"Mexicans are killing one another for the privilege of selling Americans the means with which they kill themselves."

In City Journal, Shepard Barbash writes about Mexico. After saying many complimentary things, he writes about

metastasizing violence and institutional corruption that threaten its future.

...Since the country’s birth, the barbarism in Mexican life has been its shape-shifting, dog-eat-dog lawlessness—an enduring contempt for shared norms and an allegiance to personal power that in recent decades has expressed itself in waves of violent crime. And whereas ten years ago, most crime came from drug cartels on the U.S. border, the problem has since metastasized nationwide. In cities and villages, from north to south and sea to sea, an ever-evolving, ever-replenishing population of thieves, extortionists, kidnappers, drug traffickers, cheats, and assassins has besieged society, defying or co-opting governments at every level. Mexicans’ ingenuity and ambitions, long stifled by their self-dealing political class, are finding an outlet in outlawry.

Consider the agility of the drug trade. Mexicans have supplied the U.S. with illegal substances for more than a century—beginning with marijuana and heroin between the world wars, then Colombian cocaine in the 1980s, methamphetamines a decade later, and now fentanyl, by way of China. What began as a small, locally controlled business has evolved into a multibillion-dollar industry dominated by large networks that clash and collude with one another and with the state. Violence intensified after the PRI’s defeat in 2000 scattered power among competing factions. It grew still worse after 9/11 prompted the U.S. to harden the border.

Most killings remain tied to the drug wars, but a growing share comes from robbery, assault, extortion, and kidnapping. “Mexico is no longer a world of cartels and capos,” says Alejandro Hope, a security specialist based near Mexico City. Organized crime networks control territory to varying degrees in 19 states and the capital, but much less of their profits comes from the U.S. drug market, which has become more competitive. The biggest new business is stealing oil from the state-owned energy company, Pemex. Mexico has the largest, most efficient black-market fuel-distribution network in the world, Hope says. In Puebla, reported thefts from pipelines spiked from 15 in 2000 to 1,533 in 2016. Guanajuato—emblematic of the good and bad Mexico—ranks third among states in job creation, thanks to its auto industry, and first in homicides, due to murders tied to fuel thefts from refineries.

...All told, the government reports 33.6 million crimes with a victim in 2017, an all-time high. Most victims were women. Only one in 6,000 crimes ends in a conviction. Columnists bemoan “the hydra of impunity . . . grand queen of our country”—the monster Mexico has never slain.

Mexicans spend an estimated 1.65 percent of the country’s GDP on home security—changing locks, installing alarms and window bars, buying guard dogs, hiring bodyguards. In 2017, nearly 80 percent reported feeling unsafe in their neighborhood, the highest rate ever recorded. “Whether you’re getting robbed at the bank with the collusion of the teller, or raped on your way to work, or stripped of your cell phone on the bus, crime is an almost daily occurrence,” says Valdés. Thirty years ago, I quit my job as a foreign correspondent in Mexico City because I got tired of writing about death and disaster. The stories coming out of Mexico today make those days seem quaint.

“We have lost confidence in the day-to-day because at each moment we are exposed to some new horror,” says Imelda Rodríguez, promoter for the Network of Groups of Parents in Pain. “The horror, the hopelessness, the anger, the abandonment, the disgust, disdain, hatred, humiliation, incredulity, fear—it’s a context that invades your house, the street, family, friends. It is . . . breaking the basic and symbolic bonds of elemental co-existence.”

López Obrador (he goes by AMLO) has refused to increase spending to fight crime. His campaign slogan was Abrazos sí, balazos no! (“Hugs, not bullets”). He has called for a truce with the cartels and amnesty for broad classes of criminals (including drug carriers and small marijuana growers). His plan to end violence would rely 30 percent on using force to fight crime and 70 percent on creating jobs for youth and the poor. Evidence shows that his premise is wrong: a recent study of 18 Latin American countries (Marcelo Bergman’s More Money, More Crime) found a positive correlation between rising per-capita income and lawlessness. The way to fight crime is to fight criminals.

...The best way that the U.S. can help Mexico is to help itself: first, by keeping its own economy healthy; and second, by saying no to drugs. Exports have been Mexico’s only engine of growth for 20 years, and they are entirely dependent on U.S. industrial growth. Nothing has created more good jobs for Mexicans than good manufacturing jobs for Americans. Whatever replaces NAFTA would do well not to change that. The illegal drug trade, meanwhile, has been a catastrophe for both countries. Violence from the cartels is one of the leading causes of death in Mexico; drug abuse is one of the leading causes of death in the United States. Mexicans are killing one another for the privilege of selling Americans the means with which they kill themselves. “There is no diving board without the swimming pool,” Mexicans say—no supply without demand. If the U.S. can’t cope with this scourge, how can our weaker neighbor?

Read more here.