployment of 10,000 federal troops to 18 different Mexican border cities. These troops, part of “Operation Northern Border,” will be tasked with “doing more” to crack down on unlawful immigration and stop the smuggling of fentanyl. Though she agreed to the troop deployment, Sheinbaum was quick to reject the premise that migrants or the Mexican government were to blame for the fentanyl crisis. She pointed out that the United States “has to do its part” and rejected as “slanderous” Trump’s accusation that the Mexican government has an “intolerable alliance” with the cartels. “If there is such an alliance anywhere,” Sheinbaum wrote on X, "it is in the U.S. gun shops that sell high-powered weapons to these criminal groups." In early January, Sheinbaum launched her own initiative to tamp down on fentanyl in Mexico that was focused more on preventing addiction. Contrary to racist fearmongering by U.S. politicians of both parties, the overwhelming majority of those arrested for trafficking fentanyl are U.S. citizens and, overall, 2024 saw a decrease in fentanyl seizures and overdoses. Since his first administration, Trump has taken advantage of and incited this racial backlash in order to pressure Mexico into clamping down on people transiting through the country en route to the United States. Accordingly, this was not the first time that Mexico has deployed troops to its northern border to stave off U.S. tariffs. In 2019, during the first Trump administration, then-president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) sent 15,000 troops to Northern Mexico for the same reason. In 2021, in response to pressure from Joe Biden to control migration, AMLO sent more troops to Mexico’s northern and southern borders. Sheinbaum has sought to consistently center the humanity of migrants, pushing back against their “treatment as criminals” and, in the case of deported Mexican nationals, putting into place plans for their successful reintegration. Nevertheless, her reliance upon the military to deal with issues of migration has had deadly consequences. In early October, days after her inauguration, the Mexican army shot and killed six migrants in Chiapas. In an article for Ojalá we republished last week by NACLA editorial committee member Dawn Paley, Sheinbaum was taken to task for “enthusiastically [continuing] the legacy of militarization left by AMLO.” Paley continues: “Using the army to control migration and drugs, especially over an extended period of time, may end up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy: it could dramatically increase the violence Republicans (falsely) portray as already rampant at the south border.” In her negotiations with Trump, Sheinbaum was able to score one significant victory: a commitment by the U.S. government to attempt to limit the flow of U.S. American guns into Mexico. While gun violence is a huge issue in Mexico, and the country grants its citizens the right to bear arms, it has only one legal gun store, compared to more than 75,000 in the United States. Between 200,000-500,000 U.S.-made guns are trafficked into Mexico annually and upwards of 70 percent of weapons recovered at crime scenes are U.S.-sourced. Legislation introduced by Democratic senators on Monday, titled the “Stop Arming Cartels Act,” seeks to curb this gun pipeline that has come to be known as the “iron river.” |
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| | | | | | | | | | |  | On Saturday, February 1, a massive march in Buenos Aires convened thousands of people under the slogan "Marcha Federal del Orgullo Antifascista y Antirracista" to reject President Javier Milei's attacks on inclusion and gender diversity. Here, protesters hold a banner that reads "Milei must be removed" before a LGBTQIA+ Pride flag. (Susi Maresca) |
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SANTA MARTA 5 RETRIAL — The retrial of five Salvadoran environmental defenders and former leftwing guerrilla members was postponed on Monday after the accused individuals failed to appear in court. Last October, the defenders were exonerated when a tribunal dismissed the charges — related to their actions during the country’s civil war — as politically motivated. In November, two judges overturned the exoneration and ordered a retrial. The defendants, who have come to be known as the “Santa Marta 5,” have maintained their innocence, saying they refuse to participate in a trial “that does not offer any guarantee of due process.” Miguel Ángel Gámez, Alejandro Laínez García, Pedro Antonio Rivas Laínez, Antonio Pacheco, and Saúl Agustín Rivas Ortega are all over 60 years old and suffer from a variety of medical conditions linked to an arduous judicial process that included a nine-month stint in El Salvador’s overcrowded prisons. They were initially arrested in January of 2023 on charges of murdering an army informant in 1989 and for alleged “illicit associations,”a category of crime utilized by the government to lock up tens of thousands of alleged gang members. Human rights advocates have argued that the men were targeted for their crucial role in organizing El Salvador’s 2017 metals mining ban, a ban that was recently reversed by the government. The judge assigned to the case has given the activists five days to justify their absence. -
RUBIO'S VISIT TO THE REGION — Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Central America tour kicked off last weekend with a visit to Panama. Though Rubio stopped short of issuing open threats of retaking the Canal, he pushed the country to lessen its supposed dependence upon China, with immediate results. On Thursday, the U.S. government declared that its ships would pass through the Canal for free, an announcement that Panama immediately rejected. Much of the rest of Rubio’s trip dealt with securing agreements linked to migration and drug trafficking. On his stop in El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele, made the unprecedented offer to accept deportees from the United States of any nationality, including incarcerated U.S. citizens, who could be “put in his jails” — for a fee. Guatemalan president Bernardo Arévalo also agreed to accept deportees from other countries. In exchange for U.S. help in financing infrastructure projects and further anti-drug collaboration, Arévalo even offered to receive 40 percent more deportation flights. On Thursday, Rubio visited the Dominican Republic, where the main topic of discussion was Haiti’s ongoing crisis. |
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| - MORALES TO RUN AGAIN DESPITE DISQUALIFICATION — Former Bolivian president Evo Morales announced on Wednesday that he would run for a fourth presidential term with a “borrowed party” in the country’s upcoming August 17 elections. Morales, who was a popular president from 2006 until being ousted in a civic-military coup in 2019, lost the leadership of his political party, the Movement for Socialism, in November as part of a bitter rivalry with his former vice president and current President Luis Arce Catacora. That same month, a Bolivian constitutional court barred Morales from running in the 2025 elections because he has already served three terms, a ban he plans to ignore. Bolivia has faced a deepening economic and political crisis in recent years. Though Morales continues to garner popular support, he has become increasingly isolated among his base of support in the Cochabamba region, due in part to accusations that he fathered a child with a teenage girl during his presidency.
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HEADACHES FOR PETRO— Colombian President Gustavo Petro is dealing with a crisis that has come from an unlikely source: a televised meeting of his cabinet. What began as an unprecedented dedication to transparency quickly devolved into a public airing of dirty laundry that has already caused the resignation of at least one government official. Over the course of a six-hour meeting on Tuesday, Petro spoke for nearly four hours about his government’s failure to carry out the majority of his campaign promises and criticized specific ministers by name. However, it was anger from left-wing ministers about the recent appointments of Laura Sarabia and Armando Benedetti as Foreign Minister and Chief of Staff, respectively, that pushed the meeting off the rails. Vice President Francia Marquez criticized Sarabia and lamented the appointment of Benedetti to his position given that he is under investigation for corruption and domestic abuse. Environmental Minister Susana Muhamad agreed, saying through tears that, “as a feminist," she could not “sit at this cabinet table for our progressive project” with Benedetti. Petro accused the ministers of “sectarianism” and defended Benedetti as a necessary ally. The meeting was so chaotic that Petro did not once touch upon the reason that his ministers had been summoned: the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Catatumbo. |
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