The Mexican government has shown remarkable inertia since the apparent police abduction and subsequent gang murder of students in Guerrero. Now it hopes capital will not prove a coward as it denationalises oil reserves.
The EU-Mexico Global Agreement is a vestige of a different era, the EU emboldened by ‘its success’ in shaping and promoting the democratisation of southern Europe, then of the post-Communist countries in the early 1990s.
Students shot dead by police, others “disappeared”, mass graves located … the absence of the rule of law and trampling on human rights in Mexico is sparking widespread protest.
With no end in sight for the War on Drugs, the Mexican government will only further restrict civil liberties and endow the military with unchecked powers. The collapse of liberal democratic values heralds yet another age of authoritarianism.
This essay on the Zapatistas’ Women’s Revolutionary Law twenty years on, draws on Zapatista women’s reflections, together with a decades-long engagement with indigenous feminism and Zapatismo. Engaging difference through respect rather than negation can also move us beyond impasses within contempo
Mexico’s federal government has reacted to seething discontent by violently shutting down popular protest. In doing so, it frequently breaks its own laws in the process. But how long can this last?
Illegal drug trafficking is deeply embedded in Mexico. Collusion between the state and ‘self-defence’ groups is not, however, the answer to it.
In both Mexico and the UK political apathy seems to be on the increase, on general trends at least. If citizens see little tangible connection between their vote, their wishes and public policy, voting comes to be seen as a waste of time.
Former Swedish deputy foreign minister and UN ambassador Pierre Schori remembers circumstances and characters, including the late prime minister Olof Palme, that linked him to Gabriel García Márquez, in the work they did on Latin America.
Living in a perpetual state of fear, people prefer to isolate themselves from what they perceive as the “ineffective” mechanisms of public participation; creating and perpetuating a negative vicious circle.
A little-noticed security reform in Mexico threatens a major erosion of liberty by exploiting public fear to introduce a sweeping definition of “terrorism”.
While Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium depicts a highly exaggerated science-fiction future, and Charles Shaw’s The Plastic People presents the grim conditions of the all-too-real present, the inspiration for both films came suddenly and unexpectedly from the same brutal streets of Tijuana, Mexico.
