From One Disaster to Another? Mexico's Cold War and the War on Drugs Renata Keller - NACLA
go to original March 22, 2016

An encounter between the Mexican army and student protesters in the summer of 1968 in Mexico City's Zócalo (Wikimedia Commons)

Last week, former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso and former Colombian president Cesar Gavira, co-published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times declaring the War on Drugs an “unmitigated disaster.”

Zedillo and his co-authors, who are themselves hardly progressives, pointed to the spiraling violence and corruption in the region and the weakening of judicial systems and democratic institutions as evidence that prohibitionist, militarized approaches to drug control have failed.

They make a compelling argument, one that could be even stronger given a little more historical context.

In Mexico, as in much of the rest of Latin America, the disastrous War on Drugs both resembles and grew out of an earlier conflict: the Cold War.

Mexico’s War on Drugs shares a number of characteristics with the Cold War. Both are “intermestic” conflicts, or, to quote Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, conflicts in which the international and domestic aspects are “dynamically intertwined.”

During the Cold War in Mexico, as in the rest of the world, it was frequently impossible to untangle the links between international and domestic politics.

Read the rest at NACLA

Related: Report: War on Drugs Meant to Imprison Blacks, Leftists (teleSUR)

Related: The World Comes Together, as The War on Drugs Tears Nations Apart (volteface)

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!