Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Argentina to stop foreigners with criminal records from entering the country

Op-ed in Spain’s El País:

Argentina adopts anti-immigrant rhetoric over public safety fears. Macri administration pledges to stop foreigners with criminal records from entering the country

Argentina’s foreign population is 4.5%, and foreign inmates serving time represent 6% of the prison population. The figures do not look alarming. Yet the government is providing another set of data that focuses on federal penitentiaries, and points to foreigners as being responsible for the most serious crimes, particularly drug trafficking.

“The foreign national population in the custody of the Federal Penitentiary Service has grown over the last years to reach 21.35% of the total prison population in 2016. In crimes linked to drugs, 33% of the people in the custody of the Federal Penitentiary Service are foreigners.”

The op-ed talks of Argentina as an open country. It does not mention that the drug cartels have taken notice.

Last year the WSJ reported that Argentina is becoming an international narcotics hub as cocaine traffickers have been flying south into Argentina from Bolivia:

Argentina doesn’t produce cocaine, but its porous borders, roads, rivers and ports make it a good transit point. Low chances of prosecution also attract drug dealers, says Patricia Bullrich, Argentina’s security minister.

Since 1999, Argentina has successfully prosecuted only seven money-laundering cases, according to the U.S. State Department’s latest international narcotics report. That record has inspired traffickers from Colombia, Peru and Mexico to buy luxury homes and farmland—which can accommodate clandestine airstrips—to evade tougher controls farther north in South America and secure profitable southern supply routes, officials say.

As you may recall, back in 2008 I posted on how Mexican drug cartels can use Argentina as an entry (ephedrine/pseudoephedrine) and exit (cocaine) point, as the country became a hub for U.S. methamphetamine and European cocaine. By 2013, Argentina was believed to supply 70 tons of cocaine a year to Europe, a third of its annual consumption.



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NYT, WaPo want sob stories

Scott Johnson and Paul Mirengoff post that The Former Newspaper and the WaPo are canvassing their readers

In what might be described as the journalism equivalent of ambulance chasing

for stories on

how their lives have been ruined by President Trump’s executive order on immigration.

Where were the NYT & the WaPo on Obama’s immigration record? (emphasis added)

Obama went from soliciting Latino votes in the 2008 election by promising to tackle immigration reform in his first 100 days to never getting around to crafting a remedy for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States.

And he went from criticizing the George W. Bush administration for sending federal agents to arrest nursing mothers who were “torn from their babies” to essentially deputizing, through Secure Communities, thousands of local and state police officers to enforce federal immigration law by checking the immigration status of anyone with whom they came in contact.

In recent weeks, the same person who – in August 2010 – signed a $600 million border security bill proposed by Senate Democrats that put more agents, fencing and equipment on the U.S.-Mexico border expressed worry about his successor’s plan to build a border wall.

It’s surreal to hear Obama and other Democrats express their indignation at the idea that people could be deported and families separated when, for the past eight years, this has been standard operating procedure for the Obama administration and the party that covered up for it.

There needs to be an honest and serious accounting of Obama’s cynical and cruel immigration record.

And yet we can’t very well expect the media to provide it

And to all of you hypocrites protesting at the airports,

the countries whose citizens are barred entirely from entering the United States is based on a bill that Obama [*] signed into law in December 2015.

Obama signed the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act as part of an omnibus spending bill.

Where were you then?

Related:
Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration – the full text

UPDATED
[*] The seven countries – Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Sudan and Syria – were designated as countries subject to restrictions for Visa Waiver Program travel for certain individuals under Pres. Obama

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Mexican woman arrested in Spain for inciting ISIS jihad

El País reports:
Mexican woman arrested in Madrid on terrorism charges. The detainee is said to be a “very important” figure in radical circles in her home country

Say again?
“The detainee is said to be a “very important” figure in radical circles in her home country”

Spanish authorities have accused the woman of glorifying terrorism and believe she was a part of a “stable structure” dedicated to the diffusion of extremely violent jihadist propaganda “using a range of online platforms and instant-messaging services,” Spain’s Interior Ministry said in a statement.

EN ESPAÑOL
Una mexicana, detenida en Madrid por enaltecer el terrorismo yihadista
Spanish authorities have accused the woman of glorifying terrorism and believe she was a part of a “stable structure” dedicated to the diffusion of extremely violent jihadist propaganda “using a range of online platforms and instant-messaging services,” Spain’s Interior Ministry said in a statement.

The detainee had already converted to Islam in 2010 before moving move to Spain, according to the Civil Guard. On her arrival in this country, she married a Muslim and began to spread radical messages.

“She managed to become one of the most important figures among women in the Islamic community in the country of her birth,” sources say, promoting female jihadism and sharing propaganda material with a wide range of contacts. [emphasis added]

The woman remains unnamed.

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Mexico wants respect UPDATE

Mexican president to Trump: My nation ‘demands respect’, while offering Mexicans illegally in the U.S. help in defying immigration laws (emphasis added):

Peña Nieto also highlighted Trump’s pledge to control migration into the U.S., reassuring Mexicans that their government will offer the protection Mexican immigrants require when they are in the United States. “I’ve ordered the Secretary of Exterior Affairs to reinforce the safety measures for our co-nationals. The 50 Mexican embassies will become authentic legal defense for immigrants,” Peña Nieto added

Last time I looked, there was one embassy and the rest are consulates, but I digress.

The government of Mexico has also spent money on a pamphlet that instructs migrants how to safely enter the United States illegally and live there without being detected. (I actually read one, on my own hands.)

For decades Mexico has not protected its own citizens from the cartels’ deadly human trafficking business,

To cross the Sasabe desert and go on to Arizona, migrants are told they must pay about $4,500 to the coyote, who is appointed by the cartels. They are also forced to pay an additional $700 in a separate “tax” to the criminal groups themselves.

At the church-run shelter, there were rumours that the week before, two Honduran migrants were murdered after they took the fatal decision to embark on the journey north without paying.

Indeed,

little attention is devoted to the role that the empowerment of Mexican drug cartels has played in reshaping the human smuggling dynamics in the last years. Until 2009, at least 47 independent cartels dedicated to human smuggling and human trafficking operated in Mexico. However, with the emergence of Los Zetas as an independent cartel in 2010 and the empowerment of the Cartel Del Golfo (CDG) in the last five years, the smaller cartels have been absorbed or destroyed, producing a dramatic change in the dynamics of human trafficking and human smuggling in the country.

Mexican drug cartels have identified a lucrative niche of opportunity in the geostrategic position of Mexico as “bridge country” for migration flows towards the U.S., and are now actively exploiting it. These organizations have vigorously seized the human smuggling activities in the southern and northern borders of Mexico, and have transformed them into diverse forms of trafficking and exploitation. Every year thousands of Central Americans fall prey to drug cartels while crossing the southern border of Mexico. The victims are frequently extorted, assaulted, and trafficked for forced labor and sexual exploitation within the country and in the United States.

Jason Poblete writes,

Mexico and other Central American nations need to get serious about border security within their region, as well as fixing the primary reason people try to leave: poverty and lack of economic opportunities, as well as rampant corruption and crime, lack of rule of law, among many other indicators that make life tough in these countries. This latter issue is a more long-term issue (one that the U.S. companies can help with), but border security within Central America can start today.

Respect is earned. When Mexico and the Central American countries stop seeing the U.S. as a pressure-release valve for their own countries’ problems, they won’t need to be asking for respect, they will be earning it.

Cross-posted at WoW! Magazine.

RELATED
Mexican woman arrested in Spain for inciting ISIS jihad

UPDATE
Mexican stand-off: Peña Nieto cancels next week’s meeting.
I was surprised Peña Nieto wanted to come this early in the game. Considering his popularity ratings, it would be insane for him to risk it.

And,
POBRE MEXICO, TAN LEJOS DE DIOS, TAN CERCA DE TRUMP

Nuestra angustia ante Trump debe ser una oportunidad y, en lugar de continuar montados en esa histeria colectiva, cambiemos nuestras actitudes para, enfocados, identificar esa oportunidad que el evento nos ofrece y no la vemos. Estamos furiosos porque Trump amenaza con deportar millones de paisanos. Vamos identificando el verdadero problema ¿Por qué esos millones de mexicanos fueron expulsados por Mexico? Trump quiere construir el muro ¿Por qué toneladas de droga cruzan esa frontera cada año? ¿Por qué miles de jovencitas son secuestradas por las mafias para, luego de cruzarlas ilegalmente, ser vendidas a los mercaderes del sexo? ¿Por qué la frontera es una zona de guerra por donde se trafican armas, dinero ilegal y cruzan hasta miembros de ISIS?

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Immigration: Central American border surge from the Northern Triangle

From the WSJ:
Central Americans Surge at Border Before Trump Takes Over. Migrants from violence-plagued El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala push north in anticipation of new administration’s tougher border measures

The U.S. Border Patrol apprehended 47,214 migrants along the southwest U.S. border in November, an increase of 44% compared with November 2015. It was the Border Patrol’s busiest month since June of 2014, when illegal entries from Central America were cresting.

Over the past six months, Border Patrol agents have caught nearly 240,000 migrants, an average of more than 1,300 a day—30% more than the same period a year earlier.

Click on the graph to read the article:

Related:
Assaults on Border Patrol Agents Up 230 Percent

More at InSight Crime:
Honduras news

Report Says El Salvador Gangs Have Created a Parallel State

Cargo Robberies in Northern Triangle Hamper Regional Commerce

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Mexico: How the Gulf Cartel processes its human cargo

Ildefonso Ortiz reports that, according to Mexico’s Federal Police, the Gulf Cartel controls all human smuggling in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, from the areas immediately south of the border from Starr County to the Gulf of Mexico,

The criminal organization divides the illegal immigrants by their country of origin and whether they have been previously deported. The immigrants who come from countries other than Mexico and have not been previously deported are pushed through certain well-known areas with a heavy presence of law enforcement. The move is aimed at not only tying down law enforcement resources but also taking advantage of the perceived lack of enforcement by the current administration.

According to the intelligence officials from Mexico, the immigrants are coached into requesting refugee status or told that once they are arrested they will be processed and given a “permiso”, the name misleadingly used by smugglers to refer to court documents setting their next immigration hearing. The immigrants who are from Mexico or have been previously deported are moved West to areas where cartel smugglers are able to get across the Rio Grande in a clandestine fashion.

Once illegal immigrants are in Texas, human smugglers take them to stash houses where they hold them in large numbers until they are able to prepare the next leg of the trip. In San Juan, Gonzalez’s officers have been targeting human stash house within the city. With the help of an awareness campaign, Gonzalez and his team have created a tip-line for citizens to report possible stash houses.

Full article here



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Mexico: 50,000 Haitians waiting to get into the U.S.

Elena Toledo reports that

Authorities ask Mexican solidarity towards Haitian immigrants (Sin Embargo)

Nearly 50,000 Haitian immigrants have been stranded in Brazil, and in the coming months will pass through Mexico in order to reach the United States.

President of Mexico’s National Commission of Human Rights (CNDH) Luis Raul Gonzalez said that the flow of Haitian immigrants to Mexico has become an issue over recent months as the increase has accelerated.

“The flow of people has increased rapidly in transit to the United States,” Gonzalez said at a news conference Monday.

The transit is from Brazil into Mexico into the U.S., and it’s getting so out of hand that Mexicans are starting to ask for a wall on the country’s southern border.

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The pre-debate Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean

Yes, there’s a presidential debate tonight. Meh.

ARGENTINA
Argentina plans eurobond

Probe into Nisman’s death will go to federal courts

Stiuso habló de una “guerra” entre espías tras la muerte de Nisman. La versión del ex director de la SIDE sobre su pelea con el espionaje K

En su testimonio, afirmó que se dio una orden ilegal a Migraciones para saber sus movimientos, reveló el dueño de un teléfono clave y vinculó a Aníbal Fernandéz.

Argentina Seeks To Export Its Human Rights Policy

BOLIVIA
“Narcos”. Artículo completo de Veja sobre Evo y Álvaro – Evo Morales and his vice-president Álvaro García Linera, investigated by the DEA.

Give it up, Evo: Bolivia’s Morales accuses Chile of restricting access to ports

BRAZIL
Brazil’s Supreme Court Gives OK to Open Probe of New President Temer

Judge approves preliminary investigation, which is based on plea-bargain testimony by a key witness that implicates President Michel Temer, other PMDB members

CHILE
CIA found ‘convincing evidence’ Chilean dictator was behind 1976 D.C. attack

The latest revelations about the Cold War-era case come on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Orlando Letelier, a leading opponent of the Pinochet regime and onetime Chilean foreign minister, and his think-tank colleague, Ronni Moffitt, in a car bomb on D.C.’s Embassy Row.

COLOMBIA
“The FARC’s abortionist confessed to [performing] 400+ abortions on abused girls. Is there pardon, justice, and reparation?”

CUBA
How Kim (DPRK) and Castro (Cuba) Blackmail Abe (Japan)

Nearly on a monthly basis, some senior North Korean is on a “working visit” to Cuba. Or some senior Cuban regime official is on a “working visit” to North Korea.

With the exception of China, there’s no other nation in the world that North Korean officials visit with such frequency.

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
Dominican Republic’s Former Anti-Drug Chief Sentenced to 20 Years

ECUADOR
Ecuadorian Police Oust Dozens of Cubans Demanding Visas from Quito Park

IMMIGRATION
HILLARY: THE THIRD WORLD HAS A “RIGHT” TO MOVE TO THE UNITED STATES. No, they don’t.

JAMAICA
American says he wants to protect Jamaica’s natural ganja

MEXICO
Priest Killings Highlight Mexico Govt’s Credibility Problem

NICARAGUA
Nicaragua rejects U.S. bill for loans with strings attached (emphasis added)
The Nicaraguan government was responding to the Nicaraguan Investment Conditionality Act, a bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday. A version was introduced by Senator Ted Cruz in the U.S. Senate earlier this month.

Nicaragua on Thursday criticized a proposal by U.S. lawmakers that would require the Central American country, which will hold elections in November, to make political changes in order to receive international loans.
. . .
The Nicaraguan government was responding to the Nicaraguan Investment Conditionality Act, a bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday. A version was introduced by Senator Ted Cruz in the U.S. Senate earlier this month.

The bill proposes blocking Nicaragua from obtaining loans from international financial institutions unless the country “is taking effective steps to hold free, fair, and transparent elections.”

On Nov. 6, Nicaraguans will vote for president and 90 members of the National Assembly.

President Daniel Ortega is the favorite as he seeks his third consecutive term.

PANAMA
Smithsonian opens climate change lab in Panama

PARAGUAY
Polka lessons

Budgets have been roughly in balance and public debt is low. The central bank aims for an inflation rate of 4.5% and usually gets close. Commercial banks are healthy (in part because they charge high interest rates and face little competition). Regulation, like the tax code, is business-friendly. Independent trade unions, suppressed under Stroessner, are weak.

PERU
Peru President Says Unasur Unable to Resolve Venezuela Crisis

PUERTO RICO
Where were you when the lights went out? The Puerto Rico blackout, from space

URUGUAY
More on Abu Wa’el Dhiab: Uruguay says ex-Gitmo detainee demands exceed government

“The Uruguayan government is doing everything possible,” Vazquez said. “But as I’ve said in the past: If the countries where the Syrian citizen wants to go don’t take him, we can’t do anything about it.”

VENEZUELA
Military and Police Corruption: Venezuela’s Growing Evil



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