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Mexico, Ayotzinapa and the War on Drugs

 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, even under a regime of the left, such as AMLO’s.  This is a reflection of the ways in which narcotrafficking, political control of territory, role of the military and the operation of the extractive economy are all tied together in one complicated package. To draw on the point that I made in the LAP article, what this represents is a hybrid form of liberalism in which - in a path dependent manner - the entwinement of formal and informal institutions and organizations emerges in a path dependent way, where the capital accumulation remains central to the overall trajectory of path dependency.  

In a recent piece of news about Cienfuegos, the Mexican journalist Jesus Esquivel points out that the U.S. - Mexican cooperation in the war on drugs collapsed following the release of Cienfuegos.  Had the United States not complied with this demand, Mexico would be booted 54 U.S. DEA agents out of Mexico. But neither has the release of Cienfuegos preserved that status quo between Mexico and the U.S. with regard to the War on Drugs.  This is because Mexico resents the capacity of the DEA to do what they like in Mexico while the United States is eager to reduce harmful flow of drugs from Mexico to the United States by means of some sort of enforcement strategy.   The difficulty with this, as the case of Cienfuegos indicates, is that law enforcement targeted at powerful Mexico elites destabilizes the power relationships through which the Mexican state is able to exert control over its territory and continue to secure foreign investment in the Mexican economy.  The suggestion here would seem to be that political power and economic extraction outweigh the importance of the law enforcement in the war on drugs.  

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