We received this report from Jonathan Alpeyrie which he has worked on for the last five years. It is accompanied by these 2 texts.
Over the past 5 years, I have covered the drug wars in South America and North America with the intention of creating a major retrospective on the current situation of the large international drug trade and its implications. Indeed, this project has both an anthropological and historical aim. Indeed, as a photojournalist, my primary objective is to report on current events which have, as a whole, an important historical connotation. Moreover, this project also dives deep into human activities but also into their psychology. In fact, through these photographs, I am trying to convey a message to the viewer that would make them wonder why so many people are now addicted to drugs, and why so many people are willing to do anything to kill and sacrifice to sell their drugs.
All these questions are deeply rooted in this photographic work which has taken me to 8 countries including the USA. This made it possible to explore and above all to understand how our modern world is conducive to the creation of the large international drug trade and its terrible consequences.
Some have recently claimed that Mexico has now partially become a drug trafficking state. These strong words are not used lightly by individuals living in Mexico or by experts. Indeed, a recent estimate given by the DEA shows that around 30% of civil servants are now paid by various cartels. This figure, which some say is far from reality since it could be as high as 50%, proves the extent to which Mexico’s closely intertwined federal, state and local institutions are one with criminal organizations. Who is to blame and how did this happen.
Corruption, one would say, of course, is one of the reasons, but how and why is corruption in Mexico so prevalent? Let us briefly delve into the historical context that saw the birth and then rise of the Mexican state. In 1517, the Spanish landed for the first time on the Yucatan peninsula and came into direct contact with many tribes but especially with the Mayans. Two years later, in 1519, the Spanish conquistador Cortés and 500 of his men landed on these shores and began the process of conquest. In 1521, the Spanish managed to achieve their main objective by destroying the Aztec empire and taking control of their capital Tenochtitlan. This historical watermark marks the beginning of Spanish expansion and then the takeover of what would become Mexico.
The Spanish, like the Portuguese in Brazil, brought with them their institutions, their colonizers, their technology, but also their faults. One of these mistakes was to reorganize the territory according to the feudal system, which consisted of giving all the good land to the nobility and clergy, thus destroying the possibility of the lower classes having their own piece of land. This tradition of large agricultural lands owned by only a few families was, in my opinion, one of the original sins that will see a radically different progress between the Latin States of the Americas and the future great power of the United States which had enshrined in law, the sanctity of property, whether you are rich or poor.
This fundamental sin, over time, remained rooted in the mentality of the mestizos, who over time would become the Mexican population. The poor of Mexico had to wait until 1917, after the revolution, to see the implementation of a large-scale land reform which did not end until 1992. These reforms redistributed more than 100 million hectares of land from the large agricultural groups to households organized into Ejidos (collective farms). ). This fairly recent transformation has had great benefits for Mexico, but has never completely eradicated this mentality of large family landowners. In fact, Mexican cartels operate largely this way and view control of territory and therefore financial opportunity in the same way those once-powerful Spanish families did centuries ago. The difference is in the type of goods they thrive on.
Mexican drug cartels emerged from the American demand for Maryjuana in the 1960s, but initially without much violence as at that time, Mexico and the United States had a mostly peaceful society, still deeply rooted in traditional values and a homogeneous social structure. The rise of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and his cocaine empire was a game-changer, as he used various Mexican cartels to distribute his wares in the United States. After the arrest of drug lord Felix Gallardo in 1989 for cocaine trafficking, violence subsided for most of the 1990s, but things changed in the early 2000s with a steady increase in violence. In 2006, with the election of Felipe Calderon and the violent rise of so many cartels within the federal territories, a war was declared by the federal government which triggered a very violent period for Mexico: at the end of its 6-year mandate years, an estimated 50,000 drug-related homicides have occurred. Tens of thousands of people have also disappeared.
The new administration of ex-President Pena Nieto has taken a completely different approach to the war on drugs and has decided to end the government’s authoritarian approach to getting rid of the numerous cartels that dot the federal territories. This backfired hugely, but not in a good way as homicides were down 50%. Critics have accused Nieto of being in cahoots with the Sinaloa cartels, which is now seen as a real possibility. Then came the current president, Obrador, who was even more lenient with the cartels. Both administrations failed, although they tried, to address Mexico’s drug problems because the cartels saw this as a weakness and an opportunity to further increase their power.
Today the situation is so bad that it is difficult to see the difference between the Mexican cartels, and parts of the Mexican government, power seems to be increasingly shared, creating a situation where one needs the other. Indeed, states like Michoacán, Guerrero Jalisco or even Sonora have become highly contested territories where federal troops no longer control a large part of the territory and have therefore created a state within a state.
Jonathan Alpeyrie
https://www.jonalpeyrie.com/
