ABSTRACT
Over the last twenty years, North America has been through a strange process. In the early 1990s, the region bombastically inaugurated what was supposed to become a fully integrated market, pooling together the economic strengths of three member countries and foreshadowing increased political cooperation. In the early 2000s, however, market integration and political cooperation were clouded by an overarching concern with security. Under the pressure of the strongest partner, all North American countries rebuilt their domestic and foreign security apparatuses, adopting muscular antiterrorism legislation for internal threats—often to the detriment of civil liberties—and creating stronger police and military capabilities, while spending impressively unprecedented amounts of public funds in the process. Yet paradoxically these measures seem unable to solve a pressing North American security issue: the drug war quagmire that persists in Mexico, clearly originated by this country’s closeness to the biggest illegal drug market in the world.
