"Tijuana [is] a city reeling from hundreds of slayings and kidnappings as drug gangs battle for dominance", says the San Diego Union Tribune. Tom, posting on Tuesday, rightly calls the violence and criminality there "unbelievable", "terrible".
The virtual anarchy in Tijuana - and in other Mexican border cities, notably Ciudad Juarez - has complicated causes: certainly including drug prohibition in the US, and the vast appetite for illegal drugs in this country, which spawn criminality on a world scale.
But an important part of the story in Mexico is the ingrained corruption of public institutions - corrupt politicians, hopelessly corrupt police, corruption in the military - and the equally ingrained public mistrust of these institutions.
At an interfaith religious rally in Tijuana last week to pray for "a halt to the bloodbath" a rabbi put it concisely:
The leader of the Jewish community in Baja California, Rabbi Menuel Polishenko, said that organized crime flourishes where people have little confidence in institutions.
The culture of corruption in Mexico itself has complicated causes, but it surely has roots in the political culture of the Spanish Empire. Mexico is not alone: corruption is a way of life in many, in fact in most, of the nations that were once part of that empire, in Latin America, the Philippines, and elsewhere. The Spanish Empire was a "corporatist" empire par excellence: its fundamental policy was government domination and control, in particular of economic activity. The insistence by the Spanish government that its colonists engage in no free trade, that they buy and sell only from and to Spain - the ultimate in "protectionism" - eventually led to the colonial uprisings against Spain, and the dissolution of the empire. But "corporatism" was now in the bloodstream of all these societies, and it lives on today.
When the government has too much power, of course, the incentives for corruption are enormous. "Corporatist" government - a government that monopolises the economy, or tries to - is very apt to be a wretchedly corrupt government. So it is in the successor states to the Spanish Empire. So it is in Mexico.
There is plenty of literature about this, including economic literature, but a good place to start is Politicized Economies: Monarchy, Monopoly, and Mercantilism by Robert Ekelund and Robert Tollison.
The implications for the US are obvious as well, or ought to be. This is the week of Governor Blagojevich; and the Marc Rich pardon - and its enablers - are back in the news. There is no shortage of Republican corruption too: here in San Diego, for instance, the lamentable, unlamented Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham.
The US is evidently now set on a further, enormous, if not (metaphorically) exponential growth of government power, government regulation, government domination of the economy.
Let's hope that the corrupt anarchy of Tijuana - and its untrusted and untrustworthy public institutions - will continue to be something which you have to journey "intrepidly" to Mexico to experience.
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