Hold your fire!

These three items ARE related to an upcoming event

Reuters,  06 January 2009:

MONTERREY, Mexico: Gunmen threw a grenade and opened fire outside a television news station during its evening broadcast in Mexico on Tuesday and left a message warning journalists from reporting on drug war violence.

Gunmen hurled the grenade at the regional studios of Mexico’s top broadcaster Grupo Televisa in the northern city of Monterrey during the evening news show, the station’s reporters said live on the air.

No one was hurt in the attack, believed to be the first against a TV station in Mexico, and in which the gunmen sprayed one of the complex’s outside doors with bullets. The grenade exploded in a studio workshop used to build sets.

Gunmen also left a handwritten message on a car bumper near the studio that read: “Stop reporting just on us. Report on the narco’s political leaders,” in a apparent reference to the Mexican government.

Randal C. Archibold in the 7 January  New York Times

Mr. Chertoff said that he had advised Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona, nominated by President-elect Barack Obama to succeed him as homeland security secretary, that “I put helping Mexico get control of its borders and its organized crime problems” at the very top of the list of national security concerns.

Ms. Napolitano’s confirmation hearing begins next week. Her office denied requests for an interview.

In the wide-ranging interview with Mr. Chertoff, two weeks before he leaves office, he suggested that his controversial efforts to rapidly build a fence along nearly 700 miles of the Mexican border, as well as his bolstering the size of the Border Patrol, were part of the push to defend against drug violence, not just to control illegal immigration.

“That’s another reason, frankly, why I have been insistent on putting in the infrastructure and fencing and stuff like that,” he said. “Because I don’t want, God forbid, if there is ever a spillover of significance, to have denied the Border Patrol anything they need to protect the lives and safety of American citizens.”

Press Briefing by Deputy White House Press Secretary Scott Stanzel (the White House, 9 January)

The administration has been boasting about the success of the President’s war on terror, yet data compiled by the RAND Corporation show that the global rate of terrorism, as measured by the number of people killed per year, increased by almost fivefold during the Bush presidency. And according to the government’s own terrorism statistics, 2007 was the worst year ever, with over 22,000 people killed worldwide…

Mexican gangsters attack “mainstream” Mexican institutions to, one assumes, draw attention to government involvement in gangsterism.  Michael Chertoff, who is supposed to be in charge of planning for preventing terrorist attacks, claims Mexican gangsters are terrorists and there is a need for more U.S. policing and military response capability… which RAND Corporation studies conclude, leads to MORE, not less, violence.

While I’m willing to give the incoming Obama Administration the benefit of the doubt, I don’t see any results coming from Tuesdays Felipe Calderon-George W. Bush-Barack Obama meeting.  Calderon will be pushing for still more “assistance” (read weaponry) for this “war on (some) Mexican drug (dealers)”… with little still being said about the buyers, financiers or gun suppliers in the United States.  I don’t see anyone in the Obama Administration who shows any interest in Latin American affairs, and some — like Secretary of Agriculture designate Tom Vilsack — who are likely to push programs harmful to Latin America in general, and Mexico in particular.

And, while short of dismantling the Department of Homeland Security (which just aint gonna happen),  Janet Napolitano will be a step back towards sanity in internal security affairs, I don’t see Ms. Napolitano making any moves to either deal with the gun and money laundering issues.