“So Many Bones in the Desert”

Conversation with Sergio González Rodríguez about violence in Mexico.

This stage of violence and inequality wouldn’t be possible without NAFTA in 1994, which in turn wouldn’t have been possible without the Border Industrialization Program of 1965. What I like so much about this most recent book of yours is that you speak so clearly about the border as part of a larger network of machines that must be understood as historical. In the U.S., politicians and media pundits fail to grasp the intimate relationship between fantasies of free trade, neoliberal religions of privatization and globalization, and the profound poverty that’s at the core of phenomena like immigration, drug trafficking, and organized crime.