 Sponsored by Brooklyn Book Festival Although the opioid crisis is typically associated with the United States, it plagues the other side of the southern border too. “Despite the efforts of activists, the Mexican government refuses even to count the dead,” Dawn Marie Paley writes in the Review’s June 12 issue. President Claudia Sheinbaum, Paley continues, has “said fentanyl consumption ‘isn’t a problem’ in Mexico.” But even without precise statistics from official sources, experts estimate the death toll in Mexico numbers in the thousands. Paley’s article is in part a review of Angela Garcia’s The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City, which documents one of the main treatment options available in Mexico: the practice of shutting people with problematic drug and alcohol use, as well as mental health issues, into anexos—overcrowded, unregulated, often heavily religious residential treatment centers that promote abstinence. As Paley argues, this combination of political indifference and largely ineffective treatment programs has almost certainly exacerbated the crisis: “Amid extreme violence and without any recognition from the state, it can be hard to see the people and collectives fighting for harm reduction and for drug policy that promotes health, choice, and individual and collective rights.”  Dawn Marie Paley; Paley, an investigative journalist based in Mexico, has spent the last two decades reporting on drugs, women’s rights, and political corruption in Latin America. She is the author of the books Drug War Capitalism (2014) and, in Spanish, Guerra neoliberal: Desaparición y búsqueda en el norte de México (2020). She’s also a cofounder of the feminist biweekly Ojalá, which operates out of Mexico City. Last month, I wrote to Paley to ask her about drug policy in Latin America and the future of the transnational drug war.  Advertisement Mia Euceda: You write, “In focusing on the state’s inaction, [Garcia] omits the ways the militarized enforcement of prohibition is itself a driver of war.” Why is the state so often portrayed as a passive denialist rather than an active force of violence? What benefits might the state derive from a militarized drug war? Dawn Marie Paley: We’ve lived through over a century of militarized and punitive prohibitions against narcotics, which can make it seem like it’s the way things have to be. The focus on fentanyl over the past decade or so is a case in point. We’re told fentanyl is killing people who use drugs in the US, but it’s the legal prohibition that kills. People who use drugs are often unable to know for sure what they’re using because the market for narcotics is not regulated. That’s what makes deadly fentanyl contamination possible. In addition to the deadly toll that prohibition takes on people who use drugs and their loved ones, the war on drugs is also a tool for social control. This is true both domestically, in the US, and around the world. In 2006 President Felipe Calderón deployed the Mexican Army and Federal Police to Michoacán, inaugurating a very violent era in the war on drugs. Since then, over half a million people have been murdered or disappeared in Mexico. Throughout Latin America, poor urban youth, union organizers, land defenders, and other social groups are criminalized, threatened, and worse by the government’s often specious efforts to associate them with the drug trade. Entire communities have been displaced from their lands—which are often rich in natural resources—by so-called drug cartels. This is the topic of my first book, Drug War Capitalism, which explores how the war on drugs is effectively a method of social and territorial control that’s better understood as a war on the people. What might a successful “end” to the drug war look like? Regulating narcotics and creating a safe supply is the only way out of a toxic drug crisis that has already taken so many lives. This is a step that could be put into effect immediately, as we have seen with the legalization and regulation of cannabis. Another crucial step is demilitarization: defunding the military and police, and funding education, health care, and cultural and social programs. Though official discourse suggests the opposite, the military and the police have been the instigators of deadly violence—not to mention traffickers of drugs. And best practices like harm reduction, treatment, and education programs are barely funded, if at all.  Advertisement You’ve reported on the drug war throughout Latin America. How does the situation in Mexico compare to other parts of the region? People who use drugs are criminalized throughout Latin America. They’re denied access to health care and left without options for treatment—like opioid replacement therapies—that would allow them to thrive. Instead they are marginalized and incarcerated at alarming rates, often simply for possession. But throughout the region, from the US–Mexico border all the way down to South America, activists and drug users are organizing, promoting harm reduction, and fighting for alternatives to punitive policies. How did you become interested in reporting on this beat? I started over twenty years ago, reporting on the impacts Canadian mining companies had on regions in South and Central America. This work led me to realize that there were many gaps in our collective understanding of how state and paramilitary violence intersects with corporate interests in the region. For the past ten years I’ve worked closely with friends and family members of people who were disappeared in Mexico, and I’m currently finishing up a book about militarization in Mexico that should be published by Verso next fall. You’re a cofounder of Ojalá, a bilingual feminist weekly. What inspired the name, and what’s a recent article that you’re particularly fond of? Ojalá means “hopefully.” We chose the name to reflect our belief that real social change is possible, inspired by the power and size of grassroots feminist movements in the Americas. We solicit pieces from journalists and feminist and Indigenous organizers and thinkers in the region, and we work with super-talented artists and photographers to bring a graphic element to the work. We translate everything—there’s very little contemporary movement thinking being translated into English. Every week, we put out a short newsletter with our latest stories. One recent piece I learned a lot from is “Chilean Feminists Regroup Under Progressive Rule.” It traces the trajectory of the latest cycle of feminist struggle in Chile, which had its origins in the student occupations and mass street-level demonstrations that began in 2019. Today feminists in Chile are undergoing a process of reorganization in an effort to co-opt and demobilize the movement under the government of President Gabriel Boric. Women and trans and nonbinary folks are adapting the way they organize, because even though some of their demands have been heard, others—like access to safe, legal, and free abortion and the demilitarization of the Wallmapu region in southern Chile—have yet to be met.  Advertisement More by Dawn Marie Paley at nybooks.com A Shelter or a Prison?There’s a severe shortage of public treatment options in Mexico for people who use drugs and wish to stop. Small, clandestine private clinics fill the gap. For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the Review’s website. And let us know what you think: send your comments to editor@nybooks.com; we do write back.   You are receiving this message because you signed up Update your address or preferencesView this newsletter onlineThe New York Review of Books |
sábado, 13 de septiembre de 2025
‘Hopefully’
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