Photo by Maria Izaurralde

Last week, I spoke to activist and libertarian talk show host Adam Kokesh. Less than 24 hours later he was taken into custody by federal agents.

Kokesh is a former Iraq War veteran. In 2007, he was issued a general discharge from the US Marine Corp after being photographed by the Washington Post while attending an Iraq Veterans Against the War protest in his uniform. The resulting incident made the papers and the national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars publicly backed Kokesh, then accused the Marine Corps of trying to silence and punish members of the military for exercising their constitutional rights. This would be the first in a series of controversies surrounding Adam and his politics.

Adam's latest agenda is probably his most controversial to date. A couple of weeks ago on his talk show Adam vs The Man, Kokesh announced his plans to celebrate Independence Day by marching into the nation's capital with 10,000 followers, all of whom would be armed with loaded firearms.

Adam and I talked on the phone for nearly a half hour about, among other things, his protest, privacy and security, and his Jeffersonian values. While his motivations aren't always clear, one thing was obvious: Adam Kokesh does not like the US Government. It's not that he hates the people running the government, but he believes government has invalidated itself by betraying the principles from which it was founded. At times Kokesh sounded downright anarchistic, but overall he was more empowered by the idea that government should belong to the governed.

The day after our conversation, Adam was arrested at "Smoke Down Prohibition," a public protest for the legalization of marijuana that takes place every month in Philadelphia. Basically, large groups of people gather in public and simultaneously spark up joints or smoke bowls of weed to protest the fact that it's illegal to do so. Also, they get high. It's not complicated. Before last Saturday, no arrests had ever been made at one of these events, despite the fact that police were always present and laws were broken every time.

There are several videos on YouTube that document the moments before and during Adam's arrest. In one of the clearest videos, Adam isn't sparking up. He continues talking into the microphone while everyone else is flicking their Bics. Within seconds, the police move in and Adam yells, “Lock arms, we’re going to make it difficult for the police here.” That didn't work out so well.

Moments later, Adam is being dragged away from the crowd by police. He doesn't appear to be committing any crime in the video. In fact, the only charges against him are for events that transpired after he was engaged by the officers: assault on a federal police officer, impeding the duties of a federal police officer, and resisting arrest. Almost immediately after being grabbed by the officers Adam's hands go up into the air, palms up, signaling that he has officially surrendered and isn't resisting arrest. No assault of any kind appears to take place.

According to Lucas Jewell, Adam's podcast manager, the arrest is in direct response to the upcoming Independence Day march, not the Smoke Down Prohibition demonstration. "They walked by a big black guy with dreads smoking a blunt and snatched Adam when he hadn't done anything illegal." The fact that Adam was originally taken to a local jail but then picked up by agents and transferred to a Federal detention facility has only fueled this theory. 

Kokesh went before a judge at 1:30 PM Monday and was reportedly silent the entire time. According to Jewell via the Adam Kokesh Facebook page, another hearing was scheduled for this Thursday. Jewell writes: "The reason for the detention hearing is because Adam will not speak on if he owns fire arms [sic] or his address."

It's unclear if Adam will be released in time to conduct his march on DC, if it will be canceled, or whether the arrest will inadvertently cause even more people to show up on July 4 with loaded weapons slung over their shoulders. If the arrest was indeed a preemptive strike by law enforcement attempting to stop the open carry march before it took place, the tactic of targeting Kokesh in public might very well backfire.

Here's part of my telephone interview with Adam Kokesh from Friday, May 17.

VICE: Hi Adam, thanks for talking with me. How many people have signed up to join your open carry march?
Adam:The total is over 4,000 now, so we're well on our way to meeting our goal of 10,000. There are a lot of people who have signed up by e-mail who said they're going to be organizing buses. So I think with all of the support we've gotten outside of Facebook we're close to 10,000 already.

Is your protest specifically just about the 2nd Amendment or is there a broader theme behind your armed march?
It's definitely broader than that. While the 2nd amendment is an important part of how we are able to keep government in check— at least the founders intended it that way—this is really more about fundamentally altering our relationship with government and making sure that the government fears the people and not the other way around.

You allude to a famous Jefferson quote often. He said, “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” What exactly does that mean to you?
The people have to live in such a state that their rights are privileges because they know the government can take them away at any time; I think that's the state of fear of government that a lot of people live in today. When that's the case it's because rights are threatened. When you fear someone else it's because they are a threat to you peacefully exercising your rights. Human beings are capable of ruling their own lives and shouldn't have other people exercising authority over them in any way. But, in a situation where the government truly exists at the pleasure of the people, then the government should constantly be in fear of the people and should acknowledge that at any time anybody in government can lose their job, or, as the founders said in reference to the declaration, the people have the right to alter or abolish said government.

How do you feel about these recent public comments by President Obama: "Unfortunately you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all of our problems... They'll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices."
Well, in a way, everything he said is perfectly true because the government is not a separate entity as a product of the will of the people. In the other sense, when he says that the people who say "tyranny is around the corner," it's true that they're lying. In any sense that you'd be able to define it, tyranny is already here. If the government is corrosive and only sustainable by assertively violating your rights, I would say that it already is. I think those saying tyranny is around the corner are really the one's that are saying there is some hope left in the political system or if you just do what we say, we're going to be able to fix this or if we just believe in the conservative hype we'll be able to vote our way to liberty.

In the sense that Obama meant it, of course it was absurd that he was saying "don't worry, everything is OK." It's an insult to the intelligence of his audience to suggest they don't know better.

Some people say the notion that the 2nd Amendment is in jeopardy is just a weapon of mass distraction; that gun control is just the next divisive topic to help Democrats and Republicans continue to appear different on the issues now that the polls have shifted on gay marriage. Do you agree with that?
I think most Republicans don't have any credibility when it comes to claiming that they're different from Democrats. The gun control debate is a little more significant than the gay marriage debate. I understand it could be a distraction from the real exploitation that the federal government represents but it's so much more fundamentally important because it deals with the nature of government as a violent monopoly. If you challenge that monopoly they don't like it. There's often a negative reaction and they arrest people illegally, as we've seen in Ohio, in Texas, and events all over the country where people are openly carrying legally and end up getting arrested, accosted, and sometimes assaulted by police officers. So, we're using the gun control to speak to something that goes a lot deeper.

Do you think gun control arguments politicize tragic events such as the Newtown shooting or are the debates necessary?
I think it's necessary to quell the knee-jerk reaction of those who would turn to government to attempt to solve problems, but that's why those conversations happen. Whenever there is a tragedy the government seeks to exploit it. You know, never let a good crisis go to waste. So, I think it's important that we fight back and resist that when there is such a tragedy and this is one way of doing it.

While we're on the topic of politics and guns, do you think the tens of millions of dollars spent by groups like the NRA place the value of the money above our influence as individual citizens on the political process?
I think, really, the problem of money's influence on politics isn't the money that is used to communicate ideas for whatever reason. The problem is that people are willing to vote without thinking. In a sense, voting is an act of aggression because you are saying that if I happen to have the majority when I cast this ballot, it's legitimate for the government to force my will on you; to name a leader for you that has certain policies that you may or may not agree with. To impose a tax on you or pass a law that is going to be forced on you. As long as people believe that somehow voting is appropriate as a way to organize society through force, then we're going to have a problem with influence from various places that are going to try to effect how people vote and who the guns of government are pointed at. I think that's a much deeper problem.

Is privacy the civil rights issue of our generation?
That's a good question. I think it's a very important issue as we see our lives fundamentally altered by technology. I think, in a way, technology provides great mechanisms of accountability. I'm not against surveillance, in a sense. I'm looking forward to having a camera mounted in my contact lens. It's really just a matter of who's controlling it, who is doing what with that data, and who is accessing it for what purposes. But I think privacy is going to become something that we're also empowered by technologically to create for ourselves if we need to. The problem is when you have this technology in the hands of government.

The information we're talking about when we talk about privacy... we're talking about the NSA recording every single digital phone call that takes place in the United States. Every single one. And we found that out unequivocally after the Boston bombing when it was revealed that the FBI was going to “find these conversations.” And you're like... there it is. The question is, who controls this information? Should it be a gang of violent thugs in our government? Absolutely not. But should we have that record? Should it exist? I think so.

It was recently revealed that the Justice Department obtained the telephone records of journalists working at the Associated Press. You're a member of the media, you have your own show. Do you feel this is an all-out assault on the 1st Amendment?
Do I think it's an assault against the 1st Amendment or is it just more intimidation? I don't know, because when I heard about that story and it was the Associated Press that was being targeted, I was definitely surprised. What happened to the AP is not unique to journalists, it's the entire American public. I think we all are threatened by this and we should be worried if it turns out that the government is targeting and influencing journalists—I think that the record is clear now that they have. Is it an assault on the 1st Amendment? The 1st Amendment is a bunch of words on paper. The assault is on individuals and their privacy. All of these transgressions just demonstrate how illegitimate this government is. If there is such a thing as legitimate government, this is not it.

Going back to your protest on July 4th, if the police chief does amass a police presence on the Arlington Memorial Bridge to prevent your demonstration from entering DC, how will you react?
If there is a line drawn then we will march up to that line and we will request permission to pass. If denied, then we'll take our grounds for a lawsuit with us and turn around peacefully.

Thanks for taking the time, Adam. 

@dellcam

For more about government:

How Are We Supposed to Know What the Government Does?

Why I'm Anti-Big Government, and Why Taxes Should Be Made Illigal

Helping the Malaysian Government Find Gays on Grindr

Photo via

After decades of strife, the citizens of Pakistan can point to May 11, 2013, as the first civilian transfer of power through general elections following the successful completion of a term by a democratically elected government. Nawaz Sharif’s heavily criticized party, the Pakistan Muslim League, was victorious in what was a highly contentious election, even in the context of this volatile region. Sharif has already served as Prime Minister of Pakistan twice: from 1990 to 1993 and then from 1997 to 1999. At first glance, it would be easy to dismiss these results as a rubber stamp of the status quo, a bandage on a festering wound of political unrest. When you look closer at the socio-political situation here in Pakistan, however, it becomes clear that just being able to transition governmental authority without military involvement is a victory.

It's not as if everything went perfectly. Prior to the election, Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud wrote a letter that defiantly stated that the aim of their organization was to destroy the entire democratic system in Pakistan. Threats of violence against polling stations were common. Mismanagement of the process by the election commission led to interminable lines for those who exercised their franchise. Ballot rigging was witnessed at many voting sites. Incidents of women being barred from voting occurred in a smattering of cities. Yet despite all this, 47 percent of the population chose to ignore the danger and cast ballots, and violence was kept to a minimum in a nation where political unrest is all too familiar.

Photo via

Pakistan’s history of chaotic transitions is well documented. From 1999 to 2008, General Pervez Musharraf ruled the country through a harsh military dictatorship. His siege of Lal Masjid mosque in Islamabad in July 2007, an attempt to pacify the growing Islamic fundamentalist movement in Pakistan, and the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto in December 2007 only increased pressure on the military regime and contributed to the fall of Musharraf’s government. 

Despite the progress made in this election cycle, Pakistan was not without its struggles, which isn't surprising for a nation weaned on war. At least 121 people were killed and more than 496 were injured in the month before elections. The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), and Awami National Party (ANP) were all put on notice by Taliban forces prior to the start of voting for their left-leaning platforms. Their corner meetings were targeted, and their candidates killed in suicide attacks. Sadiq Zaman Khattak, a National Assembly candidate from ANP, was killed with his son outside a mosque on Friday and elections were postponed in that constituency. 

Photo via

After the results were announced, the various political entities immediately started assigning blame for any electoral inconsistencies. In one constituency, a protest was organized by the PPP against the MQM against threats from the latter's leader, Altaf Hussain. In Karachi's NA-250 constituency, Zahra Shahid Hussain, the Vice President of PTI’s Sindh Chapter, was killed late on Saturday in an attempted robbery. PTI chairman Imran Khan blamed MQM and Altaf Hussain for her murder because of threatening remarks made after the protest. On Sunday, PTI won the national assembly seat from NA-250 after a re-vote. It is not clear if the fighting lead to an increased mobilization of PTI supporters, but it is yet another example of political rivalry spiraling out of control in the country.

Hopefully all of this is just part of the country's transformation into a place where power is tranferred through nonviolent, democratic means. As tensions rise throughout the region, Pakistan can rise to the occasion and present a model for nearby countries. Egypt’s revolution remains fiercely tenuous, Syria descends further into chaos every day, and Afghanistan’s government barely controls its countryside. If elections can be held here, they can be held anywhere. 

For more coverage of Pakistan:

I Lost My Mind in Kashmir

The Taliban Just Tried to Assassinate Me

The Gun Markets of Pakistan

Punk rock was never meant to gain municipal recognition, but with time it often occurs that what was once rebellion becomes part of the establishment. Joe Strummer of the Clash has been no stranger to public acknowledgement, and yesterday the city of Granada, Spain, named a plaza in his honor.

Sitting in the Plaza de Carmen waiting for my contact from the Granada City Council to take me to the plaque unveiling what is now known as Placeta de Joe Strummer, I thought about how much dissension there was once in Portland, Oregon, when they tried to rename a street after the renowned Latino American civil rights activist Caesar Chavez. In Granada, memorializing Strummer seemed to meet with no opposition—in fact, it was being viewed as a moment of great importance.

Prior to his death in 2002, Strummer was a frequent visitor to Granada. He first came in the 1970s with Slits drummer Palmolive, his girlfriend at the time. He would later immortalize the city in the classic 1979 song "Spanish Bombs" in which he referred to the city as his corazon and paid homage to the famous Granadino poet Frederico Garcia Lorca. Over the years he could be spotted rollicking through the Albayzin neighborhood. His daughters said they would join their father on his all night pub crawls as he worked his way from bar to bar collecting a Pied Piper crew of drinking companions. The idea for the tribute to Strummer dates back from late 2011 when local residents launched a Facebook campaign trying to lobby the city to name a square after him. In the end thousands of residents and a number of local political groups—including conservative city council members working in tandem with socialist unions—petitioned to make it so, and Placeta de Strummer became a reality.

Placeta de Strummer is situated in a quiet neighborhood called the Realejo, just outside the red walls of the Alhambra castle. It is a smallish, dirt-covered square with a few pine trees and a drinking fountain carved in stone. There is a breathtaking view of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Just below this vista there is a large mural depicting Strummer's face—it was in this little square where his family and friends along with hundreds of residents and fans gathered to say a few words and have a bit of fun in his honor.

The evening began with a speech by Marcia Farquhar, a friend of Strummer's. She spoke about how much the "extraordinary leader of lost boys and lost girls" loved Granada and Spain. This was followed by a few words from his widow Lucinda Garland, who reiterated his appreciation for the city and its people. Looking on were his daughters Jazz and Lola, as well as Richard Dudanski of Strummer's pre-Clash band the 101ers and Public Image Ltd. 

Following the unveiling of the plaque, there was music and revelry. The air filled with the undeniable scent of marijuana and bottles of wine circulated through the crowd as it was regaled by a Clash cover band made up of members from the Spanish band 091 (for whom Strummer had produced an album and worked with extensively), his old backup band the Mescaleros, and Jem Finer of the Pogues.

A slew of Clash classics rang out into the night, including "Spanish Bombs", "London Calling" and "Guns of Brixton.” Passersby were drawn into the festivity as smiling neighbors looked on from windows and balconies. Undoubtedly the celebrations were loud, but things are always loud in Granada—perhaps that's one of the reasons Strummer was drawn here in the first place.

It is an interesting moment for one of the great chiefs of punk music to garner such a recognition in Spain. Street demonstrations have been rocking the country on a regular basis, and youth unemployment has reached an insufferable nadir. Benefits are being steadily cut to the lower-classes, people are being turned out of their homes, and a number of provinces are renewing their calls for independence—could there be a more fertile atmosphere for the sound of rebellion?

The dangers of smoking are no secret in the US, but in Indonesia, the tobacco industry is virtually unregulated. The result? Over two-thirds of all men are smokers, and it is commonplace for children as young as six to take up the habit. Tobacco is a $100 billion industry here, with TV and print ads everywhere. While investigating this phenomenon in Malang, VICE's Thomas Morton got the full smoke-therapy treatment at a clinic that promises to cure a plethora of modern ailments through smoking.

Watch more at the VICE show page and check out VICE on HBO every Friday at 11 PM.

George came into my life five years ago, during a trip to Coney Island shortly after I had moved to New York. I was 18, painfully awkward, and having trouble making friends—especially with people my own age. He approached me on the boardwalk and asked me to help bury him in the sand. 

Living on a disability pension, George is ill and has a huge scar on the side of his body from surgery. He is in constant pain, but for whatever reason, the pressure of being buried in the sand or walked on gives him temporary relief. After I dug him out of the sand, I followed him back to his apartment, and we’ve hung out together ever since: taking pictures, getting wheatgrass shots, going to the park, stuff like that.

Obviously, George has a lot of problems to overcome on a daily basis, but he is also capable of an incredible lightness. Like many other friends I met during this transient period in my life, I haven’t seen him in a while, but every so often, mostly on holidays, he’ll call just to say hi.

Like looking at pictures? Check these out:

Portland, Oregon, Is a Paradise

Spring Roll

Patrick O'Dell's Skateboard High School

Cry-Baby #1: Enloe High School and Raleigh Police Department

(Thanks Charlie for the tip-off)

The incident: Some kids threw some water balloons.

The appropriate response: Nothin'

The actual response: A mini riot broke out and 8 people were arrested. 

Last Thursday, school officials at Enloe High School in Raleigh, North Carolina heard rumors that students were planning a prank.

As a precaution they alerted local police, who sent several officers to wait on campus in case anything happened. 

The prank turned out to be a group of 16 and 17-year-old students having a water balloon fight. 

The police, heroically, stepped in to break up the fun by violently throwing several teens to the ground. 

A 15-year-old student named Jahbriel Morris, who was not one of the kids throwing water balloons, had to be treated in hospital for cuts and bruises that he received as a result of being thrown down by a police officer, who then smashed his head into the ground "at least two times."

Kevin Hines, the father of a student at the school, arrived to pick his son up and witnessed the officer slamming Jahbriel to the ground. When he attempted to intervene, he was asked to leave the property. When he instead tried to go to the principal's office to talk with him, he was arrested for second-degree trespassing. 

He's not the only one who was arrested. A total of seven water-balloon-throwing students were taken in by police and charged. Six of them with disorderly conduct, and one with assault and battery for throwing a water balloon at a security guard. 

There were rumors on Twitter that the balloons may have contained urine or bleach, but a school spokesperson said that, from what they could tell, they only contained water. 

Everyone who was arrested is currently out on bail. 

:(

Cry-Baby #2: Gary Cole

(story via/image via)

The incident: A man came up with the idea for taco shells made of Doritos before Taco Bell started selling them. 

The appropriate response: Nothing. Every single stoned person ever has also had that idea. 

The actual response: He is suing Taco Bell.

Gary Cole, who has been an inmate of Colorado's ADX Florence prison since 1997, claims that he had the idea for Doritos Locos Tacos in 2006, several years before Taco Bell started selling them.

Gary is part of the way through a 25-year sentence he was given for “delaying interstate commerce, conspiring to do so, and using and carrying a firearm in relation to a crime of violence"—I don't know what that means, but it sounds bad. 

He claims that, back in 2006, he sent a notified letter to his lawyer containing several ideas for a brand he invented called "Divas and Ballers." These ideas included "hot sauce, body oil, clothing line, and shoes and accessories." But also, crucially, “Tacos shells of all flavors (made of Doritos).”

In his complaint to the court, Gary, who is representing himself (oh dear), claims that the letter must have been stolen through the US Postal Service and submitted to Taco Bell. 

Gary contacted the FBI and also sent a Freedom of Information Act request to Taco Bell, asking to be sent any documents relating to the invention of their Doritos Locos Taco shells. Taco Bell didn't respond to the request, because they're a fucking fast food chain and why would they?

Gary didn't specify the amount of money he wanted in his complaint, but did ask the court to place “a lean and moratorium on Taco Bell, Frito Lays, Pepsi Co, Yum Brands, et al. for the fraudulent and concealment, theft, lying, and covering up, to violate patent and trademark, invention and United States Constitutional Rights, to steal the taco shells made of Doritos of all flavors" (all sic, obv.)

Holy shit people must get bored in prison. 

Which of this lot do you think is the bigger cry-baby? Don't keep that shit to yourself, tell us about it in this poll right here:

Previously: A guy who destroyed his neighborhood Vs. some guys who arrested a kid for mooning.

Winner: The guys who hate mooning!!!

@JLCT

Rob Ford learning about culture. Sobriety in question. via.

As everyone in Toronto (and now the planet) knows, Mayor Rob Ford has been accused of smoking crack cocaine. Apparently there's video evidence of him getting high, while talking shit on Justin Trudeau and immigrants at large. But, the world still hasn’t seen any evidence of the alleged crack smoking and Rob has not officially addresed the issue. To make things crazier, Gawker’s crowdfunded Indiegogo campaign to raise money—so they can buy the iPhone video from some drug dealers—is closing in on their $200,000 goal, but they can’t even find the guys who are holding onto the footage. And on top of all that, Mark Towhey, Robbie’s former chief of staff, has been fired for telling him to “get help.”

With all of this insane bullshit clouding Toronto’s municipal politics, we decided to talk to someone who knows first hand what crack addiction and crack smoking looks like: a former crack addict named Rick. Here’s what he thinks of the allegations against poor ol’ Robbie.

VICE: So Rick, you’ve heard the story of Rob Ford’s crack video, Do you think the mayor could be a crack smoker?
A Former Crack Addict Named Rick: If you’re asking my opinion, I suppose it’s possible, that he might have tried it, but there is no way he is crack addict.  I will go out on a limb and say it is impossible to be a crack addict and maintain any kind of lifestyle, let alone be a mayor.  I doubt if he’s even a drug addict at all.  Or has anything like that going on.

Can people smoke crack casually?
No. I don’t think so. I’ve never heard of a casual crack smoker. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but I’ve never heard of it.

Would crack ever be the first drug people use?
[Laughs] No. Absolutely not. Usually people don’t move right to crack cocaine. People like the mayor don’t decide to have a glass of wine with dinner and then go buy a bag of crack. It doesn’t usually go that way. I know it’s readily available and cheap, but you aren’t just trying it with your friends out of nowhere when you’ve never touched another drug.

So do you think it’s safe to say that the mayor, if he has smoked crack, would have problems with drugs before this?
Yes. I mean, I can’t say for sure, because I don’t know the guy, but it’s very likely that there would be a history of drug abuse.

How would someone on crack behave?
Crack makes you extremely paranoid. In no way do I believe the mayor is leaving City Hall and going into the garage and looking over his shoulders and smoking crack [laughs]. It’s just not happening. There is honestly, very severe paranoia associated to being high on crack—and the more you smoke, the more paranoid you get. To me, it just doesn’t seem like he is walking around like he’s paranoid, if anything he walks around pretty calm.

I’ve never smoked crack, what’s it like?
Well immediately, you are super alert and super anxious. You’re off your chair and you’re walking around, you’re not leaning back in it. You’re paranoid. Someone who has just smoked crack is not relaxing in any chair. Trust me, it never happens like that.

So you’re not calm and talking coolly about life?
[Laughs] No.

Is it possible that someone could smoke crack and then engage in a conversation about things like political figures or sports teams?
Absolutely not. For a while after, you’re not saying anything. Maybe forty minutes or an hour later, but not right away. You aren’t saying anything when you first smoke. You’re silent. If they are saying Ford was holding the pipe and talking about Trudeau, it wasn’t crack in that pipe, maybe it was something else. It’s highly unlikely that it was crack. It’s possible that later on maybe sure, having a couple beers, sure, you can talk about stuff.  But it takes time.

From your experience, if someone is smoking crack, how is their behaviour changed and how will it affect their life?
Eventually you will lose everything, your family, your friends, your job. Everything. You will sell everything, lose all your money, for sure. Nothing else matters but the drug. You become a totally different person. You lose everything. Guaranteed. That’s the nature of a crack addiction.

How quickly could this change in a person start to occur?
Crack addiction happens pretty fast. If someone has started smoking crack, it won’t be long before everyone around them is aware this person has become completely different. Lying, sneaking around, stealing. It’s not an addiction that you can maintain without people noticing… not for long anyways.

What are some telltale signs that people could look for if they suspect someone is smoking crack?
Well, there are lots of things. Showing up late, being unreliable, lying. But the only real, and truly physical sign that someone is smoking crack, is a total loss of weight. Crack will make you lose weight, guaranteed. I joke now with my friends that when I smoked crack, I never had a potbelly [laughs].

If you could say anything to Mayor Ford right now, what would it be?
I couldn’t say much. Like everyone else, I really don’t have enough information. We don’t know if it was crack or if it was even Ford. I think we should really all be sticking to the golden rule: innocent until proven guilty.

Follow Angela on Twitter: @angelamaries

Previously:

Rob Ford Might Be a Crack Smoker

Toronto Is Forgetting About its Other Problems

Ryan Florig is a mid-twenties American with a knack for the natural. Self-taught with disposable cameras and skateboarding friends, this Washington-based photographer thrives on the principles of street photography. He won't be found in the studio—most of his photo stories involve him passing by 'the moment' while on his bike. Being constantly searching means you're constantly on the job, which makes him  a self-motivated dream to work with. He doesn't need to be directed to produce great work- he's got more than enough going on in that brain of his to deliver on time. None of his photographs feel hurried or spastic, but instead are carefully composed and further examined through the viewfinder before he snaps. That confident freedom doesn't come easy, but instead is the product of walking the same streets repetitively and us being glad that he does.

Photo illustration by Alex Cook

The First Amendment is great, huh? It gives people the right to (mostly) say whatever they like, because the lawyers and landholders who wrote the Constitution recognized that democracy requires people to debate and share opinions without worrying about reprisals or censorship from the government. The cost of this is that you have to allow people to hold racist protests and draw pictures of animals with human sex parts and so on, but allowing people to hold and share beliefs that most people find abhorrent or stupid is how we know we are free. Ayn Rand once said, by way of defending pornography, “Every infringement of human rights has begun with a suppression of a given right’s least attractive practitioners.” We should be free to write and say whatever we want, even if we're pornographers, racists, or fans of Ayn Rand’s books.

We don’t have those same rights on Facebook, however.

Facebook isn’t just a cool place for you to hang out and chat with your buddies and share hot new content you found surfing the World Wide Web. It’s a platform owned by a massive corporation that makes money off of advertising and can do pretty much whatever it likes with the stuff you post on it. Which isn’t to say Facebook is evil, exactly, but it’s not your friend, and it’s not under any legal obligation to protect speech or use its site to say whatever you like. Zuckerberg and company get to decide what is and is not permissible on their property, and since they own the internet’s second-most-popular site, that gives them a lot of power.

In practice, Facebook uses this power to make itself as advertiser-friendly as possible. This means they suspend users for posting NSFW content and remove photos of “offensive” body parts like dicks and female nipples. They’ve also taken down aggressively racist content and videos of extreme violence. The arguments for banning these kinds of content are simple—Facebook is used by children and millions of users who are offended by that nasty stuff, and the website is supposed to be a place that “helps you connect and share with the people in your life,” not a free-for-all where hate groups can organize and broadcast their poison.

But some have alleged that Facebook doesn’t seem all that concerned with banning content that condones sexual harassment and violence against one group in particular: women. This week, activists at Women, Action, and the Media (WAM!) wrote an open letter to Facebook calling on the site to remove “groups, pages and images that explicitly condone or encourage rape or domestic violence or suggest that they are something to laugh or boast about.” These include “photographs of women beaten, bruised, tied up, drugged, and bleeding, with captions such as ‘This bitch didn’t know when to shut up’ and ‘Next time don’t get pregnant.’” In the same letter, the activists asked people to boycott companies that advertised on Facebook and to spread the word using the Twitter hashtag #FBrape. Outlets like the Guardian and Salon picked the story up and highlighted other ways Facebook has disregarded or insulted women—in the past, the site has removed positive, nonsexual images of breastfeeding and mastectomy scars. Facebook responded by removing the pictures that WAM! highlighted, but the activists say that individual offenses aren’t the point and the site needs to do a better job moderating and removing misogynistic content.  

Obviously, the stuff WAM! points to in that last link is just fucking awful and if Facebook wants to be in the business of making sure it’s clean and inoffensive, it should get rid of that garbage. But Facebook’s censorship policies aren’t just inconsistent in regards to women—the site hasn’t successfully scrubbed other kinds of hate speech from its a pages either. Potentially objectionable content I found on the site yesterday included a few nasty groups devoted to attacking Muslims, including one called Hindus Against Islam; the official page of the nativist, Islamophobic British National Party; a page devoted to racist “humor” targeted at Gypsies in Romania; a closed group that apparently thinks “Zionists” were responsible for 9/11; a page full of shitty, deliberately offensive jokes; and Shit Black People Never Say, an entity with 13,000 likes and content like this:

What’s the argument, when you remove the First Amendment from the equation, that any of that above stuff should be allowed to stand? What do you tell the English woman who wants Facebook to ban absurdist gross-out “dead baby” jokes because they remind her of her own dead unborn child? There are several Facebook pages that demand that the site eliminated those jokes, but apparently they aren’t offensive in the same way that nudity is offensive—or at least, they don’t offend the people whose opinions count.

Like all systems of censorship that rely on subjective opinions (which is to say, all systems of censorship), Facebook’s is complicated, sometimes inflexible and sometimes lax, and often frustratingly opaque. It’s not always clear whether a post is being removed by a misfiring antispam bot or a moderator. In one case from last year, an anti-Obama image was taken down every time it was posted for vague reasons. Facebook said it was a mistake, but it wasn’t clear how the picture violated its terms of service, and some people, including Erik Wemple of the Washington Post, thought that the removal might indicate an anticonservative bias on Facebook’s part. Right wingers have suspected for some time that the site leans left, and in March, a Texas man who claimed he was banned from Facebook for making a joke about his friend being a liberal told a radio station, “Our Constitutional rights are being taken from us very slowly, however small this may be.”

Thing is, he’s not in America when he’s on Facebook—he’s on the internet, where the Constitution is just another thing someone wrote that other people get mad about. Unrestrained by the First Amendment, Facebook could ban all Republicans, or all Democrats, or all the people Mark Zuckerberg deemed racially impure. The only thing stopping it from doing those things—besides the goodness of the Facebook overlords’ hearts—is that the company makes money through advertising and wants to keep as many users around as possible. Like Michael Jordan once supposedly said, “Republicans buy shoes, too.”  

Facebook isn’t the entire internet, thank God, and other sites have taken different approaches in deciding what is and isn’t kosher:

• Instagram is similar to Facebook in that it doesn’t allow hate speech, nudity, or other “offensive” content. Like Facebook, it hasn’t eliminated all the racist content, and its censorship efforts can be ham-fisted—last year, it deleted a bunch of innocent hashtags in a plan to wipe out profanity, and Tyler, the Creator’s account recently got banned for reasons he didn’t understand.
• YouTube won’t let you post porn, but pro-anorexia “thinspiration” videos are apparently fine.
• Condé Nast–owned Reddit, despite the criticism it’s received for being a hivemind of racist, sexist perverts, still has subreddits devoted to violence against women and vile stereotypes of black people. Just about the only thing they won’t publish is pedophilic photos of young girls, and that’s only because those images caused a media shitstorm.
• Twitter* also gives its users a lot of freedom—you can find people casually sex-tweeting about pooping their diapers—but last year it announced that it would censor tweets that violated the laws of individual governments on a country-by-country basis, which means, for instance, that Chinese users can’t criticize their authoritarian regime. Predictably, the move was endorsed by China’s state-run media, including the Global Times newspaper, which wrote: “Twitter might have… already realized the fact and made a choice between being an idealistic political tool as many hope and following pragmatic commercial rules as a company.”

Those pragmatic commercial rules are what worry anyone who wants the internet to abide by some version of the First Amendment. The platforms that most users take for granted as public playgrounds where they’re free to talk and share whatever they like are actually run by corporations who are only invested in free speech as a strategy for monetizing content. As Aaron Swartz put it in an interview shortly before his death:

As malls became the cool places for kids to hang out [in the 90s], all of these freedoms we had against the government we lost in the mall, because the mall is a private company that can throw people out for saying the wrong thing or wearing the wrong shirt. Now, Facebook has kind of become the mall. It's where everyone hangs out. And so the private company that owns Facebook can tell you, "Oh, don't use those kinds of words, don't use those sorts of pictures, don't talk with those people." All of these Constitutional rights that we take for granted are now being run by a company that doesn't have to answer to the Constitution.

Places like Reddit (which Swartz helped develop) and Tumblr, major platforms that allow users to explore their interests without running into limitations imposed by terms of service agreements, are rare, and could become rarer.

Tumblr, of course, was bought by Yahoo this month for $1.1 billion. The larger company will presumably value making money through advertising more than it will protecting users’ ability to post whatever they like—especially since “whatever they like” includes porn, images glorifying anorexia and self-harm, pictures of underage girls, and racism. Tumblr bloggers are understandably nervous about potential censorship. “I’ll drag my butt over your face, Yahoo ceo [sic] if you ruin this place,” was how a guy named unicornbuttdrag put it.  

Maybe Yahoo will listen to the concerns of unicornbuttdrag, and maybe Facebook will pay attention to the campaign started by WAM! and monitor the rampant misogyny as it does other forms of objectionable speech. But it’s entirely up to them how much freedom we have, and in which directions we’re restricted. All we can do is ask the corporations nicely: please will you let us do what you like on your platform, and please will your censorship policies be fair? They have no moral obligation to us and we never elected them. But they are in charge.

*Full disclosure: VICE recently announced a partnership with Twitter and interacts in all kinds of ways with social networking sites and YouTube.

@HCheadle

More on the exciting world of the information superhighway:

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How Awful Are the Free Porn Games on the Internet?

Ethical Hackers Talk Internet Terorism, Anonymous, and DDoS Attacks

On Wednesday a soldier, Lee Rigby, was fatally stabbed by two men sporting knifes and a meat cleaver. Before being shot by police, the attackers taunted onlookers, asking them to take photos and film their ideological rants. What followed was a media scramble, with reporters ferociously compiling tweets and smartphone footage in a desperate race to get news of the latest bout of alleged terrorism into the papers. But what does "terrorism" even mean any more? 

Glenn Greenwald is a journalist, lawyer, and security expert who was partly responsible for former CIA official John Brennan not being made the Director of the CIA and forcing a UN investigation into the treatment of Bradley Manning. I called him up to see if he thought the whole "terrorism" thing had just become a label used to exaggerate crime committed by Muslims.

Image via. 

VICE: Hi Glen. What do you think about the media reaction to the Woolwich murder?
Glen Greenwald: Media outlets reacted pretty uniformly to the attack. They reacted the way that media outlets typically do to these kinds of incidents, which is by simply stating that it was a terrorist attack, and channeling outrage about the unprecedented, barbaric act that everyone saw take place.

Do you think it was a "terrorist" attack?
What the word terrorism typically means in reality, functionally, when it’s most commonly used by our media, is that the perpetrators are Muslim, and that they are driven by either religious or political motivations. I think that when it became clear that the perpetrators were Muslim (they said "Allah Akbar" during the attack), then media outlets instantly said that this was an act of terror, and politicians sort of did at the same time. The premise here is that if the violence is perpetrated by Muslims against the West, for a political cause, then by definition it’s terrorism, but not the other way around. It’s very typical to call this a terrorist attack without including all sorts of acts of violence that the US and UK has routinely engaged in over the last decade.

For example, the murder of a Muslim man by white supremacists this month. That wasn’t labeled as terrorism by the press.
Right, even though hate crimes have very clearly ascertainable, political goals—they are designed to terrorize communities; to express all sorts of political sentiments—and yet very rarely do they get called terrorism. Even when you look at what Anders Behring Breivik did in Norway, it was a day-long frenzy by the western media insinuating that this was done by Islamic terrorists, and then as soon it was discovered that the person responsible wasn’t Muslim, the word terrorism kind of disappeared. This is even though he had an overt, political agenda that he was seeking to advance by violence and terror. I think that the word terrorism has almost exclusively become reserved for violence by Muslims.

And of course that change in meaning has a huge practical consequences. Normally bloody ones.
Yeah. It’s a term that’s used to justify all sorts of things: it sends people to prison; it’s used to target people for assassination; it is used to justify wars; to engage in secrecy. The fact that it’s basically [become] a one sided term enables all kinds of really dubious actions on the side of the state.

Basically it empowers the state to do whatever it wants, because the term terrorism really does end our conversation. When media outlets bolster this very propagandist use of the term, what they’re really doing is enabling limitless state authority under the banner of "stopping the terrorists."

Terrorism has become a sort of shorthand for unmitigated evil. If all of the acts of violence towards us that occur get this label, but none of the acts of violence that we ourselves do to other people get the label, it just continuously bolsters the idea that our violence is justified, and we are civilized and noble, while they "over there" are primitive and brutal and evil. In the public’s mind it means that whatever we do to them is justified and necessary. It ruins the public debate.

What do you think will happen next?
It’s hard to predict. What’s amazing is that the war on terror has endured for 12 years now; at least if you mark the beginning as the September 11 attacks. And every single time there is a new successful attack, or new attempted attack, there’s always demand that more be done in the name of security and stopping "terrorism." It’s never the case that we get to the point where we say, okay, we’ve done enough in giving the state more power, in justifying more violence, in giving it more legal authority.

The concern is what's going to happen in terms of the government. The way in which there will be demands for legalization to put more surveillance on Muslim communities; laws to justify greater detention powers without charges; and then to raise public support for increasing acts of military violence in Muslim countries, even though that's what spawns the attacks in the first place. That’s the irony of the whole war on terror: that everything being done in the name of stopping terrorism is actually what fuels it.

Follow Joseph on Twitter: @josephfcox

More from Woolwich:

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Photo modified from original by Flickr user Edward Corpuz

Editor’s note: This is part of a “hood novel” that Bert Burykill is writing. Read previous installments here, here, here, and here.

HardWhite spied the new jack quick and hit the zoom button. Young little white guy, just arrived in the clink-clink, looking like Harry Potter with a stylish Danish-pussy-pube-beard face and cute glasses. HardWhite had spent more than the last decade or two behind bars and he’d seen this breed comin’ on board lately. He blames it all on the pills. The deluge of painkillers that’re making suburban kids fiend out younger and younger—now they’re seekin’ out dope ’cause it’s cheaper and better than their prescriptions. They slammin’ that shit much earlier than they used to ’cause it’s more accepted now. Fuck a stigma. They’re comin’ to jail for small-ball possession charges and dumb shit like credit card scams, check fraud, and petty larceny, a.k.a. “boostin’.” Johnny Law don’t play—if you’re a drug addict caught stealin’ you’re likely to wind up doin’ time behind that.

HardWhite ran shit silently behind bars. He had his jelly-butt butter honey, GutterBitch, smugglin’ him get-high on the frequent. Recently, though, him and his grimey, RockBottom, been on a bender—indiscriminately smashin’ their stash before they were made the requisite profit to re-up. HardWhite knew how to use a money whiteboy right, mostly ‘cause he used to be one—if he could get Harry Potter to send GutterBitch a couple hundred bucks, then he’d be back on top. Back living the way his doped-up desires told him he should be.

HardWhite knew the science well. Harry Potter was fresh from the world and had a sickness to feed. The weakling wizard fiend probably hated everything right then, but mostly he hated that his drug was gone. Suffering a heavy habit and landing in a jail with no methadone program, he’d be aware of the misery that’s gonna cripple him for the next couple sleepless weeks. All Harry Potter will want to do is get high and the boys are about to swarm on him. HardWhite knows some cracka gon’ try and get his knob topped off to give this whiteboy a taste of something. Scumbags in prison are ruthless. They’ll bag him up some coffee creamer, take him for everything, and then beat him to a pulp if he says something slick. Little white wizards get no play in county lockup.

HardWhite is whiteboy too, so it’ll be easier for Harry Potter to trust him. Plus, HardWhite doesn’t trip over what color the skin be, he always hits his custies with the killer kindness, at least on the surface. His papa always told him, you’ll make more bountiful babies if you stick it sweet to ‘em bitches rawdog. No funny stuff.

HardWhite had a couple subs (suboxone) stuffed in buttpockets that he could fish out to give Harry Potter a quick fix and gain his permanent loyalty. Just by peepin’ the wizard’s ways from afar, HardWhite knew this boy was ripe for some friendly-style extortion.

HardWhite stepped to Harry Potter with a smile. “Whats up, Bud? They call me HardWhite. What you go by?”

The poor kid was hunched over, crampin’, pale, with the clammy damp skin that plagues the fiend in withdrawals. “My name is Peter.”

“You look like Harry Potter. I think I’ll call you Harry Potter.”

The kid stammered a little bit, not sure if he liked being told his name. “Yeah… uh, I guess I have glasses, so… so guys used to call me that, but my, like, street moniker is P-Nutz, or you can jus call me Nut.”

HardWhite flashed the street businessman smile, meaning he could cheese like a Kraft, but his style was more Swiss Miss. “Oh yeah, Harry Potter? You’re a Loose Cannon, huh? Maybe I’ll call you LC?” It’s a simple psychological game, but HardWhite always tried to dictate the terms of a conversation by not-so-subtly playing the alpha male.

“So, Harry Potter… what they got you for? I can tell you foxin’ with that dog food… or you been poppin’ them pills willy-nilly?”

“I messed up bad… I was copping some bombs, and they had porkchops watching from the roof… the fuckers jumped out on me guns drawn like I’m gang-banging before I could even get right. Fuckkk, I’m sick as a dog, bro. I’m about to start puking and shittin’ myself. The doctor won’t give me nothin’… I think I’m going go to the hospital. I swear I can die from withdrawals. I been slammin’ a couple bundles a day… I, I really, really can’t do this shit cold turkey.”

HardWhite now heard from the duck’s mouth what he already knew to be true. He was just about to purchase himself a slave for one 8-mg pill of Suboxone, which GutterBitch got for free from Medicaid. The beauty of jailhouse economics.

“You ain’t got to sweat it, Harry Potter—I like you. You seem like a good kid, plus,” he took his forefingers and rubbed them on his pale white forearm, “we got to stick together, lo mein? Crackers gotta watch each other’s backs. I’m quite sure I can arrange to get you a sub or two to get you through the worst of your detox…”

“Oh shit! For real, man?!?! I got money for you on my books… I’ll get you commissary—you know whatever you need, bro‑I got you. I need that shit, though—I can’t do this without it. I’m FREAKIN’ THE FUCK OUT…”

“Shhh… it’s aight, baby bruv, they’re hard to come by and they go for 100 a piece in here all day every day, but I can tell you good people, Harry Potter—I’m gon’ look out for you. You gotta girl out there, someone with money?”

“Well, my mom, but she’s cool as fuck, and knows I need money ‘cause I’m sick. And then my brother is why I’m in here, ‘cause I was coppin’ from his people in a hotbox hood, and I told him I—”

“So you got money out there? This’ll be easy. You tell your moms and your bro that some big black animals with monster dicks are going make your ass hemorrhage uncontrollably messy unless you pay them some rent. Don’t fuck around sayin’ you need drug money. This is just how the game goes. I don’t need no commissary bread, I need money in the streets so I can bring in more of what’s good for us. You see, Harry Potter, your people are going to fund our drug operation and I promise you, one cracka to another, that you will never feel sick in here till your times served. You don’t talk to anyone else. Never. Or you and I are going to have problems. You don’t trust anyone else. They’re a buncha scumfuckers. You only talk to HardWhite and you don’t tell a fuckin’ soul what’s really good. You smell me, Harry Potter?”

And so it goes… with just one “jail rich” fiend, HardWhite is feelin’ comfy that he’ll keep his game runnin’ smooth. Harry Potter is the perfect ‘vict, and truthfully he will get treated proper. His street money is mucho importante to keeping the funk flowin’. All HardWhite gotta worry about now is keeping GutterBitch on the winning team… It’s just sad facts she’s gon’ get sick of the visits to jail smugglin’ the get-high in her saucy funk box. HardWhite just counts his blessings while he’s got ‘em, namely that he’s got a bad bitch on the outside, least for now. Love is what makes the world go around…

Bert Burykill is the pseudonym of our prison correspondent, who has spent time in a number of prisons in New York State. He tweets here.

Previously: The Trials of Job

Carlos Rafael is talking about mosquitoes, elephant balls, and fishing, which isn’t unusual. He is talking so excitedly, he's almost ranting and that isn't unusual either. He is actually so into the conversation that he forgets to take a drag from his cigarette. It goes out and he relights it, while I wonder how the fuck someone can be so passionate about fishing.

We are sitting in "Carlos Seafood," an unremarkable looking seafood supply warehouse in an industrial park near the waterfront of New Bedford, a fishing port in southern Massachusetts that for 12 consecutive years has reported the most revenue from domestic fish landings in America. In 2011, that figure topped $369 million. Here, fishing is big business.

Downstairs, the warehouse smells like fish and wet sneakers. Upstairs, there is a no smoking sign in the hall.

Around the corner from that sign is an office with multiple sketches of Tony Montana on the walls. In it sits Rafael, the owner of the largest fishing fleet in the port. He owns more than 30 vessels. His operation employs more than 300 people. He says his fleet is worth at least $50 million in steel alone, quickly adding that he probably wouldn’t part with it for less than $80 million.

Rafael is currently railing against the lobbying effort of the smaller New England groundfishermen whom he says are trying to put a cap on the amount of permits one individual can own.

“They are like mosquitoes on the balls of an elephant,” he says of the smaller operations in the port. “Biting, biting, biting, until finally [the government] is going to say fuck off, we got to do something.”

Sensing a significant shift in fishing rules before 2010, he horded fishing permits that would allow his boats to catch more product, spending $10 million on them. He now uses 57 permits to operate 15 full-time groundfish vessels called draggers and five part-time draggers. He operates the groundfish fleet at a loss—he estimates he’s losing a couple of million each year—but he’s still better off than the folks who only have less than a handful of permits.

“The maggots screaming on the sidelines, they’re done. They can scream all they want.  Nobody can save them,” he says.
They’re screaming anyway. Smaller fishermen want federal regulators to change the rules, saying it unfairly benefits the large operations like Rafael. This pisses him off. Why should he be punished for his business acumen, he asks?

Complex nerd stuff

It’s all very complicated: fish stocks and quotas and scientists arguing about fish stocks and quotas.

A quick tutorial is needed, because, let’s face it, you know fuck-all about the Massachusetts fishing industry. Groundfish are species such as cod and flounder. In 2010, the US federal rules for New England groundfishermen shifted from a days-at-sea scheme to a catch share program, where members of fishery collectives can buy and sell shares of fishing quota.

Bottom line: things are bleak for the groundfishermen. Two decades ago, New Bedford had 120 vessels in its groundfish fleet. Now, that number is down to around 25. Last fall, the US Department of Commerce declared the industry to be in a state of disaster. The reasons for the crisis are debated. Some scientists say that the federal rules that dictate how much someone can catch are based on bad science. Others disagree. Rafael thinks warm winters have prompted species such as cod to go north into areas where New England fishermen don’t go.

In any event, a way of life for many is being squeezed out of existence. New Bedford’s bread and butter is scallops, but bureaucratic red tape means it is almost impossible for many groundfishermen to switch to the more lucrative industry. Rafael is almost the only one in New Bedford who has enough permits to make it worthwhile to go out and catch groundfish. But it was not always like this. He was, to steal his own phrase, a mosquito.

"Built for this country"

The first thing that strikes you about Rafael is his voice. It is deep and gravelly, worn and aged by cigarettes and five decades of life on the docks. It is an impossible mix of Azorean inflections and New England nasal. He sounds like a cartoon villain. It is with this voice that he recounts his life story; a pastiche of American dream clichés.

He emigrated to America as a teenager in 1968, after running away from the monastery where he was attending school in the Azores. He got kicked out for that stunt and so his family was forced to move. He knew if they'd stayed, there was a good chance he would be drafted to fight in the ongoing conflict in Angola. He did not know a word of English.

“I was built for this country,” he says, now.

He started out working on the waterfront as a fish cutter and rose to foreman for a seafood distribution operation. A little later, he realized he could strike out on his own and make a killing in seafood supply and distribution. He launched his own business in 1980 and bought his first boat by 1981. Over the years his fleet grew, peaking at 46 vessels. He operated a seafood distribution plant.

Rafael says the groundfish industry will be completely wiped out by next year. He says that only a fifth of those currently in business will still be around by the end of 2014.

Rafael, who still dresses like a fish cutter, appears unconcerned. He has weathered storms before. Fish stocks have fluctuated, federal rules have changed, but Rafael not only survives, he thrives. His 11 scallop vessels, he says, have helped “diversify the pain.”

“I’m still making money.”

"Read my lips: fuck you"

Rafael is a cutthroat capitalist who is perpetually at war with someone: regulators, competitors, environmentalists. He battles, forever with an eye on his profit margin. Of course, he also has a history of legal entanglements.

In the early 1980s, he was thrown in jail for four months and 14 days for federal tax evasion. He operated his then fledgling business through phone calls from the federal pen. Looking back, he admits he filed his taxes incorrectly. Or, more accurately, in his own words: “I had no fucking clue about that fucking shit.”

He was taken to federal court again in the mid-90s. This time he faced charges of price-fixing. He was staring down a lengthy prison term but insisted the matter go to trial. He says he was targeted by others in the industry because he was so successful and ended up spending $1.5 million on his legal defence, which was ultimately successful. He still relishes telling off the federal prosecutor after he got off. “I told him, 'You are a fucking asshole, you and the rest of the fucking motherfuckers, so fuck you, motherfucker. Read my lips: fuck you.'” It might as well be his gravestone epitaph.

He’s had other legal headaches: he was accused of falsifying documents in order to obtain fishing permits. He has fought federal regulators, sometimes successfully, when they seized a catch illegally or fined his boats without cause. His boats have been cited for fishing for scallops in a closed area. In 2011, he made national headlines when the feds seized an 881-pound tuna that one of his boats had caught. They said it was caught illegally, but Rafael disagrees. He says that single fish could have fetched hundreds of thousands of dollars on the open market. Last year, after the local fire department cited his fleet for fire safety violations along the docks, Rafael threatened to up and move his vessels to Maine or Rhode Island. He has compared federal regulators to the Gestapo. And so on and so forth.

We are walking along the pier where his fleet is docked. The grinding of power tools can be heard from one of his 120-foot green and white vessels. Rafael says one of his draggers brought in 27,000 pounds of fish last night. He says that within the last ten years, his debt at one point was $35 million. He considers the future and the prospect of his business being further curtailed by federal regulators. Facing million dollar losses and a decaying industry, he is defiantly, absurdly obstinate.

“That’ll be a fight to the death. I’ll have them doing somersaults up there. They’re fucking with the wrong guy because when I’m right, I’m right. I don’t fuck around.”

Follow Danny on Twitter: @DMacCash

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Photo by Nate Miller

Welcome to another edition of This Week in Racism. With the assistance of my friends at the @YesYoureRacist Twitter account, I’ll be ranking this and other news stories on a scale of 1 to RACIST, with “1” being the least racist and “RACIST” being the most racist.

Recently, I was out on my porch, drinking Kool-Aid, munching on a moist slice of watermelon (which I happened to purchase with my EBT card), and neglecting my illegitimate children, when I asked myself the question, “What is the most racist sport of them all?” 

Thankfully Sergio Garcia answered it for me: it’s golf! It’s always been golf. With its history of excluding minorities from country clubs but being more than happy to give them menial jobs carrying bags around in sweltering heat, golf is way, way more racist than every other sport. Only NASCAR and whatever people in the Tea Party do for fun come close. 

-How did Sergio Garcia, a famous golfer who's been trying to start a rivalry with Tiger Woods, make his sport's racism so clear? Well, when he got asked if he would be inviting Tiger Woods over for dinner during the US Open tournament, he responded, “We'll have him 'round every night. We will serve fried chicken.” I’m glad that Sergio already has his dinner menu planned so far in advance. Whatever slave he keeps tied up in his basement is doing a great job in the kitchen. Fried chicken is a superb meal for the summertime, and I’m sure Tiger will be grinnin’ when he gets a taste of those 11 herbs and spices.

Garcia has since come out and apologized for his moronic comments. He claims that what he said made him feel “sick,” which is a common thing for someone to say after they get called out for being racist. What, it didn’t make you sick when you thought of saying it in the first place? You had to be told that your comment was ill-advised and hurtful? You needed the media to clue you into the concept that implying that blacks just instinctively love fried chicken is not a nice thing to say? If that’s the case, then you are dumber than you look. RACIST

-Oh, but it doesn’t stop there! In a feeble attempt to backtrack and make professional golf look less racially insensitive, George O’Grady, the chief executive of the European Tour, spoke to Sky Sports on Thursday and blurted out this daft bit of information: "Most of Sergio's friends happen to be colored athletes in the United States, he is absolutely abject in his apology and we accepted it."

The only people I’ve ever heard use the term “colored” while also trying to sound like they weren’t racist are characters from Mad Men and golf executives. 7

-If the United States Army is going to research hazardous chemical and biological agents, I’d hope that some white extremists could be part of that program. Once again, my prayers have been answered. John Stortstrom, a mechanical engineer who works for the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, was one of 150 people who attended the American Renaissance Conference, which is hosted in Tennessee by the publishers of the journal American Renaissance.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, American Renaissance is a “ journal dedicated to race and intelligence, with a heavy focus on the ‘psychopathology’ of black people. Its editor has written that black people are incapable of sustaining any kind of civilization.” Maybe we should get this Stortstrom guy away from the chemicals? Give him a mop or a broom, or anything that doesn’t have sharp points on it. 10

Photo via

-Suspected bed-wetter Ann Coulter receives this week’s Ann Coulter Award for Excellence in Racism for producing a huge pile of verbal shit in the form of the following sentence from her latest column:

“Why can’t the country be more or less the ethnic composition that it always was? The 50–1 Latin American-to-European ratio isn’t a natural phenomenon that might result from, say, Europeans losing interest in coming here and poor Latin Americans providing some unique skill desperately needed in our modern, technology-based economy.”

I hate to be that guy that reads between the lines and arrives at a logical conclusion, but fuck it. YOLO.

Ann Coulter is saying that Hispanic immigration to the United States is unnatural. She also wishes that we could go back to a time when white people were the unquestioned majority in the U.S. She’s not even trying to seem like she’s not racist. For her blatantly horrible behavior, I salute Grand Wizard Ann Coulter. RACIST

@YesYoureRacist’s 10 Most Racist Retweets of the Week [all grammar sic'd]:

10. @kushkitty: “This is why I don't watch the news; Yesterday they said ur life can be ordered by Obama to be taken. Fuck that ni**er, fuck this country”

9. @fisher_rf90: “Im not a racist but theres a chinese lad beside me in the library and id love to shoot the f*cker. #weirdrace”

8. @midget10780: “I ain't racist....but I fucking hate dirty fucking Muslim paki bastards, get them all out and make Britain great again #PakisOut #MuslimScum”

7. @jxhia: I'm not racist, but I am to you "slutty type" of species.

6. @_mimismarie: “I'm not racist but I'm fully convinced that all black chicks tweet about is how they're freaks in bed & have bomb pussy.”

5. @RynKuhn: “Black people playing lacrosse just doesn't look right. #notracist #justtrue”

4. @bennywhoelse: “Im not racist but I just wanna keep my blood clean, I support my roots.”

3. @donovanswift: “I'm not racist, but I wish someone would hate crime the shit out of Tyler Perry”

2. @Graymoneyy: “I'm not racist but chances are of you're Mexican you'll annoy me. Not bc you're Mexican but Mexicans just have this attitude”

1. @rangerwomen: “OBAMA IS GOING DOWN LIKE THE NI**ER HE IS”

TIger Woods photo via

Last Week in Racism: 

Former Italian Prime Minister Dressed Up Strippers to Look Like Barack Obama

@dave_schilling

Executives, a painting by William Betts.

We're constantly being spied on by closed-circuit television cameras, those electronic eyes peering down at us and monitoring everything we do. But as Orwellian as it all seems, this invasion of privacy and erosion of our civil liberties can serve as a source for art. Art like Timo Arnall's short film Robot Readable World, which was culled from found footage, and the paintings of William Betts.

Continue reading at The Creators Project.

Jeff Grosso and his son, Oliver. Photo by Chris Nieratko.

This week’s hot topic in skateboarding is corporate cannibalism. The level of outsider corporate involvement in skating is at an all-time high. Brands that never had any interest in the activity are now realizing there’s a buck to be made and they’re trying to make it. Shit, New Balance just started making skate shoes. There’s blood in the water, and the sharks are coming to feast.

But I am not here to vilify corporate greed in skating—it’s been a part of the game since its inception. As humans, greed is what we do best. Is it any surprise then that the first documented skateboarder was a Nazi? (See buttboarding at 0:32)

To a degree, I actually quite enjoy big corporate involvement when it puts huge checks into the pockets of my socially-inept skateboarding friends. They deserve it. They take more of a beating than many NFL players and they sure as shit put in a harder day’s work than Tiger Woods. So I’m thankful my high school drop out buddies can afford homes and health insurance for as long as these companies decide to leech off skating.

My take is that there will always be corporate involvement. Most of us get our checks from one corporation or another. It is what it is. I work for Vans. And although they’re owned by a larger, publicly traded corporation, for as long as I’ve been there the philosophy has always been "skateboarding is paramount." The culture of skateboarding is what we are about. And that culture must be preserved. So when we as a skateboarding community allow these visiting corporations to dictate our code of conduct, things have gone too far. It might be an idealist way to look at things, but I don’t think the guy with the most money should get to decide what we are and aren’t allowed to say and do. It’s like when your little brother begs and begs and begs to go to the Slayer show with you and your buddies and you finally say, “Fine! You can come! Just don’t fucking open your mouth!”

All outsiders and their checkbooks are allowed to come along for the ride, but don’t open your fucking mouths.

Recently a manufacturer of basketball, wrestling, and golf shoes decided to open its fucking mouth and tell their skateboarding division that one of their riders was acting too much like a skateboarder and not enough like a role model a la Kobe Bryant, Tiger Woods, or Lance Armstrong. In an interview with me the rider talked about buying (medicinal) marijuana and also shared some great poop stories from when he was a teenager some 25-plus years ago. Well, someone high up in the corporation took offense to this and had the skater fired immediately. His main source of income snatched away.

Photo by Chris Nieratko

I’ve heard many arguments on the matter since it occurred, but the saddest are from some in the new generation of skateboarding who are backing the corporation and saying the skater should have known better, or the corporation should have given him media training, or that he signed on the X so he has to play by their rules.

FUCK THAT.

This is skateboarding. They chose to be involved in this fucked up community. This is as juvenile an activity as exists; if it weren’t we wouldn’t have 50-year-olds doing it and treating it like the goddamn fountain of youth. Skateboarding is rebellious by nature. For every generation’s clean cut Paul Rodriguez, Tony Hawk, or Stacy Peralta that temporarily attracted wholesome kids to skating there has always been a Jay Adams, Tony Alva, Jason Jessee, Jeff Grosso, Mike Vallely, or Ricky Oyola type of badass who eternally inspired a troubled kid and made him a skater for life. I’ve got nothing against the talented vanilla skaters in history—they’re amazing to watch—but for a kid like me and all my friends from broken homes, it was the weirdos, fuck ups, and outsiders who we latched on to. When they spoke it was honest and from the heart, not just a canned sound bite response.

Growing up, while kids everywhere were in love with the Bones Brigade I was stoked on Jason Jesse and especially Jeff Grosso, who both told the most outrageous stories possible just for shits and giggles. It’s tragic to think how different my life and skateboarding’s landscape would be if someone told Grosso decades ago he was fired for speaking his mind or quit on him because of his drug use and abuse.

As you can probably tell, I have a real big problem with all of this. Not only with the fact that the silencing of a personality has happened in modern skateboarding, but that it is both accepted and unaddressed. There has been no mention of this travesty from any “objective” endemic media. Why? Because the corporation involved has deep ad dollars and as skateboarding shrinks and print magazines of every kind are dying off people must bow to the almighty dollar. Free speech is dead.

And I call bullshit. “This aggression will not stand, man!”

I’m more than happy to play ball with the corporate tourists and have my friends make good money, but I don’t like people telling me how to drive, I don’t want anyone telling me how to raise my kids, I won’t allow anyone to come in my house and tell me how to fuck my wife, and I sure as hell will not stay silent as the thing I love most in the world (aside from pussy) gets castrated by whoever has the biggest wallet.

OK, I'm done. I just thought it apt to give a little honesty what with today being the premiere of the fourth season of Vans’ webiseries Grosso’s Love Letters To Skateboarding:

And I thought it also a good time to catch up with my childhood hero and one of the most honest guys to ever ride a skateboard, Jeffrey Blain Grosso, to ask him if he had ever been fired from a team for drug use.

You can watch the last three seasons of Jeff Grosso’s Love Letters To Skateboarding here.

And follow Grosso on Instagram @Grossosucks

More stupid can be found at Chrisnieratko.com or @Nieratko

This week, it felt like the 2011 British riots were starting all over again in the Stockholm suburb of Husby. A man was shot dead by police and the local community started a demonstration. The demonstrations got out of control and riots and arson spread through several Stockholm suburbs. At the time of writing, at least 15 suburbs have been caught up in the unrest and on Thursday the disturbances continued into their fifth night.

Tired of reading the same sensationalist news about how dangerous and crazy the suburbs have become, we took a camera down to the now-infamous Husby.

At first we drove around Husby, Jakobsberg, Akalla and Tensta, which were all eerily quiet. We spotted a few random people with their hoods drawn up, but the suburbs were pretty much deserted.

Some evidence of the previous night's violence had been left behind in the form of burnt-out cars.

After a couple of hours, we spotted a massive cloud of smoke on the horizon. It took us some time to find it, but eventually we traced the ominous plume to a parking lot in the centre of the suburb Rinkeby.

Gathered around five burning cars were a few hundred local residents. As we joined the crowd watching firefighters trying to put out the fire, some kids approached us asking why we had come to take photos.

"This isn't funny at all," one of them told me.

"I want to find out why this is happening and who's doing this," I explained.

"Well, whatever you do, please don't write any headlines about this being riots, because it's not."

I asked again if he had any idea of who might be doing this. His friends started laughing.

"This is just a continuation of the stuff that happened in Husby. I don't think that someone who lives in Rinkeby did this."

As they left, some other kids approached us. They also told me not to write anything negative about what I say, because the locals would never set each other's cars on fire. I asked them how they felt about the situation.

"The fire's pretty cool. But it's obviously so fucking awful at the same time," one of them told me.

Then I met Max (not his real name), a 16-year-old who lives in the neighbouring suburb Tensta. He told me he was playing football in a field nearby when he saw smoke in the sky.

"I don't like that this is happening because my friends hate the police, and I really would like to become a policeman when I grow up," he said, "but it feels like I might not be able to because of this." Next to him was an 11-year-old who lives in Rinkeby. He told me that this was the fourth time he’d stood watching cars burn.

"I mean it happens all the time, it's just now – for some reason – that the newspapers write about it."

A female police officer was trying to keep people away from the fire. Suddenly, a man started shouting at her. She told him that whatever he'd just said (which we didn't hear), he shouldn't have, because it was illegal. This did not calm the man down.

"You fucking Swedish whore!" he shouted, as others tried to chill him out.

"I'm here to protect people from the fire!" she replied, but still the guy went on acting like a dickhead, and some locals had to drag him off.

I went to the policewoman and asked her if this kind of thing happens a lot.

"All the time," she said, looking as if she was about to burst into tears.

"So why aren't you arresting him?" I asked.

"I think he's pretty sick and doesn't feel very well. So we have to let go of that kind of thing. Especially now, when all of Stockholm is burning."

She told me she had been working non-stop since the trouble flared, and that she was getting pretty tired of it now.

"We're here to help and protect people, and then this kind of thing happens where one man is acting stupid. It makes you kind of tired."

When the fire had been put out, people gathered around the car wrecks. I asked some kids if they had seen anything or knew who might have done this. One of them told me that it was initially one car that was burning, and then it spread to the other ones. His friend interrupted him: "Don't know anything, don't see anything, don't hear anything." And they left.

We were taking more photos when a woman approached us shouting that we should not take any photos of people in the area because they'd already taken so much shit from the media. She told us that the arson had nothing to do with riots.

People left minutes after the cars had been doused. As we went back to our car, hoping it would still be where we left it and not on fire, an older woman asked the kids out loud: "Is everything fine now?" Some teenage girls replied: "Everything has always been fine. This is nothing compared to other countries."

We got into the car, but just as we were about to leave we heard that a school in Tensta was on fire.

We arrived at the same time as some other reporters. A cop told us to be careful as the hills around the school were a perfect place for people to throw stones from. It was dark by now and the police were dressed in riot outfits. We watched as the firemen broke into the school and put the fire out. It was a bit difficult to breathe.

Suddenly all the other journalists had left. They were all equipped with police radios. We were following developments on Twitter and via online forums. It started to get late and as we went to the car we found out that the arson had now spread to the Southern suburb Älvsjö. Apparently there was a library on fire.

As we drove along the highway a fire truck passed us. We followed it into Hagsätra where two cars were on fire. We read rumours online that firefighters had been advised not to put out burning cars as it was no longer safe for them. The firefighters waited, giving us a chance to get up close to the cars. Local residents surrounded the fire and were confused because no one came to put it out. A man had brought his own fire-extinguisher. He looked really upset, but didn't feel like talking to us. We started feeling uncomfortable, like our presence and our camera were provoking people there, so we decided to leave and drive to Älvsjö instead.

Firefighters were busy finishing off their soaking of a building that housed both a library and a police station. The windows of the neighbouring bank had been smashed as well.

As we jumped into the car, the police were questioning a couple of guys in front of us. Police had confiscated two baseball bats. It was after midnight now, and as we left we spotted at least ten police vans at a parking lot. We got out of the car and found out that two people had been arrested for the library/police station fire.

The next burning thing we were destined to spend the night gazing at so it was an elementary school in the North West suburb, Kista. It took us some time to get there and we almost hit both a deer and a fox on the way. We read online that two of the school kids' turtles had died in the fire.

When we arrived the fire was under control. A few local residents were looking on with disgust. A fireman told us that this was his first fire that evening as he had just begun his shift. A guy living next to the school explained to us how tired he was of all this. "This isn't about some guy being shot by police. This isn't about suburban kids rioting. This is just a few people picking on people who are already suffering."

It was almost 3AM now, and we decided to head home. We spotted some smoke on the horizon but were unable to locate where its source. The streets were empty. The highway was dark. We had seen so much in a few hours, but the riots, and trouble-making suburban kids, must either have been one step ahead of us, or maybe there were no riots at all, just a couple of bored and prolific arsonists. 

More recent unrest:

We Photographed a Drunk EDL Hate Mob Attacking Police

Murderous Fanatics and EDL Idiots Brought Darkness to Woolwich Last Night

My Week with Hungary's Far-Right

NEWS

Deportee Purgatory

Tijuana’s El Bordo Is Home to Thousands of Heroin-Addicted Mexican Deportees

By Laura Woldenberg

Avimael, “El Cocho,” and his girlfriend Marta Gomez, 42, sit inside their ñongo, which Cocho dug alongside the Tijuana River canal. Photos by David Maung.

Each year, more than 30 million people flow between the US and Mexico through the San Ysidro Port of Entry, the busiest land-border crossing in the world. Situated between San Diego and Tijuana, at one time the area around San Ysidro was a prime spot to cross illegally into the US. But in 1994, Operation Gatekeeper expanded the border wall and increased the number of checkpoints. With the more recent addition of unmanned drone patrols along the border, Tijuana has become one of the most fortified border points in the Americas. Border crossers have been forced to turn to alternative sites of crossing, such as the Sonoran Desert, where hundreds of people die each year.

About 40 percent of Mexican immigrants deported from the US are sent back through Tijuana. Many of the deported border crossers have established a makeshift shantytown inside a dry, concrete riverbed where the Tijuana River once flowed—called El Bordo.

In years past, local nonprofits and shelters offered humanitarian aid to immigrants attempting to cross into the US, but today they primarily care for the deportees who have been booted back to Mexico. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (better known as ICE) reported a record 409,849 immigrants deported from the States in 2012, and a recent report published by Social Scientists on Immigration Policy states that, based on the current rates of deportation, more than two million people will have been deported by the Obama administration by 2014, more than under any president in American history. 

El Bordo roughly translates as “the border” or, more grimly, “the ditch.” In the 1960s, the area around the Tijuana River was a frontier town where would-be immigrants would congregate to meet polleros (“human smugglers”), who would transport them into the US for a fee. 

Micaela Saucedo runs the Casa Refugio Elvira shelter, located a block away from the dry river, and has assisted border crossers and deportees for more than 30 years. “In the 60s, it was very easy to cross. In those years, it was a different world.” Micaela led me to a public square where several hundred homeless deportees were milling about, waiting for the free meal that local humanitarian organizations dish out every day. “The deportees stay here [in Tijuana] because they think crossing again will be easy,” Micaela said, “but they don’t realize that the border is now completely secured. It’s very hard to cross.” 

Later Micaela gave me a tour of El Bordo—an inhospitable concrete embankment filled with a sea of tents. The elegant Las Americas mall in San Diego is visible just over the border fence. 

“Gallo!” Micaela shouted. A man emerged from a hole, crowing like a rooster. Delfino Lopez, a.k.a. El Gallo, a man in his early 30s who wore a hat with a fighting cock embroidered on it, is one of the estimated 3,000 people who reside in El Bordo year-round. Like many of his fellow inhabitants, Gallo previously resided in the US. He crossed the border illegally in 2005 and worked in construction for six years, sending most of his money to his wife and kids in Puebla. 

Two years ago, Gallo’s landlord called ICE on him, and he was deported. He hasn’t seen his family since and told me he refuses to do so until he’s capable of providing for them. He tried to return to the US several times but was unsuccessful. He said the only way he knew how to make money was to return to el otro lado. “I don’t want to return as a defeated person,” he added. 

Gallo welcomed me inside his improvised dwelling—a five-by-ten-foot minibunker, called a ñongo, that he dug out some time ago. It’s one of 300 along the concrete riverbed, with the rest of the deportees living in tents or inside the sewers. I crawled through a hatch fashioned out of the casing of an old TV. He told me it was safe because the dirt walls had been reinforced with recycled materials like wood, plastic tarps, and sandbags, but I couldn’t imagine sleeping in what is essentially a hole in the ground. Or, more pessimistically, a ready-made grave. Nevertheless, Gallo said, if constructed properly there are benefits to living in a subterranean abode—“the roof doesn’t leak and people can walk on top of it without it collapsing.” Still, that doesn’t mean he’s completely protected.

“I’m afraid of the cops,” Gallo said. “They come, and they burn everything. They think we are all drug addicts and thieves.” 

“The first time they came in, they brought a bulldozer and destroyed houses here and then set them on fire,” Micaela added. “The second time, they got here and spread gasoline, not even checking if people were inside or not. Some people were burned. Then a third time the same thing happened.”

We walked the embankment’s perimeter, stopping at an overturned cooler. Micaela knocked, and moments later, Avimael “El Cocho” Martinez emerged from his hole, inviting us inside. His “Cochotunnel,” as he calls it, was much larger than Gallo’s and, he said, could accommodate as many as 16 guests. Cocho came to El Bordo two years ago after being deported, and like many of his neighbors, he still yearns for his former life in the States.  

“I was in the US for a long time,” Cocho said. “I wanted the American dream. My family is OK, but most of my belongings are still there. I left my family and my work. I used to own my own business, an auto-body shop.” His eyes welled up while reminiscing about his former home; the luxuries of having a TV, laundry room, kitchen, and guest room. “We used to eat like regular people. This place is awful. It’s really impossible to compare. There I had happiness, good memories. Here I have sadness. This is a place full of vices. I try to stay away from them.” 

Gallo and Cocho aren’t exceptions in El Bordo—many of the residents have worked in the US and even have children who are American citizens. Many were deported for infractions like drunk driving or domestic violence. 

According to Victor Clark Alfaro, director of the Binational Center for Human Rights in Tijuana, Mexicans deported from the US fall into three loose categories: those apprehended while trying to cross the border illegally; deportees who once lived in the US and had normal lives but were deported; and former inmates sent home from overcrowded US prisons.

All of this becomes even more troubling when you consider that Mexicans living illegally in the United States have become vital to the American economy, providing cheap labor for farms, factories, restaurants, and other industries. They are also essential to the Mexican economy. Remittances sent from the US represent Mexico’s second-largest revenue source after oil. 

A homeless man showers in El Bordo, the border wall separating the US and Mexico stands behind him.

“The Mexican state has a huge responsibility to provide immigrants with free food, shelter, give them IDs, and help them find work,” Victor said. “They should provide orientation about the services that the city offers. Last year, migrants sent $24 billion to Mexico, so it would only be fair, when those immigrants become deportees, that the state should give back.”

Finding work is nearly impossible for the majority of those living in El Bordo, so they come to rely on nonprofits and religious organizations for basic necessities. The most established of these organizations is the Padre Chava soup kitchen, located directly across the street from El Bordo. The kitchen serves breakfast to more than 1,000 people daily. 

Father Ernesto Hernández, the priest who oversees the soup kitchen, said that deportees can go from having respectable, comfortable lives in the States to being broke and homeless in as little as ten days. He explained that recent deportees usually spend their last few dollars on cheap hotels or shelters while trying to find work. Most are unsuccessful and wind up living on the streets where the police harass them until they end up in El Bordo. 

“A lot of the people that have been deported were in the US for a long time,” Father Ernesto said. “They have a family, wife and kids there. Once they are deported, they decide to stay here to feel a bit closer to their families [in the US].” 

Father Ernesto introduced us to Joaquin, a man in his late 30s. He said that he had lived in the US undocumented for 22 years before he was deported in 2012 for expired license-plate tags on his truck. His wife, eight brothers, parents, and four kids (two of whom are American citizens) remain in California, where Joaquin ran a welding business. Joaquin hopes that after filing his 2012 taxes in the US (made possible by “borrowing” a friend’s Social Security number) his refund will cover the $3,000 coyote fee to get him back to the US. 

Tijuana’s economy has changed drastically over the last decade. In the early 2000s, the main tourist thoroughfare, Revolución Avenue, was packed with underage gringos getting drunk and buying Viagra and Xanax over the counter at pharmacies. The debauchery came to an abrupt halt in 2006, when the Sinaloa cartel declared war on the Tijuana cartel and local police forces. In 2008 alone, there were at least 844 murders in the city. While the official death toll dwindled slightly over the next two years, the violence continued unabated. The killings have subsided in recent years, partially because of the increased presence of police and the Mexican army, and partially because the Sinaloa cartel has largely forced their enemies out of town. Restaurants are now reopening, the bar scene is booming, and the locals have reclaimed Revolución Avenue for themselves. Ruidoson, Tijuana’s brand of electronic music, is rising to prominence, and the local Baja Med cuisine is gaining international attention. Today, Tijuana is once again fun, vibrant, and for the most part, safe. 

To better understand the situation on the border, I arranged to ride along with Tijuana Police Subdirector Armando Rascón on a scheduled patrol of Zona Norte, sandwiched between the tourist center and El Bordo. Zona Norte is where most of the migrant shelters are located, along with many houses that serve as heroin-shooting dens and the red-light district, which is full of cheap hotels, brothels, and massive strip clubs.

“The problem at El Bordo is serious, and it’s growing,” Armando said. “The people that live there are not worried about eating. In the morning, they eat at the Padre Chava soup kitchen, then at 4 PM, a Christian group feeds them, and then Americans feed them again at night. These people are worried about getting money to buy their drugs because most of them are addicts. And that’s why they go snatch a purse, or steal whatever they can.” 

Armando continued, explaining the strategy of local law enforcement. “We go and destroy everything they build. But as soon as we destroy it, they build it back again. It’s like a game.” I asked him about Micaela’s allegations that the police sometimes torched the El Bordo encampments, and he assured us that his officers would never engage in such brutal tactics, claiming that the residents had started the fires accidentally while cooking food outside or burning tires. Most of the occupiers of El Bordo I spoke with, however, said that they are terrified of the police, and many told me that they have been abused and beaten up by officers, and some said they’ve had their homes bulldozed or burned down. 

As we continued along the canal, Armando pointed out the giant sewage tunnels and said that many deportees live inside of them in total darkness. “All we want is for these people to stay in El Bordo,” Armando said. “We don’t want them to rob our tourists. We have to take care of the people that cross the border legally into the US, and those that come back into Mexico… Our job is to provide security for all the citizens of Tijuana, protect the tourists and businesses in our city. And the way to show we are doing our work is with operatives and removing people from the streets.”

Cocho peers out from his “Cochotunnel.”

When I asked him about potential solutions to the growing migrant problem in El Bordo, he said, “We would have to start with the US sending the deportees by plane to the rest of the country, instead of sending everyone through here. In the downtown area, 86 percent of the crimes are related to the people that live in El Bordo… At the same time this is a problem that has to be solved from a social perspective, and not just by putting people in jail.”

The Mexican federal government has a program to help repatriated deportees, but it is not nearly enough. The program provides a free phone call, some food and medical attention, and a temporary ID (often not recognized by cops and potential employers), but beyond that, there’s nothing else given to help them get reestablished in Mexico.

It’s painfully apparent that many of the residents of El Bordo are addicted to hard drugs like heroin and meth, which only reinforces the local police’s perceptions of the embankment’s displaced residents. A dose of heroin can be bought for as little as $2, and most users I spoke with said they shot up at least three or four times per day. Many of these addicts support their addiction by collecting scrap metal, and the police said they resort to robbery and other criminal activity to fund their habits. 

Dr. Remedios Lozada, coordinator of the HIV and STD program at the Baja California health ministry, has organized a needle-exchange program in El Bordo with the goal of reducing the risk of HIV and hepatitis infection. “All of them are addicted to some substance,” she said of its residents. “Ninety percent of them do intravenous drugs like heroin. Those who don’t shoot up at least smoke meth.” Due to lack of funds, the program can only manage to conduct the exchanges every few weeks. 

I accompanied Dr. Remedios to one of the exchanges. She drove me to an encampment near the river surrounded by tall bushes. We parked the car, and I watched as approximately 30 men staggered up the concrete ramp and approached a table that volunteer organizers had set up to exchange needles. Each man was clutching an assortment of used needles, and some even had syringes wedged behind their ears. Moments after receiving their clean needles, each began cooking up heroin—or chiva (“goat”) as they call it—in plastic spoons. They then proceeded to shoot into their necks, legs, and between their fingers, right in front of the volunteer table. 

I approached a man after he finished injecting his dose. He told me he had been recently deported from a prison in the US. I asked him if he thought he was better off living in jail or El Bordo, and he replied that at least jail had provided him with basic sustenance and a roof over his head.  

Our next stop was a bridge where around 100 people—including a few women—had gathered below. The volunteers set up their table and doled out clean needles and condoms. Ten minutes later, a guy wearing brand-new shoes and a black hoodie appeared. Our driver discreetly told us that he was a wholesale heroin supplier, dropping off a fresh batch for the local dealer. We decided it was time to leave.  

Read more from our World Hates You Issue:

This Is What Winning Looks Like

A Long Way From Home

Getting Wet