High Desert Journal

An Interview with Charles Bowden 

This interview originally appeared in the Weekend Edition of Counterpunch, July 8 - 10, 2011
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/07/08/war-on-the-border/

War on the Border, An Interview with Charles Bowden, by David Zlutnick

Charles Bowden is an author and journalist whose work has largely
focused on the US/Mexico Border region. His writing has especially
centered on the Mexican Drug War and Ciudad Juárez, the border city
known as the epicenter of Mexican drug violence. His critically
acclaimed book, Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's
New Killing Fields, was published in 2010 by Nation Books. His latest
work, edited along with Molly Molloy, is El Sicario: the Autobiography
of a Mexican Assassin and was just released, also by Nation Books.

Bowden sat down for a video interview with me on June 30th, while in
San Francisco for a speaking engagement. In his responses he argues
the extreme violence seen in Mexico is a sign of a deeper societal
disintegration resulting from governmental corruption, failed economic
policies, and the War on Drugs. What follows is an edited transcript
of our conversation.

DZ: Would you please start by explaining the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) and its effects on Mexico, and perhaps the impact of
US and Mexican policy more generally over the past couple decades?

CB: Or the past couple centuries. Yeah, Mexico's a product of 500
years of corruption. But it's also a product of American intervention.
In 1846 we stole a third to half the country in the [Mexican-American]
War, which we started unilaterally. We have dominated its economic
policy. By the time of the 1910 Revolution, 20% of the country was
owned by foreigners, you know? We've constantly intervened in its
affairs and now the War on Drugs is destroying it.

NAFTA, our free trade agreement, instead of revitalizing Mexico
destroyed peasant agriculture and light and intermediate industry,
unleashing—in my opinion and in the opinion of others—one of the
largest migrations in the world today. Look, the North American Free
Trade Agreement opened Mexico inevitably to agricultural products from
the United States. Agribusiness destroyed peasant agriculture. When
the treaty was passed you could buy a ton of corn in the United
States, I think, for $100. It cost $200 a ton in Mexico. So instantly
peasant agriculture and corn was wiped out. Washington State tomatoes
destroyed the tomato orchards. They can't compete with our dairy
products. They can't compete with our hog farms, and on and on. Now
some of this was seen coming. Tom Barry wrote an excellent book on it
before the treaty passed, saying it would be an agricultural
holocaust, which it was.

The idea was it would create other jobs for these people in industry.
Well, it did and it didn't. Like there are now 400 maquiladoras—border
factories—in Juarez. But they pay a wage that no one—cannot sustain a
human being. Down there you make about 65 bucks a week in a
maquiladora, say, in Juarez. But the cost of living on the border in
Mexico is 80-90% of what it would be if you lived in the United
States. And no one seriously thinks an American can sustain himself on
$65 a week, you know, unless he's a 14 year old living at home. So the
thing doesn't work. Nobody will admit it doesn't work and I'll tell
you why: Because free trade isn't an economic policy really, it's a
theology. It's impervious to any facts. It's never a question,
empirically, "Does this work or doesn't this work?" People just—It's
just believed in. It's an act of faith. Well, I don't share the faith.
If you put 400 factories in Juarez and the city prospered, I'd be in
favor of what happened. But here's what happened: You go to the
Midwest and other places, you see the absolute destruction of blue-
collar jobs in this country, and you see those same jobs appear in
Juarez and destroy Mexican families because of slave wages. The rule
of thumb, roughly, is what a factory, say, in Ohio paid somebody an
hour, is what the same factory will pay a Mexican a day. So it's a
double-destruction. And I've done stories on that, I've been to the
factories in Ohio that are closed. A lot of them went to China, which
is the problem Mexico faces. If it raises its wages it loses its jobs
to China because Mexico's wages are four times China's wages. It's a
doubling down, a race to the bottom. Look, the global economy now, in
essence operates this way: labor's trapped and capital moves.

A lot of your work has focused on the economic situation in Mexico and
connecting that to the Drug War. How do you see economic policy having
contributed to the outbreak of the violence we're now seeing in
Mexico?

There's no simple explanation of the violence in Mexico today. But
there are multiple—There is a background to the violence, I'll put it
that way. The North American Free Trade Agreement drew people to the
border from a collapsing interior in Mexico. Places like Juarez and
all the border cities boomed with huge population growth. Now we're
into two or three generations, because free trade—the earliest phases
of it, at least, really start in the '60s on the border with the
border-plant concept. What we've gotten are steadily declining wages
in real pesos, purchasing power; two to three generations of kids
raised in poverty with absent parents working in the factory; and
overlaying on this, the explosion of the drug industry.

What changed the drug industry in Mexico and made it gigantic was when
the United States shut down the Florida corridor for cocaine from
Columbia in the early-80s. It then shifted through Mexico. Mexico
became, in certain terms, the "trampoline." [Refering to "The
Trampoline" drug route, where cocaine was moved from Columbia to
Mexico, then "bounced" up to the US.] The Mexican drug organizations
soon shoved out the Columbians, basically. They started out being
delivery boys for the Columbians and wound up the tail wagging the
dog. This led to a gigantic growth of illicit money in Mexico. No one
is really clear today on how much of the Mexican economy is based on
criminal enterprise, but it's huge. And the reason it's huge is the
drug industry is earning, according to our agencies, $30-50 billion a
year. And frankly there's no way to get rid of that just on pretty
women and hot cars and discotecs. The only place you can get rid of
the money is the legitimate economy, by buying it. Now this has been
going for year after year after year. So year after year after year
the presence of the money in the economy grows. It aggregates. The
same thing's happened in Italy. If you have a cup of coffee with an
intelligent Italian, the argument will be about whether 40% of their
economy is mafia or 60%—not whether a lot of their economy is mafia.
The same thing is happening in Mexico—or has happened. It is the
economy now. That's why the War on Drugs in Mexican terms is
preposterous. To ask Mexico to get out of the drug business is
essentially asking it to drop dead. That's its source of money.

And the three largest contributors to the Mexican economy are oil
revenue, remittances from migrant workers in the United States, and
drug money. You've argued before—and just mentioned again—that it
would be economic suicide for the Mexican state to actually destroy
the drug trade. Would you outline your understanding of the Mexican
economy and how that relates to the Drug War?

We have to be careful when you say the word "economy." 50% of the
Mexican population lives outside the economy in utter poverty. Well,
they have an economy, but when you live outside the economy it means
the bankers and the boys on Main Street don't get any of it. Because
you're out there living under a tree somewhere not buying things. What
the—What we're talking about is the access to foreign currency. And
the three licit forms [in which] Mexico has traditionally gotten
foreign currency is oil, remittances, and tourism. Drugs dwarf all of
them. Drugs have gotten bigger than all of those things. It is the
largest source of foreign money.

NAFTA is an illusion. You know, there's something most people don't
understand: These border plants operate by having all the parts
shipped in, having the object assembled—let's say a vacuum cleaner—
then the vacuum cleaner is shipped out. So the only contribution the
Mexicans made is labor. The labor's slave wages, so Mexico gets almost
nothing out of it. They fake the statistics by saying, "Oh, look, we
have these huge exports," and they count the value of the vacuum
cleaner. Well, that's a myth. All they've contributed is this tiny
little thing called labor and the people get paid almost nothing. And
that's one reason it doesn't work. Good god, if you had a hundred
thousand good factory jobs in Juarez, a city of a million, paying real
wages it would definitely be a boon to the city. But in fact you have
a hundred thousand jobs, let's say, paying slave wages where nobody
working in the factory five and a half days a week can even live on
the wages, meaning they have to live together three or four to a hut
just to survive.

On top of the fact that industry isn't providing, Mexican oil fields
are in decline and at some point will run dry. So what's the Mexican
government to do? Because if they actually get rid of the drug
industry, it seems a huge provider of foreign currency would gotten
rid of, too.

Well, look, if you shut down the drug industry in Mexico you'd get
almost a rigamortis. I mean, this is the lubricant. And it's not just
Mexico. There are serious articles you can find that during the global
financial collapse of 2008 what kept the global banks going was drug
money. And the reason the drug money mattered is it's all cash. It was
the only liquid source left as the system globally was collapsing. So
there's serious studies that think it was the essential lubricant to
keep the system of banking—international banking—staggering along.

Now the fact is nobody knows the scale of the drug industry. And
nobody ever will because there's no accurate accounting systems of it.
We just know it's big and getting bigger. One of the fantasies is
almost every year the United States government releases a study saying
that drug consumption's going down in the US, but every year the
budget to fight drugs increases. Every year the size of the seizures
increases. So you have to ask yourself, "Why are the Mexicans
smuggling heroin, cocaine, and marijuana into the United States—and
methamphetamines—if increasingly nobody uses it here?" Well, the
answer is the government's lied. They're not doing this for aerobic
exercise, the drugs are being brought into the United States just like
any other product—because people here buy them. One of the fallacies—
you know, the idiocies of the War on Drugs, is that there's never been
a successful government measure that can repeal the market economy.
You know, that's why prohibition failed.

Regarding the decision to deploy the Mexican army against the cartels,
you once said: "[President Felipe Calderón] ripped the mask off
Mexico… And the mask he ripped off revealed what's really going on in
Mexico: mass poverty and social disintegration. Now it's turned into a
war by the Mexican government against the Mexican people." Why should
the government's actions be perceived as a war against its own people?

Well, I'll tell you why: Because Mexico is an Indian nation that's
traditionally been ruled by Europeans. The presidents of Mexico tend
to look like Germans, and the voters tend to look like a mahogany
table. And the elites there always resented this, always wished they
didn't have an Indian nation to rule. And this has been going on a
long time. Porfirio Díaz tried to slaughter all the Indians, for
example, during his thirty year dictatorship, even though he was an
Indian. So it is not odd at all for a president of Mexico to attack
his own population.

Now Calderón is a very devout Catholic and he believes deeply in free
trade. He belongs to a party there that would be like the Republican
Party here. So he thinks he's giving shock therapy essentially to his
own nation. One. Two: I don't think he had any idea really what he was
getting into. He thought he'd prove he was a powerful strongman, and
the country exploded because he didn't know his own country. What I
mean when I say "ripped the mask off" is that he had assumptions about
Mexico that were not true. And now the real Mexico's there—a country
full of poor people with a corrupt government and there's—in a way a
lot of the violence is like a mass revolt in the country. It's not
political, it's simply, look, there's not a future for a lot of
people, there's no money, there's no jobs. And now they're just
killing each other and robbing. That's a lot of the crime—it has
nothing to do with cartels fighting [each other]…

Calderón put the army on the street, and you've been a strong critic
of this. Why are you opposed to the deployment of the military? And do
you think if Calderon disengaged the military it would have a
significant positive effect?

Let's take the first part of the question. I'm critical of using the
military because it's always been corrupt, and doesn't know how to
police anyway—armies only know how to destroy targets. The Mexican
military has always been in the drug business. It's just a bunch of
nonsense to say they're not corrupt. In the early-80s, Rancho Buffalo,
which was a huge marijuana plantation, had 10,000 campesinos as field
hands and it was run by the Mexican Army. The generals were there all
the time. So the premise that they're not corrupt is idiocy.

The second thing—What has happened now with 40,000 dead Mexicans, with
seventeen states at least in Mexico out of thirty full of extreme
violence, is you can't un-ring the bell. If the Mexican Army goes back
to its barracks this violence will continue. Good god, you can't
produce 8,000 slaughtered people in one city like Juarez and not have
a bunch of people permanently damaged just because they become killing
machines. You know, this thing has gotten too big. You can't stop it
now easily. What the army is doing is realizing this failure. The Army
is trying to get a lot of the duties turned over to the federal police
because they don't want to do it anymore. Because it isn't working,
it's a disaster, and armies are always about protecting themselves,
you know.

But Mexico's gone down a path now that cannot easily be changed.
Calderón's administration will end in a year, in 2012. The next
president is going to inherit a mess. And if he sends the Army back to
the barracks and announces a new policy, I don't think it will end the
violence. There are too many people in the country now living as
outlaws. We know this from our own experience. When we ended
prohibition in '33, it didn't end—the gangsters didn't say, "Ah, hell,
I can't be a bootlegger anymore, I guess I'll go get a job at JC
Penny's." They remained criminals. And basically part of the '30s was
exterminating a national criminal class created by prohibition. The
same thing's going to happen in Mexico.

The United States has financed much of the Mexican state's involvement
in the Drug War through the Mérida Initiative. Could you explain how
this plan works and outline US involvement with the Mexican military
and law enforcement?

Well, the Mérida plan doesn't work. It was an initiative started under
President Bush to say, "Well, if you help us in the Drug War, we'll
give you half a billion a year," which we are. Actually the Mérida
plan is increasing and now the US government has just announced out of
good heart we're going to expand it and give 300 million a year to
murderous regimes in Central America to fight drugs. But the problem
is, we're arming a bunch of entities in these countries that slaughter
people; it's not going to affect the drug business, because the drug
business is where the money is. This is a fantasy to sell [to] the
American voter, that we're dealing with the problem. The people in
favor of this policy know it isn't true, and functionally they're
liars. Hillary Clinton and these people are just lying, because
Hillary Clinton is a highly intelligent person. She knows better than
this. She just knows it's politically palatable.

Look, there's just no solution to what we call the "drug problem." Our
policies are at best idiotic. Americans want to consume drugs;
nobody's going to stop them. So any effort to continue this policy to
solve what we call a "drug problem"—drug consumption—through making it
criminal, will fail. It's failed for forty years. We're forty years
into this official war, we've spent a trillion dollars, and drugs are
more available than when we started and they're, in real dollars,
cheaper. Yeah, so, there's no defense of this policy…

You make the case that not only much of Mexico's economy, but also
much of the US economy is rooted in the Drug War through the prison
industry, countless thousands of jobs in law enforcement fighting
drugs, etc.

Here's the deal: It's not that the War on Drugs is essential to the
economy, it's that it's a vested part of our culture now. It has a
constituency, it lobbies, it has a life of its own. If you come out,
as I do, for legalization [of drugs], there are billions of dollars
readied against you. When George Soros bankrolled medical marijuana,
the initiative in California, the largest single source of money to
fight that initiative was the prison guards' union here. That's where,
I guess, where it's part of the economy. Most Americans—what's changed
since I've covered this is thirty years ago people tended to see drugs
as something that was used by lower class people who were losers, that
didn't have a lot to do with their life. Now there's hardly a family
in this country that hasn't had a member in it damaged by this War on
Drugs, that hasn't had a member of their family that's an addict and
suddenly is treated as a criminal. I do talk radio shows fairly
frequently all over this country, and I never bring up legalization.
Invariably a caller does, and they always do it for a personal reason.
Their uncle, their cousin, their sister, their brother, you know, has
a problem with drugs, and they think it should be treated as a health
issue, not a criminal issue, because it's no longer the darkness at
the edge of town…

As you've mentioned, remittances from Mexican workers living in the US
is one of the greatest sources of income for Mexico. You've previously
expressed the view that given the state of Mexico's economy it's
therefore in the government's best interest to encourage emigration to
the US—that a Mexican is in many ways a liability to the state if they
stay, but a source of financial revenue if they leave.

Look, what we call "illegal immigration" is actually a policy favored
by the Mexican government to exile its own citizens. 50% of the
Mexican population lives outside the economy in real poverty—deep
poverty. You take one of those people, let's say an Indian from
Oaxaca, he illegally goes north, he makes it to Chicago, he's washing
dishes. You suddenly transferred a person, as if by magic, from
somebody who can't even sustain himself in Mexico to somebody who's
sending home to Mexico hundreds of dollars a month. He turns into a
human ATM. Well, this has happened to millions of people as they've
left Mexico. I believe the most successful anti-poverty initiative in
the history of the world is the migration of the Mexican poor north.
We've probably taken ten or fifteen million people and turned them
into little bankrolls sending money home. They're sending home over 20
billion a year, they're sustaining huge numbers of people in Mexico,
and all that had to be done to achieve this miracle is let them go
through a wire and take a menial job in the United States.

So in your opinion, the Mexican "emigration" policy, I guess, and the
US immigration policy, where do those collide and where do they
complement each other?

They don't collide. Look, the Mexican policy is that "Mexicans have a
right to move freely." What's real policy is, "Let's get rid of these
worthless people that are taking up space here, and then they go to
the United States and they send money home." The US policy is, "Oh,
this is terrible," when in fact we have sectors of our economy
dependent on these people…

One of the arguments I like to make, too, especially to progressive
people, is that the most successful NGO in Mexico is the drug
business. It employs more people, it pays higher wages, it doesn't
discriminate. It's one of the few places in the country that's on a
merit system. Now, you know, that's why it's run by cutthroats from
poor families, in general. Mexico has a caste system, but in the drug
world, it's all on how well you do your job. And so you can kill your
way to success. It's the most successful nongovernmental organization
in the history of the country. All the other NGOs are just little
trifles in comparison. And that's why nobody can compete with the drug
industry. I don't care how many people get killed moving drugs,
there's a line to get the job.

I'm not sure if you've seen it, but British journalist Ed Vulliamy—

He's a friend of mine.

He's a friend of yours?

I know him, yeah. Look, there's only about seven people that give a
damn about the border…

He wrote an article on Juarez last week for The Guardian. He actually
quoted you. But he said: "The thing that really makes Mexico's war a
different war, and of our time, is that it is about, in the end,
nothing." He describes it as an "inevitable war of capitalism gone
mad." Basically, he laments that the mass violence is purely market
forces gone wrong and without rational cause, possessing neither
ideology nor honor, and fought for the latest t-shirt brand. What is
your view on this?

Well, look, I know Ed… We've had this argument for years. Ed comes
from a sort of Left perspective, and he wants to see a sort of
political meaning in things. And when I first met him, I told him
that's where I disagreed with him, that there is no political meaning,
in the sense he's thinking of, in the violence in Mexico today. There
are no manifestos. These are not proto-insurgencies, like Mrs. Clinton
alludes. This is simply about survival. It's about money and power. It
doesn't have a politics.

But I think that's what he's arguing. He's saying—

No—he is now, yes. Look, I like to argue. And Ed's a very good
reporter. And he would like to have this—there's some beginning of the
Mexican Revolution in this, but there isn't. It's apolitical horror.
It's just killing. And now we have thousands and thousands and
thousands of people inured to violence. Now we have countless people
damaged. Now I have a friend, Pastor Jose Antonio Galván, who's a
street minister in Juarez and he deals with the damaged. And he
believes—and I think he's right—that for every killing there's thirty
or forty people damaged mentally by the murder. Because these are
murders. This is not I go out across the street and get hit by a car.
People get sad then but they can—it's explicable. This is your wife
gets in the car to go to the grocery and gets machine-gunned two
blocks away and you have no idea why and you never find out who did
it. That's what's happening. There's been at least three instances in
the last couple months that I can recall of police finding little
toddlers wandering the streets, and then they finally figure out who
they are and they go to the house, and the parents have been
slaughtered. The kids have just wandered off, you know, little tiny
children.

In much of you're writing, the scale of the Mexican migration has been
put into the larger context of a greater migration: the international
mass movement of the poor toward concentrations of global wealth. Can
you expand on this larger idea and where you see Mexico fitting in?

Yeah. Americans are obsessed with the illegal Mexican migration,
because it's the only real taste they get of the actual goddamn world.
The world is full of people moving now because of collapsing economies
and growing populations. If you go to Europe there's a flotilla now of
ships across the Mediterranean to stop people from trying to get in…
This is happening all over the world. Our assumptions about a global
economy and how it'll hum along—this sort of, let's say, Clintonian
wet dream—are proven false. It isn't working out that way. China has
at least 200 million dislocated people as its tried to industrialize
like the West. And so we're going to have to live with this… And I
think, in that sense, the stresses will increase.

Our solution is infantile. We've built this actual physical wall.
Years ago, and I still am, a deep fan of Garret Hardin. Garret Hardin
was a kind of philosopher, and he wrote two key essays—"The Tragedy of
the Commons," [and] he also wrote one called "Lifeboat Ethics"—saying
we were headed toward barbarism—he wrote this in the 1970s—that as
resources decline, population increased, we would get a lifeboat
situation with people swimming to your lifeboat and you wouldn't let
them in, because if you do the whole boat sinks. In other words, we'd
have to make terribly harsh decisions. Well, I think even that's out
of date now, because there's no lifeboat ethics with global warming,
etc. There is no lifeboat. We're all trapped together now—that no
matter what I do or anyone else does, that if China wants to keep
increasing its carbon footprint, we're going to have planetary
disaster. And you can't build a wall against that. Really. We're
living in the past with those concepts.

What we haven't got yet, is a political class on the planet that can
sell the idea of global catastrophe. We're still pretending we can
wall it off, you know… Let me make this clear: it doesn't matter if
you like Mexicans or dislike Mexicans. It doesn't matter if you want
them to stay in their country or want them to come here. They're not
going to stay in their country. They're not going to stay there and
die. There's going to be 150 million of them in thirty, forty years.
The country can't sustain its current population of 110 million, so
they are going to move. I don't get to decide that. I just have to
live with that reality. Europe is going to be under siege. The rich
nations of the world are going to be under siege, because people will
try to escape into them to save their own lives.

At least in the Mexican instance, what do you believe should be done?
What are the steps that need to be taken to, at the very least,
restore some normalcy to the lives of those in Mexico?

Mexicans have to fix Mexico. Americans can't. But what Americans can
do is stop policies that damage Mexico and make everything worse.
Renegotiate NAFTA so it pays a living wage. Face the fact that we're
going to have Mexican workers here and legalize them either as
temporary workers or as people eligible for citizenship. We cannot run
a country with a secret underclass. We cannot run a country where
there's two types of human beings. We did it once; it caused a civil
war, killed 600,000 people, and set back an entire region of our
country—the South—for a century. Finally end the War on Drugs. There's
no solution, for Mexico or the United States, by giving tens of
billions of dollars a year to a criminal class. We can't stop people
from using drugs. We let them have drugs and make it a medical issue.
You know, just as we have with smoking, alcohol, etc.

You know, we can live with drugs. We already are, they're everywhere
anyway. One of the preposterous claims people make is, "Well, Chuck,
if you legalize drugs they'll be in the schools." Well, Jesus, go down
to the schoolyard, I mean they've been there for decades and everybody
knows it. What we don't want is an unregulated use of them. And we
don't want people dying from overdoses because of toxicity and bad
drugs. I would like to live in a world where there are no guns and
everybody lived on organic vegetables I guess, but I don't get that
choice. I get a choice of this world and in this world making drugs
criminal has been a disaster. And any intelligent person when they see
something doesn't work tries something else. Nobody throws sand in
their gas tank, has the engine stop, and say, "Well, I'll just keep
throwing sand in." Well, that's what we're doing. You have to be on
drugs to be in favor of the War on Drugs.

You can't be clean and actually think it's working.

To view an eleven minute edited selection of the video here.

David Zlutnick is a documentary filmmaker living and working in San
Francisco. His latest film is Occupation Has No Future: Militarism +
Resistance in Israel/Palestine (2010), a feature documentary that
studies Israeli militarism, examines the occupation of the Palestinian
West Bank, and explores the work of Israelis and Palestinians
organizing against militarism and occupation. You can view his work at
www.UpheavalProductions.com.