The Changing Drug War in Mexico: Can Activism Succeed Where the Army Can't? Brian Stewart - CBC News
go to original April 15, 2015

A demonstrator holds a photocopy of Julio Cesar Mondragon, one of the 43 missing students from a rural teachers' college, during one of the many protests that ripped through Mexico in the wake of the group's disappearance at the hands, it's reported, of local police and drug cartels last year. (The Associated Press)

There have been times in recent years when Mexico felt that its only hope to stem the rising blood-tide of its drug war was to send in the military to the most affected states, to clamp down on the near anarchy.

For the six years under former president Felipe Calderon, from 2006 to 2012, army units waged tough campaigns against ruthless drug cartels in northern Mexico.

And yet the violence soared with each escalation of force, to the point where an estimated 60,000 people were killed in drug-related violence in these years, while another 25,000 went missing.

To put this in perspective, violence in Mexico has at times surpassed the annual death toll in Afghanistan's civil war.

And while it is not classified as a "failed state," large chunks of Mexico appeared on the verge of becoming so hollowed out by corruption and violence as to be virtually crippled.

People and jobs fled, local economies stagnated, and police and local administrations were too often bought out by the drug cartels.

Read the rest at CBC News

The arrest of Mexican drug lord Joaquin 'el Chapo' Guzman in February 2014 was hailed as a victory in America's war on drugs, but the truth behind the capture could be just another murky chapter in the scandal-ridden history of US involvement in Latin America and the Mexican drug wars. (BBC/AmazingDocu)

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