04.07 Round up early April

Created Tuesday 07 April 2026


The Drug War Dope


  • Ian Grillo talks to a local reporter in Cautla, Morelos. Just 40 kilometres from the tourist town of Tepoztlan where I live. Yet in contrast to the latter; in Cautla intimidation, corruption and murder are pretty common. It is just one way that live in Mexico is a contrast. The middle class live pretty secure lives behind walls. The working class meanwhile suffer at the hands of criminals. The state unable (the liberal failed state theory) or unwilling (crimes as social control) to do do anything about it.
  • I wrote an article about Trumps drug interdiction strategy, sorry "Kick China out of Latin America" strategy. Meanwhile WOLA looks at some of the changes that we have seen in Latin America, in particular Ecuador.
  • The final piece I wrote about this week is a 2026 PhD by Jorge Isaac Vargas-Gonzalez. His main ideas is how doubt (gossip) plays an important role in Mexico's drug war violence.

The End of Neoliberalism


  • I noted earlier Adam Tooze's thoughts on China's new global role in the Financial Times last week. Basically, he does not think China is prepared to take a pivotal role in world affairs. The world's factory unwilling to poke the US bear, even as the latter abandons the system it created.
  • Meanwhile, Martin Wolf In the Financial Times, 01/04/26, looks at the latest McKinsely report on the global economy. Wolf notes that the report confirms that despite Trump's best efforts global trade continues growing. Global trade, Wolf posits, is "resilient" despite the long term issues that pre-date Trump.
  • Concluding, Wolf confirms Tooze's views to a degree. The US is no longer viewed as reliable, yet China is not ready to step up just yet. In particular he sees the nation's imbalances between exports, high, and domestic consumption of imports, low, as an issue. Namely, as this will be a driver for more tariffs and trade wars.


Militarised Surveillance as Dopamine Hits


  • Peter Thiel's Evil Palantir is making all kinds of tools to allow nefarious government to control their populations. Now, Motorola are getting in on the action, nice. (read the email version here)
  • And to understand why this is not good, you just need to watch this documentary on C4 (UK): Dispatches - Click to Kill - The AI War Machine (https://youtu.be/oayzKRZHp-Q). It looks at Israeli’s use of mobile data to murder Palestinians during the recent post-2023 genocide. Whether they were innocent or not made no difference, they had a profile that Israel deigned made them a threat. Tools now being used to bomb innocents in Iran (https://youtu.be/rsZH6ZNV1CY).
  • All this tech, of course, is designed to control our resistance to the growing global inequality. One outcome of this is increasing spaces where oligarchs are normalizing master servant relationships throughout the economy. A world that Melinda Cooper delves into to show the right wing links between Silicon Valley (Musk & Thiel), Epstein and the Trump administration.