The more the United States comes to dominate Latin America, the more Latin Americans will come to dominate the United States. 

Earlier this year, President Trump was taken with the idea of making Venezuela the 51st state. Such threats to annex portions of the Americas have become almost routine: Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal, and now Venezuela. Previous US expansion schemes failed in Baja California, the Yucatan, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and even Quebec.

Yet it is worth dwelling on what an American Venezuela would mean for the United States. The Bolivarian Republic has a population just shy of 32 million people. As the 51st star on the American flag, it would be the second largest state in the union by population, behind only California and just ahead of Texas. Allocated a fair number of electoral college votes, it would overnight become the decisive swing state in any US presidential election, with more people than Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio combined. 

Presiding over the greatest expansion of US citizenship to a Latin American population ever would be an ironic outcome for MAGA. By comparison, the Reagan Amnesty of 1986 extended a pathway to citizenship to fewer than 3 million undocumented immigrants, predominantly from Latin America. The Trump administration is currently trying to strip 600,000 Venezuelans living in the United States of Temporary Protected Status, a legal category that protects foreign nationals from deportation but does not offer a pathway to US citizenship. To then turn around and offer it to 32 million Venezuelans, who would then presumably be free to move across state lines, would be unexpected to say the least.

Assuming any deeper thought has been put into it, perhaps the kind of US citizenship envisioned for Venezuelans in this hypothetical 51st state is a second-class variety. This was the experience of the newly minted Mexican-Americans created by the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and put the territories of New Mexico, and California under US control. The former Mexican citizens lost much of their land to white settlers during the Gold Rush, and were not able to call on the rule of law to defend themselves. De facto second-class status is already the case for US citizens of Latin American origin today, thanks to the Trump administration’s deportation policies and its reliance on racial profiling, a reality that has been driving an ever-growing number of Latinos away from Trump’s political coalition. Perhaps he simply hopes to create in Venezuela a population of US-citizen Latinos who would still like to vote for him. 

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In reality, the annexation of Venezuela is highly unlikely. Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez has been accommodating to Trump since the US capture of her predecessor, but even for her, the prospect of complete annexation seems a bridge too far. The prospect of a prolonged counterinsurgency is probably unattractive. Indeed, guerrilla resistance was a major factor in protecting Mexican territory in Baja California, Sonora, and the Yucatan Peninsula from annexation by the United States during negotiations for the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Members of Congress were also opposed, not just liberal opponents of the war, but also white supremacists. As slaveholder Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina put it: “Are we to associate with ourselves as equals, companions, and fellow-citizens, the Indians and mixed race of Mexico?” There’s probably at least one Groyper in the White House wondering the same about Venezuela right now. 

Yet, it is worth acknowledging that becoming US citizens would suit many Venezuelans, Cubans, and Mexicans just fine. Many risk life and limb merely to work in America, even without the hope of becoming citizens. As unhappy as Puerto Ricans are with their commonwealth status, at least they can move to New York City or Miami at will, and vote the moment they get there. Many Latin Americans are envious. 

Furthermore, decisions that dramatically impact Mexico, Cuba, and Venezuela are being made in Washington every day. Everything from Mexico’s security policy to Cuba’s ability to import oil is being decided by the White House. And Nicolas Maduro, nominally the head of a foreign state, is being treated not as a prisoner of war, but as a common criminal arrested under US law, and charged in a Manhattan court. If the lives of Cubans, Venezuelans, and Mexicans are going to be shaped by the US presidency and their sovereign leaders subject to US laws, wouldn’t it be fair if they at least got to vote on it? 

Many more millions of Latin Americans will indeed get to vote. Whether naturalized immigrants or their far more numerous US-born descendants, they are already one of America’s largest voting blocs. The first Latin Americans to obtain US citizenship at scale were the conquered Mexicans of the Southwest. Millions more Mexicans would later migrate north into the former Mexican territories, often actively recruited as cheap labor to work in the extractive industries of the American West. American military conquest similarly created the other large and permanent US-citizen population of Latin Americans when it annexed Puerto Rico after defeating Spain in 1898. If you are unhappy that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is eligible to run for president, blame President McKinley. 

Meanwhile Cuba, while not formally annexed, was subjected to near-total US economic and political control, a quasi-colonial reality only broken by Fidel Castro in 1959, though Trump is now attempting to reverse the outcome. The political and economic entanglements with Cuba created a vast Cuban diaspora in the United States, even before Castro came to power. For example, Marco Rubio’s parents came to Florida not as political refugees but as economic migrants two years before the Cuban Revolution. 

In more recent history, US trade policies like NAFTA created dislocation and job loss in Mexico’s agricultural heartlands, at a scale similar to the destruction of the Midwestern Rust Belt. Millions of Mexicans headed north to build new lives in the United States, very belatedly meeting the hopes of the Spanish Crown in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries to settle its vast North American empire with Catholic Spanish-speakers. And these pioneers in the 1990s and 2000s largely remain in the United States today, excluded from citizenship, essential for our economy, and having in most cases already produced US-born offspring. They are increasingly joining electoral populist revolts of both the Right and Left — and have proven to be open to Trump’s pitch. Yet if you deport their parents, they have the ability to punish you at the polls. 

Despite its recent Latino support, Trumpism first emerged as a backlash to the post-NAFTA wave of mass Mexican migration. Earlier Anglo-American backlash, such as the state-level efforts of Proposition 187 in California or Senate Bill 1070 in Arizona had already made immigration the defining conservative issue in the American Southwest, an issue that ultimately helped shift both states blue. The restrictionist tendency has found its champion in Trump. Yet the US has already become a Latin American country in ways the Trump presidency is unable to reverse. And this would still be true if every undocumented immigrant were somehow deported tomorrow. 

The United States is already home to more native Spanish-speakers than any country other than Mexico. Latin American cultural influence abounds — the Bad Bunny performance at the Super Bowl was remarkable precisely because of how mundane it was. And the American Right itself is ever more Latin American. In 2024, Trump won his second term in large part because of historic levels of Latino support. Marco Rubio, the first man since Henry Kissinger to simultaneously serve as both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, records tributes to the United States’ distinctly Hispanic and Catholic roots. The Border Patrol agents who shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis are both Mexican-Americans. Hispanic authoritarians from Bukele to Pinochet to Franco are figures of open admiration in many corners of the American Right. The infamous Nick Fuentes is proud of his Hispanic heritage. In Donald Trump’s America, even our Nazis are Mexican! 

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Geopolitically, a US shift away from Europe and towards Latin America is also a defining feature of Trump’s second term. The White House endorses presidential candidates in Latin American contests as routinely as if they were governor’s races in a US state. And often, the MAGA label is attractive to voters in Honduras, Argentina, Colombia, and elsewhere in Latin America. Rubio’s “Americas First” foreign policy — experienced by Latin Americans as bullying and Europeans as abandonment — can nevertheless be read as Washington finally realizing exactly where it is and who it shares the continent with. The rumored possible shift in the US position on the Falkland Islands — from backing Britain to backing Argentina — should be understood as merely the geopolitical manifestation of America’s increasing Hispanization. The United States today is as much part of Latin America as it is the Anglosphere. It is, in Trump’s words, “OUR hemisphere.” And the more Latin America belongs to the US, the more Latin American the US will become.

It’s already happening. For Anglo politicians from the Southwest like Beto O’Rourke or George W. Bush, the ability to deploy Spanish is now an indispensable part of retail politics. Down the class ladder, white guys aspiring to work anywhere from a kitchen to a construction site need to pick up a fair amount of español just to talk to the other guys. Even Pope Leo, the first American Pope, is really more of a Latin American, admitting he would prefer to root for Peru in the World Cup over the United States. The pontiff is simply the highest-profile example of the reverse assimilation into Latinidad that will become an ever more common part of 21st-century American life.

It is natural then for both Republicans and Democrats to want to elevate Latino candidates to win over an increasingly Latino electorate. Based on recent 2028 polling, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio is a frontrunner for the Republican one. The 2028 campaign for the White House could well be between a Miami Cuban and a Bronx Boricua. That’s what a Monroe Doctrine gets you.

A Latino-on-Latina presidential contest in 2028 would be an objectively funny way to finally bring the Trump era of American politics to a close. A political movement which began with “Build the Wall” as its defining slogan and has lately devolved into “annex Venezuela” was never going to reverse centuries-long migration and demographic patterns. Whether these changes usher in a Lusotropical Neoconservatism or a Mestizo Socialism remains to be seen. Yet the arc of the moral universe is bending inexorably towards Latinidad. This may be the future that MAGA deserves: oprime 2 para inglés. 

We’ve seen other signs of stealth-conflict: a car crash killing two CIA agents in Mexico – who may have been involved in an alleged CIA assassination campaign against cartel operatives; the indictment by US authorities of Sinaloa Gov. Rubén Rocha Moya, a member of Sheinbaum’s Morena party, over alleged drug ties. Finally, the State Department revoked visas in June for Morena Govs. Alfonso Durazo and Américo Villarreal, stating that both were under investigation.

All of this has come amid conflicting statements from Trump officials. Last month, Drug Enforcement Administration head, Terry Cole, claimed that the Mexican government and cartel networks were “one and the same.” Days later, the US ambassador to Mexico, Ronald Johnson, credited Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum for an ongoing crackdown against the cartels, including a nearly 70% reduction in fentanyl flows to the US. Washington and Mexico City now exhibit a two-track relationship: one in which the two countries cooperate closely over security and another in which the White House appears hellbent on weakening the Mexican government. In the new paradigm of Trump II’s bellicose foreign policy, the latter is an ominous sign that Mexico could be the next target of US military intervention.  

Narcocorruption in Mexico is endemic and particularly rampant in failed states like Sinaloa and Tamaulipas. Sinaloa Gov. Rocha Moya, recently indicted by the US, was an alleged ally of the Chapitos faction of the Sinaloa Cartel — so named after loyalists to former kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. In the lead-up to the 2021 gubernatorial election, the cartel kidnapped Rocha Moya’s electoral opponents. In return, the governor has allegedly given the Chapitos forewarning of anti-narcotics operations. He resigned in May following his indictment by US authorities, though the Mexican government seems unlikely to extradite him.

But it is hard to make a case that the Morena party is uniquely tainted. For one thing, virtually all of Sinaloa’s governors in recent decades have had alleged links with the state’s eponymous cartel; in the 1980s, Institutional Revolutionary Party Gov. Antonio Toledo Corro reportedly harbored Guadalajara kingpin Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo in his home after the latter ordered the killing of DEA agent Enrique Camarena.  

Yet the fact that US authorities have selectively and exclusively targeted Morena politicians suggests that the Trump administration’s chief concern is neither good governance nor the drug trade. In May, the investigative think tank InSight Crime compiled a list of the most notorious Mexican officials accused of organized crime. Of the ten officials listed, six were associated with the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), two with the opposition National Action Party (PAN), and only two — including Rocha Moya — with Morena. 

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Sheinbaum, moreover, has rightly noted that Washington has denied all 269 of Mexico’s extradition requests since 2018, including former Tamaulipas governor Francisco Cabeza de Vaca. A dual citizen, Cabeza de Vaca is currently at large in Texas, despite embezzling roughly $300 million in concert with the Gulf Cartel. His affiliation with the Right-wing PAN has led many in Morena to accuse the Trump administration of condoning organized crime by perceived allies. 

Indeed, since 2025, the White House has pardoned or granted clemency to dozens of friendly fraudsters and convicted traffickers, including Chicago’s Gangster Disciples kingpin Larry Hoover and former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez. And the irony is that the first Trump administration arguably viewed AMLO, Sheinbaum’s mentor and predecessor, as a strategic ally. Officials such as former Organization of American States ambassador Carlos Trujillo lauded Mexican cooperation over trade and immigration, stressing shared interests and ideological pragmatism between both countries.  

Trump I shockingly condoned record-low drug seizures under AMLO, following the dissolution and replacement of Mexico’s Federal Police with the military National Guard in 2019. In his first term, the US president similarly heeded López Obrador’s counsel against designating Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations and dropped trafficking charges against Mexican Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos. And while Trump I also denied all of AMLO’s extradition requests, it nonetheless prosecuted former opposition party PRI and PAN officials such as former Security Minister Genaro García Luna and Nayarit Attorney General Edgar Veytia.

In contrast, it’s clear that the more interventionist — and Miami-influenced — Trump II no longer regards Mexico as an ally; in June, López Obrador went as far as to pen an open letter to his erstwhile friend, writing: “For the good of all, bring back the old Trump.” Even as Sheinbaum has deepened cooperation with Washington on immigration and security, much of the GOP is now virulently hostile to the Leftist president and her party. Many Republicans sincerely believe that Sheinbaum was “installed” by the cartels. Others, such as Miami neocon Carlos Gimenez, believe that Mexico is a “narcocommunist dictatorship” — a view shared by parts of the Mexican opposition.

Trump and MAGA hardliners have repeatedly called for strikes inside Mexico — a prospect that Sheinbaum has rebuffed. In one of many occasions in which Trump has referred to strikes, he gloated: “That [sounds] like a war. Would I do it? I’d be proud to.” And the White House strategy of punishing Leftists and elevating conservatives, deployed in other Latin American countries, appears to now include Mexico as well. Last year, Trump sanctioned and tariffed Brazil over its Supreme Court trial of former Right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro. In May, the State Department revoked visas for five board members of Costa Rican newspaper La Nación over its criticisms of the Trump-aligned government.   

Of course, unlike other Latin American countries, Mexico shares a border with the US and is the country’s largest trade partner. In the event of military action, the Mexican government could simultaneously close the border to roughly $1 trillion in trade and flood it with migrants by removing visa requirements on Cubans and Venezuelans. Given ongoing catastrophes in both countries, it is likely that millions of migrants would subsequently undo Trump’s signature accomplishment of slashing illegal crossings. Never mind the likely Mexican refugees fleeing US ordnance.  

Unlike the unpopular Trump, moreover, Sheinbaum has her country’s support: her approval rating has hovered around 70%, giving her a better chance of weathering a protracted standoff with Washington. Viewed in this light, US lawfare against Morena politicians can be read as an effort to weaken the Mexican government ahead of an eventual conflict, diplomatic or military or both.

In the case of Sinaloa, the White House’s actions have tragically worsened security — a key reason why previous administrations avoided indicting incumbent governors. Following the arrests of Sinaloa kingpins Ovidio Guzmán, Joaquín Guzmán and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the cartel has split between Guzmán and Mayo loyalists. With the Chapitos-and-Guzmán-allied Rocha Moya out, the Mayos have exploited the power vacuum to settle scores. Local journalist Luis Armando Becerra, a native of Culiacán in Sinaloa, told me that while he found the US indictments to be credible, officials “failed to consider its effects on local security.” 

The Trump administration now appears to be taking a subtler approach toward Morena officials. Despite having their visas revoked, Govs. Durazo of Sonora and Villarreal of Tamaulipas, as well as Gov. Marina del Pilar of Baja California, whose visa was revoked in 2025, have traveled to the US under a parole program reserved for informants. In July, a leaked phone call between Del Pilar and a purported FBI intermediary showed the governor offering to cooperate with US authorities.

It’s unclear whether US officials plan on indicting any of the aforementioned governors. Del Pilar is known to have associated with traffickers through her ex-husband; while plausible, Durazo and Villarreal’s alleged links to organized crime have yet to be substantiated. More likely is that the Trump administration aims to gather testimony for a bigger indictment; another possibility is that it is trying to co-opt governors it views as politically or geographically strategic. 

Much of the Mexican opposition believes that Washington aims to indict López Obrador, arguing that his son’s lavish lifestyle is a sign of drug money; the State Department has yet to give a motive for revoking the younger López’s visa. The DEA, however, has long attempted to substantiate alleged links between AMLO and the cartels — to no avail. In 2024, ProPublica revealed that the agency investigated claims that traffickers funneled $2 million into López Obrador’s 2006 presidential campaign, but couldn’t prove whether the former president “sanctioned or even knew of the traffickers’ reported donations.” Subsequent attempts to incriminate AMLO based on testimony from kingpins have failed to bear fruit.

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Alternatively, the Trump administration has shown a keen geographic interest in the US-Mexico border; Morena Govs. Del Pilar, Durazo and Villarreal control states neighboring Texas, Arizona, and California. The remaining border states of Nuevo León, Coahuila and Chihuahua are run by opposition governors, whom the White House likely sees as allies. Unlike Del Pilar, Nuevo León governor Samuel García has yet to face scrutiny from Washington despite comparable familial ties to traffickers. 

Indeed, the April deaths of two CIA officers were in the PAN-governed border state of Chihuahua. The two officers were found to have entered Mexico illegally with the blessing of embattled Chihuahua Gov. Maru Campos. Despite being nearly suspended from office over the incident, Campos subsequently authorized a joint surveillance hub with US agencies in Ciudad Juárez. US lawfare against Morena governors may ultimately be aimed at safeguarding CIA operations along the border — including its alleged assassinations of cartel members.

And yet, Sheinbaum’s government is arguably the most cooperative and competent Mexican partner that Washington has ever dealt with on security. The president and her security minister Omar García Harfuch have overseen a remarkable crackdown against organized crime, prioritizing mid-level cartel members in tandem with kingpins in addition to a policy of mass incarceration. 

Outside of Sinaloa, Sheinbaum’s strategy has managed to limit infighting within and between cartels following decapitations of kingpins such as Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) head Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera. Authorities quashed subsequent retaliations throughout the country within 72 hours. Just days after DEA head Cole’s comments regarding the Mexican government, Security Minister Harfuch thanked the DEA for its help arresting fugitive Janero Van Demario Garrett for cocaine trafficking.

Fentanyl seizures south of the border have risen to record highs while seizures north of the border have plummeted to record lows. Mexico has also illegally extradited nearly 200 kingpins to the US. Government figures point to a record 50% reduction in homicides across the country, with independent analyses putting the figure closer to a nonetheless historic 20%. Sheinbaum and Harfuch have even prosecuted more than 60 local officials with ties to organized crime, including from Morena. The charitable reading of White House pressure is that it has given the president cover to make difficult but welcome changes; last year, Sheinbaum reportedly forced the resignation of Mexico’s spectacularly corrupt attorney general, Alejandro Gertz.

Yet the sad reality is that neither Trump nor MAGA care about concrete results on security. And so long as millions of Americans remain addicted to illicit drugs, no amount of bombs will make a difference to the logic of the drug trade. Instead, the Trump administration would do well to continue aiding Mexican efforts at incarcerating violent criminals; it could also explore a program of mandatory institutionalization and rehabilitation for public drug abuse at home.

However, if success is selling televised, performative “wins” to supporters, the picture changes. In Mexico’s case, that could mean dropping missiles on alleged “narcoterrorists,” never mind the roughly 25 million Americans who visit Mexico each year, the 1.6 million US citizens who call the country home, and the likelihood of setting off a costly and indefinite endeavor with untold blowback for civilians in both countries.

The hallmark of a forever war entails a nebulous objective against an irregular actor on an open-ended timeline. In every way, the MAGA pipe dream of cartel wars in Mexico fits this description — and the groundwork is being laid.

Daniel’s story is darkly familiar. Around a third of Mexico is ruled by cartels like the CJNG, while more than 130,000 people are missing nationwide. But what’s different about Guadalajara, capital of Jalisco state in the west of the country, is that it is now welcoming thousands of football fans. The World Cup has just started, and the city’s gleaming Akron Stadium is hosting a number of games. Cartel violence has unsurprisingly thrown these plans into doubt — and, even if the security forces do manage to keep order, the scourge of the drug gangs will linger long after the final whistle blows.

The Jalisco New Generation Cartel has dominated the state for years. Emerging in 2010, after the so-called Milenio gang broke up, it’s since expanded across Mexico and beyond. Today it boasts a presence in some 40 countries. Its big earner is drugs: the cartel pulls in billions of dollars annually trafficking fentanyl, meth and cocaine to the US. Jalisco’s geography is key to this bonanza. Importing chemical precursors through ports such as Manzanillo, in the neighboring state of Colima, the CJNG then smuggles finished narcotics north to America’s southwestern border.

With wealth has come violence. The Jalisco cartel is now infamous for staging brazen attacks against Mexican government officials; that the CJNG leader Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, more commonly known as “El Mencho”, remained at large was deeply embarrassing for President Claudia Sheinbaum and her government ahead of the World Cup. Further pressure came from Donald Trump, who pushed his Mexican counterpart to “go after” the cartels, ominously warning that he’d put US boots on the ground if she didn’t.

Things came to a head in February, when Mexican special forces swooped on El Mencho. He was fatally wounded, Mexican officials say, following a shootout at a remote mountain property near the town of Tapalpa, about 100 miles southwest of Guadalajara. But that coup, aided by US intel, soon sparked cartel reprisals across Jalisco. Gunmen torched cars and blocked roads, including at the beach resort of Puerto Vallarta, where terrified tourists were left cowering in their hotel rooms. The violence left 25 National Guards dead in Jalisco alone, with bloodshed taking place within 10 miles of the Akron Stadium.

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With the World Cup approaching, Sheinbaum urged calm, claiming that Mexico could ensure there was “no risk” to supporters traveling to Guadalajara. Héctor Flories isn’t convinced. We speak in his Guadalajara home, as the smell of gas wafts in from a nearby restaurant. “We want them to come,” Héctor says of World Cup visitors, a picture of his son’s smiling face emblazoned on his t-shirt. “But [the government] can’t even have security for their own people, let alone people coming from other countries.”

In theory, Guadalajara has plenty going for it. A booming tech industry has earned it the title of the “Silicon Valley of Mexico”. Intel and Bosch are just two global firms to have a presence here, drawn to the steady flow of computer science graduates from the city’s several universities. In truth, though, it’s tequila, not tech, that puts the city on the map. The eponymous town of Tequila, just an hour from the state capital, is the cradle of an industry that produces up to 500 million liters of booze each year. It all comes from the rows and rows of blue agave plants that thrive in Jalisco’s volcanic lowlands, with profits from the drink running into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Yet the party town has a sinister side. Across Guadalajara, extortion is a major problem. For obvious reasons, no hard figures exist, but national surveys suggest there are hundreds of thousands of extortion attempts against Mexican businesses each year. Guadalajara is no exception. From tortillerías to car washes, “cobro de piso” (“floor charge”) is just another cost of doing business. Pity anyone who doesn’t — or can’t — pay up. There are roughly 1,500 murders a year in the Guadalajara metropolitan area, with many down to cartel brutality.

As if that weren’t bad enough, CJNG also raises money through kidnapping, forcing their victims to act as lookouts, move drugs — or worse. According to one former prisoner, who later spoke to Héctor Flores, the criminals sometimes make their victims carry out sicario hits. Daniel is far from alone here, with 16,000 people officially “disappeared” across Jalisco’s canyons and agave groves.

When I visit Guadalajara, there are signs of resistance. The city’s Monument to Boy Heroes, built in 1950 to commemorate a 19th-century battle against the United States, has been rechristened the “Roundabout of the Disappeared” ahead of the World Cup — and is covered by posters of the missing. One features the face of Jonathan Emmanuel Serratos Virgen, who was just 31 when he was abducted. A caption below the poster pleads: “Have you seen him? Help us find him.”

Héctor Flores tells me he’s co-founded a group called Luz de Esperanza (“Light of Hope”), which campaigns for the disappeared. Printing out flyers and posting on social media, the activists also lobby the state to invest more money in identifying corpses, increasingly found in mass graves across the city.

The grim irony is that this toll has risen with development. As the authorities have plowed money into preparing Mexico’s Silicon Valley for the World Cup — widening roads and building new apartment blocks — contractors have chanced upon a bloody harvest. According to activists, some 22 graves have in recent years been found around the Akron Stadium alone. One of the most horrifying examples emerged in February last year, when construction workers turned up 260 bodies at a place called Las Agujas, on the outskirts of Guadalajara, with many mere body parts.

A year on from the discovery, I decide to visit Las Agujas myself. I’m accompanied by Maria Luisa Estrada Hernández, a crime journalist who reports on the cartel, as well as a colleague from the UK. Héctor Flores had warned us that the cartel shooed away other journalists who’d tried their luck here — and Hernández had other reasons to be nervous. In July 2023 she’d survived an assassination attempt, after a gunman on a motorbike opened fire on her car when she was traveling with her daughter. He missed — but according to official statistics at least 141 journalists and media workers have been killed in Mexico since 2000, and, according to a 2024 Amnesty report, at least 61 of those deaths were clearly related to their work.

It’s early on a Saturday when we drive up a dirt track towards the area of Las Agujas where the mass grave was found. We park our car beside a neat lawn, water sprinklers stuttering. It’s only 10am, but the air is dry and dusty, the sun already biting. High walls block the view into the killing site. We approach a security hut and ring a bell, hoping to gain access. A wiry security guard in his sixties emerges from behind a booth, the gate beside him firmly shut. He gruffly tells us he has no authority to let us pass, directing us to contact the landowners instead. To our right, a hooded man with long hair saunters back and forth, glancing in our direction. Another hooded man races by on a motorbike.

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We ignore them, and instead keep walking, hoping to peek at the mass-grave site beyond the wall. Suddenly, a man speeds towards us in a dark blue pickup truck, the window on the driver’s side down. He pulls up on our left, his tires spinning in the dirt. “Guys, you can’t be here on this property, you gotta go,” he says in perfect American English, another hint of the cartel’s reach north of the Rio Grande. He’s in his late forties, thin, bearded, and wearing a black baseball cap. “We’re journalists,” we insist, as if that phrase means anything to him. “I know,” he replies in a menacing voice, “but you gotta get outta here now.” We pile into our car and Hernández takes the wheel and races back down the dirt road towards the highway. A red pickup truck follows and matches our speed. Estrada takes a sharp right; the red truck follows. She pulls off to a clearing on our left, then does a sharp u-turn as we race back towards Guadalajara.

That only leaves one more place to visit: the Akron Stadium itself. It rises, a low white oval, from a grassy mound on the edge of the city, more spaceship than sports venue. As we drive round the perimeter, the security presence is heavy. Army pick-up trucks stand guard, with officers in the back manning .50-caliber machine guns. The Special Forces and National Guards have their own contingent of trucks — I easily tot up more than 100 trucks in total. Football’s governing body seems pretty positive too. “FIFA is confident that the efforts being made by the governments of Canada, Mexico and the United States will ensure a safe, secure, and welcoming environment for everyone involved,” the organization tells UnHerd, noting that Mexico and the other host nations safely welcome thousands of visitors every day. As for the cartels themselves, they have been quieter in recent weeks, apparently warning their members not to bother visiting fans.

Whether that’s enough to protect the throngs of tourists now descending on Jalisco remains to be seen. The US State Department has advised its citizens to “reconsider” traveling to the state, while violence in Guadalajara continues unabated. Just this week, armed men on a motorbike chased down a man not far from the city center — before shooting him in the head. For his part, Héctor Flores is skeptical whether a show of force really makes Guadalajara safer, not least when so many officials are on the CJNG payroll. Remarkably, he says, that includes the same men who kidnapped his son, with members of Jalisco’s state prosecutor’s office caught on camera that fateful day in 2021. Local police still haven’t acted, even though, in June 2025, a tribunal confirmed that officials were indeed involved in Daniel’s disappearance. “In Mexico,” Héctor laments, “you don’t know when organized crime starts and the prosecutor’s office begins.”

If the Sheinbaum administration has struck some blows against the cartel’s leadership, few here believe that much will change. In fact, things could soon become even worse. If a leadership fight erupts for El Mencho’s crown, it could spark an all-out war, a bloodbath — and a disaster for Mexico during the World Cup. It hardly helps, here, that the flow of weapons from the US continues unabated. Cartel men boast heavy guns of the sort wielded by troops at the Akron, with government forces sometimes overwhelmed by superior firepower. Bullet casings from these weapons have been traced back to the US: one factory, the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Missouri, is even owned by the government. Once such bullets enter the open market, they soon end up in the hands of criminals, a neat way to spend all their American drug money.

Aware, perhaps, of the oddly symbiotic relationship between his country and Mexican gangs, the Trump administration has kept up the pressure on Sheinbaum. Last month, for instance, the head of the US Drug Enforcement Agency claimed that Mexican officials have been “in bed for years” with drug traffickers. Perhaps that’s fair enough. Yet political point-scoring does nothing to help Héctor Flores, let alone his vanished son.

We’re on the Tren Maya, a 965-mile railway which encircles Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Yet if my fellow travelers seem happy enough, staring at the vines and flocks of multicolored birds, the project has become a source of deep controversy — and not simply because the Tren Maya has left a building site of swathes of wilderness. Rather, as the country gears up to host the World Cup next month, the scheme has turned into a political battleground, pitting exuberant socialist developmentalism against degrowth-orientated Indigenismo.

There are strong arguments for the Tren Maya. Cutting through hills, plains and beach resorts, it joins together the Yucatan’s main towns. Apart from being a boon for tourists — who flock for the sea at Cancún and the ancient ruins near Campeche — the tracks also traverse some of Mexico’s poorest indigenous areas. The Mexican government claims that the train has helped these communities, providing work on construction, easy commutes to resort towns, and a much-needed economic boost to campesinos in the south, many of whom might otherwise migrate to America.

These economic arguments help explain why the railway is a brainchild of the Left. The inaugural project of Mexico’s former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), he won power for his Left-populist, nationalist Morena Party in 2018, ending decades of neoliberal dominance at the hands of the old establishment Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). By 2018, the PRI had been in power, barring a 12-year gap, since 1929. In reaction to this long tenure, the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa once mockingly described the PRI’s 77-year-long rule as “the perfect dictatorship”.

Over its later period of rule, the PRI became associated with car-centric development and the privatization of public transport. To distinguish himself from Mexico’s ancien régime, AMLO staked his political success on the railway, pushing through legal objections, construction delays and concern about archeological sites by controversially drafting in the Mexican army to oversee the project and declaring the train a “national security issue”.

The president’s approach was a success, with Tren Maya completed in under five years. It’s certainly been a long-time coming. Almost all of Mexico’s passenger train lines closed in 1999 during privatization efforts by the PRI, leaving Mexicans reliant on long-haul buses and cars. Not that the vanishing of the country’s extensive railway system — over 15,000 kilometers at its height in 1964 and known as Ferrocarriles Nacionales de Mexico — was merely a utilitarian matter of infrastructure. Trains are deeply resonant here, ghostly symbols of Mexico’s stalled progress.

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In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, Mexico’s railways were employed as symbols of technocratic “progress” by dictator Porfirio Díaz. In turn, they prompted resistance from indigenous communities who often lost land to concessions, before being commandeered by rebels like Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata during the revolution of 1910. Villa, especially, in the north, was famed for capturing trains, and then using them to transport rebel troops across thousands of miles of inhospitable desert.

AMLO’s Tren Maya is a reclamation, one might even say a resurrection, of this imagery. For many Mexicans, the train is not simply a moving box with windows. Rather, it aims to secure Mexico’s independence from foreign investors through heavy state involvement, while also reducing outward migration to the US. Most ambitiously of all, Tren Maya could eventually join the Yucatan Peninsula and its Gulf ports to another Morena megaproject: the Interoceanic Corridor, a land-based alternative to the Panama Canal aiming to undercut Chinese and American dominance in Latin America.

All these projects are part of Morena’s cryptic “Fourth Transformation” (4T). Essentially, 4T frames AMLO, and the recently elected president Claudia Sheinbaum, as successors to revolutionary Mexican history. Yet quietly, and somewhat awkwardly, the scheme adopts many of the development-oriented policies of Diaz the 19th-century dictator.

Notably, there are constant references in Morena-alligned media to Miguel Hidalgo, the leader of the War of Independence against Spain, as well as the 19th-century liberal hero Benito Juarez and the poncho-wearing revolutionaries of 1910. Trains are central to this self-image, with government videos of the railway racking up millions of views on X. “During the neoliberal period,” proclaims Sheinbaum, “passenger trains were privatized. With the Fourth Transformation, they have been REBORN.”

Though numbers are scarce, there are some signs that the train is helping Mexico’s poorest. During a never-ending storm, in Cinco de Febrero, a small hamlet in the southern state of Campeche, I find myself sheltering in a cow farmer’s cabin, a lean-to structure made from breezeblocks and corrugated iron. “Tren Maya has boosted ecotourism in the area,” says its owner. “This has, in turn, brought money in, improving the forest road from Cinco de Febrero into the jungle.”

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“Before, one could only traverse the road by horse with packs, now we can get around by motorbike.” The owner and his wife have a fire going. By the door, a huge Morena poster is nailed between two posts. It’s as much to keep out the rain as for propaganda, yet the couple seems happy about the train. Before it came, after all, the farmer had to spend six months a year as an itinerant laborer on far-off agave farms. Now, Guadalope says, he can “stay in the campo”, even as he can more easily take his cattle to market.

Still, other Mexicans seem unsure about Sheinbaum’s locomotive triumphalism. One family I meet is taking the train south, 460km to the rural state of Chiapas, where the grandfather, decked out in a ranchero outfit and huge cowboy hat, has family. “The train needs to be more extensive,” his American-born son says, as he leans against a wall in boardshorts and flip-flops. “There are so few roads connecting places in Yucatan. I mean, look at Mérida to Progreso,” he adds, referring to the journey from the Yucatan’s capital to a seaside town nearby. “That’s what, like one or two roads — I don’t want to drive dodging jaguars!”

My own inaugural journey on Tren Maya is from Mérida to Campeche, another state capital some 150 miles to the south. It’s not an especially auspicious start: Mérida station is a vast minimalist white cube, about a half-hour taxi journey out of town, a fact that’s already frustrating the locals. Fabiene, an accountancy student in his twenties, complains that the station’s remoteness is offputting, as is the price. Tickets are discounted for Mexican citizens and even more for locals — with short journeys only costing 1-2% of a weekly wage. Still, long-range trips between, say, Merida and Campeche can cost as much as 17% of an average weekly wage in the impoverished south. As one shopkeeper in Cinco de Febrero tells me, this is “a train for the rich”.

And if one taxi driver tells me he’s made a killing ferrying tourists from the station to Mérida’s pretty colonial center, the whole process of boarding the train, including having to show my passport, feels more like an international airport than civic infrastructure. To get there, you have to drive out past serried ranks of strip clubs, squat evangelical churches, and National Guard patrols kitted out with truck-mounted automatic machine guns. To make matters even worse, Mérida already had a station before the cube was unveiled, a 19th-century building with a handsome yellow-brick tower. Unfortunately, it closed in 1974, and remains so to this day.

Taken together, then, some here suspect that the Tren Maya is more tourist boondoggle than genuine homegrown infrastructure. And there are other worries too. “Is that worth all the deforestation?” wonders Fabiene, echoed by graffitied signs in Mérida proclaiming that “Tren Mata Jaguares” (“the train kills jaguars”). Mexican environmentalist groups, like Sélvame del Tren, have claimed that over 10 million trees have been cut down since the project began in 2020. The Mexican government has countered with a much lower number of 3.5 million. Either way, there are other worries, with activists worrying that the new tracks create barriers in the migration routes of Mexico’s jaguars.

These natural wonders are important culturally too, not least to the Yucatan’s indigenous Maya. There are some 11 million of them, scattered across Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, and they’ve not always had a placid relationship with the post-colonial Mexican state, erupting into widespread rebellion between 1847 and 1901.

To understand how this ancient culture intersects with the Tren Maya, I visit Playa del Carmen, a beach town of cheap cocktails and American tourists in Quintana Roo. There, I meet Guillermo Christy, one of the leaders of Cenotes Urbanos, an activist caving group that works to protect cenotes, natural sinkholes that are sacred in Mayan culture.

Christy drives me out from the resort town and down a remote jungle path, where we reach a chained-up gate and a military zone. We hop over the fence, looking out for soldiers, and walk several miles down a small path to a cave opening: in the distance, I can hear the Tren Maya rumbling along its tracks and military jeeps whirring past. I put on a pair of swimming boots, lent to me by Christy, shaking out hordes of angry red ants.

Then we venture into a cenote, a huge sinkhole caused by the collapse of limestone bedrock into groundwater. This particular cave, named Cenote Oppenheimer, after the father of the atom bomb, is a huge dark maw, emerging from the folds of the green jungle. Christy and I swim through a cave system until we reach a point directly under the railway — where we find huge pillars of concrete drilled through the roof of the grotto. Christy shines his head torch down and points out the huge deposits of iron and steel leaking into the pristine blue of the cave’s waters. “The government,” he says, “promised us this wouldn’t happen.”

To be fair, these worries aren’t universal. “There’s a lot of glorifying nature without caring about people in the Yucatan,” argues Etienne Von Bertrab, a long-standing expert on the train, emphasizing that groups like the Maya are “living cultures, not frozen in aspic”. And, certainly, Sheinbaum’s position is that the benefits of the train — economic improvement, fewer cars on the roads, less carbon emitted —  more than outweigh the damage caused to cenotes.

Yet there’s another issue here, too, one that arguably cuts to the heart of Moreno’s populist pretensions. According to many I speak to, the Tren Maya was pushed through essentially by government fiat, with critics of the project excluded from consultations.

That’s shadowed by some pretty blunt financial incentives. In the tiny village of Cinco de Febrero, a hamlet of concrete block dwellings deep in the jungle, the local council leader tells me that in addition to government forestry funding, the community also received an eye-watering £236,000 in state compensation for allowing the train to pass through its land.

Little wonder, then, that some radical anti-government groups are so unhappy, with one far-Left militia dismissing the train as a dangerous “pharaonic project”. Yet it’s telling, too, that even moderate Mexicans have similar critiques. “Tren Maya is a very old-fashioned way of viewing infrastructure,” says Antonio Azuela, former general attorney for the environment under the PRI between 1994 to 2000 “That trains will bring transformation. This is magical thinking.”

More than that, Azuela suggests, Morena gave management of the train to the military — exactly the kind of interference in civilian life the party is meant to abhor, and which has been a scourge of Mexican politics for generations.

Of course, most Mexicans have little time for such highfalutin arguments. In the small towns that pepper the Yucatan, life goes on much the same. Mayan communities, in many different ways, adapt around the train, just as they have to roads, telephone poles, and the internet: balancing continuity and modernity with apparent ease. Perhaps that’s just as well. Last year, after all, Sheinbaum announced that her government now plans to build another railway, spanning the 1,800 miles between Mexico City and the US border. Expect more tracks, and more debate, very soon.

To understand Claudia Sheinbaum’s place in Mexican politics, one must first situate her government, party, and movement within the broader landscape of the Mexican Left. Sheinbaum’s party Morena represents the electoral Left and the broader phenomenon of “Obradorismo”, named after Mexico’s former president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. “Obradorismo” is a political movement motivated by state developmentalism and committed to pursuing the interests of the working classes and the poor through democratic means. While a certain sense of class interest animates the project, this does not entail outright confrontation with capital, but a conviction that class interests must be harmonized, and that the state must be re-legitimized as the central social actor capable of carrying out its aims. In essence, Morena represents an effort to construct a post-neoliberal social pact, one predicated on returning class politics to the mainstream political arena, and re-invigorating the state.

But what about other factions of the Mexican Left? One crucial distinction is between the electoral Left and what might be termed the autonomist Left, which operates as an informal social movement rather than organizing under a formal party structure. More fundamentally, it rejects state power outright. The most celebrated example of the autonomist Left is the Zapatista movement in the state of Chiapas, which has pursued autonomous communal power — a form of local self-government that explicitly refuses incorporation into any broader national project. But the Zapatistas are not the only ones. Similar orientations can be found in movements such as the self-defense units in Cherán in the western state of Michoacán, where residents have for years taken up arms to protect their communities from drug cartels while simultaneously rejecting the state’s role in security provision, seeing it as complicit with organized crime. These communities have famously expelled all political parties from their territory.

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The autonomist Left also has an urban branch, though the term “branch” might overstate the degree of coordination between rural and urban variants. What unites them is a negative view of the state. What separates them is their social composition and the structural basis of their politics. The rural autonomist Left’s skepticism toward the state is materially grounded. They have historically experienced the state as an external intervention. The term “community” in this context carries real meaning: it refers to specific forms of collective land tenure and self-governance, often institutionalized through the legal category of usos y costumbres (“customs and traditions”), which grants certain communities the right to govern according to traditional practices, such as decision-making governing assemblies instead of elected delegates. Even where communities fall outside this formal category, the historical lineage of communal organization provides a material foundation for their political orientation. This structural position explains, for instance, the opposition of certain communities to developmentalist projects like the Tren Maya, where questions arose about who constitutes the relevant political unit for consultation. Individual residents as in a liberal democratic model? Or communal representatives as in a corporatist one?

The urban autonomist Left, by contrast, lacks this structural grounding. Cosmopolitan progressives with small social bases adopt the language of social movements and civil society while remaining numerically marginal and primarily active in intellectual circles. At its best, it draws on anarchist ideals and sophisticated critiques of the bourgeois state as the node organizing capital. More commonly, however, it is characterized by its “Brahmin Left” dispositions: highly educated, credentialed, invested in cultural capital, oriented toward, for lack of a better term, identity politics.

Morena and the electoral Left emerge from an entirely different historical trajectory. The party can be credibly traced to a split from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in the Eighties. The PRI had governed Mexico for over 70 years, institutionalizing the Mexican Revolution and carrying out Keynesian welfare-state projects from the Thirties through to the Seventies. While the party contained a broad ideological spectrum, it was sometimes a contradictory mix of Mexican Cold War anti-communist and national state developmentalism. This began to change in the Seventies and accelerated in the Eighties, as a neoliberal wing became dominant within the party. In reaction, the nationalist wing broke away in the mid-Eighties, forming the party that would contest the 1988 elections and eventually consolidate into the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).

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The political career of Sheinbaum’s predecessor and political mentor, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, otherwise known as AMLO, traverses this history. He began in the PRI in Tabasco, joined the Eighties splinter-faction, and became a founding member of the PRD, with which he won the mayoralty of Mexico City in 2000. What makes AMLO difficult to categorize for both domestic and international observers is precisely this trajectory: he does not come from the socialist or social democratic Left as his European counterparts might; he does not emerge from militant union leadership like Lula in Brazil or Evo Morales in Bolivia; he was not formed in the rural or urban guerrilla movements of the Seventies like Mujica in Uruguay, Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, or Petro in Colombia. Instead, he comes from the nationalist, developmentalist wing of the PRI — a Left that operated within the paradigm of the Keynesian welfare state and never let go.

Sheinbaum’s own trajectory intersects with this lineage while adding distinctive elements. An academic by training, with a career in energy engineering and climate studies, her first entry into high-level politics came when AMLO appointed her Minister of Environment during his tenure as Mexico City mayor. Earlier, she had been involved in student movements focused on resisting the privatization of higher education — movements with significant ties to the emerging PRD. Sheinbaum thus shares certain affinities with the urban progressive Left in her background, yet she was politically formed within “Obradorismo”. This duality has proven advantageous in her first year in office, allowing her to retain AMLO’s base while recapturing sectors of the professional classes that had drifted from the Left coalition.

Situating Morena within the broader Latin American context requires attention to Mexico’s peculiar timing. The Pink Tide of progressive governments that swept Latin America beginning in the late Nineties never reached Mexico during its height. The conventional explanation for the Pink Tide emphasizes the conjuncture of democratization — the famous third wave — with the growing inequality and lackluster growth produced by neoliberalism. Mexico possessed these same conditions: democratization following PRI rule, poverty and inequality caused by neoliberalism. Yet the electoral Left repeatedly failed, with three consecutive center-right governments taking power after 2000.

This anomaly can be explained, ironically, by the PRI’s own legacy. The electoral Left in Mexico developed without a social base of its own because the PRI had already organized and neutralized what would theoretically constitute the Left’s natural constituency. Through patronage, clientelism, and a combination of carrots and sticks, the PRI had captured the working classes within its own corporatist structures. The PRD therefore faced the more difficult task of contesting an already-organized social base against an established hegemon, rather than simply mobilizing an available constituency. Only as neoliberalism eroded the material basis for the PRI’s clientelist networks did these social blocs become available for rearticulation.

There are also important structural differences between Morena and the earlier Pink Tide governments. The first wave governed during a period of extraordinary economic growth, particularly tied to the commodity boom in Brazil, Bolivia, and Venezuela. Sheinbaum, by contrast, comes to power after years of lackluster growth that estimates indicate is likely to continue. This means that the basis of legitimacy of the project must rest on a continued redistributive management of the existing “pie”. It is therefore all the more remarkable that despite these disarticulated working classes, a dilapidated state, the Covid pandemic, and subsequent inflationary pressures, the Obrador administration managed to increase real wages by 30%, lower poverty by 13%, and shift the balance between labor and capital’s share of income by 8% in favor of workers.

Moreover, Mexico’s integration into the global economy differs fundamentally: 20-plus years of NAFTA have restructured the economy entirely, dilapidating the countryside and national industry, and converting the country into a cheap foreign manufacturing center and import economy. Between 40 and 60% of Mexicans work in the informal sector, primarily in services and retail rather than production. The government’s relationship with NAFTA has been ambivalent — defending and legitimizing it while using it as leverage to advance pro-worker positions, as when the 2018 renegotiation was used to secure major labor reforms that previous Mexican delegations had rejected.

Sheinbaum’s handling of the Trump administration’s tariff threats reveals both the continuities and distinctive elements of her approach. Her negotiation tactics have been simultaneously overrated and underrated. They are overrated insofar as her approach largely follows AMLO’s playbook, yet the international press has treated her more favorably, perhaps because her technocratic background makes her more legible to the journalist class. They are underrated because, unlike many world leaders who responded to Trump’s protectionism by doubling down on free trade orthodoxy, Sheinbaum has used the moment — without knee-jerk anti-Trump posturing — to advance a post-neoliberal economic order, including tariffs against Asian imports accompanied by actual industrial policy, in the form of a return to a mild import substitution industrialization. In this sense, Sheinbaum represents both the inheritance of Mexico’s national developmentalist tradition and its adaptation to contemporary conditions. A year into her administration, Sheinbaum’s project is still finding its footing, and while the prospects of economic growth remain low, the strategy of strengthening its autonomy in its interactions with global markets will prove invaluable.

Eventually, this surging tide of gentrification engulfed Gabriela. Two months ago, she had to move from Condesa to another flat, about five kilometers away across the capital’s massive urban sprawl. “They told me they would not renew my lease because the owner wanted to tear down the building. I imagine they are going to build a new building — and if they follow the other buildings on the street, they will build luxury apartments or Airbnbs to be used by foreigners.”

Gabriela, who has studied in the United States, understands why many Americans might want to flee their car-oriented and often-costly cities. But she admits to anger at seeing so many gringos — often working remotely from their new homes — take over her native district. “Mexico prides itself on being very welcoming but it’s impossible to compete with American salaries,” she says. “Of course it is fantastic when you can live a much more affordable life. But when I was a kid, the only foreigners who came to Mexico City were people interested in our culture since it was deemed the most dangerous and polluted city in the world. Now so many of them come here, but they are not interested in our country.”

Such complaints are far from unusual — and laced with cruel irony at a time when Mexicans north of the border are being hunted down, detained and deported. Visiting Mexico City early last year, I was amazed to hear so many American accents in its most prosperous enclaves. Friends told me there was growing fury over an “invasion” that exploded after the pandemic, when the nation had comparatively loose restrictions. Anti-gringo graffiti and stickers began appearing. Then came three demonstrations over the summer in Condesa, culminating with protesters attacking boutiques, cars, coffee shops and taco restaurants aimed at tourists. Some chanted “Fuera Gringo!” (Gringos Out!); others held signs saying things like “Gentrification is colonization!” and “Learn Spanish, dog”.

Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum — who is facing fresh demonstrations over corruption following the murder of a popular mayor — quickly condemned the display of xenophobia. And Mexico City is far from the only place to face protests over rapid gentrification that pitches rich against poor, local against newcomer, localism against a globalization. There have been similar complaints in other tourist hotspots where short-term lets inflame such issues. Last month, for instance, I was investigating this issue in Lisbon, where the typical price for a home has surged to 21 times median household income — making it the least affordable European capital for local people.

The shift in Mexico City’s image can be traced to 2016, when The New York Times unexpectedly labeled it the world’s best place to visit. The first substantial wave of gringos  — a word which in Mexico refers specifically to Americans — arrived in central areas like Condesa, Polanco and Roma the following year. A pair of natural disasters inflamed the influx. First, in 2017, the city was struck by an earthquake, leaving homes damaged. Many local families moved out and house prices fell. Then numbers soared during the pandemic — and gentrification started to ripple into adjacent districts.

In Condesa, perhaps one in five homes are now an Airbnb or other tourist house. And while there is limited data on numbers of foreign residents — many use tourist visas — last year 56% more temporary-residency permits were issued to Americans in Mexico City than five years earlier (though foreigners make up a tiny minority of Mexico City’s 9.2 million people). All this in a city that saw the lowest rate of new house-building of any Mexican state over the last decade, notwithstanding its Left-wing leadership.

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These are familiar concerns in many cities: an influx of foreigners seeking fun, freedom and fewer financial shackles, before becoming a focal point for generational fury over housing inadequacies and political ineptitude. Yet while the new arrivals have put pressure on costs — property prices have risen eightfold in under two decades in prosperous Polanco — the tensions are also cultural. It was no coincidence that the initial protest took place on 4 July: US Independence Day. Behind the volley of demands for rent controls, or effective regulation of short-term lets, locals are angry over the arrogance of many Americans in their city. “When I was in Condesa, the people who lived there spoke Spanish,” says Vanessa Gonzales, 49, a hairdresser driven out last year after her salon’s landlord demanded a near-tripling of rent. “Now it’s all English, English, English. We’re Mexican but you go to the restaurants and menus are in English.”

When Gonzales first opened a salon near her home in Condesa 15 years ago, almost all her clients lived in the district; now barely one in 10 remain. And, as she explains, many Mexicans “do not love American people” for economic, religious or historical reasons — a feeling intensified when strutting newcomers refuse to respect their culture. Fernando, a taco seller working with his two nieces, tells me that gringos complained about the smell of his food, the umbrellas over his stall and even how he clogs up the street. “They’re not even from here,” he says, “and they complain that this commerce should not be here.”

There are even more brazen examples too. A young American model sparked outrage last year after posting on Instagram that people should stop giving money to traditional street musicians playing automated organs since they were “polluting with their noise.” Another American in Condesa — a long-term resident married to a Mexican man and running an Airbnb in their home — tells me she was horrified to hear a group of “vile” young Americans discuss their cocaine use recently while standing in the queue at her local bakery. “This was so incredibly offensive in a country that has been ravaged by drug violence,” she says. “Although most guests at our Airbnb have been very pleasant, it sums up the arrogance of some of the people coming here.”

This seems to be the key issue — along with corrosive suspicions that rich foreigners get favorable treatment in their city. One podcast featured someone who spoke about trying to make a booking at a popular restaurant in Spanish and being told there was no room: only to get an English-speaking friend to call back and be told there was an available table. There are even scandalous claims that some restaurants have toned down the heat in their salsas.

True or false, there is a unique edge to this Mexican outrage at gentrification, since it comes at a time when the White House has dispatched controversial federal enforcement units to find and deport undocumented migrants. “Whenever I open YouTube I get this fucking Pam Bondi ad where she says don’t come to the United States illegally because we will catch you,” says Sebastian Rojas, a musician who was born in Condesa, but who moved after being “strangled” by high rents. “At the same time you see all these gringos living like kings and enjoying the beauty of the best parts of our city.”

Emilio Guerrero Alexander, a filmmaker, makes a similar point in response to claims that Americans are entitled to gentrify his city when millions of Mexicans go to the US. “This is not a two-way street,” he says. “Some people are unlucky to have been born in areas where there is lots of criminal activity and murders so they go north to escape this misery. They just want safety and a better life for their families. But the Americans coming to Mexico City are people who realized — mostly during the pandemic — they will be richer here and buy more with their dollars… They are coming to have fun and don’t even try to get into our culture. Some do — but sadly it is just a minority.”

Even some Americans tell me they supported the protests against them. “It makes sense that people are upset,” says Shaynn, a charity worker who has lived in the city for four years. “I do my best to be conscious about where I spend my money, the kind of housing I live in, how I pay or hire people — but my being here definitely has a negative impact, which is something I grapple with. Anyone earning in a foreign currency, especially dollars, and spending in pesos negatively impacts on people living here by increasing prices.”

Such ambiguities are also apparent among Mexicans. In one luxury spa, for instance, a therapist tells me she supported the protests despite feeling hypocritical. “We have to treat them like special guests because they come with money, so it feels like I am betraying my own culture,” she says. “And I hate seeing gringos coming to the city and paying huge amounts of rent when we can’t afford to live in these most beautiful parts because they have raised the costs so much.”

This woman also has relatives living north of the border. “It feels a bit icky,” she admits. “My family has friends who aren’t citizens in the US and they are being profiled the whole time. Our government sees all these Americans as bringing money into our country, but I do feel some resentment when I hear these people saying how much they love Mexico City, how they love having such fun here and how it’s so cheap. It feels like we are being colonized.”

This word is heavily loaded in a nation colonized by Spain for centuries, and then invaded by the US in 1846 and 1916 — and the fact that it kept cropping up in my conversations underlines the depth of disquiet about gentrification in the Mexican metropolis. “I support the protests since it feels like we have been colonized again, predominantly by Americans,” says Armando, 25, working in a Roma boutique selling $130 hoodies.

Not that everyone agrees. Eduardo Garcia, 64, a writer and podcaster, argues that though the demonstrations reflect genuine grievances over high rents and the conversion of buildings into short-term lets, they got out of hand and damaged the nation’s image. “The protests left a bad impression,” he tells me. “A lot of small businesses, a lot of the waiters such as those here, benefit from the high number of foreigners coming to the city. If foreigners think twice about coming to Mexico and feel unwanted, they could hurt these people.”

Protests against over-tourism in places such as Spain suggest they do not deter arrivals and have little long-term impact, but can lead to small behavioral changes, such as switching to hotels. Yet studies indicate the capital has seen hefty price rises in its swankier parts, with a single room in Condesa or Roma Norte now costing $1,000 or more — higher than average monthly wages. One report, published last year by the National Academy of Sciences, revealed average house prices quadrupled over two decades before 2022, while the country’s per capita income declined relative to inflation. “Gentrification in Mexico City,” the authors concluded, “is impacting housing accessibility and displacing its residents.”

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Given international trends, some suspect these shifts are an inevitable consequence of our globalized economy. Garcia, who is married to an American, says his country was cut off from the rest of the planet when he was growing up, with its low trade, poor-quality domestic consumer products and tourism limited to beach resorts. “Now Mexico is competing with the world, producing better products, and is attractive to foreigners,” he continues. “I saw these changes and like these changes. I believe in the strength of Mexican culture — and there is nothing to be afraid of foreigners coming into your country and changing it a little bit.”

His stance is supported by the economist José Alberto Lara-Pulido, head of the center for sustainability at Ibero American University. “Gentrification is tough,” he says. “It has a relationship with xenophobia because a lot of people from the US came to the richest areas of Mexico City, prices of houses have risen and local people are being pushed away. There is fear of real-estate speculation. But for me, it is just the market working and a big city should welcome people from all over the world.” Foreign business owners defend themselves too, claiming they create jobs, pay decent wages and assist local suppliers. “The frustration is valid but misdirected,” says Fahra Bellak, a 40 year old from Edinburgh who runs a thriving bagel shop in Roma Norte. “Farmers tell me they come into the city and make four times as much as in rural areas, which helps sustain their farms. We buy our eggs from an organic farmer — when we started it was seven trays a week, now it’s more than 60, so he says I’ve helped him grow his farm. Our coffee guy says the same.”

Regardless, the authorities are responding. Following the protests, Mayor Clara Brugada proposed a 14-point plan to regulate rent prices, protect residents, and build affordable social housing. Critics, however, point out that existing rules to limit occupancy of short-term lets to a maximum of six months a year are rarely enforced, while Sheinbaum, during her own tenure as mayor, has faced accusations of fueling the boom — after signing a 2022 deal with Airbnb to lure digital nomads and tourists.

Lara-Pulido argues that Mexico’s real problem is not gentrification but rampant inequality in a land where about half the population work in the informal sector; where inflation has long been high; where the economy is dominated by a handful of huge corporations; and where it is hard to start or close a business. “There are much bigger issues with our economy,” he stresses. “A lot of young people cannot afford houses with these rising prices but the solution is not regulating prices or controlling Airbnbs but the creation of a more prosperous economy.”

In Mexico, as in so many places, these issues are divisive. A self-proclaimed “social warrior” since his student days 50 years ago, veteran housing activist Enrique Gonzales labels the anti-gentrification protests as a publicity stunt, used to divert attention from other important issues such as inadequate security, healthcare and infrastructure. “Mexico has a long history of hospitality and welcoming people from other societies,” he says. But, like many others, Gonzales is ambivalent about the tide of American arrivals given events north of the border. “The gringos here are happy, they feel safe, but the Mexicans in the US are all scared, hiding in the shadows.”

Earlier this year, his daughter Emma, 39, had to leave her home in Texas after two decades amid the immigration crackdown, leaving behind her 12-year-old daughter. She hopes to return soon after obtaining US citizenship. Yet to her father’s shock, Emma tells me she likes Trump for his straight-talking style — even as she supported the anti-American protests in Mexico. “These people, the gringos, are taking something that does not belong to them,” she says. “This is why there is war in the world. It’s not because they are American but because they are pushing up prices and changing the economy. It is already very hard for people like me and they are making life harder.”

Both the Gonzales and their beguiling city ultimately show how the arguments over globalization, housing, migration, populism and tourism that strain our own societies are being echoed across so much of the planet. “Our culture is changing, our way of life is changing,” adds Enrique. He is right, of course — but the big challenge of our era, one that even divides this family, is over the best solution.

Two days earlier, then-president Felipe Calderón announced the deployment of 6,500 soldiers and federal police in an offensive called Operation Michoacán. The following January, an additional 3,300 troops would carry out Operation Tijuana. It gradually became a national mobilization with the bulk of the Mexican army along with marines and paramilitary federal police taking on narcos. Soon after, President George W. Bush held talks with Calderón. By 2008, Washington was bankrolling the new Mérida Initiative, a pan-American campaign to take on drug traffickers.

“New pages of glory will be written. I instruct you to persevere until glory is achieved,” Calderón told soldiers in February 2007. “We will give no truce or quarter to the enemies of Mexico.” These were stark martial terms. In another event, Calderón addressed troops wearing an army jacket and cap in a base on Michoacán, unusual attire for a Mexican president.

Over 18 years later, the Mexican army is still on the streets fighting cartels, which have diversified from drugs to a portfolio of rackets including extortion, human smuggling and oil theft. During this time, Mexico has suffered about half a million total homicides (Mexico’s statistics institute counts 486,000 between 2007 and 2024). Cartels and the security forces fighting them, which have also committed massacres, could be responsible for almost two thirds of that number. Cartel sicarios — hitmen — not only wield Kalashnikovs and 50 cals (mostly from the United States), but build home-made fighting vehicles, or “monsters”, armored drones and improvised landmines. Self-defense militias, or auto defensas, have risen up as a third force, though they can often just be narcos in disguise. With 130,000 people disappeared, and mass graves in cow fields and ranches, mothers join brigades to search for their lost children, while citizens march vainly for peace.

Meanwhile, foreign mercenaries are increasingly involved on the side of the cartels. They have come from various countries, including the United States, but Colombian veterans are especially sought after, with their combat experience and with specialist snipers and drone operators.

And then there’s Trump. He has designated various cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and US special forces are currently training Mexican soldiers. He has also threatened US attacks on cartel targets in Mexico, and US forces have blown up boats allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean and Pacific.

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While this bloody mess in Mexico has claimed more victims than some traditional wars, there is still disagreement over how we should understand this conflict, or even name it. This isn’t just an academic debate. Recognizing an armed conflict has legal implications for the Mexican government. It’s also bad publicity.

When the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London classified Mexico as the second deadliest armed conflict in the world in 2017, Mexico’s foreign office issued an irate response. “The report irresponsibly points to the existence of an “(non-international) armed conflict” in Mexico,” it said. “This is incorrect.”

But beyond what is politically convenient for Mexico, there are other factors making the Mexican labyrinth tricky to frame. Much of the country appears largely peaceful despite the bloodshed, and even when cartels control territory it’s as a shadow power rather than a full takeover. And as there are comparable problems of organized crime and militarized law enforcement across Latin America, should we also talk about armed conflicts in Brazil, Honduras and now Ecuador?

So how can we understand this period of violence, which I now think is best referred to as the Mexican Cartel Wars? We need to look at when it really began, who the sides involved are, and, to offer some hope, when it may finally end.

I join some other writers in describing the Mexican Cartel Wars as a form of hybrid armed conflict, somewhere between crime and war. This crime war is far less lethal than international conflicts like the Second World War, and nor does it reach the threshold of traditional civil wars, like the Spanish, US or Salvadoran, in terms of intensity or politics. There aren’t two sides with clear leaders and ideologies fighting for dominance of the central state. Yet there is endemic organized violence, which claims thousands of lives per year. As such, it could be compared to periods of violence elsewhere, which, though brutal, did not descend into full-scale civil wars. These include the Colombian conflict, the civil conflict in the Philippines, the Chinese warlord era, the Haitian crisis and, albeit on a smaller scale, the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

The Mexican Cartel Wars involve a plethora of criminal kingpins, death squads and self-defense militias, as well as police, soldiers and marines. All these are entwined with the cartels and fight among themselves. Violence shifts around the country in a series of distinct but interconnected conflicts, with operatives, money and techniques (from beheading to drones) flowing between them.

The Geneva Conventions haven’t caught up with the language and laws for this type of hybrid conflict. I wouldn’t argue that the Mexican government has to treat sicarios like prisoners of war, but it still has to figure out a strategy for peace.

Cartels are at the heart of this conflict, yet they are complex and evolving organisms. Essentially, they are hierarchical networks of paramilitary organized crime. Profits from drugs and a range of rackets drive the violence. Cartels include the biggest mobs, Jalisco and Sinaloa, and powerful regional players, like the Gulf and Northeast cartels, as well as more local but still brutal outfits like the Guerreros Unidos, which we could call cartelitos.

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When Calderón launched his offensive in 2006, he was reacting to rising cartel violence, especially in his home state of Michoacán. But fighting between drug traffickers and the involvement of the Mexican army in anti-drug operations go back decades. The first US Customs probe into Mexican opium traffickers was in 1916. The Mexican government mobilized soldiers against poppy growers in Sinaloa in the Forties, and then more seriously in the Seventies in what it called Operation Condor (which was also the name of a CIA op against Leftists across Latin America).

Colombian traffickers were dubbed the Medellín Cartel from about 1980, and the Guadalajara Cartel reached its zenith in 1985 (though, as the academic Carlos Pérez Ricart writes, people didn’t refer to it as that until later). The Tijuana Cartel pioneered narco terror in the Nineties, and army defectors in the Zetas seriously upped the game with paramilitary hit squads in the 2000s, leading to Calderón’s offensive.

Yet the sheer quantity of Mexican troops on the streets, and the severity of cartel violence, reached new heights under Calderón. We could see the period from the Nineties to 2006 as a proto-phase of cartel battles: with the real Mexican Cartel Wars unleashed after the military offensive.

Another detail is that after Calderón kicked off the crackdown, murders in Mexico actually dipped, before going up sharply in 2008 and then exploding in 2010. It’s unfair to blame Calderón entirely for the cartel wars, but he did throw oil onto the fire, as cartels escalated their brutal battle tactics and Mexican soldiers carried out murders themselves. From 2010 onward, Mexico suffered the massacres and mass graves that have characterized the conflict.

A tricky but central question is how many murders are actually related to cartels, as opposed to just bar fights or “passion” killings. The truth is we can’t know for sure: about 90% of homicides are never solved. Yet there are clues.

Calderón created a unit with members of the army, police and Mexico’s intelligence agency (CISEN) to estimate how many deaths were cartel-related. Alejandro Hope, who was then at CISEN, described to me how they looked for signs of cartel activity, from beheadings to the use of grenades and AK-47s. They also included killings confirmed by soldiers.

The count varies by year, but in both 2010 and 2011 cartel-related violence represented close to 60% of all homicides. If you extrapolate that over all homicides since 2006, it would be about 300,000 deaths. That is a colossal figure. Over these last two decades, Mexico has been a genuine bloodbath.

Is there a way to end the Mexican Cartel Wars? One challenge is that it’s not like a regular war where governments or political factions come to the table and hammer out a peace deal. We have also learned that taking out kingpins, like El Chapo and El Mayo, doesn’t stop it. Cartels are many-headed hydra, and when you cut off a head, several more vicious ones grow in its place.

Some have called to send the army back to the barracks. This doesn’t finish the fight either, as cartels keep on battling amongst themselves. Presidents have pulled troops out of various cities only to send them back when violence explodes.

But no conflict goes on forever. About 2010, I heard a CISEN officer make the prediction it would be a 30-year war. There is no exact science to that, but it rings true to me: a full generation of killing before things calm down. Or until the murders go back to the level of 2006, with 10,000 homicides or fewer in a year.

There needs to be a combination of factors to reach this. More effective law enforcement in Mexico is crucial, however that is achieved. Trump’s idea of bombing cartels is certainly a deterrent, though it could put prices up, which encourages others to get in the business. And Trump hasn’t addressed US drug demand; perhaps in the future this will finally go down. Changing demographics in Mexico may be key too: as the birth rate falls, there will be fewer youths to recruit as sicarios. Increased living standards could also reduce the temptation of becoming a cartel killer.

There are other worries though. Back in 1998, Charles Bowden wrote Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future, illustrating the violence on the US-Mexico border. In retrospect, the title was prescient about the bloodshed that awaited Mexico in the 21st century. But has Mexico over the last two decades itself been a laboratory for a new style of warfare? And if that is the case, could this type of hybrid armed conflict find new environments to nestle in? With organized crime moving easily over borders, economic stagnation and the power of many states eroding, I fear it will.

The tellers count out piles of pesos worth $500, $300, $100 or whatever the relatives are able to send from their wages picking tobacco, mixing cement, or washing dishes. These “remittances”, as the money sent home is called, have kept Ixmiquilpan afloat for decades along with its surrounding villages, an area dominated by the indigenous Otomí people. While Mexico suffers heavy cartel violence, Ixmiquilpan is a fairly peaceful area. Families use the dollars to build sprawling homes on ancestral corn fields, put money into community groups to construct parks and churches, or they open grocery stores and taco stalls. But most of the dollars are used to just keep food on the table.

Despite Donald Trump waging a crackdown on undocumented migrants, especially those with criminal records, migrant dollars keep flowing south. In February, Mexico received $4.4 billion in remittances, according to Mexico’s Central Bank which tracks transfers. That was a 0.8% fall compared to the same month last year but it’s still historically a huge number. In total in 2024, Mexico received a record-breaking $64 billion in remittances, the second highest in the world behind India.

Inside the United States, the Trump administration has been making high-profile raids that make media splashes in both English and Spanish. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem even went on an operation where she rather awkwardly pointed a rifle at an agent’s head as she spoke into the video camera in front of a heavily armored vehicle. The administration has been flying deportees on military planes and it released videos of migrants with the amplified sounds of chains. Most controversially, it deported alleged Venezuelan gang members to the unforgiving CECOT prison in El Salvador. (Lawyers for many of the deportees claim they were innocent people caught up in the sweep because of tattoos of football teams or local carnivals).

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All of this is on people’s minds here. María Quezada, 61, lines up to collect money sent to the family from a brother working in construction in North Carolina. “They need to keep quiet there in El Norte,” she says, using a common term for the US. “They are worried right now. This famous president, he doesn’t like migrants.” Yet others have high hopes that their own families will be okay. “I think those who get deported are the ones who have done something wrong,” says Benita Huerta, 30, as she cradles a baby in her arms. “If you don’t owe anything, you should be fine.”

The issue of the US-Mexico border, of millions of migrants swimming over the river and of smugglers sneaking in fentanyl, was a core factor that drove the MAGA movement and propelled Trump to power. Since returning to office in January, Trump has indeed transformed “The Border”, sending troops to the Rio Grande, virtually shutting down asylum claims and pressuring Mexico to hit drug cartels. The number of “encounters” by Border Patrol agents (the government term for when agents find migrants on the border area) has plummeted 94% since a record high under Joe Biden in 2023. The amount of fentanyl seized has gone down 73% since September.

Yet while deportations make headlines, the overall numbers have stayed fairly steady under Trump. The frequency of deportation flights has been similar to the last months of Biden and the total quantity of deportees appears to be slightly lower.

While Trump has massively reduced the number of new migrants coming in, therefore, he has not cut deeply into the estimated 11 million undocumented migrants already in the United States. (Some claim the true figure is much higher.) It’s hard to predict Trump, but if he does eventually do real mass deportations, as has been threatened, then it would massively disrupt many businesses, especially farms, construction sites and restaurants by taking away their workers.

In Ixmiquilpan, almost every family has members working in the US. Most of them went over illegally, either plodding over the seething desert or swimming over the river — although they usually went some years ago. None I speak to has had a loved one deported since Trump regained power, although I find several who were deported under previous presidents.

Heriberto Pedraza, 58, who sits on a sidewalk a few blocks from the central square. He says he worked construction for two decades in the US, mostly in Florida, but was deported in 2009 under President Barack Obama after he was caught drunk driving. (The liberal hero Obama actually has the record for the highest number of “removals,” at over 3 million. Migrant activists call him the “deporter in chief.” This was in response to a rising number of undocumented workers at the time and use of expanded agencies). Pedraza said he never tried to return after that. “The Nineties were a great time to be in the United States. But things have changed now,” he says. “I’m happy here in my hometown.”

Immigration over the US-Mexico border has gone in waves over the past century. In the 1910s, people in northern Mexico fled over the Rio Grande from the desperado armies of the Mexican Revolution. From the Second World War to the Sixties, millions of Mexicans went over legally to toil in fields in what was called the Bracero Program to bring over farm workers. In much of central and southern Mexico, including Ixmiquilpan, people began heading to the United States in big numbers from the Eighties. This coincided with a 1986 amnesty for undocumented migrants under Ronald Reagan, which could have encouraged further immigration.

“It used to be that men here would go to Mexico City to get work,” says Martín Rodríguez, 75, as he sits in the shade in his tire repair shop on the outskirts of Ixmiquilpan. “But then it changed. Instead of people saying, ‘I’m off to Mexico [City], they would say, ‘I’m off to El Norte.’” Locals went especially to Florida and North Carolina, where they built particular links with towns and jobs, although they worked in many other states, from Kentucky to Michigan.

Emigration from Ixmiquilpan probably reached a peak in the 2000s, but then hit a wall with the Obama deportations and great recession. Another problem was that cartels took over the Mexican side of the border running the human smugglers, or coyotes, and making it dangerous to cross without paying them. Locals tell me that coyotes now charge as much as $15,000 to go from Ixmiquilpan to a US destination, and most can’t afford that.

Instead, the record wave of migration under Biden was from elsewhere; more than two-thirds of those caught crossing in his term came from countries other than Mexico, especially Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala and Cuba but also as far afield as China and Central Africa. This was due to instability and violence in those countries and increased use of refugee claims; many applied for asylum rather than just sneaking over to work like the people of Ixmiquilpan used to.

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The difficulty in going to the US means those already there fear coming home. A woman waiting to pick up money has a tear in her eye when she tells me she hasn’t seen her daughter in 15 years. But despite living away for decades, migrants still loyally send money home.

Many migrants from the area now have children who were born in the United States and are citizens. The American influence means that many in Ixmiquilpan speak English as well as Spanish and the indigenous Otomi tongue (which the locals call hñähñu). You can see this influence in palatial houses amid the cinder block shacks, with migrants using techniques they learned building walls in North Carolina and adding in their own touches like Romanic pillars. There are also hundreds of half-finished houses scattering the villages waiting for those last dollars.

Some residents have tried hard to turn the remittances into a sustainable economic base. In the nearby village of Puerto Dexthi, Hilario Cerroblanco, 59, saved money from construction to build a small factory using a local plant to make brushes. “We need businesses so we can stay here,” he says. He secured orders from some shops in Mexico City but it’s hard to compete with Chinese plastic goods.

A lot of locals have been more successful selling cement and tools for migrant families to build their homes, or food stalls to spend the dollars on delicious meals. Ixmiquilpan market is buzzing with families. They are eating sheep that has been slow-cooked for more than ten hours in ovens carved in the earth, and they are drinking fresh green juice of celery, parsley, and nopal cactus. It’s a vibrant atmosphere that has been built on decades of global movement and cross-border transfers. But as turbulent new politics smash this old order, the resilient community of Ixmiquilpan will have to adapt to the new era.

One clear reason is economic: Mass low-wage migration depresses wages, especially on the lower rungs of the labor market. Progressives would do well to come to grips with this reality, even as the Trumpians would be wise neither to overstep their mandate nor to limit their policy to showy and polarizing deportation actions.

To see why, it’s worth examining the history. Between 1965 and 1995, the share of Americans who favored lower immigration rates rose to 65%, up from a third. The shift in attitudes corresponded with a dramatic rise in low-skilled legal — and especially illegal — immigration. Migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border reached 1.64 million in 2000, more than double the rate in 1980 (the 2000 peak would be surpassed under Team Biden).

Mass illicit immigration was and continues to be a feature of the neoliberal model that first took hold in the Seventies. The neoliberal order establishes the primacy of the market over state and society by promoting the free flow of goods, capital, and, crucially, people (that last element is often omitted by progressive critics of neoliberalism). Unsurprisingly, the decade that saw the highest volume of illegal immigration was the Nineties — an era of unfettered globalization, deregulation, and free trade epitomized by the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Nafta facilitated the exploitation of cheap labor south of the border by outsourcing manufacturing jobs to Mexico. The agreement was also devastating for Mexican small farmers, who couldn’t compete with subsidized US agriculture. The resulting mass of indigent farmers migrated largely north into the open arms of American agribiz—the same force responsible for ruining their livelihoods. In 1990, the share of illegal farm workers in the United States was just 12%. By the turn of the millennium, it was about half, where it has remained since.

Until the 2010s, many Democrats embraced a comparatively hard line on illegal immigration, in keeping with the party’s working-class base. In his 1995 State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton lamented how “the jobs [illegal immigrants] hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants”.

Back then, it was free-market Republicans like Ronald Reagan who celebrated the exploitation of illicit labor in jobs “Americans won’t do”. Never mind that these jobs were overwhelmingly occupied by Americans prior to the arrival of millions of illicit workers. Never mind, too, that native-born workers still form the majority of the workforce in sectors with large numbers of illegal employees, such as construction, household labor, dry cleaning, and landscaping.

An earlier generation of labor leaders and social democrats viewed mass illegal migration as one component in a broader suite of policies, including outsourcing and union-busting, meant to squeeze wages. United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez, for example, repeatedly denounced illegal migration and would make a point of alerting the authorities to employers hiring such workers. In 2007, Bernie Sanders said: “On one hand you have large multinationals trying to shut down plants in America, and on the other hand, you have the service industry bringing in low-wage workers from abroad”. The result: “wages go down”.

Negative sentiment toward immigration is driven by the net volume and type of immigration to a given country, dividing native populations from newcomers over wages, skills, and cultural background. The last variable, culture, is mercifully less salient in the United States, given the country’s spectacular capacity to assimilate migrants. In sufficient numbers, though, low-skilled illegal immigration necessarily provokes a backlash, including in cases where migrants and the native-born otherwise lack meaningful cultural differences.

To be fair to open-borders advocates of the Left and the libertarian Right, public opinion had been comparatively indifferent to large volumes of low-skilled legal immigration until recently — that is, except among Republicans. Plus, despite high overall immigration, illegal immigration declined dramatically after 2000, with border crossings plateauing at around 300,000 a year in the 2010s. By this point, the Nafta shock in Mexico gave way to the low-growth but resilient Mexican economy of today, leading to a 90% reduction in illegal entries by Mexicans. Mexico’s role as a source of outmigration was soon eclipsed by the likes of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

Successive presidents also oversaw crackdowns at the southern border and boosted deportations. The Obama administration instituted family detention, deporting 2.9 million people in its first term and 1.9 million in its second. By comparison, the first Trump administration managed 1.5 million deportations, including a smaller proportion of violent criminals.

Then came the social-justice revolution of the mid-2010s, which consummated the Democratic Party’s capture by college-educated professionals. Mantras such as “no human being is illegal” gathered strength in Democratic circles as activists denounced Obama as the “Deporter in Chief”. The progressive zealots got a boost from Trump I, the cruelty of whose child-separation policies did wonders for the cause of limitless migration. Despite the first Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy, illegal immigration remained unchanged up until the pandemic; pandemic-induced travel restrictions caused overall immigration to fall near zero in 2020.

At that point, more Americans (34%) favored increased immigration than disfavored it (28%) for the first time. Emboldened in their opposition to Trump, Democrats excised what little immigration dissent remained in the party. Having previously called open borders a “Koch Brothers proposal”, Bernie Sanders embraced a moratorium on deportations and called for decriminalizing border crossings under pressure from the liberal press.

The Biden administration followed suit, announcing a temporary pause in deportations and adopting a near limitless interpretation of asylum law. While a global surge in immigration was to be expected following the end of pandemic restrictions, voters correctly interpreted Democratic policy as offering an unprecedented incentive to would-be migrants. At least 10 million foreign nationals without legal permanent status entered the country since 2021, per the Congressional Budget Office, the most of any four-year period in history.

In June 2024, Biden backtracked, issuing an executive order barring migrants from soliciting asylum when average daily encounters exceed 2,500. The result was a decline in monthly crossings by around 80%. The move was supported by minorities and working-class voters but abhorred by affluent progressives. Indeed, by the end of 2024, monthly crossings were lower than under Trump prior to the pandemic.

So here we are. The question now is how tough immigration enforcement should be, and whether Republicans — and eventually, Democrats — will once again overreach in their respective preferences.

The starting point for the debate is a simple proposition: namely, that mass deportations are entirely justified, representing a return to Obama-era deportation policy. Under Biden, a total of 1.49 million newcomers were removed — a shockingly paltry figure, given the total number of unlawful entries. Currently, Team Trump seems to be prioritizing the 1.4 million migrants who have received final orders of removal. Logistically speaking, it will be difficult to deport even this number anytime soon.

The goal of the new administration should be to craft a lasting immigration policy benefiting American workers. This will require gaining buy-in from Democrats where possible. Improving the asylum system requires sending a signal to migrants they are certain to be deported unless they have a credible claim of asylum. At the same time, employing more immigration judges for the current asylum backlog is eminently desirable and an area where Republicans could work with Democrats. It’s counterproductive for the sitting president to antagonize deportees’ receiving countries — however obnoxious their leaders may also be.

A points system based on migrants’ skills — ideally similar to that used by Canada prior to the pandemic — should also be adopted. While it’s true that Americans have historically tolerated high levels of low-skilled immigration, restrictionists are correct that chain migration doesn’t ultimately serve the national interest or workers. Shifting from family-based to skills-based migration would go a long way toward taming the anti-immigration fervor of the GOP base.

During his first term, Trump expanded Obama’s family-detention policy in an effort to deter migrants of all stripes. This and later family separation was what resulted in the administration’s failure to deport more violent criminals than its predecessor: Trump I turned public opinion against itself. Disturbingly, Trump’s proposal to expand migrant detentions in Guantanamo Bay suggests a willingness to double down on past failures, though the administration appears to be prioritizing removals with infractions beyond just illegal entries thus far.

Further, the Remain in Mexico policy was a marked improvement that helped curtail the 2018 spike in illegal immigration, whose revival will similarly benefit the current asylum backlog. Contrary to progressive critiques, Mexico as a whole isn’t unsafe, with many migrants residing in vibrant metropolitan areas while they solicit asylum. Then as now, the policy’s success will turn on Trump’s willingness to maintain a productive relationship with Mexican leaders.

Like her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has displayed a willingness to work with Trump, making record arrests of migrants and drug seizures, as well as constructing facilities to receive deportees. Having cajoled Mexico (and Canada) into substantial action, the effectiveness of the president’s tariff threats cannot be denied. Given his decision to impose tariffs anyway, however, it will be hard for either country to justify continued cooperation with Washington.

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Republicans should also note that their rationale for a military intervention in Mexico directly contradicts the premise of the Remain in Mexico policy. If carried out, an invasion would fuel a migratory catastrophe. If or when Mexican cartels’ recent terror designation is taken to its logical conclusion, the resulting torrent of actual refugees would undo decades of declining illegal immigration from Mexico. Trump could, instead, aid Sheinbaum’s proposal to expand the recently inaugurated Maya Train into Central America, a prospect certain to deter migration by creating jobs and fueling development.

Finally, if Trump is truly serious about deterrence and American workers, he should support the passage and aggressive enforcement of mandatory E-verify. Forcing employers to confirm the immigration status of workers — and making an example of those that don’t — would go a long way in curtailing migrant exploitation and raising wages for native workers.

Progressives should back these efforts. As it is, their simultaneous defense of unrestricted low-skilled immigration and opposition to H1B visas serves the class interest of their professional constituents. After all, the exploitation of H1B workers directly undercuts the bargaining power of high-skilled college graduates—the same group that benefit from a ready supply of undocumented maids and landscapers. But this policy mix has proved deeply unpopular with the non-college majority that decides US elections.

In the same vein, it’s telling that the immigration rhetoric of populist Republicans — such as Vice President JD Vance — echoes that of pre-Trump labor Democrats. This isn’t to say that the comparably oligarchic Republican Party is truly representative of working-class interests. It does, however, speak to the changing nature of both parties’ coalitions.

Progressives can continue dismissing the impact of illegal immigration on wages — relying, ironically, on the same neoliberal economists they would otherwise condemn. The reality, however, is that working-class voters will continue to believe that their wages will be undercut by foreign workers willing to work harder and for less than they would.

Democrats should recall the counsel of the civil-rights icon Barbara Jordan: “For the system to be credible, people actually have to be deported at the end of the process”. For their part, Republicans should avoid an overestimation of their mandate that has and likely will once more empower their progressive enemies.

Car bombs are one of the many terrifying weapons in the arsenal of Mexico’s cartels as they battle over territory, not only to traffic and sell drugs, but to steal oil from pipelines, smuggle migrants over the US border, and extort businesses, among other crimes. They also wield weaponized drones that drop makeshift bombs unleashing shrapnel and nails. They lay landmines that kill soldiers in their Humvees as well as farmers. And they build fighting vehicles known as “monsters” that look like they are out of Mad Max, with walls of bulletproof steel and battering rams.

Mexican soldiers have been out in force fighting the cartels since 2006, and the new Left-wing president Claudia Sheinbaum has promised to keep up this militarized strategy. But the troops have failed to quell the death toll (or perhaps made it worse): Mexico has suffered over 400,000 murders since the army crackdown began almost two decades ago. During this period, many security officials have themselves been found working with cartels, including the former security minister Genaro García Luna, who was sentenced by a New York court in October.

Living and reporting in Mexico since 2001, I have covered the conflict in depth and it’s as bad as ever. In recent months, I’ve been in a village in Guerrero state that suffered attacks with armored drones, and in the city of Culiacán, where residents have shut themselves in their homes because of the violence, calling it a “narco pandemic”, in allusion to the Covid lockdown. Over the years, I have seen horrors that I couldn’t have imagined such as going into a morgue with 49 bodies that were all decapitated and had their hands and feet cut off.

It’s a complex conflict that spirals across Mexico with dozens of different groups, ever-changing frontlines and unclear rules. The cartel war is a fight that the Mexican army can’t win yet can’t pull out of. And it’s a conflict that Washington needs to be wary about getting dragged deeper into.

The United States is already involved in Mexico’s cartel war. Agents for the DEA, FBI, Homeland Security and CIA run operations against drug traffickers, using undercover agents and stings. Washington gives aid to Mexico City, partly in return for holding back migrants and hitting narcos. US companies sell arms to Mexican security forces, and gangsters smuggle an iron river of guns over the Rio Grande.

But Donald Trump has called to bring the US military into the battle. “When I am back in the White House, the drug kingpins and vicious traffickers will never sleep soundly again,” Trump said in a 2023 statement. Rep. Dan Crenshaw introduced legislation for authorization of US military force against cartels. “You need something that says, ‘You have finally pissed off the gringos. You finally did it,’” he told me last year. Trump has picked Ronald Johnson, a retired colonel and former CIA liaison to special operations, as ambassador to Mexico.

I used to think that scenes in the movie Sicario of US special forces sneaking over the border to take out cartels were pure fantasy. Now I think there is a chance such operations could really come to pass. But Washington should avoid getting drawn too deep into this quagmire.

The Republican hard-liners rightly blame cartels for trafficking fentanyl; they buy precursor ingredients from Chinese pharmaceutical companies and cook it into the lethal substance in labs south of the border. They are also right to call out US overdose deaths as a true national catastrophe; several years saw over 100,000 overdose deaths, with fentanyl in about 70% of cases.

Yet the problem with the call to bomb cartels is not only that it would inflame cross-border tensions, especially if civilians were killed, which could put American lives in danger of revenge attacks. It’s that it wouldn’t stop cartels.

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The cartels are not composed of a few arch villains who can be taken out. They are sprawling networks with look-outs, runners, gunmen, traffickers, “mules”, businessmen, accountants, and plenty of police, soldiers, prosecutors, and mayors on the payroll. A study published in Science found cartels were one of the biggest employers in Mexico with 160,000 to 185,000 members. I think that is an underestimate. Even if US special forces were to blast away 1,000 cartel operatives then more than 99% would still be standing.

Furthermore, US forces could not take out one cartel and declare victory. There are about 20 significant groups, from the biggest cartels to powerful regional players to important local mobs, and dozens more affiliated gangs and crews. As US drug agents have discovered from decades of experience, when they weaken one cartel, another steps up and it often just creates more violence and fragmentation. The US arrest of the kingpin Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada in July has created a devastating civil war in the Sinaloa Cartel that is drowning the state in blood.

The call to bomb cartels gets into the question of what kind of conflict we are dealing with south of the border. Mexico’s cartel war is not officially a war. In 2017, a British think tank claimed Mexico had the world’s second deadliest armed conflict after Syria. But Mexico’s foreign ministry in response released a forceful communiqué arguing that it is a criminal problem. “The report irresponsibly points to the existence of an ‘(non-international) armed conflict’ in Mexico,” it said. “This is incorrect. Neither the existence of criminal groups nor the use of the Armed Forces to maintain order in the interior of the country are sufficient reason.”

I think the Mexican conflict is a weird mix of crime and war and we don’t have the best language and legal norms to deal with that. Yet the same is also true for various countries in the Americas, from Jamaica to Honduras to Brazil to Ecuador. Cartels wield paramilitary forces, people flee their villages and towns, and Mexico is littered with mass graves. Yet the gangsters are not ideological and are looking to make money rather than sweep to power like the Taliban. And to recognize Mexico as having a legal armed conflict would be to recognize cartels as belligerents with rights under the Geneva Convention.

There are no missile attacks or full-on aerial bombings. It’s a brutal battle but one that paradoxically allows much of Mexico to live outside the bloodshed. When you go to much of Mexico, you might be surprised how ordinary it feels, from colonial towns with bustling markets to hipsters sipping lattes in the trendy quarters of big cities. Mexico City is a thriving and popular capital and the Caribbean beaches are bustling with record numbers of tourists. Mexico has a trillion-dollar economy and a big middle class despite the crime. It’s a weird duality of violence alongside normality.

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If the United States were to classify cartels as terrorist groups, it would create other issues. Those fleeing over the border to claim asylum would have their cases strengthened. US gun stores could be charged with providing material to foreign terrorist organizations.

Perhaps Trump is using the threat of violence to pressure Mexico to act. In November, Trump stated he would put 25% tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods if they didn’t stop migrants and fentanyl coming in. On 3 December, Mexican security forces made what they claimed was their biggest fentanyl bust ever.

Such pressure could have a long-term effect. Mexico might not be able to eliminate cartels right now but it could manage to force them to reduce their fentanyl trafficking. Seizures at the border in the coming months will see if that is the case. That would be a positive development and also stop the poison spreading in Mexico. But the United States would still have to deal with fentanyl being made elsewhere, including on US soil.

The United States could create a new robust law against cartels, this novel type of paramilitary organized crime spreading in the hemisphere. But it would need to wield the law in US cities, where cartels move vast quantities of drugs, money and guns. And Mexico has to try and reduce the bloodshed in its homeland. Right now, perhaps the best it can hope for is reducing the worst crimes. In the future, it would have to go through some fundamental change to really become a less violent society.

Cartel bosses like to bathe their guns in gold and jewelry. The Mexican army has many such captured weapons in a base in Mexico City in what is known as the “narco museum”. A gleaming captured pistol there has words carved on the side saying, “only the dead have seen the end of the war.” And Trump’s unlikely to change that.

Little did the Ayotzinapa students know that history was about to repeat itself. As night fell, their buses were stopped by police barricades. There, on a lonely stretch of highway, they were set upon by officers and members of the local drug cartel. Many of the students were shot, a number were hospitalised, and one was found dead by the roadside, a part of his face ripped away. It was only the following morning, however, that the full scale of the horror became clear: 43 students couldn’t be accounted for. A decade on from their disappearance, they’re presumed dead. Their bodies have never been recovered. 

If the Tlatelolco massacre became the defining moment of Mexico’s authoritarian past, “the 43” have come to symbolise the country’s stumbling democratic transition. There are, after all, over 110,000 desaparecidos (“disappeared ones”) right across Mexico, anonymous men and women who vanished one day and never came home. You’re reminded of them everywhere you go, their faces peering out at you from countless monochrome posters. Each, of course, represents a private tragedy. But just like Tlatelolco, the case of the Ayotzinapa students has gained vigour through the years, and ten years on represents abuse of state power at its most absolute.

Though Mexicans were disappeared in the Nineties, the modern epidemic of vanishings really started in 2006. That year, President Felipe Calderon declared a war on drugs. As gangs defended their turf, from both the police and each other, the republic was drowned in an ocean of blood. Over the next 18 years, Mexico suffered some 431,000 homicides, from random shootings to organised beheadings. Alongside the violence, disappearances have been normalised too. Alongside those 113,000 desaparecidos, after all, 4,000 clandestine graves have also been found. 

Mexico’s drug cartels are clearly to blame for the mayhem — yet it’s not quite right to see them as straightforward criminals. Their influence is so powerful that it’s nowadays impossible to draw clear lines between cops and crooks. At every single level of government, from the police to the judiciary, there have been countless examples of collusion between officials and the cartels. Indeed Los Zetas, one of the most powerful and brutal of all the gangs, actually emerged out of an elite battalion of soldiers. Trained in counterinsurgency and drug war tactics, the troops then used that knowledge to become one of the most feared cartels around. 

Given these blurred lines, it makes sense that investigations into the missing 43 have gone nowhere, and have instead been met by denial, impunity and red herrings. Only six weeks after the outrage, Mexico’s attorney general famously presented what he called the “historic truth” — and announced the students’ bodies had been incinerated by a cartel, with their remains thrown down a nearby ravine. Yet forensic investigators from Argentina, leading experts in finding desaparecidos after their own country’s history, soon dismissed these claims.

In 2021, meanwhile, drone footage showed the apparent site of mass murder being prepared. First taken by the Mexican Navy, it later shows their presence alongside soldiers and the attorney general. The families of the victims had long suspected official involvement in the massacre, a position later taken by an independent enquiry into the event. Led by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), it concluded that the disappeared 43 amounted to a “state crime”.    

Despite accepting some involvement, however, the Mexican government continues to insist that the truth of the disappeared is ultimately a case of cartel violence, and perhaps a few corrupt politicians and police officers seduced by the violent glitz of drugs. A timely reminder of this has been the recent re-arrest of Gildardo Lopez Astudillo. Kingpin of the Guerreros Unidos cartel, he was detained just a few weeks before the tenth anniversary of the Ayotzinapa attack, with the authorities presenting his capture as a definitive win in the search for truth. 

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As obfuscation over Ayotzinapa persists, meanwhile, all Mexico suffers. In a study on Colombia — a nation with over 100,000 desaparecidos of its own — the former US ambassador coined the phrase “narco-statization” to refer to a situation in which every aspect of life is shaped by the violence and corruption of the drug trade. That’s clear enough from one of the leading GIEI investigators into the Ayotzinapa disaster. As Carlos Beristain has publicly noted, the moment his inquiry got too close to pinpointing state involvement, and especially military involvement, requests for information went unanswered.

Considering all this, it’d be easy to see the case of the 43 is a quintessential example of state failure. Yet in his compelling book, Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman showed how the first systematic attempt to disappear an entire people couldn’t happen without meticulous planning and organisation. Disposing of human life isn’t straightforward. Rather, it requires a monstrous organisational effort to ensure the dead remain hidden. What we see in Mexico is not state failure, in short, but state excessiveness and impunity. 

That’s especially true when you recall that violence doesn’t actually come easily to humans. We are far from natural born killers. As with other forms of systematically enforced and culturally normalised violence, rather, disappearance thrives when it’s a learned practice. This requires us to situate the disaster in Mexico in a far broader historical and geographical framing.

In mapping out the global topography of disappearance, our journey could plausibly begin in Nazi Germany. From there, we might follow ex-Nazis down the so-called “ratlines” to safety in South America. Certainly, not enough attention has been given to links between former National Socialists and the Argentinian junta, who also disappeared a number of Jewish activists and intellectuals through the Seventies. Then, like Che Guevara, we could travel up the spine of the Andes, learning how disappearance was remastered and exported, and how many of its advocates were students at the US military training facility now infamously called the “School of the Americas”.

Like all violence, the practice of disappearance has taken new forms as societies have changed. As Latin American countries have been transformed by the globalising logic of the free market, for instance, violence itself has been privatised. Just like global capital, meanwhile bloodshed has moved with the markets, from Colombia to Mexico to the frontiers of the US itself.

The geography of violence, in turn, has shaped how it’s counted. Keen to show how he brought peace and stability to Mexico, President Andreas Manual Lopez Obrador came to power promising to find the 43. Along the way, he founded the National Search Commission, and in one of his final official acts tasked it with reorganising Mexico’s disappeared into a more “accurate” picture. Unsurprisingly, the numbers fell dramatically. At just 12,377, the National Search Commission clearly used a politically motivated methodology. Families, for their part, responded to this development by decrying “the disappearance of the disappeared”. 

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This is far from just a Mexican problem. A few months ago, I was part of an organising committee leading an international conference on disappearance in Belfast. Hosting the event in Northern Ireland was significant — not least given the acknowledgment the UK isn’t immune to the practice either. As Padraig Og O Ruairc’s recent book on the disappeared of Ireland vividly shows, it’s a technique the British government (and its opponents) have employed for centuries, and on a scale unknown even during the Troubles. The Belfast event was opened by testimonies from two women. The first, Elizabeth Santander, described how her husband was vanished by the Colombian state in the Eighties. Dympna Kerr, for her part, explained how she’s still searching for her 19-year-old brother Columba McVeigh, murdered and secretly buried by the IRA in 1975. 

Having spoken with such courage about the weight of absence, I was especially struck by how both women ended their testimonies with poetry. Apart from the beauty of their words, it reminded me how important art has become for the vanished of Mexico, with no local artist more dedicated to confronting the horrors of disappearance than Chantal Meza. In splattered flashes of red and grey, her paintings are a howl of grief for the 43 and every desaparecido. It’s appropriate, then, that today her extensive State of Disappearance collection is unveiled in the Chancellors Building at the University of Bath. A decade on from their final bus ride, it’s heartening to know that the Ayotzinapa students haven’t fully been forgotten.

More recently, the silver-haired populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or “Amlo”, chose the Zocalo as the site of dozens of rallies during his 12-year quest for power. When he finally won the top job in 2018 with his Morena party — short for “Movement for National Regeneration”, while also meaning “brown skinned woman” — he moved the seat of the presidency back to the square’s National Palace.

It was also in the Zocalo that the current opposition, centred around presidential contender Xóchitl Gálvez, filled the square with activists dressed in pink on Sunday 19 May, promising a “pink tide” to sweep to power and replace what they claim is an authoritarian government by Morena. (The pink signals Gálvez’s coalition of parties rather an ideological bent.) Come Sunday, however, it will almost certainly be Morena supporters who will be celebrating.

A 61-year-old environmental engineer, Claudia Sheinbaum — Amlo’s anointed successor — was mayor of Mexico City from 2018 to last year. With opinion polls showing her leading the polls by a whopping 20 to 30 points over Gálvez, the campaign has been no nail-biter. Either way, Sheinbaum or Gálvez will give Mexico its first female president, ahead of its super-power neighbour the United States.

Despite misgivings among commentators in the UK and US, this weekend’s election — the biggest in the nation’s history by number of eligible voters and positions being contested — is a testament to the tenacity of Mexico’s democracy. Undeniably, its political system is heavily flawed, besieged by drug cartels who finance and murder candidates as well as journalists. But, for the most part, especially when compared with the rest of Latin America, it still functions. Mexico, remember, is nothing like the nearby authoritarian regimes of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua; nor is it suffering the political meltdown of Peru nor the complete ungovernability of Haiti.

And yet, read the British and American press and you could be forgiven for thinking that Mexico is sliding into a dictatorship. Two years ago, for example, the London-based Index On Censorship named Amlo “Tyrant of the Year”, above Vladimir Putin or Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, while The Economist Intelligence Unit downgraded Mexico from a “flawed democracy” to a “hybrid regime”. Elsewhere, the Financial Times has warned  that “the country’s democracy is now in real danger”, while a headline in The Atlantic referred to Amlo as “The Autocrat Next Door”.

At its heart, this is not necessarily an issue of Right vs Left. Amlo, after all, identifies as Left-wing and promotes a range of different social programmes, some of which have reduced poverty and which Sheinbaum promises to carry on. But, perhaps confusingly for many in the West, he does not talk about “socialism” and is socially conservative on some issues, being strongly nationalist and in favour of the family. “The Mexican family is the principal institution of social security,” he has said.

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At the same time, however, Amlo is clearly populist, employing a rhetoric that pits the Mexican people against what he calls “a mafia of power”. This style has garnered comparisons with Donald Trump, with whom Amlo was friendly when he was US President. In a similar vein, since his election in 2018, critics have focused on how Morena has expanded its power across various state institutions, including the judicial system, a process they fear will carry on under Sheinbaum. They also point to Amlo’s combative approach with the media. In February, he published the telephone number of a New York Times reporter who had investigated narco-corruption, and revealed the supposed income of a Mexican journalist who wrote a report on the president’s son.

Both amounted to acts of gross intimidation that deserve to be condemned. They are, however, not necessarily symptoms of how an authoritarian regime might function. Under Amlo, for instance, there have not been any major violent crackdowns on protests or round ups of political prisoners, such as those in Nicaragua and Venezuela, let alone in Syria or China. Indeed, as Amlo goes through his last months of power, he remains genuinely popular with an approval of around 60%, according to newspaper El Financiero.

Moreover, focusing solely on Amlo risks ignoring the fact that Mexico was already a very flawed democracy before he took office. The nation’s democratic transition since was long and twisted, and it was only in 2000, after 72 years in power, that the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost the presidency and a real multiparty system took root. Nor did its trials end there. Under the new president Vicente Fox, there was a dubious criminal charge against Amlo in 2004 that would stop him running for president that was only dropped after huge protests (in the Zocalo again). Under Fox’s successor Felipe Calderón, the public security secretary Genaro García Luna was later found to be in the pocket of Mexico’s drug cartels. And under the next president, Enrique Peña Nieto, a scandal blew up over his wife buying a $7-million mansion from a company that received government contracts. In other words, Mexico’s democracy was hardly in fine shape before Amlo came along.

None of this is to say that we shouldn’t single out Amlo for criticism, particularly when it comes to national security. During his five years in office, Mexico has suffered more than 150,000 murders, the worst stretch in recent history. Cartels continue to operate brazenly in swathes of the country, using drones to drop bombs and shaking down businesses, even tortilla sellers.

And unsurprisingly, this violence places a great strain on Mexican democracy. Under Amlo, 37 journalists have been murdered, while over the past year, assassins have killed at least 30 political candidates seeking office, with victims from both Morena and the opposition. Yet while it is no excuse, the uncomfortable truth is that cartel violence has been soaking Mexico in blood for almost two decades. Neither Calderón nor Peña Nieto nor Amlo has found a solution to it. We can only hope that Sheinbaum has more success — although she has offered few concrete policies so far.

An argument made by critics is that Amlo is moving gradually towards an authoritarian system: that his aggressive rhetoric and greater control of institutions will lead to more open authoritarianism down the road. “The democratic retreat does not follow a fixed sequence,” writes Mexican journalist Eduardo Ruiz-Healy. “It is a gradual and prolonged process.” According to these fears, Amlo could still rule from behind the scenes with Sheinbaum as a puppet. However, surely it is dangerous to condemn a government for something that could happen in the future; we need to report the facts of what is actually happening.

It is common for anti-populist commentators to see populists as naturally inclined towards authoritarianism. According to this thinking, as soon as politicians start to talk of the people versus the elite, it is only a matter of time before they try to seize more power. The reality, however, is far more complex. Framing societal conflict in terms of a battle between the demos and their rulers is hardly a new phenomenon: rather, it can be traced back to the golden age of social democracy, including to the British Labour Party’s campaign in 1945.

Besides, in the following decades, a number of populist Latin American Presidents, including in Argentina and Ecuador, left office peacefully to be replaced by rival populists. Critics will rightfully point to the authoritarian takeovers in Nicaragua and Venezuela by self-avowed socialists, but they are the exception. Mexico, by contrast, is about to welcome North America’s first female president into power, off the back of a largely successful exercise in mass democracy.

Yes, it is imperfect — and yes, it can be dangerous. But after two and a half decades, Mexico’s democracy stumbles on.

Known as J, short for Junior, Flores is 42, but looks younger, with thick cropped hair and wide alert eyes. He’s driven and talkative, disarming with an easy manner and a lively mind that jumps from details of his trafficking logistics to the books he read in prison. He knows both the world of Chicago’s Little Village, where he was born, and small-town Zacatecas, Mexico, where his father hails from. He speaks with a Chicago-Latino accent.

Though he doesn’t have an aggressive demure and was never convicted of violence, Flores was key to networks that have pumped narcotics into America and drowned Mexico in blood. Mexican drug traffickers wouldn’t have made their vast fortunes without US associates to move their product north of the river. “Chapo or Mayo or Arturo couldn’t do what we did in the United States,” Flores says. Indeed, the twins made more bank from their hometown of Chicago than many of the drug lords south of the border.

Flores didn’t exactly choose this world — he was born into it. When his mother was pregnant with him in 1981, his father was incarcerated for being caught with 11 kilos of black tar heroin. He and Pedro grew up with an older brother who became a shot caller for the Latin Kings, a fearsome street gang, as well as a major drug dealer. “I didn’t have your regular childhood,” he tells me. “My brothers were in the most violent, biggest organisation which was the Latin Kings… I am basically being raised in that kind of culture.”

When his father finally came out of prison, he was furious. He was an old-school narco from Zacatecas and forbade the twins from what he saw as the crude, tattooed life of gang bangers. “He despised gang members, believe it or not. It’s this weird contradiction. Because he was in prison with them. He didn’t understand their reasoning.”

His father’s idea of education, meanwhile, was taking the twins down to Mexico to buy marijuana and drive it back to Chicago. On their first trip, aged seven, they helped stash weed in the gas tank. Over the following years, they learned how to find marijuana plantations in the mountains and negotiate with sellers. “My father made sure he introduced us to everyone and that we treated everyone with respect.”

When they were 12, their father went on the run to Mexico. After a stint there, the twins returned to Chicago to live with their Latin King brother — and help him deal drugs. After he too was sent to prison, they began making their own deals with Sinaloa Cartel intermediaries in Chicago. By 17, they had made their first deal — 30 kilos of cocaine — and by 20, they were shifting more than a tonne a month and making millions.

That the twins rose so fast up the ranks was partly thanks to their upbringing, which put them in a special position to link the drug lords in Mexico with the gangs that sold drugs on US streets. They knew both worlds, but weren’t quite part of either. Instead, they styled themselves as businessmen. It helped that they’d had a better education than most of their counterparts: even while trafficking through their teenage years, Margarito had received a high school diploma and Pedro did a couple of semesters of college.

In this business, brains are important. “Drug trafficking is not easy,” Flores says. “Prisons are filled with failed drug traffickers. Cemeteries are filled with failed drug traffickers.” He explains that moving dope in America is about running a smooth logistical operation. The cartel needs the drugs delivered fast and the payment back faster. Traffickers who are slow to move loads and mess up on paying are the ones who get killed. Luckily, the twins were workaholics who took care of every detail as they built a network of independent truck drivers, discreet stash houses, and crucially, money-counting machines.

Meanwhile, the twins kept an eye on the fluctuating cocaine prices in different cities like brokers watching the stock market. Since sale prices are higher the further north you go, they made profits by delivering to the northeast and into Canada. The buying prices are also lower the higher up the chain you get, so the twins cut out the middlemen and built relationships directly with the heads of the Sinaloa Cartel.

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Gaining the trust of the top players was not easy, however. In early 2005, an associate of El Chapo kidnapped Pedro and held him for over two weeks, almost starving him to death. Flores went to the mountains, where he successfully negotiated with El Chapo for Pedro’s release — though he ended up paying off a debt that had been caused by El Chapo’s own man messing up. Eventually, the twin’s gained El Chapo’s approval to buy cocaine directly from the inner circle of Sinaloa drug lords at a cheaper rate. This would boost their trafficking to more than three tonnes a month and up to $10 million in profit.

El Mayo (or Ismael Zambada), another Sinaloa Cartel warlord, was easier to work with, praising their ability to move so much powder, and joking about how much they could have moved if they were triplets. “He was a fierce man, but he was also one of the fairest,” recalls Flores. Now 76 years old, El Mayo has never been inside a jail cell. The veteran drug lord boasts a reputation for smoothing relations and paying off cops.

“He reminded me a lot, even nicer probably, than my father,” Flores says. “I feel like he had genuine love and respect for us… When it came to any type of business, he would be like, ‘Whatever you guys decide and you know what, here is an extra something for you guys.’ It doesn’t surprise me that he continues to be the head of the organisation, the most successful one for sure.”

In their case, US prosecutors portrayed El Chapo as the supreme head of the Sinaloa Cartel. But Flores’s account paints a picture of a federation with a cupola of bosses: among these, Arturo Beltrán Leyva, a roughneck known as Barbas, or The Beard, was actually moving more cocaine. “He was a calculator; I would grab my phone to calculate and before I even pressed a number, he was already telling you what it was,” says Flores. “He was one of the best businessmen I feel like there was in drug trafficking.”

However, Beltrán Leyva also had a reputation for murder and even cannibalism. Margarito says it bothered him that he wasn’t as famous as Chapo and Mayo, and he used violence to put himself on the map. “It’s always about legacy… To them, you are your name,” he says. “He had no limit when it came to violence.”

Another gangster with a bloody reputation was El Mencho, or Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes. When Mexican federal agents arrested the twins in Jalisco, Mencho led a squad of gunmen to force their release. He was then a rising figure in a local group affiliated with the Sinaloa mob, but Margarito says he was an aggressive, hungry guy and he didn’t like to do business with him. “He had that chip on his shoulder, a violent man from the beginning.”

In 2008, these Sinaloan bosses broke into a bloody civil war. The violence had various fronts, but a central battle was between Beltrán Leyva and El Chapo — The Beard versus Shorty. As these old childhood friends turned into bitter enemies, their gunmen painted the streets of Sinaloa with blood. In May, sicarios fired 500 bullets into a son of El Chapo, Édgar, at a Culiacán shopping mall, and from then on residents lived with ensuing daily revenge hits.

The twins were ordered to choose between Chapo and Beltrán Leyva. But by this point, they were working with the DEA. They tried to play the two men off against each other, hoping to gather evidence on both. “We were threatened by the two most powerful, most violent, drug cartels I would say in the world at that time,” says Flores.

Flores has a tear in his eye when he describes their decision to co-operate. He realised his path would only lead to death or the Super Max but flipping gave him a glimmer of hope. “I had a spiritual epiphany one day,” he says. “I felt like, I wanted to do something good for my family.” I’m reminded of his earlier description of watching the film Scarface as a kid: “Scarface was a great story, but it never motivated us to die like him.”

With the civil war raging, the twins began recording their dealings with traffickers. The risk of being caught snitching was huge, but they made good under-covers. Their sentencing memorandum has a list of 54 recorded conversations with narcos. Finally, they got El Chapo himself on the phone. To lure him in, Pedro renegotiated the price of a batch of heroin they had already received. “In the drug business you don’t do that,” Flores says. “You don’t receive a shipment and then try and get a better price.”

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On 30 November 2008, the twins handed themselves into custody and went from living the life of millionaire narcos to witnesses in jail cells. Their cooperation led to indictments against everybody: Chapo, Mayo, Beltrán Leyva, their sons and brothers and lieutenants, and even members of the twins’ own organisation in Chicago. They spent years alone in prison, segregated for their own safety. Then in 2018, Pedro took the stand and testified against Chapo in his showcase trial in Brooklyn.

As a reward, the twins were given 12 years in prison rather than a life sentence. At least, Flores says, they are alive and able to be fathers and husbands. Since his release, he has been trying to turn his life around. He’s giving classes to law enforcement about the inner workings of cartels with a group called Dynamic Police Training and testified before the Congressional “Task Force to Combat Mexican Drug Cartels,” headed by Rep. Dan Crenshaw. “I have this need to do something with all my knowledge,” he says. “I want to make sure that by the time I leave here my legacy is something positive.” Indeed, Mexican journalists often complain that the US side of the trafficking equation is poorly documented — Flores is shedding much-needed light on it.

“This a cautionary story, we are not trying to promote the life at all,” Flores says. “My brother and I were always applauded for bad, so now it feels good to go to an event where I am teaching law enforcement. Where I get a hug or a handshake or a standing ovation. And they tell me ‘Thank you.’”

A version of this interview appeared on Ioan Grillo’s CrashOut Substack.

The Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) announced themselves to the world on 1 January 1994, when they overthrew and temporarily occupied various Mexican centres for political power. The timing was symbolic, corresponding with the day the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect. Outraged at the treaty’s effective removal of Article 27 from the Mexican constitution, which guaranteed indigenous peoples their rights to collective lands, they became the first organisation to declare war on an internationally recognised treaty. Their campaign came to resemble a war from February onwards, as Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo launched an offensive to capture or destroy them.

In 2006, I was part of a delegation accompanying the Zapatistas as they returned to the streets of San Cristobal in what they called the “Other Campaign”, a broad movement of protest and civic resistance. Our vehicle followed directly behind their leader, the Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos. He led the rebellious cavalcade out of the canyon on a motorcycle, inevitably recalling the spirit of Che Guevara. For many activists of the Nineties, Marcos had filled a similar space to Che: the exotic radical who combined the roles of intellectual and man-of-action. And like Che’s movement, the Zapatistas’ idealism eventually shattered when it collided with the raw realities of power.

Often described as the “poorest of the poor”, the Zapatistas connected their fight to a broader history of persecution. “We are a product of 500 years of struggle,” their First Declaration proclaimed. Theirs was a fight for dignity, which was inseparable from their demands for autonomy and the constitutional right to self-govern according to indigenous laws, customs and practices. And their name bound their struggle to the nation’s revolutionary past, invoking Emiliano Zapata, who led the Mexican revolution of 1910.

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But though the Zapatistas wove themselves into a tapestry of Mexican history, many observers felt what they represented was radically new. My guide in 2006, the late journalist and Beatnik poet John Ross, told me: “If the Zapatistas hadn’t appeared, we would have needed to invent them. There would not have been such a thing as the anti-globalisation movement without them. They were the catalyst.” The Zapatistas immediately became icons of a global Left, largely thanks to the non-indigenous Marcos, who positioned himself as a bridge between the two worlds. Like all revolutionaries, Marcos projected a romantic allure with his trademark military cap, smoking pipe and balaclava. He became a new kind of pin-up for a globally sensitised radical generation. Indeed, perhaps part of his appeal was precisely that he was faceless, the balaclava he wore acting as a kind of leveller, which allowed men at least to dream of the romance of being a revolutionary without the impossible handsomeness of El Che.

Beyond his mystical appeal, Marcos’s greatest accomplishment was the originality of his writings. The Zapatistas insisted that words were their most formidable weapon, and Marcos became their most recognised author. Not only did he display an astute reading of global political affairs, but his adaptation of myths and tales with human spirits and fictitious animal characters showed the true power of fabulation. If there were to be a genuine revolution, he insisted, it would need to be written in a different style. Marcos quipped he was a Marxist who, intent on converting the indigenous to his doctrine, found himself being converted to an indigenous way of seeing the world.

But his movement was soon to be lost in translation. The Zapatistas arrived at the dawn of the internet age; some commentators even claimed they were the first internet revolution. Leading security think tanks, such as the Rand corporation, called their struggle “network centric warfare”. And Manuel Castells, among the most prominent social gurus for what he called the “information age”, even fronted one of his books on “The Network Society” with Zapatista artwork. It was hard to read any study of the Zapatistas in which the new language of the digital age — networks, non-hierarchy, connectivity — wasn’t applied. Yet during my visit to la Garrucha, which was widely promoted as the first rebel stronghold to have internet, it was clear that the technology simply didn’t work. The projection of digital language onto the Zapatistas was designed purely to appeal to bourgeois radicals in the West.

What actually set the Zapatistas apart was their ability to surprise, to go into hiding, and the unpredictable and untimely responses they offered that didn’t follow obvious paths. By 1998, they were already writing about the importance of slowing things down and embracing silence. This couldn’t be further from the performativity of a certain kind of radical politics they were made into emblems of. The Zapatistas never asked to become global icons, even if they undoubtedly welcomed the solidarity. Their demands were actually rather straightforward: land, liberty and autonomy for the indigenous of Mexico. Yet at the dawn of the digital age, it was external forces that wanted to momentarily parade them to the world as part of a new revolutionary vanguard — despite the fact they resisted those very terms.

By the turn of the millennium, it was becoming apparent that radicalism in the West was taking a different path. While the Zapatistas had fully embraced non-violence as a political strategy — a position that was most evident during their march upon Mexico City in March 2001 — the previous year’s protests in Seattle at the WTO convention, and in Prague against the IMF and World Bank showed how some Western anti-globalists were willing to engage in violent confrontation. And after 9/11, the attention of Western activists turned to the battles in Iraq and Afghanistan, which gradually pushed the conceptualisation of war back into a more familiar statist direction. This seemed to be at odds with Marcos’s insistence that war was a global state of affairs in which the nation state merely played a militarising and policing role.

In the two decades after 2006, the Zapatistas saw a notable decline in international attention. This was due in part to their own political moves, which included a rather disastrous foray into electoral politics in 2018 that seemed to contradict their previous critique of the state. But something else happened in 2006 that would end up transforming Chiapas, Mexico and the Americas in ways that diverted attention away from the indigenous campesinos.

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By Ioan Grillo

In December 2006, President Felipe Calderón won Mexico’s election — though many analysts believe the vote count was rigged, and the then-contender Andrés Manuel López Obrador never accepted the result. Ten days into his presidency, Calderón announced an outright assault on the narco-trafficking cartels. The expansive and violent battle that ensued drew international interest away from the conflict in Chiapas, leading to hundreds of thousands of murders and disappearances. In the process, the narco wars pushed the drugs trade into Chiapas. During one of my trips there in 2006, human rights representatives said that Chiapas didn’t have a major drugs problem. That is no longer the case today. In January, more than 700 villagers permanently fled their homes in the communities of Chicomuselo and La Concordia due to cartel violence.

This violence has escalated since smuggling groups moved in to control and exploit the flow of migrants heading north. And the electoral victory of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2019 has further exacerbated the problem. His militarisation of the region hasn’t deterred the cartels: on the contrary, with the links between organised crime, the military and the police, promises of greater profits in this new economic corridor has resulted in open warfare. In response to this instability, a Zapatista communique stated in November they were closing their autonomous municipalities to the outside world.

After this retreat, what legacy do the Zapatistas have today? By emphasising the Zapatistas’ race and identity over their desperate poverty, Western radicals were as complicit as liberals in setting aside the importance of poverty as the defining marker shaping political consciousness. What’s more, their attempt to frame the Zapatista movement to fit the language of digitalisation anticipated the parading of social justice solidarity we continue to see on social media, and speaks less to the indigenous of Mexico than to virtually connected intelligentsia of today. Given the self-serving performativity of it all, is it any wonder the Zapatistas became a kind of fetishised object, openly embraced by techno-optimists to convey an image of “good indigenous” radicals until they too could be neatly set aside?

Ever since the dawn of the 20th century, the lands and people of Mexico have been stereotyped. In their heyday, the Zapatistas fulfilled a Western radical fantasy. And now their country is over-filtered in that familiar cinematic shade of Mexican yellow: dangerous and unforgiving, lawless and ruled by crazed bandits who kill without remorse. This is not the Mexico I know. And the remedy is a better appreciation of the complexities of history, while moving beyond fetishised portrayals of identities that are loaded with prejudice, including the prejudices of radicalism.

Over the past month, this small stretch of river has turned into the symbolic ground zero of the US battle over the border and immigration, the central issue of a contentious election year. But its fault lines extend well beyond these waters. This is also the epicentre of the problems that have dogged both America and Mexico for years: drug cartel money, the exodus from crumbling regimes and an existential struggle over the identity of the United States itself.

In December, Border Patrol agents processed more than 71,000 migrants and asylum seekers who crossed the river into the Del Rio sector, which includes Eagle Pass. They formed part of a record number of more than 300,000 migrants processed along the entire border in that month. In response, on January 10, Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered his state National Guard (a section of the army under the governor’s control) to fortify Shelby Park, a 47-acre patch of scrubby land by the river.

In a historical irony, the park is named after a Confederate general who fled to Mexico rather than surrender to the Union in the Civil War. When the Biden White House ordered that Border Patrol agents be let into Shelby, Abbott refused, setting up a stand-off between the state and federal powers over who polices the border. The Texas governor has also clashed with Washington over the use of razor wire, which the federal government argues is unnecessary and harmful. Activists of the Right have sided with Abbott: hundreds declared they would lead a convoy to support Texas and “take our border back”.

Travelling in from Mexico City, I arrive in Piedras Negras on a Friday night to find a rainy and windy Rio Grande, and meet Benicio Herrera, a hardware store owner walking his Labrador along the bank. When I ask about the fortifications on the US shore, he shrugs his shoulders. “There are two sides to this,” he says. “On one hand, the migrants have human rights. But on the other, we have never seen numbers like this before so there is going to be a reaction.”

Opinions on the migrant surge in Mexico are mixed. Over in a park by the bridge into the US, I talk to Cipriano Arguello, who’s selling potato chips and chicharrón (pork rinds), who is sympathetic to those crossing. “People forget where they have come from,” he says. “We are all migrants.” Watching over his juice stand in a nearby market, however, Francisco Vázquez says he supports the hardened measures. “They have to implement tactics for security,” he says. “They should have done this a long time before.” The Piedras Negras residents also have varied opinions on the convoy of activists making their way to Texas. Some refer to them as “patriotas” or “patriots”, while others label them the “anti-migrants”.

These mixed feelings reflect how migration over the US border has transformed in the last decade. The vast majority going over used to be Mexicans, sneaking in between the official bridges to find work. But now Mexicans make up less than a quarter, with the rest coming from around the globe, particularly Venezuela and Honduras, but also South Africa, China and Russia. Most of them enter Mexico through its southern border, before trekking through the cities and countryside to the north.

On the Saturday morning, I visit the Casa de Migrante, a Catholic shelter where migrants can get a bed. Sitting on the sidewalk, Francisco Lugo tells me how he fled Venezuela with his wife and four children, after he was threatened by a government-linked militia demanding money. He wants to apply for asylum, but like many plans to cross the river and make his application in the United States. Lugo knows nothing about the convoy but has heard about a military build-up. “God will help me find a good time when the water is low and we can go over the river,” he says.

Later, a Cuban man arrives at the hostel and reveals he had been kidnapped. A mechanic by trade in his late 20s, Minardo Escalona describes how he was abducted in the city of Monterrey, taking a taxi which handed him to the gangsters. He was kept for three days until his family in Cuba sent $2,000 by Western Union. “They give you scraps to eat, just to keep you alive to pay,” he says. “I’m glad I made it but I feel terrible that my family had to lose all that money.”

Gangsters, usually affiliated to the cartels, have been kidnapping migrants in Mexico for over a decade, but there has been an uptick in cases. It’s an especially cruel crime: wrenching money from the poorest and most desperate. But human smuggling in Mexico is a bloody and ever-evolving racket. In the Eighties, the smugglers, known as polleros or chicken herders, were local players who would take migrants over the border for a couple of hundred dollars. As the fences got higher and demand got bigger, networks have formed that stretch from American cities and down into Latin America. A Central American can now expect to pay about $15,000 to go from their home all the way to their destination in Chicago or San Francisco. The human smugglers work with the cartels, and that price buys immunity from kidnapping (or so they hope). Those who can’t afford or don’t want to pay, risk getting nabbed.

While cartels control most of the Mexican border, Piedras Negras is in the state of Coahuila, which has a heavily armed police force that has chased out the remnants of the Zetas cartel. However, Isabel Turcios, a nun who runs the hostel, says the police have simply taken over the business of shaking down migrants themselves. “They hunt them down and they get every peso they can from them,” she said. “It’s terrible.” I ask Turcios about the convoy and the barbed wire. “There are women and children crossing,” she says. “Why do they keep giving these people the incentive to go north and then punish them for it?”

As Saturday heats up, I go to the river and see the Texas National Guard speeding up and down on boats, each manned by two soldiers. I talk to a group of their Mexican opposite-numbers watching from the south side. An officer tells me their instructions can vary on whether to arrest migrants or let them through, but in recent weeks they have been working hard to round them up. “We do the work of containment of the migrants,” he says. “I feel bad detaining these people looking for a better life but that is what our orders are.”

These Mexican efforts are a large part of the reason that there are not many migrants actually crossing this weekend, as activists, cameras and politicians descend on the area. In January, US border authorities processed 176,000 migrants, a big drop from December although still a high number. But the pressure has not disappeared: there are already reports that, since the start of February, the migrant flows have shifted to the parts of the border in Arizona and California.

A decisive solution remains elusive. The successive governments of Obama, Trump and now Biden have all worked to get Mexico to slow down the migrant flow using a range of incentives and threats, but the crisis has only grown. And last week, this cooperation was threatened by a tangential matter. Three media outlets, including the investigative organisation ProPublica, released stories relating to an old Drug Enforcement Administration probe into a cartel that allegedly financed the 2006 election campaign of Mexican President Andrés Obrador. The President reacted angrily, accusing the US State Department of plotting against him, and said this could threaten how Mexico was containing the migrants. Biden was forced to personally call Obrador and made clear the two were “committed to continuing their productive partnership”.

Thus the situation on the ground remains critical but stable. Travelling with Mexican investigative journalist Juan Alberto Cedillo, I head north of Piedras Negras. As we trek along a dirt path, a police car speeds over to check who we are. We show our press IDs and move on. While Juan holds back, I head further into the hills and see a movement in the trees. Walking into the woodland, I spot the khaki of uniforms and see two soldiers crouched with a dog and their guns.

Unlike the troops in town, they aren’t friendly. They demand I hand over my phone and, when I refuse, they threaten to set the dog on me. They are tense, looking through my phone and accusing me of making a call to give their location away. When Juan rings, they put him on speaker and I say I am being detained. He quickly alerts a group of journalists who keep an eye on security. Eventually, the soldiers check by radio and confirm I’d been checked out by the police. I am allowed to walk away.

Early the following day, I make the journey everyone is here for, crossing the bridge into Eagle Pass and the United States. The convoy to “take our border back” had been staying at a ranch north of the city. There were reportedly a few hundred attendees, far fewer than some had hoped, or feared, and no violence. There had been similar, smaller convoys to Yuma, Arizona and San Ysidro, California. Governor Abbott, along with 13 other Republican governors, is holding a press conference inside Shelby Park but the convoy members aren’t allowed in. Most have headed home but there are still a few in downtown Eagle Pass.

Many of the convoy members are retirees in their 70s, and don’t at all fit the profile of ferocious MAGA insurrectionists. I talk for a long while with a 73-year-old Vietnam veteran from Texas and Frank Lite, a 60-year-old businessman from Tennessee. They are both strong conservatives, and say that while they are fine with legal immigration, the border needs to be secured. And they enthusiastically support the Texas governor’s taking the park, “1,000%,” as Lite puts it. “He should have done this three years ago.”

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Walking down the street, I talk to another group of retirees from the convoy, including a former airplane mechanic and his school teacher wife who drove a thousand miles from Florida, picking up others on the way. They all seem in a festive mood and talk about meeting good Christians while protesting to close the border. Outside Shelby Park itself, there is a counter-demonstration of activists protesting the National Guard’s seizure of the park. “Our river, our land,” says one banner. “Trump for prison,” says another. An elderly member of the convoy in a wheelchair lightly heckles them from across the road.

Jesse G. Herrera, 70, a retired poet in the counter-protest, says the park should be used by the residents. “It’s a city park. It’s not a state park. It’s not a federal park. It belongs to the people.” When I ask about the razor wires, he is dismissive. “It’s a waste of money. It’s not doing anything, it’s a joke. It’s political theatre.” Inside the park itself, TV crews are getting ready to film the governors. I find Jacob Tackett, an army veteran of Afghanistan from Virginia, and Nolan Meeks, who works for a body armour company in California. They flew down to document the event, thinking it would be far bigger.

Tackett said he was especially keen to verify the claims of whether there was a genuine stand-off between federal and state forces. And, after speaking to the troops, he said the reality was far more peaceful than reports made out. “The most poignant quote I got was from a company commander. His phrase was: ‘If you look at our Humvees, none of them have guns mounted on the trucks. What does that tell you?’” The supposed militarisation of the border is clearly an exaggeration, Tackett says. “If there were a stand-off, there would be guns mounted on trucks. And clearly that isn’t the situation. Clearly, the federal authorities were happy to have the assistance.”

Before the politicians arrive, the troops set up a backdrop in front of the river with Humvees and soldiers and barbed wire. The 14 governors arrive in a convoy of armoured vehicles, and then give short speeches that are live-streamed on Facebook. “Now that we have taken control of this area, for the past three days, there is an average of only three people crossing illegally in this area,” Abbott says. I walk back into Mexico along with Tackett and Meeks and watch the rest of the governor press conference from the Mexican side.

Looking down on Shelby Park, you can see what a small section of border it represents. Whatever Abbott has achieved here is no gamechanger. Tackett says that seeing the border for himself shows how much both sides distort the issue for their bases. “It’s very clearly a dog and pony show to drive donations,” he says. “There is a corrupted incentive structure from the conservative side of the house not to fix the problem either… The migrants themselves are the currency.”

Having spent two decades covering America’s southern border with Mexico, it’s hard to disagree with him. Forces deep within their political and economic systems lack the will or ability to solve an overwhelming problem, yet know fully well how it can be deployed to make hay on the airwaves. The result isn’t just a setting for hope and tragedy — but a stage for political theatre.

There is one big exception to this trend toward liberalisation in the Americas: the United States. Last summer, American women lost their constitutional right to end a pregnancy overnight. While abortion remains broadly legal in America’s more progressive, mostly coastal states, it is outlawed in 14 states, and restricted, at risk, or unprotected across most of the south and middle of the country. Today, three states will see quasi-referendums on the issue, which has come to define local elections across the country. As a result, American feminists are looking south of the border and asking: what can we learn from Latin America?

Years of organising precipitated the green wave. In 2006, Colombia loosened abortion restrictions; in 2007, Mexico City legalised the procedure. Those hard-fought successes gave the feminist movement the confidence to broaden its approach. Instead of focusing primarily on passing laws in legislatures, they took up a kind of kitchen-sink strategy: do it all, try everything, see what works. While some focused on using the justice system to effect change, others prioritised bringing young people into activism. Women spoke out about their own experiences in a push to destigmatise abortion — and feminist groups put pressure on politicians to highlight women’s rights. This combination accelerated the green wave.

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In the United States, advocacy has long been focused on the courts, and for good reason: the legalisation of abortion came via Supreme Court decisions, and efforts to curtail access were most successful when implemented legislatively and upheld by the legal system. But groups working in the community here and building cross-movement relationships are routinely under-funded and under-resourced.

Another crucial tactic in Latin America has been to emphasise that outlawing abortion doesn’t end it; it just makes it less safe. Many nations where the procedure is illegal have high rates; indeed, while it remains restricted in much of Latin America, the region has a significantly higher rate than Europe, where abortion has long been legal in most nations. Those places where abortion is restricted also tend to see far higher unintended pregnancy rates. In these countries, women often turn to abortion-inducing pills which they source from feminist groups, or from pharmacies or hospitals where they’re sold under the counter or prescribed for other purposes. If they can’t access the pills, which are overwhelmingly safe, some women resort to far riskier methods — drinking poisons, inserting sticks, or going to untrained freelance providers who make promises they may not keep. There are also much higher rates of maternal death and injury due to unsafe procedures.

This is why feminists routinely state just how common abortion is — even where it is illegal. The difference between legalising abortion and banning it is a choice between making procedures that will inevitably take place safe or potentially deadly.

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Latin American feminist groups have also emphasised the importance of abortion access, most recently in Mexico. There, the Supreme Court decision is a step towards legal abortion nationwide, but states throughout the country will still need to lift their own bans on the procedure for Mexican women to have full access. American feminists are taking a similar tack: with abortion now criminalised in many states, there has been a renewed effort to invest in funds which will pay for women to get from abortion-hostile states to ones where the procedure is legal.

They are also fighting each state ban, as well as trying to get the issue on ballots. In every single case where abortion has been voted upon, pro-choice has won. In the conservative states of Kansas and Kentucky, voters rejected proposed bans; in California, Michigan, and Vermont, voters elected to enshrine abortion rights into their state constitutions. As a result, opponents have been working overtime to keep abortion off the ballot — voters, some Republicans argue, simply shouldn’t have a say. Pro-choice activists disagree.

Meanwhile, healthcare workers continue to provide safe abortions. A new report suggests that rates have slightly increased nationally since the Supreme Court decided to overturn Roe v. Wade. They have also increased in liberal states, as thousands of women have travelled there to terminate pregnancies. American women are also going to Mexico — particularly those living in states along the southern border where abortion has been outlawed. At first glance, this seems like a throwback to the pre-Roe era, when scared women would cross the border for procedures that were often dangerous. Now, though, women who go to Mexico to end a pregnancy are most likely to procure on abortion pills. With the latest ruling on abortion from Mexico’s Supreme Court, more Americans may head south seeking safe, legal terminations. But first, states across Mexico will need to update their local laws to fully legalise the procedure.

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Texas has betrayed women

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The Latin American Green Wave is one model for how feminists worldwide might move forward. But the global movement has also been influenced by developments in the Americas, and has been paying especially close attention to the US. “One of the lessons from Dobbs is that rights are not guaranteed; there can always be setbacks,” two activists told me. This is why, they say, any fight for abortion rights has to recognise “the importance of not having a single source of recognition of the right to abortion”.

The Mexico Supreme Court did not wave a magic wand and make abortion legal and accessible for all women  any more than the US Supreme Court made abortion universally inaccessible. When it comes to the question of whether a woman can get an abortion when she needs one, legal changes are hugely significant — but they are not the sole determinants of whether a woman, or girl, will have to continue her pregnancy against her will. And that, perhaps, is the most powerful lesson that American feminists have learned from women in Latin America. If abortion is truly a woman’s right to choose for herself, then the ability to have an abortion must be in women’s hands, whether or not her government grants permission.

Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador claimed the migrants themselves had started the inferno, after burning mattresses in protest at their treatment. But witnesses denied this, claiming that they were stripped of possessions, including lighters, when they were processed. Whatever the cause, the fire, which claimed the lives of at least 38 victims, is a potent symbol of the dysfunction that reigns on the US-Mexican border.

The grim reality, of course, is that it is just one symbol among many. Two weeks before the fire, hundreds of asylum seekers, mostly Venezuelan, amassed on a bridge crossing and stormed past the guards on the Mexican side of the bridge — only to run into a thick line of armed officers on the US side. The attempted rush ended in failure.

Perhaps more than any other, the border problem is the most divisive issue in the United States. And of all the concerns surrounding it, the contested status of asylum provokes some of the most emotive responses. But amid all the bipartisan furore lies a simple truth: the effective collapse of the asylum system can be blamed on both Republicans and Democrats.

There are now almost 1.6 million asylum seekers in the US awaiting hearings, with an average wait of over four years. The number has increased seven-fold since 2014, rising steadily under Obama, Trump, and now Biden. A decade of internecine political battles has bent the asylum system out of shape, with measures being constantly introduced, rescinded, and challenged, in a splattering of judicial cases that reach all the way up to the Supreme Court.

Most recently, both Trump and Biden have failed to get a legal handle on the situation. A pandemic measure to expel people who have been in a foreign country with a communicable disease, known as Title 42, was first used under Trump in 2020, repurposing a clause from a 1944 health law. Despite Biden promising to throw it out, Title 42 is still used, and is applied arbitrarily in different areas on different days to different nationalities. Last summer, meanwhile, Biden revoked a previous agreement made by Trump in 2019, which stipulated that applicants wait in Mexico for processing, encouraging refugee camps to spring up in cartel-controlled cities. Since then, thousands of migrants have been stuck in Mexico, while the camps simply re-emerged over time. Migrants who do make it over can be flown or bused thousands of miles, only to be expelled over a different section of the border.

Those who manage to stay in the US face a different form of bureaucratic chaos. A private contractor was paid to put ankle monitors on some of those released, but was recently found to be misreporting its numbers. Elsewhere, asylum seekers are being released from detention centres without the documents they need to appear in court. “It’s in really terrible shape,” says immigration lawyer Vinesh Patel, who says it could mean the numbers of asylum seekers are even higher than the records show.

On the ground, hopefuls trying to cross are confronted by mixed messages and haphazard rulings. Outside a shelter in El Paso, I meet Anthony Zamora, a 33-year-old barber from Venezuela. In November, Zamora fled his home in Caracas after a government-backed militia threatened him for not paying extortion. “They are extremists,” he says. “They would kill me.”

Zamora travelled over land through Colombia, Central America, and Mexico, where he arrived in Juárez and tried to use a US government app to apply for asylum. After weeks of it not working, he crossed the river and handed himself to border patrol agents to make his case. From there, he was flown 700 miles to San Diego, where he was ejected back into Mexico under Title 42. On the Mexican side, Zamora caught a bus back to Juárez and crossed again into El Paso. This time, he has successfully begun an asylum application. “Thanks to God, I have started the process,” he says. “I am waiting for my audience. I want to explain why I fled.”

This crisis has its root in the dramatic rise in those arriving at the border to claim asylum. During the Nineties and 2000s, the majority of those crossing the border without papers were Mexicans looking for work. The busiest corridor was the Sonora Desert, where the Border Patrol made the largest number of arrests, usually returning people to their homeland. Since 2014, however, the majority arriving are from across Latin America. Rather than trekking over the desert, they head to the Rio Grande, which is closer when you traverse Mexico from Guatemala. And an increasing number apply for asylum.

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Dating from 1951, US asylum law states that “any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States… irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum”. This can be lost in some news coverage of the border, which frequently discards the nuance between economic migrants and asylum seekers, the latter of whom are purportedly fleeing for their lives and freedom. This line can already be blurred in the first place when people are running from both bullets and hunger.

Today, the influx of asylum seekers from Latin America is partly a consequence of a swing back to authoritarian governments in the region over the last decade. The most severe case is Venezuela, where Nicolás Maduro’s regime has jailed hundreds of political prisoners and where GDP plummeted by roughly three-quarters between 2014 and 2021, leaving millions malnourished. Since 2015, more than seven million people have fled the country, an exodus even greater than that from Syria. Cuba and Nicaragua also have authoritarian governments and correspondingly high numbers of asylum seekers.

The past decade has also seen a significant uptick in gang and cartel violence. These groups, from Mexico to Venezuela, don’t only traffic drugs but work hand-in-glove with national police to rig votes, steal oil, and help smuggle people across the border — including those running from the gangs themselves. Known as coyotes or polleros (chicken herders), people smugglers have networks that reach across the US and throughout Latin America. They move people over deserts, across rivers, around the border in boats, and under it through tunnels.

In the last decade, those heading north have also gradually become more aware of their right to claim asylum. The UN Refugee Agency has campaigned widely, handing out pamphlets on the road. Activist groups have also grown and helped organise migrant caravans of people marching northward. Smugglers themselves will also promote the fact that people can claim asylum, offering to take migrants over the border where they can hand themselves into Border Patrol. Overall, migrant smuggling in Mexico is now a huge business, making an estimated $14 billion a year.

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Back in the US, when the asylum seekers finally get a day in court, most are turned away. This is because asylum laws favour those who are persecuted for being a religious or ethnic minority or for their political views, rather than those fleeing gangsters. According to one recent analysis, the rejection rate was 87% for Hondurans, 86% for Guatemalans, and 85% for Mexicans, while Venezuelans had a much higher success rate of 55%. “Venezuela and Nicaragua present more clear-cut cases of political persecution,” says Patel. But the rejections do not dissuade people from applying, especially when they can wait four years inside the United States for their hearing. Quite the opposite: this delay only encourages more people to come.

Meanwhile, despite Republican perceptions, the Biden administration is currently trying to make it more difficult for asylum seekers. It has, for instance, continued to liberally apply Title 42, with between 60,000 and 100,000 expelled under it every month in 2021 and 2022. And last month, the Department of Homeland Security proposed a new rule that would make “certain noncitizens” ineligible for asylum if they transited third countries before reaching the United States. This could be a game-changer, effectively stopping anyone except neighbouring Mexicans or Canadians from asking for asylum. But it could also get thrown out in court, with advocacy groups arguing it directly contravenes the 1951 law. The Trump administration attempted a similar measure in 2019 and a judge struck it down. “Biden is becoming Expeller-in-Chief,” says Rubén García, who manages a migrant hostel in El Paso.”He is out Trumping Trump.”

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Perhaps the only way to fix this intractable crisis would be for politicians to have an honest debate. Do Americans want to honour the spirit of the Refugee Convention they approved in 1951 and make it function properly? Or do they want to change the law itself ? A choice needs to be made. The alternative — squeezing an already broken system — clearly isn’t working.

It is hard to make sense of such debates on the ground, though, far removed from the corridors of power. Outside a migrant hostel in the city of Tijuana, I meet Jose Luis Aguilar, a 27-year-old from El Salvador who fled his home with his wife and two children after he was shot by gang members. He was unsure how to apply for asylum and the hostel managers had stopped giving out information. “I am just trying to get by day by day,” he told me. “I thank God I survived and I pray we will find a way.”

In a twist of fate, however, García Luna is now himself on trial in New York, accused of pocketing millions of dollars from those same kingpins after helping them traffic tons of cocaine to America. The trial, which began on 17 January in a federal court in Brooklyn and is expected to last eight weeks, breaks new ground in the drug war. Since Richard Nixon first declared a war on drugs in 1971, the US has taken down a vast array of Mexican traffickers — most famously Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who was convicted in the same Brooklyn courthouse in 2019. But never before has such a high-ranking Mexican official faced a US jury on drug charges.

Journalists and activists have for years pointed out that it is no use targeting the mobsters if you don’t go after their political protection. This case therefore marks a serious turning point for US law enforcement. But it also rings alarm bells. The level of corruption alleged by the witnesses goes beyond anything I’ve seen in my two decades covering Mexico’s drug war. At the very least, the trial is deeply embarrassing for Washington’s drug agents and politicians who schmoozed with García Luna. (There are photos of him with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder.) More seriously, the far-reaching allegations also suggest that, unless the United States can reduce the amount that Americans spend on illegal drugs — estimated at close to $150 billion a year in one study — this narco corruption may just carry on with catastrophic consequences.

What’s more, it is by no means guaranteed that the jury will convict García Luna. In his opening argument, defence lawyer César de Castro claimed the prosecution does not have hard evidence that his client led a double life as law enforcer and crime boss. “No money. No photos. No videos. No texts. No emails. No records,” De Castro said. “No credible, believable, plausible evidence Mr García Luna helped the cartels.”

Prosecutors are, however, using the testimony of so-called cooperating witnesses, including scarred and grizzly cartel operatives who could have made deals with prosecutors to take the stand. Some have confessed to killing multiple victims and were major traffickers. Before the trial started, the judge even had to rule that the defence could not ask them about potential acts of cannibalism — a practice that various gangsters have been found to engage in — because it might be “distracting”.

As the jury was selected, prosecutors rigorously made sure the candidates agreed they could believe such witnesses and convict someone on their evidence, even if it were not backed up by physical proof. If the jury were to find García Luna not guilty, it would be, as Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said on Tuesday, “a fiasco — the agencies and government of the United States would look very bad”. There is a lot at stake.

When I met García Luna back in 2005, when he was a rising star as the head of a federal investigative agency dubbed as Mexico’s FBI, he struck me as underwhelming, largely because he mumbled and stuttered. But he was convincing in his argument that Mexican law enforcement had to change to meet the new challenges. This was a time when gangland murders in Mexico were on the rise and Mexican traffickers had usurped Colombians as the biggest gangsters on the continent, smuggling the lion’s share of cocaine, heroin and crystal meth over the Rio Grande.

The following year, García Luna rose to a cabinet-level role under President Calderón, who ordered soldiers and police on a national offensive against the cartels. García Luna revolutionised the federal police, increasing it from a force of 6,000 to 37,000 officers. He also tried to salvage its image, financing a TV soap opera called El Equipo, in which good-looking cops went on daring operations. Moreover, Calderón crafted the Merida Initiative with Washington to increase cooperation in the fight. Under it, the United States provided Mexican law enforcement with billions of dollars in equipment and training, including Black Hawk helicopters and wiretap gear. García Luna also forged strong relationships with agents from across the US security apparatus.

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At first, this new war on cartels appeared to bear fruit. In 2007, Mexican marines made the world’s biggest ever cocaine bust, a seizure of 23 tons off the Pacific coast. Kingpins who had long evaded justice were shot dead. Detained cartel suspects were made to record confession videos, like that of Tyson, in which they detailed serial murders.

But then violence erupted, with relentless firefights, execution-style hits and massacres. I covered much of this bloodshed — a grim period spent discovering bullet-ridden corpses on the street and watching too many mothers screaming in grief. By the time President Calderón left office in 2012, Mexico was suffering from a humanitarian crisis of mass graves and disappearances that remain unsolved. For his part, García Luna left Mexico for Florida to set up a security consulting company and rent a luxury beach house.

Seeing García Luna in the first days of the trial, he cut a transformed figure, silver-haired and beaten down by prison, where he has been since his 2019 arrest. Yet he also looked calm and alert to all the technicalities of the trial, occasionally smirking and blowing kisses to his wife. The first government witness was Sergio Villarreal Barragán, a hulking enforcer known as El Grande, a former police officer who was recruited by the Sinaloa Cartel. The fact that Villarreal was in the police before the mob is not a freak occurrence, but revealing of Mexico’s history: the country’s cartels grew from their humble beginnings as peasant farmers with the help of corrupt networks in the security forces. The career path between gangsters and police officers was like a revolving door.

Villarreal described seeing his boss, the kingpin Arturo “The Beard” Beltrán Leyva, meet García Luna in a safe house in the south of Mexico City and hand over bribe payments in duffel bags and cardboard boxes — worth more than a million dollars a month — on behalf of the Sinaloa Cartel. In return, García Luna allowed the cartel’s cocaine to travel through Mexico, busted its rivals and passed on police intelligence. “Everything ran perfectly. It was the best investment they made,” he said. One time, the cartel used this intelligence to steal two tons of cocaine from rivals, Villarreal testified, and split the profits with García Luna himself.

Such testimony was expected in this trial. But what Villarreal then described was remarkable. The cartel, he explained, would make false cocaine bricks and swap them with police for real cocaine that had been seized. Another time, the mobsters dressed up as police, arrested a rival and then handed him over to the real officers. On one occasion, the cartel kidnapped García Luna and brought him before The Beard because he wasn’t answering the telephone.

Villarreal also explained how the cartel’s close relationship with corrupt police actually succeeded in reducing Mexico’s murder rate for a period in 2007, just when Calderon’s offensive seemed to be going well. But then, he said, the deals inside the cartels fell apart and the violence soared. One of the biggest battles was between Beltrán Leyva and his childhood friend “El Chapo”, which ended with Beltrá Leyva being gunned down by Mexican marines.

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Mexican cartels have turned to fentanyl

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In 2019, I covered a stretch of El Chapo’s trial, which was more enthusiastically embraced by the New York media. Everyone wanted to be in the courtroom and see such an infamous mobster and his beauty-queen wife in the gallery. US cable networks ran regular segments on the trial’s revelations, whether it was El Chapo running through a tunnel naked to escape marines or his former lover taking the stand and crying while his wife chuckled. García Luna’s trial, by contrast, has garnered far less attention. But in some ways, the revelations are more important in showing how corrupted Mexico’s institutions are and why the country is so violent.

The trial might act as a deterrent to make Mexican officials think twice before blatantly taking cartel bribes. Mexican President López Obrador certainly looks upbeat when he talks about it in his morning press conferences, saying it shows how corrupt the previous administration was. Yet the trial also symbolises something uncomfortable about modern-day Mexico. It is notable, for instance, that the trial is in New York not Mexico City. Mexican judges have convicted generals and state governors for working with drug gangs, but not an official as powerful as García Luna — or a former president. And as long as the country’s security forces find more sophisticated ways of taking bribes, such as using intermediaries, this looks unlikely to change. Perhaps even more depressing is the fact that since García Luna has gone, the cartels have shifted to more perilous synthetic drugs such as fentanyl, which are driving a far worse rate of overdoses in the United States.

Everything has changed since, and not necessarily for the better. In his testimony, El Grande also talked about the glitter of narco wealth; how his boss The Beard had a fleet of cars, including a Lamborghini, a Ferrari, and a Rolls Royce, and pets including a white tiger and black panther. Amid such opulence, achieving justice for the deaths on both sides of the border will be an extraordinary, if impossible, challenge. While the stories of El Grande, The Beard, and El Chapo may dominate the headlines, they are far removed from the bloody conflict that has consumed Mexico — and the decaying corpses still being dug up in mass graves.

Ye Gon was making his fortune, say US and Mexican prosecutors, by importing the flu medicine pseudoephedrine from Chinese labs and selling it to Mexican gangsters who cooked it into crystal meth to traffic to the United States. A fan of high-stakes poker, Ye Gon was then jetting to Las Vegas, where he lost $125 million at tables (a casino was later ordered to hand over much of this to the US government) and bought a million-dollar home for a casino hostess. After a lengthy legal battle, Ye Gon was extradited back here to Mexico, where he sits in a high-security prison on drugs, organised crime, money laundering, and weapons charges.

At the time, when I covered the story, Ye Gon appeared to be a passing novelty. Importing chemicals from China contrasted with the cocaine and heroin trade I was investigating, in which you can go to the mountains and witness the peasant farmers harvest coca leaves and opium poppies. It’s apparent now, though, that Ye Gon was a pioneer, and that Mexican cartels have followed his lead to reshape their entire industry — with perilous consequences for Americans.

Since that record bust, Mexican traffickers have gradually shifted the core of their business from plant-based drugs to synthetic drugs — those created using man-made chemicals. These include meth and illegally-made fentanyl as well as others, such as ketamine. Synthetic drugs are cheaper to produce and more lethal, with fentanyl many times more powerful than heroin. To churn out these synthetics, cartels followed Ye Gon’s lead to forge an unholy alliance with shady elements of the Asian chemical industry.

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The scales gradually tilted until 2018, when US agents on the border seized more crystal meth than cocaine (both considered “uppers” and party drugs), and 2021, when they also seized more fentanyl than heroin (both considered “downers”). The trend has accelerated in 2022, with US agents nabbing 14,000 pounds of fentanyl, which was seven times the amount of heroin, and 175,000 pounds of meth, two-and-a-half times the amount of cocaine.

Marijuana was once a big cash crop for Mexican traffickers, but border seizures have plummeted since 2012, when US states began legalising recreational weed. Further south, Colombia is still producing enormous amounts of cocaine, but much is now going to the booming European market. Meanwhile, the biggest shipments to, and profits from, the United States are in synthetics. This paradigm shift has transformed the logistics of Mexican drug trafficking.

Traditionally, drug trafficking relied on plantations of poppies and coca leaves, which are vulnerable to aerial crop spraying. Today, the mass production of synthetic drugs involves two behemoths of globalisation: supply chains of cargo ships, and the pharmaceutical industry. Pacific cities such as Manzanillo, Mexico’s biggest container port, have become bloody trafficking hubs. Pill mills can be anywhere, from quiet Mexican suburbs to right on the border itself.

The cartel shift to synthetics coincides closely with the soaring rise in US drug deaths. Back in 2007, about 27,000 Americans lost their lives in overdoses. By 2021, the number had quadrupled to 107,000 deaths. The majority, 71,000, involved fentanyl or other synthetic opioids. The second highest, 32,000, involved “psychostimulants” including meth. Traffickers are also mixing fentanyl into cocaine and heroin, causing more deaths with those. The rise in overdoses is especially sharp over the last five years, just as busts of fentanyl on the border have soared.

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But beyond the stats is the human pain. Most of the victims are in the prime of their lives and some are teenagers. Millions of parents, siblings, children, and friends bear the loss.

There are various forces behind the US overdose epidemic. Pharmaceutical giants dished out too many legal opioids that fuelled addiction, as courts continue to hear. Shutting down industries in the Rust Belt drove workers to despair, and the pandemic and lockdown were terrible for mental health. But it is hard to deny that changes in the supply of illegal drugs — from cocaine and heroin to synthetic meth and fentanyl — are a major factor behind the ballooning death toll.

Like everything in American life, the overdose epidemic gets dragged into partisan politics. Republicans have sought to take a hard line, lobbying the White House to classify fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction and Mexican cartels as terrorist groups. In their midterm attack ads, Republican candidates tied fentanyl deaths to illegal immigration. Democrats, meanwhile, have pushed hardest for “harm reduction” programmes, especially in deep-blue cities like San Francisco. But the level of open drug abuse there has drawn fire from both Republicans and moderate Democrats.

After covering the human catastrophe of narco violence here in Mexico for two decades, I have mixed feelings about the latest political row. I have long been a critic of the War on Drugs, which has failed to stop the drug trade while creating a huge black market for ultraviolent cartels. When US states began legalising marijuana, I celebrated it, thinking that the cartels and drug violence could slowly become a thing of the past.

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But the rise of synthetics and the sheer level of overdose deaths have rattled my thinking. It is evident that Mexican traffickers, who work with corrupt officials here, are indeed pumping ever more perilous drugs northward. When cartels mainly moved cocaine and cannabis there was an argument, at least, that they were providing Americans with products they demanded. But with the perilous fentanyl, which some people take unwittingly, there is validity to the claim they are flooding poison over the border. The question remains, however, as to what can be done about it.

In Manzanillo, I sit and watch the vast container ships come into the bay from across the globe and line up to unload their cargo. Last year, the port handled more than 3 million TEU’s (20-foot container units) — a vast amount of cargo for synthetics and their precursors to be hidden in. In a restaurant in the port, I meet up with the owner of a freight company who brings goods in from China. Working in the port for decades, he says smuggling has always been rife but has evolved over time. Today, Mexico’s two most powerful mafias, the Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco New Generation Cartel, operate there and are always looking for shippers to move their products. “This is the gateway to China and all of Asia,” he says. “They have to be here to get access to chemicals.”

Opioids or precursors can be hidden under a false bill of lading and disguised as a legitimate chemical, he explains. Customs inspectors have to bust open a container and run a test, and while they are doing that, other loads can get through. It can also be hard to keep up with all the different substances. The International Narcotics Control Board lists hundreds of precursors for synthetic drugs, and they are likely scratching the surface. Scientific papers say there are more than 1,400 variants of fentanyl, and that “every year new fentanyl analog compounds, or fentanyls, appear”.

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Smugglers also have another technique, the shipper explains, which they call “remoras” or suckerfish, in which they bring in the contraband alongside legitimate cargo. Before the ship gets into port, the contraband is thrown over the side and taken ashore in small boats. It would, therefore, be difficult to stop the chemicals even if Mexican officials were all honest — which they are not. The shipper explains that intermediaries take bribes and deal with customs so that containers can pass straight through. “I can’t see this changing,” he said. “Only a dictatorship or invasion would stop this.”

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, claims to fight corruption, and over the last two years he has put elite marine military units in charge of the ports to clamp down on trafficking. “It is translating to more security, less contraband, more decommissions of drugs, above all fentanyl and chemical drugs,” AMLO said in November visiting Manzanillo. “It used to be silver or lead,” he went on, referring to the silver of a bribe or the lead of a bullet. “Now this has changed.”

However, the quantity of drugs being seized on the US border signal that fentanyl and meth are still coming through Mexico in vast quantities. Furthermore, AMLO’s position on cartels and crime is muddled. On the one hand, he has boosted the power of the military, created a new National Guard, and kept soldiers on the streets. On the other hand, he has talked of the need to avoid fighting cartels, and to have “hugs not bullets”.

AMLO’s call for peace is understandable considering the carnage in Mexico. Since President Felipe Calderón launched a military crackdown on cartels in 2006, there have been firefights reminiscent of civil wars, more than 300,000 murders, mass graves, and thousands of disappearances. But in practice, “hugs not bullets” has meant allowing some gangsters to act with impunity. In 2019, after soldiers arrested Ovidio Guzmán, the son of kingpin “El Chapo”, on an indictment for trafficking drugs including crystal meth, hundreds of gunmen took to the streets of the city of Culiacán. In response, AMLO ordered Guzmán’s release. By bowing to cartel intimidation, AMLO has raised the spectre of a country that is militarised but where powerful gangsters still flout the law.

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Washington has also put pressure on China to stop the chemicals at the source. In 2019, China classified all variants of fentanyl as controlled substances, fulfilling a promise to President Donald J. Trump. However, a US congressional advisory group concluded that Chinese chemists were getting round the ban. “Chinese traffickers are using various strategies to circumvent new regulations, including focusing on chemical precursors, relocating some manufacturing to India, rerouting precursor shipments through third countries, and leveraging marketing schemes to avoid detection,” says the report from 2021 by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

But given China denies its responsibility for the drug epidemic, what can be done about it? If Beijing really clamped down, it could probably reduce the supply in the short term. But there are other countries where precursors could be made. Moreover, as former DEA agent Leo Silva tells me, the cartels are looking to take their drug production to the next step. “These guys are now recruiting chemistry professors from universities so they can actually produce fentanyl in labs,” he says. “Their goal is to create the precursors in Mexico so they can also stop getting the precursors from China and dealing with them… So they can produce more, and keep more profits.”

***

Order your copy of UnHerd’s first print edition here.

Three thousand faces, hidden by black, woollen ski masks, bore the distinctive features of the Mayan Indians of Central America: a people outgunned, outcompeted, pillaged, slaughtered or simply passed over since the Spanish conquistadors first arrived on their shores in the 16th century. Now, half a millennium later, here in Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest and southernmost state, “the ones without faces, the ones without voices” had come to make the world listen.

The people of San Cristobal de las Casas, the old conquistador capital of Chiapas, were still groggy from their New Year celebrations when their town came alive with the sound of marching boots. They heard orders barked in Tzotzil, a local Mayan language, by the black-haired major, carbine in her hands, pistol strapped to her chest, who commanded this uninvited army. And from the picturesque central square, the Plaza 31 de Marzo, its ancient yellow cathedral and colonial government buildings framed by a clear white moon, they heard the sound of gunshots.

Those citizens brave or curious enough to venture out into the square were met with a sight they were unlikely to forget: dozens of masked guerrillas were swarming around the Plaza. Some were standing guard with their battered rifles, others were surrounding the police headquarters, while others, armed with sledgehammers, were pounding on the great wooden doors of the Municipal Palace. There could be little doubt in the minds of the people of San Cristobal about what they were witnessing. It was the first act of a revolution.

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A small group of guerrillas raised a flag in the middle of the elegant square — a black flag, printed with four red letters: EZLN. As they did so, on to the balcony of the Municipal Palace emerged a masked figure. In his hand he held a piece of paper. It was a declaration of war against the Mexican government: one which, on that same morning, would be read aloud to the people of six other towns in Chiapas which this “EZLN” had also claimed as its own.

“We are the product of 500 years of struggle,” he read as, in the background, more gunfire and palls of smoke indicated that a rebel column was storming the police headquarters. “We are the inheritors of the true builders of this nation … denied the most elemental preparation so they can use us as cannon fodder and pillage the wealth of our country. They don’t care that we have nothing, absolutely nothing … There is no peace or justice for ourselves and our children … But today we say: Ya basta! Enough is enough!”

Five hundred miles away, Mexico’s president, Carlos Salinas, and his anointed heir, Luis Donaldo Colosio, were celebrating the New Year in an exclusive holiday resort on the Pacific coast. As the bells rang, Salinas and Colosio raised glasses of champagne and toasted the official arrival of NAFTA — the North American Free Trade Agreement — which, at the stroke of midnight, officially came into operation. With the sound of those bells, NAFTA had created, for the first time in history, one great borderless free market between Mexico, Canada and the USA. Mexico had officially entered the modern world, and Salinas was celebrating his legacy.

Two hours later he was on the telephone, listening to news of a development that would shatter not only that legacy, but his successor’s presidency and his party’s age-old iron grip on Mexican politics; and which, later — much later — would begin to shake the legitimacy of the global free trade project itself. The Secretary of Defence was calling from Mexico City, and he had bad news. Very bad news. An armed insurgent force, calling itself the Zapatista Army of National Liberation — EZLN — had seized control of seven towns in Chiapas state and declared war on the army, the government — and NAFTA itself.

“Are you sure?” croaked the president.

***

It’s been a long time since I wrote those paragraphs. That is the opening of my very first book, One No, Many Yeses, an account of the first wave of anti-globalisation protests, which was published 19 years ago. Back then, excitable young anti-capitalist that I was, I believed that I was part of a worldwide “mass movement” which was rising up against the colonisation of the world’s economies and cultures by an unaccountable corporate elite.

Since at least the end of the Cold War, the declared aim of the Western powers has been the spread of a global market economy, combined with a liberal politics and culture, to every benighted corner of the Earth. Since a globalised market can’t function without globalised tastes (you can’t sell your cheap burgers to Asia until you’ve convinced Asians that they’re lovin’ it), and since liberalism also needs an appropriate soil to seed in, the momentum of this ideological crusade is towards the creation of one global culture, whether the world wants it or not.

This threefold rollout — global economy, global culture and global political system, all of them based on the American model — has long been referred to with the bland moniker “globalisation”; or globalism, if you prefer. In reality, it is a form of soft colonialism — the latest iteration of Western empire — and a hugely successful one.

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Back in the late Nineties, the “anti-globalisation” movement that rose up in opposition to this process was a political melting-pot of anarchism, localism, indigenous perspectives, radical environmentalism, liberal commitments to democracy and various other strands, all of it uncoordinated and fervently anti-hierarchical. It was a mess, but it was an exciting mess. And though a lot of people involved, including me, were allergic to labels and boxes, there was no doubt that this was a movement of the Left.

Though wrong about plenty of things, the Left has traditionally been correct about the negative impacts of global capitalism, while the Right has floundered about denying its impacts on the poor, on democracy and on nature, generally valorising greed and rapine, and then wondering where the “traditional values” they love so much have gone. You wouldn’t have found any conservatives on the barricades at the anti-WTO protests. Most of them were either inside hymning the virtues of “free” trade, or back in Washington or London ginning up the next Middle East war.

How times have changed. Here in the 2020s, the Left anti-globalism that I once thought was the movement of the future is barely in evidence anywhere. The most incisive opponents of corporate globalisation today are often to be found on the Right; or at least, not from any identifiable sector of the Left. Conservative, traditionalist and “post-liberal” critiques of the impact of globalisation on local communities, nation states, social cohesion, family formation, working class prospects, culture and even (though not often enough) the natural world are pouring out daily. The post-working class Left, meanwhile, has veered into an identity politics cul-de-sac, dictated largely by its commitment to an elite class war and an obsessive pursuit of cultural inversion.

The worldview that the academic Eric Kaufmann calls Left-modernism is now the outlook of the professional managerial classes, the top 10% or so of society, and — not coincidentally — the beneficiary class of globalisation. Via transnational corporations, the academic and cultural sectors, NGOs, global and regional bodies and other collectives of usually unaccountable power, this class is rolling out the threefold ideology of globalism within their own nations and beyond. Meanwhile, a national populist movement built largely around a working- and lower-middle-class reaction to this ideology is coalescing around calls for national self-determination, some degree of cultural conservatism, economic protection and democratic accountability.

On the face of it, this is confusing. Why would transnational capital be parroting slogans drawn from a leftist framework which claims to be anti-capitalist? Why would the middle classes be further to the “Left” than the workers? If the Left was what it claims to be — a bottom-up movement for popular justice — this would not be the case. If capitalism was what it is assumed to be — a rapacious, non-ideological engine of profit-maximisation — then this would not be the case either.

But what if both of them were something else? What if the ideology of the corporate world and the ideology of the “progressive” Left had not forged an inexplicable marriage of convenience, but had grown all along from the same rootstock? What if the Left and global capitalism are, at base, the same thing: engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the globalised, universalist, technological matrix that is currently rising around us?

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We are living through a time of radical flattening, as this emerging global system, which I like to call the Machine, rapidly replaces previous ways of being with a new and novel global civilisation. Emerging from the industrial revolution and the dislocations of modernity’s revolutions, this Machine is now engaged in a project of deconstructing both human nature and wild nature, replacing them with a borderless world of etiolated, rational individuals, each of them equal participants in a global marketplace governed by algorithms, profit and dreams of universal oneness.

With the possible exception of the bit about the marketplace, this is also a good description of the project of the political Left. The very notion of a “Left” was birthed with modernity: the term comes from the seating arrangement of the anti-monarchy faction of the French assembly after the revolution. Despite much self-mythologising, leftist ideology has always been primarily a product of urban intellectuals and middle-class radicals pursuing a project of theoretical levelling. This levelling always begins with the destruction of previous lifeways — Mao’s four olds, the Bolshevik project to eliminate the “bourgeois family” (currently being resurrected by some on the contemporary Left), French revolutionary attempts to rationalise the landscape, the current progressive push to “transition” children — but what it ends up doing is clearing the ground for the Machine.

Progressive leftism and global capitalism, far from being antagonistic as some of us once thought, have turned out to be a usefully snug fit. Both are totalising, utopian projects. Both are suspicious of the past, impatient with borders and boundaries, and hostile to religion, “superstition” and the limits on the human individual imposed by nature or culture. Both are in pursuit of a global utopia where, in the dreams of both Lenin and Lennon, the world will live as one.

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If the past 40 years have taught us anything, it’s that dreams of universal equality can segue very easily into dreams of universal market access. There’s a reason that both progressives and The Economist champion open borders. There’s a reason so many hippies ended up as tech billionaires. If you have ever asked yourself what kind of “revolution” would be sponsored by Nike, promoted by BP, propagandised for by Hollywood and Netflix and policed by Facebook and YouTube, then the answer is here.

In the roiling breakdown of the 2020s, progressive leftism and corporate capitalism have not so much merged as been exposed for what they always were: variants of the same modern ideal, built around the pursuit of boundless self-creation in a post-natural world. The Canadian “red Tory” philosopher George Grant once observed that: “The directors of General Motors and the followers of Professor Marcuse sail down the same river in different boats.” These days, they have abandoned their separate vessels and are sailing downstream in a superyacht together, while the rest of us gawp or throw rocks from the banks.

Perhaps we could say that the levelling instinct is the West’s gift to the world. It’s a complicated offering, to be sure, but at its noblest it is one to be proud of. Without some levellers around, a culture is in danger of becoming ossified, abusive and top-heavy. Power always needs to be kept on its toes. Leaders and systems should always be prepared to justify their existence.

But what happens when levelling is the only instinct left? When the culture is so empty, so purposeless, so uprooted, that it has forgotten how to do anything but deconstruct itself? More to the point: what happens when levelling is the instinct not of the poor, but of power? What happens when the destruction of borders, limits and boundaries benefits big tech, big money and those who drink from their spigot, rather than the small voices left thirsting in the fields? And what happens when big money uses the language of the small voices — the language of levelling — to tie up its work in pretty bows?

This is where we are. The post-modern Left, which has seized the heights of so much of Western culture, is not some radical threat to the establishment: it is the establishment. Progressive leftism is market liberalism by other means. The Left and corporate capitalism now function like a pincer: one attacks the culture, deconstructing everything from history to “heteronormativity” to national identities; the other moves in to monetise the resulting fragments.

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Where, then, to stand? Could there be a Left without progress? Could there be a Right without capitalism? Perhaps, but we first need to come to terms with the radicalism of the times we are living through. This is a time in which the pertinent questions are not “who should own the means of production?” or “should we privatise the health service?” They are “what is a woman?”, “where should we implant the microchips?”, “how quickly can we get this digital ID system up and running?”, and “what do you think of my new killer robot?” The creation of designer babies, the abolition of the sexed body, the growing of brains in labs: whatever you want, the Machine can provide it, technology can fashion it, and progressive ideology can redefine it as justice.

When people ask me where I stand, I say these days that it’s with an older tradition: the same one I was writing about in that first book, although I didn’t know it then. It’s a tradition I saw represented in what the Zapatistas did back in the 1990s and I have heard its echo in historical uprisings in my own country, from the Luddites to the fen tigers. It’s a tradition which takes its stand not according to ideological positioning, but according to actual positioning: on Earth, under the sky, surrounded by people who know where the sun rises in the morning, where they come from and who they are.

It’s a tradition we could call reactionary radicalism: resisting the Machine’s totalising force from a perspective rooted in the Three Ps: people, place and prayer. Neither Left nor Right nor anywhere else, it’s a tradition that crosses all the modern divides, because it is older than all of them. It digs down, literally, to the root of the matter. It is the dream of a localised, populist opposition to gigantist, destructive modernity in all its forms.

Maybe this is a pipe-dream: but sometimes we see it carry the day. The Zapatistas are still there, after all, and still fighting. NAFTA is gone, too — though it wasn’t the EZLN, in the end, that did for it. The treaty that drew their ire as a symbol of all that was wrong with the imperial project of corporate globalisation was eventually torn up, not by indigenous guerrilleros or a socialist Mexican government, but by a reality TV star-turned Republican US president, who believed that globalisation was a con-job which empowered transnational capital at the expense of nations and their people. Whatever else he may have been wrong about, he was right about that. Unfortunately, most of the Left were too busy calling him a Nazi to notice the irony.

A hit squad compared to a “well-oiled murder machine”. A lawyer and journalist shot on the streets of Amsterdam. A blasé approach to killing the wrong person — there’s even slang for every accidental victim: a vergismoord. Welcome to the Marengo trial, where 17 men stand accused of involvement in six murders, four attempted murders and preparing for six others between 2015 and 2017.

Fear hangs in the air around this court case, telling a tale of a country where the hydra of organised crime has so many heads that it is threatening the very rule of law. When the trial resumed this month, journalists were asked to sign agreements not to name judges or prosecutors, for fear of them being targeted. After reports that co-chief suspect Ridouan Taghi was planning a jailbreak, the streets around the fortified courtroom known as the Bunker are ringed with police cars and trained teams made up of police and soldiers.

The Marengo is only the latest in a series of organised crime trials to shake the Netherlands. This year, Dutch courts are also trying alleged criminal druglord Roger P., accused of turning shipping containers into an underworld prison, with its own gruesome “torture chamber”. Meanwhile, a Marengo side-trial involves motorbike club Caloh Wagoh members charged with shooting dead five people, preparing three other murders and “putting another seven people on the waiting list to be killed”.

“I call The Netherlands a ‘narco-state 2.0’,” says Jan Struijs, chairman of the Nederlandse PolitieBond police union. “We aren’t Mexico, with 14,000 dead bodies, but in our parallel economy, there is an attack on public order and unprecedented numbers of people with personal security — politicians, judges, prosecutors, police staff, journalists — because there is still a serious risk from organised crime. It is a huge problem, being tackled on every front, but we have a long way to go.”

Struijs first raised concerns that this small, well-connected trading nation has “characteristics of a narco-state” four years ago. At the time, there was a muted political response. But then the brother of the Marengo crown witness Nabil B was shot dead and the crown witness’s original lawyer, Dirk Wiersum, was gunned down outside his house. Finally, last July, celebrated crime reporter Peter R de Vries, who had unconventionally agreed to act as Nabil B’s representative, was shot in the head on a busy central Amsterdam street and died of his wounds.

Today, few would argue that increasingly violent crime has clawed its fingers deep into civil society. But as Lieselot Bisschop, criminologist at Erasmus School of Law in Rotterdam, points out, before you can combat the crime, it is important to understand who is involved and how. She and a team of researchers have been looking at the key drug runners’ entry and exit point of Rotterdam port, where last year a Hit and Run Cargo team (HARC) confiscated a record 72,808 kilos of cocaine plus another record of 1,500 kilos of heroin. “Whether it’s a good thing that they are catching more, I don’t know — is more going through anyway?” says Prof Bisschop. “The quantity aspect is always very challenging. It’s a dark number, guesstimates.”

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Meanwhile, the Netherlands is apparently a centre of synthetic drug manufacture, with regular busts of “professional” crystal meth and MDMA labs, especially in Noord Brabant. When international police decrypted millions of messages on devices criminals thought were secure — such as Sky and EncroChat, and the Dutch decoded Pretty Good Privacy software for Blackberry’s in the Marengo case — they lit up a web of crime.

Experts agree the Netherlands’s infrastructure is key for both legal and illegal trade. In their 2020 book, Nederland Drugsland, Dutch police academy professor Pieter Tops and journalist Jan Tromp explored how criminals exploit its efficient ports, good roads, and strong financial and digital infrastructure. “The Netherlands has long been a trading country — not just the harbours but also our high-quality internet environment. We have huge numbers of bankers and our country is central in Europe in terms of all kinds of transport and transit,” says Struijs. “We have huge numbers of imports, which means a lot of drugs are mixed with legal trade, coming in containers of fruit or liquor. Organised crime takes advantage of the legal infrastructure.”

Corruption is another factor. As a nation, the Dutch are keen to make a deal — and regular businesses haven’t always been too fussy about carrying out background checks, as various banking money laundering cases and high tax haven rankings show. The NVB Dutch banking association says an estimated €16 billion in illegally-earned cash washes around each year.

Personal corruption is also a problem in a port 40km long and with 180,000 employees, says Bisschop. “Within Europe, it is definitely the gateway for any kind of trade and probably for cocaine. Over the years, the port has become more physically and digitally secure. We think this has contributed to more pressure on the people in the port. Basically, you need corruption to pull it off — both public and private, not just police and customs but also planners in container terminals. You need someone on the inside.”

So in court, says veteran crime reporter Saskia Belleman, there has been a spate of cases against allegedly corrupt customs staff, shipping and port employees, partly as a consequence of a Dutch gedoogcultuur of looking the other way. There are also concerns about so-called “collectors”, often young men who trespass into the harbour and collect drugs.

Nobody knows if the Netherlands is worse than other European port countries in terms of international organised crime, but its soft drug culture is undoubtedly a weak spot. Although smoking cannabis and coffee shops selling the drug are tolerated, it is illegal to grow commercially. This means that cafes offer a legally tolerated channel for criminal activity, and a training ground for young criminals.

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In the Netherlands, it’s become increasingly common to read about the ethnic aspect of organised crime — the so-called “Mocro Maffia” Moroccan-origin mafia which inspired a true crime book and spin-off television series. But Peter Schouten, one of the new lawyers for the crown witness in the Marengo trial, says: “It’s not true that it’s only people with another ‘heritage’. Certain gangs have a kind of micro-organism, a gangland where there’s a lot of the same culture, but there are other gangs arrested, and you read stories saying that the new kingpin is ‘Bolle’ Jos from Brabant.”

It’s hard to measure organised crime, partly because victims don’t always make reports, but ethnic minorities are overrepresented as crime suspects. Statistics Netherlands researcher Maarten Bloem says, though, that “if you correct for age, education level, socio-economic category, there is not much difference between different ethnic origins”. He concludes: “It’s not so much about someone’s colour but the situation in which they find themselves.”

It is unclear whether the segregated, Dutch grammar school system helps contribute to excluding certain groups, too: critics say it selects too young, hammers in socio-economic difference, and makes no account for innately-talented children who speak Dutch as an additional language.

Crime, after all, can be seen as a way out of poverty and an equal opportunities recruiter. So there’s a widespread recognition that long-term crime prevention needs to offer other options, especially to young men in problem districts. There’s a new drive targeting “vulnerable” areas in Utrecht, and projects such as working with the “top 600″ criminals and their families in Amsterdam. Meanwhile, international efforts have been led by the mayors of Rotterdam and Belgian Antwerp — where a record 90 tonnes of smuggled cocaine was found last year. They have visited South American counterparts and lobbied governments to ramp up international efforts against organised crime, increase barriers in harbours, and confiscate criminal assets.

In Rotterdam, there are promising signs of public-private cooperation, with busts by the multi-agency HARC, a new Information Sharing Centre, a business integrity initiative, and a “training container” to coach harbour staff in combatting corruption. A long-awaited law banning civilians from the container area is in place to help apprehend those vital ‘collectors’ picking up drugs from containers, while Rotterdam mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb is also enforcing a €2,250 anti-nuisance penalty. The new Dutch coalition hopes to add to these initiatives. It will start investing specifically in combating crime that “undermines” public order from 2023, ratcheting up to a €100m yearly investment by 2025. In the meantime, the last budget put aside an extra €434m to increase annual budgets for police, judicial organisation and subversive crime prevention, though experts warn that money must not be used to add to the layers of bureaucracy.

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Instead, some want a shift in public attitudes on drug taking: as the prosecutor said in the torture container trial, show users the “abhorrent” consequence of their habits rather than perpetuating the permissive, hippy culture of the Seventies. “It’s not done in the Netherlands to point in the direction of drug users,” says Belleman. “If you don’t use drugs, there’s no market. But people who use cocaine at the weekends don’t make the connection between organised crime and their drug use — and if you tell them, they are really offended.”

Perhaps the biggest problem, however, lies in how to prosecute those alleged criminals who are caught. In the mega-Marengo trial, hearings are currently mired in details such as whether the co-chief suspect Saïd Razzouki left his reading glasses behind when he was extradited from Colombia in December, and whether due process was followed in his subpoena.

The accused in the trial deny the charges, and Schouten doesn’t expect a verdict until 2023. “This trial is under an enormous amount of pressure,” he says. “This is about the rule of law, the dyke against injustice, and we must continue to protect this. But there is a lot of fear.” Even when the trial verdict is reached, until words turn to action, that fear is unlikely to go away.

But taking the lethal option was almost as undesired by the perpetrator as the victim. Murder has a way of redoubling the authorities’ efforts; and besides, dead men can’t pay kickbacks.

Today’s bad guy, however, leaves nothing to chance. The tripartite of gangsterism, terrorism and militarism has become a crowded market, and the art of intimidation has given way to the credo of shoot-first-don’t-even-bother-asking-questions-later.

I’ve seen this callous disregard for human life, and the blurred lines between crime, politics, warfare and “legitimate targets” in countries ranging from war-torn Sierra Leone to South Africa. But nowhere is it more abundant than in Mexico: the narco-capital of the world, a place where ingenious methods of drug trafficking and murder go hand in bloody hand.

To gauge what a typical Mexican crime reporter’s beat reads like, here’s the introduction to a recent report from Albinson Linares of current affairs show, Noticias Telemundo:

“The corpses of three people, dismembered and burned, were found in bags in Abasolo, in the state of Guanajuato, on Sept. 2. Three days later, a trans woman was murdered in the same state, and the body of a man, burned and tortured, was found hanging from a tree in Coacalco state. On Sept. 7, more than 300 migrants who had been kidnapped were rescued in Aguascalientes, and on Sept. 19, an entire family in Chihuahua was killed and an explosive package in Guanajuato caused the deaths of two men.”

And that’s a tiny sample of the 438 “acts of extreme violence” registered in Mexico that month. In this sense, then, daily life in Mexico is not a million miles away from the corrupt, ultra-violent, narco-state image of the country that Netflix has successfully cultivated via multiple documentaries, movies, series and “dope operas”.  The latest, and greatest, incarnation in the streaming service’s drug dramas is season three of Narcos: Mexico — a show notorious for its “brutal” executions and murder.

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But the truth is that, if anything, these shows actually downplay the violence of cartels. In Narcos, when someone gets whacked they’re dispatched like a third-rate nobody. A bit of blood splatter; a groan; next. In the real world, people who fall foul of the cartels get taken out in the most macabre of fashions: in one execution video allegedly released by the La Familia Michoacán drug cartel, a pit bull rips the man’s testicles off in full view of the camera. It’s horrific, gruesome, and in keeping with the cartels’ sadistic rule of law.

“These videos emerged in Mexico way back in late 2005, with the first one supposedly coming out of Acapulco,” says British journalist, Ioan Grillo, who left Britain for Mexico 20 years ago and is the bestselling author of El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency. “It showed the interrogation of a gang member who was strapped to a chair. At the end of the video someone puts a gun to his head and blows his brains out. Literally. That video wasn’t posted on the internet in the same way that videos are today, because at that time it wasn’t as easy to post videos online. It actually turned up on a VHS tape and was given to a regional newspaper in the United States before making its way to the Dallas Morning News newspaper and then onto Mexican TV. They didn’t show the video in its entirety, but that was arguably the start of it all.”

According to Grillo, the cartels got the bright idea of shooting VHS videos of their murderous activities, and disseminating them via American and Mexican mainstream media, from watching al-Qaeda’s beheading videos of Westerners in the early 2000s. After one Mexican news programme ran the unexpurgated version of an American contractor’s beheading by the terrorist group in 2003, the cartels registered the hype it generated, and a new narco-propaganda tool was born.

Ever since, an endless stream of filmed ‘media-friendly’ atrocities and ultra-violent stunts have been employed by various warring cartels, including the rolling of five decapitated heads onto a crowded dance floor in Michoacán in 2006 by masked gunmen and the discovery of a box containing a football with a man’s face sewn onto it in a Sinaloa street in 2010 as a threat to the Juarez drug cartel. Inside the box was the message: “Happy New Year, because this will be your last.” The victim, Hugo Hernandez, was found chopped up into seven pieces.

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Yet decapitations have become so routine that, as Grillo says, they’re barely newsworthy anymore. So to up the propaganda and aesthetic stakes, the likes of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel records videos to spread on Facebook and Instragram. They usually show a phalanx of military vehicles and cartel members posing in tactical gear with assault weapons and, as Grillo notes, “sometimes torturing and executing enemy cartel members”.

While YouTube had been an unwitting early adopter of cartel snuff videos, and the jihadist executions that had inspired them, its $1.6 billion acquisition in 2006 by Google soon put paid to all that. The drug lords’ propaganda activities retreated into the shadowy recesses of the Internet and onto ‘dark social’ platforms and encrypted messaging services such as WhatsApp, which contain no digital referral information about source material and thus make it nigh on impossible for law enforcement to track a video’s origins.

With decapitation fatigue setting in among Mexico’s informational gatekeepers, and the Western mainstream media having little or no interest in Latin American current affairs, dark social has given the cartels, with the help of a new breed of ‘citizen journalists’ and the pervasive use of mobile technology, the opportunity to spread its propaganda. Websites such as Blog del Narco have become aggregators and repositories for the worst of Mexico’s violent drug war, disseminating information the mainstream media and political establishment choose to ignore due to cynicism or boredom.

From these blogs — and increasingly their associated Twitter and Instagram accounts — a sort of narco-chic has evolved, spanning everything from music to fashion to ‘slanguage’. Like the criminal milieu of West Coast gangs and their symbiotic relationship with gangsta rap in the Nineties, or the petty New Jersey mafiosi who got their dress codes from The Sopranos in the early noughties, the narcotariat is seeping into mainstream culture thanks the nexus between Narcos and traditional-cum-trendy drug culture.

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And so at one end of the spectrum we have narcocorridos, or drug ballads, about the exploits of drug traffickers, sicarios (cartel hitmen), their lovers or even mass murders. And at the other we have buchonas: the cosmetically enhanced, Kardashian-esque girlfriends of flashy cartel players whose style has become something of a social media phenomenon. Just look at Jenny69, one of the more visible ambassadors of buchona culture despite being from California, who has racked up more than two million followers on Instagram.

No doubt we’ll learn about these developments in Netflix’s next outing in Mexico. But just as journalists have to wrestle with cartels exploiting us as useful idiots in a trade-off between proper news and propaganda, so documentary and film producers must contend with the costs of glamorising one of the most dangerous criminal underworlds on the planet.

In 2017, Narcos producer Carlos Muñoz Porta was shot dead while location-scouting in Temascalapa, north of Mexico City. To date, no one has been brought to justice for the murder. We will probably never know whether it was cartel-inspired or just another random act of violence. Either way, it seems guaranteed that the blurry line in Mexico between art and reality will continue to be crossed for many more seasons to come.

It is slightly hidden away from the house, not far from what was once the chicken coop. Or to be more precise, not far from Leon Trotsky’s chicken coop. For it is in Leon Trotsky’s garden that the plaque sits. And it is there that it caught my eye as I was moseying around the garden earlier this year.

The story of Robert Sheldon Harte is both deservedly forgotten and slightly suggestive. For Harte was not just a communist, he was an American communist — born in the US in 1915. A member of the Communist Party of the USA, he offered his services as a guard at the Trotsky household in Mexico at the age of 25. On 24 May, 1940, a GPU unit turned up at the house intending to kill Trotsky. The attempt failed, and so the unit settled with abducting Harte who was subsequently shot in the head and buried in quicklime in a shallow grave.

Since Harte’s death, there have been claims and counter-claims about exactly who he was working for. Was he merely an idealistic supporter of the exiled Trotsky or was he in fact — as some have claimed — a double agent, recruited by the NKVD and sent by Stalin’s agents to help in the assassination of the man he was purporting to protect? Whatever the answer, Trotsky himself believed that Harte had been loyal and had the plaque erected himself.

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Though he wasn’t able to enjoy it for very long. For only a few months later – 80 years ago today, as it happens — Stalin’s agents were successful in their attempts to get Stalin’s greatest enemy. On August 21, 1940, agents of the NKVD managed to get into the Trotsky compound and one – Ramon Mercader – successfully killed Trotsky with an ice-pick while he was in his study.

There remains something not just gruesome but impressive about this act of political assassination. Impressive because of the message of strength it sent out. By the time of his assassination, Trotsky had been away from the Soviet Union for over a decade. He had eked out that time in a variety of comfortable and miserable surroundings, moving from Turkey to France, to Norway and eventually — not least thanks to the efforts of Frida Kahlo — to his final home of Mexico.

By the time he was there, his name — indeed any association with it — had become more dangerous than any other inside the Soviet Union. At the show trials of 1936, it was enough to be accused of having been in league with Trotsky, to be assured a death sentence. Though, of course, for Stalin it was not necessary for there to be any such connection. Trotskyist connections or tendencies were enough on their own: a routine, useful cipher when the regime needed to make up its quotas of people who needed to be killed.

And of course the impressive thing — the impressive, typically Stalinist message — is that Stalin was able to pursue this enemy to the other end of the earth and, after numerous attempts, actually get him. The assassination of Trotsky was more than an assertion of vengeance, it was an assertion of power. A demonstration that the writ of Stalin ran wherever he wanted it to run. For a dictator, this is a most useful fear to spread around.

But in many ways, what is most interesting about Trotsky is not his death, or life, but his afterlife. For, to a great extent he remained (and for some people amazingly remains still) the great ‘might have been’ of the Soviet era. Never mind the people who actually grew up while the horrors of the Soviet system were ongoing, I have heard people in my own adult life, born in my own lifetime, and sometimes younger than myself (people in their twenties or thirties), seriously describe themselves as being (or at some point having been) a Trotskyist.

How is this possible? Nobody alive, let alone any reasonably intelligent person under the age of 40, would describe themselves as having gone through a period of following Ernst Rohm, before moderating their political views somewhat.

The explanation lies in a corner of Sovietology which is still not settled, though goodness knows it should have been by now. This is the corner which continues to imagine that had Stalin not taken over (or even Lenin, in the views of some), then the catastrophe that all but the most deluded communists now admit to, might never have taken place. Of all the might-have-beens and roads tantalisingly-never-travelled, none has continued to have such appeal as that held out by Leon Trotsky.

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In the Fifties and Sixties, Isaac Deutscher performed a work of personal hero-worship in his fluent and slanted three-volume biography (The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed and The Prophet Outcast). Although this work had significant critics – not least in the form of Isaiah Berlin – the works helped to cement among English-speakers a perception of Trotsky as the great what-if of Soviet history.

Of course, however long they have tried to sustain this belief, they could not have been more wrong. For all the what-ifs, history shows that had Trotsky been in power, the history of Russia in the 20th Century would hardly have been any different.

From the start of the revolution, till the day he died, Trotsky was the most fanatical and among the most persuasive of the communist leaders. He was as at ease and adept at the use of violence as any of those around him. His only aversion to the same began to emerge as he discovered that he, his associates, and his closest followers might have been on the receiving end of a thing he thought only worth dishing out. So why has the figure of Trotsky retained some allure even 80 years after his timely death?

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Several reasons present themselves. One is the possibility that his undoubted intellectual ability, plus his assassination in a far-away land gave him a certain martyr-like glamour. He was working on his magnum opus about his enemy right up until the moment of his death; the combination of work ethic and premature demise can be a heady brew. Especially so for a certain type of Western intellectual who likes the idea of fanaticism for a cause precisely because they have themselves never had to suffer at the hands of such fanatics.

But the greater reason would appear to be that reason which remains perhaps the greatest bit of unfinished business of the 20th Century. The recognition that the Soviet, Communist, Marxist experiments were not trees which just happened to give off some poison fruits. Or beautiful ideas which were just mishandled and misappropriated by misguided hands. But rather that the whole dream was a nightmare from beginning to end. And always was going to be. That the Communist experiment had no more likelihood of delivering peace on earth than did the Fascist attempt to try to produce the same.

Yet it is strange, this. There are still no shrines around the world (as the house of Trotsky in Mexico effectively is) commemorating and glamorising any of the intellectual heroes — let alone physical progenitors — of fascism. Yet here still, on several continents, these memorials to the glamorous heroes of communism remain. And it is an intellectual, as well as moral, failing that this should still be the case.

There is a passage in Victor Serge’s The Case of Comrade Tulayev worth bearing in mind. One of the novel’s many characters, who is hauled away for a crime which he had nothing to do with, is a man who has been a member of the party since 1907. For more than 20 years he has seen his colleagues, superiors, underlings and many others taken away. And now — for a suspected association with something he has no more to do with than all those others did — it is his turn to be taken away. It is a trap, he realises. The whole thing.”That’s the trap,” he realises. “The beast in the trap is you, the trapped beast, you old revolutionist, it’s you… And we’re all in it, all in the trap… Didn’t we all go absolutely wrong somewhere?”

Certainly they did. Sometimes the beast in the trap was a whole population, sometimes it was a single individual. Sometimes it was an unintelligent young fanatic like Robert Sheldon Harte.  Sometimes it was a cultured and intelligent intellectual like the man he apparently wanted to protect. It didn’t matter. They all got caught in the trap. And it is quite hard to feel any admiration or sadness for those caught in a trap that they themselves set.

El Chapo continues to have a cult-like following in parts of Mexico because his organisation helps citizens when the Mexican government is absent or incompetent. By distributing aid boxes in the city of Guadalajara, the family business, El Chapo 701, is betting that many Mexicans will trust them more during the current crisis than President López Obrador, who is leading a nation suffering severe economic stress.

The absence of the state allowed mercenary drug militants, the mafia and gangs to thrive, long before the arrival of Covid-19, and this current pandemic has merely reinforced the ability of these groups to capitalise on a once-in-a-century emergency. Many militant groups, dismissed in the West as terrorists, are stepping up to help impoverished communities that rarely if ever see state support. Think the Taliban in Afghanistan, MS-13 in El Salvador and gangs in Rio De Janeiro’s favelas.

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In Italy, too, organised crime entities are giving out food and providing essential services to citizens. As the Italian writer Roberto Saviano recently observed:

“In Italy, criminal clans which have lost their traditional drug-dealing spots outside schools and parks have resorted to home delivery on request, adopting a method known in Anglo-Saxon countries as Dial-a-Dealer.

“But there is another door-to-door service that Italian mafia clans — and in particular the Camorra of Naples — have established: daily home deliveries of essentials. In the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods of Naples, where many people had jobs in the black economy and are now out of work, it is the clans that step in to provide welfare, giving families bread, milk and other basics.

“According to Italian anti-mafia sources, the Camorra has also started providing loans — but not at its usual high interest rates — of between 50% and 70%. Demand for loans is so high in this period that it is still profitable to offer competitive rates, even lower than those offered by the banks.”

It’s easy to presume that the global drug trade will irrevocably change after the pandemic passes or eases. Pro drug-war warriors and policy optimists will tell you that it will be increasingly difficult for cartels to use the same trafficking routes as before due to uneven global lockdowns, stronger law enforcement and decreased global demand.

Believe none of it. I’ve spent the last five years investigating the global drug war for my new book, Pills, Powder and Smoke: Inside the Bloody War on Drugs, and a key component of my research is the often hidden aspects of the drug war that garner little Western media coverage. From Guinea-Bissau in West Africa — a key cocaine smuggling hub — to Honduras — where Washington’s violent drug war is fuelling rampant corruption and violence — there’s no evidence that these hidden elements will dissipate when the world overcomes Covid-19.

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Western supply of illicit substances is currently reduced, and users may instead look for more dangerous alternatives, but it won’t last. If anything, when life snaps back to a form of normality, it’s likely that in many Western countries interest in procuring cocaine, heroin, psychedelics and other drugs could increase as society looks to celebrate personal freedom while coping with economic depression.

Dark web drug sales, a safe option compared to purchasing illicit substances in person with a dealer, will continue to grow. A friend who uses heroin in Australia tells me that he’s had no issues in the past few months accessing the drug, though many people he knows have now moved online to buy MDMA [ecstasy], cannabis and poppy seeds to grow opium.

This is a pandemic that isn’t distributed evenly: it disproportionally affects people of colour, and it’s likely that law enforcement will continue to police illegal drug use most severely in minority community neighbourhoods. It’s a grimly familiar tale for the most affected communities in the US, UK, Australia and Europe.

Most drug users in these countries rarely if ever think about the source of their drugs. Next time a friend wants to use cocaine, ask them if they know where it’s from and who has suffered to get the drug up their nostril. The cocaine trade is in limbo in the source countries like Colombia (although relatively healthy across Europe) but this paralysis won’t last.

Cocaine is a dirty drug that causes a horrific amount of misery (and although Western users are complicit in continuing the trade, it’s the prohibitionists who are most to blame for refusing to imagine a more ethical alternative). Read journalist Toby Muse’s new book, Kilo: Inside the Deadliest Cocaine Cartels — from the Jungles to the Streets, for brilliant and rare insights into the trade.

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Nations have choices to make when deciding drug policies during a pandemic. Do they maintain the default “war on drugs” rhetoric and implementation or try something more humane and sensible? Argentina is using seized assets from drug traffickers and sending those resources to federal police. Such an idea is open to abuse — corrupt police and officials can use the assets for political influence — but in theory the initiative is a good one if the resources are redirected cleverly and morally.

In the UK, drug dealers are finding innovative ways to deliver drugs, including dressing up as nurses, delivery drivers and joggers to get heroin to those who want it. Dealers are born to be ingenious. One drug worker from Sussex told Vice: “A mini-cab driver told me he would normally be ferrying kids around on school runs, but now he’s staying busy by driving all the dealers around town.” In Berlin, dealers are still selling their goods as normal while wearing face masks and gloves.

One UK dealer told Vice that although prices for many products have increased, “markets have to innovate and diversify in response to change. So, I’m importing and selling concentrates and vape pens, called Shatterpens. They contain pure cannabis oil, extracted with C02, no solvents.” He said that domestically-grown hash and cannabis were far more in demand while the lockdown continued. Police are still targeting drug importers and yet the smell of futility hangs over these efforts.

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Covid-19 is forcing enterprising drug cartels to adapt to radically shifting circumstances (though traffickers are likely to re-emerge with vigour once trade routes re-open and dealers and users spend more time outside their homes). Take the ingredients for fentanyl, for example, up to 50 times more powerful than heroin and a key cause of US deaths during the opioid crisis. Although Mexican cartels produced fentanyl for the US market, they used to rely on precursor ingredients including from one state-backed factory in Wuhan (the Chinese city where Covid-19 reportedly originated).

This factory has now shut down and traffickers are increasingly forced to raise the prices of whatever stocks they still have. It’s unsustainable in the long run, and fentanyl users in the US will inevitably find alternative ways to source the drug, but Mexican cartels are no less affected by the coronavirus than other profitable businesses. Some Mexican entrepreneurs are shunning cartels entirely and growing blood-free cannabis (an initiative that pre-dates the pandemic but will hopefully increase after it passes).

Covid-19 is likely to be a massive, temporary inconvenience for the global drug trade and little more. Why? Because Western demand for illicit substances has never been higher and will continue to be so (and yes, some people are still attending drug-fuelled parties during the pandemic).

One of the main takeaways from my years investigating the drug trade has been the staggering hypocrisy of those pushing a brutal “war on drugs”. There are no statistics that support its success: arrest one drug kingpin and 20 more will emerge in his place, and yet year after year governments and many in the media push for no softening of prohibition.

Although the full legalisation and regulation of all drugs is now on the agenda in the nations most directly affected by the violent status quo, there are dangers of legalising drugs without considering all the ramifications (look at California and its failure to support the African-American community after cannabis legalisation). Covid-19 has highlighted the existing racial, social and political fault-lines around drugs, and those who use and produce them; but too often the most marginalised in the West and around the world are forgotten in the rush to judgment.

This wave of assaults last week marked the end of phase one of  ‘Project Python’, a previously-secret mission to confront one of Mexico’s most terrifying drug cartels. It led to the capture of more than 600 people linked to the gang. “They promise hope and they deliver despair,” one Drug Enforcement Administration official told a receptive journalist. Agents boasted they’d seized 20,000 kilograms of drugs along with $22m in cash and other assets.

Their target had been the Jalisco New Generation (JNG) cartel, a gang that stands out for its hideous savagery even by the debased standards of the Mexican drug war. It is led by Nemesio ‘El Mencho’ Cervantes, a former police officer with a $10m bounty on his head, whose bodyguards once shot down a military helicopter to prevent his arrest. His moustachioed face stares down from billboards across California, as the authorities appeal for help in re-capturing a shadowy figure once jailed for three years in San Francisco on drug charges.

This highly-disciplined character leads a group that has used appalling violence to become probably the world’s key trafficker of heroin, fentanyl, cocaine and crystal meth; it controls at least one-third of the lucrative United States market. Using extortion, kidnapping, torture and murder it has muscled in on several other key sectors of the Mexican economy, from farming to mining — as I saw for myself last month, while visiting the state of Michoacán.

Cervantes was born here 54 years ago, one of six boys in a poor family of avocado farmers. I was there to report on how the drug cartels have muscled on production of the fruit as a new source of cash. Initially, they used avocado farming as a way to launder their mountains of money, but soon found it had become as lucrative as heroin, thanks to growing demand from Western consumers. Mexico grows almost half the avocados sold globally — and most of its ‘green gold’ comes from Michoacán.

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By Ian Birrell

This fertile state was already at the core of cartel operations. I was staying in Uruapan, home to a club where five decapitated heads were rolled across the dance floor in 2006, in a move which kick-started Mexico’s war on drugs. The day I arrived, 11 bodies were found in a shallow grave. The following day, as I walked to my hotel, I stumbled across the scene of a mass shooting that had left nine teenagers dead. Soon after my departure, another farmer was kidnapped from his avocado orchard and killed, then 24 more corpses were discovered nearby with several of them showing signs of torture.

It is like the Wild West. Farmers speak of being extorted, indigenous people are armed with semi-automatic weapons to protect forests, trucks are hijacked daily and even taco sellers pay protection money. One journalist described fleeing the country after being summoned by a cartel chief who said he would pay $50,000 a month to have his public image improved. Vigilantes ran one town, boasting of having 2,000 weapons to protect 15,000 people. Police are distrusted since many are in the pay of cartels. Yet corruption is complex: as one source explained to me, often officers don’t have any choice, since if they refuse to help the gangs they — or their children — are killed.

The beautiful but brutalised state depicts with stark clarity the impact of the global war on drugs. Uruapan is in the midst of a vicious struggle for supremacy between JNG and a local cartel called Los Viagras (so called after the spikily-erect hair of one of its founders). Last year, the Jalisco mob strung up nine bodies from a bridge alongside a banner threatening Los Viagras, with 10 more corpses — many dismembered — left on the road below in a macabre show of force. To fight them is to attempt to cut heads off a hydra, as local leaders shift loyalties and new groups spring up. One source sent me a list of 20 different gangs contesting the terrain while the state’s security director told me the cartels have 200,000 members in Michoacán alone.

This huge figure puts the US arrest of 750 JNG goons in grim perspective. Now consider the cause of this spiralling violence in Mexico, which last year left 35,000 people dead in its worst year for murder since records began. For the emergence of this cartel highlights how criminal gangs descend into increasing barbarity as they battle to control illicit markets. JNG has filled a void left by the capture of Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, which weakened his powerful Sinaloa cartel. Typical of their depraved tactics was an incident five years ago in which dynamite was taped to a man and his son, then detonated — with the execution filmed on the sicario’s phone.

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When will politicians quit the war on drugs?

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The unintended consequence of taking out Guzman, who was jailed in the US last year, was the ending of a period of comparative peace that one analyst called ‘Pax Sinaloa’. His removal unleashed a fight for supremacy in which someone even more sinister seems to have triumphed —namely El Mencho, who oversees smuggling operations today on every continent.

The escalation of violence is a familiar story. We have seen the same thing here in Britain. Neil Woods, a former undercover cop, detailed in two superb books how risking his life for public safety made minimal impact on stopping the flow of drugs. He witnessed over his career a spiral of savagery as crooks fought to control the trade, the spoils of victory going to the most violent among them.

This partly explains the disturbing rise in knife crime in Britain, which in turn is associated with county line supply models that exploit vulnerable children to sell drugs. Politicians, though, continue to push the same old failed drug polices, which only inflame the violence — from Manchester to Mexico.

Meanwhile, we are seeing a surge in stronger synthetic drugs which are harder to detect and can be more dangerous. History has shown how prohibition fosters potency, from the days of moonshine replacing beer a century ago in the US through to skunk replacing milder cannabis more recently on our streets. Stronger products mean smaller quantities for smuggling and bigger margins. It is noticeable that JNG first emerged from Jalisco, Mexico’s centre for such products. Now, this gang is trafficking vast quantities of methamphetamine and fentanyl across the US, where the drugs are fuelling homelessness and addiction.

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Ironically, one reason these cartels moved into avocados is the recent fall in the price of heroin due to the emergence of new rivals, especially in Asia. Another reason has been the legalisation of cannabis in Canada, parts of the US and, effectively, in Mexico, which has cut off another supply of illegal cash. But this shift has happened too late to stop the cartels from becoming so strong they have corroded their country. And in any case the rise in the synthetic drug demand is filling that gap. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a veteran socialist and close friend of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, won power two years ago by promising to end violence with focus on the economy and a policy of “abrazos, no balazos“ (hugs not bullets). But the economy has stagnated, despite the avocado boom, and violence worsened.

Uttam Dhillon, acting head of the DEA, boasted after the raids last week that his team had carried out “one of the largest, concentrated actions against a single criminal organisation in many years”. He argued that the arrests would have “significant impact” since they were inhibiting the cartel’s ability “to regenerate and to continue to threaten our communities with their deadly drugs”. It’s nonsense. He should listen to his own agents who say that El Mencho is a far more deadly foe than his predecessors with his extreme use of terror and violence — and he should question why the murder and mayhem grows worse for all the DEA’s noble efforts.

There is one further pressure: he has become the most powerful Left-wing leader in the world. On his shoulders rest the hopes not just of tens of millions of Mexicans but voters in many countries who cleave to a revival of socialism as a means of addressing the many fissures of globalisation.

That is why the relationship between Obrador and Jeremy Corbyn is so important. The Labour leader, whose wife is Mexican and who has frequently visited Latin America, is a close friend. On the eve of his inauguration, Obrador made a public gesture of welcoming Corbyn to his country home in the southern state of Chiapas.

Mexico’s journey in the coming months will provide Corbyn with valuable lessons, to prepare him in the event of getting to power. In these times of deep cynicism and fear, the enthusiasm among a broad swathe of Mexicans is striking. They see in Amlo, his name’s initials by which he is best known, the answer to their prayers.

Further reading

Why we should welcome the populist victory in Mexico

By Charlotte Pickles

In his first few days in charge he has done little to dampen expectations. Launching a 100-point plan, no less, he vowed to reverse decades of free market liberal economics, put the interests of the poor and indigenous communities first, decentralise power to the regions and revive the oil industry. Five months of planning since his landslide victory in early July – perhaps the longest transition in any country’s constitution – have removed much of the surprise. Everyone has known for some time what is coming.

During a working trip at the end of August I was struck by the disdain in which Amlo is held by many professionals I met. Part of it is pure snobbery. Like Corbyn, he has spruced himself up, but he still doesn’t cut it as a suave, jet-setting leader in the style of previous presidents. Part of the ill will is simple economics. This is a deeply divided society. Polanco and Condesa, the two swankiest districts of Mexico City, resemble London’s Knightsbridge and Notting Hill. Meanwhile, the grinding poverty for millions is visible everywhere.

In a second trip over the past few days, some of the wealthier were prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, assuming that he won’t really go after them, and if he does, they have ways of spiriting their money out. So far the Mexican peso and stock market have fallen sharply but there has been no dramatic run – yet.

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The silver-haired son of a shopkeeper has tried to become Mexico’s president twice before. In 2006 he lost by just 0.5% of the vote, claiming that he had been robbed and setting up a tented protest village for months. On his second attempt in 2012 he lost by a more convincing 7%. Some thought his time was up.

In his manner of governing, he has pledged to be as different from his centre-Right predecessor Enrique Pena Nieto as possible. On Monday, on his first morning in charge, he despatched the presidential Boeing 787 jet (more lavish, it is said, than Air Force One) back to California for safekeeping until a suitable oligarch can be found to buy it. Amlo plans to fly economy on commercial airliners, and he plans to get rid of the 60 planes and 70 helicopters on the government’s books. He has refused to live in the presidential compound, Los Pinos (the Pines), and has opened it up to the public. He has promised to work 16 hours a day, starting with a 6am security briefing and a 7am press conference.

He is proud to call this austerity – but not the British version where the general population, particularly the poorer, shouldered the biggest burden. He is going after government spending on luxuries. No meetings in restaurants or posh hotels. Only in plain government offices.

One of Amlo’s most symbolic decisions, taken during the transition, was to hold a referendum on plans for a new airport, designed by Norman Foster. This was a waste of money; plane travel, he implied, was a plaything of the rich. A majority voted to scrap it, but the turnout was tiny (one million out of 45 million who voted in July’s election) and the ballot was run not by the electoral commission but by his Morena party, raising fears of ballot stuffing.

Electoral promises will be kept. The people are sovereign. Sound familiar? Amlo appears a curious mix of Brexit-era and Trumpist populism.  Trump couldn’t stand Pena Nieto (the feeling was mutual) and tweeted hearty congrats to his successor. On the chummy level there is every chance the two will get on just fine. Here are two folksy, call-it-as-it-is, leaders; convergence of the angry Right with the angry Left. But that’s before they start to deal with the detail on trade and immigration.

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There is also a comparison to be made with the smooth Davos-man Blair, a man who could not be more different to the new Mexican president. Not in policies or behaviour, but expectations. To watch Amlo’s victory speech at Zocalo, Mexico City’s colonial-era vast central square, evokes the less iconic but equally powerful setting of the Royal Festival Hall in May 1997. Things can only get better was the soundtrack. People hugged, believing a new Camelot had arrived.

Blair’s thesis, which propelled him to power with a similar landslide, was to portray the art of the possible as radical. New Labour would initiate change by stealth; he would keep on his side a country that the young prime minister believed was big C and small C conservative.  We know what eventually ensued: the financial crash and the end of centrist consensus, giving rise to the radical Left and Right.

No matter what era, however, and how it is dressed up, politics is the art of compromise, of marrying high principle with messy pragmatism. The inevitable conclusion is that he will disappoint. He has to, by the nature of the job. That is why, in his inaugural address, he asked the people for patience.

And that’s why it’s so crucial for Corbyn. Both men romanticise past Latin American revolutionaries (including the current regimes in Venezuela and Cuba). The reality of office will be more mundane. How much can radical Left-wing leaders really change within the confines of democracies and market systems? When the going gets rough, do they plough on or do they retrench, to the consternation of those voters who yearned for radical change? It will all be about managing expectations. Getting rid of presidential jets is the easy part.

The landslide victory of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador – or Amlo as he known – brings to an end the long-run dominance of Mexico’s pro-market PRI and PAN parties.

Although shaky on specifics during the campaign, Lopez Obrador has promised to transform Mexico. His critics fear a shift towards socialist autocracy, leading to ruinous decline à la Hugo Chavez. Supporters see a socialist saviour who will deliver the fair, safe and universally prosperous future they dream of. It is the populist tale of our age. His acceptance speech, though, hints at a more moderate middle way.

But regardless of the course he charts, the Mexican electorate has sent a resounding message: the status quo must end, change is needed.

What remains striking in this era of political realignment is the continuing failure of establishment politicians and pundits to adjust to this new normal. How many ‘upsets’ will it take before they accept that the demand for ‘change’ isn’t some mad cry for revolution, but the reasonable demand of electorates with legitimate grievances?

For while the severity of the three key issues which drove voters into the arms of Lopez Obrador are on a scale we in the West can hardly imagine, each of those drivers is nonetheless also behind the rise of populist politics in Europe and America.

Like UKIP’s Nigel Farage, Podemos’ Pablo Iglesias and Five Star’s Beppe Grillo, Lopez Obrador has presented himself as the ‘outsider’. And like his fellow populist leaders, he has pledged to overthrow the establishment. His criticism of the “mafia of power” proved a powerful rallying call in a country where corruption is endemic – votes are bought, public monies embezzled, and public contracts awarded to cronies.

Ordinary Mexicans, especially those outside the big cities, have had enough of an elite focused on lining their own pockets. It’s a familiar story.

Further reading

How the Left failed flyover Spain

By James Bloodworth

In Spain last month, corruption forced the resignation of Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy, and a more general backlash against the establishment has seen the rise of socialist populist party Podemos. In Italy, the populist Five Star Movement has built its platform in opposition to the corruption at the heart of Italian politics.

Across Western democracies, the people are revolting against what they see as self-serving, clubby elites. When Trump promised to “drain the swamp” we all knew what he meant – even if he doesn’t appear to be following through with it.

Lopez Obrador’s promise to clean up politics also came with a commitment to invest in social programmes – funded by the savings from his anti-corruption crusade. Echoes, perhaps, of the domestic investment promised by Brexiteers once the EU gravy train is halted.

Which brings us to the second driver of voter behaviour: poverty and inequality.

By Mexico’s own measure, half of its population live in poverty. In a country with a relatively new and burgeoning middle class, the gap between the haves and have-nots is stark. And, as is the case in many countries, that economic division is mirrored geographically, with high levels of deprivation in the South of Mexico in comparison with a relatively prosperous North.

Just as stagnating wages, insecure work and high levels of income and wealth inequality have called into question the efficacy of capitalism in the West, many in Mexico are questioning the wisdom of economic liberalisation and free trade.

NAFTA (the free trade agreement between America, Mexico and Canada signed in 1993) may have led to billions of dollars of foreign investment for Mexico, and a dramatic surge in exports, but not everyone benefited.

Further reading

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Border cities (and big business) boomed, while the rural South suffered – by 2007, Mexico had experienced a net loss of two million farming jobs. Average incomes in Mexico barely changed under NAFTA, and six in ten Mexicans still work in the informal economy. The higher paying, higher skilled jobs that were created didn’t neatly replace those jobs that were lost – a problem all too familiar to Rust Belt America and deindustrialised Northern Britain.

It is unsurprising that Lopez Obrador’s promise to redistribute the wealth and rein in big business proved so popular – just as Jeremy Corbyn’s promise did in Britain. Even the staunchest defender of free trade must recognise that globalisation has its limits, and domestic policy should seek to mitigate its harsher impacts.

The third issue driving the desire for change was, in a country notorious for its drug cartels and the violence they perpetrate, security. In 2017, Mexico recorded its highest death toll since records began. 2018 isn’t looking any better – almost 3,000 people were murdered in the single month of May, that’s pushing 100 deaths per day.

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By Tino Sanandadaji

Successive PRI and PAN governments have proved powerless to stem the violence with their law and order ‘solutions’ (PAN President Felipe Calderon’s military-led war on the drug cartels saw the death toll rise). Lopez Obrador is pledging a new approach: an amnesty for drug traffickers. Crazy as that might sound, for a terrorised nation, exhausted from decades of failed initiatives, a change of tactic is exactly what people are looking for.

Even here there are parallels with Europe and America, where, although for very different reasons, security is a growing concern. A recent YouGov poll asked citizens in 11 European countries what they thought the top two issues were facing the European Union: they were terrorism and immigration (though domestic issues were of much greater concern at a personal level).

The devastating spate of terrorist attacks through 2016 and 2017 appeared to show that governments could not perform the first priority of any state: keeping its citizens safe. And populist leaders were quick to jump on those fears – France’s Marie Le Pen has railed against “Islamism”, and Trump made a Muslim travel ban a key campaign pledge.

In Germany, the 2016 New Year’s eve Cologne attacks triggered the anti-immigration backlash that has helped propel AFD into the centre of German politics. And the populist Sweden Democrats are gaining ground, helped by rising violence which is being tied to immigration.

Significant portions of electorates across the West have lost faith in the establishment’s approach to security and are turning to more radical options.

Mexico’s problems are the West’s writ large.

Lopez Obrador’s 30-point win over his nearest rival appears to give the Leftist a clear mandate for change, but it is not yet clear that his party – Moreno – will win a majority in congress. If they do, it will be the first time that a Mexican president has commanded a legislative majority since 1997, and his ability to implement a more radical set of reforms will be significantly increased. And that, of course, is scaring the establishment horses.

In the aftermath of the British vote to leave the EU in 2016, the British Pound took a hit, just as the weakening of Angela Merkel’s grip and the rise of the far-right in last year’s German elections saw the Euro dip. In Mexico, as the scale of Lopez Obrador’s victory has become apparent, the Peso wobbled. The global markets – and their Davos backers – do not like disruption.

But disruption is exactly what voters in Mexico, and across Western democracies, are demanding. Disparaging the call for change as ‘populism’ is arrogant and counter-productive. If, instead of hurling insults, the establishment and one percenters had paid their fair share of tax, invested in re-skilling and decent wages, and acted like responsible economic stewards rather than drunken casino goers, the status quo may just have been palatable.

Until they realise that, populist leaders – like Lopez Obrador – will keep winning. And that, of course, is the beauty of democracy.

Further reading

How Latin America's Pink Tide turned

By James Bloodworth