Cartels dont exist, narco trafficking and culture in Mexico by Oswaldo Zavala

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

Subject Matter: Book by Oswaldo Zavala
Recommendation: No prior subject matter knowledge required

“The cartels do not exist: that is the early lesson learned by the traffickers themselves,” says Oswaldo Zavala in The Cartels do not exist. Drug trafficking and culture in Mexico, a daring book that demystifies the scarecrows and archetypes created by the governments of Mexico and the United States around drug trafficking and drug traffickers. What there really is, explains the writer and collaborator of Proceso, is “the market for illegal drugs and those who are willing to work on it. But not the division that according to the Mexican and US authorities separates these groups from civil society and government structures. 

Reporter: Oswaldo Zavala
On February 19, 2012, the still president Felipe Calderón offered the last speech of his government on the occasion of the Day of the Army and the Mexican Air Force. In the program of events, something extraordinary happened that the sociologist Luis Astorga, expert in drug trafficking and security, rescued from the journalistic coverage of that day. It is the moment in which a group of soldiers simulated the search of a car to illustrate to the president the procedures to detect drug. Anota Astorga:

In a vehicle where it was concealed, presumably marijuana, the soldier who played the role of trafficker was dressed according to the archetypal image that is had of them, even in the museum of Sedena dedicated to the issue of drug trafficking, ie with boots, hat and listening to corridos of traffickers: “Scene that  at Calderón, his wife Margarita Zavala and the Secretaries of National Defense and Navy, General Guillermo Galván and Admiral Francisco Saynez started laughing”, according to the journalistic note that gave an account of the act.

The military carried out a performance of their activities for the fight against drugs, personifying the figure of the trafficker that the Mexican political system has built for specific political purposes: a man dressed as a cowboy listening to narcocorridos. That image, as Astorga recalls, has been incorporated into the Drugs Museum of the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena).

There is a mannequin dressed like that same “narco” that the military improvised: a rancher boasting vulgarly the sudden wealth generated by drug trafficking and that is inevitably incorporated into his personal image with Versace shirts, leather crocodile boots and that infallible hat without which he would not be recognizable. To that image, the museum adds objects that confirm the profile of the mythical Mexican narco:

The performance of the military allows us a rare sighting of the way in which the Mexican political system has created a formidable enemy in these times of permanent national security crisis. The “narco” imagined by the military is, in theory, the opposite of the soldier: undisciplined, vulgar, ignorant, violent. In the antipodes of the army, however, the narco requires, if not a uniform, yes a uniformity that distinguishes it from the soldiers who in the name of the government will execute it.

Astorga observes that the archetypal clothing of the “narco” model coincides with that of many of the inhabitants of the rural regions of Mexico. How do the military manage to identify the criminals among the ranchers in the country? During the supposed “war against the narco” ordered by President Calderón, according to official data, around 121,683 people were killed. But if the “narcotraficante” staged by the military provoked the laughter of the president, his wife and the Secretaries of Defense and Navy, this was due to the caricature of the phenomenon, close to the way he imagines the traffickers in movies or television series.

In reality, the average appearance of victimizers and victims of the alleged war is radically different. As demonstrated by a study conducted in November 2012 by the Center for Public Policy Analysis, the recurrent profile among victims of intentional homicides during Calderón’s term is that of men between 25 and 29 years of age, single, poor and with little or no schooling, which, far from the rancherias and their denim clothes, resided in cities such as Ciudad Juárez, Monterrey or Tijuana.

The profile of the perpetrators during the supposed confrontations between “cartels” does not coincide with the narco represented by the military. It was not the rancher trafficker who killed his enemy with boots and a Texan hat while listening to Los Tigres del Norte runs as a soundtrack for a low budget movie by the Almada brothers.

Before Calderón, the military made the closest thing to a theatrical performance acting simultaneously the role of the hero and the violent enemy of the State and civil society. They had to act because the hero and the enemy, in reality, do not exist in the staged terms. Where does that archetype so recurrent in the collective imagination about the “narco” come from?

It is necessary to go back in time to articulate a first response. In 1989, just at the end of the Cold War, the political scientist Waltraud Morales wrote a fundamental article to understand the new world order after the fall of the Berlin Wall. For half a century, anti-communism occupied the center of the national security policy of the United States. The National Security Act, enacted in 1947, was the mechanism through which the US Congress gave legal support to the global strategy that polarized the planet after World War II. The Cold War, of course, directly involved the Mexican state.

During the same year of 1947, two key institutions of the new security era were created: in the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and in Mexico, the Federal Security Directorate (DFS). Over the next three decades, both agencies intertwined efforts to contain the supposed communist threat in the hemisphere.

Their collaboration was deepened with the so-called Operation Condor, through which the US government deployed an aggressive interventionist policy in the continent in the mid-1970s. The Mexican version of Operation Condor, however, was the only one that focused on drug trafficking and not on combating communism. The thousands of soldiers and federal police officers who destroyed the drug plantations between 1975 and 1978 also produced the mass displacement of peasants and drug producers and traffickers

By the end of the decade, the Mexican “narco” not only continued to exist,
Following the inertia of the United States, the media soon became accustomed to calling the organizations headed by these characters “cartels”. But the word “cartel”, like practically all the vocabulary associated with “narco”, has an official origin. Luis Astorga underlines the contradiction of referring to groups of traffickers as “cartels” despite the fact that, according to official intelligence, far from collaborating horizontally to enhance their profits, the “cartels” act as competing rivals willing to eliminate each other .

In his book the century of the drugs (1996), Astorga registers another revealing episode of the political history of the “narco”. It is an interview that Time magazine made in 1994 to Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, the Colombian trafficker who supposedly led, along with his brother Miguel, the “Cartel de Cali”. The trafficker states: the “Cali cartel” simply does not exist:

“It is an invention of the DEA [...] There are many groups, not just a cartel. The police know. Also the DEA. But they prefer to invent a monolithic enemy. ” The British journalist Ioan Grillo obtained a similar statement when interviewing in Colombia the “narco-lawyer” Gustavo Salazar, the legal representative of the supposed “cartel of Medellín”. The lawyer repeats essentially what was said by Rodríguez Orejuela: “The cartels do not exist. What there is is a collection of drug dealers. Sometimes they work together, sometimes not. US prosecutors call them ‘cartels’ to make their cases easier. Everything is part of the game. “

The cartels do not exist: that is the early lesson learned by the traffickers themselves. There is the market for illegal drugs and those who are willing to work in it. But not the division that according to the Mexican and US authorities separates these groups from civil society and government structures. There is also the violence attributed to the so-called “cartels”, but as I will discuss throughout these pages, that violence obeys more to the disciplinary strategies of the State structures themselves than to the criminal action of the alleged “narcos”.

As Waltraud Morales recalls, when US anti-drug policy displaced communism as the new doctrine of national security, the public of that country was already prepared to confirm the irruption of the “drug cartels”: a survey conducted in 1988 by the chain CBS television showed that Americans believed that the trafficking and consumption of prohibited drugs posed a greater threat to national security than terrorism or arms trafficking.

This change of perception in the American public was not the result of a correct understanding of the drug trafficking issue. On the contrary, the belief in the “drug cartels” as the new threat of national security was the direct effect of the implementation of a State policy based in part on the conception of a permanent enemy that allows to justify actions that otherwise they would be illegal and even immoral.

In order to give legal form to this securitization turn, President Ronald Reagan signed in 1986 the National Security Decision Directive 221, which since then has designated illegal drugs as the new threat to the national security of the United States. The “war on drugs”, that had begun in the 1970s during the presidency of Richard Nixon as a domestic strategy to combat leftist dissent, would now take the place of communism to legitimize US interventionist policy.

 The prediction of political scientist Waltraud Morales in her 1989 article, which is as relevant and urgent in the contemporary context as it was then, is staggering: “The danger, therefore, is that a generation of foreign policy in the United States will be rooted in the hatred of a mythical enemy, in conspiracy and not in democracy, and in ideological doctrines of national security “.

Anti-drug policy as the new social security doctrine in the late 1980s produced one of the most significant political scandals in the modern history of the United States. Although some journalists had approached the subject, the revelation was made with all its force, before the national and international commotion, by the investigative journalist Gary Webb in a series of three reports published in the newspaper San José Mercury News between the 18th and August 20, 1996.

Webb demonstrated direct links between the so-called “crack cocaine epidemic” in the black neighborhoods of the South-Central area of ​​the city of Los Angeles and the CIA-backed counterinsurgency strategy in Nicaragua to overthrow the Sandinista government. According to Webb’s report,

In 1998, the CIA admitted in a report from its inspector general that the agency “had not only worked with 58 Contras involved in cocaine trafficking, but had also concealed their criminal activities from Congress [of the United States],” according to the slogan the already classic academic study of Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin. CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (2003). That same year of 1998, the celebrated journalist Charles Bowden met with Webb in the city of Sacramento, California. Bowden underscores the resolute confidence with which Webb defended the informative validity of his report when Bowden mentioned that his work had been associated with conspiracy theories: “I do not believe in fucking conspiracy theories,” Webb said. I’m talking about a fucking conspiracy. “

From the open adoption of the US national security discourse in the following decade, especially with the creation in Mexico of the Center for Investigation and National Security (CISEN) in 1989, the political system gradually increased a violent militaristic strategy that culminated, as all Mexicans were able to witness in the daily horror of Ciudad Juárez, Monterrey or Tampico, with the crimes against humanity committed during the presidency of Felipe Calderón.

The supposed crisis of national security that Calderón said justified the “war on drugs” is based mainly on a discursive strategy without material foundation. The sociologist Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo already showed, with a simple statistical analysis based on official figures, that the violence in the country began after the militarization ordered by Calderón in 2008. In the previous decade, between 1997 and 2007, the homicide rate was going down in the main areas of the country where the thousands of soldiers and federal agents sent by President Calderón were concentrated. The presidency of Calderon wanted to militarize the country to contain a supposed “war of cartels” that did not produce violence. The army and federal agents took cities where there was no emergency.

In one of his journalistic columns, Juan Villoro analyzes the bi national tension between Mexico and the United States generated by the unexpected election of Donald Trump as president of that country. There Villoro recalls, on the subject of the infamous border wall proposed by Trump, an episode of the television series Los Sopranos. As you know, Tony Soprano, the protagonist, is a gangster from New Jersey whom we see face the challenges of daily life in American society while driving their violent illegal activities.

 In the episode in question, their neighbors can not hide the fear caused by forced coexistence with a criminal. Villoro points:
To satisfy the morbidity of living together, Tony Soprano fills a box of sand, wraps it and in an accomplice tone asks his neighbors to keep it. They can not refuse; They accept the box thinking that it contains something compromising without knowing that it is about sand. In a single gesture, Tony ingratiates himself with them and poisons his life.

The “narco” in Mexico and the United States works like that clever and perverse scheme of Tony Soprano. The “narco” appears in our society as a fearsome pandora’s box that, if opened, we believe it would unleash a kingdom of death and destruction. If we could overcome fear and confront what we call “narco” by finally opening the box, we would not find in it a violent trafficker, but the official language that invents it: we would hear words without an object, as fragile and malleable as sand. Let’s open the box, then.