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| December 6, 2014: A march is held for the 43 abducted students. (Photo: Somos El Medio) |
The disappearance and likely massacre of 43 students from the rural teachers' school of Ayotzinapa in Mexico September 26 has provoked shock and outrage internationally.
Within Mexico, in addition to unprecedented levels of public anger, it has raised serious doubts about the sustainability of President Enrique Peña Nieto's mode of government, with its aggressively neoliberal economic program and levels of violence as high or higher than under his predecessor, Felipe Calderón, who initiated the drug war in 2006 with US collaboration.
Professor of law and political science at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, John Ackerman explores the sources of growing dissatisfaction in Mexico and sheds light on how the US connection perpetuates Mexico's social inequalities, endemic violence and authoritarian government.
Ackerman is also editor-in-chief of the Mexican Law Review and a columnist for Proceso magazine and La Jornada newspaper. A leading public intellectual in Mexico, he is a frequent contributor to the international media. For the academic year 2014-2015, he is a visiting professor at the Institute of Latin American Studies (University of Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle) and at Sciences Po (PSIA).
Calderón's legitimacy problem due to the circumstances of the 2006 election, which pushed him to militarize the drug war, is comparable to George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq after the 2000 elections. Both covered over legitimacy problems by rolling out the military.
Regarding US policy in Mexico with regard to the drug war, the central objective is to make sure that the violence stays south of the border. There's much less interest in reducing the violence as such, or even in cutting the flow of drugs. It's absolutely logical from a US national security perspective: They don't want beheadings and disappeared students north of border; they want them south!
The real problem is more on the Mexican side. The Mexican government has no humanitarian concern about its own people. The Mexican state has assumed the US' priorities in the "drug war," under Peña Nieto, just as under Calderón. The US government would not allow a similar strategy in its own country, precisely because of all the violence it would engender...
Regarding US policy in Mexico with regard to the drug war, the central objective is to make sure that the violence stays south of the border. There's much less interest in reducing the violence as such, or even in cutting the flow of drugs. It's absolutely logical from a US national security perspective: They don't want beheadings and disappeared students north of border; they want them south!
The real problem is more on the Mexican side. The Mexican government has no humanitarian concern about its own people. The Mexican state has assumed the US' priorities in the "drug war," under Peña Nieto, just as under Calderón. The US government would not allow a similar strategy in its own country, precisely because of all the violence it would engender...
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