Today we welcome Oswaldo Zavala back to the show. He speaks with guest host Carlos Dávalos about the myth of drug cartels, the US’s military occupation of Mexico, and his study of the Latin American author, Roberto Bolaño.

Zavala says that we need to reassess the US’s entire national security agenda. That includes rejecting the language of “cartels” and the “War on Drugs,” as Zavala does in his book, Drug Cartels Do Not Exist.  He says that drug cartels don’t exist as mafia-like organizations, but are embedded in the military and policing of the US itself. Zavala comments on Seth Harp’s new book, saying that it productively dislocates cartels from a mythology of organizations operating south of the border, to entities operating within the heart of military institutions. 

Zavala also analyses how resource extraction and national security are linked. He says there’s not enough discussion of how militarized Mexico has become as US energy companies seek access to Mexico’s natural resources like oil.

Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño picks up the themes of the drug trade and violence in his novels. Zavala says that unlike other authors of the Latin American Boom era who depicted the region as “magical” and epic, Bolaño focuses on dispossession, marginality, migration, and exile. He is attuned to the failures of neoliberal governments across the continent. Zalvala says that Bolaño humanizes the people caught up in the drug trade and shows how the drug trade isn’t something to be eradicated with state violence.

Oswaldo Zavala is a journalist and professor of contemporary Latin American literature and culture at the College of Staten Island and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include La modernidad insufrible and Drug Cartels Do Not Exist. Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture. 

Featured image: a remix of a photo of Oswaldo Zavala, the cover of Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666, and the cover of the Spanish-language version of Zavala’s book, Los cárteles no exiten (Sara Gabler/WORT).

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