By R. Evan Ellis

With its 128 million people and GDP of $1.26 trillion, Mexico is strongly connected to the United States through geography, commerce, and family. What happens in Mexico directly affects the security and prosperity of the United States, and vice versa. Mexico, not China, is the United States’ largest trading partner, with $614 billion in bilateral commerce in 2019. That interchange is now reinforced by the implementation of the United States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement (USMCA), which feeds and is fed by enormous U.S. investment—$101 billion in 2019, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. Those commercial ties sustain the presence of 1.5 million U.S. citizens living in Mexico. The performance of the Mexican economy, local conditions, and the effectiveness of its governance thus affect American jobs, investment, security, and lives. Beyond commerce, activities related to illegal drugs—ranging from the movement of cocaine to the production of opioids and synthetics to the distribution of fentanyl (although originating in China)—involve, at least in part, Mexico-based drug gangs and Mexican territory, just as Mexicans are victimized by weapons illegally smuggled into the country from the United States. The United States depends substantially on the efforts by and cooperation with the Mexican military and law enforcement to help combat narcotraffickers and organized crime in all of its forms.

Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2020. 11p.

By Carlos Alberto Sánchez

Contemporary popular culture is riddled with references to Mexican drug cartels, narcos, and drug trafficking. In the United States, documentary filmmakers, journalists, academics, and politicians have taken note of the increasing threats to our security coming from a subculture that appears to feed on murder and brutality while being fed by a romanticism about power and capital. Carlos Alberto Sánchez uses Mexican narco-culture as a point of departure for thinking about the nature and limits of violence, culture, and personhood. A Sense of Brutality argues that violent cultural modalities, of which narco-culture is but one, call into question our understanding of “violence” as a concept. The reality of narco-violence suggests that “violence” itself is insufficient to capture it, that we need to redeploy and reconceptualize “brutality” as a concept that better captures this reality. Brutality is more than violence, other to cruelty, and distinct from horror and terror—all concepts that are normally used interchangeably with brutality, but which, as the analysis suggests, ought not to be. In narco-culture, the normalization of brutality into everyday life is a condition upon which the absolute erasure or derealization of people is made possible.

Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press, 2020. 171p.

Edited by Silvana Mandolessi and Katia Olalde

This volume presents an interdisciplinary analysis of the practice of disappearances in Mexico, from the period of the so-called ‘dirty war’ to the current crisis of disappearances associated with the country’s ‘war on drugs’, during which more than 80,000 people have disappeared. The volume brings together contributions by distinguished scholars from Mexico, Argentina and Europe, who focus their chapters on four broad axes of enquiry. In Part I, chapters examine the phenomenon of disappearances in its historical and present-day forms, and the struggles for memory around the disappeared in Mexico with reference to Argentina. Part II addresses the political dimensions of disappearances, focusing on the specificities that this practice acquires in the context of the counterinsurgency struggle of the 1970s and the so-called ‘war on drugs’. The third section situates the issue within the framework of human rights law by examining the conceptual and legal aspects of disappearances. The final chapters explore the social movement of the relatives of the disappeared, showing how their search for disappeared loved ones involves bodily and affective experiences as well as knowledge production. The volume thus aims to further our understanding of the crisis of disappearances in Mexico without, however, losing sight of the historic origins of the phenomenon.

London; New York: Routledge, 2015. 259p.