This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, November 15, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Our neighbor to the south, Mexico, has been ravaged by a war on drugs that has claimed some 60,000 lives in the last few years.

And yet American politicians rarely talk about it.

Cato Institute scholar Ted Galen Carpenter is author of the new Cato book,

The Fire Next Door, Mexico's Drug Violence and

The Danger to America.

We spoke yesterday.

The presidential debate featured no reference, none whatsoever, to a very problematic war going on in Mexico and that is

a little, spilled over a little bit into the United States, but no mention at all.

It's absolutely astonishing.

In Mexico, we've had an armed conflict that has taken roughly 60,000 lives over the last six years. This is happening on our border, yet Mexico

in general and the drug violence there in particular did not merit a single

sentence in the presidential debate in the

United States supposedly devoted to foreign policy. That is absolutely amazing.

Give us a picture of what is actually going on and what has been going on for a long time in Mexico.

There's been an escalation of drug-related violence really over the past decade, but it became acute six years ago when

Felipe Calderon became president of Mexico. He decided to have a military-led

offensive against the drug cartels to really smash the cartels.

That strategy has backfired totally.

The cartels are as powerful as ever.

In some cases, they are more powerful than before. They, for example, operate

...