Mexico's President Says The War On Drugs Is Over…Not All Mexicans Agree

AMLO’s new drug policies are a gamble, with implications on everything from internal displacements to international relations…

On February 17, some 300 people from the Mexican state of Guerrero set up camp outside of Mexico City’s National Palace to pressure the government to address their forced displacement by drug gangs from their homes in the Sierra Madre. Two weeks earlier, president Andrés Manuel López Obrador had announced that Mexico’s war against narcotrafficking was over.

“There is no war. We want peace, we’re going to get peace,” he’d told reporters in his daily morning press conference.

For communities like the displaced from Guerrero, Mexico’s war on drugs is alive and well. The hand-lettered posters around their tent encampment detailed their complaints:

“In Guerrero there is no guarantee of anything. It’s a narco state.”

Since then-President Felipe Calderon first announced Mexico’s war against drugs in 2006, military deployment in states with a strong cartel presence has dramatically altered the life of Mexicans. In Guerrero, home to many of the country’s opium fields, hundreds of people have been displaced as a result of turf wars and corruption, as gangs and traffickers have colluded with security forces and government officials.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-20/mexicos-president-says-war-drugs-overnot-all-mexicans-agree

French envoy to US: Trump plan ‘very close to what Israel wants, 99% doomed’

Gérard Araud, a former ambassador to Israel, says he’s ‘very close’ with Jared Kushner, whom he describes as ‘extremely smart but has no guts’France’s outgoing ambassador to the US, Gérard Araud, said US President Donald Trump is uniquely able to “push” Israel on his upcoming peace plan because he is extremely popular among Israelis and they “trust him.”

In an interview with The Atlantic magazine published on Friday, Araud said the White House plan, engineered by Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, will be “very close to what the Israelis want,” and is 99 percent “doomed to fail.”

“But 1 percent, you never forget the 1 percent. Trump is uniquely able to push the Israelis, because he is so popular in Israel,” he said.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/french-envoy-to-us-trump-plan-very-close-to-what-israel-wants-99-doomed/

What the Mueller Report Didn’t Say About Felix Sater and the Trump Tower in Moscow

The redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report contained quite a bit of information about the perfidy of the Trump White House, the lack of evidence on collusion, and the limits of testimony to support a criminal charge of obstruction. But what’s most interesting is what the report did not say.

This can be seen in the report’s accounting of the Trump Moscow project, which — for all of its clumsiness and failure to materialize — remains the most substantive link between the Trump Organization and the Kremlin. The report’s section on the project, headlined, “Russian government links to and contacts with the Trump campaign,” consists of a 12-page account of two fledgling Trump deals in Moscow. The report paints a picture of three of Trump’s dealmakers, Donald Trump Jr., Michael Cohen, and Felix Sater, trying to get the project off the ground with little success. The president has denied having any business relationships with Russia, but that lie falls apart in an email-by-email, text-by-text, call-by-call narrative of the deals. The report makes clear that he and two of his children participated in efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow as then-candidate Trump heaped praise on Russian President Vladimir Putin in the midst of the 2016 campaign.

The most glaring omission concerns Felix Sater. The report describes Sater as a “New York-based real estate advisor,” which is technically accurate — but a bit like calling O.J. Simpson a “California-based football player.”

https://theintercept.com/2019/04/19/felix-sater-mueller-report/