Obama blesses Mexican security plan, eyes deeper business ties

By Mark Felsenthal and Steve Holland

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama gave his blessing on Thursday to a new security arrangement with Mexican leader Enrique Pena Nieto, in which Mexico will make reducing violence a priority over hunting drug cartel kingpins in the war against organized crime.

The two presidents said they also want to step up trade and business ties that have been overshadowed by the battle against drug trafficking.

"It is obviously up to the Mexican people to determine their security structures and how it engages with other nations including the United States," Obama said at a joint press conference with Pena Nieto.

At the start of a two-day visit to Mexico, Obama sought to draw attention to the emerging might of Latin America's No.2 economy, even as worries about containing drug-trafficking and related violence remained an inescapable subtext.

The two leaders pledged to begin holding cabinet level meetings focused on boosting business between the two countries and to expand educational changes. The first high-level meeting is set for the fall.

The U.S. president pledged support for Pena Nieto's new policy of restricting contacts with the United States on drugs and drug-related violence to a single point, Mexico's Ministry of the Interior. He acknowledged that the United States can play a role with its own domestic policies.

"We look forward to continuing our good cooperation in any way," he said. "I also reaffirmed our determination in the United States to meet our responsibilities to reduce the demand for illegal drugs and to combat the southbound flow of illegal guns and cash."

Mexico's new "single-door" policy would be an abrupt change from the wide latitude the U.S. government enjoyed in working with Mexican officials across agencies under Pena Nieto's predecessor, Felipe Calderon.

The change has raised questions about Mexico's commitment to combating drug trafficking and drug-related violence.

Pena Nieto plans to shift the weight of combating organized crime from the military onto a new militarized police force, but has made few concrete changes so far, instead seeking to focus public attention on the economy rather than violence.

The Mexican government has said that killings linked to organized crime fell 14 percent in the first four months of Pena Nieto's presidency, but 4,249 people still were killed during that period.

More than 70,000 people are estimated to have been killed in drug violence in Mexico since 2007, and gang-style murders continue to provide lurid headlines.

Some question whether Calderon's aggressive policies, which focused on eradicating gang leaders, has been successful or whether it has generated additional violence as rival factions vie for control of turf.

Pena Nieto said his approach will emphasize reducing bloodshed and will operate more smoothly.

"Under this new strategy, what we are trying to do is put in order, institutionalize the security cooperation we have today with the United States, and establish clear and singular channels to help us be more efficient and achieve better results," Pena Nieto said in Spanish.

RIGHTS WORRIES

In a letter to Obama ahead of his visit, rights group Human Rights Watch urged him to review the United States' public security approach with Mexico, rapping his administration for offering "uncritical support" for Calderon's policies and citing a "dramatic increase" in rights abuses.

Both Obama and Pena Nieto have said they want the visit to focus on economic issues rather than security. Pena Nieto is eager to underscore Mexico's recent run of solid economic growth, fueled in part by its increasing attractiveness as a manufacturing hub.

The leaders pledged to conclude a trade agreement with Asia-Pacific nations, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, by the end of the year.

By highlighting Mexico's progress in moving up the economic ladder, Obama is also emphasizing that his own domestic goal of reforming U.S. immigration laws will not promote an exodus of Mexicans into the United States.

"Part of what we discussed is the importance of getting it done, precisely because we do so much business between our two countries," he said, referring to immigration reform that has drawn bipartisan support in Washington. "If we're going to get that done, now's the time to do it."

The two presidents at their meeting discussed a much publicized energy agreement that would remove obstacles to expanding deepwater drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. They said in a joint statement that they looked forward to implementation of the deal.

The United States has yet to finalize the deal, known as the Transboundary Hydrocarbons Agreement, which provides guidelines for drilling in an area of the Gulf that straddles the U.S.-Mexican boundary.

The deal is seen as the key to opening a new era of cooperation on oil production between the two countries. Mexico's state-owned oil company Pemex needs technology and investment to boost its stagnant production, and U.S. companies are eager to help.

(Editing by Simon Gardner and Paul Simao)

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Mother of bomb suspects found deeper spirituality

BOSTON (AP) — In photos of her as a younger woman, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva wears a low-cut blouse and has her hair teased like a 1980s rock star. After she arrived in the U.S. from Russia in 2002, she went to beauty school and did facials at a suburban day spa.

But in recent years, people noticed a change. She began wearing a hijab and cited conspiracy theories about 9/11 being a plot against Muslims.

Now known as the angry and grieving mother of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, Tsarnaeva is drawing increased attention after federal officials say Russian authorities intercepted her phone calls, including one in which she vaguely discussed jihad with her elder son. In another, she was recorded talking to someone in southern Russia who is under FBI investigation in an unrelated case, U.S. officials said.

Tsarnaeva insists there is no mystery. She's no terrorist, just someone who found a deeper spirituality. She insists her sons — Tamerlan, who was killed in a gunfight with police, and Dzhokhar, who was wounded and captured — are innocent.

"It's all lies and hypocrisy," she told The Associated Press in Dagestan. "I'm sick and tired of all this nonsense that they make up about me and my children. People know me as a regular person, and I've never been mixed up in any criminal intentions, especially any linked to terrorism."

Amid the scrutiny, Tsarnaeva and her ex-husband, Anzor Tsarnaev, say they have put off the idea of any trip to the U.S. to reclaim their elder son's body or try to visit Dzhokhar in jail. Tsarnaev told the AP on Sunday he was too ill to travel to the U.S. Tsarnaeva faces a 2012 shoplifting charge in a Boston suburb, though it was unclear whether that was a deterrent.

At a news conference in Dagestan with Anzor last week, Tsarnaeva appeared overwhelmed with grief one moment, defiant the next. "They already are talking about that we are terrorists, I am terrorist," she said. "They already want me, him and all of us to look (like) terrorists."

Tsarnaeva arrived in the U.S. in 2002, settling in a working-class section of Cambridge, Mass. With four children, Anzor and Zubeidat qualified for food stamps and were on and off public assistance benefits for years. The large family squeezed itself into a third-floor apartment.

Zubeidat took classes at the Catherine Hinds Institute of Esthetics, before becoming a state-licensed aesthetician. Anzor, who had studied law, fixed cars.

By some accounts, the family was tolerant.

Bethany Smith, a New Yorker who befriended Zubeidat's two daughters, said in an interview with Newsday that when she stayed with the family for a month in 2008 while she looked at colleges, she was welcomed even though she was Christian and had tattoos.

"I had nothing but love over there. They accepted me for who I was," Smith told the newspaper. "Their mother, Zubeidat, she considered me to be a part of the family. She called me her third daughter."

Zubeidat said she and Tamerlan began to turn more deeply into their Muslim faith about five years ago after being influenced by a family friend, named "Misha." The man, whose full name she didn't reveal, impressed her with a religious devotion that was far greater than her own, even though he was an ethnic Armenian who converted to Islam.

"I wasn't praying until he prayed in our house, so I just got really ashamed that I am not praying, being a Muslim, being born Muslim. I am not praying. Misha, who converted, was praying," she said.

By then, she had left her job at the day spa and was giving facials in her apartment. One client, Alyssa Kilzer, noticed the change when Tsarnaeva put on a head scarf before leaving the apartment.

"She had never worn a hijab while working at the spa previously, or inside the house, and I was really surprised," Kilzer wrote in a post on her blog. "She started to refuse to see boys that had gone through puberty, as she had consulted a religious figure and he had told her it was sacrilegious. She was often fasting."

Kilzer wrote that Tsarnaeva was a loving and supportive mother, and she felt sympathy for her plight after the April 15 bombings. But she stopped visiting the family's home for spa treatments in late 2011 or early 2012 when, during one session, she "started quoting a conspiracy theory, telling me that she thought 9/11 was purposefully created by the American government to make America hate Muslims."

"It's real," Tsarnaeva said, according to Kilzer. "My son knows all about it. You can read on the Internet."

In the spring of 2010, Zubeidat's eldest son got married in a ceremony at a Boston mosque that no one in the family had previously attended. Tamerlan and his wife, Katherine Russell, a Rhode Island native and convert from Christianity, now have a child who is about 3 years old.

Zubeidat married into a Chechen family but was an outsider. She is an Avar, from one of the dozens of ethnic groups in Dagestan. Her native village is now a hotbed of an ultraconservative strain of Islam known as Salafism or Wahabbism.

It is unclear whether religious differences fueled tension in their family. Anzor and Zubeidat divorced in 2011.

About the same time, there was a brief FBI investigation into Tamerlan Tsarnaev, prompted by a tip from Russia's security service.

The vague warning from the Russians was that Tamerlan, an amateur boxer in the U.S., was a follower of radical Islam who had changed drastically since 2010. That led the FBI to interview Tamerlan at the family's home in Cambridge. Officials ultimately placed his name, and his mother's name, on various watch lists, but the inquiry was closed in late spring of 2011.

After the bombings, Russian authorities told U.S. investigators they had secretly recorded a phone conversation in which Zubeidat had vaguely discussed jihad with Tamerlan. The Russians also recorded Zubeidat talking to someone in southern Russia who is under FBI investigation in an unrelated case, according to U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation with reporters.

The conversations are significant because, had they been revealed earlier, they might have been enough evidence for the FBI to initiate a more thorough investigation of the Tsarnaev family.

Anzor's brother, Ruslan Tsarni, told the AP from his home in Maryland that he believed his former sister-in-law had a "big-time influence" on her older son's growing embrace of his Muslim faith and decision to quit boxing and school.

While Tamerlan was living in Russia for six months in 2012, Zubeidat, who had remained in the U.S., was arrested at a shopping mall in the suburb of Natick, Mass., and accused of trying to shoplift $1,624 worth of women's clothing from a department store.

She failed to appear in court to answer the charges that fall, and instead left the country.

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Seddon reported from Makhachkala, Russia. Associated Press writers Eileen Sullivan and Matt Apuzzo contributed to this report from Washington.

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