Fleeing His Own War on Drugs, Mexico's Felipe Calderon Finds Refuge at Harvard Andalusia Knoll - TruthOut
go to original March 2, 2013

Harvard man Felipe Calderón is headed back to his alma mater, much to the chagrin of his detractors. (EFE)

Citizens of Mexico and the United States question the appropriateness of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government offering former Mexican president Felipe Calderón a prestigious and lucrative fellowship, given the dramatic increases in drug violence and human rights violations during his tenure.

When Felipe Calderón completed his Mexican presidential term in the fall of 2012, he boarded the first plane out of the country and landed at The Harvard Kennedy School of Government to start a prestigious fellowship. In his wake, he left a country reeling from violence, where kidnappings, extortions, beheadings and grave human rights violations have become part of every day life. In the past six years, over 70,000 people have been murdered and more than 25,000 people have been disappeared under Calderón's "war on narco-trafficking."

On November 28, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government announced that Felipe Calderón would be their Inaugural Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders Fellow in a program designed for "high-profile leaders who are transitioning out of public office or other leadership positions to spend time in residence at Harvard for teaching, learning and research." Within days of this announcement, Eduardo Cortés Rivadeneyra, a businessman from the state of Puebla, started a bilingual petition on change.org to urge the president of Harvard and dean of the Kennedy School to revoke Calderón 's fellowship. Simultaneously, John Randolph, a former border patrol officer, started an English petition stating, "Any moral or ethical integrity that Harvard has ever had has been submerged in Calderón's blood- soaked fellowship." Randolph and Cortés united their petitions and have garnered over 35,000 signatures in just two months.

Petitioners hailing from some 28 countries, including Mexico, the United States, India, Iran, Columbia and Germany wrote a range of complaints, but the words assassin, blood and death were a constant presence throughout the signatories' comments.

Read the whole story at Truthout

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