The Mexico Tragedy
... The world enjoys Mexico: the country welcomed nearly 40 million tourists in 2017, sixth most of any nation, surpassing Germany and the United Kingdom for the first time. Mexicans enjoy themselves: they love their fiestas, and surveys show them satisfied with their family lives. Many things are moving in the right direction. Infant mortality rates have declined; life expectancy is up. GDP per capita has risen. The middle class has slowly grown, and illegal emigration to the United States precipitously declined. Billions of dollars of remittances from Mexicans living in the U.S. have helped reduce rural poverty. Shielded [by NAFTA] from foreign competition for decades, Mexican companies now thrive in the global economy....
The military has shifted allegiance from the party to the elected government....
Yet political dysfunction and the resulting feebleness of many government institutions threaten to destroy all this progress. Adding to the worries: the landslide victory in July of a president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is a creature of the system at its worst....
In cities and villages, from north to south and sea to sea, an ever-evolving, ever-replenishing population of thieves, extortionists, kidnappers, drug traffickers, cheats, and assassins has besieged society, defying or co-opting governments at every level. Mexicans’ ingenuity and ambitions, long stifled by their self-dealing political class, are finding an outlet in outlawry....
Consider the agility of the drug trade.... What began as a small, locally controlled business has evolved into a multibillion-dollar industry dominated by large networks that clash and collude with one another and with the state....
Organized crime networks control territory to varying degrees in 19 states and the capital, but much less of their profits comes from the U.S. drug market, which has become more competitive. The biggest new business is stealing oil from the state-owned energy company, Pemex. Mexico has the largest, most efficient black-market fuel-distribution network in the world,...
Train robberies and carjackings are more frequent....
Illegal immigration to the U.S. from Mexico has fallen in the last decade because more people have been killed making the trip, dissuading others from trying....
“Whether you’re getting robbed at the bank with the collusion of the teller, or raped on your way to work, or stripped of your cell phone on the bus, crime is an almost daily occurrence,” says Valdés. ...
Since 2000, the country has gone from a one-party dictatorship, ruled by a president with kinglike authority, to a multiparty democracy ruled by presidents so weak that governors and union leaders behaved like barons, back to a one-party regime led by a president with more power than ever...
He is closer in spirit to the pragmatic statists of the 1960s PRI than to the socialists of Venezuela....
“Mexico’s Constitution and Mexico’s federalism have always been fake,” says René Bolio, a former senator for the conservative National Action Party...
Book: Wakeup Call From Mexico - An Historical and Contemporary Understanding of Mexico’s Pandemic Violence, Drug War, Kidnappings, and Illegal Immigration; How to Safeguard America as America Spirals Toward Chaos
By Wilson Beck, Mucho Press, 2009
Book review: Spiraling Toward Chaos, by Fred Elbel, The Social Contract, Winter 2009-2010
Excerpts from the review:
Occasionally, a book is published which, while providing a myriad of details on a subject matter, also conveys the complete gestalt — the big picture. Wakeup Call From Mexico is such a book. Immensely readable, this book describes Mexico’s violent history, its class-based society, its ineffective and corrupt political system, and the serious threat that Mexico as a nearly failed state poses to the United States. The historical perspective alone makes this book required reading for all concerned with U.S.-Mexico relations and unending illegal immigration across the unsecured U.S.-Mexico border....
Beck observes that “We are out of focus as a country, as a culture with the negative impact that both the drug-industry and illegal immigration is having on the U.S.” He notes that “Congress can change a fifty year-old, obsolescent immigration law that was written to address racism yet continues to be a serious impediment to the development of twenty-first century America.”
He warns that “If the U.S. and Mexico do not start down a new path of cooperation Mexico will be a failed stated within ten years” with clearly disastrous consequences for the United States.
“America’s negative response to illegal immigration is not fear. It is a desire to maintain its level of education, values, and integrity.” Beck cautions that history is trying to repeat itself: the Aztecs are migrating northward by the millions, and he asks, “Will America become Mexamerica? It is our responsibility to decide.”