It Could Happen Here - Guerillas, Cartels, and Dirty Wars in Mexico, Part 2

Episode Date: January 21, 2022

In part two of our interview with Alexander Aviña we discuss cartels, paramilitaries, and how state violence in service of taking control of the drug trade and suppressing peasant organizers built them, Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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The podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audio books 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. This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is often and today about state and paramilitary violence and we're back with part two of our interview with alexander avina about the state and paramilitary violence and the cartels in mexico the immediate thing i was thinking about this was it reminds me a lot of

some stuff i read a while back about like smuggling people over the border and about how the american militarization of that like destroyed because it used to like as as the u.s tries to like make the border more and more unsafe it becomes harder and harder and it means that like the people who can actually do it like you know you need to have access to more resources and more like technical capability and that sort of like and that that also in a lot of ways help the cartels because you know well it's like okay so who actually has a bunch of organizational expertise with smuggling routes and a lot of money and it's it's and i think that's like it's an interesting way of looking at what the the national application of state power

in these like it does which is that like it it seems almost like what's happening is that so when when you get these massive exertion to state power it's not that they like flatten like you know it's not that they just sort of wipe out our resistance what they do is they yeah it's what you were saying is like they they centralize the drug trip but they also they centralize the sort of violent apparatuses and it means that yeah like yeah if if you're going to survive that you have to be like incredibly efficient and incredibly violent and you have to also sort of start like you you have to start playing with it like playing by the rules of the state of exception which is you know and that's that's like how I guess the violence level and the organizational centralization happens.

Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, no, I counter narcotics forces in Mexico to, to do what you just described, but then also to sow dissension amongst the different drug trafficking organizations, right? So that then also increases the violence, right? So if you can get, you know, it was, it was pretty well known that in Chapo, for instance, the, the leader of the Sinaloa cartel until recently, well, let's not say leader, one of the most prominent traffickers of the Sinaloa cartel until recently, like he was giving up people, he was giving information on rivals to the DEA and to other, other, um, counter-narcotics forces,

right? And that's part of the strategy. The strategy is to fragment these groups. Um, and that only increases the violence and it, and you see that violence at the very localized level. Um, and this is what Guerrero is suffering from right now. Guerrero for a long time was under the control of one single, and they went to war, and that had disastrous consequences for the people of Guerrero because it fragmented the drug trafficking organizations, and it forced different local groups to take sides. And that's kind of how I end the article that you're referencing, right? Where different local groups start to take sides, and that increases the level of violence at the local level, and communities suffer greatly. And that's also a consequence of at the local level and communities suffer greatly. And that's also a consequence of like the kingpin strategy, right?

Like this idea that if you take down the perceived leader of a drug trafficking organization, that's somehow going to have an impact on drug production. Yeah. No, what actually happens is it fragments the organization and it creates more violence at the local level while at the same time it gives a chance to like xdea agents to go on like you know national media and be like oh yes the capture of el chapo is going to have a great impact yeah drug trade no it will not like it just increases the violence and i think that the the thing that that's very clear from this article and i think it's clear if you you know if you look at the drug trade is it's like no it's it's it's largely economic stuff and like one of the things you're talking about is these peasants who are – the people who have been able to hold onto the collective land basically get forced by the land banks to produce sesame. And it's like they can't make any money off of it.

And I don't know how directly – it looked to me a lot like that was directly one of the things that starts to lead to the shift of the drug trade there because you have all these people locked into this crop that like just can't support them yeah yeah and it's it's just the bigger story there is is really the failure of the the post-revolutionary mexican state to um to really help spur agricultural production at the level of of these small holding peasants and and these rural communities that are these ejidos who have received land from the Mexican state. If anything, most of the state subsidies and the state structure, state support for agriculture from the 40s, you know, up until the 80s, that was all directed to big agro businesses that were producing export crops in

places like Sinaloa, right? They're producing winter crops for the American market or winter fruit for the American market, right? So in the absence of like meaningful state support for small holding agriculture, that small holding agricultural sector that is meant to feed Mexico, you know, some of these, these farmers in a place like Coyuca de Catalan, they'll say, okay, well, we were growing this thing that the agricultural bank is telling us to grow sesame, but we're not making a lot of money off of it. But on the other hand, by the late 60s, they see that marijuana production is really increasing due to American demand. If I can do both things, I'm going to make a lot of money and I'm going to allow my family to make a pretty good living while staying in the countryside, while not having

to migrate to Mexico City, or while not having to migrate to these agricultural fields in Northern Mexico, or even into the United States. So because it's like really rational economic response to a broader macroeconomic situation that has put them in that position. And you still see this to this day, right? These small farmers, they still own their land, they'll grow certain crops on it, and it's almost serves as a shield for, you know, the opium poppies that they're growing on the same plot of land, but in a part that's a little, you know, harder to access, and it's a little bit more hidden, right? It's trying to find a way at bottom to make a dignified, you know, how to make a life of dignity for your family when you're living in the countryside, when you're living in a place like Coyuca de Catalán and Guerrero. And then you see that, you know, the gringos are going crazy over Acapulco gold in the late 60s. And you have, you know, North, you know, gringo traffickers coming into Guerrero with new seeds. Or you have Sinaloenses coming into your state saying,

you know, grow these, here are some marijuana seeds, grow that strain, you know, and they can buy off, you know, local politicians and soldiers and police. That's one of the ways that you get the emergence of industrial proportion production of marijuana and opium poppies in Guerrero in the 60s and 70s. And again, at the same time that this massive dirty war is being waged against two different peasant guerrilla movements. So it's like a really messy social matrix that's occurring at the same time. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows Presented by I Heart and Sonorum An anthology of modern day horror stories

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Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, I'm Jack B. 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. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Blacklit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks

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work into this because i guess like my experience with this sort of like the the the kind of like narco state fusions with like 20s and 30s china and there it's like like you're you're i don't know i mean the the the the communists have an actual independent political base outside of like like the green gang but like the kmt it's like like this is basically just a like like this like this this is just like a narco organization with like a flag planted on it and i'm wondering how like on what end of the scale we're working with with the pri and also also like with the other mexican parties because it seems like there are like parts of like a functional state app like a Gail were working with, with the PRI, and also with the other Mexican parties? Because it seems like there are parts of a functional state apparatus,

like a party state apparatus or a party apparatus, and then parts of it that are just like, this is a cartel. Yeah, that's a huge question. I've really resisted... No, no, no, it's all good. I've stopped understanding this within the framework of a nar narco state, right? Because to think about a narco state, you really have to think about how a state was captured by these drug trafficking organizations. And I historically and currently, I don't think that describes what's happening in Mexico. Mexico. I think what you would, and again, it goes back to the question of what is the state, right? Like that question is going to drive me like, just, it's going to, I'm going to be thinking about this decades down the road, right? But because you have, you know, you have, it depends on what part of the Mexican state you're also referring to, right? So if we're talking

about the military, the military has all segments of the military have always had an important role to play in the production and trafficking of narcotics from Mexico into the US from the from like the 1910s, right, the military governor of Baja California, this guy by the name of Colonel Esteban Cantu, he was helping traffic opium into the United States during the Mexican Revolution, right? And this has been a constant, right? The guys that I talked about in my article, This has been a constant. The guys that I talk about in my article, this guy who ends up, he's a general by the time he's arrested in 2002. But this guy, Mario Acosta Chaparro, he was like the main counterinsurgent theorist and bright mind of the Mexican military that gets sent to Guerrero in the 70s to wipe out these different guerrilla movements. But after they wipe out the guerrilla movements, he stays on. He serves as kind of like the leader of the state police forces. And what does he start to do? He starts to buy up land, allegedly, that will start producing opium, poppies, and marijuana. And this guy from the late 70s up until he's arrested in 2000, it's pretty clear that he had been collaborating with different narco-trafficking organizations. He gets arrested by his own military in 2000 because it was pretty clear

that he had been protecting and collaborating with the Ciudad Juarez cartel and Amado Carrillo Fuentes. So one of these anti-guerrilla, anti-narco narcos that will actually go to jail for about six years because it was pretty apparent that he had been for a long time collaborating and protecting the different narco trafficking organizations. So that's the military. Then you have the secret police that gets formed in Mexico, the DFS in 1947 with the help of the FBI. The DFS becomes like this political police that the Mexican president can use to tamp down on political dissent. They're the ones spying, surveillance. By the 60s and 70s, they're also torturing, disappearing. And with that level of impunity and power, they also get

into the drug game by the 70s and 80s. You have the federal judicial police. They're the ones who control during this 50s, 60s, and 70s, really. They're the ones who are controlling the kickbacks that they're receiving from narco-traffickers until the military moves in the 70s and takes over for them, right? So the repressive apparatuses within the Mexican state of the 20th century play a really key role, if not the role, in helping foster create this political economy of narcotics. foster, create this political economy of narcotics. Now, how do we view that in relation to the PRI, right? The party that emerges from the Mexican revolution, the party that will rule Mexico generally we'll say from the late 20s up until the year 2000. Well, you have pretty important political officials within the party throughout the 20th century that are directly linked to

narco traffickers and directly linked to military officials who are obviously involved in the game as well. But at no level can we say it's a narco state because the narcos haven't captured the state. It's actually the other way around. It's the Mexican post-revolutionary state that's trying to get its hands around this thing that's growing within its own confines, and they lose control of it. By the late 80s and 90s, they've effectively lost control of this thing. And that's when you see the rise of these highly centralized drug trafficking organizations like this. You have Juarez Cartel that's making a ton of money off of cocaine. from the very, very local level where you have these sort of landed elites and their gunslingers, it's this almost sort of

miniaturized fractal version of the state where you're getting these very, very small sort of almost like feudal domains and they sort of expand upwards and stand upwards. But yeah, and I guess the interesting part to me is how the paramilitary dynamics of that and how how the power of these sort of landed leads into power like how how it's like like the the the power like the the use of power from the top seems to strengthen them where you know if you're looking at this from like like how

how this is supposed to work in theory if you're someone who actually is like trying to eliminate the drug trade you'd think it'd be the way around that like the application of power would shatter but it sort of doesn't it causes these like these these buildups these apparatuses and then they fragment they rebuild again but it's you're not ever actually dealing with these sort of like micro state like yeah yeah no i think that's exactly right and if anything the paramilitarization is also like a like a long it's a process right so like the first if we can use this term the first paramilitaries were were used to wipe out agrarian reform-minded campesinos in the 30s and 40s. But you don't really have a paramilitarization of the drug trade in Mexico to a certain extent because you have the military and the police to do your dirty work if you're a nautical.

That's a more recent phenomenon that you start to see in the 90s, and especially in the 2000s. So right, the case that everyone points to are these, the elite of the elite in the Mexican military, the Gafes, these guys are like the Navy SEALs, or the Special Force, you know, the Army Rangers, the Mexican military, a bunch of these guys in the mid to late 90s decide, you know what, we don't want to work for the Mexican military, we're just gonna, we're gonna desert and we're gonna go hire ourselves out to the Gulf cartel. And they become really the first like paramilitary wing of a major drug trafficking organization. And these are guys, some of which probably most likely were trained at school, the Americas or received American specialized training. Now switching sides and protecting a pretty powerful drug trafficking organization like at the time

in the 90s, that was the Gulf Cartel. And these are the infamous Zetas, right? These are the Zs. They're called the Zetas because that was like their military code. There was always a Z in front of a number. So Z1 was kind of like the leader, the first guy who took 12 or 13 guys with him to desert. And they hired themselves out to this drug trafficking organization. And they become like the paramilitary unit. The rest of the group see that and they're like, oh shit, like we got to catch up. Right. Because these like, and these guys, the Gafes, you know, they have counterinsurgency experience. You know, they were the ones who were fighting against the Zapatistas and Chiapas in the early nineties. Right. They were the ones that they were sending to. Yeah. They were the ones that they were sending to, yeah, they were

the ones who were fighting against the new cycle of guerrillas that emerging Guerrero in the mid 90s, the EPR. And then when they're used for counter narcotics operations, they look at the situation, they say, you know what, we're not going to fight on the side of the military, we're going to hire ourselves out to these this Gulf cartel, we're going to make a ton of money. But they have a lot of skills, right? So the rest of the, so the rest of the drug trafficking organizations see that and they're like, we got to play catch up. And, and, and, and you see the paramilitarization of this conflict. And in certain parts, that's what's driving, I think has played a really big role in driving some of the bloodshed and violence that we've seen in Mexico, particularly since 2006, right?

we've seen in Mexico, particularly since 2006. We can speak of probably 400,000 homicides since 2006, at least 100,000 disappearances. A lot of that has to do with the people who are fighting are paramilitaries. They're receiving training from Colombian military advisors. They're receiving training from Israeli military officials. They're receiving training from Guatemalan special forces, these guys called the Caibiles, who committed some of the worst atrocities during the Guatemalan conflict of the 70s and 80s. My family's from Michoacan, which is a state north of Guerrero. And I remember when in probably 2005, 2006 or 2007, I was down there doing research in Disney Family. And they reported on the arrest of two Guatemalans and two Colombians in this random, far off part of Michoacan. You're like, what were these two Colombians and two Guatemalans doing there? Well,

they were most likely like special ex special forces in those countries, militaries, who had been hired by local organizations to train their their their soldiers to train their their paramilitaries um so that that's i think uh that has driven a lot of the violence right and you see it's in terms of techniques they use the weapons the armament the the logics of of how to take down their enemies yeah i remember i read an article like okay i've literally lost all sense of time i i think it was like mid last year about a cartel just basically running a military operation just shutting like just shutting down a city um god i really wish yeah that was pre-pandemic that was yeah that was pre-pandemic oh my god yeah i remember remember because that was on the day and the day after it happened.

I think I spent way too much time on Twitter talking shit to people. That was when, I think you're referring to when the detachment from the Mexican military in the city of Culiacán, which is the capital of Sinaloa. Culiacán is seen as like, if Sinaloa is the cradle of the Mexican drug trade,

then like Culiacán is the capital of it right um i think i think you're referring to when a mexican military detachment tried to arrest one of the sons of his chapel right and they actually found him they localized it they located him and they tried to arrest him and like the hills just came down on the city of culiacan and you had hundreds of of narcos or paramilitaries who came down and essentially forced um forced the military and the state to hand over El Chapo's son to them and and for and the reason why I was like um you know spent way too much time on social media going after people is because people said oh this is an example of a failed state oh look at the new president of Mexico Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador he. He's lost control of the state. He's kowtowing to

Narcos. And it was much more complicated than that. And something similar had already happened in the previous administration, particularly in the city of Guadalajara, where they even shot down a military helicopter, a police helicopter, and they essentially shut down the entire city because one of their leaders had been captured. Welcome, I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturno, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonoro. 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 Hey I'm Jack Peace 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. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom,

and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit 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 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. and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture 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. Okay, so one of the things you talked about at the end of the article was about this environmentalist group that gets, like, they all get arrested.

Well, like, their lawyer gets killed after he starts talking about, about like connections between business owners and the party in the narco trade so i guess what do you how do you sort of like like how how do you leftist movements sort of navigate this space because you have it seems like you have on the one hand you know you you have all these paramilitaries and then you also have a state that is like incredibly violently hostile to you and i guess i don't know like i guess you sort of have the zapatista model of this combination of sort of like armed struggle and social pressure but i guess like how how do people navigate this sort of like it seems like a like a really disastrous like yeah place to be trying to do leftist politics and yeah it's it's really difficult right and i think that's again going back to the the thesis that the

war on drugs is actually a war on poor people it's um you know leftist movements dissident movements in mexico have to well for for one, I'll say this, in a place like Guerrero, it's these movements that have provided, I think, the most accurate, like, x-ray analysis of what the state is at the local level, right? So this guerrilla leader that I talk about in the article, Comandante Ramiro, who was around in the late, you know, 2007, 2008, 2009, like, based on his travels in the mountains of Guerrero and kind of like the actions that he was engaged in, for him, it was very clear that the military was collaborating with all narco trafficking organizations, not just the one, not just like the most powerful one, right? So at the national level, there was a lot of discourse of, well, this dark drug trafficking

organization is going at it with this one. In a place like Guerrero, this guerrilla leader looks at the situation. He's like, actually, they're all working together. And not only that, but they have the police and the military. And what are they doing? They are going after poor communities up in the mountains who don't want to grow opium poppies or who want to organize a different way, an alternative model of living, of social reproduction. What they'll say is, you know, what the military is doing in terms of drug interdiction is they'll only go and burn some opium poppy fields and not others. And that's because the owner of that opium poppy field that they burned didn't pay up. So, you know, now current movements in Guerrero, particularly indigenous movements in Guerrero, there's a recent report that an indigenous group just put out, and they're

linked to the Congreso Nacional de Indigencia, the CNI, I can't remember the acronym, where they talk about a criminal state existing in the part of Guerrero that is known as La Montaña, which is a heavily indigenous area on the border, on the eastern part of the state. And what they say is what we see here is an alliance between narcos, political parties, military detachments, and transnational corporations. And in Guerrero, thosenational corporations are usually have something to do with mining and they're usually Canadian so how do you navigate that like that is like like the the correlation of forces if we want to use that kind of terminology like from a perspective

of a of a group that that wants to resist this it's it's it's damn near impossible right like you have everything going against you and yet in Guerrero people are still resisting right you have the students of Ayotzinapa they're still protesting they're still organizing even after the disappearance of their 43 comrades back in September of 2014 and we still don't have a clear answer as to what happened um you still have you know you have the model of of autonomy that like that that certain indigenous communities like the community in Cheran and Michoacan have practiced which is essentially they kick out all political parties they kick out all police officers and they self-organize at the communal level

almost like a community police force and you see that in Guerrero as well there's all you know there's there's challenges with that there's a that usually brings on a lot of violence. And the people of Cheran have really suffered for trying to protect themselves, right? They've also trying to defend themselves from narcos who have taken over local political parties and they don't want them in their town. In Guerrero, you have community police forces and you've had them since the 1980s and 1990s. But that's raised a lot of issues in terms of what happens when one community police force gets co-opted or corrupted by a political party or by even a narco. And then that group is used to hit against other community groups who are still trying to organize for a radical alternative. So on one level, it's really depressing, right? Because everything is stacked against groups and communities and organizations in a place like Guerrero who want a better world, who want to create a better world. But in the longer scope of Guerrero's history, they still resist.

They still resist. And to me, that's one of the things that fascinates me about this place and about its people, about its communities, that the odds have always been stacked against them. And nonetheless, they still resist. They still try to, against overwhelming odds, they still try to carve out a better, more just, more dignified existence for them and for their communities, even at great risk for their well-being. And they're willing to risk everything. So they're still there.

They're still there, even though the forces that they're facing are extremely powerful. Yeah, I think that's a surprisingly hopeful note to end on. Which is that, yeah, even in places with just incredible concentrations of violence and different kinds of sort of power against you that people continue to fight. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's one of the lessons that we definitely get from a place like Guerrero or a place like Chiapas, right, with the Zapatistas who are still there, who have still managed to – I mean, they've managed to reproduce themselves generationally, which is really difficult for an armed insurrectionary group, right? Like they've managed to do that and to carve out at great cost as well, right? They're currently right now suffering. They've been suffering for more than a decade, a low intensity warfare that's been waged by the military and their paramilitaries. But they're still there with their example, right?

And I think part of the power of them and the people in Guerrero is their example alone is threatening to the powers that be. And that's why there's always an effort to exterminate them. So just by virtue of surviving and defending themselves, that's like a small, it seems like a small thing, but, but they're providing an alternative. And I think that's where their, their example is really important. And I think,

I think there is, I think there's a real argument that the whole sort of the, the whole sort of anti-globalization, like that wave of struggle, like is something that was kicked off by the Zapatistas and like, and not just on the sort of like, they were the first people to go into revolt, but it's like,

I mean, explicitly like the, the way they were the first people to go into revolt but it's like i mean explicitly like the the way they brought you know i mean like social movements from across the world together and the way they you know the way that they like had they got the way they got people talking the way they had people training each other the techniques and the sort of ideas that they were changing that they like like they they set off like a wave of revolt that lasted for like i don't know if you started in like 1999 and like the end of it's like 2006 yes yeah it was incredible yeah no i think they they're and even if you want to go this might take us off topic a little bit right but like

scholars who focus on like venezuela would say actually the first one was a caracas right in the late 80s when you have a popular rebellion rebellion in Caracas, Venezuela against neoliberalism against neoliberal austerity measures, right? And then, so I've had that I've had a talk to friends, I'll be like, yeah, the Zapatistas were the first ones. They're like, no, no, no, no, no. It started in Caracas in 1989, I think is the Caracas. But yeah, no, I think their global example continues to be a really powerful one. For me, personally, it's like, I think it was a Caracazo. But yeah, no, I think their global example continues to be a really powerful one. For me personally, it's like, I still remember my parents had, my parents are migrants from Mexico. They had this big satellite dish in our backyard so we can beam

in, you know, TV stations from Mexico. And I remember January 1st, 1994, we woke up, right, groggily to celebrate New Year's. and my parents turned on the tv to see mexico city news and there was marcos right and there were the zapatistas um and there were then the mexican politicians saying no don't believe what don't believe your eyes this isn't you had a guy i remember you had a guy go on tv i think saying something like this is not an indigenous movement because if it was an indigenous movement, they would be using machetes, not rifles, like something really condescending, like the level of racist condescension that came out of Mexican politicians in response to this

movement was super high, right? But I remember I was in junior high, and I remember seeing it, and I'm just like, there has to be something wrong for these people to do this right and that just led me to want to do more research and to do more reading and and that I think is really powerful and I think I still think it's really powerful so the more we can get the word out about these movements in Guerrero and Chiapas and other parts of Latin America I think I think it's still really important and I think especially today we really we do need a bit more hope in these dark pandemic times yeah i was trying to figure out a speaking of hope segue and i could i couldn't quite get it but i do you do you have anything that you want to plug uh where can people find you yeah um well thank you so much for for me on. This was a lot of fun.

You can find me on Twitter. I think the pandemic, my Twitter consumption has really gone up. It's been awful, but you can find me at Alexander underscore Avina. Yeah. Something I want to plug. No, I think if you go on my Twitter page, you'll see you'll be able to get the link to the article that we've been talking today about the drug, from Dirty War to Drug War in Guerrero. I recently published a book review of this really fascinating book on the connection between the Israeli arms industry and Cold War Latin America. So you can find that on my page. But yeah, I don't really have anything else to plug. Whenever I finish this damn book on 30 Wars and Drug Wars, have me back on and I'll have something tangible to plug. But right now it's just short little articles.

Well, thank you again for coming on the show. Yeah, this has been It Could Happen Here. You can find us in the usual places. If you want to venture on social media for some reason, please don't. It's a bad place. But yeah, thank you and goodbye, everyone. Thanks for listening. Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow Join me, Danny Trejo and step into the flames of right An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America Listen to Nocturnal

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