David McWilliams

Of course it is.

Especially when you're poor and you're just trying to get by.

Exactly.

So, you know, tortilla sellers are fair game for these cartel guys.

So can you imagine how anxious you must be

to live in a small rural town in Mexico.

So I'll give you an example.

There's a small rural town called Buena Vista.

And like lots and lots of these small rural towns, when NAFTA started, the North American Free Trade Organization,

Mexican farmers came face to face with American farmers for the first time ever.

And American farmers were much more productive, using huge amounts of pesticides, economies of scale.

You think of your Ohio's of this world, that sort of extraordinary agricultural belt of the Midwest, right?

And they are flooding Mexico with cheap American products.

And of course, Mexican farmers are going out of business.

So in the same way as Mexican industrialists did well out of making American cars in Mexico and exporting them north, American farmers destroyed the Mexican market because their economies of scale are just so much more.

And the capital they deploy is just so much more.

So of course, what happens then?

The farmers are unemployed.

What can they do?

They are preyed on by the cartels to be the messenger boys, to be the smugglers, to be the killers of the next generation of cartels.