This is the second of a two-part series examining diversification efforts by Latin American drug-trafficking networks. Part I examined the FARC’s illegal gold-mining operations in Colombia. Part II examines Mexican drug traffickers’ use of oil-tapping to generate revenues. Mexico’s crime syndicates are well-known as exporters of heroin, marijuana and methamphetamines, importers of firearms, and perpetrators of violence. Their business has produced bloody internecine turf wars, with rival gangs battling it out for control over distribution routes mainly within the drug-producing states of northern Mexico. But over the past five years the drug trade has been squeezed between the pincers of [...]
The United States spends around $40 billion to $50 billion per year to protect the free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf to the global economy, more than the entire defense budgets of all but a few countries. China, by comparison, spends virtually nothing on Gulf security, while pursuing its strategy of building political and economic relations with oil-rich countries in order to secure oil for its growing economy. This is nowhere more apparent than in China’s relations with Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil power. Beijing’s focus on the Persian Gulf began in earnest in 1978, when it [...]
On Sunday, Guido Westerwelle announced his resignation as German vice chancellor and leader of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), the junior partner in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government. Endless disputes had already bogged down Merkel’s second administration even before it stumbled in its response to Japan’s tsunami-triggered nuclear crisis and its vote on the U.N. resolution imposing a no-fly zone over Libya. Last week, however, the bill came due, and the coalition was trounced in two crucial state elections. Since then, with the FDP in open revolt, the coalition government has been in utter chaos, and the fate of its [...]
