Mexico’s War on Mexicans

The Mexican president, Felipe Calderón, has militarized his country’s war on drugs, a task once reserved for the police. The consequences have been dire, says the editor of Mexico’s La Jornada. “Calderón followed much the same script used by George Bush after 9/11, when the US president made war the constituent power of a neoconservative order. … The army now virtually occupies communities throughout the country, carrying out functions that, under the constitution, are not the responsibility of the armed forces: it has set up checkpoints, de facto curfews and inspections. In what appears to be the pilot of a plan for the entire country, in several northern states there is a situation that resembles a state of siege—one never decreed by congress.”