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40 Crime L. & Soc. Change 1 (2003)

handle is hein.journals/crmlsc40 and id is 1 raw text is: Crime, Law & Social Change 40: 1-5, 2003. 1 Editorial introduction Present as prologue The project that produced this volume was initiated in the spring 2000, spon- sored conferences mixing security professionals and academics in Guadala- jara and San Diego in the spring 2001, solicited follow up papers in the fall 2001, and was completed in the spring 2002. Events during this final phase of preparing the volume have underscored the timeliness and importance of a project focusing on the security dimension of drug trafficking in Mexico, Colombia, and the US. The year or two preceding the summer of 2001 had already featured a series of weighty events that seemed to supercede those of 1994 in Mexico, labeled by Mexican novelist and provocateur Monsivais the year it was impossible to be bored, and those of 1989-1990 in Colombia, described in demoralizing detail by reporter and novelist Garcia Marquez in News of a Kidnapping. The political drama included the appointment of an entirely new security team in Mexico following the historic defeat of the PRI, and deep controversy throughout the hemisphere over Plan Colombia, which received well over a billion dollars in US appropriations following another debate that included warnings of Vietnam style escalation and quagmire. But the rhythm of events has only become more spectacular and unre- lenting over the past six months. Just in the first three months of 2002, for example, Mexico has witnessed the decapitation of the Arellano Felix net- work headquartered in Tijuana, with the death of Ramon on February 10 and the arrest of Benjamin on March 9. Meanwhile, Colombia has experienced the abrupt termination of negotiations between the government and the FARC and the consequent abandonment of the guerilla safe haven on February 20. Drug trafficking, had there been any previous doubt, now quite demonstrably represents one of the most serious threats to state integrity and social peace in these countries. And finally, of course, the attacks of September 11 on the US, probably more than any other single event in US history, have demon- strated the imperative of diminishing the conceptual and operational tensions between law enforcement and military paradigms, not to mention some of the security fallout from heroin trafficking.