by John Ross
If international diplomacy were a wrestling match, Fox Vs Latin America would be an apt sub–title for Mexico’s foreign relations imbroglios in 2006. During the five years plus he has been in office, the Mexican president has taken on the leaders of the Latin American Left one by one, starting with Fidel Castro, with whom he once broke off diplomatic relations.

Diplomatic relations with Cuba were once again endangered last week (Feb 5th) when the Mexican president failed to act after the U.S.–owned Sheraton Hotel chain canceled the reservations of a high–powered Cuban delegation in Mexico City to negotiate with Texas oil companies. The Cubans were kicked out of the swank Sheraton Isabel under the provisions of the Helms–Burton “trading with the enemy” act. Although U.S. laws are not applicable in Mexico, Fox failed to lodge a diplomatic protest with Washington,

Fox’s aggressive defense of free trade and the neo–liberal model now rejected by Latin America often makes it appear that he is carrying Washington’s water. This was most recently displayed at the Mar de Plata Summit of the Americas in November when the Mexican president tried to force endorsement of George Bush’s beloved Free Trade Area of the Americas (ALCA in its Spanish acronym), which would extend the dubious benefits of the North American Free Trade Agreement all the way to Tierra del Fuego. With Fox on the floor, “we don’t have to do much work ourselves” U.S. undersecretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs Tom Scanlon told the Argentinean daily Clarin.
counterpunch.org

Venezuelan ambassador in Madrid Arevalo Mendez said yesterday that former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar “has no voice, nor thought, nor discourse of his own.” When analyzing the Latin American political system, “Aznar is carrying Bush on his shoulders, which limits the vision the US has of the region.”

Aznar had committed himself to working to stop “the return to populism” in the area. He said, “Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, maybe Argentina. All those places run the risk.”

Méndez said, “I’m surprised that a person with enough intellectual capacity to have his own voice” is agreeing with Bush on Latin American issues. He added, “In analyzing current politics in the region, you can “use the context of internal leadership in Latin America, or the Americanized viewpoint of the US, which Aznar supports.”

Mendez added that Aznar was wrong when he called on Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez not to use “petrodollars” in foreign policy, because that would be like “asking Spain not to use the money it receives from tourism to make international policy, or Argentina not to use what it receives from meat to make international policy. This sort of right-wing statements have no validity nor stand up to minimal discourse.”
spainherald.com

FEMA has let nearly 11,000 unused manufactured homes deteriorate on old runways and open fields in Arkansas, and the agency spent $416,000 per person to house a few hundred Hurricane Katrina evacuees for a short time in Alabama last fall, government investigators told the Senate on Monday.
news.yahoo.com

Hotel Aid Ends; Katrina Evacuees Seek Housing Again
NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 13 — Thousands of evacuees from Hurricane Katrina became transients again on Monday, wheeling their entire lives onto the street on luggage carts or dragging bulging garbage bags through hotel lobbies, when the federal government stopped paying their hotel bills.

In the largest single step in its phaseout of emergency housing assistance for victims of the hurricane, the Federal Emergency Management Agency ended the hotel payments for 12,000 families across the country, including 4,400 now living in New Orleans.

Most will get apartment rental assistance or trailers. Federal officials acknowledged Monday that hundreds of millions of dollars worth of mobile homes might never be used to house hurricane victims.

Most?

02/14/06 (UPI) — A USA Today-CNN-Gallup Poll says Americans not only think Iran will develop nuclear weapons but also use them against the United States.

The poll done over the last weekend also says Americans fear the Bush administration will be “too quick” to order military action against Iran, USA Today reported Tuesday.

The poll said eight out of 10 respondents predicted Iran would provide a nuclear weapon to terrorists to attack the United States or Israel. Six out of 10 respondents said Iran itself would deploy nuclear weapons against the United States.
informationclearinghouse.info

Every year in February, Americans celebrate the eradication of unjust laws that had imprisoned African-Americans behind a wall of segregation for more than 90 years and the centuries of effort that brought them out of slavery — stateless, penniless, oppressed — to a state of equality and justice with their fellow citizens. Yet even now, fifty years after this remarkable transformation of our society, the reality laid bare by Katrina demonstrates that equality remains elusive and racism alive. This truth about America burst from the television screen as Katrina lashed New Orleans. Had the TV crews not presented this scene to Americans, the truth of America’s poverty stricken hordes would have remained hidden behind the glitz of Mardi Gras and Bourbon Street. “Oppressed people,” Martin Luther King reminded us, “cannot remain oppressed forever.” But they can be forgotten, nameless, and voiceless, the detritus of our touted democracy. So while we celebrate this most recent accomplishment in creating a real democracy in America, almost 300 years after its proclamation to the world, we might ask why we allow our touted mid-east allay, the only bastion of American-type democracy in the mid-east, Israel, to create an apartheid state that incorporates the imprisonment of a people behind illegal walls condemned as such by the International Court of Justice, illegal theft of land contrary to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and actions that break the United Nations’ Convention against Genocide?
counterpunch.org

JERUSALEM, Feb. 14 — Omri Sharon, a former member of the Israeli Parliament and the elder son of the prime minister, was sentenced Tuesday to nine months in jail after he pleaded guilty to illegally raising more than $1.3 million for one of his father’s political campaigns.

But because his father, Ariel Sharon, is comatose after a major stroke, a Tel Aviv court allowed Omri Sharon to delay the start of his jail term until at least Aug. 31. He was also sentenced to nine months of probation, to begin after he leaves jail, and fined $66,700.
nytimes.com

SPIN BOLDAK, Afghanistan – Afghanistan’s Taleban guerrillas are gaining strength and will step up attacks against government and foreign troops when spring comes next month, a Taleban commander said on Tuesday.

The Taleban claimed responsibility for a blast on Monday that the US military said killed four troops. The Taleban said nine Americans were killed and US forces were helpless in the face of such attacks.

“Taleban attacks will further increase with a decrease in the winter cold,” a former Taleban governor of Kandahar province, Mullah Mohammad Hassan Rahmani, told Reuters by satellite telephone from an undisclosed location.

Fighting in Afghanistan traditionally eases off during the winter months when mountain passes get snowed under.

But violence has surged in recent months, including 15 suicide blasts since November.

US military officials say the Taleban have changed tactics since suffering heavy losses in clashes last summer and are now increasingly using roadside blasts and suicide bombers against soft targets.
khaleejtimes.com

ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP) — A bomb exploded at an Istanbul supermarket during Monday’s afternoon rush, injuring 15 people. A Kurdish news agency reported that a Kurdish militant group claimed responsibility for the attack, which came days after a fatal bombing at an Internet cafe in the city.

In an e-mail, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons Organization said it carried out both attacks in response to Turkey’s policies toward the Kurdish people, the Firat News Agency said on its Web site.

The shadowy group – believed linked to the main Kurdish guerrilla group, Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK – has claimed responsibility for a number of bomb attacks in Turkey, including a blast in the Aegean resort town of Cesme last summer that wounded 21 people. The same group had also claimed Thursday’s bomb attack on the Internet cafe, which killed one person and injured 15, including seven policemen.

“From now on, we will continue our actions uninterrupted” until the Turkish government changes its policies, the militant group said.
ap.org/nydailynews

The government of oil-rich Kazakhstan has been accused of operating death squads after a prominent opposition politician was found murdered with his driver and bodyguard. Altynbek Sarsenbaiuly, 43, was the second opposition leader to be found dead in suspicious circumstances in three months.

He had made himself unpopular with the government of President Nursultan Nazarbayev by criticising his daughter and heir apparent, Dariga, for her grip on the country’s media.

Though government sources suggested he may have died in a hunting or road accident, the politician’s colleagues allege he was killed to order by the former Soviet state’s secret police.

He was last seen alive on Friday after which his mobile phone went dead. His body was discovered on Monday with that of his driver and his bodyguard in a ravine on the outskirts of Almaty, Kazakhstan’s commercial capital.
independent.co.uk

Of course the jokes are flying all over Texas—what’s the fine for shooting a lawyer?—and so forth. Dick-Cheney-shooting-Harry-Whittington is fraught, as they say, with irony. It’s not as though the ground in Texas is littered with liberal Republicans. I think the vice president winged the only one we’ve got.
truthdig.com