St. Louis CofCC Blog

Of the many things that President Bush was known for until recently, counting his days as Texas Governor, two were steadfast support for capital punishment, and opposition to anti-American international institutions and their attemped meddling into American anti-terror and other policies.

But there’s something about Mexico and its people toward which President Bush has a blind side.

Fox News:

President Bush, who presided over 152 executions as governor of Texas, wants to halt the state’s execution of a Mexican national for the brutal killing of two teenage girls.

The case of Jose Ernesto Medellin has become a confusing test of presidential power that the U.S. Supreme Court, which hears the case this week, ultimately will sort out.

The president wants to enforce a decision by the International Court of Justice that found the convictions of Medellin and 50 other Mexican-born prisoners violated their rights to legal help as outlined in the 1963 Vienna Convention.

That is the same court Bush has since said he plans to ignore if it makes similar decisions affecting state criminal laws.

(snip)

Medellin was born in Mexico, but spent much of his childhood in the United States. He was 18 in June 1993, when he and other members of the Black and Whites gang in Houston encountered two teenage girls on a railroad trestle.

The girls were gang-raped and strangled. Their bodies were found four days later.

(snip)

“The president does not agree with the ICJ’s interpretation of the Vienna Convention,” the administration said in arguments filed with the court. This time, though, the U.S. agreed to abide by the international court’s decision because ignoring it would harm American interests abroad, the government said.

Therefore, the price of “American interests abroad,” (read: cheap labor from Mexico) is the increased risk of American domestic murder victims at the hands of Mexican nationals, due to the obvious impossibility of the death penalty for such murderers, and the proven deterrent effects of the death penalty.

Related: U.S.eless Border Patrol quislings use 1963 Vienna Convention as an excuse to report Minuteman Civil Defense Corps activities to Mexican government (May 10, 2006)

Today:  30,692.0
Yesterday:  30,702.7

The Christian Science Monitor profiles growing Costa Rican nationalism, and opposition to the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and to the formal continental unification that CAFTA and its partner in crime, NAFTA, foreshadows. There is a public vote this weekend, asking the country’s citizens whether the country should adopt CAFTA; pre-election opinion polls show a slight lead for the anti-CAFTA and nationalist forces.

The irony of Latin American nationalisms are that those movements are associated with the political left, and as one can read in this article, Costa Rica’s intelligentsia, represented by the prevailing opinion of its professors of higher education, are on board. In the white world, the political left and the professorial class are usually anything but nationalist.

Costa Rica has been, for the last few decades, a retirement haven for American pensioners. The danger in buying real estate in Latin America has always been the risk of a nationalist-leftist regime coming to power, and expropriating “gringo’s” property. An anti-CAFTA victory this weekend could be the first step along the way.