Mexico, August of 2021.

“[illicit drug trafficking] generates large financial profits and wealth enabling transnational criminal organizations to penetrate, contaminate and corrupt the structures of government, legitimate commercial and financial business, and society at all its levels (recital, quoted from the 1988 Vienna Convention).”

One of the biggest curses of the Republic of Mexico has certainly been the fact that it is one of the passages between the impoverished Latin American world and the enriched superpower that is the United States of America; from the early 1920s and the Prohibition, to the early 1980s and the international cocaine trafficking trade, to the early 2020s and the Mexican War on Drugs, Mexico has been the area of trafficking - and recently producing - illicit narcotics, which enrich select individuals and organized criminal syndicates.

This war on drugs has reached a recent boiling point with the 2021 Mexican Legislative Elections, where at least 88 politicians have been killed since Sept. 2020, and in May of 2021, almost 3,000 murders were recorded. To top it all off, in August of 2021, the CJNG has launched an attack against local police forces in Jalisco; three car bombs, a two-hour firefight and over thirteen police officers dead, including the head of the police department in Zapopan.

It was in such a vicious state of affairs that the main heads of police departments all over Mexico launched a manifesto to AMLO, regarding a crackdown over the Mexican cartels or - at the very least - a dedicated effort to curbing their efforts. It was reaching a point of absolute desolation for any man willing to take up a police uniform against the Mexican cartels, and little by little, the collective determination of police departments all over Mexico was quickly washing away, alongside the liters of blood, sweat and traces of gunpowder left in the slums of Mexico’s worst cities. The Mexican War on Drugs had to produce results.

The Initial Reactions

Legal experts all over Mexico had already called for a general reform to the Mexican system, and what steps could be taken to reform the system and to provide it with the technical capabilities necessary to curb the cartels and subsequently eliminate them from Mexican society - not permanently, due to the inevitability of crime - but sufficiently, that even most impoverished Mexicans would have little to no incentive to even going near the proximity of a cartel member. These measures and general reforms were called the “Reforms of August”, and they were neatly delineated, in a simplified manner:

• Establish legal reforms to the judiciary system with better funding, thorough anti-nepotism laws and sufficient background checks;

• Establish well-funded prisons where offending members of society can be properly kept, rehabilitated and, when necessary, thoroughly punished, such as is the case of Cartel leaders and leading captains of narcotrafficking cartels;

• Provide appropriate livelihoods for Mexican citizens all over the Republic, and throughout every State in Mexico, with enough opportunities for employment through investments and public works that can allow impoverished workers to attain a basic livelihood through labor and contributions to society;

• Collaborate with the Mexican Armed Forces in the Mexican War on Drugs and focus on impeding major waves of desertion and collaboration with Cartels by experienced military officials, with the formation of a Committee between civilians, military officials and members of the National Legislature.

The list of reforms goes even further into details, with data, statistic and other well-rounded arguments against the current situation in Mexico; and in the end, it was signed by over 75 professionals of all strata of Mexican society, including prominent engineers, political leaders and political scientists such as Khemvirg Puente and Ángel Ávila Romero.

Surprisingly enough, breaking with the decorum that the supreme court members usually maintain; Alfred Ortiz Mena has said positive things about this letter, and has said that “[he] makes the words of the reform [his] own”; which led to some criticism for his opinionated views on these reforms. Nonetheless, this has given the collection of theses a more positive reputation within members of the legislative, and the talks of reform are becoming a bit more common in Mexican society - it remains to be seen whether this shall be enough.