Beheadings, balaclavas, and arsenals of AK-47s — these are the ugly images that travel to the US from Mexico’s drug war. A little more than six months after the massacre in Iguala, Guerrero, for example — where forty-three students disappeared at the hands of a local drug cartel — news outlets focus almost exclusively on the CSI-like plotline: the gruesome details of the crime, the botched investigation that followed, and the crusade to end the drug violence that has seen over 120,000 killed and close to 30,000 missing in the last eight years alone.

But these stories miss the point. “Contrary to popular belief and common public narratives,” states a recent memo from the Mexican embassy in the United States, “Mexico does not have a drug trade problem. Rather, it has a public security problem that has been greatly amplified by the drug trade.” In other words, narco-politics — the term used to describe the nexus between Mexican politicians and the powerful drug lords that control them — is a symptom of Mexico’s diseased state, not the disease itself.

Diagnosing this disease helps explain not only the disappearance of the forty-three students in Iguala. It is also the key to understanding how Iguala relates to Mexico’s broken democracy, and how it can be fixed.