CIP Americas

Against the sharply contrasting backdrop of violent conflicts in the streets and carefully staged official events, Enrique Peña Nieto took office yesterday. The general outlines of the plan for his six-year term, although still not detailed, reveal proposed changes not unlike the new president–mostly cosmetic and devoted to appearances on the surface. After taking the oath of office in the Chamber of Deputies at San Lazaro and swearing in his cabinet, the newly inaugurated president appeared before guests at the National Palace in the central plaza to deliver his first speech as Chief Executive.

The push to rebrand and re-sell the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez is in full swing. With violence way down as 2012 draws to a close, business and political leaders are extolling the return of security, inaugurating public works and opening new restaurants. According to the electronic industry trade journal maquilaportal.com, upwards of 22,000 workers have been hired this year in the assembly-for-export factories called maquiladoras, with especially strong rebounds in the auto and electronics sectors. But how much of the public relations blitz is hype and how much is real? And who benefits from the new Juárez?

With a more than comfortable margin of 332 to 206 electoral votes, President Barack Obama held onto office last Tuesday. Now the big question for foreign policy is whether Legacy Obama will be a bolder advocate for peace than the disappointing Campaign Obama. The president will need to recast a foreign policy that has been weak or downright contradictory in standing up for the principles he himself has espoused. To do that, there are several key moves ahead.

Monsanto’s bitter seeds have given another blow to the Mexican honeycreepers that had previously succeeded in stopping short the transnational corporation’s plan to plant 253,000 acres of transgenic soybeans in the Yucatan Peninsula that would have jeopardized beekeeping in the region, the main livelihood more than 25,000 families.

Venezuela’s entry into Mercosur has had interpretations centered on the economic and commercial aspects, but the most important is a geopolitical and geo-energetic matter. The region becomes a food and hydrocarbon power pointing to the Caribbean. On July 31 when the entry of Venezuela into Mercosur was decided in Brasilia, presidents Dilma Rousseff and Cristina Fernández emphasized the importance of the new Mercosur in the framework of the world crisis that is summed up in the birth of a “new pole of power.”

In an era of food crisis, the fight for corn has intensified, and the importance of this grain – a staple of the diet of Mexico and a large part of the world – has been revealed to the fullest extent. The scenario we are faced with is a battle between a culture that revolves around the material and symbolic production of corn, as well as the cultural, social, and historical value placed upon this crop by humankind, and the network of commercial and political interests that sees this prodigious crop simply as another way to increase power and profit by means of plundering its native lands.

The government of President José Mujica achieved its main objective when it proposed legalizing marijuana: to spark a broad national debate regarding drugs, prohibitionist policies, and the repressive measures used to date. The motives set out to explain the proposed legislation criticize prohibitionist policies for aggravating the drug problem and establish assert “users not be stigmatized or treated under penal law, but instead create conditions to work with them and with society as a whole.”