Final Post - Mexican Drug War- Kelleen

Throughout the semester my group and I researched the Mexican Drug War and its effect on Mexican society and population. We decided to focus on a new theme related to the drug war each week. My theme the first week I wrote was violence against women and I wrote about vigilante assassinations of  male bus drivers in Cuidad Juarez perpetuated by a mysterious woman, highlighting the frustration of Mexican women that Mexico authorities do not take crimes against women as seriously as violence between men. My second post was about Mexico City legislators considering legalizing marijuana with a theme around possible solutions for the drug war. The other members of my group wrote about a variety of topics including violence against journalists, trends in tourism related to violence from the drug war and immigration to the United States from Mexico due to drug war violence. Since we had to focus on stories in the news that week, it was hard to narrow our topic beyond the general drug war. The drug war is in the news frequently but the stories are often similar: extreme violence due to cartel fighting and control.

Before starting my research for my blog post I decided on a theme I wanted to focus on; the two I chose were violence against women and solutions to the war. Next I would look at the news for the drug war that week on different new source websites including Mexican and American Press. It was often hard to find the kind of story I was looking for because the news stories about the drug war are usually just about someone being arrested or civilian deaths. I found the vigilante killer story and the possible legalization of marijuana stories very interesting because they were not like most of the stories about Mexico. The vigilante killer story was all over the American press and was unusual as it was a female suspect. Our group had decided to have one person each week write a blog post and send it out to the rest of the group by Wednesday for everyone to give feedback. The group's feedback was helpful because they often mentioned things I hadn't thought of, like explaining the back story or including the response to the incident. Having group feedback was helpful while writing my posts.

During this project I learned that working in a group can be very difficult, communication is often hard to maintain. I also learned that feedback can be very helpful because things you had not thought of can be brought up and fixed. Our topic was not a happy one and reading all the news stories was often disheartening however I do feel that I now have a better grasp of origins and reasons for the drug war. Mexico is very close to the United States however we don't often think of the horrible things going on there, of which our citizens are partially responsible for. People also often think of immigration as an American problem but we need to look at why people leave Mexico and other Latin American countries. If we are horrified by the civil war in Syria and feel obliged to take action there we should also be looking closer to home and realize that daily senseless violence is occurring right next door and we are not doing anything to stop it.