US Security Aid to Mexico Dwindles Amid Ongoing Human Rights Abuses Roque Planas - The Huffington Post
go to original December 29, 2015

Mexican soldiers march during the country's Independence Day military parade in Mexico City. (Marco Ugarte/Associated Press)

The United States is slowing the pace of security aid to Mexico amid an ongoing human rights disaster that led the State Department to withhold some $5 million in aid earlier this year.

The budget Congress approved earlier this month awards roughly $146 million in security aid to Mexico. That figure is the lowest since 2011 and amounts to about three-quarters of the funding Congress authorized last year.

“For a close country like Mexico, if their aid for a program is cut off 25 percent, that’s a pretty huge deal,” said Robert Naiman, policy director of the membership organization Just Foreign Policy. “By Washington’s standards, that’s a pretty big slap on the wrist.”

Mexico security aid approved by Congress from 2008 to 2016. These figures exclude Defense Department counter-narcotics funding. (Congressional Research Service)

Money from the Department of Defense to help fight drug trafficking appears to be dwindling, too. In 2014, the DOD doled out some $45 million in military assistance, down from $63 million the year before.

The Pentagon hasn’t publicized the complete figures for last year or the projections for this year. But a biannual DOD report that tracks counter-narcotics funds, published in April and posted online by the Washington Office on Latin America, showed that Mexico had only received $6.8 million midway through 2015. Although the bulk of the money usually gets distributed in the second half of the year, Mexico appeared on course to receive less money than it did in 2014.

It remains unclear what will happen in 2016, since the DOD reassigns its spending priorities every year, according to Frank Mora, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Western Hemisphere from 2009 to 2013.

Read the rest at The Huffington Post

Related: Mexico's Plan Merida on Trial (teleSUR)

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