The Declining Life Expectancy in Mexico Is Brought to You by Washington Nick Alexandrov - Counterpunch
go to original February 1, 2016

Mexico Narco Killings Drop Life Expectancy for Men (TheLipTV2)

“One of the greatest stories of the 20^th century was that we doubled the life expectancy of adults,” Terry Fulmer, head of the John A. Hartford Foundation, remarked recently. In the last quarter-century, Washington has helped fight this trend.

Consider the dark news Health Affairs delivered this month. Mexico saw a “decline in life expectancy from 2005 to 2010 among men nationwide,” mainly from “large increases in homicide mortality” dating to 2006.

That was the year Felipe Calderón won an “election marred by allegations of voter fraud,” Kristin Bricker explained. In his six-year term, he deployed 45,000 troops per year throughout Mexico - more than doubling his predecessor’s annual average of 19,293, according to George W. Grayson.

Battling drug traffickers was the stated aim of the surge, which soon yielded other results. One, Frank Koughan observed in Mother Jones, was that “complaints to the Mexican National Commission of Human Rights… skyrocketed, from 182 in 2006 to 1,230 in 2008.” There were 1,415 complaints in 2010. Two years later, Human Rights Watch reported that Calderón’s policies had “resulted in a significant increase in killings, torture, and other abuses,” like abductions. “Torture and ill treatment during detention are generalized in Mexico, and occur in a context of impunity,” the UN special envoy on torture, Juan Méndez, stated last March. “There’s a very clear correlation between the increased deployment of the military and increased human rights violations,” Center Prodh, a Mexican human rights group, emphasized.

And we can draw other connections - for example, between Washington’s support and the brutality just described. “The United States was an eager participant in the militarization of Mexico’s counterdrug policy, prompting and supporting it every step of the way,” wrote Laurie Freeman and Jorge Luis Sierra. They were describing the decades before Calderón. Then in 2005, the U.S., Mexican and Canadian governments arranged the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP). This plan, Peter Watt explains, “was neither a treaty nor a legal agreement” - thus “never debated publicly” - but was a means of “armoring NAFTA,” as Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon put it.

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