From the Zeta to the A

Translated by Otis B Fly-Wheel for Borderland Beat from a Proceso article

This article will not be for everyone, it contains a breakdown of the philosophical reasoning behind why the violence in Mexico is what it has become. The article is cerebral and I would humbly suggest that if you come to BB to view pictures of the dead, or are a cartel cheerleader, you may wish to pass this article by.

Subject Matter: Los Zetas, Government corruption in Coahuila
Recommendation: No prior subject matter knowledge required

Reporter: Fabrizio Mejia Madrid
I don’t know if its good or bad. Evil is not a being, an autonomous substance, but an action. That is what I thought as I read the report before the International Criminal Court on Coahuila between 2009 and 2016, detailing the crimes against humanity committed by State and Federal Authorities together with Los Zetas.

The horrors committed against the population of Allende, or the use of prison as a war factory, documented not only how power in Mexico has become an event of evil, but how that domain is acquired on someone already devastated, humiliated, helpless, its a desire towards nothing.

The question is not, if then evil is more or less what it was in the years of the “dirty war” , with the origin of Los Zetas in the Mexican Army, or in any case, that they have refined and extended the techniques of cruelty, but what as happened to us as a culture.

Both in cases of stubborn corruption among Governors, who, according to this report, today received from traffickers arrested in Texas, trucks of money to finance their election campaigns, which makes a brotherhood together with the traffickers;with the absolution, “I leave myself and go against everything that exists, abandoned to a kind of will of nothing”.

The only justification that exists for such a will, is a power that manages who should live and who should die. The Mexican population has also assumed the idea that, for one to survive, another must be annihilated.

That power, already inseparable between legal authority and illegal groups, works according to the reason in which the actions of the murdered, tortured, dismembered and dissolved in barrels with holes to oxygenate combustion, bear no relation to the management of their deaths. The absolute victims arise. Those that have not been annihilated by something, but as part of a force device that, to remain active, must continue to select, separate and discard.

The existence of this device, which ranges from hit men armed with an ax to dismember alive another human being, to the Governor who received 200 million dollars to allow it, is oriented to nothing.

Demons, by Dostoyevsky, is one of the first novels in which evil is separated from evil, that is, stating the difference between a human existence that loves to do evil, and the result of the interaction of different frontiers of the freedom.

For Dostoyevsky, all the demons of the revolutionary struggles desire an infinite freedom -  a ripple of the place that God had, that will end up colliding with the reality of others. Simona Forti writes, in “The New Demons”, about the character of Stravrogin: “Too full of himself as to love another; too smart to be a fan; too disenchanted to not be aware of his sin.”

Dosteyevski will make his characters ask themselves again and again if the “love of self” does not have a result of evil and if cruelty is not an effect of freedom. If in that freedom there is nothing to avoid using others to self-affirm.

If the interaction with others is not worse or better than an experiment, to generate such a device of force in nothingness, Stravrogin poses to Piotr Verjovenski, the febrile activist, an experiment: “induce four members of a section to kill the fifth, on the pretext that he is an informer. Because of that poured blood, the four will continue to live together united by a glue. No one will revolt or be asked to render and account. We understand here than unity creates the sacrifice of surplus; after sacrificing a human being, he is sanctified, and the executioners are united by the complicit silence. (Otis: here you have your explanation of the actions of sicarios and why they do what they do).

The same way of experimentation is the one used by another of the “demons” of Dostoyevski, Kirilov, who says, “absolute freedom exists only when it is the same to die as to live.” Kirilov, stripped of guilt and suffering, argues: “Killing another would be the lowest point of my freedom. I look for the highest point and I commit suicide.”

In this first distinction between evil and evil, destruction has no end that justifies it, but simply is evidence that it can asset itself. For Mexico, I think of “The party of the bullets” of the Villista revolutionaries. The desire for nothing is part of all justified destruction, in the finger that is tired of so much pressing of the trigger of the Villista Rodolfo Fierro, there is still some relationship between the victim and enmity.

But with the war of President Calderon, we witness another type of force and cruelty. Irritate evil as an event. Its characteristic is that it cannot be integrated or an alibi, allegation or excuse. This disorder could not be synthesized in a narrative of suffering because there was no fault or responsibility of anyone. It seemed like a chain of events that gave rise to hundreds of thousands of gratuitous, useless, sufferings.

The non-assimilable disorder increased when both sides – ” organized crime” and the Mexican State -  seemed interchangeable, mirrors of each other, all without heads or face or judgments of sentences. Absolute victims are no longer related to enmity. They are anyone, chosen at random, innocent in their pain.(Otis: see the Veracruz innocents).

The evil was thus separated from the banal violence that of the animals that hunt, or violence anchored in the protection of the lives of some (Otis: Don Alejo and his defense of himself and his workers and ranch). In the Calderonato, the place of an excluded majority was redefined, which became the absolute victim and whose sentences never turned them into witnesses: those who can be killed without committing a crime. ( Otis: the ayotzinapa 47 ).

There is an abysmal difference between understanding the State as protector of freedom and presenting it as a guarantee of security. It is one that exists between its citizens and its population. Between sovereign life and biology. One, leads to conflict, another to select the lives that can be discarded: the singular lives are dragged by the need of the population. A state – and the narcos that are part of it, that attacks the particular life of a group of naked people, I refer to the term nudity to the condition of those Mexicans who are not citizens or owners or even visible. ( Otis: the migrants that travel through Mexico).

They are attacked, tortured and disappeared from places like those in Coahuila. The reduction of Mexicans to statistics, trends, internal products, is equivalent to discarding them as part of “the protection of life”. Their lives are not.(Otis: all BB readers will suffer from this, becoming numbed to the personal suffering of those who appear in our articles).

If we compare the metaphysical wickedness of Dostoyevski with that of the disciplinary device of 12 years of irreducible massacres, what has disappeared is the sense of pain. When a State plans an extermination that has no greater meaning than reaffirming its power, it dissociates itself from any moral and political argument. (Otis: the Ayotzinapa 47).

The absolute victims of these years are naked, they lack human meaning. They are carriers of biology but no longer of subjectivity. It is therefore no exaggeration to compare these crimes against humanity of Felipe Calderon and Enrique Pena Nieto with those that occurred in Nazi Germany, which gave rise to the legal and moral term coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin. Lets read his description today next to the report to the International Criminal Court:

“It starts with a reduction of freedoms. It proceeds to uproot individuals from the flow of their significant relationships and is assigned an identity. The perception of the rest of the population that they are subhuman, impure, contagious, will facilitate the progressive sliding of people towards a massacre. That is, it will play a kind of adaptive function that, on the one hand, serves to suspend the emotional reaction of the executors and, on the other, legitimizes as a necessary practise the mass slaughter of people.”

From Zeta to A: to exercise evil as an attribute of infinite freedom to act as an instrument of discarding. In the middle are all of us who are still alive, in the stupefaction of a chain of simple events.