Mexico: The Other Side of the Wall

This entry is a review of two recent books on Mexican Politics, Los Zetas, Inc . by Guadalupe Correa (University of Texas Press, 2017) and A Massacre in Mexico , by Anabel Hernandez (Verso, 2018). State Transformation and the Drug War In 2006, Mexican president Felipe Calderon deployed the Mexican military to attack organized crime in Mexico, which had become heavily militarized and capable of challenging the Mexican state’s monopoly on the use of force.  The subsequent War on Drugs has raged in Mexico from 2006 to 2018.  250,000 people were killed in the course of this conflict and another 37,000 disappeared.  The elections of 2018 were a major political transformation in Mexico.   All of the major political parties – the PRI, the PAN and the PRD – suffered heavy losses while the party of Andres Manual Lopez Obrador (or AMLO) won 53% of the popular vote, supermajorities in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate and legislative majorities in 26 ...

The capacity of Mexico´s civilian government to maintain the domestic order has weakened as a result of the decline of PRI as hegemonic apparatus of rule, the implantation of neoliberalism and the rise of organized crime.  As a result, Mexico has undergone a pattern of militarization in which military spending has doubled since 2000 and where, through the Law of Internal Security, the Mexican military can now be deployed by the Mexico´s president unilaterally, with no Congressional oversight and with no accountability for the military itself in terms of how it deploys force.  This makes me think of Carl Schmitt's view of soveriegnty as the capacity to decide when a nornal situation exists or not.  If not, then we enter into a state of exception where the normal rules of politics are suspended and order is imposed by any means necessary.  Since 2000, Mexico has descended into a more or less permanent state of exception. The passage of the Internal Law of Security last...

This blog post is a preliminary sketch of the October 28 Movement in Puebla, Mexico.  I will start with some theoretical points of reference and then move on to discuss the movement. The sociologist William Robinson is a key theorist of globalization.  He argues that globalization is shaped by a transnational capitalist class.  In terms of theories of imperialism, this is very different from Lenin´s thesis of inter-imperialist rivalry.  There is conflict between states in terms of how they position themselves within the global economy, a phenomena which can be understood in terms of the concept of the competitition state.  But the primary lines of conflict in the world today are not between states, but between transnational capital and the great majority of people in the world whose livelihoods, communities and environments are uprooted, dislocated or destroyed by the encroachment of transnational circuits of capitalist accumulation.  This is exactly what...

Yesterday the study abroad class that I have been teaching in Cholula, Mexico met with journalist, Samantha Paez Guzman, Adan Xicale, an attorney and social activist, and his son, Paula Xicale, also a local activist.  They told us about the movement Cholula Viva y Digna.  The movement began in 2014 when the governor of the state of Puebla, Rafael Moreno Valle (of the PAN) announced a plan to develop the archeological zone in Cholula. To tell the story of Cholula Viva y Digna, some background about the archeological zone is in order.  At the center of this zone is the grand pyramid of Cholula, the largest pyramid in the world.  Cholula has been inhabited since 1500 BC and a series of civilizations have flourished there.  During the colonial period, the Spaniards used the stones of the ancient temples to build their churches.  In Cholula, they buried the great pyramid by building a hill over it and then constructing the Church of the Virgen de los Re...

The 2018 election in Mexico was an unequivocal victory for Morena and AMLO (Lopez Obrador), its leader.  AMLO captured 53% of the vote in what was previously a fairly evenly split electorate (if you look at 2000, 2006 and 2012).  This time the PAN got 22% of the vote and the PRI just 16%. But their losses and Morena's gains did not end there.  AMLO's coalition also won a majority in the Chamber of Deputies, controlling 300 out of 500 seats and a majority in the Senate too.  Morena also won 4 of the 9 governorships plus Mexico City and won control of 19 of 24 (of 32 states on the ballot) state legislatures.  All of this ftom a party that was founded in 2014 after AMLO split from the PRD, the previous party of the left, whose remnants shifted to the center and now are on the verge of political extinction. What does all this mean?  Actually, it is hard to say.  The AMLO of 2006 wanted to reverse the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and many alarmed neol...

NAFTA was a huge step in the direction of North American Integration.  For proponents of the idea, North American Integration is a far from finished project.  I would like to spend some time examining the outlines of this project.    My text for this discussion of the North American idea is North America: Time for a New Focus , an Independent Task Force Report for the Council on Foreign Relations, written in 2014 and chaired David Patreaus (former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan) and Robert Zoellick, former U.S. Trade Representative.           I would preface this discussion with recent news from U.S. trade policy under Donald Trump.   Trump is turning away from multilateralism in U.S. foreign economic policy in favor of bilateral relations.   He has recently decided to impose steel and aluminum tariffs on Mexico and the Canada.   Mexico has announced the imposition of counter-tariffs on U....

I have just read an interesting discussion of AMLO (Andres Manuel Obrador Lopez) in the Mexican magazine  Nexos  by Hector Aquilar Camin , an important public intellectual in Mexico.  Aguilar is no ally of AMLO - he is a proponent of the neoliberal status quo in Mexico, which means reforming the reforms that Pena Nieto made in 2013 with the support of Mexico's three major political parties - the PRI, the PAN and the PRD.   But political support for perfecting neoliberalism in Mexico is waning.  The latest opinion polls from the newspaper  La Reforma  give AMLO 52% while Ricardo Anaya (of the PAN/PRD alliance) has dropped to 26% and Jose Meade of the PRI has only 17% of the voters' preferences.  AMLO's party, Morena, is given by another prominent polling firm, Mitofsky, an 80% chance of winning control of the House of Deputies and a 30% change of winning control of the Senate.  What seems set to occur in Mexico on July 1 is a massive...