John Ross, Mexico: Politics as Drugs / Drugs as Politics

Under Calderon's unsteady hand, Mexico has fallen into ruins. Despite dubbing himself the "President of Employment", unemployment numbers are at a 13-year high - more than 2,000,000 jobs will have been lost by the end of 2009 at the current rate of attrition and the economy is headed for -7% negative "growth". Oil prices continue to stagnate after a $100 a barrel tumble earlier this year and exports are plummeting - the shutdown of the transnational automobile industry that accounts for a fifth of all exports to the U.S. portends fresh disaster.

Moreover, moneys sent home by Mexican workers in El Norte have been cut 20% and the recent swine flu panic combined with bloodcurdling drug violence has crushed the tourist industry, Mexico's third source of dollars.

Calderon's war on seven drug cartels which was declared just days after his chaotic December 2006 inauguration in a effort to flout his uncertain authority, has turned into a gory fracaso - Amnesty International's 2008 annual human rights report unveiled just last week in London decries violations of individual guarantees by Mexican police and military that have resulted in a score of executions of innocents and generated over a thousand formal complaints to the government's own National Human Rights Commission (CNDH).