Six months after suffering one of the greatest embarrassments of his term, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto breathed a sigh of relief early last month. “Mission accomplished: we have him,” he announced on Twitter: Drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Mexico’s most wanted man, had been recaptured by Mexican marines in the state of Sinaloa. But the implications of El Chapo’s escape and arrest do not just end at the border. The episode has reinvigorated security cooperation between the United States and Mexico, while shining a light on the partnership’s economic benefits, as well. El Chapo’s brazen July 2015 escape [...]
With his state visit to Mexico earlier this month, Raul Castro took a major step forward in rebuilding Cuba’s relations with the country in Latin America that is most important to the United States. For Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, the summit marked the culmination of his efforts to repair relations with Cuba after a decade of antagonism precipitated by Mexico’s conservative governments led by the National Action Party, or PAN, beginning with the presidency of Vicente Fox from 2000 to 2006. Historically, Pena Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, had maintained friendly relations with Cuba’s revolutionary government after 1959. [...]
Mexico’s cartels are known for their violence and ruthlessness, the control they exert over the drug trade and for Hollywood-esque escapes from so-called high-security prisons. But not much is known or even acknowledged outside the country about another network exerting significant power and doing its own damage to the country: an economic cartel that enjoys market domination in major sectors of the economy, beneficial treatment from the authorities and whose fortunes have skyrocketed at the expense of ordinary Mexicans. A new bi-annual report by Coneval, a Mexican government agency evaluating social policies, should raise the alarm. It showed that Mexico’s [...]
