A War Against Poor People: Drug Wars, Dirty Wars and the Cold War Origins of Mexico’s Contemporary Violence

This book project contextualizes the current drug violence within a longer 20th-century history of failed state formation, persistent social inequality and political violence. Using declassified Mexican and U.S. military and intelligence documents and oral histories, Aviña locates the immediate origins of the current bloodletting in the early 1970s when state drug interdiction campaigns became for the first time fully and permanently militarized.