Final Post: US Mexico War on Drugs

The Final Entry:

US Mexico War on Drugs

by Gabriella Zheleznyak 

          My group covered the United States Mexico Drug War. In the beginning of our blog, for the introduction, we gave a brief synopsis of what the United States Mexico Drug War is and how it came to be. As such a vibrant topic that finds itself in the news on a daily basis, it was fairly easy to blog about current events pertaining to the topic. Coincidentally, a huge break occurred while we were blogging; the leader of one of the major Mexican drug cartels, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, was arrested. The leader of the Sinaloa Cartel was considered to be the world’s most wanted drug lord. His arrest drastically impacted the US Mexico Drug War, not only in a hierarchical fashion for the cartel itself, but the arrest also said a lot about the relationship between the United States government’s relationship with Mexico’s government.

            The manner in which I did my research for this project was just looking up reliable news sources covering the topic of the US Mexico Drug War. Even if the news source was deemed “reliable”, I tried to translate any biased language used into just extracting factual information from articles, rather than allowing the bias of the source affect the neutral stance of the blog. As for working in a group, we never had issues of splitting up research; it was fairly easy for each member to discover unique information pertaining to the topic. Once we all found articles we felt to be contain valuable information to our blog, we would compare the articles to accumulate the most accurate research possible. We found that sometimes articles would contain contradictory information, which just goes to show that news is not always accurate. In these situations, we would have to further research in order to learn the truth of what we were blogging about.

            I learned a lot from doing this project. Prior to this class, I really have never explored the US Mexico Drug War in detail. I realized that I had many inaccurate preconceived notions about the topic, the United States’ role in the conflict, specifically. I never realized how much effort the two governments exert attempting to solve a solution to the war. I also learned about the interworking of the cartel, which I found to be the most interesting. As for working in a group, I realized that as great as technology is, it is far more effective to work in a group in person. When there are so many people in a group, it is dire that communication take place face-to-face, rather than all through the computer. Especially since googledocs allows each member of the blog to edit the piece, it is difficult to be sure that everyone agrees on changes being made if we are all not present to make an agreement.