Setting... then clever title

In the book The House of The Scorpion, Nancy Farmer implies that the book is set some time in the future, because Mexico is a country that used to exist and cloning humans has been going on for a while. She uses this setting to explain Matt, the clone of El Patrón, but this setting also means that she can change everything about anything just as much as she wants to, she just has to say how these changes occurred. It takes place in between, what used to be Mexico and what is still the U.S.A. Farmer chose Opium to show that it is a country used mainly for drug use, as it is named after the drug it produces. This place also gives away where the eejits come from, because if someone is caught by the farm patrol trying to cross the border, this is what they become. This also adds to the story in that it shows us how powerful drug lords are in the world at this time, since they have created an entire country for their business. I believe that people still hate Opium because of its use for drugs and nothing else, and I feel they are somewhat cut off from the world because of this (other than through the marketing of drugs). On the other hand, all of these people from the United States came in hovercrafts to El Patrón's birthday party, but this may have been just to make sure they keep the border patrol running. I don't know how cut off from the world they are, or if they are at all, but all of the experiences that Matt had seem to describe a time in the past than the present whether he is in the big house or the little one in the fields. There are a lot of reasons to believe this takes place in the future (hovercrafts, clones, etc), but still many things that seem older than our time now (cowboy movies, little wooden houses, etc). I don't know why it is like that, but I just have to read more to find out.