Jeison Mendieta, Esteban Jaimes, Domenico Raimundo

ANALYSIS ABOUT CRIMINAL VIOLENCE IN MEXICO

INDIVIDUAL LEVEL

he government of Mexico has always been in trouble with regards to violence and drugs. Mexico
went through a short period of drug regulation that included harm reduction measures. However,
the prevailing prohibitionist paradigms of the moment at the international level and pressure from
the United States restricted a project that sought an alternative to the criminalization of drugs and
their users; In 1940, the last year of his term as president, Lázaro Cárdenas promulgated a Federal
Drug Addiction Regulation in which various punitive decrees that considered the consumption,
possession and sale of drugs as a crime were eliminated.

The paradigm of this regulation stopped considering people with drug abuse problems as criminals
and passed them to the category of patients. Likewise, this new regulation made the State
monopolize the sale of drugs, for which the illicit traffic continues to be prosecuted by law. At that
moment, Mexico entered this conflictive world.

DOMESTIC / GROUP LEVEL

The reasons for the increase in violence in recent years in Mexico must be traced to the instability
of the drug market and the military combat that the government of Felipe Calderón took on against
organized crime from late 2006 to the present. For decades, violence related to drug trafficking
remained at controlled levels and confrontations between traffickers and from them with the
authorities were neither frequent nor widespread. Criminal violence is not the result of an inevitable
instinct of aggression by drug groups, nor is military violence the invariable form that the state used
to impose itself on drug trafficking networks. Violence is exacerbated only under certain social and
political conditions, or under a particular configuration of power relations, the evolution and current
configuration of which must be mapped out.

INTERSTATE LEVEL

Insecurity is experienced with different intensity depending on the state and the social group to
which one belongs. The serious socioeconomic problems that the country is experiencing have an
impact on security and governance: for example, the massive emigration of population to the United
States includes human trafficking, an organized crime activity that, in turn, has an impact on
violations of the human rights of migrants. At the same time, the transnationalization of crime is
increasing, for example, the trafficking of arms from the United States or the emergence of the
phenomenon of maras, which originate in Central America and California.

GLOBAL LEVEL

Insecurity is one of the great problems in Mexico. It manifests itself in two ways: the insecurity
experienced by the population, affected by the increase in crime, and the rise in drug trafficking,
which is explained by the incorporation of Mexico into the route of cocaine from Colombia bound
for the United States. This is manifested daily in growing violence, concentrated in the
confrontations between criminal organizations and between them and the security forces. The
United States generated a strategy to combat this violence that covered two fronts: the protection
of the homeland (homeland security) and the strategy of preventive action against terrorism
(preemptive action). For the first point, the collaboration of Mexico and Canada was vital, which is
why government smart border agreements were signed very quickly, with Canada in December
2001 and with Mexico in March 2002. In Mexico, there were no major questions. to the new security
scheme signed with the US. On the contrary, the criticisms focused on US international politics:
Mexico did not support Washington's diplomatic effort to involve the United Nations (UN) in the
war against terrorism, which generated a situation of friction between the two governments.

This apparent contradiction in Mexico's policies towards the United States was the result of a debate
in the core of Mexican elites, broadly divided into two sectors: the nationalists and the globalists.
The former are in favor of greater independence from the US, while the latter are inclined to
promote any international cooperation initiative and defend closer relations with Washington. This
tension is reflected at various points. For example, the nationalists oppose the departure of troops
abroad, while the globalists support the participation of the Armed Forces in peace operations and
cooperative actions for hemispheric security. In Mexico - as in the US, Colombia and some countries
in the Middle East and Africa - there are a number of weapons in the hands of the population that
are totally out of control. This wide availability of weapons is largely explained by US law, which
allows free sale. These weapons are the main food for both common crime and organized crime and
make up a huge black market, which also feeds on weapons from Guatemala - where their trade is
legal - and other Central American countries. Arms control in Mexico, in charge of the Secretariat of
National Defense (Sedena), is very deficient.

CONCLUSION

In Mexico, all these problems were born as a result of a social problem known as poverty, which
caused people to need a change that led to the introduction of drugs and illicit businesses. Today
this has been reflected in major problems of drug trafficking and violence. These problems caused
a closure or discrimination towards said population, which has been involved in different global
problems such as non-acceptance, which causes economies to be forced to doubt Mexico based on
its violence.