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REGION'S PRESIDENTS MEET TO INTEGRATE POLICE, PROMOTE MEGAPROJECT, AND DENOUNCE A WALL.

Article Excerpt
Central American heads of state met in Tegucigalpa Oct. 3 for an "extraordinary summit" on security and other issues of mutual concern. Among the twenty-odd issues they agreed to in their final statement, the Declaration of Tegucigalpa, was a plan to create an integrated multinational police force. Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua agreed to an air-travel accord that would allow commercial and private air traffic to fly between the countries as though national, rather than international flights. Mexico's president-elect Felipe Calderon attended the summit as a special guest with a special mission.

Calderon asked for, and got, support from his colleagues to repudiate the 1,125 km wall the US is building on its border with Mexico (see SourceMex, 2006-10-11). The leadership of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, and El Salvador, all of whose countries contribute their citizens to the wave of northern migration, had already expressed their opposition to the Berlin Wall approach to immigration problems and eagerly signed Calderon's proposal urging the US Congress to implement multilateral immigration reform and reconsider the wall. In reality, the bill has already passed both houses of the legislature and the president has said he would sign it, making the Tegucigalpa statement little more than a show of regional scorn.

Guatemala's President Oscar Berger brought up the measure, saying, "Walls don't resolve anything; their construction seems to...

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