Julia Orayen has posed nude for Playboy and appeared barely dressed in other media, but she made her mark on Mexican minds Sunday night by carrying an urn filled with bits of paper determining the order that candidates would speak. Not that viewers were looking at the urn. She wore a tight, white dress with a wide, tear-drop cutout that revealed her ample decolletage. The image was splashed across newspaper front pages and websites by Monday.

“The best was the girl in white with the cleavage at the beginning,” tweeted former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda, who is also a New York University professor.

Orayen’s name jockeyed for third and fourth place throughout the day under Twitter’s Mexico City trends, where a click revealed her previous work, including an almost-nude spread commemorating Mexican Independence Day in which she appears in minimal garb modeled on images of Mexican founding father Jose Maria Morelos.

Alfredo Figueroa, director of the Federal Electoral Institute responsible for organizing the debate, blamed the incident on a production associate hired by the institute to help with the debate. The institute later issued an apology to Mexican citizens and the candidates for the woman’s dress.

The problem here isn’t really the dress, or the fact that Julia Orayen has posed nude. It’s that the debate organizers thought that what the event really needed was a hot female presenter to kick things off. I can’t imagine it ever crossed their minds to hire a man for this position—because of course we need reminders that often in politics, men are supposed to be the main characters while women are their pretty supporting players—or that they specified professional attire for the presenter. I’d be curious as to what candidate Josefina Eugenia Vázquez Mota, the lone female candidate in the race, thought of the fact that some of her rivals apparently went all goggly-eyed when Orayen came on stage. They, and Figueroa shouldn’t apologize for Orayen’s dress. They should apologize for turning a serious process into a stupid, sexist spectacle.

Felipe Calderón stands in front of a wind farm in Mexico.

by Jeffrey Cavanagh

Since Mexico’s legislative body passed sweeping climate change legislation on April 19, Mexico joins the UK as the only two countries in the world with legally binding emissions goals to combat climate change.

The new law will reduce the country’s carbon emissions, end fossil fuel subsidies, and establish a voluntary carbon trading market. This law builds on Mexico’s previous commitments to action on climate change, and reflects on the country’s green leadership on the international stage it prepares to host the upcoming G20 leaders’ summit in June.

Adrián Fernández, a consultant for the Latin American Initiative and former President of the National Ecology Institute, recently discussed the importance of Mexico’s new climate change law during a briefing 2012 by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington DC:

[Mexico] now has a framework that allows governments at national and local levels to set aside budgets with clear earmarks towards climate change, and to create new investments for climate mitigation and adaptation … pushing [Mexico] into the spotlight and, under international scrutiny, [Mexico] will be held accountable to its people and the international community.

After several years of debate and revision, the bill passed Mexico’s lower house on April 12, with a vote of 128 for and 10 against. Mexico’s Senate unanimously passed the legislation on April 19, and President Felipe Calderon, who has championed immediate action to stop global warming, is expected to sign the bill into law soon.

As President Calderon prepares to host the next G20 summit in June, his administration will make climate change and sustainable development “priorities” during the meeting under a broad Green Growth theme. With 75 percent of the world’s GDP, the G20 is responsible for 75 percent of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Bringing together finance ministers from these countries is essential for putting sustainability at the core of economic recovery and for figuring out how to mobilize significant resources for international climate finance.

Today, Mexico is the only developing country in the world to have passed binding climate change legislation.

While the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) designates Mexico a “non-Annex I country,” or a developing country — thus not requiring it to make greenhouse gas reduction targets — Mexico’s non-Annex I status is not reflective of its economic size (11th) or contribution to global greenhouse gasses (also 11th).

Given its size and commitment to sustainable growth, Mexico is well positioned to facilitate cooperation among major developing countries such as China and industrialized countries like the United States as they seek consensus on international climate finance during the upcoming summit.

UNFCCC talks have previously stalled with industrialized and developing countries “locked into definitions” that hinder global cooperation. Mexico can use the G20 Summit to build on its previous success from the 2010 UN talks in Mexico that resulted in the Cancun Agreements.  By passing climate law legislation, Mexico is acting demonstrating continuing leadership on sustainable development on the international stage.

According to Rodrigo Gallegos, the Director of Climate and Technology at the Mexico Institute for Competitiveness, and representative for the business community who also participated in the briefing, the climate legislation will simplify emissions regulations throughout the country and set a new institutional and regulatory framework that will create more certainty for Mexico’s business environment. As a result, Mr. Gallegos notes, Mexico’s business sector is supporting the climate change law:

Most of the private sector and chamber are in favor of the law and have changed positions over the last two years. So, having said that, there is a very positive sense of perception of the law among businesses.

Mr. Gallegos believes that with reduced long-term investment uncertainty, Mexico can become a destination for green technology and innovation.

As a backdrop to Mexico’s G20 summit and climate change legislation, the country is concurrently dealing with one of the worst droughts on record for several areas of the country. More than half of Mexico’s territory is experiencing drought, and over 3.7 million acres of farmland have been lost. The federal government has spent billions of dollars on food, water, and other aid relief in some of the most afflicted areas in 19 of Mexico’s 31 states. Severe drought is one of the most pressing problems caused by climate change — likely severely hindering global food production over the coming decades.

Mexico’s climate legislation may not bring sorely needed rain in the immediate future. But it is a great step in the right direction for international climate sustainability.

Jeffrey Cavanagh is an intern with the international climate team at the Center for American Progress. Policy analyst Rebecca Lefton contributed to this report.

The report notes several factors that are likely behind the change including tighter borders, including a weakened U.S. economy and a rise in deportations. But most interesting are two factors that may indicate that the trend may be lasting. First, the birthrate in Mexico has dropped. Between 1960 and 2009, the average Mexican woman went from having nine children to just two. As such the Mexican population has dropped. Second, the Mexican economy has improved. With a relatively strong economy, there is less incentive for citizens to emigrate.

For years, the U.S. immigration debate has been built around an assumption that there are large numbers of Mexican nationals trying to move into the U.S. — legally and illegally. This report suggests that this assumption may need to be re-evaluated. As Princeton Professor Douglas Massey, who co-directs the Mexican Migration Project, told the Washington Post, “I think the massive boom in Mexican immigration is over and I don’t think it will ever return to the numbers we saw in the 1990s and 2000s.”

At the macroeconomic level, Douglas Massey, founder of the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton University, has documented what he calls “net zero” migration. The population of undocumented immigrants in the US fell from 12 million to approximately 11 million during the height of the financial crisis (2008-09), he says. And since then, Mexicans without documents aren’t migrating at rates to replace the loss, creating a net zero balance for the first time in 50 years.

After analyzing census data and household surveys, Agustin Escobar, a demographer at the Center for Research in Social Anthropology in Guadalajara, Mexico, found that migrants leaving Mexico dropped from more than 1 million in 2005 to 368,000 in 2010.

The shift began as a result of the weak U.S. economy, but experts say anti-immigrant state laws, tougher U.S. border enforcement, and border violence are contributing factors as well.

Navy SEALs movie Act of Valor portrayed a tunnel system run by Mexican cartel leaders as a valuable aid to al Qaeda. Tony Scott’s working on Narco Sub, a movie about the submersibles the cartels used in smuggling operations. Breaking Bad‘s most recent season came up with a novel, moving, bloody twist on a cartel story, but it relied heavily on the visuals of sparkling pools, heavy gold jewelry, hot girls and hotter cars to set the scene. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to come up with a novel movie villain, or wanting to tap into new and different current of global anxiety. But there’s something weird about the assumptions of all of these movies that the most interesting stories you could tell about the cartels involve their impact on individual Americans rather than on Mexican society. It’s almost like there are compelling stories you could tell about Mexican characters that wouldn’t overstate the impact of drugs in the United States.

Quelino Ojeda Jimenez, 21, died in Mexico after being deported last year

But he never made it home. Instead, he was left to languish at a small Mexican hospital that was unequipped to handle his needs. UPI reports that Ojeda died on New Year’s Day:

A young man returned to Mexico by a Chicago-area hospital after a construction injury that paralyzed him from the neck down has died, officials say.

Advocates say Quelino Ojeda Jimenez, 21, spent months in a small hospital in Mexico that did not have the facilities to care for a quadriplegic, the Chicago Tribune reported. [...]

“He never even made it to his home,” said Jesus Vargas, a friend in Chicago. “He was always in the hospital stuck to the machine that helped him breathe.”

Ojeda, who was working illegally in the United States, was treated at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, Ill., after a 20-foot fall paralyzed him. The hospital transferred him to Mexico three days before Christmas in 2010.

Ojeda’s deportation followed a heated battle between the hospital and immigration advocates. He was transferred to a Mexican hospital in an air ambulance despite protests from Ojeda and his family that the move would jeopardize his health.

In light of his death, the Chicago hospital that treated him has said it will reexamine its policies for treating international patients.

Ojeda told the Chicago Tribune last February that he feared returning to Mexico because he “need[ed] a lot of things they don’t have.” Tragically, his fears turned out to be all too real.

Being deported is like taking a vacation in Cancun, basically.

He “doesn’t want to break up families,” he said, but deportation isn’t so bad because “we’re not sending them to any kind of difficult country”:

SANTORUM: Yeah I feel bad, I don’t like to break up families, but you know the family can go back. We’re not sending them to Siberia. We’re not sending them to any kind of, you know, difficult country. They’re going to Mexico, which is a great country, a nice country. And they can go back like every other Mexican that wants to come to America and come here legally.

Watch it:

Santorum may think that being deported to Mexico is akin to taking a permanent vacation in Cancun, but most immigrants find it a harrowing experience. Immigrants, some of whom have lived in the U.S. since childhood, are forcibly removed from their families and sent to a place where they often have no remaining connections, no relatives, and no housing or job prospects.

In search of a better life and more economic opportunity, approximately 400,000 migrants go through Mexico each year to reach the United States. Nearly half the Mexican population, or 52 million people, live in poverty, 11.7 million of them in extreme poverty. Much of the population lacks access to food, clean water, education, and health care.

Some immigrants who come to the U.S. are also refugees who are too scared of being deported or intimidated by the difficult legal process to apply for asylum. The U.S. asylum system has been particularly unmerciful for people running from Central American gangs — despite a surge in gang-related claims, their petitions are rarely granted. Many immigrants have been killed by gangs after being deported, proving their lives really were at risk — but too late.

Highlights:

Colombiana, despite ostensibly being a drug war movie, has absolutely nothing new to say about the relationship of American governmental organizations to drug trafficking, and nothing at all to say about the roles of cartels in day-to-day life in the countries where they operate. Miss Bala, by contrast, is set in Tijuana, and appears to have some sense (even if it is not journalism) of what it’s like to be in a place where the integrity of governmental organizations is not assured.

William Finnegan’s done amazing reporting for the New Yorker over the last couple of years in particular about things like the efforts to reclaim control of and reform Tijuana’s police force (its radio frequencies were hijacked by narcotraficantes, among other things) and by extension, the city’s streets; and the infiltration of cartels into a wide range of aspects of life and institutions, both in government and business, in Michoacán, and I’ve always wondered why we don’t have more good action movies that reflect and explore that reality, or more movies about the state of Mexico at all. The movies Mexico’s sent to the Academy Awards to compete in the Foreign Language Film category in recent year have a tendency to be either personal stories, or set in Spain: Silent Light and El crimen del padre Amaro fall into the first category; Biutiful, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Aro Tolbukhin; Al otro lado is the only one of these movies to address immigration. I’m not saying Mexican filmmakers have to make movies about the state of Mexican society, or that Mexico is obligated to put such movies in Oscar contention, but I do think it would be good for Americans to see movies that give them a sense of what’s going on one country over.

If our war on terror is abstract, Mexico’s war on drugs is dreadfully concrete, and much closer to our borders than our fights in Iraq and Afghanistan: between 2006 and 2010, it killed 23,000 people. Our movies about why people might want to come here and why we should let them haven’t done particularly well recently. Chris Weitz may be pushing his immigration movie A Better Life hard for Academy Awards contention, but it only made $1.8 million at the box office. Spanglish‘s $42 million domestic gross in 2004 almost certainly had more to do with Adam Sandler’s presence in the movie than any interest in the heartwarming immigration story. If filmmakers want Americans to be sympathetic to immigrants to the United States, illegal and otherwise, maybe they need to tell more stories about what people are coming from, rather than what they’re coming to.

Gov. Perry with then-Mexican President Vincente Fox.

In 2001 at a border summit in south Texas, Perry spoke optimistically about the prospects for a “bi-national health insurance” program that would cover both U.S. and Mexican residents along the border. He also praised the Texas legislature’s bill to increase funding for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Given that Perry now considers Medicaid to be unconstitutional, the speech reads like it comes from another world — or an entirely different person:

There are other challenges that require a unified approach, especially in the area of health care. [...] I urged legislators to pass a telemedicine pilot program that will enable, through technology, a sick border resident of limited financial means to receive care from a specialist hundreds of miles away.

But the effort to combat disease and illness requires greater cooperative efforts between our two nations. It is a simple truth that disease knows no boundaries. [...] We have much to gain if we work together to expand preventative care, and treat maladies unique to this region.

Legislation authored by border legislators Pat Haggerty and Eddie Lucio establishes an important study that will look at the feasibility of bi-national health insurance. This study recognizes that the Mexican and U.S. sides of the border compose one region, and we must address health care problems throughout that region. That’s why I am also excited that Texas Secretary of State Henry Cuellar is working on an initiative that could extend the benefits of telemedicine to individuals living on the Mexican side of the border.

In the speech, Perry also extols the need for more preventative medicine and brags about how the legislature “expanded access to Medicaid for more low-income children” and increased Medicaid funding by $4 billion. His past praise for a “unified,” transnational health care program is a stark contrast with the view he expresses in his recent book Fed Up, where he posits that the Constitution forbids a “federally operated program of pensions” and “a federally operated program of health care.”

The remarks paint a refreshing picture of an enlightened, compassionate Perry who is informed about the benefits of preventative health care and Medicaid and has sympathy for poor border residents and undocumented immigrants.

The Perry campaign is, predictably, trying to downplay the speech. Campaign spokeswoman Katherine Cesinger tried to distance Perry from the proposal, saying, “A bill was passed by the Legislature that authorized a study to look into this issue, which ultimately concluded there were numerous barriers to accomplishing that idea, and the Legislature took no further action on this concept.”

Perry has also faced scrutiny this week for a 1993 letter he wrote as Texas Agricultural Commissioner praising then-First Lady Hillary Clinton for her efforts to reform the health care system. That legislation was brought down by mass GOP opposition and “Hillarycare” is still derided by conservatives as the precursor to “Obamacare.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) have been leading the oversight charge in Congress and both lawmakers have asked authorities in Mexico and Arizona for the serial numbers of the guns recovered in violent crimes and submitted to ATF for tracing to determine if “Fast and Furious” weapons were involved. The ATF has this data too, however, appropriations riders known as the “Tiahrt Amendments” prohibit the ATF from disclosing the data to members of Congress. Just last night on Fox News, Issa complained about the lack of information:

ISSA: You have the point where it was sold and you have the point where you have a dead Border Patrol agent. And in between, you have no idea where that weapon was.

But Issa himself co-sponsored legislation in 2006 that would have made the Tiahrt amendments permanent. If passed, H.R. 5005, “a bill to make technical changes to Federal firearms laws” would have made it illegal for the ATF to disclose this information:

Information in the firearms trace system database maintained by the National Trace Center of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, shall not be disclosed to any entity, except to a Federal, State, local, or foreign law enforcement agency for a Federal, State, or local prosecutor solely in connection with and for use in a bona fide criminal investigation or prosecution and only to the extent that the information pertains to the geographic jurisdiction of the law enforcement agency or prosecutor requesting the disclosure.

So while the Darrell Issa of today requests gun data in an effort to tarnish President Obama’s Justice Department, the Darrell Issa of 2006 frowned upon any such type of information sharing, and wanted to make it permanently illegal and a punishable offense of up to 5 years in prison.

But this isn’t the only tinge of hypocrisy in Issa’s crusade to bring down Holder. The Washington Post reported last month that Issa “was briefed on ATF’s ‘Fast and Furious’ program last year and did not express any opposition.”

In one instance, Forcelli argued in favor of tougher gun laws:

REP. CAROLYN MALONEY (D): District court judges view these [straw purchase] prosecutions as mere paper violations. Have you heard this criticism before?

FORCELLI: I have and I agree with it. I think that perhaps a mandatory minimum one year sentence might deter an individual from buying a gun. Some people view this as no more consequential than doing 65 in a 55.

In another, Forcelli admitted that his agency simply doesn’t have the resources it needs to be effective:

REP. GERALD CONNELLY (D-VA): Do you really have the resources you need to do your job?

FORCELLI: It’s amazing, sir, that you ask me that… [...] I have less than 100 agents assigned to the entire State of Arizona, that’s 114,006 square miles. So do we have the resources, no we don’t. We desperately need them.

Watch it:

Issa jumped in to remind Forcelli that his assessment fell “outside the scope” of the hearing and “would not be considered valid testimony.”

Issa’s hearings on the gunrunner operation come just a few months after the NRA requested “expedited” hearings on the issue, in hopes that the it would reportedly “help kill a request from federal regulators for more authority to track gun purchases in the southern border states.” This past May, at the NRA’s annual convention, the powerful gun lobby group called for the resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder over the ATF operation.

Ironically, the NRA lobby itself has been blamed for weakening the ATF and rendering it leaderless since 2006. “The gun lobby has consistently outmaneuvered and hemmed in ATF, using political muscle to intimidate lawmakers and erect barriers to tougher gun laws,” reported the Washington Post. “Over nearly four decades, the NRA has wielded remarkable influence over Congress, persuading lawmakers to curb ATF’s budget and mission and to call agency officials to account at oversight hearings.”

Rather than further debilitating the agency, Democrats have promoted the strengthening of “toothless” U.S. gun laws in conjunction with a probe into the ATF’s gunrunner activities.

CBS News has learned that the Mexican Government has retained an American law firm to explore filing civil charges against U.S. gun manufacturers and distributors over the flood of guns crossing the border into Mexico.

Sources say Mexico’s frustration with U.S. efforts to stop the flow of weapons has pushed them into this novel approach. The law firm is looking at charges that may include civil RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act]. The contract was signed on November 2, 2010 by a representative of Mexico’s Attorney General, at their Washington embassy.

Mexicans have good reason to be frustrated by the United States’ inability to stem the flow of guns down south. A report by Mayors Against Illegal Guns found that “90% of guns recovered and traced from Mexican crime scenes originated from gun dealers in the United States.” From 2006 to 2009, a total of almost 19,000 guns in Mexico were traced to the United States. An overwhelming majority of these guns came from the stores in Texas, California, and Arizona. News broke earlier this year that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives purposefully permitted 1,800 weapons to “walk” into the hands of drug lords and gun runners in an attempt to trace them back to high-level drug cartel operatives. And while these traced firearms do not represent all of the guns recovered in Mexico, there’s only one gun store in all of Mexico where they could’ve come from. That store is run by the Mexican military. The Brookings Institution estimates that 2,000 U.S. guns are smuggled into Mexico each day.

Meanwhile, the Mexican drug war has claimed the lives of at least 35,000 people — many of them innocent civilians — since 2006.

The Firearms Committee responded to the news that Mexico might sue U.S. gun manufacturers, saying, “it is wrong for anyone to blame America’s firearms industry for the problems Mexico is currently facing.” Richard Feldman, President of the Independent Firearms Association, suggested that “maybe we should be suing the Mexican government for their failure to prevent drugs from coming into our country.” Tea Party Nation also issued its own release which proclaims that “Mexico is our enemy” and that “Mexican President Felipe Calderon is about as useful as Joe Biden sleeping through a Barack Obama speech.”

While the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act makes it especially hard to win a lawsuit against the gun industry, Mexico may have have a case. Many of the guns that have made their way to Mexico were purchased by U.S. citizen “straw buyers” who were paid by gun runners to buy the firearms for them. Yet, there has been at least one case in which a gun dealers were directly involved in funneling weapons to Mexican drug cartels. If Mexico can prove that at least one individual engaged in a “pattern of racketeering activity,” they might have a case against the gun industry under the RICO statute.

With all that said, even if Mexico does have a case against gun manufacturers, it shouldn’t distract attention away from the responsibility that Mexico shares with the United States. U.S. drug consumption is funding the drug war, U.S. guns may be fueling it, but ultimately, Calderon’s militarization of the drug war has only resulted in more violence and deaths.

It turns out, Wachovia had been receiving warnings for years from a senior anti-money laundering officer in its own London office, Martin Woods. Yet, Woods’ words of caution weren’t only met with indifference. Wachovia reportedly retaliated against Woods and essentially drove him out of his job. The Observer recently reported:

Rather than launch an internal investigation into Woods’s alerts over Mexico, Woods claims Wachovia hung its own money-laundering expert out to dry. [...] On 16 June Woods was told by Wachovia’s head of compliance that his latest SAR [suspicious activity report] need not have been filed, that he had no legal requirement to investigate an overseas case and no right of access to documents held overseas from Britain, even if they were held by Wachovia. [...]

“Wachovia had my résumé, they knew who I was,” says Woods. “But they did not want to know – their attitude was, ‘Why are you doing this?’ They should have been on my side, because they were compliance people, not commercial people. But really they were commercial people all along. We’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. This is the biggest money-laundering scandal of our time.

At some point, Woods received a letter from the bank’s compliance managing director which accused him of failing “to perform at an acceptable standard.” In 2008, Woods sued Wachovia for bullying and detrimental treatment of a whistleblower. Wachovia settled that case too and agreed to pay an undisclosed amount under the condition that Woods leave the bank.

To this day, not a single bank has been indicted for violating the anti-money-laundering Bank Secrecy Act. Meanwhile, foreign government agencies in the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Colombia, along with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime have all reportedly documented money laundering by the banking industry. According to Al Día, financial institutions such as Bank of America, American Express, Western Union, the Mexican offices of Citigroup, the European HSBC and Banco Santander have all “helped move money for Mexican cartels.”

Meanwhile, the drug war has claimed the lives of at least 35,000 people since 2006 in Mexico alone. Senior U.S. commanders told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that Mexico and Central America make up one of the most dangerous regions in the world, rivaling the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. And as the U.S. continues to pour millions of dollars into fighting the drug war in Mexico, U.S. drug users contribute approximately $40 billion a year to Latin American cartels — money which apparently often ends up passing through U.S. banks.

(my photo available under cc license)

Mark Kleiman on what Mexico can do to better control drug-related violence:

Mexico should, after a public and transparent process, designate one of its dealing organizations as the most violent of the group, and Mexican and U.S. enforcement efforts should focus on destroying that organization. Once that group has been dismantled – not hard, in a competitive market – the process should be run again, with all the remaining organizations told that finishing first in the violence race will lead to destruction. If it worked, this process would force a “race to the bottom” in violence; in effect, each organization’s drug-dealing revenues would be held hostage to its self-restraint when it comes to gunfire.

I certainly agree that something along these lines is the right way to deal with the crime and violence associated with hard drugs. The idea that a city is going to eradicate the buying and selling of cocaine and heroin from its borders is preposterous. What you want to do is make the dominant business strategy for a vendor of hard drugs be something like “don’t kill anyone and don’t be a nuisance.” You find the peg that’s stick out highest on the disruptiveness chart, and you whack it down.

But this all relies on what Mexico can’t necessarily count on—a well-functioning public sector that can be relied on to engage in “a public and transparent process” in a reasonable way.

In 2009, State Department Secretary Hillary Clinton indicated that she felt “very strongly” that the U.S. and Mexico share co-responsibility in the drug war. “Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” stated Clinton about the United States. It turns out U.S. demand for drugs is also funding an army of organized criminals who are profiting off of the nation’s addictions and follies:

American consumers of narcotics drive the drug trade, and US weapons arm narco-criminals, says Andres Martinez, a fellow with the New America Foundation think tank.

US drug users contribute roughly $40 billion a year to Latin American cartels, Admiral James Winnefeld, head of the US Northern Command, in charge of US homeland security, added in testimony. The amount of US money that goes to Mexican cartels is so considerable that “if you ranked it among the world’s militaries, it would come into the top ten.”

Admiral James Winnefeld, head of the U.S. Northern Command, shed some light on how drug cartels are spending their profits. Night-vision goggles, heavily armored vehicles, and submarines are among the items purchased by increasingly sophisticated narco-criminals. Meanwhile, U.S. taxpayers spend $52 billion to treat, prevent, interdict, and enforce existing drug laws.

Latin American leaders have often called on the U.S. to consider legalizing marijuana use and focusing more on treating drug addicts. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, César Gaviria of Colombia, and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, wrote, “it’s high time to replace an ineffective strategy with more humane and efficient drug policies…The revision of U.S.-inspired drug policies is urgent in light of the rising levels of violence and corruption associated with narcotics.” The strategy, after all, has worked in other countries. Yet, the legalization of marijuana across the country remains a political land mine.

There are still things the U.S. could do to stop exacerbating the problem. While U.S. drug users are essentially funding the drug cartels, the U.S. federal government is funneling over a billion dollars into the Merida Initiative, a counterdrug assistance program for Mexico and Central America. Most of that money has been spent on the militarization of the drug war which has had the unintended effect of increasing the profitability of the illicit drug business. Hal Brand of the Strategic Studies Institute notes that the Merida Initiative is “not being partnered with any real efforts to ramp up prevention, treatment, or other demand-side programs in the United States. Rather, the money spent on the Merida Initiative seems to have come at the expense of such programs.” Brand also argues that the initiative has paid comparatively little attention to the structural problems that have fueled the drug trade and violence, including, corruption, human rights abuses, poverty, impunity, and the flow of guns from the U.S into Mexico.

On immigration-related websites like the Juarez, Mexico Discussion Forum and Immigrate2US, members often speculate as to why, of all of the cities in Mexico, they are forced to go to the Murder Capital. Some see it as a deliberate move to discourage people from applying. “This process is built to break one down,” wrote a member of the Juárez forum. “And most importantly, to instill fear.”[...]

“The websites say stay away, don’t travel there,” one woman complained to me. “But for families who are trying to do the right, legal, thing and go through the immigration process, they do not give us any other option.”

According to the article, U.S. officials claim that the consulate’s location is completely unintentional. “The decision was made years ago…before the increased drug-related violence along the border area,” stated Nicole Thompson of the U.S. State Department. A consulate employee also pointed out that the consulate is located in the one of the city’s safer areas. Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department warns its own citizens to “defer unnecessary travel” to Juárez because of the deadly violence.

The problem with that though is that anyone who isn’t coming from within that safe area has to travel through the toughest parts of Ciudad Juárez. While it’s true that “the war is between the cartels and gangs” as Thompson claimed, civilians often get caught in the crosshairs. In fact, one visa applicant already has. Gray Davidson tells the story of Susan O’Brien (a pseudonym) and her husband, Sabas. Sabas entered the U.S. illegally and left so that he could apply for legal immigrant status to be with his U.S. citizen wife and child. During the time he spent in Ciudad Juárez he was kidnapped and killed.

Up until 1988, immigrants visas were once processed at all nine of the U.S. consulates in Mexico. In 1992, Ciudad Juárez became the only place where Mexicans could apply to legally enter the United States. State Department officials claim the consolidation was purely administrative and that it would be a huge hassle to continuously move the consulate around in response to Mexico’s turbulent drug war.

But it seems to me that it’s in the nation’s interest to make it easier for those who want to enter the U.S. through legal channels to do so. It’s bad enough to deny all those undocumented immigrants who made the treacherous journey across the border in search of a better life a path to legalization. Asking Mexicans to risk their lives to “get in the back of the line” to be in the U.S. legally is unacceptable and, as far as I can tell, unnecessary when there are eight other U.S. consulates to choose from.

According to the report, “by the end of 2010, as many as 5.4 million people were internally displaced due to armed conflict, violence, and human rights violations in the Americas.” In comparison, 3.9 million were displaced in the Middle East at the end of the year largely due to armed conflicts. The IDMC claims that, in Mexico alone, about 230,000 people have been displaced because of drug violence. While approximately 115,000 of those Mexicans were internally displaced within the country, the IDMC notes that the other half of those displaced “crossed the border into the United States.” These figures don’t include the Central American nation of Guatemala, which is also experiencing high levels of violence.

Meanwhile, those who seek asylum face an uphill battle. In order to qualify, asylum applicants must prove “credible fear” based on their membership in a social, political, religious, or ethnic group that has been targeted for persecution. While asylum applicants who are fleeing Latin America’s drug violence can usually prove they have a good reason to fear for their lives, persecution is difficult to establish. Less than two percent of the 3,800 Mexican asylum petitions were approved last year.

While some legal experts are advocating for a broader set of asylum criteria, the courts have been slow to respond and it seems unlikely that all 115,000 displaced people would meet even the most expansive asylum standards that have been discussed. Others have suggested lobbying the federal government to grant drug war victims “Temporary Protected Status,” a temporary immigration status that is available to individuals from a small number of federally-designated countries suffering armed conflicts, natural disasters, or other extraordinary circumstances. However, that option is highly controversial.

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) also released a report this week which warns, “the unchecked power and violence of these Mexican DTOs [drug trafficking organizations] present a substantial humanitarian concern and have contributed to forced migration and numerous U.S. asylum requests. If the situation were to worsen, a humanitarian emergency might lead to an unmanageable flow of people into the United States.” According to CFR, the U.S. bears part of the responsibility “given that U.S. drug consumption, firearms, and cash have fueled much of Mexico’s recent violence.” They recommend “bolster[ing] U.S. domestic law enforcement efforts to curb illicit drug distribution, firearms smuggling, and money laundering” and making “an overall commitment to preventing and treating drug abuse and other societal ills caused by drugs and reevaluate the effectiveness of current U.S. and international drug policies.”

Ultimately, it’s probably safe to say that many — if not most — of the immigrants coming to the U.S. are driven by economics more than the drug war. Yet, as the drug-related violence in Latin America escalates, dealing with migration to the North may start to require addressing U.S. drug and gun policies along with the nation’s broken immigration system itself.

Special Agent John Dodson — the program’s whistle blower — told Univision’s Jorge Ramos yesterday that he found Fast and Furious morally reprehensible, pointing out that it might have led to the death of over a thousand people:

My motivation is simply because this isn’t what we signed up for, this isn’t what we do as law enforcement officers, as an agency, this is not what we do as ATF. My mission for coming out here was to stop this kind of activity. To prevent as much firearms trafficking as I can and then as I learned that my agency, as I believed, is perhaps contributing to that, at the very least condoning it, allowing it to occur right underneath our noses, if not contributing to it – I disagree with professionally, morally, ethically and I felt that I had an obligation of all these things to try and do something about it. [...]

We knew that these weapons were going to end up in crimes; they were going to a known criminal organization; that was the whole theory behind the case. So you have 1,800 guns that you let go, imagine if you only had one bullet for each gun, or you get one death for each gun, that is 1,800 people.

Meanwhile, the National Rifle Association (NRA) is calling on Congress to hold hearings on the ATF’s efforts to stem the flow of weapons to Mexico. Ironically, it’s the NRA lobby that has so weakened the ATF and rendered it leaderless since 2006. The Washington Post recently reported that for “over nearly four decades, the NRA has wielded remarkable influence over Congress, persuading lawmakers to curb ATF’s budget and mission and to call agency officials to account at oversight hearings.”

Yet, according to The Hill, the NRA hopes that “the public discussion [about Fast and Furious] will help kill a request from federal regulators for more authority to track gun purchases in the southern border states.” That request would involve requiring gun dealers to report multiple sales of rifles and shotguns to ATF. According to the NRA, the reporting requirement “would flood the agency with even more reports of legal transactions, while likely driving criminal traffickers further underground.” Yet, experts argue that the proposal could save thousands of lives from drug cartel violence.

In 2010, MSNBC reported that Mexican cartels are taking advantage of lax U.S. gun laws which the NRA has lobbied hard for. At that time, around 80 percent of the 90,000 weapons confiscated by Mexican authorities were purchased in the U.S.

Watch the interview [in Spanish]:

We’re in a war down there on that border. If you talk to the people in Texas, they will tell you — there is a war between us and the drug dealers and the thugs that are coming across that line into our country. And, there’s a high suspicion that we’re seeing al-Qaeda and Taliban type terrorists coming across the border into the United States.

It’s a war make no mistake about it — the Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples said — and it’s happening on American soil. In this country! [...] We’re never going to solve that border problem unless we realize that it’s an area that we have to focus on, that it’s a war, and that our citizens are in danger down there.

Watch it:

To begin with, the Obama administration doesn’t arm federal agents operating in Mexico because it’s against Mexican law, which prohibits foreign diplomats or agents from carrying weapons or engaging in law enforcement activities. Ever since U.S. intervention in the Mexican Revolution, Mexico has been wary about allowing foreign officials to arm themselves while conducting business in the country. Given the fact that some U.S. politicians have actually floated the idea of U.S. military involvement in Mexico, it’s understandable that there may be some political unease associated with modifying the restrictions. It’s also worth noting that the federal agent who was killed in Mexico wasn’t there to “fight the drug cartels.” He was there for a training exercise.

Attorney General Eric Holder actually suggested asking Mexico to allow dozens of U.S. federal agents working there to be armed. Mexican President Felipe Calderon didn’t make any promises, but he did affirm that, “We definitely have to find a way to elevate the level of protection for all agents who, according to law, work against criminality. We will, of course, analyze alternatives and talk to the Mexican congress, which ultimately has the last word.” Ultimately, it seems like the best solution would be for the U.S. to tighten its gun restrictions and prevent our own weapons from flowing down south.

Meanwhile, as I pointed out yesterday, the U.S. side of the Mexican border is “safer than it’s ever been.” While Burton cites anecdotal evidence to back up his claims, hard data suggests quite the opposite. Counties along the southwest border have some of the lowest rates of violent crime per capita in the nation and those rates have dropped by more than 30 percent since the 1990s while immigration has soared. Border agents do carry guns.

While the murder of border agent Brian Terry was certainly tragic, there have also been several cases in which it appears border agents used excessive force and killed unarmed Mexican teenagers.