Mexico

Mexico
Capital city	Mexico City
Location	North America
Type	nation state
Member of	APEC, Donald Trump/Conspiracy theories, G-20, International Criminal Court, International Energy Agency, OECD, Organisation of American States, UN
Subpage	•Mexico/Ambassador •Mexico/President •Mexico/Secretary of Finance and Public Credit •Mexico/Secretary of Foreign Affairs
Former Spanish colony

Mexico is the nation state immediately to the south of the US, or "Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!" as president Porfirio Díaz once said.

Demography

One-fifth of Mexicans live in the metropolitan area of Mexico City and three-fifths live in other cities, leaving only 21 million who are rural.

Cannabis as a 'Human Right'

In November 2015 Mexico's supreme court ruled 4-1 that smoking cannabis was a basic human right. This ruling concerned a nonprofit marijuana club — the Mexican Society for Responsible and Tolerant Autoconsumption, (SMART) and so did not immediately affect marijuana prohibition laws.

Illegal Drug Trade

Mexico's geographical position makes it an import nation as far as the importation of illegal drugs into the USA - especially cocaine from South America. Joël van der Reijden writes that "Information that came out in the wake of the Kiki Camarena death clearly demonstrates that the CIA and Mexican government have been working hand in hand with the drug cartels, with the CIA apparently controlling and employing them as right wing death squads", also noting that "hundreds of journalists have been murdered or disappeared in Mexico in the past decades."

Presidents were CIA agents

In 2017, as thousands of declassified files on John F. Kennedy were made public, journalist Raymundo Riva Palacio discovered that three former Mexican presidents - Adolfo Lopez Mateos (1958-1964), Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964-1970) and Luis Echeverria (1970-1976) - were unpaid agents for the U.S. government, leading to the assumptions that these three might not be the only ones. The declassification is less dramatic than it sounds, as CIA whistleblower Philip Agee had exposed them as far back as 1975.