Mexico: The Other Side of the Wall

An interesting op ed appeared in the Washington Post (June 29, 2022) in response to the deaths of the 53 migrants trapped in a tractor trailer in San Antonio Texas.  At least 27 of the migrant dead were Mexican, indicative of the resurgence of Mexican immigration to the United States following a ten year lull. This illustrates one of the central failures of the Lopez Obrador presidency.  AMLO does not like immigration because he thinks that Mexicans should live in Mexico and he asserted that his government would create jobs (through expanding the rate of economic growth) which would diminish the economic push factors that had caused Mexicans to immigrate to Mexico, a process that largely corresponded with the breakdown of the PRI model of national development, but which also occurred in conjunction with high fertility rates among Mexican women during the middle decades of the 20th century.  In other words, migration exploded in the context of demographic and the economic ...

Jeffrey Webbe r in Report on the Americas outlines fortunes of the political left in Latin America through a series of comparisons between different Latin American states that are pursuing similar developmental trajectories.  Today, the left appears to be resurgent if one is counting the number of avowedly left wing governments in power.  It appears that the political pendulum is swinging to the left once again after the rightwing victories that brought down the rejection of neoliberalism associated with the pink tide.  This is a rather superficial reckoning, however, which Webber's comparative analysis moves beyond.  Webber distinguishes between social movements and the political left.  Social movements are associated with national popular elements rebelling against governmental oppression and neoliberal economic extraction.  These movements translate into a typically partial conquest of power for parties of the left, but these parties are then left to re...

 A few points about Ayotzinapa from NACLA.  The Group of International Experts put out their third report on the disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa.  There were several findings.  Marines interfered with the planting of remains at the Coluca trash dump and therefore participated in the fabrication of the state’s historical truth of Ayotzinapa under Pena Nieto.  For counterinsurgency purposes, the military had been spying on the students and were surveilling them in real time as police attacked their buses on September 27 and 28. All of this can also be related to the arrest of Salvador Cienfuegos in the United States in the 2019 and his subsequent release - at the insistence of the Lopez Obrador administration - by the U.S. DOJ. Cienfuegos was returned to Mexico to face criminal charges there, but such charges were never filed. Both the cases of the students of Ayotzinapa and Cienfuegos suggest the untouchability of the military in Mexican politics...