After Venezuela, Trump hints the entire hemisphere is in play

As President Donald Trump announced Saturday that the U.S. would “run” Venezuela for now, he and top aides made clear that the U.S. may not stop there — and demanded that the rest of the world take note.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said Venezuela’s long-time dictator, Nicolas Maduro, captured in an overnight raid and extradited to New York on Saturday to be indicted on narco-conspiracy charges, “had a chance” to leave on his own before becoming the latest example of a leader paying a high price for not responding to Trump’s pressure.

“He effed around and he found out,” Hegseth said of Maduro.

The menacing comments were interwoven with specific threats toward three other countries that could soon be in the administration’s sights: Colombia, Cuba and Mexico.

The rest of the hemisphere is paying attention, and attempting to push back on Trump through condemnations of the strike itself and warnings of what could come next.

“All nations of the region must remain alert, as the threat hangs over all,” the Cuban government said in a statement.

The administration’s warnings, meanwhile, are getting bolder and more definitive. Trump again accused Colombia’s president of “making cocaine” and reaffirmed his past threats that he “does need to watch his ass.” He predicted “we will be talking about Cuba.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered a more sinister threat of future American action.

“Look, if I lived in Havana and I worked in the government, I’d be concerned,” Rubio said.

Earlier during a phone interview with Fox News, Trump warned that “something will have to be done about Mexico,” stating that he’s asked President Claudia Sheinbaum if she wants the U.S. military’s “help” in rooting out drug cartels.

“American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again,” Trump said.

Read the rest here.

Trump Launches Trade War with China, Mexico & Canada (JP Morgan Chase Stockpiles Gold)

President Donald Trump has signed tariffs on goods coming into the U.S. from Canada, Mexico and China, the White House said Saturday, raising the risk of a trade war with America’s closest trading partners and threatening to drive up prices on everything from cars to avocados.

It is unclear when the tariffs will take effect.

Canadian energy products would have a lower tariff rate of 10%.

Trump said he was imposing the tariffs because he claimed the countries were allowing fentanyl to come into the U.S. More than 107,000 people died from drug overdose in 2023, with nearly 70% of those deaths from opioids, including fentanyl. Trump also said the tariffs were in response to a trade deficit between the U.S. and the three countries because the U.S. imports more from them than it exports.

Economists across the political spectrum expect tariffs to increase what consumers pay for a range of goods, including vehicles, electronics, produce and lumber. Tariffs are paid by companies importing goods into the U.S., similar to a tax.

Read the rest here

Meanwhile, JP Morgan Chase is airlifting $4 billion in gold bullion to its New York vaults.

Mexico: Evangelical Protestants are gaining ground

The Catholic majority in Mexico is slipping, as Protestants surpassed 10 percent of the population in the country for the first time ever.

According to recently released data from Mexico’s 2020 census, the Protestant/evangelical movement increased from 7.5 percent in 2010 to 11.2 percent last year.

The Catholic Church has historically dominated the religious landscape across Latin America, but especially in Mexico, which ranks among the most heavily Catholic countries in the region. Today, though an overwhelming majority of Mexicans still identify as Catholic, declines are accelerating.

It took 50 years—from 1950 to 2000—for the proportion of Catholics in Mexico to drop from 98 percent to 88 percent. Now, only two decades later, that percentage has slipped another 10 points to 77.7 percent.

Read the rest here.

Defying Conventional Wisdom, Mexico's Leftist President Rejects Bailouts and Stimulus Spending

MEXICO CITY — For the second time in a month, top business leaders sat down with Mexico’s president to implore him to do more to save the economy.

People were losing jobs by the tens of thousands, they warned. Small and medium-size companies, which employ more than 70 percent of the Mexican work force, were running out of cash. The government needed to intervene, they argued. The data was irrefutable.

“I have other data,” shrugged the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, according to two businesspeople with direct knowledge of that conversation in April. “You do whatever you think you need to do, and I’ll do what I need to do.”

Across the globe, governments have rushed to pump cash into flailing economies, hoping to stave off the pandemic’s worst financial fallout.

They have mustered trillions of dollars for stimulus measures to keep companies afloat and employees on the payroll. The logic: When the pandemic finally passes, economies will not have to start from scratch to bounce back.

In Mexico, no such rescue effort has come. The pandemic could lead to an economic reckoning worse than anything Mexico has seen in perhaps a century. More jobs were lost in April than were created in all of 2019. A recent report by a government agency said as many as 10 million people could fall into poverty this year.

Yet most economists estimate that Mexico will increase spending only slightly — by less than 1 percent of its economy — a small amount compared with many large nations.

The reason? Critics and supporters agree: Mr. López Obrador.

Hostile toward bailouts, loath to take on public debt and deeply mistrustful of most business leaders, Mexico’s president has opted largely to sit tight despite what is expected to be widespread pain up and down the economic ladder.

Read the rest here.

The Times is obviously not happy. But while Mexico may endure some serious near term pain, in the long run they may emerge in a much stronger position economically than many of their neighbors, both south and north of their border, by not saddling their people with staggering levels of debt.

Mexico — What Went Wrong?

Mexico gets a massive cash influx in remittances, American corporations get cheap labor, Democrats get voters . . .

Mexico in just a few days could elect one of its more anti-American figures in recent memory, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Obrador has often advanced the idea that a strangely aggrieved Mexico has the right to monitor the status of its citizens living illegally in the United States. Lately, he trumped that notion of entitlement by assuring fellow Mexicans that they have a “human right” to enter the United States as they please. For Obrador, this is an innate privilege that he promised “we will defend” — without offering any clarification on the meaning of “defend” other than to render meaningless the historic notion of borders and sovereignty.

Obrador went on to urge his fellow Mexicans to “leave their towns and find a life in the United States.” He has naturally developed such a mindset because he assumes as normal what has become, by any fair standard, a historically abnormal relationship.

Obrador is determined to perpetuate, if not enhance, the asymmetry. In the age of Trump, Obrador also reasons that the furor and hysteria of the American media toward the president represents a majority and a domestic grassroots pushback against the Trump administration — apparently because of Trump’s “restrictionist” view of enforcing existing immigration law. Polls, however, suggest otherwise, despite their notorious embedded anti-Trump bias.

Mexico, the Aggressor

Facts are stubborn and reveal Mexico, not the United States, as a de facto aggressor and belligerent on many fronts. Mexico runs a NAFTA-protected $70 billion trade surplus with the U.S., larger than that of any other single American trade partner (including Japan and Germany) except China. The architects of NAFTA long ago assured Americans that such a trade war would not break out, or that we should not worry over trade imbalances, given the desirability of outsourcing to take advantage of Mexico’s cheaper labor costs.

A supposedly affluent Mexico was supposed to achieve near parity with the U.S., as immigration and trade soon neutralized. Despite Mexico’s economic growth, no such symmetry has followed NAFTA. What did, however, 34 years later, was the establishment of a dysfunctional Mexican state, whose drug cartels all but run the country on the basis of their enormous profits from unfettered dope-running and human-trafficking into the United States. NAFTA certainly did not make Mexico a safer, kinder, and gentler nation.

In addition, Mexican citizens who enter and reside as illegal immigrants in the U.S. are mostly responsible for sending an approximate $30 billion in remittances home to Mexico. That sum has now surpassed oil and tourism as the largest source of Mexican foreign exchange. That huge cash influx is the concrete reality behind Obrador’s otherwise unhinged rhetoric about exercising veto power over U.S. immigration law.

What is also unsaid is that many of the millions of Mexican expatriates in the United States who send remittances home to Mexico are themselves beneficiaries of some sort of U.S. federal, state, or local support that allows them to free up cash to send back to Mexico.

When Obrador urges his fellow citizens to abandon their country and head illegally into the United States, his primary concern is not their general welfare and futures. He seems quite unconcerned that those who send home remittances live in poverty in the United States and seek offsetting subsidies from the U.S. government to find enough disposable income to save the Mexican government from its mostly corrupt self.

Why the U.S. government does not tax remittances and why it does not prohibit foreign nationals on public assistance from sending cash out of the country are some of the stranger phenomena of the entire strange illegal-immigration matrix.

Read the rest here.

On a related note; I talked about this back in 2011. You can read that blog post here.

Darwin Award Contenders

The two most abundent things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.

MEXICO CITY — The carjackers who set off international alarm bells by absconding with a truckload of highly radioactive material most likely had no idea what they were stealing and will probably die soon from exposure, Mexican authorities said at the end of a brief national scare.

From here.

I am really struggling to find some sympathy for these guys. They didn't just steal the truck, they jumped and beat the drivers. There is a really good chance they are members of an organized crime ring. That said there is nothing I own that is worth my life or that of anybody else.

But then again, I don't own anything that could be used to make a poor man's nuke.

Finally some love from south of the border

Via the MCJ, Mexico seems to have found some appreciation for us. Though I fear it will be short lived.

Mexico to rethink drug war after two states legalize pot

MEXICO CITY — The decision by voters in Colorado and Washington state to legalize the recreational use of marijuana has left Mexican President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto and his team scrambling to reformulate their anti-drug strategies in light of what one senior aide said was a referendum that “changes the rules of the game.”

It is too early to know what Mexico’s response to the successful ballot measures will be, but a top aide said Peña Nieto and members of his incoming administration will discuss the issue with President Obama and congressional leaders in Washington this month. The legalization votes, however, are expected to spark a broad debate in Mexico about the direction and costs of the U.S.-backed drug war here.

Read the rest here.

Mexico has been brutalized by America's hopeless attempt at prohibition.

Wal-Mart hushed up vast Mexico bribery case

MEXICO CITY — In September 2005, a senior Wal-Mart lawyer received an alarming e-mail from a former executive at the company’s largest foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico. In the e-mail and follow-up conversations, the former executive described how Wal-Mart de Mexico had orchestrated a campaign of bribery to win market dominance. In its rush to build stores, he said, the company had paid bribes to obtain permits in virtually every corner of the country.

The former executive gave names, dates and bribe amounts. He knew so much, he explained, because for years he had been the lawyer in charge of obtaining construction permits for Wal-Mart de Mexico.

Wal-Mart dispatched investigators to Mexico City, and within days they unearthed evidence of widespread bribery. They found a paper trail of hundreds of suspect payments totaling more than $24 million. They also found documents showing that Wal-Mart de Mexico’s top executives not only knew about the payments, but had taken steps to conceal them from Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. In a confidential report to his superiors,
Wal-Mart’s lead investigator, a former F.B.I. special agent, summed up their initial findings this way: “There is reasonable suspicion to believe that Mexican and USA laws have been violated.”
The lead investigator recommended that Wal-Mart expand the investigation.

Instead, an examination by The New York Times found, Wal-Mart’s leaders shut it down. 

Read the rest here.

Debate rages over Mexico 'spillover violence' in U.S.

TUCSON -- On an isolated ranch 10 miles from the Mexican border in southern Arizona, Tangye Beckham worries about what the night will bring. That's usually when her family's 100-acre ranch begins to crawl with drug and immigrant traffickers from Mexico heading north into the United States.

"They're belligerent, they carry weapons," she said. "It's a nightly problem with them being on the property. They've already tried to break in."

Recently, as she was closing one of her gates in the pre-dawn hours, Beckham found herself surrounded by a group of illegal immigrants and feared being attacked. By running to her car, she said, she was able to get away, badly shaken. Two mountain ranges away, ranchers Christin Peterson and Sonny McCuistion have the same problem with armed Mexican smugglers crossing their properties. "It's upsetting and there's a lot of them. It hasn't decreased; there's a lot of traffic," said Peterson.

Read the rest here.

Along Mexican border, US ranchers say they live in fear

FALFURRIAS, Texas — While walking along a dirt road bordering his property, a South Texas farmer complained about living in fear of Mexican traffickers smuggling drugs and illegal immigrants across his land. He would later ask his visitor not to reveal his identity, for his safety and that of his family.

"I'm a citizen of the United States. This is supposedly sovereign soil, but right now it's anybody's who happens to be crossing here," he said. "I'm a little nervous being here right now. Definitely don’t come down here after dark."

The farmer said a federal law enforcement agent told him to buy a bulletproof vest to use while working in his fields. Whenever he goes out to survey his agricultural operations, he always tells his office where he is headed, and he has purchased a high-powered rifle.

"One of the basic points of the federal government is to protect the people of this nation to secure the border, and they're not doing that," he complained.

Read the rest here.

Obama backs US attorney general amid gun scandal

WASHINGTON — U.S. President Barack Obama said Thursday he fully supported Attorney General Eric Holder, who has come under scrutiny after a botched operation to track guns smuggled to Mexican drug cartels.

"I have complete confidence in Attorney General Holder," Obama said at a news conference. "He has been very aggressive in going after gun running and cash transactions that are going to these transnational drug cartels in Mexico."

The backing comes as Holder has been under fire over when and what he knew about the bungled operation, known as "Fast and Furious," that was aimed at tracking guns from the United States to violent Mexican drug cartels.

Read the rest here.

Rick Perry is open to invading Mexico (updated)

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Saturday that he would consider sending U.S. troops into Mexico to combat drug-related violence and stop it from spilling into the southern United States.

“It may require our military in Mexico,” Perry said in answer to a question about the growing threat of drug violence along the southern border. Perry offered no details, and a spokesman, Robert Black, said afterward that sending troops to Mexico would be merely one way of putting an end to the exploding cartel-related violence in the region.

Read the rest here.

Update: The NY Times now reports that Gov. Perry has clarified his earlier remarks to assure people that US troops would only enter Mexico with the permission of that country (ocasión gorda).

Mexico City considers 2-year marriage licence

Lawmakers in Mexico City are proposing a new marriage licence that would allow couples to split after a two-year trial rather than go through the lengthier divorce process.

Instead of the traditional 'till death to us part,' couples would be able to opt for temporary commitments, test out married life, and then renew their licenses indefinitely if they are still devoted to their chosen spouse.

The proposed law would not help those with morning-after regrets. Couples who want to dissolve the marriage before two years would have to go through regular divorce proceedings.

"Two years is the minimum amount of time it takes to know and appreciate what life is like as a couple," Lizbeth Rosas, who is spearheading the proposed legislation on behalf of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, said to BBC Mundo in Spanish.

"If you renew, that means you have an understanding with your partner, and that you are clear on the rules of the relationship."

If the marriage is unhappy or unstable, the contract — which would include clauses on custody rights and the division of property — could be dissolved without what proponents refer to as cumbersome paperwork that hurts families.

Read the rest here.

Illegal Mexican fishing kills thousands of sharks in US waters

Game wardens have discovered as many as 3,000 dead adult and juvenile sharks tangled in a long stretch of illegal fishing netting off the Texas coast, the state's Parks and Wildlife Department said...

...Authorities suspect Mexican fishermen set the illegal nets.

According to KGBT-TV, overfishing has destroyed the populations of fish on the Mexican side of the border, and Mexican fishermen regularly sneak into the U.S. to lay illegal nets.

"They get over here in a matter of two minutes and be back in Mexico in a matter of two minutes ... The guys we have caught in the past have flat told us that there are no more fish over there and that is why they are coming over here," Dunks said.

Read the rest here.

Texas Executes Mexican National Despite Treaty Violation

HUNTSVILLE, Texas — Texas executed a Mexican citizen Thursday for the rape-slaying of a teenager after he and the White House pleaded in vain for a Supreme Court stay, saying he was denied help from his home country that could have helped him avoid the death penalty.

In his last minutes, Humberto Leal repeatedly said he was sorry and accepted responsibility...

...Leal was just a toddler when he and his family moved to the U.S. from Monterrey, Mexico, but his citizenship became a key element of his attorneys’ efforts to win a stay. They said police never told him following his arrest that he could seek legal assistance from the Mexican government under an international treaty.

Read the rest here.

Special report: If Monterrey falls, Mexico falls

Reuters) - Mario Ramos thought it was a bad joke when he received an anonymous email at the start of this year demanding $15,000 a month to keep his industrial tubing business operating in Monterrey, Mexico's richest city and a symbol of progress in Latin America.

Sitting in his air-conditioned office looking across at sparkling office blocks dotting the mountains on that morning in January, he casually deleted the email as spam.

Six days later, the phone rang and a thickset voice demanded the money. Ramos panicked, hung up and drove to his in-laws' house. It was already late and he had little idea what to do. Then, just after midnight, masked gunmen burst onto his premises, set fire to one of his trucks, shot up his office windows and sprayed a nearby wall with the letter "Z" in black paint, the calling card of Mexico's feared Zetas drug cartel.

"They were asking for money I could never afford," said Ramos by telephone from San Antonio, Texas, where he fled with his family the next day. "I should have taken the threat more seriously, but it was such a shock. I couldn't quite believe this could happen in Monterrey."

In just four years, Monterrey, a manufacturing city of 4 million people 140 miles from the Texan border, has gone from being a model for developing economies to a symbol of Mexico's drug war chaos, sucked down into a dark spiral of gangland killings, violent crime and growing lawlessness.

Read the rest here.
HT: T-19

I addressed Mexico in a post back on January 2nd.

Mexican Church Takes a Closer Look at Donors

PACHUCA, Mexico — The large orange chapel here, with its towering cross, would be just another Roman Catholic church if not for a bronze plaque announcing that it was “donated by Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano” — better known as “the executioner,” commander of the ruthless crime syndicate called the Zetas.

The nameplate goes on to quote Psalm 143: “Lord, hear my prayer, answer my plea.” But Mexican Catholics are the ones struggling with how to respond.

Ever since the chapel’s financing spawned a government investigation four months ago, the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico has been trying to confront its historic ties to drug traffickers. Long dependent on gifts, but often less than discriminating about where they come from, the church is grappling with its role as thousands die in turf wars among rich, and sometimes generous, criminals.

“The chapel put the entire church in Mexico on alert,” said the Rev. Hugo Valdemar, a spokesman for the country’s largest archdiocese, in Mexico City. “As a result, our public posture has changed, and become much tougher.”

The church has indeed gone further than before, with public pledges to reject “narcolimosnas,” or “narco alms,” and priests linked to traffickers. A handful of outspoken bishops have also stepped up condemnations of both the cartels and the government’s militaristic efforts to stop them.

Read the rest here.

Mexico: The greatest threat to American national security

Forget Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran and North Korea. They are all on the other side of the world. And while what goes on there is not unimportant, they don't border the United States. Mexico does. And right now Mexico is dangerously close to collapsing into near total anarchy.

There is a technical term for this. It is called a "failed state." Several years ago Mexico declared war on the drug cartels that have been running much of the country for years. As of right now that war is going very very badly. Massive efforts by the police (hugely corrupt) and even the armed forces to reign in the drug gangs which operate like feudal lords over whole swaths of the nation have merely provoked an almost unimaginably horrific backlash.

Violence directed at both the government and rival gangs has reached levels that make Afghanistan look relatively safe by comparison. Mass murders, kidnappings, torture (often videoed and posted on the internet) have become so commonplace that a powerful sense of defeatism has set in at every level of society. Confidence in the government is now all but extinct. Not long ago one of Mexico's leading newspapers responded to the most recent kidnapping and torture-murder of one of its reporters by posting a front page open letter from the paper's editors to the drug cartels. In the letter they asked for instructions on what they would be permitted to print in order to avoid any further killings of their staff.

All of this of course is being supported by the United States. Even as our government aggressively encourages Mexico to carry on a war that almost everyone admits is lost we are bankrolling the drug cartels with tens of billions of dollars from the underground drug trade and providing the Narcos with an arsenal that most third world countries would envy in the form of American made firearms and ammunition smuggled and often even openly carried across the border from the United States into Mexico. I am not talking just hunting rifles and shotguns folks. I am talking about .50 caliber rifles that can be legally bought at gun shows in Texas and that will punch holes in "bulletproof" glass along with even more lethal weapons of war.

I suppose we could call it reciprocal trade. They send us thousands of tons of narcotics and a million or so illegal immigrants every year and we send them billions in Narco money and enough guns and ammunition to fight a very real war. (A war that the Narcos are currently winning.) On second thought maybe we should call this Santa-Anna's revenge.

In any case entire cities are being abandoned by desperate and frightened people. Terror now stalks Mexico. And terrified people who have lost any trust or respect for their government, and any confidence in the rule of law are dangerous. In some ways perhaps as dangerous as the Narcos. I don't care how isolationist you are. Mexico is too close to ignore. What happens there affects us.

If Mexico disintegrates into anarchy (a very real possibility), the spill over is going to hit us like a brick in the face. If you think we have an immigration problem now just wait until a nation where 112 million people are faced with living in an utterly lawless society ruled by armed gangs with little hope of even being able to keep their families from starvation. A society where the economy and every aspect of a normal civilized society that we take for granted breaks down.

There will be a human tidal wave rolling across our southern border. And we won't be able to stop it unless we are prepared to order troops to fire on civilians, whole families, including women and children. We are already seeing a small foretaste of this. Many of the illegals here are coming not just in search of a better job or money, but to escape a world where they or their family members can be robbed, kidnapped, raped or murdered at any time with impunity. And of course these won't be the only ones rolling across the border.

The drug cartels will be coming with them. And again there is evidence that some of them have already begun moving into the United States. And lest there be any doubt on the subject, these are not people who are intimidated by our legal system. They shoot cops for sport and ambush military convoys to send a message about who is in charge.

This country had better start thinking about our backyard a little bit more. Mexico is far more dangerous than Al Qaida right now. We need to completely reconsider our attitudes about a whole range of issues before it's too late. I would suggest we start with prohibition. I am not wild about people using narcotics or selling them over the counter at the local pharmacy. But we need to face some painful facts. The war on drugs is over, and we lost. All we have done is spend billions of dollars criminalizing a very large percentage of our population and warehousing them at great expense in prisons, where we turn mostly non-violent consensual offenders into violent and hardened criminals. Because that is what prisons do.

And then of course there are the tens of billions we are sending to Mexican drug cartels because we are too stubborn to face the reality that if just legalized the damned drugs it would put most of them out of business overnight. Teenagers who now kill each other over who has the commercial rights to which street corner are not going to be doing that when a hit of your drug of choice can be bought legally in a drugstore for about 20 cents. There is no percentage in it.

On the other hand if we are not prepared to end this insane war we had better start rethinking the rules of engagement. Because the drug cartels are not paying much attention to the Geneva Convention. How far are we prepared to go to block out the humanitarian catastrophe in Mexico that we are engineering? How much power are we prepared to hand to the government to deal with ultra-violent cartels as they begin moving into the United States? Are we prepared to suspend Habeus Corpus? What about martial law?

Where are we going to lock all of these people up? Our prisons are already exploding in population. And we won't be able to deport people to a country that will have effectively ceased to exist. And where are we going to get the money to fight the next stage of the failed war on drugs? From a Congress dominated by people who have a stroke of apoplexy at the mere mention of the word "tax?"

Just some food for thought. But I would strongly suggest we start thinking hard, and fast. Time is not on our side.

It's time to end prohibition

Mexico is complaining (rightly IMO) about our demand for illegal drugs. My response is here.