Mexico Trucker Online

<h4>Lawmakers defy AMLO leftists protesting measures supporters say will overhaul industry as production declines</h4>

 Ignoring thousands of left-wing demonstrators. lawmakers Tuesday and passed constitutional reforms aimed at allowing foreigners limited investment in Mexico’s vulnerable petroleum industry.

After debating over the protests of leftist legislators who had taken over the podium in the Chamber of Deputies, the lawmakers passed the measures 395-82.

“With this reform the national economy wins; all Mexicans win,” President Felipe Calderon said in a nationally televised message several hours after the vote. “And it’s particularly important that Mexicans have reached agreement at a time when the world economy goes through a particularly adverse situation.”

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Turning to Mexico’s increasing narcotics consumption, President Felipe Calderon has proposed stiffer penalties for small-time drug dealers while suspending punishment for addicts who agree to enter rehabilitation.

“Drugs are the slavery of this century,” Calderon said in a speech Friday. “Criminals seek to make slaves of children and youths. They seek to place drugs, sometimes free of charge, in schools, in neighborhoods, to create addictions, to generate dependency.”

Calderon’s initiative, part of a package of proposals aimed at bolstering his offensive against the country’s powerful drug traffickers, also includes procedures for cleaning up Mexico’s police forces and getting them to better coordinate enforcement efforts.

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SAN CRISTOBAL, Mexico - Eighteen months after leaving office, former President Vicente Fox is taking a page from Jimmy Carter’s playbook and engineering his legacy as a champion of democratic values and government transparency at home and abroad.

In a wide-ranging interview at his ranch near historic Guanajuato, Fox discussed his new projects and chided the United States for abdicating its role as global leader, questioned presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s position on free trade and dismissed Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as “a loudmouth.”

The United States no longer initiates ambitious projects such as the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II or former President John Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, which spurred economic cooperation in the hemisphere, said Fox, a strong U.S. supporter.

“We don’t see this happening anymore,” Fox told The Miami Herald. “We see walls being built. What is the U.S. afraid of?”

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Migrant rights activists applauded a vote by Mexico’s Congress to remove long-standing criminal penalties for undocumented migrants found in the country.The measure passed unanimously in the lower house on Tuesday, a day after Senate approval. President Felipe Calderon’s office declined to say whether he would sign the popular measure into law.

Mexican lawmakers saw the harsh penalties as an anachronism, and some noted Mexico also owes migrants better treatment.

Immigrants here, mostly Central Americans trying to reach the U.S., are often robbed, mistreated and subject to extortion by bandits and even police.

“It is very positive that they have removed the criminal penalties from the current law,” said Karina Arias, the spokeswoman for Sin Fronteras, a Mexican group that promotes rights for migrants in Mexico. “It is a big step forward.”

Current law lays out punishments of 11/2 to 6 years, while the new measure makes undocumented immigration a minor offense punishable by fines equivalent to about US$475 (euro300) to US$2,400 (euro1,535).

Some Mexican officials acknowledged that the current harsh penalties weakened Mexico’s position in arguing for better treatment of its own migrants in the United States.

Arias said Mexico “is in a much better position” after voting for eliminating prison terms that are seldom enforced anyway. Most undocumented migrants caught in Mexico are simply deported.

Congresswoman Irma Pineiro of the small New Alliance Party said Mexico has a moral duty to protect migrants.

“Mexico is politically and morally obligated to treat migrants with dignity and to make a commitment to human rights, as a country that both exports and receives migrants,” she said.

Mexico’s lower house of Congress on Tuesday approved a sweeping judicial reform that would introduce public, oral trials and guarantee the presumption of innocence, but lawmakers deleted a proposal to allow police to search homes without a warrant.In the 462-6 vote with two abstentions, legislators approved the reform bill, which would also allow information from recorded phone calls to be used as evidence in criminal cases if at least one of the conversation’s participants agrees.

The reform must still be approved by the Senate and then by at least 17 of Mexico’s 31 states.

The original proposal, submitted last year, would have allowed police to enter homes without a judge’s warrant if they believed a person’s life or safety were in danger, or if a crime was being committed inside.

But human rights groups harshly criticized the proposed expansion of police powers, and legislators finally agreed to drop that clause.

Both the lower house and Senate approved the measure last year as well, but with minor changes that required Tuesday’s second vote in the lower house. The Senate must also give the change’s second approval.

The reforms do not include trial by jury, but public oral trials, already in place in some states, would go nationwide, replacing closed-door proceedings where judges depend mostly on written evidence and defendants cannot confront their accusers.

Suspects will also be represented by qualified public defenders instead of “advocates” who often lack law degrees. The changes would also guarantee that, for the first time in history, the presumption of innocence will be guaranteed in Mexico’s constitution.

MEXICO CITY — Mexican legislators are expected today to overhaul the country’s famously ineffective justice system, implementing public trials nationwide while turning up the heat on organized crime.

The long-awaited “justice reform” bill — the result of several years of fierce debate among security experts, academics and human rights activists — would amend the constitution to include the presumption of innocence and other guarantees. It would also provide alternatives to jail for minor crimes, in an attempt to reduce overcrowding in Mexican prisons.

Many of the new rights, however, would not apply to suspected members of the criminal mafias, who could be held for up to 40 days without charges. The bill would also insert in the constitution a liberal definition of “organized crime” as “a group of three or more people formed with the intention of repeatedly breaking the law.”

The provisions are among several concessions to the security forces, who are demanding new legal weapons in their fight against drug cartels.

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