Hispanic demographic changes in Virginia have significantly impacted social and political realities in the state. For example, Culpeper County experienced a 385% increase in its Hispanic population in the last ten years, equaling an absolute increase of 3,299 inhabitants. Northern neighbor Fauquier County similarly registered an increase of 275%, or 3,064 inhabitants over the same period. Still further to the northeast, Prince William County, known nationally for its controversial immigration policies, added 54,122 Hispanic inhabitants, a 198% increase.

Net population increases in these counties have brought massive development in the way of thousands of single-family homes, improved roads, shopping malls, and increased tax revenue. But, perhaps most striking is the pace at which Hispanic population growth has outstripped overall population growth.

Only sampling the typically rural counties between Prince William and Albemarle, a leisurely 90-minute drive down VA-Route 29, one can see how demographics have dramatically shifted towards a more Latino population. A number of factors have contributed to settling in these counties, including a construction boom in the region and relatively lower property and living costs compared to Fairfax, Arlington and Alexandria counties.  Virginia’s demographic transformation is set to dramatically alter the commercial, social and political future of the state in the decade to come.

Data/Map Source: CNN

Mexican lawmakers have condemned the US ‘Operation Fast and Furious,’ which purportedly allows gun smuggling in order to track weapons to Mexican drug lords.

By Nacha Cattan, Correspondent / March 9, 2011

El secretario técnico del Consejo de Seguridad Nacional aclaró que ‘lo que se dijo ayer fue que tenemos que evaluar e intentar cuáles son los mejores mecanismos de seguridad para agentes norteamericanos’

Alejandro Poiré, secretario técnico del Consejo de Seguridad Nacional, rechazó que el presidente de Estados Unidos, BarackObama, haya solicitado al gobierno mexicano que los agentes puedan portar armas en territorio nacional.

A pregunta expresa de Carlos Puig en W Radio sobre si los agentes norteamericanos podrán portar armas en México, el funcionario dijo: “en ningún momento por parte de la administración Obama se planteó esa solicitud, lo que se dijo ayer fue que tenemos que evaluar e intentar cuáles son los mejores mecanismos de seguridad para agentes norteamericanos que están aquí en el marco de la ley”.

Poiré agregó que se debe reconocer en EU que “es ilegal exportar armas a México”. “Reconocemos el derecho constitucional de los ciudadanos estadounidenses a tener un arma para su protección, pero también reconocemos que se tiene que hacer válido que es ilegal exportar esas armas a México”, señaló.

Sobre la relación de Felipe Calderón con Carlos Pascual, el embajador de EU en México, dijo que “el representante de EU en nuestro país ha venido en esa medida para poder hacer esa relación funcional”.

Rechazó lo señalado por el periódico The New York Times sobre que Calderón reclamó a Obama las aseveraciones de Pascual sobre el gobierno mexicano, según los cables de Wkileaks. “Me gustaría saber la fuente del NYT”, dijo.

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Los líderes panistas, Gustavo Madero y Cecilia Romero, aseguran que contrario a lo que afirma el embajador de EU, sus aspirantes son fuertes

El presidente nacional del PAN, Gustavo Madero, rechazó las afirmaciones del embajador de Estados Unidos en México,Carlos Pascual, en el sentido de que los aspirantes a la candidatura a la Presidencia del blanquiazul son grises.

En entrevista radifónica con Carmen Aristegui, Madero Muñoz dijo que el PAN está fuerte con sus candidatos y tienen la confianza de que en el 2012 refrendarán la presidencia de la República.

En tanto, la secretaria general del partido, Cecilia Romero, rechazó debilidad de los aspirantes y dijo que los candidatos del PAN son fuertes y el candidato que resulte elegido “va a estar en posición muy adecuada para ganar la Presidencia de la República”.

Entrevistada en su participación en un evento en conmemoración del Día Internacional de la Mujer de la Organización de las Naciones Unidas en México, Cecilia Romero aseguró que no son declaraciones las del embajador, sino filtraciones de un informe y esa información está descontextualizada porque fue hace más de un año.

En un cable filtrado por WikiLeaks, Pascual detalló al subsecretario de Asuntos Hemisféricos, Arturo Valenzuela, el panorama que encontraría en su visita a nuestro país, desde el punto de vista político, económico y social.

En el cable 09 México 3423, el embajador refirió que los diálogos de seguridad con nuestro país podrían verse afectados por la caída del porcentaje de aprobación deCalderón, las preocupaciones económicas, la percepción popular sobre la lucha contra el narcotráfico y la debilidad política del PAN.

Sobre esto, Madero dijo: “no comparto yo su punto de vista sobre la situación política, sobre todo que quedó demostrado que ni fue exacta, correcta, ni bien contextualizada.

En nuestro entorno político, el PAN está fuerte con nuestros candidatos y sentimos toda la confianza de que en el 2012 vamos a refrendar la Presidencia de la República, no tenemos duda”.

El panista dijo que este tipo de filtraciones deWiliLeaksestán haciendo daño porque están descontextualizadas porque cuando se hicieron “ni siquiera estaban definidos quienes iban a ser” los candidatos.

El chihuahuanse se pronunció porque el gobierno de México exija por la vía diplomática y a través de los órganos de seguridad nacional una aclaración y una explicación sobre los alcances del operativo “Rápido y furioso” que permitió el paso ilegal de cientos de armas de Estados Unidos a nuestro país.

Además se pronunció porque se dé una regulación de la venta de armas de asalto en la entidad americana para así bajar los niveles de violencia que hay en nuestro país.

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Latin America, long associated with sharp ideological swings and notably erratic politics, is increasingly settling into the middle of the left-right political continuum. This development is discernible in voter attitudes and major policy directions in many countries. At times, the rhetoric that political leaders employ and the ways in which they describe themselves can obscure this trend and give the impression that ideology is more salient than it actually is. Although ideology still dominates the political discourse and environment in some countries, a careful examination of most approaches to economic, social, and security challenges throughout the region reveals that the ideological range within which policy is made has considerably narrowed. There is today a greater measure of predictability and pragmatism.

This trend is not irreversible; it hinges on continued progress in a variety of areas. Its implications for improving the quality of democracy are generally positive, however. There is a growing focus in Latin America on developing practical and realistic solutions to serious economic and social problems—an approach to politics that tends to go together with an embrace of the rules of the democratic game.

At the same time, however, democratic deficits remain considerable. Too many Latin American countries are troubled by weak political institutions, inadequate judicial systems, stubbornly high levels of inequality, and rampant organized crime and citizen insecurity. There are also clear signs, especially among young people, of an undercurrent of discontent with “politics as usual”—meaning especially the widespread practice of cronyism—and a demand for serious efforts to tackle persistent corruption. These are warnings for the region’s political leaders: In addition to embracing more centrist politics, they must meet higher standards and expectations for effective and responsive political leadership.

The findings of the Latinobarómetro, a respected comparative public opinion survey that has tracked political attitudes throughout the region since 1995, shed light on the shift to the center in recent years. In 2002, for example, only 29 percent of Latin Americans identified themselves as centrists; by 2008, that number had jumped to 42 percent. A systematic review of left-right political identities from 1996 to 2009 (see Table) clearly shows that most Latin Americans are clustered in the middle, which has remained relatively stable over time. A number of countries have moved slightly leftward, but overall the regionwide movement has been much more toward the center than to the left of the ideological spectrum. On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being the farthest left, no country fell below 4.0 for any year during this period—only one point left of dead center.

Likewise, the Americas Barometer, a survey periodically carried out by the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) of Vanderbilt University and a consortium of some twenty partner institutions, concluded in 2006 that, while there had indeed been a “shift to the left” in many countries, “the magnitude of the shift is small and the center of gravity remains somewhat to the right.”3 The study found that the gap between left and right varies sharply from country to country. Although the results reveal continuing ideological cleavages in Latin America, it is unclear whether the shift in attitudes is more toward a leftist or a centrist orientation.

Political scientists Andy Baker and Kenneth Greene have developed an indicator known as “vote-revealed leftism,” or VRL, to determine voters’ ideology. The VRL index places voters’ preferences for leftist candidates on a scale of 1 to 20, with 1 the farthest right and 20 the farthest left. Mirroring the Latinobarómetro data, between 1995 and 2008 Latin America’s VRL went from 7.89 (center-right) to 9.82 (close to the exact midpoint of 10.5)—indicative of the centrism that has become more prominent throughout the region in recent years.

The move toward the pragmatic center is largely a product of fundamental changes along a number of critical dimensions. It is hardly surprising that political moderation has accompanied the region’s recent and growing prosperity. Between 2003 and 2008, Latin American countries registered economic-growth rates higher than those seen in any other comparable period in recent memory. Moreover, to the surprise of most economists, Latin America weathered the 2009 economic crisis reasonably well (the major exception was Mexico, whose economy is more closely tied to that of the United States). Brazil especially stood out in this respect, but other economies also endured global financial strains better than had been anticipated.

The region’s sound performance reflects improved macroeconomic policy making as well as deepening economic ties with the rest of the world and especially China, whose intake of Latin American commodities has helped to fuel its own spectacular growth.  According to the UN Economic Commission on Latin America, the region is expected to grow, on average, at a rate of more than 5 percent in 2010. Negative growth will beset only Venezuela and—in the wake of its devastating earthquake and other unrelenting difficulties—Haiti.

In addition, the region’s poverty levels have declined measurably in recent years. In some countries, the drop has been particularly impressive. Brazil, for example, managed to lift 29 million people (close to a sixth of the country’s total population) out of poverty between 2003 and 2009. Furthermore, as Luis López-Calva and Nora Lustig have documented, levels of inequality—traditionally Latin America’s Achilles heel—have also decreased in some countries, thanks in part to effective social policies such as conditional cash-transfer (CCT) programs. The standard indices of socioeconomic inequality remain higher in Latin America than in any other world region. Yet some countries have made notable progress in shrinking the enormous disparity between rich and poor that all too often has sown a harvest of discontent and instability in Latin American politics. These economic developments have resulted in swelling middle classes, particularly in a number of the larger Latin American countries. This is an important development because, as Seymour Martin Lipset wrote in 1967, a significant middle class has long been the missing ingredient for robust democratic development in the region.

Key Players Move to the Middle

Several key cases exemplify the regionwide trend toward centrism. In Brazil’s 2010 presidential election, the policy differences between the two leading candidates—Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party (PT) and José Serra of the Social Democratic Party (PSDB)—were mostly negligible, with Serra espousing a more restrained foreign policy and assigning a somewhat less important role to the state in the management of economic affairs. Both candidates promised strikingly broad continuity with the successful policies pursued by outgoing president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, for whom Rousseff had served as chief of staff.

As Brazil’s first president from the PT, Lula had built on and extended the foundation of economic stability laid by his predecessor Fernando Henrique Cardoso of the PSDB, with special focus on enhancing social benefits through the Bolsa Família CCT program. The economic results speak for themselves: Since 2005, Brazil has averaged 4 percent growth, poverty is down, and so is inequality. Lula, whose policies were marked by fiscal discipline and expanded trade with China (which has surpassed the United States as Brazil’s largest trading partner), was regarded as a “leftist” leader. Yet he exercised enormous moderation and pragmatism in his economic policies. Brazilian voters, mostly pleased with their improved well-being, quite rationally elected Lula’s handpicked successor, who will likely pursue a similarly pragmatic course. Although Brazil still confronts immense challenges, including low levels of productivity, deficient infrastructure, and low-quality education, the country’s progress has been impressive.

In Colombia, whose population of 45 million makes it South America’s second-largest country after Brazil (190 million), there is also a notable trend toward centrism and consensus on key public policies among politicians of varying stripes. In the country’s May 2010 presidential contest, the differences among the early candidates vying to replace popular incumbent Alvaro Uribe were modest. All six of them essentially endorsed Uribe’s hard-line approach to dealing with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) insurgency. In economic affairs as well, there were no serious proposals to depart from current, predominantly promarket policies. As Eduardo Posada-Carbó points out in his essay, the candidates differed mainly in terms of personal style, background, and perceived fitness for the job.

Juan Manuel Santos of the Social Party of National Unity (Party of the U) won overwhelmingly. Santos’s victory can be attributed to his having served as Uribe’s defense minister, his broad experience in security and foreign policy, the effectiveness of his campaign, and the perceived shortcomings of his rival, Green Party candidate and former Bogota mayor Antanas Mockus. Santos is a proponent of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair’s “third way,” a blend of market economics and socialist ideals. Already during the first several months of his presidency, Santos has demonstrated his pragmatism at home and abroad. He has, for example, accorded high priority to developing a modus vivendi with the notably unpredictable and problematic Hugo Chávez, president of neighboring Venezuela—a more diplomatic and institutional approach than the one that Uribe favored.

Chile, one of the region’s few consolidated democracies, has also undergone a shift toward greater pragmatism in recent years. In the past, the country had seen different ideological experiments, from the left of the political spectrum (Salvador Allende, 1970–73) to the far right (Augusto Pinochet, 1973–90). In the last election, however, the two runoff candidates—Sebastián Piñera of the conservative Alliance for Chile and Eduardo Frei of the center-left coalition known as the Concertación—displayed relatively narrow policy differences on key economic, social, and foreign-policy questions.10 But after twenty years, Chileans had grown tired of Concertación rule and were eager for a change, as best embodied by Piñera. As Latinobarómetro data reveal, however, there is no evidence of any ideological shift to the right among Chileans that accounts for this electoral outcome.

As president, Piñera has essentially continued to pursue the social programs that were carried out under his immediate predecessors, Michelle Bachelet and, before her, Ricardo Lagos—both Socialists. Indeed, analysts have characterized the Piñera government as resembling more a fifth Concertación administration than anything radically different. In the realm of foreign policy, Piñera has enjoyed a curiously practical working relationship with President Evo Morales of neighboring Bolivia. Although Piñera and Morales could hardly diverge more widely on major political and ideological questions, a set of shared interests has led them to manage the historically tense relationship between Chile and Bolivia quite effectively. The solidarity and personal connection between the two presidents was further strengthened when the eyes of the world became fixed on Chile during the October 2010 rescue of the 33 long-trapped miners—one of whom was Bolivian.

The case of Peru poses a particularly interesting and challenging puzzle. Not only has the country been experiencing an economic boom—thanks largely to trade and exports—but its levels of poverty and inequality have dropped considerably as well.  A country that has long been, and continues to be, sharply torn along ethnic, class, and geographic lines, Peru of late has witnessed a substantial growth of its middle class, a development that augurs well for its long-term democratic prospects.

At the same time, however, these impressive economic advances have yet to be joined by any high degree of political institutionalization and predictability. As highlighted by the country’s October 2010 municipal and regional elections, political parties remain severely fractured and widely discredited. Alone among Latin American leaders presiding over dynamic economic growth, Peru’s President Alan García, of the center-left Aprista party, has rarely exceeded approval ratings of 30 percent. Moreover, according to the Latinobarómetro, levels of citizen confidence in political leaders and institutions in Peru are among the lowest in the region.

As a result, the outcome of the April 2011 presidential election remains uncertain and hard to predict. To be sure, with major economic and social improvements, the risks of political instability in Peru have receded somewhat in recent years. Nonetheless, the possibility of an antisystem candidate such as Ollanta Humala of the Nationalist Union Party for Peru (who nearly won in 2006) reaching the presidency cannot be ruled out. It is striking, however—and a testament to the trend toward moderation—that in the current electoral climate, Humala has moved markedly to the center on economic and foreign policy. Despite this tack to the middle, however, polls suggest that other leading candidates are doing better than he is with voters. These contenders are former Lima mayor Luis Castañeda Lossio of the National Solidarity Party; congresswoman Keiko Fujimori (daughter of ex-president Alberto Fujimori) of the Strength 2011 party; and former president (2001–2006) Alejandro Toledo of the Peru Possible party. The campaign is likely to reveal that, in light of their recent economic success, Peruvians have come closer to a consensus about macroeconomic policy, though there is still deep discontent about corruption and public insecurity and frustration with the slow and sporadic strides on the equality issue.

What About the Supposed Left Turn?

Just a few years ago, media and scholarly observers were emphasizing a widespread leftward shift in Latin American politics, as reflected in the electoral victories of Morales in Bolivia, Lula in Brazil, Bachelet in Chile, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, and Chávez in Venezuela—in addition, of course, to the rule of the Castro brothers in Cuba.  Numerous studies and analyses focused on Latin America’s increasingly radical orientation in the arenas of economic and social policy as well as in international affairs. Such a trend, if true, would tend to undercut the argument that most of the region is pursuing a more centrist, moderate course.

There is little question that, at least in the first part of the twentyfirst century, candidates who could be described as left-leaning gained growing support and allegiance in parts of Latin America. The political center of gravity, as Latinobarómetro and other public-opinion surveys have shown, has moved slightly to the left. In general, countries in the region now place more emphasis on achieving greater socioeconomic equality, and they have become more distant and independent—at least politically, if not more broadly—from the United States than they were in the 1990s. These changes have been profound and are likely to endure.

Yet any mention of this leftward swing of the pendulum cries out for significant qualification. First, many analysts and scholars have properly called attention to the sharp differences that divide the region’s “leftist” governments from one another. For example, the literature often distinguishes between a moderate and pragmatic left—Lula’s Brazil, Bachelet’s Chile, the Uruguay of Tabaré Vásquez and now José Mujica of the Broad Front, and the El Salvador of Mauricio Funes of the FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front)—and a more populist and authoritarian grouping made up of Chávez’s Venezuela, Morales’s Bolivia, Ortega’s Nicaragua, and, many claim, Correa’s Ecuador. While such a broad distinction has some heuristic value, it obscures the sharp differences—which may well outnumber the similarities—that exist within these two large groupings. As Mitchell Seligson argues, the leftright divide lines up very differently across countries in the region.

The next major qualification that must be brought to bear in assessing the “leftward-shift” thesis is the current—and too often overlooked—tendency toward a leftism strongly shaped by pragmatism. Uruguay’s President Mujica, who was inaugurated in March 2010, exemplifies this trend. A former Marxist Tupamaro guerrilla, Mujica has shown a clear commitment to moderate and prudent economic policies. Vice-President Danilo Astori, who served as finance minister under Vásquez, adopted a range of economic policies aimed at controlling the debt, curbing inflation, and attracting foreign investment. The policies that Astori helped to put in place—under both Vásquez and Mujica—have contributed to Uruguay’s ability to weather the recent economic crisis and, with increased foreign investment and sustained growth, even to prosper. It is worth noting that Mujica has demonstrated a less ideological approach on the foreign-policy front as well, as demonstrated by his public meeting (rare for Latin American leaders) in Cuba with the dissident “women in white” (Damas de Blanco) who are protesting the Castro regime’s repressive policies.

Moreover, the most moderate among the so-called leftist countries have proven to be the most successful. They blend economic progress, social-equity gains, and democratic governance. Brazil’s accomplishments stand out in this regard, especially given its history of economic disorder, authoritarianism, and stubbornly and unacceptably high levels of social inequality. To be sure, vast inequities persist in Brazil and will pose major challenges for the Rousseff administration. But the recent gains reflect a formula that is undeniably producing positive results. Moreover, it is a formula that rests on the effective macroeconomic policies (including fiscal discipline and expanded trade liberalization) begun under Cardoso’s presidency in the 1990s and carried on under Lula’s “leftist” government.

Many of Latin America’s more successful left-leaning governments have supplemented the tenets of the Washington Consensus—ten market- oriented policies promoting fiscal discipline, privatization, deregulation, and trade liberalization—with targeted social policies. While some of the prescriptions first advanced by the Washington Consensus in 1989 are no doubt valid (fiscal discipline, for example), the list was incomplete, as is widely recognized today, and it overlooked the persistent problems of poverty and inequality in Latin America.

By contrast, leftist governments that have based themselves not on democratic give-and-take, as in Brazil, but on the autocratic concentration of vast power into the hands of a single person, have demonstrably failed in Latin America—if not in terms of longevity, then at least in terms of effectiveness. This is particularly the case in Venezuela, as Javier Corrales notes in his essay. After nearly a dozen years in power, Chávez retains the support of nearly half of Venezuela’s electorate. Yet the setback that his ruling party suffered in the September 2010 legislative elections reveals a growing dissatisfaction with the government’s performance in tackling a deteriorating economic and security situation that particularly plagues the poorest sectors, Chavez’s main constituency. In 2010, Venezuela’s GDP was projected to shrink by 3 percent, while the region’s economy as a whole (apart from natural disaster– afflicted Haiti) was expected grow by more than 5 percent.

In this regard, however, it is important to resist the temptation to lump together all the governments commonly deemed to belong to the populist-authoritarian left. There are relevant distinctions among them, and each has particular features that merit careful attention. Chávez’s grandiose ambitions and oil wealth, for example, make him a unique phenomenon in today’s Latin America. He cannot be easily compared with other leaders, even those who form part of the coalition that he heads, the Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America (ALBA). In Bolivia, for example, despite the concentration of power in the presidency and the erosion of constraints, Morales’s government has exhibited admirable fiscal discipline and earned praise from international financial institutions. Moreover, although profound political and economic problems remain, Bolivia under Morales has witnessed higher levels of political participation from the country’s majority (and traditionally marginalized) indigenous population.

Finally, it is unclear whether this set of leaders was elected in the first place because of an ideological shift or because the traditional political institutions had collapsed, discrediting the incumbents. As former Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo has suggested,

• “In the absence of concrete and positive economic results, people lose trust in a political system that prides itself on lofty values which it seemingly cannot live up to. Citizens come to feel that the protections promised by this system do not apply to them, they lose faith in themselves, and they grow dangerously ready to forfeit their human rights and their country’s liberal-democratic safeguards to a strongman who promises immediate results to a marginalized majority.”

The available polling data, from Latinobarómetro and elsewhere, do not suggest any underlying ideological transformation among voters. As Baker and Greene argue, there was a growing demand in a number of countries to moderate radical reforms in the area of privatization, for example. It remains to be seen, however, whether the resistance and discontent stemmed from the practice of privatization per se, or whether it derived from the rampant corruption that often accompanied it. According to the Pew Research Center, the overall attitude toward free trade and globalization has been consistently more favorable in Latin America—even among the “leftist” countries—than in the United States. In sum, there is little evidence to suggest that there has been a wholesale repudiation of the key ideas of the Washington Consensus, as is often claimed. Rather, there has been a modification, refinement, and expansion of these ideas, which have been put into practice with considerable success by recent “leftist” governments in Chile and Brazil.

Although some recent and important elections in South America have received the lion’s share of attention from commentators, it is also instructive to examine developments in Central America, the Caribbean, and Mexico. Analysts rightly point to the increasingly sharp differentiation that sets South America apart from the rest of Latin America in critical respects. South American countries are becoming more and more independent of the United States and cultivating important ties with China, which has become an avid consumer of the region’s commodities. Central American and Caribbean countries and Mexico, however, are increasing their economic integration with the United States through a series of important trade agreements, while simultaneously competing with China in the area of light manufacturing. In addition, the role and importance of immigration and remittance flows are considerably more prominent in the northern, as distinguished from the southern, part of Latin America.

Nonetheless, in the realm of politics there are some striking similarities. In examining a number of recent elections in Central America, for example, it is hard to discern a pronounced ideological bent. The cases of El Salvador and Panama illustrate this point. In 2009, Mauricio Funes became El Salvador’s first elected president from the FMLN, the party of the demobilized guerrilla movement that fought in the country’s bloody civil conflict (1979–92), after nearly twenty years of rule by the rightist Arena party. Funes’s election carries enormous symbolic significance for a region seeking to transcend longstanding ideological chasms.

Indeed, Funes has governed as a consummate pragmatist and has modeled his government after Lula’s and others associated with Latin America’s more moderate left. Operating within significant economic constraints, Funes has pursued free-market policies that are distinguished from those of his predecessors by a greater emphasis on poverty-alleviation strategies. The Funes administration’s foreign policies have been centrist as well, as reflected in El Salvador’s accommodating posture toward the United States and its stand in the Honduran controversy. Funes has strongly urged other Latin American leaders, including Lula, to recognize the government of Porfirio Lobo, who was elected president of Honduras in November 2009 under a provisional administration that followed the June 2009 military coup.

In 2009, Panamanians also displayed considerable fatigue with their ruling party, the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), and instead elected Ricardo Martinelli of the more conservative Democratic Change party. Martinelli, whom the Economist depicted as a “centrist independent,” had skillfully portrayed himself as an “outsider” and successfully tapped into the public desire for a change. Although there have been some concerns about democracy and the rule of law under the current administration, Martinelli has in great measure continued the economic path pursued by his predecessor, Martín Torrijos of the PRD. Panama has enjoyed an impressive economic boom and feels little incentive to change course. It would be a stretch to argue that either Funes’s or Martinelli’s electoral victory was a product of an ideological shift in one direction or the other in Central America.

Ideological fervor appears to be on the wane in other countries as well. Despite some occasionally heated rhetoric from Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega (leader of the Sandinista National Liberation Front since 1979 and president of Nicaragua from 1985 until his defeat at the polls in 1990), a close examination of his key decisions reveals less ideology and more pragmatism. Ortega’s main aim is to stay in power, and he has shown himself ready to pursue it by any means necessary—including electoral fraud, cynical dealmaking, manipulations of the political system, and even amassing troops on a disputed border with Costa Rica to arouse nationalist sentiment. At the same time, he has honored the Central America Free Trade Agreement with the United States, forged under his predecessor, and he has been accommodating with the international financial community. Under the current Ortega regime (he was elected president again in 2006 after numerous failed runs), ideology has taken a back seat to sheer power politics. Thus in the case of Nicaragua, the implications for democratic progress of waning ideological fervor are far less heartening than has been the case elsewhere.

The Dominican Republic and Mexico also offer examples of electorates that are pressing for moderate-leaning governments with a problem-solving bent. Leonel Fernández, who is currently serving his second consecutive term (and third term overall) as president of the Dominican Republic, is regarded as a reformer who has presided over sustained economic growth and implemented a number of social programs aimed at reducing poverty. Fernández has further burnished his centrist credentials by serving as a mediator in various regional disputes, including the conflict between Colombia and Venezuela in 2008.

Meanwhile, it is almost certain that the outcome of Mexico’s important July 2012 presidential election will be determined less by ideological swings in one direction or another and more by the electorate’s confidence in a candidate’s ability to tackle the grave problems of drug-related violence and organized crime, along with profound economic challenges and corruption. Although many analysts pointed to a severe ideological cleavage during the country’s closely contested and disputed 2006 presidential election between Felipe Calderón of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) and Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), Jorge Domínguez has argued that Mexico’s voters, more so than its political parties, were located in the political center of the left-right continuum.

Moreover, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had ruled the country for some seven decades before the PAN came to power in 2000 and had evolved from its original revolutionary roots to become a nonideological, establishment party, made significant gains in the July 2009 legislative elections. The PRI’s strength in those contests and its reasonably good prospects for regaining control of the presidency in 2012 suggest that citizens may be moving away from the more ideological parties. Instead, voters are concerned foremost with practical matters—primarily the country’s rapidly deteriorating security situation.

Indeed, pervasive criminality represents the most serious threat to more centrist politics and more effective democratic governance throughout Latin America (including much of Central America and particularly Guatemala, where organized crime risks producing more old-fashioned authoritarian reactions). In Mexico, since Calderón took office in 2006 and tasked the armed forces with fighting the drug cartels, there have been more than 30,000 deaths. Although security specialists are quick to point out that the overall level of violence in Mexico is comparable to that of other countries in the region, the savagery of the killings—and their concentration in such cities as Cuidad Juárez along the U.S. border—make the situation particularly alarming. In addition, the widespread public perception of unchecked violence raging between ruthless cartels makes it extremely difficult for elected officials to practice moderate politics. Nonetheless, despite the huge differences between Mexico and Brazil, for example, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean for the most part appear to share South America’s growing penchant for pragmatic centrism.

Signs of Unease

Some recent political developments in Latin America suggest that, while there is broad consensus on major economic and social policies in much of the region, there is also some measure of dissatisfaction with politics as usual. Young voters in particular, many from the region’s expanding middle classes, have been sending strong messages to the political establishment that they want cleaner and more open government, including an end to cronyism. Worries over corruption have figured strongly in a number of key elections in Latin America over the past year. These results should be interpreted as a warning against complacency about a region that in general still appears to be moving, however slowly, in the direction of greater progress on a number of political and economic fronts.

The biggest surprise coming out of Chile’s last presidential election, for example, was the emergence of Marco Enríquez-Ominami, formerly of the Socialist Party, who was neither with the center-left Concertación nor the center-right Alliance. In a country with arguably the region’s most highly structured and predictable party system—one that consistently offers voters a pair of clear options—it was striking that in the first round of balloting Enríquez-Ominami won more than a fifth of the vote. He fared particularly well among younger, middle-class voters who had grown weary of the center-left coalition yet did not feel drawn to the center-right. Even in Chile, the region’s best economic and political performer in recent years, there is a growing constituency that is pressing for institutional renewal and more open and competitive politics.

In Colombia as well, the most unexpected feature of the last election was the surge of the Green Party’s Mockus. To be sure, the Mockus phenomenon eventually fizzled and he lost badly to Uribe’s successor in the runoff. But Mockus’s dramatic jump in credible polls months before the election can be construed as a rejection of the corrupt politics associated with the country’s traditional political system. Mockus polled extremely well in major cities, particularly among young Colombians belonging to the middle classes. His supporters, disillusioned with the mounting scandals that came to light toward the end of Uribe’s second term, pressed for greater government accountability and transparency. Mockus’s support also derived to a large extent from his conciliatory style, which contrasted sharply with the confrontational politics that Colombians had grown accustomed to under Uribe in recent years. In a well-organized and structured political system such as Colombia’s, the Mockus phenomenon, however fleeting, was significant. It reflects a growing sensibility in Latin America—one that, in the Colombian case, President Santos has wisely heeded and incorporated into his own governing style.

Finally, what was most remarkable in Brazil’s 2010 election was not Rousseff’s victory so much as the surprisingly strong first-round showing made by Green Party candidate and former environmental minister Marina Silva. No one predicted that she would be able to muster 19 percent, forcing a runoff. Silva ran as an outsider, challenging the two conventional candidates. Like Enríquez-Ominami in Chile and Mockus in Colombia, Silva drew the bulk of her support from the younger, middle-class voters concentrated in Brazil’s major cities. Although most Brazilians are highly optimistic and favor continuity with the economic and social policies put in place by Lula, they wanted to send a message to the political establishment that they are troubled by some of the recent corruption scandals, including one that had implicated Rousseff’s successor as Lula’s chief of staff.

To be sure, the sizeable votes for Enríquez-Ominami, Mockus, and Silva express somewhat different phenomena and reflect specific national characteristics. For example, despite its name, Colombia’s Green Party has no particular allegiance to environmental concerns. This is not the case, of course, with the Green Party in Brazil, where such concerns are especially pronounced in certain sectors of society. Nonetheless, there are some commonalities in these and other situations in Latin America that indicate a strong and widespread desire for clean government and a demand for more open politics.

At the start of 2011, there is reason for considerable optimism about the general direction of economic and political affairs in Latin America. Given the vagaries of global circumstances, continued economic reliance on commodities, resistance to institutional reforms, and substantial democratic deficits in a number of countries, however, it is unclear whether the current situation will last. Many observers are also worried about a certain complacency toward the status quo, which would render the region less competitive economically and less robust politically than it can and should be.

Still, though it is risky to extrapolate from today’s realities, current tendencies suggest that,  despite a few exceptions and sharp differences among the countries, the region as a whole will continue to move toward more pragmatic, centrist politics. Latin America’s links to the rest of the world will only grow in number and strength, and its middle classes will probably continue to expand in coming years. Economic growth may be too modest and equity gains too slow and meager, but it is reasonable to expect continued progress, particularly in countries such as Brazil, whose size and significance make it a bellwether for the rest of the region.

Although significant problems remain, Latin America’s recent success at reducing poverty and generating a growing middle class bodes well for future democratic gains. Electoral choices and outcomes are likely to reflect government performance, especially the ability to solve such pressing problems as crime and unemployment. Ideological groups will remain on the scene and in some cases will define politics, but their numbers and strength will probably dwindle. Globalization, no doubt, has a dark side—particularly as regards the spread of organized crime, which has had devastating consequences for the rule of law in Latin America. In general, however, the deepening ties between the region and the rest of the world have had salutary economic and political effects.

The waning of unstable ideological politics and the move toward greater pragmatism and moderation mean that the old ways of seeing and talking about Latin America need an overhaul. Increasingly, the region is behaving politically much like other parts of the world, where standards of performance and effectiveness are decisive in determining electoral choices and outcomes. The trend that is now underway in this highly differentiated region is far from irreversible and is bound to suffer setbacks. Yet in the context of new global realities—and Latin America’s deepening connections to them—the move toward centrist politics may well become ingrained.

This continues to be a great resource for English coverage of drug related violence in Mexico and offers an interactive map that elegantly displays data aggregated by David Shirk’s Trans-Border Institute from weekly reporting from Reforma newspaper in Mexico City.

A grim reminder of what drives Mexican DTOs, political corruption, weapons purchases and organized criminal enterprise …

Zhenli Ye Gon's home stash... didn't have a safe big enough, I guess?

An old article from Maurizio Guerrero Martínez, writer for Mexico’s Poder y Negocios.

Even though an estimated $24 billion in criminal funds courses through Mexico each year, no Mexican financial institution has been publicly sanctioned for money laundering. The country has long been a center for drug trafficking, and a world record was set for a criminal cash seizure when $205 million was found last year in Mexico City tied to a Chinese-Mexican businessman who has been jailed in the United States on methamphetamine-related charges.

Experts fear that Mexico’s lack of aggressiveness against money laundering could contribute to global instability by allowing financing to flow to terrorists or subversive groups around the world — as has happened with the FARC guerrillas in Colombia.

U.S. officials estimate that 10 percent of the Mexican financial system operates with laundered drug money, according to Jonathan Winer, a Washington-based expert on international money laundering.

“It’s hard to understand how that much money could be moving around without any evidence of it,” Winer said.

Winer said that the United States has had money laundering laws on the books for years but that they were not seriously enforced until federal bank regulators started levying large fines.

Pablo Gómez del Campo, an official with Mexico’s chief federal bank regulator, Comisión Nacional Bancaria y de Valores (CNBV), insisted that his government does impose sanctions in money laundering cases. But his agency’s Web site does not list any fines against institutions, even though the law requires it to do so.

On July 17, the Mexican agency in charge of prosecuting money laundering, Procuraduría General de la República (PGR), announced a legal action against an exchange house — Casa de Cambio Catorce. It marked the first money laundering prosecution to stem from an investigation of country’s financial system by the Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF), the Mexican agency charged with investigating financial crimes.

Two other Mexican exchange houses, Puebla and Majapara, are currently on trial for charges that emerged from investigations by U.S. authorities.

Concerns about money laundering have taken on new urgency in an age of global terrorism. After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. government toughened the penalties for institutions with poor money laundering controls, affecting not only terrorists’ assets, but those of drug traffickers, too. Investigators focused, however, on money flowing to terrorists through Islamic charities based in the United States and elsewhere. That approach played down the U.S. interest in drug trafficking and its financing in Latin America, according to Douglas Farah, author of “Blood From Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror” and an expert in the financial operations of criminal networks.

But authorities are seeing evidence that terrorist money and drug money can flow through the same channels.

“A pipeline has been created from South America to the United States, where drugs, people, weapons and cash are trafficked, and that could be used for any aim, even by subversive groups. The ideologies no longer matter — only the money,” Farah said. “The free flow of information and money has changed everything. Mexican, Colombian and Middle East terrorist groups are increasingly connected. The limits that existed before are blurring.”

The U.S. State Department has denied that terrorist cells exist in Mexico. Nevertheless, in 2005 a British citizen, Amer Haykel, an alleged al-Qaeda member, was arrested in Baja California. According to a U.S. intelligence assessment provided by Winer, there is evidence of Islamist terrorist cells in Mexico, including a Hezbollah presence in the southern state of Chiapas.

Over the years, money laundering enforcement has proved the most effective tool for cracking down on the drug trade. Without cash, the criminal networks fall into a downward spiral.

“If you take away their money, they can’t pay their sources of supply, they lose credibility, and they can’t pay bribes and employees,” said Allan Doody, a former U.S. federal agent who now works as the principal analyst for the Homeland Security Institute, a research center that receives funding from the U.S. government.

Winer said the Mexican strategy should be to better regulate the centros cambiarios — exchange centers that act as global cash transmitters — and also to better monitor transactions between Mexican institutions and offshore banks, which he described as “opaque, and difficult to evaluate and document.”

Even with laws on the books, enforcement is difficult.

“It is not easy to align the legal infrastructure to prosecute money laundering,” explains Don Semesky, head of financial investigations for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in Washington. “There’s a lot of obstacles within the bureaucracy. To put the things in place takes a lot of time.”

The obstacles can be seen in the way the Mexican federal prosecutor, the PGR, investigates a financial crime. To respect the banking secrecy laws, the PGR must ask for the information through the CNBV, the Mexican bank regulator. CNBV can refuse the request, and in that case the dispute will end up before a judge. During the trial, the person whose account is in dispute is warned, so he has time to move his money before the investigation can be completed.

Seizures of cash have increased in Mexico in recent years. But except for Casa de Cambio Catorce, financial institutions have largely escaped seizures and penalties.

One reason may be lack of resources.

In 2008, the budget for UIF, the government’s financial investigative arm, was less than $6 million, or 0.16 percent of the budget of the Finance Ministry, which supervises UIF. The ministry spends four times that much on communications and public relations. The office that prosecutes money launderers has a budget of $3 million, just 0.3 percent of the federal prosecutor’s budget. The office’s director has changed three times since 2005.

The Merida Initiative — the U.S. government’s main program to help Mexico combat the drug trade — spends 1.25 percent of its $400 million budget on money laundering. That $5 million goes to updating computers.

Tel.: +1 781 891 2268; fax: +1 212 817 1597.

E-mail address: ddave@bentley.edu.

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The hit men moved in on their target, shot him dead and then disappeared in a matter of seconds. It would have been a perfect case for José Ibarra Limón, one of this violent border city’s most dogged crime investigators — had he not been the victim.

Mexico has never been particularly adept at bringing criminals to justice, and the drug war has made things worse. Investigators are now swamped with homicides and other drug crimes, most of which they will never crack. On top of the standard obstacles — too little expertise, too much corruption — is one that seems to grow by the day: outright fear of becoming the next body in the street.

Mr. Ibarra was killed on July 27 in what his bosses at the federal attorney general’s office consider an assassination related to a case he was investigating. As if to prove the point, less than a month later, one of the lawyers who had worked for Mr. Ibarra also turned up dead. Two days afterward, an investigator named to replace Mr. Ibarra insisted on being transferred out of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s murder capital.

The current prosecutor investigating Mr. Ibarra’s cases is working anonymously, his or her name kept secret by the government.

The Mexican government knows that revamping its problem-plagued justice system is an essential part of breaking the cartels that control vast areas of Mexico. Major efforts are under way to make the judiciary faster and fairer, and the United States has contributed millions of dollars to help bring more criminals to justice.

But even with training programs by American lawyers and judges, American aid to improve forensics and screen more effectively for corruption, as well as other cross-border initiatives, the traffickers and the cumulative pressures they are putting on the judiciary are straining it as never before.

“Obviously what happened affects us,” said Hector García Rodríguez, the federal prosecutor in Juárez and the supervisor of the slain investigator. “We’re still working. We can’t stop. But we know the dangers we face.”

President Felipe Calderón points to the arrests of more than 50,000 people on drug charges since he began his antidrug offensive in December 2006. Many of the arrests appear to have come from top-notch detective work. Other suspects, though, are quietly released after they have been paraded before the news media.

The federal government refused to provide statistics on how many arrests had resulted in convictions, how many suspects were still under investigation or how many arrests had proved to be mistakes. But independent reviews by scholars suggest that only about a quarter of crimes in Mexico are ever reported and that only a small fraction ever result in convictions.

Compounding matters is the sheer number of crimes, especially murders. On a single September night in Ciudad Juárez, 18 men were shot to death in a drug treatment centernear the border, more than the number of killings all year long in El Paso, just across the Texas border.

“Law enforcement is overwhelmed,” said David A. Shirk, a professor at the University of San Diego and the principal investigator for the Justice in Mexico Project, a binational research initiative. “If you have murders with 13 bodies one day and then you have 4 more the next, there’s not a lot of investigation into who pulled the trigger specifically.”

Fear Gets in the Way

One of the two dozen or so cases that Mr. Ibarra had been investigating involved the killing of a journalist, Armando Rodríguez Carreón, 40, who had produced a string of scoops as the longtime crime reporter for the newspaper El Diario. Mr. Rodríguez was shot to death last Nov. 13 as he prepared to take his 8-year-old daughter to school. She was at his side and saw her father struck by at least 10 bullets.

“It was similar to hundreds of homicides we’ve had here,” remarked Mr. García, Mr. Ibarra’s supervisor. “It was an execution.”

It is also similar in that the perpetrators remain at large. Fear prevents many cases from being solved because investigators hesitate to dig too deeply, and witnesses refuse to talk.

“Nobody cooperates with anything,” Mr. García complained. “They’re too afraid. Nobody wants to say what they saw. Nobody wants to give you a plate number.”

Mexico is promoting confidential telephone lines and rewards to encourage witnesses, but resistance lingers, especially when news reports circulate about threats made to those who do call in. And there is considerable doubt that the reward money is worth the risk.

The attacks on investigators only magnify the problem.

“If you had a difficult case, you went to him and said, ‘Ibarra, what do you think?’ ” Mr. García said. Now in trying to solve Mr. Ibarra’s murder, his colleagues wonder aloud how he might have pursued his killers, possibly four men in all, who shot him many times in the head with .45-caliber and 9-millimeter weapons.

The slain journalist’s wife, Blanca Martínez, said that she had met once with Mr. Ibarra, but that she did not think he had been murdered for closing in on her husband’s killers, despite his reputation for solving difficult crimes.

“I don’t think he was really investigating,” she said. Prosecutors had asked once to interview her young daughter, a witness, but had never followed up, Ms. Martínez said.

Pedro Torres, Mr. Rodríguez’s editor and close friend, was similarly unimpressed with the government’s effort to find the killers of his top police reporter.

Investigators waited for months before visiting the newsroom, interviewing some of Mr. Rodríguez’s co-workers and getting copies of his articles. The government has not yet established whether Mr. Rodríguez’s killing stemmed from his work as a police reporter, infuriating his colleagues, who are convinced that such a connection is clear.

“He’s the godfather of my child,” Mr. Torres said. “I’ve known him for years. They’ve never talked to me. What kind of investigation is that?”

Slipshod Investigations

One of the forensic specialists who photograph bodies, lift fingerprints and count spent bullets at Juárez homicide scenes complained that by the time he arrived at a site, significant tampering had already taken place.

“The soldiers come in and walk over everything,” complained the specialist, who spoke anonymously in an out-of-the-way steak restaurant because his supervisors had not authorized him to give an interview. “They leave their fingerprints all around. They want to know who died, so they move the body. They kick the bullets. They don’t realize they’re contaminating the crime scene.”

Thousands of soldiers, deployed by the president in his war against the cartels, patrol the streets of Juárez alongside the local police. Trained to take on enemy combatants, they are far less familiar with the sanctity of crime scenes, the rules of evidence and other basics of law enforcement.

Many police officers also meddle with crime scenes, sometimes out of incompetence, but sometimes to throw off the investigation or to enrich themselves.

“If the victim’s watch is missing, that could be important because it could mean it was a robbery,” the forensic specialist said. “But we can’t rule out that one of the police officers at the scene took it.”

The joint military-police mission now combating traffickers in Juárez presents a more positive picture. It cites the recent arrests of three men suspected of being hired killers, who in August implicated themselves and a fourth suspect in 211 homicides, an eye-popping number even in Mexico.

To trumpet the breakthrough, the government took out newspaper ads listing all the people the suspects were accused of killing. One man alone was linked to 101 murders.

The authorities said the arrests resulted from ballistics investigations, which are modern enough here in Chihuahua State that the El Paso Police Department used them for years for its own investigations. But the men also confessed to the murders, the authorities said, and questions were raised in the local news media about whether the detainees had been coerced, a frequent problem in Mexico.

“We solve our crimes with evidence, and they solve them with confessions,” said the El Paso County sheriff, Richard D. Wiles. “We have strict rules to follow on how to get confessions. The rules are looser over there.”

In a recent assessment of Mexico’s adherence to human rights, the State Department noted that 21 torture complaints and 580 complaints of cruel or degrading treatment had been made against the Mexican authorities in 2008, a significant increase from the year before.

And yet, the report said: “Since 2007, we are not aware that any official has ever been convicted of torture, giving rise to concern about impunity. Despite the law’s provisions to the contrary, police and prosecutors have attempted to justify an arrest by forcibly securing a confession of a crime.”

Without a Trace

Along the border, many victims are never found, leaving relatives — and investigators — in a state of limbo.

Fernando Ocegueda Flores, a founder of an advocacy group in Tijuana for relatives of the disappeared, felt an odd mixture of despair and relief in January, when the police announced that a suspect, Santiago Meza López, had admitted to disposing of the remains of 300 bodies for a drug cartel by dissolving them in barrels of lye.

Mr. Ocegueda thought that maybe his son, abducted in 2007, had been one of the victims of the Pozolero, a nickname for Mr. Meza that translates roughly as the stew maker. Mr. Ocegueda thought his years of trying to learn his son’s fate might end.

Federal authorities took Mr. Meza to Mexico City for questioning and began testing some remains. But the bones were so corroded by the lye that no DNA was found, the authorities have said.

Mr. Ocegueda contends that the investigators should be doing more, like digging up the yard where Mr. Meza said he had disposed of the bodies after boiling them, to search for more bones to test. The yard is guarded by the federal police, but a human jaw bone with a tooth attached and various suspicious mounds of earth were visible inside.

Frustrated, Mr. Ocegueda said that if the site was not properly investigated soon, he and other relatives planned to storm the place with shovels and begin digging themselves.

But a coroner’s investigator who has reviewed some of the remains from such barrels in other cases said the traffickers covered their tracks well.

“You can’t tell by looking that it’s a human being,” said the investigator, who was not authorized to speak publicly. “It’s a glob of something, and the DNA is gone.”

Cross-Border Police Work

Every month, law enforcement officials from both sides of the border, whether from the F.B.I. or the Tijuana police, gather to talk shop at a chain restaurant in southern California.

“Without cooperation, so many cases would sit still,” said the California investigator who convenes the sessions, Val Jimenez, executive director of the International Law Enforcement Officers Association. Cross-border policing has caught child molesters, car thieves and murderers.

It also helped solve one particularly grisly missing person case.

Daniel LaPorte, 27, disappeared after heading across the border to Baja California from San Diego last year. Eventually, his green Cadillac was found south of Tijuana, outside Rosarito Beach, with four dead people in and around it. None were Mr. LaPorte.

As the family’s private investigator looked into the case with police officers from San Diego and Baja California, a Mexican detective mentioned that a barrel apparently containing human remains had been discovered not far from the location of the quadruple homicide.

Luck played a role in identifying the remains. It had rained heavily after the barrel had been abandoned on a remote hillside, investigators said. The barrel had fallen over and some of the bones had been washed away by the rain, diluting the corrosive solution and preventing all the DNA from being stripped away. Laboratory tests conducted in Tijuana showed that the remains were Mr. LaPorte’s.

Investigators eventually determined that Mr. LaPorte had been involved in trafficking marijuana from Mexico to Rhode Island, some of it in surfboards. He had probably bought several tons of marijuana a year, the family’s investigator said.

Mr. Jimenez and some of the other law enforcement officials who work on these joint investigations are sympathetic to the policing challenges their Mexican counterparts face.

“We don’t think we’re going to die when we go to work, but over there it is a real possibility,” Mr. Jimenez said. “A lot of them want to do good police work, but there are some cases they can’t do because of the pressure of the cartels.”

Arresting the Wrong People

Alejandra González Licea said the only conceivable ties she had ever had to drug trafficking were purely academic ones. A linguistics professor who wrote her thesis on narcocorridos, the Mexican ballads that often extol the exploits of drug bosses, Ms. González found herself blindfolded and handcuffed by soldiers this year and interrogated about which drug cartel was employing her.

Her answer — the Autonomous University of Baja California — did not impress her interrogators. The professor and her husband endured months of detention before the charges were quietly dropped. The $28,000 in cash they were caught carrying was a gift from an uncle in the United States to help them remodel their home, it was determined, not illicit drug profits they were laundering.

After her initial detention, Ms. González was led to a news conference, where journalists were gathered to photograph her. She stood next to her husband and two men she did not know. On the table before them, much to her surprise, was nearly half a million dollars.

It turned out that she was being grouped with two money-laundering suspects arrested the same night with a much larger amount of cash. It would take two and a half months before a judge would throw out the case against her and her husband for lack of proof.

Mexico has approved a sweeping overhaul of its judiciary to replace its closed-door judicial proceedings with trials in which defendants like Ms. González are considered innocent until proved guilty. But revamping the system is no easy feat. It requires retraining lawyers and judges, rebuilding courtrooms and improving forensic technology, all while trying to keep on top of a flood of new cases.

Police forces are also getting an overhaul. Officers in Tijuana and Juárez, two of the most violence-prone cities, have been fired en masse after being linked to organized crime. The two federal police agencies have been reorganized under a single commander. Beyond that, a new police training institute has been established and the government has set up a national database to share information and intelligence.

Still, Ms. González, now back at her teaching job, shook her head when asked about the Mexican government’s competence. She doubts the official statistics, since she figures she was one of the 50,000 people that the president cited as drug suspects.

“They didn’t even find out that I wrote my thesis on narcocorridos,” she said of those who were prosecuting her. “Good thing they didn’t find out.”

Doing What Police Won’t

The authorities discourage civilians from investigating their own cases because of the obvious dangers involved. But many grow tired of waiting for the police and, having no luck with private investigators, conduct their own inquiries.

Cristina Palacios, president of the Citizens’ Association Against Impunity, recounted how one of her members, a Tijuana woman whose brother had been kidnapped, offered a reward herself, furious at how little had been done to investigate the disappearance.

Shadowy men contacted the woman, and she agreed to be taken away with a blindfold, Ms. Palacios said. Soon the woman found herself in a room where a man tied to a chair was being beaten by a group of men. The man confessed to killing her brother.

The next day, the woman, who declined to speak on the record about what occurred, saw in the newspaper that a body had been found. It looked like the man in the chair, Ms. Palacios said.

Mr. Ocegueda, in search of his missing son, had a similar experience. One night, in the course of his personal investigation, he allowed himself to be led away with his eyes covered and driven for about 40 minutes by a man he met who had links to traffickers.

Eventually, he was led into a home, where he said a gruff man told him, “You’re very brave to come here.”

Apparently impressed by his gumption, the man gave Mr. Ocegueda a shot of whiskey and told him that his son had been killed and would never be found. His remains had been destroyed in lye, the man said.

But Mr. Ocegueda, continuing to investigate, later found another organized crime figure, who led him in another direction. This time, he was told his son was alive and working for traffickers. Now, he does not know what to think.

“The police are supposed to be doing this, not me,” he said. “But they don’t want to investigate because they don’t want to solve these crimes. They might be killed if they find the truth. I don’t care if they kill me.”