Since
2006, more than 100,000 people have been disappeared or killed in
Mexico, a country where more than 90 percent of crimes go unpunished.
While running for president in 2012, Enrique Peña Nieto promised a new
security strategy for the country, and an end to the highly militarized
campaign waged by his predecessor, Felipe Calderón. Since taking
office, however, Peña Nieto’s strategy has focused not on the safety of
its people but on the confidence of its international investors. To
make Mexico more attractive to overseas capital, he has pursued a
market-based reform agenda that includes a technocratic overhaul of
education, a move to shake up the telecommunications sector and the
opening of the energy sector to foreign private investment. New
narratives about the “Aztec Tiger”
won’t make the kidnappings, beheadings and mass graves disappear, but
Peña Nieto is doing everything he can to make foreign investors forget
about them.
The
irony of touting market-based reforms as a means of sweeping the drug
trade under the rug is that the cartels themselves have become some of
the most ruthlessly effective multinational capitalist enterprises in
Mexico. The cartels are beginning to diversify, making money not just
from drugs and other criminal activities like kidnapping and human
trafficking but increasingly from control over industries like mining,
logging and shipping.
Meanwhile,
finance and real estate sectors in Mexico and the United States are
awash with cartel profits, with one United Nations analyst arguing
that drug money was the “only liquid investment capital” that kept the
international economy from completely imploding in 2008. Over the last
few decades Mexican capitalism has become a tangled web of legal and
illegal activity, and the distinctions between licit and illicit
economies have become increasingly blurred. The policies of the Mexican
and US governments are only accelerating this trend.
There
are two separate but deeply connected histories that have created the
situation in Mexico today: first, the neoliberal restructuring of the
economy that began in the 1980s; and second, the rise of the drug trade
and the cartels that control it. Squarely at the center of both stories
has been the Mexican state, whose corruption, incompetence and often
contradictory policy choices (in tandem with those of the United States)
have served to create vast sums of wealth for a few, while heightening
insecurity for Mexico’s working people. When we talk about the drug
trade, we are talking about a deeply entrenched part of contemporary
capitalism in Mexico, not its undoing.
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