Hi, I'm Ethan Nadelman, and this is Psychoactive, a production of I Heeart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the show where we talk about all things drugs. But any views expressed here do not represent those of I Heart Media, Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed, heed, as an inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they may not even represent my own. And nothing contained in this show should be used as medical advice or encouragement to use any type of drug. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. Our subject today is Mexico and it's experience with drugs and drug prohibition really over the last hundred years. But that we're going to cover a lot of ground. My guest today in this case are two people really dear friends of mine, Alejandro Madrasso and Catalina Perez. Until recently, we're both professors at a prestigious Mexican university called c d C I d E, and Alejandro had founded the Drug Research Center there. Catalina is also a professor there. They both have extensive academic degrees from Mexican universities. They both received their doctorates in law in Alejandro's case from Yale and Catalina's case from Stanford. They've published extensively, They've been active in the public debates over drugs and criminal justice and the military in Mexico, and I've known them both for a number of years. Alejandro recently joined the board of my old organization, Drug Policy Alliance. Catalina and I have been on the advisory board of George Soros' Foundations Global Drug Policy Program. We haven't seen each other since before the pandemic, but it's wonderful to have them both on. So Alejandro Catalina, thank you so much for joining me on Psychoactive. Thanks for the invitation, Ethan. It's a great pleasure. You've been second to having you here, but it's still a great pleasure. Also, I should say this is the first time I'm doing a podcast with two guests, so this is a bit of an experiment. Well, let's just focus specifically on the drugs itself before we get into the violence and the corruption all of that, because I think in a way, you know, it's such a huge subject. I want to try to make sense of this for our audience. But you know, you think back to the old days right. I mean, Mexico has been producing opium and shipping heroin to the United States for almost a hundred years and marijuana. Mexico was for a long time the major source of marijuana into the US, but that's now I think, being displaced to some extent by US domestic production. And we see heroin declining in part because entinyl has become um so significant. But at the same time, Mexico appears very innovative in terms of maintaining a significant role in this broader economy. Well, let me put it this way. I think that the role that Mexico has played has changed, but it's simple portants has been maintained because of its neighbor, which is the United States. I would think of Mexico's role in the international drug trade in three big moments. One would be one in which we were mostly small time producers would move their poppies or later cannabis also to the border and then just push it across the border, and then the trade would take place in the United States. Then there's a second important moment, which begins probably around the eighties, when the US closes off the maritime route from Colombia for cocaine from South America through the Caribbean into the United States, and so the trade shifts. It's not Mexican concaine, it's it's South American cocaine, but it now comes into the United States through Mexico because it's such a large border such so difficult to police, whereas the ships along the Caribbean were easier to police. And then I think you have to start thinking of a third moment, which is now, which I think would probably begin around the time that we began or full blown war on drugs in two thousand six, in which it's not just about moving South American cocaine into the United States, but also moving precursors of synthetic drugs such as fentanyl, and actually producing meth and crystal here in Mexico and moving into the United States. So it's always been relevant because of its proximity to the United States, but our specific role has shifted along the years. We still produced some opium, but it's certainly not as relevant as it was before fentanyl. We still produce cannabis, but it's certainly not as relevant as it was before the US legalized and had its markets. I mean, the US has been the largest production of cannabis in the world for a long time, even before it began regulating its markets, Mexico was second to the US. But still you guys stop all your pots, and you still needed some of ours. So most of our production was for experts, you know, Catalina, can you help put this in a sort of broader Latin American perspective, because if I look back historically, right in Mexico, because of the border, its has this advantage position visa the Colombia, Bolivia, Peru. I think there's never been a period in US history when less than a third of the heroine the US was not coming from Mexico, and sometimes it's been two thirds or more. But I mean, obviously Colombia, Bolivia, Peru have played significant roles. Brazil plays a big role in terms of export internationally. How would you sort of like compare and contrast this sort of role of Mexico visa vi these other prominent Latin American countries who have been deeply involved. I think what Alejandro was saying earlier is important. We've we have changed from being a producer that exported either heroin, opioids or cannabis. We were at some point the largest producer of cannabis in the world. Two of a different type of economy. Many of the drugs that go into the US aren't produced in Mexico, but enter the US through Mexico. The complexity of Mexico has to do with the fact that we're exporting in some cases and precursors are received and then distributed to the rest the continent, whether north of the border to the US and Canada or south and and it used to be the that we were also producing and sending out to two different countries. So I think that the problems are quite different. Some countries in Latin America are just countries where the drugs go through, and so that's one type of problem that we see within the prohibition and the current black market of illicit drugs. And then there's a different one, which is which drugs are being produced and where are they being sent, and so we have both of those issues in Mexico. And then of course there's a problem of the organizations that are commercing or producing drugs are also involved in other solicit economies, and so it's a very complex issue. I think. Just to answer your question more specifically, the role of Mexico in that is that we are a transit country, but we're also a country which receives precursors and then we ensemple and and produce different types of drugs and then export them. And we are also a producer of other types of illicit drugs which are grown here, like cannabis or poppy. I mean, obviously the US is the principal market, but it's also drugs that are now being exported to Europe, right Africa, westward to Asia. I mean, we always think about some of these drugs coming out of you know, coca being growing in Bolivia, Pru Colombia and then shipped from there to Europe or through Brazil. But this is Mexico scene is playing in every bigger role in the sort of non US international market as well. Well. You know, something that's been interesting with COVID is the change of roles for organized crime. And you know, there's some stories, some investigations that have been made of how the Mexican drug cartels are now trying to control European markets, and so it's interesting to see it's not only the US, but they're also sending it to Europe and we're also receiving it from from China, from other Asian countries. So again it's a very complex question because it's not only losing and exporting, but it's also receiving and sending to other countries. You know, I had on a previous episode of the former President of Columbia, President Santo sign and we talked a little bit. I think about this sort of entrepreneurial tradition in Colombia and how if one looks at Colombia's very special role different than Mexico's, but also very special in Latin America, it wasn't just about geography being relatively closer than Bolivia proved to the United States, and wasn't just about terragn that there was some entrepreneurial tradition. And then I look at Mexico and I remember twenty years ago when meth amphetam started to become a big issue in substantial parts of the United States, and a lot of it it was being produced in domestic labs, oftentimes backyard labs, kind of you know, low quality, low skill, sometimes blowing up and killing you know, the producers and their families, and a whole big domestic law enforcement thing, and very quickly it's seen within a few years, Mexico comes along, created these mega labs and basically sort of displacing a fair bit of the homegrowing meth duction in the United States by producing a higher quality myth amphetamy that they're shipping to the US. And then you look at fentintel. A few years ago, the story was fentatil being exported from China either directly to the US or via Canada, coming through the Males. It doesn't you don't need to ship, you know, you don't need big trucks or big boats or anything like that. And then in the last few years, all of a sudden surprise, Mexico like becoming maybe the number one ultimate exporter or a fentinil to United States. And obviously stats are unreliable. So I mean, is it true that one could say that there is some kind of particular tradition that's here where Mexican you know, criminal entrepreneurs are ready to jump on whatever is the latest illicit product. Or is it simply about geography. Let me jump in here. I think that geography certainly plays a leading role. You were speaking of an entrepreneur culture in Colombia. Let me say this, if there is an entrepreneur culture that we could call Mexican. I think that it's main characteristic, and this is both for icit and illicit markets, is that enterprise is built by having cozy relationships with authorities. We have a long tradition of chrony capitalism and government, and I think that that tradition also plays a role that is relevant in or illicit economies. So I'm not surprised when you can find capital investments that are far more intense in Mexico than in the US, because you know, most often than not, producers and traffickers have some form of hoots going on with some authority at some level, and that allows for more capital investment that in places when where you don't have agreements with authorities and you have to be you know, jumping and moving around. So the border. Was it Clinton who said it's the economy stupid in Mexico and drugs, it's the border stupid. I mean, it's always the border, and the border is the key factor that you have to take into consideration. But if we're gonna look at the kind of entrepreneurial culture that we have, I think that we would have to look at the chrony capitalism that we have been so invested in for such a long time. The relationship and the ties between enterprise LISIT or LISIT and authorities has to be a key factor in explaining any and all entrepreneurial and divorce in Mexico ethan, if I can jump into that, I think there's also an issue of Mexico was one of the main producers in the world of cannabis, and so a lot of the drug market was geared towards producing better or more cannabis which would be exported to the US or opioids. And with the fentanel crisis, opioid prices have gone down and so there isn't a market anymore for people to grow poppy and to produce opioid, and the same thing has happened with cannabis. I had a student a few years ago that did a study about legal cannabis flowing into Mexico from the U S. And and it's quite common and there isn't a lot being done about it. And so the Mexican Canada cannabis markets are falling because we do have a lot of things coming in from the US from the legal cannabis market in the US, and so it's also a question about people that used to distribute cannabis or now seeing that market isn't profitable anymore, so what are the options? And the market right now is for fentanel. So I think it's also just a question of market opportunity which is coming from the US and the need for substitution. You know, they wrote a book on the internationalization of US criminal law enforcement, wrote a book called Cops Across Borders, and I looked at the history of transnational crime and law enforcement, and it was an old transition of the contra bondista coming out of Mexico. And it could have been smuggling alcohol during alcohol prohibition. It might have been smuggling opium. It might have been smuggling cattle, or it might have been questioning people or commodities or electronic whatever it might be. There's that long tradition, but in some respects, a lot of it seemed relatively tame when you look back in the old days, and now it seems a lot less tame. That this economy is becoming I don't know, much more dynamic. I don't know. I don't know that it's a growing percentage of Mexico's GDP. It's not like Afghanistan or opium looms so large, but it does seem bigger, more dynamic. Is that fair to say. I think it's fair to say that it's bigger insofar as particularly. I think the biggest shift was when the cocaine route started passing through Mexico. That opened up a market that was probably far more profitable than cannabis and heroin put together. And that was the mid eighties or so. It started in the middle, yeah, the mid eighties and into the nineties, So that's one factor that one needs to take into consideration. It is bigger because as cocaine started moving through Mexico instead of through the Caribbean. Basically, as it moves from the coast of Colombia, or moved from the coast of Colombia or from the southern part of the Hemisphere through the Caribbean, it stopped over in a couple of island but it was not necessarily anywhere, and you could have your pilots ship it or fly it basically all the way from Colombia into the United States. Whereas when it started going by land through Mexico, then the people that move it through the land become much more important, and so as that happened, the bargaining position of the Mexican traffickers visa v. The Colombian producers became much more important, and so the negotiations there tended to leave more of the utility of the market in Mexico rather than Colombia. And so it is bigger as it is bigger since cocaine, I think, but it's also changed radically in terms of what kind of enterprise that is, and that has to do directly with Mexican government policies regarding prohibition. And what I mean by that is that it used to be a logistics enterprise. It used to be entrepreneurs trying to run things from point A to point B. But then in the two thousands early two thousands it started becoming a territorial business, and that is you didn't need to control the logistics or know how to move the stuff around. But because prohibition became more intensely enforced, partly because of pressure from the US after the Krena case in the mid eighties, but also because we had this is explained that the Kiki Camarady case was a d agent in Mexico who was, you know, captured and murdered. That was the year when I was doing my graduate research, and I was actually working the State Department's Narcotics Bureau, and I had access to classify cables coming back and forth, and I just remember the impact of the kidnapping and torturing killing of the d E agent and Carey had a huge impact on sort of somewhat on public consciousness, certainly on the kind of elite federal law enforcement at that time. I think it's a huge shift. I think that symbolically it was very important because it made the d A agents feel vulnerable away they had felt before, and so they had to be far more aggressive. And the U. S Government also felt more vulnerable and therefore really bore down in its diplomatic pressure on the Mexican government. And as you said, it wasn't only the kidnapping and murder, but the torture and the brutal torture that he was objected to. So he became a symbol and a rallying cry for US enforcement agencies, which then pressured the Mexican government to do a far more aggressive crackdown on trafficking that had ever done. And that crackdown changed the incentives because you no longer needed to move stuff from point A to point B, but you actually needed a lot more cloud from authorities, and you needed a lot more firepower to protect that goods that you were moving from point to point B. You could think of it as, you know, a bit of an arms race after the Cama in a case in which both the US government but particularly the Mexican government started putting in a lot more effort into repressing trafficking, and all the traffickers started investing in far more firepower than they had before. But there's a particular shift in the year two thousand, or around the year two thousand that I think changed the nature of the game. An indigenous guerilla uprising in Chiapas, the Sapatista movement in that kind of like shook the establishment because there hadn't been political violence in something like twenty five years, and certainly it hadn't been a Sailian in media as the Sapatista rebellion. And so the Mexican government apparently decided to train special forces in counterinsurgency, and so they sent a group of special forces to be trained in the United States by what was left of the School of the Americas and these special forces when they came back to Mexico in the nineties and particularly in the late nineties, the government policy regarding the Sapatista rebellion had changed. It was no longer about counterinsurgency, but it was more about you know, spin control in the media. So what to do these special forces that had been trained in counterinsurgency in very brutal tactics in the US, and then they were sent not to do the counter insurgency worked that they were trained to do, but they were sent as police in the drug enforcement Agency in the north of Mexico, and they dissected, they defected to the drug traffickers and started an elite cartel of themselves called the sets. And so I think that this logic, the military logic of the SETAs, which is territorial and not about logistics, also became a real game changer in what happened. And you really started with an arms race in the years two thousand and then of course when we fully militarized prohibition starting in two thousand and six, it all went cahoots, It all went berserk, because the logic is not about transit, but it is about firepower and territorial control. We'll be talking more after we hear this. Cally, let me turn to you here. When we see this dramatic escalation, I think it's a dramatic escalation of violence beginning. I guess when President Calderone comes to power and launches a really serious drug war. When he sees in the serious drug war, I mean, is that a sort of fundamingly different than what we can think about sort of twenties, you know, what had been going on and next over the last fifty years, it's completely different. I think there's a breaking point in two thousand and six that you can see in terms of homicide. For example, we had declining rates of homicide before two thousand and six, and then in two thousand and six, President Calderon, who had won the elections actually against our current president Lopez Rador, but he won't buy a very small margin, it was less than one percent, and once he was given the definite win for the election, he decided to declare the war on rugs. And it was basically he came out dressed as a military and said, we're going to stop the drugs that are going to our families, We're going to protect our kids, and he basically launched a war against our own population. By the end of his first year in term, there was more than fifty thousand soldiers that were being deployed in different parts of Mexico, and we saw an increase in different types of violence. One of them was, as I said, homicides. We also saw shootouts with the military starting to appear all across the country, and where something that I've studied and documented here in at Sea there, which is basically every time there was a shootout, there were very few survivors. So we had the military going out and having, you know, something that looked like extrajudicial executions in this supposed war against drugs. And then there was also something they said was we're going after the heads of the cartels, and that made something else happen, which was the breaking down of the big cartels. And suddenly we start seeing all these other cartels, smaller cartels appearing and fights within the bigger cartels, which also created another type of violence. So so we had the military fighting the drug cartels, new drug cartels coming up and fighting for territory, and we saw an increase in other types of crimes, there were kidnappings went up carceft. For the first time in Mexican history, we started seeing that the main cause of women's homicide was firearms and no longer domestic violence. And that was another shift in violence because Mexico was not known as a particularly violent country for many decades before that. I mean, now I think the homicide rate must be triple or quadruple what it is in the US, and I think the country as a whole has a homicide rate of maybe thirty thousand, which is really equivalent to not the worst, but sort of the second tier of the most violent cities in America. You also have to, you know, see the different parts of the country. To go Tomas, the homicide rates even higher than that, whereas if you come to Ascalliantes, where see the one of the homicide rate is much lower. So you know, you say thirty over one hundred thousand, and and that's across the country, but in some areas of Mexico it's a lot higher. It's gone up to you know, a hundred and twenty over one hundred thousand. Saline is pointing out to the differences and how it impacted the country just to give you an idea. At some point in I believe it was two thousand ten or two thousand elevens which sits across from a pass on the border, had a homicide rate that was higher than back that which at that time was occupied by US troops. So we had something like you know above, nearing two hundred homicides per hundred thousand people, whereas in two thousand six across the country we had eight homicides per hundred thousand people. In the country, we now have thirty homicides you say, correctly, homicides per hundred thousand people. But in what is the crisis was so bad that we exceeded two hundred homicides for thirty people and the crack, I mean, what really changed everything is two thousand six, And as Catalina was pointing it out, it was a politically motivated move by the incoming president. Then there was no violent crisis, there was no criminal crisis, There was no real national wave of violence in two thousand six. In Mexico. There were visible homicides that were very how shall I say, very performative, you know, beheadings and stuff like that in min and on the border of Tamaulipas and the United States. But when you look at the numbers, the homicide rate was still going down. We were becoming a more Pacific country up until the time that President Calron, and they cost context of a highly questioned election, decided to dress himself up as a military and launch a war on drugs. In my opinion, he was trying to emulate what George Bush had done with the War on Terror. You know, both had had a highly questioned election and both became very popular in the middle of the war. The differences Bush didn't create nine eleven and he didn't launch a war within the territory of his own country. Calderon created out of nothing the war of drugs in Mexico, and he launched it within his territory and against his population. And the difference with what happened with one war and the other well is now visible. Mexico is in a deep deterioration of its social and institutional context. Prior to two thousand six, Now do you think that decline and violence would have continued but for Calderon's you know, stepping up the drug war at that time, Because I remember one of the theories was that you know, for seventy years, Mexico is essentially a one party clasi democracy the Prey, and that part of what happened is that there were understandings between in the gangsters and powerful leaders in the pre which dominated not just the federal government but most state governments. And that then, you know, two thousand comes along, I think it was, and for the first time, you know, the opposition party, the Panamore kind of center right party, and Vicente Fox gets elected and that a lot of those old arrangements sort of break down. At the same time that you have beginnings of meth amphetamine, you know, beginning to come into Mexico and you know, new markets in that way, Mexico's really becoming dominant in the cocaine trade as well, the heroine stuff picking up again. So I mean, you know, was Calderone just simply a kind of cynical ploy or was he responding to something real? I have to say this outright, I think it was a cynical political move. I don't think he was responding to something real. All of what you said is true. The cartels were getting more money from the you know, cocaine from South Americans with the eighties and nineties, there were some fractures and I'm breaking ups. There was more political part pluralities of the protection racket was harder to hold on to. And yet homicides went from twenty by a hundred thousand to eight by a hundred thousand in two thousand six. The numbers tell us very clearly that through this whole period in which Mexico was becoming more important to drug trade, in which cartels were becoming more fractured, all of that, we stabily became a safer and safer and safer country. Two thousand six is as the hiatus. Undoubtedly, when you look at the statistics, life expectancy in Mexico dropped by almost two years between two thousand five and two thousand ten. And that's the period of time in which which Mexico invested most money in its health system. So all indicators of health we're going up, and that's pointing to a bigger life expectancy. The only variable that explains the lowering of the life expectancy in Mexico is that we started killing our kids, young male adults, and that shift is two thousand seven two two and two. It's the magnitude that really changes the game, and it has everything to do with the Calton administration beginning in two. One of the hypothesis that has been put out there is that there were these arrangements, as you said, at the local level, where you know, the police or maybe political members from the political parties would look away or make deals with organized crime, and there were all these arrangements at street level even to deal and organize crime. You know, it's not always possible and it's not always the task of the police to completely eliminate crime, but it's also to organize it. You know, you can sell illicit products from China in these corners here, but you can't sell it over there, and you can't do you know, kidnappings, but maybe we'll allow some type of other thefts. And so one of the hypothesis is that at the moment that the military was deployed, all of those local arrangements were broken and nothing was there to substitute it, because you know, the way that the militarization works is that the military is deployed as an occupational force and it brings peace to a zone, well at least at a short term. But then you know, the police and all the all these other arrangements breakdown, and then when the military is retired, everything is broken and there's no longer a police force to rearrange what was already there. So I mean, and all these are hypothesis, it hasn't been tested, but we do know that there was a big illicit economy which worked in some type of arrangement where you know, it was kind of peaceful, not not very peaceful. So we don't know, you know, would it have blown up eventually into something similar to what we look like what we have today, But we do know that there is a causal effect between the strategy you that's President Calton took and what we're seeing today. And when we describe the violence I mean and the levels of homicides, and obviously there's one portion the normal violence that goes on, you know, in terms of domestic violence and street violence that isn't related to all of this bigger stuff directly at least, And then there's the violence committed by the drug gangs. And then there's the violence being committed by the security services, by the police, by the military who may be in cahoots with the gangs, who may not be you know, I mean, is most of the violence being committed by the gangs and a small proportion by the security forces. Or is it actually so muddled because there's so much corruption at this point going on that it's hard to break it out. I mean, Catalina, how would you answer that? We know stories. The most recent scandal was Canadal sim Foegal, who was Defense Secretary with Calton. He was accused in the US for having supposedly receiving money from the Beltrand Labels, one of the big cartels here in Mexico, and he was accused of trafficking or allowing heroin to be trafficked into the US. And so we know that these exists, and and there's also some studies that show that it's it's politically motivated in some cases. In some some spaces it's you know, you give me money, I'll give you protection, and then I'll allow the whatever business you have to go through. In other cases it's more politically driven. So there's the political party, maybe there are elections, and so the cartels are given protection in exchange of having a rackets in that state. And and so it's politically driven and not just economically in the sense of you get paid off. There's different ways in which this happens, but but it does show how vulnerable the Mexican authorities and the Mexican system is big power and the economic power of the cartels, and and and I think that's you know, one of the things that we've seen. We've also seen that after two thousand and six and with the deployment of the military, the drug cartels started seeing that, you know, they were going to be shootouts, and so they needed better weapons. And so one of the things that we have seen is how the drug cartels now have you know, really potent equipment, which by the way, a lot of those guns and armament comes from the US, from your legal market, and it comes into the Mexican market illegally. But now there's an armament race within our country, which which authorities are trying to keep up with the cartels to ensure that they have enough firepower. And then the cartels, with all that money and the access that they have two consend the US, you know, are buying new weapons and they're all it's basically what we're we're fighting with here and what we're seeing are you know, Mexicans killed with inside the country. So basically the violence is mistat the size because even when Calderon leaves office at the end of twelve and he's replaced by Enrage Pennonieto from the old pre that had ruled Mexico for most of the twentieth century, and now by Lopus Overdoor a k a. Armlow, the current president. I mean, it seems the violence levels are as high, if not higher, than they wanted to Calderon. Is that just because things shifted in a way where we're just dealing with a whole new phenomenon and that you know, it's there's just almost no way to deal with it at this point. I think there's something to that. I think that Calderon broke the damn in two thousand six, changed the game completely, and now it's very difficult. And I don't know how coloqual I can be in this podcast, but it's very hard to put the ship back in the baby even and so Callon brought it out and now it's very difficult to put it back in. But let me be a bit more specific about that. I think that we see an increase in violence. When you look at the curve of homicides, for instance, you see a constant increase in violence from two thousand seven through two. Then it kind stabilizes two thousand ten, two thousand eleven, and it starts declining in two thousand eleven into two thousand twelve. In two thousand twelve, we have a change of administration and Penia comes in. The downward tendency continues slightly. It is a slight downworker tendency, but it's there, and then it starts going up again in two thousand fourteen. Now, the one thing that did happen between two thousand eleven and two thousand fourteen is that the military had a less prominent role in government at the beginning of the Pinion administration. Then in two thousand fifteen two thousand sixteen, the military take again an important role in government, and there's actually legal reforms being pushed through to allow them to legally do the work, the security work that they've been doing, because, by the way, the decision to bring out the military to substitute police was unconstitutional and illegal, and it stayed on constitutional legal for several years. And so in two thousand and sixteen, the military push the Peni administration to pass a law, the Interior Security Law, And in this context, in the debate. It is about the same time that we have the debate for legalizing military policing that homicides start going up again. They keep on going up through the end of the Peon administration into the lopesord of administration. There's a small downward trend at the beginning of the COVID epidemic, but then it's skyrockets again. And right now we are at levels that are slightly higher than the peak during the Caldon administration. After studying this for now twelve years, I'm increasingly convinced that the national catastrophe that we have has as its most important explaining and catalyzing factor military station of public security. And you can look at it across time and it plays out, and you can look at it across territory and it plays out, and you can even look at it across tactics. And this is something that was very scary. The beheadings, the heads being rolled into the dance floor at a nightclub in Luapan in two thousand and six. That kind of performative violence in which dismembered bodies are placed in very visible positions is precisely the kind of training that they set us had when they were military and being trained in counterinsurgency in the United States. The testimonies from the SETAs correspond exactly due to that kind of performative violence in which dismembering bodies and setting up a perimeter so as to delineate a territory and do it in a way that makes it unequivocal who is performing the violence is something that you can see consistently from the training of the Special Forces in the nineties to the SETAs in the early two thousand and then it becomes metastasized, as you say, throughout the territory. From culturally speaking, you know, you have this phenomenon or what they call the narco corridas narco the songs, the celebration of the narcos, and so here you have these narcos cutting off hair. It's really acting effectively as terrorists, right, terrorizing communities. I'm sending a message to other gangs into law enforcement, but also terrorizing the local population. Yet we have these songs being done and you know it's celebrating them. Is you know they kind of beloved gorillas, robin hoods and all this sort of stuff. Why was that and is that still going on? Even though in the wake of all this violence, the gorridos have a long history of being a way of transmitting news in Mexico since the nineteenth centuries. Gorridos are basically songs that tell epic stories of cultural heroes that are most often lower class, rural cultural heroes who are deemed criminals by authorities. So you know, you have gorridos of bandits in the nineteenth century, or of tobacco traffickers when the tobacco was a government monopoly in the nineteenth century. Then during the US Prohibition you have the corridos tequileros carrillos, which are gorrido's written about traffickers of tequila into the United States. And that's actually very interesting because when you look at those corridos and then you look at the narco corridos of the seventies and the eighties when they came back into force with narco traffickers now as a protagonist, specifically drop traffickers, you see a pattern that is very specific. Mexican authorities are not the enemy. It is the United States Border Patrol that's the enemy. And they have a special word for it, and it's the ring ches, which is a deformation of the Texas Rangers. So when you look at the Tequileros, the corridos te Quileros, and you look at the early corridos in the seventies, eighties, nineties, and even the early two thousands, the authorities in Mexico are not portrayed as the enemy. It is during the Calderon administration that you start finding corridos speaking more, much more openly of confronting Mexican authorities, not US border, not traders, not rival bank gangs, not former allies who be trade And so there is the shift during the warr drocks on that culture of carrillos, and the fact that the naticles so successfully tapped into that cultural stream tells you that didn't see them as terrorists, at least not originally, and many times they don't see them asterists, but rather as insurgents in some way. And that's what's most worrisome is that the political categories of who is doing law enforcement and who is doing terrorism are completely blurred at this time. And they're completely blurred because it is very difficult to tell who is terrorizing the population because both authorities and criminals use very bloody signals to as you mentioned, established their authorities. So torture is a common practice among Mexican authorities. Extra judicial executions, as Catalina has a very famously documented in Mexico, are are ways in which the authorities also perform violence in a way so as to terrorize specific populations. And so you know, the population and it's caught in between these very terrifying groups of people who are exerting violence in a way that wants to be visible. And we have to be very careful about that because I think that points to a decomposition of the idea of a political community. The big problem that we have is the legitimacy of authorities in Mexico, especially the police. If you see surveys about you know, trust and authorities are local police are usually at the very bottom of the you know, the the authorities along with politicians there they're at the bottom of the list of authorities and the trust of Mexicans and two authorities. Let's take a break here and go to an ad. I wonder sometimes I look at the levels, you know, when you see these periodic reports of corruption of governors, of senior federal officials in Mexico, you know, being threatened or baby being killed, or being charged with corruption. I wonder at times if a governor or, for that matter, I mean I even wonder if a president seriously wants to go in a very systematic way to target some of the biggest criminal organizations, do they have to worry about their own personal security or their children. I look, now you have your current president Omlo, and he's declared he doesn't want to continue the old drug war of Calderone. He wants to I don't know what was the expression, and give him a hug not whatever it is, right, Hugs not bullets, Hugs not bullets. Right. And I was reading recently about complaints by people, you know, Mexicans who are living along the West coast, you know where Jalisca, Jalisca Jalisco is and mihaw Kind is. And they're saying, God, I mean, all all the authorities are doing here is just trying to keep the two gangs apart from one another, while those gangs are extorting from UH and taxing us, just trying to move around. But you know, it's not to say that Amlo is scared of them. But I do wonder how high up does the feeling of fear, even among the most senior officials go that something could happen to them. The short answer is, I don't think they can go after these guys seriously. And they can't go after these guys seriously because Mexico has done a very poor job of setting up professional institutions for investigation, for police work, and even for the military. You say the military have a reputation of being less corrupt. Yes, but I fear that that's a reputation. It's not necessarily the truth. Here. You have to understand a little bit why the security and just the separatus of the state it is so deficient, and that has to do with the way things played out during the Peri regime. The pr I was the hegemonic political party that completely dominated politics in Mexico from two around about the early nineties. So you basically had a one party system with nominal elections, and that meant that most of the repressive apparatus of the state was subjected to this very authoritarian political regime with very little checks and very little supervision over it. So when we started transitioning towards a competitive electoral system in which the hemogemonic party lost power throughout the nineties. It congealed finally in the year two thousand when the presidency was lost the pure I lost the presidency to the pan to the to the right wing party. But it had been happening throughout the nineties. I mean, it didn't just happen in one day. There were governorships, and they were cities, and there were congressional positions that opened up. In that transition towards democracy. We did not reform the security forces, which were basically designed and operated as a repression apparatus, are selectively repressive apparatus that didn't really need technical competence to pursue and prosecute. And so that broke consists him went into this new democratic, politically competitive system in the year two thousand and and the political control that could be exerted under the authoritarian regime no longer could be exerted. But the apparatus was basically the same, and so the apparatus, the police apparatus, the military apparatus, the judiciary apparatus basically became free agents. And so they are now free agents that maximize the rents that they can pull out of the system. They're not technically competent, and so you will hardly be able to face these criminal organizations which have been growing. With the police, the prosecutorial, the judicial, and the military apparatus that you have. What you can do is keep saying that you need more resources to do it and keep growing that apparatus. And so what we've been doing is we've been investing a lot of money in police and the military, but not getting particularly better police forces. Prosecutors, better judges are better militaries. So basically what I'm driving at here is that the political the politicians don't have the tools that they would need to face organized crime because they don't want to do the long term investment that it would take to reform all these institutions. I mean, you know, the United States launched this Plan Plan Merrita right to provide o ethic over the years, billions of dollars to Mexico to help basically with the drug war, and my understanding with Andrew Obama, there was more of a push towards doing things like training of the sorts that should theoretically make a difference. And I wonder, you know, with all of that investment that happened, at least I presume under the Obama days, you know what keeps it from really taking whole And what I wonder is that if you're working in this system and then you're finding out, whether privately or in the media, that some of the most senior people involved in law enforcement and the judiciary, the person who is the drugs are of Mexico, you know, key generals, that it turns out they were taking money from major drug traffickers. Even somebody who wants to be well trained and be a serious conscientious investigator has to look around him. He's seeing journalists getting killed, He's seeing other law enforcement getting killed at various levels. He's seeing the most senior people ultimately landing up to turn out to have been in bed with major traffickers. It seems like the situation where the corruption and maybe intimidation is so pervasive that it's almost a hopeless situation to imagine that there's going to be some turning around on this. Here's a problem on that narrative. I mean, it's true, but here's a problem with it. You're looking at it from the perspective on the individual who wants to do right, and the solution is not going to come from the individual to what's to do right. What you need to do is you have to change the structures of the system. And the key change in the structures of the systems is you have to have supervision and trans parency. So you know, Obama can throw all the money at once at security in Mexico through the Very Die initiative. But if the Mexican authorities do not have civilian supervision over military authorities, or if they don't have transparency in the way the Attorney General's office works and transparency in the way the judiciary works, then all that opacity is going to be just putting money into a black box and you don't know how it's spent, and you don't know that it's spent in the things that should be spent in, or just buying more expensive toys. So it's not about a good person wanting to fight the system. The solution is not going to come from goodwill. The solution is going to come from intelligent structural institutional change, and that change comes with more transparency. And the tragedy of this whole situation is that as violence has grown in Mexico, the punitive discourse gains more political attraction and the punitive discourse usually leads to more opaque laws and less civilian supervision or citizen supervision under honor authorities. So we're getting more opaque institutions, more powerful institutions, less civilian and less citizens supervision. And these institutions have more money. And what we're actually doing is we're making the whole system worse. I'm reading occasionally these headlines Mexico legalizes, are about to legalize marijuana, you know, bills being introduced in Congress, multipartisan support for these bills. They didn't legalize that's another thing. They didn't legalize medical marijuana. They legalized pharmaceutical marijuana. So it has to be cannabis derivatives with less than two percent of THHC and they have to come, you know, from they have to be imported. They can't be produced here because of the specifications with you know, regarding the production. So it's basically US or Canadian products. So it's you know, sometimes the media is very misleading. You know, Why do we say every you know, six months that cannabis has been legalized. The last time I counted, there were already twenty eight proposals of cannabis legislation. Being proposed in either you know, either chambers in the legislative and they just you know, won't go won't go through. And it's good in some ways that it hasn't gone through because the proposals are basically you know, legislations that favor Canadian pharmaceuticals requirements that are being established in the in those you know, bills or proposals for bills which will only allow certain you know, companies to produce because of the way and the requirements that are being asked for if you want to produce or cell cannabis here in Mexico. But so far, none of them have actually passed passed Congress. I mean, I remember going to a conference in I think Guana Wata a few years ago organized by former President the Center Fox, who is a big promoter of the marijuana industry. Is nobody actually making money in Mexico legally on the marijuana stuff? Now? Importers, people who in port drops, people who have a permit to import droubs, those the ones making money. But but it's without THHC. And so basically you do have some products, but it's for you know, bombs that will be sold in Walmart or you know CBD drops for you know, your pets, or or or for arthritis. I mean, I remember when I visited you guys in late nineteen and allhandre you were. I felt quite excited at the time. He frustrated, but excited because you were working with people in the government, I think the Interior Minister, you know, about real marijuana legal regulation proposals and trying to get as we do in the American States, a better bill worth instead of a worse bill out. I guess Lopez over Door leaves office in um about three years from now, a little into three years from now, are we actually going to see the emergence of retail cannabis shops in Mexico before he leaves office? Probably not, I mean who knows, but probably not. And and so I mean part of understanding why not during his term in office has to do with going back to the question you asked about him being, you know, an outsider and the left wing president. So to understand what kind of left lopeso Alort is, you have to understand his history. And he comes from a history of being a p r I party operative in the seventies and eighties, So the left to him means close borders, import substitution economy, and highly centralized government control over the economy. That's what the left means to him. It is not progressive drug policy, it is not you know, progressive gender agenda. It is the left of the nineties seventies in Mexico, which was really authoritarian and really vertical. And the thing is, he is the president with the least checks and balances since the democratic transition, and so in many ways his administration looks like a restoration of the p r I, both in discourse and and substantive agenda, but also in the way he operates government because without checks and balance, it is because he has a comfortable majority in Congress, he basically bullies around the judiciary and the States. And so what had happened with democratic opening, which was the pluralization and opening up of politics in Mexico, has reverted and it's become highly centralized. And now I don't think that he will push through an aggressive reform agenda regarding cannabis, first of all, because he doesn't believe in it. It's not something that he thinks is the left. I think he actually comes from a left that thinks that the States should have an important role in dictating the morality of the population, which has an important tradition in the in Mexico's left that sometimes we band casinos and all of that same logic. So substantively, he doesn't have any commitment to it. But politically, the war on drugs all drug crimes because they are federal crimes as opposed to state crimes, and so it's federal criminal policy are a vehicle for further centralization, and militarization is a vehicle for further centralization. So it is useful to him to have prohibition because it is one of the tools through which government has become more centralized. So I don't think he will let up, and I don't think we will have a robust, healthy market. If we do have any form of reform passed through in the next two years, it will probably be something that is highly limited, very much oriented by the interests of the American and Canadian industries that have already introduced themselves into Mexico through medical marijuana. But as Catalina was saying, it's not that we're actually using pot for medical use, is that we're using pots to extract derivatives that can be used as you know, supplements or CBD, but not THHD based medicine, and so we will probably look at a very restrictive market, very small market. The bills that were introduced, and you were asking, you know, I was involved with the Ministry of the Interior, and I was frustrated. So let me tell you how that story ended. And it's a sad story, but I'll be quite open about it. I was advising the Ministry of the Interior and we had a table set up, working group set up with the legislative and with the Ministry of Health, and we were producing and we actually produced what I think is a very nice federal piece of legislation that would have the under Secretary and a relative opened up you know, retail, well regulated cannabis markets. But then it turns out that the under Secretary and a relative of the secretaries had a parallel working group in which American and Canadian big industry and Mexican importers were sitting at the table, and basically what they were drafting is a bill that would make it very very difficult for small producers to participate in the legal market. And it would have produced the scenario in which in the long term, I mean not immediately, but in the long term. Foreign industry could set up their production at cheaper labor costs than the production in the US or Canada, but expensive enough in terms of you know, technology for traceability of pot or in terms of you know, patenting seeds, etcetera, so that local producers would not be able to enter the legal market. So had that bill been approved, the production for legal cannabis would have been in the hands of people with the capacity to inject important capital investments into technology that is not needed in Mexico and that has no reason to be forced into the production in Mexico. Do you worry at all that, even if you've been successful, that the small growers now producing legal marijuana would have been just as much under the thumb of the criminal organizations as they were before, the least able to defend themselves, the most susceptible to being extorted, That they would be every bit as vulnerable as the folks in the avocado industry of the line industry in some parts of the country, as the avocado industry and the line industry. Yes, as the current cannabis industry. No, because out of their role may ability is they can't turn to the authorities. Now, the difference between avocado and pots is that avocado you need to be in micho Can to produce it, and min is you know, relatively far away from the cities and institutional cus at least where the where the where this is produced, and therefore it's vulnerable because that's where you know, you have the criminal economy taking over. But you could produce cannabis in places that are not that far away and that are relatively safe. The people who have been in producing pot for the illegal economies would probably keep producing for the same guys, but still the incentives for extorting violence on the rower would be less if prohibition wasn't there. Let me just finally ask you this, I mean in talking with you, it's I can't come away except with a very pessimistic feeling. Where are the reasons for optimism in all of this? Let me put it this way, I think that we're past a mystic because governments, at least the last three governments that we've been watching closely, you could probably safely say that they've done everything wrong, and they've done everything wrong both to make things worse but also to entrenched interests in keeping things as bad as they are. You know, the security, the arms deals that drugs themselves, the diversification of exhortion, all of that are entrenched interests and they all depend on actually having a very obscure, very opaque, and very dysfunctional security and justice system. And so there's a lot of incentives for keeping that and there's no inkling of hope because governments have got it wrong time and time again, or at least have gotten it wrong from the policy perspective. Again, I think that they've reaped huge benefits from the political perspective, and of course some parts of the state have really huge benefits. From the budgetary perspective. You're looking at pessimism because the people who are in charge I have been doing everything wrong. But when you look at society, at civil society, that's when you see hope, because when you look at civil society you see that what in fact are huge steps forth in drug policy reform, such as, for instance, getting a Supreme Court to actually say that using cannabis is a fundamental right that should be respected under the regime of human rights, or when you look at the possibility of growing pot through you know, very ants like judicial activism in which we probably now have a couple of thousand people who can legally grow pot or And this is my big optimistic face when you look at the statistics of what people think about pot prohibition and where it was when the drug war began. When the drug war began, there was something like seventy percent of the population were in favor of prohibition and of the militarization of prohibition. And about four years ago the measurements started showing that there was an overwhelming support above seventy for medical kind of legalization, and that non medical or adult use of cannabis was actually above fifty nationwide, And of course this is stronger in the younger generations. So when you look at the statistics of what civil society thinks about drugs, there is reason for optimism, but that optimism seems to be a demographic push, and it's not going to move the politicians who are now in power and who will be empower until they die off. So I'm optimistic about civil society, but I'm very pessimistic about government and Catalina last words, same question to you, do you see any sources of reasons for optimism and looking ahead visa, the Mexico situation as it relates to security and the drug war and all of that. I think the change that there has been in the US and regulating cannabis in different ways has changed the perception in Mexico about cannabis at least and what the correct spots from government should be. And I'm optimistic in the sense of, you know, legislation hasn't passed today, not only because you know, we aren't really sure about, you know, how to regulate, but it's also you know, there's there's a big idea that whatever legislation passes has to be focused on social justice, and so far, I think civil society has been successful in saying we don't want any type of regulation, we want a specific type of regulation that may be helpful for the people who have suffered most from prohivision in Mexico. And I think, no, for me, it's a positive thing to to see that, at least in cannabis, we still have a chance to get a regulation that may have some social justice embedded in it and that may, you know, turn the cards for the people who have suffered the most from the world on drugs in Mexico well, and that note, let me thank both of you. Catalina Hydro, I miss you eyes. I hope to see you back, either at your Homonouguas Collientis or elsewhere in Mexico sometime, befar along come and visit. I will definitely do that and give my love to your children as well. If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please tell your friends about it, or you can write us a review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We love to hear from our listeners. If you'd like to share your own stories, comments and ideas, then leave us a message at one eight three three seven seven nine sixty that's eight three three psycho zero, or you can email us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot com or find me on Twitter at Ethan Natalman. You can also find contact information in our show notes. Psychoactive is a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me Ethan Nadelman. It's produced by no him Osband and Josh Stain. The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus, and Darren Aronotsky from Protozoa Pictures Alex Williams and Matt Frederick from My Heart Radio and me Ethan Edelman. Our music is by Ari Blucien and a special thanks to a bios f Bianca Grimshaw and Robert bb. Next week I'll be talking with Sam Canonis, the journalist whose book Dreamland, about the spread of heroin, won all sorts of awards, and his latest book, The Least of Us tells us about the spread of fentanel and the spread of a new form of meth amphetamine and its impact on communities around America. It's about how our opioid epidemic ignited the creativity and the profit mode of the Mexican trafficking world, and along the way of providing us with heroin, they discovered fell could be in in a lab. And it's the story too of how they become really just synthetic drug producers mostly and that this is extraordinarily a deadly harmful thing for the country of the United States. Will Mexico to, I have to say. And at the same time, though, along with that, I find great hope possible because all of this is really awakening us, I think to or pointing us to the idea that how thoroughly. We have shredded a community in this country in many, many ways. 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