An altered state
Mexico’s president Felipe Calderon has made a military campaign against the country’s ascendant drug-trafficking gangs the centerpiece of his presidency. After thousands of fatalities, many of them due to retaliatory strikes by the cartels — including the murders of United States consulate workers last month — the battle remains unresolved.“I don’t see the drug traffickers giving up, and I don’t see the Mexican government winning this struggle with violence,” says Diane Davis, a professor of political sociology in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and a leading scholar of society and politics in Mexico. Lately, Davis and other similarly minded experts have been making an increasingly public case that the Mexican government will not find long-term success focusing on a conventional military-style battle, as if it were fighting conventional insurgents from Latin America’s past, such as Colombia’s rural rebels. That is because, Davis argues in a pair of recent...