Ayotzinapa

If you haven’t read the Times’ deep dive into the text messages it acquired that unveils as much as we are likely to ever know about how the Mexican military helped deliver the 43 students at Ayotzinapa into the hands of a paranoid drug gang, which is the most important event in Mexico since the 1985 earthquake, you really need to do so. It is incredibly depressing. It shows without doubt how the drug gangs have Mexican police and military completely under their thumb. Of course the Trumpesque figure leading Mexico–Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador–has completely dismissed all of this as a major problem, even as he has given the Mexican military unprecedented power to control society. What could go wrong there! The fact that the U.S. had this information and simply did not trust the Mexican authorities enough to deliver it to them–and this is quite understandable–says just about everything you need to know about the state of modern Mexico.

It is so, so sad, not only because of the dead and their families, but because there is so little everyday Mexicans can do about it. And this is the desperation you see growing in Ecuador, where Mexican, Colombian, and Albanian gangs have moved in recent years to make Guayaquil one of the world’s most dangerous cities and now have assassinated a presidential candidate speaking out against corruption. What do you actually do when this happens to your country?