Congested and Polluted, Mexico City Embraces Carpooling

February 11, 2013 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Emilio Godoy

MEXICO CITY, Feb 08 (IPS) – In a megacity like the Mexican capital, plagued by air pollution and traffic jams, carsharing and carpooling initiatives offer obvious advantages in addition to the economic benefits enjoyed by users.

carpool_400Two of the most popular new initiatives of this kind are Aventones and Carrot, small companies founded by young recent university graduates.

Aventones takes its name from “aventón”, the Spanish word for hitching a lift. The company’s creation was spurred by “the excess of traffic and the inefficient use of cars,” in the Mexican capital, said Ignacio Cordero, a 28-year-old industrial engineer and graduate of the Universidad Iberoamericana (UIA), a Jesuit university in Mexico City.

“The idea is to promote a culture of shared car use,” he told IPS, which in this case is achieved through carpooling.

Cordero joined forces with Cristina Palacios, a business administration graduate from UIA, and Alberto Padilla, an industrial engineer trained at the Monterrey Institute of Technology, to create the company in 2010.

Their services are offered to “communities of trust” – companies, universities and government institutions – with an average of 200 or 250 people, who are matched up through an online system that searches for compatible routes, travel times and empty seats in cars. The service’s users not only share a vehicle – they also share the ride together.

The client organisation is charged a fee of 8,000 dollars a year, which includes training courses.

The software used was created by the company’s founders. It is currently utilised by 5,752 users and 27 clients – 23 in Mexico and four in Chile, where the company began operating in January.

Carpooling has become well established in countries like Germany, Spain, Canada and the United States, but is just beginning to catch on in Latin America. Similar services are being developed in Argentina, Chile and Brazil.

Carsharing is another means of multi-user car transport, popular in Germany, Spain, Canada and the United States and now offered by Carrot in Mexico, Zazcar in Brazil and SigoCar in Costa Rica.

“There is a growing trend of providing more options for getting around. This has a significant positive impact on the environment and fosters multi-modal transportation,” said industrial engineer Jimena Pardo, 28, a UIA graduate, who co-founded Carrot in 2012 with Diego Solórzano, a graduate in actuarial science from the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico.

The company, which is affiliated with the international CarSharing Association, offers its clients 40 vehicles, including three electric cars, and has already attracted 1,600 users.

Clients register through a website and pay a fee in accordance with how frequently they need the use of a car, Pardo told IPS. Occasional users pay around 23 dollars annually and seven dollars an hour, plus 23 cents of a dollar for each kilometre travelled.

A frequent driver pays around eight dollars a month, five dollars an hour, and 23 cents per kilometre. Users can pick up a car at one station and leave it at another when they are finished.

According to Carrot, each one of its shared vehicles keeps 20 private cars off the roads.

These new means of transportation are one of the most visible forms of “collaborative consumption”, a movement aimed at increasing the use and shelf life of consumer goods and resources by promoting their use by numerous different people, reducing the time that they sit unused but continue to generate expenses.

These solutions are more than welcome in a city like the Mexican capital and its metropolitan area, which have a combined population of 20.4 million. According to the Centre for Sustainable Transport, the inhabitants of this megacity carry out a total of 49 million trips daily, 53 percent on public transport and 17 percent in private vehicles.

The Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley estimated that as of October 2012, carsharing was operating in 27 countries and five continents, with an estimated 1,788,000 members sharing over 43,550 vehicles, and was planned in seven additional countries worldwide.

The “Propuesta de sistema de vehículos compartidos basado en un sistema de información geográfica” (Proposal for a carsharing system based on a geographic information system), co-authored in 2011 by Luis Guadarrama, Daniel Santiesteban and Javier García at the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico, states that “the expected benefits of a carsharing system include a reduction in the use of individual vehicles and the number of these vehicles in circulation.”

“Our goal is for carsharing to become a habit, and for our service to be a social experience in every way,” said Cordero.

Aventones states that it has prevented the emission of 115 tons of carbon dioxide and saved 750,015 kilometres and 10,586 hours in car travel and 71,430 litres of gasoline.

Carsharing systems “can be replicated in medium-sized and large cities that have urban transportation, a high population density and a mix of residential and office areas,” said Pardo, whose company employs nine people and operates stations in the largest Mexico City neighbourhoods.

Both initiatives are self-financed and have ambitious plans for the future.

Aventones, which employs a staff of 10, hopes to begin operations this year in Bogotá and attract 25,000 new users, thanks to financing provided by its new partner, Venture Institute. Its software team is developing an open application based on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Carrot, which has also partnered up with Venture Institute, plans to begin operations in Toluca and Puebla, cities near the Mexican capital, raise its membership to between 3,000 and 5,000 users, expand its fleet to 100 vehicles, and open up more stations in different neighbourhoods of the city.

Both organisations also hope to forge closer ties with the leftist local government of Mexico City, which is promoting the Metrobús (a bus rapid transit system using dedicated lanes), a public bike sharing system, and an electric taxi programme in the city’s historic centre.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the World Bank.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2013.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Environment, Latin America, Politics, Report Tagged With: ,

Mexican Victims Get Law That "Should Not Have to Exist"

February 11, 2013 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Daniela Pastrana

MEXICO CITY, Feb 08 (IPS) – “We will not stop fighting until there is justice for our children,” says Araceli Rodríguez, the mother of a young federal police agent in Mexico who disappeared along with seven other people in the western state of Michoacán on Nov. 16, 2009.

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Rally in Ciudad Juárez in June 2011, when the civil society movement decided to promote the Victims’ Law. Credit: Daniela Pastrana /IPS

This woman is one of tens of thousands of relatives of the dead, disappeared and displaced by violence in Mexico, and she hopes to find support for finding her son, Luis Ángel León Rodríguez, in the General Law on Victims, which enters into force on Saturday, Feb. 9.

“If it’s true that he’s dead, I want to find his ashes. If it’s true that they incinerated him, I want to find his teeth. And I won’t rest until all those responsible for his death are in prison and his name is cleared of any suspicion,” she told IPS.

For the last two years, Rodríguez has been participating in the citizens’ Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD), created by poet Javier Sicilia.

Twenty months have passed since the MPJD demanded a law to help relatives left behind by violence in Mexico, at a mass rally in the northern city of Ciudad Juárez. The law, backed by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, was promulgated Jan. 9.

The big challenge is for it to be enforced and produce results, everyone agrees.

“Such a law should not have to exist,” Sicilia said the day it was promulgated. “It’s the consequence of not applying the laws that are made to protect and provide justice to citizens, and of a war that should never have happened.”

Since his son, Juan Francisco, was murdered in March 2011, Sicilia has toured the country and knocked on the doors of government offices, accompanied by hundreds of victims and fellow citizens in solidarity with them, who seek to end the security policy inherited from the government of former president Felipe Calderón.

In December 2006, when Calderón began his presidential term that ended Dec. 1, 2012, he declared war on drug trafficking cartels, militarised public security and conferred extraordinary powers on the federal police, whose personnel increased six-fold while their budget expanded from 800 million to three billion dollars.

As a result of the strategy, 60,000 people have been killed and 25,000 disappeared, according to official figures, although civil society organisations cite much higher statistics. A total of 250,000 people have been displaced and there are countless relatives of victims, many of whom have lost everything in the pursuit of justice or have even been murdered themselves.

In June 2011, in Ciudad Juárez on the border with the United States, after a caravan had driven 3,400 kilometres through the most violent states in the country, the MPJD first proposed a victims’ law.

The victims’ bill had a rough passage, and once the law had been approved in Congress, it was vetoed by Calderón. But his successor, President Enrique Peña Nieto, promulgated it in a solemn ceremony at which he said it was urgent to have a legal framework in place to protect victims.

“It is a victory for the Movement, and will benefit many people, but enforcing it is still a distant prospect,” another mother, Margarita López, whose 16-year-old daughter disappeared, and was presumably killed, in the southern state of Oaxaca, told IPS.

On Jan. 19, López was attacked in Mexico City when she was going to meet a team of Argentine forensic scientists to take DNA samples from the skeleton that the authorities say is her daughter.

“I am tired of fighting everyone, because the authorities are part of the problem. Sometimes I think about leaving the country, but if I go, who will look for my daughter?” she said.

The Victims’ Law covers legal and psychological protection, compensation, health services, housing and education, as well as a key element: “declarations of absence”.

These allow, for example, grandparents to have legal custody of their grandchildren, while the state is compelled to continue to look for their disappeared parents, because the declaration is not a death certificate.

The law involves re-engineering the enforcement of justice by means of a National Victims’ Assistance System. It has been harshly criticised by organisations close to former president Calderón, and also by the autonomous National Commission for Human Rights, which would lose some of its powers.

The law’s promotors themselves acknowledge that it contains errors, due to the speed with which it was enacted. The senate will have the opportunity of making corrections this month when it incorporates regulations that will translate it into policies.

“The law needs to be perfected; it was approved very quickly because the priority was getting the state to recognise the tragedy, but we are already amending it,” the recently appointed coordinator of human rights advisers to the attorney-general’s office, Eliana García, a supporter of the law, told IPS.

“It establishes a system of restorative justice in four dimensions: the right of victims to the truth, the right to justice, comprehensive compensation and the guarantee that this will not be repeated. It is an unprecedented law,” said García, a renowned leftwing social and political activist.

Detractors of the law point to the burden on the budget, as the law obliges the state to pay the costs of physical, mental, moral and material harm, as well as healthcare costs for victims of crime and human rights violations, no matter the perpetrator or when the crime occurred.

This means coverage would be extended to victims of the so-called “dirty war” in the 1970s.

Article 71 states that if the perpetrator of the crime cannot pay compensation, because he or she is a fugitive, dead or disappeared, the state will take responsibility for reparations up to the equivalent of 78,600 dollars.

“It was a mistake to make such a broad promise of subsidiary compensation; in the corrections we are working on, we have restricted reparations to serious crimes against life, freedom and physical integrity,” García said.

There will also be modifications to the National Victims’ Assistance System, which under the law includes nearly 4,000 officials in national and states’ ministries, as well as to the chapter on competencies, which only involves the national government.

What is still not clear is how regional and municipal authorities will be made to comply with the law, especially as they are most frequently accused of crimes by victims and their relatives.

The new bodies that will look after victims who are currently helped by the Procuradoría Social (socio-legal office), created in September 2011 and now to be replaced under the new system, have yet to be identified.

The MPJD is already preparing workshops and reading circles to study and promote the law in the country’s 31 states, in accordance with one of the agreements at a meeting held in the Mexican capital Jan. 25-27, at which organisations in the United States and Canada were also represented.

“We know that after this law’s publication, there is still a great deal to be done. We have come away with a long agenda,” activist Ted Lewis, head of the human rights programme for Global Exchange, one of the organisations that financed the caravan that travelled the United States and arrived in Washington in September 2012, told IPS.

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This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Featured, Human Rights, Justice, Latin America Tagged With:

Think Tank Urges “More Ambitious” U.S.-Mexican Agenda

February 6, 2013 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

mariposa_640-629x353

Border leading into the desert at the Mariposa port-of-entry. Credit: Jeb Sprague/IPS

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb 06 (IPS) – The electoral and political stars are aligning in ways that offer the United States and Mexico major opportunities to substantially deepen their cooperation, particularly on trade, energy, and immigration, according to a report released here Wednesday by a special commission of the Inter-American Dialogue (IAD).With Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto taking office at virtually the same time as Barack Obama begins his second presidential term, the two leaders have four years to address some of the most difficult and longstanding bilateral challenges, according to the report, entitled “A More Ambitious Agenda”.

Like a longer one on the same subject released two weeks ago by the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars here, the IAD report comes at a particularly auspicious moment, given both the strong performance of the Mexican economy and the apparent willingness of long-resistant Republicans in Congress to make key compromises on immigration reform.

These include finding ways to legalise the status of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., more than half of whom are believed to be Mexican.

“There is an enormous amount of optimism right now in the bilateral relationship, and the reason of that is because there’s an idea that this is a new beginning,” said Duncan Wood, co-author of the Wilson Center report, entitled “New Ideas for a New Era”.

“There’s optimism about the Mexican economy and the real potential for immigration reform in the United States,” he told IPS.

“So you have the opportunity for a much more positive dialogue, particularly when you compare it with what we saw during the (Felipe) Calderon administration, when the primary focus was on security, violence and death. There’s now an opportunity to reframe the relationship, and I would say the economic issues lead that.”

The IAD report highlights Pena Nieto’s proposed reforms of Mexico’s energy sector which, among other things, could result in the exploitation of its huge deposits of shale gas and oil. This would not only assure the country’s status as a major oil producer, but also “bring North America closer than ever to energy independence".

In addition, the “decisive role” played by the Latino vote in the November elections here has propelled immigration reform to the top of the U.S. political agenda for the first time in a generation, according to the commission which was co-chaired by former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo and former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills.

Hills also serves as IAD’s co-chair, along with former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet.

“(T)he prospects are better than they have been in decades for a sensible reform of U.S. immigration policy – which should produce significant economic gains for both nations while easing a long-standing source of bilateral tension and mistrust,” the report concluded.

While opportunities for breakthroughs may be less obvious with respect to their approaches to fighting drug cartels and the violence that has killed an estimated 60,000 people in Mexico over the last six years, the cooperation between their security and police agencies has reached unprecedented levels.

“This is the right time to reassess the (U.S.-backed) Merida Initiative, reinforce efforts to shrink U.S. drug use, and stop the flood of weapons (from the U.S.) into Mexico,” according to the report.

It also noted the Obama administration’s willingness to discuss alternative approaches to the “war on drugs”, as well as recent initiatives, both within the U.S. and Latin America to consider legalising the production, sale and use of marijuana.

Since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992, bilateral trade has expanded by some 500 percent, making Mexico Washington’s third largest trading partner amid predictions it could overtake Canada for the top position within a decade. At the same time, Mexican-Americans now make up more than 10 percent of the U.S. population and seven percent of its electorate.

The report calls for the two nations to pursue three “high-priority goals. On the economic side, the two countries should work to make their shared labour markets more efficient and equitable; create a more-coherent North American energy market; and co-ordinating with Canada in negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership with selected South American and East Asian nations.

“There’s a perception that the Pena Nieto government can get things done,” said Wood, who noted that his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled the country for 71 years, “knows how to reach a consensus” in contrast to Cardenas’s National Action Party (PAN), whose 12-year reign ended in December.

On the immigration front, the U.S. should implement an expanded and predictable temporary labour programme for both professional and low-income workers, ensuring a larger flow of legal migrants whose homes would remain in Mexico.

In addition, immigration legislation must include a pathway for undocumented immigrants here to legalise their status. Such a step, according to the report, “could hugely benefit both the U.S. and Mexican economies,” in part by increasing both tax payments to local, state and federal governments and remittances sent to Mexico.

Given the results of the November elections and the pressure on Republicans to ease their opposition to any such “amnesty” scheme, such reforms are considered more likely to pass the Congress than at any time since the last major immigration reform in the mid-1980s.

The challenges posed by public insecurity, organised crime, and drug trafficking and abuse “may be the most harrowing test” for both governments, according to the report, which recommended that they should jointly review Washington’s policies toward illicit drugs and firearms, whose export to Mexico has fuelled the violence there.

Pena Nieto should follow through on campaign pledges to create an elite federal police force that would sharply reduce the role of Mexico’s military in the anti-crime campaign, while Obama should allocate significantly more resources to prevention and treatment programmes that help reduce demand for illicit drugs, it says.

The report’s recommendations to consider U.S. drug policy reform and legalisation of marijuana – as well as reassessing the five-year-old security-assistance programme, the Merida Initiative – were welcomed by Laura Carlson, director of the Mexico City-based Americas Program of the Center for International Policy as “bright spots” in the report.

But she expressed disappointment that the commission “repeats the formulas that have led to increased poverty under NAFTA and made Mexico one of the most unequal nations in the world.”

“That this group would come out with a recommendation of …more free trade, more privatisation, more guest workers, more oil drilling is not surprising,” she told IPS in an email. “But it’s particularly hard to swallow when no mention is made of poverty alleviation, shared environmental crisis, human rights or corruption on both sides of the border.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2013.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Diplomacy, Featured, Foreign Affairs, Human Rights, Politics, United States Tagged With: , ,

Prisons in Mexico on Verge of Collapse

December 28, 2012 by

Global News Blog / IPS

Daniela Pastrana

MEXICO CITY, Dic 28 (IPS) – Edgar Torres Castillo, 21, has spent two years in the prison of Gómez Palacio, in the Lagunera district between the northern Mexican states of Durango and Coahuila – an arid zone known as one of the most dangerous parts of the country.Amparo Castillo, the mother of Edgar, who was sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing a cell-phone, last saw him during a Dec. 18 visit to the prison. “I thought he was acting strange, he seemed really sad and as if he had been hurt,” she told IPS by phone. “We spent just an hour together before they started to shoo us out – things were really tense,” she said with anguish in her voice.

In the wee hours of the morning on Dec. 17, the police transferred 137 prisoners from the Gómez Palacio prison to federal penitentiaries.

The next day, at the end of the visiting hours, people living in nearby homes heard loud bursts of gunfire and cries inside the prison. The authorities reported that 25 prisoners and six unarmed guards had been killed during an escape attempt.

In a communique, the Durango police said the prisoners had opened fire on the guards when they were thwarted in their attempt to escape.

Later, the federal government emptied out the prison, where 78 people have been killed in the past three years and several major prison escapes have been staged. At the time it was emptied, there were 500 inmates left in the prison.

Like other family members, Castillo went to the prison after the reports of gunfire, to find out what happened. When little information was offered, the prisoners’ relatives held protests and set up roadblocks. “We didn’t even know if they were alive or not,” she said.

The bloody clash between prisoners and guards was one more illustration of the crisis plaguing Mexico’s prison system, which experts say is on the verge of total collapse.

There are 429 prisons in Mexico, according to the latest report by the ministry of federal public security. Of that total, 15 are run by the national government, 10 by the authorities in Mexico City’s Federal District, 91 by municipal governments, and the rest by the states.

Studies indicate that the prison population is 22 percent (around 40,000 prisoners) over capacity. In addition, four out of 10 inmates are still pending sentencing. But prisoners awaiting trial are held in the same cells as convicted inmates.

Those charged with or convicted of federal crimes, generally for involvement in organised crime like drug trafficking, make up just one-fifth of the prison population.

After a visit to 24 prisons around the country in 2009, a report by the United Nations Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture warned about structural flaws in Mexico’s penal system, which encourage abuses of all kinds committed with the aim of obtaining confessions or self-incriminating statements.

The already heavy use of preventive detention became even more excessive during the crusade against the drug cartels waged by President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) in his six years in office.

The “Diagnóstico Nacional de Supervisión Penitenciaria”, an assessment of the prison system presented by the governmental National Human Rights Commission in September, found that six out of 10 prisons in the country were co-governed to some extent by criminal groups.

The report warns of prison hotspots in 10 of Mexico’s 31 states. Between 2010 and 2012 alone, a total of 521 prisoners escaped in 14 prison escapes, and 350 people were killed in two riots and 75 fights.

The prison of Gómez Palacio, which went through six different directors in less than three years, has been the site of high-profile escapes and acts of corruption.

In March 2009, a group of armed men wearing federal police uniforms walked into the prison in broad daylight and took five prisoners away with them. In July 2010, the then director of the prison, Margarita Rojas, was arrested and accused by the attorney general’s office of allowing inmates who later took part in a mass killing of 17 people on a nearby farm to leave the prison.

According to the federal government, the guards allowed a group of inmates to leave the prison at night, using the guards’ weapons and official vehicles, to carry out reprisals against rival criminal groups.

But that was not the only case. Jorge Carvallo, president of the bar association of the state of Mexico, next to the capital, reported in November 2010 that prisoners, with the complicity of the state police, were allowed to leave the Barrientos prison at night to commit armed robberies.

The government of Durango announced on Dec. 21 the definitive closure of the Gómez Palacio prison, which will be converted into a police station.

Meanwhile, the families are still desperately seeking information about what happened to the inmates.

“We are trying to help a group of women who came to us in a terrible state, in despair and full of fear for their loved ondes,” activist Verónica Villarreal of the Popular Workers Coordinating Council told IPS. Her group provided shelter to a group of women who came to the capital of the state, four hours from Gómez Palacio, in search of information.

Since Dec. 19, Amparo Castillo has been on a vigil outside the Durango prison, hoping to see her son. “They haven’t told us anything, we don’t know how they are. We only know that they took some to prisons in other states and that others are here, but they told us we’ll only be able to see them in four weeks.

“There’s no law here, people have been tried and convicted without evidence. And now it’s easy for them just to shut down the place; they don’t think of the expenses that represents for us. My son didn’t steal the cell-phone, but in any case, I have already paid it off. What do they want? It wasn’t something that deserved eight years in prison, or to have to go through all of this,” she said.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Featured, Justice, Latin America, Security Tagged With: ,

Legalisation in U.S. States May Prompt Changes in Mexico’s Anti-Drug Policy

November 9, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Emilio Godoy

MEXICO CITY, Nov 08 (IPS) – The legalisation of small amounts of marijuana for recreational use, which will allow the drug to be taxed and regulated, in two U.S. states will prompt debate on anti-drug policies in Mexico as well, and on the coordination of strategies between the two countries, experts say.“The least bad option is legalisation,” Jorge Chabat, at the Centre for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE), told IPS. “It will have an impact on the way prohibition is designed, because there will be a cascade effect, and we’ll see changes very soon.”

On election day in the U.S. Tuesday, Colorado and Washington became the first states to approve referendums for the legalisation of marijuana – up to one ounce for personal use for adults 21 and over.

Voters in Oregon rejected a similar initiative, while Massachusetts became the eighteenth U.S. state, in addition to the District of Columbia, to allow medical use of marijuana.

In Colorado and Washington, the production, possession and distribution of marijuana will now be regulated, and licensed growers will be able to sell up to one ounce to adults.

Washington will establish a system of state-licensed marijuana growers, processors and retail stores, and the state liquor control board will levy a 25 percent sales tax on the drug.

The tax revenue collected on marijuana sales in the two states will go to state and local budgets, substance abuse and prevention programmes, research, education, healthcare and other areas.

Mexico looks on with interest

“Legalisation doesn’t solve the problem, because cocaine generates the biggest profits,” Jorge Javier Romero, a professor at the department of politics and culture in the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City, told IPS. “It has to be approached as a foreign policy issue, because Mexico doesn’t have a drug use problem – it’s the United States that has a drug abuse problem.”

Approximately 30 million of the United States’ 312 million inhabitants use a total of 3,700 tons of marijuana a year, which has a retail value of 15 to 30 billion dollars, according to the report "Si los vecinos legalizan" (“if the neighbours legalise”), produced by Alejandro Hope and Eduardo Clark of the non-governmental Mexican Institute for Competitiveness (IMCO).

The study says that, of the marijuana consumed in the United States, 40 to 67 percent comes from Mexico, where drug cartels take in some two billion dollars a year from trafficking the drug, which is mainly grown in western and southern states.

Mexico is a graphic illustration of the mistaken approach used in the repressive drug control policies backed by the U.S. government, according to the experts who spoke to IPS.

The drug war launched when conservative President Felipe Calderón took office in December 2006 put thousands of soldiers on the streets. But the catastrophic results of the strategy include at least 90,000 people killed, 10,000 missing, and 250,000 forced to flee their homes, according to the estimates of human rights groups.

The legalisation of drugs in the United States “would be the most significant structural clash that drug trafficking has experienced in a generation…and would transform the terms of the debate on drugs,” says the IMCO study.

The administration of reelected President Barack Obama can challenge the state referendums in court, but has not announced plans to do so.

“Even if only one U.S. state were to approve legalisation, the decision would reverberate throughout the hemisphere, where the drug policy debate has opened up dramatically,” John Walsh, the drug policy expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, wrote in the article “Taking the Initiative on Legal Marijuana” before the elections.

“The new government could copy what will be done” in the U.S. states that have legalised marijuana use, said Chabat, referring to the future administration of Mexican president-elect Enrique Peña, of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, who takes office on Dec. 1.

Peña has talked about a change in law enforcement strategies, but without giving details.

The IMCO study estimates that as a result of the legalisation of marijuana, Mexico’s criminal organisations will lose 36.5 percent of the market in the northwestern state of Washington, representing 1.4 billion dollars a year, and 37.9 percent of the market in the western state of Colorado, also representing 1.4 billion dollars.

The hardest hit will be the Sinaloa Cartel, considered Mexico’s most powerful organised crime group, and the Los Caballeros Templarios – two of the cartels disputing the smuggling routes to the lucrative U.S. market.

“Mexico’s role as a dike,” imposed by the United States with a view to making it a “bulwark against the transit of drugs,” must be reviewed, said Romero, who argued that “the revenue flows of drug trafficking organisations have to be stopped, and that is done by regulating the trade.”

According to IMCO, the Mexican government should not legalise the production and sale of marijuana until U.S. federal laws on the matter have been clearly defined.

It also recommends that alternative development programmes be implemented in the regions where marijuana is grown in Mexico, and calls for guarding against potential “reverse trafficking” of drugs, from the United States to Mexico.

The legalisation of production and sales of marijuana in Colorado and Washington will take time, because the two states will have to create the necessary regulations and infrastructure in the first half of 2013.

“The consequences of a state-level vote in favour of legalisation will depend on real-world implementation, and that will in turn depend on how the federal government responds to the state action and to the specifics of the state’s new regulatory design,” Walsh wrote.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Politics, Report, United States Tagged With: , , ,

Narco-States Grope for New Strategy*

November 5, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Emilio Godoy

MEXICO CITY, Nov 05 (IPS) – Mexico, Colombia and Guatemala face the need to modify their approach to the fight against drug trafficking and are urging the world to do the same. But Mexico and Colombia’s willingness to make the necessary changes is unclear.The three countries are connected by a powerful circuit of trafficking of drugs – whose main market is the United States – weapons and money from illegal activities. But the extent of the problem and the way drug organisations operate in each one of these countries vary.

Mexico is urgently in need of a new strategy. The militarisation of the drug war since President Felipe Calderón took office in late 2006 has resulted in more than 90,000 people killed, some 10,000 missing and at least 250,000 forced to flee their homes, according to human rights groups and press reports.

And the power of the drug cartels, over society, the government and the economy, has remained intact.

Colombia, for decades the world’s number one producer of cocaine, should look at how the mafia works in Italy to understand its own drug cartels, while Mexico should look at Colombia, said one of the most knowledgeable analysts of the drug trade in Colombia, sociologist Ricardo Vargas, a researcher associated with the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute.

His summary of the situation puts one in mind of the descriptions by Italian journalist Roberto Saviano in his book “Gomorra” of how organised crime works in Naples, where few economic activities are really what they appear to be, and most leave no tracks.

The situation in Colombia “can be likened to the case of Italy, in terms of the effort to reduce violence and create much more sophisticated mechanisms of managing illegal activities, relations with the world of politics, and taking advantage of the economic growth experienced by some countries in Latin America,” Vargas told IPS.

Drug traffickers “are also investors, and launderers of huge amounts of dollars. For that reason they don’t need a lot of violence; they need a more organised and subtle, a more business-oriented, structure,” just like the mafia has in Italy today, he said.

The analyst said he saw Colombia as “moving in that direction,” while “Mexico is still in a phase of outright violence.”

Guatemala, meanwhile, a small Central American country that has become a storehouse and transit point for drugs, has one of the world’s highest homicide rates. But its president, right-wing Otto Pérez Molina, has publicly suggested that drugs be decriminalised as part of a regional agreement that would include the United States.

In a joint statement to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in October, the presidents of the three countries urged U.N. nations “to undertake very soon a consultation process to take stock of the strengths and limitations of the current policy, and of the violence generated by the production, trafficking and consumption of drugs in the world.”

Colombian analyst Luis Garay says that what is needed is close cooperation in intelligence, and oversight of financial flows.

“Intelligence has to operate transnationally, the way criminal organisations do,” Garay told IPS. “It must be highly interactive and must operate in real time. Regional cooperation is not the best, but it is the second-best option, because any cooperation must include the United States.”

Garay is the academic director of Scientific Vortex, a non-profit research group that describes itself as providing “methodologies and inputs for policy-making, under integrative science principles.”

He studied case files from Mexico, Colombia and Guatemala and social interactions between drug traffickers, paramilitaries, businesspersons, legislators and government officials in legitimate and clandestine activities, with which organised crime has effectively co-opted the state, he said.

The result of that work is the book “"Narcotráfico, corrupción y Estados. Cómo las redes ilícitas han reconfigurado las instituciones en Colombia, Guatemala y México" (Drug trafficking, corruption and states; how illicit networks have reconfigured the institutions in Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico”), co-authored by Scientific Vortex director Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán and released in Mexico City in late October.

The book suggests using financial intelligence information, creating a trilateral investigation agency, reaching agreements for technical and logistical cooperation between Mexico and Colombia, and signing agreements for investigations between institutions in the three countries.

Luis Astorga, a professor at the political science faculty of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, says “a fundamental element is being ignored: the United States, which must be taken into account in the internal, bilateral and international debate,” he told IPS.

In Mexico, president-elect Enrique Peña of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, who takes office Dec. 1, announced a shift in the country’s anti-drug strategy, to expand beyond the hunt for drug traffickers. He proposed creating an elite body to fight the cartels, and promised to cut the number of murders in half in his first year in office.

But he has not announced detailed measures. And his track record does not shed much light on the question. In his 2005-2011 term as governor of the state of Mexico – which surrounds the Federal District of Mexico City – he replaced the state’s chief prosecutor three times, and the murder rate climbed from nine per 100,000 population in 2007 to 14 per 100,000 in 2010, according to official figures.

Vargas believes that in Mexico, the violence “will tend towards reaching a point of equilibrium, and will improve, although not with an end to the drug trade but through a process of stabilisation in which Mexican drug traffickers will consolidate structures along the lines of what exists in Colombia.”

This will be seen as “a great political achievement by Mexico. But it will not mean the disappearance, but the consolidation through other channels, of these criminal organisations,” Vargas said.

That is the big issue ignored in the October declaration by the presidents of Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico calling for changes in the global fight against drugs. “No country has fully acknowledged that the problem lies in the presence of solid organised crime structures, which also have a strong capacity to influence states,” Vargas said.

“That dimension of the problem has not been put on the table, although it must be the cornerstone of any real change in strategy,” he said.

Mexico’s criminal organisations are involved in nearly two dozen different kinds of illegal economic activities, from drug and people trafficking to kidnapping, extortion, contraband and counterfeit goods, which gives them the ability to quickly mutate.

Nevertheless, Vargas believes that Mexico and Colombia should lead a process of influencing multilateral institutions where Latin America has an important presence, to spearhead reforms in international conventions on drugs.

Mexico’s president-elect announced that he chose General Óscar Naranjo, a former Colombian police chief, as his future security adviser.

According to Vargas, Naranjo “advocates differentiated treatment of marijuana and other substances. If his actions are consistent with what he has proposed up to now, Mexico and Colombia could drive a process of experimentation with the decriminalisation of marijuana use.”

That would be an “extremely interesting approach,” because there is no evidence available yet of the effects that this would have in the region, said the analyst.

He also mentioned the case of Uruguay, where the government presented a bill that would essentially create the world’s first government-run marijuana market. But he said that the South American country’s experience was “a bit isolated from the Latin American context.”

* With reporting by Constanza Vieira in Bogotá.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Crime, Featured, Health, Latin America, Politics Tagged With: , ,

Tangled Web of Corruption Debilitates Mexico

May 10, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Emilio Godoy

MEXICO CITY, May 10, 2012 (IPS) – Although Mexico has signed several multilateral anti-corruption agreements, so far these instruments have yielded few concrete results in combating the rampant bribery, extortion and embezzlement, according to experts.

"We have the necessary legal instruments, but they are rarely used. More laws will not reduce the risk of corruption," Eduardo Bojórquez, head of Transparencia Mexicana, the national chapter of the Berlin-based watchdog Transparency International, told IPS.

"We are concerned that there are companies that are larger and more powerful than many nation states, which confront governments at different levels of institutional development," Bojórquez said.

The most notorious recent scandal in Mexico involves U.S. retail giant Walmart, which has been under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) since December 2011.

Walmart’s Mexico branch was the subject of a report published in April by The New York Times, which alleged the company paid 24 million dollars in bribes to facilitate the construction of new stores, in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

The report said that the company had engaged in widespread and systematic bribery in this country. But the Mexican Attorney-General’s Office only opened an investigation after it was published.

Mexico has ratified the United Nations Convention against Corruption and the Inter-American Convention against Corruption, as well as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions (Anti-Bribery Convention).

It is also a member of the U.N. Global Compact (UNGC), the world’s largest corporate responsibility initiative. Launched in 2000, the UNGC has over 8,000 participants, most of them businesses, in more than 135 countries, and local networks in over 90 nations. The 10 universal principles it upholds relate to human rights, labour law, environmental standards and the fight against corruption.

The UNGC is a voluntary agreement which in Mexico has 302 members, counting companies, NGOs, foundations and academic institutions.

"It is important to use these mechanisms to expose human rights violations committed by companies, and to demonstrate that regulations need to be stricter," Valeria Scorza, head of the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Project (ProDESC), a Mexican NGO, told IPS.

But "we criticise the lack of mechanisms to sanction member companies for non-compliance, or to secure reparations for damage. The principles should be reformulated to pack more punch, although this is a fairly difficult collective process and companies usually have no interest in it," she said.

ProDESC has persistently denounced violations of labour rights at Walmart, which was founded in the United States in 1962 and entered the Mexican market in 1991, originally in alliance with a local company.

But Walmart is not the only company to have been involved in corruption scandals. Various studies in the past few years have revealed the tangled web that is debilitating Mexico with enormous economic and social costs.

Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index for 2011 ranks Mexico in 100th place out of 183 countries – the worst result among the 34 member countries of the OECD, known as the "rich nations club".

The index is based on 17 surveys covering topics like enforcement of anti-corruption laws, access to information and conflicts of interest. Countries are assigned a numerical index of perceived levels of corruption on a scale from 10 (very clean) to 0 (highly corrupt). Mexico was given a grade of 3 in 2011.

The 2011 Bribe Payers Index, also produced by Transparency International, found a particularly strong culture of bribery and illegal commissions in Mexico, China and Russia.

Based on a survey of 3,000 members of the business community in industrialised and developing countries, the index ranks 28 of the world’s largest exporting countries according to the likelihood of firms from these countries using bribes to obtain commissions and contracts when doing business abroad.

In order to compile an independent report on the implementation of the Inter-American Convention against Corruption in Mexico, in December 2011 Transparencia Mexicana asked for information from the comptroller’s offices of the 32 Mexican states, and only 10 replied.

"The institutional capacity of anti-corruption bodies is vital for controlling corruption, so that further analysis of the capabilities of these bodies at sub-national level in federal countries such as Mexico is essential," says the report, released in January.

Due to the proliferation of free trade agreements in the past two decades, like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, the United States and Mexico, dozens of foreign companies have ventured into new markets, coming into contact with the institutional weaknesses they may find there.

Paradoxically, the most serious cases of corruption linked to Mexico have come to light as a result of investigations by authorities in the United States, as companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges are required to meet stringent accounting and reporting provisions designed to prevent concealment of improper transactions.

In late April, the Mexican Congress approved the Federal Anti-Corruption Law, which created a special prosecution service and established fines for businesses found guilty of wrongfully procuring a contract. The fines can total up to 35 percent of the value of the contract. Reduced punishments were approved for persons cooperating with investigations.

"We have reached the point where corruption can no longer be covered up or overlooked as a minor problem. What we need to see now is how to articulate the national oversight and regulatory system with internal and external public administration bodies, the judicial branch and state parliaments," said Bojórquez.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Featured, Human Rights, Latin America, Politics, Transparency Tagged With: ,

U.S.-Mexico Border Build-Up Found Excessive

April 20, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Jim Lobe*

WASHINGTON, Apr 19, 2012 (IPS) – While Republican politicians and other "border hawks" call for ever-tougher measures to secure the U.S.-Mexican border against drug trafficking and illegal immigration, a one-year bi-national study released here Thursday suggests that current efforts may be excessive.

The study, a collaboration of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and Mexico’s College of the Northern Border (COLEF), concludes that additional steps, such as increasing the ranks of the Border Patrol, will almost certainly yield diminishing returns, particularly at a time of record federal deficits.

"In fact, a closer look at the border reveals that after a historic build-up of the U.S. security presence there, further increases in money, barriers and manpower are unnecessary," according to the 60- page report, "Beyond the Border Buildup", which calls for the U.S. to reassess its border strategies and invest more in the Office of Field Operations, the understaffed and overworked agency that mans the country’s ports of entry.

"The threats that actually exist don’t justify them, and the side effects – among them a severe humanitarian toll on migrants – are mounting," the report said. "It is urgent that Washington view the border security buildup as a past policy, not a direction for the present or future."

The report comes as both countries are engaged in presidential elections in which border and migration issues are expected to play an important role.

Throughout the primary season, Republican candidates, with the exception of Texas Rep. Ron Paul, have all supported stronger measures to better "control the border", such as increasing the number of Border Patrol agents and completing construction of a fence along the entire 3,200-km land frontier.

One favourite of the far-right Tea Party faction, Herman Cain, even endorsed the idea of electrifying the fence before dropping out of the race for unrelated reasons.

Only 20 years ago, fewer than 4,000 Border Patrol personnel were deployed to the southwestern border. That number has more than quadrupled since, exceeding 18,000 last year.

Nor does it include thousands more personnel from an alphabet soup of federal agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), various other sub- agencies of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and inter- agency task forces that, according to the report, appear to be working without a clear overall strategy.

Even the Pentagon has become increasingly involved in enforcement, deploying troops to back up the Border Patrol, build roads, and collect intelligence, most recently by flying reconnaissance drones on both sides of the border.

Since 2006, hundreds of armed National Guard troops from states across the country have also been deployed at any one time, primarily for ground and air surveillance, although their numbers and the budget to support their deployment have recently been reduced.

The build-up, which gathered pace after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, has been fuelled by dire claims by prominent politicians and the media about the alleged threats of massive illegal immigration, drug trafficking, violence, and terrorism crossing into the U.S. from Mexico.

Of those four threats, however, "three have either never materialised or been reduced," according to Adam Isacson, WOLA’s senior associate for regional security and one of the report’s lead authors.

While drug seizures have indeed increased markedly in recent years, the government has yet to report a single case of a terrorist crossing the border, Isacson said Thursday.

And while it is impossible to know how many undocumented migrants have tried to cross the border, virtually all sources agree that the number has been substantially reduced in recent years.

Indeed, the number of apprehensions by the Border Patrol itself has fallen by 61 percent since 2005, to levels not seen since the early 1970s. Last year, for every Border Patrol Agent, an average of only 20 migrants were apprehended – down from a 20-year high of 327 migrants in 1993 and from 102 migrants in 2006.

According to the report, the decline can be attributed to three main causes, of which the U.S. security build-up is only one, and perhaps not even the most important.

The impact of the 2008 financial crisis on the availability of jobs for migrants in the U.S. appears to be a major factor, the report noted.

A third key factor appears to be the increased risks faced by migrants travelling through Mexico to the U.S.

"The dangerous gauntlet of abuses at the hands of criminal organizations – and certain Mexican officials – through which migrants must pass on the way to Mexico’s northern border causes some to reconsider the journey," according to the report.

Because the border is not heavily patrolled on the Mexican side, "migrants are increasingly targeted by criminal groups" that control key migration and drug-trafficking routes along the border, said Maureen Meyer, WOLA’s senior Mexico associate and another co-author.

She noted that approximately 20,000 migrants, mostly from Central America, are kidnapped every year and countless others are subject to extortion, sexual assault and other abuses, sometimes with the complicity of corrupt Mexican officials.

On the U.S. side, non-governmental organisations have also documented abuses by U.S. authorities whose use of "lateral repatriations" – repatriating migrants to cities far from where they were detained and which often lack basic social services for migrants – adds to the dangers they face, according to the report.

As to the fear that the drug-related violence that has wreaked so much havoc in Mexico would spill across the border, that, too, appears unfounded, according to the report.

It noted, for example, that El Paso, the U.S. border city across from violence-plagued Ciudad Juarez, had the lowest homicide rate of all U.S. cities with a population over 500,000. While El Paso may not be typical, the report cites a "general consensus in border communities" that very little of the violence crosses the frontier.

"It’s because narco-traffickers prefer it that way," according to Isacson. "They don’t want to provoke anything that could close the border," since their profits depend on getting their product to the consumers on the other side.

Meanwhile, the border-security build-up appears to have worsened the situation of those migrants who do try to cross, according to the report, which pointed to the increased control exercised by narco- traffickers on the Mexican side along smuggling routes. That control makes the trip both more costly and more hazardous.

The extension of the border fence and related measures have also resulted in migrants crossing in ever more inhospitable terrain, according to the report.

"Even as the overall number of migrants drops, the number of human remains found in the Arizona desert and elsewhere remains shockingly high," according to the report. While 183 remains were found there last year – down from 253 in 2010 – the ratio of remains per apprehensions reached a record high.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Foreign Affairs, Politics, Security, United States Tagged With: , , ,

Shale Gas May Be a Mexican Mirage

December 5, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Emilio Godoy

MEXICO CITY, Dec 5, 2011 (IPS) – In spite of mounting scientific evidence about its negative aspects, Mexico is getting ready to intensify exploration for shale gas, natural gas found trapped in shale, a sedimentary rock.

The state oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), is planning to sink wells into 175 shale gas reserves between 2011 and 2015, on a budget of 700 million dollars a year.

Since February, PEMEX has been extracting three million cubic feet of shale gas a day from a well in the northern state of Coahuila, where it has invested 25 million dollars.

"It’s a good thing for Mexico to know what resources it has, but it’s not advisable for the country to pursue this adventure. The technology involved is very controversial. Shale gas is found in areas where there is no water," Lourdes Melgar, an expert at the private Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM), told IPS.

Shale, a common type of sedimentary rock made up largely of compacted silt and clay, is an unconventional source of natural gas. The gas trapped in shale formations is recovered by hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking".

"Fracking" involves pumping water, chemicals and sand at high pressure into the well, a technique that opens and extends fractures in the shale rock to release the natural gas on a massive scale.

"We have to explore all the alternatives. First, we have to confirm that the gas is there. Next, water is needed to extract it, so regulations are needed that will allow water use and infrastructure development," Rogelio Gasca, a member of the National Hydrocarbons Commission (CNH), a decentralised government agency, told IPS.

Over the next 50 years, PEMEX expects to operate 6,500 wells, producing eight billion cubic feet a day.

Shale gas extraction involves large amounts of water, and drilling and "fracking" generate large quantities of waste fluids, which contain dissolved chemicals and other contaminants that require treatment before recycling or disposal.

Mexico depends mostly on oil and gas for energy. PEMEX produces 2.6 million barrels a day of crude and the country consumes some 56 billion cubic metres of natural gas per year, most of it imported.

While it spends millions of dollars on fossil fuels, Mexico has sidelined renewable sources like wind, solar and geothermal energy.

In its 2011 study "World shale gas resources: an initial assessment of 14 regions outside the United States", the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) assessed 48 shale gas deposits in 32 countries, including Mexico, and calculated reserves of 5,760 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of potentially recoverable gas.

Production of shale gas in the United States was 4.87 Tcf in 2010, compared with 0.39 Tcf in 2000, and by 2035 domestic production could supply 45 percent of the country’s gas consumption, according to the EIA.

But recent scientific work has unearthed some negative environmental effects of shale gas and concerned researchers have raised the alarm.

The paper "Methane and the greenhouse gas footprint of natural gas from shale formations", by Robert Howarth, Renee Santoro and Anthony Ingraffea of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, published in April in the journal Climatic Change, concluded that shale gas is more polluting than oil and conventional natural gas.

The carbon footprint, or greenhouse gas footprint, is the total set of greenhouse gas emissions caused by an event, process, product or person.

"The footprint for shale gas is greater than that for conventional gas or oil when viewed on any time horizon, but particularly so over 20 years. Compared to coal, the footprint of shale gas is at least 20 percent greater and perhaps more than twice as great on the 20-year horizon, and is comparable when compared over 100 years," the study says.

Natural gas is composed largely of methane, and 3.6 to 7.9 percent of the methane from shale gas production leaks into the atmosphere over the lifetime of a well. These methane emissions are at least 30 percent higher, and even twice as high, as those from conventional gas, the report says.

Methane is one of the most polluting of the greenhouse gases that are responsible for global warming.

The research study "Methane contamination of drinking water accompanying gas well drilling and hydraulic fracturing", published in May in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, documented the environmental impact of shale gas extraction in the northeastern U.S. states of Pennsylvania and New York.

"In active gas extraction areas (one or more gas wells within 1 km), average and maximum methane concentrations in drinking-water wells increased with proximity to the nearest gas well and were a potential explosion hazard," says the paper by Stephen Osborn, Avner Vengosh, Nathaniel Warner and Robert Jackson of Duke University, a private research university in Durham, North Carolina.

These results bring into question the energy industry’s reasoning that shale gas could replace coal in electricity generation and lower greenhouse gas emissions, to help mitigate climate change.

"It is too premature and too risky a venture. The projects are too costly in terms of sustainability. There are cheaper, more accessible options," said ITESM’s Melgar.

Furthermore, its energy balance – the ratio of useful energy supplied when the shale gas is burned, to the total energy used to extract it – is unknown, although the indications are that it may be unfavourable.

"A reassessment of energy policy is needed," that ought to include new "financial, regulatory, technological, legal and infrastructure aspects," proposed Gasca of CNH.

In April 2010 the U.S. Department of State set up the Global Shale Gas Initiative (GSGI) to help countries identify and develop their unconventional gas resources safely and economically, with a view to furthering U.S. economic and commercial interests, including those of U.S. multinational corporations.

"We conclude that greater stewardship, data and – possibly – regulation are needed to ensure the sustainable future of shale gas extraction and to improve public confidence in its use," the Duke University study recommended.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2011.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Energy, Latin America, Report Tagged With: ,

Unique Mexican Oasis in Danger of Vanishing

November 18, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Emilio Godoy

MEXICO CITY, Nov 18, 2011 (IPS) – A rare wetlands ecosystem in the Chihuahuan desert in northern Mexico that may hold key information about the origins of life on earth – and even about possible life on Mars – is in serious danger of disappearing if water continues to be extracted by agribusiness concerns, local scientists warn.

The 200-km-long Valle de Cuatrociénegas – "valley of four marshes" – located 1,000 km north of Mexico City is a complex ancient wetlands system of mineral-rich springs, streams, lakes, marshes and turquoise pools of water known as "pozas" fed by natural underground channels and surrounded by a mountain chain with peaks over 3,000 metres high.

"It is our only window for understanding the planet’s past, why life emerged here, and we aren’t taking care of it as we should," Valeria Souza, a researcher at the ecology institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), told IPS.

"Instead of trying to understand how the ecosystem functions, the authorities have dedicated themselves to exploiting it and taking away as much as they can, in exchange for nothing," she complained.

Souza, who has received several environmental awards, has been studying the area since 2000, along with other scientists from Mexico and abroad.

The extraordinary biodiversity and number of endemic species in Cuatrociénegas make its ecosystem as unique as that of Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands.

The basin, declared a natural protected area in 1994, covers 84,350 hectares, and is home to more than 70 endemic species – which means they are found nowhere else on earth – including the only aquatic box turtle in the world and several species of tropical-looking fish.

"A lot of water is removed and transported to other valleys to grow alfalfa, which requires a great deal of water," said Francisco Valdés, an environmentalist and professor at the public Technological Institute of La Laguna in the city of Torreón, near the nature reserve.

"Since 2000 we have had several wet years and the aquifers were recharged, and the water was running in the underground channels. But this year has been very dry," he told IPS.

The National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity says the valley is under threat due to the growing extraction of surface and underground water for irrigation, the transformation of habitats, the spread of exotic species, livestock grazing, the cutting of trees for firewood, illegal cactus gathering, poaching of reptiles, the exploitation of gypsum, and unregulated tourism.

Experts also accuse the local dairy industry and the growers of alfalfa – which is used for animal feed – of exhausting the water resources of Cuatrociénegas.

Some 500,000 head of cattle in the area produce seven million litres of milk a day for the domestic market and for export.

In Mexico, it takes approximately 2,500 litres of water to produce one litre of milk, according to "Water Footprint of Nations", a report by the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education.

Mexico’s national water authority, Conagua, says there are nine aquifers in the region, which are all overexploited and which supply 1.23 billion cubic metres of water a year, while they are only replenished with 868 million cubic metres a year.

Cuatrociénegas is one of the 55 priority wetlands in Mexico under the Ramsar Convention, an intergovernmental treaty on conservation and wise use of wetlands and their resources in force since 1975.

The drying up of the Churince poza, the ecosystem’s oldest pond, bodes poorly for the reserve, warns Evan Carson, a biologist at the University of New Mexico in the U.S.

After his last two visits, in March and May, Carson, who has been studying the ecosystem since 1998, reported in a research study "Churince System Status aquatic fauna" that "at this point, the Churince system is essentially a dead system, at least relative to its former condition."

At least three species of fish and two species of snails, all endemic to the ecosystem, may have been "extirpated from this system," and "more environmentally hardy species have also been reduced in population size and shifted in geographic distribution in the system," Carson wrote.

He concluded his paper by warning that "arresting water extraction (from the ecosystem) may already be too little, too late."

Although conservative President Felipe Calderón has promised since 2007 to invest about 75 million dollars to preserve the nature reserve, only around eight million dollars have been disbursed.

In September, Conagua signed an agreement with the National Commission of Natural Protected Areas to pipe 100 litres of water per second into Churince, an amount that was to be increased to 300 litres in December. But the agreement was abruptly cancelled, presumably due to pressure from large agricultural producers.

Scientific researchers, whose warnings over the last few years have fallen on deaf ears, recommend an immediate ban on extraction of water and the implementation of alternative agricultural projects, to maximise the use of water.

"The problem is that the authorities think of water not as something essential to life but as something that can be bought and sold. That has led to ecocide. It is impossible to reverse the damage, because the ancient water reserves are gone. The deep underground water is running out, and without it, Cuatrociénegas is nothing," Souza said.

The researcher, who predicts that the area will not survive more than two more summers under the current conditions, has launched an online petition drive to urge the government to rescue the threatened ecosystem. So far she has collected just over 3,000 signatures.

In September 2010, Souza began a biodiversity inventory in a project sponsored by the Mexican office of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Carlos Slim Foundation to "understand who lives where, from the tiniest virus to coyotes, and who feeds whom," said Souza.

"There are very powerful economic interests involved here," said Professor Valdés. "But alfalfa should no longer be grown in Cuatrociénegas, because the local community reaps no economic benefits from it, and a productive reconversion effort is needed."

The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is studying microorganisms in Cuatrociénegas that are similar to those that occurred on earth hundreds of millions of years ago, to help understand the origins of life on earth.

It also considers the unique wetlands useful for discovering life on Mars since the conditions are apparently similar to conditions on that planet.

NASA’s next Mars rover, Curiosity, will be launched Nov. 25 with a science laboratory, to explore a crater on that planet that Souza – who has been invited to the launch – describes as "similar to Churince."

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2011.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Environment, Latin America, Report Tagged With: , ,
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