World Briefing | The Americas: Mexico: Guards Accused in Prison Riot

The beliefs of a Catholic media network have put it at odds with the Obama administration.

Room for Debate asks: What is missing from this sprawling legislation, and what should be cut?

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U.S. and Mexico Agree to Cooperate on Energy

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mexico's foreign minister signed the deal at a ceremony in the Mexican resort of Los Cabos as Mexican President Felipe Calderon and U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar looked on.

The cooperation stems from an understanding that President Barack Obama and Calderon reached in 2010 to share in the profits and work together to avoid spills.

Clinton said the deal would "ensure safe, efficient, responsible exploration of the oil and gas reservoirs in the Gulf of Mexico."

"These reservoirs could hold considerable reserves that would benefit the United States and Mexico alike," she said.

But they don't necessarily stop neatly at our maritime boundary," Clinton added. "This could lead to disputes if a company discovers a reservoir that straddles the boundary — disputes, for example, over who should do the extraction and how much they should extract."

Clinton said the agreement will prevent such disputes and create new business opportunities.

Calderon said the deal creates clear rules and should erase any fear among Mexicans that their oil will be appropriated by Americans.

And he stressed that "operations will be done in a safe and responsible manner, with full respect to the environment."

Under the agreement, U.S. companies will now be allowed to partner with Mexico's national oil company in drilling. But neither country is constrained by the other.

If the two governments can't agree on how to exploit a reservoir, either can take its share unilaterally.

The U.S. Interior Department said the agreement makes nearly 1.5 million acres of the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf more accessible for exploration and production activities.

The area could contain 172 million barrels of oil and 304 billion cubic feet of natural gas, it said.

"This is an area larger than the state of Delaware," Salazar said.

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Mexico and U.S. Agree on Oil and Gas Development in Gulf

The agreement, if ratified by Mexican and American lawmakers, would for the first time provide for joint inspection of the two countries’ rigs in the gulf. Until now, neither was authorized to oversee the environmental and safety practices of the other, even though oil spills do not respect international borders.

“Each of the nations will maintain sovereignty and their own regulatory systems,” Ken Salazar, the interior secretary, said from Los Cabos, Mexico, where the agreement was completed. “But what this signifies, and what may be the most significant part of the agreement, is that we’re moving forward jointly with Mexico to ensure we have a common set of safety protocols.

“As the Mexicans move into deepwater development,” Mr. Salazar said, “we want to make sure it’s done in a way that protects the environment and is as safe as possible.”

The Transboundary Agreement, as it is called, will make up to 1.5 million acres of offshore territory claimed by the United States available for leasing as early as June, though the leases will not become active until a pact is ratified. The Interior Department estimates that the area contains as much as 172 million barrels of oil and 300 billion cubic feet of natural gas, relatively modest amounts by the oil-rich gulf’s standards.

Mexico’s oil production has been a major source for the United States for more than 25 years, and it is the single most important revenue-raiser for the Mexican government. But its output has been in sharp decline in the last decade, as energy demand by its growing middle class has risen, forcing a decline in exports and raising the possibility that Mexico could become a net oil importer by the end of the decade.

In response, Mexico’s national oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos, known as Pemex, has started a deepwater drilling program in recent years despite concerns that it is not sufficiently experienced for the task. Under the Mexican Constitution, Pemex cannot bring in a foreign partner like Royal Dutch Shell or Exxon Mobil to develop the gulf reserves, even though those companies have much more expertise in drilling in challenging waters.

Pemex has drilled more than a dozen exploratory deepwater wells since 2002, but the results have been mixed. It plans to drill six more wells this year, including two at depths of more than 6,000 feet, where well pressure is customarily high and the possibility of a blowout is greater than in shallower wells.

The program has been controversial in Mexico, especially after the BP accident two years ago. Juan Carlos Zepeda, Mexico’s chief oil regulator, has warned that Pemex is not prepared to control a possible leak from the two deepest wells it is planning this year and that the National Hydrocarbons Commission, the three-year-old agency Mr. Zepeda oversees, may be overmatched when it comes to regulating deepwater drilling. With a staff of 60, little logistical capability and a budget of only $7 million, it has had minimal say in how Pemex operates.

In 1979, a blowout at one of Pemex’s shallow-water wells called Ixtoc I in the Bay of Campeche resulted in the largest oil spill ever in the gulf until the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010.

The issue of sharing oil and gas reserves in gulf border waters dates from the 1970s. The two countries negotiated a treaty that would define their exploratory rights in border zones, but the United States Senate declined to ratify it in 1980.

Presidents Obama and Felipe Calderón agreed to extend a drilling moratorium in the area until they could negotiate a final accord. The zones are near areas being drilled successfully, but they are in water depths reaching 10,000 feet and are considered vulnerable to hurricanes.

“Mexico doesn’t have the resources to combat a major oil spill, and the United States does,” said Jorge Piñon, a former president of Amoco Oil Latin America and a current research fellow at the University of Texas. “Coordination and sharing communications, training, personnel, equipment and technology are essential for safe and productive drilling.”

Gasoline prices are on the rise, and Republicans have blamed the administration for being slow to approve more domestic drilling. With the new agreement, coming at a time when the White House is moving closer to approving drilling in Alaskan Arctic waters, Mr. Obama was expected to argue that his policies have led to a surge in domestic production.

John M. Broder reported from Washington, and Clifford Krauss from Houston.

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In Mexico, Prison Riot Kills at Least 44 People

The authorities in Mexico’s Nuevo León State said a confrontation between inmates in two cellblocks broke out around 2 a.m. Sunday and lasted a few hours before the state and federal police could bring the prison, in Apodaca, under control.

Jorge Domene, a spokesman for the state government, said it appeared that members of Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel, two of Mexico’s most powerful criminal groups, started the fight as part of a power struggle, using sharp objects, stones and clubs. He said firearms were not used.

The riot was the deadliest in a recent series of prison riots, including those in which 31 people died last month in Tamaulipas State and 20 were killed there in October. In Durango State, 23 people were killed in 2010.

Deadly rioting is commonplace in Mexican and Central American prisons as a drug war rages among criminal groups and government forces, filling prisons and jails well beyond their capacity. Local news reports said that the prison in Apodaca held 3,000 inmates but was built for 1,500.

Harsh overcrowding played a role in the fire last week that killed 359 people at a prison in central Honduras; it was one of the deadliest prison fires anywhere in decades. Officials were investigating the cause, including the possibility that an inmate had set fire to a mattress.

That prison held more than 850 inmates, twice its capacity. As in Mexico, many prisoners were being held on drug charges in a country overrun by drug-trafficking gangs shipping cocaine to the United States and beyond.

Supervisors at the prison in Mexico were being held as part of the investigation, which Mr. Domene said would also determine whether guards took part.

In other prisons, inmates have been known to bribe guards for parties, drugs, prostitutes, cellphones, TVs, even their freedom.

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Mexico Drug War Bloodies Areas Thought Safe

Last week, two headless bodies were found in a smoldering minivan near the entrance to one of the largest and most expensive malls in Mexico City, generally considered a refuge from the grisly atrocities that have gripped other cities throughout the drug war.

Two other cities considered safe just six months ago — Guadalajara and Veracruz — have experienced their own episodes of brutality: 26 bodies were left in the heart of Guadalajara late last year, on the eve of Latin America’s most prestigious book fair, and last month the entire police force in Veracruz was dismissed after state officials determined that it was too corrupt to patrol a city where 35 bodies were dumped on a road in September.

The spreading violence, believed to largely reflect a widening turf war between two of the biggest criminal organizations in the country, has implications on both sides of the border, putting added pressure on political and law enforcement leaders who are already struggling to show that their strategies are working.

“It is a situation ever more complicated and complex,” said Ricardo Ravelo, a Mexican journalist who has written several books on criminal organizations. “Resources are and will be stretched to deal with this.”

American officials here acknowledge that the mayhem is unpredictable but contend that they have a way to help tackle it, spreading word that the $1.6 billion Merida Initiative, Washington’s signature antidrug program, will step up training and advising for the Mexican state and local police and judicial institutions this year, rather than emphasizing the delivery of helicopters and other equipment.

In a year in which President Felipe Calderón’s party, in power since 2000, may struggle to hang on to the presidency in July elections, the expanding violence is giving political rivals, all promising a more peaceful country, much to run on.

Discerning patterns of violence in the drug war can be perilous; it is often like a tornado skipping across terrain, devastating one area while leaving another untouched.

But government statistics released last week showed a surge in deaths presumed to be related to drug or organized crime in Mexico State, which surrounds the capital and is the nation’s most populous state, in the first nine months of last year. The government data also show that violence has now afflicted 831 communities nationwide, an increase of 7 percent.

Although questions have emerged about the government’s tally, many analysts agree that the violence is widening.

“There has been a definite shift of violence away from the border and back to the interior states,” said David A. Shirk, director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego, who closely tracks drug crime.

In a way, he said, the shift is a stark reversal of the trend of six years ago, when violence exploded in more southerly states and migrated north along drug-trafficking routes, accelerating a drug war that has now left more than 47,000 people dead, according to the government.

In response, the Mexican government deployed its military and the federal police, arresting and killing more than two dozen cartel leaders and splintering or dismantling several groups. Their push has been backed by American aid in the form of helicopters, remotely piloted drones and the deepening involvement of American drug agents in investigations and raids.

The violence slackened in many areas along the border, including Ciudad Juárez, the bloodiest city, where homicides have been declining. Mexican officials say the decrease is proof that they are making headway, but analysts say it may have more to do with one rival group’s defeat of another, reducing competition and the bloodshed that comes with it.

As for the violence in other areas — Acapulco, in the south, is now the second most violent city — that, too, may reflect the shifting contours of the fights between criminal organizations.

The drug war, Mr. Shirk and other analysts say, is increasingly coming down to a fight to the death between the Sinaloa cartel, a more traditional drug-trafficking organization widely considered the most powerful, and Los Zetas, founded by former soldiers and considered the most violent as it expands into extortion, kidnapping and other rackets in regions far off the drug route map. A third, the Gulf Cartel, remains well armed and rises to attack from time to time.

Many of the clashes have been in central or more southern areas where the two main rivals have not previously fought each other so violently, analysts say. George W. Grayson, a longtime researcher of Mexican violence and co-author of a coming book on Los Zetas, said the group had spread to 17 states from 14 a year ago.

Damien Cave and Karla Zabludovsky contributed reporting.

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Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl Journal: For Some in Mexico, Trash Is a Treasure Worth Defending

A few weeks ago, though, the city closed its giant Bordo Poniente landfill for good, padlocking the gate and trucking the garbage to distant new dumps. Officials have optimistically outlined fast-track strategies to recycle, burn and compost all but a fraction of the garbage that the city now generates.

But that European-style vision of handling garbage stands in sharp relief to the needs of the 1,500 trash pickers, or pepenadores, who rely on the refuse at Bordo Poniente every day for their livelihood.

“The garbage will never run out,” predicted Mr. Téllez, who is 74, at the start of an hourlong monologue during which he cited Socrates (despite being illiterate himself) and compared himself to Galileo. “We have made great advances, and now others are coming to take the business we have created.”

Don Pablo, as all the workers call Mr. Téllez, presides from an office decorated with photographs showing him accompanied by presidents. In the old days, politicians counted on the trash pickers as a base of support. They would help swell campaign crowds, wave flags for visiting dignitaries or even provide pro-government shock troops to attack opposition protests.

Presidents no longer come calling. But the pepenadores can still make politicians take notice.

Several times last year they blocked the arrival of giant trash trailers at the dump to protest the planned shutdown. In response, when Mayor Marcelo Ebrard of Mexico City turned up on Dec. 19 to close the 975-acre landfill and to announce a project for a power plant fueled by the dump’s methane, he also had to promise that the pepenadores could stay.

The city agreed not to close the separation plant where the pepenadores pick through garbage, even though it means the trash must first be delivered to Bordo Poniente, and then reloaded onto trucks to be hauled to the new dumps hours after the pepenadores have finished extracting what they can sell.

“Marcelo pledged that we would be working here for 25 years,” Mr. Téllez warned. “He has to fulfill his commitment.”

In the gloom of the separation plant, a vast shed, workers sift through garbage moving by on three raised conveyor belts, striking an atonal note with every bottle or can they drop into gaping bags below.

Outside, teenagers scrape rust off metal or slice hair and faces off dolls, tossing them into a disconcerting heap of pink vinyl limbs and torsos.

Only one-tenth of the garbage they sort through can be set aside for recycling. And for all that effort, each pepenador makes $39 to $62 a week. The work is likely to become harder.

“Since they closed Bordo, you can tell there is less garbage,” said César Laguna, 46. “The street sweepers and pickers on the trucks go through it, and it doesn’t get here anymore.”

The neighborhood garbage trucks carry their own pepenadores, three or four volunteers who dig through household waste. They make even less than the workers at Bordo Poniente, but at least “we get fewer illnesses working here,” said one of them, Adrián Castellanos.

Héctor Castillo Berthier, a sociologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, estimates that a quarter of a million people in Mexico City depend on trash. He ticks them off: street sweepers, garbage collectors, pepenadores, junk dealers and the families they support.

“Anything you change is going to alter that tradition,” he said. “There are more and more layers of informality. These are complex processes.”

He has no confidence in city officials’ plans to reduce and compost garbage. “They have no Plan A,” let alone a Plan B, Mr. Castillo said. “They are going to bet on a reshuffling of the informal systems.”

Indeed, while keeping the separation plant open at Bordo Poniente placates the pepenadores, it makes little economic sense. The 20-ton trailers that collect the garbage from neighborhood trucks must now make a detour to the plant before driving to far-off landfills that the city is paying to take its garbage.

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Mexico Turns to Twitter and Facebook for Information and Survival

“Avoid Plaza Las Américas,” several people wrote, giving the location.

“There are gunmen,” wrote others, adding, “they’re not soldiers or marines, their faces are masked.”

These witness accounts have become common in Mexico over the past year, especially in violent cities where the news media have been compromised by corruption or killings. But the flurry of Twitter messages about the bodies arrived at a telling moment — on the same day that Veracruz’s State Assembly made it a crime to use Twitter and other social networks to undermine public order.

It is the first law of its kind in Mexico, but most likely not the last. At least one other state, Tabasco, is considering a similar measure, and all across Mexico, public officials are now complaining about new technologies that can help spread rumors. Panic is the fear: Two people in Veracruz were charged last month with terrorism and sabotage after their Twitter messages — spreading a false rumor that schools were under attack — seemed to cause traffic accidents as parents flooded the roads.

And yet, according to scholars and many Mexicans, social media has become a necessity in Mexico, with a mission far different from what has emerged in the Arab revolutions, or in China. In those countries, social networks have been used to route around identifiable sources of repression and to unify groups dispersed over large areas. In Mexico, Twitter, Facebook and other tools are instead deployed for local survival.

“These aren’t acts of political sedition or real-time attempts to bring about a change in government,” said Nicholas T. Goodbody, a professor of Mexican cultural studies at Williams College. “These are people trying to navigate daily life.”

In many ways, the explosion of electronic crime-sharing is the product of trends that both create and destroy communities: Mexico today is both highly connected and highly dangerous. Around 40,000 people have been killed in the ramped-up drug war of the past five years, while the middle class is growing, scared and increasingly networked. Cellphones are as common as keys; Twitter has more than four million users in Mexico, according to tracking companies; and among the more than 30 million people with regular Internet access, 95 percent have profiles on Facebook.

Add to that the proliferation of Web sites and blogs dedicated to covering violence with submissions from readers (Wikinarco, Blogdelnarco, Borderland Beat), and what Mexico has ended up with is a crowd-sourced universe of morbid, frightening information — which is often not available elsewhere.

“Social media is filling the gap left by the press,” said Andrés Monroy-Hernández, a doctoral candidate from Mexico at the M.I.T. Media Lab. “In different regions of Mexico, both the state and the press are weak, while organized crime is becoming stronger and, in some places, replacing the state.”

Many Mexicans now say they trust Twitter more than local news outlets, and in some areas, parents and grandparents are being taught by their children how to get online — specifically so they can be safe.

Anonieta Salazar Loftin, a doctoral student in Mexican history at the University of Texas at Dallas, said this is how her relatives back home use social media. She said that anonymous crime-focused Twitter accounts like @balaceramty — which is based in Monterrey and has more than 40,000 followers — provide a needed public service.

“They fulfill the need for information in an immediate and accessible way and, on a deeper, psychological level, provide some knowledge or certainty in the face of uncertainty,” Ms. Loftin said.

The Veracruz law is specifically aimed at false rumors that create unnecessary panic. But experts say that given how hazy real-time reports of violence can be, there could also be a danger of prosecuting well-intentioned watchdogs who share information that turns out to be wrong.

Diana (a k a @mariana_war), one of many Mexicans who is following developments in Veracruz via Twitter, said that more good than bad comes from open, unregulated sharing. Declining to give her full name out of fear, she said that while she probably lives with more fear now because she is “in the know” thanks to social media, its civic role should not be undervalued.

Referring to digital warnings about cartel checkpoints and shootouts, she said, “People’s lives are saved with Twitter.”

Not always. Two weeks ago, a man and a woman in their early 20s were found hanging from a bridge in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, with a sign near their mangled bodies that read: “This will happen to all the Internet snitches.” A third person was found dead on Saturday with a sign declaring she was killed for social media postings.

These are grisly warnings to the new media faithful. “Social media is no longer for fun and socializing in Mexico,” said a contributor to Borderland Beat from the state of Tamaulipas, who goes by @OVEMEX.

The killings highlighted the growing power of the so-called cyber guardians, whose Twitter accounts sometimes carry avatars depicting Pancho Villa and other heroes of the Mexican Revolution. The drug cartels, which have often successfully enforced information blackouts at the local level by intimidating the police and reporters, are clearly threatened by the decentralized distribution of the Web. And it may be harder for them to control.

“People are uniting and exposing the truth,” said @OVEMEX, pointing out that delicate information often passes through several people or accounts before it reaches the public. “We all watch each other’s backs.”

Of course, Mexico’s struggle goes well beyond information. Mr. Monroy-Hernández at M.I.T. said that the spread of social media, which he describes as a symptom of institutional dysfunction, will probably not “play a central role in fighting the problem.”

Some government officials may figure out how to work with, or at least tolerate, social media. On Wednesday afternoon in Veracruz, the authorities said they had identified most of the 35 dumped bodies, which were discarded, seminude, near a mall popular with tourists. They said that 12 were women and that nearly all of the identified victims had criminal records, hinting that they may have been members of the Zetas gang, killed by rivals.

On Thursday, an additional 11 bodies turned up across the city, prompting another round of Twitter commentary.

But by that time, the state’s governor, Javier Duarte de Ochoa, had pardoned the two Twitter users who had sent out false messages about the attacks against local schools. He even announced it on Twitter.

Online, the response was swift. “He’s not useless after all,” wrote one Mexican Twitter user.

Another, referring to a Twitter campaign of solidarity with users using #TwitTerrorista in their messages, added: “Thanks to our efforts, our Twitter friends are free.”

Karla Zabludovsky contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 25, 2011

An earlier version of this story misstated the given name of a doctoral student in Mexican history at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her name is Anonieta Salazar Loftin, not Antonio.

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The Texas Tribune: In Texas Border Town, Drawing a Line on Coal for Mexico

But Mr. Baxter may be gearing up for his toughest battle yet, as he and a coalition of residents in his adopted town of Eagle Pass — across the border from Piedras Negras, Mexico — fight a coal partnership that they say is intent on destroying their peaceful way of life.

The Dos Republicas Coal Partnership, which is owned by Mexican mining companies, has applied to renew a permit that would let its American partners mine about 6,300 acres of land in the border town. An existing permit already allows for mining, but officials said that work has not started because of several attempts to modify the permit to meet specifications, as well as supply-and-demand issues affecting potential customers.

Residents worry that the mining will harm the environment and that they will lose land due to property damage. They are also concerned about having a Mexican company that is held to lower standards operate in Texas. Adding salt to their wounds is the fact that the coal, considered to be of too low quality to be burned in the United States, will be shipped to Mexico.

A spokesman for Dos Republicas, which partners with North American Coal Corporation and a subsidiary, Camino Real Fuels, both based in Plano, said criticism of the partnership was unwarranted and the result of a misunderstanding.

For now, the opposition is united. The Eagle Pass City Council and Maverick County Commissioners Court have approved resolutions opposing the project. The school and hospital districts, and the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas, are also protesting the project.

“Coal that generates electric power has got to come from somewhere,” Mr. Baxter said at a recent town hall meeting. “But the fact that we are going to suffer all the consequences and all the power goes to Mexico is really the sticking point in my mind.”

The permit application has set up the latest chapter in what the residents call a David-versus-Goliath battle against a corporation with deep pockets — deep enough to hire lawyers who could persuade the Texas Railroad Commission’s three members to grant the permit. That would pave the way for the company to mine as much as 2.8 million tons of coal annually.

Rudy Rodriguez, a partner with Rodriguez Industries and Operations, which handles public relations for Dos Republicas, said the firm’s role in the proposed operation is overblown.

The belief that “a Mexican company is operating here is not the case,” he said. “They are merely investors owning a permit.”

Mr. Rodriguez said that the onus to comply with state and federal regulations, which he said are vastly different from Mexican policies, is on the American companies, which would manage the daily mining operations.

“The companies meet the regulations in Mexico and in the United States,” he said. “The company, North American Coal, that comes over to operate this can’t have a black eye on this permit because it impacts their whole operation in the United States.”

But people in Eagle Pass say that even if the regulations are met, the residents are in danger of being poisoned. They fear that the transport of low-quality coal will release particles into the air that will affect their breathing, and that discharge from mining operations will run off into the creek that feeds into the Rio Grande, the city’s main water source. The blasting, which officials with the coal companies said is possible if needed, could disrupt the already fragile terrain that is vulnerable to sinkholes, a byproduct of mining in the area over the last century.

“What we want is for our voices to be heard because we feel like we are being discriminated against,” said Martha Baxter, Mr. Baxter’s wife. “Is it because we’re a poor community and don’t have a lot of money and fancy lawyers?”

Mr. Rodriguez said that what the residents of Eagle Pass do not understand is that there is already coal moving through the city. Rail traffic that moves coal from sites farther north already passes through.

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