CANCELLED Mexico's Drug War in the Era of AMLO

Speaker: Author and journalist Michael Deibert
Chair: Dr Kieran Mitton, CSDRG and Co-founder of the Urban Violence Research Network

The Urban Violence Research Network and the Conflict, Security and Development Research Group invite you to this Monday afternoon talk with author and journalist Michael Deibert. A recognized authority on organized crime in Mexico, Michael will be delivering a talk on the state of criminal violence in that country more than a year after the inauguration of presidential candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The third president to govern Mexico since its militarized confrontation with drug cartels began in 2006, the tenure of López Obrador, colloquially know as AMLO, has seen a spiralling of the country's already-severe violence, with nearly 35,000 people - a record - losing their lives in 2019 and the murders of activists and brazen cartel invasions of cities and towns continuing unabated. Deibert will examine why the country's violence has been so resistant to change, the out-sized role played in it by the United States and what the path forward may be.

 

Michael Deibert is a Visiting Scholar at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais at the Universidade de Lisboa. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Miami Herald, the Daily Beast, Le Monde diplomatique, Folha de Sao Paulo and the World Policy Journal, among other venues. He is the author of five books: When the Sky Fell: Hurricane Maria and the United States in Puerto Rico (Apollo Publishers, 2019), Haiti Will Not Perish: A Recent History (Zed Books, 2017), In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel, and the Price of America's Drug War in Mexico (Lyons Press 2014), The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books, 2013) and Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press, 2005).