What's missing from this picture? (Answer: The United State's appetite for illegal drugs and legal guns.)
Anyone who follows the American news media’s coverage of Mexico recently knows that the news hasn’t been pretty. The peso is trading weakly against the dollar, making daily life harder for Mexico’s middle class and near impossible for Mexico’s poor. (The recent exchange rate has been between 13 and 15 pesos to the dollar. Good for those paid in dollars. Bad for everyone else.) Perhaps more alarming to tourists, recent weeks have brought dozens of articles about the gruesome violence associated with drug trafficking and the cartels that control the drug trade in Mexico.
Among this influx of bad news, there have been several interesting articles about Mexico that aim to help keep this kind of bad news in perspective.
The first was by our own Anahi Parra, on the blog Latina Lista where she writes about the idea of Mexico as a “surrealist country” and the role that both the United States and Mexican governments play in creating the surreal images (decapitations, etc.) that we see now. She lets neither government off the hook, “since both of them have built up the whirlwind that we witness now.”
In the New York Times, Mexican historian Enrique Krauze’s March 23rd op-ed piece warns readers not to buy into the recent references to Mexico as a “failed state,” highlighting Mexico’s achievements over the past century and pointing out the danger of this rhetoric on both sides of the border. He similarly calls for consideration of the United States’ role in Mexico’s current problems,
Washington should support Mexico’s war against the drug lords — first and foremost by recognizing its complexity. The Obama administration should recognize the considerable American responsibility for Mexico’s problems. Then, in keeping with equality and symmetry, the United States must reduce its drug consumption and its weapons trade to Mexico. It will be no easy task, but the United States has at least one advantage: No one thinks of it as a failed state.
Then, just last week I noticed travel writer Christine Delsol’s article in the San Francisco Chronicle asking potential tourists to Mexico to read “Between the Headlines.” After acknowledging the chilling 7,300 deaths that have been associated with the drug trade in the past two years, she contextualizes these murders in a broader picture of Mexican safety:
While these alarming numbers aren’t exaggerated, the risk to tourists visiting Mexico definitely is. The latest comprehensive data available from the United Nations Survey of Crime report Mexico’s overall murder rate as 13 per 100,000 people, compared with 4 per 100,000 in the United States. An estimated 90 percent of Mexico’s murders are specifically drug-related — not U.S.-style mall shootings, schoolyard massacres or road rage — and concentrated in five of its 31 states, leaving the rest of the country freer of crime than most of the United States.
Perhaps her analysis will be helpful to those thinking of visiting or moving to Mexico in the near future, and have been warned by countless coworkers and relatives not to do so. (For another thoughtful interpretation of crime and safety in Mexico City, read the “Who’s Afraid of Mexico City?” chapter of David Lida’s book First Stop in the New World.)
What drew me to compile these three articles here is the way they all acknowledge that Mexico and its problems do not exist in a vacuum. Looking at any “Mexican problem” (“Mexican crime,” “Mexican poverty”) without a broad (read: multi-national) lens teaches us very little about the problem at hand and even less about Mexico. We can see the consequences of this kind of narrow thinking in the Obama administration’s recent move to station hundreds of additional agents at the U.S.-Mexico border. This sort of muscle-flexing is a short-sighted non-solution to a much larger and more complex problem, and will no doubt further endanger those immigrants pushed to cross in even more remote stretches of the border. Although I was impressed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s admission that “our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” I remain disappointed by the new administration’s business-as-usual approach to Mexico and its people.
I welcome comments about these articles, safety and violence in Mexico, U.S. Mexico relations, and anything else this post might have stirred up!