YouTube video

YouTube video

In part one, Miguel Tinker Salas explained how the North American Free Trade Agreement helped to create the desperate economic conditions whereby Mexico’s drug cartels could flourish. Here in part two he criticizes the military-first response of the US and Mexican governments, pointing to the abject failure of a similar nine-year-old policy in Colombia. A country where the drug trade has actually expanded over the last decade of the heavily-funded drug war and US military aid has been turned against the social movement. A phenomenon that is already being observed in Mexico as well.

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Miguel Tinker Salas is a professor of History and Latin American studies at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He is co-author of Venezuela: Hugo Chavez and the Decline of an Exceptional Democracy and author of Under the Shadow of the Eagles and The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela. His latest book is Venezuela: What Everyone Needs to Know.