Monday, August 16, 2010

Find A Senegal Parrot For Sale

The dark side of the left. Interview with José Woldenberg


The dark side of the left.

Interview with José Woldenberg *

Ariel Ruiz Mondragón

In the four most recent decades the Mexican left has experienced significant growth that has made outstanding player Mexican politics, which has held important positions of power. Is a key period in which he has spent virtually the catacombs of the guerrilla struggle almost to the Presidency of the Republic through his intense activity in the independent unions, social organizations and party complex construction.

The development of the Mexican left has had many downs. In the mentioned period also took actions, policies and behaviors more than questionable, which, paradoxically and ironically, there have rarely gone against his own achievements: for example, the defense of privilege, political intransigence, the revolutionary and the atavism attack on the electoral institutions.

on the follies of political sinister José Woldenberg published late last year Disenchantment (Mexico, Cal y Arena), a fiction in which, through a character named Manuel passes critical review of four dark moments of the Mexican left in the period mentioned, in addition to a review of works in which seven writers expressed disappointment communism.

About this book we had a chat with the author, which addressed matters such as literature and memory, the claim of reformism, the bright moments on the left, ethics and politics, and the need for democratic left , among others. Woldenberg

holds a Masters in Latin American Studies at UNAM, which institution is a professor in the Faculty of Political Science and Social. Former Board Chairman of the Federal Electoral Institute, director of Nexos and the Institute for the Study of Democratic Transition. He has worked in publications such as Unomásuno , La Jornada, Point, and currently Etcetera Reform. He has written at least a dozen books and co-author and coordinator of many others.

Ariel Ruiz (AR): Why publish a book like disenchantment, especially taking into account historical memories and historical books such as left memory or history documentary SPAUNAM ? José

Woldenberg (JW): For several reasons. First, there is an attempt to recover his memory, and in this sense is related to left Memory and the Documentary History of SPAUNAM . But unlike those texts, this is a more critical view. Those, in one way or another, were very festive texts largely apologetic, of which I have no regrets because they offer a face of those events that are worth retaining.

But now what interested me was to show the other side and take a critical approach to some of the episodes of the Mexican left in the past 35 years, I think, from my subjectivity, marked for evil.

In that sense, creating a fictional character who goes through a series of events that really happened was a formula that seemed to me appropriate to make that criticism.

AR: How has your transition from the political science literature in this book?

JW: I call loaded test story. I believe that the creation of this character to me allowed me to see the events from the outside, and gave me freedoms that perhaps from the trial or from the autobiography could not deploy. For example, the character is, perhaps, more empathetic and more blunt than I am, but I wanted to highlight the issues inks I'm concerned and I discouraged, as are told in this story.

was then that why I chose this fiction actually charged, but conscious, and so begins the book, which says a caption I use Doris Lessing, who assumes the inability to write the only kind of novel interests you: a book equipped with a moral or intellectual passion so strong that it can create an order, a new way of seeing life. Assuming that disability

, anyway I started writing this book.

AR: There is also the possibility that you stated in the appointment of Alain Finkielkraut ago: "The past must be taken as one's sleeve who is drowning. "

JW: Yes. Even that was a possible name for the book: "As someone who is drowning." This, taken from the phrase I take from Jankélévitch Finkielkraut, which says that the past is to grab the sleeve as someone who is drowning. Because I think a very relevant consideration: the past is doomed to disappear, the inertia of the past makes things evaporate, dilute. Then it takes an effort to try to keep it alive, which is to recover memory.

already know: the memory is always subjective and individual, and I do not doubt for a moment that those who lived, for example, the same episodes of trade unionism, the unification process on the left, the Zapatista uprising and the 2006 post-election conflict, have other views and other versions, surely legitimate. But I'm here I want to recreate this.

AR: One of the book is the mnemonic exercise, and the other is composed of seven essays on writers who were very critical of communism. Why did those seven? There would be many more we could add.

JW: Of course that could increase the list, but what have these seven writers? One, they are very good writers, from my very particular point of view. Two, six of them were fascinated, in a moment, by the Soviet experiment, they placed their hopes in him and that, ultimately, were deeply disappointed.

Third, because they are of seven different nationalities; room because the reasons for disappointment are different in each of them, and fifth, which is perhaps the most basic, it all stopped, whether in novels or testimony, a reflection about what had happened. For example, in the case of Arthur Koestler, he became a novel, a fiction, but in the case of Howard Fast and André Gide they left their testimonies.

What I think gives the final set of reflections of the seven are the different veins of disenchantment. For example, Fast became disenchanted after XX Congreso del Partido Comunista de la Unión Soviética, cuando se conoció el llamado “Informe secreto” de Jrúschov, y cuando se pusieron sobre la mesa todas las aberraciones de Stalin.

En el caso de Gide, él desde antes había viajado a la Unión Soviética. Vio que aquello en materia cultural era un páramo en el que se estaba tratando de homogeneizar lo que debe ser diverso, y dijo: “Esto está mal.” Koestler se desencantó por los juicios de Moscú, y Victor Serge lo hizo por la burocratización y la insensibilidad; George Orwell, quien a final de cuentas fue el único que no fue comunista, se decepcionó por la matriz misma del sistema que se estaba construyendo, a powerful state unable to respect the freedoms of individuals, and then created the dystopia that is 1984.

Meanwhile, Ignazio Silone, who very early, as delegate to the International Italian Communist Party, saw ways to "discuss", and said: "This is not," not to be uncritically aligned to a position and not being asked to condemn someone without knowing who the document is being brought to trial. Not that.

Each is very expressive, everyone has strong reasons, but the seven together make the mural more complex, more colorful and more eloquent.

AR: But the other writer you try, José Revueltas, was very radical, because not only lashed out at the Communists, but came close to condemning the human condition.

JW: That's what I read in terrestrial Days . I think in the case of Revueltas his book is terrible in the best sense of the word, ie, makes his characters very introspective, and I have the impression that almost reaches the conclusion that mankind is unreformable. It says in the text, do not say in its political life, because the appeal of Riots in political life is that while writing this book, as militants continued. In 1949, when he wrote, have not even broke with the party, I say that the book itself, but its membership no. And when he wrote errors then yes, he was a convinced anti-Stalinist.

is a phenomenon that I find very interesting. I think the literature of Revueltas was ahead of his own political texts, and I think, at least until now, has no expiration date, and perhaps some of his political texts themselves.

AR: I think your book is a vindication of the reform that goes from the creation of a university union to defend electoral institutions. Why too much of the left has been so bad given the reformist path? In the book are few episodes ranging from radical left-wing guerrillas that it murdered even reformist leaders of the left, to knock for democracy.

JW: I think you overshoot, that is perhaps one of the strong threads of the book. But I would go even further, because there is a huge paradox: most of the Mexican left, which is in the parties, trade unions, agricultural organizations, which has publications, etc., is de facto reform. However, there is a kind of bad conscience: he wants to be thought of as revolutionary. In the case of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), I think in his own name is that breath.

However, I would also say this: the mechanics of political change and what the Left has succeeded in recent years, has done, from my point of view, the revolutionary currents that go down, and that want to or not, reformism has its way, often without recognizing their own name.

What I mean by reformism? A policy of gradual changes that are in the sense that you think right, and that can be deployed by a participatory and peaceful way, and today in Mexico even institutional.

So, I think the great challenge of the Mexican left to grow further is to assume that democracy is a way, but is also an end in itself. He says the character in the book, and I think that's one of the things that are not yet solved, since there are still a bad conscience that each time it appears the ability to skip stages of the revolutionary path, again activate a set of expectations, the truth, I do not think that can lead to nothing.

That was the case of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. The criticism made, rather than to the EZLN, is the inability of a constellation of diverse leftist groups to clearly condemn the use of arms, especially at a time -1994 - where there was a transition process up, when things were changing in a democratizing effect.

Then, there is a difficulty to commit themselves to a peaceful folds institutional and social change.

AR: The book is very critical, and it identifies four moments of the Mexican left negative: the conservatism of the Student Council (EWC) in 1986-87, the intransigence of the PRD in the early 90's, the EZLN violence and lies about the 2006 elections. But what has illuminated aspects?

JW: A lot. Glad you mentioned. The book is called his name, largely because I want to address the dark side of the left, from my perspective, of course, "and he made no light, but there are many that really happened. For example, I think the process of unification of the left, the process, not the moment to be seen as a happy and very important process.

Two, the left's commitment to the electoral process is a great thing and is a great political capital. The 1988 elections were a time of exceptional growth of the Mexican left, as well as the 2006. Also the political and electoral reforms of 1994 and 1996, which attended the PRD, were policy and institutional redesign that enabled what we see today: electoral competition as never before.

The Triumphs Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, and then for Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Marcelo Ebrard at the nation's capital, as well as victory in Zacatecas Amalia García are bright moments. The decriminalization of abortion see it very favorably.

there are plenty of bright moments, but this is a story that is neither balanced nor wants to be, because when you go that route, then what you want to highlight and focus on the losing end.

I wanted to do consciously is a story of a person to be disenchanted by a series of attitudes, and on-hopefully-I would like to have a debate, a discussion and a correction.

why the text is about the dark side of things, which does not deny that in reality there are many adventurous moments. Moreover, I have forgotten many.

AR: In the early seventies, as shown in the book, one of the major topics on the left, and I think the transition has been lost somehow, it was social inequality. It seems it was more successful the political transition, but what happened to social inequality?

JW: You look good: there was a democratic transition that made us move from a hegemonic party system to a balanced, non-competitive election processes competitor, a monochrome world of representation to a plural of a presidency to a limited overwhelmed; of Congress subject to a lively and plural. It was a major political change.

But that apparently does not change, and that from Humboldt, is that this country is absolutely deformed, crossed by an inequality, sometimes as ECLA itself says, prevents thinking about building a "we" inclusive, Both Mexico because Mexico is marked by inequality, the sense of belonging to a national community becomes involved.

I think that's the fundamental problem of Mexico, and maybe you're sharpening. I also believe that this problem is where the left can have their roots and better growth.

But I insist it is not just opt \u200b\u200bfor equity, which is what must be the unique flag on the left, but combined with the other great achievement of civilization that are individual freedoms.

In this conjunction that, I think, has tried and succeeded in making social democracy in the world can be a way for the development of a strong left and able to reverse the structural failure of Mexican society is its profound inequality.

This topic is in the genetic code on the left. But I say should be of concern even to the right, because one can not be betting only the deployment of freedom in a world of great inequalities as the Mexican. I Said No: The United Nations Programme for Development has warned that much of the disenchantment with democracy in Latin America has to do with poverty and inequality, because people perceive that their material conditions of life in democracy and improve perception then is: "Beautiful Democracy!".

Then, of course, is one of the main concerns of the left, but it should be all political. There is a minor issue.

AR: Another big issue that crosses the book is the discussion of political ethics. Are there any ethical specific policy to the left?

JW: I do not know if I can have an ethic of left and another right. What I do believe, unlike the cynical and pragmatic, is that politics and ethics should be connecting bridges.

There is a pragmatic policy that is perhaps hegemonic, which can be dispensed without difficulty ethics. It is the policy that would, in short, that the end justifies the means.

AR: And as you said in the book, the media are shaping the ends.

JW: The media are often more important than ends, because they are modeling the actor: the way I act, speak, say and unfold, I will be doing to me. Then, the media are not incidental, but rather the opposite: they tend to be more important than ends.

is no coincidence that the armed revolutions usually end up in moments of terror. Because who has pursued the formula feels legitimate political activity, and may extend for a further period.

I return to the idea of \u200b\u200bethics and politics. The character, of course, it repels the amoral pragmatism, but also the other extreme, in which ethics is not in charge of policy requirements, which would as a matter enclosed in itself, so the quotes - at least two teacher-Adolfo Sánchez Vazquez, who is the one who has thought of, from left, the links between politics and ethics in a way, I think, more sophisticated.

AR: Do not you think that, on many occasions, the left has seemed to threaten its gains?

JW: Yes, the left has been beneficially incentive and political change. That is, democratizing change in Mexico would not be understood without the contribution of the Mexican left, but it has also been beneficially. That is, given that there are democratic ways of choosing the rulers, today the PRD has five governors and the mayor of Mexico City. So, while it has been a driver of change, has been receiving him.

However, at certain moments it seems that the Left threatens the very achievements that have served to unfold and grow. This is the case of conduct after the 2006 elections.

Before the 2009 elections could speculate how much it would affect the post-electoral behavior, 2006, but what happened in them, which, by adding the votes of the PRD on one side and the alliance Convergence-PT on the other are something like half of those who had received the Coalition for the Good of All, should be a warning to rectify, I think.

But the hardest thing in politics is correct, because the dynamics of the PRD is very easy to accuse moderate currents the most radical of the results, and also very easy to turn, radicals accuse the moderates of them. Stronger than the reality is the lens through which it is viewed.

Then, reality can change, but if you continue with the same lens, will continue to draw the same conclusions. That is the most powerful issue for any political organization.

AR: At the beginning of the book the main character says: "We are the generation of disenchantment. We made lots of noise and our nuts are rotten. "

JW: Well, the character can be much more emphatic what I am. I think Manuel's vision is high contrast, and that is what I think may be the intention. Maybe in my view there are many more gray, but the idea was to put the character through a series of issues that I believe deserve to be discussed.

AR: For writers who are discussed in the book, after the disillusionment with communism was different positions, from those who continued to insist on social change to that observed in a pessimistic way to the human condition. "You are still left?

JW: I think this is a plea from the democratic left positions to the left. That is, I still believe that a democratic left in Mexico is not only possible but necessary, because it is very difficult from other political ideologies can be put in the center issues of inequality. So I say a democratic left, which is able to combine the drive for equality with the drive for freedom.

* A slightly shorter version of this interview appeared in Millennium weekly, no. 664, July 19, 2010. Reproduced with permission of the director.

Monday, August 2, 2010

Condolescences Sentences

"The press does not come to warm the place." Interview with Diego Enrique Osorno


"The press does not come to warm the place." Interview
Diego Enrique Osorno with


by Ariel Ruiz Mondragón

Sinaloa is the entity in the country that has had a reputation for being the birthplace of major drug lords and a stronghold of drug cultivation. Indeed, there can be traced, at least since the twenties of last century, a budding trade in psychotropic substances in the presence of Chinese immigrants, marketing that grew and that was multiplied with the prohibition of marijuana in the States in 1937.

now on illicit drug trafficking in the state grew, the policy has had different uses over time: from the strengthening of the opposition Agrarian policy of Lazaro Cardenas, to be used as an excuse to repress opposition movements and hide social problems.

A good account of this journey is in the book The Sinaloa cartel. A political history of drug use (Mexico, Grijalbo, 2009), in which, through the review and interview, Diego Enrique Osorno gives a good account of the changes experienced by the Sinaloa drug and use it to combat have given governments to suppress dissent.

"I'm the kind of date who still think that journalism must take social responsibility," says Osorno. He adds: "I see this business as a platform to become rich or famous, but as a tool to achieve a society to know each other, ask questions, debate and questioning. I try to do my job taking into account the spirit of humanism. "

With Osorno held a virtual conversation that addressed issues such as the contributions of his book, the risks of research, demonstrations and cultural changes of drug-trafficking and warrior bet Felipe Calderón. Also the benefits it has brought the drug, the practice of journalism and the press treatment given the subject. Osorno

studied journalism at the University Autónoma de Nuevo León, and has worked in various media, as Replicante , Links , Leopard and Letras Libres. Also a regular contributor to Millennium weekly.

Ariel Ruiz (AR): Why write and publish a book like yours? Diego Enrique Osorno

(DEO): In 2006, as a reporter, I had to give coverage to events that occurred at the two presidential campaigns, like the Pasta de Conchos tragedy, the miners' strike in Lazaro Cardenas (killing two workers during a police assault) and Nacozari and Cananea, as well as the operation of repression in San Salvador Atenco and Oaxaca rebellion. During a year of my job I lived directly important social events that occurred while the country was turned into a troubled electoral process.

next year, March 1, 2007, was aboard an Army armored truck with a bulletproof vest, walking paths Tierra Caliente, Michoacán, in search of drug traffickers. The country of that March 2007 was the same as 2006, but it was a radically different.

How had a clear scenario of social and political crisis in which an issue of security was predominant, I wondered while made that trip in the military convoy. The book The Sinaloa Cartel, published by Grijalbo in 2009, is the answer I could give to that question. Along with my work in the newspaper Milenio, which allows me to travel to different parts of the country during those two years I ask the same question to wealthy entrepreneurs such as Mauricio Fernandez Garza, farmers up in arms as the commander Ramiro ERPI (RIP), in consultation with specialists and Luis Astorga and Froylan Enciso and reviewing documents from the National Archives. I decided to publish the material he had gathered, after getting reports of Miguel Felix Gallardo, a key drug trafficker in the process Creation of drug cartels, who in his writings made in Almoloya, though not recounted in great detail the mechanisms of the drug world, it gave some important signs of a world where popular mythology abounds in short supply direct versions of itself as the Gallardo.

wrote the book because I felt I had something new to say on the subject, was published because it was interested in my editor Andres Ramirez, who knows that journalism is a matter of chance. And at this point is very obvious that the country we are quite hungry for information about what is happening to us. I think my book is a rare book on the subject of narco. No blood drained him and tried of it not being a big narcocorrido a police report nor implausible. I wanted to look at the world of narco with surprise, as I would to see the world of hunting in the country, if I were asked to do a story on this topic.

AR: You've devoted a good part of your journalistic effort against drug trafficking. Have you been threatened?, Have you felt in danger?

OED: The truth is I have not spent a lot of my work as a reporter to the issue of drug trafficking. In 2002 I wrote some articles about the issue that caused controversy in Nuevo Leon, but it was not until 2007 that I became involved with greater commitment.

I have received some threats but fortunately none seriously. Yes I have been in dangerous situations many times, especially in the process of gathering information in areas where the state has a weak presence and where organized crime queen, but so far, except for a couple of momentary retention, no is not nothing to regret too. Hopefully keep that hot streak, although the conditions are reducing the country's current good fortune of the citizens in general.

AR: At the beginning of the book points to a narco-poor, but there is also the rich, "of which little is said," but it also has its folklore. What is that culture and how it manifests?, what features it has in common with the poor?

OED: The book begins with a Sinaloa Cartel sent peacefully walking the aisles of one of the buildings where the richest men in Nuevo Leon, and perhaps the country, have their offices. Also tells how a businessman Fernando Canales level party lives in one of the kingpins of the Sinaloa group. In this kind of thing I refer when I make such a reference.

The narco of the rich is the one surrounding the whole apparatus that allows the drug business can wash their illicit profits in the legal financial system without much trouble. Not only She speaks little, but that efforts to combat narco seem obvious that reality and we see very little impetus to combat official money laundering, which is undoubtedly the structural problem of drug trafficking. Where

increasing number of entrepreneurs narco hit men arrested that believe that there is a real will to solve the problem that it is drug trafficking in Mexico.

AR: Already on the Sinaloa cartel, is there one, or are several? I point this out because if it is true that you rescue story that Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo came to dominate the drug trade even at the national level, and says that after being taken prisoner handed the territory between several characters, which they soon fall into disputes among themselves and divide, it seems that the unit has not been required to speak of a single cartel. Even as it is told in the book, it was recently the breaking and the war between the "Chapo" Guzman and "Mayo" Zambada, on the one hand, and the Beltran Leyva, on the other. Thus, in this case, has been, is, a single organization that can be called "cartel" (as far as I know, word originally foisted by the FBI and CIA to Colombian narcos groups) or is named as this group of bosses, even facing each other, whose origin is Sinaloa?

OED: In the book explain the origin of the word "cartel" citing experts from the likes of Luis Astorga and Froylan Enciso, who, among others, refuse to use it, because they believe does not correctly describe what it names. Also clarified that the DEA (not the FBI or the CIA) was the one who began using it but also, undeniably, the criminal groups themselves have returned now to the point that you see today in convoys Tamaulipas truck with the logo "Gulf Cartel" and also see characters talking near Sinaloa drug cartel of Sinaloa. As often happens, a technical vocabulary word officially became popularly rooted. This is the case of the word cartel, which today serves to name a coalition of criminal groups that have something in common, be it a name (the Arellano Felix Cartel, the Beltran Leyva cartel) or a main area of operation (Cartel de Sinaloa, Juárez).

Just think that after reading the book a reader can have elements to know that the Sinaloa cartel, rather than a hierarchical organization, blended and well defined, it is rather a circumstantial coalition of interests in the world Sinaloa drug .

AR: In the book you some statements that are just outlined. For example, when he died the "Lion of the Sierra, Pedro Aviles, one of the great lords of Sinaloa, said that the agricultural mafia began to transform their style and wealth," taking a huge cultural leap. " What was it, and the consequences?

DEO: After the death of the "Lion of the Sierra", who traded mainly marijuana, appears as a major figure Miguel Felix Gallardo, which not only begins to sell marijuana and opium crops in Sinaloa villages, but also a new product: cocaine, which requires sophisticated business alliances, as it is sent from Colombia. Death of the Lion of the Sierra symbolizes the death of drug dealer as a character of the countryside and peasants, and it will give new elements to the profile of drug, cutting more business than the peasantry. I do not think that the statement is only sketched. There are two chapters, one of them very long, which he dedicated to Felix Gallardo, and which, I think, shows the huge cultural leap.

AR: Later you say that Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, Rafael Caro Quintero and Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, and their operators, "are a generation that gave a twist to the illegal drug business." In the same sense of the previous question, what was that money?

OED: In the book describes, through an analysis of Paul Gootenberg, how to change the map of the transnational drug trade when Chile and Cuba are no longer the major players in the United States traffic. Due to the heavy hand of the Cuban revolution and the dictatorship of Pinochet, that route is closed and appears to Colombia as a new supplier of cocaine instead of Chile, while Mexico replaces Cuba as a transit country. Amid these changes, Fonseca Carrillo Caro Quintero and Felix Gallardo become important men in Mexico in drug trafficking to the United States, especially cocaine, that in the eighties fashion has established itself as replacing marijuana.

AR: On the ethical issue, he discusses in the prologue Froylan Enciso, who intends to reinvent the moral "including the voices silenced, and even criminalized, to reintegrate humanism." Examples of such voices gets daily excerpts from Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, which is difficult to avoid surprise. " What I read in the Journal of the bonnet and the responses to the questionnaire that you sent me, rather, the idea of \u200b\u200ba character played by beating the average Mexican political discourse, in my opinion: the elusive, the complaint settled "can not be otherwise form-of impunity and social injustice, repeated a thousand times good wishes to combat violence and so forth. As a kicker, just read what it says about a criminal on the size of Pablo Escobar Gaviria, of which little need to make the apology. Do you think that voices like these can serve to "reinvent the moral" and "reintegrate humanism"?

OED: One of the problems usually found in the analysis of the phenomena of narco-and many other topics, is to take for granted a number of facts which are not necessarily our knowledge. What he says Felix Gallardo, in your opinion, is what you expect to read a drug, but after hearing the reports of him are published in the book you do not have a belief but a certainty. And your view that reproduces the average Mexican political discourse is no longer a vagary, but an analysis of a real testimony to which you could access and which can refer to when making an analysis. I think this refers mainly to a scholar as rigorous as Froylan Enciso in his preface, which claims the need to know what they think the narcos.

From my point of view, the testimony of Felix Gallardo is a valuable addition to the specific data that you throw and you may not seem relevant but I think, yes are, as their version of the creation of the drug cartels, which he says was made by a police chief and not by him, as had been saying in this ritual of giving as truths beliefs. In this book I tried not to be a narco mythologist over at the risk of huge events play some characters such as Felix Gallardo, which could eventually bore the reader.

I think even in public areas used by Felix Gallardo to explain their role lets us see many of the keys of the phenomenon of drug trafficking. The voices of the criminals help us understand better the functioning of our society, no doubt. Obviously, giving voice and attention a criminal just to show human traits analyzed, even when it is someone ruthless and with little appreciation for life. I was also aware of that risk.

AR: The final chapter is devoted to the political use of Felipe Calderón's war on drugs. Mention as a context, several political and social conflicts, such as moving doers, Atenco, Oaxaca, the dispute over the miners union and the EZLN's Other Campaign. But I think the President did well on fertile ground. In this regard, I also used as a very direct context of public safety Other information provided pages later: the drug had caused 500 deaths in Michoacán in 2006, and January to June 2008 is estimated between 15,000 and 17,000 the number of people executed in the style of the mafia. Do not you think that in this context and at a critical time was a good bet Calderón policy?

DEO: It was a measure designed to short-term and yes, indeed, gave the appearance of being a good political bet at first, but now it is clear that this was a serious error, because of the lack of a strategy to address the problematic. As you suggest, Calderon did not really want to finish with a problem like drug trafficking, he wanted the governors who were at risk at the beginning of his administration. And if you look at the Opinion polls in the early months of the Calderón administration, when there are 4 000 violent deaths, people openly supporting his alleged crusade against drugs, but a year and a half after the newspaper Reforma do another poll in which is that while the number of deaths low public approval. Today or say. Even to the red circle and many of those close to President Calderon challenge this dire public policy. Ruling blood, the story says, it always ends badly.

AR: We have identified a lack of government's communication strategy to address the political propaganda of the drug. It seems that the federal government itself has had a relevant strategy, but rather to obscure social and political problems. How would you describe it?

DEO: I do not understand the question but I guess it has to do with the above, regarding the placement of the drug issue on the public agenda priority over other issues like employment that both invoked in his campaign chairman Calderon, or the protests of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his followers, which today look nothing threatening as if it came to be in the first months of the Calderon. I do not know how to describe that campaign communications. Could perhaps say that now is in crisis and was designed by a desperate administration.

AR: Does the drug is no longer any benefit to Mexican society, especially the Sinaloa?

DEO: What an interesting question. In the book I mention some passages from Lazaro Cardenas to "The Gypsy", a gunman who killed a governor of Sinaloa Mazatlan during Carnival. Lazaro Cardenas, who legalized marijuana for a few months and then backtracked under pressure from the United States, was among those who believe that marijuana would help the balance of trade between Mexico and the United States and lead to greater economic independence the country.

Today, the illegal drug business is a source of immense wealth that just leaves a terrible trail of pain, death and impunity throughout the country, but it was also causing a huge economic benefit. As someone here wondering what would cause the 20 million of our compatriots go to the U.S. could get a job and send money to support their families in the country, it would be interesting exercise to ask about what would happen if Without the drug business in Mexico, what this huge mass live now depends on this huge illegal economy?

AR: At the end of the book, stating that: "I do not see how a reporter can be credible if it has no political principles and ideas about the current situation. Those who say lack of political ideas because they are impartial, they lie. At a time like the present one is perverse that there are those who invoke this alleged innocence. " In that sense, do not you think that another risk of journalist is to become member of "good causes"?

DEO: There is always the risk that a reporter who makes the process of total immersion necessary to tell a news story end devoured by it. Today it seems that there are two kinds of journalism: the fast, which seeks to place a small piece of information as soon as possible in the galaxy of information, and the other, now seems dated, in which the reporter involved, he lives, he asks, he knows many versions, feels, and is contradicted by the nature of their mission , is liable to come out with more confusion than certainty, and then make mistakes. That is one of the risks of this profession, perhaps a higher risk than the bullets of drug dealers, but I think we should accept it and deal with it. The commitment and militancy is the story you want to say. The rest is up to politicians.

AR: Also taking the above quote from your book, could make more explicit your principles and policy ideas which I believe support this book and your work in general?

DEO: It is very simple. I'm the kind of date who still think that journalism must take social responsibility. I do not see this business as a platform to become rich or famous, but as a tool to achieve a society to know each other, ask questions, debate and questioning. I try to do my job taking into account the spirit of humanism. I do not automatically or unconsciously. I'm not a machine.

Although it may sound shocking to me, journalism is not a professional matter, but something to something personal. I have 29 years and half of my life, since very little, I've been heavily involved into the fascinating world of the newsroom, the billiards and bars where journalists gather to chew over old, the daily attempts of powerful men trying to coopt consciences through acts openly or concealed, all that adrenaline to get information revealing that frustration of not getting it and the immense solidarity that exists among reporters for coverage difficult.

AR: In the book, including the use of press releases for decades, so you know how it was uncovered the problem at its roots. Broadly speaking, how has been the development of the Mexican press coverage has given the drug?

OED: The issue the drug was one of many who were little reflected in the pages of newspapers during the most important era of the PRI. Among the fifty-late nineties, when the PRI system was still very efficient in its authoritarian control, there is little news on the subject. During Operation Condor was launched by Mexico to U.S. pressure in the seventies in Sinaloa, there were some reports extensive and chronic, but obviously they did in the context of interest that existed at that point the government.

I think one of the things that also reflects this "drug war" is precisely this lack of journalistic expertise to address the phenomenon of drug, although it already has dozens of years in existence. Not a week in which I meet with colleagues to wonder what the hell to do or not do to cover this or that event. Like, for example, what happens today in the Tamaulipas border. We all know that there is a war going on but there is no sent to monitor. The last reporter who tried it, a friend of mine, was kidnapped by a gang of drug, with handcuffs and a black bag on his head, in a safe house. The narcos he was released and told to convey a message: "The press does not come to warm the place."

AR: You make a historical episodes and no follow a strict chronological order, but offer a good overview of what has been the drug trade in its main plaza in the country, and the responses that the government has three main stages of the seventies, the 1988 -1989 and the present. In this sense, do you think the country's democratization process has brought changes in the war on drugs?

DEO: Initially had settled the chapters of the book in chronological order, but decided in the final stage, although some friends advised me not to do so, it was better to intersperse episodes of present and past, to give a kind special rate to the history of the group is being told. One of the things that obviously is that I try to reflect how bipartidización the country (rather than democracy) altered drug codes.

AR: There is a hopeful sign mentioned in the book, I want more information. In a village in the municipality of Badiraguato there is a school, the Centro de Estudios Justo Sierra, who is an advanced community education project. How did?, Who studied there, how is it funded?, What lesson do you get there?

DEO: Sururato is a community nestled in the very area where it is concentrated Badiraguato planting marijuana and opium poppy and where many operators are often important drug in Mexico and the United States. The lesson of Sururato, where publicly funded and foundation are given to doctorate, is that there may be options in a region which we describe as a bastion of drug trafficking.

* Interview published in Replicante , June 2010. Reproduced with permission of the publisher.