bs2Jun 5, 2024
> Why are we talking about a war on drugs? Why are we giving a half-a-billion dollars a year for this thing, when this war has been going on forty years now? Every drug is more available in this country than it was forty years ago. Every drug has higher quality. Every drug is cheaper. This is a war that benefits prison guards, federal agents, the drug cartels.
https://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/14/charles_bowden_murder_city_ciudad_jurez
#CharlesBowden #DrugWar #MexicoPresident in 2010
#CiudadJuarez
Charles Bowden on “Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields”

First Lady Michelle Obama arrived in Mexico City Tuesday night after making a stop in Haiti on her first official trip abroad without the president. Her trip to Mexico comes as a new report by the Mexican government has found the death toll from the so-called drug war is much higher than previously thought. Nearly 23,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in Mexico since a US-backed military crackdown on cartels began more than three years ago. The report said 2009 was the deadliest year in the drug war, with over 9,600 people killed. The death toll is on track to be even higher in 2010. We speak to reporter Charles Bowden, author of Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields. [includes rush transcript]

Democracy Now!
Show threadbs2Jun 5, 2024
> What we’ve created, with a foreign policy, meaning our free trade treaty, is, one, slave factories all over the country, where nobody can live on the wages, two generations at least of feral kids on the street. Fifty percent of the kids you call high school kids in #Juárez neither go to school nor have jobs. They did a recent university study there, and they found out 40 percent of the kids in #Chihuahua , young males, wanted to become #sicarios , professional killers.
#CharlesBowden
Show threadbs2Jun 5, 2024

> Twenty-five percent of the houses have been abandoned in a city of poverty where housing’s short. They’ve got a bumper crop there now: 10,000 new orphans from the slaughter. Forty percent of the businesses have closed. Thirty to sixty thousand people have fled to the United States. You know, this is a city dying. And I must say, this was the poster child for NAFTA.

#FreeTrade #NAFTA #PosterChildNAFTA #CiudadJuárez

Show threadbs2Jun 5, 2024
> ... in a mental institution run by a friend of mine, #PastorGalvan, and slowly recovered. And I used her as an example of what the city does to people. Actually, the mental institution is full of former lap dancers and everything else who have just lost their minds.
> This is a city that destroys people. This is a city where Mexico used to tout it as having the lowest unemployment in Mexico. This is a city with 400 foreign factories, mainly US.
#FreeTradeSuccess #NAFTAsBeautyQueen
Show threadbs2
> These recent consulate killings that caused Secretary Clinton and others to fly to Mexico City happened in broad daylight on a Saturday afternoon in front of City Hall in a city with 11,000 federal police and army checkpoints everywhere. A convoy of cars, you know, follows these people and executes them, and nobody sees anything.
#ClintonInMexico #ConsulateKillings #MexicoCityPolice #ElPaso #CharlesBowden
Jun 5, 2024 at 6:40amWeb
Show threadbs2Jun 5, 2024
> ... 40 percent of the Mexican budget, for example, comes from their oilfields. Their oilfields are dying... [2010] president says they’ll be gone in nine years. The second.. money in Mexico, is remittances from illegal Mexicans working here who send back $20-$25 billion a year. Drugs earns the country $30 to $50 billion a year. For Mexico to seriously say “We’re going to wipe out the drug industry” would be saying “We’re going to commit suicide.” The country has become dependent on it.