Jo Tuckman writing in The Guardian points out a sad indicator in the battle for hearts and minds in the Mexican drug trade. Several bosses of drug cartels have been arrested wearing Ralph Lauren polo shirts. There is a cycle of aspiration expressed in the wearing of these shirts. The drug bosses are wearing them as the shirts several years ago as they were popular amongst Mexico's weathy elite. Now poor kids in Mexico are wearing the shirts in order to copy the drug dealers.

While there is certainly a tangled web of socio-economic problems behind the long standing problem Mexico has with drug dealing (not least the fact they share a land border with the huge market for drugs that is the USA). Oscar Galicia, a research psychologist from the Iberoamericana University in Mexico City says,

There is an aspirational crisis in Mexico today in which young people have lost faith in legal means for social advancement and see the 'narcos' as figures of respect.

The governor of the state of Sinaloa has said he wished that people would idolise figures like Emiliano Zapata instead but I suspect that in many ways that would be more uncomfortable than the idolisation of drug dealers. The drug trade has grown for 40 years or more in Mexico and is by persistence perhaps now a way of life. A rise of Zapatista sentiment would probably do much good for the poor and disenfranchised of Mexico but the staus quo is making lots of people rich.