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And what difference does it make? Stop this deal from going through and there’ll just be other deals. Stop this source of drugs and there’ll just be other sources. You’d be sacrificing yourself for absolutely nothing. It’s one thing to give your life for something, another thing to give it for nothing.
And the danger is real: more than 150 Mexican reporters have been murdered covering the drug wars. At the height of the violence, Óscar had even forbidden them from covering the drug situation.
The Corrections Corporation of America wouldn’t make any money on Nico Ramírez if he got transferred, as he should be, into a group home. But if the judge deemed Nico a “threat” because of a gang tattoo, he would be sent to a “secure facility,” which would make sixty-three bucks a day on the boy. CCA was a publicly traded company.
Most of these kids hope for things they know, deep in their hearts, they’re never going to get. They hope for their status to get changed, they hope for a sponsor, they hope they’re going to live happily ever after in America. They know none of that is going to happen. But they always have the hope they can beat Santi. That isn’t going to happen, either, but they hope. I give them hope, Nico.”
In Barrera’s day they would have strung up a guy who sold children by his dick with barbed wire; now it’s just another business. Now they tolerate anything, as long as it makes money to support their troops.
He’s valuable because he doesn’t have a dog in the fight. Paradoxically powerful for his lack of power. But if one party—a Núñez, an Esparza, an Ascensión—wins and becomes dominant, Caro becomes unnecessary, superfluous, just another old gomero living out his life telling tales of past glories. What if Caro isn’t trying to hold the Sinaloa cartel together but is trying to keep it divided? He owes them nothing; they sat and let him rot in Florence for two decades.
Because if Caro is manipulating all the other organizations, and if you can manipulate Caro . . . You’re el padrino.
And he felt stupid as shit; he comes two thousand miles to escape Calle 18 and he ends up right in the middle of them.
Nico didn’t sleep that night. He wanted to do the right thing, stay out of the gangs, that’s what he came here for, after all; but at the end of the day, life made Nico Ramírez a realist. Life taught him that there are bad choices and worse choices, and that you have to do what you have to do to survive.
He knows that he’s become a polarizing figure, embodying the rift that threatens to widen and tear the country in two. He’s triggered a scandal, an investigation that has spread from the poppy fields of Mexico to Wall Street to the White House itself.
In trying to remove a cancer, we had only metastasized it.
Courts, lawyers, police, prisons—we are more addicted to the war on drugs than to the drugs against which we wage the war.
Five dead and fourteen wounded. The aftermath was the usual—thoughts and prayers and talk about gun control and mental health and then absolutely nothing was done.
A border is something that divides us but also unites us; there can be no real wall, just as there is no wall that divides the human soul between its best impulses and its worst.
