U.S Air Force worker, helps unload tons of relief aid at Armenia's airport, Colombia (Str Old/Courtesy Reuters).

Last week WOLA released the report “A Cautionary Tale: Plan Colombia’s Lessons for U.S. Policy Toward Mexico and Beyond.” The study is a useful reminder of the real differences between Colombia and Mexico. Unlike Colombia, where security forces fought to assert control over territory left to criminal groups, Mexico has had a strong state presence throughout the country for decades. Whereas violence in Colombia was concentrated in rural areas, in Mexico the highest rates of crime are in population centers and along drug trafficking routes.Their analysis also puts the Colombian experience into historical perspective. The real fight against drug cartels, as opposed to guerrillas and paramilitaries, happened in the 1990s – before Plan Colombia was even on the table. Successes here depended on police work by specialized vetted units, as well as a strong public prosecutor’s office – not sending the military into the streets or hills.

There are a number of good recommendations about how the United States and Mexico can apply these lessons to their joint policy on the drug war going forward.  A few stand out.

For Mexico (and other countries dealing with organized crime):

•             Don’t rely on the military, as it lacks the investigative capacity and the right training to provide public safety to civilians.

•             Measure what matters. Rather than process (e.g. how many arrests or drug kingpins captures) the government should focus on tangible results, such as how many cases are successfully prosecuted, or how much violence and other crimes decline.

For the United States:

•             Take on challenges at home – guns, money, and demand. Since the United States is asking other countries to implement politically difficult policies, policymakers at home should try it themselves – particularly because all these issues feed into the escalating violence Mexico (and other countries) face.

•             Make human rights a top priority, not an afterthought. Do more than just require police and military forces to take classes in human rights, and withhold bilateral security cooperation if standards are not met.

•             Let USAID take the lead in managing security  assistance, not the Department of Defense or even State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, as these are likely to overlook the crucial socioeconomic side of the security problem.

For all involved: protect local populations first. In addition to safeguarding, these governments need to invest in people – protecting them through law enforcement, courts, and social policies, and creating economic alternatives to a life of crime for those that today remain on the margins.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Photographs of missing people are on display at a square in Queretaro (Courtesy Reuters).

Last Wednesday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released its report “Neither Rights Nor Security: Killings, Torture and Disappearances in Mexico’s ‘War on Drugs’.” The report is incredibly thorough – based on two years of research in the states of Baja California, Chihuahua, Guerrero, Nuevo León and Tabasco, and incorporating information from over 200 interviews. It charges Mexican security forces with routinely violating citizens’ most basic rights during President Felipe Calderón’s six years in office, and further argues that these horrific tactics are not incidental, but endemic to the government’s drug war strategy.

Some of the most worrisome statistics and findings include:

·       Formal human rights abuse complaints increased seven-fold, from 691 during the 2003-2006 period, to 4,803 from 2007-2010

·       Of some 3,700 military investigations into human rights abuses in the past four years, just 15 – less than one half of one percent — resulted in convictions

·      Formal complaints of “degrading treatment” – read torture — at the hands of security forces more than tripled since 2006

Based on witness testimonies and material evidence in specific cases HRW investigated they find:

·       Law enforcement – including the Army, Navy, Federal Police as well as local and federal judicial investigative police — participated in over 170 specific cases of torture – including beating,    asphyxiating, water boarding, electrically shocking and sexually torturing detainees

·       Others facilitate this torture –  medical examiners fail to document signs of physical abuse on detainees, and judges admit confessions and other evidence acquired through torture, even when the victim protests

·       Law enforcement played a part in 39 “forced disappearances” and 24 extrajudicial killings of civilians

After a meeting with HRW representatives Calderón agreed to investigate the findings, though he did say that the “main threat to the human rights of Mexicans is from criminals”.

Why have human rights violations expanded so drastically?  One explanation lies in the use of the military.  Armed forces are trained to kill the enemy on the battlefield, not police neighborhoods to ensure basic public safety. With some 50,000 soldiers now on the front-lines of the drug war, this disconnect can lead to abuses of the rule of law.

Another reason is the profound weakness of Mexico’s judicial system.  Most crimes – likely 80 plus percent — are never even reported. Of the few complaints filed, the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) investigates only one in every five; even fewer go to trial. In the end, only one to two of every hundred crimes end in a conviction. Once prosecutors do move forward with a case however, the chances of acquittal are slim, as roughly 9 in 10 of all suspects brought to court end up in jail. This has less to do with the stellar cases built around airtight evidence, and more to do with the underlying system, which is stacked against defendants – resulting in few safeguards and a de facto presumption of guilt.

Finally, Mexico doesn’t even have the laws needed in some cases to prosecute bad behavior. For instance, only eight of Mexico’s thirty-two states have laws against forced disappearances and only sixteen have formally criminalized torture. What it does have is opportunities to limit citizen rights – such as the arraigo procedure, which lets prosecutors lock up individuals for up to 80 days if they’re allegedly involved in organized crime, and vaguely defined “flagrancia” rules that dictate when police officers can make arrests without a warrant.

The spike in human rights complaints is worrisome on many levels. First and foremost, it reflects the government’s utter failure to protect thousands of citizens from itself. But more strategically, the abuses described in the report run counter to the state’s long-term aims.  In order to “win” the war on organized crime, Mexico’s government must have society’s support. Egregious human rights violations will just push away the one force the narcos can’t match. To end drug related violence, Mexico must construct a truly democratic rule of law, in which the means to and the ends are one and the same. To do so, the government must track and punish human rights abuses and abusers as fervently as it does those on its Most Wanted lists.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Workers harvest soybeans at a farm in Tangara da Serra, Brazil (Paulo Whitaker/Courtesy Reuters).

A recent article by Mariano Turzi argues that soy is the most recent of Latin America’s commodity booms, creating many of the same challenges that metals, minerals, and oil brought in the past. Whether economic booms and busts, populist leaders, or fights between more powerful (e.g. Brazil) and weaker (e.g. Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia) nations in the supply chain, Turzi worries about the fallout for the Southern Cone and its future.

Mexico Evalúa recently released the first study I have seen evaluating the outcomes of Mexico’s New Security Model. The results are mixed, at best. Some of the most fundamental measures differentiating the new security model from its predecessors – such as tracking law enforcement officers and their arms in a national database – have not become universal, and in fact have actually declined in recent years. The huge government outlays – now six times the amounts at the start of Calderon’s term – remain at times unspent and in others poorly accounted for. Accountability in general remains perhaps the biggest challenge. Mexico Evalúa finds it hard to judge these programs from the outside, as few metrics are provided. The military maintains even less oversight than the other security agencies they analyze. But reports such as these are at least a start toward pushing for more openness, evaluation, and in the end, better outcomes.

Finally, the Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center’s annual report shows cocaine prices increased by a third and purity decreased by more than two thirds from 2007 to 2010. This seems to have led to a decline in cocaine use – down by almost a quarter — confirming the findings of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration report included in last week’s reads. Less positive, methamphetamine production (north and south of the border) seems to have reached an all time high, driving prices down, while purity has continued its steady climb.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

A man holds a symbol of the Patriot Party during a political rally in Solola (Jorge Lopez/Courtesy Reuters).

Front-runner Otto Pérez Molina won 36% of the vote in first round of Guatemala’s presidential elections on Sunday, and will face off against second place finisher Manuel Baldizón in the second round in November. Though winning the runoff election will not be easy for either candidate (both have to build coalitions to clinch a second-round victory); far trickier will be facing Guatemala’s long list of challenges, topped by insecurity.

Guatemala’s murder rate has more than doubled in the last twenty years, reaching a high in 2009 when nearly 6,500 people were killed – 17 a day — more than in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. Over the past four years the government of Álvaro Colom has been unable to quell the violence or bring its perpetrators to justice. During the campaign the leading presidential candidates advocated a mano dura, or iron fist security policy, with Pérez Molina as its most forceful proponent (his Patriot Party has a clenched fist as its emblem). He even proposed bringing back the notorious military task forces used against guerrillas in the 1980s and 1990s, this time to take on drug traffickers.

It is unlikely this strategy will work. Guatemala’s military today doesn’t have the capacity to ramp up its public safety functions. As a part of the 1996 peace agreements (ending 36 years of civil war) the military agreed to downsize. The current force stands at 17,000 troops (roughly 60 percent less than 1990 levels).  Earlier this year, when the government called a state of siege in the northern province of Alta Verapaz taken hostage by traffickers, the military could only send 600 soldiers in to patrol the area – less than one tenth the size of the Mexican military force sent to fight the La Familia cartel in Michoacán in 2006. After the operation, President Colom himself admitted that the military could not match the drug traffickers’ vast resources, noting “just the weapons seized in Alta Verapaz are more than those of some army brigades.”

But the issue is not just one of capacity. Even if the government found the resources to beef up the military, it shouldn’t be the force to take over the fight against organized crime. If deploying the armed forces in Mexico’s drug war is considered controversial, in Guatemala it is decidedly more complicated. The Guatemalan army enjoys considerably less citizen trust than their Mexican counterparts due to their long and ignominious involvement in the country’s brutal civil conflict. The U.N. truth commission report (whose findings Pérez Molina questions) deemed the war a genocide, and blamed the army for 93 percent of the massacres of innocent civilians that occurred. Breaking the peace accords’ promise to keep the military out of citizen security would be a step backward to a past many would rather not revisit.

Growing evidence too suggests the military itself may well have ties to organized crime. Reports from the UN peacekeeping mission in Guatemala (MINUGUA), and a number of NGOs show that long standing military ties with the criminal groups that today work with Mexican and Colombian drug traffickers.  The Kaibiles, an elite special operations force, trained some of the Mexican soldiers that would later become the Zetas, and many former Kaibiles now work full time for the cartels.

If the army is not the right choice for improving security, the only alternative is the National Civil Police (PNC). Unfortunately, the PNC faces many of these same challenges: a lack of manpower, resources, and public trust. Furthermore, the U.S. and the Guatemalan government have tried a number of times, and on the whole failed to reinvent the PNC in the past.

Still, trying again is the least bad alternative. And there are a few hopeful signs from the past year. With new wiretapping, plea bargaining and seized assets laws in place (in no small part due to the work of CICIG), the police have arrested some high-ranking drug traffickers and suspects in high-profile murders. With human rights leader Helen Mack at the helm of a new police reform initiative, some observers are more optimistic about the chances of finally building a professionalized Guatemalan police force.

As the U.S. and other countries in the region look to begin working with the new administration, security assistance – including Mérida funds — should focus on strengthening the national police (and court systems). Despite the PNC’s past failures, and Guatemala’s weak institutions in general, the issue of security is simply too important to let fall by the wayside, or worse, into the wrong hands.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Argentine President Fernandez waves to supporters after hearing the first results of the nationwide primary election in Buenos Aires (Enrique Maracarian/Courtesy Reuters).

The Pew Research Center released the results of a wide-ranging public opinion poll based on interviews with some 800 Mexicans (the study is part of their larger Global Attitudes Project). It finds strong continued support for military – 83 percent favor their role in the drug war – and for U.S.-Mexico security cooperation, with nearly 3 in 4 Mexicans supporting U.S. training and weapons for national security forces. Calderón, despite an economic recession and ever more bloody drug war, still enjoys the confidence of a majority of Mexicans, with 57% saying they view his political influence in a positive light. While these numbers look bad vis-à-vis past Mexican presidents entering their last term in office, other Western Hemisphere leaders (Barack Obama and Sebastian Piñera, for example) would be quite pleased with such levels of support.

A recent survey of the Guatemalan judiciary, on the other hand, paints rule of law institutions in a much more more troubling light. The Plaza Pública study shows that overall Guatemalans see judges as corrupt, controlled (by vested economic interests and other political elites), and inefficient.

This Cefeidas Group report provides an update on the Argentine elections, where Cristina Fernández de Kirchner looks even more likely to win a second term in the October 23rd election, due in part to the weakness of the opposition.

On a different note, Rolling Stone has an in-depth and well written article about La Barbie, a native Texan who rose to become the top drug kingpin in Acapulco. The behind the scenes narrative of his rise and fall shows why going after kingpins will not, on its own, make Mexico safer.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

A customs officer is handed a passport by a motorist at the San Ysidro border crossing (Fred Greaves/Courtesy Reuters).

The U.S. debates over Mexico’s drug war increasingly focus on spillover violence. Border state governors Rick Perry and Jan Brewer insist that Mexican cartels are hitting their states hard, portraying the border as a lawless “war zone” in which the drug cartels and illegal Mexicans incite “terror and mayhem” on a daily basis. In stark contrast, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Alan Bersin and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano contend that the border has never been safer.

The statistics bear out the latter position. A recent study based on FBI figures shows that violent crime in cities within 50 miles of the border is consistently lower than state and national averages. The robbery rate in the Texas border region, for example, remained at least 30 percent lower than the state average for every year in the past decade. The data also show that the number of kidnapping cases in border areas dropped by more than half since 2009.  This doesn’t mean that bad things don’t happen – they do. But they happen less frequently along the border, on average, than in other parts of the United States. Despite local politicians’ concerns and rhetoric, the border is more secure than in the past, and in fact safer than the rest of the country.

But the downward trend in border violence does not mean that the Mexican drug war hasn’t had spillover effects on the United States. Among the most troubling is corruption. Local newspapers recount the stories of public officials engaged in foul play; from the South Texas county Sheriff Conrado Cantú, who took bribes from drug traffickers, to Columbus, New Mexico Mayor Eddie Espinoza, charged with operating a gun smuggling ring in connection with Mexican cartels. Available data also show a rise in corruption within the ranks of the border patrol. Since the reopening of the Homeland Security Bureau’s internal affairs unit in 2003 – in and of itself a reflection of the increased risk of corruption within the agency – cases of corruption against law enforcement officials on the border have more than doubled. Tales of CBP agents turning a blind eye to, and sometimes actively aiding drug traffickers smuggling narcotics, arms and migrants across the border abound.

The increase in corruption reflects the lure of drug money and the CBP’s institutional weaknesses. Doubling the border patrol’s numbers in less than a decade made it more vulnerable to corruption, diluting the once highly disciplined force with less experienced and committed newcomers. The border patrol administers lie detector tests to only 10 percent of applicants, more than half of which fail — raising serious concerns about the capability, and even intentions, of many of its new hires.

Other spillover effects are positive for the United States – namely increasing economic activity. Seemingly every day new restaurants, stores, and private schools are opening in border towns, serving clients that once traveled further south. Many attribute Texas’ strong real estate market to the influx of Mexican citizens eager for greater peace and stability. In the spring of 2008, when foreclosures hit record highs across the United States, real estate agents in El Paso reported steady sales of houses and apartments worth more than $100,000. The President of the Greater El Paso Association of Realtors, Dan Olivas, attributed the stability of the El Paso market to “a substantial number of people from Juarez coming over to buy properties for security reasons, for fear of kidnappings, extortion, and cartel violence.” This El Paso trend has continued, and spread more broadly.

Not only do Mexicans buy homes, but many are bringing their businesses north. Immigration consultants say  inquiries from Mexicans for EB-5 investor visas – which cost $500,000, and require that applicants’ create at least 10 jobs in the U.S. within two years – have doubled in recent years.  Mexico has quickly risen the ranks to become one of the top recipients of these visas.

Mexico’s drug war is indeed affecting the United States – but mostly in ways that politicians overlook, misunderstand, or (more cynically) choose not to recognize. The current policy prescriptions – a higher and longer border wall, more boots on the ground and predator drones overhead – won’t slow seeping corruption, nor bolster the beneficial economic ties. Unfortunately, the wrong diagnosis means also the wrong policy prescriptions, hurting both countries in the process.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents usher Fabio Ochoa, Colombian drug kingpin, to an awaiting vehicle following his extradition from Colombia to Florida, September 8, 2001(Courtesy Reuters).

One of the heralded lessons of Colombia’s fight against drug cartels is that fragmentation reduces violence. The vertical command structures of the famed Medellín and Cali cartels were legendary. Their pseudo-celebrity leaders lived extravagantly, socialized widely, and often died violently. They spent billions to buy off politicians, judges, and business leaders, and they spent more to assassinate adversaries they couldn’t buy, chasing their targets not just all over Colombia but the world. The country became, for a time, the most violent place on earth, the nationwide homicide rate topping 80 per 100,000 in 1991.

But a couple of decades later, the drastic levels of violence have fallen, the motorcycle assassins disappeared, the car bombs ended. The conventional story goes something like this: the killing first of Pablo Escobar and then the arrest and conviction of the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers fragmented the cartels and their command structures. From the ruins of the once centralized cartels sprang smaller – and less vicious – criminal organizations. While cocaine production and distribution (which hasn’t changed much) continued, violence fell.

A U.S. law enforcement official once told me that their antidrug strategy in Mexico was first to go after the wolves (the highest level cartel leaders), then go after the snakes (the next level down), and then clean up the remaining rats. The odd animal analogy aside, this strategy seems straight out of Colombia’s playbook.

Mexico has, in fact, done this fairly successfully. Of the 37 thugs on its Most Wanted list, 21 are either behind bars or six feet underground. Where once U.S. and Mexican officials cited four main criminal organizations, today the number has at least doubled, complemented by the rise of many smaller operations and local gangs. But as the Mexican cartels multiplied, violence escalated to all time highs.

Why the difference? Obviously Mexico and Colombia have different histories, and different security problems, so the reasons for divergent outcomes are multiple and complex. Perhaps one issue — seemingly forgotten in the transfer of “lessons learned” —is the direct targeting of the Colombian government by its cartels.  In the early 1990s, at the peak of the violence, one of the biggest points of contention was Colombia’s extradition law. The drug cartels wrote open letters offering to stop the car bombs and assassinations, to retire from the drug business, to even pay off the national debt if extradition to the United States was taken off the table. Denied, the cartels tried to lay down their own version of the law on the nation. Fighting back, Colombian law enforcement slowly gained the advantage, and as these groups fragmented, violence declined.

In Mexico, by contrast, the cartels are not openly and directly confronting the state. Sure, they threaten, co-opt and even increasingly kill local and state police and elected representatives. But their open letters –narcomantas hung over important intersections– are primarily directed to their drug trafficking rivals, or to local political alignments. They don’t often explicitly challenge the national government, much less launch violent “campaigns” against it. Even the most high-profile recent killings – for instance DEA officer Jaime Zapata in San Luis Potosi, the brother of former Chihuahua Attorney General Mario Gonzalez or PRI gubernatorial candidate in Tamaulipas Rodolfo Torre Cantú— the assassinations don’t seem to have come from the top. If the violence isn’t ordered from on high (as it was in Colombia), then taking out the top echelons of the cartels won’t end it. Furthermore, if most of the bloodshed is between the criminals themselves, going after the heads will just escalate the cycle, as more and more mid-level criminals fight it out for control of the remaining business (catching innocent civilians and law enforcement officials in their wake). 

This suggests Mexico should rethink its kingpin strategy — or at least complement it with other approaches. There are many other models out there to consider – the “broken windows” approach (perhaps the other extreme, as it focuses instead on smaller quality of life crimes before building up to the big organized crime rings); community policing models, used to good effect in U.S. cities such as Boston, Los Angeles, New Haven, and elsewhere; or a territorial approach, which integrates neighborhood level policing with other public services, and is already being used in the historic center of Mexico City. These methods may work to raise the social, in addition to the material costs of violence for the criminals.

As Mexico debates the right policy mix in the coming year under Calderón and beyond next July’s presidential elections, the big missing question is how to get Mexican society– the one weapon the cartels can’t match – involved. So far, citizens have been relegated to the status of “clients” or victims. Opening up the security policy to analysis and debate is an important first step.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Suspects wait at the Supreme Court in Guatemala City (Jorge Lopez/Courtesy Reuters).

The conventional Guatemalan security story is one of a country riddled with violence, where law enforcement institutions are in shambles and corruption reaches the highest levels of government. Its homicide rate triples that of Mexico, and its notoriously weak rule of law system lets more than 99 percent of criminals walk free. The growing presence of Mexican and Colombian cartels, pushed out of their home countries due to intensive antidrug campaigns, has only made matters worse. As the Zetas in particular move into the northern provinces, observers sound alarm bells about Guatemala’s possible descent into a “narco-state”.

Still, it may be too early to give up on Guatemala. Since the capture of top drug-smuggler Juan Alberto Ortiz-López, alias ‘el Chamalé’, in late March of this year, Guatemalan officials have arrested a number of local gang leaders, some with close ties to the Zetas. Within days of folk singer Facundo Cabral’s murder this month, the authorities announced the arrest of three suspects, presenting a slideshow with a play-by-play rundown of the events.  The swift response became a point of pride for Guatemalans accustomed to sluggish, if any, justice.

The UN International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) can take much of the credit for these improvements. Set up in 2007, the commission has been an enormous boost to law enforcement’s (still limited) capacity; assisting in high-profile investigations and promoting important reforms, notably witness protection and plea bargaining laws. It works in conjunction with domestic security agencies, employing a “learning by doing” model that teaches investigative methods to Guatemalan prosecutors on the job. Not least of all, CICIG played an instrumental role in the appointment of current Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz, who has had a markedly positive impact on the public prosecutor’s office.

But Paz y Paz and her fellow reformers face an uphill battle. Guatemalans are among the most mistrustful of judicial institutions across Latin America, and the most skeptical of democracy overall. Winning the public’s trust in the justice system requires sustained improvements, not just sporadic high-profile successes. The lack of funding for security poses another major challenge – last year the government cut the public prosecutor’s budget by a quarter. More generally, Guatemala’s tax revenue is the lowest in the region at around 10 percent of GDP (its Central American neighbors are not much better, with this part of the region ranking below the rest of the continent and even Sub-Saharan Africa in tax collection).

The upcoming elections may also stall progress. The presidential frontrunner, Otto Pérez-Molina, is a retired army general with a questionable human rights record and a preference for iron fist, hard-line security policies. While he has promised to respect political appointees’ mandates, many fear that if elected he would replace Paz y Paz and even block the continuation of CICIG’s work beyond its current 2013 deadline. While outsourcing justice is not a long-term solution, banishing the UN commission before it has completed its investigations and trials will handicap efforts to strengthen the rule of law.

For a place that many have already labeled a failed state, the recent advances in security are a ray of hope. A committed Attorney General and external commission have shown that it is possible to make inroads combating organized crime and Guatemala’s pervasive culture of impunity. But to sustain and further these small islands of progress, other branches of government and citizens more generally will have to do their part. The very wealthy will have to pay higher taxes to underpin public security (a point stressed by Hillary Clinton during last month’s Central American security conference). The next president may have to forgo partisan calculations and bolster the justice system, starting with keeping the effective Paz y Paz as chief prosecutor. These are by no means easy steps to take. They require personal sacrifices and the setting aside of self interest for the public good of a stronger state. But if Guatemalans truly want a more stable and secure future, they will have to start making these tough choices. Instead of writing Guatemala off as a lost cause, we should applaud the work of a few courageous reformers and encourage the rest of the country to follow their lead.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

U.S. President Barack Obama and Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff toast during lunch in Brasilia (Ho New/Courtesy Reuters).

Today the Council on Foreign Relations is releasing its independent Task Force report, “Global Brazil and U.S.-Brazil Relations”.  I sat in as an observer for the Task Force, ably led by co-chairs Samuel W. Bodman — former Secretary of Energy under George W. Bush — and James D. Wolfensohn — chairman of Citigroup’s international advisory board and former president of the World Bank Group — and directed by my CFR colleague, Julia Sweig. The project’s 30 participants hail from diverse backgrounds, some old Brazil hands and others with functional and/or wide-ranging expertise. Needless to say, the four meetings that took place over the course of a year yielded a stimulating and fruitful dialogue. Although there were some differences of opinion among Task Force members (some of which are noted in the additional comments and dissents section of the report), everyone agreed to Brazil’s rising importance.

We addressed a wide range of issues, including Brazil’s economic health, its energy agenda, its role as a dominant regional power and its relationship with the U.S. government. The report’s core recommendations focus on deepening cooperation between Brazil and the United States so that both can more effectively advance their common interests (and better manage areas where we might come into conflict). In particular, the Task Force points to Chinese monetary policy, climate change mitigation, the expansion of the biofuels industry and regional counternarcotics policy as issue areas that provide opportunities for bilateral cooperation.  It calls for Washington to better appreciate Brasilia’s increasing potential as a global strategic ally. As a sign of goodwill, the Task Force recommends a particular concrete step: fully endorsing Brazil as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.

The report’s most basic takeaway is that Brazil is the newest pillar in a multipolar world and must be treated as such. Slotted to become the world’s fifth largest economy within the next decade, it grew at a stunning pace of 7.5% in 2010 (whether this is sustainable remains a big question mark), and is expected to expand 4.5% this year. Unemployment and inequality — perennial concerns for the nation—have fallen. Still, Brazil’s economic outlook is not entirely rosy. In the short to medium term, rising exchange rates and inflation threaten Brazil’s growth. Decrepit infrastructure and an overwhelmed public education system threaten its longer term competitiveness. Whether Brazil can take on these myriad obstacles effectively remains to be seen.

Whatever its economic future may hold, the Task Force report is worth a full read, as it provides important insights and ideas on how both Brazil and the U.S. can manage the challenges that lie ahead, and the U.S.-Brazil relationship, for the better of both nations.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Venezuelan President Chavez looks on as his Brazilian counterpart Lula da Silva speaks during their meeting at Miraflores Palace in Caracas in July, 2010 (Jorge Silva/Courtesy Reuters).

Jorge Dominguez’s recent testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere gives an overview of Latin America’s progress toward democratic consolidation in recent history, and the role the international community has played in this slow, but steady, march.

Time and America’s Quarterly have two good pieces on Mexico’s state level elections last weekend. While both rightly focus on the PRI’s strength coming out of the election, it didn’t win everywhere. The party lost nine municipalities it previously held in the state of Hidalgo, due in large part to successful alliances between the PAN and PRD. Meanwhile, the PRD mayor of Mexico City urges that these ties must become stronger to give his party and its allies a fighting chance in the 2012 presidential elections.

A recent New York Times article looks at the current state of  illegal immigration from Mexico to the U.S., highlighting how changing dynamics within both countries dissuade Mexicans from crossing the border illegally. This discussion addresses issues I raised in the past, namely changing demographics and new economic realities, including the rise of the middle class in Mexico and the region more broadly.

Lastly, for readers worried about Brazil’s overheating, this Economist graph won’t calm your fears.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.