Mexican drug cartels don't exist. An interview with Professor Oswaldo Zavala (part 1)

Political Ecology Forum @NMBU

Oswaldo Zavala, author of Drug cartels do not exist: Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture. He is a Mexican who grew up in Ciudad Juárez – a city in the north of Mexico that stands next to El Paso, Texas. Oswaldo began his career as a journalist in his hometown Juárez, but his professional trajectory evolved towards researching post-national imaginaries, representations of violence at the US-Mexico border, and the exhaustion of discourses of modernity in the Latin American narrative of the last two decades. Oswaldo is a Professor of contemporary Latin American literature and culture at the City University of New York.

This interview is divided into two episodes. The first episode (this one) lays down the main arguments of Oswaldo’s work on narco-narratives, especially referring to his book “Drug cartels do not exist: Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican culture”. Oswaldo will explain how an agenda of national security, originally designed by the US, influences public policies of security, migration and energy, not only in Mexico, but even beyond the American hemisphere.

In the second part of the interview - which you will find in the next episode - Oswaldo briefly describes the story of the Drug Wars and reflects on the continuities and changes that Mexico has experienced under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. You will find references to Oswaldo’s books, articles, book chapters, and the work of other authors that Oswaldo mentioned during the interview in the description of this podcast.

The host of this epsidoe is Noé Mendoza. He is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department for International Environment and Development Studies of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. REFERENCES (Oswaldo's work):

• Zavala, O., 2018, Los cárteles no existen: Narcotráfico y cultura en México. Malpaso ediciones.
• Zavala, O., 2021, Dispossession by militarization: Forced displacement and the neoliberal “Drug War” for energy in Mexico. In Liquid Borders: Migration as resistance. Moraña, Maribel (ed). Routledge.
• Zavala, O., 2022, Drug cartels do not exist: Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican culture. Vanderbilt, University Press.
• Zavala, O., 2022, La guerra en las palabras: Una historia intelectual del “narco” en México (1975-2020). Penguin Random House.

Other REFERENCES:

• Astorga, L., 1996, El siglo de las drogas, México, Espasa-Calpe
• Astorga, L., 2012, Seguridad, traficantes y militares, 2007, México, Tusquets
• Paley, D., 2014, Drug War Capitalism, Oakland, AK Press
• Halper J., 2015, War against the people, London, Pluto Press
• Mastrogiovanni, F., 2016, Ni vivos ni muertos. La desaparición forzada en México como estrategia de terror, México, Penguin Random house
• Miller T., 2019, Empire of Borders: The expansion of the US border around the world, Verso, Londo
• Benjamin S., 2021. The Dope: The real history of the Mexican drug trade, New York, W.W. Norton & Company