Clinton: U.S. wants to increase help for Mexico's fight against drug cartels

Can the United States really help Mexico succeed in its battle against drug cartels that have expanded their influence farther and farther south from the border between the two countries? From the safety of Northern California, hundreds of miles from Tijuana, it used to look as if the Mexican government was forced to fight corruption it its own police forces before it could engage the drug traffickers that had turned even peaceful cities into dangerous places. But years of unabated violence have made the lines of power a lot easier to understand. That's why U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the other day that the powerful Mexican drug cartels were behaving a lot like political insurgent groups than mere gangs. "This is one of the most difficult fights that any country faces today," Clinton told San Francisco's nonpartisan Commonwealth Club in a speech Friday, according to Cable News Network (CNN). "We are watching drug traffickers undermine and corrupt governments in Central America, and we are watching the brutality and barbarity of their assaults on governors and mayors, the press, as well as each other, in Mexico." Clinton said the United States could help Mexico rebuild its criminal justice system and retrain its police forces to fight the cartels, which she said were acting like terrorists. "For the first time, they are using car bombings," she said. "You see them being much more organized in a kind of paramilitary way." Clinton's comments were no doubt a reference to U.S. efforts to find the body of David Hartley, a U.S. resident believed to have been shot by drug traffickers on Mexico's border with Texas, CNN said.

Costa Rica elects new president to succeed Arias

Latin American business leaders probably were delighted with Sunday's easy victory by Laura Chinchilla in Costa Rica's presidential election. Chinchilla, currently vice president in the administration of Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias, well-outpaced her two closest rivals and garnered 47 percent of the vote, enough to avoid a runoff. Her election means a continuation of pro-business policies that have proved controversial in the Central American country but are credited with helping Costa Rica avoid the worst effects of the global economic slowdown, according to the Reuters international news service. Chinchilla is the first elected female president in Costa Rica, which has long been one of Latin America's most stable countries. She and Arias, who is finishing his second term in office and plans to retire, championed the U.S.-backed Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) that relaxed trade barriers between the United States, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. But CAFTA met with widespread opposition in Costa Rica before being narrowly approved by voters in 2007. "I am thankful for the good work of the outgoing government and thankful our country is again moving forward and refuses to allow this advance to stop," Chinchilla said told cheering supporters in San Jose. She promised to expand existing trade pacts and attract new investment to Costa Rica's vibrant economy in the campaign, and received twice as many votes as either of her two strongest opponents, center-left Otton Solis, a CAFTA opponent, and conservative Otto Guevara. Costa Rica's economy is thriving on a mixture of tourism, manufacturing and exports of its popular coffee, pineapples and bananas, Reuters said.

U.S. prosecutions expected in wake of UBS deal

At least the recent deal between the U.S. Justice Department and the giant Swiss bank UBS will result in more money for the deficit-ridden U.S. Treasury. U.S. prosecutors have opened 150 investigations against 150 U.S. citizens they believe were helped by Swiss bankers to avoid taxes on $20 billion in assets held in Europe, Central America and the Caribbean. Under the terms of the deal, a major dent in previously inviolate Swiss banking secrecy laws, 5,000 additional owners of hidden assets are expected to be revealed, according to the Reuters international news service. But Swiss bankers are believed to be still be hiding the identities of 10,000-15,000 more depositors from the United States with possibly hundreds of billions more in assets. Those names are not expected to be revealed in the current case, in which UBS also agreed to pay $780 million in fines. This apparently means that the United States has backed away from permanently neutering Switzerland's banking secrecy tradition, which has no place in the evolving global economy. It also looks like the United States has failed use the case to right one of the great festering wrongs from World War II, and force Swiss bankers to reveal the locations and amounts of money and assets stolen from victims of the Nazi conquest of Europe. Why Swiss banks should continue to be exempt from common human decency defies explanation. And, yet, even the world's most powerful nations seem to quiver at the prospect of correcting this indecency. In fact, if not for the testimony of one former UBS banker turned whistleblower, there may have been no case. That banker, Bradley Birkenfeld of South Boston, formerly of Geneva, pleaded guilty in 2008 to helping a South Florida billionaire hide $200 million in assets from U.S. tax authorities. Birkenfeld agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for a lighter prison sentence.

Honduras takes giant step backward -- military coup topples leftist government

No doubt, the military geniuses who engineered Sunday's dawn overthrow of the democratically elected president of Honduras, leftist Manuel Zelaya, thought they were doing the right thing. And maybe they were. The Supreme Court said it had ordered military commanders to remove the president after he precipitated a political crisis last week by firing the armed forces chief, Gen. Romero Vasquez, over a disagreement about a national election Zelaya had called in an effort to change the constitution to allow him to run again, according to the Reuters international news service. Zelaya was put on a plane and flown to exile in Costa Rica over objections from the United States, the European Union and other nations; and the Honduran legislature named Roberto Micheletti, a member of Zelaya's Liberal Party, as the new president of the poor Central American nation. Micheletti immediately declared a curfew for Sunday and Monday nights as the streets of the capital, Tegucigalpa, filled with pro-Zelaya protesters, Reuters said. U.S. President Barack Obama called for the reinstatement of Zelaya but Micheletti refused, Reuters said. "I don't think anybody here, not Barack Obama and much less Hugo Chavez, has the right to come and threaten," Micheletti said. It was Zelaya's growing relationship with Chavez, the leftist Venezuelan president famous for his angry anti-U.S. rhetoric, that appears to have upset the generals, Reuters said. The court ordered Zelaya's removal, saying he had exceeded his authority by firing Vasquez. The coup was a rather painful reminder of the political turmoil that characterized Central American governments last century, but which had calmed down in the past few decades as democracies became firmly established. The United States still has 600 troops stationed at Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras, Reuters said.