ABSTRACT
In 2008 Mexico’s security failure become impossible to hide. By the year’s end, as we mentioned in the Introduction, Mexico was suddenly targeted as a failed state. The country’s security failure was a matter of state evolution, but the state failure agenda was characteristically uninterested in either that or the further harm that it represented for the state. Against this, then, we advance the argument that both drug crime and the war on it in Mexico are politically conditioned. An unobjectionable, even anodyne, argument, it cuts against two common contentions. One is frequent in Mexico: drug crime is merely a matter of law and order. The other is constant for Mexico: there is no alternative to the war on drugs. The aim of this chapter is to show that efforts to de-couple security from politics are unsustainable.
