The economic situation in Mexico has been bad since the 1980s. The bad situation was made worse by NAFTA. One of the side affect of NAFTA was that the US could dump corn into the Mexican Market. This drop the price of Corn in Mexico so that the peasant farmer who had grown Corn in Mexico since the days of the Aztec could no longer sell it at a profit. This forced these peasants to look for work elsewhere in Mexico and the US (Most illegal immigrants into the US are from Southern Mexico and Central America NOT Northern Mexico, for Northern Mexico is marginal farm land, but Southern Mexico and Central America is rich farm land).
Now, these peasants look for work, but this huge increase in the numbers of workers has the same affect in Mexico and they do in the US, they tend to bring down wages (it is the law of supply and demand, the supply or workers goes up, while demand holds steady, wages fall to meet the demand for labor). This has been further complicated by the growing collapse of the Mexican Oil Fields. They seem to have peaked production in 2005 and have been on a slow decline (expected to rapidly speed up).
For more on Mexican Peak oil Concerns:
http://www.peakoil.net/files/Cantarell%20Is%20Not%20Mexico%E2%80%99s%20Only%20Oil%20Production%20Problem.pdfhttp://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/becoming-peak-oil-aware-part-1/1119Now, one of the reason Mexico has been stable since the 1960s has been Cantarell oil field:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantarell_FieldCantarell, is a unique oil field. Founded in 1976, peaked in 2003:
Cantarell Field, as it turns out, is a real freak of geology. The porosity - or holes in the rock where the oil is located - is believed to be the result of a rubble pile from an asteroid strike which took place some 65 million years ago. And not just any asteroid strike: The asteroid which caused what has become known as the Chicxulub Crater, on the Yucatan Peninsula, is thought to have been 6 miles in diameter, and many scientists attribute this particular asteroid strike as being the “extinction event” that took out the dinosaurs. The impact energy from that strike is believed to have been some 2 million times that of the largest man-made explosion, that of the Tsar Bomba, a 50 megaton hydrogen device set off by Russia in 1961.
By 1981 the Cantarell complex was producing 1.16 million barrels per day (180,000 m3/d). However, the production rate dropped to 1 million barrels per day (160,000 m3/d) in 1995. The nitrogen injection project started operating in 2000, and it increased the production rate to 1.6 million barrels per day (250,000 m3/d), to 1.9 million barrels per day (300,000 m3/d) in 2002 and to 2.1 million barrels per day (330,000 m3/d) of output in 2003, which ranked Cantarell the second fastest producing oil field in the world behind Ghawar Field in Saudi Arabia. However, Cantarell had much smaller oil reserves than Ghawar, so production began to decline rapidly in the second half of the decade.Notice, this field seems to be a very small field in terms of area, but a huge field in terms of oil. Thus it was easy to put into production, easy to produce at full capacity, and easy to empty out. This field provided Mexico a huge source of money starting in the early 1980s (as its economy hit the skids). The Central Mexican Government then used the money for various projects, but the Government was so corrupt most of the money was wasted projects that enriched friends of the ruling government. Some of the money went to buy off the peasants, but as it peaked and production drop so did the Income. With the decline in income the Government had less money to spend and being a cozy club, the first things that was cut was support to the peasants and the poor living in the Cities.
The decline in INCREASE In money started about the time NAFTA was passed. As things went bad on the Farm do to NAFTA, oil revenue, while staying high, did NOT increase as the same rate as the economy as a whole was increasing (i.e. the Government needed revenue to increase at the same rate it had in the 1980s, but by the late 1990s that was NO longer possible, income increased by a low rates and then in 2003 started to decline do to oil production decline).
Mexico, which was already a poor country BEFORE NAFTA and PEAK oil found itself in a bind, it needed increased revenue, but its main source of revenue (The Mexican Oil Fields) were on a steady decline. Worse, the remaining oil fields appear to be high in number, but small in size. Thus instead of being able to use two to four wells to pump out all of the oil, you would need hundreds (if not thousands) of wells to produce what one well produced out of Cantarell. This is going to be very expensive. Mexico may be able to export oil from these small fields, but the cost to produce that oil will be high (and the profit margin may be close to Zero, unlike Cantarell, which the cost to pump was cheap even with expensive nitrogen injection).
Given the above, and the tradition that certain states of Mexico are controlled by local elites NOT the central Government, the peasants have had a very rough time over the last 20 years, much like what happened pre-1911 revolution.
Pancho Villa is remembered as a Revolutionary leader of Mexico during the 1911 Revolution, but he started out as a peasant, who became an outlaw at age 16, when he killed the owner of the Hacienda he was working on (The owner of the Hacienda was raping his 12 year old sister when he came in from the fields, but in that date and time that was Murder). Thus he did NOT want to become a bandit, he was forced into that profession for he had no other choice (The Hacienda's owner's family control the law in that region, very similar to the situation of peasants in Mexico today). He stayed a "Bandit" till the revolution and slowly gathered around him a group of men (and women) outlawed for very similar actions. These were his hard corp followers, people who would follow him anywhere for he tried to make their lives as pleasant as he could given the fact all of them were outlaws. He would rob and kill to feed them, and their families (most of these people still had families who needed support). Thus Pancho Villa was NOT a Criminal by choice, his first choice would have been to become a peasant again, but the laws of 1890 Mexico forbade that UNTIL 1911 where his band became the center of his Army. His band had become large enough to be an effective military force and with reinforcements (from the peasants who he and his men had supported) he was an effective military leader in the 1911 Revolution.
For more on Pancho Villa See:
http://history1900s.about.com/cs/panchovilla/p/panchovilla.htmWhile Zapata did NOT commit a crime, his view as to the Government of Mexico and the need for armed rebellion to force the Government to do land reform (give peasants the land the were working on, instead of the peasants being peons of the large land owners). Zapata knew that unless the peasants were able to control the land their work, the situation in the Countryside would never be settled. For this belief and his opposition to the Central Government and is refusal to do land reform Zapata was also called a bandit. For more on Zapata see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emiliano_ZapataWhat is happening in Mexico today is very similar to what happened in Mexico pre-1911 Revolution. The peasants are being squeezed and they are trying to solve the problem on a person to person basis. Thus some peasants are heading for the US to get jobs, some peasants are looking for work in Mexico, including illegal work such as drug running.
The increase in POLITICAL killings implies that more then drugs are involved. Drug smugglers have smuggled drugs for decades without the wide spread killings of today. Furthermore the killings seem to be more revenge for acts done to third parties then any fight over drugs. This is complicated by the fact that since these peasants are disparate, they are cheap, and thus the drug dealers may have determined it is cheaper to kill off the opposition rather then bribe them. That may imply that the killers are cheap to hire and the people that are hiring them do NOT fear them ever being caught for the crime (i.e. a Mexican war lord hires an illegal Guatemalan to kill someone, then pays off the Guatemalan with enough money to go back home to Guatemala (This also applies to any other illegal in Mexico from Central America, in fact the price may be to ship the killer to the US for the potential to earn money in the US that he could then send back home).
My point, is that while drugs are a factor, drugs are NOT the cause of the problems of Mexico. The Drug dealers are taking advantage of the situation to their benefit, but the situation is NOT their creation. Mexico is heading for revolution, especially as oil income goes down even further AND more and more peasants are forced off their farms do to the dumping of corn into Mexico.
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