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In the last few years I've come to realize that Mexican politics is much more complicated than The Usual Sources give it credit for. I'm not going to claim to be an expert here (would be interested in more sources that aren't full tomes).
For one, the median Mexican lives very far from the border: ask an American what they think of Mexico and your answer will describe the border, or maybe Cabo or Cozumel. The large cities in Mexico are mostly further south, and many aren't considered particularly dangerous with respect to the cartels.
There is an element of outsider homogeneity bias there, probably helped by the language barrier. Various parts of the country (the northern ones most notably) have long histories of, for lack of a better descriptor, lawlessness and civil discord. Parts have tried to secede -- Texas was not the only province to attempt this, but was notable for its success. Violence in the less-populated northern areas isn't new: Pancho Villa was literally attacking the US a century ago.
And it seems that so much of how we see the issue is clouded by modern politics: "Wait, why did Spain and the Mexico invite mostly-American settlers peacefully to live in what would become Texas and other parts of the future American West? They didn't demand that they identify as Hispanic or Latino in the definition of the US Census Bureau almost two centuries later." From what little I know, Hispanic doesn't align with historical ideas of national origin in Mexico (and other parts of Central and South America) even up until today, although tremendously Amero-centric progressivism is trying.
Latin American countries tend to be very centralized and tend to have large amounts of territory where the state has very little presence, direct analogy to what the American West was like back in the day.
In addition to the vast desert regions of the north, another factor is that Mexico is one of the most consistently mountainous countries in the world. The entire country is basically two large mountain chains with some major population centers in different valleys in the central region.
There’s a reason that what El Salvador did is extremely hard to replicate in other Latin American countries. El Salvador is basically a large city state centered on San Salvador, while a country like Mexico is in a whole different universe of challenges for any similar approach.
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Yeah, that was a shock to me when I went to live in Mexico for a year. The average Mexican thinks of the border... basically the same way as the average American. It's very far away and you have to cross a huge inhospitable desert to get there. The Mexican states near the border are their version of New Mexico/Arizona/rural Texas... not exactly "normal" states.
They’re also some of the wealthiest places in Mexico.
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To answer your last paragraph, back in the early 1800s there were very few people living in northern Mexico, to the point that it was difficult to hold the land from the Comanche. The Mexican government needed warm bodies in that area fast. They did require Anglo settlers to at least nominally convert to Catholicism. Also, the Texas revolution wasn’t the race war/craven attempt at land piracy that it is often portrayed as. President Santa Ana was engaged in a political crackdown that made many people in Mexico unhappy. Texas was the fourth or fifth attempted provincial secession that decade. And many of the people on the Texas side were ethnically Mexican, including some of the leadership like Juan Seguin and Texas vice-president Lorenzo de Zavala.
Indeed, the republic of Texas spent most of its history at war with both Mexico and the commanches simultaneously, and Mexico was embroiled in a civil war(with the antigovernment side allied to the republic of Texas) during the entire period.
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