04/06/09 – Guy Lawson – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing Guy Lawson.
He's an author and journalist.
He's written for Harper's and many other magazines and has an article in Rolling Stone from early March, March 4th, talking of a narco state.
And it's about the drug wars in Mexico.
So, welcome to the show, Guy.
Hey, man.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, so, narco state.
How exactly do you define that?
And do you really think that Mexico can be qualified as such a thing?
Well, look, there's a couple of ways to look at this thing.
You know, the conflict, the so-called war, what Calderon calls a war in Mexico.
You know, as people live their lives, you know, if your listeners have been down to have a holiday on a spring break or something, you'll see that it's still a functioning society as far and away.
It's as far from Afghanistan in that sense.
You know, people can walk the streets at night.
And I just took my wife and kids down there for a vacation as well.
So, in many ways, it's a completely ridiculous statement.
But it fundamentally, elementally, politically, legally, criminally, economically, in every kind of metric of a functioning state, it's really becoming the truth.
Mexico is in danger of a serious collapse of national security because of the effects of American appetite for narcotics and America's guns and America's hypocritical foreign policy.
Well, the Obama administration already is signaling an increase in money and military equipment.
And Admiral Mullen has, I don't know to what degree they've already gone ahead and talked, or at least they've talked about sending troops to the border.
It seems like the worse it gets down there, the more the policy is to just do the same, only worse.
They call that the border surge.
It's not quite a surge yet, but, you know, hold your breath and it'll become the next surge.
They call that Operation Firewall.
And if you think about it for a minute, it sounds like a great idea until you consider who's on the other side of the firewall and where the fire is burning.
So, you know, it's an apt metaphor for the American kind of indifference to the plight of Mexico.
Mexico's got murder rates that are doubling, narcotics-related murder rates that are doubling from 2,500 to nearly 6,500 last year.
And this year it's on course to double again.
And that's out of a population far smaller than ours, right?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
It's just over 100 million.
But, you know, more importantly, it's the most dangerous place in the world right now in terms of conflict, more dangerous than Iraq, more dangerous even than Afghanistan.
That's the measure of it, you know.
So Mexico has still got Cerveza and, you know, all the sort of normalcy, but at the same time there's this violence going on, not just between drug dealers and drug dealers, but between drug dealers and law enforcement and law enforcement and law enforcement and law enforcement and military.
You've got basically a war between the cartels, a war among the cartels, within the cartels, and then you've got a war with the government waging, the government is waging against the cartels.
Okay, so tell us about some of the cast of characters here.
And, you know, in your article you really go through and tell the story in detail about the head of the national police and the intelligence agencies and the massive amounts of bribes.
If the rest of my audience is anywhere near as ignorant as I am about this story, which I assume that they are, no offense to you all, then they really need to hear this story, something that I really knew nothing about other than, you know, there's widespread corruption.
But as far as details, I don't know any of these names, never heard these stories at all.
Yeah, well, perhaps I can just recommend or urge your listeners to go online and look for another story, which I did.
The story that you read is actually the second in a series.
A story I wrote in Rolling Stone in November was where I went to a state called Sinaloa, which is on the Pacific coast opposite the Baja Peninsula, which is the traditional home of the cartels in Mexico.
And Ronald Reagan declared war on drugs, you know, the American rhetoric of war, which doesn't just apply to conventional conflict, it also applies to drugs, which is bizarre.
Well, as George Carlin pointed out, it applies to cancer and to everything.
It's the only metaphor we have in our society for empowering our government to destroy liberty one way or another.
Yeah, we're just waiting for elections to become war.
Yeah, exactly.
They succeeded to a certain extent through the 80s, to a significant extent actually, from stopping the method of importation of narcotics through Florida and the Caribbean.
The Colombians, to a large extent, were thwarted in that way, but it didn't stop the production of narcotics and it didn't stop the consumption of narcotics.
It just meant that a new path into the country was forged, and that was through Mexico.
And what the Mexican, the old traditional cartels who had been running pot up into the United States for decades did was essentially take over the main operations of narcotics from the Colombians, and they became expert at getting all these various cocaine products, and now crystal meth and all the other kinds of drugs that you see coming through.
Was this the article where the DEA agents were quoted saying, gee, you know, it's funny, but looking back over the last decade, it's almost like we made things worse.
Well, Rolling Stone's been covering this issue.
I think that might have been a Ben Wallace Wells article from about a year and a half ago.
Yeah, that sounds right.
Yeah, my piece was really looking at the first piece that I did that ran in November.
I think it was issue 1065 of Rolling Stone.
It's online.
We looked at the tradition, the historical and cultural traditions inside Mexico as it relates to the narcotics industry, and the way that the war amongst the cartels had begun and the impact that it had.
I went up into the Sierra Madres and I went after the modern-day equivalent, I guess you'd say, Pablo Escobar is this guy named Chapo Guzman.
Chapo means shorty, and he's been at war with a guy named Machomo.
These guys all operate with nicknames, much like in the Wild West, and Machomo means red ant, and they were once allies, but now they've become sworn enemies in this fight to control the various routes in the United States.
And, again, there is this other group called the Gulf Cartels, which arose basically out of the, God, I don't know how complicated it would be for you folks, but I'll just try to give it to you in a nutshell.
Basically, NAFTA really, really changed Mexico's culture in almost every way.
It changed the political system from a one-party rule.
It changed the business rule, and it changed almost everything about the country except law enforcement, which was left behind, and the criminal justice system.
And as a part of that, sort of, the loss of that stability inside Mexican society, you saw all these new drug-trafficking cartels emerge, primarily from the Gulf side of the country, which is the other side over in the Caribbean side, and they've been at war with the traditional Pacific cartels, and that was part of the fight that was going on.
Well, you talk about there was some big bust at an airport, and some of the top guys of a major cartel were taken down, and that's really what set off the war between the new guys, trying to see who was going to take the place as the new Tony Soprano.
Well, yeah, put it this way.
There's all manner of ways to trace the lineage of this back, but the big thing for your listeners to know is that it really has its roots in NAFTA and the way that NAFTA destroyed this sort of stable, corrupt, but considerably less violent way of running itself that Mexico had.
And so now you have these various cartels at war, but the violence that's contained, what really transformed this into a huge conflict, the conflict that you see now in your television news and in the newspapers, was the election of 2006, which was the closest election in Mexican history.
It was closer even than Bush-Gore in 2000, and that was a hotly contested election.
There were protesters in the street in December 2006.
The issue of narcotics had not really been a prominent one, not at all, during the campaign between Calderón and his leftist opponent.
And it was so bad, in fact, that Calderón had to be smuggled into the Congress to be sworn into office, and it really seemed like he was not going to hold on to power.
Right, there were thousands of people camped out all through Mexico City around the presidential mansion or whatever for months, right?
And as proof that the rhetoric of war and the fact of war is initially at least a popular way to entrench power, Calderón five days later declared war on drugs.
Five days later only?
December 6, 2006.
And that began this government initiative.
Forty thousand troops were sent into the streets, and all of a sudden the violence rates went through the roof, and you had the beginnings of what you have now.
Now, that's not to say that Calderón did this for purely naked political reasons or that he's not a well-intended man in the sense of meaning what he says, but there is an awful lot of similarity between Calderón's way of solving problems and George Bush's way of solving problems.
And there's a lot of similarities between Mexico's war on drugs and the war on terror.
Consuming must be changed, must be fought until the bitter death kind of rhetoric where you have people divided into enemies of the state and those who are for or against Calderón.
It's become a very dialectical kind of political discourse in Mexico.
So that is when you can really trace the beginning of the quote-unquote war.
Well, I don't want to be too cynical, but is it possible that he knows that a war on drugs is good for driving up the price and making people rich?
I mean, in the article you say that the corruption is throughout the entire government at very high levels.
No, that way craziness lies.
No, that ain't it.
Calderón's not in, you know, there's no one who thinks Calderón's in league with the drug dealers, but if you read the article, my second article, you'll see that almost everyone around him is, or at least is suspected to be.
You know, the cartels use law and government as a method to control their own success and their own business model, but also to defeat and destroy their rivals.
And so you've seen in the past number of months, the Mexican drug czar, for example, the head of the top-secret agency that's in charge of prosecuting and investigating narco-cartels, were both proven to be on the payroll of the cartels.
The equivalent is the head of Homeland Security, the head of the FBI, the drugs are all being on the take from the crypts of the blood, you know?
It's really, really disastrous for Mexico, and it's turned the Mexican elite into a very paranoid group indeed.
There's kidnapping and extortion have become commonplace as the cartels fight over diminishing revenues, because they're fighting so much over these revenues.
So you have a situation where the elements of national power are being challenged in fundamental ways, and that's really where the narco-state thing comes in.
It's not a conceit, it's a real distinct possibility for that country.
Well, now I know that you're a reporter, and you're dealing with the facts on the ground here, but is it possible to question the economics of the situation, and why it is this way?
You know, when I was a child, I learned about prohibition and how it just turned the alcohol industry over to criminals.
It didn't destroy the alcohol industry, and that it was the bootleggers and the Baptists that teamed up together to try to defeat the repeal of 18th Amendment.
I think it's really important for your listeners to understand that the impact of sparking a blunt, the harmless spliff on a Friday night has inside Mexican society.
Marijuana, to speak specifically about the prohibition, represents, they think, something between 60% and 70% of the revenues of the drug cartel.
It is the cash cow.
It's the thing that funds all their ventures into other drugs and into establishing their drug trafficking networks throughout the United States.
So the prohibition, just for an example, but with marijuana, could have a massively detrimental effect for the cartels.
Look at what's happening with General Motors when sales are down by 30% and 40%.
Imagine if 60% of the revenues to these multi-billion dollar corporations were removed.
But having said that, that may be the solution.
I think it is the only solution down the road.
I mean, the choices that this society faces, which is to say North America, because America and Mexico are entwined in this problem.
The border is meaningless in any true way when it comes to the drug traffickers.
It's become as porous as can be.
There's three choices, really.
You can continue to confront the drug cartels and have the rhetoric of trying to go after consumption the way Hillary Clinton did recently when she was in Mexico, or President Obama has, which is just pie-in-the-sky nonsense.
That's what I would urge your listeners to think about, the responsibility they have as they buy these drugs.
The second choice is to just go back to corruption, to pretend to enforce the law, but just return to the old ways before NAFTA and just basically give up on trying to fight the cartels.
Most people in Mexico actually long for those days.
They've become nostalgic because it was so much less violent and it was so much more stable.
You knew which end was up.
If the drug dealers were going to kill someone, they did it on the edge of town at night and left the body in a place for the police to find them.
Now there's shootouts in broad daylight.
There's this kind of decapitation and this culture of narco-culture that's really threatening the youth culture inside Mexico.
It's really, really bad.
And the third choice, of course, is to end prohibition.
It worked.
Probably most of your listeners know it worked with alcohol in the 30s in Chicago.
What your listeners might not know is that it was the end of prohibition that really destroyed the mafia in New York City.
I wrote a book about the mob and I'm friendly with some old mobsters and I can tell you that when they legalized gambling, when you had casinos up and down the East Coast, when you had lotteries, when you had all these kinds of legalized gambling, it destroyed the mob because they lost half their money and they began to fight amongst themselves over the ever-diminishing returns.
They started dealing drugs.
The whole culture fell apart.
So prohibition or decriminalization has this massive hidden effect which is it just turns the thing into what it is really.
It's a health issue and a business issue.
And so what about cocaine too?
I mean that's, I guess, the antichrist or something and it's far beyond politically correct to say in front of professional people but, hell, they're the ones who do most of the coke anyway, right?
I mean, I'm not really.
I mean a lot of crack cocaine has had a terrible effect on interstate in the United States.
Well, and that's only because the price is so high that the only way to afford cocaine if you're a poor person is to rock it up.
Well, you know, man, I'm about as libertarian as it comes to people whatever gets them through the day and night and I'm not into telling people what to do but cocaine for me is a bridge too far, at least so far.
My reporting and my experience on the ground in Sinaloa, in Mexico City, and now I'm working on a story inside the United States that relates to how the Mexicans operate in this country has all pointed to the fact that these are vicious, violent, dangerous people and you'd be a fool to think it can be wished away and that the fight is real but that the rhetoric of war is really not helpful and if you use sort of a judo type analogy, if you just stop fighting the thing that you don't need to fight and fight the thing you do need to fight, that you would find a very different dynamic in Mexico and in this country.
Well, that's very well put.
Of course, I want to state my radical position or whatever but the fact is what we really need is simply to just think calm and rationally about this like adults rather than having a knee-jerk, there-ought-to-be-a-law attitude.
If we're smart about it, maybe our society won't decide exactly, legalize everything along the lines that I would like to see and for the same reasons, not because I like to do cocaine, which I've never done in my life, but because of the consequences for the people of Mexico, for example, or our Colombia policy.
Yeah, you don't need to go much further than Mexico to see how devastating this is.
You know, hypocrisy has a terrible wage and it often comes in hidden or oblique ways.
You know, when you have a society which bans something that so many people want and then fetishizes both the desire for it and the illegality of it.
I mean, you know, Jim Webb, Senator Webb from Virginia, came out last week and introduced a bill about the prison rates in this country.
This country is suffocating and it's just criminalizing and jailing whole generations of young people, particularly black people, African Americans, for drug-related offenses that aren't violent.
There's no reason to have these people in jail and there's no reason to spend $100,000 or whatever it is a year jailing these people.
It's just that it's a consequence of hypocrisy.
And, you know, to all those within the listening range of this, you know, really think about your own habits, your own, the way that you don't think, you know, you don't confront the consequences of your own consumption.
Well, there are plenty of drug users in Chaos Radio's audience.
In fact, there's, what, 30, 20 or something, at least, percent of the population in this country use illegal drugs.
So any radio audience is full of drug users.
There you go.
You know, it's just that's the way it is.
And, you know, 60% of Americans are opposed to any kind of legalization for marijuana.
I happen to believe that you're seeing the beginnings of a serious debate.
You know, Obama, the president laughed about it at a press conference last week.
It was, I think, an uncharacteristically glib way for him to talk about a very profound issue.
And I hope that he can dial that back because this is not just like, you know, Cheech and Chong or some, you know, on the way to White Castle kind of thing.
This is like real people's lives.
These are children.
You know, here's something, like, for your listeners to consider.
You hear about this corruption and you think, oh, God, you know, how terrible, but, you know, these people are just so nasty, I guess.
But I think most, but certainly a significant piece of the corruption that's inside Mexican law enforcement is because the police and the lawyers and the judges attached are terrified.
These cartels are so violent they will send you a, they call it the suitcase.
They'll give you a suitcase filled with money, you know, tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and in that suitcase will be a photo of your family.
And they have a saying in Mexico, you can take the lead or the silver.
And so these people are on the take in many cases because if they don't take, and I met people like this, if they don't take, their families will be killed.
Do you have any idea what the official numbers are of the amount of money per year in billions of dollars that we're talking about in the Mexico-America drug market?
Well, you know the joke about where, I don't know where the police buy their drugs because they're always putting numbers on it that no one would pay, right?
You're right.
You know, the big bust.
I don't know where you got your coke, dude, but you're paying too much.
You know, in the multiple billions, somewhere between 10 and 30 billion, it's the second largest industry in Mexico, people think, after oil, something along the lines of the tourist industry.
It is epic amounts of money, epic amounts of cash.
Chapo Guzman was just put on Fortune 500's list of the wealthiest men.
He is a billionaire, and I make the joke that he's the only one who's got his billion bucks in cash.
Yeah, well, that's not the same guy that's hidden out somewhere that did the fantastic jailbreak.
What's that about?
That's him.
That's Chapo.
That's Shorty.
Yeah.
Well, tell us about that.
How did he break out of jail?
They call it the golden kilogram.
Nobody knows.
You know, he was in the maximum security prison.
You know, to give you a taste for how good Chapo is at what he does, he had a girlfriend in there, he had a couple of girlfriends.
You know, as much Buchanan's whiskey as he could drink, he was living at large, even in prison.
So he walked out the front door, basically.
Well, yeah, and the short answer is, in Mexico, most people, many people, everyone thinks he bribed himself out, but lots of people in Mexico think that the government of Vincente Fox let him out, or someone high in that government, in order to fight these very violent Gulf cartels, the new drug dealers who have employed this group called the Zetas, which is a Mexican army term for a high-ranking army official, and they are former special services, American-trained special services forces that have become their own drug-dealing cartel, and they are the really dangerous dudes.
Well, and where does all this money go?
Because you have to have the money laundered somehow in some form of legitimacy at some point, no?
You do.
That's a good question.
I don't have the answer for you.
People are studying it.
It goes into banks, it goes into buying nice big houses, and then lots of people talk about hotels up and down the Pacific Coast being funded this way, and it's become the lifeblood of a large section of the Mexican economy, and that's why people are so, you know, the one thing that I, when I was in Sinaloa, that everybody seemed to agree about is that legalization would be a disaster for Sinaloa.
Yeah, well, and I've actually met drug dealers before who said, Oh, no, if they legalized drugs, I'd be out of business.
Just as simple as that.
Well, it stands to reason, man.
Yeah.
Okay, so now, who is Vasconcelos, the Bush administration's man in Mexico?
What's the story with that?
The guy who was shot out of the sky?
Well, I'm not sure.
He got a very brief mention in the Rolling Stone.
He was, I think he was the national security advisor to President Calderón and, you know, considered a very untouchable figure, and he was, there was a plane crash in Mexico in early December of last year that killed him and another senior official.
I think the other senior official was, in any event, he killed these two very, very senior officials, and lots of people thought at the time that it was the drug cartels that killed them or that the military had killed them or the police.
You know, it was all these conspiracy theories, and there's so much corruption, people really don't know which way to turn or which ends up.
But after his death, there's been accusations that he was corrupt himself.
You know, as anyone in the know will tell you, Mexico is really kind of obnoxious or tragic or whatever it is because he has no ability to defend himself now, and these charges are so commonplace and so they're used.
People accuse people of being in the pay of narco as a way to disempower them, to defang them, to destroy them, even if they aren't on the pay.
So it's become a hall of mirrors, a very complicated and fast-moving situation in Mexico.
Well, in the article you talk about a guy who walked into the embassy in Washington, D.C., and turned himself in as a double agent, and then people now have conspiracy theories about maybe he was a triple agent sent to sow confusion.
Tell us about that story.
Well, Felipe is his codename.
He was working in the American embassy in Mexico as a liaison between the American and Mexican law enforcement officials, and exactly how he walked into the Washington embassy remains a little bit unclear, which is to say classified.
But it would seem that he got caught somehow, but he was one step ahead of somebody.
But he basically revealed high-level corruption, and then when those people were caught and the various officials and things, they revealed even further corruption.
The way these investigations often go is it goes from one person, and then they talk to save themselves and on and on.
Felipe, you would have to say, is something on the order of a Watergate of Mexico.
It is a revelation, his revelations that have cascaded through the law enforcement and political and security apparatus have revealed the depth and extent of Mexico's problems.
So even if you legalize and even if you recognize that sending more guns to Mexico is just not a good idea, you have to also recognize, I think, that Mexico's problems are serious, ongoing, and need to be confronted in a very sophisticated and determined way.
You can disagree with Calderón in a million ways, and I do, most especially about the idea that this is a war rather than a cultural, health, and social issue.
But the one thing that they definitely have in Mexico is a major criminal matter.
Well, I'd be interested to know what you think about this.
It seems like part of the story is now new calls for legislation about guns and gun sales in the United States because of all the arms being sent back and forth across the border, sold back and forth across the border.
And I guess just like I'm a non-cocaine user who's for legalizing cocaine, I'm not a gun owner, but I'm for the right to bear arms, and it seems like here's a problem our government's created, and now their solution is to take away even more liberty.
Again, if you don't have the cartels fighting over the thing, it doesn't matter whether guns are for sale in New Mexico.
Yeah, you know, I'm not an American citizen, but this thing really mystifies me, the whole gun fixation.
I have to say the idea that these, you know, I don't want to take anyone's freedom to have a gun, but just look what it's doing inside Mexico, you know.
Something has to be done.
Now, just what, I don't know, but something.
Well, see, but go back to this very same thing.
If you outlaw .50 caliber machine guns, then you take them out of the plain old market and you put it into the black market, you turn the whole market of those kinds of guns over to the very same kinds of criminals, whereas at least now it's half legitimate.
Hey, man, I'm just trying to, I'm just, you know.
I'm sorry, you're a reporter and I'm browbeating you.
It's okay.
That's cool, I don't mind.
I just, you know, it seems to me like it's time for people to start, you know, really looking at the step-by-step nature of some of the causes and consequences instead of just assuming conclusions and solutions so quickly.
That's kind of how we got into this mess in the first place.
Nobody likes crack cocaine, and so we fill our prisons with crack cocaine users.
We didn't stop and think about how it was we got that way.
And so now, as you're saying, it's an emergency.
It's a terrible crisis.
It is, man, it is.
Is there a reason you think that the American media doesn't ever really tell the story?
Like the Felipe thing, you say it's the Mexican Watergate, and yet I've never heard of that.
Yeah.
I think that there's a couple of reasons.
I think that, you know, begin with the fact that Americans are complacent and are indifferent to Mexico by and large.
So Mexican stories like Canadian stories just don't get the coverage or taken seriously in the same way.
You've got serious problems with the funding and, you know, the financing of ongoing investigative journalism.
That's why I'm so grateful to Rolling Stone for giving me this opportunity to not just write one piece but two and now three long-form articles.
So those things are becoming rarer as time goes by.
It's also a dangerous story.
It's also, for Mexican journalists, the most dangerous assignment imaginable.
I think Mexico has become the second most dangerous assignment in the world after Iraq for journalists.
And most of those suffering from the violence are Mexican journalists because the cartels, well, you know, just up and kill people.
This is a real problem in Juarez where you're getting local newspaper reporters are quitting just because they can't endanger their lives and the lives of their families.
So there's that.
You know, I think that there's been a kind of a late awakening.
You know, I know that the CNN's been doing some reports from there.
The New York Times has had some front-page stories on it.
But, you know, it's part of a larger narrative, which is how well does America report on and care about the impact that its, you know, Goliath-like size and economic power have on its neighbors?
And the real answer is that the kind of self-searching and self-critical reports that I think this country so desperately needs is all too rare.
All right, well, Rachel Maddow, call your office.
We've got one for you.
Guy Lawson, Rolling Stone Magazine.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today.
Again, pardon me, the article is called The Making of a Narco State.