Introduction: Beyond the Drug War: The United States, the public sphere and human rights

Just before the 2000 presidential elections that would end more than seventy years of one-party rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party in Mexico, the New York Review of Books published an article that asked if Mexico was a narco-state. Since the 1980s, most accounts of Mexico's war on drugs have concentrated on the confrontations either between organised criminals or between law enforcement agencies and groups of organised criminals. There are different ways one could approach the totalisation of the drug war. Until now, one profitable avenue has been to examine the intersection of drug trafficking and culture, and for over a decade scholars have analysed the narcocorridos, narco-películas, narco-telenovelas and narco-novelas produced in Mexico and over the border. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, national and international scholars lauded the gradual opening of the Mexican press. Many linked the process to the development of a functioning multiparty democracy.