UnHerd: Leon Trotsky’s disturbing afterlife

 But in many ways, what is most interesting about Trotsky is not his death, or life, but his afterlife. For, to a great extent he remained (and for some people amazingly remains still) the great ‘might have been’ of the Soviet era. Never mind the people who actually grew up while the horrors of the Soviet system were ongoing, I have heard people in my own adult life, born in my own lifetime, and sometimes younger than myself (people in their twenties or thirties), seriously describe themselves as being (or at some point having been) a Trotskyist. [...]

Several reasons present themselves. One is the possibility that his undoubted intellectual ability, plus his assassination in a far-away land gave him a certain martyr-like glamour. He was working on his magnum opus about his enemy right up until the moment of his death; the combination of work ethic and premature demise can be a heady brew. Especially so for a certain type of Western intellectual who likes the idea of fanaticism for a cause precisely because they have themselves never had to suffer at the hands of such fanatics.

But the greater reason would appear to be that reason which remains perhaps the greatest bit of unfinished business of the 20th Century. The recognition that the Soviet, Communist, Marxist experiments were not trees which just happened to give off some poison fruits. Or beautiful ideas which were just mishandled and misappropriated by misguided hands. But rather that the whole dream was a nightmare from beginning to end. And always was going to be. That the Communist experiment had no more likelihood of delivering peace on earth than did the Fascist attempt to try to produce the same.

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99 Percent Invisible: Return of Oñate’s Foot

1998 marked the 400th anniversary of Oñate’s arrival. There were “Cuarto Centenario” celebrations planned all over the state, complete with parades, theater, and a commemorative stamp. In a second note to the Albuquerque Journal, the anonymous foot thieves — calling themselves the “Friends of Acoma” — wrote: “We see no glory in celebrating Oñate’s fourth centennial, and we do not want our faces rubbed in it.” [...]

His cruelty to the innocent at Acoma was one of twelve crimes for which Oñate would later be tried and convicted by the Spanish crown. As punishment, he would be banished, permanently, from the territories of New Mexico. Yet just as people in New Mexico were learning more of this history, the city of Albuquerque was considering building yet another statue of him. [...]

When Naranjo-Morse arrived at the first meeting, the other two artists wheeled in a model of a statue they’d already put together. It was another triumphant statue of Juan de Oñate on a horse. They told her she could work on the granite pedestal beneath Oñate’s horse’s feet. “I felt insulted, I felt hurt, I felt marginalized,” said Naranjo-Morse. [...]

The second memorial, right next to it, looks like a huge dirt spiral. This is Naranjo-Morse’s contribution. The dirt path spirals slowly downhill, into the ground. As you walk it, the street disappears behind berms of chamisa and juniper. Then the buildings, then Oñate himself. Until finally, at the center of the spiral, all you can see is the land.

 

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WorldAffairs: Is the United Nations Still Relevant at 75?

Seventy-five years ago, delegates from 50 countries met in San Francisco to sign the UN Charter. Initially, the purpose of the United Nations was to maintain peace and security through international cooperation and to essentially prevent another world war. Today’s UN has 193 member countries and is facing a time of uncertainty and open disdain from US President Donald Trump, who has cut funding to the world body and declared, “The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots.” On this week’s episode, we look at the UN’s achievements, its shortcomings and what the future holds for international cooperation with journalist James Traub. Then Ray Suarez talks with former Prime Minister of Canada The Rt. Hon Kim Campbell and former Foreign Minister of Mexico Jorge Castañeda about how the United States is viewed by its neighbors.

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Politico: U.N. vote deals Trudeau embarrassing defeat on world stage

Despite being a founding U.N. member and part of the G-7 and G-20, Canada’s size and history once again counted for little: the government of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper was defeated by Portugal in 2010, even as the former colonial power was in the midst of the humiliating EU bailout. [...]

With Norway, Ireland and Canada all taking similar approaches to such core global issues as climate change, multilateralism and peacekeeping, Canada’s relatively late entry into the race — as well as stumbles like Trudeau’s brownface scandal — hurt Canada’s ability to stand apart and make its case.[...]

The Canadian government shelled out roughly $1.7 million and employed 13 full-time campaign staff, compared to Norway’s $2.8 million budget and Ireland on $1 million. Ireland splurged on U2 and Riverdance tickets for diplomats, and Canada on Céline Dion tickets, BBC reported, in addition to giveaways such as greeting cards, chocolates and Canada-branded facemasks.

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The Guardian: How the US helped create El Salvador’s bloody gang war

A decades-long veteran of the security forces, Ticas’s first job was as an artist in the counter-terrorism unit, sketching suspected guerillas during the country’s 1979–1992 civil war. The experience left him equally as distrustful of the rightwing generals he had served as of the guerrilla commanders who would join them among the political elite at war’s end. In most ways, the country has never quite recovered since. In 2015, homicides in El Salvador rivalled the most violent peak of the civil war, and it ranks consistently among the world’s most violent nations. Before long, Ticas spots a body by the roadside. “It’s fresh,” he observes. “With clothes on.” It hasn’t been stripped or dismembered. The victim, he says, was likely shot at that spot during the night. [...]

The murders that occurred here happened in the middle of a truce that the government negotiated between the rival gangs, which was credited with halving the homicide rate. But the reality, the informant says, is that it taught them to hide their victims in clandestine graves such as these. Ticas was not formally trained in forensics, and many of the techniques he uses he discovered himself. But he is not the only one learning in the process. [...]

Rather than a problem to be deported away, however, the reality of the gang is considerably more complex. Born out of the ecology of Los Angeles’s fierce gang warfare, MS-13 was founded in the 1980s by Salvadoran refugees who had been hardened in a brutal civil war still raging at home. In time, the gang expanded to include other nationalities, and it spread to other American cities. Today, in the US, it numbers no more than 10,000 members and functions mostly – its penchant for sensational violence aside – like an average American street gang, fighting to control neighborhood turf and local drug sales.

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WorldAffairs: MS-13 and El Salvador's World of Violence

How did El Salvador become one of the most violent countries on earth? And what role did the United States play in creating the notorious MS-13 gang? On this week’s episode, we explore the origins of El Salvador’s bloody gang war with journalist William Wheeler. Wheeler spoke with gang members, frustrated reformers, crime investigators and government officials to better understand the violence in the country and what is driving El Salvadorans northward and for his new book: “State of War: MS-13 and El Salvador’s World of Violence.” He is in conversation with World Affairs executive producer Joanne Elgart Jennings.

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99 Percent Invisible: How To Pick A Pepper

Sarah Taber is a crop scientist based in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and she says the great recession scrambled the familiar labor paradigm, in which migrant workers would arrive in the US looking for work on farms. Increasingly, potential foreign workers are staying put in their home countries to work in places like call centers. And Sarah points out that the children of immigrants who came to the US and went into agriculture are not following suit. [...]

After a decade of testing, Walker finally found a machine that showed promise called the Moses 1000. But even after discovering her dream harvester, Stephanie’s work still wasn’t over. Finding the machine was actually the easy part. Walker also had to deal with a larger problem, one inherent to agriculture that, despite the successful automations of the past, still makes many crops — including asparagus, cherries, apples, saffron, and chocolate — difficult to harvest with a machine. [...]

This means if you want to automate a harvest, you can’t just find a great machine. You have to make your plants more standardized, like cars. So for the past five years, most of Stephanie’s work has been about breeding a whole new plant, one that is designed specifically to be picked by a machine.

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The Guardian: 'People have had enough': Mexican town that lynched alleged kidnappers

The lynchings, which took place in the Mexican state of Puebla on 7 August, were the latest expression of a regional malady blighting countries from Bolivia to Brazil, whose far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, recently declared criminals should “die in the streets like cockroaches”.

Most weeks Latin American newspapers feature chilling tales of mob justice, often committed by otherwise law-abiding citizens and increasingly coordinated on social media and filmed on smartphones. In one recent case in the Brazilian Amazon, vigilantes smashed their way into a police station with sledgehammers in search of a suspected killer, before hacking him to death with machetes and scythes.

But Mexico, which last year registered a record 35,964 murders and where only a tiny fraction of crimes are solved, has been particularly affected.

The number of lynchings almost tripled here last year, jumping from 60 incidents in 2017 to 174 – 58 of which resulted in deaths. In the first half of this year that trend has continued with security expert Eduardo Guerrero counting at least 42 killings.

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WorldAffairs: What Comes Next? How the World's Most Violent Places Recover

The most violent places today are not at war. Eighty-three percent of all violent deaths occur outside of conflict zones, and in 2015, more people died violently in Brazil than in Syria’s civil war. Yet multiple places which were once engulfed in violence and instability have recovered and have since formed stable democracies. Rachel Kleinfeld, senior fellow at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and author of "A Savage Order: How the World’s Deadliest Countries Can Forge a Path to Security", joins Markos Kounalakis, WorldAffairs co-host and visiting fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, in conversation about how violent and weak states transform into stable ones.

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99 Percent Invisible: Depave Paradise

Back in the 1940s, this unusual landscape became a source of inspiration for Mexican Modernist architect Luis Barragán. Famous for his bold uses of color and careful integration of natural light, he designed a number of homes among the rocks of El Pedregal. In attempting to build harmoniously with this volcanic landscape, however, Barragán may have accidentally contributed to an ecological crisis that’s playing out in Mexico City today. [...]

When Spanish conquistadors sacked Tenochtitlan, they rebuilt a modern city with a grid. This new metropolis, however, would flood regularly, eventually leading to efforts to drain the former lakes of the basin. Over the course of the next several centuries, Mexico City built an elaborate system of tunnels designed to evacuate rainwater out of the basin and preventing flooding. Little by little, the city drained the lakes and expanded out over the dry lakebed.

Mexico City still has major flooding issues to this day, but it also faces a seemingly paradoxical problem: it’s running out of water. All of the infrastructure aimed at draining the rainwater from the basin works against efforts to retain water for human consumption. Today, many neighborhoods in Mexico City don’t have reliable running water — and when the rainy season comes, those same neighborhoods get far too much water all at once.

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Vox: The race to save endangered foods

We’re letting foods we’ve eaten for thousands of years disappear from farmers’ fields, and from our plates. Saving them isn’t just a matter of cultural preservation. In the next 30 years, we’re going to need to learn how to feed more people on a hotter planet, and the more genetic varieties we lose, the harder it’ll be to adapt.

To learn more about the foods facing extinction in the US and around the world, check out the Ark of Taste, a project of Slow Food USA.

Journalist Mark Shapiro’s book, Seeds of Resistance, goes into much more detail about the risk that genetic homogeneity poses to our food supply. He also profiles some of the efforts, many led by indigenous communities, to preserve older seed varieties.

For more on seed relabeling, check out the Farmers Business Network’s 2018 Seed Relabeling Report.

The chart on declining global yields for corn, wheat, and rice comes from an article in the academic journal Disasters and Climate Change Economics from agricultural economists Mekbib G. Haile, Tesfamicheal Wossen, Kindie Tesfaye, and Joachim von Braun. Their prediction model takes into account both climate change and price volatility, which is why their estimates are higher than those of some other researchers.

Special thanks to Marie Haga of Global Crop Diversity Trust, and Marleni Ramírez of Bioversity International for sharing their knowledge with me. 

Jacobin Magazine: AMLO’s First One Hundred Days

Whereas former presidents restricted press access to a combination of carefully scripted public events and fluffball interviews with friendly media, AMLO gives a morning press conference every day for upwards of two hours at a time. Far from saturating his image and subjecting him to debilitating attacks — the warnings of high-paid handlers the world over — the mañaneras, as they have come to be known, have set the agenda for both the nation’s politics and its front pages. In a sign of the times, the archive of past conferences is now available on Spotify.

AMLO’s results in the policy terrain have, inevitably, been more nuanced than his masterful public image maneuvers. As promised with disciplined insistence during the campaign, AMLO wasted no time in attacking the kleptocratic state inherited from Peña Nieto, lowering the bloated salaries of top bureaucracy, reforming the bidding process for government tenders, and launching a war on the multibillion-dollar industry of gasoline thievery that literally fuels the nation’s criminal economy. He’s also quickly rolled out a series of social programs, including a modest universal pension for over-68s and those with disabilities, a scholarship program to allow young people who are neither studying nor working (known in Mexico as “ninis“) to receive training and apprenticeships, a system of microcredits for areas of high marginalization, and a centralization of the nation’s scattershot health care system with the promise of phasing in some form of universal coverage over two years.[...]

Other aspects of AMLO’s relationship with the US, however, have been less forthright. Since taking power, he has accommodated — to a fault — Trump’s border policy, seeking to provide visas and jobs to Central Americans in an attempt to curb migration, allowing asylum seekers to be returned to Mexico while their cases are processed with only a mild statement of disagreement, and refusing to speak out against both the American president’s inhumane policy of family separation and his repeated insistence on building a border wall. AMLO is clearly banking on behind-the-scenes persuasion standing a better chance of success than a high-profile, asymmetric war of words. But, although Trump has been unusually measured when referring to his Mexican counterpart, it is unclear what else Mexico is gaining by opting for the soft sell. [...]

On February 14, in another awkward miscommunication, a presidential order announced the cessation of governmental subsidies to all social organizations, unions, civil, and citizen movements. At stake was $30 million pesos in direct government subsidies. In the neoliberal era, the leeching of core state functions to an unelected, unaccountable army of NGOS and “civil society organizations” has represented a deliberate strategy of undermining the state. In that context, AMLO’s decree was clearly in the right. “They created this idea of civil society, satanizing and stigmatizing the government. If the work is done by the government it won’t be efficient and they’ll rob it all, so better to give it to us [civil-society organizations],” he stated at a press conference.

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openDemocracy: The strange connections of Tashkent City’s “British investor”

Corso Solutions LP appears to be an unusual property developer. The Edinburgh-registered company has no website, no contact details and no obvious business activity. And yet it was named last autumn as a foreign investor on the Tashkent City project, a giant property redevelopment in the centre of Uzbekistan’s capital. openDemocracy has found that Corso Solutions has connections to an opaque international network that provides company formation services, including to apparent money laundering vehicles.[...]

According to the UK companies registry, Corso Solutions has not logged any activity or accounts since its formation. As reported by Scottish newspaper The Herald, the company should have disclosed its beneficial owner (“Person of Significant Control”) after new UK legislation on Scottish Limited Partnerships came into force in 2017. Concerns about this situation were raised in September last year. [...]

Corso Solutions was first mentioned in a September 2018 report by Uzbek media on investors in Tashkent City. Since then, we have been unable to find any information on the exact nature of Corso Solutions’ investment, and it is not mentioned on Tashkent City’s official website. When Radio Ozodlik contacted Tashkent City in October 2018 regarding Corso Solutions, an official responsible for foreign investment stated that information on approved foreign investors, including Corso Solutions, was a “commercial secret”. When we contacted Tashkent City project administration to confirm Corso Solutions’ role in the project in January and February 2019, we received no response.[...]

OCCRP and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists report that the GT Group has set up offshore corporate networks used by Russian organised crime, Hezbollah and the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel to launder funds and hide ownership. Companies House records that Ian Taylor has been disqualified as acting as a company director until 2021 under section 6 of the Company Directors Disqualification Act 1986 (Duty of court to disqualify unfit directors of insolvent companies).

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The Guardian: Criminalisation of sex work normalises violence, review finds

The review, by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, found that sex workers suffering repressive policing – including arrest, imprisonment and extortion by officers – were three times more likely to experience sexual or physical violence from a client and were twice as likely to have HIV or another sexually transmitted infection as those who lived in countries where sex work was tolerated. [...]

Their health and safety were at risk not only in countries where sex work was criminalised, but also in Canada, which has introduced the “Nordic model” pioneered by Sweden, under which the client can be arrested for a criminal offence, but not the sex worker. [...]

France, Iceland, Northern Ireland, Norway, the Republic of Ireland and Sweden also criminalise the client. Guatemala, Mexico, Turkey and the US state of Nevada have regulated sex work, which allows better conditions for some, but worse for the many who operate outside the regulated arrangements. [...]

New Zealand is the only country to have decriminalised sex work, in 2003, although it is not legal for migrants. Sex workers said they were more able to refuse clients and insist on condom use, while relationships with police were better. “We always have police coming up and down the street every night,” said one woman. “We’d even have them coming over to make sure that we were all right and making sure … that we’ve got minders and that they were taking registration plates and the identity of the clients. So … it changed the whole street, it’s changed everything.”

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Vox: Jared Kushner is getting an award from Mexico, and Mexicans aren’t happy about it

The Order of the Aztec Eagle — or La Orden Mexicana del Águila Azteca, in Spanish — is the highest honor Mexico’s government bestows on foreigners. It is awarded to individuals who’ve done a great service for Mexico or for humanity. Previous recipients include and Roberta Jacobson, the former US ambassador to Mexico, Bill Gates, and Queen Elizabeth II. [...]

Enrique Peña Nieto is deeply unpopular in Mexico, and this award for Kushner isn’t likely to win over detractors who already felt Peña Nieto let himself — and by extension, Mexico — get bullied by Trump. Incoming leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who is taking office on December 1, has promised to take a much tougher stance against the US president, but bitterness persists about Peña Nieto’s stance toward Trump. [...]

But Duncan Wood, the director of the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, said Kushner might have helped stop Trump from tearing up NAFTA altogether — and helped salvage parts of the bilateral relationship that became extremely testy during Trump’s tenure. [...]

Kushner, along with other advisers, helped convince Trump to renegotiate a trade deal, rather than totally scrap NAFTA. In an April interview with the Washington Post, Kushner hinted as much, claiming that he explained to the president the “plusses and minuses” of unilaterally pulling out of NAFTA.  [...]

Which means there’s another reason Peña Nieto chose to honor Jared: to possibly secure future investment in his commitment to Mexico. “By giving this award,” Wood said, “you’re hoping to stay involved in the bilateral relationship.”

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Jacobin Magazine: Latin America’s Re-Militarization

Law No. 13.491, passed by the Brazilian Congress in October 2017, gives military courts jurisdiction over their personnel accused of human rights violations. Prior to the law’s approval, the Ministry of Defense publicly made the case that allowing civilian courts to handle such cases would hinder policing operations. Michel Temer’s administration increasingly used the armed forces for domestic policing duties, whether in rural areas against land rights activists or in the favelas and peripheries of major cities.

Brazil’s 2008 “pacification” policy led to the deployment of military personnel to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and the militarization of policing intensified in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic games. According to Human Rights Watch, thousands of civilians are killed by the military and police each year. The new Ministry for Public Security, created in February, is led by an army general, and in May the Brazilian military was deployed in response to the nationwide truckers’ strike that blockaded highways. This was the first time the military had been used in this way since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985.[...]

Brazil is not alone in militarizing its justice system. Military courts are increasingly asserting jurisdiction throughout Latin America. In June 2015, Colombia passed a bill similar to the one adopted in Brazil, shifting jurisdiction for most crimes committed by members of the military to the military courts. The Constitutional Court struck down the first two iterations of the bill, but the government was determined to make the change and crafted a slightly narrower law that has since taken effect. Since 2005, Venezuela has been using military courts extensively to prosecute civilians involved in protests against the government. In Chile, cases of human rights violations committed by the military are still tried in military courts. [....]

Many politicians have run on platforms promising to be “tough on crime” and have deployed the military to conduct domestic policing operations, as in Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Elected leaders, seeking to deliver results for their voters in fighting drug trafficking and gang violence, are turning to their militaries and equipping them with increased legal powers.

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The Huffington Post: Trump Keeps Lying About Having Started His Wall, And His Supporters Don’t Care

Donald Trump keeps claiming that construction on his promised “great wall” is well underway although not a single yard of it has been built, and his supporters are getting mad ― not at the president, but at those who point out his lie.[...]

“All politicians are liars. They’re all weasels,” said the 60-year-old from Panama City. “You know why he’s so good? Because he’s up there breaking all the furniture. If he wanted to shoot somebody on Broadway, I’d vote ‘not guilty.’”[...]

Trump promised hundreds of times during his campaign that he would force Mexico to pay for the wall’s construction. Yet nearly two years into his presidency, he has not even once broached the topic with that country. In fact, he acknowledged to Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto just days after taking office that he understood Mexico would not pay for the wall but asked Peña Nieto not to say that publicly to avoid embarrassing Trump with his supporters.  [...]

With most of Trump’s thousands of falsehoods, it is unclear whether he knows he is saying something untrue. Trump has proven to be deeply ignorant on any number of issues important to the presidency, so in many cases, a given falsehood could be a matter of him lacking information about a topic but forming a strong opinion nonetheless.

But on the matter of the wall, Trump does seem to understand that Congress has not provided any funding for its construction. In fact, he threatened to veto a massive $1.3 trillion spending package in March because it did not pay for his wall. He wound up signing it anyway, and said he did so because of all the money it contained for the military.

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CityLab: On Weaponizing Migration

The menace that has triggered this show of force is an unarmed group of migrants—at least half of whom are women and children—several hundred miles away. Most are attempting to flee violence and escape poverty in Central America; a smaller subset are people who have been previously deported from the U.S., and want to return to their families in America. Such migrant caravans aren’t new: In the past, activists from Pueblo Sin Fronteras, a group that has been providing humanitarian aide and legal help to migrants for 15 years, have assembled these groups in order to ensure safer passage to the U.S. and draw attention to the conditions they face in their home countries.[...]

Historians trace the origins of today’s refugee crisis from Central America to the Cold War policies of President Ronald Reagan. The rhetoric has parallels too. In 1983, Reagan warned Americans that if they rejected his plan to send military and economic aid to Central America, “a tidal wave of refugees” would come crashing onto the borders. “This time they’ll be ‘feet people’ and not ‘boat people’ —swarming into our country,” he said at the time. More recently, Barack Obama and David Cameron have also used words like “waves” and “swarms” to suggest vast numbers of outsiders coming ashore, overwhelming American towns and cities. [...]

In an interview with Public Radio International, Professor Gregory Lee at the University of Lyon called this narrative of a nation being consumed by refugees the “inundation” metaphor. His own research explores its usage in the context of immigration restrictions on Asians in the late 19th and early 20th century. The passage of these laws required the portrayal of Asians as the unassimilable other—a group that would drain American society and pose existential threats to its culture. Hence, the racist, dehumanizing terms “yellow peril” and “Asiatic horde.” Fast forward to post-9/11 America, and the same tropes persist for Muslim and Arabs living in the U.S.[...]

When it comes to migration, Americans across the political isle share misconceptions. Simply correcting them will not be enough. “What those who seek to oppose Trump’s migration policies need is a compelling narrative of their own,” Greenhill writes in Foreign Affairs, “one that takes voter concerns seriously, defining problems responsibly and offering comprehensible and attainable solutions.“

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99 Percent Invisible: Mexico 68

The 1968 Olympics took place in Mexico City, Mexico. It was the first Games ever hosted in a Latin American country. And for Mexico City, the event was an opportunity to show the world that they were a metropolis as worthy as London, Berlin, Rome or Tokyo to host this huge international affair.[...]

And these government-commissioned designs would also be co-opted by local activists, who wanted to reveal the darker political reality in Mexico — a reality that they felt was being covered up behind the beautiful glossy imagery of the 1968 Games.

In the decades leading up to the 1968 Olympics, Mexico had gone through a period of major economic growth, which would come to be known as the “Mexican Miracle.” The country had rapidly industrialized, rapidly urbanized, and its capital, Mexico City, had grown into an enormous metropolis.

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Vox: Mexico’s new president has a radical plan to end the drug war

Trujillo is part of a massive community in Mexico: the families of the disappeared. Official statistics show that more than 37,000 people have gone missing in Mexico since 2007, though NGOs say the figure is likely much higher, as families are often too scared of retribution to report. [...]

Since the military took to the streets to fight the increasingly powerful and violent cartels producing and trafficking drugs north to consumers in the United States, tens of thousands of Mexicans have died. And a broken police and judicial system means perpetrators are almost never held accountable for a disappearance or murder. [...]

But the latest iteration of the drug war, which has coincided with Mexico’s most violent era in modern history, began in 2006, when the newly elected President Felipe Calderón declared war on cartels and sent 6,500 soldiers to the unstable Michoacán state. [...]

Calderón’s military deployment was later bolstered by the Mérida Initiative, an agreement with the United States to cooperate on the drug war. Since 2008, the US has given $2.7 billion to Mexico through the initiative “to help shape Mexico’s security policy,” while the Department of Defense gives millions more in its work with the Mexican military. [...]

It’s an ambitious goal, given how weak Mexico’s police forces are. By the government’s own analysis, Mexico has fewer than half the police officers it needs. Only 42 percent meet “basic competency” standards. Only 10 percent have been trained in criminal investigation. The average salary is barely $500 per month.

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