After a decade of growing popularity, democracy has hit a slump in Latin America. A recent Latinobarómetro poll cited by The Economist in late October underscores this point. In all but three Latin American countries, fewer people than last year believe that democracy is preferable to any other type of government. In the cases of Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico, the drop in support for democracy is significant.
Rethinking Mexico’s relationship with the United States is an urgent priority, according to leading Mexican politician Andrés Manuel López Obrador. It “is more effective and humane to implement cooperation in order to reach development, rather than insisting on giving priority to police and military cooperation, as we do now,” Obrador said recently in Washington.
As the blood-spattered violence of the drug war takes over the headlines, many Mexican men, women, and children confront the slow and silent violence of starvation. The latest reports show that the number of people living in “food poverty” (the inability to purchase the basic food basket) rose from 18 million in 2008 to 20 million by late 2010.
Because of its resource wealth and strategic location, southeastern Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehantepec has for centuries been subject to the destructive ambitions of colonial powers. The Trans-Isthmus Megaproject is just the latest in a series of schemes to transform the narrow strip of land, which stretches from Salina Cruz on the Pacific to Veracruz on the Caribbean, into a first-class commercial route.
In early September, Mexican authorities arrested a U.S. citizen, Jean Batiste Kingery, for smuggling grenades across the border for the Sinaloa cartel. Astonishingly, U.S. agents had released Kingery a year before when he was captured for the same offense. U.S. law enforcement officials reportedly wanted to use him in a sting operation.
From July 25 to August 2 of this year, hundreds of Central American migrants, their family members, and activists participated in the Caravan “Step by Step for Peace” to demand respect for immigrant rights. Part I (here) of this article details the goals of the Caravan, especially its protest of the kidnappings of migrants who cross Mexico. Part 2, presented below, chronicles the travels by freight train across Mexico.
In 1936, a church group commissioned a film “to strike fear in the hearts of young people tempted to smoke marijuana.” But it was not until the 1970s that Reefer Madness — billed as “the original classic that was not afraid to make up the truth” due to its grotesque portrayal of the supposed dangers of marijuana — obtained cult status.
Mexico’s drug war is spiraling into bedlam. Within the past month, local Ciudad Juarez authorities deemed 15-year-old girls attending prison parties “impossible to control,” a 14-year old was accused of beheading and kidnapping for cartels, and masked guerilla groups continued to avenge their countrymen’s deaths. The war has no end in sight. Atrocities plague northern Mexico and other Central American countries, including Guatemala and El Salvador.
Although Obama’s attempt to reframe the debate moved discussion back into economics, he left out any structural explanation of what pushes migration in a globalized world. He portrayed U.S. companies that employ undocumented labor as rogue rule-breakers, and simultaneously exalted migrants as valuable assets while still describing them as global interlopers.
“It is undeniable that Mexico is going through a situation of violence in which groups of armed civilians (organized crime) sow terror and death, provoking the displacement of entire families so they are not murdered,” read a statement from three human rights groups.