A War on Mexican Drug Cartels or a War on Surplus Humanity? Richard W. Coughlin The New War on Drugs – Attacking Mexico Over the last year, there has been a cascade of foreign policy proposals for the United States to brand Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations and, with this pretext, stage military attacks against them. Republican leaders in the U.S. ( Pompeo 2022, Cuccinelli 2022, Barr 2023) have authored these proposals and all of the 2024 Republican presidential hopefuls have emphatically endorsed them. The idea is the U.S. would use its military assets - in conjunction with the Mexican military but unilaterally if need be - to interdict the flow of fentanyl to the United States. Policy analysts have doubted that such policies could be successful given the decentralized character of fentanyl production in Mexico ( Larison , 2023; Carpenter and Singer , 2023). The typical pattern in the war on drugs is...
This is a blog about Mexican politics meant to inform public understanding of Mexico and Mexican politics.