"And he didn't give it to us," Rosario said. "So we had to do it ourselves."
She added up all the arrests in Juarez and shared the information with reporters from National Public Radio. NPR then conducted its own count nationally, using the Mexican federal attorney general's press releases announcing arrests. Both studies showed that nearly 90 percent of those arrested were accused of belonging to the Sinaloa Cartel's rival and enemy drug-trafficking organizations. (As we'll see, the former Chihuahua State attorney general proceeded to release about 90 percent of those detained.) I asked Rosario how she made sense of all the murder. Was it really the result of a war between two Sinaloan families? Is the federal government carrying out an extermination campaign for El Chapo? Is it pure homicidal mayhem without reason?
"It is a lot of extermination," she said. "It is also a real war between two groups, and a lot of the murder stems from the impunity that allows anyone to just grab a gun. Part of the logic of this war is that people can collect on pending debts, or whatever, I've got a gun and I don't like you."
Luz del Carmen Sosa, 41, covers la nota roja for El Diario and has worked that beat since 1992. If Rosario speaks at 90 miles per hour, Luz del Carmen does 120. I went to speak with her at the newspaper's office one day in early November 2010 and asked her what her job was like.
"A crime scene is usually the same," she said, "the body, the ballistics. But each family's pain is distinct. I can tell you that together with my photographer, we have seen a thousand different kinds of death. All of them have been painful, especially for the families. That is the hardest thing. When you arrive before the police sometimes, or the family asks you for help, or you have to run and catch a relative so they don't faint and fall to the ground-those are hard moments. First, because that is not our purpose, our purpose is to provide information. But you are there, you are at the scene, and you can't just turn your back. That is the most difficult thing: to see how the families get destroyed; to watch how a mother screams, desperate; or to see how a child cries because they killed her parents. Recently a child . . . I had to give a child a soda and hold him because he was wounded. The baby was about one-year-and-a-half old, and his body was covered in glass. He urinated. A fireman had taken him out and handed him to a woman who then handed him to me. The boy was covered in blood and then peed all over me. I had a soda and an apple and I gave the child the soda while we waited for the ambulance. These are the things that happen and you say, 'Man, how long can this go on?' This hurts, you know? Me, as a mother-I am a mother; I have two children-this has been what impacts me the most. In all this war, this is what sticks with me: not the dead victims, but the living victims who are destroyed and whose lives are thrown up in the air. But sadly, our government has not learned anything, because they have not created institutions to deal with these types of cases. Our society is ill; it is a wounded society, a scared society that is more and more distant from this pain. And this it what makes me look for other things, other angles for information."
And she has found many. She was the first reporter to cover the collapse of Juarez's forensic medical services. She was the first reporter to write about the young female sheriff of Praxedis G. Guerrero, a story that then became a huge news boom across the world with headlines like "The Bravest Woman in the World." She is the one who updates the daily death count in Juarez-the government either does not do it or does not share its figures-which she says is "the closest thing to the reality that there is." And she keeps track of violence against women. October 2010, for example, was the worst month on record for violence against women in Juarez: forty-seven women were murdered. A total of 446 women were slain in Juarez in 2010, nearly the same number as during the entire ten-year span of 19932003. And yet all the nongovernmental organizations that clamored for years to end feminicide in Juarez, she said, are nowhere to be found now.
"Everyone talked and everyone stated their opinion," she said. "But now we are seeing a very active women's participation in criminal groups." She mentioned the case of a Eunice Ramirez Contreras, a 19-year-old model who moonlighted with a gang of kidnappers. Eunice would help select and then seduce the gang's victims. While I was interviewing reporters at El Diario that day, one of the reporters was flipping through Eunice's Facebook page and discovered photographs of her posing with automatic rifles in a bedroom and posing with another woman in front of a federal police car. Antonio Montana, a man who identified himself on his own Facebook page as a federal police officer, commented on a photo of Eunice in a swimsuit lying by a hotel swimming pool, "How good you look, my love." El Diario's front-page headline the next day read: "Kidnapper model appears in Facebook armed and with federal police."
"You see how these young girls are getting lost in the narco-culture and you ask yourself, 'Where in hell is that girl's mother?!' Juarez is a city where you can very easily get lost, and I think this is relevant, the fact that women are more active in organized crime and there is no longer the same respect. Now they see the women as equals, and so as equals they torture them, decapitate them, burn them. This is a fact. And another fact is that all the nongovernmental organizations that always fought for 'not another murdered woman!' [Ni una mas!], they have all stepped aside because they know that in this context there can really be consequences."
I asked her about the common assumption that anyone found executed was somehow dirty, and she told this story: "They throw somebody out all wrapped in tape and it is an execution, no? But then later you learn that the person had been kidnapped, that the family was negotiating the ransom, and that they killed the person even though the family had already paid two ransoms. And that's when they say, 'We were wrong.' That is, we judge without knowing the stories behind the events. Until it happens to us, that is when we want the benefit of the doubt. But we still haven't understood that even if someone was a drug trafficker they still have a right to life. As long as the person wasn't from your family, you like the nota roja and even want to see the blood and the decapitations. That is a fact. Until it happens to you, and that's when you say, 'But no, it wasn't like that.'"
At one point in our conversation Luz got a call on her cell-a report of a shoot-out and four dead bodies-and walks to another part of the office to take notes. I stared transfixed at the shelf in her cubicle against the wall, to the left of her desk. Broken and jagged pieces of seemingly random objects from crime scenes densely fill the space. A name-tag with dried blood on it. A stretch of yellow CAUTION tape. Red plastic pieces of a shattered taillight. Dozens of bullet casings, live ammunition, spent bullet casings, and bullet fragments. Wine corks and shotgun shells. A tiny Eiffel Tower and a plastic rose. Folded origami paper boats and small rocks. A bottle of spray paint and a tear gas canister.
Luz came back, saw me looking at all the objects on the shelf and started to describe them. She picked up the tag and said, "This is from Salvarcar," referring to the January 2010 massacre of fifteen students at the house party. The broken pieces of taillight came from the car where Luis Carlos Santiago was murdered. One of the bullet fragments was extracted from his friend who survived; before the friend went into surgery he pleaded with the doctor to save the bullet then lodged against his spine, so he could give it to Luz as a present for her collection. She picked up a rock and told me it came from the scene where army soldiers murdered a young boy. A sparkly purple elastic hair tie caught my eye, and I pointed to it. "That is from the first case of a woman decapitated," she said.
"This is part of the shoddy work that they do here," she added. "All of this should be in a laboratory, not here. If something is here it is because they left it behind."
The debris of impunity. I asked her why she collects it.
"So that you don't forget," she answered.
THERE WERE 3,111 KNOWN MURDERS in Ciudad Juarez in 2010, while across the border in El Paso, there were only five. The killings in Juarez have left more than 10,000 children orphaned. Between 2007 and 2010, unemployment in Juarez rose from near zero to 20 percent, more than 10,000 businesses permanently shut their doors, and 120,000 jobs vanished. In the past two years at least 100,000 and perhaps as many as 230,000 residents have fled across the border, leaving their houses and apartments abandoned.
And yet there is one sector of the Juarez economy that is humming along just great. Juarez's sweatshops, or maquiladora plants-where Mexican workers earn $5 a day on factory floors assembling imported components into for-export products-are expanding, hiring, and drawing foreign investment, undaunted by the bloodshed. Bill Conroy reported on the Narconews website in August 2010 that in the previous three years of murder only one homicide had taken place in the city's maquila industrial zones. Conroy called this the maquiladora exception: "There is often an exception to most rules, and in the case of Juarez, the rule of violence does not extend to its industrial zones, which are home to some 360 maquiladora factories that employ more than 190,000 people."
Tecma is an El Paso-based company that advertises "sheltering services" for foreign companies looking to outsource to Mexico. As the violence exploded in Juarez, Tecma signed new clients and made some $45 million in profit in 2009. Toby Spoon, the executive vice president of Tecma, told a reporter from the New York Times in December 2010 that "Juarez is open for business." Spoon lives in El Paso. He shares his schedule with no one and takes different routes each time he visits factories in Juarez. He told the Times, "I have discovered maybe an unsavory part of human nature: If we can make money, and it's not just too bad, then we are going to go for it."
Two things to note in Mr. Spoon's statement: first, his hubris in elevating to the status of "human nature" his discovery of something "unsavory" about his own business practices, and second, that 7,341 executions over the course of three years in a single city and the forced exodus of more than 100,000 people from their homes is "not just too bad" for him and his colleagues to keep making money. Tecma has been in business for 25 years. Apparently the more than ten years of ritual rape and murder of female maquiladora workers in Juarez that preceded the current homicide epidemic was also "not just too bad."
It should not surprise that the Juarez-based maquiladora industry would surge unaffected by the murder and chaos all around it. Maquiladoras and illegal drug trafficking are two gears in one economy, and in Juarez those gears meet and turn together. More than 2,000 trucks and 34,000 cars cross from Juarez into El Paso every day. In 2009, more than $42 billion in legal trade crossed between Juarez and El Paso. An estimated $1.5 million to $10 million worth of illegal drugs moves over the border from Juarez to El Paso every single day. How do you think the drugs-bulky, heavy packages of cocaine, marijuana, heroin, and crystal meth-get across? Where does the infrastructure and organizational capacity exist to transport so much merchandise? On the backs of mules led out through the desert? In the backpacks of pedestrians? In the trunks or spare tires of SUVs and sedans going through customs? Sure, there are the occasional sensational discoveries of underground tunnels. But what about the thousands of daily cargo trucks with their NAFTA fast passes? What about the maquiladora warehouses? Recall, when Forbes first listed El Chapo Guzman on its list of billionaires, the magazine, with no moral qualms or qualifiers, credited the source of his fortune as "shipping."
Writer Charles Bowden called this place "the laboratory of our future" back in 1998 when he and a group of Juarez photographers published a book by that name chronicling the city's impoverished sweatshop workforce, migrants, drug-related executions, and feminicide in the wake of NAFTA. "The book was strongly criticized by the government at the time," said Julian Cardona, one of the Juarez-based photographers who worked on the book. "But now the present is so much worse than what was shown and described in the book. In other words, we were right, but few paid attention."
Julian Cardona has worked as a photographer in Juarez since 1993. He shot for El Diario from 1993 to 2000. He has published several photography books with texts by Charles Bowden and has contributed photos for Bowden's magazine articles and his recent book about Ciudad Juarez, Murder City.
In March 2008, Julian Cardona set out to document every homicide that took place that month. There were 181. Of those, he said, seventy-seven were corner boys, small-time local dealers. "El Chapo ordering the murder of corner boys?" he asked, incredulous. This would be like Bill Gates ordering the firing of computer salespeople at Best Buys in Los Angeles. "It's absurd," he told me. "These were poor people, corner boys. Many were tortured. There were executions before, but this was something unprecedented."
Julian urged that one take a broader view than the gang war and cops-and-robbers explanation given by the government and repeated uncritically in the U.S. press. "It is important to emphasize the local factors that are kept out of public scrutiny: land speculation, the local oligarchy, and four decades of political manipulation of a global economic scheme. This has been an equation: land profits plus exploitation of cheap labor equals criminal machine. We can't evade the fact that the city chose to be a maquila. And when I say the city I don't mean the citizens, I mean the elite. If the problem could really be reduced to Chapo versus Vicente or good versus bad then the rest of society and the economy would be fine. What the citizens of Juarez are suffering is much worse than that. This is the manifestation of a failed state incapable of providing security, justice, or peace, where the role of the state has been taken on by a kind of parallel state where extortion and kidnapping are used instead of taxes. This is happening in other regions of Mexico. In Juarez, the state cannot guarantee the security of its citizens; it has lost the monopoly on violence."
In late October 2010 when I arrived in Juarez, the top story in the news was a series of YouTube videos of former Chihuahua state Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez Rodriguez's brother, Mario Angel, calming answering the questions of an off-camera voice while sitting handcuffed and surrounded by five masked men in desert fatigues aiming assault rifles at his head and body. Mario Angel appeared unharmed in the video and spoke with a strangely matter-of-fact tone of voice and always with precise information. Among the many revelatory declarations in the first video was Mario Angel's testimony regarding the former governor, Jose Reyes Baeza, and his own sister, Patricia Gonzalez Rodriguez, indicating their direct involvement with the Juarez Cartel, use of their offices to protect the cartel's personnel, shipments, and, in Patricia's case, direct involvement in the assassination of Armando Rodriguez. State prosecutors under Patricia Gonzalez's command released more than 9,500 suspects of the 10,000 detained or arrested during the federal Chihuahua Joint Operation. Mario Angel's body was later found in a shallow grave on the outskirts of town. (The video can hardly be taken as courtroom evidence, nor Mario Angel's statements as having been made freely and in the general interest of truth. That said, such narco videos have a disturbing record of disclosing accurate information, and it would be a mistake to simply disregard the accusations.) With all this violence, impunity, and intrigue, one might half expect to see roving death squads firing on pedestrians and writhing bodies on sidewalks while riding from the airport into town. But the only constant sign to the outsider's eye that something is terribly wrong here is the heavy, militarized police presence-federal police convoys of large pickup trucks carrying masked, battle-ready officers with machine guns poised in the back. Seeing these convoys every time you step outside, seeing them anywhere and everywhere you go at any time of day or night, leads to a haunting question: how can so many people get shot down, so many bodies get dumped, and yet so few people get caught in the act with all these cops roaming about?
One of the most striking features of Ciudad Juarez is that in the grip of so much terror it is still a "functioning" city. People still go to work and to school. City buses still make their routes. While I was there you could still take a walk in the morning to pick up the paper and sit outside with a cup of coffee and not have to duck bullets. But you couldn't take that walk without thinking that getting shot was an actual, and not all that remote, possibility. It is a battered and terrified city, but it has not yet surrendered.
Quite the opposite: there are more mobilizations against Calderon's drug war in Ciudad Juarez than anywhere else. And the stakes for participating in such mobilizations are much higher there. A few days after I arrived, a small march of about two hundred people was nearing the campus of the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez. The march was part of the opening ceremonies of a three-day conference called "The International Forum vs. Militarization and Violence," organized by a coalition of student, doctor, teacher, and progressive organizations. A small group of young students ran up ahead of the march to spray-paint images on the walls of a PRI office building across the street from campus. Almost immediately a federal police convoy sped around the corner and sent the students running across the street to campus. Several officers jumped out of the back of the truck and pursued the students. In Mexico, with its history of student massacres, it is against the law for police to enter an autonomous university campus-universities hire their own security. The federal police followed the students through the university entrance gate and then almost immediately opened fire on them from behind. Nineteen-year-old sociology student Jose Dario Alvarez took a bullet in the back and collapsed on the asphalt of the campus drive. The bullet, a 7.62 high-caliber bullet fired at close range from the police-issue G-3 assault rifle, opened a hole in Jose Dario's stomach the size of his hand. Still conscious, he tried to gather up and hold his intestines in place. The police officer stood over his body, apparently stunned for a second, and then attempted to lift him up. Another officer approached to help him; both were masked.
Pavel Vasquez, a 23-year-old elementary school teacher, and Violeta Cangas, a 27-year-old general physician, were in Violeta's car at the university gate entrance when the students and police sprinted past them. They heard the shot and flinched with fright. When Pavel looked up he saw Jose Dario fall to the ground. At first he thought that the police had fired tear gas or rubber bullets, but when he got out of the car and ran up to Jose Dario he realized the mistake.
"When I came up to see him," Pavel told me, "I saw that his intestines were hanging out. The police officer approached and, you know if [the police] shot him then I doubt he's there to help him. My friend got out of the car and pushed the cop aside shouting, 'Look what you did, asshole! Everyone film him; take his picture!'"
As more students and witnesses gathered, they prevented the federal police from taking Jose Dario away and started making frantic calls for an ambulance. Several students, understandably enraged, shouted insults and threw rocks at the police vehicles still parked across the street. The police aimed their guns at the students and fired several shots in the air. The students shouted, "You're here to kill us, not defend us!" Press photographers arriving with the march took photos of this moment, which led to a briefly held mistaken view that the police had opened fire on the students after the latter had confronted them. The ambulance dispatcher kept hanging up on the callers, and after about fifteen minutes Violeta, Pavel, and a professor from the medical school lifted Jose Dario into Violeta's car and sped him off to the hospital, saving his life. (Over the course of several days, he survived multiple reconstructive surgeries.) The federal police first tried to obfuscate the events by putting out a press release combining two different events that took place in distant parts of the city and at distinct times. They seemed at pains to somehow link shooting a 19-year-old student protester in the back to the drug war. Pedro Torres of El Diario brought this to my attention-I hadn't seen the first press release-and said, "I thought that the federal police were putting too much emphasis on the fact that they came from a different part of the city. To me, that says that actually they were following the march. They say more with what they don't say that with what they say." Next the federal police said that the officers saw a group of "masked men" and fired shots in the air. Jose Dario was not masked, though the police officer who shot him was.
I spoke with Pavel and Violeta the following morning at the scene of the crime. As they walked me through the events they pointed to the bullet casings still on the pavement and the pool of blood where Jose Dario fell, a few yards inside the university grounds. No one had conducted a crime-scene investigation. The municipal police arrived three hours after the fact and then left without gathering any evidence. Students made a wide ring of bricks and rocks around the pool of blood. One of the pieces of brick held down a hand-scrawled sign that read: EVIDENCE.
"Spray-painting a wall is no reason to shoot somebody," Pavel said, standing over the bloodstain. "We live in a fucking city where every day at least three people are executed, where convoys of armed commandos with up to five vehicles will drive away from the crime scene, and yet a city where not more than five minutes go by without a damn federal police convoy driving by, and they don't arrest anybody. There are police roadblocks throughout the city. Military searches. Disappearances. But never, never do they arrest and convict somebody. They tell us that this is a war against drug trafficking. A war is a confrontation between two enemies. There is no confrontation here. Here there are paramilitary groups killing people. And how strange that the ones they kill are poor and young. And the government doesn't give us any explanation beyond 'The dead were up to something.' And with that the government links you to organized crime. But we know that is not the case, and even if it were, it is no justification for execution. Come on! There is the rule of law, so detain them, put them on trial, sentence them. But don't send paramilitaries out to kill them. . . . There is no war on drugs. In Juarez, there are paramilitary groups shooting us dead, companero."
The student organizations planning the antimilitarization forum called for another protest march for the evening of November 2, 2010, Day of the Dead. More than two thousand people heeded the call. Some people on the left are tired of marches. I once read a hostile comment on a website where I had posted photographs of a massive march in Oaxaca. "Another cattle drive," it said. In places like Mexico City barely a week goes by without a march of a few thousand people grinding traffic to a halt. But in Ciudad Juarez-with its daily executions and only three days after police shot a student protester in the back-marching through the streets at night handing out flyers and shouting chants against the federal government's murderous militarized drug policy is risky political action. The march was aimed at the protesters' fellow city dwellers as much as at the federal government, and the message was a call to overcome fear and take back the city. People driving by in their cars, waiting for buses, walking down the sidewalks, either honked their horns or cheered the students on. The federal police kept mostly out of sight.
Many of the protesters wore elaborate handmade Day of the Dead costumes. One young woman, dressed as a melancholy grim reaper, held a sign that read: ENOUGH! LET ME REST.
FIVE.
At the forefront of our minds, the obvious signals of violence are acts of crime and terror, civil unrest, international conflict. But we should learn to step back to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible 'subjective' violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent. We need to perceive the contours of the background which generates such outbursts. A step back enables us to identify a violence that sustains our very efforts to fight violence and promote tolerance.
-Slavoj Zizek.
In Mexico today tuberculosis kills more people than AK-47s, but the sound of the daily bloodshed wrought by this illness of poverty remains silent.
-Diego Osorno.
G.W.F. HEGEL SAID THAT THE MONUMENTAL EVENTS in world history occur twice. Karl Marx later commented that Hegel forgot to add that the first time they occur as tragedy, the second time as farce. Reagan's drug war was an overwhelming tragedy; Calderon's is a farce. The tragedy of mass incarceration, community degradation, and decades of brutality and murder at the hands of U.S.-supported counterinsurgencies and military dictatorships throughout the hemisphere is now being repeated as the farce of senseless murder, a so-called "narco-insurgency" south of the border. Techniques and expertise acquired from decades of U.S. military training and assistance, meant to aid Latin American armies and death squads in their elimination of leftists and anyone labeled communist, have been diverted and perverted to serve the illegal drug industry: ritual beheadings; massacres of children, families, bystanders, and migrants; the brutal use of torture. Slavoj Zizek, in his book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, reminds us that Herbert Marcuse "added yet another turn of the screw" to Hegel's comment, "Sometimes, the repetition in the guise of a farce can be more terrifying than the original tragedy."
A terrifying farce. What better way to understand the Zetas? About thirty men, originally trained by U.S. and Israeli commandos to be elite Mexican special forces counterinsurgency operatives after the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, abandoned ranks, went to work for the Gulf Cartel, recruited heavily from the Mexican military and Guatemalan counterinsurgency forces known as Kaibiles, completely altered the practices of cartel violence with their brutal and spectacular torture and execution techniques, and then staged a coup against the Gulf Cartel and went on a murder spree that included the indiscriminate slaughter of seventy-two Central and South American migrants in a barn in Tamaulipas. A terrifying farce. What better way to understand the Mexican Army's participation in the drug war? The same institution that created the Sinaloa drug capos-by bowing to U.S. pressure to carry out defoliation campaigns, but then raiding, raping, and pillaging villages throughout the Sierra Madre in the 1970s-thirty years later, during Calderon's drug war, is doing the capos' dirty work. The army went to Ciudad Juarez soon after the Sinaloa Cartel had arrived to conquer that plaza, and many Mexican reporters and analysts I spoke to said that the army's deployment was intended to back up El Chapo against his rivals. But here is the salient fact: after some ten thousand soldiers of the Mexican Army arrived in Juarez, the execution rate nearly doubled. The army mostly withdrew; in its stead five thousand federal police occupied the city, and the execution rate continued its grim rise.
And then there is Obama. Reagan was a tragedy: his drug war unleashed forces that have wrecked millions of lives throughout the entire hemisphere. But what will Barack Obama become? He arrived with "hope" and "change" and then largely pursued the same prohibition, "supply control," and "law enforcement" policies that have reigned since Reagan, though with a few notable differences-he stepped away from the bellicose rhetoric of drug wars, indicated that his administration would not target medical marijuana practices in those states where they are legal, and signed the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act-that do not challenge the dominance of the drug war ideology. For at the same time his administration stopped using the term "drug war," it stepped up military aid ($830 million in 2009) to Mexico's army and federal police for the now unspoken drug war and further militarized the border. Perhaps the pinnacle of farce is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's proclaimed concern about a budding "narco-insurgency" in Mexico. . . .
But let's step back.
Mexico's economy is in shambles. More than 51 percent of the population lives in poverty. Ten million people fell below the poverty line between 2006 and 2009, according to a 2009 World Bank report. In the second trimester of 2009 the Mexican economy shrank by 10.3 percent, a fall not seen in seventy-five years. In 2008 alone 12,850 businesses closed and 8,310 people died of malnutrition, that is, hunger. Between 2000 and July 2009, the number of manufacturing jobs in Mexico declined by 27 percent, a loss of some 1.1 million jobs. Meanwhile, one in three Mexican workers labors in the so-called informal economy-where defiance and bribes replace permits and taxes-which grew by nearly a million jobs from 2008 to 2009. And yet the maquiladoras in Juarez are "open for business," Mexican telecommunications tycoon Carlos Slim remains the world's richest man, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency estimates that between $18 billion and $39 billion of illicit cash is smuggled across the border into Mexico every year, with $10 billion to $25 billion successfully laundered into the Mexican financial system annually.
The United States and Mexican governments continue spending billions of dollars on police and military campaigns that have no rival in history in terms of their absolute failure. More people use drugs than ever before. At the time of this writing, fifteen states in the United States have some form of legalized marijuana for medicinal use. In October 2010, California reduced marijuana possession from a misdemeanor to a civil infraction. In 2009, Mexico decriminalized minor possession of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, and LSD.
Calderon took office in December 2006, exactly six years after the end of seventy-one years of one-party rule. Mexico was supposed to be a full-fledged democracy. That year, however, was one of mass protest mobilizations and extreme acts of state violence. State police arrested and raped more than twenty women taken prisoner in San Salvador Atenco on May 4, 2006. Oaxaca state police death squads killed at least seventeen people during a five-month teachers' strike that controlled Oaxaca City until federal police were sent in to repress the movement. The presidential election itself was the cause of massive protests alleging fraud and calling for a full, vote-by-vote recount. Calderon's less-than-one-percentage-point victory was challenged in court and in the streets. The federal electoral court ordered a recount in only 9 percent of precincts and later declared Calderon the winner. Calderon had to sneak into the Mexican Senate at midnight, take his oath, and flee through a back door to avoid protesters. During his first days in office he raised the salaries of the military's top brass, appeared in military uniform at a parade, and sent the army into the streets to wage a war on the drug business.
Just over three years later, in March 2010, Calderon told CNN, "My main objective is not to do away with drugs or eliminate their consumption. That is impossible. My objective is to strengthen Mexican law. I want to make Mexico a country where the law is respected, because that is the first step to development." To "strengthen Mexican law" Calderon sent the army and federal police into the streets to unleash a war that, by May 2011, had left more than 38,000 people dead, 38,000 families shattered, and some 50,000 children orphaned, with an impunity rate for all these murders of at least 95 percent and an accompanying drastic increase in all manner of crime from kidnapping to oil theft.
All talk of law and order in the drug war battlefields where 16-year-old kids roam the streets with AR-15 assault rifles following orders like, "Kill every last fucking one of them," where one of the principal combat tactics in the trafficking zones is to "heat up" enemy territory by massacring innocent people, where five thousand federal police constantly patrol the city with the highest homicide rate in the world-and that rate keeps going up-where 95 percent of the murders are not even being investigated, all such talk of strengthening the law is simply bullshit.
Calderon sent the army into the streets to protect him, seeking to grasp through the exercise of violence the social legitimacy he never achieved through the ballot box. The army meanwhile does what it has always done with drug traffickers; sell the plaza to one group and eliminate that group's rivals.
And in the United States, what is all this talk of prohibition as the only way to address health concerns, crime rates, and keeping children safe where decades of narcotics prohibition has produced the highest number of drug users in history, the largest prison population in the world-disproportionately people of color-and police forces that subsidize themselves from assets seized during drug-busts? In these battlefields, all discourse about prohibition as a public safety policy is self-serving, fundamentalist lies tantamount to complicity in the intellectual authorship of perpetual mass murder.
Let us be clear, absolute prohibition is legislated death.
So what do we know? After decades of a multinational drug war imposed by the United States government, illegal plants, fungi, and chemicals are more plentiful and more people consume them than ever before. Profits generated by this illegal market pulse through the legal capitalist economy and keep it afloat when speculative markets crash. The United States has the largest prison population in the world. And Mexico-the gateway to the United States drug market-is being bludgeoned with murder.
U.S. policy has not stopped the flow of drugs, but it has outsourced most of the killing. Judging by the drug war's own proclaimed objectives, there is no better case study in failure. But it is not a failure, of course; illegality increases the value of the commodity, and illegality allows for massive funding of police and military repression and mechanisms of social control. The drug war is a horrid success of state violence and capitalist accumulation, a cash-intoxicated marketplace that simply budgets for murder and political graft to keep things running smoothly.
And if the myths and rhetoric of good guys and bad, cops and robbers, are so completely inadequate for gaining any understanding of the scale and nature of the misery, murder, and destruction of the drug war, what reorientation could lead to understanding and thus possible solutions? What questions could prove helpful? What if the persistent and colossal failure of the drug war reveals less about the lengths people will go to get high, the relationship between people and psychoactive alkaloids, effective law-enforcement strategies, or criminal behavior than it does about endemic problems in the structures of our basic economic and political systems? What if illegal drug businesses are not a threat to the state and capitalism, but a covert and powerful lifeline? If people agree on finding a way to end the abhorrent brutality of the drug war, then doesn't the fact that states and capital markets benefit so tremendously from that war warrant serious analysis?
And so we come to the various proposals for decriminalization, legalization, and regulation. The end of prohibition, however, does not signal the disappearance of very real problems associated with substance abuse and chemical addiction. Legalization will address the problems created by prohibition: rampant murder, regions of absolute impunity, mass incarceration, disguised repression, and a pretext for U.S. interference in drug-producing countries, among others. Opponents of legalization will list the social and individual problems associated with drug abuse as reasons for prohibition. We now know that such an argument is ridiculous. Prohibition enjoys a track record of failure spanning more than a century, during which time it has set in motion a host of devastating problems far worse than the ones its advocates claim to solve. Unfortunately, prohibition and the drug war propagated to enforce it are good politics for Democrats and Republicans who want to appear "tough on crime," even though prohibition propels far more crime than the mere use of marijuana, cocaine, or heroin.
Legalization is not a fringe proposal. The Economist magazine, Yale law professor Steven B. Duke writing in the Wall Street Journal, former Mexican presidents Ernesto Zedillo and Vicente Fox, and the centrist Mexican magazine Nexos have all advocated for various legalization proposals. Legalization will solve one set of problems, but it will leave two other spheres untouched. First, individuals and communities will continue to suffer from substance abuse, as they do now with problems related to consuming legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco. However, with prohibition and the drug war over, real issues of substance abuse could be addressed through education, harm reduction, and public health measures without having to hide, scrounge for funding, or risk jail time for giving someone a clean syringe.
Legalization will do nothing, however, to address the second problem, the underlying economic and social violence that has motivated U.S. prohibition efforts and drug wars throughout the twentieth century. Bringing pot and cocaine into the legal market economy's open arms will stop the gangland murders but leave Mexico, for example, to the good old days of living under a bloody authoritarian regime that bows to U.S. economic bullying, concentrates wealth in a tiny fraction of the population while sinking the majority in destitution and misery, prompts the mass exodus of nearly half a million jobless souls annually, and brutally crushes organized resistance. One can imagine a new wave of child laborers fleeing economic destitution and political violence in Guerrero to pick marijuana buds in Sinaloa (where they already pick tomatoes) for a company owned by the world's richest man, Carlos Slim (who already controls Mexico's tobacco industry) and sold abroad in slick $20 packs of rolled joints.
And this is what should be fought: a future of hunger, forced migration, and thinly disguised slave labor. Not the drug war. For the drug war-as designed, waged, and imposed on other nations by the U.S. government-is not a war of political beliefs, of manifestos and declarations, a war for homeland, defense of nation, or liberation. The drug war is a proxy war for racism, militarization, social control, and access to the truckloads of cash that illegality makes possible. The drug war itself is a violent criminal enterprise. To stand by and watch it rage is to step inside the silence that hangs over every anonymous death, bow our heads, and wait our turn.
IT WOULD TAKE A NAME. Police got the call at 6:20 a.m. on March 28, 2011. They drove out to the scene and pulled seven dead bodies from a Honda sedan on Brisas de Tampico Street near the Cuernavaca-Mexico City highway. Bodies were stuffed in the front and back seats. Bodies were stuffed in the trunk. Their hands and feet were bound. Asphyxiated, the autopsies would conclude. The police reported finding a poster board sign in the car threatening the Mexican military and signed "CDG." (Later that night banners signed CDG would appear in Cuernavaca denying responsibility for the killings.) The police did not release the exact words written on the poster board. But the intended message-whoever its authors were-was clear: death. Nameless death.
But the names were waiting there in that car. And one name would break the siege of custom and silence, Juan Francisco Sicilia Ortega.
Juan Francisco's father is Javier Sicilia, a well-known and respected novelist, journalist, and poet. Juan Francisco, age 24, was not another nameless dead youth. He was, in the eyes of Mexico's mass media, the son of a poet. The first news reports informed that seven bodies were found dead, but gave only one name. Mexico City's El Universal wrote on March 29, 2011, "The Morelos state Attorney General confirmed that Juan Francisco Sicilia Orteda, 24 years-old, son of the journalist and writer Javier Sicilia, was among the victims." The names of these six victims were left out: Julio Cesar Romero Jaimes, Luis Antonio Romero Jaimes, Alvaro Jaimes Avelar, Jaime Gabriel Alejo Cadena, Maria del Socorro Estrada Hernandez, and Jesus Chavez Vazquez.
The Morelos state authorities first announced that the killings appeared to have been a "settling of accounts" between drug traffickers. They soon rushed to clarify that Jose Francisco was not involved in any illicit activity. Two days after the killings the local Cartel del Pacifico Sur, or CPS, hung banners in town denying responsibility. One local blog (http://notaroja-koneocho.blogspot.com) posted that two of the young men killed, Gabriel Alejo and Luis Antonio Romero Jaimes, had been beaten and robbed by armed men who identified themselves as state police officers and threatened to kill the young men if they reported the crime. One local police officer commented that the victims appeared to have been asphyxiated slowly, using tourniquets, a method, he said, unseen before in executions in Cuernavaca. Rumors flew that the Army was involved. But the official reaction was again that of the presumed guilt of the dead; "it was a settling of accounts."
In a classist political culture the poor mothers and fathers of the dead are almost as nameless as their murdered children. Rarely will the microphones and cameras seek them out. And rarely will they wish to speak in a place where the killers act with absolute impunity. The poet was different. The microphones and cameras sought and found him. And he spoke out.
On March 28, 2011 Javier Sicilia was attending a poetry conference in Manila when he heard that his son had been murdered. On his long trip to Manila he had a fourteen-hour layover in Amsterdam. He walked through the red light district and saw people buying and selling drugs. He did not see anyone firing AK-47s. He did not see any dead bodies being pulled from the trunks of cars. He would describe this vision to President Felipe Calderon, who asked to see him upon his return. He would tell Calderon that in Amsterdam people buy and sell drugs and they do not kill each other; what Calderon has done with his drug war is shameful and has no pardon. Calderon would respond, in so many words, you are right; I was mistaken, but there is no turning back now.
Javier Sicilia would not turn back. In that rare media opening that gave him the opportunity to speak to millions, he said his son's name and the names of his son's friends, and in so doing reminded a wounded nation that behind the swelling statistic human beings with names and loved ones lie dead. And then he decried the murder, the impunity, the idiocy of prohibition; he railed against the United States government's blind eye toward arms trafficking into Mexico and Felipe Calderon's entirely failed war. He wrote an "open letter to politicians and criminals" widely reprinted and discussed across Mexico in which he told them that he and his nation were completely fed up, exhausted, and repulsed with all the murder and impunity, that they had had enough. He called for people to take to the streets on April 6, 2011 and march against violence, march against the so-called drug war.
Tens of thousands of people in some forty Mexican cities answered his call. In Cuernavaca alone, more than 20,000 people filled the streets in one of the largest demonstrations in that city's history. One of the many signs held up during the April 6 march in Cuernavaca read, "Mexico, wake up! Indifference kills." Another read, "If they don't kill me, the fear will." Another read, "Our deceased demand our justice. Legalize drugs now!" And yet another, "Some parents are poets, but all the children are poetry. No more blood." The march paused in front of the military base in Cuernavaca, where Javier Sicilia stood on top of a truck and addressed the crowd, "Our dead are not statistics," he said, "they are not numbers. They are human beings with names."
Javier Sicilia used his position of fame and unspeakable pain to carve his son's name into a wall of indifference, to wedge his son's name into a country's misery and in so doing pry open a space for all the names of the dead to be spoken, for the indifference to fall. On April 12, 2011, on the walls of the state government palace in Cuernavaca, Sicilia drilled a metal plaque bearing his son's name into the stone. He then drilled six other plaques into the wall bearing the names of those killed with his son. He called on the people of Morelos to come and drill more names of people killed in the so-called drug war into this same wall. Within hours others had put up ninety-six plaques. He called on people across Mexico to drill similar memorials into the walls of government palaces throughout the country. He called on people everywhere in Mexico to stand up and demand an end to the murder, an end to the prohibition regime, an end to the drug war.
A rebellion of names in a war of anonymous death.
A war that rages on. In April 2011, while Javier Sicilia spoke names into the drug-war dark, forensics teams were searching out mass graves in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, the same city of 60,000 where drugland killers executed seventy-two migrants in a barn in August 2010. By the end of April 2011, the forensics workers dug out 183 bodies. Most of the dead had been traveling by bus on a toll-free highway. Armed men stopped the buses at military-style roadblocks, removed the passengers they wanted, robbed them, perhaps tried to recruit them, killed them with sledgehammer and iron-rod blows to the head, and then buried their bodies in huge mass graves. Nameless dead.
Journalist Marcela Turati traveled to the morgue in Matamoros, Tamaulipas to interview family members of missing persons standing in line to learn the identities of the recovered bodies. In an article published in Proceso on April 17, 2011, Turati quotes a woman bringing bottled water to the out-of-state people waiting in line who said furiously, "There have been many denunciations [of what was happening along the highway] but no one heard us, it was like speaking under water." Morgue officials asked the more than 400 family members waiting in line to prepare descriptions of their loved ones's clothing, jewelry, or tattoos. The bodies were "no longer recognizable due to the passing of time and the conditions of their deaths." One morgue official told Turati that the dead were all of the marginalized class. "They didn't have the money to pay the toll fees and take faster highways, and no one wanted to learn what was happening because they weren't the sons of anyone famous," the man said.
Murder, impunity, and the mass grave of indifference. This is precisely what Javier Sicilia and people throughout Mexico are up against. And from their grief and rage a movement is growing. The movement has roots in Ciudad Juarez where for more than two years people have taken to the streets in marches and organized community-based refuges from the violence. It has roots in the work of journalists who risk everything to report stories that pierce the silence. It has roots in women like Alma Trinidad who refuse to go home and cry. And it has roots in people like Salomon Monarrez and Meche Murillo who look death in the face and keep fighting.
A name and a poet's courage have taken on the indifference surrounding drug war murder. It will take a movement to stop it. That movement has begun.
SOURCES.
Most of the material in this book comes from interviews and observations. Source information for quoted or referenced material is provided in the body of the text. I used the following Mexican media outlets to corroborate facts gathered in interviews as well as to monitor the daily and weekly news events: El Diario de Juarez, El Sur de Guerrero, El Universal, La Jornada, Milenio, Proceso, and Riodoce.
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