Los Angeles Times’ collaborator Kate Linthicum says Mexican drug cartels are powerful due to their alliance with corrupt government officials.
Oswaldo Zavala is a Mexican academic and writer whose provocatively titled 2022 book — “Drug Cartels Do Not Exist” — argues for a bold reframing of how to think about organized crime in his country. Zavala says that the cartels are not as all-powerful as U.S. and Mexican authorities insist, and that they could not flourish without the support of corrupt public officials.
After the arrest last month of two leaders of the Sinaloa drug trafficking organization, The Times’ Kate Linthicum spoke with Zavala about the the “kingpin strategy,” which targets cartel chiefs, and the ways he says authorities have built up the idea of all-powerful narco “bogeymen” in order to obscure the involvement of government officials in the drug trade.
Their conversation has been edited for clarity.
What did you think when you heard news reports that two high-level Sinaloa cartel members had been arrested outside El Paso?
The first thing that came to my mind was, “Oh, here we go again.” It’s the narco-narrative recycling itself again, just with a shuffling of names.
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Source: Los Angeles Times
