Obama’s biggest challenge – Central America

A section from the Miami Herald, 20^th March 2011, By Andres By Oppenheimer

….Fifteen years after the end of Central America's civil wars, this region is once again becoming the world's most violent place, and a major source of drug trafficking, organized crime and illegal immigration to the United States.

According to United Nations estimates, more than 15,000 people a year are dying in drug and human trafficking-related violence in Central America.

Honduras is already the world's most violent country, with a homicide rate of 67 per 100,000 people a year, four times higher than Mexico's, the weekly The Economist reported recently….

According to U.N. figures, there are at least five times more private security guards than police forces in Honduras and Guatemala.

What is going on, I asked Honduran President Porfirio Lobo in an interview. Lobo, who was democratically elected after a constitutional crisis triggered by a 2009 civilian-military coup, told me that growing numbers of Mexican drug lords are moving south to Central America because of the Mexican government's military crackdown on the cartels.

"The cartels are coming our way," Lobo said. "The growing crime rates are affecting us a lot, in many ways. Among other things, they scare away investments."

Lobo reminded me that in over the past two years, members of the Los Zetas armed gang — originally part of Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel — have burned down buses with dozens of people inside in several Central American countries. The drug gangs, which are heavily involved in human trafficking, have also opened fire against a shoe store in Honduras, killing several innocent bystanders, and murdered 72 Central American migrants in Mexico when they couldn't pay for being smuggled into the United States.

"They are much bloodier than anything we've seen before," Lobo said. "By comparison, the traditional cocaine barons look like schoolboys.''

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/03/20/2124221/obamas-biggest-challenge-central.html