1. The Drug Trade
AM102

2. Cartel Land, Dir. Matthew Heineman, 2015
Think about the usefulness and limitations of this film as a source.

3. Questions for discussion
How has the drug trade affected politics and society in Mexico?
What has been the relationship between the state and the drug trade?

4. Michoacán

5. Isaac Campos, “Degeneration and the Origins of the War on Drugs,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 26, no. 2 (2010): (CORE READING)
Benjamin T. Smith, Drug Policies in Mexico, , Beatriz C.Labate, Clancy Cavnar, & Thiago Rodrigues, (eds.), Drug Policies and the Politics of Drugs in Latin America. (Cham: Switzerland, Springer International Publishing, 2016)
Isaac Campos and Paul Gootenberg, “Toward a New Drug History of Latin America: A Research Frontier at the Center of Debates,”, Hispanic American Historical Review, 95, no. 1 (Feb. 2015): 1-35.
Peter Watt and Robert Zepeda, Drug War Mexico
Elaine Carey, "Selling is More of a Habit than Using": Narcotraficante Lola la Chata and Her Threat to Civilization, in Journal of Women’s History, 21.2 (Summer 2009)
Isaac Campos, Homegrown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico's War on Drugs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012)
Mark Cameron Edberg, El Narcotrafficante: Narcocorridos and the Construction of a Cultural Persona on the US-Mexico Border
Charles Bowden, Molly Molloy, El Sicario, Confessions of a Cartel Hitman (New York: Nation Books, 2011)
Terrence Poppa, Drug Lord. The life and death of a Mexican kingpin, (Seattle: Demand Press, 1998)
Articles by Peter Watt, Trevor Stack and Ben Smith online in ‘The Conversation’

6. Essay Questions
How is the downfall and decline of the PRI connected to the rise of the drug cartels?
Did or does the Mexican state benefit in any way from the drug trade?
How has the development of the drug trade effected the lives of peasants in Mexico?
How have the Mexican drug cartels adapted to an increasingly globalised world?

7. Essay Questions
To what extent have drug cartels in Mexico come to supplement the services of the state in some areas? To what extent do preferences for drug consumption in the US effect the nature of the drug trade/ cartels in Mexico?
To what extent has the war on drugs changed the nature of the drug trade?
To what extent has the development of neoliberalism contributed to an escalation of the drug trade in Mexico? How has the drug trade influenced US-Mexican relations and foreign policy?
Assess the extent of collaboration between state officials and the cartels?

8. Essay Questions
To what extent did government policies encourage rather than quell the power of the cartels?
Has democratization caused the current situation of cartel violence and control in Mexico? Was neo-liberalism the main reason behind the proliferation of drug cartels and the escalation of violence in the context of the War on Drugs?
What has been the effect of US policy on the drug cartel situation?