Greetings After A Long Hiatus!

Hello everybody,

First of all, I'm sorry to have left you all hanging after starting up this blog back in November. As may be true with many of your lives, my life has taken quite a few turns over the past few months. From New York, I have relocated to South Florida, where I will now be practicing personal injury law, immigration law, and civil litigation with the firm of Gonzalez, Porcher, Albear & Garcia, of West Palm Beach. Our firm caters extensively to South Florida's Latin American community through our program of Abogados Hispanos USA, in which we offer personalized, multilingual attention and representation in diverse fields of law. I hope you will visit our website at http://www.palmbeachinjurylawyers.com to learn more about our firm.

Due to confidentiality and other ethical requirements, that is probably all that I will be discussing as to our firm on this blog. Other than, of course, to explain my absence over the past few months. Unfortunately, it's nothing that exciting like a trip to a faraway land or an engrossing case. Nope, instead, because each state in the U.S. has its own bar and bar exam requirement, I was studying for the Florida Bar, which I took at the end of February. It's an experience I went through once already in New York, and let me tell you, it is no picnic. It does give you a wealth of useful information, though, unlike many other exams, so I will be peppering my new posts with some recently regained legal knowledge.

A little more than six weeks have passed since President Obama's inauguration and predictably, the economy dominates his domestic agenda. Because of our serious and ongoing economic downturn, the President has been unable to take many foreign trips, and has yet to visit a Latin American country. In March, he will receive his first visit from a Latin American head of state, from President Lula of Brazil. Many of the same issues that I discussed regarding Brazil in my November posting about the country remain front and center. I still continue to strongly believe that it is in the interest of both the United States and Brazil to cooperate closely in the economic negotiations that will take place at the G-20 next month. The surprise issue in the first Obama-Lula meeting, however, is an ugly custody battle that brings up memories of the Elian Gonzalez controversy between the U.S. and Cuba. I will address the David Goldman case in my posting on Brazil in the next couple of weeks.

Perhaps the most alarming and significant change in the relationship between the US and Latin America that has emerged since I last wrote has been the escalating Drug War in Mexico. The horrible violence in our neighbor to the south and its multiple effects on the US have become a major topic of the cable news networks in the past couple of weeks. To those of us who have studied Latin America over the past 10 years, such violence is not surprising and not new. Mexico today resembles Colombia of the early 1990's and Peru of the early 1980's, and could be the future for other nations in the region where drug cartels are embedded and hold significant political and armed power. Organized and unorganized violence is one of the region's most severe, most persistent and most widespread problems. It is intricately tied to so many issues affecting the region, including poverty, skewed income distribution, corruption, the privatization of security and the economic force of the informal sector. What is more disturbing to the US about the drug war in Mexico is the significant impact that it will have on this country on multiple levels far and beyond the effect of Colombia's drug war. Both the escalating violence and its negative impact on Mexico's economy will most certainly fuel increased migration northward. This has the potential to skew an already thorny, polarized and discriminatory debate on immigration policy and law. Not only that, the violence of the drug cartels has already risen its ugly head in this country. As Anderson Cooper said tonight on his CNN program, the Mexican drug cartels operate in over 200 American cities, and are already the most serious organized crime threat to this country. People have been brutally assassinated by these cartels not just in Mexico but in cities like Atlanta, Chicago and Miami. Not only that, over 90% of the arms possessed by these cartels and used to brutally murder their victims were bought in the United States. This is clearly a problem for both nations, and I would argue, for the Americas as a whole. The Obama Administration is still developing a policy to deal with this new challenge. The response must be multifaceted, in the tradition of his approach so far, because it really is a complex situation involving many areas. I hope the Administration acts forcefully to counter this new challenge, and it truly is a serious crisis, but also, like the other crises it faces, an opportunity to change the face of U.S. - Mexican and U.S. - Latin American relations. I plan to write much more about this problem in the weeks and months to come.

And of course, I couldn't finish this reintroduction to my blog without talking about the developments in Venezuela last month. A trend was reversed in that all-important political country when President Hugo Chavez won his arguably illegal referendum to continue to run for office for life. Basically, when President Chavez lost the referendum back in December 2007, his response was to shove it down the throats of Venezuelans again with the hopes that his political machine and fear could turn the tide in his favor. As Chavez has always done, he did what he, in his "infinite wisdom," thought was best for his people, rather than governing in a democratic fashion prioritizing the demands of his people. He succeeded and Venezuela and the region lost, in my opinion. What this means is that Chavez will continue to be a political force in Latin America for years to come. The Obama Administration, focused at home, has yet to develop a clear policy on Venezuela. It is interesting and encouraging that they are not taking the same useless confrontational approach that the Bush Administration took. However, they should note the impact of this victory and the challenge that Chavez will continuously pose to US leadership and to democracy in the region. I hope to continue to write about Venezuela in the weeks to come.

Again, welcome back to my blog and I hope you enjoy this and my future postings!