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Aileen Teague, "Policing on Drugs: The United States, Mexico, and the Origins of the Modern Drug War, 1969-2000" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
I'm Caleb Zakrin, editor of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Eileen Teague, Assistant professor in the Department of International affairs at Texas A and M. We're discussing her book, Policing on Drugs. The United States, Mexico and the Origins of the Modern Drug War, 1969-2000. Policing on drugs is a critical analysis in the history of the attempts by law enforcement to curtail the illicit drug trade in the Americas. In the past half century, militarization of the police in Mexico and increased spending by the US Government on enforcement have not led to a decrease in overdose death rates in the United States. The story that Eileen tells seeks to understand the failure in enforcement in narcotics to curtail the worst aspects of the drug trade. Policing on Drugs also examines the drug war from the Mexican government's perspective. Overall, Eileen's book provides vital background for today's ongoing drug war. Eileen, thanks for joining me today on the New Books Network.
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C
It's great to be here, Caleb.
- [02:02]
B
Really excited to talk to you about this book. I feel that the topic, the subject is just incredibly relevant to a lot of the discussions that are going on today. And I do feel that when it comes to how people talk about drugs and wanting to curtail the very worst aspects of it, from drug overdoses to the violence that comes from the smuggling, from all aspects of it. It does seem that, you know, there's always this kind of push and pull around whether or not more enforcement, whatever that means, will lead to better outcomes or whether or not, you know, in some cases, people advocate for completely decriminalizing drugs, and maybe that will lead to better outcomes as well. I find that the drug war is just such, such a fascinating topic. And the history that you provide, what you go into, how you analyze it, I just find it to be incredibly interesting. I also absolutely love the title Policing on Drugs. Thought that that was a bit of a funny title. I'm sure you, you, you meant it on some level to sound, sound a little funny that the police, the idea almost that the people that are doing the policing of this are themselves on, on drugs. But I was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself and your background.
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C
Absolutely. Well, first, I don't know if you recall, but during the 1990s, there were these commercials like, this is your, you know, this is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. And that was applied to, I mean, this is policing, and this is policing on drugs, implying that there's quite the intensification and the unintended consequences that come with this type of policing. But personally, I've been at Texas A and M for the last five years or so. I am a, I'm half Panamanian, I'm a former Marine, and that was sort of my, my life prior to coming to, to academia. But I'm interested mostly in US Latin America relations and understanding what the impacts of US Policies are from the perspective of other nations. And so this is why I was drawn to this research and the opportunities and the lack of work that has been done about the effects of militarized U.S. policies inside Mexico. And you know, what you said enforcement or whatever that means. I think that we don't really spend a lot of time asking what enforcement means in our own cultural context, let alone that of a supposed partner nation.
- [04:33]
B
Yeah, I feel that the way that it's often described in terms of how the US Goes about the drug trade with respect to other countries like Mexico. You bring up a lot of really interesting questions around what sovereignty means in this context and how the United States conceptualizes Mexican sovereignty, which is definitely things that I want to get into in the, in the interview, because I found this, this really just a fascinating point that you dig into. I'm wondering for you how you first became interested in this subject.
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C
Well, prior to 2013, I had actually never been to Mexico before. I went there on a summer program for about a month and then I ended up staying on there for an extra month. And there were some interesting records that really hadn't been utilized to study drug enforcement in Mexico during that period. And it's the period of, or it's the records of a, an organization known as the Federal Security Directorate, or dfs. And at that time those records were slightly available. And so there was just really great people working in Mexico that kind of mentored me and ushered me along. And I just found myself really falling in love with Mexico and the people there. And it's very rich history. And so I came back and it was enough after being there for two months to come back and apply for a year long fellowship to spend an extended amount of time doing research there. And so I, yeah, it was completely unexpected. I think I had entered graduate school intending to ground my research in Panama and kind of understand a little bit more where I came from. And that's what I'm sort of working on now in my second project. But you know, for this I was just sort of drawn into Mexico and the fact that many of these historical narratives I was exploring in the 1950s, 1960s about border security, drug policing and things like that, I mean, they continue to happen and people continue to sell it in current news media as sort of a late breaking story. And so I wanted to, once I kind of was able to understand Mexican history a little bit more, I was just very interested in stepping back and trying to understand why these types of policies that the United States enacts or has enacted towards Mexico and the arrangements these two countries have engaged in together. I mean, why it continues to happen and why is it that we're not, we kind of the collective, we are not learning more from this history.
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B
Right. It's interesting too. You start the book, you start examining in 1969, and it really begins with Operation Intercept. And I was wondering if you'd talk about Operation Intercept and how Nixon really turned the drug war to the US Mexican border. Because prior to that, you know, obviously there was concerns about drug usage. There were, you know, lots of arrests of kids, you know, found, you know, with marijuana and other drugs within the United States. And it was very, very, you know, just local police driven. There was of course, focus on, you know, in the 1950s and earlier of, you know, Mexican people in California having drugs and that sort of policing. But you begin in 1969. I was wondering why this year stuck out to you and this Operation Intercept.
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C
Well, it was shortly after Nixon came into office. And at that period of time, it was sort of unprecedented to completely, you know, almost shut down the border to. For the United States to, for all intents and purposes, coerce the Mexican government into complying with. With US Drug policies. And so that exactly was the very sort of purpose for that. And so I think that that's a really important period of time because the United States and Mexico both responded and understood the border shutdown very differently from the United States perspective. I mean, it was. Today, it may seem not very newsworthy that the United States threatens to close down the border or imposes harsh rhetoric in Mexico, but at that point in time, it was unprecedented to take such a measure from the Mexican perspective. They really had to review and at least show that their government was responding and devoting more of its resources to police drugs in the way in which the United States wanted it to. And so that also had not happened before. I mean, there had been. The United States had been in Mexico. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics, predecessor organization to the dea, had operated in Mexico, but not in such an intensive role. Today, Mexico is one of the largest embassy missions. And here, I mean, not just the main embassy, but all of the consulates, and there are a lot of government agencies that are devoted or have some sort of hand in the pot of drug control. I mean, so it's not just about a more intensified version of border security. It's also sort of the culmination and an apex point, 1969, in operation intercept of when the US drug control bureaucracy really begins to expand into places like Mexico for policing purposes.
- [10:19]
B
What was the reaction of the Mexican government to this operation?
- [10:24]
C
Well, eventually it was compliance. But the Mexican government, both, I would say, I would argue both then and now, it has to kind of play two ways. I mean, they, they, they really kind of lean in. And I, I point this out a few times in the book to anti American rhetoric. I mean, other nations do this too, while they comply with the United States. And so there was a. It was kind of, especially in border cities, on border cities on both sides of the border, there were reactions just because it really shut down the border economy. And then border politicians started communicating to those in the federal district. And so there was, I mean, Mexico was not happy about this happening. But at the same time, as I show later on in the book, they really began to lean into what subscribing to a more intensified version of US Drug control could do for their own policing tools.
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B
And prior to this, what was the Policy like in Mexico, how did they treat the production of various drugs like marijuana or like opium, you know, potty fields?
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C
Yeah, well, in 1920, Mexico was actually. They banned marijuana 17 years before the United States did. Or that their first marijuana or anti marijuana legislation actually preceded that of the United States. But Mexico didn't have an addiction problem. There was, there were poppies cultivated in the country's northwest, now the home of current cartels like the Sinaloa cartel. This was because. And we look back at unintended consequences, but with policies like the Chinese Exclusion act of, you know, the 1880s, Chinese laborers couldn't get into the United States, so they went to Mexico and that there the origin lies of the poppies being planted in places in Mexico's northwest where Chinese migrants found the ideal conditions for the growth of these substances. Nevertheless, Mexico continues to be quite a classist society and drug use was associated with the lower classes, with lower ranking soldiers, with prisoners. And so there were policies in place to regulate drugs and drug production. But it wasn't as much of a problem in Mexican society as it would become in the United states after the 1950s and 1960s, just because I think that just the nature of society, people were ostracized to an extent for using these substances. Now this would change later on with the proliferation of like, you know, cocaine after the 1980s and other drugs. And now we get to some border cities today who have, that actually have quite high addiction rates. And here, I mean, on the, the Mexican side, but during the period in which my book is starting, 19, the late 1960s, there isn't a, an addiction problem in Mexico like there would be in the United States.
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B
Right. You talk about how there's, there's quite a focus in the media in the US Side on, you know, drug abuse by, by, you know, both just people living in the United States, but also drug abuse by, by veterans. And like the, you know, the concern about returning, returning veterans who had, you know, maybe taken on certain drug addictions, you know, during their time in Vietnam. I, I was quite interested in how you look at or examine how the United States begins operating within Mexico. And this is quite interesting to sort of think about how, you know, the sort of, the focus on drug enforcement goes from within the borders of the United States to then outside the borders. How does the US Begin operating within Mexico alongside the government and these various paramilitary forces?
- [14:39]
C
Yeah, that's a good question. And there's one thing I wanted to just address that I think we chatted about a little bit earlier about this which is the question of sovereignty and also the question of perception. Because in the earlier chapters of the book, one of the reasons that the Mexican government subscribed to US Drug policies, that is more aggressive US Drug policies, is because they didn't want to let sort of the gringos into Mexico to police what they felt Mexican leaders, they needed to police drugs themselves. But the sort of, the perennial question across the timeframe of this book is that US Agents see these efforts as corrupt, inadequate, et cetera. When you look from a larger scale from Washington at the fact that these enforcement policies, these escalations of the so called war on drugs aren't fixing Americans drug addiction problems. And so there's a weird sort of sovereignty framing that question here. Because Initially during the 1970s, the United States, I would argue, sort of sought to influence Mexico's drug program or developing drug program and you know, attract them in a sense into it. Co opting is another word that I've used a couple times in the book. But by the 1980s, when you see a very extensive expansion of the drug trade, I mean it's, it's going through Mexico is at that point junior partners to Colombian traffickers. You get to this point where the United States is operating under the, under the assumption that the Mexicans can't be trusted in this endeavor and they aim to police the drug trade within Mexico themselves. Which raised a whole bunch of questions about extrajudicial policing and what the role of, for example, agents of the DEA or the CIA that have operated in Mexico. What are actually their parameters in Mexico? And if they operate clandestinely or, you know, or undercover, I mean, how would you regulate that? And why isn't there any sort of restriction to that sort of, to the way that these US Agents are operating in Mexico? But it's just interesting that from an enforcement and policing perspective, Washington doesn't put a lot of parameters or regulations on its anti drug agents operating in Mexico. And this is something that really kind of pushes up against Mexican sovereignty, especially by the mid-1980s. And this is something that continues to occur in US Mexico relations more broadly. Whereas just a few years ago, I mean the same thing happened when, when you had the DEA going in rogue and arresting, you know, a Mexican official because for exactly that reason, because he's suspected in, in being complicit in the drug trade without the knowledge of the Mexican government. So I guess to kind of package it up and answer the question as you had initially asked it, I mean this starts gradually and the United States Anti Drug Presence in Mexico for a policing perspective comes to be premised on the fact that US agents don't trust their Mexican counterparts, and they believe that they can do a better job of doing it themselves. And this is what gets to tragedies like the kidnapping and murder of DEA agent Enrique Camarena in 1985, which is the sort of the part of chapter four of the book.
- [18:21]
B
So I want to get to the 1980s, because obviously by then it feels like, as you describe it, that things have at that point intensified to a pretty extreme level. But you. You also look at, you know, just the US And Mexico's collaboration, cooperation under the back. You know, with the backdrop of the Cold War going on, for example, you look at the Corpus Christi massacre. So I was wondering if you could talk about the. The pri, Mexico's ruling party at the time, how they exercised authority, and also how the US Operated alongside them to promote their own goals and agendas.
- [18:58]
C
One of the big arguments that I make in the book is how the Mexican policing was largely motivated by the pre. By policing dissidents to the pri, and so. And not so much policing drugs as the United States, which was becoming an increasingly important policing imperative for the United states into the 1970s and the 1980s. And so this was sort of related to Mexico's Cold War experience, which in Mexican history is very much predicated on the fact that those that are anti pre are part of the Mexican left. And the Mexican left is very much not a product of the bipolar rivalry as the United States sees the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. And so from a policing perspective, when you start to see telegrams and notes and that kind of thing coming between Washington and Mexico City, the PRE is successful at this point in saying and agreeing to police drugs the way in which the United States wants it to after 1969. But it's successful at sort of funneling these resources through its security apparatus to target dissidents largely from the Mexican left. I mean, so like Cuba and, you know, other countries that have had their experience with sort of going left during. In Cold War Latin America, you have a host of Mexican guerrillas that are inspired by, you know, what's going on within the region, and they're calling for democracy of the authoritarian rule against the authoritarian rule of the pri. But where it comes back to drug control is that some of these guerrilla groups in Mexico are using drugs as a way to fund their campaigns. And I look at this both in the second paragraph and the third paragraph. So by the time drug Policing becomes more intensive in Mexico. It really kind of draws more importance to the fact of drug control, while at the same time the government is using a lot of these funds to police the left. And so to kind of bring it back here. It's that Mexico's Cold War experience is not premised on this bipolar rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union. It's very much a localized battle between leftists, communists in Mexico and the one party state. But the United States has an imperfect understanding or people in the US government that are working in Mexico have an imperfect understanding of the Mexican government's war against the left. And so with that sort of improper, with that misunderstanding, you have some actors in Washington actually believing that Mexico is a state that potentially could be threatened by the left. And they're happy to kind of use that Cold War mindset to support that. I mean, during the 1960s, the CIA station chief, some people called him the third most powerful man in Mexico because he had such an important role and such an open line of communication with the President of Mexico. And so obviously the Cold War is changing. I would argue that the PRI was never sort of existentially undermined by Mexico's left, but it did take up a lot of the state's policing capacities at the same time and in many of the same places where drugs were increasingly being policed with U.S. assistance. And so the middle parts of the book really kind of look at how these two policing functions, drugs and sort of anti guerrilla activities become to come to overlap and shape each other. And so instance that I look at in like the Corpus Christi massacre which took place in 1971, were these instances in which the United States equipped Mexican paramilitaries for Mexico's Cold War, but didn't necessarily understand, you know, who they were equipping and what they were equipping for. And it was basically feeding Mexican violence in some places and atrocities by the Mexican government, especially in the early 1970s.
- [23:39]
B
Right? Yeah, you, you, you look at for example, Operation Condor, which was, you know, this anti drug campaign where they used, you know, herbicide that, which, you know, would then go on to, to harm people that would end up using, using the drugs that were sprayed with herbicide to, to try and, to try and destroy the various plants that were being grown. But then you also look at how, you know, alongside this too, like the Mexican army was sending, had essentially this military first, that force that was going in and policing these drug production areas. What, what, what was the, the effects of this? And, and, and you, for example, like you talk about how, how this was, you know, quite destabilizing. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, things like Operation Condor in these various, these various other programs undertaken and how they were destabilizing.
- [24:28]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of things that are worth mentioning about Operation Condor, which is Mexico. After a couple of years after Operation Intercept, the United States government did not kept on pushing Mexico to enact an herbicidal eradication program. I mean, this was in the years following Vietnam. These herbicidal programs had their origins in Vietnam and that's why the Mexican government refused as long as it could. But you know, with the fact that the initial push of Nixon's war on drugs wasn't successful and actually heroin addiction or heroin overdoses increased, instead of went, went down, there was pressure to, to take more of a supply focused response. And this is where Operation Condor comes from. And so it's interesting though, because one of the arguments I make about the operation is that how much U.S. agents were so focused on the herbicidal efforts of Operation Condor, who was in the planes, you know, doing the, using different types of technology to locate poppy fields, the amounts of, of herbicides that were sprayed, et cetera. While for the Mexican government, the very large effort on the ground led by the Mexican army was very much about social control and policing of perceived dissidents in places that weren't as connected to the federal district as other states. I mean, and these are the states where you have a history of drug production. Durango, Sinaloa, Chihuahua. And so the effects of this sort of thing is destabilizing because it's a US Sponsored campaign. It's very much the United States thinks that they are taking the most efficient route at tackling drug supply, but they are largely ignorant. And I've talked to or interviewed policymakers that were in office at this time. They were largely ignorant to the campaigns going on on the ground by the Mexican army. And so these campaigns were indiscriminately arresting suspected drug producers. A lot of them were children, women, et cetera. And so all of this was sanctioned more or less by what was a US And Mexican coordinated operation. And I think what's also very interesting about Operation Condor is the ways in which the United States was pushing for the campaign for so long. But they also, while they provided the aircraft to conduct it, they were insistent on not providing the actual chemicals. Some of this was politically motivated and they really didn't know the kinds of things that were happening on the ground. And even into the 1980s. Because eventually what's going to happen is, and it's like kind of a boomerang effect type thing in that the United States is pushing for these herbicides to be used. But just a couple of years into the operation now we're having marijuana smokers in San Francisco that are getting sick and having lung issues purportedly tied to the chemicals used in Operation Condor. These chemicals were supposed to kill the marijuana and the poppy plants within 24 hours. But in many cases, producers could still cultivate the plants for up to 24 hours. And this could lead to kind of lung issues that were popping up. And so you have, under President Jimmy Carter here, you have sort of a pushback in the United States against herbicide use in, in Mexico. And when you kind of step back, it was the United States that was pushing the use of herbicides, you know, to begin with. And then it raises bigger questions of, you know, what responsibility the US Government has for protecting citizens who choose to use these so called drugs which it outlawed to begin with. And so interestingly enough, the Mexican government, for them, historically Mexico is more concerned about marijuana, not opium poppies, which poppies for US Policymakers are the more, the bigger concern because they cause heroin addiction, this produces overdoses, et cetera. But then you also have then the case of Mexican government officials wanting to only spray marijuana and not the poppy plants. And so it was very difficult once these health scares started to come up because the United States couldn't selectively ask the Mexican government to only spray poppies and not marijuana because marijuana was more of more interest to the Mexican government. So even just the act of implementation of this operation had so many contradictions as it went forward. I mean, and this was an early stage, stage of using these types of tools to destroy drugs. I mean, this would become part and parcel of plans like Plan Columbia in the late 90s and into the 2000s. But Operation Condor offers a glimpse of what this looks like and the potential consequences on the ground of these ostensibly more efficient anti drug efforts.
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B
Right. And not long after you see more DEA agents within Mexico coming from the United States to, you know, to seeking enforcement. What was the role that the D agents were, were playing? And, and you, you brought it up before, but the, you know, the very high profile murder of D agent Enrique Camarena, what was the impact of this, what, what, what occurred there? Sort of, if you could just tell, tell his story a little bit.
- [30:41]
C
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, around the time of Operation Condor, which takes place, this is late 1970s you do have US agents trying to let their Mexican counterparts take the lead, but this isn't proceeding as planned. From the US perspective, the DEA is sort of reformed in 1973 with a more intensive policing purpose overseas. And so, I mean, there are reports in the initial iterations of Operation Condor of the dea, who, who was who, I mean, who, who did have knowledge of some of these on the ground policing efforts that were occurring during Operation Condor. But there are reports of agents engaging in, in confession, in eliciting confession, sometimes using or having their Mexican counterparts use torture. And one, one thing that I, I wouldn't say it's an argument that I make, but I try to kind of shed some light on how in some cases you have U.S. policing agents that are empowered by working in Mexico using some of the local customs of policing that wouldn't be authorized in the United States. And in the years after Operation Condor and the murder of Enrique Camarena, there's this larger shift happening towards the United States using both its own sort of regulatory policing powers and observing how policing takes place in Mexico, being increasingly emboldened to police to do the job themselves in parts in Mexico, where it didn't have the powers to necessarily do so. And this is what I would argue puts us on the course for the kidnapping and murder of Enrique Camarena, who was undercover with the Guadalajara cartel, which is the predecessor drug trafficking organization to many of today's cartels that we see. And so when he had a large discovery of a marijuana ranch up in Chihuahua, Mexico, which is a border state just south of Texas, this kind of put him on the map of Mexican drug lords. And so, I mean, this gets pretty complicated because you asked about Cold War dynamics earlier and, you know, the role of the Cold War. And I mean, there's conspiracy, conspiracy theories that, that go, that, that surround this whole murder and that like a DE agent wouldn't have been killed in Mexico without some sort of acknowledgment of the US in some way or form. You have the CIA that's operating in Mexico at this point. And, you know, and some people had said that, that Camarena discovered something illicit between the US government and Mexican drug lords, and that's what sort of put him on the hit list of the Guadalajara cartel. I mean, there's no sort of archival evidence that, that points to this. But what we can sort of deduce in both the US and Mexican records, you know, is the fact that, that DEA agents and agents of other, like FBI, to a lesser extent, the CIA are operating in Mexico with increasing policing powers that aren't authorized by the Mexican government. And this is becoming part of the status quo of the US Drug mission in Mexico. And this wasn't, it wasn't like this in 1969 when the books, when the book starts, right?
- [34:14]
B
And, you know, despite this, this, this desire, constant desire by the United States to, to police the border and to stop the drug trade. At the same time, there's also this desire to increase productive trade of various goods, non drug goods. You see, the passage of NAFTA in 1994, I think maybe the idea that more trade and more enforcement would go alongside might not make sense to people, but it was clearly the, you know, the preferred approach. How did NAFTA impact the drug war? What was the cause of this new free trade agreement?
- [35:03]
C
Well, most, and there have been studies that have come out in which, despite all of these border security measures, both with expansion of the border patrol and construction, the border walls, drugs enter the United States or illicit drugs enter the United States mostly through licit channels. And El Chapo said this most recently after he was apprehended the leader of the Sinaloa cartel. And so the chapter that I look at here, that I. My fifth chapter looks at this phenomena, this sort of paradox, and other people have touched on it before, between opening up licit trade and sort of then trying to put barriers on or opening up licit trade, like not just like legal trade, and then putting up barriers against illicit or illegal trade. And how difficult it is to do that, how difficult it remains to do that even today after NAFTA has been rewritten into the USMCA and we're going into revisions of it next year. And so nafta, I mean, it was the suggestion of the Mexican government, actually, which a lot of people are often surprised to learn. And so obviously the United States bought in. It was part of these larger neoliberal reforms that were very in vogue at the time, and Mexico had a lot of debt to repay. And so what happened was that in the United States there required this sort of extensive public relations campaign, which I write about in the book, to make NAFTA palatable to your average American citizen for a number of reasons. But at the top of the list was fears that, you know, of illicit drugs coming into the United States due to. Due to the construction of these NAFTA superhighways and increased connectivity between both countries. And I also looked then at how US Politicians had to respond, and they did so by taking a more pronounced view of the drug trade. This was also coming at a time when in a post Cold War world, the threats that were facing US Security were not Russia or a specific country. They were more abstract, unconventional threats like immigration, crime, the drug trade. And so you're having a more, we're seeing a more aggressive stance being taken by President Clinton on issues like border security and the drug trade and protecting America's borders. And so, I mean, this is interesting because you asked the question of how NAFTA might have helped promote the drug trade. I mean, the very simple answer is that increased illicit trade, you can't kind of just shut, shut down illicit trade and open up licitrade. I mean, you kind of have to do none or both, I would think. And I think that NAFTA remains this situation in which, or sort of case in point, you know, with that no matter how much policing or enforcement that you have on the border or even inside Mexico, if these two countries are so interdependent, you're not going to be able to have licitrade without illicit trade. And that is what the chapter, the fifth chapter really tries to point to. It also wants to sort of dispense these myths that NAFTA was somehow good for Mexico, which it wasn't. I mean, it shut down large parts of the agricultural industry. You also have to ask yourself here these sort of intangible consequences of increased move to Mexican cities. You know, who is employing young Mexican men at a time when at the same time that NAFTA is going into effect, you have these larger regional shifts taken in drug trade where Colombian cartels are being destroyed and Mexico, Mexican drug trafficking organizations are stepping up as kind of the bigger actors in the business. And so all of these sort of events are happening at the same time. And they are really kind of set the US And Mexico up for a lot of the violence that, you know, that is seen in Mexico with the expansion of the drug trade and the security agents with face coverings and the increased egregious murder rates and the militarization of the border that we've seen for the last 15 to 20 years.
- [40:01]
B
Well, one thing that seems to be almost a mystery that you're seeking to, to, to understand is how is it that, or why is it that as enforcement increases and the intensity of, of regulation increases, that the drug cartels actually become more sophisticated, they become more dangerous. They, they, they, they, they themselves almost seem to professionalize and militarize. So if you could talk a little about this dynamic and how you, you know, as you were doing the study how you were thinking a little bit about, you know, what approaches to drug enforcement might look like, you know, that don't necessarily then cause the secondary negative effect of the cartels becoming more dangerous, more violent, et cetera.
- [40:55]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think people have speculated on this before, but I mean, there's a way of thinking that goes that enforcement makes the drug trade violent. And had enforcement not increased, as you say, you know, the drug trade might have been as it was in the 1970s and 1980s. This was a period of time. And I can speak specifically to Mexico where, you know, cartels didn't have these public displays of violence as they do today. They didn't necessarily go after a drug lords, family members. There were certain cities that were just off limits for the violence. I mean, that is not the case today. And so exactly as you say, there's a way of thinking in which it's not just about enforcement, it's about any drug trafficking organizations. They care not about ideology or politics. They care about profit. And so when that profit starts to be threatened by increased enforcement measures, what are they going to do? I mean, they are going to try to seize back the monopoly of violence. And then you have a response by enforcement, whether it be in the Mexican context or the U.S. context. And so this is just sort of this discursive going back for who has the monopoly on violence. And it's been very sad to watch the impacts of, of this back and forth on that. And I mean, I've talked to border officials, I've talked to people who are observing the drug trade and working in policing it inside Mexico. And I mean, most of these, from, from what we discover, most of these trafficking organizations, I mean, they're always two steps ahead of, you know, what we know as the, the authorities. And so I think that enforcement and continued firm enforcement by states is going to continue to, to intensify the consequences of, you know, related to who has this monopoly on violence. And so the other question that you asked was, I mean, well, then what are our, what are our options then for policies? I mean, I think that it sounds a bit trite even today to just say that we have to look at our domestic addiction problem here in the United States. And that's absolutely true. I would go a step further in saying that the United States needs to acknowledge its domestic addiction problem and be a little bit more vocal about it in its bilateral and foreign policies, because it really is a place in which it really bumps up and grinds against a lot of its partnerships. Not Only in Mexico, but throughout the region. There are cities in Mexico that the violence has gotten out of control at different times. And so initially, there is going to need to be intensified. I wouldn't say intensified, but there is going to need to be shared enforcement, reliable enforcement focused on building trust in local policing forces and then helping to build, rebuild Mexican institutions. But that has to have an end date. There can't be this sort of prolonged militarization of Mexican enforcement. And I think that that's where in 2008, under Mexican, Felipe Calderon, where it really kind of got Mexico on the map because Calderon took on the cartels and it became very violent in Mexico. There has to be an exit strategy, especially if the United States is involved. And it cannot be a unilateral U.S. effort. It has to be one in which the United States and Mexican governments are working together. We've struggled politically to do that recently. Yeah, it's just like we have to work together with Mexico to, To address this issue. And I don't think unilateral issues are going to kind of work.
- [45:03]
B
Right. And that makes, you know, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, given just our current world, even if there's attempts to sort of put the GD back in the bottle of, like a globalized world, it's. It's. It's a little impossible. And, you know, one thing that I found really striking, you include some charts that just show drug overdoses, drug overdose rates in the United States, and how, you know, when this enforcement begins in the 1970s, the drug overdose rate in the United states is like 1 in 100,000. Accidental drug overdose, death. And I looked it up, and I think in the past couple years, it's been as high as 30 per 100,000. So clearly, by certain metrics, it hasn't really been that successful. The war on drugs. I mean, who knows, maybe that number would be way higher. But it is striking in a way just the extent to which problems around, you know, drug deaths have just proliferated since this enforcement starts. And, and I'm wondering, you know, when you. When you're looking at, you know, the contemporary debates today around how we can, you know, deal with problems like fentanyl and, and, you know, and other other drug issues. You know, how do you think about. About sort of the contemporary approaches, you know, whether or not, you know, some of these, you know, some of these policy initiatives similar to, you know, maybe what Richard Nixon tried to do in the 70s, you know, whether or not that you. You think some of the approaches that. That have been going on today are. Are effective or what you might sort of counsel if asked?
- [46:49]
C
Yeah, I think a lot of people throughout the region, during our. Throughout our country say that the war on drugs has been a failure. I think that this book tries to show the ways in which it's as much of a failure when a partner like Mexico, a supply country, adopts the war on drugs and sees it through the lens of its own political, social, and sort of military institutions. And so it's not even just the fact that it's a failure. It's that if we continue to promote it, sometimes in the context of other countries, it can take on a life its own in ways in which the United States government doesn't even understand. Because any. I mean, just kind of basic foreign policy, you know, any way in which a partner nation adopts a US Policy is going to be filtered through the prism of its own institutions, et cetera. And in the case of Mexico, the consequences, I mean, since the 1960s of filtering militarized drug control through Mexican institutions have been terrible, and they continue to be that way. So I think that nobody knows what the fix is going to be to contemporary drug issues. I mean, it's a very difficult thing to pick apart. I mean, because there's addiction issues in the United States that we haven't really even begun to grapple with and look at. And there's a whole. I mean, you mentioned Matthew Lasseter's book, you know, about the fact that we have our own sort of demons to look into, with how we've targeted certain people in U.S. society for Drugs and not targeted others, largely through issues of race, etc. But also in a foreign policy context. In the case of Mexico, which has a very unique relationship with the United States and a very long shared border. I mean, there's so many other factors that come into play. Mexico's own political history, marginalized groups in Mexican society, and Mexico's own sort of policing history. And so I think this is something that I want to bring to the forefront of consideration as we sort of look at what the next chapter of US Mexico policing and military cooperation could look like. I mean, it's happening right now despite the fact that there's sort of this sovereignty war and people don't acknowledge it. I mean, there's still a large or a sizable U.S. presence in training Mexican militaries on exactly these counternarcotics issues. And some of that is very much related to the coercion and the type of political theater brought on by operation intercept in 1969. I mean, you have President Trump that talks about, talks about the potential for using military force in Mexico. And then you have Mexico's president, Claudia Sheinbaum, who immediately, whether it's effective or not, she sends 10,000 National Guardsmen to the border. This is exactly what happened in 1969 with Operation Intercept. I mean, you close down the border and Mexico is forced to mobilize. But as we've seen from the case study that I've tried to illuminate in Policing on Drugs, there's just so many unintended consequences with these sort of coercive moves that really run deep inside Mexico.
- [50:30]
B
Absolutely. And I think it's one of these, it's one of these topics, one of these issues where finding the long term solution. I don't know if there's a, there's a long term fix for this sort of issue, you know, besides maybe some, you know, magic pill out there that, you know, that makes people never want to use drugs. I guess. But, you know, I guess that might be a, there'll be unintended consequences to that as well. But it does seem that regardless, everything that is being tried right now or being suggested right now is something that we've done before, something that you've tried in the past and to not always great effect. So regardless, I think that this book is a really useful work for just exploring the ways in which we have been pursuing this war on drugs for 50 plus years and it hasn't really gone the way that we wanted it to. And the cartels are in many ways more dangerous than ever before. So it's really just been wonderful to get the chance to talk to you about this topic. I think it's just an endlessly fascinating topic, but I'm sure that you'll have lots to explore. As you point out too, this is just the US Mexico cooperation on drug enforcement is just one example. There are plenty of other instances of the US working with other countries as you know, the US working as sort of the big brother partner to the junior collaborators. And the impacts that this has on various places is very interesting. So I really do think that this is valuable work that you've contributed. So, Eileen, thank you so much for being guest on the New Books Network. It was really wonderful getting the chance to speak with you about your book, Policing on Drugs.
- [52:18]
C
Yeah, it was wonderful. Thank you so much for the opportunity to talk about it, Caleb. Thank you.
- [52:22]
B
Of course.