The F-word in Mexico

I just saw this story in the Mexican edition of Rolling Stone: American journalist Guy Lawson ventures to Sinaloa to score an interview with Chapo Guzmán. He comes up short, but the account of his time there is entertaining. If you've read an article or two about Mexico's drug trade, there's nothing too groundbreaking here, but the close personal connection that Sinaloa has with Chapo is richly detailed, and the description of his feud with the Beltrán Leyvas is thorough.

Like Forbes' recent cover story, Lawson's article also wonders if Mexico is on the verge of becoming a failed state, comparing it to Afghanistan. I have a hard time believing that the people who ask if Mexico is on its way to being a failed state have spent a lot of time here.  Here's the Fund for Peace's brief definition of a failed state, which is based on 12 social, economic, and political factors: 

One of the most common is the loss of physical control of its territory or a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Other attributes of state failure include the erosion of legitimate authority to make collective decisions, an inability to provide reasonable public services, and the inability to interact with other states as a full member of the international community. The 12 indicators cover a wide range of state failure risk elements such as extensive corruption and criminal behavior, inability to collect taxes or otherwise draw on citizen support, large-scale involuntary dislocation of the population, sharp economic decline, group-based inequality, institutionalized persecution or discrimination, severe demographic pressures, brain drain, and environmental decay.

Mexico has a crime problem that manifests itself in state dysfunction, but it does not have a general state-legitimacy problem. There is no erosion of legitimate authority to make collective decisions, no inability to interact with the international community, nor is their any sharp economic decline because of the state's failure to exercise authority. There's no large-scale involuntary dislocation, no severe democratic pressure, nor is there institutionalized discrimination of Mexicans as a result of the war on drugs. And even if you latch onto the few areas where the comparison between Mexico and Afghanistan (or Haiti or the Congo) isn't laughable, it doesn't really offer you any insight into either nation. So please, journalists in the American media, cut it out. It's cheap, it's lazy, and it's untrue.