But Bills Introduced in the Mexico City and National Legislatures Face a Tough Fight. MEXICO CITY - Lawmakers in Mexico introduced bills Thursday that would create marijuana dispensaries in the capital and increase the amount of the drug people across the country could carry for "personal use." The proposals to Mexico City's Legislative Assembly and the federal Congress would amount to a partial "decriminalization" of marijuana, advocates said, not full legalization. The Mexico City bill would instruct police and judges to deprioritize the prosecution of marijuana violations in some circumstances. [continues 408 words]
MEXICO CITY (AP) - After months of tacit cooperation with rural vigilantes trying to drive out a cultlike drug cartel, the Mexican government is seeking to permanently solve one of its toughest security problems with a plan to legalize the growing movement and bring it under the army's control. But the risks are high. To succeed, the government must enforce military discipline and instill respect for human rights and due process among more than 20,000 heavily armed civilians, then eventually disband them and send them back home in the western state of Michoacan. [continues 844 words]
Mexico City, Mexico - After months of tacit co-operation with rural vigilantes trying to drive out a cult-like drug cartel, the Mexican government has moved to permanently solve one of its toughest security problems with a plan to legalize the growing movement and bring it under the army's control. But the risks are high. To succeed, the government must enforce military discipline and instil respect for human rights and due process among more than 20,000 heavily armed civilians before returning them home to the western state of Michoacan. [continues 833 words]
MEXICO CITY - Federal authorities rushed Monday to head off a mini-civil war in the "hot land" of Mexico's Michoacan state, urging rural vigilantes to lay down their arms and go home rather than attempt to seize a city of 90,000 that has become a stronghold of a drug cartel calling itself the Knights Templar. The armed peasant groups emerged last year to fight off the cartel, which had metastasized throughout the southwestern state, coordinating the lucrative methamphetamine trade and extortion rackets and wielding significant control over the major container port of Lazaro Cardenas. Until recently, the self-defense groups had been largely tolerated, if not encouraged, by President Enrique Pena Nieto's administration, which had allowed them to staff some roadblocks alongside federal police and soldiers. [continues 901 words]
Tixtla - Newly formed militias worry criminal gangs - and authorities, who fear they may become a rebel force With their scuffed shoes, baggy trousers and single shot hunting guns, the eight men preparing to patrol their hillside barrio in the southern Mexican town of Tixtla hardly looked like a disciplined military force. But this motley collection of construction workers and shopkeepers claim to have protected their community from Mexico's violent drug cartels in a way the police and military have been unable or unwilling to do. [continues 1294 words]
The Ex-President Is an Unlikely Champion of Legalizing Marijuana. SAN CRISTOBAL, Mexico - Former President Vicente Fox grew up on a farm here in rural Guanajuato, one of Mexico's most conservative states. He is the kind of guy who wears big belt buckles, collects handtooled saddles and worships the free market. Ask him about his experience with the drug culture and the big man with the cowboy-movie mustache exhibits a kind of strait-laced pique: Never smoked pot, he says. Hardly knew anyone who did. [continues 1305 words]
COALCOMAN, Mexico - Rafael Garcia slaps the oversize wooden desk where he sits, one of the last mayors still in office in this region of Mexican farm country known as Tierra Caliente - hot land. Mayors from a couple of the nearest towns fled with their drug-cartel pals, people here say, when locals took up arms against them. But at Garcia's City Hall, the facade is festooned with hand-lettered signs supporting local gunmen who challenged the cartel, loosely referred to as community "self-defense" guards, comunitarios. Several cities in Tierra Caliente are now patrolled by such groups, whose members, often masked, man checkpoints and pull over passing vehicles for inspection. They have reached a kind of tense coexistence with the army, which moved in a couple of weeks ago in an attempt to bring order. [continues 974 words]
MEXICO CITY - A comprehensive report on drug policy in the Americas released Friday by a consortium of nations suggests that the legalization of marijuana, but not other illicit drugs, be considered among a range of ideas to reassess how the drug war is carried out. The report, released by the Organization of American States walked a careful line in not recommending any single approach to the drug problem and encouraging "flexibility." Prompted by President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia at the Summit of the Americas last year to answer growing dissatisfaction and calls for new strategies in the drug war, the report's 400 pages mainly summarize and distill previous research and debate on the subject. [continues 678 words]
The New President's Decision to Rein in U.S. Agents Spurs Dismay in Washington, Highlighting Divisions Over Goals and Costs MEXICO CITY - The recent changes ordered by new President Enrique Pena Nieto to Mexico's anti-narcotics partnership with the United States have produced markedly different reactions here and in Washington, underscoring what appear to be diverging perceptions of the drug war's goals and the costs of fighting it. Pena Nieto's decision to limit the ability of American agents to operate in Mexico has been met with dismay by U.S. law enforcement agencies, which left a heavy footprint under the previous administration of Felipe Calderon. They warn that intelligence sharing will suffer if they can no longer choose which Mexican force - - the army, navy or federal police - to give sensitive information to; they've been instructed to now funnel everything through Mexico's Interior Ministry instead. [continues 1017 words]
Goal: Better U.S.-Mexican Links MEXICO CITY - President Barack Obama sought Thursday to tamp down a potential rift with Mexico over a dramatic shift in the crossborder fight against drug trafficking and organized crime, acceding that Mexicans have the right to determine how best to tackle the violence that has plagued their country. Since taking office in December, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto has moved to end the widespread access that U.S. security agencies have had in Mexico to tackle the violence that affects both sides of the border. It's a departure from the strategy employed by his predecessor, Felipe Calderon, which was praised by the U.S. but reviled by many Mexicans. [continues 852 words]
WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama said Thursday that the U.S. will cooperate with Mexico in fighting drug-trafficking and organized crime in any way Mexico's government deems appropriate. Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto emphasized that the security relationship must be expanded to focus on trade and commerce. Appearing alongside Pena Nieto at a news conference, Obama recommitted the U.S. to fighting the demand for illegal drugs in Mexico and the flow of illegal guns across the border to Mexico, even as the southern neighbor rethinks how much access it gives to American security agencies. [continues 1034 words]
ACAPULCO, Mexico - Catholic priest Jesus Mendoza ministers to a workingclass neighborhood in the hills of Acapulco that are a world away from the tourist resort destination below. He says one parishioner had three of his daughters abducted for a $2,500 ransom. Business owners are being forced to pay off extortionists. And 120 parishioners are either missing, kidnapped or have been killed over the past six years. When President Barack Obama arrives in Mexico on Thursday, he will come to a country that is still suffering from widespread violence against ordinary citizens from organized criminal and drug cartels. But he will also find that Mexico President Enrique Pena Nieto, who took office Dec. 1, has little interest in talking about crime or getting more help from the United States to combat it. [continues 330 words]
ACAPULCO, MEXICO Catholic priest Jesus Mendoza ministers to a working-class neighborhood in the hills of Acapulco that is a world away from the tourist resort destination below. He says one parishioner had three of his daughters abducted for a $2,500 ransom. Business owners are being forced to pay off extortionists. And 120 parishioners are either missing, kidnapped or have been killed over the past six years. When President Obama arrives in Mexico on Thursday, he will encounter a country that is still suffering from widespread violence against ordinary citizens from organized criminal and drug cartels - but he will also find that Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, who took office Dec. 1, has little interest in talking about crime or getting more help from the United States to combat it. [continues 508 words]
Early on a December morning, Robert Coogan pulled his red Chevy hatchback into the parking lot of the state prison in Saltillo, Mexico. It was frigid outside, the sun had not yet cleared the reddish mountains, and Coogan lingered, staring at the tall black letters on the prison's high walls: "CERESO" - Centro de Reinsercion Social, the place where criminals are supposed to be reformed. Coogan, who has served as chaplain at the prison for a decade, slowly pulled himself from the warm car. In dark jeans, brown boots and a thick gray sweater, he looked more like a factory foreman than a Brooklyn-born priest. [continues 5076 words]
MEXICO CITY - Three former heads of state are urging the United States to engage in a serious discussion of drug legalization, saying its counternarcotics policies are becoming untenable in the wake of voter approval last fall of measures that legalized the recreational use of marijuana in Washington state and Colorado. The three - the former presidents of Brazil, Colombia and Switzerland - - said the inconsistency in U.S. attitudes toward marijuana shows that American public opinion is changing, even as the U.S. continues to press Latin American nations for tough enforcement of antidrug trafficking laws. The result is confusion and anger in Latin American nations embroiled in drug violence while Americans adopt a more lax approach toward marijuana. [continues 424 words]
MEXICO CITY - Three former heads of state are urging the United States to engage in a serious discussion of drug legalization, saying its counternarcotics policies are becoming untenable in the wake of voter approval last fall of measures that legalized the recreational use of marijuana in Washington state and Colorado. The three - the former presidents of Brazil, Colombia and Switzerland - - said the inconsistency in U.S. attitudes toward marijuana shows that American public opinion is changing, even as the United States continues to press Latin American nations for tough enforcement of anti-drug trafficking laws. The result is confusion and anger in Latin American nations embroiled in drug violence while Americans adopt an evermore lax approach toward marijuana. [continues 351 words]
OUTSIDE SAN LUIS DE LA LOMA, Mexico - Don Polo's heavily armed convoy wound its way through the hills above the lush coastal plain of Guerrero state, its groves of slender palm trees now far below him. The two-lane country road twisted eastward, and upward, for miles. But around each bend, there were no campesinos, no burros, no dogs, no cars barreling toward the Pacific. Fields of yellow grass, taller than a man and animated by the wind, covered the landscape. [continues 1714 words]
New President Opposes Measure MEXICO CITY - Forgive the Mexicans for trying to get this straight: So now the United States, which has spent decades battling Mexican marijuana, is on a legalization bender? The same United States that long viewed cannabis as a menace, funding crop poisoning programs, tearing up auto bodies at the border, and deploying sniffer dogs, fiber-optic scopes and backscatter X-ray machines to detect the lowly weed? The success of legalization initiatives in Colorado and Washington state in November has sparked a new conversation in a nation that is one of the world's top marijuana growers: Should Mexico, which has suffered mightily in its war against the deadly drug cartels, follow the Western states' lead? [continues 979 words]
U.S. Ballots on Legalization Could Have Ripple Effect MEXICO CITY - Forgive the Mexicans for trying to get this straight: So now the United States, which has spent decades battling Mexican marijuana, is on a legalization bender? The same United States that long viewed cannabis as a menace, funding crop poisoning programs, tearing up auto bodies at the border, and deploying sniffer dogs, fiber-optic scopes and backscatter X-ray machines to detect the lowly weed? The success of legalization initiatives in Colorado and Washington in November has sparked a new conversation in a nation that is one of the world's top marijuana growers: Should Mexico, which has suffered mightily in its war against the deadly drug cartels, follow the two U.S. states' lead? [continues 776 words]
Is War on Cartels Worth It As Legalization Grows? MEXICO CITY - Forgive the Mexicans for trying to get this straight: So now the United States, which has spent decades battling Mexican marijuana, is on a legalization bender? The same United States that long viewed cannabis as a menace, funding crop-poisoning programs, tearing up auto bodies at the border, and deploying sniffer dogs, fiber-optic scopes and backscatter X-ray machines to detect the lowly weed? The success of legalization initiatives in Colorado and Washington in November has sparked a new conversation in a nation that is one of the world's top marijuana growers: Should Mexico, which has suffered mightily in its war against the deadly drug cartels, follow the Western states' lead? [continues 1079 words]
Inside Mexico
