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Editor's Note: Vaclav Masek Sánchez is licensed by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) of the University of New York (NYU). His academic research focuses on political histories in Central America. Follow him on Twitter at @_vaclavmasek.
(CNN Spanish) - Latin America reaffirms its position as a case study where it is shown that the Westphalian concept of State-Nation will face existential threats throughout the twenty-first century.
Conventional definitions of basic concepts such as border , national identity and sovereignty are in flux thanks to actors that serve as a counterweight to the State in Haiti, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Puerto Rico and Brazil.
There are several examples, both positive and negative. Multinational corporations with incursions into the extractive industry, non-governmental organizations ensuring reproductive rights, and mainly, social movements fighting neoliberal policies, are contemporary examples of non-state actors whose response presence in the hemisphere is unquestionable and inevitable.
In Mesoamerica, the region that historically has included Mexico and the countries of Central America, the emergence in the public eye of non-state actors could not have more opportune conditions to precipitate state degradation: weak democracies and governments without legitimacy, judicial institutions unable to overcome impunity rates, social tensions due to counterproductive public policies, indigenous peoples with emancipatory and self-determination efforts.
The fact that some of these countries are fresh out of an armed conflict, with fissures in their social fabric that remain unmediated, has created ideal conditions for non-state actors to gain vigor in the political sphere.
But among these non-state actors it is also necessary to include organized crime, emblematically represented by drug trafficking, a group that seeks to repeal the spatial and power limits that continue to be monopolized by the Nation-State.
In Mexico, cartels overwhelm entire cities and regions for more than a decade. In Honduras, these strategically buy from high-ranking state officials and strengthen their control based on transnational commercial exchanges. In Guatemala, they offer their technical and logistical expertise to political aspirants; they occupy areas outside the reach of the State and begin the production of illicit counting on fertile land, both geographically and symbolically.
The fact is that decades have passed trying to stop a social problem based on the same approach, mainly war, which has proved disastrous. And it is that the anti-drug crusade in the region, the historical thread that unites the Mesoamerica of the twenty-first century, tends to expedite the bloodshed.
If the focus of continuing to militarize the security forces remains in force, a strategy certainly sanctified by the United States in the past (see Colombia), the implications may continue to claim innocent lives. The data illustrates a failed war in Mexico: 150,000 murders related to organized crime are estimated since 2006 and thousands of reported disappearances.
It will be necessary to rethink the governments of the region if the time has come to modify the laws that criminalize the consumption and supply of drugs.
The Mexican government is morally defeated after a week that saw three mass shootings in different parts of the republic. But perhaps the most surrealist was fought in Culiacán, where different factions of the Sinaloa cartel joined forces to free the son of the former patron.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador justified the release of the Chapito as a utilitarian decision: "Many people were at risk." And when a reporter from Reforma asked him if his counterpart in the White House had requested the extradition of Ovidio Guzmán López, one of the sons of the capo just sentenced by a Court in New York, the president accepted, although reluctantly, that yes It was true, without first reprimanding the editorial line of that Mexican publication. His detractors insist that he gave his hand to twist and gave a victory to drug trafficking.
Although it is not the first time that something like this happens, a Mexican state capital besieged by a poster of the way it was seen in Culiacán for years is not remembered. But the prolonged shooting between suspected members of the Sinaloa cartel and members of the National Guard may have had a much worse outcome.
Within this worrying dynamic, perhaps the greatest regional threat in Mesoamerica is the insertion of drug trafficking into the public administration, something that from Washington is received with indifference and cynicism. On the same day that Antonio Hernández was convicted of drug trafficking in a Federal Court of New York, the State Department acknowledged that Honduras is an “effective and reliable partner in the fight against drug trafficking.” One more foolishness in relations between the United States. UU. and Central America.
In Washington, hypocrisy functions as a foreign policy. They agree to have a narco-state in their sphere of influence, while providing high-caliber weapons to cartels that terrorize the population. They engage in an intergenerational drug war, while their consumption of illicit does not stop growing. They sentence for criminal acts closely related to transnational drug trafficking, while coordinating anti-narcotics operations with governments accused of illicit association - read the Sinaloa cartel - in Honduras.
If we cannot agree on what is happening, then how will we know what to do about it? In this great Mesoamerican cage with a foreign foreman, three things are true: the legitimacy of the State is seriously threatened; new actors operating on the edge of legality gain momentum, inside and outside state institutions; and society, spiritually in convulsion, survives thanks to its organizational capacity despite the externalities that impede its prosperity.