Mexico: The Other Side of the Wall

  Sovereignty of the Mexican Nation State: I read another editorial by Guadalupe Correa from Sin Embargo on the conception of Mexico as a narco-state.  Of course, evidence for this idea is abundant everywhere you look, but Correa suggests that this conception of the Mexico state as ultimately dysfunctional is also a new mode of imperialism.   On this account, an important aspect of imperialism lies with the different ways in which countries like Mexico have been conceived.  There is a whole genealogy of the development that one could reconstruct.  One of its central pillars would be the emergence of the paradigm of development, which has been analyzed by post developmental thinkers like Wolfgang Sachs and Autruo Escobar (see the Development Dictionary).  The point here is simple:  how the world is ideologically constructed opens it up to different forms of governmentality and empowers some actors and lets others off the hook for all of the violence t...

  Sera Mexico un narco-estado (Will Mexico Become a Narco-State), Guadalupe Correa Interesting piece by Correa which discusses how the pundits and analysts are quick to brand Mexico as a narco-state and this kind of branding is consequential because it can lead to stepped up intervention from the United States.  What that would be, I do not know.  A reinvigorated Plan Merida with more focus on institutional building within Mexico’s law enforcement and security apparatus?  Probably.  The spate of recent incidents that lead to this conclusion are, most notably, the arrest and detention of Garcia Luna and the arrest and subsequent release of Salvador Cienfuegos.  Gacia Luna was Felipe Calderon’s drug anti-drug cop and worked closely with U.S. counterparts.  His arrest and prosecution certainly validates Anibel Hernandez’s account of Garcia in Narcoland .  And then Cienfuegos, the head of the Mexican army during the sexenio of Enrique Pena Nieto was...

But here is a good piece to get started on analyzing current events again: Enrique Krauze, “Mexico’s Ruinous Messiah” . Krauze is a convervative critic of AMLO and of the Mexican left in general - although whether AMLO can be associated with the left is problematic. For Krauze, AMLO is a charismatic leader, a tropic messiah that wants to save Mexico from “neoliberalism” even though his major economic policies scarcely diverge from the general neoliberal model of seeking growth by opening Mexico up to the foreign corporate investment, with some measure of greater degree of participation by the state, epitomized by AMLO’s efforts to the revive PEMEX. Krauze’s central criticism of AMLO is his attempt to the dismantle the construction of multi-party democracy in Mexico through weakening the independence of the federal electoral institute - a cornerstone of the democratization project - and also, interestingly, the of AMLO’s republican austerity, which have defunded key Mexican social progr...