Gerardo Vieyra/Getty ImagesMexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador on Friday rebuked the calls of U.S. officials to crack down on the illegal drug trade, saying the U.S. opioid crisis caused by drugs funneled through Mexican cartels wasn’t Mexico’s problem to deal with.At his daily news briefing, the Mexican leader located his inaction to combat cartel violence within a “Mexico First” policy that doesn’t answer to anyone else—namely the U.S., Mexico’s northern neighbor.While explaining why
The problem with Jon Tester, he is no longer a Montanan! Tester votes the party line just to line his pockets. If the bill hurts Montana, he votes for it,
Multiple former law enforcement and border security officials are teaming together in an attempt to make the border crisis the defining issues of this year's election.
Organized crime groups (OCGs) in Mexico are some of the most violent and sophisticated active criminal cells. The conflict with the Mexican state, commonly understood to have begun in 2006, has resulted in approximately 400,000 casualties. The focus of this research is the discourse produced by Mexico’s OCGs. The tropes within the discourse projected by these groups present an ominous threat to the legitimacy of the Mexican state. OCGs operate, largely, in the rural areas of Mexico, those with populations that have been, in their eyes, long forgotten by the central government. These groups establish a discourse in which the state is weak, corrupt, and a distant outsider in their communities. Further, the populations of these regions should invest their trust and loyalties to the OCG rather than the state. This paper utilizes available theoretical frameworks to trace the parameters of OCG discourse to better understand how it functionally serves these groups and how it serves to under