 I'm going to just briefly introduce our two speakers, and I'm sure there's a lot more than I could say, but they know a lot more than I do about this, and so I'd rather let y'all hear from them. First of all, to sort of introduce the topic and introduce our speaker, we have Julianne Aguilar. He reports for the Texas Tribune. Yay, the Trib. His recent stories have covered the presidential elections, violence, immigration, and drug activity. Previously, he reported for the Rio Grande Guardian and the Laredo Morning Times. He has a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Texas and a master's degree in journalism from the University of North Texas, and this topic is close to his heart as he was born and raised in El Paso and his family in Mexico. Then Dr. Ringo, you want to hear about his other, later on we'll have the second part of this. He is actually a, this is one of the things you learn here, if you come and you speak in the future for him, you do a really good job, we'll find an excuse to invite you back. This is actually his second time coming to, gosh, it was maybe four or five years ago, the first time. Anyway, he, a whole different topic, also wonderful. We found another excuse. He has many, many hats he wears and many things he can do, and so we found something else that he was knowledgeable on and asked him to come back and speak again. He is a native of Mexico City and a U.S. citizen at UT Austin. He is affiliated with the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies, the Center for Mexican American Studies and the American Studies Programs, where he's also a professor and fellow in the Department of Educational Psychology. For almost two decades, he has devoted himself to working in communities in Texas and Mexico that have experienced significant conflict and transformation, exploring broader questions about how communities function and how individuals and cultural groups live within them. Last to you, he testified before Congress and his new book, so y'all I'll put this on your list, and we will talk to the book cluster about reading this later on once it comes out. The Fight to Save Juarez, Life in the Heart of Mexico's Drug War, will be published this spring. So without further ado, I guess if you want to pull your hand, come up and talk to us first. Good evening, you all. I appreciate you guys having me and I appreciate being invited. I was mentioned, this is a, I was asked, you know, if I could speak for five or ten minutes about Ciel Juarez and El Paso, and I could probably speak for five or ten hours about it, Sport and Raise there, Saha family and Juarez. It's difficult separating the journalists from the person when you're writing about these issues. We try our best, but I think the first time I met Professor Ainsley was actually in 2007, I was still in Laredo, and he was interested in what was going on in Nuevo Laredo at the time, specifically some stories that I had written about teenage cicadiros, hitmen, if you will, U.S. citizens that were paid by then the Gulf Cartel to kill people on this side, getting into the spillover violence thing. So we chatted a little bit about that at La Posada, I think, at the fancy hotel in Laredo, but it's still close enough to where you look out the window and you want to see who's walking by, especially when you're talking about something like this. Months later, I would visit El Paso on a trip just to say hi to my folks and my mom and I were in Juarez. We have some properties in Juarez that haven't been rented out for a while, so we wanted to go check on them, see kind of how things were. This was early, middle part of 2008, if I remember correctly. In Juarez, you could tell something was just not right, something was going on, but nobody exactly knew what the reason was. So my mom and I are talking about it and we're looking around and it's daylight. This is a city of 1.2 million people, so it seems normal. It's not a Wild West, it's not a Clint Eastwood movie or whatnot, but everything that happens at night or a big city can happen anywhere, you don't always need to see it. So we are at these apartments and I remembered from my high school days that there was a little corner store, a block down that would sell you individual beers. So my mom and I were thirsty. I said, hey, mom, I'm going to get us some beers. Got a couple and on my way back, there were about 44, 45 rounds of 8K47. It was three o'clock in the afternoon. It was two blocks away. And I just remember I paused and I thought, first, where's my mom? I need to run back and make sure she's okay. So of course I did that and then the journalist and me took over and I wanted to get right to the scene and see what was going on. And my mom said, give me your gold chain, give me your watch. Go do your thing. And on the way over there, it's interesting because if you guys have been in Cielo Juarez, there's a whitewash message on the mountain that says, la biblia es la verdad, leela. The Bible is the truth. Read it. There was a car that was being chased and eventually the assassins got these four men in the car that were all dead at the scene. The car rolled in and stopped at a middle school named after Francisco Villa, Pancho Villa Middle School. It was two blocks away from a place called, a park called La Plaza de Periodista. It's like the journalist's pausa that has statues and plaques to the journalists in Mexico. And I remember as the Mexican Red Cross drove by, they didn't even stop. The cops just said, there's no point. I realized later that the day before, the cartel's it sent a message to the Red Cross saying, if you don't want to become part of the dead, don't help the wounded because we'll get you to. And then it hits you when you're there. What is going on? And you start sort of asking questions, and it can be something as simple to Gilberto Antiveros, aka Greñas, was a couple for the Juarez cartel. He did some time when he got out. He went to work for the Sinaloa cartel. It could be something as simple as Saúlores Gamboa, who was a former police chief in Juarez, getting arrested in El Paso for trying to bribe ICE agents to smuggle loads across. It could be because Chapo Luzman decided, I'm not going to mess with the golf cartel and no light either anymore. I'm going to focus on Juarez. I'm going to try to come east from Sinaloa and take Chihuahua. And journalists and academics and politicians, we can all sit and ask 1,000 questions. But what it comes down to is in Juarez alone, years later, it's 11 or 12 or 13,000 people, depending on what statistics you look at. And I think what gets lost a lot is you all picture your son or your daughter being born or picture the saddest funeral you ever went to. And that's one person. And when we talk about the struggle, we're talking about thousands. And every time somebody is lowered into the ground, somebody's heart is breaking. And I think that we get so wrapped up in the why and the Second Amendment and the gun running and the prohibition that I think that gets lost in the coverage. But I was also in Mexico City for the elections recently. And I was walking around at night. And people were waiting to go into nightclubs during the day people were sitting at sidewalk cafes. And I remembered thinking, this is the first time that I have been in Mexico since 2007, without doing this every five seconds, without seeing the fedatas drive by with their masks and machine gun turrets mounted onto their trucks. And that was somewhat hopeful. There was a lot of talk about the Brie winning, the Brie going back to the old days. The Brie allegedly started this. Actually, it was President Fox that at the tail end of his administration started the crackdown. Galdiron picked it up and ran with it. He's been criticized. But it was a sort of odd balance of emotions thinking so many thousands and thousands and thousands dead. And what's going to happen? Are people looking to the Brie again? Are people looking to the person? Are people just looking to find anything good in whichever party it is? And I think Dr. Ainsley is probably the expert on this seeing as how he's researched it more. But in my brief introduction, I just wanted to give a perspective from a reporter that crunches numbers that reach press releases that's sometimes hailed as very brave for going over to Mexico for three or four days and then I was telling the professor I can flash a passport and come back to the promised land. The real heroes I think are the Mexican journalists that still are able to every single day of their life report on these issues, let people know what's going on. And they have nowhere to hide. And they're dropping one at a time, two at a time, three at a time. And this is going on in Central America. This is going on in South America. So I think that when we sit and we read these stories and we have our own opinions, I think it's very, very important to realize that these are people's lives that we're talking about. We get in the back and forth of why and how and who's to blame. But eventually something has to give. And I'm hopeful for my family and for the, for the, for my countrymen and for the people in the United States as well that are very conflicted about this issue that something will start to change. Seattle Juarez has been, compared to what it has been, somewhat safer. I think there were 38 homicides in August, which was, which is great, you know, considering that there had been three, 4,000 a year, you know, in previous years. But then again, we wake up this morning and we read the paper that just in the first five days of September alone they've already killed, I think, 21 people. So it speaks to the unpredictability. You know, I get asked, like, hey, should I go to Acapulco, should I go to Puerto Vallarta, should I go to Nolaro? Some places are obvious, like no, don't go. But even the places that you're not really sure of, you can't ever say with any certainty, sure, that place is fine, because you never know when it's going to kind of pop up. But I'll end there and I'll let Professor Ainsley take it up and hopefully he can give us a better insight on what he sees as the future of Mexico, which by the way is Texas's number one trading partner in the United States is number two trading partner overall. I think the economic interests of both sides get lost in the immigration debate and the drill board debate, but that's also something that needs to be, at least in the back of people's minds when they talk about finger pointing, is how much we both rely on each other's countries and from state to state. So with that, Professor Ainsley, thank you all very much. I appreciate it. Thank you, Catherine, for inviting me tonight. And thank you, Hunyan, for sharing with us some of the personal experiences you've had as a reporter and as a citizen of the past in Mexico and the kind of experience of in that very personal way of encountering the violence, which I think the point you make is really excellent, that we too readily lose the thread of that sort of intimate element of what's going on every single day in many of these communities. So what I'm going to present, though, is a little different from that. That is, I want to talk a little bit about what's going on in Mexico at two levels. One is the work I've been doing over the last three and a half years or so is focused on two dimensions of this issue. One, at one level, I've been looking at, what does the Mexican government think it's doing? And I've interviewed a lot of people in the Calderón administration, people in the security cabinet, trying to get them to articulate what it is that their strategy is and what's happened here and what's worked and what's not and why. And the second part of what I've done is that I spent the better part of a year and a half going to what is trying to look at this city, which at the time was the epicenter of this violence, trying to look at it at the level that Julian is just talking about, interviewing people whose lives are really more directly affected by the violence, interviewing people who lost their children, people who were working in marginalized communities, trying to help intervene in the lives of kids who are forming the ranks of the Cicadillos that Julian is mentioning, or who are playing other roles in the cartel universe because of the fact that there are no other jobs, there are no other opportunities in many of these communities. So in Juarez, I did more of that sort of close to the ground, close to the lives of individuals and families and people who are trying to do something about what's going on there. So those are the two levels of the work I've done. And so I want to start with giving you a little context and I would actually typically walk around, but I know we've got audio linked to the camera, so I'm going to stay put for the sake of the media situation. But I think it's important to get a sense for the context for how it is that Mexico got to this situation. This gives you, if you disregard the red arrows here, which are more related to flights coming into the US, but the yellow arrows through the Caribbean, that's where 90% of the cocaine entered the United States until the 1990s. At some point around the mid-1990s, the United States, actually the late 1980s, the United States made agreements, international agreements that allowed US naval forces to interdict vessels coming out of South America and begin to disrupt the flow of, at that time it was marijuana and cocaine primarily, but into the eastern seaboard, which is where most of the drugs came from. That effort was successful. And so this is the first of the strategies and it has a profound effect in shaping and creating the power of the Mexican cartels today. That's this interdiction effort. The second occurs in the mid-1990s when the US government sought to seal the borders, strengthen border defense, and this has gotten even more acute since in post 9-11. So as the US sealed the borders, which was the funnel through which most of the drugs were coming into the United States, that had a profound effect on things in Mexico, on the strategies that the Mexican cartels used to get drugs into the United States and several things in particular. One is that the cartels started paying their people with product. If you were a couple in Juarez and you were making $30,000 a month working for the cartel and getting cocaine across to El Paso, suddenly you were being paid $15,000 and $15,000 worth of cocaine. That cocaine was turned into cash by creating a domestic retail drug market in Juarez and the same model has happened all over Mexico. So Mexico historically did not have a major drug problem in terms of consumption. Mexico was a country through which drugs passed on their way to American markets. And so suddenly in the mid-1990s and especially post 2000, there's an explosion in drug of addiction in Mexico and communities where there's a lot of drug markets going on. This is really relevant to the violence that we're seeing in the number of deaths we're seeing as you'll see in a second. And the third thing is that both of these strategies then that are American government strategies or policies change the dynamic of the drug process of the drug business and they single-handedly create the sort of the character of the Mexican cartels. They create, these cartels had been around in some form or fashion for a century. Some of them even as family run businesses and border communities, but they merge not as sort of employees who are facilitating the Colombian passage of drugs into the U.S. They emerge as really the key players and they in many ways substitute the Colombians with their own people and their own power and their own influence and they start generating a tremendous amount of money for themselves. This is what changes the dynamic of what's going on in Mexico. So I've really covered most of this but so hold the line in the mid-1990s was one of these really important policy changes that had a profound effect. So this is more of a current picture of the flow of drugs and you can see that they're coming into Mexico from Colombia, from Bolivia, from Guatemala and Central America and the meth trade is coming from, mostly from China, from India, into the Eastern, the Western Seaboard of Mexico and then into the U.S. after it's manufactured in Mexico. So the whole picture has changed radically and really in about a little more than a decade. That also has this change. In the 80s, 1980s, 70s, 80s, 90s, the Mexican power structure, the authority of the state, still really called the shots. You had the cartels and organized crime groups that were involved with and colluding with and paying off government officials. But there was a process through which in some ways the cartels were sort of kept in their positions and in their territories by the agreements that were formed and in some way still had to answer to authorities. So a cartel could be, the Mexican army could launch an operation against a cartel that wasn't living up to its agreements and things like that. That paradigm changed with the changes that I was just describing and in many Mexican states and communities, the cartels became the preeminent power, the force behind the political face of these communities. And I think the power dynamics really shifted profoundly. Primarily as a function of two things. One is the new and exponential growth of the wealth of these organized crime players. And secondly, the weaponry that was now in their hands. Post 2004. So Felipe Calderón launches the drug war in 2000 and December 2006 when he's inaugurated as president. And as most of you probably know, there's a Mexican president's serve one six year term that's not renewable. Prior to the Calderón administration, there were basically, these are the basic cartel structures. There was a Juarez cartel, Gulf cartel, the Tijuana cartel and the Sinaloa cartel, which is basically this federation which was a collection of groups or alliances and so on. And throughout, prior to Calderón launching this war against the cartels, most of these cartels worked pretty well together. They had their own territories. If the Sinaloa people wanted to run drugs through Juarez, they paid the Juarez cartel a percentage, 10%, 15%. And their product was protected as it moved through Juarez cartel territory, et cetera. That was the sort of the standing working arrangement between these cartels. There were always squabbles. There were always people who were being executed here and there. But in a place like Juarez, for example, up until 2008, those kinds of executions, crime, organized crime, related executions were sort of done quietly. People were picked up, they were taken to safe houses, they were tortured, they were killed, they were taken out to the desert and they disappeared. You didn't have a lot of massive violence in the communities themselves. The drug war and the Calderón strategy in this war changed that as well. But I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. So at the time that Calderón takes office, I think it's fair to say that the major drug cartels controlled most of the border areas, the border states, the way that things operated in those communities, the state and municipal law enforcement in those communities, as well as other, like Michoacán and Guerrero and Jalisco and Sinaloa and places like that. But especially along the border, it was a fisting glove, the way in which the cartels worked in terms of law enforcement, for example. There's no one who will tell you that the law enforcement was not owned and run by the cartel. They were the arm-dwing of the cartels. So this is Calderón at the time that he makes this declaration of war. Never in the history of modern Mexico since the revolution have you ever seen a Mexican president don military garb like this. This was unprecedented. And it was a real statement of where he was going. So we're gonna talk about the current violence. The tallies are, the numbers are really slippery. Let me just say that. But these are the official Mexican government figures that say through September of 2011, that is as of a year ago, there were about 48,000 people who'd been killed throughout Mexico between 2007 and September 2011. There are no official government figures in the last year. They have sort of shut down the documentation of this. And the reasons are probably, I'm certain they have to do with the election and trying to sort of stem the attitudes and the feelings in Mexico throughout Mexico about the number of dead, the violence in all of these communities and so on. So the figure I use is, let's see if I've got it here, is somewhere between 55,000 and 60,000. I think that's a fairly widely accepted figure. There's some people who are saying 100,000, 150,000 today. They're citing figures from the National Census of Mexican Bureau, but those figures include all deaths, not only supposedly organized crime-related deaths. But let me say this, that I spent a lot of time in Juarez when I saw lots of crime scenes and talked to a lot of people. And among this 55,000 to 60,000 number are lots of people, I think, who are assassinated because they don't pay the extortion fees that are being demanded of them and things of that sort. So this 55,000 to 60,000 number, which I think is probably certainly in the ballpark, but it's victims of organized crime. A percentage of those are organized crime groups killing each other off and a percentage of those are victims of organized crime, but it's really hard to tease those out. And I'll tell you a little bit more about why that's the case in a second. These are the most violent states for 2011, January through September that we have. It's changed a little bit this year and other years, you know, so, but the top states on this list have been sort of high violent states consistently for years now. Chihuahua always leading the pack by a significant margin. So these numbers kind of capture that. This map is a little out of date. Coahuila between Chihuahua and Nuevo León has had a lot of violence. Tijuana, Baja California, a lot less. Jalisco has more violence. Veracruz has gone up and so on. So it's not exactly up to date, I apologize for that, but just to give you a sense for sort of the spectrum there. So I'm talking to these Mexican government people and I'm asking them sort of a consistent question is, you know, what's the strategy here? What are you all doing and how are you going about doing this and why? So the first shocked me really when I had the head of CISEN, which is like the Mexican CIA, told me that our strategy consists first of all in recovering territory from the cartels. And what shocked me about that is to me, it seemed like a concession of the degree of control and influence that the cartels in organized crime had in broad swaths of Mexico. The second key plank for the Mexican officials is what they call this in felicitous term, perhaps, disarticulation of DTO, drug trafficking organizations, by which they mean the killing or the arrest of the leaders of the cartels. And finally, they talk about strengthening institutions, law enforcement, and the judiciary. Those are the key planks of the Mexican government. They've been the key planks from the beginning of this war and they are still things that Galerón is referencing in his State of the Union speech last week, okay? And we'll come back at the end to sort of analyze some of these, but so the first problem that they run into is a real obvious one, which I'm calling boots on the ground problem. So the Mexican government launches this war in quotes, but it's not really in quotes. We know that in most of these border states, just for example, let's just take Chihuahua. We know that the state and the municipal police forces in that state are run lock, stock, and barrel by the cartels. So, how are you going to take down or dismantle or disarticulate or whatever the euphemism is that you wanna use? How are you gonna go into these states and alter that situation? You can't rely on local law enforcement. You don't have anybody to help you do this in that level. Secondly, the Mexican federal police in 2007 consists of 6,500 officers, the AFI, the so-called Mexican FBI, 6,000 people, 12,500 federal law enforcement altogether. And I just give you this figured by comparison, there's 80,000 police in Mexico City alone. 12,500 officers, assuming that these people who are not in collusion with some of what's going on are really just not an adequate tool for this purpose. So, Calderón makes the decision that the only alternative he has is to deploy the army. Meanwhile, he launches a massive campaign to build up the Mexican federal police. So, I wanna take you to Juarez for a second and talk a little bit more about what's taking place there because Juarez becomes basically the epicenter of this struggle and it becomes the testing ground for the Mexican government's policies. And so, in 2008, the Sinaloa Cartel basically, as Julián was referencing, pulls out of Laredo, Nuevo Laredo, and starts moving into Chihuahua and Juarez in particular. They start actually in 2007. They start infiltrating their people. They start, they've already, they know all these people. They've worked with a lot of these people. They start what they call in Mexico, levantando. They start picking up people, disappearing them, torturing them, getting information about who's holding what positions, which police are working with what groups, et cetera, et cetera. And by 2008, the Sinaloa Cartel is ready to actually launch the assault on Juarez. And so, that's why Juarez becomes so important and becomes head and shoulders above any other community in Mexico or Latin America for that matter in terms of the level of violence. It's actually a very beautiful town in many ways. So, to also understand the violence, you need to understand something about the structure of these cartels. And this is the basic Juarez cartel model. The setas are a little different than this, but basically in the way the Juarez cartel worked is that they had their top echelon people. Then they have their armed wing, which was the municipal police and the state police, la línea, they were called. And then at the bottom, they had local gangs and the subsidiaries of these local gangs who were managing the retail drug markets at the street level. So, those are the three tiers within, this is Vágera Azteca or Aztecas and Juarez, one of the Juarez cartel street gangs who control manage the retail drug markets. This gives you a sense of the explosion of violence in Juarez. In 2008, that's a typo, that's 1,621, it's 962. In 2008 is when it explodes. And you can just see 2009, 1011. I think it was just a week or two that we learned that in Afghanistan we had lost the 2000th fatality, U.S. military fatality. And that's over the course, that's a full-blown declared war over the course of 10 or 11 years. And why does there were more people than that dying every year for several years? So it just gives you a sense for the scale of the violence that was being visited on this city. These are some of the scenes that I encountered. This was a family who owned a key shop that made keys for people. And I was told that they didn't pay the quota. And one of the things that these cartels have done, and really this is more at the level of, depending on the community in Juarez and depending on the amount of money you're talking about, but the street-level gangs are extorting businesses and individuals in a rampant way all over town. And so that's why I say it's really unclear how many of these fatalities are specifically drug-related people as opposed to sort of victims of this kind of organized crime. But what strikes me, and what I hope strikes you, is you look at these children. This is an execution in broad daylight. There's no one in Juarez who's not been directly affected by this violence. There's no community that's been spared. It doesn't matter if you live in the wealthiest enclaves or the poorest of neighborhoods. Everybody in Juarez has seen the violence firsthand, has felt it in terms of family members, and so on. And this is an execution of a police commander. And you can really see the discipline of the higher-level cicadios that can pull off an execution like this. This is some 18-year-old kid with an AK-47 who's just firing wild shots at people. This is an execution in front of a school that was one of the most haunting of the ones that I saw. This kid, this is the same execution. This kid's arriving at school. And you can see the victim behind him. So he's gonna have to go under this crime scene tape and go to the right. These two young women here are coming to school too. So this is the kind of stuff that people are living every day in Juarez. So in 2009, the Mexican government launches really a massive infusion of federal forces to try to stem the violence. 10,000 army and they disbanded the police. They had done several efforts to clean up the Juarez police force. They were all ineffective. So they finally just disband the entire force. The army starts patrolling the streets. And these people in red are forensics people and their faces are covered because they're afraid of being identified and being killed. In May of 2010, then the federal police, now a much more robust force comes in and replaces the army. Sets up roadblocks all over the city. There are a lot of problems with all of this that we'll talk about in a minute. So I wanna sort of come back to sort of break down the Mexican government's strategy and look at what's happening, what's not. In terms of recovering territory from the cartels, the violence is, if you follow the news, has spread to a lot of new communities. For example, like Veracruz that historically did not have a lot of violence, but suddenly it's rife with cartel violence. Nuevo León, you all have probably heard the story that Monterey was one of the safest cities in all of Mexico and in less than a year, it's sort of becomes really terrorized by the violence. In all of these communities where this violence is taking place, you've got a really a horrific dynamic taking place because the citizens in these communities are absolutely vulnerable and they have nowhere to turn. They don't trust the authorities. They don't trust any of the authorities. And this is partly a function of decades, a century of being abused and violated and having your own authorities turn on you and exploit you. And it's also a function of the fact that the authorities that even have an interest in doing something constructive and useful, which I actually believe there are people who have those intentions, they're not being sufficiently efficient. They can't protect these communities. I interviewed a woman who works at a maquiladora in Juarez. She makes about 400 pesos a week and she has to pay the neighborhood gangs 100 pesos a week for safe transit to and from her bus to work. This woman is like 60 years old, lives by herself, completely at the mercy of the gangs in her neighborhood. There is nowhere for her to turn. So this is the kind of stuff that's taking place. And so I think it's the recovery of territory strategy is clearly not worked. And it costs Calderón dearly in the polls obviously, his party lost not only the presidency but a lot of political power. In terms of the disarticulation of the drug trafficking organizations, actually I think at this level, the Mexican government strategy has been more successful than they've been given credit for. I mean, there's a lot of people like, this is La Barbe, sort of infamous guy that they have taken down. A lot of people who've been arrested, as I note here, 22 of the 37 most wanted, on Mexico's most wanted list have been taken down. Of the original cartels, a lot of these cartels have been severely weakened. The Tijuana Cartel is shadow of itself. The Gulf Cartel basically displaced by the setas and pushed out. La Familia severely weakened, atomized. The Juarez Cartel, most people think it's a shadow of its former self. Bertrand Leyva Cartel's a lot of that leadership has been taken down. A lot of these mid-level couples have also been arrested or killed each other off or whatever. What we've had also though is, so that's created a tremendous amount of violence. And at the same time that we have this sort of atomizing of the whole violence structure, we've also got the consolidation of powers. It's kind of a paradox here. But the Sinaloa and the setas, I think, are emerging as the two most powerful cartels in Mexico without question. And so this is an image of sort of the distribution of cartel influence early on in this war. And this is a more contemporary image with the blue being the Sinaloa cartel and the red being the setas. They're sort of rough images, but basically you can tell that the setas basically control the eastern seaboard, those eastern border states, and the Sinaloa controls the western side of things. In terms of strengthening institutions, law enforcement, the Mexican federal police is much more stronger, much more professionalized. It's a much more robust force. There's a lot of them are college educated. I think that there's been a tremendous amount of it invested in the Mexican federal police and they have worked very closely with the U.S. law enforcement. And there's a lot of, until the recent Cuernavaca CIA debacle, there was a lot of cooperation and collaboration between them. Not to set aside though the fact that there are, have been at the same time some consistent symptoms of deep structural problems. You may have heard that in the Mexico City Airport that the Mexican federal police sort of control, two officers killed some of their colleagues. It was involving their management of drugs flying in from South America. In Juarez, there was a literally rebellion of a group of something like 200 federal police against their commander. They actually called the media and said these guys are picking up people, they're extorting them, they're planting drugs on them. They, and they dragged them out of their housing quarters and four of those commanders were imprisoned. So I'm not saying that this is an ideal situation, but I'm just saying that compared to anything Mexico has had in the past, it's much better. But there are lots of problems remaining. State and municipal police still highly problematic. It's been very difficult to clean up these police forces at the state and municipal level. In terms of the institutional strategy, the judicial system remains highly problematic. And I think my own opinion is that this is the Achilles heel of the entire enterprise. If you don't have a judicial system that works, there's no way that you can have any kind of an effective in interference with the operations of criminals of any sort. I think it's the Mexican Congress should be ashamed of itself. There've been calls for judicial reform going back a long time. You may remember the Million Person March in 2004 in Mexico City where it was the largest outpouring of citizens in the history of Mexico, not counting the Mexican Revolution. They had one demand. We want to clean up the police, we want judicial reform. And so that continues. Most crimes aren't reported because people don't, people know nothing will happen. But this is the really problematic statistic. Only one to 2% of crimes get solved in Mexico. So if you have a city like Juarez where there's been almost 11,000 murders and there's only been about 200 people processed and imprisoned for those murders, that tells you the degree of impunity that people have. Unless you're caught red-handed in front of somebody committing a crime, any kind of crime, I'm not talking about just cartel-related crime, the chances of you having any sort of consequence are almost no. So there is no investigation, still after almost 20 years of appeal. So this is a protest at the University of Juarez based on this same issue. I think this also creates, it's part of the reason why there's so many human rights abuses related to this effort. Number one, you have an army that has no training in law enforcement work. What they're trained to do is to go in and kick ass and torture people to get information. That's what all of the police forces historically know to do. And if you don't have a system that trains police to investigate crimes, and if you don't have a judicial system that takes those criminals in the evidence that's been gathered and processes it in some sort of standard, transparent way, then you don't have a system that's gonna work. And that's exactly what is going on in Mexico. And I think it helps produce the human rights violations because when a Juarez municipal police officer picks up somebody on the street, the only thought that person has about how to get to quote unquote the truth, even if their intent on getting the truth is basically to take this person down into one of those cells and beat them up and keep them separated from their families and contact with other people until they tell you what you think they need to be telling you. That's the standard investigative tool. It's been the tool for decades, most of a century. And for all of the talk about judicial reform in Mexico, it is going at a snail's pace and that should be the first priority of the government. So I'm gonna try to wrap up here. But in terms of the issue of failed stake which comes up occasionally, I don't think you can call Mexico as a country of failed state. I think that's really off the mark. But there's no question that there are areas in numerous states that are failed areas, failed, that there are failed states in fact. I would say Tamaulipas is a failed state. There are most of the places in that state have no rule of law. In Chihuahua, there are many communities that don't have mayors, they don't have police chiefs, they don't have police forces because they've either been killed or they've fled. The only people who have any sway in those communities are the organized crime groups. So to me, that's the definition of a failed state. When a government cannot provide its citizens with basic protections and safety and recourse, you have a failed state. When workers going to work have to pay the local gangs a fee to not be beat up or kidnapped or killed, that's a failed neighborhood. Massive problems with the media. I mean, Julian mentioned that. Many journalists are being killed. Many journalists are fear for their lives. Many have thought exile. We've got a massive problem. That's another sort of symptom of a failed state, right? When people whose job it is to inform us about what's going on are not allowed for fear of their lives to communicate what they know and what they see. When in Nuevo Laredo, a journalist uses Twitter to communicate something and she's tracked down and brutally killed. You don't have a functioning civil process. You've got a failed state. Dozens of mayors have been executed in Mexico. The gubernatorial candidate in the 2010 elections in Tamaulipas assassinated in broad daylight on a campaign tour, 10 or 11 o'clock in the morning. And the violence in a lot of these communities continues. And one thing that's not reported is that in these same areas, the ancillary crime has just exploded. So we talk about the drug war, but what we don't hear a lot about is the fact that a lot of the violence is taking place between people who aren't cartel members. They're not involved at that level of organized crime. They're local gang members who are killing each other, who go into homes and beat up and torture and rape and main people who don't do what they want them to do, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a lot of extortion going on in these states especially, but in lots of places. There's a lot of kidnappings. And the cartels are also involved in that in terms of changing their business model to try to find other sources of income, but they are not the only problem with this. And so the Mexican government faces a daunting challenge of dealing not only with the drug cartel organized crime dimension of what's going on, but also just ordinary crime in communities where there are no institutions that help protect people. Most of this, I'm just gonna kind of run through this. I think you're probably aware with all of this, but the amount of profits that are being generated by U.S. drug consumption are enormous. The DEA says a couple of years ago was saying 250 cities. You can get drugs in any American city. And so anybody in those cities who's responsible for getting the drugs to their consumer has some link to Mexican cartels. I mean, that's just obvious. A huge problem that's the unmentionable, that's the you can't, if you're a politician, you can't touch this with a 10 foot pole, is the salt weapons ban. Letting that lapse has armed the cartels and is a big part of the scale of the violence. And Juan Medida, I think, is so pathetic, so anemic in relation to the nature of the problem. We spend more than this $1.6 billion a week in Afghanistan. This is an outrage. Every American should be outraged in terms of what's going on in Mexico and should be doing something about it. Julian mentioned the second most important trading partner to the US, they typically say third, but that's because they're counting the amount of Chinese products that we buy. But if you're looking at who's buying American products, Mexico's the second most important. A tremendous amount of economic relationships and family, community, cultural relationships. So this is what makes something national security. This is a national security problem. And it's not getting the attention it deserves. D1, not for you. So there's some evidence that the violence is actually peaked in Mexico. The data for the first six months of 2012, compared to 2011, suggest that homicides, for example, are down eight percent. This is the first time in five or six years. In Tijuana, the violence has dropped 42% since 2008. Remember that Tijuana was the Juarez in 2008. Tijuana was the Nuevo Laredo in 2008. A lot of people were being killed, journalists were being killed, a lot of people being kidnapped. So, and what they did in Tijuana is that they, as they did in Juarez, they fired all the police, the federal police came in and tried to rebuild the police, et cetera. And Juarez, as Julian mentioned, homicides are down almost 60% over last year. And these are the figures for July and August, although as Julian mentioned, we've seen a spike in the first week of September. But still, I mean, these numbers are so, there were weekends in Juarez that 34 people were killed, many, so to have a whole month of 34 people is like people are like astounded, you know? And there's other evidence in Juarez, you know? Tax receipts are up. Real estate prices are beginning to move up and people are buying houses and stuff like that. So there's, for the first time since 2008, there's some evidence that the con and people are going out and spending money and so on. And we can talk about why that might, why that's happened if you care too. But I also want to put this in perspective that while there are areas in Mexico and cities in Mexico that have a tremendous amount of violence and are very scary places to go, if you look at it in comparison to some other Western Hemisphere countries, it's really, Mexico is sort of at the median of something like, well, how many countries are there in Western Hemisphere, like 40 or, and yet there's going to have to, he's got a big job on his hands. First of all, he's got to convince people he's not going back to the pre-evolved. Secondly, there's tremendous pressure on him to put a stop to the violence. And if he's able to do that, he's going to have to do it in a way that doesn't reinforce the perception that a lot of people have that if he does it, it's going to be because he's, the pre-is-made deals with some of the cartels. The U.S. government is going to put tremendous pressure on him as well. The amount of cooperation between U.S. and Mexican law enforcement and intelligence people, you would have never, prior to that on, you would have never had a situation where two CIA people are driving in a armored embassy vehicle with a Mexican military person. This kind of situation, it's really new. So, and I think achieving real judicial reform is going to be a real challenge. I always like to end with this because this is a neighborhood picture I took in what is a very hard scrabble, very beat up neighborhood, lots of dead people, and most of the dead are the ages of these kids. Most of the dead are between 15 and 25. And so, I'd actually just left a cemetery with a friend who visiting the plot of somebody who had died and died of, actually died of natural causes, not narco-related death. But I heard this sound coming from this house down the street, and I stopped and said, what are you guys doing? And they said, we're getting ready for the party tonight. And I said, what, you know, party? And what is, this is 2010. I mean, there's people dying every minute in this city, you know, and they played a couple of tunes and, you know, they were so vibrant and so alive and so they still have a kind of an innocence. And I think this is really what, at the end of the day, is going to save Mexico, you know, these kids. So that's it. Glad to entertain questions, anything that wasn't clear, or anything you don't agree with or are curious about. Mm-hmm. You know, I doubt it, because the thing is that there are lots of people producing drugs in Columbia, Bolivia, Peru, and so I suspect that somebody else will just step up, you know? Yeah. What about the... That, well, and let's not forget that the cartels are not the only problem in the Mexican Congress, you know? I mean, this is a highly dysfunctional, I mean, we think the American scenario is dysfunctional right now. Well, it is, you're right. But this is in a different league, you know? If you look at, you go on YouTube and look at some of these sessions, people are just completely nuts, you know? And so the real question is how much corruption and, you know, a percentage of that corruption is cartel-driven. I mean, certainly the cartels, in terms of judicial reform, for example, have a tremendous investment in the status quo, keeping it the way it is. They don't want a judiciary that works. They don't want a relationship between law enforcement and the courts that's functional and that's transparent, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's not in their interest, you know? But then also, other people who are involved in other kinds of corruption, it isn't in their interest either, so there's a real collusion there. So, you know, I don't have a number, but it's a huge problem, yeah? Well, I think several things. You know, if you ask people in what is, there's one answer they'll give you, and that is that the Sinaloa Cartel won. They've wiped out the what is cartel, they're calling the shots, and anybody who was in their way has mostly been removed. That's the standard party line. That's also a very cynical view. I'm probably a lone voice in this, you know? But here's how I see it, you know? And it's probably sort of the standard, what's that aphorism that success has many mothers or whatever it is. Look, the Mexican federal government sent 12,000 army and federal police into what is in 2009 and 2010. That's about 25% of the total troops that they deployed. They took down a lot of people. There's no question about it. That's one thing. Secondly, in the spring of 2010, the Mexican government launched what they call a tejido social intervention, social fabric intervention. Up until this point, the Mexican government had nothing but strict old school law enforcement come in, pick people up, vans with lots of armed people, breaking down doors, hauling people off. They invested along with help from USAID and Inter-American Bank and the World Bank and so on, they invested a quarter of a billion dollars in social programs, building schools, childcare, building childcare centers, unemployment interventions, addictions interventions, building hospitals. That money was exclusively used to address the social fabric problems, which were huge in one sense. I mean, that's a whole other talk, but they were and in many ways they continue to be. But a percentage of the change, I think, must be related to that unprecedented infusion and efforts to repair some of the social conditions that breed violence, breed desperation, that have kids like those I just showed you with no schools to go to, with nothing to do, but maybe a maquiladora job, which is mostly hiring young women and pays not enough to get you through the month. So that's got, so some kind of law enforcement issue, the impact of this huge, again, unprecedented investment in the social fabric, the U.S. economy. Juarez lost something like 80,000 jobs in a short period of time, because half of the maquiladoras in Juarez build parts for the U.S. auto industry. We know where that industry was in 2008. It was on the verge of bankruptcy. So nobody's buying cars, these maquiladoras are all shutting down, even those people who are making not much money no longer have a job, no longer have a way of putting food on the table. So when the U.S. economy starts getting traction, a lot of that unemployment is reabsorbed. I think that's another variable that people don't really talk about, I think that's a big piece of it too. So I think it's things like that. Well, let me start with a second and let me say, I think it's unconscionable that we allow people to buy combat weapons, automatic assault weapons, and they don't even have to show an ID. We don't track, we're not allowed to track even basic purchases of those kinds of weapons. And it's absolutely documented fact that those are the weapons that are being used in Mexico by the hundreds of thousands. So that's gotta stop, but we don't have the political will to even have a national dialogue about that. People are so terrified of raising some sort of second amendment, something. We had an assault weapons ban, and it wasn't until it lapsed, until it was allowed to lapse that we had this huge explosion in the use of these weapons in Mexico. People, cops as well as criminals in Mexico were used, they had their 38 revolvers and their whatever, but nobody had assault weapons. In Mexico they're called weapons for the exclusive use of the army, because the army is the only force in Mexico that had those kinds of weapons. And so that's huge. In terms of the other question, yeah, that's another conversation that we have a very difficult time with. You know, it's obvious you take the money out of this business, that's what would bring it to a stop, actually that's the only thing that will bring it to a stop. I mean, we've had this war on drugs for decades, and it's done nothing, nothing. So any kid in Austin High School can tell you where to get anything you want. And that's not just true in Austin, that's true anywhere. So it's an utter failure, but we don't seem to have the political will to look it in the eye and say, okay, what are the tough choices here? If we legalize drugs, it's gonna take all the wind out of the sales. It's also gonna produce a lot of addicts. Have you ever seen somebody who's addicted to meth? Somebody who's addicted to crack? We shouldn't kid ourselves. There's no easy solution to this thing, but it would take a tenth of the money that we're spending on this other effort to try to address these issues through rehabilitation centers, drug treatment, education, et cetera, et cetera, prevention programs would cost a lot less. And you're still getting these addicts anyway, but in Mexico, you mean? Coming to the States? Well, I don't have any personal experience with that. I mean, the reports I read say that, yeah, local, in every community, there are local gangs that are running this show for, it's a business relationship that they have with these cartels. And a lot of them are gangs that start in prison and then continue doing what they do, so. Yes, I'm not an expert on that, but what I do know is, look, I'm in Mexico City three weeks ago, Reforma, the leading newspaper in Mexico City, front page story. They have a reporter drive in San Luis Potosí between two points. In that, I don't know, it's like a 50 mile stretch. They count something like 32, sorry about that, 32 little fetch hut places where people have barrels of gasoline that they are selling to put into your car for like 35, 40% less than if you went to a state gas station. So, the PIMEX is so thoroughly saturated with corruption, that's one problem, and it is still nationalized and it's been nationalized since the 30s. It's a huge problem, you know. El Petróleo Nuestro was a rallying call in Mexico in the 30s, you know, and so there's a tremendous amount of pride in the idea that Mexico owns the oil industry, but beneath that, the facade of that nationalism is a real crisis, and they don't announce that they found all of this oil off of, in the Gulf of Mexico, et cetera, but if you've got, this PIMEX system is, and also the Mexican government has been feeding off of PIMEX, using it to underwrite its own expenses, and so it's really a huge problem. If they could fix that, it would do a lot for the Mexican economy. Are you all ready to go see Barak, or you're, you know, well, thank you very much, enjoyed being with you, and thank you for inviting me.