It Could Happen Here - Guerillas, Cartels, and Dirty Wars in Mexico, Part 1

Episode Date: January 20, 2022

In part one of our interview with Alexander Aviña we trace the history of how Mexico's dirty war against leftist guerillas and peasant movements transformed into the War on Drugs and created the cartels. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy

Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Or whenever you get your podcasts. while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T, connecting changes everything. everything welcome it could happen here a podcast about things falling apart and sort of how you can put them back together this is again another mostly things fall apart episode um here with me is garrison hello hello and joining us today to talk about, well, a pretty wide range of things, but about the

drug war in Mexico, about paramilitaries, and I guess also about the narco state is Alex Avenia, who is an associate professor of history at Arizona State University and has written several very, very good articles that I've read recently. Alex, how are you doing? I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me on. Yeah, thank you for joining us. So I wanted to start by talking about an article that has come out fairly recently

that is about essentially the transition, particularly in Guerrero, from, I guess, the sort of 60s, 70s dirty war in Mexico to the drug war. And I guess I wanted to start from, because I don't think this is a history that's particularly well known, I want to, I guess, start with sort of an overview of how we got into the sort of dirty war in Mexico in the 60s, because I think, I don't know, like I think if anyone, if people know stuff about this, it tends to be the very dramatic sort of like massacre in 1968. But it's been, it went on for longer than that and has a sort of deeper history. So can you bring us into that? Yeah, for sure. and has a sort of deeper history. So can you bring us into that?

Yeah, for sure. So I'll start off by saying that generally, when most people think about dirty wars and the Cold War Latin America, Mexico was probably the last country that they think of having one, right? There's a certain exceptionalism that Mexico has enjoyed until relatively recently. Amongst academics and especially historians,

right, where we're in the last 10, 20 years, we started to uncover Mexico's own version of a dirty war that we are more familiar with in other places like Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, etc. Mexico's dirty war, though, and if people know a little bit about this period, like, as you mentioned, right, they know about the infamous student massacre at Tlatelolco on October 2nd, 1968. But, you know, my, my research focuses on, on this, the Southern state of Guerrero. It's on the Pacific coast. It's made famous by the resort city of Acapulco. And I wrote a book in 24, published a book in 2014 that really traced the emergence of armed resistance in the state of Guerrero during the 1960s and 70s. And that was my entrance into this idea of

a Mexican dirty war, of the Mexican state practicing systematic state terrorism against political dissidents, and in my case, armed guerrilla dissidents, who enjoyed the backing of dozens of rural communities and even urban poor working class neighborhoods in places like Acapulco in the late 60s and early 1970s. That's a very regional story, right? That's another thing that kind of distinguishes the Mexican Dirty War from other Latin American cases is that the Dirty War was localized to a few major cities and then to very specific locales in the countryside, Guerrero being the most bloody theater. The way that these guerrilla

movements emerged, they really began as these popular civic-minded social movements in the late 50s, early 1960s. And they protested things like political authoritarianism and economic injustice. But they did so essentially within the confines of the Mexican constitution, they followed the law. You know, Mexico has the, you know, that characteristic in Latin America of having the first great social revolution of the 20th century. You do have a post-revolutionary government that emerges from the 1910 revolution that has to pay lip service to the radical traditions, to the revolutionary traditions that came out of that movement. And for that reason, the Mexican constitution that was passed

in 1917, in its time, was the most radical social democratic constitution in the Western hemisphere. And peasant communities, campesino communities in the state of Guerrero believed the letter of the law. So when they started to protest, you know, authoritarian state governors, police violence, army violence, economic injustice in the 60s, they followed the rules and they followed the laws. And each time that they did so, they experienced pretty horrific instances of both state violence exercised by the military and the police, but also everyday forms of violence practiced by, you know, gunslingers who were working for landed elites. And that then radicalized some of these social movements into two separate guerrilla movements that were led by rural communist school teachers, Genaro Vazquez and Lucio Cabañas. Cabanas. And Lucio Cabanas' movement in particular, the Party of the Poor, they ended up creating a guerrilla force of about, the high estimate is about 300 fighters. A more realistic estimate

is somewhere from 150 to 200. But the key is that in Coastal Guerrero and in some of the mountains, mountain communities of Guerrero, they obtain a pretty substantial amount of popular support, which then leads the Mexican government that had been, you know, ruled by the PRI, and it was ruled, Mexico was ruled by the PRI for like 80 years, they sent in the military, and they waged this pretty horrific counterinsurgency that did things like disappear people, torture, rape, you know, they razed entire communities. And that's generally what's known as the Dirty War in Mexico. It's rural theater. Its main rural theater was in a place like Guerrero, where we think there was almost a thousand disappearances from 1969 up until the early 1980s. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill.

Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura

podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people.

I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment

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Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German,

where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian.

Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died

trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, and one of the things that interested me a lot sort of reading through this was that it's sort of weird for an insurgency in that you get aspects of both kind of the kind of like classical 70s urban 70s thing which is that you know they they they did they did a bank robbery and then two people get tortured and the rural gorillas sort of get hunted down and i was i was wondering about the the dynamics of this

because it seems like like there's it seems like you have these groups that are kind of unusually moving back and forward between like having bases in cities and having bases in these rural areas? Yeah. Usually when folks think about these guerrilla movements in Guerrero during the 60s and 70s, they think of them primarily as a fairly typical rural guerrilla movement, as you just described. But these two movements, the one led by Lucio Cabañas, the Party of the Poor, the other one by Genaro Vazquez, the ACNR, Asociación Cívica Nacional Revolucionaria, from the very onset, they tried to connect the rural to the city. Whether it was cities in Guerrero, like the resort city of Acapulco, particularly working class neighborhoods on the outside of the city, or the state capital in Chilpancingo, which housed the state university, right? So both of these movements made pretty substantial inroads into that community.

And then also into Mexico City. So they tried, their idea was not necessarily to start as a strictly rural movement, but their idea was always to expand, because I think, to the cities. And I think quite rightly, they perceive that what the Mexican state was going to do to them was try to corral them in the state of Guerrero and prevent them from logistically and politically expanding beyond that. And in the end, that's exactly what happened. And that's how these movements were ruthlessly crushed. That and it took a lot of terror to separate these armed movements from their popular base of support. But a lot of this has to do with the fact that both Vasquez and Calañas were school teachers.

And they were involved in union movements that were national in scope. They were in move. They were in, you know, Luzio Calañas was in the Mexican Communist Party, right? So he had extensive urban experiences and networks throughout the country. So their perspective was always to connect the rural to the urban, particularly because Mexico by the 70s was a rapidly urbanizing country, right? It becomes for the first time in its, well, first time in its post-colonial history, it becomes primarily an urban country. So they tried these really interesting experiments to try to connect the two theaters. But as you mentioned, right,

they did that typical 1970s thing of robbing banks, and their terminology was expropriation, right? But that then exposed them to police actions. And anytime any of their militants were captured, they were immediately tortured, information, you know, they were interrogated horrifically. And that intel was used to hunt down their comrades up in the mountains in Guerrero. Yeah, and I think that that's a good place to move towards sort of the other side of this, which is partially the Mexican state response. But the part of it that was really interesting to me was about how – so part of what these groups are fighting are these sort of very, very local sort of landed elites. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how these sort of local elites are able to merge with and sort of like co-opt in a lot of ways the military units that are deployed. Yeah, that's one of the biggest.

So let me see how I can answer this question, because there's there's so what I try to do in this article, and it's part of my broader ongoing research is to kind of connect the violence, the state violence of the Mexican dirty war as it as it happens in Guerrero in the 70s, with with with something else that's happening simultaneously, which is like the so called drug war war and the exponentially increasing cultivation of drugs in a place like Guerrero, particularly marijuana and then opium poppies that are used to produce heroin. So what I try to do in the article that you're referencing is kind of to show there's a longer history in Guerrero of how power is exercised at the local level and how some of these local landed elites are able to weather the 1910 Mexican revolution. They're able to weather the agrarian reform efforts that occurred in the 1930s and 40s. And really these families, one of the things that captures my attention of Guerrero is that you can tell who's in power by just by almost by looking at their last name, because there's this remarkable continuity in the state of who has managed to exercise power

at the local level, political, social, economic power for decades now, for generations. And you can track how power works by looking at families. And what I do in this article is to look at a couple of landed elite families that had managed to stay in power for decades. So there's certain that landed in this article. I focus on one municipality called Coyuca de Catalan, which is in the hotlands region of Guerrero during, you know, probably from about 2008 to 2015. It was in the top three in Mexico for opium and heroin production. So it becomes this massive drug producing region. So I go back in time and I kind of trace like who was in power in this region, who owned land, who owned the resources throughout the 20th century and how they were responsible for essentially creating this little narco fiefdom as it currently exists and trying to figure out

which families were involved. So on the one hand, you have these families that have been in power from like the 1920s and 30s, and they're still exercising power. And then when we get to the 1970s, and you have this horrific dirty war, this counterinsurgency that the state and the military are waging against communities in Guerrero, that opens up new possibilities for new families to come in and to ally themselves with locally stationed military units. And they work together to wipe out guerrillas and guerrilla supporters. And at the same time, they start to kind of dip their toe into this world of narcotics production. Because really, Mexico in the 1970s, especially by the mid-1970s,

it becomes a number one provider of marijuana and heroin to the United States. And this is part of just a broader global history of narcotics, right? There's US-led drug interdiction efforts in places like Turkey, Afghanistan, and in Southeast Asia, and efforts to suppress the drug production there creates this, you know, what people usually refer to as a balloon effect. It just displaces the drug production somewhere else because the demand in the U.S. is still there. And that creates, in Mexico, the number one provider of narcotics by the mid-1970s.

And that then has an impact locally in the place of Guerrero, which is, again, simultaneously experiencing a guerrilla insurgency, a dirty war, and then also the ramping up of drug production. so the ramping up of drug production. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories

inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite

has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to the leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology, I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people.

I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again. podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme

laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German,

where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. One of the most interesting parts of this that I didn't know about was about how, I mean, how explicitly, because I've read a lot of, well, not a lot, but I've read about a lot of how, particularly like after, like when, when the sort of, after sort of the, the various upheavals in 2006 in Mexico with the Oaxaca uprising, with the Zapatistas making a bunch of moves and the, the CP presidential election about how you get the drug war is the sort of like military solution to these leftist movements. But I was interested in how,

I mean, incredibly explicit they are about this. Like the, the, the, the anti-guerrilla operations are like like they don't call them anti-guerrilla operations. They talk about like bandits and like they're explicitly like, no, no, no, this is an anti-narco operation, even though, you know, they're going and massacring like essentially peasants and occasionally guerrillas, but just a bunch of just random like campesinos. Yeah. Yeah, there's a great quote that I got in this article. You know, there's this wonderful researcher in Mexico, Carlos Flores,

who has a really good book on kind of like the failed state in Mexico and drugs and military. And in that study, he managed to interview a military participant in the dirty war in the 1970s. And he has this great quote that I included in this essay, which he says, this military guy says, basically, look, with the marijuana growers, we had no problem, we had no beef. But with the gorillas, we had to fuck them up. And for me, like that, that direct quote kind of encapsulates like, what the drug war in Mexico has been historically and in its current form. Like, and this is something that I learned from people like sociologists and journalists, Don Paley, right?

Like the war on drugs is a war on poor people. And it becomes in the 1970s, it becomes a really useful cover for the type of horrific violence that the state is practicing in a place like Guerrero against these popularly supported guerrilla insurgencies. So publicly and to the international audience and to its own domestic national audience, the Mexican state is saying, look, we're not waging a dirty war. We're not waging a counterinsurgency. We're fighting a war against cattle wrestlers, against cattle thieves, and against criminals, against drug dealers. When in reality, they're waging a war against poor people who are supporting these different guerrilla insurgencies led by these rural communist school teachers. And that's in the rural theater, right? It's really interesting

when you think about how the Mexican state in the 70s will criminalize urban guerrilla movements. Mexico had like 38 guerrilla movements in the 1960s and 70s. That's just like people don't really recognize that, right? Like 38 to 40 different rural and 38 guerrilla movements in the 1960s and 70s. That's just like people don't really recognize that, right? Like 38 to 40 different rural and urban guerrilla organizations. The big urban one that managed to create, I don't know, 10 to 12 different focos or fosa was the Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre, the Communist League of the 23rd of September. Communist League of the 23rd of September, they became such a big threat in the urban theater that the Mexican president, Luis Echeverria, devoted his 1974 State of the Union, basically the Mexican version of the State of the Union, he devoted a pretty good chunk of it to these quote-unquote terrorists, right? So for the urban guerrillas, he referred to them as terrorists.

And then he does this thing where he says, you know, most of these terrorists are unpatriotic. thing where he says, you know, most of these terrorists are unpatriotic. They, and I'm going to paraphrase some of his language. They reveal high indices of homosexuality of like, just basically othering them to the point that they're seen as like the most despicable other in Mexico, in Mexican society. And that then opens them up to getting wiped out, which is, fulfills a similar function as calling the rural gorillas, nothing more than cattle rustlers, cattle thieves, and narcos, right? So it's all this counterinsurgency, like discursive strategy that justifies the elimination of these people. But at bottom, these are just wars against the drug war is a war against poor people. And you see that to this day,

you see that, you know, most one of the things that really animates my research about the history of drug wars in Mexico is that I really want to push back against, you know, journalistic treatments that, that will say, look, Mexico's war on drugs began in 2006 when president Felipe Calderon, you know, launched the military against these different drug trafficking organizations. And, you know, historians like, like myself who work on this were like, wait, no, Mexico's had a series of drug wars, right? There's a historian, Alec Dawson, who talks about, has a really excellent book on peyote. And he talks about how the war on drugs begins in like the colonial era, right? In terms of how the Spanish colonial state criminalized indigenous consumption of drugs like peyote for their own ritualistic cultural practices. The 1970s is

another moment where you have a form of drug war that the Mexican state exercises. But from my perspective, it's almost like a cover as a way to wage war against political dissidents and armed guerrilla challenges to its rule in Mexico. Yeah. And's a that's an important way of looking at it also as just a way to understand why you know like if you're looking at it from the perspective of like a policymaker it's like oh well we spent all this time doing the war on drugs like why are there more drugs and it's like well yeah because i mean the point isn't really about like i mean i think okay i want to make a caveat here which is like it's not like there's such a thing as like a quote-unquote good war on drugs that you could wage like there's no there

isn't a version of this that's like oh no if if we actually just try to like focusing on stopping these people it would work but it's like no but simultaneously yeah it's that the the the goal isn't really about like it's not about drugs. It's just about killing poor people. Yeah, I think that's a good way of framing it. I think also it's an interesting way of looking at why you start to see these sort of supposedly like anti-narco units just immediately start doing like immediately get into the trade yeah yeah well because they're like they're positioned to make a ton of money off of it yeah like it's yeah they're not dumb yeah yeah and i think i don't know this is an

interesting question about like the structure of the state here too because you know like like in chicago this is another like this is the thing that happens all the time is yeah you get these you get these anti-drug units that are you know incredibly specialized they get a bunch of money and then they immediately turn around and start like just do like just enter into the drug trade and so i was one of the other things yeah i was just been interested in this of just about there's there's – seems to be these very – these very interesting sort of alliances between paramilitaries, cartels, the know, devote academic disciplines to. But I was wondering how you look at the state in the context, in a context like this, because, yeah, I mean, in a context where, you know, it's not the state doesn't really have monopoly on violence. Right. Yeah, no, that's a that's a huge question. And there's how you I mean, essentially, the question is like, what is the state?

Yeah, that question always terrorizes me. Yeah. And how you answer that question then has consequences to how we think about things like the drug war or, you know, violence in Mexico or a variety of different things, right? So what I do in this article is to just simply look at what the state looks like at the local level, right? Particularly like its repressive apparatuses. And what you see in a place like Coyuca de Catalan, because you see kind of like, it's a multi-scalar issue, right? Where you have generations of conflicts over land and land tenure, and who gets to control rural markets, who gets to control access to rural markets and rural production, right? So there's already like

a built-in structure that's exploitative, that has somehow managed to weather a big social revolution and a grand reform effort. And on top of that, then in the 60s and 70s, you get, you know, industrialized narcotics production placed on top of this pre-existing structure. Right. So it's should be no it's almost like no surprise then that, you know, the gunslingers that used to work for landed elites will now serve is not just gunslingers for landed elites who are terrorizing campesinos. But now they're also going to work with like local narcotic, you know, narco farmers, drug farmers, and traffickers. And then at the same time, they're going to do their best to co-opt, to buy off military units that are stationed at the local level, police units that are stationed at the local level, local judges, local magistrates, local political officials. And it creates a very dense network at the local level of people who are working together to maintain power, but at the same time, make sure that this really profitable political economy of narcotics is going to thrive.

And this is at the very local level, right? So in some ways, those local interests of the quote unquote, the state are will conflict with the state in Mexico City. Yeah, yeah. And how to resolve those tensions and becomes a big deal. So that the guy that the military participant that I referenced earlier, he was he was actually sent in from outside of Guerrero into Guerrero to wage counterinsurgency. And, you know, he talks in this book about how they didn't know what to do when they see their soldier comrades obviously collaborating with local narcos, even though this guy and his unit have been sent in to wipe out the narcos. So what ends up happening is that the goal is never to eradicate from a national level, from a state national level. The goal is never to eradicate the drug trade in Mexico in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. The goal is to rationalize it. The goal is to control it. And the the overall power they have to kick back to are different state officials.

And there's a recent really great book by Ben Smith called The Dope that just came out. It's really like the first really good English language, big history of the Mexican drug trade. really good English language, big history of the Mexican drug trade. And he essentially, he says that the Mexican state is a racket. It's a racket, and it's ensuring that this drug trade exists, and it's centralized, and it's rationalized in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. But by the 90s, it starts to lose control as the state itself is neoliberalized and becomes smaller and its capacity to control these different groups becomes weakened. So that's like the big national level, right? And then we can, that takes us to the scale of the international, which is a whole nother thing. But at the very local level, what does this look like? It looks like if you're a drug farmer, right? Because another thing in Guerrero is that these drug farmers are like small scale, right? They're

small scale. They have a little bit of autonomy, but they're small scale. But they're selling their product to these traffickers. And these are the traffickers usually that will have connections to local landed families, will have connections to military, to police, to politicians that will ensure that this economy will continue to thrive in a profitable way. will ensure that this economy will continue to thrive in a profitable way. By the late 70s, and this is something else I think that I need to do a little bit more research on, but you see it happen elsewhere in Mexico, especially in the Northwest, in a place like Sinaloa, which is usually seen as the cradle of the Mexican drug trade. But I think in the late 70s, both in Sinaloa and in Guerrero, the dirty war and the sending of the military en masse in a place like Guerrero, it not only takes out armed resistance to the Mexican state, but it will also take out small scale narco traffickers who don't want to play. They don't like the rules that the Mexican state is imposing upon them in order to make money and traffic drugs. of documents where, you know, secret police spy agent documents where they say, okay, yes,

you know, these, these campesinos who are accused of being guerrillas, yes, we are disappearing them. But apparently, some small scale drug traffickers are also being disappeared, because they're not, they don't want to go along with the rules being imposed by the Mexican military. And that's something that you see in, in Sinaloa, in the late 70s, when something called Operation Condor gets launched, and you get thousands of troops and federal police who go up there. And instead of eradicating the drug trade and getting rid of these different traffickers, what they do is they centralize it, they rationalize it, they make it more efficient. I mean, that actually, so in a counterintuitive way, it's state violence that actually leads to the formation of things that we think about as cartels and not the other way around, right? Because the very trade begins within the confines of the Mexican state.

In part two of this interview, we're going to drill deeper into that question and look at how the state's attempt to get in on the drug trade created the cartels and how they sort of lost control of them, leading to an incredible increase in paramilitary violence and death and destruction. And on that happy note, this has been It Could Happen Here. Join us again tomorrow for that. And in the meantime, stay safe and don't die. If you want to find us, we're at HappenHerePod on Twitter and Instagram. You can also find other work that we do at Cool Zone Media on Twitter. If for some reason you want to continue venturing onto the hellsides. Goodbye.

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or step into the flames of life. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.

Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T. Connecting changes everything.