 Thanks to all of you for coming. My name is Andres Martinez. I'm a vice president here at the New America Foundation and the director of our Schwartz Fellows Program. Before we get started, I wanted to make a few housekeeping notes, which is that this is being webcast. So obviously, it's all on the record. And please be mindful of that when it comes to Q&A time. Wait for the microphone, which will be circulating so people can hear online. And identify yourself when you ask a question. I am very excited to have this conversation this evening about Mexico and about how Mexico is visually represented. I grew up in Mexico, so I have a very parochial interest in the subject. And one of my frustrations is it seems that when it comes to our neighboring country, we often have a hard time, it seems to me, focusing on more than one aspect of Mexico at a time, whether it's, gee, it'd be really great to have California or immigration or NAFTA or, more recently, the drug situation. So it seems that we often end up with a vision, a portrayal of Mexico that is a little bit too limited. And for a long time, I felt that the portrayal of Mexico in the media has been too negative, too obsessed with one single topic. You know, we often don't think about it in these terms, but the United States has been historically, I would say, quite privileged as a major continental power to not have to deploy its military to protect its borders. If you think about it, we've had the advantages of an island power, because we've had Canada to the north and Mexico to the south, and we've been able to project our military prowess elsewhere in the world, because we haven't had to deploy armies along our border, which is fairly unique for land mass continental powers in history. Yes, we can quibble, obviously, about how many border patrol agents to post along the border, but that's just a very different proposition in terms of magnitude. And I think that's sometimes helpful to remind people of in terms of the context and what we're talking about. And mind you, this is a border where plenty of land has changed hands, and yet we've had the benefit of a sensible, peaceful neighbor. It also strikes me that when it comes to the economy, Mexico is more of a success story than we often assume or think of in this country, and especially in terms of what comes across in the media portrayal. Mexico is not a poor country by global standards. It's more of a middle class one. It's sort of one of the poor members of the OECD. A nation with enough resources to be the second largest buyer of American goods. A nation that's often cited for its macroeconomic stability and fiscal prudence in the last 15, 20 years, which has enabled an expansion of the middle class. And these are stories that often get lost in the perspective. Huge problems to be sure, particularly in terms of how the wealth is distributed, which is a fairly familiar problem to plenty of developing nations around the world and even some developed ones, but let's not get into that. You also have a country that outperforms most of the BRIC nations on a wide array of living standard indices, and yet the BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China, get a lot more hype and positive meaning in the United States. So I've been a little bit frustrated about the portrayal of Mexico and American media. Although I would say that starting with the inauguration of the new president, Benignito on December 1st, it felt like a memo went out to mainstream media. Here's your talking points, or maybe it was a memo calling for a bit of a corrective narrative. And on the eve of that, swearing in of President Benignito, the Washington Post, the New York Times, a lot of outlets had more balanced stories about Mexico, at least pieces that took a broader perspective and looked at the economy and other stories, not just the drug war. Some of them actually struck me as almost too positive, but I'm not gonna complain given where we had been. And the economist around that time also had a special section that I feel the Mexican embassy must have ordered a million copies of, because it was so optimistic. And then yesterday I picked up the New York Times, and I should say I tapped in the New York Times because I didn't have the physical copy. And there was Thomas Friedman discovering Mexico in a column that was entitled How Mexico Got Back in the Game, and it's this breathless piece on how Mexico could be the next India or China. And it was spot on and in some ways hitting on all the issues that I've frustrated that have been absent from the coverage. But I did grimace a bit at one line where he writes, it says that it was as if Mexicans decided to no longer be defined by the drug war. And I thought that was a bit amusing because I feel like it's been the media in this country that's been defining them by the drug war, not Mexicans themselves for the past years. But Thomas Friedman went to Mexico and decided that Mexicans had decided to think of themselves differently, perhaps because he was there. So again, but the trick, the challenge in how we think of countries and how they're portrayed, it's one of perspective. The drug war obviously is a hugely important part of the Mexico story. You cannot dismiss 70,000 deaths in the last six years. Just last week, there was an admirable report that came out from Human Rights Watch on a lot of the atrocities that had been committed in the persecution of this struggle against the cartels. And even on the economic front, one of the things that's startling is that you have a 2,000 mile border between two countries that have living standards that are about four or five times different. So income in the US, depending on how you measure, it's about four or five times higher than Mexico. So it's all fine and well to say, well, Mexico by global standards is a middle income country. I mean, it has income that might be 15 or 16 times greater than Afghanistan. But again, you have this somewhat, I was always told as a journalist, never used the term unique, but it's fairly unique to have this shared border between two countries with such disparate living standards, even if one is not dire poor by global standards, that the contrast is what creates a lot of the tension. Not to mention the fact that given our subject this evening, Mexico does find itself between the suppliers of very expensive illicit drugs and the consumers. And that is not a great place to be. So to beat a dead horse, it all comes back to perspective, to how we compose the picture, what we focus in on. I feel like there has been some remedy to the distorted representation of Mexico in recent months. I fear that maybe there's a danger that we might go too far and forget about the drug violence. I just wish that there was a way to have a more balanced portrayal over time of all of the diversity of issues that go into this relationship between the two countries and what's happening on Mexico. So given these challenges of composition and focus, it couldn't be more appropriate to have with us Louie Pellew, who is the first photojournalist to be a Schwartz fellow here at New America. Louie, as many of you already know, is an award-winning documentary photographer whose work has appeared in publications and exhibitions internationally, including the New York Times, Foreign Policy, where some of this work has appeared, Time, The Atlantic, and the BBC. He has been awarded numerous accolades, including awards for pictures of the Year International, White House News Photographers Association, National Magazine Award, Alexia Foundation Documentary Photography Grant, Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting Grant, which we really wanna make a special effort to thank the Pulitzer Center for making a lot of this work possible. That's been very appreciated both by Louie but also by New America. And as I said, Louie's in the second year of the Bernard Schwartz Fellowship Program here in New America. From the first day that I met Louie when he applied for the fellowship, and I remember as we were going through the applications, the question arose, do we consider photographers? Cause usually our fellows are involved in writing books and I looked at his work and I said, well, we do now. I mean, Louie just, he goes deep and Steve Call, our president, who had spent a lot of time obviously reporting in Afghanistan for many years, was just blown away by the depth and the insights of Louie's work in and out of Kandahar for about five years, which was a project he was doing prior to taking this on. He has also gone deep on issues, social and political issues involving mining in Canada and the situation, the prisons in Guantanamo Bay. So I think that's about all the nice things I'm gonna say about you tonight, Louie. Thank you so much for all of you for coming and Louie, stage is yours. All right, good afternoon, everybody. My name's Doug Coleman. I'm the special agent in charge of DEA in Arizona. And thank you all for coming. We're gonna talk today about a investigation that involved the seizure of the cross border tunnel. We went inside and their cut in the floor was this shaft with a ladder that went down about 50 feet. And there was a 240-yard tunnel that went all the way under the border and came up in a business in Mexico. These aren't five guys in the corner selling dime bags of pot. The topic of discussion on the US-Mexico border before the drug war was illegal crossing of Mexicans to work in the United States. The difference now is that those routes that they would sneak across the border on are all controlled by drug cartels. Arizona has the least amount of security on the border. It also has the hardest part to cross. There's a big, massive desert. You also have Tucson and Phoenix right above the border. Once people get into those cities, it's hard to find them. The main injury that Mexican migrants get while crossing the border because they walk huge distances and incredibly high heat is massive blisters on the soles of their feet. I photographed one woman who had just been deported back into a shelter in Nogales, Mexico. And she had walked in the desert for six days. I mean, you can get disoriented, you can get lost in the desert, and they're border patrol everywhere. Sometimes people get overwhelmed by heat and they just say, hey, leave me here and they just wait until hopefully border patrol arrests them. It's my girl. Anyway, I'm just gonna get going. What I wanna start about is I don't want this to be a night like, hey, here's my favorite pictures and this is what I did. I want you to understand the history of where guys like me come from. Like, I don't just show up and think, wow, there's lots of murders down there. Wow, I gotta go cover the news and I come back, thanks. So there's gonna be a lot of graphic pictures. It's just part of the subject. So just be aware as we go, there's gonna be more graphic photographs. So I wanna totally give you a little bit of a narrative of my personal narrative, why I'm interested in Mexico and what I looked at and what many other photographers before me and contemporary colleagues, many of some of them are in the crowd here, have been influenced by. This is a picture by Neching by Francisco Goya. It's called from a series called The Disasters of War. And sorry, with years, because years are important for history, I'm just gonna go to my notes. This is from like 1810, 1820. He made drawings of the atrocities committed by French troops while they were in Spain. Now the difference between this and other artists doing things is he actually made etchings and plates and made multiple prints. So like distribution, it's like, kind of like the early fundamental idea of sharing pictures with people of atrocities. This is from the First World War. Any sort of Commonwealth countries realize the First World War is a big part of our history. So these are dead Canadian soldiers. It's called the Sunken Road. And that the King government actually commissioned war artists to go out and paint scenes of the war to bring back home as, to share visuals. A sort of an equal to this in America would have been some of the photographers like Alexander Gardner from the First World War. Sorry, the Civil War, I mean, US Civil War. This is a picture by Lewis Hine. Many photographers think of him as a photographer in the history of photography. But he's actually more of a social activist, used photography to photograph child labor in the United States. And he's probably, one of the few people actually who used photography to actually make a massive change in government policy here in this country. So I just wanted to show those pictures, just sort of things that I looked at and influenced me and sort of got me interested in being a photographer in especially focusing on social and political issues. I'm just gonna do a quick brief sort of view through some of the early parts of my work just so you understand how everything's connected. I grew up in Canada. Canada is one of the biggest mining centers in the world. All world mine finance mostly goes through the Toronto Stock Exchange. Spent about 12 years as in a copper mine, photographing in mines. And for me, my parents were immigrant workers. So the whole idea of photographing workers was fascinating to me. It's sort of an element we all don't get to talk about enough of, I think. And a lot of this work was influenced by some of the early paintings. And we'll see one by Diego Rivera in images of labor. I'm gonna fast forward through sort of the narrative of my body's work to show how everything's connected. And then around 2006, I'd been working as a staff photographer at the Globe and Mail. And Canada had not gone to war since the Korean War. So it was a big deal that Canada was going to war. And they were in Kandahar. And I went and right away, as a photographer, much of what we report on is right pretty much in front of us where we can't photograph it. I would get articles, while I was kind of on the front lines covering the war. And the article sort of didn't match what I was seeing a lot of times. And that's sometimes a casualty of the economics and the logistics of covering war. But I just felt like as the years went on and as I was seeing the war, I was wondering why the editor would pick this photograph or that photograph. And a lot of photographers go through that every day. But there's just not enough room. There's not enough space. It's what news is. I just felt like over the years, I could tell a lot of different stories with different pictures of the article. I could change your view of a story. So like an Afghan soldier searching a civilian, an image of fear. An Afghan soldier terrified the middle of a battle. A dead insurgent. Why don't we hardly ever see insurgents in photographs? And I just started asking who are the gatekeepers and how are our views of the world, how are policy makers shaped by what pictures they're shown in our news? Or do I show a picture of humanity? This is a injured Afghan soldier singing to some birds. Or maybe it's something a little more abstract. Kandahar surrounded by grape fields. It's the bread basket of Afghanistan. And the whole idea of like, this is pretty much based on a caravaggio painting. That's what I saw in my mind. There's a picture called Sikbakis where he's chewing on these grapes. It just happened. I thought, wow, it's a caravaggio painting. The whole idea of being a little more deeper layer symbolic like sweet and sour bullets and grapes. Fruits of war, fruits of nature kind of thing. Or is it about civilian casualties? And I don't think we see enough pictures of civilian casualties because any war, anyone who's covered war knows war, knows that this is one of the number one things that happens when people go to war. This is a 19-year-old man who got caught between the Taliban putting an ambush on some Afghan soldiers and he was killed in the crossfire. Or do we have sympathetic pictures of soldiers? Is that, how, which of these pictures on a story in Afghanistan after over 10 years of being at this war, which of those pictures, if you're an editor, are you gonna pick? And this kind of slowly develops into what happened when I started covering Mexico. Now let's talk about use of aesthetics in the politics and social issues of aesthetics. If I show a picture of blood in black and white, it's black, that's not real. Or is it? Or am I unethically using color as an aesthetic to get your attention? Is it ethical to use color in this youth, in this way? This is a Medivac helicopter of Kandahar. I'm using color here as an aesthetic. When Susan Maisel has covered the civil war in Nicaragua, she was criticized heavily from the use of very bright colors. She was one of the early sort of combat photographers to start showing war in color. This is an Afghan soldier with henna stained hands, warming his hands in Kandahar. Or do I actually have to show you the horror to tell you about horror? I mean, my whole, I went to art school, so the structurality compositionally of all my pictures are based on paintings. It's like a Jackson Pollock painting. That's what I was thinking when I was taking the photograph and that what's on the table would never get published. So I as, I mean, I photographed the whole scene, but as the editor, this is the photo I filed amongst a few others. Or a photo like this. I mean, this is a wounded Afghan soldier, and it's real, but is it real? It's blue light. Do we see in blue light? The helicopter has just been bombed and an emergency light turns on the back of the helicopter while we're flying to bring this casualty back to hand our airfield. So let's just understand how we, how our images are disseminated. How do we share our pictures? Because this really ties into how we perceive or misperceive what's going on in Mexico or any conflict for that matter. So everybody who knows me knows that I share my pictures cross-platform. Like this is a photo book. This is for my minor's body of work. So your standard two-page book. You know, this is a very old way of looking at pictures. This is an installation of my Marine portraits. They're about 10 feet high. They're transparent, hung in a cathedral in Amsterdam. Same pictures in color as a magazine cover. This picture on the right is a landmine victim. In color, and if it were in focus, they would never publish this photo. Actually, it's rare for even to publish the black and white photo. So I'm using aesthetics, and I'm using a technical technique to make the picture publishable. And this is a traditional exhibition. It wasn't this exhibition that I had this kind of idea I thought, I had this exhibition, people came, they liked it. And a few of my friends are like, hey, I would love, mostly photo editors. Some of them are in this room. They're like, wow, I'd love to see more of these photographs. Like what else do you have? And I said, I thought, wow, you know, I think on the second floor, I asked the curator. I said, I made a bunch of laser copies, and I hung all the photos they didn't put in the edit in. I thought, because this is what we never see, right? We never question these massed heads of these respected magazines. What are you publishing? What are you not publishing? What are the politics of that particular left wing, right? And what do they lean, this news organization? So I hung them up, and it kind of got me thinking about who are these gatekeepers? Why is it that one museum has a curator that says this artist is the person with the opinion, and these 20 don't? Or this magazine's more respected than that magazine. And how do you know who actually went reported on what? So we get to Mexico. This is a Diego Rivera painting. It's a mural actually, and just bear with me as I go through some of the dates here, just so we understand sort of where all the different histories from where I'm coming from. This is the enslavement in the Indian. It's in the Cortez Palace, and I want people to understand that in terms of war and tragedy, Mexico has had its share of it for sure. Million people up to a million killed in the revolution. The enslavement and the colonization by the Spanish. And this is a painting that I looked at very, very long before I did my minors project. It's called The Agitator. These are from 1929, 1930, and it's about the community talking about the condition of workers. And as an Italian immigrant kid, that's what we, all our parents were like, my mom was a seamstress and a factory. My dad was a stone mason. My whole street was people like that. So I really related to this. The other fascinating things that we think about is that if you wanna see an exhibition of Diego Rivera paintings, you'll never see it in the city you're in because these murals are on giant walls and buildings. The whole idea of the internet, like the big television, Mexico's too poor for that. They made big giant murals so that people can go look at them. That was like the big television, said it was the theater of their history. And that's what Diego Rivera and they're like the big three, Orozco and Siqueiros, were mostly commissioned by the government to do. And of course, images of death. Mexico's very famous for it. This artist, Jose Guadalupe Posadas from 1903 is probably made, is one of the famous and made that whole image of death of daily part of Mexican life. Not to be afraid of showing up until today. This is a romantic photo book by Henry Cartier-Bresson. These are all the different ways we can see Mexico, right? This is one of my favorite photographers. I think one of the greatest living artists in Mexico. This is Graziella Torbida, she's still alive. This is from 1991. And this is where we turn to what's personal to me because as a kid, I grew up in an Italian neighborhood and something you never talked about was organized crime. We always knew who was who. It's always like that. 1991, Mexican border. And this is the other vision we have of Mexico. Well, this is valid. Mexico has lots of great vacation places. This is another use of photographs to communicate all these different things about Mexico. This is a police press conference held by the Mexican government with the federal police who've just arrested some narcos. It's a setup news event meant to control image or a message. This is called a narcomanta. This is a commercially produced banner. They happen all the time that the narcos and the cartels hang up. And it's a message to the public about what one, in this case, one cartel's doing to another. I cropped it out because we don't need to see it. But there's all heads and arms at the bottom. And they're commercially published and produced. So everybody's into message control here. I just thought as I did the Mexico project, I thought I have some responsibilities of what I'm gonna cover and not cover and what I'm gonna photograph and how I'm gonna photograph it. This is some of my work in Mexico. I chose not to shoot in color. I just felt like all the dead body pictures are gonna overpower everything else. So I edited them all in black and white and made them black and white. This is a man who is, and you have to understand a lot of these executions, people's hands are bound. So at one point they were somewhere where they were held or kidnapped or tortured. And they're usually shot on the spot. They're held somewhere and then they're dropped somewhere and dumped. It's usually symbolic where they're dumped. This is in Cuyacan, Sinaloa. It's the cradle. I wonder if the batteries are there. There we go. This is, let's understand the deeper sort of social structure of what's going on. If you wanna cross illegally into the United States now, the facilitators who help Mexican migrants cross must pay someone. They always have had to. But now all that money goes to organized crime groups. The Mexican cartels are far more sophisticated. These aren't guys on the corner selling dime bags apart. These are multi-billion dollar complex organizations with connections throughout the world. She's from Chiapas. She spent about six days in the desert of Arizona until she was arrested by US border patrol. And it's simple, some of the policy ideas to understand here is she's coming up here to find work. She's coming up here to improve her life. Chiapas is one of the poor states of Mexico. You understand who the assassins are? Anyone who's burned out on guns or security situations? Those are double taps. That's a professional hitman. That's someone most likely trained by another professional or someone who's in the military who's probably special forces. This is a scene of an assassination of three men in broad daylight in the main street in Cuyacan, Sinaloa. If you wonder why all the Mexican security forces wear masks, they're just trying to hide their identity so the cartels don't find out who they are and go and kill them. These are three men executed and dumped between territory between the virus cartel and the Sinaloa cartel. Now I only have three pictures I'm gonna show tonight or in any of my edits, three pictures of dead bodies and I wanna communicate sort of three different ideas with them. Territory, I don't just publish, that was never a rule I made. No publishing dead bodies because I happened to be there and I got a dead body and it was a murder. I wanted to explain some factual levels to what was going on. Again, bound hands, shot in the head, executed on the spot, on the territory line. So one cartel, I was explaining in this, one cartel fighting for another over territory. I think that this, showing this picture of this man here is probably, if anyone's involved in policy, it's understanding people like this that you're gonna figure out your policy. Luis, when he was two, was taken across the border by his mother to work in Arizona. They snuck over from Juarez until Paso, ended up in Arizona. He is the cannon fodder of this drug war. He is the man with no education, grew up poor, fell into gangs and drugs and no opportunity and every time he got sent to jail, instead of treatment and rehab, it was like training to become a better criminal. And then every time he came out, he was connected to a higher and higher and more powerful criminal organization. These are young girls, just a lot of edit stories on this, that young girls part of a group would dress up as angels and protest against in Juarez, Ciudad Juarez, protest against the police and the government and they go to most of the scenes of murders to do this. This is at the scene of where a 14-year-old was killed in Juarez. If I'm gonna show dead bodies, if I'm gonna show the narcos killing someone, I'm gonna show people are being killed by the government because there's every side, sorry, in every war there's two sides. And I think it's important to understand that if your government's gonna be doing state-sponsored killings for, even for reasons to protect the public, it's important that we see that as well. This is a man believed to be part of Sinaloa Cartel. They were hunting for El Fantasma, I think they just caught actually. This is in Kila, just outside Cuyacan. And I know he was someone not on the government side, heavily armed, like probably 10 weapons in his truck. The truck was on fire out in the field when we arrived. This is a street-level shooting. He's not dead and his face isn't blown off, which means he was shot probably with a handgun, really close up. Apparently it was over, arguing over the street price of drugs. Like, this is what people gotta understand now. Nothing I see is absolute because in different cartels and different groups in different areas, numbers fluctuate. But my understanding is, for me, at least my interpretation, a cartel isn't 10,000 guys that are part of the Zetas. The cartel are, for me, the main, like the board of directors, the main leaders, and cartel is about, that word for me is about controlling the price and flow and the logistics and the overall organization. For my interpretation, for what I feel, is everybody else is kind of like affiliated gangs and organizations and sort of contractors and subcontractors. And so the whole idea is, this probably guy was shot was probably selling drugs less than someone else somewhere else. Cause it's, these organized crime groups are like the police of the underworld. If you get out of line, usually you get killed. If you do something wrong, someone comes to warn you or tells you, no, no, you're not supposed to be doing it like that. Or, hey, this is our territory. If you want to come through here, you pay us to move your drugs to our area. And one of the biggest parts of the drug war what people don't understand in Mexico is a lot of the killing is fighting over the territory of who has the right to control what drug room. This is a man who's a heroin addict. This is in Iñuadas and these are track marks. And all those veins have collapsed in his arms and his legs. There aren't enough drug rehab clinics on the border anymore. I've gone to a lot of them. A lot of people I've interviewed at the government run drug rehab clinics have said that it's quadruples, the number of drug addicts on the border actually. Because they mounted drugs in this. So you put security along the border and this is a whole idea of development in social infrastructure and security. If you're gonna do a bunch of security, it's like Afghanistan is the same thing. You do a bunch of security. If you don't have social infrastructure to follow then you're gonna have problems like this. So this man's been deported. He got hooked on drugs in the United States. He was living illegally and now Mexico's gotta deal with it as well. So the security's against the border so all the drugs get smuggled up and they sit longer on the border before they can get smuggled. There's a lot more drugs ending up in border towns and there's leakage out more into the communities than there used to be. This is in Laredo, just north of Laredo, Texas. This looks like a lot of drugs. This is nothing. This is like only 116 pounds of pot. So every border checkpoint, like you know where you show your passport and they have the booths, along the border on every major interstate there's a second checkpoint where they check you where they got dogs sniffing dogs and there are multiple checkpoints, movable small checkpoints they put in different areas all along the border. It's almost like there's two borders now. If you wanna understand the politics and the power structure of Mexico from this president all the way down to some of the local narcos, you go to the mayor. This is in the mayor's office in the Juarez Valley and if you wanna understand Juarez, you gotta go into the valley. The valley is probably one of the most strategic and important drug trafficking routes outside of the actual city itself of Juarez. There's a, I don't know the exact measurement. It's like 50, 60 miles of interstate that parallels very closely to the actual border which makes it ideal for smuggling to get drugs right onto interstate. Whole idea of drug smuggling is you wanna get on a big highway and get up into a big city. Everywhere else the interstate is very far away from the border. Makes it a lot more difficult to smuggle drugs. Now these are the history of some of the mayors in this area, mostly one party rule for 70 years in some towns. These are the guys that have to deal with the local narcos. These are the guys who are getting killed by some of the local narcos. When I got in there was a picture missing I thought just symbolically it made a lot of sense. So anyway, this is the end of the border on the Pacific West Coast state and that's it for my slideshow. And... So we're just gonna chat for a couple of minutes and then open it up to you all for questions and comments. And then... I was gonna, forgot to mention this. Oh, oh, tell us about it. Sorry, I forgot about this. So, remember the exhibition that I mentioned and I kind of started thinking, hey, you know, like why don't I publish my own newspaper to like make it so I control what's going on. So you can all have a copy of this. There's gonna be a box, take it yourself on the other end. But here's the trick to understand. The instructions are on the back and this was sponsored by New America and on the disc out behind this and I really wanna thank him for helping with this. So there's 16 pictures. You can only see eight at a time. On one side's all dead bodies and drugs. On the other side, it's just daily life in Mexico. The only way you can see the pictures is you gotta take the newspaper apart, the whole idea of dismantling the platform of news. So when you lay them out, you either have eight pictures of one story, no drugs, no violence, or eight pictures of all drugs and violence, completely two unbalanced views of Mexico or mixed up. So you're the editor, curator, censor, whatever you want. You can even take it apart and hang it up as an exhibition if you want. So it's, there you go. So they'll be, we'll take questions and there's a box here, we'll rip it open. Sorry, I forgot about that. Thanks, Louis and congratulations again. Thanks. I don't think, I think we should have more think tank events where we get to see Diego Rivera murals too. Totally. Before we open up, I just had a, I wanted to get your thoughts on, you know, you showed the, the sort of the poster, mantas they call them in Mexico. I think it was Chapo's cartel. Yeah. Sending a message to the people about how he's, his cartel is getting rid of those mugrosos zetas. Those dirties zetas. And you said part of the communique, public communique was also parts, you know, body parts. Yeah. And in terms of like the visualization of violence, I'm curious to get your thoughts on the extent to which the communication itself is fueling some of the violence. You know, there does seem to be just an element of spectacle involved where, I mean, you, you in Mexico, across Mexico, you read these, you know, papers that are obsessed with showing all the dead bodies. And it's a way for the cartels to sort of, you know, it seems like they're in a competitive contest to sort of create more spectacular gore than their competitors. And it's a form of intimidation. It's a form of sending these messages. And what's your thought, I mean, as somebody who's in the business of thinking about where the boundaries are and the impact of these images, I mean, to what extent is the image itself and the desire to visualize violence, kind of be getting more violence in the context of two cartels going at it in a particular region? So I think I, well, I covered 110 murders a month. Like it was just insane. Like I have so many dead body pictures. There's no shortage. In Sinaloa. Sinaloa and Ciudaduadas. So those are the two where I thought, okay, I'm going to cover just violence on these two. And then I started going to other places and I just did not cover the violence. I wanted to cover other elements and build deeper layers, especially on the social issue side. You can show up pretty much right away and you can see it was just an assassination or a hit or sometimes it was like sending a message. The whole idea is that if there's a bunch of pictures, dead bodies all the time, you'd mostly know they're done by the cartel guys. So everybody in town's like, hey, if you mess around, you'll be in that photo next. So it's definitely message spreading. And I mean, the guys who sell the newspapers down, I mean, more dead bodies, more newspapers they sell. That's a known and agreed upon thing. So it's like the mafia, you know. I grew up seeing pictures of mafia hits all the time. I mean, it's funny how I talked to Mexicans and different people in Mexican government, they were talking about how hard they're being hit. I'm like, hey, I'm Italian, man. They made Academy or winning films about how we killed people. I mean, and see it's we like, it was like every time, oh yeah, the Sopranos, you know. And the kind of thing is, is that what really disturbed me, I guess, as I started working this project is I thought, why we've made like heroes like, hey, you know, breaking bad, like, yeah, no, no, don't catch him. He's the drug dealer, don't catch him. And I thought, when did we start cheering for these criminals? These people are murderers, I mean. And I just felt like I saw a film called Gamora, as in Sodom and Gamora. If you wanna see a true film on the Italian mafia, it's maybe three or four years old. That is a film where you don't like anybody by the end. And it's about the Neapolitan mafia, the Camora and Naples. And it's in Italian. And all the actors are real people, actually. Yeah, it's called Gamora with a G. So, but anyway, back to what you're asking is, I just felt like I could go to scenes and I thought, this explains something. This tells me something about what this cartel is almost killing off this one. This one gives an important fact of history, of news, a perspective of who's fighting who. And I just felt like a lot of times the heads and all that sort of stuff, and there's plenty of that, is really just, it's kind of like one tribe trying to scare off the other tribe. And it's also, the Mexican government has all these, they use photography as well, like, we're arresting people, we're arresting people, we've busted more drugs, we're burning more drugs. And I just, I would not go to any of those press conferences, because I just felt like it was a set up photo, and it was not something I needed to communicate to people with the kind of project I was doing. Because it's actually something that's meant to get press to lean to what their message is, which is, no, no, no, the narcos are not in control, we're in control. Narcos are like, no, no, no, no, no, they're not in control. Here's some 10 people hung from the bridge, we're in control. Well, what's also shocking to American sensibilities when you go down there is not just the photo ops and the press conferences that the government puts on to show that they're making progress or checking more cartel heads. Kingpin's off their list of people they've arrested or killed, but the fact that they, in a lot of these cases, go out of their way to humiliate the bodies, and we saw one, I think, where the Peso, the 50 Peso bills are pasted onto them, and that's, you know, is there any, what's the effect of that on the other side? The Peso bills, I think that started, it started with, there was a guy named Beltran. The military killed him and they put all the money on his body, it was like a horrifically infamous photo, and it just started being like, hey, we can be more, we can be, we can scare people more if we show more horrific stuff, and it's just gone to some crazy point, like every day in C-Lo, like there'd be A-1 photos full bleed with dead bodies, like the Daily Newspaper down in some of these towns, and I just thought it's gone completely out of control, and that was one of the goals and the fundamental base of my project was to not be sucked into that, just so that there was a little more, to understanding poverty, social issues, social infrastructure, and those are really important things, so that's something I wanted to focus on. I have about four more questions in mind, but I don't, I'm looking at the clock, I don't want to monopolize the conversation, so I want to open it up to your questions and comments for 15 minutes or so, and then we can have more refreshment, please. And again, wait for the microphone, please, and introduce yourself. Hi, my name is Mary Ann Stein. I'm curious, you say you focused on two places, one of which was Ciudad Juarez, and yet my understanding of many of the killings in Juarez is that they were of young women, often working in the, the keel, whatever they're called, the factories. What is the connection there with the drug war, in your opinion? Oh, okay, first just want to clarify, I worked across the entire border back and forth on both sides and many other places in Mexico. Those two places, when I say Cuyacán and Ciudad Juarez, those are places I just said I'm gonna cover murders in two places, and then everywhere else I'm gonna cover other stuff. What you're talking about, the murdering of women, say you take one years of homicides in Ciudad Juarez, it's probably like 3,000 at its peak. The killing of women, mostly in the drug war, is not completely directly related. I think that it started earlier on before the actual drug war was launched, and it was happening in Juarez, but mostly in the valley in Juarez, and to this day they still have not, they, the Mexican government, the authorities, haven't figured out everything to do with it, or who was doing it, but there was a lot of mutilating going on, but the numbers of men killed, the proportion is in the drug war. It's a massive amount compared to the women, and it's not as related, it's not something I focus on, because it really is just, it's a separate issue from the drug war. Yes, sir. I'll just wait for the microphone. Some are chatting with you from Safe Foundation. I have a concern that this entire drug war in Mexico is funded, fueled by United States. I mean, if the US didn't pay and buy their president almost, and put them into this kind of a approach to it, where all these people would be fighting, this would not happen. So would you like to comment on what kind of, because you mentioned that Mexicans had, Mexicans are Spanish, had killed millions of people before, I mean, that has happened in this country too, when this country went through all that, and in fact this country used to pay people to get Indians' head, you know. I mean, how many heads can you bring? You can become a million, maybe you killed a million, you become a million. In those days, million was a lot of money, nobody got it. I think we need to understand that Mexico is not just selling drugs in the United States. Let's just understand that Mexican organized crime groups have connections to crime groups throughout the world. Andrangata, no one probably never heard that word before, probably the most powerful Italian-based mafia group, well beyond what the Sicilians ever were. Actually, the diminishing of the Sicilians made the Calabrian mafia even bigger. They control, I mean, these are all guesses. No one can actually, it's not like these crime groups say, hey, we shipped this much coke this year. So there's kind of educated guesses. But they control a massive amounts of distribution of drugs through Europe. And I think that, I think the United States would love to control Mexico, but I don't think Mexico will let United States control them, so I think that there's some influence there, but. Money controls everything. Well, I do think that there's a, there's a, the perception in Mexico, of course it's hard, you can't generalize too much, but generally there's been I think a sense that we, a lot of our people, you know, if you talk to people in Mexico, they would say that a lot of their, you know, military cops, you know, mayors in small towns, and a lot of plenty of innocent people who get caught up in this, are dying as a result of activity that's still being driven largely by the U.S. That, and I think a lot of people are seizing on the notion that if only the U.S. legalized drugs, and I think this could, this always runs the risk of becoming sort of an oversimplified narrative, that sort of, it would be a panacea if, you know, but what's been striking to me, looking, you know, tracking public opinion in Mexico over time is the extent to which, you know, very conservative elements of Mexican society have now kind of, just out of the sheer frustration and exasperation with the situation, are also pushing this notion that the U.S. really needs to decide, you know, what it's gonna do, either, you know, stop having this tremendous demand for illegal drugs, or legalize it and regulate it in some way that, because there's a sense that the U.S. has sort of outsourced a lot of the law enforcement related killings to Mexico, and so I don't know if that's exactly where you were getting at, but I would also, I wouldn't divorce, I mean, I think there's still a fair amount of agency on the part of the Mexican government to take this on. I mean, there was a new president in 2006 who had a very black and white view of things, and while some of his other political leaders in Mexico for quite some time had had a sense of, you know, so long as the violence is in out of control, we know that these groups are out there, and if they want to traffic stuff to the U.S., we're not gonna get in between that. President Calderón had more of a sort of sense that this is a long-term threat to the integrity of the Mexican state. We have to take these guys on. The extent to which he was willing to take them on, and the suddenness with which he was willing to take them on, took a lot of people in the American government by surprise, so I think there was plenty of independent agency on the part of the Mexican government there. There was a question here in this third row. Hello, Ashley Garcia, student at Georgetown University. I had a question about your project overall, and I was wondering if you faced any challenges with the untold stories of the drug war, like trying to cover women as victims and victimizers, displaced individuals, or those that have been extraditioned, images of money laundering or, you know, cases where you see businesses that have been in the money laundry business, et cetera. I covered a lot of different stuff. Tonight I kind of focused the theme on how images kind of control how we view the drug war or any sort of war or political issue. Money laundering, I've done a lot of research with lots of some of the world's top sort of experts in organized crime. If you're photographing the money laundering, you're not gonna be alive probably next day if they find you there. I'm not making fun of you. It's just, there's things you can't photograph. I know a lot about money laundering, like smurfing, stuff like that. I mean, I've done a lot of in-depth research. I'll be honest, there's stuff I know, but like a lot of people talk about organized crime, and I've said to some of my colleagues, Montreal is a major hub for smuggling drugs in New York City. New York is the crown jewel of where you wanna sell your drugs. That's the market. I have done the displaced, some of these places are inaccessible, especially seeing a lot of those parts in the mountains. We just started getting followed by people. It's kind of like, okay, now let's leave, so please stop following us. We have to change hotels, you know, this kind of thing. So yeah, I've done a lot of these issues. There's more, you go on to that first multimedia piece I showed, there's a five-part piece there as well, and there's, I know I believe it goes as a five-part piece. If you go to the Pulitzer Center, look up Louis Poulou and the Pulitzer Center, and they list everything that's been published. It's quite extensive, actually. Right there, right by you, like. Hi, this is Juan. I'm Richard Solas with Radio Free Europe. A question about perhaps the different roles of your work. You're obviously a photojournalist, but also an artist. And I think that's, if it's not only through the photos, but through the illusions that you've presented to past works of art. I wonder, and I know that artists have grappled with this, you know, since the beginning, but I wanted to know how you grapple with the issue of finding something aesthetic in images of death or suffering. It's obviously something you encountered with a lot of frequency, especially throughout this trip. So, wondering how you personally deal with that. I probably had to start dealing with this when I was in Kandahar, like 2006. I mean, I've covered my share of murders, covering news, city stuff, and it's not easy. Everybody wants to learn something. Everybody here, I'd say, in this room is interested in what's happening in the world around them. And there have to be people that go out there because we all can't go to Afghanistan or Iraq or wherever, or Chicago, or even Anacostia here. I mean, there's violence in our own city. There's drug dealers, two blocks from my house, I mean. And I know who they are, and they say hi to me. I know who they are. And I think that there need to be people who build those bridges, who go out and sort of our ambassadors are our envoys. I make pictures, some people make films, some people write, and I think that there are some really difficult topics. And I kind of showed this slide show, I get a little history at the beginning, it's almost our duty to understand our history and what's happened before us. It's kind of like going to war, you know? You want to look back at that war's past, like when the Russians were Afghanistan and we went to Afghanistan, and did we learn anything when we saw that happen to them, that kind of thing. And I think that dealing with dead bodies, it's very difficult. One of the first things I cover in Afghanistan was a suicide bombing, like heads and body parts all over the place. It's like, never forget that scene. The first thing I'm thinking of is, okay, everything's safe, this is how I work, everything's safe. Then if it is, I start doing my job. And it basically becomes shoot everything and then what will I be able to publish? If I have time, what can I get? There's a head. My editor's not gonna publish a head in the newspaper. But is it really a critical moment in history where I'm showing a photograph of, say, Eddie Adams with the execution of the Viet Cong, where photos like that at a certain time are important to publish to communicate something. The burning of the American contractors in Fallujah when hanging from the bridge. The execution by the Northern Alliance of the Taliban right after 9-11. These are really important figures at that time to publish and they're hard decisions to make. I try and use respect. I, you know, there's victims, there's family members around screaming over the dead bodies, how close do you get? You gotta be respectful. Sometimes I don't take photographs, sometimes I just walk away. Sometimes it's just not safe. I gotta not stop and not go. So every, I take every situation based on what's going on, the ground conditions on every situation I approach. But then again, I still need to get all of you to pay attention to what's going on somewhere. So I got, I have like a little toolbox and their composition, lighting, all these sorts of things, how I use my lens focus to try and make a picture that's digestible. That's not so shocking that I get over that line where it's more about learning and teaching and sharing so that when you look at that picture, you are engaged in that topic that you don't forget about these people being killed here or this injustice going over there. So if I gotta use, and every picture and every scene, it's a case by case basis. But it is important for us to connect with these things. Whether it's a great poetic style of writing or some great sort of bit of filmmaking or the way I use pictures in blood and as long as it's done respectfully every photo, I can't have one rule for every single scene I do, but that's sort of how I work on that. Jason Reed, Reuters. I was wondering how you got along as a photographer. Did you embed yourself with people to get access? Did you have to obviously switch sides to get that? Otherwise, you're gonna be an outsider. And while I got the mic, I'm gonna ask one more question. Do you think the people in Mexico are like desensitized to these head pictures on the newspaper front pages every day? I mean, I know clearly the historic photographs go back into the 1800s, so it's a culture of death and destruction, but at some point, just seeing dead bodies every day, they're not gonna be afraid anymore of that sort of image. And this is a very good question. I think there was a point, it was December 2011. I'd probably cover about 50, 60 murders every day. There was like 10, two, one, eight, 26. And we were trying, I work with someone local. So I find them, we usually call them a fixer. It's usually a local journalist. Someone who speaks the language knows the area. And they gotta be good drivers, especially if I'm covering spot news like murders, I gotta get there fast before, this is just religious, before they take everything away. And we were driving really fast and there's a woman in front of us blocking the road and she was yelling at the cops at the murder scene, like, hey, look, I'm late. I'm late for cooking dinner for my family. Like, can you hurry up and clear the road off? And it's just like, because it's every day there. 3,000 murders a year. I mean, I think Wada has had between eight or 10,000 over a few year murders and it's a city of one million. So, I mean, after a while, it's kind of like, hey, look, I'm living my life. I have nothing to do with the drug war. I wanna get home. You guys work it out and just let me go about my life. And I think it just becomes sort of natural and a part of it. So, I think there is a desensitization going on, but the fear of what those things represent is very much 100% all the time. People are being killed all the time in some cities and it goes up and down. It is going lower now, actually, the killing. But everybody has, the rules in place. Hey, look, you get out of line. This is what happens to you. Now, working as a photographer, this is where I learned about, say, compare Afghanistan and Mexico working there. In Afghanistan, the trouble comes looking for you no matter where you are. Like, it could come from anywhere all the time. Mexico, you only get the kind of trouble you go looking for. Really, overall, that's the case, unless you're in the wrong place the wrong time, which is rare. I always went to look for stuff because it's the drug war, so I had to be very careful. So, I grew a beard. I changed my appearance. I would rent one hotel on one side of the city, stay in a hotel on the other side of the city, and I would go into that hotel. My driver picked me up in the back and then, maybe I shouldn't be telling all this on the recording, and then drive to another hotel across the city and sleep somewhere else, where I'd pay cash and not register. Or I would stay at my fixture's house. I would stay at someone's house. And I would always plan about five interviews. I'm not a really writer. With, like, the Farming Association or, so that when cartel guys would send people to follow me and say, who is this guy? They would say, oh, he's just a stupid journalist. You know, he's interviewing the Farming Association president, so they knew I was a journalist. I was not, because this is what they're wondering. Is he CIA, it's crazy this country, how many agencies? He's not CEIA, he's not DEA, he's not ATF, he's not ICE, and he's not FBI, or he's not something else. So, right away, it's like, he's just a journalist. Okay, what's your reporting on? Ah, he's just covering dead bodies, and he's not doing investigative reporting. He's innocent. As long as I don't photograph certain things. But, you know, murder scenes, like in Juarez, you have to figure out things, right? Like, everybody talks about embedding Afghanistan, like, oh, you're under control? Look, anyone who works in this city understands message control by the government. You don't have to get an embed in Iraq or Afghanistan to try and have the government control the way you're taking pictures. It happens at the White House all the time. Thank God that there are very skilled people who always look at the rules and find a way around it, and that's what I do too. I would light a cigarette at the police tape and melt the police tape at the murder scene, and walk forward. The cop would turn around and say, what are you doing? I'm like, he goes, oh, the tape fell down. I said, what, I don't see. I said, well, let me get some pictures while I'm here. So, it's about finding the holes in the system, and that is what good journalists always do, and I learned that from my colleagues, is there's, no matter how much of a wall the government puts up, there's always a crack somewhere you can find a hole somewhere. There's always a gaffe, or there's a look the president or someone else makes, and we get the picture, and that was my job in Mexico. And I would hang out with lots of local journalists. So, safety in numbers. We go out somewhere in the field, we go three pickup trucks full of photographers. So, I remember once, this is a funny story, we're driving in a scene of law, we're going to, we can't find this murder we're looking for, these bodies. We're driving around three trucks of guys, and we got cameras, and I guess from a distance, we look like a group of armed men. So, we're driving, and we got sunglasses on, the cigarettes, and we're driving in the back of this pickup truck, and this poor Doritos pickup truck guy is looking terrified, and he turns off the highway and is driving for his life from us through the field to get away from us, thinking we were narcos. You are a little scared. Yeah, we had beards and stuff, but anyway. It was kind of a humorous moment, but do you have your, the paper there? Oh yeah, yeah. I want to brag about one photo you took, which was not on the, and it's related to the question. Let me see if I can find it. Which one is it of? The, who else has one question, but while I look for this. How about in the middle of there? Sorry, just to move it around. The witness is on the street. Hi, I'm Connor Matthews with the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, and I was just asking, you saw a lot of image control with the police and the drug trafficking, but did you see a lot of image control with other sectors of Mexican society? Yeah, but media, the Mexican government, and what would be, we would just, let's just call them the narcos, those three. And amongst those three, I mean, it's not so much about image control, but it's the use of images to control something. So yeah, you can call it image control, but it's more about controlling your message. So if I'm in the government, security's fine. We got everything, we're arresting them, we're busting the drugs, and the narco's like, hey man, we're in control, not them, and that cartel, they're not in control either, we're in control in this town. And if it's the media, it's like, hey, in some cases, some newspapers are like, hey, more bodies you put in there, more pictures, more newspapers we sell. Some are like, we're putting too many bodies, we're giving into the narcos, no more. Or one newspaper gets a phone call, hey buddy, you publish any more new pictures of that, you're dead, or hey, you're gonna publish these pictures tonight, and if you don't, you're gonna get two more grenades in, and yes, grenades have been thrown, jaw journalists have been killed there, and some newspapers are like, we no longer cover the drug work because they've killed two more of our journalists. So it is about sort of controlling what, it's more about controlling us. That's what it really is all about. So it doesn't just happen in Mexico, it happens right, this is the capital of message control, the United States, like right here, you know, and it's our job to understand and look at as many sources, Foxy, and all of them, and sort of intelligently form our own opinions, and that's what really I wanted this to all be about, about forming your own opinion, and using sort of Mexico as a platform for that. So Louis has such a vast body of work from this year long reporting that one of my favorite pictures did not make it into this project, but it made it into some of the other publishing, and it's kind of related to the one of the girl angels, and it relates back to your question about the impact on society and how desensitized people get, and one of the things I like about the concept of this paper, and also the name, Mida Mexico, which is sort of a playful, it could mean look at Mexico or Mexico looks, and the sort of act of witnessing, and one picture that I thought was very powerful that I think was in the FP package and elsewhere, was just, it was a shot of people lining up along a street, and it looks like it's in front of a school and kids have come out, but there's street vendors, and it's just a wonderful tableau of sort of street life in Mexico, which for those of you who've been there, it's bustling, it's vibrant, and it's, but there are all these people who are clearly just fixated on looking at one scene, and what's powerful, really powerful about that shot is we have no idea what they're looking at until Louis, as the interlocutor, kind of tells us that it's a shooting, but you don't see the violence, you just see a lot of people's reaction to it, and it just leaves you with this question of what is the impact of that on individuals, on kids, on a society of witnessing all that violence over time, and particularly when these cartels and the government are concerned that as people become desensitized, they have to ratchet up the spectacle of it, and I think that question has framed some of this work in the way that we can sort of play on, do you wanna be witness to the violence, or do you wanna step back and be witness to the society that is afflicted by it and is witnessing it and be sort of, have a more indirect take on it? So congratulations again on this work, and thank you for this evening. Please stick around and have another beverage, and let's continue the conversation. Thank you. Good job. Thanks, man.