Mexico: War without end?

Last weekend in Mexico, in a new escalation of the drug war, 24 people were killed in a 24 hour period. While falling short of the grisly record established in January this year, when 69 individuals died violent deaths in one day, it should give pause for thought to anybody who still believes that repressive methods can suppress the illicit drug market. In total, since President Felipe Calderon took office in 2006, over 23,000 people have died in the bloody war the US government continues to support.

Plan Merida, the government’s assault on the country’s massive drug trade, is funded by the US to the tune of $1.4 billion. It relies heavily on military intervention, with the bulk of the money going to equip the Mexican army. However, the project’s ‘successes’—centred on the arrest of cartel bosses—have only exacerbated the violence, creating a power vacuum quickly filled by violent conflict. And, despite the army’s new US weaponry, organized crime appears able to match it, using a combination of corruption and guns flooding in from across the US border. Human rights groups in Mexico have claimed that this southbound traffic is more severe in its consequences than the northward flow of drugs, despite the publicity generated by the latter.

To add to the human rights deficit associated with the drug war, Arizona has recently passed an anti-immigration law that gives the police the right to search and detain anyone they think looks like an illegal immigrant. Naturally, this is going to impact on US citizens of Hispanic appearance, adding a new layer to an old pattern of racism linked to the war on drugs. It has led the Mexican government to issue a travel alert urging extreme caution to its citizens travelling in Arizona. The measures have also been highly divisive inside the US, with mass protests across American cities and opposition from prominent figures including President Obama. In a final irony, traffickers have started avoiding border controls by moving the growing operation into the US, setting up plantations in National Parks, a displacement tactic familiar across decades of prohibition.