Mexico's Drug Crisis: Alternative Perspectives

More than 40,000 Mexicans have been killed since the country's president, Felipe Calderón, launched his U.S.-backed “War on Drugs” in 2006. But the sensationalized media coverage and the government’s stilted depiction of the crisis clarify little. The superficiality, silences, and outright distortions demand alternative, progressive analyses of Mexico’s drug war. In this Report, we offer a series of articles that aim to provide much-needed historical and cultural context to understanding the crisis.

May/June
2011
Volume: 
44
Number: 
3

Taking Note

Open Forum

Updates

John Lindsay-Poland
For the last two decades, the dominant narrative justifying the U.S. military’s activities in Latin America has been the war on drugs and the fight against “narco-terrorists.” In the last ten years, however, the U.S. military has undertaken several unrelated activities including low-profile tests of military equipment; humanitarian assistance that the military itself acknowledges has intelligence-gathering purposes; and training to suppress social protest.

Report

Natalia Mendoza Rockwell
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Ethan Nadelmann
Isaac Campos
The roots of the drug war run deep in Mexico, perhaps deeper than in the United States. If we seek to achieve a moral revolution against prohibitionism, it must take place on both sides of the Rio Grande.
Michelle García
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John Gibler
@font-face { font-family: "Times New Roman"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }@font-face { font-family: "BaileySansITC-BookItalic"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 10pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Cambria; }table.MsoNormalTable { font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.TOCBlurb, li.TOCBlurb, div.TOCBlurb { margin: 0in 0in 9pt; line-height: 12pt; font-size: 10pt; font-family: BaileySansITC-BookItalic; color: black; font-style: italic; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } The constant images of death in the Mexican media serve as propaganda to justify military and police deployments. The violence has become a kind of insidious marketing campaign for the very policy that unleashes the violence.
Howard Campbell
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Elaine Carey and José Carlos Cisneros Guzmán
@font-face { font-family: "Times New Roman"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }@font-face { font-family: "BaileySansITC-BookItalic"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 10pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Cambria; }table.MsoNormalTable { font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.TOCBlurb, li.TOCBlurb, div.TOCBlurb { margin: 0in 0in 9pt; line-height: 12pt; font-size: 10pt; font-family: BaileySansITC-BookItalic; color: black; font-style: italic; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } The stories of four Mexican women working in the drug trade echo that of Ignacia “La Nacha” Jasso, who controlled much of the Ciudad Juárez drug market beginning in the 1920s.
Rossana Reguillo
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Reviews

Richard Bourne
Evo Morales: The Extraordinary Rise of the First Indigenous President of Bolivia, by Martín Sivak, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 241 pp., $27 (hardback)
Steven S. Volk
Nostalgia for the Light, a documentary film by Patricio Guzmán (Icarus Films), 2011, 90 mins., Spanish with English subtitles.

Tracking the Economy