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mistersandmanPresident Obama has denied that rising violence is making Mexico more and more like Colombia at the height of its drugs war.
The remark is an apparent contradiction to comments made by his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.
She said on Wednesday that the drug war in Mexico had begun to resemble the violence in Colombia 20 years ago. But Mr Obama told a US Spanish-language newspaper that there was no comparison between the two.
"Mexico is vast and progressive democracy, with a growing economy, and as a result you cannot compare what is happening in Mexico with what happened in Colombia 20 years ago," he told the Los Angeles-based daily La Opinion.
Mrs Clinton made her remarks after a foreign policy speech at a think tank in Washington.
Drug cartels, she said, were "showing more and more indices of insurgencies".
The traffickers were "in some cases, morphing into or making common cause with what we would consider an insurgency in Mexico and in Central America", she said.
The violence was beginning to resemble Colombia of 20 years ago when insurgent groups controlled some 40% of the country, Mrs Clinton added.
Mexico rejected Mrs Clinton's analogy.
Speaking in Mexico City, a government spokesman said the only aspect that the Mexican and Colombian conflicts share is their root cause - a high demand for drugs in the US.
More than 28,000 people have died in drug-related violence in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon deployed the army to fight the cartels in 2006 and violence has spilled over into Central America.
Source
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Recent advances in the War on Drugs aside, why would President Obama contradict Hillary Clinton? If drug cartels are indeed linked to insurgency groups, perhaps Obama wants to avoid getting the whole War on Terror thing mixed up in the smorgasbord of issues the United States currently faces with its southern neighbor, immigration being the hot topic of the hour.
As part of the Merida Initiative passed in 2008, Congress allotted 1.6 billion dollars over three years to combat drug trafficking, etc. While this brings up some awkward questions of sovereignty, the fact remains that without America, the drug trade in Mexico (and Columbia for that matter) may never have become an issue. This poster wonders what effect legal marijuana in the US would have on Mexican drug cartels.
The remark is an apparent contradiction to comments made by his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.
She said on Wednesday that the drug war in Mexico had begun to resemble the violence in Colombia 20 years ago. But Mr Obama told a US Spanish-language newspaper that there was no comparison between the two.
"Mexico is vast and progressive democracy, with a growing economy, and as a result you cannot compare what is happening in Mexico with what happened in Colombia 20 years ago," he told the Los Angeles-based daily La Opinion.
Mrs Clinton made her remarks after a foreign policy speech at a think tank in Washington.
Drug cartels, she said, were "showing more and more indices of insurgencies".
The traffickers were "in some cases, morphing into or making common cause with what we would consider an insurgency in Mexico and in Central America", she said.
The violence was beginning to resemble Colombia of 20 years ago when insurgent groups controlled some 40% of the country, Mrs Clinton added.
Mexico rejected Mrs Clinton's analogy.
Speaking in Mexico City, a government spokesman said the only aspect that the Mexican and Colombian conflicts share is their root cause - a high demand for drugs in the US.
More than 28,000 people have died in drug-related violence in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon deployed the army to fight the cartels in 2006 and violence has spilled over into Central America.
Source
---
Recent advances in the War on Drugs aside, why would President Obama contradict Hillary Clinton? If drug cartels are indeed linked to insurgency groups, perhaps Obama wants to avoid getting the whole War on Terror thing mixed up in the smorgasbord of issues the United States currently faces with its southern neighbor, immigration being the hot topic of the hour.
As part of the Merida Initiative passed in 2008, Congress allotted 1.6 billion dollars over three years to combat drug trafficking, etc. While this brings up some awkward questions of sovereignty, the fact remains that without America, the drug trade in Mexico (and Columbia for that matter) may never have become an issue. This poster wonders what effect legal marijuana in the US would have on Mexican drug cartels.
