interview with zavala

Dr. Zavala is a professor of Latin American literature and culture. He became interested in researching culture in Mexico and organized crime while working as a journalist. He realized that our perception of the drug trade is influenced by official institutions. He argues that the violence associated with drug trafficking is often a result of anti-drug policies. He also challenges the misconception that drug cartels are all-powerful and highlights the disproportionate impact on poor young men. He points out the spike in violence in Ciudad Juarez after the militarization began. He suggests that effective drug policy should consider the complex factors involved and not solely focus on the flow of drugs. All right, Dr. Zavala is a professor of contemporary Latin American literature and culture at the College of Staten Island. He has written numerous books and scholarly articles on organized crime and culture in Mexico. Welcome, Dr. Zavala. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for the invitation, happy to talk to you. My first question is just how did you get interested in this field and interested in researching culture in Mexico and looking at organized crime? Well, before I became an academic, I was a journalist. I actually was a reporter covering the U.S.-Mexico border for several years when I was a college student. And then after graduation, I became a foreign correspondent covering D.C. for a Mexican political magazine. While doing that work, I became aware of the complexity of anti-drug policy and the difficulty of understanding the dynamics of contraband and smuggling at the U.S.-Mexico border, but also its impact in both of our countries. And one thing that was pointed on my way when I was a reporter was the fact that most of what we think we know about the drug trade, in fact, is conditioned and comes directly from official sources. And so this came to me in a way as a revelation when I was a reporter, realizing that what we think we knew about the drug trade and drug organizations and traffickers themselves usually came from official sources, from people in institutions like the DEA or the Attorney General or Mexican police and Mexican government officials. And so I became very interested in understanding this official language, how is it that this imagination that seems to permeate most of cultural products about the drug trade in reality has its origin in official institutions. And so part of my work has been to study not so much the nature of the traffickers and their organizations themselves, but actually to try to understand how our perception of the drug trade is deeply mediated by official institutions in both the U.S. and Mexico. So my work has tried to bring light to this imagination, this official imagination that seems to condition most of what we think we know about the drug trade. In your book, Let's Cartel If No Existence, I think you talk about that, a lot of the misconceptions that we have about cartels, you're saying they don't really exist in the way that we think they do. So what are the realities of these criminal organizations? How do they, what are these misconceptions that we have and what is the truth behind these organizations? Well, you know, when we talk about the drug trade, in many ways, we talk about something that should be understood in a very, in a fairly easy way, right? In the end, we're just simply talking about contraband and an informal, illegal economy. And there are plenty of other objects that fluctuate in such types of economies, right? We have contraband genes, contraband CDs, contraband, well, in the age when we used to buy CDs, music CDs, or counterfeit Louis Vuitton bags, etc. And if you walk around, for example, in some parts of downtown Manhattan, you'll see a lot of that informal economy unfolding on our very own streets. And it doesn't necessarily imply violence or any sort of disturbance, right, to consume those illegal or counterfeit goods. But when it comes to the drug trade, we have a very powerful official structure that comes with prohibition. And prohibition, in many ways, is a condition of possibility for an illegal market that necessitates the use of violence to a certain degree. So one of the many narratives that unfold from this clandestine activity is that violence is a major mechanism to activate gangs, to control organizations, and to facilitate the trade altogether. And I believe, in fact, that this is one of the big mythologies and misconceptions of the trade, right? Of course, there is violence and, of course, traffickers are capable of violence, but it's not their main objective, right? Their main objective is, of course, to generate income, to generate gains from this illegal market. And so if you look at the history of violence attributed to the drug trade, we see that these levels of violence usually spike or become something alarming when they are followed by military activities, by anti-drug policy, trying to curtail the flow of compromise. And so what I think is one of the major misconceptions of the drug trade is that they are to be blamed entirely for the violence that we have seen, in particular in countries like Mexico and Colombia, when most of our data, even official data produced by our own governments, show that there is a direct correlation between anti-drug policy and the spikes of violence, right? This does not mean, of course, that we truly understand the nature of all the violence, but we definitely should be concerned about the fact that the heavy militarization of regions and cities in Mexico seems to detonate an explosion of violence and all kinds of disturbance that affects most of the civilian population. And what is most alarming, I think, and this is something that I point out in my work with Extreme Urgency, is that we seem to characterize or imagine traffickers as very powerful individuals who are able to challenge official structures, right, to have so much power that they are able to reach transnationally to other countries, and even in those foreign countries, overcome authorities in their business expense. But what data shows is that most of the people who end up in the receiving end of violence tend to be poor young men without any education who were born and who died poor in the outskirts of the major cities where drug trafficking is active. And so what I think should be a very alarming end result of anti-drug policy is that it seems to be affecting disproportionately poor brown young men. And yet the cultural imaginary of the drug trade seems to point us into the direction of rich brown men, right, that apparently overcome official structures that go way beyond the law, right, and who cause all this mayhem and destruction. And so we have a tremendous dissonance, right, in the way we perceive the drug trade, right? On the one hand, our governments are telling us that these organizations are capable of extreme violence, but hard data shows us that anti-drug policy seems to be the leading factor for a lot of the violence, right? And in cities like mine, I'm originally from Ciudad Juarez, from the border city right next to El Paso, Texas. This has been clearly the case, right? Before the militarization began in 2007, we actually were experiencing one of the lowest homicide rates in a full decade, right, up until 2006. What we saw in Ciudad Juarez was that our murder rate was actually descending from 1997 to 2007, so much that 2007 was our least violent year in that entire decade. With about 340 plus homicides that year. And when we went to 2008, the first year of the full presence of military forces and federal agents in the city, we saw that figure escalate quickly to over 1600 killings, right? So we went from 300 to 1600 the following year, over 2000, and by 2010, we had over 3000 killings. That's over a 900% spike, right, in homicide. That, of course, cannot be understood simply by the actions of traffickers who did not seem to be engaging in that level of violence right before the militarization began. And so, yeah, so that's among many of the questions that I think we should be looking at when we are thinking critically of anti-drug policy and the way we perceive the activities of traffickers heavily mediated by this official narrative. Yeah, and like you said, Calderón's kingpin strategy, this very militarized approach, clearly has been super ineffective and only raised homicide rates. So what does more effective policy look like against drug traffickers, policy that doesn't necessarily raise violence incredibly, but can also still attempt to combat these drug traffickers? Well, it's a very complex question that you're asking, because I believe there's two ways to look at this. On the one hand, we have the explicit public discourse of the drug policy being concerned with the flow of drugs and the harm that, of course, it does on the consumer population, especially in the U.S., where two thirds of illegal drugs are consumed. So on the one hand, everybody is afraid of the harm that especially synthetic drugs are causing on the U.S. population because it's the heaviest consumer of those, especially opioids like fentanyl or methamphetamine, et cetera. So you have these drugs that are, of course, very, very dangerous and very concerning. On the other hand, anti-drug policy has been framed as within a general national security policy that is pushed into regions like Latin America, along with different other phenomena that raises the alarm of the national U.S. security agenda. Terrorism, on one hand, and the other, immigration. And so when you bring these three issues together, terrorism, undocumented migration, and drug trafficking, you have a very complex conflation of phenomena that, depending on the political discourse prevailing on the national scale, they can be very worrisome or presented as a very potent enemy of national security altogether. So if you think, for example, in the years of the Donald Trump presidency, the drug trade was not just the one issue, but drug trade conflated with immigration, blaming traffickers for also smuggling people across the U.S. Mexico border, but also with very outlandish claims that drug traffickers were going to align themselves with terrorist organizations like Hezbollah or Hamas, even. And so when you look at this full spectrum of national security threats, you quickly realize that this is not just about drugs, that it's about the question of non-state violent actors that are organizing for different purposes and sometimes working together, these organizations, in such a way that they seem to be very difficult to stop. But when you start thinking these three phenomena separately, when you get away from that narrative, the idea that, oh, my God, these organizations are very powerful and very dangerous, and when you look separately, these three issues, you start realizing that maybe the entire narrative is perhaps creating this false mythology around them. So, for example, fentanyl, we know for a fact, and these are official data, that most fentanyl is actually being smuggled into the U.S. by U.S. citizens, not by Mexican citizens. So it's over 80% of traffickers are actually U.S. citizens who bring very small quantities of fentanyl because it can be very easily transported. We're talking about very small pills that fit in very small baggage. You can bring it in a car, and most of fentanyl actually makes its entrance through regular ports of entry, international bridges or air traffic or maritime ports. And we know also that most people detained and serving sentences for fentanyl end up being U.S. citizens. So it's very disconcerting then to think of the drug trafficking gangs and organizations as the main factor. When you look at terrorism and this supposed link with the traffickers, it's pretty much nonexistence. There's basically no evidence whatsoever, at least credible evidence. I mean, people in politics would say one thing or another, but credible, verifiable evidence that there is any link between trafficking and terrorism, for example. And so when you then consider all this, then you realize that anti-drug policy really serves the purpose to aggravate discourse and the rhetoric about national security. Right. And so going back to your question, I think if we're really only focusing on the drug trade itself, the best way and a way that has been proven in other countries where this has been done, for example, in Portugal, the best way is to decriminalize all usage of drugs, of illegal drugs. Right. This does two things. On the one hand, we end this very punitive policy that usually is exerted against minorities and people who are in very marginal positions. And this can be verified simply by looking at the prison populations in the U.S. where we incarcerate mainly minorities and impoverished minorities, not people who consume in the upper scales of society or even people who, with power and means, evade the legal system. Right. And so we know that there is a punitive, racial, racist aspect to the drug, to the war on drugs, but also on the public health dimension. Right. We know for a fact that decriminalizing drugs does not mean that there'll be more users or addicts. And even better, by decriminalizing all consumption, we can tend better to those people who are going through addiction. Right. We can treat addicts in a much better way. So all this to say that anti-drug policy is a failed policy if its real purpose is to stop drug trafficking and to stop or reduce the number of consumers. Right. So we know that for a fact. But my argument, and this has been part of my work, is that anti-drug policy may publicly argue that, right, but in reality, it's part of a larger set of policies concerned with national security that involve other aspects that are not really related to the drug trade. Right. And that involve, you know, all these other inflammatory policies that that mobilize militarism across borders, that propels geopolitical U.S. intervention in different countries. Right. And that masks, you know, the public safety concerns of this policy by in reality showing us it's true nature, which is, you know, the fact that the anti-drug policy seems to be serving the military's agenda of countries like the U.S. and other countries in the global north. Right. And that, of course, in itself, it's a very successful policy that promotes weapons sales, that involves very expensive security systems that are sold to the U.S. government and especially at the U.S.-Mexico border, and that it involves, of course, a public expense of billions of dollars that every year increases even more. Right. And so going back to your question, I think if we are really only talking about the drug trade and drug trafficking and drug consumption, of course, the reasonable stance is to decriminalize drugs, to treat addicts. Right. And to stop the punitive racist policies, right, that usually affect impoverished marginal minorities. Yeah. And I've seen that argument a lot in other areas of my research, too, just looking at how like legalization of marijuana, for example, in the U.S. It's already happening. Yeah, it's already happening. And that's had a significant effect on that drug market. And let me tell you something even more that maybe some other researchers that are not so focused in Latin America may have looked over, you know, now that the U.S. has decriminalized marijuana in over 20 states of the U.S., two things have happened. Right. One is that the cannabis industry has really boomed, right, and it has become a very important industry in itself with over 20 billion dollars in revenue annually. Right. And just to give you a sense of the size of this market, when the biggest trafficker in Mexico, Joaquin El Chapo Guzman, was tried in New York a couple of years back, the DEA was only able to demonstrate about 14 billion dollars of income generated by his organization in over 20 years of activity. What is very ironic, right, is that now the legal industry of cannabis overcomes the entire Sinaloa cartel operation in one year for 20 years of the cartel activity. Right. And what is even more shocking about this whole thing is that Mexico still prohibits the use of marijuana. Right. And we still send people to jail for it. And we are missing out our own opportunity to create our own national industry for cannabis. Now, so you have to ask them again another question along with this, right, how disingenuous anti-drug policy seems to be, right, because now nobody cares about marijuana as a national security threat or for addictions or anything. The only reason seems to be that it exists now in countries like Mexico is precisely to prevent the rise of a national industry of cannabis that competes with the U.S. one. Right. So this is now peer monopoly business that once again goes against the interests of countries like Mexico. My final question is, how do you get these mythologies about cartels and these misconceptions? Is it spread by the government, popular culture, the social media play a role in it? How do you how do you get these big misconceptions? Right. Well, you know, the main problem with the mythologies created around anti-drug policy is that they have become so dominant that they have become what we would hear in political theory called hegemony. They are hegemonic narratives. Hegemonic narratives simply means that they are so deeply accepted in our population that we spontaneously seem to believe in them and act upon them. Right. And so this hegemonic understanding of the drug trade that begins with official institutions telling us, of course, that drug cartels are very powerful. They have international reach. They make billions of dollars. They can buy the countries at their will. They can turn an entire presidential election upside down, etc. They have become so deeply accepted truths that they end up being first validated by most mainstream media. Right. So most mainstream media, that's what the official institutions tell them, mostly at face value and with very little criticism. And then because we as the public accept what our media, respected media is telling us, then we end up accepting it as well. And so you have entire generations of creators, right, of people who wrote, who write music, who write scripts for TV series, for movies, who write fiction, who come up with all kinds of creative imaginations for all these productions. Then they themselves accept it and give it, you know, this very visible resonance. So every time you ask about the drug trade to mostly anyone, they'll tell you the same thing, the same perception. Right. Well, no, traffickers are very powerful. These institutions are very dangerous. We need to do something or they're going to come and take over, etc. One other aspect that is seldom mentioned in academia, but it's a very important aspect of this whole thing, is that most official institutions in the U.S., in particular, the Department of Defense, but also the Department of Justice and even agencies like the DEA, actively participate in the actual cultural production of most films and TV series. Right. So they they're not as consulting eyes. Right. They actually act almost as censors. Right. So so if you want, for example, to shoot a film about the drug trade at the U.S.-Mexico border, you will need the cooperation of probably the Department of Defense, because you will need some equipment to make it real, to make it look like something, unless you have your own airplanes and gear. Right. You will probably need military assistance. And in order to get that, you must accept their own perception and interpretation of this thing. So they make sure that your scripts say things that align very easily with the official narratives of the drug war. So once again, it's very difficult to get past these misconceptions and misinterpretation of the phenomenon because we're constantly being regulated, disciplined by official discourse, either by the direct intervention of these institutions or by our own spontaneous acceptance of these policies. Right. And so going against that grain is very difficult because most people believe in these things as if they were true. And so that's perhaps our most difficult challenge, right, how to help people incorporate a critical understanding of what, for example, they see when they watch a film about the drug trade or when they listen to a song, when they listen to, for example, I don't know if you're aware of Corridos Tumbados, right, like singers like Peso Pluma, for example. Yeah, Peso Pluma. Who, right, you know, this young, very interesting singer who yet, you know, incorporates this narrative of the drug trade, right? You know, he plays songs about, you know, the children of traffickers who are supposed to be very powerful, who have all kinds of jewels and expensive luxury cars and they're seen with exotic women, etc. And so that imagination is what I would call the narco-narrative, right, that imagination is what it's replicated over and over so much that just becomes our mediated, customary understanding of the drug trade. So it's very difficult to undo. But, you know, with the brilliant work of young students like yourself and as a community, the academic community, perhaps we can try to make a change, right? And I think thinking critically is the most important thing that we must do every time we consume all kinds of objects, right? Doesn't matter if it's an entertainment object like a movie or, you know, a work of an academic or a journalistic report, right? We must think critically. We must think for ourselves. We must look at verifiable data and go against just this assumed perceived knowledge of what we think we know. Alongside your book, Los Carteles No Existencia, are there any other books or research materials that you would recommend to people who wanted to get into this? Sure. And to learn about this? Oh, plenty. Well, I mean, in English, in particular, I recommend strongly the book Drug War Capitalism by journalist Dawn Paley, which, by the way, can be freely downloaded because she has made it available without any copyright. So the book is called Drug War Capitalism, and the author is a Canadian journalist and sociologist named Dawn Paley, P-A-L-E-Y. And there's plenty of other works that I would suggest, one in particular that I think it's also very important to understand, not just the U.S.-Mexico border conflicts with drug trafficking, but the greater picture of transnational militarism that connects with the drug trade. It's a book called War Against the People by an anthropologist and an activist from Israel named Jeff Halper, who, you know, one of the important relevant aspects of this book is that it connects the military-industrial complex that emanates from the Israel-Palestine conflict and that informs directly other zones of transnational conflict like the U.S.-Mexico border. Right. So it's a very, very important book. And one final book that I would add to that list is the book by U.S. journalist Todd Miller, and his book is called Empire of Borders. Right. And this is a book about how borders have become the way of interacting between the U.S. and Latin America and how the idea of a border actually has been reproduced and in many ways become the only way to inhabit Latin America. Right. In such a way that, for example, Mexico has become all together in itself, almost like a big extended border. Right. In the way that even, for example, Donald Trump wanted. Right. So that we have now the Mexican police detaining undocumented migrants on the northern side of the border. Right. Preventing them to go across the U.S. Right. Acting almost like an extension of the border patrol. So this, of course, involves a lot of money and public investment in security and just a very violent security apparatus, military security and police security apparatus that Todd Miller researches very well. So I strongly recommend that one, too. He writes for a small newsletter called The Border Chronicle that anybody can subscribe, but it's very cheap and sub-stack. And he also regularly uploads podcasts there. They're very, very interesting and very, very extremely timely for understanding the drug trade and the complexities of anti-drug policy. Well, great. Thank you so much. This has been wonderful. Well, thank you. I wish you luck. And I'm so happy to see young students like yourself, you know, getting interested in understanding these difficult, complex issues from New York. And so I applaud what you're doing. And please send me an email if you have any other questions. I'm happy to help.