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.
Mexican History Break!
This painting depicts the final moments before execution of Emperor Maximilian, a man who is said to have loved Mexico so much he prayed for it even in his last moments. What happened to him? Ask many Mexicans and the answer you get is "He had to die."
Max took the throne in 1864 (During the US Civil War) after being told Mexico
wanted him to do it (but really it was more Euro/Mexico power struggle stuff).
"If you succeed in bringing order out of this chaos, fortune into this misery, union into these hearts you will be the greatest sovereign of modern times. Go poor fool! You may regret your beautiful castle of Miramar!
- François Claude du Barail
While the European powers that put Maximilian in power expected him to roll back liberal reforms once he got to Mexico, he did not. Instead he:
- Created laws to protect freedom of speech and protect workers' rights
- Extend amnesty for his political rivals (got his hand slapped by Benito Juárez)
- Stood up to the pope and said the Mexicans didn't need no dang ol' state religion
- Tried to set up national public schools
And what did it get him?
Because the US still acknowledged Benito as the rightful leader of Mexico, Max was never acknowledged emperor. Just the prospect of the US siding with Benito was enough for some of Maximilian's men to abandon him. With guerilla attacks increasing in rural areas, Maximillian issued "the black decree" which said anyone found to be aiding the guerillas was to be executed. It was very unpopular - so unpopular he sent his wife back to Europe and told her to just stay there if she couldn't get them help.
In 1866 he tried to set up a national assembly on what to do, but Juárez refused the ceasefire necessary to actually pull it off. Max was captured and killed almost immediately after the remaining French troops left and he had to switch over to using the Mexican ones.
He was succeeded by Benito Juárez.
"I'm on your side!"
Here's a video about that first painting, by the way:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QcMpw0dNpIM
Let's see what the comments say!
So what do we learn?
There is nothing Max could have done to "win" here. It wasn't
what he did that mattered, it was
who he was. He could not win. There was no policy, no behavior, no choices he could have made that would have saved him. His very existence needed to be erased.
"He had to die."
American meddling in favor of the most cancerous factions & movements in Mexico predates both the neoliberal era and even the French intervention to prop up Maximilian, tbh. The
War of the Reform between Juarez's liberals and the clerical-conservative faction saw the US support Juarez, less because the American financial & political elite particularly liked the guy (although that was true, he was a Masonic liberal type) and more because they liked what he represented: 'opening Mexico up for investment', ie. making it piss easy for American business interests to set up shop & exploit the absolute shit out of Mexico's resources & labor pool, and overthrowing the previous ruling elite - the colonial-era
criollo (actual White Hispanic, as in, of Spanish heritage with little to no native admixture) landowning aristocracy or
hacenderos who stood in the way of that.
See, most land in Mexico prior to Juarez's reforms were owned either by the
criollo gentry, or by the Catholic Church. In fact,
most of the remaining native-owned land in Mexico was legally owned through Catholic confraternities, affording the native communities a degree of legal & spiritual protection against Spaniards who might've wanted to snatch away what little they still had left. When Juarez won with American support, he took a buzzsaw to Church ownership of land and privatized all that good shit in the name of modernity, economic efficiency, etc. which was theoretically supposed to turn the Mexican peasantry & natives into self-sufficient yeoman farmers who owned their own scraps of farmland (the American model and Jeffersonian ideal), but in practice was tantamount to giving said lands away to corporate interests.
These policies continued under Juarez's eventual successor, Porfirio Diaz; and under his
Porfiriato, the Mexican economy was known to have grown massively, but those newfound riches hardly 'trickled down' to the Mexican working classes. It didn't even particularly enrich John Smith, the average American farmer or factory worker or clerk or soldier or whatever from Ohio (or any other state). Only the American and Mexican business/political elites, who could now plunder Mexico's natural resources with even greater impunity than before, benefited from the new arrangements. In other words, proto-neoliberalism's (or perhaps one can just call it old-school liberalism? It wasn't 'neo-' back then) results in Mexico were functionally the same as, well, modern neoliberalism's.
Hell, this didn't even clear up corruption in the Mexican government either. The
Porfiriato was infamously horrifically corrupt as well, IIRC many of the bad habits of Mexico's present rulers dated back to the era of Diaz's misrule.
Maximilian was intended as a puppet for the clerical-conservative faction to retake power, but that obviously didn't pan out and he proved too liberal anyway. Far too soft and urbane, unwilling to accept the reality of what it would take to impose any measure of real order on that country. Future American meddling only ever further empowered worse and worse strains of Mexican parasites, critically Woodrow Wilson fucking over the generalissimo
Victoriano Huerta and keeping him from stabilizing Mexico with his
mano dura (authoritarian, militaristic policies - Huerta was a cunt, but you basically needed to be one to have any chance of ruling Mexico) caused the
Mexican Revolution to spiral way the fuck out of control and eventually put borderline-Marxists like Calles in power, and then
that regime decayed into the corrupt bureaucratic tyranny that has plagued Mexico for most of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Mexico would've been far better off if the US had never stuck its dick into its internal politics (storming the Halls of Montezuma and shearing off Alta California is one thing, actively meddling in Mexican civil wars is quite another), rule by feudal barons and the Catholic Church suit the sensibilities of the Mexican people - stuck in another time as they are - infinitely better than an oligarchy of robber barons in suits pretending to be a liberal democracy. If anything, it'd surely be to the benefit of the American Average Joe if Mexican peasants weren't be able to steal American manufacturing jobs or march over the border to illegally lay down roots in California because they were still stuck as serfs on some
hacendero's estate.
