Fragilecologies

Tag: mexico

  • Violence in Mexico: What’s the Cold War got to do with it?

    Violence in Mexico: What’s the Cold War got to do with it?

    Mexico is plagued (the correct choice of words. Another might be infested) with gangs that live and die by violence. While philosophers and economists have labored for centuries about how to put a monetary value on a human life, in Mexico today the value of life to any one of those drug-related gangs is but a few dollars, the cost of a bullet or two.

    There is no line drawn between the guilty targets of one gang against a rival gang and innocent bystanders. It seems that the gangs are trying to intimidate their rival gangs by killing innocent bystanders in the area controlled by their rival gangs. When they can’t strike out at each other they strike out at innocent people. Anyone, anywhere — butcher, baker, candlestick maker — has become fair game in this Mexican style “proxy gang war.”

    Proxy wars were common during the Cold War decades. The Soviet Union and the United States were engaged in an ideological do-or-die war of ideologies with each superpower backed up by its large and growing nuclear arsenal. But because both countries possessed nuclear weapons, they sought to avoid a heated conflict that could potentially escalate into a hot nuclear conflict. So, they resorted to the use of proxy combatants with each superpower supporting one or the other side in a conflict: north vs south Korea, north vs south Vietnam, east vs west Germany, Chang Kai Shek’s China vs Mao Tse Tung’s China, and so it went right up to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

    Much of the Cold War rhetoric was centered on terror tactics of which there were two types, one focused on force and the other focused on value. Force meant one country would threaten to strike at the army of the other: if you strike first, we will go after your military bases and other installations. The second type was based on value or threatening to strike back at non-military (soft) targets such as highly populated urban centers, if provoked.

    Strategies were then developed to counter such types and were called counterforce and countervalue, with follow up programs to harden the defense capabilities of urban areas as well as military establishments.

    So, can the Cold War serve as an analogue to current situation in Mexico?

    The situation in Mexico, as I see it, is one of a “proxy war” that is focused on value: that is, where rival drug gangs seek to intimidate each other by going after the public within the territory of its rival gang to expose vulnerabilities and the proverbial Achilles heel of the rival gang. The government is helpless and apparently hapless in protecting its citizens. It has no counter value strategy and cannot guarantee the safety of its citizens.

    The question then becomes, who needs a government that cannot protect it from hostile forces? Isn’t this one of the basic inalienable rights of citizens in their exchange for loyalty to the government, sort of an unwritten social contract between governed and governors?

    What then is the government to do — business-as-usual by letting the rampant violence continue while protecting enclaves of the wealthy within the country? Or should it concede that the situation within its borders is out of its control and call for international assistance to go after the destabilizing gangs?

    the people protest drug wars in Mexico, 2011

    To do nothing would be to allow for a situation like the one that exists far away in the heart of Africa, in the Congo in the heart of Africa to continue. A government that accepts the status quo — violence in areas out of its control, is accepting “anomie” a situation in which unstructured violence can prevail. [NB: ” French sociologist Emile Durkheim used the concept ‘anomie’ to talk about the dangers that people in modern societies experienced. He constructed this French word ‘anomie’ (meaning without ‘norms’ or social laws) to describe the dysfunctional aspects of modern societies.” (yahoo.com)]. Does this describe what is happening to our neighbor to the South?

    America’s hands are not clean. Americans buy the drugs that those gangs illegally send North to us. In large measure Americans have a collective responsibility for what has happened to Mexico.

    Is it too late to reverse the violence to the South or the drug use to the North? Only time will tell, but there is not a lot of time left to resolve this situation. Sometimes it makes me think of the movie “Mad Max.”

  • A few centuries of US-Mexico interactions: Going Full Circle? Mickey Glantz. 3 August 2010

    Some months ago I came across a high school world history book (Human Achievement, 1967 by M.B. Petrovich and P.D. Curtin). It was a typical history book in that it began with discussions of the Egyptian, Roman and the Greek civilizations and ending up with the state of the globe in the post World War II era. It was filled pictures, drawings and with maps showing the changes in national political power throughout millennia. While each map merits a book to describe the times it represented, one map captured my attention when I first saw it; and it still does. I think about what it might mean or how it might be viewed not in an historical context of a century and a half ago but in the context of today’s domestic politics of the US and of Mexico.

    The map shows that much of the culture if not the territory west of the Louisiana Purchase (that is, west of the Mississippi River) was dominated by Mexico (though, in fact, the territory was inhabited by a wide range of Native American civilizations).

    Though all of that land was in some way influenced by Mexican culture or politics, bit by bit it was taken over by war or diplomacy by the United States pursuing as early as the late 1830s its policy of “Manifest Destiny.” All the above is my recollection of American history, inaccuracies notwithstanding.

    Today, there is a lot of controversy over the issue of illegal immigrants focused mainly on those immigrants coming from Mexico. The US Government has a Border Patrol spread thin along the 1956-mile (~3200 km) border. Groups of vigilantes have emerged to protect the border against illegal alien crossings. The federal government has built fences/walls to keep people from illegally crossing into the US. The State of Arizona has perhaps taken the biggest step so far, when its legislature passed a state law that seeks to weed out illegal aliens based on how a person looks, dresses, walks, talks or even who that person hangs out with and where.

    Police are given extraordinary subjective powers to determine “the illegal aliens among us.” Much of the racial profiling aspects of the law was recently struck down as being unconstitutional, but the federal judges ruling will likely be challenged by the Governor of Arizona. There is a lot of angst as well as racial or ethno-language bias in America these days. During hard economic times, there is a backlash by the dominant culture against minority cultures.

    The North America map of 1821 keeps reappearing in my mind. It causes me to wonder if the parts of North America that was lost by Mexico during the 1800s due to war and diplomacy are being regained by Mexico in other ways. In the absence of conquests related to Americans’ Manifest Destiny” policy, might not today’s map of North America been still represented by the map of 1821?

    Most Americans likely have not seen that 1821 political map, except for a brief moment in middle or high school. Out of sight; out of mind. In the mid-1990s American Political Scientist Samuel P. Huntington wrote about “the clash of civilizations” in reference to his belief that “that people’s cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world” [from wikipedia]. Today, we are witnessing what I believe is really a clash of cultures, and even civilizations, being played out on the North American continent and no one knows how best to address it.