In other news from Mexico, the country’s president-elect Felipe Calderon has urged President Bush to veto a bill authorizing the construction of a 700-mile fence along the US-Mexico border.

• Felipe Calderon: “We must understand the migration cannot be reduced by decrees or physical obstacles that only make migrants take greater risks and, as a consequence, produce more unjust deaths on the border.”

In Washington, the State Department maintains the wall is needed.

• Thomas Shannon, U.S. Undersecretary for Latin America: “We are building barriers that allow us to manage and control how people move across borders… We need to know who’s coming across our borders and after years of not paying that much attention to the frontier … we are now attempting to come to terms with it.”