Guerrilla History - The Mexican Dirty War: A War to the Death w/ Alexander Aviña & Benjamin T. Smith

Episode Date: October 6, 2023

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we bring on Benjamin T. Smith and his coauthor, returning fan favorite Alexander Aviña, to talk about an article that they just cowrote about the (ongoing) Mexican Dirty War for NACLA titled A War to the Death!  This short article condenses the decades history of the Mexican Dirty War in advance of an upcoming Truth Commission report on state terrorism within Cold War era Mexico.  As our guests highlight though, this dirty war never really ended.  A great conversation, do us a favor and send it to comrades who are interested in Cold War Latin America, Mexican history, or state sponsored dirty wars, they will certainly find this useful! Benjamin T. Smith is professor of Latin American history at the University of Warwick and author of several books, including The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade.  Ben's website is available at thedope.co.uk, and he can be followed on twitter @benjamintsmith7 Alexander Aviña is associate professor of Latin American history at Arizona State University and author of Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside. Alex's website is available at alexanderavina.com, and he can be followed on twitter @Alexander_Avina Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory                               

You don't remember Den Van Boo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to guerrilla history, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history

and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckimacki, joined, as usual, by my two co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussain, historian, historian of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan, how are you doing today? I'm doing great, Henry. It's a pleasure to be with you. Yeah, always nice to see you. And joined also, as usual, by our other co-host, Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you doing?

Doing very good. It feels like it's been quite a while since all three of us have been together, so I'm happy to be back. Well, you know, you were traveling, lucky dog. So, you know, you'll have to tell us about how that was sometime, but not today. We've got a big topic on the table and two guests, including one returning fan favorite. Before I, and he shrugs as if he doesn't know that, but of course he does. And the listeners probably already know who we're talking about. But before I even introduce the topic and the guests, I want to remind the listeners that they can help support the show and allow us to continue making new episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history, guerrilla being spelled G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. I know you and I are also running a Patreon exclusive miniseries right now on the religious cultures of the medieval Mediterranean. and so folks, if you sign up to support the show and help us to do episodes like this,

you'll also get some bonus episodes like those in the process. You can also follow us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A-U-Skore pod. That's where you can find out all of the things that Adnan, Brett, and myself are getting up to individually as well as what the show is doing collectively. So on that note, I want to introduce our guests. We have, as I mentioned, two great guests today. day, including one returning guest. First, we have Benjamin T. Smith, professor of Latin

America history at the University of Warwick and author of several books, including The Dope, the Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade. Hello, Ben. It's nice to have you on the program. It's great to be here. Thank you very much, Henry. Absolutely. And we're also joined, as I mentioned, returning fan favorite, Alexander Avina, Associate Professor of Latin American History at Arizona State University and author of Spectors of Revolution peasant guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican countryside, as well as a many-time guest on guerrilla history and Rev Lesb. Hello, Alex. It's nice to see you again. Hey, guys. It's great to be here.

So the topic today, the two of you have recently co-written a article that came out in NACLA, titled A War to the Death, which is talking about the dirty war in Mexico. Now, before we dive into this piece specifically, I know, Alex, we have previously recorded an episode with you where we talked about Cold War Latin America. And actually, that's one of our most popular episodes. So listeners, if you haven't heard that Cold War Latin America episode yet, you can go back and listen to that at any point. But for those who haven't heard that episode yet, I'm wondering if the two of you, Alex and Ben, could kind of orient us into what the situation was like in Cold War, Latin America, in brief. because we're going to be talking about specifically Mexico, particularly in the 70s and 80s, in large part. But, you know, it does, of course, go back earlier than that, the story.

And it reaches up to today. But getting that little bit of a regional perspective on what the situation was like in the Cold War in Latin America might be a good opening point for us to get into this conversation. Yeah, I'll start it off. And then, Ben, please feel free to add anything that I miss. I think to think about, maybe going back to that episode we did a while back would be really helpful for the listener. But when we think about dirty wars in Latin America during the Cold War era, we think about going back to the early 1960s, sometimes we date this back to the Brazilian coup that takes place in 1964. And really from 1964 until the mid to late 1980s, we have a series, a cycle of different military and authoritarian dictatorships that take power in Latin America. with a few minor exceptions, like Paraguay, where they had a long ruling dictator from like the mid-1950s.

And for a long time, so from the mid-1960s up until the late 1980s, it's a really dark period in Latin American history where you have everything from military dictatorships like Argentina that disappeared 30,000 people from 1976 and 93. You have Guatemala that launched a genocide against Mayan communities in the early 1980s. that killed anywhere from 100 to 200,000 people, completely eradicated more than 600 indigenous villages from the face of this earth. And for a long time, in this history of Cold War Latin America, Mexico was left out.

Mexico was thought to be kind of like an island in a very turbulent Latin American sea that somehow had managed to avoid the type of state terrorism and violence that places like Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile. We just had the 50th anniversary right of the coup d'etat against Salvador Allende and different Latin American, Central American country, sorry. And one of the things that Ben and I try to do in this article is to, you know, really

working off of some recent historiography by scholars both, you know, in Mexico and in the U.S. and in the U.S. and in the U.K. in Ben's case, really trying to situate or to include Mexico in this history, right? Mexico actually did not escape. the type of horrific state terrorism that I just described for the entire region. There are some differences that we go into, I think important differences that we go into in the article, but it comfortably fits within this history. So I just wanted to add, I mean, in terms of Mexico being seen as an outlier, this is something that, you know, not simply outsiders have concluded,

but also many Mexicans never saw their consequences. country as being affected by the kind of brutal dictatorships like the rest of Latin America. So I remember distinctly, my father-in-law was a member of the Communist Party in the 1950s, 1960s, and then had to leave, basically, because communists were being killed in the area that he lived in.

And I said, well, what's the difference between that and the rest of Latin American? He goes, well, look what happened in Guatemala. Mexico was never like Guatemala. So even people on the left in Mexico in some ways didn't want to acknowledge or reluctant to acknowledge quite the extent of the dirty wars effect in Mexico

and didn't want to make that comparison. So this is, it's quite a recent thing that the populace but also historians have started to investigate this. Yeah, that's very interesting and I think you even say in the piece that, I mean, Mexico is seen not only as the exception to some of the more brutal, you know, stuff going on throughout Latin America, but was even sometimes seen as a place of refuge for Latin American, you know, refugees fleeing this political violence.

So that even adds another layer of sort of like, you know, maybe Mexico does stand outside the rest of Latin America. But, of course, this piece shows that that is the exact opposite of the truth. And of course, Mexico had its own dirty war going on. I was hoping as kind of an opening question, if you could maybe define. define exactly what a dirty war is. I mean, people have heard that term, but perhaps they're not exactly sure what makes a dirty war different than other forms of civil or international conflict. So if you could define that, and then kind of tell us how the dirty war in Mexico started. I know you start your piece with a reference to the popular revolutionary army and the

torturing of one of its members, but that was in the 90s, sort of implying that this dirty war has continued, you know, 70s, 80s, 90s, and in many ways to this very day. But yeah, let's start with just how, what is the dirty war and how did it start in Mexico? So this is actually within broader Latin America, the term dirty war is a rather contentious one, right? In a place like Argentina, it's been completely, I think, completely banished, right? Because the idea of a dirty war somehow creates some sort of political or moral equivalency between different sides that were involved in what was a campaign of state terrorism. So in places where you've had very powerful social movements that have been working on issues

of historical memory, on recovering, you know, the disappeared loved ones and putting the executioners and the tortures and the killers on trial, they tended to discard this term of a dirty war, which essentially is a stand-in for a state terrorism. That's what it is. But in Mexico, as Ben mentioned, because this is a relatively recent topic in the last 10, 20 years that has slowly made his way into public discussions, Dirty War is still used as a term that encompasses a period of state terrorism directed against a variety of different social and political groups, as we outline in the article, from the mid-1960s to, Well, as Ben and I argue, to this day, one of the big arguments that we make in this article is that the dirty war in Mexico never quite ended. It just became something else.

Whereas in other Latin American countries, there's a very, there's a beginning date, usually when the military takes power in some sort of bloody coup. And then when that military leaves, you know, is forced to leave and you have the return of democratic governance in depending on the country, but usually throughout the 1980s in some Central American countries in the 1990s. So it's really interesting to be engaged with with historians and scholars of places like Chile and Argentina who completely, like to use the term dirty war is like an offensive term. But in Mexico, it's become a term that activists and historians and other scholars who are interested in this era of state terrorism from the mid-60s to today encapsulates these different processes. But a lot of it has to do, again, with the fact that this is a relatively recent phenomenon in Mexico. We, you know, Ben and I in a smaller group of historians were among the first to really get access to declassified spy political police and military documents that were released, partially released, in the early 2000s. So this is, again, this is a relatively recent phenomenon where, you know, in contrast to other countries in Latin America, the tortures and the killers. and the murderers in Mexico had largely gone free

and they were allowed to die peacefully. So this is part of the ongoing memory and political struggle in Mexico. And I think, I mean, I don't think either Alex or I would define ourselves as necessarily historians that are obsessed by language. But I think the nature of the issue of definition is quite important.

If you can define something, you can put an end to it. You can find some closure. You can start putting people in jail, whether it's a genocide or whether it's a military dictatorship, Mexico is still struggling to know quite how to define this period and as a result this period really hasn't ended because it, as we point out in the article, the Dirty War in Mexico starts very gradually

during the 1960s and involves massac of students, of guerrillas, of civil society members. This kind of thing has kind of been going on since the 1940s in Mexico in a less less extensive, no doubt. But in Mexico, we have no sudden stock to the dirty war like you have in places which have military coups. And as Alex points out, we don't have an end to it either.

Yeah, that's very interesting to see the historical process and how to compare with other Latin American countries. I'm sure we're going to get into some of the details you document and discuss here, which really are quite stunning in terms of, to my mind, the scale, really, over a long period of time. But I wanted to ask about your analysis here. I mean, there was almost a suggestion in the piece that because there hadn't been, you know, a kind of cataclysmic military coup government that then resistance eventually brought down

that the whole pattern of Mexican historical consciousness and investigation into these processes of state repression hadn't really kind of taken off and that there hadn't been a narrative that was comparable to those kind of implotments that take place, just as you've been saying, when you have a coup government and then you can get rid of the military, then there's a clear kind of narrative discussion. This kind of leads me to wonder, because of the scale of state repression that you were documenting and discussing here, it almost seems as if there's something worthwhile asking about the structure of Mexican politics and political power that has allowed essentially the facade of a kind of liberal government of, you know, elections and sort of

quasi-rule of law, even if there's considered corruption and problems and all of that, but that you didn't have to have, especially during the Cold War period, so many of these military governments in league usually with U.S. kind of positions in the Cold War to repress social justice movements in this crushing sort of dramatic way. Why is Mexico's pattern been like that? And does it see itself as very exceptional to the rest of Latin America? as a result. So starting with your last question first. Yes, it sees itself as exceptional still to this day. As I say, the vast majority of Mexicans still see it as exceptional. And key to this, you're absolutely right, is the political structure of Mexico. Now, traditionally, we've

seen the political structure of Mexico after its revolution that runs from about 1910 to 1920. The argument has always been that since the state was formed, the one-party state under a party called the pre, Mexico has had civilian presidents. The last civilian, the last military president left in 1946. Since then, every president has been a civilian and the army has mostly been kept in check. There have been rumors of attempted military coups, I think, in 1948 and another one in 1976, but these have never come to pass. The military has always thought

to have been subsumed to civilian power in Mexico. Now, it's quite easy to see now that that might not be the case, and for anyone who's following Mexico at the moment, you can see the Mexican military has enormous power at

the moment under the current president a guy called Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and has taken control of the tourism industry, the airports, the ports, the customs, the border. But having said all this, the military still has a fantastic reputation in Mexico. If you look at any of the polls they do about what people think, what the levels of respect that they have for politicians, journalists, teachers, the military always come out top.

which I think something quite remarkable, given, as we see, the level of repression that they have been absolutely crucial to. Just a quick question. If I recall correctly, and I know that this episode will be coming out probably two weeks after we record it, so it won't be as new of news, but I'm pretty sure I just saw in the last couple days that AMLO had just passed a 71% or it was proposing at least a 71% increase in the military budget in Mexico. Am I remembering this correctly? I thought I just saw it in the news, like, within the last couple days. Yeah, that is the case. I don't know if it's 71, yeah.

I mean, it was something like that. I might be misremembering it, but I just saw that in the news. It's a vast increase in the military budget, which is quite confusing, given that they've also got access to all these other sources of funds, such as running airports, running train lines, running customs. So this is, yeah, as I say, potentially this might wake up the population to the fact because traditionally the military in Mexico, and this has been one of the arguments, the military in Mexico has always been underfunded. So if you look at the statistics on state spending on the military in Argentina or in Chile or in Guatemala during the 1970s, it's massive.

It's kind of 20 to 30% of the state budget. in Mexico never goes above 6%. Now, one of the things I think we're starting to suspect is that one of the reasons it never goes above 6% is it manages to fund itself through effectively running what I call protection rackets. It basically extorts people involved in criminal activities, particularly drug traffickers,

and gets a lot of its funding from that. So it doesn't really need the state funding. So it can keep the illusion up that it's not terribly powerful. Yeah, I think the number that you mentioned, Henry, takes into account, if I remember correctly from the article, what Ben just mentioned in terms of alternate revenue streams that are now institutionalized in terms of the military getting more money. So it's not necessarily a greater budgetary allocation. It's that they're responsible under Amlo for running all the things that Ben mentioned from airports to train lines to I think they control ports as well now. I just wanted to step back and add to Ben's

earlier comment about Mexico's place within Latin America. I think one of the great historians of Mexico, Friedrich Katz, has this argument that talks about how what made Mexico different from the rest of Latin America and we see the consequences of the differences in the Cold War is that because of the Mexican Revolution,

the Mexican Revolution destroyed the old army. It destroyed the old land of elite. We can question how much. And it really brought the Catholic Church to heal. And those are generally the three social factors or forces that play a huge role in Cold War Latin America in pushing forth some sort of authoritarian or military dictatorship. It's always this generally, this alliance between the military, bourgeois usually

landed elites and the Catholic Church. And minus that, you know, having had those forces cowed because of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, Mexico is somehow exceptional. And Katz has a really interesting personal story like President Lazaro Cardenas, Mexico's left wing president in 1930s actually provided safe haven for Katz's family because Katz's father was a journalist Jewish journalist who was writing

in favor of the Spanish, the Republicans or in the Spanish Civil War. So I always felt like his critique of the post-revolutionary Mexican state was a bit mooted. But I think his argument is really interesting for us to think about it. For me it just led to a different type of state

terrorism breaking out in Mexico. In techniques and in strategy, in actual specific forms of terrorism, it's very similar to what we see in the rest of Latin America. But because of this revolutionary history, it's allowed to position itself internationally as like a progressive force, right? So during the entire time that it's massacring, you know, parts of the arm, most of the arm left in Mexico, we're going after all the other social forces that we discuss in the article, it's also accepting exiles from Chile, from Argentina, from Uruguay. And then you'll have someone like President Luis Echeverria from 1970, 1976, who is leading this dirty war. But internationally, he's seen as a progressive. He's seen as someone who's standing up to the United States. We now know

that was not true to the things to declassified documents. So Mexico's international self-styled image really helps it avoid international attention in terms of what it was doing internally. Well, that's really interesting. And the point about the new institutionalized revenues for the military and this kind of changing, you know, set of conditions for the increase in power of the military, perhaps is quite interesting and maybe even disturbing. I don't know what you think about where this fits in the longer trajectory of Mexico civil, military relations. But, you know, it does remind. me a little bit of the kind of ways in which militaries and places like Egypt or Pakistan have, you know, entrenched themselves so fully in a kind of alternate economy, not just through, say, protection rackets and corruption, which of course they also, you know, perhaps are involved with, but in kind of controlling certain state revenues and production and areas of the economy that then makes it virtually impossible to remove them from, you know, control in the

state. And so I'm just wondering what you think about, about that and that pattern, especially in the context, both in Egypt and in Pakistan as analogs of a sort, that you have movements to elect, you know, popular governments or at least leaders who reflect some kind of populist discourse and language. You've got Imran Khan, you had Mursi in Egypt, and in each of these cases, two cases, you see that the real problem that they have to deal with and where the increasing political repression comes from the military reacting to, you know, the instability from their perspective of their security interests taking precedence when you have populist leaders who want to you know do things for the national interest or that kind of thing so anyway

that point just reminded me of those and it's it's a concerning kind of observation from my perspective and i wonder what you think about with the process that's undergoing a taking place in in in uh mexico in this direction i i've just i mean i think that's a really brilliant idea and i've been played with the other uh place i would see that somewhere somewhat similar happening is Indonesia under the dictatorship where there's a kind of alliance of the army and certain criminal factions. In terms of why it happens in those places particularly, I wonder if one of the major reasons is because the army in those places has a fair amount of power and a fair amount of popular legitimacy because it's facing down a fairly terrifying neighbor

or former colonial power. So Egypt faces down the UK during the 1950s and 1960s. Pakistan has been facing down both the UK and then India. And Mexico is continually facing down the United States, which gives it legitimacy and certainly gives it legitimacy under the government of AMLO, who says, well, you've got two options, really. You can either have the DEA crawling all over Mexico,

and the US and US agents or you can have our army wouldn't you prefer to have somebody who is Mexican so I think those countries potentially do their history

allows them to have this quite kind of powerful embedded military but I'd love to see the kind of scholarship on I have started on Indonesia but I'd love to see the scholarship on like Egypt and Pakistan about that particular history of the army I think Mexican

at the very least Mexican journalists have started to make that comparison like the last couple years, explicitly to places like Egypt. And I think there is some academic work that compares kind of like Mexico's long ruling single political party to like the Turkish case as well. Like I have seen a couple of academic pieces on that, which is really a fascinating, I think, contrast or comparison in terms of the development of the Turkish single party state with the Mexican one across the 20th century. But the more recent more recently, yeah, you've seen Mexican journalists making that. that connection between the predominant role of the Egyptian military in the Egyptian political

system and civil society with what is happening in Mexico. In the shocking part of what's happening in Mexico, I think, is Amlo, the president campaigned a certain way. And then when he got down to the task of governing, he essentially was faced with the choice that Ben just outlined. And it's been very clear what decision he made. If you want, we can definitely go into that later on. I mean, I find that very, very insightful. Of course, Ben mentioned Indonesia. You make reference to Vincent Bevin's wonderful work, the Jakarta method, sort of compare it a little bit to the Mexican state's methodology and approach in the context of the dirty war there.

And then you also say that, quote, from the article, these state strategies and tactics of disappearing citizens of this brutal crackdown that kind of tries to hide the victims, targeted four main groups. So my question is twofold. Can you talk about some of the methodologies of the dirty war by the Mexican state? And then can you tell us the four main groups who were targeted by that state? Actually, I want to add something onto that question. So in addition to talking about who the four main groups are,

if you can talk about why they were the groups that were targeted. And then also the justification, because as you mentioned in the article, the two of you, what they were being claimed, the groups that were being claimed to be targeted were not in actuality what was being targeted. So if you can, in addition to what Brett had asked, discuss why these groups were being singled out for, you know, in particular this violence. And then also the justification that was being given to the populace of why there was this repression that was taking place. So let me talk a little bit about the tactics. And then Ben can cover the four specific groups. So I came at this research because my first book focuses

on these communist school teachers in the countryside who led different revolutionary movements in Mexico during the 60s and 70s. And it was through that research that I started to discover documents and testimonies of people who would talk about the Mexican military in the countryside waging the type of counterinsurgency that we see in other Latin American countries. And you even have some of the survivors that started to make, you know, claims like Guerrero, the state that I focus on in southern Mexico was kind of Mexico's Vietnam, right? So, and they were making these links because in the counterinsurgent tactics that the Mexican military was using, you know, the concentration of strategic hamlets, the reconcentration of populations. You would have,

um, the Mexican military go up into the mountains. Some of them would land, you know, use helicopters and land on the basketball court of a school in a small mountain village. You know, they would force the community to gather on that at that school. And sometimes they torture people in front of the entire community. Sometimes they execute people in front of the entire community because they were alleging that they were supporting these different peasant guerrillas. So in the countryside, the Mexican military waged the type of counterinsurgency that we see in other countries. They use things like the enforced disappearances, torture, sexual violence.

They used something that became infamous with the Argentine. case, these death flights where they would put people onto helicopters or airplanes, especially these Israeli-made airplanes called Arab planes. They fly off the coast near Air Force Base in Akapunco, fly onto the Pacific Ocean, just dump people into the ocean. So their tactics are very, there's like a genealogy, and Ben and I have talked about this a lot. There's a global genealogy of these torture and terror tactics that go that we see in Algeria, right, during the Algerian National Liberation struggle. Actually, that's one of the first instances where we see the use of death flights.

I can't remember the name of the officer who used them, but like they were called shrimps, like people who were thrown into the Mediterranean, FLN militants who were thrown into the Mediterranean. So part of the, I think part of the, or one of the areas that we need more research on is how these state forces

were kind of communicating with one another and really in a sick way, sharing quote unquote best practices. And they're doing it in a way that's not, you know, usually the old story is that the, the U.S. was doing directing this entire thing out of the school of the Americas in Panama or other military bases like Fort Benning, Georgia, or in Florida, whatever, but there was something else going on as well where Latin American countries and militaries and police forces

were communicating amongst themselves and sharing these horrific practices. So Mexico, we see, in Mexico, in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, we see the same things that we've seen in other Latin American countries. Torture, systematic torture, disappearances, death flights, rape. If you want a really powerful cinematic rendition of this, there's a Mexican movie that came out in 2006 called El Biolin. That's essentially about these guerrilla movements that I write about in the southern state of Guerrero. And it's a really powerful movie that covers some of this, some of this history. Yeah. Thanks, Alison. And Alex has left me with the groups that were targeted. I think some of them will come as no surprise to listeners. So the most obvious

targets and the one that have been really what were known about during the 1980s and 1990s, but few people maybe knew the extent of the repression were left-wing guerrillas and communist students. And they

formed guerrilla organizations in Mexico during this period and Alex has studied several of the very powerful ones that worked in Guerrero and they were treated brutally and many of their members were made victims of this terrible repression. However, I think what the current Truth Commission is looking into and what a lot of the literature

is now focusing on are other groups. And we distinguish, we claim there are kind of three other groups and I'm maybe like to kind of throw in a fourth that I've become more aware of recently. So the first is people who are doing land invasions. So Mexico has a long history of peasant land invasions, which are effectively peasants taking over the land of large landowners because they can't afford to live on their own. And this has been going on really since the Mexican Revolution.

And up to the 1960s, it's frowned upon, but it's broadly allowed by the government. Starting in the 1970s, it would appear that landowners, their own hitmen, state policemen, spies and army basically team up and start to take out anyone who does a large land invasion. And we're talking about massacres and a massacre that I'm investigating, which is quite extraordinary, appears to involve the killing of 320 men, women and children up in the mountains of Pue. in a place called Montere de Chila, which is basically been wiped off the map by one of these, actually by bombing the village. So you've got those. The second group are indigenous groups fighting for basically political and economic autonomy, the most famous of which is a group that runs down in the southern state of Oaxaca, which is called the Kossay. But there are loads of these other groups that were kind of fighting for indigenous rights.

very kind of modern, almost kind of quasi-identity politics, but often linked up to left-wing land invaders or even left-wing students. The third group, the other group that I think is really important, which we haven't focused up enough upon, are broadly what we would call criminals. Mostly the growers of opium and marijuana, which were treated in exactly the same way, as the students and the guerrillas and the land invaders,

but also other groups who are deemed to be criminals, so that involves people who involved in prostitution, in gambling, also people from the LGBTQ plus community. So a lot of these same repressive techniques were meted out towards people that hadn't really very little to do with left-wing insurrection. you know i would add i would add uh that there's also there is a a strong as you see it with well let me start with this there's a in the middle who's doing this stuff right in the countryside

as ben mentioned it's the military it's an assortment of like private paramilitaries there's a paramilitary that was operating in the state of idalgo whose name was october second as a reference to the massacre of students in mexico city on october second 1968 right so they're very explicitly using that massacre as a way to terrorize land invaders in a state of Idalgo. And you have different regional police forces. In the city, you have an anti-communist police forces, secret police forces, that are wiping out both urban guerrillas, but are also, and this is, as Ben mentioned, this is like very

recent research or attention has been focused on, groups that are targeted for quote-unquote social cleansing, right? So just common criminals or people identified as common criminals, street children. Like there's so much more to investigate and to uncover, even though we have a pretty good idea now in terms of who was doing the killing, right? The different police forces, different military forces, the people who are ordering this kind of stuff. So that's who's doing it. And they're doing it within the confines, again, of a state that's ruled by a single political party that is quite apparent. Like, it's quite clear that they're the ones issuing some of these orders, right?

So even though it's at times a tense relationship between like the Mexican military and the civilian political leadership, if you follow the trail of declassified documents, they all know what's going on. And you can kind of see who's doing the ordering of the committing of these horrific forms of terror, both in the countryside and in Mexico cities. Well, she'd like to add one more thing. And I realize that Alex and I probably talk about this all day. So go on two. much, but I used to be quite skeptical of the idea that the Mexican military and the Mexican

authorities were committing what we might see as acts of social cleansing. But I think that's really the only way to explain what are these kind of these mass murders of people right on the margins of society. I would say, however, there is also an economic reason for this, which is that you terrorize these groups, you kill a lot of them, particularly drug dealers, and then you make the rest pay you. So a lot of this, the entire dirty war, and I would say the continuation of the dirty war, runs on an economic rationale, which is that if you terrorize these marginal groups, they'll pay you for protection. Yeah, that's an important point. Absolutely. Now, I do want to ask really quickly, because I think Alex said earlier, something

about using Israeli helicopters or planes to throw people into the Pacific Ocean. and in the article you mentioned also the role of the U.S. and Belgium in particular. Can you just kind of quickly talk about the role of other countries like the U.S., like Belgium and like Israel and Mexico's Dirty War? Yes, so in terms of, I mean, the Mexican military has a, they've had a difficult time over the course of the 20th century developing like its own homegrown armaments industry, even though it does have one, it has one to this day, and they have developed some homegrown forms. of armament, but, you know, in the 60s and 70s, they are getting weapons, not necessarily just from the United States, but they, Mexico's always trying to, it's very wary of, they know that their location could quickly lead them to be subsumed under U.S. at Germany, right? So they try to get their sources of armaments from a variety of different countries, right?

So this is why we have, you know, one of the standard rifles that the Mexican military is using the 60s and 70s is Belgian, right? It's an FAL. They do start to get helicopters from the United States, particularly in the 1970s, under the, under like a counter-narcotics campaign, right? But these helicopters and airplanes are being used for a variety of different things. The Israeli made Aarva, I wrote, I've written a couple pieces about it. I think it's really interesting, right? In Mexico, they nicknamed it the flying avocado because it's got this like really, it's a really weird shape airplane.

but the Israelis developed it as a counter-insurgency plane that could take off from very short landing strips and land in the mountains. So in other Latin American countries bought those airplanes for precisely that same reason, especially in Guatemala and other Central American nations. So in Mexico, they're using it in a place like Guerrero where you have a very thin Pacific coastline

and then this massive mountain range that immediately starts. And they bought a bunch of those planes during the 1970s, And we now know that they use some of those planes to disappear people and to throw them out into the Pacific Ocean. And then there's also there's rumors and there's suggestions based on some court trials that perhaps those very planes were also used to traffic marijuana from Guerrero up into northern Mexico where the goods were unloaded and then trafficked into United States. So for me, the use of that plane as a counter-insurgent instrument, which then gets repurposed to, you know, essentially traffic drugs into the United States by the Mexican military is really indicative of what Ben just mentioned, right, about the economic rationale for a lot of this violence. Yeah. I have a couple of other questions and just sort of following up on this, I'm wondering, you know, the arc of the process was described. I think in your article as from counterinsurgency to state terrorism.

And so some of what you document here questions, getting back to that opening kind of question about the dirty war. Maybe this is something in conclusion at some point we might think about, but I just want to put it out there is that the extent of what you were documenting and discussing seems like it moves from simply, you know, dirty war counterinsurgency kind of structures to something more like, you know, state or fairly organized state repression because of these, you know, this apparatus of military and police forces, you know, working with, you know, in tandem with landowners and other elite, you know, groups to suppress.

you know, popular resistance. So that's something I was thinking about here. If by the end of the article, you say it is kind of controversial to talk about the dirty war, this term. So maybe it is worth characterizing this as state terrorism. But the actual other question that I had was really about the process by which this historical memory, which seems to have been either ignored or suppressed or because of the narrative of Mexico's exceptionalism just didn't seem to rise to and didn't have this kind of military coup around which structure the process of, you know, a truth and reconciliation commission. But you mentioned that there has been quite a lot of local historians, activists, social justice figures who have really put together some kind of a

movement here, it seems of a truth commission, and also the declassifying of certain kinds of documents. And so this intrigued me to, you know, ask you a little bit more about what the process of research and historical investigation has been, how these stories have come to light, what people are doing with them, and also how and why they were suppressed in various ways. So to give us a sense of like what's percolating when it comes to really engage, the historical memory to tell the story here from victims, from documents and so forth. If you could tell us a little bit about your research and the research others are doing that you're connecting with.

Well, I just want to answer the first question, which is the idea that this moved from being a counter-terrorism or counter-insurgency to be general state repression. And I think that's certainly something that may be asked. So I certainly thought that. But the more we investigate, the more it appears that many of these tactics and strategies were first meted out towards people that were deemed criminals. This was first meted out in the, you know, in the brothel zone of Mexico City or Sudad Juarez. That many of these tactics were first employed against drug traffickers, pimps, prostitutes, sex workers and LGBT people. people. I mean, the first mentioned, for example, one of the classic torture techniques was

the use of electrocution, particularly of people's private parts. And the first, and the term for it in the police was called the Chichata. And the first use of it that I can work out was early 1950s, not against supposed communists or leftists or students, but in actual fact, against drug traffickers. So I wonder if some of the tactics at least come from, yeah, come from the repression of crime rather than the repression of leftists, which again, kind of leads to this idea that the Mexico is somewhat different, even if has so many similarities with the rest of Latin America. Yeah, we don't see in Mexico, this is something that's ongoing, right, that Ben and I continue to discuss and try to find more sources for,

but Mexico really doesn't see that type of existential struggle between Western civilization and the evil communist framing that, you know, the military in Brazil and Argentina use. The Argentine military dictatorship was extremely anti-Semitic. They would say things like, you know, the three great enemies of Argentina and Western civilization were represented by Freud, Marx, and Einstein, right? Because they all somehow destroyed Christian notions of time, of the family, and of space. We don't really see that in Mexico, even though some of the military officials and police officials were very anti-communist. But there's no existential, like, this is going to take over Mexico. And I think

that goes to Ben's point that I think, you know, we may have to reconfigure our historical trajectory in terms of how some of these tactics and techniques and reasons emerge in the first place. And they emerge in a place where the single political party that's in power seems to be rather quite comfortable, right? They don't, they don't feel like they're going to be overthrown anytime soon for a variety of different reasons. In terms of the historical part, one thing I'll say is that, or the memory part, Adnan, your second question, is that, you know, when I was researching my first book and really thinking about these horrific, you know, interviewing people and reading about these horrific things, right, like talking to

people who had lost a son or a daughter to disappearance, this horrific things, like things that change you, that really challenged your notions of academic objectivity. You know, I thought that, well, in a place like Guerrero, you know, the state terrorism, you know, wiped out resistance, a coward communities into fear. And actually, it did the opposite. You know, we didn't see, the armed struggle perhaps did go underground and then would reemerge in the 1990s. But you saw communities since the 1970s testifying to these horrific practices that the Mexican state had engaged in the 1970s. You had the relatives and the families of disappeared loved ones who were organizing and protesting at great risk to their lives and challenging the Mexican state to return

their loved ones who had been taken by the military or by the police. And in a way, I think Mexico's quote unquote modern human rights movement begins in the mid to late 1970s. When you have relatives of the disappeared that belong to the arm left with relatives of the disappeared of calming criminals and drug traffickers join forces. And in the late 70s, they start to organize hunger strikes in Mexico City. And again, at great risk, at great risk to their personal health, to their lives. So there's been people in Mexico who have been saying this stuff has happened for a long time. And it took scholars a long time to catch up to that and to be like, oh yeah, these people who were talking about the disappearance of their father

in 1974, they were actually, quote, unquote, telling the truth. Mexico has had several Truth Commission efforts, right? The one that Ben mentioned earlier, that's, I think, the third or fourth effort. The big, the major one occurred in beginning the early 2000s when the PRI, the party that ruled Mexico since 1929, finally allows itself to lose a presidential election, and the right-wing party comes into power. And the way I read under Resente folks, and the way I continue to read that election, and folks's order to declassify millions of documents is that the right way in Mexico wanted to present themselves as the bringers of democracy to Mexico, and that here, check this out,

we're declassifying all the dirty laundry of the PRI regime, and we're going to put together this Truth Commission report. And there's a whole story behind this first Truth Commission report that we probably don't want to get into the details, but it names names, it presented a lot of evidence, and no one got in trouble for it. The state of Guerrero did it. Its own Truth Commission report in the 2010s, and again, they named names. They actually located the remains of two guerrilla fighters who had been buried in clandestine graves in the 1970s. They did a really important work. They named names, but once again, there's impunity and no one was taken to justice.

So the current Truth Commission under Amlo is really like the third main effort. And who knows? We'll see what happens. I'm not very optimistic that it's going to result in any actual judicial. proceedings and the bringing of justice to people who have been fighting for their disappeared loved ones, tortured loved ones since the 1970s. But perhaps I think what we are getting is more evidence and more information that can kind of fill in some of the gaps in our understanding of the Mexican Dirty War. You know, you talked about, Ben talked about

how some of these tactics, many of these tactics were being used for various what were considered criminal elements of society before being adapted for the dirty war. war, that also then calls to mind one of the parts of the article that, you know, is rather interesting and I think fairly, I don't want to say self-explanatory, but you know, when you look at the comparison between places like Argentina or Brazil, it is pretty stark, which is that the dirty war in Mexico, as you put out, started regionally and in kind of a halting process until it became a national, you know, structure of this dirty war. that was taking place.

I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how this developed from on a region by region basis and then became part of the state apparatus of the federal government of Mexico. There is, I think that marks another difference in terms of the dirty war in Mexico vis-a-vis the rest of Latin America, right? So what we make, I think one of the arguments that we make is that this isn't a linear process, right? There's an ebb and flow to how this type of state repression emerges and becomes consolidated. And to a certain extent, becomes imbricated in the fabric of Mexican security

forces. So the point that today that, you know, torture is systematic. I mean, if you get picked up by the cops or the military, it's like a, you know, above 90% chance, you're going to be tortured in some way. And this is, again, this is one of the, one of the reasons for that that that we talk about in the article is that because these people got away with it. they've been getting away with it right they've there's been no pushback or or uh legal efforts to to to punish uh security forces officials police whatever who have committed torture and other horrific forms of state terrorism um so this is a this is not a linear process i think what we do see the one the one thing i think that we do see is that a lot of this uh based on my research

a lot of this repression really does emerge as you mentioned henry in the provinces in the countryside in provincial cities in the 1960s, and it makes its way into major urban centers, at least when it's in reference to, like, political movements. So, you know, most people around the world know about the infamous, and I referenced it earlier about the Mexico City massacre of students on October 7, 1968, right before the Summer Olympics. But you had already had several of those similar type of massacres in provincial cities earlier in the 1960s, right?

So these security forces are definitely learning from previous insights. instances and applying them in mass. You know, there actually, there's a letter that one of the guerrilla leaders that I cover in my first book, he actually sends a letter to the Mexico City student coordinating committee saying, like, you guys better stop negotiating with the regime. They're going to drown out your movement in blood. And it ended up being a tragically a horrific prophecy because this guy had been involved in social activism for more than 10 years and he had experienced this type of state terror.

The one, I think, linear thing that we do see, we talk about in this article, is, and it continues to this day, as we already mentioned, is the increasing power and increasing size of the Mexican military from the mid-1960s to today. You do see the, we can track this in terms of the size of the Mexican military. We can track it in terms of the budget. It's really interesting to look at the budget of the Mexican military during the 1980s. when Mexico goes through a neoliberal transformation, the Mexican military doesn't suffer, right? Which, you know, says something about neoliberalism and the supposed disappearance of the state.

And leading us all the way to today where the Mexican military as occupying such a huge outsized role in the political and social system. So I think that as the Mexican military continues to grow throughout the 70s and 80s, it consolidates its role as like the main force that's supposed to guarantee the maintenance of a particular form of social and political stability. And it hasn't stopped. And I think this is one of the unique features of the Mexican Dirty War that we say never ended.

It's because the Mexican military remains as the guarantor of social peace. Internal stability and social peace is kind of like the language that they would use. I don't know if you want to add something then. Well, I'd like to see the kind of, one of the flip sides to this is that within Mexico and within, I would say, I mean, you talked about the extraordinarily bravery of people who testify and have testified in front of Truth Commission and some places like Geredo or Hacker as well, you know, places like that. But among certainly the kind of, let's call it, the kind of, the Mexico city base kind of commentary at, there has, there is. to this day, a belief that really repression only happens when it happens against middle-class students, which is why, to a certain extent, the massacre in 1968 just before the Summer Olympics, gets so much press, right? And I think, and still to this day, I think a quarter of the Truth Commission

is looking into that repression, terrible repression of mostly middle-class students in Mexico City in 1968. majority of repression actually was meted out towards poor people, either in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, um, uh, in the kind of urban barrios, the urban, uh, kind of working class, uh, communities, um, or in rural places or, and particularly in rural indigenous places. Um, so I think that there is this, um, and this is something I think Mexico finds it very difficult to, to come to terms of us, but it has this intersection of, of class and racial prejudice that has allowed this to happen and the example I give was there's a terrible massacre in 2014 of 43

teacher training students many of whom actually were of indigenous descent but they were still to this day their massacre has been investigated and people take their massacre seriously and it's almost thought of as another 68. I mean, not quite that level, but it still thought of it was very serious because these

were students. These were people who were trying to better themselves, or that's in the kind of Mexican or in the, in the, in the, Mexico City's mindset. However, one year later, the government dumped about 40, actually the same number, were 43 suspected members of a cartel outside a torture house and gun them down with a helicopter gunship. There's been no investigation and no one cares. It's not even mentioned.

And the press really hasn't investigated, the government hasn't investigated, the local authorities haven't investigated, but there are still 43 groups of parents without kids anymore. Absolutely horrific. One question I definitely wanted to touch on is the question of colonialism. Now everybody knows whether you're in North Central or South America, colonialism is obviously going to play a huge role in the forging of modern nation states, you know, the European colonialism in particular. The first episode Alex and I ever did many, many years ago at this point, was actually on the Zapatistas. And so my question is centered around that, which is, you know, when you're talking about some of the major groups that were targeted by the Mexican state in this Dirty War, obviously, indigenous groups were among them. And the Zapatistas emerging officially in the 90s, obviously, are deeply intertwined with and rooted in these indigenous struggles. So I'm wondering what the connection is between this indigenous resistance to the Mexican state's dirty war and the evolution and eventual emergence of the Zapatistas as an actual organized group in the 90s.

well I'll talk a little bit of that I think I mean I think again one of the one of the myths that underpins the idea that Mexico is in some way different from the rest of Latin America is the idea that Mexico is a mestizo or mixed race country that there is actually no racial prejudice and they look south to Guatemala and they see the dreadful racial prejudice there

they look north to America and see the dreadful racial prejudice there and many Mexicans and certainly the Mexican authorities present the country as something that doesn't have this kind of legacy, such a brutal legacy of colonialism, because it's had independence and it's had a revolution. But clearly, and I think this is what, when that, you know, during this period, that kind of legacy of colonialism does rear its ugly head again. But I think we, I mean, and maybe Alex would like to.

correct me on this, but I don't think we look seriously enough of this. I mean, one of the massacres that I've started to investigate is a massacre of a group of indigenous people called the Trichies, who are repressed not only by the kind of I suppose

you say Spanish descended or mixed race ranches, but also by other indigenous groups. And we don't know how many people were killed by local hitmen and the army because this indigenous group couldn't even record it's dead, because it couldn't get into the local community to go

to the civil registry to record how many people have died. So I think they've recorded about 45 people, but if you talk to people around there, they're talking about hundreds and hundreds in the late 70s, early 80s. So this is something I think, and again, I'd like to hear Alex on this, because Guerrero is clearly a place with a large group of indigenous people and maybe there is some investigation there. No, I think this is an area of investigation that remains. I think they're, you know, just generally speaking,

the being indigenous now or during the period of the dirty war in the 60s and 70s and 80s made them more killable or more disposable in the eyes of these Mexican security forces, right? And that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a instance of coloniality, right? Like the, um, we don't see it perhaps expressed in like some of the declassified documents, but it's, you know, it's the fact that you can just eradicate an entire community of indigenous peoples in Oaxaca and Guerrero. Um, it's quote unquote easier, made easier for security forces because they are indigenous, right?

And because it is southern Mexico. I mean, one of the, one of the, one of the ways that we see, um, the way that this colonialism, the afterlives of colonialism is expressed in Mexico is the way that, again, mostly people based in major cities like Mexico City, describe the country as divided in half between Southern Mexico and Northern Mexico. And Northern Mexico is to be the wider part, the more productive, the more capitalist, the most entrepreneurial, and poor Southern Mexico, Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Chiapas are the, you know, the implication is they're economically deprived and poor and backward because of, of their indigenity. And that's an idea that is one of the consequences of colonialism that continues to exist to this day. And I think one of the ways that I think one of the areas of research that we really need to continue is thinking about this term in terms of like bare life or the disposability

of these communities vis-a-vis the imagination of these security forces, that the idea that they can get rid of these people and not even have to track them because they are indigenous and that somehow gives them cover. I think our friend and historian Adela Cedillo, she's working on a book that looks at these Mexican guerrilla movements that emerged in the north and how they relied on a lot of support from northern indigenous communities in Mexico and the type of horrific state terrorism that these indigenous communities suffered, particularly like the Raramuris or the Taramaras. And that's, she's really opening like a new avenue of research to see, to think about and to explore, you know, what happened to these

indigenous communities that decided to throw their lot in with, with these more mestizo or whitezican guerrilla movements who were trying to establish a sort of focal up in, in northern Mexico. But this is, again, this is, this remains to be research. This is, and there's a lot to be, that remains to be researched in this, in this time period. can I yeah I'd like to just come out I would say I completely agree with Alex that there is this vision that you know outside Mexico City there's the north which productive and there's the South that is unproductive and useless and indigenous and browner but at the same also every state has its own version of Guerrero and Oaxaca right and every city does it's where the brown or the poorer people live and so you know these these kind of colonial ideas percolate through Mexico in strange ways. I mean, Mexico has, what, 61 indigenous groups, and they're not all down south.

I mean, as you rightly say, some of them are up north. So, so you're right. Chihuahua has its own version of Oaxaca. It's where the Ra Ra Ra'amuri live. And you're right. Impunity, I mean, impunity is now depressingly generalized. Maybe that's what democratization has given to Mexico, the democratization of impunity.

but impunity is absolute if you are a poor indigenous person and there is a faint chance you might get justice if you're not. Well, this whole question of colonialismality reminds me that US attempts to dominate the hemisphere and be the regional hegemon could be characterized in some ways as neo-colonial features and structures. And, you know, but I'm also struck by how much of this account of the dirty war is really based on an internal perspective of the forces and structures within Mexican society and

history that have led to, you know, the suppression of, you know, various groups, the four groups that we've been talking about. And so, you know, I wondered if, you know, you had any kind of. comment about how to relate the balance between these kind of external geopolitical pressures and U.S. intervention with its kind of so-called concerns about the so-called drug war and the pressures that it's put on, you know, equipping and, you know, kind of directing at least some kind of larger objectives that the Mexican state has either fit into or not. versus those internal kinds of questions. And since we do have a fairly, you know, U.S., I mean, we have a

global audience, you know, but I think there are a lot of U.S. listeners. I mean, I think when it comes to Mexico, there's probably hard truths that also still need to be told to U.S. activists and so on. So I'm wondering what you would say about that dimension of the story that you're telling and the kind of solidarity that perhaps activists in the U.S. need to have. Well, if I could talk about kind of U.S. influence in the drug war, so that's absolutely crucial. I mean, the drug war, really in Mexico doesn't care about the drug war hugely until America intervenes, and it particularly grotesquely intervenes in 1969 where basically Nixon closes the border and says you better sort out the drug problem, or you're not going to have any trade with the U.S.,

it's Operation Intercept, it's course. And from then on, the US has a fairly, particularly during the 70s and 80s, well, actually, and certainly up to the present day, has a very large part to play, not only does it give kind of helicopters and guns and flame throwers to take out marijuana and opium plantations, but it also gives intelligence, it sends a large amount of DEA agents,

now ice agents, customs agents down to Mexico. to make investigations and starting from the 2000 onwards it also starts extraditing a lot of Mexican so-called drug lords or what you probably should call drug traffickers.

So no doubt the US plays a really big role there. In terms of the dirty war, I mean Alex is much better on this but it strikes me one of the things that Mexico is very careful to do and this is why it's kind of escaped to probium before is it's very careful to kind of distance itself.

It doesn't send very many military actually. It sends more than we thought, but it doesn't send huge amounts of military to the school of the Americans. It's not like Uruguay or Brazil or Argentina or Chile. It has this, its own kind of it has its own

fairly independent methods of repression. And having said that, there have been declassifications, as Alex mentioned, which do show that groups like the CIA clearly had an enormous present right at the top tier

of the Mexican government and were using, I mean, even, I think you might be right, but I think it's four presidents in a row were informants for the CIA. Now, quite what an informant is for the CIA, I think it's difficult to judge. I don't think they were necessarily, you know, hand puppets of American imperialism.

but they were certainly not unwilling to talk to members of the security forces. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was four. They just, yes, four Mexican presidents from the 60s up until the early 80s that were on the payroll of the CIA. And we also know some of the secret police forces that were wiping out urban guerrillas in the 1970s and early 80s were also highly prized CIA assets. Ben knows more about one, in particular, this guy by the last name of Nasat, who was the head of Mexico's political police, who organized or ended up taking over this massive car theft ring where people in the United States would steal luxury cars

and then send them into Mexico. So the head of Mexico's version of the FBI slash CIA, Nasar Ado, was the head of this car smuggling ring. And when he gets arrested, the reason why he gets to leave on a trip to United States, the reason he gets to leave the United States is because the CIA intervenes and says, and I think also the FBI, look like this guy is actually one of ours like he's going to go back to Mexico and continue to do what we want him to do. But I think Ben is right like that the Mexican military, but

looking at the Mexican military, they have their own legacies of how to deal in traditions of how to deal with internal rebellion. And they're also like they're very, they're anti-communist, but they're also very nationalistic, right? So they're very, and so much of like Mexican national identity and nationalism depends on a certain form of anti-U.S. for obvious historical reasons, So there was one rumor that I came across in Guerrero where people were saying that U.S. Green Berets were up in the mountains fighting the guerrillas in 1970s, but they could tell that they were Puerto Ricans because of the accent of their Spanish. Now, I don't think that was the case. I think it was actually Mexican soldiers from northern Mexico who have a different accent. I think that's more likely the case because honestly, the U.S. didn't really need to intervene that directly.

they did intervene, as Ben mentioned, through their counter-narcotics and drug interdiction programs that would introduce, you know, DEA agents, particularly after it was founded in the early 1970s, and the CIA. And that's where we see the level of U.S. involvement in Mexico to the point where, again, they had four presidents on the payroll. But it was pretty limited in that regard. I think also, you know, but the drug war is the. a way to connect it to today, right? So one of the arguments that we make is that the dirty war continues in the form of the drug war today. And that's the way where the U.S. has managed to affect the most influence. I just read a story where 11 Mexican police officers from the state, from a northern state of Tamaripas, I think, were just arrested for the massacre of mostly

Guatemalan migrants in 2019. Who trained these Mexican police forces, the U.S. So we also just discovered recently that the botched raid in 2019 to capture El Chapo's son in the city of Kulaqan was led by the CIA and especially highly trained small group of Mexican military forces that they worked with directly. So it's through the quote unquote drug war that the U.S. has managed to affect the most influence in Mexico in the last three, four decades. And this is one of the things that Amlo has tried to push back again. against, particularly by forcing out the DEA or at the very least, like, limiting, extremely limiting the influence of the DEA in Mexico today. And he's definitely gotten a lot of flack. But the last part of your question, Adnan, about U.S. activists and solidarity movements, I think, you know, we've seen about three or four months worth of GOP presidential candidates

talking about how we need to bomb the U.S. Mexico border or we need to shoot migrants at the U.S. Mexico border, oh, the U.S. needs to militarily intervene in Mexico to end the drug war. And I know this sounds kind of, it sounds ridiculous, but, you know, the more respectable version of this argument that I've seen at least three or four times in the last couple weeks are these U.S. commentators saying that Mexico needs a new plan Colombia to deal with the drug issue in Mexico. And I think, you know, one of the things that U.S. based activists and solidarity movements can do is to continuously like emphasize and organize about what are the actual factors that are driving the war on drugs in Mexico from the U.S.

side, right, and continue to highlight that it's U.S. weaponry flowing south and U.S. drug demand pulling drugs north that are really the main dynamics at play here. Yeah, I think that that's a pretty good note to end on, actually. That was more or less the question that I was going to wrap up on, which was what what is the state of the dirty war now and what are the prospects going forward but i think that the two of you really nailed that talking about you know why you consider this to be an ongoing dirty war uh or that you know as you had said many times throughout the conversation or in the peace the dirty war never ended even though in popular accounts it's either never mentioned to begin

with or when it is it's mentioned that you know it stopped decades ago But as you wrote about and as you spoke about in this episode, there are certainly parts of it that continue to the present. So I think that that's a great note to end on. Let me, can I leave you with like two harrowy statistics? Of course. Go ahead. So based on the research that these Mexican Truth Commission's and scholars have done is that from 1964 to 1982, anywhere from one to three thousand Mexicans were disappeared by the Mexican state. So one to three thousand. since 2006, more than 110,000 Mexicans have been disappeared.

So it just shows you like the scale of the problem and I think it adds a little urgency to this argument that Ben and I are trying to put forth in this article about how the Dirty War didn't end. It actually has gotten much, much worse. Yeah, terrific. So on that note, Ben, we'll wrap up again. We were talking about the article that Ben and Alex co-wrote in, NACLA report of the Americas titled Award to the Death. I will link to that article on the NACLA page in the show notes. And thank you both very much for coming on and discussing this piece.

It was a really interesting piece and a really great conversation. I'm going to turn it over to Ben first. Ben, can you tell the listeners how they can find you online and where they can find more of your work if they're interested in following up on this kind of material with you? Yes, certainly. Don't just put Benjamin Smith into Google, because the first two, Benjamin Smith, come out of mass murderers. I'm not. So if you put in Benjamin Smith and then the slightly obscure British town that I come from Warwick, W-A-R-W-I-C-K, you should be going to find my webpage. You can also look at the dope.com.uk, which is the web page for my blog on and stuff

about issues of drugs and state repression. So yeah, thanks a lot for having us. Absolutely. And And, you know, of course, listeners, if you're reading about serial killers, you can do that on your own time, but it is not Ben. You know, that is a good note to, you know, I could vouch for Ben and Ben is not a search. Although, you know, then again, the best serial killers are the ones that you never suspect are. So, you know, who really knows? But Ben, I have faith in you. Alex, thanks again for coming on the show again. I will tease that you have already agreed to coming on again in the fall to talk about operations.

Operation Condor. Oh, happy things. I only talk about happy things in the show. Of course, we only talk about happy things on this show. Have we ever had a truly happy episode? Our soccer, our football. Even then, we were talking about the sordid side of it. Like, even when we take something as joyful as football,

we can't just have fun with it. We have to really bring the audience down. So I apologize audience, but Alex. It should be made clear that Alex and I are both, And this is, Alex, I'm going to out to you now, are both Chelsea supporters. So, really, we do have a particularly miserable tale to tell at the moment. Oh, yeah, the last two years have been absolutely terrible for you. Richly deserved.

But I don is an Arsenal fan. Gunner fan, gooner. I support Rubin Kazan, so I'm neutral on this, but I always smile when the big teams do poorly. So I'm quite happy anyway. Alex, how can the listeners find you and more of your work? I'm still on what used to be called Twitter at Alexander underscore Avina. I have a web page, alexanderavina.com. So yeah, those are the two areas, places that you guys can find, the listeners can find me.

Thank you so much. It was great to be back and it was great to be on with my compa Ben. It was actually, it was really, you know, collaborative work is so, rare in academia. But when it happens, it's so much fun and so productive and it just, it was great working with Ben on this article. So I'm glad that we had a chance to talk about it today. Thanks, guys, for giving us that opportunity. Absolutely. It was our pleasure. Brett, how can the listeners find you and more of your work? Sure. Well, first thing I just wanted to mention, Alex mentioned earlier that this is just a couple days after the 50th anniversary of the U.S.-backed fascist coup in Chile,

that sort of, you know, killed the end day, et cetera. And I re-released the episode that Alex and I did many years ago on that exact topic. So if you want to sort of brush up on that history for the 50th anniversary or share it with somebody, what you think should know about that period of Latin American and American history, definitely go check that out. And we also have done many more episodes on the Mexican Revolution, the Zapatistas, the Haitian Revolution. So if you like Alex, there's plenty of stuff in the Revelect and Guerrilla history world. for you to follow up with.

As for me, you can find everything I do at Revolutionary at LeftRadio.com. Absolutely. And of course, I highly recommend the listeners to check out both of the other shows that Brett does. Although now there's three shows that you do, but one of them is not really politically related.

Yeah, you can plug it, Brad, if you want, but, you know. Actually, I'm experimenting with anti-marketing and anti-promotion, so I actually don't promote it. And to see who can find it. See, this is your, it's like a quest for the listeners. If you can find it, you belong. Good luck. Adnan, how can the listeners find you in your other podcast?

You can follow me on what I still like to quaintly call Twitter as well at Adnan A-Husain, H-U-S-A-I-N, and check out my other podcast, The M-A-J-L-I-S, about Middle East, Islamic World, Muslim diaspora culture. We still have quite a few episodes, and I'm hoping to get some new ones out soon. So listeners, you know, check that out. Yes, absolutely. Highly recommend the listeners do that. As for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-K-1-995. The translation that I did alongside Salvatore Angled Imgo de Morrow of Domenico LaSorto's Stalin history,

critique of a black legend, is available. You can download the PDF for free at iscrabbooks.org or pick up the paperback or hardcover additions. They both look awesome. And you can support the show guerrilla history and allow us to keep making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash gorilla history, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history in return for helping us continue to do the show. You get bonus content, like I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, Adnan and I are in the thick of a mini-series for patrons specifically on the religious cultures of the medieval Mediterranean. I think we've just recorded our fifth episode of that. and so listeners, if you join for as little as $3 a month,

you can help us keep making episodes and get bonus content like that. And you can, of course, follow the show on Twitter to keep up with all three of us as well as what we're doing collectively by going to, on Twitter, looking up at Gorilla underscore Pot, G-O-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-Score pod. So on that note, listeners, and until next time, Solidarity. I'm going to be able to be. You know,