CNN news 2012-12-01 加文本

cnn news 2012-12-01

President Obama, members of Congress, corporate executives, small business owners, all of them involved in meetings this week. They’re all talking about the same thing: the fiscal cliff. Yesterday, we said what could happened if the government goes over that cliff, so to speak, on January 1st. Taxes would go up for all Americans, government spending would be automatically cut for different services. What we didn’t mention is that the government set this thing up when they couldn’t work out a deal to lower the U.S. debt, lawmakers and the president came up with this idea for this automatic spending cuts. Everyone involved agrees that the debt needs to be reduced. They don’t agree how to do that, so for now, the clock is ticking. The person you’re looking at here is Maria Santos Gorrostieta. From 2008 to 2011, she was the mayor of a town in Mexico that was plagued by violence from the country’s drug war. The mayor, herself, was targeted by attacks twice. She survived both times. This month, Gorrostieta was kidnapped. Her body was found last week. The drug war and the wave of violence that’s part of it have dominated Mexican politics for years. It’s something that the outgoing president, Felipe Calderon has faced, and it’s something that Mexico’s next president, Enrique Pena Nieto will face as well. Brian Todd examines their approaches. Deploying the Mexican army and Marines as never before, Galderon fought the cartels head on, took out several kingpins. But during his six-year term, the streets of Juarze, Tijuana, Sinaloa flowed with blood. At least 50,000 Mexicans were killed. Many of them innocent civilians. That’s far more than the American death tolls in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Homicide rates in those areas have recently plateaued. And a Mexican official tells us, civilians there are telling them they do feel safer now. Tourism is bouncing back. Analysts say President-elect Pena Nieto will continue to confront the cartels, but in a more nuanced way. “With the United States, he is going to ask for more intelligence sharing from the United States. There’s been intelligence sharing, it’s been in a little more limited way. They would like to see that expanded. So that Mexican authorities, police, army, Marines have more information and can go after the bad guys with that intelligence.”