The Mexican government's full-frontal attack on the powerful drugs cartels has achieved mixed results. This book considers the issue from a variety of viewpoints. The essential argument is that the organized crime is best combated by institutional reforms directed at strengthening the rule of law rather than by a heavy reliance on armed force.

Mexico has failed to achieve internal security and poses a serious threat to its neighbors. This volume takes us inside the Mexican state to explain the failure there, but also reaches out to assess the impact of Mexico’s security failure beyond its borders. The key innovative idea of the book—security failure—brings these perspectives together on an intermestic level of analysis. It is a view that runs counter to the standard emphasis on the external, trans-national nature of criminal threats to a largely inert state. Mexico’s Security Failure is both timely, with Mexico much in the news, but also of lasting value. It explains Mexican insecurity in a full-dimensional manner that hasn’t been attempted before. Mexico received much scholarly attention a decade ago with the onset of democratization. Since then, the leading topic has become immigration. However, the security environment compelling many Mexicans to leave has been dramatically understudied. This tightly organized volume begins to correct that gap.

The security situation in Mexico has deteriorated in recent years. To help inform debate on the future of U.S.-Mexico relations, this study examined a set of U.S. policy options and potential policy priorities that hold promise for Mexico?s security.

Issues of public security - crime, violence, corruption, and defective law enforcement - all play important roles in the Mexico-U.S. bilateral relationship. The contributors to this volume shed new light on the determinants of transnational crime and its consequences for domestic politics in Mexico as well as for U.S.-Mexico relations.

Unlike other analyses which aim to explain the notion of national security in Mexico and at the same time address the security challenges facing the country, this short text describes the distinction between national, internal and public security in Mexico. It is the first book to provide detailed analysis on Mexico’s security policy and its long-term consequences. Former Mexican government official Augustin Maciel-Padilla contends that the absence of a clear understanding of the complexities and sophistication of the concept of security has the potential to aggravate security conditions in Mexico. Achieving a proper understanding allows for a better guidance in confronting the grave insecurity facing the country, and for addressing other issues such as human rights, democracy and the country’s international exposure. Maciel-Padilla reasons that Mexico is required to formulate a comprehensive, long-term, security strategy, and with this book he proposes a contribution towards that long-term goal. Understanding Mexico’s Security Conundrum will be essential for scholars, students, and policy makers.

The events of September 11, 2001, combined with a pattern of increased crime and violence in the 1980s and mid-1990s in the Americas, has crystallized the need to reform government policies and police procedures to combat these threats. Public Security and Police Reform in the Americas examines the problems of security and how they are addressed in Latin America and the United States. Bailey and Dammert detail the wide variation in police tactics and efforts by individual nations to assess their effectiveness and ethical accountability. Policies on this issue can take the form of authoritarianism, which threatens the democratic process itself, or can, instead, work to "demilitarize" the police force. Bailey and Dammert argue that although attempts to apply generic models such as the successful "zero tolerance" created in the United States to the emerging democracies of Latin America—where institutional and economic instabilities exist—may be inappropriate, it is both possible and profitable to consider these issues from a common framework across national boundaries. Public Security and Police Reform in the Americas lays the foundation for a greater understanding of policies between nations by examining their successes and failures and opens a dialogue about the common goal of public security.

* Mexico was named an Outstanding Academic Title of 2010 by Choice Magazine. Bloodshed connected with Mexican drug cartels, how they emerged, and their impact on the United States is the subject of this frightening book. Savage narcotics-related decapitations, castrations, and other murders have destroyed tourism in many Mexican communities and such savagery is now cascading across the border into the United States. Grayson explores how this spiral of violence emerged in Mexico, its impact on the country and its northern neighbor, and the prospects for managing it. Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ruled in Tammany Hall fashion for seventy-nine years before losing the presidency in 2000 to the center-right National Action Party (PAN). Grayson focuses on drug wars, prohibition, corruption, and other antecedents that occurred during the PRI's hegemony. He illuminates the diaspora of drug cartels and their fragmentation, analyzes the emergence of new gangs, sets forth President Felipe Calder�n's strategy against vicious criminal organizations, and assesses its relative success. Grayson reviews the effect of narcotics-focused issues in U.S.-Mexican relations. He considers the possibility that Mexico may become a failed state, as feared by opinion-leaders, even as it pursues an aggressive but thus far unsuccessful crusade against the importation, processing, and sale of illegal substances. Becoming a "failed state" involves two dimensions of state power: its scope, or the different functions and goals taken on by governments, and its strength, or the government's ability to plan and execute policies. The Mexican state boasts an extensive scope evidenced by its monopoly over the petroleum industry, its role as the major supplier of electricity, its financing of public education, its numerous retirement and health-care programs, its control of public universities, and its dominance over the armed forces. The state has not yet taken control of drug trafficking, and its strength is steadily diminishing. This explosive book is thus a study of drug cartels, but also state disintegration.