Bona tarda. Bona tarda. Comencem. Estem a punt de començar el quart diàleg humanístic on parlarem de les fronteres del segle XXI amb l'escriptor historiador Matiu Carr, historiador professor de la Facultat d'Humanitats, en Toni Luna. Sisplau, Matiu. Toni. Toni. El presidente de Estados Unidos, Donald Trump, solicitará dos mil millones de dólares en nuevos fondos para la construcción del muro fronterizo en el presupuesto de 2021. Fuentes, el periódico de Cataluña ayer, 10 de febrero de 2020. La suma fue reportada por primera vez por el diario Wall Street Journal. Hace un año el gobierno de Trump solicitó al Congreso que proporcionara 5.000 millones de dólares para el muro, además de 3.600 millones de dólares para reponer los recursos, que la Administración había tomado de proyectos de construcción militar. A mesura que avanza la segunda década del segle XXI, vivim en un món de murs i barreres fortificades que augmenten. Sembla que les fronteres nacionales han adquirit un nou paper en el discurs polític que no estava present ni durant la Guerra Freda. Per què ha passat això? Quins són els factors polítics que impulsen les noves fronteres del segle XXI? Què pretenen assolir aquestes fronteres? En què es diferencien aquestes noves fronteres del segle XXI de les anteriors? Què ens expliquen sobre el nostre present i el nostre possible futur? Tot això són els temes del que avui es parlarà en el diàleg amb el Matiu Carr i Toni Luna, que ara presentaré els dos convidats breuament. Matiu Carr en escut va néixer a Londres en 1955. Ara ve de regna unit per participar en aquest diàleg, així que li agraïm especialment el fet que hagi vingut. Ell va viure aquí durant quasi de ones. Avui em explicava que lo explicaré en castellano para que lo entienda mejor, que en su primer viaje a España no le dejaron entrar por una de las fronteras y el guardia le dijo que era porque tenía el pelo demasiado largo. Y entonces se fue por por bó y allá sí que pasó y entró a España hace muchos años. Ellos explicarà alguna de estas experiencias. És escritor, periodista, difusor i promotor que ha escrit ampliamente sobre emigració, conflictes, terrorisme, guerra i justícia social. Ha col·laborat en diverses publicacions, entre d'altres, The New York Times, The Observer and the Guardian. És autó de 8 llibres publicats. La seva no ficció inclou The Infernal Machine, an alternative history of terrorism. Després, Blood and Fate, The Purging of Muslim Spain. Després, un llibre que està directament relacionat amb el tema d'avui, Fortress Europe, Inside the War on Immigration, la última edició de 2012. I diversos llibres més que poden consultar a la nostra web. La seva segona novel·la, Black Sun Rising, està ambientada a Barcelona de 1909 durant la setmana tràgica i la publicarà aquesta primavera amb llengua inglesa Pegasus Box. Antoni Luna, nascuta a Barcelona, 1965. És professor d'anàlisi geogràfica regional i coordinador del Grau en Global Studies. És l'agenciat en filosofia i lletres per la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Té un Master in Urban Planning i és doctor en geografia per la Universitat d'Arizona en l'any 2001. A Barcelona he impartit classes de master i de grau per a programes de les universitats de Chicago, Pennsylvania, Georgetown, Duke i altres. Els seus principals temes d'investigació són la geografia cultural i política, els estudis urbans i didàctica de la geografia. És autor de diverses publicacions, acadèmiques, monogràfiques, etcètera. No vull robar més el temps d'aquest diàleg que ara comença. Moltes gràcies a tots. Per favor, Matiu, tienes la palabra, como nuestro invitado, para empezar este diálogo sobre las fronteras. Thank you, Tamara. Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here, everybody. Thank you. When I was invited here, I was trying to think, the subject of borders is such a huge subject. So many different things, human rights, war, conflict, how nations define themselves, how nations exclude people who they think don't belong within their borders and so on. There's a lot of things you can discuss and I hope we will discuss most of them today, but I thought I'd begin by telling you a couple of personal stories. One is the first time I ever came to Spain. That was in 1975. I was hitchhiking to Spain and I think I arrived at the frontier of La Junquera. I arrived there, my girlfriend and I were hitchhiking and we couldn't get into the country because the Guaira Seville wouldn't let us into the country. I said to the Guaira Seville, look, I'm only here for a few days. Can't we come in? They went no, your hair is too long. So we'd moved away from that border post to the coastal road, the road that goes to Port Bu and there we didn't have any problem. We just walked straight in. So, you know, that was a time, mid 1970s, when borders were not really talked about in political discourse in the so-called free world. When we talked about borders, we talked about the Berlin Wall as an evil thing. We talked about the Berlin Wall as a barrier that had to come down. We talked about the iron curtain and so on. So, jump forward to 1995 when I was living in Barcelona and working as a correspondent from time to time for the BBC. In 1995, Spain joined Schengen, it joined the Schengen area formally. And the BBC gave me a job. They said, go to La Junquera and see if it's possible to cross that border without being stopped. So my job that afternoon was to get in the car and just drive back and forth between La Junquera and France. And I had an interview with the mayor of Bourg-Madame, the French town right on the frontier. And I remember asking her, how do you feel now there's no border anymore? And she went frightened. And I said, so I said, why? And she said, because of Africa. And I thought that was a strange thing to say. She said that because Africa feels too close to her, she thought. And, you know, we are now in the present, 2020, when there is an actual global obsession, not only with borders, but with militarized borders, with the kind of barriers we see here, fences, walls, police, soldiers. So the question that I hope we will discuss tonight is why has that happened? What explains this transformation? We have similar stories in different borders. I did my dissertation, as I told you this morning, on the US-Mexico border. And I was crossing every single day with my car to interview people on the Mexican side. And every time the Mexicans used to have, I don't know if they still have, they used to have a traffic light with red and green. And you have to push a button. And randomly, if you got red, you got check. The car, then everything. And if you get green, you can pass. And probably of over 100 times across that time, I got 95 times red. Obviously it was a young man driving alone in a suspicious empty car with only my papers and my pens and not even a computer because they didn't have any. So that was the story in that time. So that's one thing. On the other side, a very similar to your story on the border, now I take my students sometimes to France to visit basically some of the areas that were involved in the Spanish refugees going to, you know, Spanish Republican crossing to France and so on. And now for me it's still a weird experience to crossing the border and nobody's asking anything. So we have these two different situations that are quite different in one place to another. So I remember crossing that French border and it was not that easy. You were always suspicious that we were trying to do something illegal or especially if you were young. Yeah, but I mean that's one of the interesting things about borders is they can seem to be permanent for a long period of time and people assume that such and such a barrier could be the Pyrenean border or the US Mexico border is there forever. And people imagine that it's always been there. But in fact a lot of these barriers are actually quite new and they suddenly change. I mean, you talk about going to the Pyrenees. I remember the story of Walter Benjamin, the philosopher and writer Walter Benjamin when he had his tragic journey to try and escape through Spain in 1940. What happened to Walter Benjamin was he knew that he could not cross the Pyrenees very easily walking because he was in his middle ages, he was a smoker, he was only used to kind of walking around Paris. So he calculated that he would stop every 10 yards while walking, every 10 minutes, while walking across the Pyrenees and if he hadn't had a heart attack, he would continue. And he also took with him morphine tablets because he told Arthur Kersler, if I don't make it, I'm going to kill myself. And what happened was, it's a long story and I'll keep it short, he arrived, you probably know this story, some of you know this story, that he arrived in Port Bell and the Spanish customs guard said, look, you haven't got an exit visa. So you have to go back to France. He was once meant to go back on a train that would take him to Auschwitz in the end or someplace like that. So in the night, he killed himself with those morphine tablets. And the next morning, the Spanish customs guard said, okay, the rest of your party can continue. So what you have there is a situation which a border that has disappeared now, we cross it all the time for our holidays back and forth without even thinking about it, was once a frontier between life and death for some people. If you didn't have the right papers, you could be killed or sent back to your death. And the Pyrenees has played that role for a long, long time. You know, for hundreds of years, the Pyrenees has been that kind of border. So it's amazing now, like when you drive a walk through it, it's just not there, as if it never existed. And then we go out, we find the rest of the world, 65 states in the last 15 years have fortified their borders with fences, new barriers, soldiers, police and so on. So I guess the thing is, what explains that? What explains this global obsession with walls and militarized frontiers? The other thing that's very interesting is that borders used to be built by non-democratic countries, do not allow the people to let, not allowing the people to leave the country, to keep it inside. Now it's democratic countries are building the borders to not allowing the others to get in. So it's a different type of conception of the border. But on the other side, we know that the idea is, I think they have a physicality. There is a physical wall or a physical fence or a physical thing. But it's more like a icon, a symbol of protection, more than anything, because the truth is that... But what's it protecting, do you think? Well, they are trying to protect from getting criminals, non-desirable people, and so on. But the truth is all these people, the goods and the bads, got in through other sources. The border is not stopping from all these people to get in. So that's the interesting thing. So we created these huge borders, cost of fortune. There's a lot of people getting a lot of money, because it's a money-making machine building walls. But they are not stopping to get all these people in, because those people are getting through airports, through other sources they get inside. So that's a very interesting construct. So it's a very symbolic construction of walls, especially in the last 20-something years. It is, and I think it's worth putting a little bit of historical context on that. If we go back, the first state borders didn't really begin to appear on maps till about the late 16th century, early 17th century. So a lot of people, like Mateus Quant, would show state borders in Europe for the first time. But they're not state borders the way we think of them now. They were often done in a kind of hazy colored line because the border was debatable. The words they used to use to describe borders, they often used to use the phrase debatable lands, like the Spanish March, the area known as the Spanish March, that's one thing. And the other thing is, if you wanted to move from one place to another before the 20th century, quite often you didn't need a passport. And if you had a passport, you didn't show it at the frontier, at the border, you went into the country and then you could be checked by the police, I don't know, in the capital, in the towns you passed through. I mean in the 17th century, Fernández de Navarrete, the secretary of Felipe II, he said it's a tragedy that is coming to Castile right now. He said, the scum of Europe, meaning beggars, thieves, robbers and Frenchmen, all coming to Castile. But the thing is, Felipe did not try and stop these people at the Pyrenees. They came into Spain and then if they were in Valencia some policeman or militiaman might check their papers. So this idea that the border is the line where you have to show if you have the right to enter is actually quite a new concept, you can really trace it back to like, probably back to the French Revolution when the French government after the revolution began checking people at the frontier. And then this kind of spread at different speeds throughout the world. Yeah. And I think actually things are starting to get even stronger when we got the Cold War after the Second World War. The moment the borders started to be a very strong area and they put a lot of money in protecting those borders, those walls and so on. So that's something that happens quite recently. Absolutely. And also going back just before that, Stefan Zweig, the Austrian writer, once wrote in his book, his last book actually, The World of Yesterday, he wrote nostalgically of the period before World War I when he said it was possible for him to travel right through America, and also to India, without a passport. So Stefan Zweig was a middle class, fairly affluent writer who could do that, not everybody could do that. But nevertheless it's striking that he said after World War I there was this big transformation. Because of World War I, Europe began putting up these militarized borders because everybody was an enemy of course.  So you had this huge problem of refugees, what we began to call refugees for the first time. So you then get to World War II, the end of World War II, this massive refugee problem, 10 million people moving back and forth across Europe. So the whole question of refugees was tied up with the stabilization of Europe and then you have the Cold War. As Churchill said, an iron curtain has fallen across Europe. So we, those of us who were in the so-called free world, Spain wasn't in those days obviously, but those of us who were, we assumed we were told that borders are an evil thing and that one of the things that defined communism as an evil system was the fact that it stopped people moving.  When I say kill, I mean kill because the Berlin Wall, about 135 people died in the whole period of the Cold War, trying to cross that border. Every one of those lives is important. Yet 34,000 people have died trying to enter Europe in 1932, 34,000, probably more now, and nobody even knows that number. Most of them drowned, some committed suicide in detention centers, others died in the Sahara desert trying to cross, trying to reach Europe. What are they having in common, these people? Most of them are black, brown, they're not white. And I think when we talk about why these borders have been introduced in the so-called free world, we can't ignore that racial, ethnic dimension.  It just so happens, the majority of people who die trying to cross them are not white. Yeah. Well, I suppose it used to be an east-west type of wall, and now it's a north-south type of wall, but it's different. And it's not that different in here, in Europe. Now, well, the world in, even in those times there was a lot of restrictions of the poor countries in the south to cross to the northern countries. It's when Greece, Spain, Portugal, even Italy, or even Yugoslavia were trying to work in Germany. They have a lot of controls because they were poor. Now that border has shifted south. I know it's the Mediterranean, so it's a safer border in that way because there's a mass of water that protects us from getting more people getting in. And that's interesting when we go, I think it's interesting case because it's our borders on the Moroccan side for Europe. And they didn't exist like a very heavy border before Spain joined the European Union. So it became a very strong hold, a very important wall, a very defensive area when Spain entered the European Union because it was one of the requisites before joining the Schengen Treaty. Absolutely right. And I think that's some, of the contradiction, the paradox of the European Union and the paradox of Schengen. On one hand, Schengen has brought freedom to something like 450 million people who are members of the Schengen Zone, the 26 member countries of the Schengen Zone. And it makes it possible, well, in our case, in my country now, in one year's time it won't be possible because we're doing things differently, as you probably know. But generally speaking, it took away borders, European borders, for example, in the time of Walter Benjamin, had been borders of life and death. So that's the softening, the dismantling of historic frontiers. But that process was accompanied by the hardening of the external borders of the European Union. And that meant that places like future and Malia had a new importance that they didn't have before. I mean, I remember in Malia, people always commented to me, oh yeah, before Schengen there was just a little bit of barbed wire, anyone could walk around it. But it's quite astonishing. And when I say now, now in my case, actually means a few years back, because the last time I was in Malia was about nine, ten years ago. It was bad enough then. Huge fence with all kinds of electronic devices on it. You cross one fence and then you find yourself in the middle of this little no man's land about, I don't know, about that wide, with these, the three dimensional fence going across here. The point of that is to catch your legs. While it catches your legs, if you manage to get through that, climb higher, you have razor wire, which will cut your hands. If you manage to get across that, the top part of the fence will fold back against you, forcing you down. Yet in 2005, hundreds of African migrants who had been trapped outside that fence for months tried to cross it. And at least 13 of them were killed trying to cross it. No one knows why they were killed or who killed them or who killed them. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. i s'inforça en els seus drets. Es crea una lletel·la ambiguita. Quan parles de les persones que han vingut, quan veus com s'ha fet, és molt horrifying veure-ho. D'una altra cosa molt interessant, que és una cosa d'experiència en México, però també aquí, és la creació de totes aquestes cultures. Aquestes persones que viuen en una molt particular manera. En Féuta, en Melilla, hi ha totes aquestes persones carregant, totes aquestes altres bàsiques, esmagrant coses a i a fora. La mateixa cosa que passa en México. Hi ha totes aquestes persones passant a i a fora. L'economia a tots els llocs depèn molt de... de tenir fans en el middle. Recordo, una de les coses més joves en l'US-Mexica, per exemple, en l'americana, hi ha una gran residenció de les xilèries per a els altres persones, que venen de Canada, o dels nord-estats de l'Unit, els colds, els snoberds, perquè van venir aquí durant la sèrie de la winter, i van venir al costat a les xarxes de l'unió nord-empar de l'Unit o a Canada durant l'esquadra, perquè aquella zona és molt llarga. I l'estat d'allà, és perquè es fan a l'esquadra, perquè no és una llarga llarga, perquè es fan a l'esquadra per a prescripció a les farmacèries a l'estat mexicà, perquè són molt llarga, que hi ha a l'estat americà, i que es pot comprar sense prescripció. Si es fan a l'estat mexicà, i que es fan a l'estat mexicà, que es fan a l'estat mexicà, que es fan a l'estat mexicà, i que es fan a l'estat mexicà, perquè és un partit de l'esquadra. La gent es fan a l'estat mexicà, ho fan a l'estat mexicà. Hi ha bars i restaurants, lletres de bar i coses així, però hi ha moltes farmacèries que si es fan a l'estat mexicà pot comprar una cosa que sigui prevenible. I així, han creat el microcosm, les diferents situacions de les persones, arregllant-li a fa de diferents coses. i després van anar al costat de les xarxes. Aleshores, van passar a les xarxes. I a vegades, van treballar per quatre hores, però han de prendre una o una meitat de hores per per fer-la a les xarxes. Aleshores, no sé com es fan, però es suposa molt petit, però han de comptear com va la temps que es va fer i com va la temps que es va fer a la xarxa. És interessant que ens enmentin les xarxes, perquè algun polític científic que es va agafar al Correna i Innisfree. для la transversalitat i per la de laativa del tymèdia i de la decorations, es va reclamar una tornava a la frontera. Quina va ser la frontera que va fer a la frontera i que va ser la frontera que es va agafar? però és permís aquí. No és exigent, però no és illegal. Què passa a les dones? They take things like nappies, cosmetics, carry these huge bundles, like I'm talking about this kind of height. And they carry them through special tunnels created just for them. And so you watch that happened, you see the civil guard shouting at them, occasionally hitting them, poking them in sticks, per fer-los anar fàcil. És molt horrífic. És com una cosa de Mad Max, Bartetown. Aquest és l'únic tema. És una cosa més d'enviar en compte. Quan parlem de aquesta nova política cultural obsessió amb bordes, hi ha certes diferències. Una és la factura que, en el 1990, el més utopi de proponents de globalització ha dit que hem entrat a un món bordelós. I ha dit que la Wallet de Berlín ha sortit, i en el futur no hi haurà barres així. Perquè ara hi haurà moviments freqüents de goods, capital, informació, data, i so on. Hi haurà crossbordes, i aquests altres barres ideològics o polítics desapareixen. Què és el lloc? És que això no ha passat? I encara que també ha passat. Perquè, de vegades, el paradoxe de l'Unió Europea, dozens de bordes desapareixen. Hi ha aquest gran, i en moltes maneres, molt succesiu experiment en la sobrità del shared. I, al mateix temps, hi ha aquestes viscors exclusionaris bordes que surten de tot el continent, en què ciutadans, com Espanya, Gràcia, Itali, Malta, han allò de la responsabilitat de ser càstigues i franquers per a l'Europa del nord, essencialment. I en ciutadans com Gràcia, ha tingut conseqüències catastròfiques, perquè hi ha milions de persones intentant entrar a Gràcia, no perquè vulguin anar a Gràcia, perquè vulguin anar a algú altre, però que no hi hagi ningú altre, perquè l'Unió Europea, perquè l'Itàlia, ha estabilitzat una nova borda, no una borda de Schengen, és la seva pròpia borda per a migrants. Una vegada vaig anar a aquest lloc de l'Àgua de Manitza, que és al cap d'aquesta ràpid, que hi ha dins d'aigua, és on es pot fer xips per anar a l'Itàlia. Hi he fet una cosa en què hi ha 400 persones que van viure en les kiles de l'Àgua. I en les lloces de l'Àgua de Manitza... i a cada una de les les usuals, intentant emparar a la Gràcia. Per què faig això en Gràcia? El que fa de la Gràcia és que hi ha engrà, arthritis l'insidió d'insidió de Gràcia, perquè hi ha Gràcia, un país que s'ha subjectat per les mesures brutal, a més de la crisi financial. Hi ha un populista que se sent migrants quan se venen a l'Àgua de Manitza que no poden sortir. Aleshores, ells no volen ser allà, els grups no volen ser allà, i doncs hi ha una possibilitat terrible per a les partides faràtes, com la de Golden Dawn. I, a vegades, Espanya no es comporta així com a Gràcia, però Espanya ha, a vegades, fet això. Jo he trobat persones en Milía, per exemple, migrants, que van donar permís per a la policia espanyola per anar a Milía i venir a Espanya. Aleshores, van donar aquests jocs jocs. So they get on the boat, they arrive in Spain on the mainland. In theory, they're in Spain, if they're in Milía, they're in Spain politically but not in practice. So what happens is Milía and Thíota act like little detention centres and you find people living there that have basically been living there for 5 years. They can't work, they can't get nationality, they can't get permission to work. Finally, the Milía or the Thíuta police say, okay you can go to mainland Spain now. You get a temporary visa with a yellow card. que arriben a Mainland, Espanya, i la policia diu, no, no, no, no ho pots, anem a Melilla. Unes situacions increïbles, les conseqüències d'aquesta nova franquia que volem ara inhabitar. Sí, hi ha una altra cosa que per mi és molt estricant. A l'esquadra de l'esquadra de l'Europa, per exemple, hi ha ciutats que, per exemple, l'esquadra entre el germà i la Polònia, per uns anys va ser una bona franquia. Absolutament. I va ser molt difícil de passar de l'un a l'altre. I ara aquest lloc ha desaparegut. Una de les coses que hi ha... hi ha una altra artista treballant en les abandones de càstigues customes de l'Europa. Perquè hi ha càstigues customes de l'altre lloc que no són més envergudes, perquè són totes les bordes i ningú n'hi ha de utilitzar. A vegades són fàcils de graffitis i altres. Aleshores, hi ha persones que tenen fotos d'aquest decay de bordes polítiques. Però, a l'altre, la borda entre Polònia i Belarus ara és una altra borda. I hi hauria de ser una borda molt poca. Aleshores, això és canviant les bordes de l'altre temps. Creant un nou... Aleshores, s'ha de construir totes les coses que abandonem a l'altre, s'ha de construir a altres llocs. Aleshores, això és un procés molt interessant. Absolutament. La borda polòsica és molt interessant, perquè la borda polòsica és on la solució final va ser implementada. És on va ser desigurada a Lublin. Amb l'operació de Reinhardt i això. I això és on va ser posat a practició. En les primeres actuals camps d'aigua, com a detenció, eren tots a la borda polòsica. I, en en en termes de violència etnècdota durant la Guerra de la World War II, podria parlar de l'esquadra, l'esquadra que parla de la Crècia, com parla de la Polònia, la tota la borda que parla de l'esquadra d'Europa era la més violenta borda en la segona Guerra de la World War II. Aquest és el lloc on tenia anti-semitisme i practició, no només per les nazis, sinó per les romanes, per la Lithuania, per la Polònia, obviusament. Aleshores, és molt estricant que ara veus aquest nou intent de pujar les bordes d'Europa més a l'est. I això és una altra cosa sobre bordes, que encara que s'ha de ser permanent ara, s'està debatant. En el lloc d'aigua, fins i tot 15 anys fa, no pensem que la Polònia i l'Esta d'Europa serien part de l'Europa. Hi ha debats. ¿Està part de l'Europa? ¿Està realment l'Europa? Aquestes debats. Ara, ningú en preguntarà. És molt possible, un dia, possible que la Turquia sigui un membre de l'Europa Union. Potser hi ha les bordes de l'Europa Union arribant a l'Iraq, una cosa que terrifiqui l'Empari, a tot el continent, sempre hi ha una veritat sobre això. Però es veu que les bordes poden ser les barriures, les obstacles, i, al même temps, poden just vanar, com parlàvem al cap de l'anterior, en el cas dels piraneses. Però, en realitat, és una altra cosa. Countries com Espanya, o França, o Itali, treballen més a Maroc, per fer-ho a les persones abans d'anar a Maroc, ajudant l'Armi de Maroc, o la Polònia de Maroc, per fer-ho a les persones, en el mateix cas, les americains, per fer-ho a les persones a Guatemala, i a Honduras, abans d'anar a Mexica. És tota aquesta connexió, d'anar més dins, per fer-ho a les persones abans d'anar a les reales fències del país. Jo crec que és un punt molt important, perquè l'India, per exemple, ha construït un almost 2.000 quilòmetres de fències a la borda amb la Bangladesh, i l'aigua de aquesta borda és per fer-ho a les migrantes i el documentari de les migrantes de la crossing, i també per fer-ho a les musulmans de l'entrada a l'India. Això es becoming clearer now. Botswana has created a small fence to stop Zimbabwe and migrant workers for entering. So lots of countries are doing this, but powerful states like ours have different potential. We can project border power far beyond our own frontiers. So what you get is a situation in which, in effect, Spain has done this very well, but so has my own country. What we do is we send officials to certain countries where we think people might want to come, and we stop them. We stop them getting on planes, we say you can't get a visa, you can't do this, and therefore what we're actually doing by this is we are enlisting other countries as our border guards, particularly clear in the case of Morocco. I'll give you an example of this. In Morocco, I went to visit the border at Ujda, the town of Ujda. It's quite a large town, about 500,000 people right on the border, on the Algerian border. And on the other side of Ujda in Algeria is a town called Magnaia, i Magnaia és a l'end de la so-called Transsaharan route. So most migrants who've made their way up through Sub-Saharan Africa will have crossed the border to get there. So then they enter Morocco if they're lucky, if they get past the Algerian border guards. Then if they're in Morocco, the Moroccan police keep them trapped in this little corner around Ujda, where they have no shelter, no one looks after them, no health service, no way of gaining any money. And I met people literally living in the forest, like forest people. And from time to time, the police come and they beat them up, chase them, or they take away their shoes and their mobile phones and they push them across the border into Algeria. What happens in Algeria, the Algerian guards push them back into Morocco. And this goes on and on and on. And who is benefiting from this? The answer is Spain is benefiting from it and the European Union is benefiting from it because Morocco is doing this work for Europe, essentially. And it does it in return for money because we made it conditional to Libya, to Tunisia, to Morocco and to other countries in Africa that if you do this work for us, you are likely to get more development aid and so on. Sometimes it's as clear as that. It's actually almost like a bribe. Well, that's sometimes where I think Schengen has benefited enormously the northern European countries because they don't have to worry about the borders anymore. Absolutely, yeah, it does.  And that's happening, the Hungarian-Servian border, the Mexican-Morocan-Spanish border, and all those borders, all Greece with Turkey. So these areas are becoming the outside borders of Europe and the rest of the Europeans are fine because they don't have to do anything. That is what happens. That is what happens a lot. And it's part of the tragedy that we are witnessing, really, that basically richer northern countries in northern Europe are expecting southern Europe to do their work for them as border guards. But I mean, the consequences of this can be absolutely catastrophic. You know, like now, for example, I'm sure many people here will know that Libya is a state that is a state of extreme conflict and chaos and have not managed to kind of like have a stable government since the fall of Gaddafi. So Libya is a place that was always a difficult place for migrants. So the arrangement we now have, the European Union now has, is when we are ships, or be they Italian ships or Spanish ships or whatever, find migrants, we push them back, give them to the Libyan coast guard, who then take them back into Libya. What happens to them in Libya, no one knows. But we do hear reports, we know that there are actual slave markets in Libya now. Where literally migrants are being bought and sold like in old slave auctions. We know that the detention centres in Libya are some of the worst in the world. So this is part of the paradox of the European Union again. We in Schengen belong to a space of peace, security and justice. Yet we are creating spaces where none of those things exist. But because we are liberal democratic states, we don't say, okay, this is what happens, we don't care. What we do is, we push the whole problem away so that it's unseen and it becomes invisible. So what happens to migrants in Libya, what I was saying before, they become ambiguous zones where who is responsible, no one knows, no one asks. And the result is an ongoing tragedy. And I think if we're ever going to get out of this, to get to a better place, we need as citizens and as government to recognise that this is happening and that we bear some responsibility for it. And once again, I say some because some people say, ah, Europe is deliberately killing these people. For me, that's an exaggeration. What Europe does and what the United States does is it forces migrants to make more and more dangerous journeys in which they're likely to be killed or at least experience extreme hardship. And the philosophy behind that is, the harder it gets, the more likely they won't come, which is actually not true in practice, because they still come. Yeah. Well, I think another thing that's very interesting is when... all the discussion about Trump building the new wall and all that stuff, many European countries complain about that policy against the Mexicans. But then nobody realised that we were doing those things in Teota Media before they were doing that in Mexico. And actually it was a very interesting concept that I found out recently that the blade wires that were being used... and now, I think they are no longer in use because they are being forbidden in the Teota-Morocco-Mililla-Morocco border, it's being built by a Spanish company that promote that blade wire as a very protective system, a very cheap to establish or to set it up. And now it seems it's being bought by that company selling that wire to the people in Hungarian... Hungarian survey board. So there's all these businesses that are building up things. That's another thing I found fascinating. Who built the Berlin Wall? I suppose it was the army, the German army did it. Now everything is privatised. So it's a commission, we buy, we get companies involved, I think they have some pictures here, they show people selling Trump all the models of the world they can get. Like when you buy curtains for your house, you have a catalogue with different, so if you have a catalogue of walls, you can get this one, this one, that one. The security guards in many cases are not police, these are security guards in many of those things. So everything is going privatised and there's a big business around those things. That's another thing, it's strange and new. It didn't exist before. You can see lots of connections like that. I think that part of the explanation for that is that border enforcement overlaps with law enforcement, immigration enforcement and also security from the point of view of the governments that do it. So if you look at some of the companies like Halliburton, Halliburton was very involved in the Iraq war, providing logistics to the American army and so on. Halliburton is also very influential in law enforcement in managing prisons inside the United States and also in managing immigration enforcement, deportations, detention and so on. So you have this constant overlap, as you say, between which companies like in the United States it might be Boeing or Lockheed Martin, over here there's a project called Eurosaure, which is a long-term research project to create permanent surveillance of all Europe's land and maritime borders. The idea is that the Mediterranean and all these borders will be permanently watched, either by UAVs or by ships and so on, and by robotics. Robotics is a very important element in terms of how borders are being developed for the future. In the ideal future border, there won't be border guards, there will just be robots. And if you're an illegal undocumented migrant or whatever, or somebody who doesn't have permission to be there, when you come near to the frontier, some form of robot technology will stop you. In the worst case scenario, is that robot technology might shoot you, but it will certainly stop you. So there are lots of companies looking to make money out of that, as is always the case. It's interesting that you were talking about the U.S. when I was talking about Libya, you were talking about the U.S.-Mexico border. I was thinking it's a very similar process in the United States to what I was describing in Libya, in that since the United States began to reinforce the U.S.-Mexico border in the 1990s, more or less corresponding with the NAFTA, the introduction of the NAFTA, then what they've done is they've transferred the whole of Mexico into a gauntlet, which migrants have to cross. So all the things I was talking about, violence, rape, arbitrary detention, slave markets you find in Libya, you also find them in Mexico. Mexico is an incredibly dangerous place to be a migrant. And most of them, of course, as we know, are coming from Central America. So they're fleeing countries that are already countries being overwhelmed by various forms of criminal narco-violence. They then have to cross Mexico, and they have to go through the bestia, the train, the famous train, if they're on land, they have every chance of being kidnapped by narco gangs and put into forced labor. Then they get to the border and they find this huge array of defenses waiting for them, and a country that, well, especially under Trump, but also under Obama, just wants to push them back. Even kids. I mean, one of the most horrific things about under Trump is we've seen border guards taking kids away from their parents and actually permanently separating them.  Doing that, taking kids away from their parents and not allowing them to see their parents again in some cases. And Trump would like to go further, of course, as always. There was some conversations recorded with him speaking to some of his officials in which he said, why can't we just dig a long moat running the whole length of the wall and put snakes in it? This was the conversation he had with some of his border officials. And they said, Mr. President, we can't do that. And he was going, why can't we put snakes in a moat? This is the kind of insane thinking that he's doing. So we can laugh at Trump.  But we have to think that these kind of things were already underway under Obama and a part of a long-term process. I remember the person who started to build the wall in the US-Mexico border was clinted. It was the one who started to make the bigger fence with Clinton at that time. Actual, it's another interesting thing. The border, the fence in the US-Mexico border is only stopping people from crossing, but not goods. Because the Mexicans created, I think it's something like 20 kilometers, free zones on the Mexican side where you can run business of any kind. And that was the success of the whole Maculadora business. So they can establish Maculadoras with the same rights. They don't have to pay any taxes in that side because it's considered a free zone. So it's quite strange how they created very strong fences for the people, but not for the businesses. So that's another very interesting thing. And also, under Clinton, the death toll began to rise because basically, through things like Operation Gatekeeper, when they began strengthening the borders around San Diego and El Paso and places like that, they were forcing migrants to make more dangerous journeys through the Arizona desert where they were likely to die. But I guess also, you know, we can talk a lot about the kind of disastrous humanitarian consequences of these borders. But I think a very important thing to bear in mind and consider is why is this happening? You know, why are countries doing this now and they weren't doing it before? And to me, there are various answers which sort of overlap with each other. I don't know what you think of this. One is that from, to some extent, these frontiers are a reaction to globalization in the sense of governments are prepared to allow the movement of data, capital investment and so on, technology, 24-hour production lines and so on. They want that, they're prepared to allow that. But what is dangerous for them is the movement of people. And then you come into this whole thing which is the borders, to some extent, are attempts to answer a question. The question is, who are we? It's the question that the political scientist Samuel Huntington put in a book he wrote with that title, who are we? And he argued that the United States was now in danger of becoming no longer a Christian country, no longer a Protestant country, but becoming a Catholic country and a Spanish-speaking country, which actually, in terms of Spanish speaking, could be true in about 30, 40 years because the demographic is changing. To some extent, putting these borders up is an attempt to redefine who are we. What is the, what belongs inside these borders and what is not compatible with it? And in Europe, we see the same argument played out. We see a new form of culturalized racism in which we don't talk about skin colour anymore, we talk about religion or culture, and we talk about culture as if it was a permanent thing, like a genetic thing. So we think, you hear Victor Orban say, Hungary is a Christian country and then he presents himself as a defender of Christian Europe. You know, and so, to some extent, borders are part of the response to these kind of politics, primarily driven by the right and including by the far right, but not only by them because many mainstream politicians and governments have made the same kind of arguments. To defend who we are as a country or as a civilization, we need to keep people out. And if they die or get injured in the process, they are collateral damage. And this is kind of how I see what is happening now, and that overlaps with security, the war on terror and various other things. So what do you think of that? I think the very interesting thing is that I think everything has started to be stronger, you know, borders became really hard places and all the policies started to be the way you're saying after September 11th in the United States and with the general fear for terrorism. But the truth is, if you chase or you check where these people who commit the terrorist attacks come from, almost none of them cross the border through these border zones. So you got the case of the United States airplane attacks where people got into the United States with a student visa. The people who attacked in Paris, I think there were people that just bought for other sources. So the truth is, it's a symbol to create this idea that we are protected, but we have created a wall that is protecting us from all these dangers because it's not only the people, but also drugs and weapons and so on. But the truth is that all those things are getting in through other sources, and that's another border that people don't realize exist, that free zones on the harbors, for example, these areas where the containers are. There are areas that nobody can go, unless you have a permit, and those areas nobody checks. Any of those things, I think, from all the containers that got into Spain or into Gibraltar and Al Jazeera, only about 5% of them are scanned, the rest of them just cross. And inside there, there could be anything, weapons, drugs, any type of food or any type of product, and even people, in some cases. And nobody checks those. And it's like you are trying to protect something with a fence, and then you have holes everywhere else where things can get inside the country. So in a way, it's a way to, as you said, I think it's a border of globalization. We want globalization because it's good for business, but at the same time we have to say that we are protecting the security of us, of all the people that are benefiting from this globalization. Absolutely. It's a complex problem because it's like borders are the wrong answer to what sometimes is the right question and sometimes is the wrong question. But the thing is, if we were dictatorships, for example, we would not even be having this conversation. Nobody would question why are they borders. It's because we are democratic states that we supposedly aspire to a different way of conducting ourselves, not only domestically, but in terms of foreign policy as well. And so this is one of the reasons why this whole process is so striking and so egregious. Because we see the security argument, for example. Gordon Brown, one of our ex-prime ministers in our country, used to say about the Afghan war, our security begins in Afghanistan, he said. So basically, in other words, we're there fighting them to stop them coming here. So this kind of discourse is actually quite common. American politicians use the same kind of language. And the idea is that it's like forward border protection. So you've got your border around your country and then you've got your army over there, also adding another layer of border defence. This is actually quite a kind of reductionist, simplistic and quite often dishonest way of looking at the world. And it's certainly a very chaotic way of looking at the world. Because this is one of the things that borders are part of the management of globalization. They're an attempt, most officials that I've ever spoken to, be they border guards or politicians. None of them have ever told me we want to stop migration completely. What they have said is we want to slow it down and control it. So this is the way of... You know, another argument that you often hear, I'm sure everybody here has heard this at some point, is the reason we have to act is to stop criminal traffic of people. But the problem is that the traffic of people, the movement of people, the smugglers, the people who make money out of it, do this because of the borders. In other words, the borders themselves are creating a huge criminal industry in the movement of people. And some of the people, some of these people who our governments often call them traffickers, they're not traffickers, they're smugglers, it's a different thing. But governments often deliberately mix the two words up, trafficker, smuggler, totally different things, is that you'll find smugglers who are actually utterly ruthless and really horrific characters, like the kind who puts, say, a hundred migrants in a tiny boat without life jackets and then they die and they take their money off them. You'll find people like that. But there are also smugglers who actually think it's a humanitarian thing to do, to move people from one place to another, just like Raoul Wallenbeck did during World War II. There were people who smuggled Jews in and out of countries because they saw it as a humanitarian exercise. So something similar is happening now. I guess our challenge, really, as citizens of democratic countries, is to think of how we can manage the various international global problems that we have in a more humane way, in which we actually live up to our own ideals, instead of contradicting them again and again through these kind of border systems. Yeah, it's supposed to what we should do. I always thought the same way. I remember when Spain joined the European Union or Portugal at the same time, there was a huge concern by, I think it was Luxembourg, that there will be huge flows of Portuguese going to Luxembourg and it's going to be a big problem. And there are many countries that were saying the same. The truth is, after those two countries enter the European Union, the flow of people trying to get into the European Union disappear because the increase of the quality of life in the two countries increase and people don't want to leave. If you are good in your country, you don't want to move. The problem is that when countries don't... So I don't know, for me, the question is, we need to do policies and improve the situation in those countries in the south beyond just making little investments. I agree, but there's also, there is a theory that if we... the idea is that development will stop migration. But development doesn't necessarily stop migration because what happens is, as people's standards of education rise and as their income levels rise, their expectations also rise. Personally, I think we need to find a different way of looking at migration in general, accepting migration as a natural human activity that has been part of human history since human beings first came into the earth. That doesn't mean you don't need... you don't have to have borders. I don't see anything wrong with a border in itself. What I see wrong is when you're excluding whole categories of people and exposing them to death and danger as a result of the barriers you impose. And this is what we're doing all the time. So even if we did that, even if we had a more equal world, it's certainly true that you wouldn't get so many Mexicans wanting to cross the United States. After all, the average income in Mexico is about $3,000, $4,000. In the United States it's $34,000. So obviously if you're Mexican and you see that, you would want to cross, because you could help your family that way. You could help your family, you could send money back to them, you can use remittances as development. So, yes, we would reduce the level of migration, but it would still continue in some form because people will always want to move to some place where they think they can find something better. And also because the issue of persecution, war and conflict is not something that's going to disappear. We hope it will, we'd like to create a world in which these things are reduced, but at the moment, we're not looking at that at all. Yeah, but I'm thinking, for example, that some of the countries what they really want to do with the borders is to select the people who want to... They don't want to stop migration. They want to be able to select which one of them are going to cross and which one we don't want. That level of selection. I think it's basically one of the reasons the UK is getting out, one of the reasons there is. They don't want all the Schengen people getting there freely. They want to select who they want to get in. It's true, but my country, which is a disastrous... In my opinion, this is my opinion, you might or might not share it, is a disastrous test case in the calamitous inconsequences of populist politics. I mean, when I was young, the UK was always a country that was obsessed with immigration. There were always too many immigrants coming from India, from Pakistan, from the Caribbean. Then we introduced successive governments, Labour governments and Conservative governments, introduced one law after another, saying you can't come from this part of the country, you can't come from India. We reduced that possibility. So at that time, we more has had a country dictated by skin colour racism. It was black people, we didn't want, or brown people. Now, we've found in the last few years, it's just people who don't speak English. So we've had the whole Brexit process, the idea that free movement, which free movement is actually a privilege that I feel I have lost, personally, free movement is now seen as a form of colonisation by Europeans. So you now have situations in the UK in which people are being attacked verbally and physically in the streets for speaking their own language. Imagine if that happened to British here in Spain. You know, and so what I mean by that is that the expectations of who are we are always changing. And they're always based on excluding one category of people, be it based on skin colour, be they Muslims, be they Polish immigrants, whatever. And what we need to change is the civic culture of our countries, that we have a more generous idea of what we should be as a country, instead of thinking ourselves in terms of only one thing, one thing, one majority in the first person plural. Until we get there, we will continue to have these kind of barriers with all the consequences they entail. I was thinking, there is that program that the United States used to have, I don't know if you're familiar with. Which program? The Green Lottery, the Green Car Lottery. If you live in the United States or elsewhere in the world, there is a Green God, I think it's no longer working, I'm not sure. You can apply, you just send a letter, and if you win, you get the green card. And then you have to prove that you have a profession, or some studies, some degree. And then you have to go through a physical examination, if you don't have anything bad. And then you get the green card, so it means that you are entitled to work and live in the United States freely. I think that when you read it, they give it something like 55 green cards every year, 55,000 green cards every year. But it's only, I think it's Mexico, where you get 5,000. The Europeans get over 25,000. So it's a way to select who you want to get in that country. Yeah, that's true. There's quite an important subject you've touched on, actually, which is, I remember when I was in Italy, in the city of Brescia, I think I was there in about 2011, and around that time, there was a protest known as the crane protest, in which about six or seven Egyptian and African migrants climbed to the top of a very high crane, and they spent like about two months on top of the crane. So loads of Italians, Italians are very creative, I think, with their protests. They all gathered round underneath the crane in support of those migrants who were on top of the crane. The question is, why were they on the crane? The reason the Berlusconi government had offered an amnesty for all undocumented migrants in Italy, but he didn't say how many would get it. So what you had was something like maybe six or 700,000 people paying money to access the process, the bureaucratic process, to get an amnesty and get legalization, only to find that only about 80,000 people actually got it. So these migrants were saying, we've spent all this money to these middlemen who've taken our money and we don't have much money anyway, and they're not going to give us an amnesty, so they climbed the crane. And I've seen the same thing in Spain as well. Yeah, yeah. It's very similar, and in my country as well, exactly the same process again and again. Yeah. Thank you very much. I just want to ask a few questions. Al final, en modo de conclusión, hoy estábamos hablando de este tema y, bueno, Toni Luna, que es profesor y coordinador de Global Studies, estaba explicando que llevaba a sus estudiantes de Global, que hay muchos de aquí, pero que también hay estudiantes de todas las nacionalidades, que uno de las cosas que hace cada año es llevarlos a las dos fronteras, la de Marruecos y la frontera con Francia. Y también estábamos hablando de diferentes viajes y estancias que Matiu hizo para poder escribir sus libros. No sé si queréis decir algo en relación de esta experiencia para el final, y también para acabar una perspectiva, una visión respecto al futuro y este tema, ¿no?, el tema del cambio climático, el tema de, bueno, una cosa para la última intervención, en forma de estas dos preguntas. Mm-hm. I guess that kind of touches on a point I raised earlier, which is that this century, the 21st century, is going to be a century dominated by migration. Not only by migration but by forced migration. Already we're seeing the kind of increase in so-called climate refugees. As climate change begins to bite, and we're going to see vast movements of people. So the decision we will have to make over the next century, are we going to respond the way the writer Christian Parenti, he wants to use the phrase, the politics of the armed lifeboat. I think it's a great phrase because the idea is, are our countries going to be like lifeboats in which we have people on the edge of the lifeboats with guns, stopping people getting into the lifeboat? Or are we going to find a different kind of more collective concept of global security based on cooperation and real integration? A mi, la qüestió és que, en l'endemà, continuem a ser democràcies, continuem a ser ciutadans que facin el concepte de humanitat seriosament. Si no ho fem, si no ho fem, anirem a la ruta que persones com Salvini voldrien anar a la ruta, que és una ruta per al fascisme, en mi opini. Doncs, he pensat... Hem pensat en això l'endemà, però, en realitat, els borders de l'endemà, o en el ximple del ximple del XIX, o en el ximple del ximple de l'anterior, són els prefrits de la realitat. Avui, els borders són el centre de la globalització, són les areas en què tot s'està passant. Aleshores, hem de tenir molt bona importància a saber què ha passat en aquests llocs, perquè és on la nova cosa s'està passant. Aleshores, crec que això és el que s'està passant. The climate change will create a lot of flow, but for me it's not very clear, it's going to be south going north or east, west, it's still very clear how it's going to be the facts, so that's still un questionable. Maybe we'll get people from rich countries getting into the poor countries to colonize because in the rich countries you cannot leave, so we don't know what's going to happen. Thank you very much. Moltes gràcies. Moltíssimes gràcies a tothom. La setmana que ve continuarem parlant del tema dels refugiats amb la Mar Saber d'Open Arms i amb la professora de dret d'aquesta universitat, Silvia Morgades. Així esperem que podeu també estar aquí per continuar aquests diàlegs. I també vull anunciar que relacionada amb el tema de fronteres, de drets humans, de la justícia social i del tema dels refugiats, tindrem com un diàleg filmic el dia 26 de febrer a la BCM, UPF, al carrer Balmes. Anunciarem i enviarem un mail a tothom que es veurà la pel·lícula Sal de la Tierra, Devin Venders, relacionada amb la figura de Sebastió Salgado, que és un altre de les figures que ha lluitat perquè el món sigui més just a través de la seva feina, així que també ho anuncio perquè està particularment relacionat amb els temes de diàleg d'avui, de la propera setmana, i també del benestar del planeta, del canvi climàtic, que també intentem, d'alguna manera, introduir en els temes que parlem. Moltíssimes gràcies a Matiu, que ha vingut de regna unit, per estar avui amb nosaltres, el professor Toni Luna i amb tots vosaltres. Moltes gràcies i bona nit. Gràcies.


The next panel will again be Secretary Rice talking about North American energy and With Secretary Rice, we have Peter McKay from Baker McKenzie in Canada and Jaime Perrada with the Institute of Innovation and Technology Transfer in Nueva Leone, Mexico Oh good afternoon gentlemen, and We've just had an opportunity to talk about the region of the world That I think for the last 70 or 75 years if you had said Energy people would have said the Middle East and they would have said Saudi Arabia They would not necessarily have said North America But now if there is a development that is really in in many ways a Revolutionary development in energy It is the coming on board of the North American platform that stretches from Canada down through the United States and into Mexico And so this is really an extraordinary time to talk about the opportunities That North America presents now I have mentioned with the ambassador that when I was Secretary of State Oil spiked at a hundred and forty-five dollars a barrel Nothing warps diplomacy like a hundred and forty-five dollars a barrel oil It allowed Iran to ignore calls for dismantling its nuclear Program it allowed Vladimir Putin to play games with Ukraine and Eastern Europe and indeed Western Europe with the so-called oil card And it allowed Hugo Chavez to buy elections in many Latin American countries So it really empowered some of the worst actors in international politics Everybody now says oh how amazing it will be that North America this stable Place of good friends will be such a major energy producer as a matter of fact the energy producer Are we right to be encouraged and optimistic by the fact that we have this bounty That's called the North American energy platform I just have to mention Peter McKay was the foreign minister of Canada when I was Secretary of State But he's also been the justice minister and the defense minister And so he held almost every important job in Canada But we were very good friends and Peter welcome to Stanford where I've been trying to get you to visit for a very long time Well, thank you so much Secretary Rice I'm delighted to be here and it truly does feel like Stanford University this forum is the the beating heart of energy innovation and in North America if not the world to your question those who think this is our time and The North American energy sector in particular is hitting its stride. That's true. I Have you followed the NAFTA negotiations? At least we still have we do North American integrated we do and I think that in fact there's lessons to be learned I believe that there is Tremendous strength in the relationship in North America and that could extend beyond and should extend behind the Canada U.S. Mexico trade agreement it it could extend to security and in fact it should extend to energy and Renewables and our effort to wean ourselves off quite frankly some of those countries that you've mentioned who intermingle geopolitics and Malignant influence in the world by by virtue of having countries who are dependent upon them for energy And so there are a number of competing and important Issues that are inextricable is what I would say I don't take issue with what the ambassador of Saudi Arabia was saying but Russia Looked Russia you alluded to use their influence in an extremely negative and destabilizing way very disruptive For not just Ukraine but for the entire region and still to this day I mean the late great John McCain referred to it as a mafia run gas station masquerading as a country I Mean those are harsh words, but they're there. There's there's some truth in it and Coming back to North America. I think we have tremendous opportunity at this moment in time with shale gas with Perhaps working closer together. Canada has always Seen itself and and I say this with great respect to Mexico as your best friend. We're your best friend We're your northern neighbor. It's very cold up there. We need energy. We're all huddling along the border, you know Just hugging each other But we have an opportunity I think to work a lot closer rather than being Competitors which is kind of where we're headed at this moment in time And so I'm hopeful with the successful conclusion of the negotiations around trade that we can perhaps Work closer together on a number of these technological advances in renewable energy But also using our our energy power for a force for good in the world Yes, I'm totally agree with you and And On the Mexican side, I would say that in the last five years Mexico had achieved an important progress in the energy sector in 2013 was approved a new law for energy that permits private investment in oil gas and electricity and That was a huge transformation in the country Because you remember that our national companies Pemex and CFE were monopolies so the country Took a very important step forward To permit the private investment in this sector and this is vital because Mexico is the second largest Latin American economy is ranking in number 16 in GDP in the world We have 123 million in habitants in population We have close to 50 million electricity users We have 98 percent of Coverage of electricity So almost all the people Has access to electricity With its exemption of the poor regions and distant areas and the installed capacity of Mexico is 73 gigawatts and 23 percent of that belongs to clean energies Mexico has signed an agreement to reach at least 35% for clean energies in 2024 and We have a serious commitment With clean and renewable energies. We have a serious commitment for Reducing a greenhouse Emissions Mexico has signed the Paris protocol as you know perfectly well so Mexico is well prepared for the future But especially for the region Because we are very dependent Mexico imports important amounts of gasoline natural gas So the the objective is how can we work together in order to Provide the best conditions for our users and the best terms Thinking not just in North America, but also in the world and the planet So this is the in my view the last Important achievement of this government Going just to that and then Peter I'd like to come to you about the politics in Canada because I Mentioned that we think of the politics of North America is Settled as stable. I think it's fair to say that They feel a little less settled these days. Maybe all the way from Canada to Mexico, of course not in the United States but in any case the politics of Mexico's recently taken a very potentially very big turn with the the election of Manuel Opes-Lobrador and As you mentioned Mexico made a really Fundamental decision a few years ago under President Pena to change the Constitution so that there could be foreign investment in What had been considered? Mexico's price Price energy that could never be shared with with anyone else There are many who wonder now if given the politics of Lopez-Obrador. He would try to undo the change in Mexico's laws Concerning private investment now. He said that he would honor current contracts. I understand that But in the long run, how does this how does this look? Well, if we are seeing the the numbers As a consequence of this energy reform in Mexico, we have to take in account that we have achieved at least 254 billion U.S. investments in the energy sector 13 in oil, 13 in gas and 13 in electricity 100 billion additionally for the oncoming years and Those contracts were provided to hundred and thirty different companies From 19 different countries 51 are Mexican companies so as you can see Based on facts and numbers the energy reform broad investment employment and Mexico requires additional energy to sustain the growth So there are some concerns about if the energy reform will continue in these terms or not I am a positive guy that thinks that the energy reform will be respected as it is Notice the case About other structural reforms like the education Education. I'm not so feels so optimistic They will make important changes especially in the evaluation process for professors Because for political reasons the unions Professors in Mexico are very strong so That the structural reform will be affected in my opinion But in the energy sector we have two important allies Canada and U.S. And you know, this is the check and balance very very important and also Will transmit a negative sign For foreign investment if we don't respect the contracts and Obligations that Mexico has subscribed to them. Yes. Thank you So Peter talk about the politics of Canada at this point and in particular several in the audience have raised the question of the carbon tax and And whether in fact this is now Canada taking leadership in North America indeed maybe in the world in terms of a carbon tax But how do you think about the the fact that there is a carbon tax But also the sort of pull and tug between The provinces on this issue Alberta for instance with the tar sands very concerned How should we think about the political situation in Canada around this carbon tax? So it's a very it might surprise you to say that it's a very volatile time We're in the perpetual election cycle that every country seems to be in but will be in an earnest election cycle starting in the new year and I suspect that energy will figure very prominently in the run up to and even the outcome of the next election carbon tax Which I'll address in a moment, but also pipelines and the politics of pipelines have become very divisive in Canada And very difficult to reconcile In part because of our Relationship with our first nations are Aboriginal people the courts have intervened on a number of occasions to stop pipeline development Provinces have launched lawsuits British Columbia in this instance to block The development of a pipeline and we saw for the first time since Petro, Canada, which was a government-run Gas company the purchase so the the nationalization of a pipeline When our current government invested in and paid An exorbitant amount of money billions for a pipeline that probably won't be built So in the run up to the election, these are going to be very contentious issues to come back to carbon tax Yes, I think Canada is projecting leadership on this issue But again, not without call causing a great deal of internal consternation with our provinces And it's a jurisdictional issue that they're fighting over the federal government wants to impose a price on carbon the provinces who will be tasked with Implementing and and basically policing And it's it's a tax on everything which is never popular It'll affect disproportionately rural parts of our country of which there was massive amounts of territory that will be affected and the problem is is this Canada I would contend has a very low manufacturing footprint to begin with a relatively small population vis-a-vis Mexico and the United States and others and With our forestry we are really a carbon sink. We are not a major emitter You know relative again to other economies if you look at if you compare us to China Russia India Pakistan Other countries who may or may not have signed on to Paris Accords Kyoto But they're not doing it and they're not going to reach their targets And so the debate becomes oversimplified if Canada is going to hobble our industry and our population By imposing a carbon tax and other countries are not going to do it. We're whistling past the graveyard We're really not having the impact. We may be able to say at UN meetings and otherwise Climate change accords, you know look at the world Boy Scouts that we've become But it's not going to impact unless everybody participates and therein is the problem One last point. I want to register. I heard the president of Stanford this morning and his opening referenced the Arctic You and I have had discussions about the Arctic waters Contentious areas even even boundary disputes in the Beaufort Sea the internal waters of Canada the the Northwest Passage The change is happening. I mean this is beyond any debate now. I Went there when I was 17 years old on supply ships spent summers in the Arctic as a student 25 30 years ago and to go back today as we did on on Arctic maneuvers with our military These now these small ports are wide open where they used to be packed with ice the maps that you see today satellite images show the Incredible incredible mountain melting of ice that's happening both on land and sea And you're going to see increased traffic. We're already seeing increased traffic because it opens up waterways. There's a Arguably a fourth ocean now around North America the Chinese the Russians in particular and others are Interested in our resources and they're interested in having a presence there So it has a very much a security element to it. So again, I come back to the need for cooperation and we do it through NORAT We do it through other international security forums like NATO But I think there is again an impetus in North America for Canada and Mexico in the United States to really pull together When it comes to the subject of climate change when it comes to the subject of energy and energy security Yes, yes, in fact what's happening in the Arctic both in terms of the competition and the melting Which is it says that we'd better get busy quickly about the issue of environmental sustainability and one of the one of the challenges for any government is to find a balance between economic growth energy mix and environmental concerns and so you mentioned the Mexican commitment to It was thirty four percent thirty-five percent reliable reliance reliance on renewables How does Mexico plan to get there? and What are the steps that are being taken? How is this something that can be helped through? Cooperation with Canada in the United States I often thought that one of the problems with NAFTA and the new negotiations on NAFTA and what has come out of it the US Mexico Canada Relation Mexico Canada Treaty is that actually we were going back over old ground We didn't really Peter you and I used to deal with dairy price supports in Canada and apparently Dairy price supports are still at the center of US Canada discussions when perhaps we could have used this time to Have the region be more Sustainable and more influential on things like the sharing of technologies some have suggested that Environmentally important technologies ought to be tariff free This would have been a chance to try that so how are we going to get there? And can you start with talking about how Mexico might get there? Yes? It's a very good question and in the last five years Mexico Has passed it from 150 megawatts in solar energy to 5,000 megawatts in solar energy That represents more let's five billion US dollars of investment We have to take an account that Mexico is a it's a very sunny country 85% of our territory is sunny. We have five kilowatts per square meter per day so in that respect the the forecast that The Ministry of Energy has made for the future. I mean talking about the potentiality For solar energy and other clean energies Represents a potentiality of 6,000 Gigawatts that represents 35 times of our present installed capacity of Mexico. So the opportunity is huge and Mexico is providing tax incentives for the investments associated with clean energy a Of that figure 6,000 gigawatt of potential application for clean energy 75% for solar and I would say 20 20% for wind in a very selected areas of the country So the opportunities there The the government attitude in terms to provide tax incentives is there So the big question is the cost of the solar panels is one real Challenge and the other challenge is the cost of the natural gas You know because we need to to create a sustainable business to Generate electricity in a very solid foundations in that respect probably Mexico, Canada and US can provide the necessary framework in terms of financing in terms of Prices in terms of install capacity for producing High-efficient solar panels and so on So it's a very in my opinion. It's a very integrated and systematic approach that we have to take in account In order to take the advantage that Mexico could offer for the region Yes, and in fact You one of the questions here is do you think that the new government? I'm low will Continue these policies and it sounds as if you think this is these renewal these target renewables is going to that's going to stay in place Yes, I Think that the the next government that will take place the first day of December this year will take seriously the The take care of the environment. We have a very solid legal framework for control the environment Mexico has developed a good attitude To control our natural resources So it's a tradition not that comes from this last government comes from several governments ago So my forecast is that the the next government leading by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador Will continue with this path so The vital ingredient Ingredient is that we have we are we're going to sign the final agreement between Mexico, Canada, and US So this is a very very important step forward facilitate the next Action plan for the energy sector and Peter a year There's a question from the audience about why you keep talking about pipelines which are dirty rather than Focusing on renewables and Canada's actually been quite a leader to the degree that you can some of the Geographical limitations for Canada on certain kinds of renewables, but do you want to talk a little bit about this? Yeah, sure I mean the reason pipelines are important to us is We're now discounting our oil at about $50 a barrel sending it to the United States 97% of oil in Canada oil and gas goes to the United States We don't have diversity in our market. We can't get it to tide water and I alluded to some of those problems earlier So that's that's a big issue that cost the Canadian economy about 16 billion dollars annually the fact that we discount our oil and send it to the US so You know there's regions in Atlantic Canada for example where I'm from where we import oil We buy it from who Saudi Arabia? Algeria and Venezuela and then we hector them about their human rights, and we complain about Military contracts, but we buy their oil so it hasn't it there's an issue of independence and sovereignty The United States is doing the opposite You're becoming more energy independent to the point where you won't be importing any oil at the current rate And you're up to I think it's around 10 million barrels a day So, you know diversity within the industry is one thing we need diversity within our entire economy in terms of our supply and the supply chain that also I Should say doesn't take away from the fact that we're moving into renewables. We're moving quick You know solar. We don't have the same amount of Sun as Mexico, but we have water We have some of the biggest hydroelectric generation Plants in North America and they're getting bigger Newfoundland and Labrador is is completing a project What what's called the lower Churchill falls or muskrat falls that could literally light up the whole eastern seaboard of the United States? When it comes online we still use nuclear we are one of the world's biggest producers of uranium We are moving in the area quite innovative innovative in the area of wave technology We have some of the highest tides in the world And so water is part of our solution and water is as I mentioned is contentious I remember we had some discussions around Passamaquoddy Bay and some of these very I Used to just a I often said that when we were going to we had a US Mexico Canada forum for all issues And it felt like a homeowners association because we were always talking about issues like water And then treaties for water made many many centuries ago So one of the most undiplomatic things I ever did and I got chastised by my own department was one of your first visits Ottawa I got up from the table and I walked around to the other side and put a map in front of you and started pointing to things that The officials were horrified that I would do this Anyhow it didn't it didn't seem to to affect the relationship where we're okay, right? No, no, I've seen the map I thought you did But I I think that the whole subject of how the countries have Integrated on trade on economy on energy bodes well for us in in the broader sense This university to my astonishment has invested in energy projects in Canada substantially Which I think again helps with the understanding of the North American Responsibility that we all share. I think we can do more on things like tailpipe emissions I think we can do more in the area that we have in the past around emissions generally with new technology The acid rain treaty was a shining moment in the relationship between Canada and the United States Going back to the Reagan administration where they work very closely To address these issues because you know We have borders at the the 49th parallel and between Mexico and Canada But pollution doesn't stop at these borders. These are not smoke-free Cylones that we live in so that is an energized Generation behind us to address those problems and I for one think we're going to get there I think we will find ways The carbon tax is not the be all and end all Because you some have called it a price on pollution, but it's it's a license to pollute Is another way to look at it and unless everybody's in it doesn't work so there's also a Question about nuclear cooperation with the United States because Canada has continued to be all in on the nuclear side the United States is on and off on On the nuclear side, but that might be an area for cooperation as well. I believe so I think we've certainly advanced in Our understanding of nuclear technology nuclear energy I know it's contentious in the mind of many rightly so what we've seen happen in places like North Korea and Iran are Reasons for concern because it's taken from from a domestic purpose to weaponize it But it's there. It's it's at our disposal. We know that it has a much When when used properly has a much more positive impact on the environment than fossil fuels But we're not going to be off fossil fuels I mean, that's a hard reality, but we're not going to wean ourselves off fossil fuels for decades We can accelerate it in certain ways and the way to accelerate it is in my view to share technologies With like-minded countries democracies predominantly Let me ask you about the view from the north and the view from the south of the middle How should we think of these days about how the United States is thought of in terms of some of the issues that we've been talking about Energy renewables Climate change There's a question here that asked me about the Paris Agreement, but let's start it as a Conversation if you're looking from the north you're looking from the south. What do you see in the United States on these issues? Wow, please Well, Mexico's first in the named agreement with the United States so it makes sense Okay. Well In my view we need a 25 year plan a very well integrated 25 year plan because it's the the limit time that the this humankind has To reduce this negative effect of gas emissions so It's a very complex Problem that needs to take care of many many aspects One is infrastructure Because when we are talking about the clean energies the the first hurdle The first tackle that we need to remove is transmission lines That means infrastructure when we are talking about natural gas we are talking about pipelines So infrastructure means a very very important capital expenditure Issue that we must solve together because that represents a huge investment The second point in my opinion is How how can we design the appropriate conditions for the three countries To encourage to facilitate and to provide the necessary tax incentives for clean energy investment and the third point in my opinion is the Regulatory aspects. I'm talking about Prices Because all the time the clean energy Alternatives is Fighting against the natural gas prices and the oil prices So we need to define some clever strategy to deal with that aspect Because if we leave all this The final solution for the market Never never will happen never So we need to to make an agreement among these three countries to think jointly Not just in in terms of the marketplace and the benefits and the returns But as a whole integrated strategy that take care of the environment and the Cheap access to energy for everyone I try to take a positive view of of what's happening and It's alarming sometimes. We have institutions that are being challenged. We we have Agreements that are being rewritten and that's fine. I think you know, you made a very good point that modernizing Age-old agreements and institutions is actually not a bad thing if it's done if it's done properly And if people do so with the best interests of everyone in heart There's such a history Between our countries that goes back militarily that goes back throughout our our entire history that can't be ignored You know other than that little dust up in 1812 and the White House and all of that But that was the Brits. It wasn't that's right. Yes sort of Well, you know, they're they're paying for it now in brexit there They have their own problems. I mean that that to me is another example of a country that You know while they're they're going through this unscramble of the egg in the European Union We should be doing more with Great Britain. It's a natural extension in North America to loop in the British and they they are doing a lot of Interesting and innovative things and energy as well. I mentioned wave technology. They like Canada, US Mexico have offshore platforms The oil sands have been mentioned a number of times. There is remarkable technology that gets overlooked what's happening in the oil sands It is not this major Dark, you know hellish spot in North America. It's actually when you see it with your own eyes It's remarkable how they leave the ground after the bitumen has been extracted So they they are using rightly so highly regulated important technological advances to do proper extraction Pipelines have been referenced time and time again, but look, this is about an economy That we can help produce competition Away from some of those countries instead of using sanctions for example Against Iran and Russia if we can sell them clean North American oil and gas put it on tankers and send it to their ports I mean what greater way to defang Vladimir Putin than to be able to offer clean renewable and and Energy that has been improved produced in North America at a competitive price So those are things that again we should be looking to work together on to find a way a North American Energy solution I think is very important at this moment in time and we're never going to be able to get away from the geopolitics of all of this It's so important to the world economy We're never going to be able to put it off to one side or Remove the politics entirely from it that that to me is impossible and can't really be part of the solution the problem is in some cases the The lack of continuity when governments do change That's why international treaties international climate accord international agreements have to be respected and have to stay in place Regardless of the turnover that happens quite rapidly in governments in North America Well, I would the Paris Agreement is referenced here and obviously the United States withdrew from the Paris Agreement The the good thing about the Paris Agreement was it was really unlike the Kyoto Accords, which I think had created Targets that no one was going to meet as a matter of fact only two countries met them little Croatia and Germany and Germany because it shut down the power the dirty plants in East Germany and met its targets that way so Having these sort of artificial targets, but but Paris had a different approach Which was to have each country come up with an answer to the three e's economic growth environmental sustainability and energy mix and then to sort of aggregate that up into an international treaty I think thought it was actually a very smart way to go about it, but the United States is currently out I think we need to remember that the United States an awful lot of environmental policy in the United States actually not federal It's actually at the state level and we're probably Going to have a test here soon of whether a state like California can have its own emission standards So American institutions are struggling with all of this But let me ask you one final question about our cooperation, which is that we we have Governments that have to deal with one another. We've had our ups and downs I think Amalot will will test those relationships in important ways But if you could give the president of the United States the prime minister of Canada and the president of Mexico One thing to do So that 30 years from now we had fully realized the potential of the North American energy platform What would you say? We know that politicians have kind of limited Attention span so you only get to say one thing Peter I would say a North American Emissions reduction standard I Think I think if we came up with one here in North America and we can that doesn't negate our obligations Internationally but to aim for something here in North America And and how we coordinate better our grid and we're not talking about marijuana here because that would be another contentious That's a different matter. Yes. Yeah different different summit. Yes Hmm Well, I would say We have a tax to do Me in my opinion the first Component of the answer will be Increase the efficiency and the effectiveness of our actual present grid Incorporating all these fabulous technologies that we are ready on place 4.0 for energy sector means many many many things In my opinion, that is the first task that we have to do a smart grid distributed network Storage energy solutions We have many many many projects and things to do in that respect and the second one I Totally agree with but that we need to take care about the environment and comply the The obligations that we have in the in front of the humankind Thank you very much, and if you'll join me in thanking our guests for their really very powerful insights. Thank you