Mexico: The Other Side of the Wall

Kurt Hackbarth, a contributor to the Jacobin , has been a consistent defender of AMLO, which is contrary to the all the shrieks of horror emanating from the various defenders of the democracy in Mexico (Denise Dresser, in particular, comes to mind).  One could say that AMLO has failed to generate high levels of economic growth and reduce violence in Mexico.  Hackbarth’s reply is that AMLO has in fact managed to stabilize the Mexican economy in the wake of the pandemic, which is impressive in comparison with how other developing countries have fared.  Below is a chart from the Dallas Federal Reserve : The information reported here indicates how Mexico has bounced back from the pandemic. There might be reason to believe that Mexico has benefited economically from the pandemic by becoming a haven for digital nomads during the pandemic and by attracting investment that would have otherwise gone to China because China continues to be strongly affected by the pandemic. In other...

Because, as Christian Merch (see below) could tell us, narco-trafficking in Mexico is just not that much of a priority for the United States.  It certainly wasn’t during the Operation Condor of the 1970s; it took a decided backseat to counterinsurgency, with the prerogatives of the CIA always trumping those of law enforcement agencies like the DEA and the FBI.  Nor was drug enforcement all that important during the 1990s.  Most border arrests were of low level traffickers - the most easily replaced foot soldiers in the Drug War, who were trying to move, bulkier, lower value products such as marijuana.  Their apprehension was, as Peter Andreas suggests in Border Games , mostly to demonstrate that the government was doing something about narcotrafficking, but drug dealing took a back seat to NAFTA and, consequently, that a border designed to accelerate licit flows of goods would also facilitate illicit flows as well.  Today, according to Tim Golden’s story about S...

I would file this article by Alejandro Lerch, Police Protection Rackets and Political Modernity in Mexico , as an example of the geopolitics of development in Mexico. Central to the geopolitics of development in Mexico are processes of state formation in which the development of state capacity plays a central role and, of course, integral to state formation are the development of the police, which provide the political and administrative underpinnings for capitalist development.  From this point of view, to draw on Lerch’s review of the critical literature on policing, “The police is the tool allowing for the unequal distribution of resources and skills required by the capitalist division of labor” (3), its main functions being to quell riots, protect property and break up strikes.  From the point of view of Stuart Schrader, the police provide the means through which dominant groups can avoid negotiating a social contract with subaltern groups.  In place of that, the poli...