The article linked to on this site reporting the recent Joint Operating Environment 2008 report by the U.S. Joint Forces Command is one of many of the web; surprise and concern at the US military’s bluntness is common. Many of these articles give the impression that the main concern of the American soldiers is the rising tide of kidnappings, violence and corruption, caused mainly by the drug trade. But a quick look at the report shows the wording is more precise.
The Phoenix Business Gazette points out “the U.S. military warns of globalization and urbanization fuelling social unrest, as well as a potential collapse of the Mexican government as that country deals with violence and corruption...”
So it’s more than crime and corruption which causes concern, it’s ‘social unrest’. The broad picture of the crisis has to incorporate (at least) the following factors:
- Neoliberalism in Mexico since the late 1980s has undermined many of the gains that workers and peasants won through the Mexican revolution, deepening poverty and widening the gigantic gap between rich and poor Mexico, like Brazil, is in world championship class in inequality.
- The NAFTA treaty has crushed Mexican agriculture and allowed US-controlled agribusiness to take over. Rural poverty is endemic, with the consequent huge migration to the city (especially the capital Mexico DF), when the ranks of the urban poor become enlarged every day.
- All drugs going from Colombia and Bolivia to the US have to go over through or round Mexico. Mexico is not just neoliberalised, it has joined the Narcosphere. The presidency, the state governments and the national government are deeply mired in drug corruption, as are large chunks of the police, military and judiciary. Hence the inability to stop drug violence. A recent report by Stratfor said, "There comes a moment when the imbalance in resources reverses the relationship between government and cartels. Government officials, seeing the futility of resistance, effectively become tools of the cartels. Since there are multiple cartels, the area of competition ceases to be solely the border towns, shifting to the corridors of power in Mexico City. Government officials begin giving their primary loyalty not to the government but to one of the cartels. The government thus becomes both an arena for competition among the cartels and an instrument used by one cartel against another. That is the prescription for what is called a “failed state” — a state that no longer can function as a state. Lebanon in the 1980s is one such example."
- The vicious contempt for the poor amongst the super-elite, and the collapse of the ideology of Mexican nationalism in the two ruling parties – the PAN and the PRI – has combined with drug violence to create an increasingly repressive, militarised, response to popular movements. The paramilitary attack on the dissident community of Atenco in May 2006 and the ultra-violent repression of the popular uprising in Oaxaca in 2007 showed the new militarised face of government repression. And of course Zapatista communities in the south west have been victims of sporadic military attacks since 1998: the general militarisation makes their situation doubly insecure.
- Mexico's dependence on the United States makes it extremely vulnerable to changes in US market conditions. Today that means the Mexican economy is going downhill rapidly. Guess who will pay the price of lower economic growth and higher unemployment?
It is true that kidnappings and crime have spiralled out of control. Kidnapping is a very organised business and so is the drug trade. Much street crime comes from sections of the urban poor, generally brutalised and brutal young men. But the main source of violence is the corrupt rich and the wholly corrupted state apparatus. Every significant section of the powerful and rich, including the army command, take their cut of the drug money.
As ever it is not the drug trade, or the kidnappings or the gang killings that worry the US military: it is the social unrest and the social movements. The US military is concerned by an unstable state with large popular movements on its borders; and of course the US is host to large numbers of migrants from Mexico.
The statement of the US military is extremely worrying. US military intervention won’t happen any time soon, but in the face of a growing and powerful mass movement in the future, who can say that it would never happen? In the light of the events of the last five years?
|
