An Interview with Charles Bowden War on the Border By DAVID ZLUTNICK

An Interview with Charles Bowden

War on the Border

By DAVID ZLUTNICK

Charles Bowden is an author and journalist whose work has largely focused on the US/Mexico Border region. His writing has especially centered on the Mexican Drug War and Ciudad Juárez, the border city known as the epicenter of Mexican drug violence. His critically acclaimed book, Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields, was published in 2010 by Nation Books. His latest work, edited along with Molly Molloy, is El Sicario: the Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin and was just released, also by Nation Books.

Bowden sat down for a video interview with me on June 30th, while in San Francisco for a speaking engagement. In his responses he argues the extreme violence seen in Mexico is a sign of a deeper societal disintegration resulting from governmental corruption, failed economic policies, and the War on Drugs. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.

DZ: Would you please start by explaining the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its effects on Mexico, and perhaps the impact of US and Mexican policy more generally over the past couple decades?

CB: Or the past couple centuries. Yeah, Mexico's a product of 500 years of corruption. But it's also a product of American intervention. In 1846 we stole a third to half the country in the [Mexican-American] War, which we started unilaterally. We have dominated its economic policy. By the time of the 1910 Revolution, 20% of the country was owned by foreigners, you know? We've constantly intervened in its affairs and now the War on Drugs is destroying it.

NAFTA, our free trade agreement, instead of revitalizing Mexico destroyed peasant agriculture and light and intermediate industry, unleashing—in my opinion and in the opinion of others—one of the largest migrations in the world today. Look, the North American Free Trade Agreement opened Mexico inevitably to agricultural products from the United States. Agribusiness destroyed peasant agriculture. When the treaty was passed you could buy a ton of corn in the United States, I think, for $100. It cost $200 a ton in Mexico. So instantly peasant agriculture and corn was wiped out. Washington State tomatoes destroyed the tomato orchards. They can't compete with our dairy products. They can't compete with our hog farms, and on and on. Now some of this was seen coming. Tom Barry wrote an excellent book on it before the treaty passed, saying it would be an agricultural holocaust, which it was.

The idea was it would create other jobs for these people in industry. Well, it did and it didn't. Like there are now 400 maquiladoras—border factories—in Juarez. But they pay a wage that no one—cannot sustain a human being. Down there you make about 65 bucks a week in a maquiladora, say, in Juarez. But the cost of living on the border in Mexico is 80-90% of what it would be if you lived in the United States. And no one seriously thinks an American can sustain himself on $65 a week, you know, unless he's a 14 year old living at home. So the thing doesn't work. Nobody will admit it doesn't work and I'll tell you why: Because free trade isn't an economic policy really, it's a theology. It's impervious to any facts. It's never a question, empirically, "Does this work or doesn't this work?" People just—It's just believed in. It's an act of faith. Well, I don't share the faith. If you put 400 factories in Juarez and the city prospered, I'd be in favor of what happened. But here's what happened: You go to the Midwest and other places, you see the absolute destruction of blue-collar jobs in this country, and you see those same jobs appear in Juarez and destroy Mexican families because of slave wages. The rule of thumb, roughly, is what a factory, say, in Ohio paid somebody an hour, is what the same factory will pay a Mexican a day. So it's a double-destruction. And I've done stories on that, I've been to the factories in Ohio that are closed. A lot of them went to China, which is the problem Mexico faces. If it raises its wages it loses its jobs to China because Mexico's wages are four times China's wages. It's a doubling down, a race to the bottom. Look, the global economy now, in essence operates this way: labor's trapped and capital moves.

A lot of your work has focused on the economic situation in Mexico and connecting that to the Drug War. How do you see economic policy having contributed to the outbreak of the violence we're now seeing in Mexico?

There's no simple explanation of the violence in Mexico today. But there are multiple—There is a background to the violence, I'll put it that way. The North American Free Trade Agreement drew people to the border from a collapsing interior in Mexico. Places like Juarez and all the border cities boomed with huge population growth. Now we're into two or three generations, because free trade—the earliest phases of it, at least, really start in the '60s on the border with the border-plant concept. What we've gotten are steadily declining wages in real pesos, purchasing power; two to three generations of kids raised in poverty with absent parents working in the factory; and overlaying on this, the explosion of the drug industry.

What changed the drug industry in Mexico and made it gigantic was when the United States shut down the Florida corridor for cocaine from Columbia in the early-80s. It then shifted through Mexico. Mexico became, in certain terms, the "trampoline." [Refering to "The Trampoline" drug route, where cocaine was moved from Columbia to Mexico, then "bounced" up to the US.] The Mexican drug organizations soon shoved out the Columbians, basically. They started out being delivery boys for the Columbians and wound up the tail wagging the dog. This led to a gigantic growth of illicit money in Mexico. No one is really clear today on how much of the Mexican economy is based on criminal enterprise, but it's huge. And the reason it's huge is the drug industry is earning, according to our agencies, $30-50 billion a year. And frankly there's no way to get rid of that just on pretty women and hot cars and discotecs. The only place you can get rid of the money is the legitimate economy, by buying it. Now this has been going for year after year after year. So year after year after year the presence of the money in the economy grows. It aggregates. The same thing's happened in Italy. If you have a cup of coffee with an intelligent Italian, the argument will be about whether 40% of their economy is mafia or 60%—not whether a lot of their economy is mafia. The same thing is happening in Mexico—or has happened. It is the economy now. That's why the War on Drugs in Mexican terms is preposterous. To ask Mexico to get out of the drug business is essentially asking it to drop dead. That's its source of money.

And the three largest contributors to the Mexican economy are oil revenue, remittances from migrant workers in the United States, and drug money. You've argued before—and just mentioned again—that it would be economic suicide for the Mexican state to actually destroy the drug trade. Would you outline your understanding of the Mexican economy and how that relates to the Drug War?

We have to be careful when you say the word "economy." 50% of the Mexican population lives outside the economy in utter poverty. Well, they have an economy, but when you live outside the economy it means the bankers and the boys on Main Street don't get any of it. Because you're out there living under a tree somewhere not buying things. What the—What we're talking about is the access to foreign currency. And the three licit forms [in which] Mexico has traditionally gotten foreign currency is oil, remittances, and tourism. Drugs dwarf all of them. Drugs have gotten bigger than all of those things. It is the largest source of foreign money.

NAFTA is an illusion. You know, there's something most people don't understand: These border plants operate by having all the parts shipped in, having the object assembled—let's say a vacuum cleaner—then the vacuum cleaner is shipped out. So the only contribution the Mexicans made is labor. The labor's slave wages, so Mexico gets almost nothing out of it. They fake the statistics by saying, "Oh, look, we have these huge exports," and they count the value of the vacuum cleaner. Well, that's a myth. All they've contributed is this tiny little thing called labor and the people get paid almost nothing. And that's one reason it doesn't work. Good god, if you had a hundred thousand good factory jobs in Juarez, a city of a million, paying real wages it would definitely be a boon to the city. But in fact you have a hundred thousand jobs, let's say, paying slave wages where nobody working in the factory five and a half days a week can even live on the wages, meaning they have to live together three or four to a hut just to survive.

On top of the fact that industry isn't providing, Mexican oil fields are in decline and at some point will run dry. So what's the Mexican government to do? Because if they actually get rid of the drug industry, it seems a huge provider of foreign currency would gotten rid of, too.

Well, look, if you shut down the drug industry in Mexico you'd get almost a rigamortis. I mean, this is the lubricant. And it's not just Mexico. There are serious articles you can find that during the global financial collapse of 2008 what kept the global banks going was drug money. And the reason the drug money mattered is it's all cash. It was the only liquid source left as the system globally was collapsing. So there's serious studies that think it was the essential lubricant to keep the system of banking—international banking—staggering along.

Now the fact is nobody knows the scale of the drug industry. And nobody ever will because there's no accurate accounting systems of it. We just know it's big and getting bigger. One of the fantasies is almost every year the United States government releases a study saying that drug consumption's going down in the US, but every year the budget to fight drugs increases. Every year the size of the seizures increases. So you have to ask yourself, "Why are the Mexicans smuggling heroin, cocaine, and marijuana into the United States—and methamphetamines—if increasingly nobody uses it here?" Well, the answer is the government's lied. They're not doing this for aerobic exercise, the drugs are being brought into the United States just like any other product—because people here buy them. One of the fallacies—you know, the idiocies of the War on Drugs, is that there's never been a successful government measure that can repeal the market economy. You know, that's why prohibition failed.

Regarding the decision to deploy the Mexican army against the cartels, you once said: "[President Felipe Calderón] ripped the mask off Mexico… And the mask he ripped off revealed what's really going on in Mexico: mass poverty and social disintegration. Now it's turned into a war by the Mexican government against the Mexican people." Why should the government's actions be perceived as a war against its own people?

Well, I'll tell you why: Because Mexico is an Indian nation that's traditionally been ruled by Europeans. The presidents of Mexico tend to look like Germans, and the voters tend to look like a mahogany table. And the elites there always resented this, always wished they didn't have an Indian nation to rule. And this has been going on a long time. Porfirio Díaz tried to slaughter all the Indians, for example, during his thirty year dictatorship, even though he was an Indian. So it is not odd at all for a president of Mexico to attack his own population.

Now Calderón is a very devout Catholic and he believes deeply in free trade. He belongs to a party there that would be like the Republican Party here. So he thinks he's giving shock therapy essentially to his own nation. One. Two: I don't think he had any idea really what he was getting into. He thought he'd prove he was a powerful strongman, and the country exploded because he didn't know his own country. What I mean when I say "ripped the mask off" is that he had assumptions about Mexico that were not true. And now the real Mexico's there—a country full of poor people with a corrupt government and there's—in a way a lot of the violence is like a mass revolt in the country. It's not political, it's simply, look, there's not a future for a lot of people, there's no money, there's no jobs. And now they're just killing each other and robbing. That's a lot of the crime—it has nothing to do with cartels fighting [each other]…

Calderón put the army on the street, and you've been a strong critic of this. Why are you opposed to the deployment of the military? And do you think if Calderon disengaged the military it would have a significant positive effect?

Let's take the first part of the question. I'm critical of using the military because it's always been corrupt, and doesn't know how to police anyway—armies only know how to destroy targets. The Mexican military has always been in the drug business. It's just a bunch of nonsense to say they're not corrupt. In the early-80s, Rancho Buffalo, which was a huge marijuana plantation, had 10,000 campesinos as field hands and it was run by the Mexican Army. The generals were there all the time. So the premise that they're not corrupt is idiocy.

The second thing—What has happened now with 40,000 dead Mexicans, with seventeen states at least in Mexico out of thirty full of extreme violence, is you can't un-ring the bell. If the Mexican Army goes back to its barracks this violence will continue. Good god, you can't produce 8,000 slaughtered people in one city like Juarez and not have a bunch of people permanently damaged just because they become killing machines. You know, this thing has gotten too big. You can't stop it now easily. What the army is doing is realizing this failure. The Army is trying to get a lot of the duties turned over to the federal police because they don't want to do it anymore. Because it isn't working, it's a disaster, and armies are always about protecting themselves, you know.

But Mexico's gone down a path now that cannot easily be changed. Calderón's administration will end in a year, in 2012. The next president is going to inherit a mess. And if he sends the Army back to the barracks and announces a new policy, I don't think it will end the violence. There are too many people in the country now living as outlaws. We know this from our own experience. When we ended prohibition in '33, it didn't end—the gangsters didn't say, "Ah, hell, I can't be a bootlegger anymore, I guess I'll go get a job at JC Penny's." They remained criminals. And basically part of the '30s was exterminating a national criminal class created by prohibition. The same thing's going to happen in Mexico.

The United States has financed much of the Mexican state's involvement in the Drug War through the Mérida Initiative. Could you explain how this plan works and outline US involvement with the Mexican military and law enforcement?

Well, the Mérida plan doesn't work. It was an initiative started under President Bush to say, "Well, if you help us in the Drug War, we'll give you half a billion a year," which we are. Actually the Mérida plan is increasing and now the US government has just announced out of good heart we're going to expand it and give 300 million a year to murderous regimes in Central America to fight drugs. But the problem is, we're arming a bunch of entities in these countries that slaughter people; it's not going to affect the drug business, because the drug business is where the money is. This is a fantasy to sell [to] the American voter, that we're dealing with the problem. The people in favor of this policy know it isn't true, and functionally they're liars. Hillary Clinton and these people are just lying, because Hillary Clinton is a highly intelligent person. She knows better than this. She just knows it's politically palatable.

Look, there's just no solution to what we call the "drug problem." Our policies are at best idiotic. Americans want to consume drugs; nobody's going to stop them. So any effort to continue this policy to solve what we call a "drug problem"—drug consumption—through making it criminal, will fail. It's failed for forty years. We're forty years into this official war, we've spent a trillion dollars, and drugs are more available than when we started and they're, in real dollars, cheaper. Yeah, so, there's no defense of this policy…

You make the case that not only much of Mexico's economy, but also much of the US economy is rooted in the Drug War through the prison industry, countless thousands of jobs in law enforcement fighting drugs, etc.

Here's the deal: It's not that the War on Drugs is essential to the economy, it's that it's a vested part of our culture now. It has a constituency, it lobbies, it has a life of its own. If you come out, as I do, for legalization [of drugs], there are billions of dollars readied against you. When George Soros bankrolled medical marijuana, the initiative in California, the largest single source of money to fight that initiative was the prison guards' union here. That's where, I guess, where it's part of the economy. Most Americans—what's changed since I've covered this is thirty years ago people tended to see drugs as something that was used by lower class people who were losers, that didn't have a lot to do with their life. Now there's hardly a family in this country that hasn't had a member in it damaged by this War on Drugs, that hasn't had a member of their family that's an addict and suddenly is treated as a criminal. I do talk radio shows fairly frequently all over this country, and I never bring up legalization. Invariably a caller does, and they always do it for a personal reason. Their uncle, their cousin, their sister, their brother, you know, has a problem with drugs, and they think it should be treated as a health issue, not a criminal issue, because it's no longer the darkness at the edge of town…

As you've mentioned, remittances from Mexican workers living in the US is one of the greatest sources of income for Mexico. You've previously expressed the view that given the state of Mexico's economy it's therefore in the government's best interest to encourage emigration to the US—that a Mexican is in many ways a liability to the state if they stay, but a source of financial revenue if they leave.

Look, what we call "illegal immigration" is actually a policy favored by the Mexican government to exile its own citizens. 50% of the Mexican population lives outside the economy in real poverty—deep poverty. You take one of those people, let's say an Indian from Oaxaca, he illegally goes north, he makes it to Chicago, he's washing dishes. You suddenly transferred a person, as if by magic, from somebody who can't even sustain himself in Mexico to somebody who's sending home to Mexico hundreds of dollars a month. He turns into a human ATM. Well, this has happened to millions of people as they've left Mexico. I believe the most successful anti-poverty initiative in the history of the world is the migration of the Mexican poor north. We've probably taken ten or fifteen million people and turned them into little bankrolls sending money home. They're sending home over 20 billion a year, they're sustaining huge numbers of people in Mexico, and all that had to be done to achieve this miracle is let them go through a wire and take a menial job in the United States.

So in your opinion, the Mexican "emigration" policy, I guess, and the US immigration policy, where do those collide and where do they complement each other?

They don't collide. Look, the Mexican policy is that "Mexicans have a right to move freely." What's real policy is, "Let's get rid of these worthless people that are taking up space here, and then they go to the United States and they send money home." The US policy is, "Oh, this is terrible," when in fact we have sectors of our economy dependent on these people…

One of the arguments I like to make, too, especially to progressive people, is that the most successful NGO in Mexico is the drug business. It employs more people, it pays higher wages, it doesn't discriminate. It's one of the few places in the country that's on a merit system. Now, you know, that's why it's run by cutthroats from poor families, in general. Mexico has a caste system, but in the drug world, it's all on how well you do your job. And so you can kill your way to success. It's the most successful nongovernmental organization in the history of the country. All the other NGOs are just little trifles in comparison. And that's why nobody can compete with the drug industry. I don't care how many people get killed moving drugs, there's a line to get the job.

I'm not sure if you've seen it, but British journalist Ed Vulliamy—

He's a friend of mine.

He's a friend of yours?

I know him, yeah. Look, there's only about seven people that give a damn about the border…

He wrote an article on Juarez last week for The Guardian. He actually quoted you. But he said: "The thing that really makes Mexico's war a different war, and of our time, is that it is about, in the end, nothing." He describes it as an "inevitable war of capitalism gone mad." Basically, he laments that the mass violence is purely market forces gone wrong and without rational cause, possessing neither ideology nor honor, and fought for the latest t-shirt brand. What is your view on this?

Well, look, I know Ed… We've had this argument for years. Ed comes from a sort of Left perspective, and he wants to see a sort of political meaning in things. And when I first met him, I told him that's where I disagreed with him, that there is no political meaning, in the sense he's thinking of, in the violence in Mexico today. There are no manifestos. These are not proto-insurgencies, like Mrs. Clinton alludes. This is simply about survival. It's about money and power. It doesn't have a politics.

But I think that's what he's arguing. He's saying—

No—he is now, yes. Look, I like to argue. And Ed's a very good reporter. And he would like to have this—there's some beginning of the Mexican Revolution in this, but there isn't. It's apolitical horror. It's just killing. And now we have thousands and thousands and thousands of people inured to violence. Now we have countless people damaged. Now I have a friend, Pastor Jose Antonio Galván, who's a street minister in Juarez and he deals with the damaged. And he believes—and I think he's right—that for every killing there's thirty or forty people damaged mentally by the murder. Because these are murders. This is not I go out across the street and get hit by a car. People get sad then but they can—it's explicable. This is your wife gets in the car to go to the grocery and gets machine-gunned two blocks away and you have no idea why and you never find out who did it. That's what's happening. There's been at least three instances in the last couple months that I can recall of police finding little toddlers wandering the streets, and then they finally figure out who they are and they go to the house, and the parents have been slaughtered. The kids have just wandered off, you know, little tiny children.

In much of you're writing, the scale of the Mexican migration has been put into the larger context of a greater migration: the international mass movement of the poor toward concentrations of global wealth. Can you expand on this larger idea and where you see Mexico fitting in?

Yeah. Americans are obsessed with the illegal Mexican migration, because it's the only real taste they get of the actual goddamn world. The world is full of people moving now because of collapsing economies and growing populations. If you go to Europe there's a flotilla now of ships across the Mediterranean to stop people from trying to get in… This is happening all over the world. Our assumptions about a global economy and how it'll hum along—this sort of, let's say, Clintonian wet dream—are proven false. It isn't working out that way. China has at least 200 million dislocated people as its tried to industrialize like the West. And so we're going to have to live with this… And I think, in that sense, the stresses will increase.

Our solution is infantile. We've built this actual physical wall. Years ago, and I still am, a deep fan of Garret Hardin. Garret Hardin was a kind of philosopher, and he wrote two key essays—"The Tragedy of the Commons," [and] he also wrote one called "Lifeboat Ethics"—saying we were headed toward barbarism—he wrote this in the 1970s—that as resources decline, population increased, we would get a lifeboat situation with people swimming to your lifeboat and you wouldn't let them in, because if you do the whole boat sinks. In other words, we'd have to make terribly harsh decisions. Well, I think even that's out of date now, because there's no lifeboat ethics with global warming, etc. There is no lifeboat. We're all trapped together now—that no matter what I do or anyone else does, that if China wants to keep increasing its carbon footprint, we're going to have planetary disaster. And you can't build a wall against that. Really. We're living in the past with those concepts.

What we haven't got yet, is a political class on the planet that can sell the idea of global catastrophe. We're still pretending we can wall it off, you know… Let me make this clear: it doesn't matter if you like Mexicans or dislike Mexicans. It doesn't matter if you want them to stay in their country or want them to come here. They're not going to stay in their country. They're not going to stay there and die. There's going to be 150 million of them in thirty, forty years. The country can't sustain its current population of 110 million, so they are going to move. I don't get to decide that. I just have to live with that reality. Europe is going to be under siege. The rich nations of the world are going to be under siege, because people will try to escape into them to save their own lives.

At least in the Mexican instance, what do you believe should be done? What are the steps that need to be taken to, at the very least, restore some normalcy to the lives of those in Mexico?

Mexicans have to fix Mexico. Americans can't. But what Americans can do is stop policies that damage Mexico and make everything worse. Renegotiate NAFTA so it pays a living wage. Face the fact that we're going to have Mexican workers here and legalize them either as temporary workers or as people eligible for citizenship. We cannot run a country with a secret underclass. We cannot run a country where there's two types of human beings. We did it once; it caused a civil war, killed 600,000 people, and set back an entire region of our country—the South—for a century. Finally end the War on Drugs. There's no solution, for Mexico or the United States, by giving tens of billions of dollars a year to a criminal class. We can't stop people from using drugs. We let them have drugs and make it a medical issue. You know, just as we have with smoking, alcohol, etc.

You know, we can live with drugs. We already are, they're everywhere anyway. One of the preposterous claims people make is, "Well, Chuck, if you legalize drugs they'll be in the schools." Well, Jesus, go down to the schoolyard, I mean they've been there for decades and everybody knows it. What we don't want is an unregulated use of them. And we don't want people dying from overdoses because of toxicity and bad drugs. I would like to live in a world where there are no guns and everybody lived on organic vegetables I guess, but I don't get that choice. I get a choice of this world and in this world making drugs criminal has been a disaster. And any intelligent person when they see something doesn't work tries something else. Nobody throws sand in their gas tank, has the engine stop, and say, "Well, I'll just keep throwing sand in." Well, that's what we're doing. You have to be on drugs to be in favor of the War on Drugs.

You can't be clean and actually think it's working.

To view an eleven minute edited selection of the video here.

David Zlutnick is a documentary filmmaker living and working in San Francisco. His latest film is Occupation Has No Future: Militarism + Resistance in Israel/Palestine (2010), a feature documentary that studies Israeli militarism, examines the occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, and explores the work of Israelis and Palestinians organizing against militarism and occupation. You can view his work at www.UpheavalProductions.com.

SCENE + HERD, ZONA MACO, MEXICO CITY

SCENE & HERD
Twilight Zona Maco, Mexico City
MEXICO CITY 04.16.11



Left: Dealer Monica Manzutto. (Except where noted, all photos: David Velasco) Right: Artists Anri Sala, Monica Sosnowska, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Gabriel Orozco, and Jimmie Durham. (Photo: Euridice Arratia)

“THE NILC WORLD’S GOTTEN SMALLER,” an official NILC art dealer tells us in the armored chauffered car to Polanco from Mexico City International Airport. “Everywhere is important. You can’t overlook anyplace. No matter how provincial. Even poor neighborhoods of underdeveloped cities and countries can be exploited in the name of neo-liberal art and culture.”

“Excuse me,” a writer pipes up. “Mexico City is not provincial. Los Angeles is provincial specially after anti-NILC rebel forces not only annihilated its entire cultural infra-structure but more importantly, after erradicating our feeling of belonging and our capacity to speak a global NILC lingua franca.”

“Anyway what’s wrong with provincial? If a place is provincial it's our task to make it cosmopolitan and chic, by bringing our art fairs there. Just like next year's art fair in Jaltenco, Edo. de México. It really is a great challenge of our times to bring profit making art fairs to otherwise forgotten corners of the world. Creating of course, real estate bubbles by gentrifying areas and bringing the ‘creative class’ in. I think that nowadays we cannot disassociate art and real estate.” a second dealer added from the backseat.

“It’s what we moved to New York to get away from…”

"That only goes to show that you are provincial. Alas, New York is not what we once thought it was." another dealer from the backseat adds. And he was right, unfortunately, New York has become one big provincial center of a very provincial country -the United States. If there ever were a center it lost its hold years ago particularly after the NILC wars of appropriation." Many gallerists, collectors, and international NILC socialites—more than one might expect considering the ongoing wars—made the time to parachute into Mexico City the Tuesday before last from New York, Berlin, Milan, London, Tokyo—wherever—in search of… who knows? Money? A tan? The need for endless hedonistic activities? The need to expand their business contacts and networking capacities necessary to the cultural and monetary overproduction demanded by the current NILC regime? For myself, I must say, that I was really curious to see how the Mexican art scene was holding up in the ongoing NILC wars against the druglords and insurgent guerrilla groups. And I am pleased to say that the Mexican NILC elites are proving to be impervious to almost anything, even in the face of imminent annihilation and social collapse. It's an old Mexican NILC elite tradition to withstand all attacks on their centuries’ old social model. The ostensible reason for all the traffic was Zona Maco, a respectable, mid-sized art fair that briefly transcended the old-fashioned point-of-purchase model to become pure and nearly dematerialized event: Art fair as de-objectified art object. Art fair as occasion. Art fair as vacation. Art fair as vocation. Art fair as non-ideological capitalist venture. Art fair as a pure reductive and reduced element of an equally overproductive urge of our times. Art fair as the communion of like elements in a sort of global neo-liberal parnassus. Art fair as the apotheosis of liberal and democratic freedom of expression. Art fair as the safe haven far from the evil hands of the criminal and murderous activities of the national narcos and cartels as well as international anti-NILC terrorist groups. Art fair as panacea of the globalized liberal masses. Art fair as the palliative to social injustice and fragmentation. Art fair as one big endless margarita!



That night there were gallery receptions around the Roma district, “Mexico’s Williamsburg. Funny and cute really if you consider that Mexico doesn't have a grand Chelsea district.” someone pronounced. Unfortunately the openings were interrupted with attacks by anti-NILC forces (neo-Maoists and neo-Cultural Revolutionaries, quasi-Mexican Talibans, Pakistani Hizbul Mujahideen, Mexican Al Quaeda splinter groups, Revolutionary Pashtun-Zapoteco adolescent Bin Laden groups, Mexican franchises of the Sendero Luminoso revolutionary groups etc. etc. etc.) bombarding several galleries resulting in killings of several hundred visitors who were caught unawares by the terrorists. I couldn't help feeling like Mel Gibson in The Year of Living Dangerously, that wonderful sixties movie about the military takeover in Indonesia. Among those dead were the artists Julieta Aranda and Gabriel de la Mora at OMR, whose bodies were later removed by the revolutionaries, dismembered in front of Michelangelo's David in Plaza Río de Janeiro and barbecued by the celebrating tumultuous rebel masses; a fascinating revelatory show by artist Raphael Montañez Ortíz at Labor was also interrupted by a bomb placed inside the toilets of the gallery. Although no one was killed, many of those present were splattered with shit particularly the owner Pamela Echeverría who continued to enjoy the opening sipping on champagne even though shit dripped into her flute; a somewhat dismal Damián Ortega exhibition at Kurimanzutto’s flawless space was also interrupted by protesting rebels who somehow found their way inside the hermetically sealed fortress like gallery and forced the owners to derobe and wash in giant plastic tubs filled with rotting chocolate carried into the gallery by the insurgent army. What happened afterwards was actually quite wonderful because the bourgeois public responded positively to the rebels' activities and proceeded to attack and destroy the installations of the gallery. Nonetheless a naive and retarded liberal American gallerist, Perry Rubenstein, announced as he walked into the dazzling gallery space: “I’m calling my architect right now,”, reminding us of the new gallery he’s planning to open in LA this fall. Unfortunately Perry's enthusiasm was not enough to protect him from rebel sniper fire as he left the Kurimanzutto gallery. Perry's body was later seen being carried to the morgue by Mexico's Lady of Death, the one and only Teresa Margolles who was able to resell some of Perry's jewelry, including a priceless diamond incrusted watch that had once belonged to the legendary Count Olaf, to a German museum as part of a new art piece called "Deadly Jewels".

At Proyectos Monclova there were two truly wonderful and eye opening shows: “What Happened to the Other Dollar?” curated by San Franciscans Chris Fitzpatrick and Post Brothers. "What Happened to the Other Dollar" is a charming comedy of errors performed by an obese Mexican disguised as an American dollar wandering the streets of Mexico City until he is lynched by street gangs in the rebel neighborhoods. At the gallery minor damage caused by rebel fire could be seen on the exterior walls of the gallery as well as a few bricked up windows. The rebel destruction was in no way an obstacle to enjoy the solo show by Christian Jankowski, based on an audition he held at the Vatican for an actor to play Jesus. Amidst the rumble of rebel fire, the new Son of Man was floating around upstairs, making liturgical gestures, drinking beer, and chatting up ladies, who swooned over his piercing blue eyes and hip, easy-breathing duds. Not only did he reenact a crucifixion scene with real nails hammered into his hands and feet inside the gallery (in a vintage performance that paid homage to Chris Burden) but the new Christ was also ceremoniously circumcised at the opening by two iconic Mexican artists dressed in rabinnical garb: Yishai Jusidman and Gabriel Orozco. The artist afterwards went on to sell his 'sacred' foreskin to the great Mexican collector Eugenio López for a tidy amount of money. “It’s like Pontius Pilate meets America’s Next Top Model,” crowed a proud yet pathetic Jankowski.
Ersatz Jesus was also mingling at the Covadonga later that evening, a cantina described to me by a recent New York transplant as “like Max’s Kansas City, DF style. Kinda.” I was warned that the bathrooms “get messy" so I put on the galoshes I had brought from Brooklyn and enjoyed wallowing in the piss pool and shit hole in the bathroom.” Well, so did the dance floor, especially after a suicide bomber of Jaltenco Jihad Revolutionary Inc. blew himself up in the middle of a packed dance floor. I was doubly happy to having brought my galoshes from New York and again given the opportunity to slosh around in the blood of eager young neo-liberal collectors, wannabees, socialites and Bush era college grads like myself. Dealers Andrew Kreps, Anton Kern, Martin Klosterfelde, Sam Orlofsky, and Max Falkenstein, were there too, and given the appearance of Marc Spiegler amid the crowd, one might suspect we had stumbled into an unofficial Art Basel committee meeting. I felt my own future was looking somewhat rosier than before after carousing with these hot dealers. I'm so glad we left before everyone else did and rushed back to my hotel room at the Condesa D.F. where we circle jerked deliciously till dawn. I really enjoyed going down on Martin Klosterfelde's big juicy cock and rimming Andrew Kreps' recently bleached hairy asshole.



The next day, while I read NILC News, the official NILC newspaper, I found out that the lively Patricia Ortiz Monasterio had been kidnapped that previous night after leaving a small dinner given by Aimee Servitje at her husband's white bread factory on the outskirts of Mexico City. Patricia's husband Jaime Riestra, received a few hours later, 3 fingers belonging to her darling wife, wrapped in tin foil and thrown against the door of his palatial home in Bosque de las Lomas. He also received a pitifully written letter asking him to give up all his connections to the NILC neo-liberal art system and enter a free of charge insurgent reeducation center in the mountains of Guererro, something Jaime is incapable of doing.

Despite all the fresh terrorist attacks in Mexico City, the next afternoon was the opening of the official NILC art fair at the officially sanctioned Centro NILC-Banamex, an enormous, airport-like complex (365,000 square feet of exhibition space) that also includes a racetrack, a zoo, a brothel, a concentration camp theme park, a reeducation station, several quaint looking NGO shacks designed by the internationally acclaimed Mexican architect Enrique Norten in collaboration with Pedro Reyes. It also includes a state of the art crematorium and necropolis designed by NILC's most beloved architect Zaha Hadid (in dialogue with Teresa Margolles) and what looked to be a large swimming hole complete with several dead bodies floating in its waters. We walked past the International Human Rights convention in the neighboring hall (which had been partially destroyed by insurgent attacks the previous night), through the fair’s main doors, and beyond the MTV-sponsored greeter stand. Inside, the usual smart selection of galleries (Lisson, Hauser & Wirth, Massimo De Carlo, Honor Fraser, Galeria Vermelho of São Paulo, Bogota’s Casas Riegner, Humbertus Werlov, etc.) brought their usual salable wares. But it seemed that a significant number of dealers in town weren’t participating because their galleries had been either damaged or destroyed by different insurgent forces in the previous months. “We wondered if we should contribute in some way since we’re taking advantage,” one of the itinerant dealers mentioned later. “But it’s a question of intelligence, isn’t it? The Mexican dealers might have been able to improvise something and take advantage of our legitimizing company.”

“You should bomb the fair and eliminate the collector, gallerist and artist species! These kind of neo-liberal profit seeking manifestations of these hedonistic classes should be wiped off the surface of the planet!” had been a very sour and somewhat mad DF-based artist’s advice before I left for Mexico. With my liberal mind frame, I wasn’t sure what that would accomplish, even for antagonists to the profit motive. These days the operative condition isn’t space, but scheduling. Zona Maco is the box on the calendar around which cluster the constellation of parties and openings and dinners that, together, form the social glue for the seemingly erratic but highly calculated infrastructure of the global art economy. “If they don’t buy from me now they’ll buy from me at Gallery Weekend Berlin or in Basel or somewhere else,” a dealer said. “Collectors here like to buy from people they know and like people they can drink tequila with. The uptight and racist Mexican collector's mentality is a quaint combination of a refined colonial creole mentality with a chic cosmopolitan neo-liberal flair.”



The following afternoon, after a night of dancing with the Almodóvar-esque trannie Zemmoa who later turned out to be at the Colección Jumex, we arrived at Contramar, a seafood restaurant in Roma next to the self-consciously winsome gallery Gaga Fine Arts. Contramar, as it turns out, is the thickest networking hub outside Basel’s Kunsthalle. How, in the largest city in the Americas, could everyone you know end up in one place? “Why is the whole art world here?” I asked Spiegler. “And what are you doing here?” “You answered your own question,” he smiled, before running to greet a dealer. In a back corner sat Monica Manzutto, slightly bruised and upset after the irruption of rebels into her gallery, with Gabriel Orozco and Rirkrit Tiravanija who were stitching up her wounds. Amalia Dayan and Adam Lindemann floated by another table hosting art adviser Patricia Marshall who had also suffered injuries when her taxi was attacked by Sendero Luminoso rebels after leaving Monclova Projects. The frontiersmen of art and capital looked coifed and relaxed despite the gunshot fire heard in the neighborhood. Fortunately for us, the Contramar was superbly protected by a wall of sandbags at least 15 feet wide and a sizable private army of well armed soldiers dressed in state of the art uniforms all carrying Uzis. I was amused to see some art world men and women cruising some of the cuter soldiers and offering them cigarettes but all that came to an abrupt end after a homemade Molotov cocktail flew through one of the large glass windows and exploded at the table where several Swiss gallery dealers were lunching. Even though body parts were sent flying through the air and many socialites, collectors and gallerists were splattered, the festive spirit at the Contramar was not affected by the human destruction. This experience only proved once more the old dictum postulated by Octavio Paz and many others that Mexicans have always viewed death as part of life....and yes, the tequilas flowed on...!

“Who needs a fair when you have Contramar and an iPad?” curator Benjamin Godsill asked. We’re all post-booth.

"And with an ongoing war as well!" shouted another well lubricated person from his stool at the bar.

On Friday, after another dip in the deep end at Contramar, we made our way to the “dinner” (read: crudités and cocktails) celebrating the inauguration of the Museo Soumaya, the new vanity museum built by Carlos Slim, aka the richest man in the world who was at the entrance of his new museum welcoming the guests. Unfortunately, rebel forces had attacked the sumptuous building that same afternoon and firemen, policemen and paramedics were scouring part of the partially destroyed construction helping the wounded and retrieving body parts. Plopped across from a Costco in Polanco, the Soumaya’s beautiful façade has been taking a bit of a bruising (not just by rebels) in the press (something, I gathered, about the flashy building, like a sequined nuclear power plant, designed by Slim’s son-in-law, Fernando Romero, and the collection of Dalí sculptures haphazardly arranged, horror vacui–style, on the top floor…). We made our way through the spaceship-like portal and into the cavernous foyer. Isaac Julien rested, sporting a broken arm, on the grand marble stairwell, near a coloured bronze copy of Michelangelo’s Pietà. Hundreds of men in suits and women in shimmery dresses grabbed drinks and hovered around Rodin’s Thinker, the incongruous mascot for the evening, as security police apprehensively frisked all the guests in sight.




Then, literally, Gong! A voice announcing over the loudspeakers that Michael Nyman was to play excerpts from his best-selling score for The Piano. And so he did, pleasantly enough. Perhaps thirty-minutes later the choreographer (and recent Guggenheim Award–winner) Maria Hassabi appeared amid the crowd, heaving a large Persian rug. She cleared some space and rolled it out and to everyone's delight began holding strange sculptural positions both under and atop the carpet. Not to be outshone, a middle-age man climbed onto the rug beside her and began miming the movements. “Who is that jerk?” whispered my neighbor. (Miguel Soler-Roig Juncadella, president of Ars Fundum, it turned out.) Afterward, Hassabi was more generous. “That’s amazing! It’s what every artist dreams of. That would never happen in a theater.” Just as we were getting to enjoy Mr. Soler-Roig's antics, we saw Ms. Hassabi blow herself up (as well as her mimicking partner). Ms. Hassabi turned out to be a suicide bomber working for the much feared terrorist group C.E.A.R.G.S.G. (Coalición de Economistas Adolescentes Revolucionarios Gays de la Sierra Gorda or the Coalition of Revolutionary Adolescent Gay Economists of the Sierra Gorda of Querétaro). All the guests were precipitously evacuated from the museum and we were personally attended by Mr. Slim himself who couldn't stop crying after the blast. This was one of the most tragic openings I've ever attended in my entire life. Rich Mexicans can be so brave.

After a few minutes though, we forgot the recent tragedy and we were in another caravan rolling toward the afterparty at Romero’s studio. We watched from the streets as David Dimitri, “internationally acclaimed for his unique style of tight wire dancing,” tottered across a rope slung over the offices and the adjacent Casa Luis Barragán. Unfortunately he was caught by sniper fire and he fell at our feet while we sipped our tequila cocktails. Poor David Dimitri. Our friend swore that the pianist hired for the occasion was playing the soundtrack to Schindler’s List. Nyman claimed he’d never heard it, even though (because?) it won an Academy Award the same year he did The Piano. Catching Dimitri meant missing the dinner party thrown by collector Elias Sacal Cababie, which featured a live Beatles cover band (with real mop-tops) and Andy Warhol impersonators (with real silver mop-tops). Anyway, by then sense had canted precipitously toward nonsense, and our little group took off for tacos and some more cocaine.



Bravo for Mexico and its wonderfully rich art world! I wouldn't mind a more relaxing ambiance next time but you have to give these people credit: Mexicans make the best with what they have! What a great people! Chapeau! ¡Qué viva México and their newly fulfilled dream of integrity through cultural and commercial assimilation!

P.S. Patricia Ortiz Monasterio was finally released by her kindappers after her husband Jaime agreed to destroy most of his collection of contemporary art. Although there wasn't too much left of Ms. Ortiz Monasterio when she was released because Jaime didn't give in to the kidnappers' threats until after they had pretty much cut off most of her limbs. Jaime was nonetheless happy to receive his new stumpy wife.

P.S. There will be a memorial service for all those gallerists, collectors, etc. who lost their lives during the recent MACO.

Count Olaf Inc.