HuffPo | I’ve been reading your book Narcoland, and your
vision of Mexico’s drug war caught my attention -- it’s very different
from what we’re accustomed to reading in the U.S. press. What are the
biggest misconceptions that you see in the media about the drug war?
When
I started to work on that book about Chapo Guzmán back in 2005, I had
the same misconceptions that most of the media and journalists had in
Mexico, the U.S. and the rest of the world. I had swallowed the story
that Chapo Guzmán was just a brilliant criminal -- a man so intelligent
that he was capable of subjecting the governments of Mexico and the
United States to his will. The Mexican government constantly said they
couldn’t catch him because he lived in a cave in a mountain in the
Sierra Sinaloa surrounded by people who protected him.
And those
of us in the media had only concentrated on the legend of Chapo Guzmán,
based on his violence, on the tons of drugs he trafficked, without
asking ourselves, “How does he do it? How can this man be so powerful?"
And the only way of explaining how the Sinaloa cartel and Chapo Guzmán
became so powerful is with the complicity of the government.
It
was that way, reporting on the story of Chapo Guzmán and the power he
was accumulating during the Felipe Calderón administration, that I found
that this so-called drug war was completely false. When I started
investigating, I began receiving information in documents and testimony
in the U.S. courts and interviews I did with drug traffickers that the
Sinaloa cartel enjoyed government protection since the Vicente Fox
administration, and that protection continued through the government of
Felipe Calderón. [editor's note: Former Mexican President Vicente Fox
was in office from 2000 to 2006. Former Mexican President Felipe
Calderón served from 2006 to 2012.]
I starting doing public
information requests in Mexico to see if these things being said in [the
U.S.] courts were true. What I found was that during Felipe Calderón’s
so-called drug war, the cartel that was attacked the least, that had the
fewest arrests, was the Sinaloa cartel. And in government statistics,
throughout the Felipe Calderón administration’s six years, there were
increases in marijuana production, increases in opium production,
increases in amphetamine production, increases in drug consumption in
Mexico. What kind of drug war is this where a cartel gets stronger,
becomes the most powerful cartel in the world, and on the other hand,
drug production reaches historic levels in Mexico?
