The failure of Drug war is glaringly obvious to judges, cops, wardens, prosecutors and millions more. Now calling for decriminalization, legalization, the end of prohibition. Let us investigate the Century of Lies.
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Hold on to your hats folks, this promises to be quite a show. First, here’s a quick little editorial here, let’s examine the history of the Drug War and what do we find? Lies damn lies and fabricated statistics.
Who wins? Drug lords and drug czars, cops and cartels, gangs and treatment providers. Who loses? The tens of thousands dead in Mexico, the millions arrested each year in the US. What is it all about? Corruption, bribery, extortion, self perpetuating mayhem and infinite madness. All due to a continuing belief and superstition and ignorance personified.
With that, I want to bring in our guest, Mr. Charles Bowden, he's author of Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields. Welcome Mr. Bowden.
Charles Bowden: Thank you. I'm glad to be here.
Dean Becker: I started your book earlier this weekend and I couldn't put it down. This thing. It just brings it home, hammers it home and tells the story of madness and mayhem, does it not?
Charles Bowden: Well, I think so. Juarez is bow the most violent city in the world. I'll give you an example, in 2007 we had 307 murders, in 2008 it went to 1650, in 2009 it was over 2700. So far, this year the murders are up 60% on 2009.
There's a lot of causes for the murders but certainly our drug laws and our official War on Drugs and our giving Mexico half a billion a year for their army, for the War on Drugs has killed a lot of people.
Since this January 1st in 2007, about 25,000 people have been slaughtered in Mexico by this drug initiative of the Mexican army. The government of Mexico, the government of the United States, insists these people were all dirty. Meaning that they are somehow criminals.
When in fact, by the Mexican army's own admissions, less than 5% of these people murdered, have their killings even been investigated. What you’re seeing is a kind of slaughterhouse growing in Mexico. One of the triggers is the drug laws, another trigger is corruption and a big trigger is poverty, part way induced by trade, fostered by the North American Free Trade Agreement. So we have hell at our doorstep and we refuse to acknowledge why it is happening and what’s happening.
Dean Becker: Well, I want to read a little clip here. It talking about somebody who has just been abducted by the cartels. They’re being put into the car and this is your observation to that person who just got locked up:
"See those people on the street pretending you don't exist with that big machine with tinted windows that doesn't exist? Pretending that none of this is happening to you? That was you, until just a few minutes ago."
That’s a type of blindness, a type of reluctance to see what’s before our eyes, correct?
Charles Bowden: Well, what it is, we have beliefs and we bring beliefs to the evidence and facts. Then we either deny the facts or refashion the facts and keep the beliefs.
Out secretary of State, Hillary Clinton and other officials in our government keep insisting that the violence in Mexico is caused by American drug users. A statement I find preposterous, because I don't know anybody in Kansas, smoking a joint, trying to kill Mexicans.
The violence in Mexico, the reason it comes from drugs is because of drug prohibition. As I am sure your listeners know, drugs would not be very expensive or worth all the violence if it were legal. So, yes, we live in an illusion.
The other illusion is our government now, since President Bush initiated it, we are committed under Plan Marita to finance the Mexican army. Which has about 250,000 members. The Mexican Army is the largest criminal organization in the country. It kills people. Now we are paying it to kill people.
While we've been paying it to kill people, while this violence has exploded, it's had essentially no affect on what you’d call the drug industry. It’s not like the drugs have disappeared from the United States or proffers. It's just a slaughterhouse that’s killing Mexicans and our government keeps saying, "Let's do more".
Secretary Clinton, in March, when three people associated with the Mexican consulate in Juarez were killed, flew to Mexico City and reaffirmed our support of all the current policies.
Out of everything, I’m sure, I doubt your listeners know, that this is a war by the Mexican army against people in the drug industry. If the 25,000 people have been killed are all actually criminals, then how come no one in the Mexican Army dies?
As far as I can tell, less than a hundred people, in the last three years, in the Mexican army have been killed. This is a strange war where your adversary never tries to hurt you but you kill 25,000 of them. What's really going on under disguise of a Drug War is a grab for power and drug money. It's happening all over Mexico and a lot of Mexicans get killed.
I don’t want to belabor this, but if you look into the dead in Juarez, which in three years are now 5.300 corpses in a city of a million, you’ll find that almost all the people that are killed are extremely poor. They don't have gold chains. They aren't big people. They're just starving people trying to make a living.
You’ll find that at least eight drug clinics have had people suddenly descend with machine guns and kill the people in them, in the last three years. You'll find that the army's been present according to everybody in these neighborhoods when these killings went down and has done nothing. What you’ll finally think when you smell the coffee, is under the disguise a the drug war or our drug war, there’s a kind of social cleansing going on in Mexico. It’s a war of the government of the poor.
Dean Becker: Once again we're talking to Mr. Charles Bowden, author of Murder City. Charles, this book was dedicated to Armando Rodriguez. Tell us about him.
Charles Bowden: Armando Rodriguez covered crime in Juarez. He was an executed November 13th, 2008 at 8:30 in the morning. He was in front of his little house, warming up his car to take his eight-year-old daughter to class, when some guys walked up and machine-gunned him.
Now Armando, as of November 13th of that calendar year, had filled 907 murder stories in that city. So, I dedicated the book to him because he’s what a reporter should be, somebody that reports the news and he’s a casualty as someone who tries to report the news.
Of course, his murder’s never been solved etcetera but I don’t know if your listeners realize it but I think it is 2,753 people executed in Juarez in 2009. There were no convictions. There were thirty arrests, almost all those were tossed out. So you have a city, where you can kill and nothing’s ever going to happen to you, legally or though the justice system.
It’s just a feral city. This is a city now with 500-900 street gangs. This is a city with professional criminals in the drug industry. This is a city with 10,000-11,000 soldiers and federal agents. This is a city where average working people trying to make a decent living are defenseless. A lot of what’s fueling this violence is obviously the American laws on drugs.
They’ve created an enormous capital wealth, estimated by the DEA, they vary from 30-50 billion dollars a year in foreign currency for the drug industry. That’s more than Mexico earns in its official largest source of money, oil. That’s more than it earns from remittances from people who have come here illegally and are sending money home to help their families, which is twenty-odd billion.
This is a huge part of Mexico. One of the preposterous things about OUR support of the War on Drugs or the claim of a war on drugs, is that if Mexico actually obliterated the drug industry, it would commit suicide. It’s solely dependent on the money to keep its society on life support now.
Why this charade goes on is beyond me. Why people don’t look at the numbers is beyond me. Why I see officials and reporters constantly talking about the Mexican army fighting drugs, when in fact the Mexican army hardly ever gets work is beyond me.
You almost have to use drugs to understand the reporting on this war.
Dean Becker: I hear you, Charles. Now, again, reading from you book, “four years ago the Chihuahua State police were doing contract murders. They supplied their own guns and bullets with a full knowledge of the US Department of Homeland Security”.
Charles Bowden: That’s right, there was a House of Death, as they call them, a place where you’re kidnapped. You’re taken there. You’re tortured. You’re murdered and you’re buried in the backyard.
The state police are the official executioners being hired by the people in the drug industry but in this instance, the guy running the death house was an ICE informer for Homeland Security. On the first killing, he left his cell phone on so it was broadcast, so ICE was fully aware.
That happened, in August, the death house ran until January; twelve, fourteen people will killed eventually. Twelve were buried and two they didn’t have time to put in the ground.
ICE never intervened, never did anything. They didn’t care because it was dead Mexicans as far as they were concerned. They screwed up a little when one or two Americans went into holes in the ground. Well, this is typical at the border.
I remember talking about this case, with somebody I won’t name, on a big East Coast magazine.
Dean Becker: Right.
Charles Bowden: Him saying it’s a good story but saying it’s impossible and that our government would never do that – and I said, maybe you should come down to the border.
This is not unusual. What is unusual, in the instance you mention is, it’s documented and it’s public. Usually it’s never revealed. The reason it’s documented and public is these people running this death house in Juarez went to the wrong address to kill a family because they thought it was a stash house and they hit the house of a DEA agent that was living in Juarez, of course. Then the proverbial stuff hit the fan and that’s why we have documentation.
No one was ever punished for this incidentally. The only consequence was, the ICE informant was incarcerated in the US after this happened, the guy running the death house.
The Department of Justice spent five years trying to deport him back to Mexico, knowing full well that once he was returned to Mexico that he would be executed, so they could silence the whole case. As it happened, a federal judge finally stopped that and the man is on release now, on bond and still alive – but hat’s strictly an accident. Normally, this is swept under the covers.
Dean Becker: We’re speaking with Mr. Charles Bowden, author of Murder City. Earlier, Charles, you referenced the fact that it was a city of poverty and again, reading from your book here, “There are no jobs. The young faces, blank futures, the poor are crushed by sinking fortunes. The state has always violated human rights and now in the general mayhem, this fact becomes more and more obvious”.
Charles Bowden: Let me give you an example. El Paso, Texas and Juarez, face each other, you know, they’re twin cities?
Dean Becker: Yes.
Charles Bowden: This year, there’s been over, there’s been about 1300 in Juarez. There have been two in El Paso. Both cities are overwhelmingly Mexican American or Mexican. Many of the families are related.
In Juarez, you can get a job in an American factory and make about $45 a week. Your cost of living will be about 90% as if they were living in the United States.
In El Paso, there’s decent wages. The cops aren’t corrupt. The water works. The electricity works and I think so far this year, as I said, there’s been two homicides. So, you can’t explain this simply culturally. It’s how you treat human beings.
There’s 400 factories in Juarez. They pay wages nobody can live on. They’re mainly owned by American corporations. The turnover in these factories, in a city of poverty, where people need jobs, is a 100-150% a year because people leave because the work is killing them. They work five and half days a week for $45-50 a week and you never get ahead.
A lot of Phillips vacuum cleaners a made in Juarez, for example. A lot of car parts for the Big Three, or what used to be the Big Three in Detroit are made in Juarez. This is part of what fuels the violence, as I said, the War on Drugs was a trigger for a city getting to the breaking point and I mean, breaking point.
25% of the houses now in Juarez have been abandoned. 40% of the business, strip commercial, have closed. 30,000-60,000 of the rich in Juarez, essentially all the rich, have moved to El Paso. The city is just breaking down and disintegrating and it’s all been denied because were busy with our War on Drugs.
Dean Becker: Isn’t that the truth.
Charles Bowden: What really stuns me is that I now live in a country where American politicians are willing to talk about gay marriage but they won’t talk about legalizing drugs. This is preposterous.
As you know, especially given your program, we’ve created the largest prison population per capita on Earth. We’ve got a NARC industry that consumes tens of billions [of dollars] and every drug is more available and of higher quality then when Richard Nixon officially started the Drug War forty years ago. I don’t know how anybody can support this war.
Even if you want to say drugs are terrible. Let’s say they’re like Big Macs or some damn thing, what we’ve done had taken, what is at most, a public health problem and made it a criminal problem and we have failed. No one looks at these things and could possibly think this war is a success.
Dean Becker: Absolutely.
Charles Bowden: We have criminalized human behavior that’s private, essentially. One thing that drives me nuts about this, among other things, is when people talk about all the crime created by drug addicts. Well, the only reason that people have ever become criminals because they consume drugs is that the drugs are illegal and they’ve stole to buy them.
The actual stuff would be relatively cheap without the intervention of government. It just seems to me a false argument. Well, I’m waiting for the day where any American politician will finally speak up. As it happens, there’s a city councilman in El Paso Texas, Beto O'Rourke.
Dean Becker: We’ve had him on the show several times. He’s a good man.
Charles Bowden: I mean, this guy got in trouble for simply saying that we should talk about legalizing marijuana, like we should have a public discussion. The federal government fell on him and the rest of his council members like a ton of bricks. The reason I bring him up is that he’s about the only politician I know that’s willing to raise the question.
We now have, for example, we have 20,000 border patrol agents on the border trying to solve illegal immigration, which is also driven by poverty. Would you think you could stop Mexicans coming north if you can’t stop a kilo from coming north? We’re like in a fantasyland on these issues.
Dean Becker: To back you up Charles, right now, the best place to score drugs in America is at the high school and seconded by the junior high and third, by the prisons. It’s absolutely insane.
Charles Bowden: Well, you know the most interesting thing, I know this isn’t about immigration, but the constant thing now is that we can’t talk about immigration reform until we secure the borders. There isn’t a jail or prison in the United State with enormous security where they can stop people from escaping or stop drugs from entering.
Dean Becker: Yeah.
Charles Bowden: So, in other words, they set a standard for the border that can obviously never be reached. You’ll never have, in that term, a secure border. It never has existed. There is no way to avoid the issue.
Dean Becker: Charles, we’re going to take just a thirty second break that allows us to get a drink of water and we’ll be right back with Mr. Charles Bowden. He’s author of Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields. We’ll be right back.
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(Frightening wind blows)
The winds of prohibition howl
As the irrational maelstrom blows
Pipe dreaming warriors raise their eternal chant
Dancing for rain in the eye of a Drug War hurricane
(wind blowing)
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Drug Truth Network programs are archived at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy.
bakerinstitute.org/DTN
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Dean Becker: Alight, once again we’re talking to Mr. Charles Bowden, author on Murder City, a brand new book that will shoot you right between the eyes with a lot of information that you need to know.
We Americans are responsible for this, not because we use drugs but because we built this policy. Charles, I’m looking here, normally the El Paso Times has about a dozen stories about the Drug War. They had one today about digging a tunnel under the Rio Grande, but there was also one that reminded me of your book and your discussion with some of some of these killers down in Juarez. They say a suspect of 62 homicides has been arrested there in Juarez. Let’s talk about the big time killers. Who are they? Where do they come from?
Charles Bowden: Well, in the past the – well, the term they use is “Sicario” – normally, they were contract killers in the drug business and they were paid. There’s a guy in the book, I interviewed at length, who’s killed hundreds of people under contract.
Now, because the violence has spread, there’s a lot of freelancers. This guy used to get several thousand dollars for a killing. Now you can get murdered in Juarez for fifty bucks, a hundred bucks, a hundred and fifty bucks.
One thing I should point out, not to get too much into detail, is that the Mexican government has a way if arresting alleged “Sicarios”, saying they killed fifty or a hundred people, parading them – the perp walk – and having them confess. Then if you check the records, two weeks later, they’ve been released. In other words, it’s a charade.
You really have to get down to what the Drug War really is though. The tunnel is more interesting. What the Drug War – what the prohibition on drugs does is corrupt decent people. It’s corrupting the agencies on this side. Anyone who deals with them knows that.
That particular tunnel went under the Rio Grande but where it popped up in Mexico, where the entry point was, was at the Mexican Customs House. (laughs)
Dean Becker: Oh, man! (laughs)
Charles Bowden: Which is kind of poetic. You can’t tell me they didn’t know it was there. There was a big tunnel right in the middle of the customs house.
There was the same thing with our government when a politician starts screaming about a “river of iron going south”, but you can buy a gun in the United States. Well, these are the guys that check for guns, the guys who had a tunnel right in their facility.
Dean Becker: Well, again, reading from your book, we talk about anybody, at any level of these cartels can be taken out, if the situation or the circumstances are there, but quoting from your book it says,
“If you are a success in the drug industry you will have police credentials, most likely federal or state and these credentials will identify you as an officer. If rich, you move with bodyguards in a car with bulletproof glass and slabs of armor.”
Charles Bowden: The drug industry in Mexico is part of the State. The State’s dependent on and the money and the drug industry cooperates with the State because it wants to function. What’s going on now, the only way to explain what killing in Mexico is, it’s a war for drugs.
The various entities that the State erodes in Mexico, are fighting for the tuff and the money and the industry, including the Mexican army. That’s what a lot of the killing is. There’s no question, in Juarez, that some, I think a lot of the killing is done by the Mexican army.
You just talk to the people and that have been there when guys come with machine guns and kill everyone and leave. They’ll tell you it was army. Trust me, there’s nothing in it for them to say that. It’s dangerous to say that. There have been thousands of complaints against the Mexican army for rape, torture and murder for the last two or three years, since they’ve been unleashed.
On this side, what you’re seeing in the agencies – and this isn’t publicized – but you find if you trawl the press, which you apparently do, is a steady corruption of the people in these border agencies, like in border control and customs. That’s because of the money.
They’re basically taking guys and gals from small town sheriff departments and they get a bump up with a federal job and a decent salary, pension and health benefits. Then they realize they’re involved in something that’s hopeless, it’s like an endless tide of people and drugs and they start taking money. Then, we say they are criminals but we’re creating criminals by the laws, in my opinion.
Dean Becker: I’m with you Charles. Now, once again we’re speaking with Charles Bowden, author of Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields.
If you want to understand what’s going on down in Mexico, I highly urge you to get a copy of this. Charles, I mean honestly, this thing validated or substantiated and underlined what I had already been learning. You’re the one who has boots on the ground and been in the trenches down there looking at this.
I went down to Ciudad Juarez just briefly for an evening last year, as part of a conference, if you will and I saw on every major street corner, police, multiple numbers of police on each street corner with machine guns strapped across their chests or just holding them out towards the sidewalk. The little parks had a machine gun nest in the middle of it. It’s serious there, isn’t it?
Charles Bowden: You have to realize that the heavy presence of police, police roadblocks, and military roadblocks, since March 13th when the three people affiliated with US consulate were killed and executed. They were pursued in broad daylight on a Saturday afternoon for miles down major streets in Juarez and under these police and roadblocks. It didn’t have any affect. What I’m saying is, whoever did the killing, for whatever reason, it was sanctioned.
Two other people were killed and finally at City Hall of Juarez, right at the foot of the bridge where you cross into the US, in plain view and nobody did anything.
What you see in Juarez, I think, is a new kind of city where no one is in control. It’s like violence has become general and a fact of life. What bothers me is that we aren’t going to put the genie back in the bottle that easily.
We’ve created with our drug laws and our factories that don’t pay wages, a couple of generations of poverty. We’ve created a city where 50% of the adolescents in Juarez neither have a job or they in school because you have to pay to go past the ninth grade there. They’re all wandering around and it’s become a feral city.
We can’t have all these murders and all these gangs and then suddenly wave a wand and it all goes away. We’ve created kind of a monstrous environment and we’ll never fix it until we face it and admit it.
It’s just like with the drug laws in our country. Somebody who is in favor of the drug laws should finally sit down and smell the coffee and realize that things aren’t working.
Dean Becker: Exactly. I look at it this way, you have summarized part of it here in your book. I want to take a little passage, “People having the guts to take a ride, to become part of the cartel”. This is a little summary of it here, “Dying is the easy part., Killing is the fun part. Taking that first ride is the hard part.”
We’ve got about two minutes left here Charles, you want to wrap things up for us?
Charles Bowden: There’s a couple of things I’d like to say. One thing, I think a dead Mexican is just as significant as a dead American.
Dean Becker: I’m with you.
Charles Bowden: Two, we can’t create the kind of world we have by just blowing off the death of a city, by blowing off 25,000 people being slaughtered in Mexico in a drug initiative.
Three, we can’t live in a world that’s safe unless we start insisting that our trading partners pay decent wages. The migration that people resent here is never going to end, as long as we’re financing a corrupt country where the military kills you and where the American factories pay slave ages. We just have to do better or expect worse.
Dean Becker: Exactly.
Charles Bowden: This thing isn’t going away. I’m in favor of legalizing marijuana but frankly I’d legalize all drugs. As a person who has personally taken care of people going through chemotherapy, I know, just like anybody listening does, that it’s hard to find a substitute for marijuana in these cases.
I took care of a dying NARC, with liver cancer and had to get him marijuana.
Dean Becker: How ironic. Charles, we are flat out of time. Here’s hoping you will come back and join us again here in the near future.
Charles Bowden: It’s been my pleasure.
Dean Becker: It’s been a pleasure for me sir.
Charles Bowden: Well, thank you.
Dean Becker: Thank you so much for this great book, sir, Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields.
Be sure to join us in the coming weeks. We’ll have many other great guests including: Judge James P. Gray, he’s got a great new book out. I’m out of time.
You know the truth about the Drug War. It’s an absolute scam. You’ve got to do your part. Please visit our website: endprohibition.org
Prohibido istac evilesco!
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For the Drug Truth Network, this is Dean Becker. Asking you to examine our policy of Drug Prohibition.
The Century of Lies.
This show produced at the Pacifica Studios of KPFT, Houston. Drug Truth Network programs, archived at the James A. Baker III Institute for Policy Studies.
Transcript
Transcript
Century of Lies June 27, 2010
The failure of Drug war is glaringly obvious to judges, cops, wardens, prosecutors and millions more. Now calling for decriminalization, legalization, the end of prohibition. Let us investigate the Century of Lies.
-----------------------
Hold on to your hats folks, this promises to be quite a show. First, here’s a quick little editorial here, let’s examine the history of the Drug War and what do we find? Lies damn lies and fabricated statistics.
Who wins? Drug lords and drug czars, cops and cartels, gangs and treatment providers. Who loses? The tens of thousands dead in Mexico, the millions arrested each year in the US. What is it all about? Corruption, bribery, extortion, self perpetuating mayhem and infinite madness. All due to a continuing belief and superstition and ignorance personified.
With that, I want to bring in our guest, Mr. Charles Bowden, he's author of Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields. Welcome Mr. Bowden.
Charles Bowden: Thank you. I'm glad to be here.
Dean Becker: I started your book earlier this weekend and I couldn't put it down. This thing. It just brings it home, hammers it home and tells the story of madness and mayhem, does it not?
Charles Bowden: Well, I think so. Juarez is bow the most violent city in the world. I'll give you an example, in 2007 we had 307 murders, in 2008 it went to 1650, in 2009 it was over 2700. So far, this year the murders are up 60% on 2009.
There's a lot of causes for the murders but certainly our drug laws and our official War on Drugs and our giving Mexico half a billion a year for their army, for the War on Drugs has killed a lot of people.
Since this January 1st in 2007, about 25,000 people have been slaughtered in Mexico by this drug initiative of the Mexican army. The government of Mexico, the government of the United States, insists these people were all dirty. Meaning that they are somehow criminals.
When in fact, by the Mexican army's own admissions, less than 5% of these people murdered, have their killings even been investigated. What you’re seeing is a kind of slaughterhouse growing in Mexico. One of the triggers is the drug laws, another trigger is corruption and a big trigger is poverty, part way induced by trade, fostered by the North American Free Trade Agreement. So we have hell at our doorstep and we refuse to acknowledge why it is happening and what’s happening.
Dean Becker: Well, I want to read a little clip here. It talking about somebody who has just been abducted by the cartels. They’re being put into the car and this is your observation to that person who just got locked up:
"See those people on the street pretending you don't exist with that big machine with tinted windows that doesn't exist? Pretending that none of this is happening to you? That was you, until just a few minutes ago."
That’s a type of blindness, a type of reluctance to see what’s before our eyes, correct?
Charles Bowden: Well, what it is, we have beliefs and we bring beliefs to the evidence and facts. Then we either deny the facts or refashion the facts and keep the beliefs.
Out secretary of State, Hillary Clinton and other officials in our government keep insisting that the violence in Mexico is caused by American drug users. A statement I find preposterous, because I don't know anybody in Kansas, smoking a joint, trying to kill Mexicans.
The violence in Mexico, the reason it comes from drugs is because of drug prohibition. As I am sure your listeners know, drugs would not be very expensive or worth all the violence if it were legal. So, yes, we live in an illusion.
The other illusion is our government now, since President Bush initiated it, we are committed under Plan Marita to finance the Mexican army. Which has about 250,000 members. The Mexican Army is the largest criminal organization in the country. It kills people. Now we are paying it to kill people.
While we've been paying it to kill people, while this violence has exploded, it's had essentially no affect on what you’d call the drug industry. It’s not like the drugs have disappeared from the United States or proffers. It's just a slaughterhouse that’s killing Mexicans and our government keeps saying, "Let's do more".
Secretary Clinton, in March, when three people associated with the Mexican consulate in Juarez were killed, flew to Mexico City and reaffirmed our support of all the current policies.
Out of everything, I’m sure, I doubt your listeners know, that this is a war by the Mexican army against people in the drug industry. If the 25,000 people have been killed are all actually criminals, then how come no one in the Mexican Army dies?
As far as I can tell, less than a hundred people, in the last three years, in the Mexican army have been killed. This is a strange war where your adversary never tries to hurt you but you kill 25,000 of them. What's really going on under disguise of a Drug War is a grab for power and drug money. It's happening all over Mexico and a lot of Mexicans get killed.
I don’t want to belabor this, but if you look into the dead in Juarez, which in three years are now 5.300 corpses in a city of a million, you’ll find that almost all the people that are killed are extremely poor. They don't have gold chains. They aren't big people. They're just starving people trying to make a living.
You’ll find that at least eight drug clinics have had people suddenly descend with machine guns and kill the people in them, in the last three years. You'll find that the army's been present according to everybody in these neighborhoods when these killings went down and has done nothing. What you’ll finally think when you smell the coffee, is under the disguise a the drug war or our drug war, there’s a kind of social cleansing going on in Mexico. It’s a war of the government of the poor.
Dean Becker: Once again we're talking to Mr. Charles Bowden, author of Murder City. Charles, this book was dedicated to Armando Rodriguez. Tell us about him.
Charles Bowden: Armando Rodriguez covered crime in Juarez. He was an executed November 13th, 2008 at 8:30 in the morning. He was in front of his little house, warming up his car to take his eight-year-old daughter to class, when some guys walked up and machine-gunned him.
Now Armando, as of November 13th of that calendar year, had filled 907 murder stories in that city. So, I dedicated the book to him because he’s what a reporter should be, somebody that reports the news and he’s a casualty as someone who tries to report the news.
Of course, his murder’s never been solved etcetera but I don’t know if your listeners realize it but I think it is 2,753 people executed in Juarez in 2009. There were no convictions. There were thirty arrests, almost all those were tossed out. So you have a city, where you can kill and nothing’s ever going to happen to you, legally or though the justice system.
It’s just a feral city. This is a city now with 500-900 street gangs. This is a city with professional criminals in the drug industry. This is a city with 10,000-11,000 soldiers and federal agents. This is a city where average working people trying to make a decent living are defenseless. A lot of what’s fueling this violence is obviously the American laws on drugs.
They’ve created an enormous capital wealth, estimated by the DEA, they vary from 30-50 billion dollars a year in foreign currency for the drug industry. That’s more than Mexico earns in its official largest source of money, oil. That’s more than it earns from remittances from people who have come here illegally and are sending money home to help their families, which is twenty-odd billion.
This is a huge part of Mexico. One of the preposterous things about OUR support of the War on Drugs or the claim of a war on drugs, is that if Mexico actually obliterated the drug industry, it would commit suicide. It’s solely dependent on the money to keep its society on life support now.
Why this charade goes on is beyond me. Why people don’t look at the numbers is beyond me. Why I see officials and reporters constantly talking about the Mexican army fighting drugs, when in fact the Mexican army hardly ever gets work is beyond me.
You almost have to use drugs to understand the reporting on this war.
Dean Becker: I hear you, Charles. Now, again, reading from you book, “four years ago the Chihuahua State police were doing contract murders. They supplied their own guns and bullets with a full knowledge of the US Department of Homeland Security”.
Charles Bowden: That’s right, there was a House of Death, as they call them, a place where you’re kidnapped. You’re taken there. You’re tortured. You’re murdered and you’re buried in the backyard.
The state police are the official executioners being hired by the people in the drug industry but in this instance, the guy running the death house was an ICE informer for Homeland Security. On the first killing, he left his cell phone on so it was broadcast, so ICE was fully aware.
That happened, in August, the death house ran until January; twelve, fourteen people will killed eventually. Twelve were buried and two they didn’t have time to put in the ground.
ICE never intervened, never did anything. They didn’t care because it was dead Mexicans as far as they were concerned. They screwed up a little when one or two Americans went into holes in the ground. Well, this is typical at the border.
I remember talking about this case, with somebody I won’t name, on a big East Coast magazine.
Dean Becker: Right.
Charles Bowden: Him saying it’s a good story but saying it’s impossible and that our government would never do that – and I said, maybe you should come down to the border.
This is not unusual. What is unusual, in the instance you mention is, it’s documented and it’s public. Usually it’s never revealed. The reason it’s documented and public is these people running this death house in Juarez went to the wrong address to kill a family because they thought it was a stash house and they hit the house of a DEA agent that was living in Juarez, of course. Then the proverbial stuff hit the fan and that’s why we have documentation.
No one was ever punished for this incidentally. The only consequence was, the ICE informant was incarcerated in the US after this happened, the guy running the death house.
The Department of Justice spent five years trying to deport him back to Mexico, knowing full well that once he was returned to Mexico that he would be executed, so they could silence the whole case. As it happened, a federal judge finally stopped that and the man is on release now, on bond and still alive – but hat’s strictly an accident. Normally, this is swept under the covers.
Dean Becker: We’re speaking with Mr. Charles Bowden, author of Murder City. Earlier, Charles, you referenced the fact that it was a city of poverty and again, reading from your book here, “There are no jobs. The young faces, blank futures, the poor are crushed by sinking fortunes. The state has always violated human rights and now in the general mayhem, this fact becomes more and more obvious”.
Charles Bowden: Let me give you an example. El Paso, Texas and Juarez, face each other, you know, they’re twin cities?
Dean Becker: Yes.
Charles Bowden: This year, there’s been over, there’s been about 1300 in Juarez. There have been two in El Paso. Both cities are overwhelmingly Mexican American or Mexican. Many of the families are related.
In Juarez, you can get a job in an American factory and make about $45 a week. Your cost of living will be about 90% as if they were living in the United States.
In El Paso, there’s decent wages. The cops aren’t corrupt. The water works. The electricity works and I think so far this year, as I said, there’s been two homicides. So, you can’t explain this simply culturally. It’s how you treat human beings.
There’s 400 factories in Juarez. They pay wages nobody can live on. They’re mainly owned by American corporations. The turnover in these factories, in a city of poverty, where people need jobs, is a 100-150% a year because people leave because the work is killing them. They work five and half days a week for $45-50 a week and you never get ahead.
A lot of Phillips vacuum cleaners a made in Juarez, for example. A lot of car parts for the Big Three, or what used to be the Big Three in Detroit are made in Juarez. This is part of what fuels the violence, as I said, the War on Drugs was a trigger for a city getting to the breaking point and I mean, breaking point.
25% of the houses now in Juarez have been abandoned. 40% of the business, strip commercial, have closed. 30,000-60,000 of the rich in Juarez, essentially all the rich, have moved to El Paso. The city is just breaking down and disintegrating and it’s all been denied because were busy with our War on Drugs.
Dean Becker: Isn’t that the truth.
Charles Bowden: What really stuns me is that I now live in a country where American politicians are willing to talk about gay marriage but they won’t talk about legalizing drugs. This is preposterous.
As you know, especially given your program, we’ve created the largest prison population per capita on Earth. We’ve got a NARC industry that consumes tens of billions [of dollars] and every drug is more available and of higher quality then when Richard Nixon officially started the Drug War forty years ago. I don’t know how anybody can support this war.
Even if you want to say drugs are terrible. Let’s say they’re like Big Macs or some damn thing, what we’ve done had taken, what is at most, a public health problem and made it a criminal problem and we have failed. No one looks at these things and could possibly think this war is a success.
Dean Becker: Absolutely.
Charles Bowden: We have criminalized human behavior that’s private, essentially. One thing that drives me nuts about this, among other things, is when people talk about all the crime created by drug addicts. Well, the only reason that people have ever become criminals because they consume drugs is that the drugs are illegal and they’ve stole to buy them.
The actual stuff would be relatively cheap without the intervention of government. It just seems to me a false argument. Well, I’m waiting for the day where any American politician will finally speak up. As it happens, there’s a city councilman in El Paso Texas, Beto O'Rourke.
Dean Becker: We’ve had him on the show several times. He’s a good man.
Charles Bowden: I mean, this guy got in trouble for simply saying that we should talk about legalizing marijuana, like we should have a public discussion. The federal government fell on him and the rest of his council members like a ton of bricks. The reason I bring him up is that he’s about the only politician I know that’s willing to raise the question.
We now have, for example, we have 20,000 border patrol agents on the border trying to solve illegal immigration, which is also driven by poverty. Would you think you could stop Mexicans coming north if you can’t stop a kilo from coming north? We’re like in a fantasyland on these issues.
Dean Becker: To back you up Charles, right now, the best place to score drugs in America is at the high school and seconded by the junior high and third, by the prisons. It’s absolutely insane.
Charles Bowden: Well, you know the most interesting thing, I know this isn’t about immigration, but the constant thing now is that we can’t talk about immigration reform until we secure the borders. There isn’t a jail or prison in the United State with enormous security where they can stop people from escaping or stop drugs from entering.
Dean Becker: Yeah.
Charles Bowden: So, in other words, they set a standard for the border that can obviously never be reached. You’ll never have, in that term, a secure border. It never has existed. There is no way to avoid the issue.
Dean Becker: Charles, we’re going to take just a thirty second break that allows us to get a drink of water and we’ll be right back with Mr. Charles Bowden. He’s author of Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields. We’ll be right back.
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(Frightening wind blows)
The winds of prohibition howl
As the irrational maelstrom blows
Pipe dreaming warriors raise their eternal chant
Dancing for rain in the eye of a Drug War hurricane
(wind blowing)
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Drug Truth Network programs are archived at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy.
bakerinstitute.org/DTN
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Dean Becker: Alight, once again we’re talking to Mr. Charles Bowden, author on Murder City, a brand new book that will shoot you right between the eyes with a lot of information that you need to know.
We Americans are responsible for this, not because we use drugs but because we built this policy. Charles, I’m looking here, normally the El Paso Times has about a dozen stories about the Drug War. They had one today about digging a tunnel under the Rio Grande, but there was also one that reminded me of your book and your discussion with some of some of these killers down in Juarez. They say a suspect of 62 homicides has been arrested there in Juarez. Let’s talk about the big time killers. Who are they? Where do they come from?
Charles Bowden: Well, in the past the – well, the term they use is “Sicario” – normally, they were contract killers in the drug business and they were paid. There’s a guy in the book, I interviewed at length, who’s killed hundreds of people under contract.
Now, because the violence has spread, there’s a lot of freelancers. This guy used to get several thousand dollars for a killing. Now you can get murdered in Juarez for fifty bucks, a hundred bucks, a hundred and fifty bucks.
One thing I should point out, not to get too much into detail, is that the Mexican government has a way if arresting alleged “Sicarios”, saying they killed fifty or a hundred people, parading them – the perp walk – and having them confess. Then if you check the records, two weeks later, they’ve been released. In other words, it’s a charade.
You really have to get down to what the Drug War really is though. The tunnel is more interesting. What the Drug War – what the prohibition on drugs does is corrupt decent people. It’s corrupting the agencies on this side. Anyone who deals with them knows that.
That particular tunnel went under the Rio Grande but where it popped up in Mexico, where the entry point was, was at the Mexican Customs House. (laughs)
Dean Becker: Oh, man! (laughs)
Charles Bowden: Which is kind of poetic. You can’t tell me they didn’t know it was there. There was a big tunnel right in the middle of the customs house.
There was the same thing with our government when a politician starts screaming about a “river of iron going south”, but you can buy a gun in the United States. Well, these are the guys that check for guns, the guys who had a tunnel right in their facility.
Dean Becker: Well, again, reading from your book, we talk about anybody, at any level of these cartels can be taken out, if the situation or the circumstances are there, but quoting from your book it says,
“If you are a success in the drug industry you will have police credentials, most likely federal or state and these credentials will identify you as an officer. If rich, you move with bodyguards in a car with bulletproof glass and slabs of armor.”
Charles Bowden: The drug industry in Mexico is part of the State. The State’s dependent on and the money and the drug industry cooperates with the State because it wants to function. What’s going on now, the only way to explain what killing in Mexico is, it’s a war for drugs.
The various entities that the State erodes in Mexico, are fighting for the tuff and the money and the industry, including the Mexican army. That’s what a lot of the killing is. There’s no question, in Juarez, that some, I think a lot of the killing is done by the Mexican army.
You just talk to the people and that have been there when guys come with machine guns and kill everyone and leave. They’ll tell you it was army. Trust me, there’s nothing in it for them to say that. It’s dangerous to say that. There have been thousands of complaints against the Mexican army for rape, torture and murder for the last two or three years, since they’ve been unleashed.
On this side, what you’re seeing in the agencies – and this isn’t publicized – but you find if you trawl the press, which you apparently do, is a steady corruption of the people in these border agencies, like in border control and customs. That’s because of the money.
They’re basically taking guys and gals from small town sheriff departments and they get a bump up with a federal job and a decent salary, pension and health benefits. Then they realize they’re involved in something that’s hopeless, it’s like an endless tide of people and drugs and they start taking money. Then, we say they are criminals but we’re creating criminals by the laws, in my opinion.
Dean Becker: I’m with you Charles. Now, once again we’re speaking with Charles Bowden, author of Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields.
If you want to understand what’s going on down in Mexico, I highly urge you to get a copy of this. Charles, I mean honestly, this thing validated or substantiated and underlined what I had already been learning. You’re the one who has boots on the ground and been in the trenches down there looking at this.
I went down to Ciudad Juarez just briefly for an evening last year, as part of a conference, if you will and I saw on every major street corner, police, multiple numbers of police on each street corner with machine guns strapped across their chests or just holding them out towards the sidewalk. The little parks had a machine gun nest in the middle of it. It’s serious there, isn’t it?
Charles Bowden: You have to realize that the heavy presence of police, police roadblocks, and military roadblocks, since March 13th when the three people affiliated with US consulate were killed and executed. They were pursued in broad daylight on a Saturday afternoon for miles down major streets in Juarez and under these police and roadblocks. It didn’t have any affect. What I’m saying is, whoever did the killing, for whatever reason, it was sanctioned.
Two other people were killed and finally at City Hall of Juarez, right at the foot of the bridge where you cross into the US, in plain view and nobody did anything.
What you see in Juarez, I think, is a new kind of city where no one is in control. It’s like violence has become general and a fact of life. What bothers me is that we aren’t going to put the genie back in the bottle that easily.
We’ve created with our drug laws and our factories that don’t pay wages, a couple of generations of poverty. We’ve created a city where 50% of the adolescents in Juarez neither have a job or they in school because you have to pay to go past the ninth grade there. They’re all wandering around and it’s become a feral city.
We can’t have all these murders and all these gangs and then suddenly wave a wand and it all goes away. We’ve created kind of a monstrous environment and we’ll never fix it until we face it and admit it.
It’s just like with the drug laws in our country. Somebody who is in favor of the drug laws should finally sit down and smell the coffee and realize that things aren’t working.
Dean Becker: Exactly. I look at it this way, you have summarized part of it here in your book. I want to take a little passage, “People having the guts to take a ride, to become part of the cartel”. This is a little summary of it here, “Dying is the easy part., Killing is the fun part. Taking that first ride is the hard part.”
We’ve got about two minutes left here Charles, you want to wrap things up for us?
Charles Bowden: There’s a couple of things I’d like to say. One thing, I think a dead Mexican is just as significant as a dead American.
Dean Becker: I’m with you.
Charles Bowden: Two, we can’t create the kind of world we have by just blowing off the death of a city, by blowing off 25,000 people being slaughtered in Mexico in a drug initiative.
Three, we can’t live in a world that’s safe unless we start insisting that our trading partners pay decent wages. The migration that people resent here is never going to end, as long as we’re financing a corrupt country where the military kills you and where the American factories pay slave ages. We just have to do better or expect worse.
Dean Becker: Exactly.
Charles Bowden: This thing isn’t going away. I’m in favor of legalizing marijuana but frankly I’d legalize all drugs. As a person who has personally taken care of people going through chemotherapy, I know, just like anybody listening does, that it’s hard to find a substitute for marijuana in these cases.
I took care of a dying NARC, with liver cancer and had to get him marijuana.
Dean Becker: How ironic. Charles, we are flat out of time. Here’s hoping you will come back and join us again here in the near future.
Charles Bowden: It’s been my pleasure.
Dean Becker: It’s been a pleasure for me sir.
Charles Bowden: Well, thank you.
Dean Becker: Thank you so much for this great book, sir, Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields.
Be sure to join us in the coming weeks. We’ll have many other great guests including: Judge James P. Gray, he’s got a great new book out. I’m out of time.
You know the truth about the Drug War. It’s an absolute scam. You’ve got to do your part. Please visit our website: endprohibition.org
Prohibido istac evilesco!
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For the Drug Truth Network, this is Dean Becker. Asking you to examine our policy of Drug Prohibition.
The Century of Lies.
This show produced at the Pacifica Studios of KPFT, Houston. Drug Truth Network programs, archived at the James A. Baker III Institute for Policy Studies.
Transcript provided by: Ayn Morgan of www.eigengraupress.com