Are you a professional pillow fighter or a 9-to-5 low-cost time travel agent? Or maybe real estate sales on Mars is your profession? It doesn't matter. Whatever it is you do, however complex or intricate, monday.com can help you organize, work a straight, and make it more efficient. monday.com is the one centralized platform for everything work related. And with monday.com, work is just easier. monday.com for whatever you run. Goodamonday.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to new books in terrorism and organized crime. I'm your host, Mark Locks. Today we're going to be talking to Paul Rexton Khan about his new book Cartels at War, Mexico's drug-fueled violence, and the threat to US national security. This is quite amazingly good book. It's very short but packed full of information. Mr. Khan covers everything from the background of how the drug war began, how it's laid out, the groups involved, how it affects other governments, what government responses are, and then also gives some excellent recommendations on what, if anything, can be done about this program. So I thoroughly enjoyed the book and I hope you enjoy the interview. Okay, welcome to another episode of new books in terrorism and organized crime. I'm your host, Mark Locks, and today we're talking to Paul Rexton Khan about his excellent new book Cartels at War, Mexico's drug-fueled violence, and the threat to US national security. Hi, Paul, how are you going? Hi, good, Mark. Good to talk to you. That's good. And you're in Washington, is that correct right now? No, I'm in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Oh, okay, Pennsylvania, right. Sorry, Army War College. I'm just making assumptions there about where it's located. Oh, that's right. Yep. And thank you for having the interview today about your book. I really enjoyed the book. I was saying to you in the pre-interview. I learnt so much. My full knowledge of this area was coming from watching CNN and getting miniscule percentage of the information that's actually involved in what's going on in this particular issue. But we'll start off with just a bit of background about yourself and how you ended up in the career you've gotten into up writing this particular book. Sure, yeah. This is actually an offshoot of my first book, which is a drug-fueled temporary warfare, which actually examined how various non-state actors from insurgent groups of terrorists are actually involved in the drug trade at some level, either to finance their activities or they will ingest drugs themselves, to fight conventional forces. And my publisher a couple of years back said, you know, hey, have you thought about writing anything about what's going on in Mexico? And I thought, well, you know, I think that subject is pretty well covered. But as I did some more digging around, what I did notice was that a lot of the books that had been written were mostly journalistic accounts of people who basically said, yeah, I've been to Mexico. It's really scary. Or very alarmist books that said that Mexico is going to collapse. So what I decided to do was to actually kind of take the flip side of my first book, which was which is actually this book, looking at how a lot of these organized crime groups in Mexico are actually adapting their tactics to mimic what is insurgent or terrorist violence. Right, right. And you do so in a lot of detail. I'll repeat again what I was saying to you in the free interview that when you pick this book up, it doesn't look very long, but you were very, very concise in your writing style. So there's a tremendous amount of information in what appears to be a quite short book. So having said that, we might jump straight in and start talking about you want to give us just a bit of a background to how this whole issue began in Mexico in particular. I think everyone knows a lot about Colombia and things like that, but Mexico is fairly recent. Yeah, it is, you know, it really started in the 1990s with the North American free trade agreement between Canada, the United States, and Mexico, which opened up our borders to free access and free movement of goods and services. So what that did is that actually broke down to one of the barriers that allowed kind of illicit goods to piggyback, if you will, on to illicit goods and to travel more freely. And as you mentioned, Colombian cocaine was also influential in that the United States, in particular, was getting very good at interdicting Colombian cocaine coming via the Caribbean. And with the opening of overland borders because of NAFTA, the Colombian cartels decided, you know, there's this new entryway now through Mexico. Why don't we get involved with some of the Mexican drug traffickers who have always been smuggling marijuana and some Mexican heroin into the US overland and use them as middlemen to get Colombian cocaine into the United States more easily, rather than having to put up with the Caribbean route. So that was one of the early phenomenon that actually led to the expansion of Mexican cartels, power and influence. And the other thing that occurred was in 2000 in Mexico, there was an election that swapped out a political party that had been in power for over 70 years. And so you had new arrangements that all of a sudden the cartels and the drug traffickers are trying to figure out, okay, well, who are really now the political bosses that we can corrupt, co-op and collude with in order to get this new product, Colombian cocaine, roof of the United States, as well as our previous products of marijuana and Mexican heroin. So there was kind of a free for all that occurred in the 1990s, early 2000s, and then in 2006, there was another presidential election in Mexico, and that President Felipe Calderón decided that he was going to take a much more confrontational approach to the cartels and send in the military to take them on. And that's when the explosion really took off from 2006 until today, where since 2006, there have been over 60,000 Mexicans who have been killed. And about 30,000 Mexicans have disappeared. And as of last year, there's one drug-related homicide every half hour in Mexico, and there's also a sizable number of Mexicans who are now coming to the United States to seek asylum from criminal violence. What's an amazing number of fish? Yeah, it's tremendous. It actually exceeds some low intensity conflicts. For example, it exceeds the IRA in Northern Ireland over decades during the troubles. It also exceeds the PKK and Turkey that the insurgents were there. I think there have only been around 30,000 deaths. Right now, the only conflict that is close to that is the conflict in Syria, which is a full on war. Right, right, which is a full on war that's been, you know, which is now two years old going into three years. But it is a staggering number of homicides in Mexico. And who is actually being killed? Is it the actual participants themselves, the cartel, arthritis, or is it collateral damage, or is it police? Well, it's all of that. It's, you know, state agents like police and mayors, also journalists. The most dangerous country for journalists is actually Mexico. But it's also folks who are related to the drug gangs who are enforcers for the cartels. It's also innocent people who go to discotex or who are even going to drug rehabilitation centers. Also, other illegal migrants who are passing through Mexico from other countries in Central America, the largest one-day massacre occurred two years ago. In Northern Mexico, there were 70 migrants from Central America who were gunned down by the cartel Los Ettas because they refused to work for the gang, and also refused to carry drugs into the United States with them. So it's a very targeted set, if you will, but it ranges from ordinary citizens going about their daily business to migrants, to state agents, to other cartel and gang members. Wow. Well, a surprise is a good sign then to move on and if you can tell us exactly who these cartels are and how many they are and how they're spread out. Yeah, you know, there are actually there are actually about seven big cartels now, six or seven, depending on who you talk to. Rather than going through all seven, I'll pick out a couple of or two or three of the more exceptional ones. One of them is the Sinaloa cartel, which is run by one of the world's wealthiest men, El Chapo Guzman. El Chapo is a slang for shorty and he is actually sort of like a narco venture capitalist. He's one of the most expansionist leaders of a cartel in drug trafficking history. As a matter of fact, in Australia, they've caught a couple of members of the Sinaloa cartel not too long ago. So he's actually been moving product even to West Africa. So from Australia to West Africa. Well, I'll just say that the reason why they're moving to Australia is the street price of cocaine in Australia is five times the street price in the USA. Yeah, that's correct. There's a massive profit incentive there. Yeah, it's one more market. And same with the West African market, they actually the West Africa is a transit point for the European market, particularly on through Spain into the UK. So that profit margin is also larger than the US profit margin. So it's another attempt to gain more profit. Another cartel is Los Ettas, which loosely translates as the disease, the letter Z or Z. And these are, this group is actually made up of former members of the Mexican special forces, who used to be enforcers for another cartel, the Gulf cartel, until they broke away and started their own cartel in and of themselves. They're very proficient in the use of violence, very wanton. They have a very martial spirit. They will carve their initials, the Z or the Z into corpses to lead their mark, their criminal brand, if you will. And they were also responsible for that massacre of 70 migrants. They're very good at psychological warfare. They targeted journalists, state agents, and recently this is an article that I have coming up. They recently had a cyber spat or cyber skirmish with the activist group Anonymous, where they actually tried to reverse hack members of Anonymous to figure out who they were and to intimidate them. Then there's another group called La Familia, Mitchell Wakana, or La Familia, which split, and there's another group, a split off from that called Los Caballeros Camparios, which is really the Knights Templar. And there's sort of this quasi-religious, almost born-again Christian cartel that started off as kind of a vigilante group, but began the series of beheadings in Mexico, where they actually cut off six heads in a disco tack and threw them down the stairs, and said this was divine justice for all those who opposed their will in their particular state. But they really, as I mentioned, started this campaign of beheadings, where by 2008, there are more beheadings in Mexico than in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. This is getting to a point where it's beyond movie scripts where the characterization of these groups and what they're doing wouldn't be acceptable to a movie producer. I would laugh out of the room. Well, yeah, that's right. And there have actually been a couple of cinematic attempts to capture just how wild a lot of this has become. I think there was recently an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie here. I can't remember. I think it's called The Last Stand, or something like that, where this cartel member is actually moving back down towards Mexico. But there is a pantheon of narco saints, if you will, or these kind of quasi-mystical figures that a lot of traffickers will pray to in order to get protection from the authorities, or to grant them safe passage as they smuggle their goods since the United States, or even to seek revenge upon another group that will venerate these particular saints in order to gain protection or to get good standing within their particular community. So are these things said former gang members, or are they, you know, living God so to speak? Well, one of them is Jesus Melverde, which is an image crafted on a 1940s Mexican cinematic star. And another one is Santa Muerta, which is the Grim Reaper. And basically, these two narco saints are the ones that are venerated by these traffickers in order to gain protection, as I mentioned, for their particular missions. So they're not actually deceased members of the cartels, but a lot of cartel members and gang members will pray to these saints for the souls of those who have departed. So it's pretty wild stuff. Amazing. And you also point out in the book, this quite quick maps about the range of influence. It's quite territorial. Yes, that's right. I mean, what the war is really over is access into the United States, or process or routes into the US. So the six states of Northern Mexico that run along the border of the southern United States, these are really the states that have had a lot of the homicides. For example, Sudad Juarez, which was also nicknamed Murder City, that particular city for the longest time had a murder rate that was stratospheric. It was one homicide every three hours. And recently, the violence has come down where so much so that the headline in the newspaper a few weeks ago was no homicides over this past weekend. So, you know, celebrating something that didn't happen, if you will, which is somewhat amazing. But yeah, those six states are really prime territory in that. Again, they're the access point for drugs and for people seeking to come into the United States. There are other areas of Mexico that are ports where precursor chemicals for processing heroin or methamphetamine or access to Colombian cocaine, where Colombian cocaine actually enters Mexico bound for the United States. So those areas are also hotly contested, but not quite as violent as the Northern States. Right, right. So the choke points, so to speak, of entry, the ones where the attention is. Right. It's also what my friend, Phil Williams, calls strategic warehousing. This is where all the drugs kind of go to be disarticulated and into smaller parcels in order to be smuggled. But these particular areas, where all the drugs kind of arrive into these warehouses, if you will, and then are kind of disaggregated for various deliveries in the United States. Is there any fighting over the northern side of the border when the drugs are arriving again, where people are fighting to get access? Because obviously, if you're entering from one side, you have to come out on the other side. Right. You know, that's interesting. It's not as violent as Mexico, for sure, because it doesn't actually behoove the gang members and the cartel members to be as violent in the United States as they are in Mexico. In Mexico, only 5% of crimes are ever solved. Only 2% of crimes ever go to trial. A small fraction of those end up being a conviction of some sort. And then a smaller fragment of that means prison. Whereas in the United States, there isn't that culture of impunity. And that a lot of traffickers actually rely on the fact that it's more peaceful in the United States to conduct their operations. In fact, a lot of cartel members and drug gang leaders who live in the United States and not in Mexico because it's actually safer for them to be in the United States than in Mexico. So they're running away from their own violence. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then, you know, it's a sort of perversity that happens too, where in the US, we have ordinary Mexicans called Invertanistas or people who are inverted, where they will actually now live temporarily in the United States and commute down to Mexico during the day for their work and then come back to the US at night because it's just safer to be in the United States temporarily overnight than it is to be in Mexico. So you'll have mayors and police chiefs who actually live in the US but run their towns via cell phone from the United States and will ever so occasionally go back in the Mexico. Wow, just amazing. So let's talk about what effect this has all had on Mexico itself. Is Mexico turning, not maybe down to a fail state, but is it massively undermining civil operations in the country? Well, you know what has happened is the steady erosion of a Mexican's belief in democracy and democratic practices that in a recent Poland of Latin America, Mexicans have consistently rated democracy as not all that effective in their particular country, which is which is sad in a lot of respects because Mexico is a democracy. But what you've had is also a lot of kind of transition between political parties. So we've had an election in Mexico last year that has brought about the return of the former political party that was in power for 70 years and who had colluded with the drug traffickers. So a lot of Mexicans were hoping that, okay, if you return this particular political party to power, maybe they can cut the deal with the traffickers and just reduce the violence. Mexicans are just so tired of violence that they're willing to sacrifice transparency and openness that democracy means just in order to have some relief when it comes to violence in their daily lives. Yeah, I mean, that's quite a standing. But it's easy to say that from Australia where nothing like this is actually happening. Is it doing anything to the economy? I mean, you're talking about precursor chemicals are coming in. They've still got the marijuana crops, which I was surprised to see which I think is still the majority of the largest crop that's being moved across the border. Right. Well, the Mexican drug economy is estimated to be about $39 billion American, which outstrips the legitimate parts of the Mexican economy. For example, remittances from Mexicans living in the United States to Mexico is actually only around $18 billion. And the Mexican tourism economy is about $11 billion. However, the Mexican economy is growing because of manufacturing. A lot of US companies are leaving the Chinese market because the Chinese market wages are rising in China. So American companies are trying to figure out, well, okay, so how do we maintain profit? So we move our manufacturing to Mexico that reduces our transport costs. So that's actually starting to happen. The Mexican economy is also buoyed by the fact that it has a large natural gas and petroleum deposits. So that has actually helped their economy quite a bit, especially during the recession. Has the danger of the drug wars affected foreign investment into Mexico? Yeah, it has in sort of fits and starts, just in bits and pieces where a lot of US companies, they haven't left Mexico, but they've reconsidered expanding their operations in Mexico. But they've also hired a lot of extra private security for their employees and also for their assets in Mexico. So that, in some respects, is a subsidiary economy, this private protection economy that's kind of popping up in different parts in Mexico. What about the tourism industry? Is that something? You know, it has, especially around Acapulco. Acapulco has had significant increases in violence and in homicides. And that's largely because it's a retail market for drugs in Mexico. And that's really the thorny issue with Mexico is it's a hybrid node in the global drug economy. It's a transit country for Colombian cocaine and some Colombian heroin. It's a source country for marijuana and Mexican heroin and also methamphetamine. But it's also a retail market for a lot of these drugs as well. So it's a consumer node of a smaller kind. So it's this hybrid type of country which breathes a lot more violence because you have those features that are being auto provide gangs and by drug trafficking organizations. And what effect is it having on all the Mexican neighbors? So the United States and the other Latin American countries that border with Mexico? Are they suffering in any way or are they even gaining in some manner from all this? Yeah, the countries that are really suffering are actually in Central America because they're also now becoming transit countries for drugs on the way to Mexico than on the way to the United States. So for example Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras have homicide rates that are the highest in the region. And the only other two countries that have higher homicide rates than say Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, one is Colombia which has active insurgency going on. And the other one is Venezuela. Venezuela is, I think it's just below Colombia or not on top of Colombia. And that's just because of the breakdown of law and order in the capital of Caracas. But El Salvador is permeated by a gang called the Marasama Prusa Treque which is MS-13, MS-18 as well. Guatemala has cayviles. Cayviles are former members of their special forces that are colluding with Mexican drug traffickers on the other side of the border from the sheer border of Mexico and Guatemala. And Honduras as well is another country that has just a large gang issue and gang population. So a lot of those countries are suffering. And then on the United States side of the equation we have increasing crime rates along portions of the border. And we also have had a sharp uptake in number of homicides in Chicago. Now Chicago is not on the border of Mexico. But what you have up there is a turf war as well that is occurring on the streets as to who's going to control what retail markets in that city. And that's a lot of it is related to Latin gangs and also drugs coming in from Mexico. So it's extended all the way to the Canadian border effectively. And we hear some things on the news certainly I've been hearing other people around the world probably have heard about the fast and furious and the gun trade. How large is that gun trade? So this is the product that's returning across the border when the drug is going across the north. Right. Yeah. There's sort of a mutually reinforcing dynamic where you have drugs coming from Mexico coming northbound and you have money and guns going southbound. So it's this reinforcing cycle. Now a lot of weapons are also coming from Central America. A lot of really heavy weapons are left over from the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala. During the Cold War. So you have a lot of the 50 caliber machine guns and the plastic explosives and mines and anti-tank weapons and such. Those are a lot of that's coming from Central America. Are they really using those? I mean are they having fights in the street with 50 cows and tank ribbons? Yeah. They will actually mount these on pickup trucks with their own logos on the side of the pickup trucks. I'm not sure of the precise number of Mexican helicopters from the Mexican military that have been that have actually been brought down. Nobody's been killed fortunately but a number of Mexican government helicopters have been brought down by these weapons. A lot of these these groups actually will will manufacture what's what are known as narco tanks. These are trucks and vehicles that are up armed that have turrets with 50 cows mounted on them just to break through blockades that are set up by other dangs or other cartels or even the Mexican military. It's just incredible. That sounds like the the wars in Africa with the fundamental technicals driving around with the 50 cows on the back. Yeah and you can see it from across the border. You can see these groups going at it with one another. What's becoming a real worry is how you know the younger members of these dangs are willing to take on US border patrol and immigration folks more directly and more violently than they have in the past. That's incredible. So what has been the government response to this in Mexico? Well the Mexican government's response during the Calderon years has been has been kind of two-fold. One is reliance on the military for patrolling the streets in collaboration with some local law enforcement when they can find local law enforcement that is in corrupt. And on the other side is a judicial reform as well as law enforcement reform. So the Mexican legal system is based on the inquisitorial system. It's not based on the adversarial system. So you still have a very Napoleonic way of conducting trials where there's you know the judge is also the investigator in any respects. So they're actually transitioning into a more adversarial type of legal system that for example we have in the United States. So we have a lot of partnerships here in the US with Mexican judges and lawyers as they begin this transformation to a more evidence-based system. One that is not reliant on say confessions and just testimony. And the new president in Mexico is trying to organize a gin-barmory that's based on say the French or the Italian model. This is going to take some time and there's already been a number of police reforms in Mexico especially at the national level as a way to backfill the military. So the hope is okay the military can get off the streets. They can get a more national police force that is less corrupt than say state police or municipal police and that will be one of the ways that you can actually have a more legitimate government presence through a non-corrupt law enforcement agency of some kind. But it can take some time and that's you know a lot of Mexicans just don't don't have that time. No which is what you were talking about earlier with the breakdown in conflict and democracy in this particular civil society. Right and especially when you have troops on the street you know because soldiers are not trained to be police officers so you have an increasing number of human rights complaints against the Mexican military in particular the army and that's just by virtue of okay they're not trained to do it they're also in some respects corrupted by the drug traffickers anyway and are recruited by the drug traffickers especially Los Ettas who are again former military so they know exactly the weaknesses that the Mexican military has and especially the Mexican army and will directly try to recruit individuals come over to their side. This sounds very similar to a conversation I had been another recording last year where it was an expert on Afghanistan. I was saying they needed a similar policy of a John Donnery rather than a military and civilian policing because the civilian policing process that would come from say a United States city, an Australian city, a British city was inadequate and the military was far too strong and they did that middle road. Yeah and that's you know that's basically what we have is we have two organizations that deal with collective violence right one is a military which is really designed to kill people and break things and a police force which you really hope doesn't do that you know you don't want a police force that kills people and breaks things. Citizens have a very low threshold for collateral damage when it comes to policing so but between those two is really the gap or the scene where these cartels and gangs operate because they have such a high level of violence there's willingness to use violence at a very high level but they're also criminal so where you know who takes who takes over is it the military or the police right the military that is too strong to really work and in and with a community that's affected or a police force that is outgunned by criminals who are in fact or remembers of the military. Hmm yes the standing problems I teach a policy subject here and we call these wicked problems there's just no easy solution to them right yeah there's sort of you know the least worst solution yes yeah no one's going to be happy but it's about how less unhappy you will be rather than happy right yeah um what about from the United States point of view what's the United States been doing well the US has again been trying to work with the Mexican government in police reforms judicial reforms there's also the merida initiative which is a substantial aid package that is is helping to the train Mexican law enforcement and and the transformed legal system there's also been greater cooperation across the border between the Mexican military and and US military but there's also kind of a history of mistrust on both sides that is a product of our shared history for example Mexicans still harbor some ill will towards the United States because the United States had seized a lot of their territory over the years and so they're always worried about sovereignty issues I'm just going to have to bet that's just nearly 200 years all that free rights yeah this is true but you know it's still part of of of the culture of the area of Mexicans in fact they're their national military academy celebrates several cadets who who fought the Americans as they tried to prevent them from taking the Mexican flag down when they conquered Mexican territory and annexed it to the United States so it's still part of that institutional memory even of the Mexican armed forces and then on the other side of the equation the United States is off the east trussle of sharing too much intelligence information with Mexican counterparts because they're worried about corruption we give you any intelligence this is really just going to end up in in the hands of the cartels and gangs or you're going to tip them off anyway so there's there's a lot of work to be done and overcoming that sort of mutual mistrust between the two sides all right now I'd like to move on and spend a fair bit of time on on your recommendations on what should be done they're quite detailed and I thought very positive really given the circumstances so we're still talking about a wicked problem but you try and bring things into perspective especially in relation to this is not a counterinsurgency you know you're trying to differentiate between anti-terrorist activity as opposed to the situation in Mexico right and that that's um for me that's the most and one of the most important points of the book is that even though the levels of violence are very high and mimic things like insurgency or terrorism it's not low intensity conflict I call it high intensity crimes actually a label I I borrow from post-Cold War literature but it's high intensity crime so you have to look at the motivations for the violence rather than okay the violence itself has similarities between no terrorism and and insurgency so looking at motivations and looking at causes gives you a better idea of how to frame solutions or at least approaches to solutions because as soon as you say insurgency or terrorism you immediately then begin to look at counter insurgency and counter terrorism which again if we're talking about counter counter narcotics you know counter terrorism counterinsurgency counter narcotics are not the same thing just because they share a common prefix doesn't mean they can be employed towards a common end that you can actually undermine one by using the other so counterinsurgency you can do winning hearts and minds that's one way another part of counterinsurgency is a really heavy-handed enemy centric approach that we saw in places like Sri Lanka or even Russia in the case of Chechnya so that you probably don't want to do in a situation like Mexico and counter terrorism or you go into things like preemption and prevention and some abuses of civil liberties and civil rights and that's probably also not the right way to go when it comes to dealing with what is criminal activity I mean I think very bad criminal activity but at the same time the guiding star has to be civil rights and civil liberties as a way to begin to build legitimacy and then figure out ways to reduce violence over thought right right so do you want to just run to what you think of the key recommendations that you would make in dealing with the problem yeah sure I you know I if it's high intensity crime what I recommend is high intensity law enforcement which isn't to say that you need to turn Mexico into a police aide or you need to flood Mexico with police officers what civil studies have suggested is that Mexico has a large number of police however a lot of them at the municipal level are corrupt or there are areas in town that have no police coverage at all so what needs to be done is actually to train this national gendarmory and also to have certain parts of the Mexican military train with this gendarmory much as the Italian army and Italian carabinary trained together at an academy to do police work and to figure out which are the most violent cartels and to go after who they are and where they operate rather than going after all six or seven cartels simultaneously over all areas of Mexico so you could have for example what I call a death of first strategy which is to go after the most violent cartel which is must at us the one that is the most proficient in the use of violence so one of the most dangerous for the Mexican state so in essence pick a side which is what the Colombian did in the 1990s they said okay papa lezco bar the median cartel most vicious most violent most challenging on the state we're going to pick them to go after first we're going to leave some of the other cartels alone for a little bit and they'll feed us information and intelligence anyway because they're trying to eliminate market competitor so I think if you pick the zetas first you can begin to reduce some of the violence in some areas of Mexico because you're eliminating a competitor another idea is to actually focus geographically on certain key areas especially along the northern part of Mexico those northern states and focus on how to bring some security to this to the citizenry there surrounded looking at a blanket strategy of covering all of Mexico focus on some of the more violent areas in northern Mexico so those are some of the approaches that I that I recommend there's been a lot of discussion about state what drug legalization would do you kind of suck out the oxygen from these groups but that's sort of that's a difficult argument in a lot of respects because what you would do let's say you know we were to legalize drugs here in the United States overnight or pick a deadline some kind you what would happen is a lot of gang members a lot of cartel members would be immediately thrown out of work so now you have sort of people who are very proficient in the use of violence and they would simply move on to another industry or another set of activities of extortion cds etc so it wouldn't necessarily solve the problem immediately it would just cause a labor force to move out of a particular market and seek out new avenues and again if their expertise is violent and smuggling that's what they're going to rely on it's clear and the US is still going to be a very large market place that they need to smuggle goods into whatever these particular contraband goods are right and this is you know somewhat akin although not exactly the same as what happened with all of the Soviet Union you had you know a lot of KGB secret police all of a sudden they're out of work like well what do I do huh actually pretty good at you know the gun and violence and then shaking people down so they get hired by the russian mafia even in the elton years you have very similar rates of violence and types of violence occurring in Russia that you have in mexico so there there are sort of prevailing conditions that happen that bring about these you know these episodes of high-intensity crime right right um one of the interesting things one of my other I guess I've spoken to about is with the continuing rise in the process tobacco through tobacco taxing is a policy to produce smoking in places like australia united states and in europe tobacco is becoming a smuggling product of choice because the um penal consequences are very low the likelihood of going to jail is extremely low and the profits are becoming higher and higher as tobacco started to appear in mix you know it's actually appeared on our northern border with canada right precisely the reason you talk about which is tobacco cigarette taxes in canada are much higher than they are in the united states um so you have that that that again that incentive to smuggle north of order uh with uh in the tobacco cigarettes and what's interesting is we have a couple of native american indian reservations that order canada and as part of the arrangement with the united states government uh they do not tax cigarettes at all in the u.s so they're non-taxed even cheaper cigarettes on the indian reservations that can be smuggled into canada at even lower price so there's a there's a greater incentive so we've actually had um some violent episodes across the northern border because it's cigarette smuggling you know for the precise reason that you talk about that it's you know it's just that's such a higher rate of taxation there's such a higher rate of taxation in canada as compared to the united states so i'm supposed to wrap up i'm going to ask you to be a um well just some predictions of the future where do you see this whole situation being in about ten years time ah boy um i think what we'll see in mexico is um you'll probably have a return to the old regime which is a lot of the politically lead we'll figure out okay which tracking group is or which trafficking groups are the best ones to actually have a partnership with and if they can guarantee a certain level of stability a reduction in violence then everything will be fine so it's one of those things where you scratch my back i'll scratch yours the deal is you know take the killing somewhere else don't be so violent and we'll let you traffic the drugs up to the gringos in the north and so i think what we will see in the future is a is a reduction in the number of big cartels so you probably won't have six or seven you probably have about three um so there'll be a balance of power of some sort amongst the cartels themselves then a return to the collusion by the mexican government uh rate the violence will will be reduced and and largely each side can claim some sort of success if you will there'll probably be you know spikes and dips in the violence it'll be kind of the new normal if you will whether horrific spikes and violence all of a sudden then there'll be kind of a anybody calm down here's what the arrangement is that'll return to a certain basic level that's acceptable to everybody um but i think that's that's where the situation is going because it's this sort of level of violence can't be sustained over such a long period of time without without deals being made in without eliminations happening without a cartel or two just self eliminating because they're just pushed against the wallet anger too many cartels that angered the government and so there's uh the kind of pylon effect that occurs well it's not a thrilling outcome for everybody sadly positive but it's the history we'd see it would sound like history would prove you're right it's again it's the least worst outcome because i we're not going to legalize drugs uh here in the u_s uh we may legalize marijuana but we're not going to legalize things like methamphetamine cocaine or heroin so there'll still be those markets and also prescription medications are also hugely trafficked between our two countries as well um so there's that that market um trafficking of human beings so the least worst outcome is okay a reduction in violence and sad to say people who are getting high they're always going to get high so there's always going to find a way to get drugs yeah especially from from Mexico yep i've done an exercise in uh our tutorials with the students every year of if you wanted to legalize drugs what would you legalize and they start by saying everything and by the time the conversation's over they end up with just decriminalizing marijuana because the consequences when you think about it you don't want five-year-old children smoking PCP so you have to start showing things back so realistically the legalization option is it just not going to happen yeah and it depends on you know i've had this discussion as well most various audiences when it's allowed by legalizing drugs and i said well first of all you need to be clear on two things one is when you see drugs what you mean marijuana all the way through to methamphetamine um because those those are very different drugs and by legalization do you mean commercialization do you do the same thing that we do with cigarettes and alcohol so companies can get involved i said companies are not in the business of getting their product into as few hands as possible they want their product and as many hands as possible so you want that to occur you want coupons for methamphetamine found in your glamour magazine yeah i sort of what you envision it to look like which is sort of the exercise it sounds like you do yes it's very similar yeah i hadn't quite gone that far that's good i'll explain that in future with your permissions yeah but it's sort of you know what what does this drug utopia look like um and you know i'm Portugal have had some success with decriminalization but that's decriminalization of use not necessarily trafficking and production no so that's you know those are you those are the open questions i have for those folks who want to legalize right so okay well what what are we talking about here um and who do you want living next door to you know if you want to and that may give you some indication of when you think about drugs what you define you know it's sort of okay you want to have uh your next or neighbor who's a drunk you know a weedhead a meth freak um you know who you want tell you okay maybe i don't want to have them you know next door who's hallucinating and what have you um yeah it's it's it's a difficult subject and you know like i said i think there's always gonna be some control over um intoxicants just by as you mentioned just for public safety and public health which means there will always be a black market which means there's an opportunity a business opportunity for the cartels yeah yeah i think that's right yeah well just that final question i'm would you like to discuss what you're working on now what's your next project you know i'm actually working on on two things one is related to to the topics i've uh i've worked on for a few few years now so i'm looking at the radical organized crime which should be like what we've been talking about here organized crime that is much more confrontational towards the state that is wanting in their use of violence and that is aggressively expansionist into into new markets because a lot of organized crime is not that way generally organized crime is much more peaceful walking of the state and will expand in bits and pieces but not aggressively so into these other areas so that's one area i'm looking at and then another area i'm looking at is um hopefully off in some respects i i call them ideologically motivated cyber groups uh so groups like anonymous activists and trying to do a genius in species uh typology of them so rather than just saying okay they're all hackers or they're all activists who doesn't try to delineate okay well they're the activists who actually have a political motivation in the physical world and will go online to try to enlist others versus groups like anonymous who actually have an ideology that um is somewhat akin to saying you know human liberation begins with the liberation of information uh so you have to have the free flow of information in order for humans to be truly free and a lot of their activity is is is online rather than in the physical world so um i call it the hackitus, lactavists, and wiki warriors and that's kind of where i'm heading right now well that sounds really really interesting actually so well keep me informed of uh when your next publications come out and we can discuss those as well um well thank you very very much for giving me your time today Paul um i really appreciate it Sure my pleasure Mark thanks very much you have been listening to new books and terrorism and organized crime and my interview with Paul Wrexton Khan about his new book car tells at war i hope you enjoyed the program.
The violence in Mexico is receiving a lot of media attention internationally. Paul Rexton Kan has produced a book that provides us with a comprehensive and comprehendible introduction to the background to the conflict and its effects. Cartels at War: Mexico’s Drug-Fueled Violence and the Threat to US National Security (Potomac Books, 2012) is a relatively short book packed with detailed information. The book covers the nature of the drug war, the cartels involved, the national and international responses and the effects of this war on the local and international communities. But this is not just a descriptive work. Kan provides us with his recommendations for solutions and predictions about the future of the conflict. In particular, he draws comparisons between treating this as an insurgency and spells out how a counter-terrorist response would not be the correct way to deal with the issue. This is high intensity crime and requires a high intensity policing response. Overall the book is an excellent introduction to the very complex drug war in Mexico, as well as being a source of practical and realistic policy options for addressing a conflict this large.
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