My work will soon suffer the same fate. The paywall is going up around the Sunday Times website in three weeks or so, after which time, people will have to pay a pound for a day's access to thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk, or two pounds for a week's.
Anyway, in the May 31 edition of the New Yorker, William Finnegan has a finely observed, and disturbing feature about organised crime, drugs, and the collapse of the state in Mexico. And, like much of the magazine's best stuff, you need to be a subscriber to read it online. On the strength of this piece, I would thoroughly recommend becoming one. A typically chilling piece of testimony about the drugs cartels comes from a Mexican ex-governor:
"There were these incredible scenes in small towns all over Michoacan," he said. "I would get a call afterward from the mayor. Ten pickup trucks full of armed men had arrived at the municipality. The local police could do nothing. They were outgunned. But the criminals were very respectful. They would tell the mayor, 'We want to work here. There will be no trouble, no crime, no drunkenness, nothing.' They they would take over the town, and enforce their rules. If a boy hit his mother, they would punish him and dump him in the plaza for people to see. If he did it again, they would kill him. It was a strategy to gain popular sympathy, and it worked." Mayors are typically paid for their hospitality. It is plata o plomo - silver or lead. You take the money or we shoot you and your family.
The New Yorker has a "web-only" talk with Finnegan about his reporting from Mexico here.
