Lawless elements are ascendant in Mexico, as evidenced by the operations of criminal cartels engaged in human and drug trafficking, often with the active support or acquiescence of government actors. The sharp increase in the number of victims of homicide, disappearances and torture over the past decade is unparalleled in the country's recent history. According to editors Alejandro Anaya-Muñoz and Barbara Frey, the "war on drugs" launched in 2006 by President Felipe Calderón and the corrupting influence criminal organizations have on public institutions have empowered both state and nonstate actors to operate with impunity. Impunity, they argue, is the root cause that has enabled a human-rights crisis to flourish, creating a climate of generalized violence that is carried out, condoned, or ignored by the state and precluding any hope for justice. Mexico's Human Rights Crisis offers a broad survey of the current human rights issues that plague Mexico. Essays focus on the human rights consequences that flow directly from the ongoing "war on drugs" in the country, including violence aimed specifically at women, and the impunity that characterizes the government's activities. Contributors address the violation of the human rights of migrants, in both Mexico and the United States, and cover the domestic and transnational elements and processes that shape the current human rights crisis, from the state of Mexico's democracy to the influence of rulings by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on the decisions of Mexico's National Supreme Court of Justice. Given the scope, the contemporaneity, and the gravity of Mexico's human rights crisis, the recommendations made in the book by the editors and contributors to curb the violence could not be more urgent. Contributors: Alejandro Anaya-Muñoz, Karina Ansolabehere, Ariadna Estévez, Barbara Frey, Janice Gallagher, Rodrigo Gutiérrez Rivas, Susan Gzesh, Sandra Hincapié, Catalina Pérez Correa, Laura Rubio Díaz-Leal, Natalia Saltalamacchia, Carlos Silva Forné, Regina Tamés, Javier Treviño-Rangel, Daniel Vázquez, Benjamin James Waddell.

From one of America's most prominent philanthropists, an eye-opening, myth-busting new perspective on the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. Howard G. Buffett has seen first-hand the devastating impact of cheap Mexican heroin and other opiate cocktails across America. Fueled by failing border policies and lawlessness in Mexico and Central America, drugs are pouring over the nation's southern border in record quantities, turning Americans into addicts and migrants into drug mules -- and killing us in record numbers. Politicians talk about a border crisis and an opioid crisis as separate issues. To Buffett, a landowner on the U.S. border with Mexico and now a sheriff in Illinois, these are intimately connected. Ineffective border policies not only put residents in border states like Texas and Arizona in harm's way, they put American lives in states like Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Vermont at risk. Mexican cartels have grown astonishingly powerful by exploiting both the gaps in our border security strategy and the desperation of migrants -- all while profiting enormously off America's growing addiction to drugs. The solution isn't a wall. In this groundbreaking book, Buffett outlines a realistic, effective, and bi-partisan approach to fighting cartels, strengthening our national security, and tackling the roots of the chaos below the border.

The authors are uniquely positioned to provide valuable insights on both the Mexican crisis and the metamorphosis in the nature of financial debacles.

Drawing on a mix of political, economic, literary, and filmic texts, Crisis Cultures challenges current cultural histories of the neoliberal period by arguing that financialization, and not just neoliberalism, has been at the center of the dramatic transformations in Latin American societies in the last thirty years. Starting from political economic figures such as crisis, hyperinflation, credit, and circulation and exemplary cultural texts, Whitener traces the interactions between culture, finance, surplus populations, and racialized state violence after 1982 in Mexico and Brazil. Crisis Cultures makes sense of the emergence of new forms of exploitation and terrifying police and militarized violence by tracking the cultural and discursive forms, including real abstraction and the favela and immaterial cadavers and voided collectivities, that have emerged in the complicated aftermath of the long downturn and global turn to finance.

Murals have been an important medium of public expression in Mexico since the Mexican Revolution, and names such as Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco will forever be linked with this revolutionary art form. Many people, however, believe that Mexico's renowned mural tradition died with these famous practitioners, and today's mural artists labor in obscurity as many of their creations are destroyed through hostility or neglect. This book traces the ongoing critical contributions of mural arts to public life in Mexico to show how postrevolutionary murals have been overshadowed both by the Mexican School and by the exclusionary nature of official public arts. By documenting a range of mural practices—from fixed-site murals to mantas (banner murals) to graffiti—Bruce Campbell evaluates the ways in which the practical and aesthetic components of revolutionary Mexican muralism have been appropriated and redeployed within the context of Mexico's ongoing economic and political crisis. Four dozen photographs illustrate the text. Blending ethnography, political science, and sociology with art history, Campbell traces the emergence of modern Mexican mural art as a composite of aesthetic, discursive, and performative elements through which collective interests and identities are shaped. He focuses on mural activists engaged combatively with the state—in barrios, unions, and street protests—to show that mural arts that are neither connected to the elite art world nor supported by the government have made significant contributions to Mexican culture. Campbell brings all previous studies of Mexican muralism up to date by revealing the wealth of art that has flourished in the shadows of official recognition. His work shows that interpretations by art historians preoccupied with contemporary high art have been incomplete—and that a rich mural tradition still survives, and thrives, in Mexico.

Internationally recognized experts from the academic and think-tank communities in the United States, Mexico, and Canada consider the origins of the current crisis in Mexico, and the nature and effectiveness of the Calderón government's response, through the lens of Joel Migdal's concept of "the state in society."

DIVAnthology about three of the persistent crises that have wracked Mexican society throughout its modern history, asking why these ruptures occurred, why they mobilized Mexicans of all social classes, and why some led to significant political transformatio/div

The war between the United States and Mexico was decades in the making. Although Texas was an independent republic from 1836 to 1845, Texans retained an affiliation with the United States that virtually assured annexation at some point. Mexico's reluctance to give up Texas put it on a collision course with the United States. The Mexican War receives scant treatment in books. Most historians approach the conflict as if it were a mere prelude to the Civil War. The Mexican cession of 1848, however, rivaled the Louisiana Purchase in importance for the sheer amount of territory acquired by the United States. The dispute over slavery-which had been rendered largely academic by the Missouri Compromise-burst forth anew as Americans now faced the realization that they must make a decision over the institution's future. The political battle over the status of slavery in these new territories was the direct cause of the Crisis of 1850 and ignited sectional differences in the decade that followed. In Crisis in the Southwest: The United States, Mexico, and the Struggle over Texas, Richard Bruce Winders provides a concise, accessible overview of the Mexican War and argues that the Mexican War led directly to the Civil War by creating a political and societal crisis that drove a wedge between the North and the South. While on the surface the enemy was Mexico, in reality Americans were at odds with one another over the future of the nation, as the issue of annexation threatened to upset the balance between free and slave states. Winders also explains the military connections between the Mexican War and Civil War, since virtually every important commander in the Civil War-including Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Grant, McClellan, and Longstreet-gained his introduction to combat in Mexico. These connections are enormously significant to the way in which these generals waged war, since it was in the Mexican War that they learned their trade. Crisis in the Southwest provides readers with a clear understandin

This volume documents and explains the remarkable resilience of emerging market nations in East Asia and Latin America when faced with the global financial crisis in 2008-2009. Their quick bounceback from the crisis marked a radical departure from the past, such as when the 1982 debt shocks produced a decade-long recession in Latin America or when the Asian financial crisis dramatically slowed those economies in the late 1990s. Why? This volume suggests that these countries' resistance to the initial financial contagion is a tribute to financial-sector reforms undertaken over the past two decades. The rebound itself was a trade-led phenomenon, favoring the countries that had gone the farthest with macroeconomic restructuring and trade reform. Old labels used to describe "neoliberal versus developmentalist" strategies do not accurately capture the foundations of this recovery. These authors argue that policy learning and institutional reforms adopted in response to previous crises prompted policymakers to combine state and market approaches in effectively coping with the global financial crisis. The nations studied include Korea, China, India, Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, accompanied by Latin American and Asian regional analyses that bring other emerging markets such as Chile and Peru into the picture. The substantial differences among the nations make their shared success even more remarkable and worthy of investigation. And although 2012 saw slowed growth in some emerging market nations, the authors argue this selective slowing suggests the need for deeper structural reforms in some countries, China and India in particular.

This paper examines credibility and reputational factors in explaining the December 1994 crisis of the Mexican peso. After reviewing events leading to the crisis, a model emphasizing the inflation-competitiveness trade-off is presented to explain the formation of devaluation expectations. Estimation results indicate that investors appear to have seriously underestimated the risk of devaluation, despite early warning signals. The collapse of confidence that followed the December 20 devaluation may have been the result of a shift in the perceived commitment of the authorities to exchange rate stability.