Here are links to  Part 1
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99010638
and Part 2
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99047804
of a 3 part series Scott Carrier prepared for National Public Radio, concerning ongoing violence in Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico.
Part 3 will air tomorrow on the Day to Day program.

A link to an article from El Universal (Mexico City) is provided below. The article notes a change in the demographics of drug related arrests in Panama. It appears Colombian groups are ceding or yielding freight business to Mexican groups. It seems on the surface that Sinaloa and the Gulf are expanding operations in Panama.

http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/566957.html

On the side, this may be related to an expansion of the presence of Mexican cartels in Argentina, to acquire 'efedrina'. Let us remember that a significant percentage of freight processed in labs controlled by Sinaloa and the Gulf is shipped to European customers. Not everything is shipped to American customers.

By Brenda Norrell

On the Texas border, it is party time.

The No Border Wall Coalition is celebrating, with this message, "Hasta la vista Chertoff!"

In a statement just released from Brownsville and El Paso, Texas border communities are announcing it is time to party down, with no fond memories.

"On January 10th communities along the Texas border will be throwing Retirement Parties to celebrate the end of Michael Chertoff’s tenure as Secretary of Homeland Security.

International tribunal vital for justice for residential school victims

By Brenda Norrell

Churches in Canada have not been held responsible for the rape, murder and disappearance of 50,000 to 100,000 Native American children in Canada's residential schools, said Kevin Annett, speaking on RedTown Blog Talk Radio today.
Canada has not made an attempt to provide real healing for Native people, or to prosecute the perpetrators, including those who murdered and buried children.
Annett said many of the Indian survivors of residential school abuse have taken their own lives.
"They are crushed and broken by this."
"Who will speak for the children who never came back?"
"What about all those children who died? Are we going to pretend it never happened?"
During the 90-minute program aired on RedTown, Annett said the churches pushed the Canadian government to keep these schools open, even after Canada wanted to close the schools. Now, the churches place themselves above the law, refusing to even identify where the children's graves are.

During the Festival of Dignified Rage in Chiapas, Subcomandante Marcos breaks the EZLN's silence on the drug war

On the first day of the Zapatista National Liberation Army's participation in the Festival of Dignified Rage, its spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos discussed the drug violence that has increasingly plagued Mexico.  Marcos' speech marks the first time the EZLN has addressed the drug war in any sort of depth.

Marcos couldn't avoid addressing drug violence in his discussion of violence against social movements.  He says Mexican President Felipe Calderon and the corporate media "use and abuse the word 'violence'" for their own means.  "They say they condemn violence, but in reality they condemn action."  Marcos accuses Calderon of using the drug war to pacify discontent with his government.  "Mr. Calderon decided that, instead of bread and circuses, he would give the people blood."

Tlaxcala is the only state without victims of organized crime

by Esther Sanchez, El Universal

In 2008, the war between the drug trafficking cartels left a record-breaking 5,630 people executed in the country.  According to El Universal's count, in the past four years 12,061 people have died from organized crime; 46.5% of these murders occurred within the past year.

The daily average of victims in 2008 was 15, and the most violent day was November 3, when 58 homicides with the narcos' mark were reported.  Of the fifteen, 19 were in Sinaloa and 12 in Durango.

By Brenda Norrell

The New York Times gutted its credibility with the advertisement for Barrick Gold and Newmont Mining, disguised as a news article today, "A Nevada town escapes the slump, thanks to gold."
This article reads like a paid commercial for Barrick and Newmont, considering there have been protests underway by the Western Shoshone since Thanksgiving, who are now in court to halt the gold mining on their sacred Mount Tenabo.
The Times article appears one day after I wrote that Barrick and Newmont are among the Worst Companies in the World, according to a Censored News readers' poll of primarily Indigenous readers.
The New York Times article reeks of either a duped reporter or one that has been paid off by Barrick or Newmont to write a spin article to counter the ongoing protests and media exposure.
Perhaps the Times reporter should visit Barrick and Newmont gold mines in Africa, New Guinea or South America, where Indigenous Peoples are being pushed off their lands, raped and killed because of these gold mining corporations and poisoned by cyanide leaching.

Native American radio journalists urge war crimes tribunal for Bush, immediate withdrawal from Iraq and protection of Native sacred places

By Brenda Norrell

LOS ANGELES -- On American Indian Airwaves, Native American radio hosts Kehaulani Kauanui, Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and James Brown, Elm Pomo Nation in California, called for a tribunal to hold President Bush responsible for war crimes, during a panel discussion by distinguished Indigenous journalists and scholars.
"I think we need to pursue trying George Bush and company for war crimes related to this illegal and unlawful occupation in Iraq," Kauanui said.
"We need to have a war crimes tribunal and bring all these people in," Brown added. Both Kauanui and Brown called on President elect Obama to initiate immediate withdrawal from Iraq upon entering office.

Mexico's drug war fits into the rubric of the Security and Prosperity Partnership and the US security agenda

by Carlos Fazio, La Jornada

One. In the days leading up to the arrival of the first package of US armament, intelligence software, and military consultancy under Plan Mexico, Felipe Calderon's so-called "Operation Clean-up" takes on the appearance of a tribute to the White House and Capitol Hill.  Beyond the religious connotation of the "operation's" name, which refers to a dualistic Christian discourse: good/bad, clean/dirty, the leader with "clean hands," who declared himself an admirer of General Francisco Franco, seems to be carrying out a purification ritual.

A record-breaking 5,612 people were executed in Mexico’s drug war in 2008, making the drug war more deadly than the drugs

Mexico's daily El Universal, which began counting drug war executions four years ago, reports that 5,612 people were executed in Mexico’s drug war in 2008.  This year’s deaths more than doubled 2007’s total of over 2,700 executions.  By El Universal's estimates, about 8,463 drug executions have occurred during the first two years of Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s six-year term in office.  Calderon deployed the army and federal police to combat drug cartels almost immediately upon assuming office in December 2006.

The 2008 death toll means that the drug war in Mexico alone (that is, not including the copious number of drug war deaths in Colombia) is more deadly than illicit drugs in the United States, which is the biggest drug market in the world and the destination for the overwhelming majority of the American continent’s drugs.

The United States was voted the Worst Company in the World, followed by Monsanto, Peabody Energy Corp. and Barrick Gold

By Brenda Norrell

Photo by Mano Cockrum

The United States was voted the "Worst Company in the World," in a reader poll conducted by the Censored News blog that ended today. Readers, primarily Indigenous Peoples, voted Monsanto as the second Worst Company in the World. Peabody Energy Corp., recently granted a life of mine permit to expand coal mining on Navajo and Hopi lands, was voted the third Worst Company in the World.

Though beleaguered Gov. Rod Blagojevich has exhibited little of what we would call upstanding character to date in the Illinois Senator-appointment controversy, it’s worth driving home the point that this guy is no defender of the oppressed, or minority communities for that matter.

There’s a little-noticed case still pending in U.S. District Court in Chicago that shines more light on that fact. The litigation points out that under Blagojevich, there is a total of nearly 2,000 clemency cases pending the governor’s final decision [some awaiting action for years], including those of the plaintiffs in the case, which was filed September 2006.

Activist organizations accuse the government of using the anti-drug operation to repress indigenous communities, poor neighborhoods, and social justice organizations

On November 27, 2008, rural education students in Michoacan put down their books and headed to the state’s capital, Morelia, to commemorate repression they suffered in 2002 with a protest demanding more resources for their schools and the firing of Elba Esther Gordillo, political hack and despised president of the national teachers union, the SNTE. The students from the Normal Rural Vasco de Quiroga in Tiripetío, Michoacán, were accompanied by their counterparts from fourteen other states, all members of the Mexican Federation of Socialist Peasant Students (FECSM in its Spanish initials).

An Opinion Piece, by Cheryl White, Toronto Drug Users Union, Canada.

Report on the 2008 INPUD Annual General Meeting and International Drug User Day (IDUD2008) Gathering, “Moving Forward II”, Copenhagen, Hosted by the Danish Drug Users’ Union – BrugerForeningen

I have spent more than 20 years as an Illicit Drug User activist (IDUA), participating in the early years of forming local, national and international networks of common cause dedicated to harm reduction and DU activism. To say these periods were characterized by extreme growing pains would be to put it lightly indeed. Because our fight has been and continues to be a fight for our very lives, feelings are often raw and our activism is driven by a high level of passion...

Click Here to read the full article by Cheryl White.

Readers of the Narcosphere may well be aware of some of the more problematic aspects of biofuel as an ostensibly "renewable" energy source, including food scarcity, deforestation, and soil erosion. Now, in yet another example of neoliberal interests dressing up the disenfranchisement of traditional and indigenous communities in "green" drag, a business reporter for the BBC relates how paramilitary syndicates in Colombia are kicking Afro-Colombian communities off of their traditional homelands for the sake of biodiesel production, destroying their sustainable way of life in the process. As the article states,

land use [i.e., on the part of the Afro-Colombians of Colombia's Northwest] is based on cultivating a few traditional crops for subsistence - such as corn, yucca and cocoa - or for hunting and fishing