Video at the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDNLDXQdlBQ&feature=player_embedded

 Charles Bowden's latest book, Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields has been released.

I've ordered the book and read excerpts. More importantly, I have talked with the man. No one understands what's happening in Juarez like Bowden, and no one writes like he does either.

Don't believe me? Well, hit the look inside button on the cover of the book at Amazon and read a few pages.

As time goes by I continue to reflect on the situation. The more I think about it, the less convinced I become that the Mexican (and US) plan will work. The Zetas and other groups like them are Mexican versions of Al Qaeda: organic, self-organizing, constantly morphing. Cut off one head, ten more rise up.

I doubt few if any of the original members are alive and in charge of anything.

The body of consumers and addicts that have grown in Mexico over the last 20 years are not just going away. Not even when threatened with death. When you have nothing to lose, you have nothing to lose.

Poverty and inequality of wealth distribution and resources will continue to incubate new and more violent members of the resistance.

Mexico has a plan, not unlike the one I suggested.

The plan will fail.

The blood will continue to flow.

Lord have mercy on us.

Last week I took a trip to Mexico with Daniel Pace and Caio Ribiero, the current owners of a film rights option to my book, Contrabando. We visited some of my old haunts and a few survivors from the past. We also got a taste of what’s happening in Mexico.

To begin, the Mexican aduana confiscated two sacks of non-hybrid, non-genetically modified corn seed I wanted to take my Mexican friends at the border. Monsanto can and does flood Mexico with Frankencorn, but I can’t take a sack of good seed into their country. So much for the notion of free trade.

Daniel forgot his passport so we were forced to spend a day in Acuna waiting on a Fed Ex delivery. With a history of problems in Acuna, I didn’t want to be out and about after dark, so we rented rooms in a large upscale hotel. Despite spring break, we were one of perhaps 40 guests in a hotel containing a thousand rooms. Waiters in the restaurant, hotel maids and those that operated nearby businesses that cater to tourists sat around with nothing to do.

The next day we drove to a small town near Musquiz, Coahuila. Caio got out a camera and began filming. As I feared, this activity did not go unnoticed. Shortly after leaving the town, we were pulled over by two young local policemen and questioned. The cops weren’t abusive or threatening in any way; they just wanted to know who we were and what we were doing.

I found out why the cops stopped us later while talking to a Mexican friend in-the-know. Apparently, not too long ago, Chapo Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel allied itself with the Gulf cartel. A few days before we arrived, virtually every jefe of the Zetas was picked up and disappeared if they didn’t flee for their lives. The local cops are in a quandry, trying to figure out who the new owners of the plaza will be.

I think the Zetas, and perhaps also the Juarez cartel have outlived their welcome in Mexico. They’ve strong-armed people and preyed not only on those involved in the drug trade and the smuggling of illegal immigrants, but also legitimate businesses as well, all the way down to the poor woman selling used clothing. They also fed the habits of a rather large body of previously non-existent domestic consumers and addicts.

Mexico’s economy is collapsing as oil production continues its steep decline and as remittances from workers in the United States continue to slow. Income from tourism has crashed as violence scares visitors away. Drugs continue to provide lots of money and therefore, despite the rhetoric, will continue to flow north. But those that choose to sell dope to Mexican citizens are being eliminated. No trial, no jury. A hail of bullets, dead bodies. A knock on the door and a disappearance. What’s happening in Juarez and other areas is government sanctioned social cleansing. That is what your tax money is buying.

I wrestled with myself before writing this piece. I believe this is the plan that “worked” in Colombia and it will probably “work” in Mexico as well. What's happening is immoral as hell.

It is what it is and people should know the truth. The Juarez murders by and large are government sanctioned acts of social cleansing. Small time Mexican drug dealers and addicts are being eliminated. Chapo and his cohorts probably promised not to sell drugs domestically. Once competitors are eliminated, (if this can be done), the violence will be quelled and security will be restored. Chapo, or someone like him, will get the green light to keep American appetites for drugs satiated and the flow of drugs will continue, unabated.

Here's a ten minute interview of Charles Bowden from yesterday's episode of Democracynow.

Chuck pulls no punches.

 Apparently, not everyone in Mexico is suffering in the current economic climate. Carlos Slim, a Mexican national, is now the world's richest man.

For those of you that think things are OK here in the United States because stock markets are soaring and you made a ton of money off of your year-end Wall Street bonus check, I'd submit that this country is beginning to look a whole lot like Mexico: protected zones containing small numbers of fabulously rich; another relatively small segment of society that derives modest income tending to the needs of the rich; masses of desperately poor outside the wire-enclosed zones of privilege with little or no voice or hope for a better life; laws designed to protect the rich; cops protect their property and prey on the poor.

We're not quite there, but that's where we're headed.

I've gotten to the point that all the fucking political parties and organized movements I'm aware of make me sick. So, under current circumstances, I suppose I have become an anarchist.

However, Chris Hedges has written a piece, supposedly from the left, that has nothing to do with the left and everything to do with what I believe.

Calling all rebels.

 Congratulations, Ryan.

Hot damn!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WUPmeYG4Lk&feature=player_embedded

I spent part of the day cutting cabbage for sauerkraut. I'm not real crazy about the canned stuff, but fresh sauerkraut is good stuff. And canned kraut is decent enough in a pinch and a good way to store excess cabbage from the garden.

I cut into a block of Leah's homemade raw milk chedder cheese today. The first couple of blocks we tried didn't taste good. I had blamed the failure on inconsistent curing room temperatures. But I wasn't sure.

We rigged up a freezer with a probe and an external thermostat. The block we cut today wasn't cured the whole time in the freezer, but it came out pretty good nonetheless. It had cured 70 days and was alreay what I would call semi-sharp. I'm a sharp chesse man myself, so it can't do anything but get better with time.

Both Leah and I breathed a sigh of relief. We have about a hundred pounds made and curing. It takes a minimum of sixty days for raw milk cheese to properly cure so if this hadn't worked we would have had a pile of worthless shit into which we had invested plenty of hours of time and effort, she more than I.

Halleluiah. 

A recent glimpse of Juarez, compliments of Chuck Bowden.

High Country News

An excerpt:

If the press reports this sort of thing, it is framed as part of a War on Drugs that must be won. These stories are fables at best. There is no serious War on Drugs. Rather, there is violence, nourished by the money to be made from drugs. And there are U.S. industries whose primary lifeblood comes from fighting a war on drugs. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, has 225,000 employees and a budget of $42 billion, part of which is aimed at making America safe from Mexico and Mexicans. Narcotics officers in the U.S. cost at least $40 billion a year. The world's largest prison industry would collapse without the intake of drug convicts, and, in recent years, of illegal Mexican migrants. And around the republic there are big new federal courthouses rising that would be cobwebbed without the steady flow from drug busts and the Mexican poor coming north.

The border now is a bundle of issues: drugs, terrorists, violence spilling across, illegal aliens, free-trade economists insisting on open borders, humanitarians calling for no more deaths. On the ground, this hardly matters. The giant wall being slowly built across the southern flank of the U.S. hardly matters. In the Altar Valley south of Tucson, the wall was barely in place before gates were cut, the hinges facing the Mexican side.

What is happening is natural. And like some natural things, deadly.

...

It is early January as I write. This weekend, over 40 people were murdered in Juarez, a city once hailed as the poster child of free trade, the city with the lowest unemployment rate in Mexico. The killings -- three of them women -- had little touches. A double amputee was shot in the head and then left on a dirt road wrapped in a blanket. Another man was found with his severed head on his chest -- the tongue, eyes and nose had been removed. A narco-message was left on yellow cardboard and weighted down with two severed arms. Such slaughter usually goes unnoticed in the U.S. press. Should it actually come to the attention of our newspapers, it simply will be written off as part of a cartel war. This is a fiction. Almost all the dead are poor people, not drug-enriched grandees. And though we give Mexico half a billion dollars a year to encourage its army to fight drug merchants, this alleged war has a curious feature: Almost no soldiers ever die. For example, in Juarez, over 4,200 citizens have been slain in two years. In the same period, with 7,000 to 10,000 soldiers in town, the military has suffered three dead.

...

Read the rest at the link.