The Mexican news first, because I think it’s potentially more consequential. Tuesday night, the Mexican Senate convincingly passed a telecommunications reform bill, pushed by Peña Nieto and already approved in the lower Chamber of Deputies. It’s aimed at dismantling the monopolies that smother competition in Mexican industries like telecom, where the América Movil company headed by tycoon Carlos Slim, the world’s richest man, controls more than 80% of the nation’s land line market and more than 70% of its cell phone market. The legislation packs sharper enforcement teeth and “prevents monopolies from being able to resort to the constant, endless appeals litigation they use to avoid paying fines and sanctions,” as Peña Nieto described the bill to me in a TIME interview shortly before his inauguration last December.

So why does this impact the drug war? Call it a leap of faith, but if this reform really does turn out to be a monopoly-buster–and, this being Mexico and the ruling party being the PRI, it’s better to take a wait-and-see approach–it will be striking evidence that rule of law has a chance to take root in Mexico. Slim and the other Mexican monopolists targeted in the bill aren’t drug lords. But for decade after decade they’ve been getting away with an unjust practice that modern democracies usually penalize if not thwart. Stripping them of their notorious impunity could go a long way toward fostering the kind of culture of legality that in turn nurtures more professional and less corrupt courts, judges, prosecutors and especially investigative cops–the judicial backbone of any credible fight against organized crime.

Washington ought to know this already after its happier experience more than a decade ago in Colombia—where the billions the U.S. poured into anti-drug aid bore fruit largely because Colombia finally made the effort to strengthen rule of law.