Since these particular riots are in response to a raid on cartel money laundering and human trafficking operations, and are funded (at least initially) by a cuban national who has been found guilty in the past of money laundering... I'm guessing the goal is to slow them down long enough for them to destroy evidence and get anyone important out of the region before ICE and the Fedboys can arrest them.
Hold on fellas... Wait a minute. I'm starting to feel like these gangs of drug smuggling, human trafficking, butchering, torturing, rapist murderers may be the bad guys...
Jokes aside, Mexico is a really fascinating and unique dumpster fire from a historical perspective. Since the inception of the nation state in the 1600s the general trends is that states exist in "neighborhoods" wherein most states share some similarities and a developmental course. The Eurasia area is quite well developed for the most part, as is North America. Whereas Africa is a pit and the Middle East is a basket case all round. But the Mexico-USA relationship is one of the rare examples of two neighbors going in complete opposite directions.
I have come to conclude that the prosperity of the USA feeds into the shittyness of Mexico. Obviously Mexico is going to be a hotspot for drug smuggling and human trafficking because the affluence of the USA creates around the clock demand for vices. As long as there is demand there is money, and as long as there is money the culture of corruption and looking the other way continues. (Now, this is not a once off phenomenon. You actually see this process occur quite a bit in other regions. In the European area peripheral places like Albania, Bulgaria, Kosovo and Morocco are all slowly becoming states run by organized crime. In Asia we see a similar thing in the Golden Triangle and the back jungles of Myanmar, which pretty much exist in perpetual anarchy and warlordism.)
But in my eyes what makes Mexico unique is the extent to which they exist basically as a parasite. During the 1990s the Mexican state ,under the leadership of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, gave up everything meaningful in Mexico preventing it from becoming a junkie that could only survive off the American Economy. This is called the Neoliberal era in Mexico. They gave up almost all of their state run industries, their currency controls, economic protectionism, labour protection and border security to be eligible for NAFTA. On the part of President Salinas this represents the ultimate Faustian bargain. "Give up on your current project of statehood. Remove your worker protections and open your border so that you will become an extension of the American economic zone. In exchange, we will send our manufacturing to you to take advantage of your low wages, and we will let the our new slaves send home remittances". Essentially, the neoliberal economic order is akin to a global patronage network.
But I suspect that the people who drafted the NAFTA plan for Mexico legitimately did not consider the inherent weakness and corruption of the Mexican state. The free trade agreement was supposed to give Mexican businesses unprecedented access to the American economy. Well it just so happens that the biggest "business" in Mexico is the cartel, and BOY did they benefit from this new access. I have to stress that the cartels are businesses in all but name. They have products (drugs), they sell services (smuggling comes to mind), they pay taxes (in the form of bribes), they engage in regulatory capture (by buying and threatening law enforcement, as well as paying politicians and the military to look the other way) and they even have unofficial relationships with the state (in the form of informal "if you don't touch our shit we will not touch yours" agreements). Nafta was supposed to Americanize Mexico but it mainly just Americanized the cartels, who are by now probably large enough to be listed on the NASDAQ. Thanks to NAFTA they were able to grow and consolidate. Now they are almost too big to fail.
On the other hand, cheap Mexican labour 'Mexicanized' the American economy in a bunch of unforeseen ways. In places like California it has been argued that without Mexican serf labour the agricultural sector would become dysfunctional. Construction is another industry where this occurs. Before the Mexican revolution this was how things got done there. A couple of elites and land owners owned practically everything and got fantastically rich exploiting cheap labour. After the Mexican revolution, these people were persuaded to relinquish all of these goodies in exchange for being invited into the political system under the PRI. But consider this carefully. If Mexican politicians are elites who are in politics for the money, it naturally makes sense that they would make alliances with whatever was most lucrative, in this case the cartels. Furthermore, pawning all their excess people onto America gives them the space to continue to do a crap job at governing, because anyone who can't find a job will sneak into America.
This in my analysis explains why both American and Mexican elites are so protective over this system. In the final analysis, the only people who well and truly benefit from this are the Mexican and American elites and the cartels. It will always be amazing to me how this neoliberal "integration" project poisoned BOTH Mexico and America, and brought the worst things about America to Mexico and the worst things about Mexico to America.
