Friday, January 22, 2010

Castañeda on the Drug Wars

Vicente Fox's foreign minister has a long piece summarizing the points from La Guerra Fallida here. It strikes me as very flawed, for reasons I will lay out in a future post.

Update: This isn't Castañeda's fault (I imagine), but can we retire the whole, "What's Spanish for..." as the default headline for articles about Latin America? Tired. Very tired.

2 comments:

Noel Maurer said...

I want to hear your take on it.

BTW, the return of paracaistas to the D.F. is very disturbing. In general, the recession is invisible in the inner city --- construction continues, crime feels the same --- but when you get the outskirts, you can't miss it.

The Cabanas shooting, BTW, has provoked a serious crackdown on closing time at bars. They threw all these drunken teenagers onto the street outside the Bulldog. (Well, they're actually in their early 20s, but they look like teenagers to me these days.)

pc said...

You're back in DF? I guess everyone's an americanista these days, eh? Hopefully he'll be able to make it back on the field.

RE Castañeda, I think the broad thrust of the argument he was making--that Calderón made a mistake in being so aggressive--is debatable, but the way he built the article makes his argument less rather the more convincing . It's reflective of a lot of the criticism of Calderón's crime policies over the past three years, in that it spends too much time arguing over tangential stuff without getting to the bigger, longer-term strategic questions. And I think that he spent so many words on the subject without a single quote from the government to support his perception of their priorities is really pretty damning.