- Mexican Defense Department’s Response to Shootouts, Chaos in Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros: “No Immediate Information”
- US Tourist Gunned Down in Ciudad Juarez, El Paso Resident Jose Gil Hernandez a Texas National Guardsman
- Cartel Gunmen Murder Mayor of Praxedis Guerrero, Near Ciudad Juarez; 12th Such Assassination for 2010
- Narcistas Lob Grenade at Army Barracks in Matamoros, One Soldier Injured; Follows Failed Grenade Attack at Same Location Last Week
Pictured above: On October 20 a Mexican soldier guards packages of marijuana being incinerated after army and police seized 134 tons of US-bound pot in Tijuana.
Between October 18 and 19, Salvadoran Foreign Affairs Minister Hugo Martinez visited Berlin and, then, flew on to Moscow, where he will stay until October 23.
In Germany, Martinez made preparations for next year’s official visit by President Mauricio Funes, who represents the ruling Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). Martinez met German Foreign Minister Wido Westerwelle and Economic Cooperation and Development Minister Dirk Niebel, both of whom visited San Salvador last week. A statement released by the Salvadoran government quoted Martinez as saying: “Germany is the main buyer of Salvadoran products in Europe and a strategic partner in our coffee exports.” Intriguingly, El Salvador’s FM also planned to confer with members of two left-wing German think tanks, the Friedrich Ebert and Rosa Luxemburg foundations.
The Friedrich Ebert Foundation is named after Germany’s first democratically elected president and connected to the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation is named after a German communist who supported the Spartacist uprising in January 1919 but was later executed by the new republican government. It is associated with the German Left Party, which traces its origin to the Socialist Unity Party, the Marxist-Leninist party that ruled Soviet-occupied East Germany. The Left Party operates in a political "grey zone" since the federal government in Berlin views some factions of the party as subversive to Germany's constitutional prohibition against "extremism."
In November 2009, the German Left Party, FMLN, and communists from around the world sent delegates to Caracas, where they rallied behind Hugo Chavez’s call for a “Fifth Socialist International,” an entity that is unquestionably more left wing in its aims than even the more well-known (Third) Socialist International. It may be that the “Fifth Socialist International” was the subject of Martinez’s conference with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.
On October 21, Martinez arrived in Moscow, where he will start the first official visit by a Salvadoran foreign minister since the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1992. In Russia, Martinez and his counterpart will sign a memorandum of understanding on cooperation in the areas of disaster management and increased trade. Although the news story linked above does not say expressly so, it would appear that Funes will also visit Russia after stopping over in Germany. Previously, the US-backed governments that ruled El Salvador during the 1980s shunned Russia, rightly perceiving the Soviet Union as one of the main sources of weapons and ideological inspiration for the FMLN, then a guerrilla army.
Russia holds observer status in the Organization of American States, which it uses for promoting its interests in the region, including the Inter-American Committee against Terrorism and the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission. In 1997, Russia gained observer status in the Association of the Caribbean States and, in 2004, Russia and the Central American Integration System signed a memorandum of understanding that laid down a legal foundation for political interaction. In November 2008, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, while visiting Caracas, articulated Moscow’s interest in joining the Havana/Caracas-led Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, a bloc of socialist states committed to exporting anti-capitalist principles and anti-USA sentiments throughout the Western Hemisphere.
On Thursday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed reports that the Kremlin demanded that El Salvador recognize Georgia’s breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent republics. “We didn't ask our Salvadorian colleagues to recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia,” huffed Lavrov to journalists after talks with Martinez. He added: “We just discussed the situation around these republics, including the United Nations' repeated efforts to politicize the humanitarian problems that appeared after Georgia attacked South Ossetia and the [Russian] peacemakers [peacekeeping soldiers].”
Russia recognized the separatist regions after fighting a five-day war with Georgia in August 2008. Thus far, the communist regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua, as well as the South Pacific nation of Nauru, have followed Russia’s lead, resulting in significant financial and commercial perks for Moscow’s allies. This past June, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov visited El Salvador and held consultations with Martinez.
Meanwhile, last Saturday, in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, Rito Grado Serrano, mayor of the town of Praxedis Guerrero, and his son were gunned down by assailants at their home. Grado is the 12th Mexican mayor to be killed so far this year. Praxedis Guerrero is near war-torn Ciudad Juarez where, over the last two months alone, 7,000 soldiers have failed to prevent the murder of more than 500 people. In spite of some high-profile drug lord arrests in 2010, it is estimated that more than 28,000 people have died in drug-related violence throughout Mexico since 2006.
Several days later, on Wednesday, Mexican soldiers battled cartel gunmen in Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa, which are across the border from Laredo and McAllen, Texas, respectively. The US consulate in Nuevo Laredo warned US citizens to stay indoors, reporting that drug gangs had blocked at least one intersection near the consulate. The city government and witnesses reported several more blockades, a new tactic that has emerged this year in northeast Mexico, where the Gulf and Los Zetas cartels are battling to control the drug trade.
Shootouts also erupted in Reynosa, which is allegedly under the near-total control of criminal mafias, causing a massive traffic jam in the highway connecting the city with Monterrey and Matamoros, which is across the border from Brownsville, Texas. In yet another sign of the Mexican government’s barely effective response to the narco-insurgency, officials at the press office of the Defense Department indicated they had “no immediate information” on the shootouts.
In Matamoros itself, narcistas hurled a grenade at a military barracks. Five civilian passers-by and one soldier were lightly injured. The grenade exploded less than one week after another attack on the barracks, in which at least two grenades failed to detonate.
In war-wracked Ciudad Juarez, which is across the border from El Paso, a US tourist was reportedly one of two men killed, apparently caught in the cross-fire between rival drug gangs. Spokesman Arturo Sandoval of the Chihuahua state attorney general's office says family members identified the Texas National Guard soldier as 21-year-old Jose Gil Hernandez.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s El Paso spokesman, Michael Martinez, told The El Paso Times that Hernandez was shot about 1 p.m. Wednesday in Ciudad Juarez’s Colonia Revolucion Mexicanaz. Martinez told the newspaper that the FBI and the US Army’s Criminal Investigation Division were looking into the details of the shooting. More than 50 US citizens have been killed in the past two years in Ciudad Juarez.
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