Mexico: The Other Side of the Wall

NAFTA was a huge step in the direction of North American Integration.  For proponents of the idea, North American Integration is a far from finished project.  I would like to spend some time examining the outlines of this project.    My text for this discussion of the North American idea is North America: Time for a New Focus , an Independent Task Force Report for the Council on Foreign Relations, written in 2014 and chaired David Patreaus (former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan) and Robert Zoellick, former U.S. Trade Representative.           I would preface this discussion with recent news from U.S. trade policy under Donald Trump.   Trump is turning away from multilateralism in U.S. foreign economic policy in favor of bilateral relations.   He has recently decided to impose steel and aluminum tariffs on Mexico and the Canada.   Mexico has announced the imposition of counter-tariffs on U....

I have just read an interesting discussion of AMLO (Andres Manuel Obrador Lopez) in the Mexican magazine  Nexos  by Hector Aquilar Camin , an important public intellectual in Mexico.  Aguilar is no ally of AMLO - he is a proponent of the neoliberal status quo in Mexico, which means reforming the reforms that Pena Nieto made in 2013 with the support of Mexico's three major political parties - the PRI, the PAN and the PRD.   But political support for perfecting neoliberalism in Mexico is waning.  The latest opinion polls from the newspaper  La Reforma  give AMLO 52% while Ricardo Anaya (of the PAN/PRD alliance) has dropped to 26% and Jose Meade of the PRI has only 17% of the voters' preferences.  AMLO's party, Morena, is given by another prominent polling firm, Mitofsky, an 80% chance of winning control of the House of Deputies and a 30% change of winning control of the Senate.  What seems set to occur in Mexico on July 1 is a massive...

What are the mechanisms for narco-violence in Mexico and for political violence elsewhere in the world?  In a previous post, I discussed Anabel Hernandez’s Nacroland , which argues that the Sinaloa Cartel successfully coopted the PAN led governments Vincente Fox (2000-2006) and Ferdinand Calderon (2006-12), so that government policies enforcing (or not) drug laws reflected the preferences of the dominant cartel.    When Sinaloa Cartel wanted to go to war against the Arellano brothers in Tijuana or the Gulf Cartel in Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas, the PAN led federal government complied.    When the Sinaloa Cartel began to go war against itself, the government found itself in difficult straights:   which factions of the cartel should they align with?   Hernandez also provides a backdrop to these developments by sketching out Pax Mafiosa that prevailed during the era of PRI domination of Mexican politics.   Cartels paid what Hernandez des...