The Americas Post - The alleged Chilean spy is the one wearing the Jack Daniels t-shirt

Peru’s government said Wednesday it is investigating an alleged Chilean spy arrested in the vicinity of a military airbase in the north, in a case that could cast a shadow over relations between Lima and Santiago.

Defense Minister Alberto Otárola, said when Luis Maximiliano Seraín was arrested he had in his possession a CD,  a USB memory stick and “some writings” that are being investigated by the local public prosecutor.

“From what we know he is a Chilean citizen who was arrested near the barracks of El Pato military base in Talara.  I can not provide or confirm more details because I repeat is in full investigation,” Otárola told journalists.

In 2009, Peru and Chile engaged in a diplomatic row after the arrest of a Peruvian Air Force officer, who was accused of sending classified information to Chile.  After a year of research, a military court in Peru convicted the officer, formerly employed in the Peruvian Embassy in Santiago, to 25 years in prison.

This new espionage case involving Chile, a major investor in Peru, comes at a time when both South American countries are in international court disputing differences in their maritime boundaries.

Chilean government spokesman Andrew Chadwick said in Santiago they are fully confident that the person arrested in Peru has no link with Chilean state activities.

“We are absolutely clear on the country’s foreign policy in relation to our neighbors.  We never want to risk any type of situation that could harm our relations,” he said.

“As a government we deal with these situations calmly and wisely,” he added.

Relations between Peru and Chile, both major mineral exporters, have gone through ups and downs since they fought a war in the late nineteenth century.  Despite the friction, trade links and business between the two countries have grown rapidly in recent years.

The Americas Post Security News. U.S. Armed Forces, including this fighter, shift operations to the cloud. Photo Credit iStockPhoto

To defend the U.S. military’s information assets, Pentagon leaders say defense computers must be tied to the cloud — meaning an online environment that can be centrally locked down. Yet it’s difficult to police parts of that environment manufactured or even housed in countries that stand accused of cyberespionage, experts say.

The shift of military operations to the cloud  will require protecting electronics manufactured in Asia from supply chain tampering, say some private security auditors. But that won’t necessarily mean inspecting every network component made in China

“Our clouds are running off of hardware that’s built in China,” said…READ MORE HERE

The Americas Post - That isn't the Exxon Mobil logo on the side of that storage tank

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced on Sunday that his nation will not recognize any decision by a World Bank tribunal in a multibillion-dollar arbitration case against Exxon Mobil Corporation.

Exxon has called Venezuela before the World Bank’s International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes, or ICSID, demanding $12 billion in compensation for nationalization of the Cerro Negro oil project by Chavez in 2007.

“I tell you now: we will not recognize any decision by ICSID,” Chavez said in a televised speech.   He repeated accusations that the U.S. oil producer has used unfair practices to rob the South American OPEC member of its resources.

“They are immoral … How much could they steal in 50 years? Who would dare launch this madness without any foundation?  They wanted $12 billion. From where?” he said.

“We are not going to bow before imperialism and its tentacles, understand that … They are trying the impossible: to get us to pay them. We are not going to pay them anything.”

Exxon declined to comment.

Some interpreted the statement to mean Venezuela would reject rulings in the 20 other cases pending before the World Bank’s tribunal, responses to multiple state takeovers in recent years.  They include separate multi-billion dollar claims filed by another U.S. oil company, Conoco Phillips.  Two statements issued later however, by Venezuela’s Petroleum and Mining Ministry and by its state oil company PDVSA, only mentioned the Exxon case.

Last week an arbitration panel at the International Chamber of Commerce, awarded Exxon $908 million in a separate case about the Cerro Negro nationalization.  On Saturday, Venezuelan Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez said he did not expect a verdict in Exxon’s World Bank case before the end of this year.

Both cases are being monitored by the industry for precedents in future disputes between companies and producing states, which have demanded a larger share of oil profits as prices increase and new reserves grow scarce.

For years, Venezuela’s socialist president has accused foreign oil companies of looting that nation’s resources, while still maintaining close ties with many of them.

Exxon says the World Bank case is to compensate for its assets, and experts say it could result in a larger award.  The government has insisted Exxon receive only slightly more than the $750 million it said was invested in the project.  In September, Venezuela offered to settle for $1 billion.

For years, Chavez has hit oil companies with tax hikes and contract revisions  to fund public anti-poverty programs.

Venezuela’s push for more control over its oil has been emulated by other producing nations.  Critics say it has scared investors away from that country and reduced production volume.  Regardless, some companies remain eager to invest in Venezuela’s Orinoco extra heavy oil belt, one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of crude.  Chevron and Spain’s Repsol both signed deals in 2010 for new projects there.

Victor Bjorgan - Publisher of The Americas Post

Dear Readers of our blog: Starting now, TheAmericasPost.com will publish papers and essays from prestigious academics and decision makers within the US intelligentsia. Those documents will focuse on interamerican relations, and will bring us light into the way of thinking of the United States in relation to The Americas. In this case,  this working paper of 2003 will enlight us about US policy toward The Americas during the Bush Administration.  Hope you will enjoy this paper written by RICHARD FEINBERG.

Mr. Feinberg served as President Bill Clinton’s Senior Adviser for Inter-American Affairs and was a principal architect of the first Summit of the Americas in 1994. He is now Professor of Political Economy at the University of California, San Diego. Professor of International Political Economy; Director of the APEC Study Center University of California San Diego; Chair of the Global Leadership Institute. He is a Ph.D., Stanford University, 1978 (international economics) University College, University of London. Concentration in British history and a  B.A.in Brown University, 1969 (cum laude, European history). As The Publisher, our TheAmericasPost.com gives full credit for this paper to Mr. Richard Feinberg and to the University of California, San Diego.

Policy Issues
Regionalism and Domestic Politics:
U.S.-Latin American Trade Policy
in the Bush Era

by Richard E. Feinberg

ABSTRACT
With remarkable success, Latin Americans have sought to impose
their free trade policy agenda on a very reluctant and internally fractious
United States. They have an ally in President George W. Bush,
whose senior appointments notably support hemispheric trade integration
even as political pressures sometimes have yielded protectionist
outcomes. Bush’s trade negotiator, Robert Zoellick, pursues a
doctrine of competitive liberalization while accepting some linkage
between trade and social and political goals. In negotiating the Free
Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), the administration will have to
balance many domestic pressures without alienating Latin America.
Ultimately, FTAA ratification will signal a new Western Hemisphere
economic-security alliance for the twenty-first century.

The United States has long resisted what geography would seem to
dictate: a special relationship with Latin America. Frequent rhetorical
and occasional real concessions to the idea of hemispheric solidarity
notwithstanding, U.S. foreign policy has generally preferred to focus
on other regions of the world––notably Europe and Asia––or to eschew
regional favorites altogether in favor of a global reach. These preferences
have been deeply rooted in the ethnic origins of the long-dominant
East Coast foreign policy establishment, and in global power relations
that located the nation’s major challengers and allies in those
distant theatres. After World War II, U.S. hegemony seemed to dictate a
universalist perspective that favored global institutions and policies as
against a more parochial and local regionalism.

This denial of geography often had been reciprocated by Latin
American elites throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
(Feinberg and Corrales 1999). Nationalists of the right and left preferred
to limit their dependence on U.S. power by diversifying their relations
through stronger ties to Europe or other Latin American nations, or
simply by erecting nationalist barriers against foreign commerce and
capital. There have been moments in history, however, when Latin
America has reached out to the United States and the United States has
responded affirmatively. We are living in one such moment.

The idea of a hemispheric free trade zone is not new. It can be
traced back at least to Simón Bolívar (whose integrationist vision sometimes
excluded but sometimes seemed to include North America), and
it was discussed at the time of the founding of the Pan-American Union
at the end of the nineteenth century. Presidents Ronald Reagan
(1980–88) and George Bush (1988–92) made rhetorical references to the
idea of a hemispheric free trade zone.

This vague aspiration did not become a hard policy option, however,
until it was advanced with energy and persistence during the 1990s
in a series of Latin American initiatives. The Latin Americans––acting out
of a series of economic, political, and diplomatic motives––have sought
to impose their free trade policy agenda on a very reluctant United
States. The Latin Americans have worked to take advantage of the sharp
divisions within the Washington bureaucracy, Congress, and public
opinion to tip the balance in their favor. Just as U.S. policy has so often
altered the course of history in Latin American nations by playing on
internal divisions and decisively strengthening the hand of its internal
allies, so now the Latin Americans have worked their will on a fragmented
U.S. body politic, seeking to alter the constellation of forces at
the margin that made a difference.

In President George W. Bush, the Latin American integrationists
have a professed friend. The 43rd U.S. president inherited his preference
for free trade from his Eastern Establishment family, his elite New
England schooling, and his Republican Party roots. He took up the
cause of free trade in the Western Hemisphere after he saw how
exchange with the Mexican economy benefited the Texan economy,
and he was among the first politicians to grasp that better relations with
Latin America could help garner Latino votes. He learned the benefits of
the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) from his business
associates and Mexican friends, and when he became president his new
counterparts in Latin America repeatedly told him that the reputation of
the United States as a reliable friend and partner hung on his completion
of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

Bush wants to please and support his friends south of the border as a gesture of generosity
and reciprocity that exemplifies his unique combination of Eastern
noblesse and Texas hospitality.

Bush’s selection to direct his trade diplomacy, Robert Zoellick, is
another true believer in hemispheric integration. Indeed, the administration’s
trade team is a remarkably homogeneous collection of freetrade
advocates who also support regional trade initiatives. Yet even
with well-placed sympathizers in the executive branch, the Latin Americans
cannot be certain that their historic gamble will pay off. Only aca-
demic theorists rooted in the rigid realist tradition of state security studies
would be surprised to discover that trade policy does not arise from
some unitary “national interest” embodied in the presidency but rather
boils up from the many strands of domestic politics. And U.S. society is
deeply divided on trade policy, especially with regard to developing
countries. Protectionists, mercantilists, social welfare advocates, and
other opponents of freer trade in general and the FTAA in particular
have strong influence in the U.S. Congress, which, in turn, has a powerful
voice in the making of U.S. trade policy. These forces also carry
weight in the more political circles in the White House and presumably
with President Bush himself, as evident recently in the joint executive legislative
branch complicity to grant protection and enriched subsidies
to steel and agriculture. In the summer of 2002, after a prolonged struggle,
President Bush finally persuaded Congress to grant him the authority
to negotiate trade agreements that Congress would not seek to
amend, an authority denied to President Clinton since 1994, even as this
trade promotion authority was approved by a razor-thin margin in the
House of Representatives.

To cross the finish line––to negotiate and then ratify a free trade
pact, with all that will imply for U.S.-Latin American relations––the Latin
Americans will have to devise strategies with their embattled U.S. allies
that build a willing coalition in U.S. public opinion and the U.S. Congress
while simultaneously keeping Latin American elite support behind
a vision of a more integrated Western Hemisphere. The outcome of this
highly disputatious, complex, multilevel game will determine the future
of U.S.-Latin American relations.

MADE IN LATIN AMERICA

Scholars typically attribute the emergence of regionalism in the
post–Cold War period to the shifting trade strategies of the hegemonic
powers, the specter of competition among great trading blocs in a more
pluralistic world, or the structure and interests of domestic actors in the
key industrial countries. Smaller nations are depicted as mere pawns in
these struggles of the giants or, at best, as lemmings scurrying to follow
the major powers. Rarely is the drive toward regional integration perceived
to be a bottom-up affair, in which the smaller, developing nations
are a driving force in history. In reality, by the early 1990s, structural
shifts in Latin American economies and polities and in Latin Americans’
interpretation of their own interests had altered the region’s traditional
aversion to integration with the United States. Seizing control of their
own destiny, Latin American actors have successfully engaged the
United States to negotiate what could amount to a strategic alliance for
the twenty-first century: the FTAA.

As the process of hemispheric trade integration has unfolded, the
key initiatives have come from Latin America (Feinberg 1997). In 1990,
it was President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, returning from Europe disillusioned
with the lack of interest in Mexican markets, who proposed an
FTA to President George Bush. It was the leaders of the Andean countries,
at a minisummit in Cartagena, Colombia, who first urged Bush to
consider a post–Cold War economic policy toward the region that
yielded the Enterprise for the Americas Initiative (EAI), a forerunner of
the FTAA. It was the Chileans who have pressed three successive U.S.
administrations for an FTA. It was Latin Americans who proposed to the
Clinton White House that the U.S. convene a post-NAFTA meeting of
hemispheric leaders to diffuse the spirit of NAFTA southward, who
insisted that the centerpiece of the subsequent 1994 Miami Summit be a
free trade pact, and who cornered the United States into accepting a
firm end date for negotiations (Feinberg 1997, 76).

The United States acceded to Latin American pressures only at the
last moment, when the credibility of the Clinton summit hinged on the
announcement of a certain date (Feinberg 1997, 77–78). Without the
Miami Summit, regionwide free trade would probably have remained a
vague aspiration, not a hemispheric consensus. Most recently, in early
2002, it was Central America’s turn to twist the U.S. arm to open negotiations
for a plurilateral FTA, as a building bloc toward Central America’s
final goal, the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

The Latin Americans have good reasons to pursue hemispheric
integration. We can group their motives in three clusters: trade and
investment, macroeconomic issues, and political-strategic matters.

Trade and Investment

As a consequence of the 1980s debt crisis, among other factors, Latin
American economies have adopted a more outward-oriented growth
strategy, and regional integration models have shifted from inward-looking
and protective to forms that couple domestic liberalization with an
opening to global markets (“open regionalism”). By enlarging their markets,
Latin Americans have hoped to attract more international investment
and, with it, technology transfer––as Latin America has increasingly
turned away from viewing a north-south division of the world
toward perceiving its future as tied to global capital and technology
flows. Entering into a free trade pact with the United States would signal
to investors a more stable policy environment and a warmer and more
predictable business climate.

Latin American trade strategists saw another, specific advantage in
an FTAA: the opportunity to gain the secure access to the world’s
largest and most dynamic market that they had never really extracted
from negotiations in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(Tussie 1998).

Macroeconomic Reform

In regional integration with the United States, macroeconomic reformers
in Latin America perceived additional leverage in their domestic
political struggles. In their constant battles against the remnants of the
import substitution industrialization model, reformers saw international
treaties as ways to lock in the steps already taken toward liberalization,
or at least to significantly raise the costs of backsliding.

More concretely, international competition could overwhelm and destroy the inefficient
and reactionary “national” industry sectors, as Chile and then Mexico
had demonstrated. A regional free trade alliance would also focus
national policy debates on the next stage of reforms required to achieve
international competitiveness, including further market liberalization,
effective regulation and competition policies, and modern infrastructure
in, for example, telecommunications, energy, and transportation
(Salazar-Xirinachs and Tavares de Araujo, 1999). As the antiglobalization
backlash has gained momentum in some countries, this search for international
leverage becomes all the more salient.

Democratic Consolidation and
Strategic Bargaining

Politically, Latin America’s democrats were looking to Washington and to
interamerican institutions to bolster their position against the everpresent
authoritarian tendencies in Latin American polities. During the 1990s, the
effective exercise of this collective defense of democracy scored several
impressive victories and gained prestige and legitimacy. The oft-repeated
phrase “Democracy is the only legitimate form of government in the
Americas” took on substance and probably altered the correlation of
forces in several countries when democracy was in the balance.

As César Gaviria, secretary-general of the Organization of American
States, has noted, “The FTAA was conceived from the beginning as part
of a broader effort at rapproachement” (2001). Shrewd Latin American
diplomats recognized that a hemispheric free trade alliance would give
them leverage over the United States on a range of interdependence
issues. They saw how Mexico again and again sought advantage from
NAFTA to squeeze indulgences out of Washington, a strategy raised to
an art form by President Vicente Fox and his wily foreign minister, Jorge
Castañeda.

Just one example of this leverage: Fox asked Bush to overrule
his advisers and join him at the Monterrey Conference on Development
Finance, transforming that U.N.-sponsored meeting into a major
international gathering and a huge diplomatic success for Mexico and
for Fox himself.

IN THE UNITED STATES,
REACTIVE CONVERGENCEThis Latin American push for hemispheric integration has not been
entirely well received in the United States, as most of its diplomats, generals,
and merchants have preferred to ply their trades in more powerful
and prosperous parts of the world. During the 1980s and 1990s,
however, the appeal of Latin America did gain ground in some circles,
even as the debate on trade became increasingly polarized.

Economic Interests

Latin American economies expanded during the late 1980s and through
most of the 1990s. Latin America’s weight in U.S. exports rose during the
1990s, from 17 percent in 1992 to nearly 21 percent in 1998. The exposure
of U.S. multinational firms, lenders, and portfolio investors
expanded in many markets. U.S. direct investment in Latin America
increased from $71 billion in 1990 to $172 billion in 1997, or 20 percent
of U.S. overseas holdings.

The attractiveness of an FTAA to such market participants is evident.
A fulsome FTAA could make such transactions less risky and possibly
more profitable. An FTAA could lower tariff and other trade barriers,
eliminate or reduce some bothersome regulations, and enhance predictability
and transparency.

According to one calculation, an FTAA could result in the doubling
of U.S. trade with Brazil in the short term alone (Schott and Hufbauer
1999; Hufbauer et al. 1999). What’s more, the density of merchandise
trade flows within a country is estimated to be at least ten times greater
than trade flows that cross international borders, holding constant the
economic size and distance between the source and destination (Schott
and Hufbauer 1999). Seen from this perspective, U.S.-Brazilian
trade––only $25 billion in 1997––is far below its potential.

An FTAA, moreover, has the additional advantage that it would
grant U.S. firms preferential treatment––as against, for example, competitors
from Europe and Asia. Or, as other nations sign free trade pacts
with Latin American nations and as the Latin Americans themselves
weave a web of intraregional trading arrangements, an FTAA would
guarantee U.S. firms at least a level playing field.

Many U.S. traders and investors active in the region have developed
business as well as personal relations with their Latin American counterparts.
They interact regularly with them in various incountry business
associations (for example, chambers of commerce) and in the New
York–based Americas Society and its affiliate, the Council of the Americas.
Sensitive to the interests of the internationalized Latin American
corporate and financial sectors, these U.S. executives serve as conduits,
spokespersons, and lobbyists for their regional partners. These channels
are particularly influential in the Republican Party and in the editorial
pages of business-oriented media. It could be argued that the flow of
influence runs in the opposite direction––from U.S.-based firms to Latin
America. Perhaps we can best talk of a convergence of interests, a
transnational alliance among the internationalized interests in the hemisphere’s
private markets.

Trade-bargaining Strategies

Pursuit of a regional free trade pact in the Western Hemisphere offers
other advantages to U.S. trade negotiators. As seen from a trade-bargaining
perspective, plurilateralism or regionalism can strengthen the
hand of U.S. negotiators engaged in global or other regional forums.
First the Canadian and then the Mexican FTAs were designed in part to
encourage negotiations taking place within the GATT (Elliot and Hufbauer
2002, 403). The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum
served to spur the wrap-up of the Uruguay Round. Regionalism also
offers opportunities to set precedents that may later be advanced in
global forums––as APEC did in 1996 with its international telecommunications
agreement, later accepted by the World Trade Organization.

Regionalism, that is, can spur globalization. The Bush administration has
adopted the phrase “competitive liberalization” to describe this positive
interaction among bilateral, plurilateral, and global trade forums.

An FTAA could be a positive spur to global freer trade. But it could
also be seen as building a fallback option, should other forums fail and
global trade contract. It is interesting that this component of strategic
“hemispherism” crept into President Bush’s language at the third Summit
of the Americas in Quebec City in April 2001. Speaking extemporaneously
at the closing press conference, Bush asserted that freer trade
would better enable the Western Hemisphere to compete against Asia
and Europe. This seemed to put Asia and Europe on notice that Bush
would be willing to contemplate turning inward toward his own hemisphere
should relations elsewhere deteriorate. At the very least, Bush
appears willing to play one region off against another, to the potential
benefit of U.S. bargaining power and strategic interests. In a similar but
more positive vein, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick told a
gathering of business executives with interests in Latin America, “If the
Americas are strong, the United States will be better positioned to
pursue its aims around the world” (Zoellick 2001a).

Positive Externalities

Beyond trade and investment flows, successive U.S. administrations
have recognized an interest in supporting the internationalized sectors
in Latin American economies and polities. Many U.S. policymakers have
understood that free trade pacts could enhance the legitimacy and leverage
of those sectors, help to lock in their macroeconomic reforms, and
accelerate steps toward market liberalization. The standard U.S. rhetoric
linking free markets and free societies thus has taken on real form in a
region struggling to consolidate democratic institutions. Furthermore, on
issues from counternarcotics to counterterrorism, environmental protection
to energy cooperation, free trade was widely understood as generating
positive externalities or spillover effects in diplomatic negotiations.
Countries linked together in an FTAA could also serve as useful allies in
global forums, whether in the WTO or elsewhere.

A FRAGMENTED NATION

Not all U.S. citizens have been persuaded, however, by these arguments
of economic interest, bargaining tactics, and issue linkage. During the
1990s in the United States, opponents of the FTAA and of freer trade in
general grew increasingly vociferous. Their arguments were many.

Trade specialists in and outside the bureaucracy favored globalism over
regionalism––although as time went on, they grew more accustomed to
regionalism, less frightened that it might divide the world into hostile
trading blocs, more willing to see regionalism as a building block or catalyst
to global freer trade. They continued to question the urgency of
the FTAA project nevertheless, pointing out that most of the alleged
gains from hemispheric free trade had already been realized in NAFTA
and that once Canada and Mexico were excluded from the numbers, the
near-term gains from more open trade with Central and South America
would be modest.

Some critics continued to question the wisdom of entering into such
a close arrangement with Latin America. In the bureaucratic and policy
community, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East continued to hold sway
as regions of primary importance and attention––even as George W.
Bush’s extraordinary focus on the Western Hemisphere dampened, at
least temporarily, those attitudes in the executive branch that disdained
Latin America. As several South American countries, notably Venezuela
and Argentina, experienced renewed political or economic instability
between 2000 and 2002, concerns surfaced once again about the
region’s reliability as a diplomatic ally and economic partner.

The loudest opposition to the FTAA came from the “blue-green
alliance”––that de facto coalition between organized labor and many
progressive nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) advocating environmental
protection, human rights, poverty alleviation, and other social
concerns.

The unionists worried that an FTAA would expose them to
competition from lower-wage areas, and they sought to protect their
jobs––if even at the expense of Latin American workers––by linking
trade sanctions to alleged violations of workers’ rights. Most of the
NGOs had other motives; they saw in trade accords one more arrow
they could add to their quiver as they sought leverage over developing country
social policies to internationalize good practices and to prevent
a “race to the bottom” that could endanger hard-won gains in the United
States.

Distrusting governments’ vague statements of good intentions,
both the unions and the NGOs sought hard sanctions to enforce their
high standards of behavior.

Politically, many of the blues and greens were linked to the Democratic
Party; and as the ardor of their opposition to freer trade pacts
grew, more and more congressional Democrats began to vote against
trade legislation.5 When the renewal of fast-track negotiating authority
came to a vote in 1998, it went down to defeat in the U.S. House of Representatives
by 243 to 180, with over 80 percent of Democrats voting
against the measure. This blue-green alliance was joined by 32 percent
of the Republicans, many located in the traditionally protectionist South,
to form a rejectionist majority.

By 2000, it appeared that the Clinton administration’s decision in
1994 in favor of an FTAA had been a disequilibrium solution, in the
sense that it lacked sufficient domestic political support to reach the
final goal. In the run-up to the Miami Summit, the pressures from Latin
Americans and the summit itself temporarily pushed U.S. decision makers
off the true equilibrium path––which perhaps would have led to a
gradual and incomplete expansion of NAFTA or the signing of disconnected
bilateral FTAs, well short of a comprehensive FTAA. At moments
when the trade debate turned essentially domestic and Latin American
preferences failed to register, as in the 1999 fast-track authority vote, the
oppositionists demonstrated a blocking majority.

BUSH-ZOELLICK TEAMTHE

The Bush trade team came charging out of the gates during its first year
in office, presenting a seemingly united determination to advance trade
liberalization. Zoellick made strong speeches laying out his strategic
vision, pursued international negotiations on many fronts, and strove to
build a winning coalition in the Congress. But in the administration’s
second year, as the midterm congressional elections approached,
domestic political interests increasingly impinged on trade policy, slowing
international negotiations, dragging out the debates in Congress,
and driving the administration itself to advocate or acquiesce to some
highly visible protectionist measures.

Having criticized Clinton during the 2000 presidential campaign for
dropping the ball on the FTAA and paying insufficient attention to Latin
America, and driven by a calendar that fixed the third Summit of the
Americas just three months into his term, Bush quickly jumped into
Latin American relations. In his first year in office, Bush had 26 meetings
with Western Hemisphere heads of state, not including his attendance
at the Summit in Quebec (Feinberg and Rosenberg 2002).

He has given several speeches devoted to U.S.-Latin American relations, one at
the OAS and another at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB),
two venues symbolizing multilateralism in hemispheric relations. Bush
White House aides report that he regularly pushes them to keep working
on various Latin American issues of special interest to him, including
the FTAA; and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, has
beefed up her Latin Americanist staff to keep pace with her boss’s interest
in hemispheric affairs.

Bureaucratic Homogeneity

Bush’s senior appointments were notable for their homogeneity in their
belief in free trade. If pockets of protectionism, disdain for Latin America,
or distaste for regionalism remained, they were submerged by the
president’s compelling affirmations of his intention to complete the
FTAA. In his appointment of Zoellick to direct the U.S. Trade Representative
Office (USTR), Bush found a seasoned policymaker who, during
the elder Bush’s administration, had worked on the Uruguay Round,
NAFTA, and APEC, and was comfortable with the FTAA. Zoellick combines
a sharp intellect with operational skills honed as an aide to James
Baker III during the earlier Bush administration in the departments of
Treasury and State and at the White House.

Among the various agencies with equities in trade, Bush has given
Zoellick and the USTR the lead over U.S. policy and has blessed him with
appointees in the other key agencies who have a decidedly pro–free trade
bias. At the Treasury, the leading international post is in the hands of the
undersecretary for international affairs, John Taylor, a Stanford University
economist who served under free-marketeer John Boskin (a Stanford University
colleague) on the Council of Economic Advisers during the previous
Bush tenure.

The Treasury deputy secretary is Kenneth Dam, whose
credentials include a standard text on the WTO (Dam 1970).
At the State Department, Colin Powell is inclined toward freer markets,
as is his chief economic officer, Under Secretary for Economic,
Business, and Agricultural Affairs Alan Larson. At the Commerce Department,
the views of Under Secretary for International Trade Grant
Aldonas are less easy to classify, but he had experience advocating free
trade policies while serving previously as special assistant to the under
secretary of state for economic affairs and at USTR as director of South
American and Caribbean affairs. He was also viewed as a supporter of
more open markets when he was a Republican Trade Counsel on the
Senate Finance Committee.

At the White House, the National Economic Council, under Harvard
professor Lawrence Lindsey, in its role as White House coordinator of
economic policies, potentially could challenge USTR for primacy. But
the NEC’s international role was diluted in a Bush reorganization that
stripped the NEC of a separate international staff, creating instead a
small international office under a deputy, Gary Edson, that reports
jointly to NEC Director Lindsey and National Security Adviser Condoleezza
Rice. In any case, Edson has impressive free-trade credentials:
he worked for then-deputy secretary of state Kenneth Dam during the
Reagan administration and USTR Carla Hills during the first Bush administration,
and he holds an MBA from the University of Chicago. Another
White House player is Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Bolten, a former USTR
general counsel known in Washington policy circles as a sophisticated
proponent of market-opening trade policies.

Zoellick reportedly confers routinely with his cabinet
peers––notably, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, Commerce Secretary
Donald Evans, and National Security Adviser Rice––who generally defer
to him in his spheres of primary jurisdiction: trade policy initiation and
negotiation.7 With the self-confidence of a Robert McNamara, when
challenged at interagency meetings Zoellick does not hesitate to establish
his superior grasp of both strategy and details. As a result of this
policy homogeneity, delegated leadership, and aggressive style, Zoellick
got off to a quick start during 2001.

The early Bush-Zoellick trade offensive benefited from a certain
bureaucratic momentum that had built up behind the FTAA process after
the 1994 Miami Summit. There is nothing like the repetition of boilerplate
language––asserting that the FTAA favored a laundry list of U.S.
interests––to persuade its drafters and articulators little by little of the
virtues of that policy direction. What some once saw as an unfamiliar
and dangerous innovation of trade policy become part of the everyday
landscape. The same familiarization process occurred in other countries,
as leaders and ministers reaffirmed their commitment to the FTAA project
at meeting after meeting.

Institutional Momentum
The Bush-Zoellick offensive also benefited from an institutional momentum
embedded in several international forums and institutions.

As negotiations on the FTAA proceeded, there evolved an elaborate web of negotiating
committees and working groups that networked with as many as
a thousand trade officials. Through repeated interaction and learning,
they gradually developed mutual knowledge and trust. As their understanding
of each other’s interests became more sophisticated and realistic,
some ill-founded prejudices evaporated, professional friendships
developed, and a stake in a successful outcome took shape (Salazar-Xirinachs
2001). These government experts became a form of epistemic community
with an interest in regional cooperation and the FTAA.

Other sources of this institutional momentum were the premier
regional institutions, the OAS and the IDB, with their built-in inclination
to favor regional integration projects. These multilateral agencies became
increasingly attached to the FTAA project. Their respective leaders, César
Gaviria and Enrique Iglesias, spoke out repeatedly in favor of the FTAA,
and their bureaucracies became the FTAA’s de facto think tank, churning
out supportive databases and policy studies that tracked the direction of
regional trade, monitored the various regional trade pacts, and analyzed
the remaining obstacles facing the FTAA negotiators.

Yet another source of institutional momentum was the summit
process, as set in motion by the 1994 Miami meeting and carried forward
in Santiago in 1998 and Quebec City in 2001. These hemispheric summits
have served as markers for negotiators and occasions for leaders to
reaffirm their devotion to the FTAA vision. The Quebec Summit, coming
only three months after Bush took office, compelled his administration
to focus early on hemispheric trade issues and gave Bush and Zoellick
occasions to voice their strong support for the regionalist option.

Together, these various institutional locations and procedures took on a
momentum of their own, somewhat autonomous from those national
leaders who had originally set the FTAA project in motion––just as institutionalists
might have predicted and some FTAA opponents had feared.

Some Favorable Domestic Trends
Certain developments in U.S. domestic politics and opinion also supported
Bush’s intuitive preference for the FTAA project. In the Republican
Party during the 1990s, it appeared as though the protectionist wing
was growing stronger. But Bush’s own preferences and his reliance on
his father’s circle of senior advisers––committed free traders––promised
to pull the party leadership and congressional majority back into the
free trade camp. In the trade policy community––which, until the early
1990s, sided with the USTR in strongly preferring global trade liberalization
as a first-best solution––regionalism became an increasingly
acceptable second-best option, especially if conceived as part of a “competitive
liberalization” strategy.

In addition, Hispanics emerged as an increasingly potent political
force, courted by both Republicans and Democrats. Clinton had
believed that Latinos were primarily interested in local “bread and butter
issues” (other than the Cuban American community, with its passionate
hatred of Fidel Castro), but Bush intuited that a subtle link existed
between U.S. policy toward Latin America and Latino sentiment.

Most Latinos might not pay attention to the details of U.S. policies toward the
hemisphere, but they were offended by the sort of verbal assaults on
Latin America that seemed to evoke racist imagery, as disseminated by
some anti-NAFTA voices and as repeated during the debates over trade
promotion authority. By adopting a more positive tone toward Latin
America and by seeking to embrace it as a worthy partner for the United
States, Bush was indirectly flattering the Latinos and making them feel
more welcome in their chosen land. This interpretation of Latino politics
gave the FTAA a new and increasingly influential constituency in the
domestic political realm.

Paradoxically, the business community presented a problem for the
Bush team. It generally supported the Bush administration and freer
trade, and business alliances such as the U.S. Trade Coalition worked on
behalf of the administration’s market-opening trade initiatives. Many
corporate lobbyists, however, were not placing trade at the top of their
congressional agenda (Alden 2002). Some sectors, such as telecommunications
and pharmaceuticals, had satisfied many of their trade goals in
previous negotiations.

Other sectors, such as agriculture, were increasingly
divided on trade policy, as some big commodity producers now
feared fresh competition from cheap imports. Many corporate executives
preferred to focus on tax reforms or on the current quarter’s earnings,
rather than to spend political capital on potential long-term gains
from trade liberalization. Nor had the executive branch been particularly
adept at making tangible and visible the projected gains for U.S. business
from future trade accords.

More generally, the current Bush administration, like previous
administrations, has not engaged in a comprehensive and systematic
effort to educate the U.S. public about the value to the United States of
an engaged and market-opening trade policy. The critics of trade agreements
and more open markets have done a much better job than the
proponents, post-NAFTA, of getting their message out to the public. This
has significantly complicated the congressional debate on trade.

THE BUSH-ZOELLICK TRADE STRATEGY

Against this complex domestic political backdrop, Zoellick has articulated
a trade policy with two central characteristics: the simultaneous
pursuit of trade agreements at multiple levels in ways that definitively
bestow legitimacy on regional trading arrangements (RTAs); and the
linkage of international trade with other social, political, and strategic
objectives. (For his major speeches, see Zoellick 2001a, b, c; and his
congressional testimony, Zoellick 2002.)

Multiple Fronts and RTAs

Zoellick is pursuing global, regional, and bilateral trade agreements, to
be negotiated simultaneously and to be seen as potentially complementary
and mutually reinforcing. In phrases that echo military tactics
and international political economy, Zoellick has stated with candor, “By
moving on multiple fronts, we can create a competition in liberalization
that will promote open markets around the world” (Zoellick 2001b).

In following this multiple-front strategy, Zoellick initially accepted the
hand dealt him by the outgoing Clinton administration, or as dictated by
prescheduled international meetings, including FTA negotiations with
Singapore and Chile, regional negotiations with APEC, the FTAA, and the
renewed efforts to launch the new WTO round.

As far as can be determined, at the outset of the Bush administration there was no “bottom-up”
review of U.S. trade policy that might have questioned these negotiations
and forums in any fundamental manner. In this sense, Zoellick represents
continuity in U.S. trade policy as it evolved during the 1990s. But he
raised this multiple-front strategy approach to the level of trade doctrine.
It is significant that RTAs are no longer anomalies to be explained
away as fitting unique circumstances; rather, they have been fully
accepted and incorporated into the heart of U.S. trade policy. The USTR
has buried its historical dedication to globalism and the GATT-WTO as
being not only the first-best but the only legitimate trade strategy. For
the Bush administration, RTAs can serve a variety of purposes. As Zoellick
succinctly told Congress in February 2002:

[Bilateral free trade agreements] can open up a new front for free
trade. They can create models of success that help reformers, break
new ground for liberalization in changing or emerging sectors (e.g.,
biotech, high tech––including IPR-related [intellectual property
rights] sectors––and services), build friendly coalitions to promote
trade objectives in other contexts (e.g., biotech, SPS topics), add to
America’s trade leverage globally, underpin links with other
nations, and energize and expand the support for trade. Next trade
agreements also present fresh opportunities to find common
ground at home, and with our trading partners, on the nexus
among trade, growth and improved environmental and working
conditions. (Zoellick 2002)

Beyond pursuing the FTAs with Singapore and Chile inherited from
the Clinton administration, the Bush administration has begun talks with

Central America and is considering FTAs with a number of other nations,
including Uruguay, Australia, South Africa, Morocco, and possibly others
in sub-Saharan Africa. While this more aggressive pursuit of FTAs is a
new element in U.S. trade policy, Zoellick realizes that the United States
is playing catch-up with the rest of the world. As the USTR lamented in
its “2001 International Trade Legislative Agenda” (USTR 2001), “There are
over 130 preferential trade agreements in the world today––and the
United States is a party to only two of them.” As Zoellick pointedly
moaned, moreover, “There are 30 free trade agreements in the Western
Hemisphere; the United States belongs to only one” (Zoellick 2001c).

Linkage Politics

Another trend that had emerged during the Clinton administration was
codified in the Bush-Zoellick trade strategy: that of linkage politics. In a
retreat from USTR purism, which held that trade policy should be kept
neat and separate from other policy issues, Zoellick accepts that trade
cannot be quarantined from other variables in the international political
economy. “We need to align the global trading system with our values,”
he says (2001b).

Specifically, Zoellick has argued that trade policy can show respect
for core labor standards and environmental protectionism, as well as
democracy and the rule of law––but “without slipping into fear-based
campaigns and protectionism” (2001b). In an effort to move away from
a sanctions-based approach to advancing trade-related issues, Zoellick
has proposed a “toolkit” of measures to advance trade and environmental
objectives.

These measures consist primarily of technical and financial
assistance that can be extended to the relevant ministries in developing
countries by bilateral and international agencies, such as the U.S. Agency
for International Development, the World Bank, the International Labor
Organization, and various United Nations agencies (USTR 2002b). Zoellick
has also floated the idea of applying monetary fines against violators
of agreed-on standards as an alternative to trade sanctions.

To persuade Congress to grant it authority to negotiate trade
accords and then present them for an up or down vote with no amendments
and limited debate time (formerly known as fast-track authority,
renamed trade promotion authority, or TPA, by the Bush administration),
the executives agreed to accept as overall negotiating objectives
the following: to promote respect for worker rights consistent with the
core labor standards of the International Labor Organization (ILO), to
ensure that trade and the environment are mutually supportive, and to
seek to protect the environment.

This TPA legislation also bound the administration to seek appropriate
penalties in a given violation of these requirements (while not adversely
affecting interests not party to the dispute). It remains to be seen exactly
how far the Bush administration will attempt to push these issues in
international negotiations, whether inthe WTO round, the FTAA, or
bilateral accords, and whether it can find compromises that satisfy the
more accommodationist elements in the blue-green coalition without
alienating Republican free traders and foreign governments.

Trade and Democracy

The Bush administration has also accepted a linkage between trade and
democracy. At the Quebec Summit, Bush and the other 33 hemispheric
leaders adopted a democracy clause that “establishes that any unconstitutional
alteration or interruption of the democratic order in a state of
the Hemisphere constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to the participation
of that state’s government in the Summits of the Americas
process” (OAS 2001).

It was understood that the phrase “Summits of the
Americas process” encompasses the FTAA. That is, the FTAA became a
tool of international political economy, a potential trade sanction to
deter would-be authoritarians and to punish those adventurous enough
to violate democratic norms.

This linking of potential trade sanctions to democracy puts teeth
into the hemisphere’s collective defense of democracy. Secretary of
State Colin Powell traveled to Lima (by coincidence on September 11,
2001) to join his fellow foreign ministers in signing the Inter-American
Democracy Charter, which codified the Quebec democracy clause into
hemispheric dogma. The Democracy Charter defines the “essential elements”
of democracy and records the procedures by which a member
state could be suspended from the OAS, although it does not detail procedures
for suspension from the prospective FTAA.

Of course, the idea of inserting a democracy clause in a trade agreement
hardly originated in Washington. The European Union requires
members to be democracies respectful of human rights. In 1996, the
MERCOSUR countries (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay)
agreed that “the full effectiveness of democratic institutions is an essential
condition for cooperation in the framework of the Treaty of Asunción”
(MERCOSUR 1996). Led by Brazil, MERCOSUR threatened to
invoke the agreement’s democracy clause to quell political instability in
Paraguay. Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso warned the
Paraguayan authorities that the interruption of the constitutional order
would result in Paraguay’s expulsion from MERCOSUR (Feinberg and
Bates 2001). This pressure was a key factor in the resignation of then president
Raúl Cubas.

When his domestic opponents sought to oust Venezuelan President
Hugo Chávez in April 2002, many parties to the drama, both foreign and
domestic, sought to justify their actions with reference to the newly
minted Inter-American Democracy Charter. By chance, a meeting of
FTAA negotiators was scheduled to begin shortly on the Venezuelan
island of Margarita, and a movement began among governments to boycott
the gathering, in effect to sanction Venezuela for its interruption of
democratic procedures.

The quick restoration of Chávez, however,avoided this test.
For its part, the Bush State Department badly bungled
by publicly endorsing what quickly proved to be a short-lived and
unconstitutional change of government, even as it sought to justify its
ill-considered posture based on its reading of the principles of the Inter-
American Charter (U.S. Department of State 2002).

Responding to Latin American Pressures

To keep the trade ball rolling forward in the Western Hemisphere, the
Bush administration has continued the bilateral FTA negotiations with
Chile initiated by the Clinton administration and has acquiesced to Central
American pressures to launch FTA negotiations, while engaging in
the ongoing FTAA negotiations as best it could until Congress finally
granted trade-negotiating authority in August 2002.

The administration also sought and won congressional renewal of the Andean
Trade Preference Act (ATPA), which gives the Andean nations duty-free treatment
for certain exports, and of the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP),
which provides duty-free benefits to the vast range of developing countries
and to those in South America that do not benefit from the ATPA
or CBI programs.

In a speech at the OAS on January 16, 2002, President Bush
announced that the United States would explore a free trade agreement
with the five countries of Central America. In explaining the timing of
the announcement, a senior USTR official said, “First of all, we were
responding to continual expressions of interest by Central America”
(USTR 2002c), most recently reaffirmed to Bush administration officials
at the Quebec Summit. Once again, the initiative came from Latin America.
Sounding like an official from the Treasury Department, the USTR
official added, “Secondly, following a recent cycle of elections, there are
new governments in Central America particularly interested in reform
and we want to enhance that” (USTR 2002c).

Opening a new trade front also fit the administration’s “competition
in liberalization” strategy, as well as increasing the momentum in the
hemisphere toward completing the FTAA by 2005 (USTR 2002a). It
could serve to line up the Central American parties behind U.S. positions
in the FTAA talks. The announcement was timed to offset another
move: in order to garner votes in the House of Representatives for the
fast-track decision in December, the administration had rescinded some
concessions made in the enhanced Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI), to
the distress of the Central Americans.

The President’s speech, scheduled partly to dispel allegations
that Bush had lost sight of Latin America in
the wake of the terrorist incidents of September 11, served to focus
senior-level attention and to provide a deadline for a decision.
In mid-February 2002, Uruguayan president Jorge Batlle visited
Washington and appeared to be following up on his earlier public
expressions of interest in an FTA with the United States. If so, he was
disappointed, as the Bush administration did not want to appear to be
dismembering MERCOSUR at a time when it was seeking Brazil’s cooperation
in both global and regional trade negotiations. Instead, the Bush
administration agreed with Batlle to establish a Joint Commission on
Trade and Investment. The United States held out hope for Uruguay by
noting that it had created a similar mechanism with Chile in 1998 (USTR
2002b). The U.S.-Uruguay bilateral talks will contemplate the compatibility
of an FTA with MERCOSUR’s common external tariff; but one
senior U.S. official admitted, “It will be hard to square that circle.”

CONGRESSIONAL WARS

Despite certain of the aforementioned favorable domestic political
trends and its own greater homogeneity and commitment, the Bush
administration still has had to struggle mightily to wrest trade promotion
and fast-track authority from the U.S. Congress. To win the first test in
the House, the administration had to promise temporary import relief
for steel manufacturers, offer guarantees to the citrus and textile industries,
and claw back some of the trade benefits granted in 2000 to CBI
countries and to sub-Saharan Africa (Alden 2001). Even with the
enhanced weight of the post-9/11 presidency, the administration triumphed
by a single vote, 215–214, in a largely partisan tally at the end
of the 2001 congressional session. Democrats voted against, by 189–23;
Republicans voted in favor by 194–21 (New York Times 2001). Still, this
outcome was a marked swing from the 1998 tally, which the Clinton
administration lost by 63 votes.

The administration won the next grueling battle for TPA in the
Senate by a more comfortable margin (66–30), but only after the
Democrats extracted major concessions in trade adjustment assistance
(TAA). In legislation passed in late May, the Senate sharply expanded
the existing TAA program and set new precedents for coverage of tradedisplaced
workers (U.S. Senate 2002; Chen and King 2002). Income benefits
would be extended by six months, and funds available for training
programs would jump to $300 million. For the first time, displaced
workers would receive a tax credit for purchasing qualified group health
insurance coverage. TAA coverage would be extended to an estimated
60,000 workers, including some secondary workers who supply importimpacted
plants. Under a pilot program, older workers would be eligible
for wage insurance; workers over 50 who took lower-paying jobs
could receive, for two years, as much as $5,000 a year in wage insurance.
Another innovative program would help communities develop
strategic plans following job losses, providing such communities with
technical assistance, loans, and grants.

The overall cost of the proposed TAA was estimated at $12 billion
over ten years, or about triple the financing levels of the existing assistance
programs (Mitchell 2002). Perhaps this better balancing of trade
liberalization with worker protection would contribute, if not immediately
than in the long run, to recreating a bipartisan majority behind
freer and fairer trade.

After some intense partisan jockeying and personal squabbles, just
before midnight on July 25, a joint House-Senate conference committee
reached agreement on the Trade Act of 2002 that contained the key
accords that each chamber had been approved separately. The following
day, Bush made a rare visit to Capitol Hill to personally lobby House
Republicans to rally behind the measure.

In the early morning hours of July 27, the House passed TPA by 215–212
(with 190 Republicans and 25 Democrats in favor, 27 Republicans
and 183 Democrats plus 2 independents in opposition).
President Bush joked that the margin of victory had
tripled since the December vote (from 1 vote to three). In its last vote
before leaving Washington for an August recess, the Senate passed the bill
by a secure margin of 64–34, with 20 Democrats joining 43 Republicans
and 1 independent to give the President trade promotion authority for five
years, with renewal possible for an additional two years.

In the White House signing ceremony on August 6, Bush acknowledged
the role that Latin America had played in the internal U.S. political
struggle. He thanked the diplomats present in the East Room,
addressing by name the ambassadors from Ecuador and Peru.
I appreciate your hard work on sending the message of trade to
members of our Congress. I want to thank you for your diligence,
and I want to thank your Presidents for their care and concern about
this incredibly important initiative. . . . I want to thank the ambassadors
for their role in getting this bill passed. . . . (Bush 2002)

It was an extraordinarily candid recognition by the President of the
United States of the transnational political alliance at work among the
integrationists throughout the hemisphere.

While the passage of TPA was a major legislative victory, during
2002 the free-trade credentials of the Bush administration were tarnished
by the rush of domestic politics. White House political advisers,
focused on gaining Republican majorities in both houses of Congress in
the midterm elections, responded to political pressures that might swing
key congressional contests and repeatedly trumped economic officials
concerned with market efficiency or fiscal soundness. The administration
itself initiated protectionist measures for the steel industry in the
hope of bolstering the prospects of Republicans in steel-producing districts,
even as Zoellick argued that this was the price for critical congressional
votes for TPA.

More egregiously, Congress passed a farm bill that sharply
increased agricultural subsidies, embarrassing U.S. trade officials who
for years had been chastising the Europeans and Japanese for protecting
their domestic farmers at the expense of global efficiency and developing-
country producers. Some administration spokespersons, including
those at the Department of Agriculture, initially opposed this
trade-distorting measure; but Bush signed the bill on May 13, 2002, fearing
that a veto could compromise Republican chances in agricultural
districts in the November elections, and even his own reelection.

The Latin Americans were alarmed at the many compromises the
Bush team was making with domestic constituencies––whether for the
noble objective of gaining a congressional majority behind TPA or for
partisan advantage––in agriculture, textiles, citrus, and steel, among other
products of great interest to regional producers. Bush trade officials
sought to persuade their foreign counterparts that trade negotiations
would be the best way to cajole Congress to rescind these measures and
to forestall new protectionisms, but foreigners wondered whether U.S.
trade negotiators would have sufficient political power to negotiate balanced
agreements that constrained their own trade restrictions and also
made reciprocal concessions to foreign producer interests.

THE ENDGAME

The TPA vote was a high––perhaps the highest––domestic hurdle facing
U.S. proponents of the FTAA. During the prospective FTAA bargaining sessions,
U.S. trade negotiators will have to consult closely with a multiplicity
of interest groups, NGOs, and members of Congress; but once an agreement
is signed, it will be difficult for the U.S. Congress to vote it down. If
Jimmy Carter could persuade two-thirds of the U.S. Senate to pass the
Panama Canal Treaties, with all of their negative symbolism, George W.
Bush or his successor in about 2005 should be able to garner the necessary
simple majorities behind the positive imagery of the world’s largest
free-trade pact, stretching from Alaska to Argentina. In addition to all the
economic self-interest arguments, the Executive Branch will play its trump
card––the security rationale––with powerful effect as it paints the FTAA as
the centerpiece of U.S. strategic policies toward Latin America.

In this final push, the U.S. President will be accompanied on Capitol
Hill by as many as 33 democratically elected leaders, underscoring how
critical the FTAA is to maintaining economic liberalization and democratic
reforms in their countries, how it is precisely in times of turbulence that
the region needs the stabilizing anchor of a major trade accord (Feinberg
2002). They will also explain how they would prefer to cooperate with the
United States on a host of important issues, from antiterrorism to environmental
protection, and how they look forward to celebrating the Western
Hemisphere’s new economic-security alliance for the twenty-first century––
an alliance that will serve as a strong and stable platform from which
the United States will be able to project its power around the world.
During its first two years in office, and especially in 2002, the Bush
administration’s trade policy has been heavily preoccupied with
domestic politics.

Now that it has extracted trade promotion authority
from Congress, it will have to concentrate on negotiating with Latin
America. These negotiations, which will encompass a broad agenda of
trade and trade-related matters, will be arduous. The administration will
have to balance many pressures as it seeks middle ground on a range
of contentious issues in order to satisfy U.S. constituencies without
alienating Latin America. It will have to factor in the simultaneous WTO
Millennium Round talks, also scheduled to finish in 2005. Global talks
may take some pressure off the FTAA by tackling such contentious
issues as agricultural export subsidies and antidumping, but FTAA
negotiators may withhold concessions pending 11th-hour bargaining in
the global round.

As the largest South American country, and with the most astute
negotiators, Brazil will play a leading role in the FTAA endgame, which
Brazil and the United States will cochair.10 It is not surprising that the
two nations with the largest domestic markets and with globally diversified
trading patterns face the greatest protectionist pressures and have
been the most ambivalent about regional integration. The 2002 U.S.
farm bill, which boosted subsidies in several product areas of interest to
Brazil, caused Brazil to question whether the U.S. political system could
deliver on freer trade, but also gave Brazil additional incentives to enter
into a regional trade pact, the rules and understandings of which might
roll back such protectionism and make it less likely in the future. As a
tough bargainer, Brazil can be expected to resist certain measures, such
as trade sanctions tied to social behavior, that Latin Americans fear
would open the door to a new protectionism.

Should political forces that have been vociferously critical of free
trade gain the presidency in Brazil, its negotiators will be even tougher
in their defense of particular national economic interests. But in the end,
it is likely that Brazil will not want to be excluded from a hemispheric
accord or to risk jeopardizing its cherished leadership role by abandoning
at the final moment the quest that Latin America has pursued with
such purposefulness for so long.
As the demandeurs and with so much to gain, Latin American negotiators
will have to be realistic about the ultimate asymmetries of power.
As Mexico did in negotiating the NAFTA, they will have to accede to
many U.S. pressures, including those designed to shield politically sensitive
sectors from competitive imports. Such a flawed Free Trade Area
of the Americas should be understood as an ongoing project and as a
historic accomplishment for Latin American diplomacy. There will be
time enough in the future to revisit the agreement’s many imperfections.

NOTES
In preparing this paper, the author benefited from informal conversations
and interviews with many officials in the U.S. government, Latin American governments,
and international institutions, who preferred to remain anonymous.
For their valuable comments on earlier drafts, the author wishes to thank Jorge
Domínguez, Gary Hufbauer, Jeffrey Schott, Jonathan Hueneman, and Kati
Suominen. Elizabeth Erwin provided able editorial assistance. Portions of this
article draw on a paper presented at the conference “Competing Regionalisms
in the Americas,” organized by Oxford University and El Colegio de México,
Mexico City, March 14, 2002.
1. The Central Americans had been pressing the United States for an FTA
at least since 1997, as noted in Salazar-Xirinachs 2002. For an early example of
the intellectual case, presented at a Washington, DC, conference in 1995 by two
leading Central American economists, see Lizano and Salazar-Xirinachs 1997.
2. For overviews, see Salazar-Xirinachs and Tavares de Araujo 1999;
Tussie 1998; Bernal 1996; Devlin and Ffrench-Davis 1999. See also the essays in
Jatar and Weintraub 1997; and Burki et al. 1998.
3. The Chileans, for example, sought an FTA with the United States to
enhance their nation’s worldwide image. See Butelmann and Meller 1995.
4. For a succinct survey of the views of greens and blues, see Roett 2001;
see also Korzeniewicz and Smith 2001.
5. For a detailed political analysis, see Baldwin and Magee 2000, especially
table 1, p. 7.
6. For Zoellick’s thoughts before taking office, see Zoellick 1999–2000, 2000.
7. The White House and other agencies would play more central roles in
the domestic political task of guiding trade legislation through Congress, where
Zoellick’s strong personality sometimes ruffled feathers. In the March 2002 decision
on protection for the steel industry, with its important implications for
domestic politics and the November 2002 congressional elections, the president’s
chief political adviser, Karl Rove, reportedly advocated stiff tariffs to protect
steelmaking jobs. Predictably, Zoellick sought a compromise that balanced
free-trade precepts with such political realities (Kahn and Sanger 2002).
8. For a discussion of the role of the state and institutions in advancing
trade policy, see Hurrell 2001.
9. There were, however, some purist holdouts. See Bhagwati 2002.
10. On the dangers of Brazil’s overestimating its bargaining power, see
Mackay 2002, 15.

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Security: Joe Parry from Cambridge Intelligence and Victor Bjorgan, CEO og Global Security Services LLC and Publisher of TheAmericasPost.com, during the EISIC 2011 Conference.

How should we communicate the results of our analysis to decision-makers? How to visualize key information for decision makers?  The talk of Joe Parry argued that visualisations and infographics play a very important role, not only for analytical processes of data analysts, but also for explaining the analytical results to decision-makers at the highest of levels.

Some care must be taken to avoid various common pitfalls when designing such visuals: the talk will cover bad examples as well as good in order to uncover design guidelines and practical advice for those wishing to pursue a more visual approach.

in that sense, Joe Parry initiated his keynote that these visualization tools are specially important for law enforcement and National Security. In that sense he recalled an old saying ” a good sketch is better than a long speech”.

What is visualitation? asked Parry to the conferencists. Well , a good visualitation does not consist in just good pictures.

About graphs and numbers, Parry said that the use of interactive data and vissualy representation of data is used to amplify cognition. Parry briefly described how a good visualization helps in the Intel analysis. Described some common pitfalls in data visualization. he recommend the reading of the book written by Westell, Duncan and Weeks on visualization in Intel analyIntel analysissis.

Parry also described a model of intelligence analyzing processes. The final product of such analysis is a report.

In the reports, he does not recommend the use of colours to describe the visual variables. He recommend the use of Kinley Visual variables.

To start the visualization of the Analysis in its low phase, Parry mentioned the visualization of pattern of life, but said this is a analytical tool, not a decission tool. He also said that this analysis must be simplified, not use numbers.

During his keynote speech, Joe Parry showed a photograph of former President George Bush looking a wall full of sketches with the networks and interrelations of all individual terrorists participants in the attacks of September 9/11. It was a very confusing material, President Bush was looking at in this photo. Not the best intelligence visualization report.  President Bush was not looking in the photo at a screen with the three followings ingredients that are important in any report: geovisualization, timeline visualization and network visualization.

Parry said, that if only using that photo, it was impossible for former President Bush tot ake any intelligence decission, because there is no report, but only information.

In things not to do, Joe Parry also told participants that it is no good to put pies in the reports, neither 3D presentations. The intelligence reports for decission makers must avoid the use of colour since there is often a color blind among the public. He recommends not to use labels, simplicity instead  of complexity, no use of black backgrounds, no use of pie charts, not use of misleading scales.

Joe Parry showed enthusiasm while talking about the infographics reports of the New York Times NYT. He said the NYT infographics show all needed info to understand what is happening.

Summarizing, Parry described some of what he called as ” design guidelines” for any Intel report, like  first an overview, always  aim for clarity, show context, show how the situation has changed, make comparison easy, all visual elements must be backed by data, and that the report should be so clear and convincing that the decission makers will act backed by the report.

To know more about the subject, Joe Parry from Cambridge Intelligence mentioned some sites that can be of interest like:

flowingdata.com

infosthetics.com (slow uploading, be patient..)

visualcomplexity.com

nytgraphics.com

stamen.com

visualization.org

Finally, Joe Parry ended his keynote speech saying to all participants: “Back Up everything you say!”

Joe Parry´s email address is joe@cambridge-intelligence.com

His twitter is @parry_joe

Phone nr: 07973 787 233

His address is:

idea Space

The Entrepreneurship Centre

3 Charles Babbage Road

Cambridge CB 3 OGT

Biographical Details:
Joe Parry has worked on visualization and graphics systems for intelligence work for the last thirteen years.
During that time he has done software development, design, systems architecture and more experimental
research projects. He has worked with the intelligence communities of the UK, US and other countries. His
recent professional interests include social network analysis and web-based visualisation systems. This year he started his own software company which is producing what he hopes will be part of a new wave of
investigation software.

Dr.Nasrullah Memon, Program Chair of EISIC 2011 in exclusive interview with TheAmericasPost.com

On the occasion of the EISIC (September 12-14,2011) held in Athens, we interviewed the Program Chair of the event Dr. Nasrullah Memon, professor at the University of Southern Denmark and member of the Steering Committee of the European Intelligence & Security Informatics Conference EISIC on Counterterrorism and Criminology. The event was organized jointly with The International Symposium on Open Source Intelligence and Web Mining (OSINT-WM 2011), and having as Academic Sponsors The University of Arizona, University of Southern Denmark,  and The Hellenic American University, as technical co-sponsor the IEEE Computer Society, as local organizer the Hellenic American University and SPRINGER as the Industry Sponsor.

During the interview, Dr. Memon gave details about EISIC (past, present and future plans) , how the Intelligence Community can take advantage of the Intelligence & Security Informatics discipline, the relationship between counterterrorism and computational criminology, the role of Higher Education, as well as differents kinds of Crime involving information and communication technologies. The privacy problem was also analized during the conversation.

Here is an excerpt of a very interesting interview with one of the world´s most brilliant minds in Defense, Counterterrorism and Security Informatics, Dr. Nasrullah Memon.

Dear Dr. Memon, could you please tell us what is EISIC 2011? Please elaborate on its creation, mission, objectives and members.

EISIC is the European chapter of Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI) series of conferences. The conference is dynamic and allows academicians, researchers and practitioners to keep abreast of new tools and methodologies in the area of Intelligence Security and Informatics. It is also a venue that fosters networking opportunities for people working in this scientific area.

After my graduation (PhD Defense), Professor Hsinchun Chen, Director, Artificial Lab, University of Arizona, the founder of ISI series of conferences encouraged us to organize the European chapter of ISI. In this context, the first event was organized under the name of EUROISI 2008 at Esbjerg, Denmark.  That event was organized more as a workshop than a conference and it was not very well attended.

In September 2010, while Professor Hsinchun Chen visited University of Southern Denmark, we discussed how to re-organize the European chapter of ISI as an annual event in order to create a consortium involving academic researchers in information technologies, computer science, public policy, criminology, and social and behavior studies as well as local, national, and European law enforcement and intelligence experts, and information technology industry consultants and practitioners to support counterterrorism and national/international security missions of anticipation, interdiction, prevention, preparedness and response to terrorist acts. In other words the mission and objectives for the organization of EISIC series of conferences that came out from the discussions with Prof. Chen are to provide opportunities to establish a European network in the area of Intelligence and Security Informatics.

The organization of the conference was a very difficult task and we started working for the success of the event from September 2010 with the collaboration of Hellenic American University, University of Southern Denmark and University of Arizona. We formed a team from the above mentioned academic institutes and Hellenic American University accepted to host EISIC 2011 in Athens, Greece while University of Southern Denmark accepted to host EISIC 2012 in Odense, Denmark.  As per program chairs, Daniel Zeng and me invited around 100 researchers from academia and industry to work as program committee members. We received 111 submissions for EISIC 2011 and we accepted 27% of high quality papers as LONG papers based on the peer-review process.  The research articles were received from 41 countries from all sub-continents.

The founding members of EISIC 2011 are: Prof. Hsinchun Chen, Prof. George J. Hagerty, Professor Uffe Kock Wiil, Professor Triant Flouris, Dr. Panagiotis Karampelas and myself.

What is your assessment of the conference in Athens?

As per feedback from the audience we found it was a very successful event. The keynote speeches as well as the paper presentations were very well attended by the participants and there were a lot of positive comments on the quality of the presentations. There were also a lot of opportunities for networking between the participants and we witnessed several discussions about future collaborations between the participants. I would like to mention at this point that the host organization played a vital role in the success of the conference sponsoring the expenses of keynote speakers and finding alternatives of certain problems we faced because of unforeseen incidents such as strikes, etc.

What activities does EISIC plan to carry out in the near future?

We have a number of long and short term plans in the area of Intelligence and Security Informatics.  We have established the Counterterrorism Research Lab at University of Southern Denmark in October 2009.  Behind the lab there is a small group of researchers (around 10, one Professor, one Associate Professor and several PhD students) working in the area of ISI. We are publishing our research articles in the area in various conferences and journals and we try to establish connections with various law enforcement bodies and intelligence services providing them with our cutting edge technology and experience. Concerning EISIC, we plan to organize EISIC 2012 at our University at Odense on August 22-24, 2012. We also received a number of informal proposals for the organization of collocated events. As soon as we receive formal proposals, we’ll decide accordingly. We have also received informal proposals for the organization of EISIC 2013 and EISIC 2014 in Italy and Sweden respectively. The steering committee will decide as soon as we receive formal proposals for the organization of EISIC and related events in future.

In regard to the Intel discipline, where do you classify the Intelligence Security Informatics ISI? Is it a separate intelligence discipline in and of itself, or part of other intel disciplines like HUMINT, SIGINT, IMINT, etc.?

ISI is a discipline where INTEL disciplines could be benefited. Let us take an example; we are working on a research project (sponsored by the Faculty of Engineering, University of Southern Denmark): Developing an Early Warning System to predict Terrorist Threats. Mostly we use OSINT (Open Source Intelligence), but there is room for counterterrorism experts/INTEL to work. We do not have yet a formal collaboration with INTEL agencies, but I’m sure INTEL people could be benefited as well from ISI research.

What role does higher education play in ISI?

As this is a new inter-disciplinary area, higher education can play a vital role in encouraging students from Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Criminology, Computer Science, and Applied Mathematics to adopt research in the area of ISI in order to educate experts to help us in building a SAFE AND SECURE WORLD. It is also a need of the hour to train INTEL people with this emerging area of research.

What is the relationship between counter-terrorism and computational criminology?

Computational criminology like Countering terrorism is an emerging blend of criminology, anthropology, social computing, computer science and applied mathematics. Modern concerns about public safety and security include a focus on a range of events from less serious everyday crimes like shoplifting to personal violent crimes like homicide and ultimately terrorism. Underlying all of these events is a decision process or a chain of steps in target identification, steps that focus first on rough and vague decisions and move towards the precise plot. The fields of counterterrorism and computational criminology involves the use of computational power to identify: (1) crime patterns and emerging patterns; (2) crime generators and attractors; (3) terrorism, organized crime and gang social and spatial networks as well as co-offending networks; and, (4) cybercrime/cyber terrorism. Algorithms are developed using computational topology, hyper-graphs, Social Network Analysis (SNA), Knowledge Discovery and Data-mining (KDD), agent based simulations, dynamic information systems analysis and more for detecting organized crime and predicting terrorist threats.

The methods and models used for counter terrorism and computational criminology can provide information about pattern theory and identification. In short, we treat terrorism as an organized crime, and therefore, it would be possible to use some of the traditional methods to detect terrorism evidences, but also new models can be developed looking into the new type of terrorism of 21^st century.

What is cybercrime and what current challenges does it pose?

Crime involving information and communication technologies (ICT), for example:

·        ICT as an instrument, where ICT can be used as primary tool to commit the offence (Identity theft, Internet scams and Fraud-misappropriation of funds are some of the examples)

·        ICT as target, where ICT is the target of the offence (Hacking, Misuse of  ICT resources, Denial of service, Stealing information)

·        ICT as Ancillary Resource, where conventional crime can be assisted by ICT; in other words technology can be used to commit conventional crime or technology can be used to store information about crime (Fraud, Money laundering, etc., are known examples)

As the cybercrime has border-less and transnational reach, therefore, there is urgent need to establish competency in predictive cyber analysis and to develop trusted relationships to encourage information sharing among the INTEL agencies.  There are number of challenges in cybercrime, for example

·        Enforcing extraterritorial/ trans-border law enforcement activity

·        Many offences are never detected

·        Many detected offences are never reported

·        Difficult to quantify the offence

·        Difficult to “Police” the cyber space

·        Evidence can be intangible

·        Issuing warrant without knowledge of the precise location of data (evidence) can be problematic

·        Evidence can be destroyed during search

·        Encryption and other concealment technologies are available to offenders

·        Human rights and privacy issue, etc.

How can the right to individual privacy be balanced against the need for protection from cybercrime?

It is a very difficult question; I think security is more important than privacy of individual person in some cases.  But according to the laws of each country, the privacy problem should be dealt in treating with cyber criminals.

Keynote Speaker Charalampos Doulaverakis Eng MSc after his speech in Athens, met with our Publisher Victor Bjorgan.

This document was published by the criminology scientists Charalampos Doulaverakis, Nikolaos Konstantinou, Thomas Knape, Ioannis Kompatsiaris and John Soldatos.

Doulaverakis was the keynote speaker at the EISIC 2011 SecuAll scientists are related to three institutions: a)  Informatics and Telematics Institute, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas  in Thessaloniki, Greece  b) the Autonomic and Grid Computing Laboratory, Athens Information Technology, Athens, Greece

c) Data Fusion International, Dublin, Ireland.
Abstract—This paper introduces a novel sensor information
fusion system enabling security and surveillance in large scale
sensor saturated urban environments. The system is built over
state-of-the art sensor networks middleware and provides information
fusion at multiple layers. A distinguishing characteristic
of the system is that it support seamless integration with semantic
web middleware (including ontologies and inference mechanisms),
which enable intelligent high-level accurate reasoning.
This is a key functionality for efficient surveillance in large scale
environment, where manual inspection of individual tracking
systems becomes extremely resourceful and overall impractical.
A proof-of-concept implementation of the system manifests its
benefits and technical challenges, while also outlining lessons
learnt.
I. INTRODUCTION
The proliferation of ubiquitous computing and the parallel
decrease of the price of sensors has recently allowed sensor
applications to make their appearance in a variety of domains.
Especially, sensor applications with emphasis on large scale
deployments in urban environments and the emerging wave of
participatory sensing applications such as WikiCity [1], City-
Sense [2], and Google Latitude [3] has offered fundamental
changes and advancements both in the academia as well as in
the heart of the society itself. Nowadays, more than ever, we
are witnessing the materialization of visions and concepts such
as the Internet-of-Things (IoT) [4] and M2M communications
[5].
Recent incidents have manifested that modern cities are
very susceptible to terrorist attacks. For instance, the collapse
of New York’s Twin Towers on 11th September 2001, the
bombing of packed commuter trains in Madrid on 11th March
2004, the London bombings in July 2005, or the Moscow
metro in March 2010 demonstrate that prominent applications
need to be devised in order to serve critical surveillance and
security needs in urban environments.
However, numerous challenges are associated with such
efforts. The large scale nature of both the geographically
dispersed environment as well as of the volume of the data,
the multiple distributed heterogeneous components that need
to be assembled, spanning sensor, sensor processing, signal
processing (including A/V) components, often from multiple
vendors are some of the issues that need to be addressed. Additionally,
the need for automation, since manual observation
of multiple camera feeds is not possible, and the inclusion of
high-level intelligent reasoning for event inference are features
without which the added value of the system is limited.
In order to tackle these issues in global sensor networks, various
frameworks have been developed, offering programmable
and configurable solutions, e.g. [6]–[8]. Among the most
important in these frameworks is the limited support for perceptual
processing components – with the exception of some
more heavyweight frameworks [9] – and limited support for
semantics embodiment, inference, and high-level reasoning.
Employment of Semantic Web technologies in sensor networks
research focuses mainly on sensor modelling in order
to enable higher level processing for event/situation analysis.
Initiatives such as [10] use SUMO as their core ontology under
which they define a sensor ontology for annotating the sensors
and it can be then queried for sensor discovery. Other frameworks,
such as the one proposed in [11], define ontologies for
sensor measurement and sensor description. The framework
emerges from the W3C Semantic Sensor Network XG1 which
aims at providing ontologies and semantic annotations that
define capabilities of sensors and sensor networks.
Ontologies have been proposed for situation awareness
(SAW) in sensor fusion applications where their ability to
model a domain or a “part of the world” is utilized. Several
approaches have been proposed as in [12] where the authors
define a core ontology for SAW which can be used as a basis
from which to build separate ontologies for arbitrary situations
that are able to express objects, relations and their evolution
over time.
In [13], we  the authors used an ontology to create a unified
expression of the Situation Theory [14], [15]. The Situation
Theory Ontology (STO) is expressed in OWL which enables
situations to be described using a formal language, thus
allowing inference through a reasoning engine or by using
appropriate rules.
A framework for the designing of ontology for SAW is
presented in [16] where a six step guide to design ontologies

based on the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is presented. The
authors test their framework in a situation assessment in a postdisaster
environment context and claim that their BFO-based
ontology was able to capture the complexities of the testing
context and provide adequate inferential capabilities for higher
level fusion.
All the above methods do not propose an architecture which
will integrate sensors and low level processing modules with
higher level fusion process for situation awareness. In order
to address this limitation, a solution is presented in this paper
that
∙ Comprises a multi-level fusion system, at all JDL (see
Section II-B) levels
∙ Seamlessly blends ontologies with low-level information
databases
∙ Combines semantic web middleware with sensor networks
middleware
The structure of the paper is as follows: Section II analyses
the architectural approach that is followed, Section III demonstrates
the Low Level Fusion (LLF) capabilities, Section IV
the semantic and reasoning capabilities, Section V presents
implementation details and example use cases, while Section
VI concludes the paper by presenting out comments and
remarks.
II. PROPOSED APPLICATION AND ARCHITECTURE
In order to test our approach, a suitable environment for
setting up and deploying the proposed sensor analysis architecture
had to be selected. Security surveillance environments
offer an ideal set up in which the main characteristics that
make it distinguishing are:
∙ Usually security surveillance areas are sensor saturated
environments with electro-optical (visual and IR cameras)
and acoustic sensors being more common while
others like temperature or RFID, etc sensors can also
be found. The abundance of available sensors makes it
more possible to capture the various events that take
place in a surveillance session. However, the higher the
number of sensors, the more difficult it is to manage and
observe them. Additionally, it makes it harder to filter out
information that is irrelevant or discover information that
could potentially be useful.
∙ Surveillance environments are deployed in areas that are
densely populated in terms of people but also in assets,
e.g. buildings or vehicles, hence many events that could
be of interest are taking place. This fact, coupled with
the higher chance of these events to be captured by the
sensors (the previous characteristic), makes discovery of
important events difficult.
∙ Multiple processing algorithms and context-acquisition
components, which are used for extracting information
and detecting events, require a method for managing the
data that they produce.
∙ Due to the variety of sensor modalities that are deployed
there is a large degree of sensor and data heterogeneity

Fig. 1. Architecture of the proposed system
that need to be tackled by the sensor management and
analysis system.
Public security in urban areas can be a challenging task to
security personnel. Threats posed to citizens include crimes
such as robberies, terrorism attacks, natural catastrophes and
other emergencies. Being aware of threatening situations either
in the moment or being able to forecast events from security
monitoring applications enables security personnel to take the
right actions in context. Fusion of data from appropriate sensor
types supports inferring threatening situations in the context of
situation specific parameters. An example of such a deployed
sensor network is the case of urban surveillance in an urban
war environment where data feeds from multiple sensors, e.g.
visible spectrum and IR cameras, acoustic sensors, seismic
sensors, etc, are directed to a command center and critical
decisions have to be made in short time regarding the threat
level in a situation.
Taking into account the above facts, a method is required
that will enable efficient information processing and management.
Semantic web and ontologies can efficiently handle
heterogeneous information through semantic description of
knowledge. Additionally, ontologies are used to model domain
knowledge through class definitions and relations between
classes. The knowledge model and the underlying data can
then be used for supporting reasoning services in order to infer
new knowledge that is not explicitly stated. These features
can be utilized in a sensor network in order to provide the
backbone for intelligent sensor fusion.
A. System architecture
Figure 1 illustrates the approach followed in the hereby
presented work. At the bottom layer are the sensors, that are
translating their perception of the world into raw sensor data.
This data is processed by the leaf nodes, that are operating
at the LLF layer which adds structure to the data. The nodes
are named “Leaf” nodes because, if the architecture can be
considered as tree-like, then these nodes can be considered
as leaves, in the sense that they do not have children nodes
of inferior capabilities or at a lower level. When deemed
necessary, signal processing components can be hosted in
dedicated hardware since, specifically in A/V processing, algorithms
may be extremely resource-hungry. At the high-level
fusion (HLF) layer, intelligence is added to the system, by

mapping the collected data into ontology concepts, achieving
thus uniform information representation throughout the system
and enabling reasoning.
The Central Control layer that is logically on top of the
infrastructure offers monitoring and control capabilities. In
essence, it comprises:
∙ A database (DB) where high-level information such as
events and threats is stored
∙ An Environmental Service (ES) that enables geospatial
services
∙ The Semantic Fusion component that performs analysis
on the system-wide high-level collected information in
order to infer events and potential risks and threats
∙ The Common Operational Picture (COP) that offers a
visualization of the system state with regard to deployed
sensors, detected objects, sensed events and inferred
threats.
In the following sections, we analyse how the aforementioned
layers and components function and interoperate in
order to achieve intelligent information fusion in an urban
environment.
B. JDL model for sensor fusion
In order to improve communications among military researchers
and system developers, the Joint Directors of Laboratories
(JDL) Data Fusion Working Group began an effort
to define the terminology related to data fusion. The result
of that effort was the creation, in 1986, of a process model
for data fusion and a data fusion lexicon [17]. The JDL
process model is a paper model of data fusion and is intended
to be very general and useful across multiple application
areas. The JDL data fusion process model is a conceptual
model which identifies the processes, functions, categories of
techniques, and specific techniques applicable to data fusion
(Figure 2). According to the model data fusion process is
conceptualized by sensor inputs, human-computer interaction,
database management, source preprocessing, and four key
subprocesses:
1) Level 1 (Object Refinement): is aimed at combining
sensor data together to obtain a reliable estimation of
an entity position, velocity, attributes, and identity;
2) Level 2 (Situation Refinement): dynamically attempts
to develop a description of current relationships among
entities and events in the context of their environment;
3) Level 3 (Threat Refinement): projects the current situation
into the future to draw inferences about enemy
threats, friendly and enemy vulnerabilities, and opportunities
for operations;
4) Level 4 (Process Refinement): is a meta-process which
monitors the overall data fusion process to assess and
improve the real-time system performance.
Revisions of the model suggest the addition of 2 more
levels: A lower Level 0 (Source preprocessing/Sub-object
refinement) which aims to estimate the state of sub-object
entities such as signals and features, and a higher Level 5

(Cognitive or User Refinement) which introduces man in the

fusion loop where the aim is to generate fusion information
according to the needs of the system user.

Fig. 2. The JDL model levels and how they are related to the proposed
system’s layers and nodes
The current paper focuses in the definition of a sensor fusion
architecture which addresses matters that correspond to the
higher JDL levels 2, 3 and 4, i.e. situation, threat assessment
and process refinement respectively, as is depicted in Figure
2. Ontologies, with their inherent ability to model relations,
can be employed to provide enough specificity in describing
the higher level concepts of JDL but also to describe the
relations between these concepts [18]. The ontology provides
the standardized form in which situations are defined so
that appropriate algorithms for situation assessment can be
formulated.
III. LOW-LEVEL FUSION CAPABILITIES
In order to perform Low-Level Fusion, our work relies on
the GSN2 middleware. The middleware constitutes an opensource,
Java-based implementation. It was designed in order
to allow processing from a large number of sensors and as
such, it covers the functionality requirements of low level
fusion in sensor data streams. In order to acquire information,
GSN introduces the concept of “virtual sensor”. Any data
provider, not only sensors can provide data to a GSN instance,
as long as a virtual sensor configuration file (in the form of
an XML) defines the the processing class, the sliding window
size, the datasource and the output fields. GSN Servers can
communicate between them, thus forming a network where
information is collected, communicated, fused and integrated
in order to produce the desired results.
As far as it concerns data acquisition, each GSN node can
support input from more than one data stream. In order to
combine the information, an SQL-like procedural language is
offered. This allows to the user to define LLF functions in the
following manner, while GSN takes care behind the scenes
about crucial issues such as thread safety, synchronization,
etc.
SELECT source1.S1 AS NumberOfPersons, source2.S2
AS ExistenceOfSmoke
FROM source1, source2
WHERE NumberOfPersons>0 AND ExistenceOfSmoke=”true”
In the example above, there are two data providers for one
GSN Server.

This virtual sensor definition will produce events only in
the case when the WHERE condition is satisfied. The example
above demonstrates the concept of fusion: results are provided
by taking into account the inputs from both the sensors.
Using the abovementioned approach, a variety of signal
processing components can be integrated into one unifying
architecture. For instance, the example above can be supported
using a Body Tracker [19], [20] and a Smoke Detector, in order
to produce alerts when persons are detected near smoke. In the
same manner, results by processing components such as face
detectors [21], unusual event detectors [22] can be fused in
order to achieve the desired system functionality.
Communication with these processing components constitutes
a difficult to tackle problem, mostly in terms of
implementation since:
∙ Two worlds have to be brought together: image processing
and the distributed systems. The former typically processes
images or videos that are fundamentally different
in nature from streaming data. As such, the component’s
input has to be modified in order to take into account
streams that may lack synchronization, be erroneous, or
overwhelming the network with data.
∙ Integration is hardly a trivial task. Prototypes in Matlab,
algorithms implemented in C++ will need to communicate
with the java-based GSN servers, running either
locally or remotely. Web services/socket interfaces can
be developed, imposing though, additional processing
overheads.
Next, in order to allow GSN-GSN node communication, the
information produced can be forwarded to other GSN nodes
either in push or in pull mode. Data streams can be forwarded
in order to be processed at remote GSN nodes. In order to
forward these data streams, GSN supports subscriptions, onceoff
queries or even simple data forwarders. Data is forwarded
using a RESTful approach (remote wrappers return XML over
HTTP).
IV. SEMANTICS AND REASONING
The Higher Level Fusion (HLF) layer of the proposed
architecture consists of the underlying ontology which will
be used as the backbone for performing the reasoning that
is required for situation assessment. OpenLink Virtuoso3 has
strong support for Semantic Web technologies and provides
services like RDF triple storage, a SPARQL compiler, rulebased
reasoning and can expose relational data as RDF.
Virtuoso acts as a federation layer between the relational and
semantic data thus enabling their seamless integration. A block
diagram of the HLF approach is presented in Figure 3 (Virtuoso Universal Server: http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/).

Fig. 3. The High Level Fusion process

A. Ontology for high level fusion
The ontology is the main information gathering point in the
proposed architecture. It is defined according to the domain
where the sensor network is placed and it defines the entities
that are taking place in a situation, the events and the relations

between them. All data that are produced by the processing
modules and by the LLF nodes are eventually stored here
where reasoning is performed in order to infer new knowledge
which corresponds to events and situation assessment that
cannot be performed at the LLF level.
In order to take advantage of research that has been conducted
in the area of semantic enabled situation awareness, the
current system uses as its core ontology the Situation Theory
Ontology (STO) [13] which has been developed specifically
for that purpose and is based on Situation Theory. In short
STO is written in OWL and models the events/objects and
their relationships in a way that can be extended using either
OWL axioms and properties or in combinations with rules
for supporting complex cause-effect relations that cannot be
expressed in OWL alone. The main classes of STO are
displayed in Figure 4.

Fig. 4. Situation Theory Ontology with its main classes and properties
Situation is the central class. Instances of this class are
specific situations. The second class is the Individual class,
which is a counterpart of the individuals in situation theory.
Similarly, Relation captures the n-ary relations. Attribute is
a generalization of locations and time instants in situation
theory. Instances of this class are attributes of individuals
and situations. An attribute may have a dimension associated
with it so the class Dimensionality represents this fact. The
Polarity class has only two instances that correspond to the
two possible values associated with a tuple, either that a
given tuple holds or that it does not hold.

Classes of STO are related through a number of OWL properties.

Situations are linked with four kinds of entities. First, the property
relevantIndividual captures the individuals that participate in a
situation. The property relevantRelation is used to assert that
a given kind of relation is relevant to a given situation. Since
situations are objects, they can have attributes of their own.
The STO is extended with classes and relations that correspond
to the actual application scenario. In order to be able
to use it in a real sensor fusion environment two additional
ontologies are integrated. These are the “Time ontology”

(Time Ontology in OWL: http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-time/

which holds the timestamp of any concept instance that
is stored during runtime and the “WGS84 Geo Positioning
ontology” (Basic Geo (WGS84 lat/long) Vocabulary: http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/5)

which holds the latitude and longitude values of
entities.
B. Mapping relational data to RDF
As explained in Section III, the data that are produced by
the processing modules and by the LLF nodes are stored in the
relational database that backs GSN. In order to forward these
data to the ontology they have to be translated into semantic
notations. This task is performed by the mapping layer which
maps the relational schema to the semantic schema. There
are two strategies for accomplishing this transformation, using
either a push or a pull method.
The push method forwards the data to the ontology using
semantic notation as soon as they are generated. This has to be
implemented in the lower level layer with the semantic layer
having a passive role in the process. The advantage of this
method is that the transformations are executed fast and the
ontology is always up-to-date. The disadvantages is that each
lower level node will have to implement its own push method
while there is the risk that the ontology will be populated with
data even when no query is sent to the semantic layer.
The pull method transforms the relational data to semantic
on request, i.e. during query time. Virtuoso supports this
functionality through “RDF Views” where mappings, simple
or complex, between relational database tables and ontology
concepts and properties are defined. During query time, the
mapping process is triggered and data are transformed on
the fly. The advantages of the pull method is that the actual
mapping is defined at the higher semantic level rather than the
lower levels and that data are transformed on request so that
the ontology will accumulate instances that are needed for the
actual query evaluation. The disadvantage of this method is
that it could lead to longer response times during queries.
In the proposed system, the pull method which utilizes
Virtuoso’s “RDF Views” is used as it is best to separate the
semantic layer from lower level processing. This will make
extension of the system by adding more sensors and sensor
processing modules easier without having to mix the lower
level processing level with the high level semantic fusion level.
Additional information can be integrated by the HLF layer
in order to derive situations.

Information coming from sources like environmental services which could provide details about
the geographical locations of specific structures or points can
be queried, as long as they expose I/O interfaces, and these
data can be used for inferencing.
C. Reasoning

Reasoning uses the ontology structure and the stored instances
in order to draw conclusions about the ongoing situations.
Under this approach relations between classes like
rdfs:subClassOf, properties like owl:sameAs and relations
that are defined by experts in the ontology are utilized
for inference. The knowledge base can further be extended by
using rules to describe situations/events that are too complex
to be defined using OWL notation only.
For utilizing the above, two different reasoners are integrated
in the system, Virtuoso’s internal reasoning engine
and the Jena Semantic Web Framework (The Jena Semantic Web Framework: http://jena.sourceforge.net/.)

Virtuoso provides inference capabilities using OWL only thus does not provide
support for an external rule set. However, Virtuoso implements
a powerful geospatial inference mechanism which is a crucial
feature when dealing with sensor networks and sensor fusion.
On the other hand, Jena supports external rules, advanced
reasoning capabilities and seamless integration with Virtuoso
where in this case, Virtuoso is treated only as a triple store.
Both of them can be employed simultaneously on the same
dataset and their activation is managed programmatically by
the application.
Another issue that had to be dealt with is that sensor analysis
modules and the LLF processes can generate a significant
amount of data over time, enough to make the reasoning
service not responsive. To overcome this problem, the solution
that is proposed is to use a time window where reasoning is
performed using only facts in a specific time interval. Jena
and Virtuoso can support this type of inference by assigning
a RDF triples to a specific “context” type, thus dealing with
RDF quads.
The reasoning service can also use information and data
from external services in order to use them in the inference
process. In the proposed architecture, an Environmental
Service provides the location information of sensors, events,
waypoints and critical or important landmarks which are
subsequently used for geospatial reasoning.
It should be noted here that in a real world application the
different information sources that provide data to the proposed
fusion architecture could make use of different ontologies
for their purposes. In order to enable a seamless integration
of these sources an ontology mapping process between the
information source ontology and the HLF ontology would have
to be defined.
V. IMPLEMENTATION AND EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
Implementation is based mostly on two types of GSN-based
servers that communicate with the sensor world, with a central
node that monitors and controls the network. As illustrated

in Figure 1, the Leaf Nodes are the ones that consume the

sensory information. These ones are in fact GSN-based servers
configured to process incoming data from the sensor layer.
In order to integrate Signal Processing components as in
Figure 5, our implementation allows the use of standalone
hosts. This happens because the components can either be
resource-hungry in terms of processing capabilities to the
extend that they utilize the whole processing power for their
efficient operation or simply because the implementation is
not portable, as in linux/windows-specific libraries.
A. System Implementation
In the scope of a proof-of-concept implementation and
also as a testbed for our experiments, the snapshot of the
architecture above that was implemented employs 1 computer
node that hosts a Leaf Node and two processing components:
a Smoke Detector and a Body Tracker, a camera that streams
its feed using RTP, a node that hosts a Semantic Node that
offers HLF capabilities and, finally, the Central Node that has
the overall system supervision as already depicted in Figure
1.
Bottom-up, the system can be described as follows:
First, the camera generates an RTP feed with its perception.
The feed is processed by both the signal processing
components (the Body tracker and the Smoke detector).
The first component generates a stream containing at
all times the NumberOfPersons detected by the component.
The second one, simple however, is not as straightforward:
it splits the image into particles and reports the
NumberOfSmokeParticles detected. Then, the LLF Virtual
sensor, according to the example presented in Section
III fuses the data. Figure 5, illustrates the behavior of the
BodyTracker.

Fig. 5. Body Tracker Sequence Diagram

The sequence is initiated by the Body Tracker wrapper,
which is polling for results the Body Tracker component
host at fixed time intervals. The host, when it receives
the POLL command – note that the component may
support a number of functions such as START, STOP,
REQUEST_VIDEO_DETAILS etc. – it returns a string containing
a description in XML of the number of persons tracked.
This description is of the following form:

<frame>
<frame_counter>1534</frame_counter>
<person n=”1″>
<trackID>25</trackID>
<x>587</x>
<y>493</y>
<w>79</w>
<h>130</h>
<quality_detection>2.8480</quality_detection>
<quality_color>7.6249</quality_color>
<quality_motion>5.1601</quality_motion>
</person>
<person n=”2″>
<trackID>30</trackID>
<x>1024</x>
<y>491</y>
<w>41</w>
<h>83</h>
<quality_detection>42.8867</quality_detection>
<quality_color>6.7535</quality_color>
<quality_motion>9.0603</quality_motion>
</person>
…
</frame>

Note, next, that sampling the video source takes place
asynchronously. This happens because the camera will be
streaming at 25 fps, while for the needs of the LLF, 500
ms may suffice between two consecutive polls. In addition,
tracking a person is a more demanding task than detecting
it, since the former implies comparing consecutive frames for
differences between them while for the latter processing single
frames is enough. Therefore, the asynchronous behaviour is
explained from the fact that the camera fps is not aligned
with the messages per second that the component produces.
Under any circumstances, the LLF Wrapper receives a
notification from the BodyTracker. The same information flow
applies to the Smoke detection component. The LLF Wrapper
generates results only in the case when the fusion conditions
are true. Of course, more processing components and more
complex fusion conditions can be added in the processing
scheme hereby described.
For the HLF, the major difference is in the introduction of
an ontology and reasoning procedures where more complex
conditions for fusion can be applied. HLF only deals with
higher level detections and events meaning that it communicates
directly with the LLF and individual perception modules,
pulling data in order to make inferences. An example situation
where an alarm would be triggered by a rule, expressed either
as a Jena rule or as a SPARQL construct query, which would
state ”If smoke is detected near an object then raise an alarm”
with objects being a Person or Vehicle. The classes that are
inserted are
Smoke rdfs:subClassOf Non-RigidObject
Person rdfs:subClassOf RigidObject
Vehicle rdfs:subClassOf RigidObject
Alarms can then be retrieved with a simple SPARQL query
issued to Virtuoso as
SPARQL
SELECT ?x WHERE {?x rdf:type STO:Alarm}
This example illustrates the use of the subclass inference in

order to define situations that hold for a class of objects
which is something that cannot be defined using the LLF
layer only. In a similar way, the owl:sameAs property can
be used for reasoning. The property can be evaluated during
runtime. For example if two distinct detection instances is
decided that are actually the same entity, e.g. if they have
the same geographical locations, then by inference through
owl:sameAs the rules and properties that apply to one also
apply to the other thus enhancing the reasoning capabilities of
the system.
B. Advanced inference
In order to demonstrate the inference capabilities of the
proposed architecture, a scenario was set-up which makes
full use of the data chain from low level sensor data to high
level complex event detection and situation awareness/threat
assessment. The example demonstrates how external services
can be utilized in order to detect “critical” situations. For
setting up a realistic usage scenario, the Environmental Service
which exposes an interface where all interest points, e.g.
buildings or sensors, positions in absolute lat/long coordinates
are registered, is employed. These locations can be queried
in real time by the HLF layer and are used for inferencing
through geospatial reasoning. These data along with the lower
level processing modules are used by the HLF layer in order
to derive hypothesis about the criticality of a situation.
To demonstrate the use of sensors typically deployed in
urban environment we selected video cameras which can be
used to detect persons and also incidents, such as smoke, in
an area of interest. Sensor locations are associated with a
priori knowledge during reasoning. Detected smoke at a petrol
station marks a significant threat to public safety based on
a priori knowledge about the location and can be associated
with a clear emergency action plan. A public square with a
highly varying number of persons and smoke allows inferring
various situations which can be controlled as necessary based
on a security agenda. A specific public area can be subject
to an event schedule which can provide significant semantic
input to inferring on the threat level associated with detected
situations. A gathering of locals celebrating with a bond fire
on a public square is different from an unplanned detected
smoke event during mid-day hours.
1) “Smoke detection in critical location” situation: Reasoning
over triples in Virtuoso requires that the underlying
triple store was populated with inferred event data from the
smoke detector and body tracker. RDF views have been
developed and used to load the underlying data from the
sensor inference database. Using the scheduler component in
Virtuoso we trigger a procedural logic which updates the triple
store via RDF views from the sensor inference database and
subsequently invoke on the reasoning.
In the example of smoke detection at the petrol station
the relevant smoke event together with location data of the
video camera is forwarded to emergency personnel with the
relevant information. The reasoning process associates the
smoke detection event with a criticality factor according to

events modelled in STO and information coming from the
ES. The process of modelling events in STO is described in
detail in [23]. Figure 6 illustrates the model with instance
data by example. We used the STO:FocalSituation class
to mark significant situations that prompt action by security
personnel. The class interlinks the data associated with events
which we query via SPARQL and forward to emergency via
a Web service call.

Fig. 6. Modelling of the “significant situations” in STO

The query of Figure 7a (Fig. 7. a) Query for retrieving focal situations and 7b) the results of the query
run against the modelled “significant situation ) retrieves focal situations with their
event related details such as time location and further textual
descriptions and was run against the model above with the
results shown in Figure 7b. Predefined SPARQL queries are
invoked on in Virtuoso/PL.
Integration with emergency departments can be achieved
by sending details on significant threats found in SPARQL
result sets to a Web service endpoint exposed in an emergency
department.
SELECT ?focalsituation ?sentTxt ?timeTxt ?locTxt
WHERE {
?focalsituation STO:focalRelation ?event .
?event STO:hasAttribute ?time .
?event STO:hasAttribute ?location .
?time rdf:type STO:Time .
?location rdf:type STO:Location .
?sentence rdf:type STO:Sentence .
?location rdfs:label ?locTxt .
?time time:inXSDDateTime ?timeTxt .
?sentence rdfs:label ?sentTxt

b)

VI. CONCLUSIONS

In this paper we have presented a framework for implementing
intelligent information fusion in a sensor network
environment. The framework deals with all aspects above the
sensor layer i.e. it deals with perception modules integration,
communication of the perception modules with GSN, low
level fusion, high level fusion with integration of semantic
description of information, communication with external services,
situation assessment and alert generation. It is a generic
framework that can be applied to any sensor network and
it is not restricted to the security and surveillance area that
was demonstrated. Illustrative examples of how the framework
would be deployed in realistic scenarios have also been
demonstrated where inference capabilities are shown. The core
advantages of the proposed framework are it’s extensibility
with pluggable perception modules integration and the ease of
defining rules for LLF and HLF, using SQL-like syntax and
semantic rules/queries respectively.
Future work will be focused on implementing and integrating
probabilistic reasoning, probably through fuzzy-DL,
in order to drive inference as opposed to the deterministic
reasoning that is applied up to now, thus enabling resolution
of issues such as conflicts or missing detections in situation
assessment.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Part of this work has been carried out in the scope of the
MEDUSA project (Multi sEensor Data fusion grid for Urban
Situational Awareness, co-funded by the European Defense
Agency (MDS-MoM-A026RTGC-C-0003-VCS). The authors
acknowledge help and contributions from all partners of the
project.
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Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham and our Publisher Victor Bjørgan during EISIC 2011, European Intelligence & Security Informatics Conference on Counterterrorism and Criminology.

On September 12th, and during the first day of the conference EISIC 2011 “European Intelligence & Security Informatics Conference, on Counterterrorism and Criminology,” the first keynote speech was given by the expert Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham Cyber ​​Security (BT) (*). The title of his presentation was “Data Mining for Malicious Code Detection and Security Applications”. Among the highlights of his academic dissertation BT defined the meaning of saying that data mining “is the process of posing queries and extracting patterns different from data using techniques”. About its use, she said the technology can be used in national security as well aganist cybercrime and security, like f.e. like to Prevent buildings, destroying critical infrastructure (power, telecom). Dr Thuraisingham said that also can Data Mining find out who the bad guys are, capable of carrying out those Terrorist Activities.
Defining Cyber ​​Security BT said it is a technology to Protect the computer and network systems due to Against Corruption last generation of malware like Trojan horses, worms and viruses, including the ultradangerous malware called RAMAL (Radioactive Adaptive Malware), as well as intrusion detection and auditing.

During the first part of the presentation, BT described her research (together with Prof Latifur Khan and students of the University of Texas) and said that some techniques like the Link Analysis technology can be used to trace the viruses to the perpetrators. Another technology called Classification can prevent future attacks depending on the data mining learned about the terrorists through emails and phone conversations. The technology can also separate between real threats and non threats at all, by reducing false positives and false negatives.

More into details of her speech, BT said that the researched techniques like the CFB Program can extract the code blocker malware from data, and make a control flow analysis. She also compared her System with another already in the market , the code blocker SigFree, and assured her system is better, performs better.   Her System can detect Malware that is evolving continuosly, even every milisecond, like the RAMAL (Radioactive Adaptive Malware). Currently, all last generation malware evolve continuosly and it is difficult to prevent for regular firewalls. Dr. Bhavani Thuraisimgham defined her anti RAMAL malware tech as the NCD Novel Class Detection, and the tool is the system based on NCD, the so called SNOD or SNODMAL).

Currently, the most advanced Malware goes undetected because a continuos change in behaviours , every milisecond, and the regular anti malware software can not keep up that speed.

BT assured that her SNOD hast the ability to detect new classes of malware and its changes. She used the SNODMAL, malware detector using SNOD.

She classified the Malware in two categories: Benign and Novel.

The usefullness of SNODMAL will extend to detect multiple novel malware classes and quarantine them.

Summarizing, BT also revealed that they are working to find the best way to detect where this malware attack comes from, and to be able to attribute the attack, where it come from with 100% certainty (to avoid false accusations). Several countries have been attacjed by these novel malware.

In regard to the privacy matter, BT affirmed that the extract of results of the data mining should be private, this is a legal matter, not only an ethical one.

Once her speech finalized and the round of questions ended, Dr. Bhavani Thuraisimgham met Victor Bjoergan , CEO of the U.S. based Global Security Services LLC,  also Publisher of TheAmericasPost.com and EuropeSecurityNews (this under construction). Both discussed the importance of developing these technologies, and its role anti Cybercrime and the strengthening of global security against terrorism.

(*) READ MORE ABOUT DR. BHAVANI THURAISINGHAM

(**) MORE ON DR.THURAISINGHAM

New business alternatives within Airport Security

The U.S. Government agency that manages airport security shifts its strategic emphasis from stopping weapons to finding people.

It’s a potential $4 billion market for private industry, based on what the Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, currently spends on aviation security.

“Businesses that are good at data analysis, behavior-pattern recognition, big data handling, data-visualization — all ought to come out ahead,” said Stewart Baker, who headed the Department of Homeland Security from 2005 through 2009.

“We could also see an increase in demand for identification tools, such as biometric and facial-recognition scanners,” he said in an interview.

Stepping up to the plate are well known publicly-traded companies such as…READ MORE HERE

Police High Technology Unit in Monterrey, Mexico.

In Mexico, 1500 new police officers are reinforcing the fight against crime in the state of Nuevo Leon. The police are using the latest military technology, as reported by the Federal Ministry of Public Security SSPF to international news agency Prensa Latina PL.

According to PL reports , the Federal agents were endowed with these resources to gain an operational advantage over organized criminal groups, which have bought and/or stolen military weapons smuggled from the United States into Mexico.

According to the SSPF, the troops have the support of armored units, motorcycles, ambulances, police cars, high tech communications and helicopters Black Hawk, all equipped with latest instruments, as well as surveillance cameras, a high tech police headquarters, etc.

With these tools, new units in the northern state can operate in extreme conditions, using automated controls and infrared systems for advanced search.

The SSPF also announced that they have implemented at Monterrey and other cities in the northern state various operations, dynamic patrols, designation of safe corridors and use of intelligence units.

SSPF  also activated the Emergency Response Center (see photo)  and set up checkpoints and fixed phones in critical areas or high incidence, on instructions of President Felipe Calderón.