Fault Lines

Mexico’s hidden war

Josh Rushing finds out how campesino communities caught in the narco-economy are resisting repression and dispossession.

The spectacular violence of Mexico’s drug war grabs international attention. Some 40,000 people have been killed since 2006, when President Felipe Calderon deployed Mexican military and security forces in the so-called war against the cartels – often in gruesome and sadistic ways.

Fault Lines extra:
• Building community interviews

But behind the headlines, under cover of impunity, a low-intensity war is being waged.

In the second episode of a two-part series, Josh Rushing and the Fault Lines team travel to the state of Guerrero to investigate claims that Mexican security forces are using the drug war as a pretext to repress indigenous and campesino communities.

In one of Mexico’s poorest and top drug-producing states, where struggling farmers are surrounded by the narco-economy, we ask about the cost of taking the struggle against dispossession into your own hands.

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Click here to watch the first part of this series, Mexico: Impunity and profits.

Click here for more Fault Lines.