newspeak

92,000 Dead in Mexico’s War on the Drug Cartels | Drug War 101.

A failed state? I mean Mexico. I’ve been wondering what even constitutes a successful state. During Calderon’s regime, especially in the last few years, Mexico’s GDP grew very quickly and there was a lot of foreign investment. Too obvious to write that the drug war provides the cover for a gross police state, including the supposedly rogue death squads and other paramilitary organizations…. (A police state of this magnitude serves to protect capital investment, such as factories and privileged retail areas.) Also, an incomplete summary and possibly misleading, as it would seem to suggest then that the drug gangs (they are not really cartels) represent the increasingly disenfranchised and generally poor/working class. But I would guess they do not and in fact do not “represent” any political body we normally would identify as a legitimate actor. But they are, in all likelihood, from what I’ve read, made up of the poor, disenfranchised.

Let’s fast forward and imagine that in a decade or so, this terrible nightmare of murder will have passed. What kind of public memory will be possible? Who will be held accountable? Even in Columbia, I don’t really see this: the claim is always that is over with, that the cocaine barons no longer represent a threat, they are no longer there. But  is that so?