A Drug War Made in Mexico? America's Drug Policy Has Meant Nothing But Trouble Belen Fernandez - Al Jazeera
go to original May 28, 2015

Heroin production on the rise in Mexico (Al Jazeera)

A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the "Mexican Drug War" by Carmen Boullosa and Mike Wallace Check it out on Amazon.com

In a new book called A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the "Mexican Drug War", Mexican novelist Carmen Boullosa and Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Mike Wallace document NAFTA's passage as an essential godsend for the drug trade, the lucrativeness of which has greatly exacerbated official corruption.

The aftermath of the agreement, the authors note, saw the number of Mexican farmers living in poverty increase by one-third, with two million of them eventually forced to abandon their land.

The rampant dismantling of rural livelihoods was due in part to the fact that US agribusiness, "having zero qualms about ideological inconsistency, remained heavily subsidised", while Mexican subsidies for small farmers were forcibly removed along with tariffs and quotas on agricultural imports. "Free trade" indeed.

NAFTA didn't create the drug business in Mexico, nor did it single-handedly spawn the calamitous 'Mexican Drug War', which officially commenced in 2006 and in a matter of six years eliminated an estimated 70,000-109,000 people.

Many remaining farmers "found the burgeoning market for marijuana and poppies their only avenue to surviving on the land", while the swelling mass of urban unemployed provided the drug cartels with fertile recruiting ground. And the NAFTA-induced surge in cross-border traffic simplified the "insertion of narcotics into the stream of northward-bound commodities".

Obviously, NAFTA didn't create the drug business in Mexico, nor did it single-handedly spawn the calamitous "Mexican Drug War", which officially commenced in 2006 and in a matter of six years eliminated an estimated 70,000-109,000 people.

But it's a prime example of how a century's worth of US policies and cross-border machinations have exacerbated narco-activity under the pretense of curbing it.

Read the rest at Al Jazeera

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