Jorge Casteñeda, a leading Mexican intellectual and professor of politics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City and Global Distinguished Professor of Politics and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University has written a fascinating analysis of the violence attendant to the "war on drugs" in Mexico.
The subtitle of the article is Five Myths that Caused the Failed War Next Door.
Casteñeda surfaces and challenges five myths that informs and justifies the war against drugs, myths like "drug use among Mexican young people is skyrocketing," or the war on drugs is caused by the flood of U.S. guns into Mexico, and so forth.
For me, it helped put the shocking news stories about violence in Juarez and Chihuahua, and other parts of Mexico, in a larger context.
Casteñeda's article also reminds me that, in his foreign policy, President Obama again follows the precedent of President Bush. The principal policy of the Bush Administration toward Mexico was to prosecute the war on drugs in Mexico. Obama's policy toward Mexico is essentially more of the same. Basically, today, we ignore Mexico, our most important neighbor by far except for training their police and military to do a better job against the cartel violence.
By the way Spanish for quagmire is "lodazal" or "cenagal" or "ciénaga" all words for the big muddy or swamp. My Spanish professor, Guillermo Retana prefers lodazal.
The reference in Casteñeda's article is obviously toward the American use of "quagmire" to describe our war in Vietnam. It should also be applied to prosecuting our "war" against terrorism by invading Afghanistan and Iraq.
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