Undergraduate

The world knows Mexico as a country full of vitality – from its rich history to its mesmerising geography to its cosmopolitan culture. However what happens when fear and crime join as equal adjectives of its national image? As written by Sam Dillon and Julia Preston, “Mexico passes from despotism to disorder. Mexico is a country each time more open, however, everyday less governable. ”
In thelast seven decades, Mexico has transitioned from priístas predominance, to a divided democracy, from the omnipotent presidentialism to the incompetent presidency, from the country without liberties to the country that does not know what to do with them. It has become a country of fugitive democracy, where instability and imbalance has enhanced organised crime to overwhelm authority, to gainimpunity and become authoritarian itself.
Today raw transfiguration of the Mexican State offers crucial points of study from which one can critically analyse subjects such as sociology, psychology, politics criminology, language studies, among many other disciplines. Therefore, it is important and the aim of this Critical Review of Sources to infer and analyse through a selection of sources thatdemonstrates a framework of academic responses that explains and analyse the approaches to history and relevance of the violent Mexico’s Status quo.

The first source for analysis, Preston and Dillon’s book – Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy – is an essential reference for students, academics and cultural studies interested in the intertwined Mexican political background and drugcorruption. Samuel Dillon accurately annotates in interview with Uiniversidad Iberoamericana “Mexico is a country with a democratic electoral system , but with a traditional political culture ”.
Preston and Dillon further contributes a range of controversial subjects that analyze drug trafficking, insecurity, puberty and immigration in a time-span of seven decades in Mexican politics, culminatingwith the July 2000 election of Vicente Fox Quesada which brought 71 years of dictatorial rule by Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), to a peacefully end , a singular democratic transition remarkable given Mexico’s bloody political history.
Indeed, this peaceful democratic transition, brought a new era of democracy to the country, Preston and Dillon book carefully underline thealarming race in power of El Cartel de Sinaloa just after the new panista government took power.

The consolidation of the Cartel of Sinaloa in the Panista era in Mexico, not only brought questions referent to possible alliances between organised crime and the new government, but also was studied as an indicator of social change.
Michael Shiner´s further analysis from the book Drugs Use andSocial Change: The Distortion of History break down how it is that illicit drugs use has become such a well-established feature of the late industrial societies. Shiner’s thesis, a key source to unveil the rationale of the Mexican drug conflict that followed the 2000 elections. He define that “Drugs use is simultaneously old yet new .The use of mood altering substances dates back to prehistorictimes, but also act as a barometer of social change- one that is rooted in the twin forces of globalisation and modernisation.”
Shiners thesis main contribution “the use of mood altering substances as an indicator of social change”, could conduct a better study of subjects such as the 2001 indigenous march from Chiapas to Mexico City by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation . Why is that theindigenous sectors of states like Chiapas, had become leading harvesting regions of natural enervatings such as marijuana , opium, poppy among others and in parallel this regions has been in a declared war against the Mexican state after the introduction to Mexico of the free-trade area with USA and Canada?
An existent relationship between drug production, trafficking and the poor sectors in...