[Ed. note: This piece is excerpted from a video interview of Charles Bowden, author of Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields (2010 by Nation Books) and El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin, edited with Molloy Malloy, (2011 Nation Books) talking with David Zlutnick, a documentary filmmaker, whose latest film is Occupationo Has No Future: Militarism+Resistance in Israel/Palestine. You may read the full article at
http://www.upheavalproductions.com/articles/25.]
DZ: 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 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?
CB: 50% of the Mexican population lives outside the economy in utter poverty… 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…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.
DZ: 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 be gotten rid of, too…
CB: 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…
DZ: 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…?
CB: Well, the Mérida plan doesn’t work…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… 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…
DZ: 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…
CB: 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…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…
DZ: …Expand on the idea of the international mass movement of the poor toward concentrations of global wealth and where you see Mexico fitting in.
CB: 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…Our solution is infantile. We’ve built this actual physical wall… Garret Hardin wrote [an essay] 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.
They’re not going to stay in their country. They’re not going to stay there and die. 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.
DZ: At least in the Mexican instance, what do you believe should be done?..
CB: 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. 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…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. I get a choice of this world and in this world making drugs criminal has been a disaster…