Merida Initiative (2007-2018): Mexican Prohibitionism Endless War
The object of this research is the Mérida Initiative (2007-2018), a bilateral plan between Mexico and the USA to combat drug trafficking in Mexican territory and shared borders, focused on its impacts on public security and on the deepening of the conflict and the expansion of actors involved. The research is part of a broader discussion about the regime of illegalities and prohibitionist laws. The general objective is to analyze the positivity of the war on drugs by standing out as an international policy that feeds the conflict itself by imposing extraordinary measures and actions by security forces, becoming the main element that perpetuates and accentuates the very performance of drug trafficking. The specific objectives are to explore the factors, forces and effects of the Mérida Initiative, primarily in terms of the militarization and para militarization of organized crime; and question the reason for the continuity of such strategic plans, judging by the “failure” since their beginnings, and thus, evaluate their political-economic relations and interests.
This is a qualitative research, of a theoretical and empirical-analytical nature, with a genealogical study following the contributions of Michel Foucault, in which what matters is to understand the play of forces and knowledge involved in the research object and demonstrate how it is operationalized in the various devices. Starting from an analysis outside the field delimited by the discourse of legal sovereignty and the centrality of the State, it is suggested to think about power from its techniques and tactics of government. The research also follows the post-positivist movement in contesting the explanatory limitations of the dominant theories of International Relations on certain themes, judging that, in order to understand cross border dynamics such as organized crime, a perspective that takes into account the singularities of transformations in political practices.