He also spent some time reporting on the drug war in Mexico. Here's an interview:
http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/06/03/int06008.html Joanna
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I read through the interview and was struck by its parallel with the US government and its relationship to Wall Street and in particular the banking and finance system. The parallel is built in the equivalence between drugs and money and the interdependence between government institutions and the economies of both worlds---which at the end of the trail are pretty much the same, squirlling away vast amounts of money in off shore accounts where the money gets laundered and put back into circulation. In this parallel the drug cartels are just the low life family branch to the bank and finance elites. About the only difference I can see is the drug kingpins have trouble getting appointed as secretary of the US Treasury.
You can for example watch a similar process between the upper levels of the drug trade and the housing bubble built by mortage securitization. Then follow the foreclosure system with the courts with fraudulant paperwork, rubber stamp kangaroo courts, judges with investments in the system, city government's budgets dependence on the same systems, etc, etc.
There is the obvious more direct interconnection example of Karzi.
I was thinking just yesterday, who encouraged Baby Doc to come back to Haiti? What on earth is that story about? It is probably rich families who control Haiti and own a lot of the land where tourism and restorts are build and now threatened with displaced squatters going back to live on the land. Then there is viceroy Clinton, with his direct channel to the US State Dept. and the implicit connection to the CIA.
Then there is the Tunis story where evidently the whole government and the primary economic `leaders' are all members of the same family.
Maybe it's just a mood developed from watching three straight hours of The Wire's first season on the drug trade in the projects.
CG