Javier Sicilia - Mexico and the US: Two Faces of the War on Drugs Javier Sicilia - Proceso
go to original December 2, 2013

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander Check it out on Amazon.com

The other face of the drug war, whose costs in Mexico are already extremely high, rest in the segregationist policies that African-American communities suffer in America, despite the triumphs of the blacks' civil rights movement. To find the intimate relationship between our suffering and that of these minorities in the neighboring country, it is necessary to read a book by attorney Michelle Alexander: "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" (2010).

Jim Crow is taken from the nineteenth century stage show Jump Jim Crow performed by white actor Thomas D. Rice to satirize the populist policies of President Andrew Jackson, and it refers to segregationist laws that, enacted in 1875 under the slogan "separate but equal," came to an end in the 1960's with the blacks' struggles for civil rights. For Alexander, however, these laws have returned to be enforced under the guise of the war on drugs that Richard Nixon decreed in the early 1970's.

This war, which over the last seven years in Mexico has claimed more than 80,000 lives and at least 30,000 missing, in the United States has taken the form of criminalization and incarceration. The fact, says Alexander, that the United States - a country with 5% of the world's population - has 25% of the world's prisoners in the world - in first place, black youth; in second place, Latinos - reveals that the majority of those [imprisoned] have no place in the global economy and have become a population "warehousable in prisons."

Read the rest at Mexico Voices

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