The disappearance and presumed murder of 43 Mexican students from the rural teacher’s college in Ayotzinapa on Sept. 26 has exposed Mexico’s inability to contain the rising tide of drug-fueled violence plaguing the country. Within days, a search team looking for the students unearthed mass graves that contained the remains of 30 others, barely eliciting a response from officials for whom the macabre discovery of clandestine graves has become all too common.

The lack of answers about the fate of missing students has unleashed massive protests and discontent across Mexico and abroad, as enraged demonstrators direct their fury at systemic and entrenched problems: drug-trafficking violence, rampant corruption, neoliberal economic reforms and pervasive poverty and inequality. The tension poses the most critical challenge yet for the presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto, but this tragedy is not a crisis for Mexico alone. The carnage south of our border is closely intertwined with U.S. security and trade policies that have intensified rather than stanched the flow of blood in Mexico.

The whole episode is emblematic of Mexico’s corruption, impunity and weak democratic institutions, with elected officials and security forces colluding with the drug cartels. In this case, the students were apparently abducted by local police on direct order from Iguala’s mayor and handed over to the local Guerreros Unidos gang, which has close ties to the mayor’s wife, who claim to have killed them, burned the bodies and dumped the ashes in Cocula. And though nearby, the military evinced indifference to the students’ plight.

Despite these entanglements, however, the U.S. continues to engage in a bi-national strategy with Mexico to combat drug trafficking, entrusting the very politicians and security forces whose ties to criminal enterprises are readily apparent.

In the last six years alone, Washington spent $3 billion on the Mérida Initiative, a border security, counter-narcotics and counterterrorism program established by the George W. Bush administration in 2008. The U.S. also funnels millions of dollars through the Department of Defense to train state security forces. In 2006, Peña Nieto’s predecessor Felipe Calderón declared war on the cartels, and the human cost has been staggering. During his six-year tenure from 2006 to 2012, 83,000 people were killed and at least another 26,000 disappeared. The death toll has now reached 100,000.

Mexico’s U.S.-backed anti-drug policies are inherently counterproductive. The criminal networks associated with the illicit and unregulated drug trade are intrinsically violent, and dismantling one cartel does little to curb overall drug trafficking and violence. Instead, interdiction and drug-related arrests can escalate violence by creating power vacuums that spur fragmentation, decentralization and competition among cartels for the freed-up market share.