Mexico’s liberalization of trade and finance, with help from the world’s largest banks, has enabled drug traffickers and the corrupt political establishment.

Mexican blood is once again being splashed liberally across the front pages of the international press. After eight long years of the government’s disastrous war on drugs, the people have finally had enough and are rising up in a wave of quiet fury.

For Mexico’s ever-dashing President, Enrique Peña Nieto – the man that Time magazine not so long ago dubbed Mexico’s “savior” – none of this was part of his script to transform Mexico into a miracle economy. Even with the assistance of Televisa, Mexico’s largest media company, he can no longer keep up the pretense that things are on the up – not since the disappearance of 43 trainee teachers from the South Western city of Iguala two months ago.

According to the latest revelations (backed up by scant evidence), the students met a brutal end at the hands of a makeshift coalition of municipal police officers and drug gang members – all supposedly at the bidding of a local mayor, José Luis Abarca, and his wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda Villa, both of whom moonlighted as agents for Guerrero Unidos, a local drug cartel.

The Final Proof

The events prove what had long been common knowledge – namely that the federal government and local authorities have been infiltrated and in some cases replaced by organized crime cartels. As Jeff Faux recently wrote:

Many in the police, the judiciary and even the military are intimidated, inadequately trained, and/or corrupt. The influence of drug money within all three major political parties is now taken for granted…

That is not to say that Mexico is a failed state, as some are asserting, but it is failing in many critical areas – in particular at the local level. Endemic political corruption has played a vital part. According to international security expert Eduardo Buscaglia, political corruption is the “mother and father of organized crime’s expansion in Mexico” and there is a “pact of immunity” between all three main political parties. A fact that even some senior politicians are beginning to admit.

This chronic breakdown in law and order has its roots in Mexico’s transition, in the 1990s, from a de facto one-party state into a multiparty democracy. This transition opened up an enormous power-vacuum. Organized crime rushed to fill it, using corruption and violence to expand their operations and co-opt political power.

On a positive note, the problem of endemic political corruption in Mexico is now finally getting the attention it deserves, both inside and outside Mexico’s borders. However, corruption tells only part of Mexico’s tragic sage. There is another no less important, but generally ignored, factor in the rise to dominance of Mexico’s drug cartels: the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

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