What can be done, if anything? Mexico’s root misfortune is to have a 2,100-mile border with the world’s biggest market for illegal drugs, and a long history of violence and corruption in its own culture and society. For 71 years after the bloody mayhem of the revolution, Mexico was ruled by an authoritarian kleptocracy called the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI, in Spanish) and during the 1980s and 1990s the PRI made discreet arrangements with the burgeoning drug cartels. Everyone took their cut, there was less violence and mayhem than today, and Mexico’s war against drug trafficking was essentially a sham designed to please the United States. Then came the overthrow of the PRI by democratic election in 2000. The monolithic system of power in Mexico started to open up and loosen, and so did the arrangements of corruption and protection with the cartels.