Did I miss some part which accounts for the police becoming involved in the war. Did the state attempt to stop the flow, thus inciting the attacks on police? And if so, why did the state make this decision? Not regulating trade is one thing; trying to stop it is another.
But NAFTA's only role was making smuggling easier, not in its impact on rural Mexico.
Carrol
On 5/22/2011 3:18 PM, Dennis Claxton wrote:
> Here's the beginning of an interview with Canadian investigative
> journalist Bruce Livesey. The whole thing is here (realnews tv and a
> transcript):
>
> http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=5572
>
>
> 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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