Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture

by Oswaldo Zavala

The goal of this system of terror is exile: the depopulation of immense territories that are rich in hydrocarbons, minerals, and water. Today we can see how the energy sector has been affected by such reforms. Private and foreign capital that has been waiting on this moment for two decades can now exploit these natural resources.20

The important investigative work of the Italian journalist Federico Mastrogiovanni as well as Canadian academic and journalist Dawn Paley have separately come to the same conclusion: the federal government’s energy reform is one of the central explanations for the current violence in Mexico.

The war on drugs is a long-term fix to capitalism’s woes, combining terror with policymaking in a seasoned neoliberal mix, cracking open social worlds and territories once unavailable to globalized capitalism. This project is about re-thinking what is called the war on drugs: it isn’t about prohibition or drug policy. Instead, it looks at how, in this war, terror is used against the populations in cities and rural areas, and how, parallel to this terror and resulting panic, policies that facilitate foreign direct investment and economic growth are implemented. This is drug war capitalism.22

Without crossing paths, Alvarado, Paley, and Mastrogiovanni embarked on research that led them to the same conclusion: the War on Drugs is a cipher that masks the political strategy of large-scale community displacement for the appropriation and exploitation of natural resources that, if not for the War on Drugs, would remain unattainable for national and transnational capital.

Gareth Williams’s book The Mexican Exception is symptomatic of this problem. Williams makes the argument that the “War on Drugs is a conflict that is internal to capital, rather than being a conflict between external sovereign domains or distinct ideas of social organization.”4 According to Williams, the narco is essentially a phenomenon internal to the logic of economic capitalism, which presupposes its position outside the power structure of the state.

costumbrismo

metonymy of the narco but instead is the condition of the

deeply affected by the unprecedented success of La reina del sur (The Queen of the South, 2002), written by Spaniard Arturo Pérez Reverte. The

it made the official discourse turn toward a supposed permanent emergency independent of any specific political coordinates of organized crime. The narco then became a primary object of national security: a permanent enemy, without real political objectives, its only interest being economic domination through illegality and violence. In this way, the state conveniently stopped recognizing the political specificity of the opposition and resistance movements and instead constructed and disseminated national security discourses of organized crime groups that supposedly threaten civil society in general and not just the government elite. In other words, the state came up with a national security strategy devoid of political content in order to consider political grievances no longer relevant.

A study conducted by the Drug Policy Program at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE, in Spanish) showed that the armed forces’ rate of lethality grew dramatically during the War on Drugs ordered by Calderón. Between 2007 and 2011, according to the study, 86.1 percent of murdered civilians who allegedly confronted the Army and federal police were killed with “perfect lethality,” that is, in confrontations where all enemy combatants were killed with no survivors left. All this without Federal Ministerial Police investigations that could prove that the murdered civilians had some link to “organized crime.” The Mexican Navy has the highest lethality rate: 17.3 deaths for every civilian injured. This is followed by the Mexican Army with 9.1 deaths per injury and then the Federal Police with 2.6 deaths per injury. CIDE researchers also point out that violence increases by 6 percent with each combat and over a period of three months. And even more serious: of the 3,327 documented clashes, 84 percent were actually caused by the Mexican Armed Forces. Only 7 percent were direct attacks against the Mexican Armed Forces. Alejandro Madrazo, one of the CIDE researchers, interprets the data unambiguously: “The high lethality and perfect lethality levels are a very strong indication that we are facing extrajudicial executions or the excessive use of public force.”28

The federal government’s masterful move is confirmed by revelations made by the drug trafficker himself in the interview with Penn. El Chapo is far from being the brilliant criminal genius as reported at the time by journalists like Anabel Hernández, Diego Enrique Osorno, or Alejandro Almazán. Joaquín Guzmán appears in Penn’s text rather as a clumsy criminal surrounded by a limited group of collaborators who do not have a single English interpreter to translate the actor’s questions nor the minimum technology to get online to send a simple cell phone video of himself with his answers. All this despite the inordinate fortune that the world’s media took as fact and that was supposedly built on a criminal structure that “sent tons of drugs to more than fifty countries around the world,” reiterates the same New York Times correspondent who months before reported on the irreparable blow to the Mexican government caused by El Chapo’s escape.43

In the midst of the Obama administration’s interventionist strategy, Mexico waged the supposed War on Drugs ordered by President Calderón. As journalists Ignacio Alvarado, Dawn Paley, and Federico Mastrogiovanni have reported, the location of the violence attributed to cartels coincides with the sites of large natural resource deposits. The specific areas where the government denounces a war between drug traffickers are often the places of massive looting of energy-rich lands. There is no cartel war, these journalists say, but rather transnational corporations laying siege, along with the interested cooperation of the Mexican political class.

The Obama presidency, let us remember, never considered the probable crimes against humanity committed during Calderón’s government reported by 23,000 Mexican citizens—from activists, academics, artists, and judges, to the International Criminal Court in The Hague—as worrisome.67 It was only until October 2015, a year after the disappearance of the forty-three normalistas from Ayotzinapa, that Obama penalized the Mexican government by withdrawing 15 percent of the annual funds provided for the Mérida Initiative. In total, Mexico lost five million of the 148 million dollars allocated for that year.68

In 1994, his administration toughened immigration policy, sealing border crossings for undocumented immigrants, pushing them further into the extreme desert where they are forced to risk their lives in order to get across the border. As García records, the iron plates that were nailed vertically to separate the two countries during the Clinton administration were brought in from Kuwait, where they functioned as a landing strip for US aircrafts during the 1991 Gulf War. García points out: “The Democrats quietly put up the controversial wall without fuss in the same way that Barack Obama has been the president who has deported the most undocumented immigrants during his almost eight years in office.”71

Given the Democrats’ proven antiimmigrant inclinations, it should not come as a surprise that the thirteen border security companies that dominate along the US-Mexico border—Deloitte, Elbit Systems, CoreCivic, GEO Group, General Atomics, General Dynamics, G45, IBM, Leidos, Lockheed Martin, L3Harris, Northrop Grumman and Palantir—contributed more than $40 million to the Republican and Democratic parties during the 2020 election. Contrary to conventional thinking assuming a more progressive political stance on the part of the Democrats, those thirteen companies contributed three times more to Joe Biden’s campaign ($5,364,994) than to Trump’s ($1,730,435). In exchange, US agencies of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued 105,997 contracts worth $55.1 billion to these and other corporation between 2008 and 2020, according to reporting by Todd Miller and Nick Buxton.72

Every vision of organized crime, López Cuadras seems to say, is based on an unsatisfied desire to perceive something more than its simple reality.

In the posthumous novel, Los sinsabores del verdadero policía (Woes of the True Policeman, 2011), Bolaño, via one of his characters, says: “[he] seemed to subscribe to the maxim of De Kooning: style is fraud.”30 More than a mere provocation, Bolaño takes up one of Borges’s most famous maxims from his essay, “The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader.” Instead of the “perfect page,” as if under museum glass, whose delicate order cannot stand alteration, Borges admires the fluid and volatile work that keeps its meaning alive: “The page that becomes immortal can traverse the fire of typographical errors, approximate translations, and inattentive or erroneous readings without losing its soul in the process.”31 Thus, if “style is a fraud,” in Bolaño’s poetics, this involves literary practices that aim to produce discontinuities that are unafraid to disarm narrative structures, sacrifice plot, and neglect characters as long as critical discovery and transcendent meaning is found in the end.

Villoro echoes here Martín Caparrós’s thesis in his essay, Contra el cambio: Un hiperviaje al apocalipsis climático (Against change: A hypertravel into climate apocalypse, 2010), noting how after destroying the world for their benefit, the world superpowers demand that their subordinate countries build natural reserves and virgin beaches, forcing them to renounce the benefit of the exploitation of mineral wealth and allow no one to access nuclear power except those who prohibit others from building new reactors.

The Reef is an added warning that, after the national apocalypse of more than 121,000 homicides attributed to the narco—that other ghost invented by the state—it is only possible to survive by reproducing the vectors of violence as another exotic product of our international street fair, along with mezcal, petroleum, and telenovelas, whose stars now decorate, with their blonde presence, our criminal but very photogenic political class.

Usually, the authorities would protect their man from rivals; other times they would not, preferring a variety of natural selection to determine who should run the plaza. If the authorities arrested or killed the plaza holder, it was usually because he had stopped making payments, or because his name had started to appear in the press too frequently and the trafficker had become a liability. Sometimes international pressure became so strong that the government was forced to take action against a specific individual regardless of how much money he was generating for his patrons.

It is not a simple coincidence, as I discussed at the beginning of this book, that this is the same year that the United States Congress passed the National Security Act to lay out their anti-communist strategy that would define global geopolitics for the following forty years, and in addition to that, the same year the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was also founded. In this context, Canadian academic and diplomat Peter Dale Scott explains, “the prime purpose of the DFS was not to contain drug violence, but on the contrary to manage it and unleash violence against the pro-communist left.”

Anti-drug security policy, as we have already seen, has also served as a principal public legitimizer of the Mexican political system and has been assimilated into the most recent reconfigurations of cultural imaginaries surrounding drug trafficking in the hemisphere. Contrary to common liberal critiques, the War on Drugs is far from being a failure: it is perhaps one of the most successful geopolitical power structures advancing the interests of political and business elites against the rest of the people in either country, disenfranchised by their own governments.

In Juárez, there was no war until the arrival of the federal units sent by Calderón to stop a cartel war that no one could see on the streets and that did not produce any increase in the number of murders in all the previous decade.

AMLO accepted the resignation of the Mexican head of the National Institute of Migration, Tonatiuh Guillén López, who led the federal government’s initial strategy of encouraging the “human right to migrate.” In his place, AMLO named Francisco Garduño Yáñez, a former official with Mexico’s Attorney General and former secretary of public security in Mexico City, to promote “the toughening of the federal government’s strategy to stop migration and comply with its commitment to U.S. President Donald Trump.”

On Nov. 4, 2019, nine members of the Lebaron family (from a Mormon community established in northern Mexico) were brutally assassinated in Sonora state. Although the crime has been attributed to drug traffickers, it is now reported that in the same region is found the world’s largest lithium reserve—about 243 million tons, eleven times bigger than Bolivia’s reserves—where increasing unrest is constantly reported as another form of a “drug war.”14 President Trump, unsurprisingly, offered President López Obrador his full support in the form of a military intervention.