The War Next Door: Adam Smith's invisible hand meets magical realism on the border.

High Country News p. 15 March 1, 2010. Vol. 42, No.4
The War Next Door. Adam Smith's invisible hand meets magical realism on the border. Charles Bowden.

"If the press reports this sort of thing, it is framed as part of a War on Drugs that must be won. These stories are fables at best. There is no serious War on Drugs. Rather, there is violence, nourished by the money to be made from drugs."

"The border should not be an issue in American life, but rather our window on the world. All our foolish beliefs are refuted here. Free trade is creating the largest human migration on earth. The migration of the Mexican poor should be seen as a natural shift of a species. We need ecologists on the border; the politicians have become pointless."

"The official line of the U.S. government, one most recently voiced bny Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is that drug consumers in the United States are responsiuble for drug murders in Mexico. Only someone who is drugged could believe this claim. The sole source of the enormous amount of money in the drug business and the accompanying violence is the U.S. prohibition of drug use by its citizens."

"On the border, Adam Smith meets magical realism. Here the market tenets of supply and demand, the basic engine of both the migration and the drug industry, are supposed to be overturned magically by a police state."

But that's not what's intended: The Border Patrol, DEA, the world's largest prison industry, "are literally failure-proof -- the more Mexicans that migrate, and the more drugs that arrive, the more agents that are hired."