Mexico: The Other Side of the Wall

This is from an article in Latin American Perspectives ( State Violence, Capital Accumulation and Globalization of Crime ) which is focused on interpreting Ayotzinapa in the context of extractivist forms of domination in Mexico.  There is a history to this, which is very much embedded in the rural education school of Ayotzinapa, a legacy of the Mexican Revolution and agrarian reform that was heavily repressed by the Mexican state.  The lineage of Ayotzinapa goes by the Zapta’s liberation army of the South.  Ruben Jaramillo was a member of this army and a leader of the Agrarian Labor Party of Morelos. Jamamillo’s assassination by the Mexican military in 1962 helped to spark and armed movement among the peasantry of Guerrero in the 1960s and a dirty war of repression by the Mexican military in 1970s.  An important episode in this conflict was the guerilla kidnapping of PRI Senator Rueben Figueroa Figueroa, inspiring an antagonism between the Figueroa’s and peasant acti...

I am intrigued with a column by Luis Hernandez in La Jornada , about the lady Iguala, aka, Maria de Los Angeles Abarca Pineda, who was the wife of the mayor of Iguala when the 43 students of Ayotzinapa went missing in 2014.  She came from fairly humble origins - her parents being market vendors. But the family also sold drugs locally.  Pineda’s brothers all became narcos and three of them were killed in their line of work.  The surviving brother, Salvador, is thought to be the chief of the drug organization Guerreros Unidos, who allegedly played a role in the disappearance of the 43 normalistas.  Much of the fortune of Pineda and her husband, Jose Luis Albarca, came from the drug money being reinvested into licit enterprises. The couple owned more than 60 properties, the crown jewel of their throne being the ownership of a shopping mall outside Iguala.  Hernandez notes that  Cuando en mayo de 2009 la entonces Secretaría de Seguridad Pública federal anun...