For this, blame a combination of managerial incompetence and ideological inanity from Donald Trump and his Mexican counterpart, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. In 2015, I asked then-candidate Trump whether he feared that his protectionist policies would hurt Mexico in ways that ultimately would hurt the United States as well. His reply: “I don’t care about Mexico, honestly. I really don’t care about Mexico.”

Since then, Trump has forced a dubious renegotiation of NAFTA, but has yet to get the new trade agreement ratified in Congress, causing business uncertainties that have brought the Mexican economy to the edge of recession. It took the administration more than a year to replace its ambassador in Mexico, after the last one resigned in disgust. And Trump’s insistence that Mexico militarize its southern border with Guatemala has drained its army of the manpower it needs to fight the drug cartels.

Last month, in the northwestern city of Culiacán, Mexican security forces found themselves quickly outnumbered and outgunned when they tried to arrest the son of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the jailed drug lord. The soldiers capitulated and the son was promptly freed.

If Trump’s actions have been damaging, López Obrador’s have been disastrous.

His slogan in the face of cartel violence is “hugs, not bullets.” His strategy has been to increase spending on social programs while urging gangsters to think of their mothers. He has claimed, preposterously, that crime is under control, and still insists he has no intention of rethinking his approach. In the Culiacán fiasco, he praised the decision to release El Chapo’s son while ordering the disclosure of the officer’s name who had ordered the operation, endangering the man’s life. Much of the army officer corps now openly reviles their commander in chief.

A parody of a policy has produced a predictable result: 2019 is on course to become Mexico’s most violent year in decades, with about 17,000 killings between January and June. In sheer numbers, that’s a figure that exceeds the civilian death toll in Iraq at the height of war in 2006.