Archives for drug war

New factors and circumstances are reshaping and redefining modern drug dealing organisations in Colombia. A defensive response Consistent violence has occurred within and throughout Colombia in the last thirty years as a consequence of the so-called “war on drugs” between the state and criminal actors. This unrest has catalysed a…

December 2021 marked the 15th anniversary of the so-called ‘war on drugs’ in Mexico. In that time – and as renowned sociologist Fernando Escalante has articulated – “too many certainties” have become commonplace in national discourse. In particular, a cacophony of expressions have repeatedly been used by government officials across…

Amid high expectations, and on a popular mandate to curb violence across the country, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (commonly known as AMLO) won the Mexican presidential election in early July 2018. However, by November, the then president-elect AMLO dismayed some of his electorate by placing the National Guard under military…

Graphic crime scenes accompanied by figures depicting unprecedented homicides rates continue to dominate the Mexican media landscape. In Mexico, violence and its causes have dominated almost all areas of public discussion for the last ten years and countless pages have been devoted by journalists, fiction writers and academics to dissecting the so-called Mexican insecurity crisis. Each of…

In 2017, 29,168 people were murdered in Mexico, the most since records began. Excluding countries at war, there were more homicides in Mexico last year than in any country in the world, apart from Brazil, which has 80 million more people, and India, which has ten times Mexico’s population. Six of…