A Mexican official told US law enforcement agencies yesterday that their efforts to counter violent drug-trafficking cartels in Mexico are largely lacking, noting, for example, that cocaine traffickers allocate annually twice the sum of Mexico’s attorney general’s salary just for bribes; the New York Times reports that, in Peru, Shining Path rebels have rekindled their fight against the government, taking a note from Columbia’s FARC and morphing their guerilla army into an illicit drug enterprise to fund their armed struggle; meanwhile, El Salvador’s presidential election last weekend ushered into power a Leftist-rebel-faction-turned-legit-political-party, the FMLN, which was “once targeted by the US government as a threat to the world as we knew it.”