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FREESTON: I think, Bruce, a lot of people are aware of the violence in Mexico, but not all of us really understand it and what's at the roots of it. And sort of that was what compelled your journey there. Could you tell us a little bit about what you found?
BRUCE LIVESEY, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST: It's a somewhat complicated story, in the sense that it's very much rooted in the history of Mexico, in sort of the past and recent times. And, essentially, in a nutshell, up until about 2000 the arrangement in Mexico was that the Mexican state and government and the political party at the time, which was the PRI, and the cartels sort of worked all in this kind of tango of corruption together. And so drugs could pass through Mexico, and everybody got a bit of money out of it, and the role of the state was to sort of manage and be a referee among the cartels. And what changed was in 2000 the PRI fell from power, and essentially PAN came to power on an anticorruption platform. So they essentially didn't want to be the referee among the cartels any longer. And what that led to was that in this sort of vacuum of power, the cartels began to compete with each other openly for each other's marketplace. Really it was through, I'd say, from about 2000 to 2006, the violence among the cartels began to grow as they began to sort of jostle for market share. I think the other thing that was very critical in this was NAFTA, and NAFTA played a role in two ways. In the early 1990s, the Americans were very successful in preventing, stopping sort of the flow of drugs to Florida from Colombia, especially cocaine. And what this did was that it forced the Colombians to think of another route of the drugs into the North American market, and they essentially cut a deal with the Mexican drug cartels to start transporting the drugs through Mexico. And when NAFTA came into effect in the early '90s, this made it much easier, 'cause the flow of trucks across the border increased enormously. And they began throwing shipments of heroin, crystal meth, and marijuana in with these shipments of cocaine, and it made them suddenly much more wealthier. Their portion of controlling the American market place grew enormously. So most of the drugs now entering the United States come through Mexico. So you had this combination of where the Mexican drug cartels got wealthier, the government stopped playing this role of being the referee. And what always happens in the world of organized crime, when you have no sort of regulation, is thatand it's generally a world that attracts the most ruthless aspect of the population is you end up with a lot of people killing each other. And that's really sort of in an overview, what's been happening.
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