UPDATE: A senior Obama administration official told CNN late Saturday that Chavez had asked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to consider the return of US and Venezuelan ambassadors to their posts in Caracas and Washington. The official endorsed the initiative, “This is a positive development that will help advance U.S. interests. And, the State Department will now work to further this shared goal.”
No doubt, we will now have lots of media frothing about Obama’s appeasement of Latin America dictators through displays of courtesy, rather than, say, slapping Chavez across the face with a white glove and ripping the book to shreds. Already Newt Gingrich, who apparently was once a Republican Congressman, has made the magic link between smiling at Chavez, bowing to Saudi King Abdullah, and giving a loving kiss to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:
Behind this flapping, there is one of the major foreign policy stories of this Administration. In sharp contrast to the macho posture taken by George W. Bush and his advisors — which failed to overthrow Chavez and alienated many in Latin America as new governments emerged from Bolivia to Ecuador — Obama’s White House has decided to exert influence through discussion and partnership. Even before this handshake, a new Washington had accepted referenda in Bolivia and Venezuela that bolstered the Morales and Chavez Governments.
And, of course, there are the gradual steps being taken by Obama to ease the US isolation of Cuba, as well as his Friday declaration that “the United States seeks a new beginning” with Havana. Indeed, this may be Chavez’s inadvertent contribution to American “engagement”: by grabbing the media hot lights with his book presentation, he has taken criticism away from Washington’s tip-toeing but still significant approach to a relationship with the former #1 Latin American Bad Guys.
As the Summit of the Americas opens and after attention to drug-related violence and its political effects in Mexico, Mark Schneider of Global Post looks at another Latin American country where crime and drugs are unsettling the system.
Guatemala: the next to fall?
While U.S. attention has rightly been focused on Mexico’s drug wars — with high-profile trips by President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton before this weekend’s Summit of the Americas — Mexico’s southern neighbor is in far more serious danger of becoming a failed state. Reeling from gangs, corruption and pervasive poverty, Guatemala now faces well-armed, well-financed drug cartels.
Narco traffickers and organized criminals dominate an estimated 40 percent of the country, from the Mexican border to the Caribbean coast, as well as in the little-populated Mayan jungle and forest preserves of the Peten. Opium poppy fields grow freely. The major threat, though, comes from more than $10 billion in cocaine passing through Guatemala each year, with a tenth of the money laundered in the country and used to bribe officials.
The drug lords and their friends have become the self-ordained local governments and police, either directly or by buying off others. The Sinaloa Cartel, which has run cocaine trafficking in Guatemala for the past several years, is pitted against the Gulf Cartel newcomers. Their “Zetas” (paid assassins) are ratcheting up violence that inevitably hits “civilians.” Last year there were more than 6,200 homicides reported in Guatemala. Read the rest of this entry »
Comments Off 
UPDATE: 
As the Summit of the Americas opens and after attention to drug-related violence and its political effects in Mexico, Mark Schneider of Global Post 
Entries (RSS)