Mexico: The Other Side of the Wall

  The Flow of Precursor Chemicals for Synthetic Drug Production in Mexico This is a report from Insight Crime that investigates the production of synthetic drugs in Mexico. This is an entirely new form of drug production compared with plant-based production.  The latter had some sort of the rural base - concerning poppy, coca leaf, or marijuana cultivation whereas synthetic drug production depends on access to chemical substances that have already been produced - fentanyl or meth in its final form - or the precursors, pre-precursors, and other chemicals (bonding agents, catalysts, reagents, etc) needed to manufacture synthetic drugs.  The supply chains for producing synthetics are completely different and effective drug policy needs to focus on controlling them through multilateral diplomatic efforts as well as regional (at the level of North America) and national (at the level of Mexico) policies. I will summarize this report, beginning with the major findings.  Fir...

El Pais did an interview with representative Dan Crenshaw, an advocate of branding Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations and using military force against them - which would amount to fighting a new war of terror against traffickers, with or without Mexico’s support.  What are the arguments that Crenshaw offers for this position?  First is the threat posed by the cartels because they control parts of Mexico and use fentanyl to poison Americans.  The point of getting authorization for the use of military force is for the U.S. military to collaborate with the Mexican military. Wasn’t this the Merida initiative about, albeit in a more indirect manner - providing training and weapons to Mexican security forces so that they could engage in a “courageous war” (I think according to Hillary Clinton) against the cartels.  “We’re going to stop the cartels, just as we did in Colombia and Panama,” says Crenshaw.  This is a historical analogy that does not stand up to sc...

  The AMLO Project An interesting view of the AMLO project as the presidency of Lopez Obrador is winding down, offered by Edwin Ackerman in Sidecar.  The overview of the article is as follows:  "We can therefore assess AMLO’s administration based on three fundamental criteria: the reinstatement of class cleavage as a primary organizer of the political field; the effort to reconcentrate the power of a state apparatus hollowed out by decades of neoliberal governance; and the break with an economic paradigm based on institutionalized corruption. Let’s consider each of these in turn."   These are the things that any progressive government would need to do in the context of Mexico’s rather deep submersion into neoliberalism.  With respect to class politics, Ackerman points to the redistributive politics of the AMLO administration in terms of cash transfers to various categories of persons in need (students, seniors, etc) and increased tax enforcement, which extracted...

 Critique of Republican Plan to Invade Mexico This op ed by Jean Guerrerro brings together many of the key threads of a critique of the Republican proposal to use military force against Mexican cartels.  Here are the key elements.  There is a lot of public support for militarizing the war on drugs as a way of responding to the overdose deaths of U.S. citizens on synthetic opioids.  At the heart of this the rage of family members who would personally like to shoot every single drug dealer.  One of the dangers here is that this is an issue with deep visceral support from a large segment of the population that would like to see perpetrators of harm inflicted on their children punished.  Why, asks Guerrero, don’t we bomb the Sackler family.  They’re just as culpable.  Instead, they’re being given pretty lenient treatment by the Department of Justice in the form of legal judgements that strip them of some but not all of their wealth.  This undersc...

Kurt Hackbarth, a contributor to the Jacobin , has been a consistent defender of AMLO, which is contrary to the all the shrieks of horror emanating from the various defenders of the democracy in Mexico (Denise Dresser, in particular, comes to mind).  One could say that AMLO has failed to generate high levels of economic growth and reduce violence in Mexico.  Hackbarth’s reply is that AMLO has in fact managed to stabilize the Mexican economy in the wake of the pandemic, which is impressive in comparison with how other developing countries have fared.  Below is a chart from the Dallas Federal Reserve : The information reported here indicates how Mexico has bounced back from the pandemic. There might be reason to believe that Mexico has benefited economically from the pandemic by becoming a haven for digital nomads during the pandemic and by attracting investment that would have otherwise gone to China because China continues to be strongly affected by the pandemic. In other...

Because, as Christian Merch (see below) could tell us, narco-trafficking in Mexico is just not that much of a priority for the United States.  It certainly wasn’t during the Operation Condor of the 1970s; it took a decided backseat to counterinsurgency, with the prerogatives of the CIA always trumping those of law enforcement agencies like the DEA and the FBI.  Nor was drug enforcement all that important during the 1990s.  Most border arrests were of low level traffickers - the most easily replaced foot soldiers in the Drug War, who were trying to move, bulkier, lower value products such as marijuana.  Their apprehension was, as Peter Andreas suggests in Border Games , mostly to demonstrate that the government was doing something about narcotrafficking, but drug dealing took a back seat to NAFTA and, consequently, that a border designed to accelerate licit flows of goods would also facilitate illicit flows as well.  Today, according to Tim Golden’s story about S...