Abstract:
Mexican journalist, scholar, and human rights advocate Sergio Aguayo examines the paradoxes that have caused the emergence of democracy in Mexico to be overshadowed by the grim brutality of the drug war.
Mexico is in crisis. Large swaths of the country are at war. Mass graves, beheaded bodies, and public shootouts have become a regular feature of the Mexican news cycle. Meanwhile, government institutions are even more corrupt than they were under one-party rule, according to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, and trust in government — and the concomitant willingness to pay taxes — remains low. This was not how democracy was supposed to be.
Publication date:
January 11, 2011
Publication type:
Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies Article
