The “War on Drugs” has been devastating to Mexico’s social fabric. It has waged a war on young people who, already suffering the absence of any real opportunities in education or employment, have increasingly turned to the expanding network of drug cartels or, thanks to kidnappings or induced addictions, have been forced into their ranks.

At the same time, these chavos banda, or gang members, suffer the stigma of the poor and marginalized in a society rigidly stratified by race and class. Thousands have been killed; thousands more have flooded the nation’s overburdened penitentiary system, from which they are cycled back out onto the streets.

When Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) won the Mexican presidency in 2018, he promised to end the violence and attend to the needs of these left-behind youths. Pedro Carrizales, who won a seat in the legislature of his home state of San Luis Potosí for the Morena/Workers’ Party Coalition — Carrizales is currently sitting as an independent — dedicated himself to the same work.