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We’re missing yet another capitalist experiment go bad. Chile self-destructed earlier under the watchful eye of the IMF and its neo-liberal reforms. Mexico, geographically, is much closer to us and you would think that its slide into anarchy would garner a little more attention in our news media.
Nah.
The breakdown of Mexican civilized society continues unabashedly while the important powers that be continue to make their money. The unravelling of the social fabric of Mexican society is chilling reminder of lawlessness actually is.
The North American Free Investor Agreement (NAFTA) was the harbinger of the demise of Mexican society. Austerity and cost-cutting denied the government the funds necessary to do what governments are supposed to do, serve and protect their people. Not industry, not finance, not capital – the people of Mexico. The inequality and insecurity are so entrenched, the people so desperate, people will do anything to survive. Morality, ethics all go down the shitter when you struggling just to survive the day. Consider the police situation:
Watch closely and you can see our future written in the blood of the poor of Mexico. We mourn for them, yet fail to see the precursors (neo-liberal reforms, etc.) that are shredding the social fabric of our societies.
Before my libertarian friends get entirely up in arms I’d like to preface this article with a disclaimer. This is not a’ beat up on libertarian inanity’ post, I have plenty of those already, but rather an examination of the role of the state when it comes to managing the affairs of a country. Now as to what the optimal mix is between the public/private is, is quite contentious. In my opinion, the social democratic state a la Sweden or to a lesser extent Canada does the best at preserving choice and liberty while keeping its citizens safe from “free-market” discipline and providing the social services necessary for a smoothly running society. Unfortunately for Mexico, they have been herded far away from anything resembling a social democratic state.
Mexico, the biggest loser in the NAFTA free investors agreement has never recovered from the trauma. Local industry and manufacturing was gutted with the influx of tariff free American goods. Local agriculture was hollowed out as tariff free food-stuffs made farming unprofitable with people leaving the land en mass (Our churlish Canadian federal conservatives are dismembering our single desk wheat board, moving us merrily closer to the Mexico model, yaaaa!) . What was left intact in Mexico was drug cultivation and production, as illegal trade tends not to respect treaties or borders (kinda like a different shade of NAFTA, creepy eh?) While the Mexican economy is going on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, the government was forced to adopt many of the notorious structural adjustments that we tend to enforce on even poorer countries to cut the ‘fat’ out of government spending.
What constitutes “fat” are programs that strengthen the social fabric and cohesion of society: Health Care, Education, and Welfare. Obviously the state has no business in areas like these, and the inevitable cuts destroy the social safety net for a countries citizens. Another step toward that lovely Darwinian state of being that is so often bandied about by libertarians. Survival of the fittest, personal liberties and freedom from government interference. Most of the time, your freedom consists of choosing how you and your family can starve or how quickly you can be come destitute if your unlucky enough to get sick. As the structures of the state fall away society morphs closer to the “me first, once I get mine, fuck you” attitude that exemplifies the majority of libertarian thought. Altruism, community, social supports all decay as the struggle to survive quickly marginalizes these now luxurious concerns. “How can I help my community?”, is trumped by, “How can I feed my family?” and necessarily so.
The emergence of the Mexican Narco state is the response to “how can I feed my family?”. The Narcotics industry is profitable, and there are many jobs available, positions that need to be filled and are filled by desperate people who struggle to exist in Mexican state that has been economically and socially hollowed out by ‘market forces’. The violence continues as the Cartels struggle for territory and power while the enfeebled state attempts to maintain order.
“The bound and gagged bodies of 26 young men were found dumped in the heart of Mexico’s second-largest city, in what experts said could mark a new stage in the full-scale war between the country’s two main drug cartels.
The bodies were found early on Thursday in two vans and a pickup truck abandoned on an expressway near the Milennium Arches in Guadalajara, one of the most recognisable landmarks in the city, according to several local media.Most of the men died of asphyxia, according to officials in Jalisco state where Guadalajara is located, though initial reports indicated some had been shot. Mexican drug cartels frequently leave threatening messages with the bodies of their victims as a way of sowing fear and taking credit for their actions.”
This is a version of the free market in action. With no rules, no regulation, everything is on the table.
“The victims, apparently between the ages of 25 and 35, all had the words “Milenio Zetas” or “Milenium” written on their chests in oil, said Jalisco state Interior Secretary Fernando Guzman Perez. A law enforcement official who was not authorised to speak on the record said the writing was apparently meant as the killers’ calling card, identifying the assassins as being from the Zetas and a smaller, allied gang, the Milenio Cartel. The official said a banner found in one of the vehicles, whose contents Guzman Perez refused to reveal, was in fact signed by the Zetas. The killings, apparently carried out before dawn, bore an eerie similarity to the September 20 dumping of 35 bodies on an expressway in the Gulf coast city of Veracruz.”
The desperate poor a set on each other killing themselves for their small slice of “the action” so they and their families might survive another day.
“Our correspondent said the federal government was steadfast in its decision to continue using the full force of the state to battle the Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel.
“Despite all of those efforts … these kinds of killings continue here and there’s a sense at times that the federal government is really unable to control these kinds of possible revenge killings by trafficking organisations,” he said. Felipe Calderon, Mexico’s president, has deployed the army to crack down on powerful criminal gangs and some 45,000 people have died in the conflict since he took office.”
The Drug War continues in Mexico. We are at least partially responsible for what has happened there, and what continues to happen there (we provide the market for the narco state’s end products).
Destroy enough of the domestic economy, deny the people access to basic welfare and state services and you get the drug fuelled cartel driven country wide chaos that is engulfing Mexico. People in Mexico are dying in violent drug related deaths every day but the Mexican media is not covering these stories. The coverage is not there because they tend to start loosing reporters when they focus too much on the drug cartels dangerous activities.
“Violence linked to Mexico’s drug war has claimed more than 36,000 lives since President Felipe Calderon declared all-out war on cartels in December 2006.”
The War on Cartels smacks of the same bankrupts ideas that the War on Drugs featured. Going after supply rather than demand for narcotics is a recipe for disaster. The disaster is largely unreported except for in blogs that have sprung up to fill some of the gaps in the Mexican mainstream media’s coverage.
“The images are gruesome and unedited: a dead man in a sports jersey with his face covered in dried red blood and grey sand; a woman hanging from a rope above a busy urban over-pass and naked bodies lined up on the ground displaying clear, uncensored, signs of torture.
You have reached Mexico’s narco blog: Click to continue.
“The narco blog uses much of the information citizens upload to other social networking sites,” says Pedro Perez, president of the democratic union of journalists in Tamaulipas, one of the states on the US-Mexico border hit hardest by drug violence. “Organised crime gangs don’t use it [social media] to inform, they use it for issuing threats.”
Anonymous blogging seems to be the only way that the chaos in Mexico is being covered.
“While much of Mexico’s mainstream media, especially television stations and local newspapers, has shied away from covering killings and naming the cartels involved, the narco blog and its anonymous curator, publish graphic details of spiraling violence.”
“Individuals journalists are doing the best they can, but in general I don’t think the media has done a fair job in covering drug violence,” says Lucila Vargas, a professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina who studies Mexico’s media landscape. “The media in Mexico are commercial enterprises and their first concern is with the bottom line,” she told Al Jazeera.
Like most large scale industries in Mexico, the media – particularly television stations – are highly concentrated in a few hands. Mexicans are more likely to own a television set than to have access to running water but two TV stations – Televisa and TV Azteca – control 94 per cent of television entertainment content, according to the Mexican Right to Information Association.”
Ah, the wonders of corporate media concentration. None of the news, none of the time.
“Mexico has become one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists: Between 2005 and 2010 at least 66 reporters were killed, with 12 more disappeared, according to a report by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). There have only been convictions in 10 per cent of the cases.
Violence, fear and impunity don’t just hurt reporters and their families, they decimates the quality of coverage.
“Local journalists have made a pact to just cover official acts like government activities, local policemen and local activities, things that are not dangerous,” says Perez, who has been threatened by cartels while working with journalists in one of the most violent border-states. “We would like to be heroes, but we are being shot at by criminals.”
A 2010 analysis of drug war coverage from the Fundacion MEPI, and investigate journalism center, found that regional newspapers in Mexico are failing to report most execution style killings linked to cartels. Journalists interviewed for the study said threats, bribes and other forms of pressure influenced their decisions not to cover killings or name the suspected cartels involved.
“Organised crime members have tried to bribe or influence traditional media [and] that is the importance of social media,” says Raul Trejo Delabre, an independent media analyst in Mexico City.”
With large scale media rendered ineffective the small scale citizen level journalism is doing what it can to pick up the slack and report the horror that is going on Mexico.
Mexico provides a grim case study of what can happen when the state has been rendered deficient almost to the point or being irrelevant in carrying out the basic functions necessary for its citizenry.
“Last year was the bloodiest yet in Mexico’s war against organised crime as drug-related deaths jumped to a record high.
More than 15,000 people lost their lives in Mexico’s conflicted with the traffickers in 2010.”
Watch, read and be depressed. I’m curious as to how long the US is going to ignore the Mexican Meltdown. Maybe when the death toll doubles? Triples?
What was particularly interesting was the poll cited during the interview saying that the Mexican government strategy of using the Army to tackle the Drug Lords was wrong, and rather a negotiated settlement between the government and the drug dealers should be reached, as the current plan is causing too much death and upheaval.
Not mentioned is the idea that the major consumers of Mexican drug trade, the US and Canada could probably do away with a large portion of this violence by simply legalizing and taxing the heck out of these substances.
We have many interesting ideas floating around about how capitalism works and its benefits. I would like to focus on just one small aspect of capitalism with regards to how it is implemented in the world and how it applies to difference classes.
One economic fact that escapes many proponents of the ‘free market’ is that for an country’s economy to grow strong, high tariffs and decidedly protectionist measures are required to protect sovereign industry from competition. State intervention in the economy is necessary for the economy to prosper an grow. The pattern has been repeated several times in recent history.
Starting with Britain and her industrialization and capitalization of her economy. To foster the domestic cotton industry, that in the beginning had no hope of competing with a superior product from India, Britain raised tariffs on Indian products and well, brutally conquered India, kicking there textile industry back into the stone age. Imperial solutions for economic problems were easier back then as we could take the role of ‘bringers of civilization’ to the unruly barbaric masses.
Flash forward to today; the economic imperatives remain the same. Protectionism for us and free market discipline for the rest of world. The mailed fist is still omnipresent, but not so blatant as public opinion of the generally benevolent masses must not be stirred from their slumber to protest the injustices being wrought in their name. One of notoriously sublime moves our business classes made in North America was the North American Free Trade Act, which more aptly should be called the North American Free Investing Act giving enormous power to private business and severely curtailing the power of the states involved to intervene in their economies. Mexico, being the weakest signatory to NAFTA, has suffered the most.
Unable to control the flow of goods into the Mexican domestic economy, Mexico’s society has steadily been devolving under the weight of cheap imported products, especially foodstuffs, that have undercut and essentially destroyed the local economy. What has replaced industry in Mexico is the narcotics industry, given the huge market in the US for drugs, narcotics trade and trafficking has become the new Mexican domestic economy.
The Mexican state, not strong to being with, can do little to quell the illegal drug industry, as people have to work and eat. However, the resulting narco-state is not particularly stable or safe as recent headlines have illustrated.
“The bodies of 15 young men, 14 of them headless, were found Saturday outside a shopping centre in the Mexican resort of Acapulco, police said.
Police believe the victims, all appearing to be in their 20s, were killed and their bodies stuffed into five vehicles by drug cartel members. Investigators say handwritten signs were left with the bodies, a common calling card for the country’s cartels.
This was the largest single group of decapitation victims since Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against cartels more than four years ago.”
Not exactly something you want to put in your tourism brochures.
So Mexico is currently embracing the free market and devolving (has devolved?) into a narco-state to feed demand in the US and Canada. Thanks NAFTA.
If we were to apply the same free market prescriptions the IMF and the World Bank do to other countries to ourselves, we might get a small taste of why we and our trumpeted economic system are not welcomed with flowers and open arms.
Strike that. Give us your perimeter fences, surveillance drones and border guards.
“U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday signed into law a bill to improve security at his country’s border with Mexico.
The $600-million US measure will pay for the hiring of 1,000 new Border Patrol agents and the purchase of new communications gear — including surveillance drones.”
I guess the poor and tired masses need to go to a different country as the US is plum full up.
“But his administration has come under fire from many Republicans for not doing enough to prevent huge of numbers of Mexicans from illegally crossing the border into the U.S. The issue seems likely to play prominently in this fall’s mid-term elections.
The controversy over how best to deal with Mexican migrants came to wide public attention earlier this year, when Arizona passed a controversial law that required law enforcement officers to check the immigration status of anyone they reasonably suspect of being an illegal immigrant.”
Past the glaring police-state provisions that were once part of the Arizona bill, Obama guessed he would have to do something to support the xenophobic undercurrent that swirls in the southern states. As the article says, mid term elections are coming, which I guess is code for pandering to the Republicans and putting ones own liberal democratic base into a deeper category of “ignore”.
I hypothesize that his move will only further alienate the people who elected Obama as president and will make the US electoral choice of the lesser of two evils a closer call.
“On Wednesday, Florida lawmakers introduced their own immigration bill that would require immigrants to carry valid documentation or be jailed for up to 20 days.”
Well, I guess Arizona cannot have all the authoritarian fun. :/
Al Jazeera reports: Mexico has become the top provider of sex slaves to the Americas, according to the United Nations.
Is this report really surprising? I mean with NAFTA and all the globalization free trade nonsense aka the Race to the Bottom how can this be an unexpected result? Mexico is at the bottom of the North American socio-economic heap we should look to this country as laboratory as to the results of unregulated capitalism and what it does to people, especially women who inevitably are on the lowest tier of society.
The report is chilling.
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