a friend of the Homeland Security secretary told The Washington Post that Kelly, a tough talking Bostoner who spent 45 years in the Marines, is ideally suited to confront the challenges he’ll face.
.. Kelly did not gel with the previous administration, and his military career ended on a sour note in January 2016 after he repeatedly clashed with the Obama White House.
.. Officials there had grown tired of the four-star general speaking off message — about the president’s plan to shut down the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, about the perceived vulnerability of America’s borders, about the threat posed to American interests by any number of terrorist organizations. Their relationship had become so strained that in the weeks before he retired, multiple administration officials went to the media and accused Kelly and other military leaders of endeavoring to undermine the Guantánamo closure plan.
.. His final job in the military, as head of U.S. Southern Command in Miami, gave Kelly deep insight into the criminal networks ravaging South America, Central America and the Caribbean, and their illicit trafficking pipeline — for drugs, guns and people — running north through Mexico and into the United States. He has long argued that transnational organized crime is among the greatest threats to U.S. national security.
.. A big piece of that will be addressing leaks and the president’s portrayal in the media.
.. “There’s a way to handle it,” Kelly’s friend said. “Simply go dark and do not engage.”
How to Revive Central America
To succeed, it will have to break with the State Department’s conventional wisdom that underdevelopment is caused by a paucity of taxes and regulation. It will also have to climb down from its view that trade is a zero-sum game.
.. Failure to create jobs and grow, and the heavy concentration of businesses in the consumer sector, reflects the difficulty Guatemalan entrepreneurs have in getting credit. That’s not unusual in an economy in which more than 72% of businesses operate underground and therefore cannot access the formal banking system.
.. Guatemala ranks 88th out of 190 countries world-wide for ease of running an enterprise, but in key categories that make up the index it performs much worse.
.. The survey finds that it takes 256 hours to comply with the tax code. The total tax take is 35.2% of profits. It takes almost 20 days to start a legal enterprise and costs 24% of per capita income. To enforce a contract it takes more than 1,400 days and costs more than 26% of the claim.
.. at home the state is hostile to business and disrespectful of property rights. As a result, most new ventures see the cost of formality as outweighing the benefits.
.. Nor is Trump protectionism going to help Mr. Tillerson turn Central America around. Companies won’t want to manufacture in the region if they don’t have access to the U.S. market.
Top U.S. Officials Met With Defiance in Visit to Mexico
Secretaries of State and Homeland Security encounter objections to hard U.S. line on deportations
MEXICO CITY—Top U.S. officials arrived for talks here Wednesday to find a defiant Mexican government refusing to accept President Donald Trump’s tougher immigration and deportation policies.
.. “We won’t accept it because we don’t have to,” he added, in an apparent reference to U.S. plans to return illegal migrants to Mexico, regardless of their nationality.
.. Mr. Trump’s new guidelines, which flesh out executive orders signed by the president last month, call for enlisting local U.S. authorities to enforce immigration law, jailing more people pending hearings, and sending border-crossers back to Mexico to await proceedings, even if they aren’t Mexican.U.S. statistics show most of those entering the U.S. illegally through the southwest border are from countries other than Mexico.
.. Of more than 400,000 people apprehended in the year ending Sept. 30, more than 220,000 weren’t from Mexico.. The guidelines issued separately this week suggested the U.S. would seek to have people arriving from countries other than Mexico await their deportation proceedings in Mexico rather than in the U.S. At the end of that process, those people would be returned to their country of origin, officials said... Ahead of the visit, Mexican officials suggested that a U.S. pullout from Nafta would affect all aspects of U.S.-Mexico ties.“Logically, there wouldn’t be incentives to continue collaborating on the issues most important to national security in North America, such as the issue of migration,.. Mexico and the U.S. have collaborated for decades on efforts to fight drug cartels, police the border and prevent terror attacks... Mexican officials want to use issues including national security and migration as leverage for future talks about Nafta, experts said