For those bullish on Mexico, Sunday was a big day. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist, published a glowing essay on why Americans should look next door to Mexico as the country to watch, not China or India.

The essay, titled How Mexico got Back in the Game, notes that Mexico has 44 free-trade agreements, more than any other country in the world, and the country sits atop “massive cheap natural gas finds.”

The three main political parties have signed a pact “to fight the big energy, telecom and teacher monopolies that have held Mexico back.” Americans, Friedman says, need a “more nuanced” view of Mexico but should be quite bullish on the nation.

There are many ways to slice Friedman’s essay. And some analysts went to work immediately. One is George Baker, a Houston-based energy analyst who lived for a time in Mexico. He quickly whipped off a comment to the Grey Lady taking apart Friedman’s argument. Here is one paragraph on trade:

“Take out intra-firm transactions in which Chrysler-Mexico sells to Chrysler-China, and daily trade will shrink to the value of commerce in oil and food products, services (including oilfield services), plus the remnants of a tourism industry battered by violence. Meanwhile, Carlos Slim skims off the top of the Mexican economy monopolistic rent whose value has been estimated by Mexican economists at 3% of Mexico’s GDP.”

Baker dismissed the reference to huge shale oil reserves – “Pemex has no plans to develop shale fields” – and concludes that, “Celebrations about Mexico’s advances in its economy and governance are premature.”

If the enthusiasm (or hype) about Mexico is reminiscent of the euphoria for Brazil back around 2009, then Friedman’s essay may actually be a contrarian indicator. Friedman was a regular visitor to Brazil back then. Here’s one of his columns. 

As a colleague noted at a weekly bull session we foreign reporters hold on Friday evenings, Brazil seemed at the top of the emerging market heap back then, the lead nation of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and, later, South Africa). But the BRICS are now passé. And Brazil has posted anemic growth for several years.

Indeed, the benchmark Bovespa index is down 16% since the end of 2010.

Maybe the apathy for Brazil is overdone. And the euphoria for Mexico also an overreaction.

Certainly the number of free-trade agreements that Mexico has signed does not indicate how open the economy is. It only takes a trip to Office Max, the neighborhood supermarket or a furniture stores to see hidden barriers to entry in Mexico. Why are Hewlett Packard printers assembled in Mexico not available here? Why are Sony plasma screen TVs assembled in Mexico cheaper in the States than here? If it's so open, why are there so many monopolies and duopolies? 

This is not Taipei, Singapore or even some Central American capitals. There are many things you cannot get here or that are quite costly. Anybody go in the Liverpool department store and look at prices lately?

I don’t find my reporting colleagues here a cynical group. Mexico-bashing is not a practice. Many are married to Mexicans, are Mexican themselves or have lived here for decades. That’s a short way of saying they want Mexico to progress and flourish. But the obstacles are many. Governance and security issues are critical. Corruption is rampant. It is too early to pop the champagne.

Only watch the above video if you have a strong stomach. It shows a cold-blooded gangland style assassination of two youths on Nov. 21, 2012, in the Comayagüela neighborhood of the capital, Tegucigalpa. The images are from a security camera.

The video appeared on the website of the El Heraldo newspaper in Honduras last week. According to this blog, "El Heraldo claimed that the authorities failed to open an investigation into the shoot-out and that the prosecutor's office had not filed the video as evidence."

Since then, the public security minister, Pompeyo Bonilla, who has failed to rein in a runaway murder rate that has made Honduras the world's most homicidal country, or oversee the capture of a single suspect in the slayings, had the audacity to lash out at the newspaper, claiming the video marked "total disrespect for the bereaved" and also defamed the image of Honduras.

My opinion: These videos, as awful as they are, need to be in the public sphere. Maybe someone will recognize one of the killers and help bring them to justice. Only if the killers are handed to Bonilla on a platter will he have courage to take action rather than taking aim at the journalists. If he takes effective action, the image of Honduras will improve.  

Across Central America, hundreds of sugar cane workers succumb each year to a mystery kidney disease that leads them to an agonizing death. This is a well-done Associated Press video about the disease that focuses on sick workers in Chichigalpa, Nicaragua. If you drink rum, sip sugary sodas or have candy bars, then you should be concerned about the how sugar cane is harvested. I first learned of this illness from this Center for Public Integrity investigative report. Since it came out a year ago, PBS has also reported on the issue, followed most recently by this AP report. A report in Nephrology Times says mortality from kidney disease increased tenfold between 1984 and 2005 in El Salvador, a sign of how severe this public health epidemic is. The most prevalent hypothesis is that sweltering heat and chronic bouts of dehydration cause the disease, rather than exposure to pesticides. But while this is a strong theory, experts aren't willing to rule out other causes. 

When it comes to riotous Christmas parties, the Honduran Embassy in Bogota, Colombia, chalked one up for the annals.

On Dec. 20, according to press reports, while diplomats at the embassy cavorted with prostitutes, others ransacked the mission, stole a laptop computer and even pooped on the floor of the ambassador’s office.

The Honduran ambassador until last Saturday, Carlos Humberto Rodriguez, says he was in Miami on vacation at the time of the party and left a personal assistant in charge of the mission, who decided to have the party of a lifetime.

Rodriguez handed in his resignation on Saturday. Yesterday, he told the HRN radio network: “I feel very ashamed of what occurred. I wish this had never happened, but it happened and now I find myself in this situation.” (Transcript in Spanish).

The Honduran El Heraldo newspaper said the Christmas party turned into an orgy, and that attendees left the embassy in shambles.

Rodriguez said his secretary called him the next day and related what had happened. He tried to cover up the incident.

“I wanted to keep it at a low level that did not leak out. The country doesn’t deserve another scandal,” Rodriguez told HRN last night.

But someone called police Dec. 21 in the morning and reported a theft from the embassy. When police arrived, they found Rodriguez’s assistant, Jorge Mendoza, asleep in the embassy.

Even though he wasn’t an employee of the embassy, Mendoza apparently had keys to the mission and the run of the place. Honduras says it’s sending investigators to interrogate the six formal employees of the mission about what happened. Colombian police, meanwhile, are trying to track down the two prostitutes.

If you happened to glimpse the televised Rose Parade on New Year's Day, you might have noticed the performance of the Banda El Salvador. If so, here's the rather amazing back story of the marching band.

Southern California is home to the greatest concentration of Salvadorans anywhere outside of Central America. For many of the 147 high school age members of the band, the overland trip to California was as much about family reunion as performance.

They almost didn't raise enough money to go. Once they arranged transportation for the four-day overland journey, they didn't have enough for lodging. So they camped out at Duarte High School, a little to the east of Pasadena, site of the Rose Parade and Rose Bowl. Here's what KPCC public radio said about their conditions (click here for a slide show of the band, too): 

Money for flights and hotels didn’t materialize. So 147 teens are sleeping and showering in the high school gym and taking their meals in a large, very drafty vinyl tent.

Away from the parade, band members found themselves in emotional family reunions.

Twenty-year-old clarinet player Nelson Hernandez saw his older brother for the first time since he came to the US to study and work 12 years ago.

“It was perhaps one of the most beautiful experiences in my life,” he said.

Hernandez says his brother is more like a father to him because he sent money to pay for Hernandez’s college tuition.

Andres Trigueros plays saxophone. His father left El Salvador 14 years ago to look for work in Los Angeles. This trip’s only the second time he’s seen him since.

“I’ve felt his absence a lot,” Trigueros said. He keeps in touch with his father through social media.

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We foreign correspondents have enviable jobs. We consort with princes and poker players, bankers and brewers. We poke our noses in all kinds of places.

It’s the end of the year nearly, so I can’t help but think of the fun places and interesting people I’ve been blessed to write about in 2012. Sure, there’s been plenty of serious things to report on. But then there’s been the fun things, those that are personably memorable.

Topping the list for me this year was a trip to Baja California to visit Scammon’s Lagoon where thousands of gray whales migrate each winter. I actually got paid to do this so I could write this story. That’s my video above.

Less than a month later, I visited a town in Veracruz state that created its own currency. I had never considered the ramifications of alternative currency till I did this story.

I’m still the butt of jokes in our house for something that happened after I was sent by editors to Costa Rica to write about “poker refugees” – American online poker players who moved abroad once several online poker sites became illegal. I expected to find frat boys swigging beer and playing online. To my surprise, I found brainy engineers, Russian literature experts, math whizzes and assorted other oddballs, all of whom I quite liked.

Then I made a mistake. I mentioned to our older daughter, who is very good at math, how much money these guys were making and, er, OK I confess: I suggested that she might want to look into online poker as a temporary career option.

I might as well have suggested a life of crime for all the guff I got about this later.

Still, it was a fun story. Almost as fun was this story about an artisanal chocolate maker in Nicaragua, and this one about a ghost town that has come back to life on the border of Nicaragua and Costa Rica. I also enjoyed writing about the Kuna Indians in Panama, a surprising number of whom are albinos.

It’s been a great year. I head off tomorrow through the end of the year to Florida so no more blog postings till January. To all my readers, Feliz Navidad y Prospero Año Nuevo!

Tomorrow is Journalists’ Day in Guatemala. You might think it would be the same day to honor journalists all over the region. You’d be wrong.

Like Mother’s Day, which is set on different days in different countries, no nation around here seems to celebrate journalists on the same day. Mexico does so on Jan. 4, Nicaragua on March 1, Honduras on May 25, Costa Rica on May 30, and El Salvador on July 31.

None of them set the day to coincide with International Day of Solidarity of Journalists, which is on Sept. 8.

Reminds me of the confusion in our house over when to celebrate Mother’s Day. In Mexico, Mother’s Day is May 10. Stay home that day if there’s any way possible. The roads are jammed as every Tomas, Ricardo and Enrique takes his mother out for a meal. In the U.S., Mother’s Day is on the second Sunday of May. In Nicaragua, my wife’s land of birth, Mother’s Day is on May 30th.

When I mentioned the confusion to a friend about when to celebrate, he wisely said: “Every day is mother’s day.” Well put. May every day be journalists’ day as well.

Another mismatch is Labor Day. In some 80 countries of the world, Labor Day is May 1, also called International Workers Day, which commemorates the slaughter of workers in 1886 in Chicago who were protesting for an eight-hour work day. It may have occurred in the United States, but in the U.S. we celebrate Labor Day on the first Monday of September.  

John McAfee’s surname is synonymous with computer security. A company bearing his name is one of the world’s pre-eminent antivirus software concerns.

But McAfee doesn’t have much security these days – despite the pack of dogs and the small arsenal he keeps. He’s on the lam in Belize, a “prime suspect” in the murder of a fellow American whose body was found in a pool of blood Sunday morning.

The murder took place north of San Pedro Town on Ambergris Cay, where both McAfee and the victim, Gregory Viant Faull, have homes. The area is very popular with foreigners.

McAfee, who used to work for NASA’s Institute for Space Studies before starting his own antivirus company, retreated to Belize in 2008, only to see his $100 million fortune decimated by the global economic crisis. In Belize, when not hanging out with his 17-year-old girlfriend, the 66-year-old McAfee runs a start-up called QuorumEx.com that prospects for substances in Belize’s abundant fauna that might make for potent "paradigm-shifting medicines." It isn't clear if the company is even solvent anymore.

McAfee hasn’t had an easy go of it in Belize. He’s fought with his neighbors, particularly Faull, who complained that his dogs were running wild, barking at all hours and attacking people.

Last Friday night, someone came on McAfee’s property and poisoned the dogs.

Faull is a former contractor from the Orlando area who made a small fortune doing construction projects around Disney World and at other theme parks.

After he turned up dead on Sunday, Belizean police described McAfee as a “prime suspect.”

While McAfee went underground, he kept up a running conversation with Joshua Davis, a reporter with WIRED magazine, and Davis has kept up an account of what McAfee is telling him at both the magazine’s website and on his Twitter account @JoshuaDavisNow.

At one point, McAfee told Davis that he eluded police by burying himself in the sand with a cardboard box over his head so he could breathe. “It was extraordinarily uncomfortable,” he told Wired. “But they will kill me if they find me.” Here are some of Davis’s recent tweets:

2h McAfee says the police raided the house next door to where he was and he evaded them.

2h McAfee just called: He has changed locations. The police have not caught him yet.

3h McAfee says he is not armed. If the police shoot him, it's not because he has a weapon.

7h McAfee 7:05AM PST: "Power was just cut to the house I'm in. I think this is it."

7h McAfee at 5am: "The police have set up roadblocks across the country to catch me. I slept last night on a mattress infested with lice."

If McAfee has a persecution complex, he’s also got ways to protect himself. Click on the WIRED article to see photos of him posing shirtless with what looks to me like a shotgun. Faull was killed with a shotgun wound to his head. When police raided McAfee’s compound in May of this year, a television report said this is what they found: 7 12-gauge pump action shotguns; 1 12-gauge single action shotgun; 1 Taurus 9mm pistol and 1 9mm CZ pistol were found. Five air rifles with scopes that resembled sniper rifles were also found. Some of McAfee's bodyguards are known to be gangsters in Belize.

Click here and here to read Belize television website reports on the search for McAfee. A reporter for Gizmodo also has known McAfee for a long time. His recent article is titled: Secrets, Schemes, and Lots of Guns: Inside John McAfee's Heart of Darkness. The reporter, Jeff Wise, said on this posting this week that McAfee seems to be delving into bath salts, a mind-altering amphetamine that can cause a sustained psychotic state.

Are you going to believe what the Organization of American States tells you? Or believe your lying eyes?

If you trust the OAS, everything went hunky dory in Nov. 4 municipal elections in Nicaragua in which the Sandinista Front won 134 of 153 mayoral posts, broadening their control of the country.

“Nicaraguans could exercise their right to vote in a peaceful manner,” Lazaro Cardenas Batel, head of the 26-member OAS observer mission, said, according to the EFE news agency.

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland was harsh, saying that the Sandinistas tilted the electoral board before the vote and allowed numerous shenanigans on election day:

“Among the irregularities that were observed on election day were the denial of citizens who wanted to vote, cases of violating the right to a secret vote, and complaints of people who were allowed to vote more than once. These practices have characterized various elections in Nicaragua recently,” Nuland said.

If you want to get a granular account of the fraud that occurred, turn to this posting by a U.S. resident of Nicaragua who accompanied U.S. Embassy observers to an area east of Managua. Here’s an extract of what he saw in the municipality of Teustepe, posted on his site Bloggings by Boz:

I watched for a bit longer and saw more ID cards distributed by electoral police and more young men and women who were still rubbing ink off their thumb from previous voting get back in line to vote again. Over the next 30 minutes, I personally saw at least five more people vote twice at JRV 4, one guy vote three times, and several others vote in spite of having ink on their finger from voting prior to our arrival. Other young men and women appeared to hang around after voting, wiping the ink off their thumb and looking for the signal from the authorities at the voting center that they should get back in line. While the biggest problem was JRV 4, which had a long line that never subsided, I saw at least three cases of young men voting multiple times at other JRVs at that site. Judging by their actions, many of the young men and women standing around that voting center appear to have been there for a lengthy period of time voting.

This wasn't a small abuse by one or two people. What I witnessed was a systemic electoral fraud that involved the voting site coordinator, the electoral police and over a dozen Sandinista activists who were standing around the voting center. The electoral police high fived several of the men as they walked in an out of the JRVs to vote and kept tally sheets on their desks of how many "jovenes" and "adultos" had voted (all of those voting multiple times appeared under 20 years old).

Some of the vote totals are hard to believe. According to a tweet by Carlos Fernando Chamorro, a former Sandinista Front newspaper editor who turned against the party, the Sandinistas claim to have won 95 percent of the vote in the township of Yalaguina, “just like Dear Leader Kim Jong Il.” (Disclosure: Chamorro is a personal friend.)

Clearly, there were problems with the vote. And the OAS can barely be trusted to observe them. When Ortega won re-election in November 2011, hours after the polls closed amid a flawed process, Chilean OAS Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza sent a message: “Democracy and peace advanced in Nicaragua yesterday.”

When other observers complained bitterly about the OAS stamp of approval of the elections, Insulza backtracked, saying it was a misinterpretation by an underling.

Then again, the OAS seems to have a track record of “hear nothing, see nothing.” 

Certainly, some Nicaraguans were not content with the municipal elections. Protests, like the one in the AP photo above near Leon, left three people dead after the vote.

With the help of a global development organization called Counterpart International, some of the one million Guatemalan women whose livelihood is based on making handcrafts are getting a better deal. Some of their handcrafts ended up recently at the International Gift Fair in New York City. This video struck a chord with me. When I worked for The Miami Herald in the 1990s, I once went up to the devastated Ixil Triangle of Guatemala to do a story on women contracted by a major U.S. designer (I can't remember which one now) to knit sweaters that would be sold on Fifth Avenue. The Ixil Triangle was ground zero in the Guatemalan army's scorched earth campaign against leftist rebels in the early 1980s.