Mexico's drug war

Shallow graves, deepening alarm

Still no end to the horrors

Apr 28th 2011 | MEXICO CITY

OFFICIALLY, nearly 35,000 people have been killed since Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón, began an assault on his country’s drug-trafficking “cartels” at the end of 2006. But the true body count will never be known. On April 6th police discovered mass graves near San Fernando, a town in Tamaulipas state near the border with the United States, which so far have yielded 183 bodies. Two weeks later hidden tombs were discovered in the north-western city of Durango from which 100 corpses have so far been extracted.

The Tamaulipas victims were apparently killed with sledgehammers or burned alive. They included a car salesman, a social worker and a Guatemalan migrant. Investigators believe they were kidnapped from buses to be robbed and raped by the Zetas cartel. The authorities’ failure to stop the slaughter, even as unclaimed luggage mounted at bus terminals, is stunning: only last summer, 72 migrants were found murdered near San Fernando, supposedly by the same cartel. However, police did free two groups of kidnapped migrants elsewhere in the state this month.

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Cuba's communist congress

The start of a long, slow goodbye

Age has at last caught up with the Castros and their revolution. New ideas are emerging slightly faster than new leaders

Apr 20th 2011 | HAVANA

WHEN serious illness forced him to hand over power in 2006, Fidel Castro had been running things for almost half a century. This included an incident when, needing a knee operation, he contrived to have an epidural so that he could remain conscious and therefore in charge. Under Fidel, term-limits seemed less likely in the Plaza de la Revolución than in, say, Buckingham Palace.

But on April 16th Raúl Castro, who formally took over as president from his older brother in 2008, broke with tradition. Speaking at the opening of a four-day Congress of the ruling Communist Party, he declared that senior officials, including himself, should be limited to two consecutive five-year terms in office. “It’s really embarrassing that we have not solved this problem in more than half a century,” Raúl, who is aged 79, said. As the generation that led the revolution of 1959 has grown old in office, Cuba has lacked “a reserve of well-trained replacements with sufficient experience and maturity,” he admitted.

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Central America briefing

The tormented isthmus

Big-time drug trafficking has arrived in Central America. Its poor, politically polarised countries must now try to cope

Apr 14th 2011 | GUATEMALA CITY, SAN JOSÉ AND TEGUCIGALPA

WHEN Eduardo’s father came back to Guatemala after a spell in the United States, the tattoos up his arms gave away his roots in the mara (gang). Before long a rival gang had planted a knife in his back; when that failed to kill him they returned to finish him off in the street near his home. Eduardo (not his real name) was only eight at the time. But to avenge his father he joined his gang as a sicario (hitman), and killed his father’s murderer. Eduardo is now trying to find out whether life can offer any of the happiness he says he has never known. Since January he has been studying computing with La Ceiba, an NGO. As for that murder: “I enjoyed it,” he says blankly.

The bullet scar on Eduardo’s chest and the beaten right arm hanging limply by his side are signs of the violence that has come to engulf Guatemala and much of the Central American isthmus. No region on earth is more routinely murderous. Guatemala’s rate of 46 murders per 100,000 people is more than twice as high as Mexico’s, and nearly ten times greater than that of the United States. Honduras and El Salvador—the other two countries that make up Central America’s “northern triangle”, as it is called—are more violent still (see chart in map). Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama, the quietest members of the group, have also seen violence increase in recent years, as has Belize.

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Mexican documentary

The uglier face of justice

Banning a documentary film has resulted in even more people seeing it

Mar 31st 2011 | MEXICO CITY

Sent behind bars with a yawn and a sneer

“PRESUMED GUILTY”, a documentary film which was released in Mexico in February and banned two weeks later, is the opposite of a whodunit. From the beginning it is clear that Antonio Zúñiga, a mild-mannered computer-repairman, had nothing to do with the murder that took place near his Mexico City market stall in 2005. Forensic tests were negative; fellow stallholders gave him an alibi; the one supposed witness could not even describe his appearance. This quietly angry film, which has been shown at film festivals over the past couple of years, is a detective story in reverse, following Mr Zúñiga’s difficult, dignified fight to overturn his conviction.

It sets out to shame Mexico’s justice system, and succeeds twice. After the prosecution witness in Mr Zúñiga’s trial made a dubious complaint that the film invaded his privacy, a judge suspended screenings on March 2nd. But the ban, seen as an attempt to suppress an embarrassment, has backfired gloriously. In the days before it kicked in, multiplexes were jam-packed. More than 1m tickets have been sold, making it by far the most successful documentary in Mexico’s history. Pirate DVD hawkers stock it alongside Hollywood blockbusters.

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Guatemala's ruling couple

Divide and rule

The president and first lady split up—leaving her free to run for office

Mar 24th 2011 | GUATEMALA CITY

TO AVOID the dynasties that have misruled many Latin American countries, Guatemala’s constitution forbids relatives of the incumbent president and vice-president from running for high office. This clause had seemed to scotch the chances of Sandra Torres, the country’s ambitious first lady, becoming its first presidenta. But on March 21st she and her husband, Álvaro Colom, announced a novel way to sidestep the rules: they filed for divorce.

Rather than being a sign of marital discord, the parting looks much more likely to have sprung from political unity. Speaking last month, Mr Colom gushed over his wife’s leadership skills and the “impressive passion” she inspired. On March 8th Ms Torres declared that she would run as the candidate of National Unity of Hope (UNE), her husband’s party. Candidates can register from May 2nd, and the election will be held in September.

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Mexico's communications monopolies

Amigos no longer

Billionaires feud over converging television and telecoms markets

Mar 17th 2011 | MEXICO CITY

What’s on television tonight? Nada, as usual

MEXICO’S telephone and television industries are near-monopolies. About 80% of landlines are connected to Telmex, one of many companies controlled by Carlos Slim, the world’s richest man. Another of Mr Slim’s firms, Telcel, has 70% of the mobile-phone market. A second-division billionaire, Emilio Azcárraga, maintains almost as tight a grip on the television business, in which his company, Televisa, claims 70% of the country’s free-to-air TV audience. Most other viewers are mopped up by TV Azteca, run by Ricardo Salinas, the country’s fourth-richest tycoon.

The Mexican billionaires’ club has long been cosy. Apart from some sporting rivalry between the two broadcasters, there has been little reason for members to intrude on each other’s captive markets. Until now. On March 9th a group of 25 companies led by Televisa and TV Azteca filed a complaint with the competition authorities against Mr Slim’s telephone empire. Full-page newspaper ads denounced the industry’s “expensive and bad monopoly”.

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Honduras and its former president

Why a pariah may return

Many now have reason to want Manuel Zelaya to come home

Mar 10th 2011 | TEGUCIGALPA

SINCE the confused morning in June 2009 when its president was marched to the airport at gunpoint and sent packing, Honduras has been creeping back towards something resembling normal political life. Porfirio Lobo, a conservative who was elected president in a reasonably fair contest five months after the coup, is popular at home. Most of the world now recognises his government, meaning that the vital tap of international grants and loans to one of the poorest and most violent countries in the Americas has been turned back on. Last year the Honduran economy was restored to growth, which many forecasters think will accelerate this year and next.

Yet political life in Tegucigalpa, the higgledy-piggledy mountain capital, cannot get back to normal until relations are patched up with Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, the left-wing former president, who remains in exile in the Dominican Republic. As long as Mr Zelaya is away, a hard core of governments, including Brazil, Argentina and left-wing allies of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, will have nothing to do with Honduras. While they freeze the country out, Honduras has little chance of rejoining the Organisation of American States, a regional group that is one of the remaining obstacles to a normal existence on the international stage. And since Nicaragua’s president, Daniel Ortega, is one of those who still boycotts Honduras, previously routine co-operation among Central America’s leaders has got harder.

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