The Latin American Report # 457

President Donald Trump says one thing and then another as if it were a game. He knows very well what he is doing and so the repercussions of any truth or wild statement. Last Wednesday, it was almost taken for granted that there would be another moratorium on the decision to impose 25% tariffs on goods imported from Mexico and Canada. However, Thursday ended with Trump stating that the measure would be activated as of next Tuesday. He can always back down, especially looking at Mexico's intense moves to avoid the heavy shadow of tariffs on its strategic trade with the north. Canada is also engaged in strong lobbying in Washington. The Republican leader made the case that he is not satisfied with the results of his partners' strategy for tackling drug trafficking. “Drugs are still coming into our country and killing hundreds of thousands of people... Drugs are coming from Mexico; many of them are also coming from China, not all of them, but many are coming from China,” the mogul said. The back-and-forth is undermining the performance of the main stock market indexes in the United States and Mexico.

Aztec and US officials agreed to carry out "coordinated actions" to reduce fentanyl-related deaths. Mexicans extradited some thirty notorious criminals to the United States, including Rafael Caro Quintero, a former cartel kingpin who worked with Pablo Escobar and who is directly linked to the murder of a DEA agent some 40 years ago. It is an old debt that Sheinbaum settles urgently, cutting short the legal chicanery to which Caro Quintero had appealed to avoid his transfer to the United States. “I was an orphan, my father died, I was 14 years old, and I had to feed my brothers, that's how it all began,” he once defended when asked how he had become a drug lord with a lot of blood to claim. It remains to be seen if this placates Trump's temper, as the irregular migration has improved considerably. This February is on track to be the month with the fewest Border Patrol arrests since these statistics are tallied, following Trump's tough anti-immigrant stance—or rather, against the poor migrant—, Mexico's collaboration in the border, and the agreements reached with countries in Latin America to accept back migrants from their own and third countries.

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Criticism persists regarding the treatment of migrants deported to Panama who refused to be returned to their countries.

Honduras

Father and son, environmental activists against illegal logging, were murdered in the Central American country, marked by violence. The tragic event occurred in a community in the department of Comayagua. The bodies were found dismembered in a wooded area 40 kilometers from the Honduran capital, although the heads were not at the crime scene. They went out to look for evidence of illegal logging operations, and it is presumed they were then surprised, killed, and dismembered with the same chainsaws used by the loggers. On January 31, the murder of two members of a peasant cooperative in the Caribbean department of Colon was reported. “This regrettable act of extreme violence is part of the escalation of aggressions against several peasant cooperatives in the Bajo Aguán region, which began with the incursion of armed groups,” denounced the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Honduras at the time.

_{The murdered son. He was only 20 years old according to reports (source).}