The Tragedy of Mexico

Like millions of Americans I was born in what used to be Mexico. In my case, it's Texas, but California, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico were Mexican territory at one time, before the Texas revolt, the Mexican War and the Gadsen Purchase of the nineteenth century. Today all we hear about is the continuing migration of Mexicans north and the unending drug war. For a great country blessed with rich, ancient cultures and a glorious physical setting, Mexico has endured more than its share of history's miseries.
Mexico has suffered from economic and political disasters since before Cortez came ashore. The Aztecs were the dominant group at Contact, and they had effectively enslaved much of Central Mexico. Cortez and his Conquistadors brought huge and often devastating changes, militarily dominating the Aztecs, destroying much of the social infrastructure of the indigenous people, oppressing them socially and economically. Even after the Mexican people successfully revolted against Spanish rule in 1810, and in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910, the country was never able to shake its colonial past or to overturn the ruling oligarchies that to this day dominate the nation politically and economically.
The North American Free Trade Agreement was supposed to put Mexico on the fast track to modernization and economic stability. What NAFTA actually accomplished was negligible, and in the long run, ruinous. Farmers and campesinos rushed to the factory jobs in the north of the country, only to find employment in shoddily run factories, jobs devoid of benefits, and woefully low wages. Meanwhile, agriculture, long the mainstay of the Mexican economy, suffered because of competition from other nations. As the reality of the economic situation began to set in, the Great Migration to the United States intensified.
With the disappearance of traditional farm products markets, and the increasing demands for drugs in the U.S., many farmers turned to poppy and marijuana cultivation to make ends meet. Meanwhile, powerful cartels arose that took control of the cultivation, processing, delivery and sales of illegal drugs. These cartels became major players in the politics of the country, their narcodollars buying cops, judges, military officers and politicians. The central government, which for generations was run by one political party, was corrupt already. The narcodollars, which are estimated to be at least forty billion dollars a year, bought cover for the cartels. In 2006, a new president was elected, and his first act was to declare war on the drug trade. Since then, over thirty thousand people have died, with nearly half having been killed in 2010.
Two of the great economic engines in Mexico are remittances sent from Mexicans working in this country to their families back home, and the drug trade, both of which have an enormous impact on the United States. Desperate people in Mexico continue to stream north, risking their lives and savings, looking to cross illegally into the United States in order to work the fields or clean toilets or do day labor - jobs Americans themselves shun.
The Great Migration will not stop, not as long as Mexico remains economically crippled and its government feckless and corrupt. The central government has lost control of much of several states in the north of the country. The city of Juarez, across from El Paso, is deadly and dying, the cartels and their hired gangs having reduced the city of over a million to a war zone that neither the Mexican army nor the federal police have been able nor perhaps willing to stop. The nation appears to be teetering on the edge of failure.