In My Opinion

Media as an Educator: Teaching Us to Intervene

By Amy Jungwirth

Mexico is a violent place where innocent people become the victims of a cruel drug war between battling cartels that an ineffective police is incapable of stopping. Does this narrative sound familiar? If you have opened your newspaper or watched your local news station in the last five years, it likely does. It is rare to see a news piece about the subject that doesn’t cast the Mexican state as helpless to protect its people from a dangerous and uncontrollable narcotics war.

But, as consumers of media, what does this teach us? It teaches us that Mexico is a scary, helpless place. It teaches us that as the principal neighboring country, we have an interest in making it safe once again. It teaches us that we can intervene. And, in fact, we have! A recent article from NPR reports that the U.S. has significantly increased its aid to Mexico, providing it with “state-of-the-art” military software and flooding it with CIA operatives and American military contractors.

But is this a good idea? The U.S. has provided Colombia with military counter-narcotics aid for over a decade (amounting to over $5 billion) and still guerilla and paramilitary violence plagues the country. Maybe we should reflect on whether we really want to continue our escalated involvement in Mexico. Maybe we should question the line of logic that steered us toward involvement in the first place. And maybe, just maybe, the media should be more diverse in its reports so that its lessons lend themselves to a variety of conclusions instead of just one: intervention.