on mexico's drug wars. >> good afternoon. you are here at the line in the sand panel, so if you are looking for whether poetry in the modern age, you are in the wrong room. we are going to be talking about drug cartels this afternoon, so -- >> sometimes marijuana. >> so in tucson anything is civil discourse. it's a pretty volatile issue and i hope we can all follow that principle today. just to introduce myself, my name is margaret regan and i'm a journalist or a tucson. i've written a nonfiction book about the border called the

death of jostling. i'm very honored today to present these authors on this panel which by the way is sponsored by the university of arizona press so thanks to them. here's our format. we are going to introduce our speakers and they're each going to speak terry briefly about how their book deals with the drug issue if it does, and in what way and then we are going to go into questions. out that a lot of you have questions. i have got a bunch of questions, but then we will cut off my questions and we will get you guys going. we only have one hour and it's one hour sharp. we don't have the information yet but i do want to find out where you can find these authors selling their books afterwards. where is it? 10b and we hope there is an escort to leave them there and perhaps you will want to buy their books. okay so we will get started right away. we have peter laufer to my left.

he is a journalist, broadcaster and documentary film make or who is now a james wallace chair in journalism at the university of oregon, meaning that as a writer he has said very prized commodity, a full-time job and a full-time salaried. peter has recorded all over the world. his first major exposure to immigration issue was the soviet invasion in afghanistan in 1980. he's going to give us some pretty interesting cross-cultural perspectives on the drug trade. from afghanistan he went to europe in the 19 80s. he started seeing lots of immigrants coming in from the middle east and asia and back in this country he was in california and around mexico struck by the similarities of that immigrants coming from mexico to our country the he is the author of more than a dozen

nonfiction books on social and political issues including nation, the case for opening the mexican-american border. it kind of tells you his perspective right there. and today, today he is going to be talking to us about his latest book, "calexico" true lives of the borderlands. >> you would like me to take this up the drug stuff? i'm happy too because in fact what i attempted to do with the book "calexico" true lives of the borderlands was to look at the border through the lens of calexico, which is, it isn't the stereotype of the border town that you might think for most people and i went to calexico with the goal of trying to look at the border without looking too much at migration or add drugs, because these are the

three things that i was trying to get away from, the magaw bolus, san diego, tijuana, el paso and juarez so often where there are borders and looking in looking at the borders as a drug problem or a migration problem. calexico is intriguing because so much is reversed in calexico. collects oh as many of you may know is a crossroads town. the cosmopolitan city is on the other side of the border, mexicali. that is where 1.5 billion people live in the sprawl of calexico. and in mexicali is the state capitol and the university and the symphony and the all-night body houses and really good restaurants. everything closes down at dinnertime, which is maybe 6:00. even in calexico and calexico is an imperial town which hits the

bottom of everything in california, education, health, air quality, water quality, all of these things where california counties, imperial counties is the worst. and life in calexico as it has been, for those of you who are from here and know what it used to be like going back and forth across the border, life in calexico for calexico's was a mix life, going across the border and coming back and living until the wall went up. that which is called a fence in some places or a border in some places where there isn't even anything except say sand is awol in calexico. it's a wall that looks so much like the berlin wall looked when i lived in berlin and reported from berlin dryer to 1989 when the berlin wall came down.

it is security and yes, it's wrong to equate the two but it certainly isn't wrong to compare the two. the architecture is so similar standing in downtown calexico and looking south as someone who lived up against that wall and west berlin, it is beyond e-rate. we don't have the automatic machine guns that are triggered by somebody crossing the free fire zone and we are not i think trying to keep ourselves in the way that the east germans were trying to keep their people in east germany. we are we think trying to keep people out, or so we say, but in fact what you learn from calexico very quickly is that wall is keeping us in and it is

radically changing life and has radically changed life in calexico where the community, the communities of calexico and mexicali, something that was once one, is forcibly bifurcated against the will of the people who live there. they are at the mercy of mexico city and sacramento and washington were decisions made about their lives and these are decisions that they know our counterproductive. so the premise in my book "calexico," the conclusion, what i jump up and down about is that what we need to do with something different. one of the fascinating aspects of the border as an issue is that we can all agree about something, no matter our political point if you. no matter how we live in relation to the border and everybody in every state and on

the border one way or another. we can all agree on this and that is that the border is broken. it is a tragedy and a disaster, and we can't fix it by putting a wall up because we don't have the political will or the social desire to have a complete wall. we are maintaining a fiction that we want to keep people out. and so what i suggest we should consider doing, and this relates berkley to the drug trade, is we let any mexican who wants to come up here, peer and to do whatever they would like to do. do they want to study? do they want to go shopping? do they want to see their relatives? do they want to go to disneyland? do they want to go to school. as long as there is system for knowing who is coming up and we are checking people who would want to, peer from any country and then we would use the power of the border control, all of

their equipment, all of their men and women power to keep those big groups including the drug pushers. >> thank you peter. now sylvia comes from quite a different background. law enforcement i guess it's to say. sylvia longmire served as a senior intelligence analyst on drug trafficking and border violence in the state of california. she was also a specialist in the air force. her writing is regularly featured in home and today magazine and she is currently an independent insult patch consultant testified as an expert witness on the asylum case. sylvia's book is "cartel" the coming invasion of mexico's drug wars, which argues that cartels are moving their operations north of the u.s. and the drug wars are compromising our national security.

and i have a nice quote on the book from an arizona and, terry goddard, the former arizona attorney general. he said that sylvia's book provides the much-needed perspective on a problem that has been hijacked by exaggeration, hyperbole and outright manipulation. so sylvia if you would take a few minutes right now to tell us the basic gist of your book in three to five minutes. >> the bottom line of sublive is drug war when a one. it's an overview of what's happening in mexico, why it's happening but more specifically how it's impacting our national security and white americans should care. i've been writing about the drug war for many gears and when people talk to me and asked me what do i do, and almost everybody in the country has heard at least one story about the violence in mexico and they'll think do you know what? it's really sad and it's really tragic but they kind of go about their day. it might as well be afghanistan,

it might as well be something going on in cashmere and people in montana or illinois where i live or massachusetts or just kind if you know, why should i really care? it doesn't impact me. so my book is very u.s. centric as far as an american perspective and as qaeda from the strategic, where peter's book is a 1000-foot level where we focus on a particular area i am at the 30,000 levels taking a look at everything that's happening and then kind of drilling down on why americans should care, meaning that cartels are operating more than 1000 u.s. cities either directly operating there. 90% of the illegal drugs consumed in the indymac are coming from mexico. even where i live, live just outside the st. louis area and you'd think okay st. louis has nothing to do with mexico but we are seeing a huge spike in overdoses of heroin. not in urban and bad

neighborhoods. these are 19-year-old caucasian kids who are middle class, upper middle class who are smoking this black tar heroin in their own homes and it's coming from mexico. hub cities like denver and detroit and atlanta, the largest methamphetamine lab ever busted in united states was run by one of the larger drug cartels in mexico and they have a huge problem in gwinnett county. again, not just along the border. i take a look at the challenges posed to u.s. law enforcement. i get a lot of questions about the somewhat, the title coming invasion and the town is really dire. it's not a world situation where you have armies of drug smugglers coming across with assault weapons and bombs and killing everybody in their path. think of it is an invasion like a virus. they are already here. their already here. they are already in violent

confrontations. we are having an impact on what the cartels are doing with the mexican law enforcement and are having an impact on the cartels. but as they get squeezed tighter and tighter demand is not going anywhere. the drug demand is growing so the drug cartels want to keep moving those drugs into the united states so they are more willing every single day, every single year more willing to engage in violent behavior in public with u.s. law enforcement and with each other. the first beheading we had related to the drug war and chandler arizona just outside of phoenix, a pretty nice neighborhood. that only made the local news. that did not make the national news. we have had other beheadings related to the drug wars in the u.s. but that didn't exactly make the front page of the "boston globe" because it seems to be a local issue. cross-border kidnappings are exploding particularly in phoenix. there was a controversy because the numbers were pumped up for

political reasons but even at two broke again in 2009 there were something like 260 kidnapping strictly related to the drug war, just a couple of hours away from here and it's not limited again, to the border region. in 2008 a 6-year-old child was kidnapped at gunpoint from his home because his grandfather wrote the drug cartel money. i had this great urge to write a book that explained it in very plain language to people who really wanted to know more but didn't want to drill into a lot of details about why it's happening and why they should care and why they should become, most importantly why it should become a national priority is supposed to just a side thing in folk saying that order is safer and more secure than it's ever been. i think we need to re-examine that, and that is what the book is about. >> thanks cilia. r. next up there is the very distinguished philip caputo. he has been coming here to the

book festival i think every year since it started. isn't that right, phil? >> yeah. it's getting to be kind of old hat. >> it's still very popular. phil worked for nine years for the "chicago tribune." he shared a pulitzer prize in 1972 for his reporting on chicago and is a foreign correspondent for the tribune. he covered the fall of saigon in 1975. phil is the author of a work sufficient including "crossers" which you will be talking about today in into man o' wars including a rumor of war, highly respected book about his service in vietnam and more works of nonfiction. he divides his time between connecticut and arizona and "crossers" is a novel about the border. he tells me is just back from france where "crossers" is in french and i'm dying to ask bill, what is the name of your

book in french? >> it's all -- is called clandestine. i probably mispronounced it. >> has book has been called a blistering novel about brutality and beauty of life along the the arizona mexico border. i'm going to direct my first question to phil since he lives down in cochise county. >> santa cruz county. >> santa cruz county, okay, but down in the southeastern part appears on it. in march of 2010, robert printz was murdered on his ranch in cochise county. law-enforcement officials immediately suggested it might have been killed by a drug smuggler and undocumented immigrant. to this day, princes murder remains unsolved. we don't know who killed him. nevertheless in the resulting fear and paranoia about mexico's drug violence spilling over the border, arizona passed punitive

anti-immigrant law as the 1070 which targets undocumented immigrants who are living and working in arizona. so my question is, how much do our fears about drug smuggling feed into anti-immigrant sentiment that is already raging in the united states? >> well i think there is a kind of a general paranoia ball a long the border. it's probably strongest here in arizona because this has been for many many years were the most trafficking has been taking place. i think the fears about the drug smugglers and smuggling that does feed into a general kind of xenophobia that extends to the traditional jesus coming over to work in the holiday in. they are somehow lumped together with a really bad guy.

i think people would do well to remember that there have now been something like 2000 people murdered on the mexican side of the line and printz, i think there were three murdered on this side of the line or two or something like that. so that, when the spheres are raised, they certainly have to be put into perspective, and somehow, and it won't happen here in this state with the arizona state legislature ever, but it's a very challenged group. [laughter] but you do need to make a distinction between the illegal

migrant and the drug smugglers and even there you have to make distinctions between some guy he was just a drug mule, who generally is just carrying a load of marijuana over and say his boss, or a cartel leader or a sub lieutenant i guess is what the mafia might call the captain. so, yes, the answer to the question is i do think the fears about drug smuggling feed into it. again, a generalized xenophobia. >> anybody else want to respond to that? >> i totally agree with what he is saying it i've always tried to explain to people that they are two separate issues. josé maria who we should prioritize how we look at people because we can't stop everybody in my idea is we should stop dangerous people from coming first however those lines between those two groups are becoming increasingly blurred and that's making it very

challenging for law enforcement because we are we are increasingly seeing a number of migrants who are just looking for work, who were being forced to become mules so they are being forced to carry drug loads either at gunpoint or their families and their children are threatened and they find out where their families in the united states are, their families in mexico and is not traditionally how the cartels of operated because the normally allow one hired hands or third hardees to bring those drugs across because, can we really rely on these immigrants to take the stuff across? they are also looking for risk reduction so it's a pretty good as this practice to let -- to threaten somebody in migrants are scared. they are scared out of their mind and they will do anything just to get out of there with her life intact. so it reduces the exposure to law enforcement for those drug cartels to just send a forced mule to send some dope across and if they get busted, at least they are not the ones that are

going to jail. there is a lot of, a lot of -- and i love how it wrought that reality into his novel. so it's really challenging in border control. i consult with the "national geographic" channel on the border series which is very fascinating. if you have never watched it, watch it. and talking to the field producers in the folks who are out there who are dealing with the border patrol and working with them on a daily basis, east of it they could more clearly delineate between looking on their scope sore -- and saying this is a group and they are drug smugglers and this is a group of migrants when they get out there sometimes it's the opposite. when they catch these migrants who are forced to carry these loads, it's very difficult to tell whether or not they are telling the truth and they were at gunpoint or if they are working directly for the cartel

and becoming very muddy. it's been recently challenging for folks who are working for security on our site to differentiate between the two and politically speaking to differentiate between how riled up should we get about this issue? >> and this is exactly why it's in our self interest to come up with a system to a lao those that we want to have up here, because they wouldn't be coming up here, the bulk of them, if we didn't have the need to have them appear. that's why it's in our self-interest to figure out a way to open the border to those who are not in a kind of a threat to us or our way of life or reinforce our way of life. once we do that, those who are coming up who are not a threat, those who we want, then those who are were hiding in the

shadows, those who are identifiable as people we don't want up here, the drug pushers, the drug cartels fighting for their territory, the drug mules and one could add to that -- are we afraid of some terrorists coming up here that were signed by somebody that's not in mexico? all of these people can be separated from those we choose to just let up here without the excruciating wait that is now to try to get people to come up here often which is denied. you can just imagine the potency of the border patrol, the training that they have, the personnel that they have, and equipment that they have if they were running after people that are going to get here anyway and we want them here anyway, then those really bad guys which you identify in your book, we have a chance of keeping out of this

country. >> thank you. phil i didn't give you a chance to explain your novel. would you like to do that now? >> well just real quick, i think sylvia mentioned it too, but the novel doesn't deal with illegal immigration or with drug smuggling as an issue. they are the background against which a different drama unfolds. that's partly a family saga about a ranching family here in arizona, partly a love story and in some parts the kind of novel, sort of a good tale. so i think what would speak more to the subject, it makes me feel more important as a novelist

seems kind of frivolous. >> excuse me? >> oh, but i did do a story on the mexican drug wars in juarez for the atlantic a couple of years ago and that probably speaks more to the point of what we are discussing today and what i do remember from being down there was this, really was this sense, at least there, of being in a failed state almost, and of his a true service where people were afraid to talk to us and when i finally did get somebody to talk to us about what was going on, and this was down in the town called the way those casas grandes, he had to go into a backroom in a soundproof radio

station with the door closed before they would say anything to the press. so, again, i think that probably has more foisted my novel. >> i am a huge fan of it and there are a lot of actors because there is one thread in this book that talks about drug smugglers that are coming onto ranch lands and kind of tearing up defenses and the violence in those ranch lands. i worked with the texas -- finding out what is happening with the ranchers and there's so much accuracy having to do with the issues that ranchers of having in arizona and texas so there's definitely a lot of crossover, what we are talking about here. >> like elvis. [laughter] >> okay, getting back to that whole issue of the things that are happening in mexico, the

estimate of those dead in the drug wars in mexico is something, somewhere between 40 and 50,000. am i correct? in february the mexican president calderon came up to the border to juarez and he made a plea to the united states in english and he said, no more weapons. please, dear friends in the united states, mexico needs your help to stop the terrible violence we are suffering. sylvia and her book details how we already all know this that the market for the drugs being peddled by the mexican cartel is right here in the united states but she also details that the guns used in that violence are primarily coming from the united states. sylvia, my question is if we are providing both the market and the guns for the cartel, how complicit is the united states really and the death of the people in mexico?

>> man, you know i always make people mad whenever i get asked about guns the matter what i say so we are off to a great start today. >> we love guns in arizona. >> you can hear me talking about it and texas. at dover's -- goes over real well. here's the things with the guns. is a polarized situation so we know that the cartels are using a lot of guns to engage in their violent behavior and it's kind of ironic. the mexican constitution allows for private ownership. they have their own version of the second amendment, they really do put their federal law prohibits private ownership by most people. you have to go through you now a congressional entry in a letter to santa claus in order to buy a gun in the one gun shop which is run by the military in mexico city so technically you can own one but in reality you can't. that is a reason why the cartel has to go elsewhere to get their guns. so you have two groups. you have pro-guns that has come

everybody has the agenda when you are lobby group but they argue that the vast majority of weapons that are being used in mexico are coming from central america, former eastern block countries in asia. it's not in their best interest for, to say that the majority of guns that are coming here because they are afraid of weapons assault bands will be reinstated and they are worried that the government is all of a sudden going to start breaking into their homes and taking their guns away so that is what they will argue until the end of the world. then you have the other side who says it's the federal government to make up the vast majority of guns in mexico are coming from the united states and that is relying very heavily on the bureau of on the bureau of alcohol, tobacco and firearms data. there are obviously a huge issues where something around 2000 guns were purposefully allowed into mexico under that operation, so that skews the

statistics a little bit. here is where the problem comes in nobody likes hearing it. the only paying -- thing that people don't like being told more than they are wrong, they don't like being told that they don't know so that is very frustrating. i am analyst and i have my own personal opinions and my own personal politics but i can take a look at the information i have in the information i have tells me that no one knows exactly how many guns in mexico are coming from exactly what countries are wet places and in what proportions, because it's the nature weapons trafficking. it's a black market trade. so we know that many of the guns have been traced back. we know thousands of those guns have been traced to point of origin here in the united states and it's not just arizona and texas. the number for state, the most popular state to buy guns and ship them into mexico, washington state and there is no drug war going on in canada.

it's the wrong order, folks. they are coming from other states far away from the border and it's because of the gun laws they're so yes we do have a black gun laws in some particular areas but the bottom line is the cartels are using our own laws against us. they are u.s. citizens with clean backgrounds who passed a background check to hire cartels to go do these gun stores and buy the guns and give them to a middleman who gets it to a courier to send it to mexico so even if you reinstate the assault weapons ban which by the way his 17 is 17 weapons on the assault weapons ban and only two are the favorite listed the mexican cartel. there are so many ways to modify weapons. it's easy to convert a semiautomatic rifle into a fully automatic right of. the cartels are smart. they are businessmen, their profit makers which means they want to get their products or whatever they need fast, cheap and easy. a black-market ak-47 in honduras

will run about dirty 700 to $4000. if you get in and texas about $2025 depending on how far you want to take it. it. honduras is an exactly, technically next-door but it's a long ways to get it there. it's only a day's drive to go from monterey into texas and turn around and come back so looking at it from a business perspective from a logical perspective, logic tells me as an analyst that the easiest place for them to get the guns they want us to come to the u.s.. but such a small percentage of the guns being used in mexico are actually seized and the small percentage of those are actually trained in a way that tells us something. part of those came from fast and furious. many of the guns that are seized are destroyed and never submitted for tracing, stolen, sent back to the cartels, so we have to little reliable data, to

little reliable information for anybody anywhere on the political spectrum to say that they know exactly what percentage of guns, so if the nra tells you something or the mexican government tells you something or the federal government tells you something and they are 100% sure that is the truth, don't believe them because nobody knows. it's a terrible answer to say that we don't know. i don't like it is an analyst. it drives me crazy but that is the reality of it and it's because of that disparate information and the lack of facts and the lack of data we are at a stalemate when it comes to policy or to a slowing down that south down flow of weapons and i don't think we are going to see a lot of movement because of the political issues surrounding it. >> would you just speak about arizona? i know you mentioned arizona of being being a source of guns. >> as far as specific?

i mean, obviously arizona is the home of fast and furious. came out of the phoenix field office. i don't know if you want me to talk about that in particular. is one of the top source states but that is going on atf trace data which is reliable in some cases and others not so anytime the trace data comes back from mexico from a particular store in arizona, especially going back anywhere from 2900 fast and furious really started, some people automatically assumed well it was part of the fast and furious program and now it's even harder to find out and separate, is this gun genuinely purchased by a straw buyer somewhere in arizona by the cartel in mexico or was it part of the fast and furious program? that is becoming even more challenging but yes arizona -- the gun laws are lax compared to many of the other states in the union and the guns are cheap and

it's easy for cartel to higher straw buyers so it is one of the top states in my opinion. >> maybe we could talk a little bit about possible solutions. what we are talking about is the lack of gun control laws. peter do you have any thoughts on guns? >> i have my uncle hugo's on. my uncle hugo managed to escape from prison in siberia and spent six years getting across asia and europe, back home to budapest where he asked his kid on the street who was about six years old where the house was and his family because they had moved in the intervening time. he said i will take you there, it's my house. it was his own kid and they had this terrific gun. >> that's quite the story. >> and that gun, if you

pulled -- put it up your nose and pull the trigger you might manage to get a nosebleed. regardless, there is another part to this equation of making the border more secure and safer by allowing for the transit of mexicans who we have no problem having up here and that is as bill said, mexico can be with all respect identified as a failed state. and whatever responsibilities we may feel that we have or not, it is only in our self-interest to try to figure out how to work with mexico if we can imagine any possibility of repairing it to some extent. so, when you look at the border and many of you i am sure have gone back across the border,

going into mexico the straw buyers in the middlemen you are, when they take those guns into mexico they are not screening anyone. it can be in a safeway bag. just doesn't may kinney bis -- difference because of the nature of the border. once they are in mexico, when they are doing whatever they're going to do with these guns likely there is somebody who also has a badge in his pocket that they are dealing with because it's a corrupted police force most everywhere, except maybe with some of the better -- some, some. i said some. >> all two of them. [laughter] spisak but true. so we can from her privileged position here get a laugh out of that and it is perversely funny but until and unless there is improvement in the political

reality that makes up that part of the mexican social life, we are going to have problems. >> margaret if i could just interject? there is no doubt that the u.s. as a drug market, and i might add also a market for cheap and exploitable labor, as well as to whatever degree it is, supply, and i believe there is a lot of mythology about how much weaponry goes drum the north to the south. all of that said, one of the things that really gets my hackles up is when calderon makes a, it like that. nobody is trying -- he's trying to do with the elite in the mexican government society have done and that is to call attention away from the

political corruption. it isn't just that it's expensive. it is systemic. >> it is endemic. >> is within the very dna. and not just the politics. >> in journalism, the cash payouts in government without which so that so many journalists in mexico could not make their heads. >> or those who, like a gentleman i met a couple of years ago named gutierrez, who would not take any payoffs and was critical of the activities and actions of the mexican army as well as the straw wars, was finally threatened with death and escape to el paso where to this day he is still seeking political asylum. >> we have been talking about

the death of migrants and it's appropriate to talk about how dangerous mexico is for journalists and after iraq it is the most dangerous place for journalists based on journalists being murdered. >> what would be the impact of legalizing drugs or even legalizing marijuana? how much of this thing would it come out of the drug cartel? it's one of my favorite things to talk about. >> i wrote an op-ed for "the new york times" and i got a huge response. i never wanted a polarizing topic but you know that is what i live for. you have to understand how the drug income breaks down. the cartels are involved in the trafficking of drugs, marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and there one that accounts for the highest volume of drugs however cocaine accounts for the largest

profit they are making from bringing it across, so you take a look at it and again it's black market, it's not like they have pricewaterhousecoopers doing their books for them and putting it on the internet for everyone to see so remember it's only an educated guess. we are only stopping 10% that's coming across are you have to extrapolate from that but the limitations of an educated guess, the rand institute did a study on this, but roughly 25% at the high-end of the cartel process is coming from marijuana and, not just the other drugs but now they have branched out into kidnapping, extortion, even if fuel theft, cattle rustling, mining. if there is money to be made in mexico, the cartel has their hands and his oath you take away marijuana and in my opinion you're going to have a -- just like all of a sudden if you say were going to cut off oil. we will get it from somewhere

else and then he will be stuck if you have nowhere else to send it. so you cut off marijuana and you're going to have a short-term debt in the market as far as for the cartels but they are going to make it up using cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine and still bring in that across and they're still making money hand over fist especially with kidnapping because kidnapping of migrants coming more from central america and from mexico is absolutely exploding. so unless you legalize every single one of those drugs from top to bottom from production to consumption you're not going to have a serious impact. you're not going to stop the cartel. it may go down a little bit. >> we are just about ready for our audience questions, but before we go to that i just have to reach read you guys this letter that philip caputo rattu are daily newspaper this week. our legislature in its wisdom has passed a bill saying that they are going to offer warnings

to everybody not to go to southeastern arizona if i understand it correctly. >> that's right. >> the a 62-mile corridor. they warned people not to, and as we all know we have a lot of tourism down there. here is a quote from philip caputo from the "arizona daily star" on march 7. i travel the highways and county boards of southern arizona for four months a year for the past 16 years and never have been threatened by anyone, citizen or alien. i have also hunted, hiked, camped in written horseback in the backcountry over the same. lack of time. i've had numerous encounters with illegal migrants and even drug smugglers are going number of times i've been shot at or otherwise threatened, menaced, zero. so phil that is a public statement made about the safety over the rural lands. if anybody would like to ask a

question, we have microphones on the other side of the room. >> you forgot to add that i did say the sponsor of the bill, representative peggy -- claims she asked people everywhere in arizona and i want to bring this out and i did state that that's her problem. [laughter] cnn he goes on to say in these tough economic times, the last thing this area needs is to scare visitors away by raising imaginary fears. so mr. philip caputo, in our paper. [laughter] [applause] start with this i. >> i like this push on the question, how do we do this? if you were to absolutely trace your perfect path, how would your book result in action that

would improve the situation? testifying in congress, would have to country read the book and say this is what we have to do? how are we going to get some action out of it? >> i want half the country to read my book. [laughter] >> what would be the process? the process likely could be administrative, to change the rules regarding what is needed to, from mexico as a mexican into this country. and if we instituted a process that would likely go through the state department that would indicate what type of identification we would mandate and what kind of a check we

would institute, what are siege or would be, this is something that could just be put into place. we are constantly making changes. brazil decided to charge $100 for a visa fee for americans to go to resell and we respond we start charging $100 for the visa fee for brazilian to come up here. we have these bilateral relationships with the foreign ministries or whatever they call them in the various countries that we have agreements with and we could institute this and just make it happen. >> let's have one person answer each question because we have several people lined up. >> is the son? this question is mainly for you, but i am reminded because peter and phil also used the same language defining mexico as a failed state.

and my question is, they call the mexican democracy so fragile in the cartels are increasingly more powerful. from the analyst point of view, do we have to fear the total collapse of the democratic state of mexico? >> that is one of the few things that i disagree with my fellow panelists here. i don't think mexico is a failed state and i don't think it's a failing state. mexico has the 13th largest economy in the world and it's actually expanding believe it or not. tourism has expanded. the private sector has expanded by a small percentage and their economy is hurting pretty bad but they do have a functioning democracy. the local elections, local and sometimes at the state level have been impacted by the drug war by coercion etc. but they still do have a functioning democracy. yes the judicial system is totally screwed up but at least

they have one. they have a functioning military that works. they have like i said, grouping -- booming private sector in their tourism is still exist in. when i think of failing state or failed state i went -- i look at somalia and pakistan being on the brink. if you take a look at somalia and take a look at mexico and put them next to each other and compare the two, just can't do it. looking at what's going on in afghanistan trying to compare the situation in the tribal areas, it's two totally different situations into totally different world. yes there are several parts of mexico that are under cartel control and not under government control but the same as the case in colombia for decades. it was only maybe a decade ago for the colombian government could say the of the government present in every single department and even that was maybe one person who worked for the government and that is not in my opinion government control.

we never said columbia was a failed state. so i understand where some people are coming from when they say look, the situation with the cartels and the fact that they own the police and they own the government and at this date -- the local level and sometimes the state level but overall i don't think they are -- but that is just my opinion. >> phil? >> i guess i would have to direct this question to sylvia. i saw the back of the beaufort police car there written in very large letters, this vehicle was purchased with confiscated drug money and i have read numerous articles about the amounts of money that the police departments confiscated from people who are suspected or actually involved and i'm curious if you thought that there might be developing just as there is an mexico is

symbiotic relationship between the people who are in the drug business and the people who are in the law enforcement business, if they are becoming very much dependent on each other for their own survival? >> you are not the first person to suggest that. ian, there is a writer out there and he lives out in arizona. he doesn't like me very much. he believes that, he believes that it's a huge industry that border security as an industry and there is a lot of money involved in the border security. if it wasn't for the extra police and the extra money going into it and the fight against drug dealers and drug cartel as a whole, is a huge industry so i can't argue with that. there are also an increasing number of corruption cases dealing with the drug war along the border and elsewhere and not just border control and not just customs, looking at the sheriff

as far as that is concerned. so at one level i would say yeah. it's big business and there a lot of state department to rely heavily on grants from the federal government because they are dealing directly with border security issues in those grants are not always use in a way that they are supposed to. but i also know there are a lot of police departments out there who are very underfunded and they don't have nearly enough resources to deal with the challenges that they are being faced with because of the increase in confrontations and the increasing border security. 's be. >> overhear. >> this question is for anybody but sylvia. thank you for mentioning columbia because i have been concerned for years about the billions of dollars that the u.s. given to colombia knowing that the military was enlisted

in displacing over a million people and now there is the merida initiative by which we have, i don't know the figure, but the panel knows that the police and the local police and so forth are corrupt and yet the u.s., i mean a book by a former border patrol agent who is retired now, he was really mad at kos they had to share permission with the corrupt police. could someone please tell me why we give money to people that we know are corrupt? not you, no, not you. >> this is a common misconception. that is completely spent on u.s. resources and u.s. companies who manufacture and provide equipment to the mexican police and the mexican army and it's provided to the mexican --

american contractors and american businesses are going to mexico to provide training to the mexican police or military or private training here in the united states so not red cent of the merida initiative is provided to the mexican government. >> just the material. >> the material yes, and that equipment yeses possible that equipment to get into the wrong hands but we are talking about helicopters, night vision goggles. the cartels already have the stuff so they want to get more but there is obviously you know, they could always use more but as far as the training provides the bulk of it and they are actually pulling back a lot of the heavy equipment because they are changing the merida initiative focused to focus more on state and local because the main problem with corruption is it's at the state and local level and not at the military level. they do have the problems but that's a common misconception about the corruption and are we just pouring the money into the hands of politicians?

>> so all that material and training goes to those that phil was talking about? >> that's right. and they are in fact asking for asylum. [laughter] >> but you know it's possible, and i have no expertise on this but i have heard that same story about the reason we keep up this policy of her liberation enforcement and interdiction is because it has become an industry and it could be that the merida initiative has led to american contractors and they can make a lot of money selling whatever to limit who can army or the mexican federal police are in a way part of this industry. >> at the same with border control and certainly in calexico were it not for the

infusion of border security, the economy would be in worse shape. that is recognized in calexico. the border patrol is associated with the economic realities. >> okay. we have about five minutes, or three minutes. if we can get a few questions answered. >> this is a follow up question to sylvia who spoke earlier about legalization of drugs in the u.s. and what impact that might have on cartels. some in latin america are taking steps to legalizing drugs and i wonder what your thoughts are on the impact of legalized drugs in other countries that it could have on the cartel problem and also what impact does it have on u.s. policy in relation with those countries? >> one thing that i want to make very clear is that a lot of people don't understand the difference between decriminalization and -- decriminalization and legalization. what -- a lot of people talk

about portugal having legalized -- they have decriminalized meaning that if you are busted with a couple of joints are not going to jail. it's like getting a traffic ticket. it's still illegal in every country in the world to manufacture and produce all these different drugs. mexico itself quietly decriminalized personal use, i mean everything, everything, and the local drug markets in mexico have exploded. the drug use in juarez has actually gone up so unless you want to truly legalize, meaning from growing the poppy to injecting it into your arm and and make all of that legal for all of the drugs, only that, and you have to have it happened several countries. as far as the u.s. taking a look at other countries, don't really think it will make that much of an impact. there is that whole little thing

called the united nations single convention against illegal drugs and we are one of the signatories along with 186 other countries and that requires that all signatory countries have anti-drug policies. bolivia just pulled out of that because they are big on pro-illegal coca and having the legal market but they want to go back in. they want the u.n. to make changes to it and bolivia relatively speaking or are standing on the international, the international world there's really not that high so no one is seeing a decline but the u.s. has a long moral history of being anti-drug. so i think even if all of latin america were to decriminalize or looking at the corolla station i don't think the u.s. would change their mind. >> overhear. >> the or mr. laufer. you talked about changing our policies to allow those we love to cross the border and focus on keeping out those we don't want.

you may have answered this in part but how do you distinguish between them? >> you distinguish between them with concern and accepting the fact that you are going to make some mistakes but we do have some method of identification that you are going to accept, then that will allow you to have some sort of a check on the person. then you ought to be able to determine who you want to have been then and who you don't than we do that with countries all over the world that we allow much easier passage into this country. a passport or a card, gas and get it in this room and let's search you or whatever it takes so you're happy that the person who is coming in is probably okay. but that way, when the border patrol is out there looking for people that are running you can be pretty sure they are somebody we don't want and hear. >> wouldn't that open it up for

the cartels to hire people to get these cards? >> of course and there are probably some of you that will drive home tonight over the legal limit because you stop off at a bar and maybe some of you that drove here, and your licenses have been revoked. you probably went over 65 on the freeway or whatever the speed limit is underway here. of course. it isn't perfect but what we have now is a disaster. it's chaos. it's a human tragedy. it is causing nothing but problems, so i say let's try something different and this is the idea i've come up with. >> thank you. i would like to see that happen. [applause] >> i think that brings us to the outcome is that right? we have no time left. the authors are going to