I was born and raised in Mexico and lived at the Texas-Mexico border for eight years. As a professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville, now the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, I began to research Mexican organized crime groups that operate transnationally. Since 2009, I have studied illicit networks involved in U.S.-bound migration and the drug trade. My interests have to do mainly with the fact that I started my U.S. academic career as an immigrant, some of my relatives arrived here as undocumented immigrants, and because my father and brother were victims of extortion by Los Zetas in 2006.
Over the years, I’ve interviewed countless victims of border violence—as well as its facilitators and perpetrators, analysts and narrators—and exposed disturbing myths about the players in the so-called “drug war.” To understand the dynamics of this armed conflict, we must admit that our main border security problems aren’t really about drugs or narcos at all. Otherwise, both the United States and Mexico risk wading into the quagmire of another unwinnable war.
In 2017, I published Los Zetas Inc.: Criminal Corporations, Energy and Civil War in Mexico, the product of several years of fieldwork in places like Tamaulipas, then one of Mexico’s most violent states. I lived just 15 minutes away by foot, via Gateway International Bridge, from Matamoros, the birthplace of the Gulf Cartel, the drug trafficking organization that later paved the way for the formation of the brutal Zetas.
