Mexico's narco war isn't ours

I was about to tell you about how Vanguard’s office here in Hollywood is located in the unofficial transgender street hustler capital of Los Angeles County, and about the effect that recession seems to have had on them, when my colleague Darren Foster mailed me this link.

I can switch subjects because even though, in March of 2001, Laura Ling and I shot an hour doc for MTV on street hustlers one block from where my desk at Vanguard now is, Laura and I also shot one last fall on the war among Mexico’s narco-traffickers.



When considering the size of the recent raids around the US against what’s happening in Mexico, one question is why the narco war down there isn’t up here, given how big the narcotics distribution networks here seem to be. The standard answer is that the cartels in Mexico didn’t used to be particularly violent either, until the federal government started to pressure them. In the old days, before the year 2000, when Vincente Fox was elected Mexico’s first president from a party other than the PRI in 70 years, cartels could maintain their position as multi-national corporations pretty much in the way that other multi-national corporations maintain their positions in their host countries—they were too big to fail. But once Fox, and his successor as President, Felipe Calderon, started to act against the web of corruption that bound the cartels to law enforcement and government officials, the cartels were obliged to maintain their positions the old fashioned, Chicago-in-the-1920s way, by shooting it out.

Another view might be that we seem to have just passed out of one of the more violent epochs in American history, the roughly 40-year period from the mid-‘1960s, until just a few years back. And if you look at all the urban homicides we had in that period, and look at how many were related in some way to narcotics, then maybe we already had our narco war. It was simply that, unlike what’s going on now it Mexico, ours wasn’t organized, just low-level dealers and users committing murder, often against each other. And where violence by powerful organized criminal groups can be viewed as a threat to the state, unorganized violence is just a threat to the neighborhood.

On the third hand, we seem to be in an era where globalization brings us all sorts circumstance that we don’t seem to have seen before, and sometimes when you’re in the middle of something, it can be tough to see which way the trend line is moving.