Mexico

Watered down telecoms reforms represent a victory for big business in Mexico.

Watered down telecoms reforms represent a victory for big business in Mexico.

Mexicans make up the highest number of underpaid workers in the world's most powerful economy. Much of the story of Mexican migrants in the United States can be seen as a criminalization of poverty.

Violence in Mexico is the result of a climate of impunity in which violent crime goes largely unpunished.

There's nothing new about drones flying over Mexican airspace without congressional approval. But Peña Nieto is challenging the most traditional—and also progressive—practices of sovereignty and national development in Mexico.

That groups of armed peasants are more successful in controlling organized crime than the state should be a terrible embarrassment and public relations disaster for the government of Enrique Peña Nieto.

Credited with developing BRICs theory, Jim O'Neill is now onto a trendier acronym. According to his MINTs theory, Mexico's competitive manufacturing edge and cheap and "flexible" labor will place the country among the ten most powerful economies.

Credited with developing BRICs theory, Jim O'Neill is now onto a trendier acronym. According to his MINTs theory, Mexico’s competitive manufacturing edge and cheap and “flexible” labor will place the country among the ten most powerful economies.

Over the last year, vigilante groups have become a survival method in Mexican towns. Yet now, they aren't just fighting the cartel. This week, they clashed with police forces too. Mexican federal forces seized control of the war-torn state of Michoacan Tuesday, in an attempt to reestablish public order.

In a move that appears to complete Mexico's loss of national sovereignty to international capital, the senate has finally passed a sweeping and far-reaching reform of the country's oil industry. The restructuring is treated with widespread skepticism—polls suggest that about 65-75 percent of the population oppose the initiative.

Following Mexico's "transition to democracy" in 2000, many of the old systems of political and judicial control which the one-party state had at its disposal were dismantled, leaving a power vacuum that was filled by both legal and illegal capital. This process did not replace the older structures and failed to bolster democratic institutions, allowing for the most ruthless and merciless capitalist institutions to rise to the top.

The neoliberal project in Mexico, as elsewhere, has achieved a totalizing dominance over almost every aspect of everyday subsistence, work, and even leisure time. And yet the apparent power of the current order also makes it increasingly vulnerable to popular activism, dissent, and political mobilization.