The Mex Files

From the International Herald Tribune:

Mexico and Argentina said Monday they are negotiating a free trade accord for vehicles and car parts that would make foreign car companies with factories in those countries more efficient.

“It’s an agreement we know will benefit both countries enormously,” President Felipe Calderon said in a news conference with Argentina’s leader, Nestor Kirchner. “We could have a huge potential for growth in this area.”

We don’t think about how important the Mexican auto industry is to the United States, but an agreement on auto parts isn’t likely to get people interested. When the Argentine President said that the proposed Great Wall of the Rio Grande is an affront to all Latin Americas the usual suspects commented (and, no I’m not going to bother linking all over the place to every anti-immigration “fuck you Argies” site). It’s a standard AP article on Latin America. Except for one overlooked phrase:

Kirchner also said he would personally help Mexico improve relations with leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and that Mexico has an open invitation to join the South American trade bloc Mercosur.

Some negative reference to Hugo Chavez is de rigur in AP-landia these days, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Mexico is being openly courted to get out of NAFTA and join Latin America. THAT IS IMPORTANT…

We don’t hear much in the U.S. about Mercosur (hell, we don’t hear much about Latin America in general), though it is likely to be extremely important to the futures of all the Americas. Mercosur is still feeling its way around (but then, the European Community took 50 years to develop, and Mercosur has only been around for the last ten), and – if we hear anything – it’s only that Venezuela hasn’t quite joined yet. Or, as the U.S. press puts it, Hugo Chavez hasn’t joined – much to our relief. WE (and Canada) were counting on a U.S. led “Free Trade Area of the Americas”, and blame Chavez for killing OUR plan – and instead opting for the existing (though far from united at this point) Mercosur.

The Mercosur countries (Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay) and the “associate states” (Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia and Peru) and semi-member Venezuela (there’s a diplomatic spat holding up Venezuelan membership) have been paying down their debts to the big foreign lenders like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Interamerican Development Bank. Hugo Chavez has his own ideas about development, but is in agreement, and likely to work with, what Mercosur itself has been organizing – Banco del Sur, a self-financed development bank.

The Global Policy Forum describes the problem with just one of the existing development banks this way:

The World Bank, based in Washington, is a multilateral institution that lends money to governments and government agencies for development projects. For more than twenty years, the Bank has imposed stringent conditions, known as “Structural Adjustment Programs,” on recipient countries, forcing them to adopt reforms such as deregulation of capital markets, privatization of state companies, and downsizing of public programs for social welfare. Privatization of water supplies, fees for public schools and hospitals, and privatization of public pensions are among the most controversial Bank reforms. While the Bank insists that “fighting poverty” is its first priority, many critics believe instead that it is responsible for rising poverty. Many also criticize its cozy relationship with Wall Street and the United States Treasury Department. The stormy resignation of World Bank Vice President and Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz in late 1999, and his subsequent public comments, suggest that the Bank is not as benign as it claims to be.

Yeah. There were riots in Argentina over privatizing water systems (and the country went through a couple of presidents in a couple of months), Bolivia nearly had a coup and Mexico is roiled over “suggestions” that various public utilities be privatized. Even the most conservative proposals for Banco del Sur will take into account peasant economies and state services. Right now, Banco del Sur is mostly Brazilian and Argentine money. Their economies are recovering from the tender mercies of IMF and World Bank concern (fun fact – every Latin American country with a president or treasury secretary with a graduate degree from the U.S. universities that turn out the bankers who run the development funds over the 40 years went broke, or had to restructure their currency).

And this is where Mexico comes in. Mexico has been losing ground economically since joining NAFTA. Mercosur requires single membership (in other words, countries like Bolivia would have to pull out of the Andean Pact to join, though the two trade groups may merge, or Mercosur may make special rules for Bolivia). NAFTA was originally pushed by PRI President Carlos Salinas de Goutari, though PRI has lost much of its original enthusiasm for the trading bloc since then. The PRD and the smaller left-wing parties never liked it, and have been pushing for more pan-Latin economic intergration. ONLY PAN, and only the wing of the party to which Calderón belongs, have been cheerleaders for the status quo development plans.

Although the announced agreements between Mexico and Argentina only cover auto parts, Mexico has expressed real interest in Banco del Sur. The country won’t be pulling out of NAFTA any time soon, but under pressure from the “left”, it has been considering renegotiation of the treaty, and it would not have to join Mercosur (where it is already an “observer”) to become a member of Banco del Sur. Once Venezuela works out it’s differences with Brazil, that’s going to change the whole pan-Latin development picture… and our economic ties to Mexico.

I’m not an economist, nor a banker. Nancy Davis, at Narco News isn’t either. She writes about the existing development project in Mexico (Plan Puebla-Panama). Even skipping over the Marxo-academic phrasing, it sounds as if the locals are getting screwed. They’d probably still get screwed by developments funded by Banco del Sur, though there’s a better chance of their being included in the plans.

The Canadian economics website, Angus Reed Report, blames Mercosur for killing the “Free Trade Area of the Americas” (which would benefit Canada), but notes that “free trade” conceptually is salable to the Latin American voter:

Investors’ Business Daily wonders whether “WE will clear Latin America for Takeoff” and misses the point that the Latin Americans may not give a shit what we think about it.

In January 2006, Laura Carlsen speculated in an article for the Center for International Policy on Mexican participation in Mercosur. At the time, she saw the Fox Aministration as likely to act as a “trojan horse” for their northern neighbors, but that appears to be changing now.

The Bank Information Center sees Banco del Sur as “direct challenge to the Northern based IFIs [International Financial Institutions] struggling to remain relevant to the region.”

I was able to get into subscription only “The Banker” for an in-house look at the effects of Banco del Sur on international lending. At the time the article was published (in May) Hugo Chavez was the big worry. The link may or may not get you in, so I’ll try posting my copy somewhere accessible.

A few cohetes are going off (to the delight of my 3-year old neighbor Tristan) in a post-fourth of July frenzy, but thank you very much, we are not taking up arms against a sea of “insurgents” down this way.

A sombrero-tip to “Couldbetrue” at South Texas Chisme for finding Jeremy Roebuck’s article in the McAllen Monitor:

The U.S. Border Patrol could dramatically increase its presence on the nation’s southern frontier by adding hundreds of private contractors to its ranks, according to a proposal presented to Congress last month.

DynCorp International, a Virginia-based military security firm, said it could train and deploy 1,000 private agents to the U.S.-Mexico border within 13 months, offering a quick surge of law enforcement officers to a region struggling to clamp down on illegal immigration.

Currently, the company manages an army of private security agents deployed across the world in support of U.S. missions, including several former Border Patrol agents hired to help secure the Iraqi border.

While of course there are problems along the border, the “Statement of Robert B. Rosenkranz President, Government Services Division, DynCorp International before the Subcommittee on Management, Investigation, and Oversight Committee on Homeland Security House of Representatives Hearing on ‘Increasing the Number of U.S. Border Patrol Agents’ (June 19, 2007)” — pdf file here — says that his company’s border control experience is of a different sort than what is normal between two countries with close diplomatic, economic and social ties:

We currently have approximately 14,000 employees, more than $2 billion in annual sales, and employees deployed in some 35 countries. Some 4,000 personnel support our contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan and 142 have paid the ultimate sacrifice, including 23 Americans. We have broad and deep experience in our core competencies of law enforcement services, contingency support, logistics, base operations, field construction, aircraft and ground equipment maintenance, maritime services, and program management. We also support the government’s counter-drug efforts in Latin America and South Asia and provide selected security services to customers in various locations around the world.

…

In Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Liberia, and Iraq, we have built and operated forward operating bases, military bases, training camps, and police facilities. Should these types of facilities be necessary to sustain forces in remote areas along the U.S. border, DynCorp International can build them, maintain them, and provide personnel to work from them.

In other words, the company is selling their experience in unfriendly countries — and war zones — IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Local policing here is done by the Brewster County Sheriff’s Department, the Alpine Police Department, the National Park Service rangers and the Border Patrol. While the latter are arguably a paramilitary outfit (and DynCorp also wants to subcontract our tax-payer trained agents to work in Iraq!!) all these are civilian police forces — what are usually called “Peace Officers”. Yeah, a few of them are jerks and throw their weight around, but more than a few of these guys carry an extra lunch with them to share with any “illegal” they have to turn in. And, they won’t admit it, but I’ve know a few who look the other way. If we’ve got hard-asses, they’re more the Joe Friday type than Rambo.

Our locals probably have less training than other police agents around Texas, but that’s more a matter of low salaries and the difficulty of recruiting officers to live in a rural area (if there’s a retired State Trooper or Border Patrol agent who likes horses and hunting… the Sheriff may have a deal for you! If you are were tops in your class at the Police Academy and have a MA in sociology, I don’t think we can afford you). Still, they are trained as civilian officers… and usually learn (or are native speakers of) Spanish. Most are locals who want to stay in the area. Even the new Border Patrol agents receive 10 months of training, and some immersion in border culture before coming here. Robert Rozencrantz trains his guys too:

Before deploying overseas on a training mission, our police officers typically undergo three weeks of training and orientation. … Obviously, this would also ensure a faster augmentation of the Border Patrol and—perhaps most importantly—provide a level of professional experience that may not be available when recruiting from the general population.
Half of the 10 months of current Border Patrol training is on-the-job and in-service training, and might be waived or reduced if prior law enforcement experience is accepted. Similarly, some of the academy training might be redundant, or perhaps could be revised to gain greater efficiencies.

What exactly is “redundant” about the training? And who is being trained. While the only news source I can find about this is from 2005 article on the World Socialist Web Site, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights has been very concerned about companies, including DynCorp, hiring Peruvian (and other) mercenaries for duty in Iraq. I don’t see where DynCorp. is proposing to train people on the local culture… or where these rent-an-agents would have any ties to the local community.

Lower-paid rent-an-agents in an unfamiliar place with no local ties should worry even the die-hard “close the border” folks. Besides our real concerns about the inevitable growth of police corruption with more and more policing along the border there’s a model for what we can expect in Los Zetas.

I can’t find many reliable links about them, the Wikipedia.org piece at noting that they don’t have sufficient information, and most links being a few years old. I don’t buy the story that Los Zetas are an army of rouge Mexican special forces soldiers (there aren’t more than about 200 special forces soldiers in the entire Mexican military), but the hired killers do include guys with military and police training who’ve gone over to the dark side.

What will keep mercenaries (especially if they are from a third country) from going to work for the narcotics traffickers in the U.S. who have a heck of a lot more access to weapons and money than their counterparts in Mexico? What loyalty to … well anything, let alone the Constitution of the United States do mercenaries have?

I wish this was just some bad political idea that was killed off when “cooler heads prevail”… but I’m very concerned that this is already in the works, and the financial benefits to the company (and politicians?) are making this a likely prospect. War is the health of the state, as Benito Mussolini put it. I wish they’d remember what his namesake, Benito Juarez said: “Peace is respect for the rights of others.” Like those of us who live here.

Nancy Conroy caught on to another “rent-an-army” — Blackwater — operating on the border. CorpWatch has several links to news about what they call “world’s premier rent-a-cop business”.