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Much of what is known about Mexico and what happens on that side of the border, in the stereotypical yellow tint, is learned through Hollywood. Heroic tales of American law enforcement agents going in and hunting sicarios and busting cartels are common plotlines for action movies or Netflix series. While the violence often portrayed is real and rampant in Mexico, the reasoning behind it is usually ignored, thus spawns this crude image of evil south of the border.
In a compelling podcast series for Reveal, journalist Anayansi Diaz-Cortes dives into an infamous case involving all these conventional elements of Mexican crime: drugs, corrupt police and horrific violence. She explains, however, in this episode of Scheer Intelligence with host Robert Scheer, that while this took place in Mexico, much of the blame falls on American policy enforcing the war on drugs, along with a host of other insidious factors.
The case of Ayotzinapa, where, in 2014, 43 college students were disappeared after commandeering a bus for a school field trip, is “a paradigmatic case that begins a movement around the now over 100,000 people disappeared in Mexico—officially to date—as a product of the war on drugs,” says Diaz-Cortes. “…more than 90% of these cases of forced disappearance happened after 2006. This is after the Merida Initiative between the U.S. and Mexico to effectively militarize Mexico, to counter the war on drugs and criminalize the war on drugs.”
Diaz-Cortes elaborates on the role of U.S. policy in creating incidents like Ayotzinapa and explains the lack of accountability and impunity that exists for those responsible. “Instead of a U.S. policy gearing toward supporting local judicial branches, it’s gone through militarization, through more helicopters, more guns. And that has only increased death and forced disappearances.”
The policies, Diaz-Cortes says, “only failed, they’ve only led to bloodshed. And this case is the prime example of that, because this case got all the privilege of international attention. It has Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and the National Security Archive digging in. What happens to all the other cases? Absolutely nothing.”
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Credits
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Transcript
Robert Scheer:
Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guest, in this case Anayansi Diaz-Cortes. I read in your bio that you’ve appeared everywhere. It’s actually true, you appear all over the place. But we’re here to talk about some excellent work you’re doing for Reveal, which is the radio outlet for the Center for Investigative Reporting, which is an operation that I have a lot of respect for. And it was developed by people who came out of conventional journalism, and they saw that the business models were collapsing. And so enough of a promotion for Reveal, but they do great stories, and a lot of them are distributed on NPR and other places like this one. And so, but this is a story about a horrible incident in which 44 children were kidnapped and killed, or college students, in 2014. And then it was blamed on gangs, it was blamed on the government, it was blamed [inaudible]. But it’s an insight into Mexico and what happens in life in Mexico. And we have a new government in Mexico now that has reopened some aspects of this investigation. So I’m going to turn it over to you and begin with the question, why are we revisiting this now? You know, what, eight years, nine years after the fact, and tell us sort of the overview of the case.
Anayansi Diaz-Cortes:
Yes, Bob, that makes sense. And, you know, just as to ground your listeners and viewers on why now and why this case, you know, the case of the 43 disappeared college students, it’s called the case of Ayotzinapa, it’s what they call in human rights circle, this very wonky term called a paradigmatic case. So it’s like a case from which to view all cases and it’s also a case where all these different things intersect, just like, you know, not only like impunity in Mexico and that kind of thing, but forced disappearance, the reality of the war on drugs in U.S. policy toward Mexico and the effects of that, and, of course, what it means to conduct an investigation in Mexico with kind of a global impact that it had. But just to back up a little bit, Bob, and then you can guide me if I’m going down too many rabbit holes. But this is a story about 43 college students basically commandeering buses in the city of Iguala to take back to their campus to go on a field trip in late September 2014. Now, you know, this is a common practice in Mexico, especially schools that are called rurales normales, like rural schools. They come from a kind of leftist… They come from the revolution in the early 19th century, no, in the early 20th century and 1920, that basically are subsidized by the state. And the point is to take basically campesinos and sons of farmworkers, or sons of campesinos are what you would call peasants, I guess in English, but it’s slightly different, and the term used campesinos, to basically make them teachers. It’s a teachers college. And the idea is that then these teachers will go out into rural communities and teach other young people and like, you know, there you get out of poverty and create a system. Now, these are schools that are in the leftist tradition, so for the Mexican government, especially at the time in 2014, they’re kind of seen as a nuisance and as kind of expendable in some ways. So you have kind of this climate and these students commandeering these buses coming out of Iguala, which they do every single year over time. Okay, so, you know, and usually, you know, when these buses are commandeered, these are public buses like Greyhound or Amtrak and the U.S. equivalent. They talk with the chauffeur, they talk with the passengers, and they’re like, we’re going to take these buses for a couple of days. You know, usually the police don’t like it, but they let them pass or there’s a scuffle with the police. But on this day of September 26, 2014, they’re commandeering a few buses coming outside of Iguala and, you know, they’re met by police as they’re leaving the city. They start to, you know, get out, they stop, they’re met by police. They think there’ll be some rock throwing or that kind of thing. You know, there might be an arrest or two. But what ends up happening is that the police straight up opened fire on these young men. You know, by the end of the night, you know, our podcast, you know, talks to survivors that were there on these buses. You know, the first person is shot dead, this young man named Eldo Barrera, who’s still in a coma till this day. And, you know, and a lot of these kids, about 70 kids, see 42 kids taken off these buses, thrown to the ground, put on the backs of police trucks and taken away, and disappeared without a trace for eight years. Now, that night doesn’t end there. It ends with six people effectively dead and kind of a night of terror that involved, now we know, all aspects of local police, military and the federal government on that night. So you have this date on September 26, 2014, this huge crime that happened, these kids that disappeared. And that’s kind of the night of the crime, Bob. But I’ll pause there to see if you want to deepen and we can get into what came after.
Scheer:
So basically, when you say commandeer, they take hold. They basically hijacked or grabbed these buses. Right?
Diaz-Cortes:
They basically hijacked these buses. Now, this is like a very common practice. And again, it’s a way to bypass. These schools are subsidized by the government. But often there’s no money for public transportation. They’re deep in rural communities in this case, you know, there’s you know, there’s electricity one day off. They don’t… So it’s a way to get public transportation. It’s a common practice since the 1940s in Mexico. In this case, of course, it’s not well seen.
Scheer:
This is like something that could happen in spring break in Orlando or something. But I’m being serious, though, but it’s accepted as sort of a way of getting back to school.
Diaz-Cortes:
It’s accepted as a way of getting back to school and as a kind of political protest. You know, it’s a way to take, you know, corporate transportation and make it public.
Scheer:
But it certainly doesn’t justify the murder of what did you say? They’re all dead, you know, 42 people, right?
Diaz-Cortes:
And I mean, this seems like semantics, but they have been forcibly disappeared. So the way to look at it kind of from this perspective is that until, from the family’s perspective, is that until you have a body, until you have remains, until you know what happened to your child, you’re not effectively dead. You’re disappeared. Right? So the reason why this case is so important now is because you have this case, as I said, a paradigmatic case that begins a movement around the now over 100,000 people disappeared in Mexico officially to date as a product of the war on drugs. You know, more than 90% of these cases of forced disappearance happened after 2006. So this is after the Merida Initiative, which is this initiative between the U.S. and Mexico to effectively militarize Mexico, to counter the war on drugs and criminalize the war on drugs. So this is happening in this context. And this case kind of represents a watershed moment in Mexico in 2014, where before this, if you had people that had disappeared, you know, you’d go to the cops and maybe they’d tell you, oh, they went to the other side, you know, to the United States, al otro lado. Or if they went with their lover, you know, there was no way to build a case around forced disappearance. When this happens, the parents and the day after are told, Oh, guess what? We found these like, you know, we found these, like, mass graves outside of Iguala. It’s likely the students, it’s likely your children, you know, once they get there. It wasn’t not only not the students, it was a whole other set of people, women, children. You know, some families talked about being told about a quinceanera still in her dress just suddenly that the top is blown off of this huge problem of forced disappearance. And it starts a movement, right, where you have people in Mexico actually not trusting the government or the police and going to the mountainsides with sticks to look for remains. And so when we talk about why Ayotzinapa, it’s a drop in the bucket. 43 amidst 100,000. But it’s the first time that Mexico has to face itself. And this problem of forced disappearance in the face and even though it’s been eight years, it speaks to this larger issue of not only forced disappearance, but impunity, which is there’s no accountability. There’s no, you know, these cases aren’t solved. The truth is never figured out. And this is in the most important case in Mexico, which is the case of these 43 students. This is still the case eight years later.
Scheer:
And so you started digging into… Tell us about your own work and about Reveal and you know how you work. You had a partner on this…
Diaz-Cortes:
Yes.
Scheer:
How did you get into journalism? And what kind of journalism do you do?
Diaz-Cortes:
You know, yeah. So I came into this work basically more from an oral historian perspective. I’m not an oral historian, but I came into it with this idea of storytelling, less journalism and storytelling. And I worked with my current partner now, her name is Kate Doyle, and she’s from the National Security Archive, which is basically a nonprofit in D.C. that FOIAs uses the transparency law to get information from the U.S. government around mass atrocities around the world, in this case, Latin America and and Mexico. And, you know, back in the day for a company called Radio Diaries that airs on All Things Considered on NPR, her and I worked together around a massacre that happened in 1968 in Mexico City, where for the 40th anniversary, we did a kind of an oral history that aired on All Things Considered and a documentary around that night and what happened in 1968 and October 2nd of 1968.
Scheer:
Let me just ask you, what is your background and your language skill and so forth.
Diaz-Cortes:
I’m originally from Mexico City, Bob, so I have this perspective on impunity very much ingrained and it very much speaks to me. I was born there. I grew up in Miami, of all places, and I hated Miami. So I went back to Mexico City at the age of 18, 17, 18 to college there. Not at the UNAM, everybody always asks, but I basically came from Miami-Dade Public Schools and had no idea about the U.N. or international relations or Latin American studies or anything of the sort. And my brain was blown in Mexico, and I stayed there for many, many years. And in this context of Latin American studies and doing Latin American politics, my partner, my reporting partner, Kate Doyle, is kind of a legend. She’s a person that has basically built truth commissions in Guatemala and El Salvador around forced disappearances, around paramilitary activity, around the Cold War. So to be able to work with someone that you study when you’re 18 and then to make a documentary with them was a huge honor in 2008 and then in 2018 to come together again to basically co-report and co-produce the story as Reveal and the National Security Archive and add in kind of all the investigative weight to that really put us in a unique position to to take on this case. Right. And so how we basically did that was that she reached out to me in 2018 and of course by 2014 I was frantically obsessed with this case as all Mexicans. I was living in Los Angeles, which, as I say in the podcast, is very much a Mexican city. And I think in Los Angeles, this case hit everybody right? It hit all of us. And so I was low key, obsessed with it. So when Kate Doyle reached out to me, you know, her main thing was like, why the ferocity of these attacks on the students? It’s like, why that night? Not just what happened that night, but why the forced disappearance, why the gunshots, why the bloodshed? And what the hell is up with these buses? Right? These buses that they were riding on. And that’s kind of where we start to dig together as a co-reporting team. And our goal was less to make a podcast about the night of the crime. I think that’s been done. It’s been a hugely covered story in Mexico, around the world. Every major outlet has covered it. But what was less covered was the story of the investigation that followed. And now, because Kate Doyle’s so well positioned with the forensic anthropologist, the fire experts, the families and the lawyers of the families, we were able to kind of build on her trust and access to sources in these stories and capture that for public radio, for a US audience, many times in English, usually in Spanish, but really capture this moment of a story, yes, told in the past, but the story of an investigation.
Scheer:
So could you summarize what we now know? Because I’ve listened to your podcast, but just for people who haven’t, what you’ve come up with, what has been the product of all of this research and revisiting this?
Diaz-Cortes:
And maybe the way to do that, Bob, is to continue with the chronology of like what you know, what ends up happening after, just to give your listeners a sense, is that right after, you know, weeks after this horrible night, this horrific night, the parents are basically told and this is hard to hear for your listeners, especially those of us connected to Latin America about what the families are told, which is like this horrific kind of story, is that their boys are basically taken by police to a garbage dump. They’re passed off to, quote unquote, local criminals, local gang members. They’re shot. They’re thrown over a cliff, a 40 foot foot of garbage. And they’re burned in a huge pyre overnight. And, that’s that. You know, the parents early on are like the government is lying to us. This is not possible. This is not how fire works, we’re campesinos. We know how fire works. You know, now we know we have satellite images. It was raining that night. It was impossible to create a huge fire to burn that many bodies, frankly. But so what they do is they basically, through their lawyers, they reach out to the Orient, to the OAS, the Organization of the American States, which is like the U.N. And they’re like, this is something really freaking shady that’s happening. We’re being lied to. Please help us bring international experts to investigate the case. Now, for about a little under a year, they bring in this like dream team of experts, you know, from Chile, from Argentina, from everywhere to dig down into this case with the Mexican government. Now, what ends up happening is that they start to figure out that there’s some kind of cover up that’s happening. They’re stonewalled all throughout. They bring on this Secretario Omargo Mestrejo, who is very much featured in our podcast and becomes the prosecutor eventually. But basically, their investigation is so damn good that they get kicked out of the country and their mandate ends in 2016, about a year and a half after the night of the crime. And that story of the garbage dump is the one that sticks with the government. They tell the parents of the families to go home and to move on, you know, and to be like your kids are… That is the official truth. They call it the historical truth, la verdad historica. Now, when Kate Doyle reaches out to me, a new government has been sworn into office in Mexico, the government of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, effectively a leftist government in Mexico who basically campaigns on finding the truth about what happened to these families’ sons. And, you know, he parades the families around. The families basically publicly support him and campaign for him. This time, Kate Doyle is reaching out to me and she’s telling me, you know, let’s do a story on this. I have an insider named Omargo Mestrejo. He was the secretary for these international experts. So he knows basically the skinny on like what went down and how that went down and basically thinking how do we tell human rights stories, Latin American stories for a U.S. audience? So that’s where we were. Andres Manuel gets sworn in, opens up the case, and to our surprise, like our main source, is basically chosen as the lead prosecutor for the reopening of the case. So that was an interesting turn because he could, he decided that, you know, our communication had to be so restrained because suddenly in 2018, no, 2019, the case reopens. A then six year old cold case reopened to try to find the truth. And our main source is heading the investigation. Shortly after that, the pandemic hits and we’re kind of put in this position where, you know, we were hoping to like, go there and interview people, build trust, and that was not done. So what we did, Bob, is we basically sent reporters to the people we wanted to interview because they couldn’t talk to us over Zoom or Signal for security reasons.
Scheer:
When you say we, you mean Reveal.
Diaz-Cortes:
Reveal and Kate Doyle yeah, Reveal and with the National Security Archive.
Scheer:
These days when you have some newspapers and most of them are actually supported because some billionaire is willing to do it, their business model is broken. I mean, investigative journalism is in a bad state and you have a few institutions. You know, full disclosure, they are also a fiscal sponsor of this show, it’s CIR. But I’m very proud to have that connection because I think they do some of the best independent journalism now. And so we should give them credit and talk a little bit about how you work, you know, And are you afraid, by the way, of doing this story? I mean, there’s, it’s a risky business.
Diaz-Cortes:
It’s definitely a risky business but once you’re, you know, once you’re in that situation, you’re like, wow, as Americans, you know, as U.S. citizens, I’m a citizen of both Mexico and the United States. But it’s a huge privilege to be able to do this work and then to be like, okay, I’m going home now. You know, I get to go home and tell this story for like a niche U.S. public radio audience and the families that say and the journalist, the Mexican journalists on the ground doing this work every day are really put in danger. So it’s almost like putting that in perspective and kind of honing our privileges as American citizens to be able to tell these stories and be protected and be able to go home and to, you know, just to make this connection. And, you know, we can go back to what happened. But this case is hugely connected to the U.S. war on drugs and to say what responsibility do we bear on this side of the border for this bloodshed in Mexico, for this demand? Because what Kate Doyle and I end up kind of, the thread we end up pulling on is that, you know, early on, the experts figure out that the same gang that like disappeared the children and burned them in this pyre. Their name is Guerreros Unidos. There were eight of them indicted in Chicago during this same time. So the thread that Kate and I start to pull on is that there was DEA surveillance… There was surveillance by the DEA on these same gang members. It’s not just like these local gang members. It’s a transnational drug cartel that basically transport heroin on top of buses from Iguala, where the students commandeer the bus to Aurora, Illinois, which are the suburbs of Chicago. And we actually interviewed this retired DEA agent, Mark Dufrey, who was at the center of this investigation, who was basically surveilling Guerreros Unidos at the time, not even linked to the forced disappearance of Ayotzinapa, but who opens up Time Magazine to read up on the on this case of forced disappearance in Mexico in this garbage dump and these buses. And suddenly he’s like WTF. They have it all wrong. They need to look at the buses. And while the local experts were looking at the bus, the experts in Mexico, international experts were looking at the buses, the government was stonewalling them every step of the way. So through the FOIA basically, we’re able to pressure the US to give us any and all information they have, not only about Ayotzinapa forced disappearance, but on this transnational drug cartel that the government is saying disappeared the students, Guerreros Unidos. And that’s kind of where we are at this point, Bob, where we can effectively prove that the students on the bus that they were riding had drugs or heroin because those buses then disappeared and dismantled. But we can make a pretty clear link to the buses that they were driving on and the ferocity of the attack that they were commandeering and the ferocity attack and that those buses were involved in a transnational heroin drug operation between Iguala.
Scheer:
And you don’t mean that the students had the drugs, you mean, the buses themselves.
Diaz-Cortes:
The buses, but they commandeered the wrong buses.
Scheer:
The buses have fake floors or something where they can hide drugs.
Diaz-Cortes:
Well, so, you know, Omar himself, the prosecutor would tell you, I’ve been on these buses. Mark Dufrey, the DEA agent, was like, I took about the buses with my own hands and I found nothing. Very deep into his investigation, he gets one of the engineers of these buses to show him blueprints of where they were hiding the heroin or the cash. And it was inside the bumpers, inside these very sophisticated bumpers. And that’s where either the heroin going up or the cash coming down that’s where it was.
Scheer:
Okay. So let me just summarize here. We’re going to run out of time here. That you now have, you know, well-informed people looking at it. Right now, you have a government and, you know, sometimes people look at Mexico and they see it as a seamless web of corruption or something. But, you know, you have a government that has campaigned to get at the truth of this case and is presenting a different image of Mexico as not just this corruption, but as an attempt to do something. And I want to know, you mentioned the DEA. Let’s get to this. What is their connection with this? The US government’s primary connection with Mexico is through this drug enforcement. This is how we intervene. It’s not really through human rights or supporting their agriculture or paying their workers more that work on products going to the United States, a major trade partner of the United States. But really, our intervention has been over the drug, so-called drug war. And what is that relation to this case?
Diaz-Cortes:
Well, I think in this case in particular, this is where it all intersects, right? This is where when you have initiatives like the Merida Initiative that instead of creating judicial reform, instead of, you know, creating a sense of, you know, going to the root cause, they’ve effectively militarized Mexico, strengthened the military and gone after like these, the kingpins. Right? The El Chapo’s, gone after the top. And because they make good headlines but have not really focused on the culture of impunity around this. So if you have a forced disappearance and you go to the cops to file, to report it, there’s no legal system to support you in that. So instead of a kind of U.S. policy gearing toward, you know, supporting local judicial branches, it’s gone through like militarization. Through more helicopters, more guns, more. And that has only increased death, forced disappearances. Like, it’s like it’s parallel, Bob. It truly is. Like since 2000, these 100,000 cases, 90% of them just to reiterate, have been since 2005 since these policies were put into place under the then Felipe Calderon and under Condoleezza Rice in the Bush administration. And they’ve only failed, they’ve only led to bloodshed. And this case is like the prime example of that, because this case got all the international attention, all the privilege of international attention that a case could get. It has Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and the National Security Archive digging in, which is not the most glamorous thing, but it is a US outlet digging into this. What happens to all the other cases? Absolutely nothing. Like they just you know, they’re… Absolutely nothing. So when we look at the bloodshed on that side, we bear responsibility on this side. And a lot of that is through U.S. policy. Now, the DEA in this case specifically was actually kind of shed a lot of light on this case because they were surveilling the cartel from Aurora to Iguala. So it gives us an insight into what was happening. Now, we have FOIA’d for… We’ve sent in about 300 FOIA requests to the government. We’ve gotten back nothing, Bob.
Scheer:
So this, for the uninitiated, you should explain FOIA is the Freedom of Information Act. It allows you to file a request and get information that’s otherwise classified or kept back.
Diaz-Cortes:
That’s exactly right. It allows for classified information. And we have gotten absolutely nothing from the U.S. government on this case. We’re actually working on a story about the secrecy aspect of this case. And before I drop…
Scheer:
That is because they have something to hide or I mean.
Diaz-Cortes:
I mean, these are the questions that we’ll be digging into this year, Bob. It’s like why? Why the secrecy? First, it was why the ferocity around the attacks and now it’s like why the secrecy around this case and how far up the chain does it go? It started with students being burned in a garbage dump by like local corrupt officials. And now when you go up the chain, this involves the military, it involves federal federal agencies. It involves the United States. Like what are those chains of command?
Scheer:
I hate to be cynical or flippant here, but this is being done for KCRW in the NPR station in Santa Monica. And there’s a lot of screenwriters right now thinking this is kind of the ultimate drug war story. You get involved with another country primarily over this one issue, your idea of how to best control the drug trade, which turns out to be a very bad idea, but you stick with it. It ends up corrupting the whole political process and policing and everything. There’s a human tragedy story that you’re focusing on. And then it turns out there were all these big shots involved who have a stake in looking the other way, which are all the ingredients of a great Hollywood movie, right?
Diaz-Cortes:
Oh my God, Bob, and the plot thickens, even this year, you know, where we left off the podcast is that Omar, the lead prosecutor, had reopened the case. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador had, you know, the president fully backed him. And, you know, in August, basically Omar reaches out and says the case is in shambles. The international experts that he brought back in have now left. Omar exiled for the second time and is now living in D.C. And what we’ve learned now is that his investigation was inching very, very close to the truth and the people involved in it involved the military. And while Lopez Obrador is a president of the left and does represent a lot of hope, the truth is that he’s basically militarizing Mexico at the same time. So as the lead prosecutor is going after the military, this new government, they promised the families to get to the bottom of it, found some truth. There were more remains that were found, more students. We know much more about what happened that night. And what we know happened was that there was involvement at the military level. And so that caused Omar to resign because he felt that he could no longer work within the administration and to leave Mexico. He’s now living in Washington, D.C. and hopefully, you know, we’ll be working together with him on a new chapter of the podcast because, you know, the family that we did follow Dona Christine Bautista and her daughters are now in Bridgeport, Connecticut, working. They have left Mexico as well. And the case is currently yet again in shambles and not… While closer to the truth, there’s not really closer to justice.
Scheer:
For people who want to follow up on this. You have a product that they can listen to, right?
Diaz-Cortes:
I do. Yes.
Scheer:
So why don’t we discuss that and how they get more information and stick with it? And also a little bit about how you handle working in such a dangerous situation.
Diaz-Cortes:
Right. And so, Bob, just you know, I will be in Los Angeles tomorrow presenting on the podcast in UCLA. And I have the flier here, and the event is tomorrow. And I can send it to Max as well tomorrow.
Scheer:
Well, this won’t be broadcast.
Diaz-Cortes:
Okay. So you can listen to the podcast. It’s a three part series with one update on it called After Ayotzinapa. You could do the spelling, but that’s if you go on your podcast, feed whatever it is, and go to Reveal presents: After Ayotzinapa. Online, we are RevealNews.org/disappeared and it’ll take us to our landing page. And there you can get a sense of the story of the night and the crime, the investigation that followed and this new president that was sworn in, that campaigned around finding the truth and those attempts that were made in that investigation.
Scheer:
Right. You know, about your own fear or your own working. I mean, this you know, I’ve seen so many stories about what happens to independent journalists in Mexico and the dangers. I don’t want to stereotype the country, but, are you okay?
Diaz-Cortes:
It is an unsettling time for journalists because, you know, when you start to dig into this and you start to touch on it, the sense is that you get either shut down or are killed. There was one journalist in Iguala who was effective, you know. Yeah. It’s a bad time for journalists in Mexico. And that’s why our role from the U.S. is so, so, so important. And to understand that Mexico just doesn’t end at the border or with immigration policy, but that really it’s not only our neighboring country, but it has an effect on us and an effect on them. And the way we cover it has to also be from a Mexican lens. So I kind of see that as my role, Bob. And yes, well, well, there is kind of the fear of danger, I just I really think of the families in these moments and to think that they have to navigate that danger every single day that they leave every single 26th of the month, they leave their villages in Guerrero or their towns or their cities, and they go to Mexico City to march every single month for the past eight years. And so it’s almost like it puts it into perspective, but it’s definitely like a dangerous time where you’re walking on eggshells a little bit with the current government and with the current government that wants to seek truth, you know, so.
Scheer:
Well, my hat’s off to you. You know, it’s. Yeah, you know, for the United States, Mexico is obviously critically important. And to only treat it as a crime scene, to only be concerned about drugs coming here and so forth, and to deny the quality of life, the complexity, questions of justice and so forth, and increasingly cheap labor from Mexico, whether it’s performed in Mexico itself or in American fields and agriculture and homes, is critical to our economy. And so really what you are doing is exploring a human rights story in a country where we have a lot of intimate connection and responsibility. I think that’s a fair way of putting it. So thanks again for doing this work and take care of yourself. Well, that’s it for this edition of Scheer Intelligence. I want to thank Laura Kondourajian and Christopher Ho at KCRW, the NPR station in Santa Monica, for posting these shows. Joshua Scheer, our executive producer for Scheer Intelligence, Diego Ramos, and Max Jones from ScheerPost. Diego does the intro, Max does the technical stuff and the J.K.W. Foundation, which supports this show in the name of Jean Stein. Thank you and see you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.
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