Hello and welcome to Why Is This Happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

The episode you're about to hear originally ran last April, but we're going to bring it back in light of the crazy cartel violence situation in Mexico this weekend.

So on Sunday, Mexican security forces killed the leader of Halisco Nueva Generation, which is a 59-year-old ex-police officer named Nemesio Oseguera,

Servantes.

Members of his cartel responded by setting cars and buses on fire in the middle of the streets

around the state of Halisco.

That includes the Torresstown of Puerto Vallarta, where a bunch of Americans were told

to shelter in place.

And according to Trump administration officials and Mexico's Secretary of Defense, the raid on this cartel leader did use information gathered by the CIA.

And the whole thing reminded me of this conversation I had with Pulitzer Prize winning Professor Greg Grandin, whose book America America is about understanding the U.S. and Latin America as fundamentally part of the same unit,

as fundamentally inseparable, as fundamentally a shared history and connection.

And it's this incredible history of the hemisphere, meaning like the Western Hemisphere,

together as one unit.

So I really do think that viewing the developments of the past week in this way really

sort of helps us understand what's going on.

I hope this episode helps explain the context, history, and background as we watch

the fallout from the death of that cartel leader in Mexico.

What I see in the book is that every wealthy country went through some restructuring to deal

with changes in the global economy, competition, rising oil prices, you know, every rich country

in Europe.

No other countries so gleefully assaulted the institutions that could have ameliorated that restructuring, as did the United States.

Hello and welcome to why is this happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

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