True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 290: The Beast
Aired: 2023-05-11
Duration: 01:23:16


=== Hello, Ladies and Gentlemen (06:24) ===

[00:00:00]  No, we're not doing the gong again.
[00:00:02]  You can't do it every episode.
[00:00:03]  Why not?
[00:00:04]  Because you have to save it and make it special.
[00:00:06]  Or if you do it every episode, it'll be like, that's the thing that they just do every episode.
[00:00:11]  First of all, you don't want to be the gong guy.
[00:00:13]  Yes, I do.
[00:00:14]  Oh, you don't know.
[00:00:15]  Yeah, more than anything, I know.
[00:00:17]  No, They're trying to take our gongs.
[00:00:48]  Hello, ladies and gentlemen.
[00:00:50]  I opened the podcast with a giggle.
[00:00:53]  My name is Brace.
[00:00:54]  Hello, Brace.
[00:00:55]  My name is Liz.
[00:00:56]  Hello, Liz.
[00:00:57]  What's his name?
[00:00:58]  His name is Jung Chomsky, and this podcast is called True Anonymous.
[00:01:02]  Oh, usually I do that.
[00:01:04]  I know.
[00:01:04]  That's why we flip it and reverse it.
[00:01:07]  Liz pointed her finger at me, but I was so engrossed.
[00:01:11]  So a lot of people don't know this, but I watch movies during when we record podcasts.
[00:01:16]  I watch movies.
[00:01:17]  I fidget spin.
[00:01:18]  I stim in general.
[00:01:21]  Okay.
[00:01:22]  I don't know what that means.
[00:01:23]  And I make shake and bake methamphetamine, sort of under the table.
[00:01:25]  I thought you're going to go with shake and bake chicken, which my mom made for me when I was.
[00:01:29]  You don't know that?
[00:01:30]  No.
[00:01:30]  You don't remember shake and bake?
[00:01:32]  I have a vague memory of it.
[00:01:33]  Oh, man.
[00:01:34]  We ate so much crap when I was kids.
[00:01:36]  Yeah.
[00:01:37]  When I was a kid.
[00:01:38]  I was raised in a strict vegan diet, which is why I am 4'8 and I weigh 19 pounds.
[00:01:45]  And my insides look like milk.
[00:01:48]  It's just one big gut.
[00:01:50]  You know what I mean?
[00:01:50]  It's just one big intestine that kind of takes the form of a.
[00:01:53]  It's kind of like you got balloon boy on the inside.
[00:01:56]  I got balloon boy.
[00:01:57]  They did a full body scan of me.
[00:02:00]  And first of all, you've never seen so many internal moles in your life.
[00:02:04]  Because my moles go outwards and they go in.
[00:02:06]  So I have moles basically covering the entire internet.
[00:02:08]  Sometimes they crisscross each other.
[00:02:10]  Yeah, it's crazy.
[00:02:11]  It's just like a rosebush.
[00:02:12]  You got to trim up.
[00:02:12]  It's six inches out, six inches in.
[00:02:14]  But then they cross each other.
[00:02:17]  There's one mole that I have, Liz, that goes straight from the back of my nipple to my shoulder blade.
[00:02:22]  Okay.
[00:02:23]  It's fucking insane.
[00:02:24]  It's like a bullet.
[00:02:25]  I'm going really straight through you, but it's a mole.
[00:02:28]  I have kind of a lot of structural integrity because of it.
[00:02:32]  Unfortunately, I have been voted most cancerous man in America for the past 15 years of my life.
[00:02:37]  Yeah, but the good guys call you Moleman.
[00:02:39]  They do call me Moleman.
[00:02:41]  I was thinking the other day about you seeing that mole man.
[00:02:45]  Oh, yeah.
[00:02:45]  He wasn't a mole man.
[00:02:46]  He was a mole man.
[00:02:47]  He was a mole man.
[00:02:48]  Yeah, I was thinking about that.
[00:02:50]  What were you thinking about it?
[00:02:51]  I was just thinking about what he looked like the other night.
[00:02:56]  Have you seen the episode with the Seinfeld episode with the Pigman?
[00:03:00]  The Pigman?
[00:03:00]  Yeah.
[00:03:01]  Yeah.
[00:03:04]  It's a Pigman!
[00:03:07]  A Pigman!
[00:03:10]  So then you got an idea.
[00:03:11]  Okay.
[00:03:12]  I don't remember what the Pigman looks like from that.
[00:03:14]  You don't really see him, just a little flash and a squeal.
[00:03:17]  Damn.
[00:03:18]  Well, ladies and gentlemen, we actually have with us a guest.
[00:03:22]  I hope you didn't just listen to that intro.
[00:03:25]  Because we had such a great conversation with him.
[00:03:27]  He's so smart, so shit, yeah.
[00:03:29]  Yes.
[00:03:30]  Very captivating, great writer.
[00:03:31]  Yeah.
[00:03:32]  And now he's going to hear me talk about Mullman and think, what the fuck?
[00:03:36]  I get this feeling as though he already did the show.
[00:03:39]  So like, you can't.
[00:03:40]  Yeah, no takes you back season.
[00:03:42]  You can't take it back.
[00:03:43]  Yeah, no flipping and reverse it.
[00:03:45]  Well, some podcasts we should name, but maybe no, have deleted some episodes.
[00:03:51]  We'll never do that at the request of a guest.
[00:03:54]  Welcome, ladies and gentlemen.
[00:03:56]  Oh, you want to know?
[00:03:57]  I just said that so that you would be like, who did that?
[00:03:59]  Yeah.
[00:03:59]  Was that a thing?
[00:04:01]  No.
[00:04:02]  I'll tell you afterwards.
[00:04:03]  Okay.
[00:04:03]  I mean, it's any, yeah.
[00:04:04]  Anyways, it's here is, we have with us today Oswaldo, or as I call him, Osvaldo Zavala, the author of Drug Cartels Do Not Exist.
[00:04:16]  And we have a very, it's a very good interview.
[00:04:18]  That's a wide-ranging.
[00:04:20]  Wide-ranging interview.
[00:04:21]  Wide-ranging interview.
[00:04:22]  About his provocatively titled book.
[00:04:26]  We're talking cartels.
[00:04:27]  We're talking drugs.
[00:04:28]  We're talking DEA.
[00:04:29]  We're talking narcos.
[00:04:31]  But we're also talking narratives.
[00:04:33]  Yeah.
[00:04:33]  Imaginaries.
[00:04:34]  Imageries.
[00:04:35]  Floating signifiers.
[00:04:37]  You guys looked at each other when you said the empty vase, and I was just like, damn, that's probably a concept, huh?
[00:04:43]  Because in my line of work, I also dealt with a lot of empty vases, but you know what I was doing?
[00:04:47]  I was filling them with flowers.
[00:04:48]  Love that.
[00:04:49]  And so we're going to fill the rest of this episode, like an empty vase, with an interview.
[00:04:53]  That doesn't make sense.
[00:04:55]  With a bouquet of an interview.
[00:04:57]  I'm going to give him his flowers.
[00:05:00]  So ladies and gentlemen, take up your watering cans.
[00:05:03]  You don't want that?
[00:05:04]  No, it doesn't.
[00:05:06]  What is that?
[00:05:07]  Don't worry about it.
[00:05:08]  I won't.
[00:05:09]  Ladies and gentlemen, take up your irises.
[00:05:11]  Take up your shears.
[00:05:12]  Take up your watering cans and pull out your empty vase because the interview begins.
[00:05:30]  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show.
[00:05:32]  The main event we have with us today, Osvaldo Zavala, journalist and Latin American literature.
[00:05:38]  And I fucked that up already.
[00:05:41]  You're going to give me a failing grade, but you know what?
[00:05:43]  I'm not going to stop.
[00:05:44]  Latin American literature professor at the City University of New York, author of four books, including Drug Cartels Do Not Exist, Narco-Trafficking in U.S. and Mexican Culture, published by Vanderbilt University Press.
[00:05:58]  I don't think I needed to actually add that part, but welcome to the show.
[00:06:02]  Thank you.
[00:06:02]  Thank you for having me.
[00:06:03]  It's a pleasure and an honor to be with you guys.
[00:06:06]  Thanks so much.
[00:06:08]  I am, as I said to you guys before we started recording, thrilled to finally be able to say this.
[00:06:17]  You begin your book with a provocation, Monsieur Zavala.
[00:06:22]  The title is a very provocative title.

=== Cartels: Beyond OPEC (10:53) ===

[00:06:24]  Drug Cartels Do Not Exist.
[00:06:28]  And it's also, you know, the cover looks cool when it says it on there.
[00:06:31]  But what do you mean by that?
[00:06:34]  Right.
[00:06:35]  It is a provocation that I stand by in the sense that I, so much that I don't even think it's really a provocation, but a statement of truth, a statement of fact.
[00:06:46]  A lot of people misunderstand it, of course, and I expect that so.
[00:06:50]  But when I say drug cartels do not exist, I do not mean that drug trafficking is not real or that the violence is not out there or that it shouldn't worry us.
[00:07:02]  None of that.
[00:07:03]  Of course, drug trafficking is a very serious problem for governments, for social viability, livelihood of people.
[00:07:12]  And it is a question that should be tackled from different perspectives, including policing.
[00:07:20]  And so I agree with all of that.
[00:07:22]  But the idea of the cartel that we commonly employ to describe the phenomena of drug trafficking is false and is politically motivated and is ideologically driven by a mentality that in my book I call the securitarian mentality,
[00:07:40]  meaning the national security discourse that first U.S. institutions started articulating sometime in the mid-70s and that permeated into Latin American culture, in particular in countries like Mexico and Colombia, to justify and to legitimize the gradual militarization of the country with the horrible consequences that we all know, right?
[00:08:05]  Over 400,000 killings since the militarization began in 2006 and over 100,000 forced disappearances.
[00:08:17]  So we're talking about half a million people killed or disappeared under the so-called drug war.
[00:08:25]  And so I think one of the main justifications and motivators for this discourse and this, I guess, how do you call it, aggressive militarization effort is the word cartel.
[00:08:39]  And the word cartel is the one that cleanses the violence and the brutality of soldiers and agents fighting in the streets because it portrays an enemy that is supposed to be so big and so terrible that only soldiers armed to their teeth can help us and save us from.
[00:08:59]  Yeah, it's interesting, right?
[00:09:00]  Because the word cartel, I mean, I think up until it was like deployed to describe drug traffickers in Central America was really, I mean, people would think of like OPEC, right?
[00:09:10]  Like price fixing in the 70s and like the big producers like, okay, we're price fixing or we're controlling oil supplies and production and we're all colluding together to kind of like get what we want.
[00:09:22]  And that and now it's just basically synonymous with what seems like realistically more of a kind of array of different kind of small, I don't know, small town trafficking enterprises.
[00:09:34]  Yeah.
[00:09:35]  Constellation.
[00:09:36]  Yeah, constellation, totally.
[00:09:38]  But it is really politically motivated because like you say, it gives this image that the only way to fight this would be with a massive state military effort.
[00:09:48]  Right.
[00:09:49]  And because the word it's been borrowed from the field of economics into the judicial, the policing and the military effort of the so-called drug war, of course, is from the beginning misused.
[00:10:02]  And it's so much misused that it carries all kinds of absurd and arbitrary meanings and very contradictorily depicts a reality that refutes itself.
[00:10:12]  So sometimes a cartel, it's a pyramidal structure that is so powerful in size and so large in capability that it can challenge the state in Mexico and all kinds of institutions transnationally and that supposedly allegedly has all this presence in over 100 or 120 or 150 countries depending on who you're asking, what expert is explaining this to you.
[00:10:37]  Or it could mean like you just said, a bunch of little organizations that fight among themselves and that don't hesitate to kill each other over turf.
[00:10:47]  So it's a very contradictory and dissonant word that explains it all and doesn't explain anything.
[00:10:55]  And like you mentioned, it was first used sometime in the late 70s when most people had in their mind the OPEC for the word cartel.
[00:11:05]  These countries that produce oil together and that manipulated the price of the barrel.
[00:11:11]  Famously, OPEC was, I don't think, looked upon very kindly in the 1990s.
[00:11:15]  Well, because the U.S., of course, could not compete with the producers, right?
[00:11:19]  So they became some form of enemy.
[00:11:21]  So the politics of OPEC in the U.S. migrated to antagonize traffickers in the same vein.
[00:11:32]  Of course, when it did, Like I was just mentioning, it described a very dispersed, very uneven field of producers, of traffickers, of consumers that in no way or shape or form amounted to an enemy.
[00:11:48]  So what I argue in drug cartels does not exist is that the world invented the enemy, right?
[00:11:53]  Manufactured the enemy.
[00:11:54]  So it's not so much that reality copied the word, but the word invented the reality that we started seeing.
[00:12:01]  And we started labeling cartels.
[00:12:04]  two, three people moving some drugs or somebody like El Chapo Usman, whose supposed reign of terror could not be calculated to any reasonable figure and who made Forbes magazine's list of multi-billionaires.
[00:12:21]  And so it is very interesting then to look at the history of this language because when you do, very easily you find that there's no materiality to any of this.
[00:12:32]  And it's usually just words that are being peddled across the board and that become adopted and used and reused so much that somehow we end up accepting them at Faith Valley.
[00:12:45]  I think before I've read that, you know, you've referred to this as the kind of security critique.
[00:12:50]  Right.
[00:12:51]  Which I think is very interesting because it's kind of adopting, like you say, this like national security lens through which to understand or, yeah, I guess explain the violence that's being experienced in Mexico.
[00:13:03]  Right.
[00:13:03]  So one main argument that I would like to make in my book from the very beginning is that the history of the drug trade as a phenomenon is one thing, right?
[00:13:14]  I mean, you know, you can look at the history of traffickers, you know, how it began in a state like Sinaloa or in the state of Chihuahua, you know, the old-timers, you know, who peddled drugs in the city of Juarez or in the city of Culiacán.
[00:13:26]  That's one thing, and it's been done brilliantly by historians and journalists.
[00:13:30]  A recent book about that, for example, is by British historian Ben Smith.
[00:13:34]  It's called The Dope, and it's a really— It's called what?
[00:13:37]  The Dope.
[00:13:38]  The Dope.
[00:13:39]  It's a history of Mexican traffickers based on official archives.
[00:13:43]  And it's really great.
[00:13:45]  And you'll find the mini micro-histories of all these traffickers.
[00:13:49]  And that is something that has a lot of value to understand how society dealt with that across decades, from the early 1910s to the present.
[00:14:01]  But what I do is very different.
[00:14:03]  What I want to say is that you can do that kind of history, but then you also need to do a very different history based on how we talk about the drug trade as a war.
[00:14:12]  And for that, you need to understand the history of national security, not of the drug trade.
[00:14:17]  So I separate both, right?
[00:14:19]  And my main argument then is that in order for you to really understand what we mean by the drug war, you need to look at the institutions manufacturing that idea, right?
[00:14:29]  The idea that we're at war with traffickers, not about traffickers themselves.
[00:14:33]  You don't need to really know who Chapo is or what the Sinalua cartel is supposed to be made of.
[00:14:38]  You need to really look at the people telling you what they are supposed to be.
[00:14:42]  Yeah.
[00:14:43]  And the history of that discourse, how it came to be from the 70s and how it escalated across the late 80s and into the 90s until we became used to the idea of a cartel being such a powerful organization that we all have to fear for our lives and that would end up killing half a million people in just a few years.
[00:15:04]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:15:05]  I mean, I think, so I'm 33 years old.
[00:15:07]  And so from the time I was a teenager and sort of aware of the fact that there were drugs and that those drugs came from somewhere and that they were manufactured by somewhere, someone moved and then sold by people, cartels have loomed pretty large.
[00:15:21]  We were talking about before we started recording about the movie Traffic.
[00:15:25]  I saw traffic when I was very young and that informed naturally a lot of my thinking on that.
[00:15:30]  And I think that like, I mean, I use myself sort of as an example here because I'm somebody who moved throughout, especially my early years, with mostly getting this sort of information from fictional works that I which is what most people do.
[00:15:44]  Exactly.
[00:15:45]  Exactly.
[00:15:46]  And so all of that knowledge that I thought I had was actually delivered to me by basically Hollywood movies.
[00:15:53]  I wasn't exactly watching a lot of foreign films.
[00:15:55]  Hollywood movies, which are themselves often, especially if they use U.S. military assets, you know, advised by agents from, I mean, not only the Pentagon, but probably the DEA, CEIA, FBI, all the ways.
[00:16:07]  They get a say on the productions, right?
[00:16:09]  Exactly.
[00:16:09]  Yeah, they get a say on the productions.
[00:16:11]  Big say, by the way.
[00:16:12]  And so it was only as I got older and realized that like, well, many things that are portrayed to me as true in the media are not exactly true, or certainly not true in the way that the Washington Post, the New York Times might portray them.
[00:16:26]  And why should the same not be true of drug trafficking, for instance?
[00:16:32]  And as I learn more, I realized that like, yeah, it's not just like these big cartels full of people with golden AK-47s and rhinestone-laden fucking off-road vehicles.
[00:16:46]  It's actually like there is obviously these sort of mafias, these cartels, I guess, that exist, but they're much more integrated into the Mexican state as opposed to a parasitical element with outside of them or outside of it.
[00:17:01]  And the same can be true of a lot of criminal elements in most countries.
[00:17:07]  And that's something that you say in your book is that the way that these cartels, these institutions are portrayed are something that is always opposed to the Mexican state.

=== Criminal Integration into State (15:19) ===

[00:17:18]  External to the Martin.
[00:17:19]  External, exactly.
[00:17:20]  And you say that's not the case.
[00:17:21]  Well, it historically hasn't been that way.
[00:17:24]  From the 70s and on, in particular, when we started growing our security apparatus, the Mexican state had such a powerful presence that most criminals that meant anything at the political level were co-opted, right?
[00:17:42]  We're working for police institutions.
[00:17:45]  And so by the mid-80s, for example, the most notorious traffickers of the era were all based in the city of Guadalajara in central Mexico.
[00:17:56]  And they all carry police IDs, they had police escorts, and they were happily living life as part of the system.
[00:18:06]  And they didn't seem to be bother or be bothering anybody about their business.
[00:18:13]  That changed only because the U.S. paradigm of security changed as well.
[00:18:21]  In the mid-1980s, Ronald Reagan understood that the idea of fighting global communism was coming to an end.
[00:18:31]  They anticipated the end of the Cold War.
[00:18:34]  And as they were doing that, they had the brilliant idea of gradually shifting the enemy of national security from the communists, the guerrillas, and people forming rebel armies in Nicaragua or in Colombia or elsewhere into trafficking, into drug trafficking.
[00:18:53]  So there's a secret document signed in 1986 that designated traffickers as the new national security threat.
[00:19:02]  And when they did that, well, the entire board shifted, right?
[00:19:06]  So all these traffickers that were happily working with police institutions in Mexico suddenly found themselves on the wrong end of history.
[00:19:15]  They did no longer have a place to be.
[00:19:18]  And so this also coincided with the kidnapping and the torturing and killing of Enrique Camarena, the DEA agent that died in 1985 in Guadalajara.
[00:19:32]  And so the U.S. seized that opportunity to promote this big radical shift in the national security ideas of Mexico.
[00:19:40]  So they started cooperating.
[00:19:42]  The traffickers stopped cooperating with the institutions and they became then the enemy.
[00:19:48]  So all these guys went to prison and then the Mexican government created a new institution that promoted national security.
[00:19:56]  Back in the day, it was called CICEN, Centro de Investigaciones Eguria Nacional.
[00:20:00]  It's kind of like the Center for Investigation and National Security in 1989, right?
[00:20:06]  The key year of the end of the Cold War, right?
[00:20:11]  Berlin was collapsing.
[00:20:13]  Everything's changing.
[00:20:15]  And by that same year, 1989, then President Carlos Alina de Gortari is the very first president that publicly says that traffickers have become a national security threat, something that was unheard of, of course, and that nobody reasonable could accept in Mexican political history, right?
[00:20:34]  Because all these traffickers were employees of the system, right?
[00:20:37]  How is it that they are any threat, especially in 1989, when all of them were dead or imprisoned?
[00:20:44]  Yeah.
[00:20:45]  Just watching like the real life invention of a criminal.
[00:20:48]  Exactly, right?
[00:20:48]  So this is something really fascinating about the drug war discourse and narratives that the things they talk about usually don't have any real models.
[00:20:58]  They have no referent, right?
[00:21:00]  So national security threat, but where?
[00:21:01]  I mean, there are not even traffickers out there of any notoriety that preoccupied the political class.
[00:21:08]  So by 1989, truly, literally all of them are dead or in prison.
[00:21:12]  And there's a couple interviews that some of those notorious traffickers gave during those years, saying, for example, that they first heard of the word cartel when they were already in prison.
[00:21:24]  It's like, well, back when we were working, they said, you know, this idea of cartel didn't exist.
[00:21:29]  I mean, that came later when we were already caught.
[00:21:34]  So the word, again, right, started circulating, and the last people to hear about it were the traffickers themselves.
[00:21:42]  You know, you talk about in the book, too, like, the term cartel, I mean, as we mentioned earlier in the interview, usually implies some sort of like, you know, large coalition of people who set prices for things, who maybe set the corporate corporations.
[00:21:57]  Exactly.
[00:21:57]  Yeah, yeah, essentially function as the board of directors of like a large, broad corporation.
[00:22:01]  Sure, right?
[00:22:02]  That doesn't seem to be the way that cartels at all.
[00:22:06]  In real life, actually.
[00:22:07]  Actually, to the contrary, right?
[00:22:09]  So this is why the word is so heavily misused.
[00:22:15]  It means actually the contrary, right?
[00:22:17]  So how is it that a cartel is fighting among itself, among its members, for turf and not for controlling or for making sure that your product gains as much value as possible, right?
[00:22:31]  So it's completely contradictory.
[00:22:33]  I kept asking whenever I have a chance when I sit down and talk to economists.
[00:22:38]  And two things that I hear from them is this, it always comes to the discussion.
[00:22:43]  A, the word makes no sense when it is used in the criminal context.
[00:22:48]  And two, and this is something that keeps me wondering all the time, that no serious economist thinks of money, of drug organizations and their income as something relevant for the world economy.
[00:23:03]  No serious economist will tell you, oh yeah, the money that the Sinaloa cartel is making is such an empire that with or without it, things could be really come in shambles.
[00:23:13]  None of that, right?
[00:23:14]  They don't even factor it in.
[00:23:16]  It doesn't matter.
[00:23:16]  Inflation is up because.
[00:23:17]  Inflation is, yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right.
[00:23:20]  Inflation is the keyword they want to discuss, but traffickers have nothing to do with this.
[00:23:24]  And so, you know, drug trafficking for them is just something in discourse that they receive in a distant echo, right?
[00:23:30]  But it's not really relevant for the world economy, for world numbers.
[00:23:35]  So it's something really interesting because here we're all talking about trafficking as a major problem for the hemisphere, right?
[00:23:43]  And economists will tell you not at all.
[00:23:45]  When you say that these institutions that kind of reproduce these words, recirculate these words, these images, this language that we use to kind of describe these phenomena, it seems like the mid to late 90s through the mid-aughts was really like, like you mentioned, traffic.
[00:24:03]  Like this was the time.
[00:24:04]  That's important.
[00:24:05]  It was like the films.
[00:24:06]  I know there's a lot of literature, Mexican literature that was really focused on new stories.
[00:24:12]  And I mean, you think about post-9/11 America too.
[00:24:16]  Absolutely.
[00:24:17]  And obviously, the invention of DHS and its sort of assumption of taking over from what was INS on the border.
[00:24:26]  And really just the.
[00:24:28]  Or my immigration became a part of DHS.
[00:24:30]  Absolutely.
[00:24:30]  Yeah.
[00:24:31]  And really when full-throated militarization kind of came to a head.
[00:24:37]  It's really interesting, right?
[00:24:39]  Because in my new book, I tried to do a history of it, right?
[00:24:44]  And to see how discontinuous and arbitrary and disruptive this language is.
[00:24:49]  So it's not like a history that makes sense, but rather it doesn't make any sense precisely because it's changing so radically and the words themselves start meaning things that back in the 70s did not mean right.
[00:25:03]  So for example, the word cartel in the 70s was first used in a congressional hearing in 1977, to my knowledge at least, right?
[00:25:11]  And the DA was using it to describe this group of traffickers in Sinaloa that were using drugs in exchange for guns.
[00:25:19]  That was kind of like, oh my god, you know, these guys are buying weapons.
[00:25:22]  And by the late 1980s, they're not just buying weapons, they're the national security threat.
[00:25:30]  By the mid-95, 1990s, around 1995, maybe 1996, traffickers are not only a national security threat, but are the threat.
[00:25:41]  And the Juarez cartel back in the day in those years was the most meaningful boogeyman that you can think of.
[00:25:49]  And of course, by the 2000s, everything gets even more radical with the appearance of DHS and all the post-9/11 mentality.
[00:26:00]  Yeah, I mean, with national security becoming like really the watchword of the 2000s.
[00:26:05]  And it starts colonizing every aspect of civil society.
[00:26:08]  Exactly.
[00:26:08]  And the same happens in Mexico, right?
[00:26:10]  So, the idea of security became so much interentwined with governance that nowadays we talk about national security for even for healthcare, for the COVID vaccine, for migration, for all kinds of things.
[00:26:25]  And we now have the Army supervising operations of the international airport, of all custom entry points, of the southern and the northern border.
[00:26:38]  The military is basically in control of the country.
[00:26:40]  So, it's a very paradoxical moment, precisely because we keep hearing, especially from the U.S., that traffickers are in control of chunks of the Mexican territory.
[00:26:49]  I mean, sometimes the U.S. Northern Command talks about 35% of the Mexican territory is taken by traffickers when we have the most powerful military presence we ever had in our history policing the totality of the territory, right?
[00:27:08]  If a territory is under somebody's control, it's under the military control, not under drug traffickers or any sort of a criminal organization.
[00:27:19]  So, the militarization of Mexico, I mean, it really happens under this banner.
[00:27:24]  Right.
[00:27:24]  But it's a long history, right?
[00:27:26]  It doesn't just begin as some people have it, would have it in 2006 with the right-wing president Felipe Calderon and his deployment of military presence to fight the drug war, right?
[00:27:40]  I mean, that was the most visible point of this history, but in reality, it's a process that began in the late 80s.
[00:27:48]  You can even argue that it begins in the 70s when the first joint U.S.-Mexican operations began to eradicate poppy and marijuana in northwest Mexico, right?
[00:28:02]  The so-called Operation Condor.
[00:28:05]  Different for those listening.
[00:28:06]  Right.
[00:28:07]  The exact same name, but technically a different Operation Condor than the other Operation Corporation.
[00:28:12]  Right.
[00:28:13]  Although conceived under the same national security paradigm.
[00:28:16]  Yes, yeah, yeah.
[00:28:17]  Although the other one was a little more upfront about bringing drugs.
[00:28:20]  Right.
[00:28:22]  So Operation, or what we call Operation Condor in the rest of Latin America, had to do with regime change, with fighting communism.
[00:28:31]  Chile perhaps is the most visible example for That, right?
[00:28:35]  Argentina.
[00:28:35]  Bringing that Argentina, bringing down Salvador Allende and installing a military rule.
[00:28:41]  In Mexico, you didn't need to do that because we had a friendly government to the U.S., a government that cooperated from the start with national security interests of the U.S. In fact, when the U.S. approved the national security law in 1947 that created, for example, the Department of Defense and that created the CIA, Mexico created its own Dirección Federal de Seguriad,
[00:29:05]  kind of like the Federal Security Directorate, a federal police shaped in the model of the FBI, and that was actually created with FBI mentorship and guidance.
[00:29:18]  And we started immediately from the start following the lead of the U.S.
[00:29:23]  So what is it that this police did?
[00:29:25]  Well, it fought against communists, right?
[00:29:28]  Students who had sympathies with China or with global communism.
[00:29:34]  People who supposedly were infiltrated by the Soviets, right?
[00:29:38]  Of course, labor movements, teachers' movements, right?
[00:29:42]  And so we were a replica of the U.S. Cold War in our own territory.
[00:29:49]  And this is why, again, we didn't need regime change, right?
[00:29:52]  What we needed was just simply keep in alliance with the way the U.S. described national security.
[00:30:00]  So throughout those years was communism, and then by the late 80s, drug trafficking.
[00:30:05]  Yeah, and it's funny because prior to that, I mean, Mexico had sort of held the same position as like France in a way for people fleeing from a lot of these, you know, from Germany or Spain or places like that.
[00:30:16]  And then you're right, like in the post-World War II era, especially from the 1960s and 70s.
[00:30:21]  Yeah, I mean, maybe I'm reducing a lot of what the Mexican system back in those decades did, because it was truly a fascinating and complicated geopolitical environment, right?
[00:30:37]  Where Mexico was following closely the lead of the U.S. in national security ideas, but at the same time was sheltering, for example, refugees from Uruguay, from Argentina, from Chile, from the coups that happened in those countries.
[00:30:52]  Well, something you talk about in the book, and I'm going to mispronounce this word, even though I know how this word is pronounced, but sovereignty, sovereignty, sovereignty.
[00:31:01]  Yes.
[00:31:01]  You talk a lot about sovereignty in the book, or the concept of sovereignty, and both sovereignty of the Mexican state in terms of the cartels, but also in terms of the U.S.
[00:31:12]  Yes.
[00:31:13]  And it is interesting how that's portrayed because at least in America, the popular, I guess, portrayal of the Mexican state is a weakened state, right?
[00:31:29]  What's that?
[00:31:29]  A weakened state.
[00:31:30]  A very much weakened state and a permanent emerging market.
[00:31:34]  Right, yes.
[00:31:34]  Yes, yeah, exactly.
[00:31:35]  A permanent emerging market.
[00:31:36]  Or even a failed state.
[00:31:38]  Yeah, depending on perspective.
[00:31:41]  Right, right.
[00:31:41]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%.
[00:31:46]  But no such words are used to describe the U.S.'s relationship to the Mexican government.
[00:31:53]  Right.
[00:31:54]  It's a very interesting discussion, right?
[00:31:56]  Because I think from the start, we need to explain that under neoliberal rule and the neoliberal paradigm, the idea of the state gets implicitly weakened.
[00:32:10]  In the sense that supposedly you are to reduce the functions of the state to allow for the free flow of capital, right?
[00:32:18]  And in this sense, the size and the power of the state shrinks.
[00:32:24]  And as it does, other informal criminal economies emerge.
[00:32:31]  And of course, this is the conundrum for the neoliberal moment that we're living.

=== Emerging Cartels and State Decline (10:04) ===

[00:32:38]  But people like David Harvey or Wendy Brown, people who've studied neoliberalism with greater detail, would explain that not only that it's false, but to the contrary, the states like the Mexican state or the Colombian state have actually expanded in size, but not maybe for welfare of the people, but for security purposes.
[00:33:01]  So our security apparatus grew exponentially during the neoliberal era.
[00:33:08]  From the late 1980s to 2006, we doubled up the size of the military and the Marine.
[00:33:15]  And so what we have then is a very powerful security apparatus that can claim sovereignty of the territory and put all these criminal organizations in check.
[00:33:27]  And at the same time, we hear the idea that cartels are emerging and they're challenging the state.
[00:33:33]  And so what happens is that we create a false necessity for keep augmenting the size of the security apparatus.
[00:33:41]  And this is something that I keep bringing to the fore in my book.
[00:33:45]  If anything, the state in Mexico hasn't been weakened, right?
[00:33:49]  At least not in the security perspective.
[00:33:51]  To the contrary, we are oversaturated by the state.
[00:33:55]  The presence of the state is one of the most deep and profound catastrophic traumatic events of Mexican recent history.
[00:34:04]  Yeah, it's a funny paradox.
[00:34:06]  I think that you mentioned Wendy Brown, and she describes this kind of like, she says it's like a democratic deficit within the like neoliberal logic, which is like kind of perverse, where it's like, like you say, there's this sort of supposed weakening of the democratic institutions.
[00:34:24]  So you have a weakening and a kind of dissolving of public space, of Public, while at the same time, then to overcompensate for that deficit, you have this like the angry roar of the actual id of the state, of the security arm of the state.
[00:34:44]  And so you have this like weak state with these big border walls, you know what I mean?
[00:34:49]  And this like huge police force, and they go hand in hand.
[00:34:52]  Well, because there's a theatricality and a performative aspect to security, right?
[00:34:56]  So the border is always porous.
[00:34:59]  The borders are always in crisis, right?
[00:35:01]  Sometimes something's always about to go down, right?
[00:35:04]  Yeah, I think there's something real big.
[00:35:06]  Right now, they're doing that.
[00:35:07]  Exactly.
[00:35:08]  And they keep on going in that direction, right?
[00:35:10]  There's got to be a crisis, right?
[00:35:12]  Something has to be about to blow up so that you can continue justifying the very lucrative business of war.
[00:35:19]  This is where, for example, my friend Todd Miller, an independent reporter based in Arizona, has done with extraordinary detail.
[00:35:27]  His book that I recommend, by the way, is called Empire of Borders.
[00:35:31]  And what he does is he follows the trail of weapons and the security business that emerges from the global north into the global south.
[00:35:41]  He takes as a model the Israeli-Palestine conflict, right, and the very lucrative agenda that has produced all kinds of tremendous business for companies like Elvid Systems or Lockheed Martin, all these companies that sell weapons that use that model to replicate them in places like the U.S.-Mexico border or the borders in Central America.
[00:36:04]  And the very same people who showcase the weapons for governments to buy, you know, go and tour the world and they demonstrate what they are capable of doing.
[00:36:16]  And so, again, this is one of the big contradictions and paradoxes of the national security mentality.
[00:36:22]  They're telling us you need all this, right?
[00:36:24]  And create this monster border of enforcement and security and vigilance.
[00:36:31]  And what it really does is not fight against so-called cartels, but just fighting against poor people.
[00:36:38]  And this is something that we have seen over and over in the years of the so-called drug war.
[00:36:43]  The average victim of the drug war in Mexico tends to be young men from ages 19 to 25 who were poor and who were born poor and die poor, brown with no education, who died in the margins of the larger cities of Mexico.
[00:37:02]  No narcos, you know, in a big private jet, you know, with the lion and the next seat or something.
[00:37:09]  Right, right, exactly.
[00:37:10]  With you know, with the zoo, like, you know, they keep still to this day peddling the fantasy of Pablo Scovarino and the excesses of the Medellin Cartel.
[00:37:19]  Which, you know, part of that is true, of course, but it's also true that he died, you know, in the rooftop of Colombia and killed almost like an animal, right?
[00:37:30]  And in his photo of paraded, right, like a hunting prowess.
[00:37:38]  And so, what is really interesting then again is that we keep investing in the lucrative business of national security, but in order to do that, we need to keep talking about cartels, right?
[00:37:48]  We need to keep augmenting the fantasy that cartels are so powerful.
[00:37:52]  Now, of course, for example, the U.S. Discourse is using the idea of the narco-terrorist.
[00:37:56]  Yes.
[00:37:57]  So, you hear this.
[00:37:58]  I never actually saw Sicario 2, but the prayer rug at the beginning of Sicario 2 was pointed out as an example.
[00:38:04]  And this is kind of like Narcos 3.0, right?
[00:38:07]  I mean, talking about this continuous history of it, if you remember back in the day, Traffic, the trafficker that appeared in those years was some form of very tropical, sinister guy, you know, who has some capabilities, but it was pretty much on the Mexican side of the border.
[00:38:26]  Yeah, a sweaty Mexican businessman who would kill other Mexicans.
[00:38:30]  Exactly, exactly.
[00:38:31]  But the narco-terrorist of movies like Sicario is no longer bounded by the right, right?
[00:38:39]  Yeah, he's a world traveler, right?
[00:38:41]  Well, I mean, fastboard.
[00:38:42]  In the first Sicario, they first, I don't know if you remember the movie in detail, but they find these bodies inside walls of the security house, I think on the U.S. side of the border, somewhere in New Mexico, if I'm not mistaken.
[00:38:56]  So it's really interesting, right?
[00:38:57]  Because then Hollywood, what it does is that it absorbs and promotes propaganda, right?
[00:39:03]  But it changes and it shifts this.
[00:39:04]  It shifts with the propaganda discourse as it keeps on moving forward, right?
[00:39:09]  And so the years, you know, the late 90s, 2000s, you know, when Steven Soderbergh is doing traffic, they have a very different idea of the trafficking world.
[00:39:19]  There's a scene that I love to remember in Traffic that I think is just a perfect symptom for what those years meant of the so-called drug war.
[00:39:29]  I don't know if you remember, but it's Michael Douglas plays The Drug Czar.
[00:39:32]  I do remember that, yeah.
[00:39:34]  And he's visiting the U.S.-Mexico border.
[00:39:36]  I think he's by San Isidro across from Tijuana.
[00:39:39]  And they're right at the edge of the border.
[00:39:42]  He's with the non-trach of people working with him.
[00:39:45]  And he's given this, how do you say this?
[00:39:48]  Binoculars?
[00:39:48]  Binoculars.
[00:39:50]  I couldn't remember the word.
[00:39:50]  I was thinking the word only in Spanish only.
[00:39:53]  He's given these binoculars and he's looking across as almost as if they were on the warfront.
[00:40:00]  As if you could cross over.
[00:40:03]  And you can see the little guys in sombreros bringing over the bags of a chiche Uzis.
[00:40:11]  There's a big truck that comes out of a security house that has like a scorpion.
[00:40:16]  It's supposed to be a safe house.
[00:40:17]  In this case, it's weirdly gun-shaped.
[00:40:19]  I mean, basically on broad daylight, moving drugs, right?
[00:40:22]  And it's supposed to be a safe house.
[00:40:23]  How safe it is if you can see it from the US side.
[00:40:26]  But then, you know, not only is, of course, not only is very stupid, right?
[00:40:29]  The idea, the way they're portraying, but then he says, he asks the people around him, so who has my job on the Mexican side?
[00:40:36]  And then they say very worrisomely, well, nobody.
[00:40:39]  Nobody.
[00:40:40]  Oh my God.
[00:40:40]  So who do we talk to?
[00:40:42]  No one.
[00:40:43]  We just don't go across.
[00:40:44]  And this is the most extraordinary moment, right?
[00:40:47]  Because by 2000, there's been an entire decade of all kinds of treaties, of agreements, of basically coercion and extortion almost from the U.S. institutions in Mexico, not only to do what they say, but to even replicate the very post that the drug star had in the U.S.
[00:41:08]  We had a drug czar in Mexico by that time, right?
[00:41:11]  And it only existed because the U.S. willed that into existence.
[00:41:16]  So what is amazing of this movie is that it erases deliberately the entire present history of the brutal violence of the U.S. national security paradigm in Mexico and peddles this propaganda that Mexico is like some form of in rogue country that doesn't obey, that doesn't care, that doesn't even think of human value, right?
[00:41:39]  And just basically ruled and governed by traffickers.
[00:41:43]  And so it's just an astonishing moment because something is done in that movie that installs this idea of Latin America as this emptiness of lawlessness of violence.
[00:41:59]  And this is done, mind you, by a liberal filmmaker.
[00:42:04]  This is Steven Solover, who's supposed to be on the right side of history.
[00:42:10]  And he's portraying actually the drug war debate from the democratic perspective.
[00:42:15]  This is what some sociologists call the dove version of Hollywood, as opposed to the hawkish version.
[00:42:22]  So he's a dove filmmaker.
[00:42:24]  And when you really look at it, he's not.
[00:42:27]  He's a hawkish filmmaker, disguised as a dove filmmaker.
[00:42:31]  And this is what is so powerful about Hollywood propaganda, that it doesn't even look like propaganda, that it looks like the best intentions of the U.S. left.

=== Hollywood's Hidden Propaganda (04:23) ===

[00:42:42]  And this is what should give us the guiding lesson for what is then supposed to come later.
[00:42:50]  The film industry became so entangled and so intertwined and so penetrated by the national security paradigm, by the Department of Defense, DEA, supervising their scripts, their productions, that by the time you get to Sicario, they're just bidding their war.
[00:43:09]  They're doing exactly what they're told to do.
[00:43:12]  And so the very first scene, one of the first scenes in Mexico in Sicario, I'll never forget it because I keep being wondering And just in shock and awe by this thing is, I don't know if you remember, it's Benicio del Toro, who plays, I think, as a State Department agent.
[00:43:31]  I think he's like a former prosecutor turned hitman.
[00:43:34]  No, no, no.
[00:43:35]  He's a hitman, but he, I don't think he's Mexican.
[00:43:38]  I think he's supposed to be Colombian.
[00:43:39]  I forget.
[00:43:40]  But he's now a State Department agent and then turns out to be CIA.
[00:43:44]  And he is with Emily Blunt, who's an FBI agent.
[00:43:47]  And they're coming across the border by Juarez, right?
[00:43:49]  They're driving on the El Paso side.
[00:43:51]  I'm from Ciudad Juarez, right?
[00:43:52]  I'm from that city.
[00:43:53]  And they're looking at it and then they look at it and say something like, here it is.
[00:43:59]  The beast.
[00:44:00]  It's like Juarez.
[00:44:02]  The beast.
[00:44:03]  And then they go into Juarez, right?
[00:44:04]  And just as they cross the border, of course, they see tons of bodies hanging out.
[00:44:09]  This jungle of violence and death.
[00:44:12]  And then they're coming back across the bridge and there's a shooting, you know, with this almost like animalized killers, right?
[00:44:19]  Yeah, it's a very famous scene.
[00:44:21]  They're like tribal looking.
[00:44:23]  Right, right, right.
[00:44:23]  I mean, they're very psychopaths, you know, that really look in a very racist way.
[00:44:28]  Like, like I kept thinking now of the Bukele prisons, right, in Salvadora.
[00:44:33]  They actually look like MS-13 guys.
[00:44:35]  Absolutely.
[00:44:36]  And that's where they were going for.
[00:44:38]  And I kept thinking, you know, what would it have been like to watch that movie in a Juarez movie theater, right?
[00:44:46]  What would it be like for people watching this, like, oh, we live in the belly of the beast and we didn't realize it, right?
[00:44:52]  My parents were living there.
[00:44:54]  My brother, my nephews, I go to Juarez all the time, right?
[00:44:58]  And just seeing my city and then my country portrayed at this, you know, like Trump would say, a shithole country, right?
[00:45:06]  It's not only just shocking, but extraordinary because most people accepted the film even in Mexico, right?
[00:45:13]  I mean, they were like, oh, it was cool, that was entertaining, you know.
[00:45:16]  And this is really the danger of propaganda, right?
[00:45:18]  It doesn't really look like it.
[00:45:20]  I mean, they're basically criminalizing the entire country.
[00:45:24]  But for the sake of entertainment, you really don't notice it, right?
[00:45:26]  And this keeps happening in series like Nauticals and all kinds of productions.
[00:45:33]  Yeah, I mean, that scene, I remember watching that scene and just, you know, yeah, it's just got me out of my head for a little bit when you're saying, you know, imagine being in that movie theater, also surrounded by all other American pro-you know, you got Coca-Cola everywhere and popcorn and trailers for all over the movies.
[00:45:50]  And then this aside and it doesn't look anything like that.
[00:45:52]  Right.
[00:45:53]  And this is a movie, if I'm not mistaken, written by Taylor Sheridan, who is the scriptwriter of Sicario, who then became the producer of Yellowstone.
[00:46:04]  I don't know if you've seen that.
[00:46:05]  I have not yet, although I know everyone's a freak for it.
[00:46:08]  It is.
[00:46:09]  And it's one of those things that I didn't know was happening, and then I saw everywhere.
[00:46:13]  I saw everyone's going for a high Western sublime.
[00:46:16]  Absolutely.
[00:46:16]  Absolutely.
[00:46:18]  He's kind of like a liberal Republican.
[00:46:20]  Right, right.
[00:46:20]  Like, like, you know, man from a little bit out of time, and now he's in, yeah, yeah, that's and what is amazing about that series, I mean, and how it, you know, it plays well with the imagination of a film like Sicario, is that it gives it a very complacent view of what the U.S. supposed to be and do, right?
[00:46:40]  So, from the Yellowstone perspective, it's these white cowboys, you know, who founded places like Texas and Montana, right?
[00:46:47]  And you know, they're down to the ground and they're really great men.
[00:46:52]  And you know, in a very woke way, you know, they respect women and they're just awesome people to be around, but they're very masculine, but they're not toxic.
[00:47:00]  Yeah, yeah, not toxic.
[00:47:01]  You know, the good kind of masculine.
[00:47:03]  Exactly, exactly.
[00:47:03]  So, they're good men.
[00:47:04]  They're cleansed from the toxicity.

=== Good Kind of Masculine (04:17) ===

[00:47:06]  And so, the same writer then looks at Mexico and it's like, all these assholes, you know, they're just criminal psychopaths.
[00:47:12]  So, don't even dare to cross the border because they'll kill you.
[00:47:16]  And that for me is just so problematic, right?
[00:47:18]  Of course, not only because I'm Mexican, but because it is racializing, right, not just my country's history, but in opposition to U.S. history.
[00:47:28]  So, the country that militarizes my country then washes its own face, right, and appears to be the good guy by the same writer who then looks at me and said, No, you're the criminal.
[00:47:40]  Yeah.
[00:47:40]  Well, it's interesting too.
[00:47:42]  We talk about national security as well.
[00:47:44]  And, you know, there's the famous case of like the origins of the Zetas, right?
[00:47:47]  Right.
[00:47:48]  These people trained at, I think, what was formerly School of the Americas.
[00:47:53]  I don't know what they call it now.
[00:47:54]  They might still call it School of the Americas.
[00:47:55]  Right, right, right.
[00:47:56]  No, it's called it.
[00:47:57]  But, you know, this sort of like center that has given birth to all of these assassins and killers.
[00:48:04]  And that's exactly one of the most important points, right?
[00:48:07]  Yeah.
[00:48:07]  A lot of the military, not just the SETAs, right?
[00:48:11]  Specialized forces in Mexico, for example, the special forces of the Marines in Mexico.
[00:48:15]  Yeah.
[00:48:16]  And also city and state police agents that compose special units to fight the drug war, they all have received training in the U.S.
[00:48:25]  Yeah, right?
[00:48:26]  So they become efficient killers, right?
[00:48:29]  Not only the training, but the political support and literally the gear and the weapons to use them.
[00:48:35]  And this is part, of course, of not just the long history, but even recent history.
[00:48:40]  President Bush and then President Obama supported President Calderon in the first deployments of the drug war under what it was called then Iniciativa Merida, right?
[00:48:49]  The Merida Initiative, that gave them about $3 billion and all kinds of support and training.
[00:48:56]  But now, of course, this is renewed in all kinds of other cooperation treatments and agreements to keep supporting it, right?
[00:49:05]  So what is amazing then is that you have a security apparatus that is shaped, modeled, and set forth against people by the U.S. discourse, but also with explicit political and economic support.
[00:49:19]  And when you look at what they've done, then that's when you really become resentful, right?
[00:49:25]  Like I am.
[00:49:25]  Yeah, yeah, understandably.
[00:49:27]  The lethality index of the Mexican armed forces is the highest in percentage of other Latin American countries, even those that are very securitarian in nature, like Brazil, for example.
[00:49:39]  Sal Salvador, like we mentioned, which, by the way, has its own film industry, legitimizing.
[00:49:44]  I mean, my God, that is, yeah, I do.
[00:49:48]  And so this is extraordinary, right?
[00:49:50]  Because there you could see another phenomenon that happens a lot in culture, which is the conflation of all these narratives of national security.
[00:50:00]  For example, the guy who played one of the most famous cops fighting the drug war in Brazil was actor Wagner Mora, who then became Pablo Scovar, right, in the series Narcos, right?
[00:50:11]  So he went from cop to narco, right?
[00:50:14]  And from Brazilian cop to Colombian narcos.
[00:50:17]  He had to learn, you know, Spanish, of course, in a very fake way.
[00:50:20]  I mean, if you're Latin American, you can hear his accent, of course, doesn't make any sense.
[00:50:24]  The same happens for Benicio El Toro, right?
[00:50:26]  Benicio El Toro played the Mexican cop in Tijuana in traffic, then became Caro Quintero, the Mexican trafficker from the 1980s, then became Pablo Scobar also himself, right?
[00:50:37]  And in an interview, Benicio El Toro used to say, well, you know, if you want to be an aspiring actor, our Hamlet is Pablo Scovar.
[00:50:46]  So don't play Hamlet if you're a Latin American actor.
[00:50:49]  Play Pablo Scovar.
[00:50:50]  That's your litmus test, right?
[00:50:52]  That's when you know that you become a great and accomplished actor.
[00:50:55]  Oh my God.
[00:50:57]  So it's extraordinary, right?
[00:50:58]  Because this is a Puerto Rican actor that moves across countries, right?
[00:51:02]  Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, whatever.
[00:51:04]  And it doesn't matter, right?
[00:51:06]  And it doesn't matter because we are looking at it from the perspective of the U.S. consumer, right?
[00:51:11]  That has no subtleties in the differences between the countries, but in the end doesn't care because it is a Latin American narcoto anyway, right?
[00:51:19]  It doesn't matter.
[00:51:20]  A narco can come from any of those countries.

=== Hard Worker Stereotype (03:12) ===

[00:51:23]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:51:24]  I mean, the thing is, too, like, as an American, I'm actually one of the worst people to speak on this because I am one of the world's worst consumers of media in general.
[00:51:33]  I am too.
[00:51:33]  I am too.
[00:51:33]  I mean, you have to consume in order to criticize it.
[00:51:36]  Yeah, but like, it's like the American sort of media portrayal of Mexico in general is, I would say, almost always either a like crazy, fiery Latino woman who's like, it is sort of like a culture clash with maybe an uptight guy of another race.
[00:51:54]  I'm right there with you.
[00:51:56]  Or narcos, right?
[00:51:58]  Like, I mean, it is a country directly next to ours.
[00:52:02]  You know, there's, there's, I mean, especially being from California, like half the people I've known my whole life are, you know, either from Mexico or their parents are from Mexico.
[00:52:09]  But the only real media representation you see of Mexico is exactly.
[00:52:14]  Always violence or this sort of like sweating sensuality.
[00:52:19]  And I take a lot of crap for it for having this position, but I must.
[00:52:25]  I can't think otherwise.
[00:52:27]  For example, just lately they're celebrating that the World Billboard is taken by three Mexican songs, right?
[00:52:33]  Some bad bunny and some Norteño band, Guerpo Frontera or something.
[00:52:37]  And then this guy, Peso Pluma, who has been making the rounds even in the late talk shows in the U.S. I think he went to the Jimmy Fallon show or something.
[00:52:46]  And these songs not only are very distasteful, but this idea of sex and I'm out there and missing you and I just want to be with you, baby, baby, mommy, mommy.
[00:52:57]  I don't know.
[00:52:58]  It's just, it drives me crazy, right?
[00:52:59]  Because that's exactly what the mentality of making us appear in U.S. visibility and media ends up being, right?
[00:53:09]  We either play the trafficker, the criminal, or we are sexual objects, right?
[00:53:14]  Or I would say the other thing, too, the thing that those are always based against is a hard worker.
[00:53:22]  Absolutely.
[00:53:22]  I think also like – Or on the flip side, not a hard worker.
[00:53:27]  Not a hard worker.
[00:53:27]  Well, it's funny because, yeah, I think sort of like that's like the hawkish thing.
[00:53:31]  The poor refugee that has to be a lot of people.
[00:53:33]  The poor refugee and sort of like the simple hard worker, I think, is like how a lot of Americans would like to see like good Mexicans and the bad Mexicans are like the lazy Mexican serves you food and costs a lot in an orderly way and respects the law.
[00:53:48]  The other ones are just crazy drinking tequila and shooting people.
[00:53:52]  Yeah, 100%.
[00:53:54]  And there's never room for just a citizen, right?
[00:53:56]  Like just a normal citizen who doesn't do any of those things and can have an education and contribute in other shapes or forms in this country.
[00:54:08]  But going back to traffic, I think that's why the history of how we consume these objects is so important because it ends up being even more dramatically decisive than official discourse itself.
[00:54:22]  And so when I started studying these cultural products, I realized there's like a chain of production, right?
[00:54:30]  The official paradigm begins with the institutions saying something about the trafficker, right?

=== Why Top Gun Matters (02:07) ===

[00:54:35]  The DEA saying Dolo Chapo is the largest, the biggest criminal mine in history of the drug trade.
[00:54:42]  And then it goes through a first filter, which is journalism, right?
[00:54:46]  And this is something that I criticize a lot in my book.
[00:54:49]  A lot of the journalists, the most visible journalists in the U.S. and in Mexico that covered the drug war followed the script, to the letter of the DEA.
[00:54:59]  They started talking about drug organizations as they were supposedly the biggest national security threats.
[00:55:04]  And then on a third level are the cultural products, which received this discourse already legitimized by the media.
[00:55:12]  And they received that in the most naive and predictable way, right?
[00:55:17]  Because most writers for TV shows or for film, they think they do research, but they don't.
[00:55:24]  What they do is they take the most visible journalistic product out there and then they listen to maybe official discourse on TV and then they form their own opinion, which is not really an opinion, but a mediation.
[00:55:38]  They basically replicate what they hear in the legitimized discourse, right?
[00:55:44]  And so they end up reproducing a state mentality.
[00:55:48]  So what you consume for the most part is a state thought, right?
[00:55:52]  Something that the state first articulated and that we end up consuming and thinking that is the real.
[00:55:59]  There's been many studies of audiences, of series like Nauticos, and people who consume these things believe that they're looking some form of documentary product, right?
[00:56:09]  That it brings some form of history to their screen.
[00:56:13]  And that's really the danger, right?
[00:56:14]  When they confuse propaganda with history.
[00:56:17]  And on the flip side, it's important to watch and read and listen to because it's a way of understanding how the state wants to articulate itself.
[00:56:26]  That's why I watch it, right?
[00:56:27]  It's a symptomatic viewing.
[00:56:29]  I end up hating it, but you know, it's also entertaining.
[00:56:32]  And that's part of the trick, right?
[00:56:34]  I mean, I'm thinking, for example, Top Gun.
[00:56:38]  You know, the new movie, right?
[00:56:40]  The new Top Gun.
[00:56:41]  Everyone loved it.

=== State Mentality Reproduction (16:09) ===

[00:56:42]  Right.
[00:56:43]  Well, I watched it and it's very entertaining.
[00:56:45]  I remember the first one I re-watched just to make sense out of this.
[00:56:48]  And what is really extraordinary about the new Top Gun is that it's a celebration of these pilots, right, and their skill.
[00:56:55]  Yeah.
[00:56:56]  And the history of U.S. pilots and the things that they're capable of doing in a moment when most of military operations are done by drones.
[00:57:07]  That's what I say.
[00:57:08]  When pilots are not really needed.
[00:57:10]  But the idea of the pilot.
[00:57:11]  That's why the idea of the pilot is so needed.
[00:57:14]  Absolutely.
[00:57:14]  But this is the same thing that happens with Nauticals, right?
[00:57:17]  We talk about the pilots, we look at Tom Cruise, like, oh my God, that guy's a hero.
[00:57:21]  The same way we look at traffickers, right?
[00:57:23]  We look at somebody on the screen that has no real model, right?
[00:57:27]  That doesn't mean anything, that doesn't serve any purpose, right?
[00:57:30]  The pilot is an outdated technology for military purposes.
[00:57:34]  The same as the trafficker.
[00:57:35]  The trafficker exists, but he's irrelevant when it comes to understanding national security.
[00:57:41]  He's just the pretext, right?
[00:57:43]  He's the object of the story, but he has no real relevance in the world.
[00:57:48]  Yeah.
[00:57:48]  Which is why it's such perfect, like the perfect fabric for the movies and for entertainment.
[00:57:53]  Well, and you can keep on bringing any, in a new season, a new trafficker like they do in real life.
[00:57:59]  Now that chap was captured, right?
[00:58:01]  You know, they can always come to the storage and they'll find new traffickers.
[00:58:06]  Right now it's their children, his children, right, who are supposed to be the real culprits for fentanyl, right?
[00:58:14]  Okay.
[00:58:14]  So now that the new DEA tune is that Mexico is solely responsible for fentanyl and that especially Chapo's children are the ones who are supposed to be really the heads of fentanyl.
[00:58:26]  Well, Chapo's son was just captured, right?
[00:58:29]  And from prison, he sent a letter to the media.
[00:58:32]  And this is something really interesting.
[00:58:34]  This just happened about four days ago, where he and his brothers basically say two things.
[00:58:40]  One, you know, they don't deal fentanyl, that's what they say.
[00:58:43]  I mean, and mind you, of course, you don't have to believe them, right?
[00:58:45]  I mean, just like I'm here questioning official discourse, I'm also supposed to question, and I do, you know, what traffickers say.
[00:58:52]  But what is really interesting is they say two things.
[00:58:54]  A, you know, they don't do fentanyl, but B, more importantly, people keep talking about them as if they somehow headed this organization called the Sinaloa Cartel.
[00:59:05]  And they basically say, well, no such a thing really exists.
[00:59:08]  You know, what they call Sinaloa Cartel is a horizontal field of multiple producers and traffickers that work independently, he says.
[00:59:17]  And they don't bring any money to us.
[00:59:20]  They're not subject to any accountability.
[00:59:21]  They do their own business.
[00:59:22]  Sometimes they are related to us for operational purposes, but most of the times they just work on their own.
[00:59:29]  And people use this word, the Sina Loa Cartel, just politically to legitimize the monetization and whatnot.
[00:59:36]  But in reality, he says there's no such a thing.
[00:59:38]  And then they moved on to talk about culture.
[00:59:42]  And they say, look, a lot of the film, a lot of the music that you hear that portray our lives, they're just based on bullshit.
[00:59:51]  They have no idea what it's about, anything.
[00:59:54]  They have no real insider information.
[00:59:57]  And this is consistent at least with the way traffickers talk about themselves throughout history whenever they have a chance to do this independently directly to the media.
[01:00:09]  Because they don't really get the opportunity to do that.
[01:00:11]  I mean, Chapo, right, right.
[01:00:14]  Yeah, because I mean, most traffickers you hear either have already been caught, and so they're talking in some process.
[01:00:20]  For example, in the Chapos trial, they used a lot of traffickers in prison already to say, yeah, no, he was the badass monster and he was our boss and he ordered us to kill a thousand people, whatever.
[01:00:30]  But when they talk about the business by themselves, separately, independently, they all say kind of the same thing.
[01:00:36]  First, they say they live very precarious lives, not in the sense that they're poor.
[01:00:40]  Oh, they're part of the precariat?
[01:00:43]  But not in the sense that they're poor contractors.
[01:00:44]  In the sense that their quality of life is not great, right?
[01:00:48]  I mean, yeah, I got to be real.
[01:00:50]  Like, I mean, just, you know, I would love a lion, right?
[01:00:53]  But like, if you have a lion, but you have to live in like with a lion.
[01:00:57]  Yeah, with one point.
[01:00:59]  But like, you know, it's like the sort of like mafia bosses or whatever.
[01:01:03]  Right.
[01:01:04]  They end up having to live in these really secluded areas.
[01:01:07]  That's what I'm talking about by percharacting.
[01:01:09]  And being totally cut off from normal life.
[01:01:11]  Right.
[01:01:11]  And always watching their back.
[01:01:12]  And they don't really enjoy much because they know their time is coming and it's coming fast.
[01:01:18]  Practicing, digging their tunnels.
[01:01:20]  Right.
[01:01:20]  And then the second thing they say that is also very consistent is that nothing happens if you kill or send a big boss to prison.
[01:01:29]  Nothing is altered in the business.
[01:01:31]  It's not suddenly that the price of cocaine is going to rise because El Chapo was captured.
[01:01:35]  Like, you know, like Warren Buffett died and then, you know, Berkshire collapses.
[01:01:40]  Nothing like that happens in the world of drug trafficking.
[01:01:44]  And they explain why, because they're just one among many other people who are involved in the business.
[01:01:49]  They don't control anything to that larger scale.
[01:01:54]  And I think history gives them, proves them right.
[01:01:57]  Every time somebody falls, like El Chapo, nothing happens in the greater world of drug trafficking.
[01:02:04]  But even more importantly, nothing really is demonstrated beyond what the DA says.
[01:02:10]  In the Chapo trial, they were able to pinpoint $14 billion for his entire career.
[01:02:19]  $14 billion.
[01:02:20]  Of course, it's a lot of money for us, for normal people.
[01:02:24]  But in the world of organized crime, it's not much.
[01:02:29]  If you think, for example, that the Office of Drug Control from the UN claims that the cocaine market should render you about $30 billion annually, right?
[01:02:40]  And instead, Chapo only supposedly, according to the DA, what the DA was able to demonstrate, only gained about $14 billion in about 20 years of being the head accumulator, 14 billion years, $14 billion, I'm sorry, $14 billion in his entire career, spanning about 20 years, more or less.
[01:03:00]  The legal cannabis industry in the U.S. now surpasses that figure in one single year.
[01:03:07]  I mean, we're talking over 20 billion of the legal cannabis industry in the U.S., in those states that it's been legalized.
[01:03:16]  So it's extraordinary, right?
[01:03:17]  So the myth of the king pin completely crumbles and collapses when you really get to look at it directly in a process like the trial that they did on the Chapo.
[01:03:41]  Well, we have to wrap up soon, but I think we'd be remiss not to talk about the current president of Mexico and especially in relation to a lot of the things you talk about in your book.
[01:03:53]  The war on drugs features very prominently in your book.
[01:03:56]  And Amlo famously ended or publicly ended the war on drugs.
[01:04:01]  And we also have talked quite a bit about the military, and a lot has been made of the fact that the military has gained an even more prominent role within AMLO's administration.
[01:04:13]  What was your reaction, I guess, to hearing him talk about ending the war on drugs?
[01:04:17]  Because I will say, you make a very deft point in that, yes, the deployment of the military to all of these cities in around 2006 was concurrent with a massive spike in the news.
[01:04:30]  And homicides.
[01:04:31]  Yeah, and homicides and deaths and with sort of the rise of the cartel.
[01:04:37]  The so-called rise of the cartel.
[01:04:38]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:04:39]  But the cartel as such, right?
[01:04:42]  But AMLO seemed to be speaking publicly, but trying to a different course on this.
[01:04:49]  Well, I mean, like everybody else, you know, sympathizing with the left in Mexico, I was happy when he got elected.
[01:04:56]  I voted for him.
[01:04:57]  And I'm still enthusiastic about different things that his presidency has brought.
[01:05:03]  And of course, I was hopeful when he announced the ending of the drug war.
[01:05:08]  But what he meant by that in 2019, when he took office, was that he was suspending immediately all military operations related to what the U.S. called the kingping strategy, right?
[01:05:21]  The idea that you pursue and tackle the head of a cartel, and once you do, supposedly the organization falls apart.
[01:05:30]  And of course, we know that the end result is quite the opposite, and violence rises, and we have seen this bloodshed.
[01:05:38]  So I think he was very justified in trying to put an end to this.
[01:05:44]  And so he did so in 2019.
[01:05:46]  And some effect of this was very positive in the first months.
[01:05:53]  I can give you a couple examples.
[01:05:55]  For example, in that same year, in 2019, two things happened.
[01:06:00]  There was a group of people extracting illegally oil and gas from pipelines in especially in the state of Guanajuato, right, in central Mexico.
[01:06:12]  And one of those pipelines exploded when they were trying to extract illegally by poking holes into the pipeline directly.
[01:06:20]  As opposed to going with the military to arrest everyone or even shoot everyone that were in the near vicinity, AMLO ordered medical assistance, helped everyone, didn't bring any charges to anyone, and basically treated this as a tragedy, where desperate people were hurt by this illegal activity.
[01:06:47]  Then you move to late 2019 when the military ordered the arrest of El Chapo's son, Ovidio Guzmán in the city of Culiacán without the president's consent.
[01:07:01]  And this is something also extraordinary because it tells you how the military had its inertia fighting the drug war and disobeyed directly the presidential policy of ending all operations.
[01:07:16]  And they tried to capture him, the operation failed, and AMLO ordered all the military personnel to leave the city of Culiacan.
[01:07:26]  This was portrayed as a big triumph for the traffickers.
[01:07:30]  Not at all.
[01:07:31]  I mean, first of all, the military outnumbered the traffickers eight to one, according to media reports.
[01:07:38]  They could have easily apprehended him and killed a lot of people on the way.
[01:07:42]  But AMLO refused to.
[01:07:44]  And he publicly stated, well, we don't want just to kill people over one trafficker.
[01:07:49]  I don't see the point in doing that.
[01:07:51]  And very candidly, put himself out there to take all kinds of criticism, but I thought it was the right move, and I still believe it was the right move.
[01:08:00]  However, by 2020, he started talking more in depth with his military commanders and what we have, I guess, the equivalent of the Joint Chiefs in Mexico.
[01:08:15]  And of course, U.S. pressure continued.
[01:08:18]  And so by the end of 2020, a very different tune started being uttered from Presidential Palace.
[01:08:25]  So well, we're going to keep having the military presence.
[01:08:29]  We're going to create a new federal force, a new federal police called the National Guard that was supposed to replace the military in all security operations in Mexico.
[01:08:39]  But it turned out to be just an extension of the military that is now under the control of the armed forces.
[01:08:46]  And so we're back to the militarization of the country.
[01:08:49]  Not under civilian control.
[01:08:50]  And not only that, we are back to operations of trying to capture traffickers.
[01:08:56]  And of course, they, in the end, ended up capturing the son, the same son of Chapo Guzmán, with a much larger military force.
[01:09:04]  Over, I believe it was over 3,000 soldiers that came to get him in Culiacán with this horrible display of violence and whatnot.
[01:09:15]  And so I'm sad to say that in the greater scheme of things, AML is just acting the normal securitarian way.
[01:09:24]  So I am disappointed, of course, but I'm not surprised in the sense that he's just responding to the logic of the militarization that goes on all across the continent.
[01:09:33]  This is what happens in Colombia, I know, with the drug war.
[01:09:36]  This is what happens with President Bukele in El Salvador.
[01:09:40]  And what is this thing that then is happening?
[01:09:43]  Well, the militarization is targeting consistently poor brown people in poor areas of the country.
[01:09:51]  That's really what this drug war is doing.
[01:09:55]  And it's advancing geopolitical interests of the U.S. and transnational companies.
[01:10:00]  And in the name of security, we keep on going with the destruction of civil society.
[01:10:05]  What do you think accounts for the shift in his, I don't know, orientation, let's say, towards the military?
[01:10:15]  Well, I think it's a combination of factors.
[01:10:17]  Well, first, like I mentioned, there's strong pressure by national pressure from the U.S. and not just the U.S. alone, right?
[01:10:26]  It's a transnational idea that you have to fight the drug war, right?
[01:10:30]  And it comes from different institutions, not just the U.S., like I said, but the EU, the UN, and different organizations also within Mexico, of course, and the right in Mexico that is very heavily interested in promoting the drug war.
[01:10:46]  And then it comes from the military itself.
[01:10:49]  The military has, like I mentioned, grown tremendously in influence and in budget.
[01:10:55]  And their domestic presence is so extraordinary that it's difficult to let it go.
[01:11:02]  I mean, once you control the territory and exert a form of sovereignty over different parts of Mexico, why would you willingly cede that power and control?
[01:11:16]  And for what purpose?
[01:11:18]  And along with it, and this is something that I also study in my new book, you have the question of the national security discourse diversifying its object.
[01:11:30]  So it's not just the trafficker that is at stake in the narrative, but also undocumented migration, terrorism, and just simply human displacement altogether becomes a question of national security.
[01:11:45]  So the militarization is not just aimed at fighting traffickers, it's also aimed at human smugglers, people who smuggle avocado, people who are engaged in oil theft, all kinds of other things, extortion, kidnapping.
[01:12:03]  And all those aspects of criminality are often conflated with the trafficker.
[01:12:08]  So the trafficker becomes the stand-in metaphor for everything that goes wrong in Mexican society.
[01:12:14]  So it's very difficult to cut it short, right?
[01:12:17]  Because you can claim, for example, that marijuana is out of the game now that it's legalized.
[01:12:23]  But then here comes fentanyl, a synthetic drug that only needs precursors from China and very easily manufactured in small labs that can go undetected.
[01:12:36]  And so you can rearm the narrative of national security.
[01:12:41]  For that purpose, you end up needing the military again and again and again.
[01:12:46]  And so often I am asked, what is my stand when it comes to legalizing drugs?

=== Displaced By Extraction (08:21) ===

[01:12:52]  And of course, like any reasonable person, intelligent person, I am for it.
[01:12:57]  I think we should legalize all drugs immediately and cease the criminalization of consumers, especially.
[01:13:03]  But that would not solve violence in Mexico altogether because as the DA already astutely tells us, cartels are not even about drugs anymore.
[01:13:13]  I mean, they're about whatever you want it.
[01:13:15]  It's more, I mean, that's from what I mean.
[01:13:18]  I understand just the, and I do, I think it is, I agree with you.
[01:13:22]  Like, I think like saying these drug traffickers are doing all these other things too is misleading because from what I understand, it's not even just the drugs, it's like the governors of some of these states.
[01:13:31]  Right, right.
[01:13:32]  You know what I mean?
[01:13:32]  Like, this is, we had on, we were talking about earlier, this guy, Seth Harp, and he very astutely talked to us about this.
[01:13:38]  Like, it's like, it's not just like, you know, this cartel is also engaged in these other criminal activities.
[01:13:44]  It's like part and parcel with like officers, high-up officers of the state.
[01:13:49]  Yeah, and I think that, so in the end, the word cartel is what in political theory is called an empty signifying.
[01:13:56]  Yeah, I was going to say the empty vase.
[01:13:58]  Right.
[01:13:58]  It's a concept that floats around, right?
[01:14:00]  That you can re-signify historically with whatever content you want.
[01:14:05]  So if the drug cartel peddling heroin or cocaine was something that drove the national security mentality in the 90s, now, of course, the traffickers have become parallel to narco-terrorists, right?
[01:14:20]  The organizations that are just out there, you know, terrorizing civil society on both sides of the border and that engage in all kinds of sophisticated crime, including, for example, oil theft and gas resources, et cetera.
[01:14:34]  So, for example, now some cartels are even blamed for illegal extraction of energy resources in parts of the country where, ironically, where the extraction is done mainly by transnational companies from China, from Canada, from the UK, and of course from the US.
[01:14:55]  Don't forget the big boys.
[01:14:57]  So, for example, in the years of the reign of terror of Las Cetas in the state of Tamaulipas, you had one of the largest projects for laying up pipelines all across the state and across the border, all the way to California, by one of the largest companies for energy.
[01:15:19]  And in that exploration of the market, in extraction of gas, all kinds of transnational companies come along.
[01:15:26]  And with the help and support of both the US and the Mexican government, it is very easily done.
[01:15:32]  And so one has to wonder how is it possible that in a territory that is taken supposedly by cartels, engineers can very quickly and easily create and lay this pipeline and extract natural gas.
[01:15:47]  And so this question, of course, is only answered politically, right?
[01:15:52]  Because it seems to be that there are two separate Mexicos, right?
[01:15:56]  One that is ripe for investment, for foreign investment, for all kinds of entrepreneurship, right?
[01:16:01]  And that is open for business from China, from Europe, from the US.
[01:16:06]  And then at the same time, simultaneously, the very same territory is a site for traffickers, for terrorists.
[01:16:13]  And the militarization is needed to fight them because otherwise Mexico is a failed state.
[01:16:18]  So it's very extraordinary to hear both debates happening.
[01:16:23]  If you listen to podcasts for world business.
[01:16:26]  Don't do that.
[01:16:27]  Well, I mean, I do because I need to inform myself about how they're sounding these things.
[01:16:33]  They seem to talk about Northern Mexico like this new land for business, right?
[01:16:40]  And that is generous, that is easy to invest.
[01:16:43]  You have Tesla coming to the state of Navalon, BP, Chevron, all these companies that are involved in the extraction of gas.
[01:16:52]  And the electrical revolution, right?
[01:16:55]  The clean energies.
[01:16:57]  You have aeolic parks in southern Mexico.
[01:17:00]  And in those very same places, you have cartel activity.
[01:17:04]  And you have the militarization supposedly fighting the bad guys.
[01:17:09]  Some journalists have pointed out that in many of these places, the function of the military is to facilitate the extraction of resources.
[01:17:21]  And in some cases, violence works to depopulate communal lands, to displace the market.
[01:17:28]  Yeah, the clearing out for the creation of new markets.
[01:17:31]  Exactly.
[01:17:31]  And when you're pushing people out by violence, nobody's asking questions.
[01:17:35]  There's no political resistance.
[01:17:37]  There's no environmental militants trying to protect the land because cartels are crazily killing people left and right.
[01:17:47]  And so in the end, this is what my friend and colleague Don Bailey called, this is drug war capitalism, right?
[01:17:57]  This is one way in which capitalism uses, instrumentalizes the idea of national security to advance transnational interests.
[01:18:08]  Well, the book is so fantastic.
[01:18:10]  I really do.
[01:18:11]  With such a provocative title as well.
[01:18:14]  Title Provokes.
[01:18:16]  Thank you, guys.
[01:18:18]  We'll definitely link to it in the notes.
[01:18:19]  And I'm looking forward to your second book, or your not second book, but your new book.
[01:18:25]  There's still not an English translation.
[01:18:27]  The book is called, the new book is called, I realize I never said the title, La Guerra en las Palabras, which I guess translates roughly like a war within words.
[01:18:37]  And I call it an intellectual history of the Narco in quotations in Mexico.
[01:18:44]  And it covers the years 1975 to 2020 to the AMLO presidency, from Operation Connor to the AMLO presidency.
[01:18:52]  And what I do in this book is I research national archives in the U.S. and in Mexico, presidential archives, institutional archives like the DA, the FBI.
[01:19:04]  And what I try to piece together is the operation, the first emergence of all these concepts, the idea of cartel, the idea of the boss of bosses, silver or lead, all these expressions, and how they fit into this greater narrative that keeps radicalizing across decades until we got to what I call the simulated war of President Calderon.
[01:19:28]  And by simulation, I mean that they're supposedly fighting an enemy that requires military force when in reality what they were doing is occupying the territory and harming the most vulnerable and least protected parts of society, right?
[01:19:47]  The poor for the most part, and people displaced in entire regions.
[01:19:52]  We have, I mean, there's so much to talk about, but I could just simply wrap it up saying that we have one of the largest populations for internal displacement in Latin America.
[01:20:04]  Of course, Colombia was the most affected by this, over 6 million people displaced.
[01:20:09]  But in Mexico, numbers are not exactly known because there's not an official tally about this.
[01:20:16]  But people talk about anything in the range of 500,000 to a million people internally displaced.
[01:20:23]  And this is in part what we're seeing also at the U.S.-Mexico border, right?
[01:20:28]  People seeking asylum coming from this context of extreme violence where they have been literally pushed out by the armed forces, trained and supported and backed by the U.S. You know, narcos may not exist, but narcs definitely do.
[01:20:54]  I'll demonstrate that for you right now.
[01:20:56]  A guy named Ham Han sold me $40 bags of cocaine at the beauty bar for a number of years in San Francisco.
[01:21:01]  If you are a police agent or in the DEA, hit me up and I will, for the small sum of $500,000, give you his cell phone number.

=== Narc Culture Confessions (02:02) ===

[01:21:14]  I used to tell people, Liz, I used to tell people that people asked what I would do at parties and stuff.
[01:21:21]  This is like a number of years ago.
[01:21:22]  I would be like, oh, I narc.
[01:21:23]  Like, if I buy Coke from a guy at a bar, like, I'll call the police and sell their information.
[01:21:28]  You know, like someone tells me like $20 for the Coke, I'll just turn him in for a reward and stuff like that.
[01:21:32]  And you just look him straight in the eyes and go, business is booming.
[01:21:35]  Business is crazy.
[01:21:36]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:21:37]  And then I asked for, was I with, I was with somebody recently when somebody, no, I wasn't with you, I don't think.
[01:21:45]  Somebody came up to me and was like, do you have any drugs to sell?
[01:21:49]  And it was like, I know you're not a narc because police narcs are not that stupid.
[01:21:56]  You know what I mean?
[01:21:57]  But what are you?
[01:21:58]  What do you mean, do you have any drugs to sell like on your person?
[01:22:01]  Yeah, I'm like, like where you're going to like open your coat and be like, well, yes, check out my wares.
[01:22:05]  And then like all these things kind of like, all these little bags like slink, you know, drop down.
[01:22:10]  It was at a party.
[01:22:11]  I have actually no, I feel like this might have been in LA.
[01:22:14]  It was at a party.
[01:22:15]  And I have, I was so weird.
[01:22:17]  I was like, no.
[01:22:18]  And then he asked me again, or he said, do you have any party drugs?
[01:22:21]  And he asked me again.
[01:22:22]  And I was like, dude, I'm going to like strike you with a closed fist if you don't keep, you know, if you keep insisting on pestering me.
[01:22:31]  It was bizarre.
[01:22:32]  Sounds like he needs to learn the art of conversation.
[01:22:35]  Yeah.
[01:22:35]  Just see if someone's visibly on cocaine and then pretend that you know them, strike up a conversation, and then jingle your keys around like they're going to be.
[01:22:43]  Or just talk about something else.
[01:22:46]  Yeah.
[01:22:47]  Find a new topic.
[01:22:48]  Natural wines.
[01:22:50]  All right, everyone.
[01:22:51]  With that, I'm Liz.
[01:22:52]  My name is Brace, aka the dime dropper.
[01:22:57]  And of course, we have with us young Chomsky, who will be sworn by federal agents immediately after we leave this studio because I might have made a little phone call, told a couple of fibs, and that ends the podcast permanently that we call True Anon.
[01:23:14]  We'll see you next time.
[01:23:15]  Bye-bye.