Mexico: The Other Side of the Wall

Mexico has a peace movement which emerged in response Ferdinand Calderon's phony war on drugs.  I would like to discuss the peace movement, but first a few points about the phony war on drugs. Calderon was president from 2006-12 and declared a war on drugs, but the conflict did not pit the state against the cartels.  As Anabel Hernandez shows in her book Narcoland (Verso, 2013, but first published in Mexico in 2010), Calderon followed in the footsteps of the Vincente Fox administration, siding with the Sinaloa Cartel of "el Chapo" Guzman.  Guzman's cartel was really a federation of different narco-trafficking groups.  Calderon's war on drugs was really a war against the adversaries of the Sinaloa Cartel - the Felix Arellano Brothers in Tijuana and then the Gulf Cartel in Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas.  These conflicts were instigated by Sinaloa Cartel, whose army consisted of the AFI (Agencia Federal de Investigacion), directed by Garcia Luna, who went on to become...

Mexico is sometimes referred to as a "narco-state".  What does this mean?     "Neoliberalism y crimen organizado en Mexico:  El surgimiento del Estado narco" (Fronteras Nortes, Vol. 25, No. 50: 7-34) by Luis Solis suggests, as the title of the article implies, that the narco state in Mexico has emerged from the convergence of neoliberalism with organized crime.  Solis examines the consequences of neoliberalism:  these include the disarticulation of the livelihoods associated with import substitution and the dominance of transnational capital within the Mexican economy, employing only 20% of the workforce, and the stagnation of national economy outside the circuits of transnational capital.  This is obviously because the national economy was systematically dismantled under the weight of structural adjustment and Mexico's accession to NAFTA, which both deepened and "constitutionalized" neol...