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Cocaine alone is a $30 billion market in the United States annually. Of the cocaine that goes into the United States, 70 percent of it goes through Juárez and the Gulf.
Then there’s money management—tens of millions of dollars flooding back from the United States, in cash, that need to be laundered, accounted for, invested in overseas accounts and businesses. Salaries, bribes, and commissions that need to be paid. Equipment to be purchased.
Adán’s operation employs scores of accountants to count the money and keep an eye on each other, dozens of lawyers. Hundreds of operatives, traffickers, security lookouts, police, army, politicians. Adán hired a convicted embezzler to digitize all his records so he can track accounts on computer, laptops that are swapped out once a month and freshly encoded.
He gets up and goes out again to midnight Mass at an old Catholic church of tired yellow brick, an old lady whose children have moved out to the suburbs and rarely visit.
Chuy lifts the gun. It’s heavy, solid, real, and he points it at the kneeling man’s head, looks into the man’s eyes and sees the terror as the man begs and pleads for his life. The trigger is heavy, harder to pull than with the gun he found in the brown paper bag. “If you don’t do it,” Forty says, “you’re a punk. A bitch.” Chuy fires. Puts the man’s lights out. It feels good. Chuy Barajos just turned eleven years old.
The Mexicans have finally found a drug that white trash likes and can afford. And one thing you ain’t never gonna run out of is white trash. That stuff makes itself.
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More than two thousand trucks and thirty-four thousand cars cross those bridges every day, carrying $40 billion worth of legal trade in a given year. And somewhere between $1.5 million and $10 million worth of illegal drugs (Pablo finds the wide range of the estimate itself instructive) go over those bridges every day. Cash comes back.
The bridges into El Paso from Juárez.
Mexico is a very good place to be a criminal.
The narcos are a media franchise, for God’s sake, this generation’s version of the Mafia.
And it speaks to another truth about Juárez—everybody knows someone in the drug business.
The gang actually started in American prisons, where it’s called Barrio Azteca, but when the U.S. started to deport convicts who were also illegal aliens, the gang quickly spread to Mexican prisons. Then into the community.
“I’m beginning to feel like a pornographer,” Giorgio says as he takes the photographs. Violence porn, Pablo thinks. He wonders if Óscar will really put these images on the pages of his newspaper. A lot of papers do. It’s become a new industry, la nota roja, tabloids with pictures of the dead—the bloodier the better—hawked by newsboys from street corners and traffic islands. You can make a lot of money taking photos for la nota roja, and Pablo wonders if Giorgio is tempted.
The same press release in which the Juárez mayor’s office announces that ninety-five people have been killed in the first two months of 2008 also announces a major crackdown on jaywalking. — Then the army comes in.
A police chief in the small town of El Carrizo on the Texas border is killed in his car as he pulls into his driveway. The army has to take over the town because every police officer quit or just ran off after that. When police bring four narcos into a Juárez hospital, other narcos come in and execute them on their gurneys. Hospital staffers call police for three hours, but nobody comes. It gets worse and worse.
Mexico, the land of pyramids and palaces, deserts and jungles, mountains and beaches, markets and gardens, boulevards and cobblestoned streets, broad plazas and hidden courtyards, is now known as a slaughter ground. And for what? So North Americans can get high.
Just across the bridge is the gigantic marketplace, the insatiable consumer machine that drives the violence here. North Americans smoke the dope, snort the coke, shoot the heroin, do the meth, and then have the nerve to point south (down, of course, on the map), and wag their fingers at the “Mexican drug problem” and Mexican corruption.
As for corruption, who’s more corrupt—the seller or the buyer? And how corrupt does a society have to be when its citizens need to get high to escape their reality, at the cost of bloodshed and suffering of their neighbors? Corrupt to the soul. That’s the big story, he thinks. That’s the story someone should write. Well, maybe I will. And no one will read it.
The strategy of drug interdiction is a broom sweeping back the ocean. The strategy of arresting traffickers at any level only creates a job opportunity that any number of candidates are eager to fill.
“Al Qaeda killed three thousand Americans,” Taylor says. “This is going to sound callous, but that’s a fraction of the harm that drugs cause every year. And we spend tens of billions on interdiction and incarceration.”
“Where would I fit in?” Keller asks. “You’d run the American end of things,” Taylor says. “You’ll base yourself here and at EPIC. Only military flights back and forth. FES plainclothes security. Top-level clearance, top-level access.” “I get a free hand,” Keller says. “I work alone. No handlers, no office spies.” “You get only the logistical support you request,” Taylor says. “And if this program comes to light, I get crucified.” “I have the nails in my mouth.” Jesus, Keller thinks, he’s offering me a job as the head of an assassination program. Just like the old days in Vietnam. Operation
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“Identification?” the soldier asks. They hand him their press IDs, and he scans them carefully, although Pablo doubts that the soldier can read. Most of them are rural boys who joined the army to escape hunger and drudgery, and most are illiterate.
Ports are important to the cartels not so much for the product they send out as for the product they bring in—the precursor chemicals needed to fuel their methamphetamine super-factories, the new maquiladoras. Mazatlán, firmly in the hands of the Sinaloa cartel; Lázaro Cárdenas, contested between the Zetas and La Familia Michoacana; and Matamoros, held by the CDG, are all important inlets for the chemicals that come mostly from China.
“Who gave the order?” Ramón shrugs. “Who the fuck knows? No one’s in charge anymore. No one knows…anything. Someone above you tells you to kill someone, you kill someone. You don’t know why, you don’t know for who. Then the guy above you is dead, and it’s someone else.”
You’ll give them just enough help to keep the war going until both sides bleed each other out.
Maybe it was the sorry fact that he could no longer feel anything when he watched the wife, the mother, the sister, the child, scream and weep. Or that he no longer felt shock or even revulsion at the shattered or dismembered or decapitated bodies. Heads and limbs scattered around his city like so much offal, dogs in the rougher colonias slinking away with bloody jowls and guilty looks.
Pablo knows what the expectations are; he doesn’t need a rulebook to know the rules: Write what we tell you, and only what we tell you, or we’ll kill you. Take the sobre, or we’ll kill you. Sell us your soul, or we’ll kill you.
“Do you think anyone is serious about the so-called war on drugs?” Adán asks. “A few cops on the street, perhaps—some low- to middle-management crusaders like yourself, maybe—but at the top levels? Government and business? “Serious people can’t afford to be serious about it. Especially not after 2008. After the crash, the only source of liquidity was drug money. If they shut us down, it would have taken the economy on the final plunge. They had to bail out General Motors, not us. And now? Think of the billions of dollars into real estate, stocks, start-up companies. Not to mention the millions
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They say that love conquers all. They’re wrong, Keller thinks. Hate conquers all. It even conquers hate.
The U.S. government has in recent years fought what it termed wars against AIDS, drug abuse, poverty, illiteracy and terrorism. Each of these wars has budgets, legislation, offices, officials, letterhead—everything necessary in a bureaucracy to tell you something is real. —Bruce Jackson Keynote address “Media and War” symposium, University of Buffalo November 17–18, 2003
The rest of their mutual ennui, he supposes, is simply cumulative. He had read that the Puritans used to execute heretics by placing stones on their chests until their rib cages were crushed or they suffocated. And that’s a little what he feels like—and he supposes that Marisol does as well—the sheer cumulative weight of death after death, sorrow after sorrow, crushing them, taking the air out of their lives.
Eighty percent of the cocaine that flows into Europe comes through ’Ndrangheta at its port of Gioia Tauro. The organization’s income from drug trafficking is estimated at $50 billion annually, a whopping 3.5 percent of Italy’s gross domestic product.
What cocaine doesn’t come into Europe through Gioia Tauro comes in through Spain, mostly through the small fishing towns on the Galician coast, but also increasingly through Madrid airport. Spain is also an important market in itself, with the highest rate of cocaine use in Europe. Most of the coke comes directly from Colombia, the deal being that the Galician mob, Os Caneos, keeps half the shipment and sells it domestically in exchange for allowing the other half to flow through their territory into the rest of Europe.
You say “narco” anymore in D.C. outside the hallways of DEA, you get a yawn. You say “narcoterrorism,” you get a budget.
There are seven thousand arms dealers within a few hours’ drive of the Mexican border. That’s three a mile. Most of those guns aren’t going to shoot deer in Minnesota.
From their safe haven, they’ll kill more people, launch more terror and suffering. And we’ll sit safely on this side of the border, fat and happy, and buy their dope and fund more killing.
at the end of the day or the end of the world, there are no separate souls. We will go to heaven or we will go to hell, but we will go together.
People don’t run the cartel; the cartel runs people.
