the drug war is the inevitable result of capitalism gone mad
Post on 07-Apr-2018
219 Views
Preview:
TRANSCRIPT
-
8/6/2019 The Drug War is the Inevitable Result of Capitalism Gone Mad
1/3
The Drug War Is the Inevitable Result of Capitalism Gone Mad;
Ciudad Juarez Is All of Our Futures
By Ed Vulliamy, Comment Is Free - Posted on June 21, 2011, Printed on June 27, 2011
War, as I came to report it, was something fought between people with causes, however crazy
or honourable: like between the American and British occupiers of Iraq and the insurgents
who opposed them. Then I stumbled across Mexico's drug war which has claimed nearly
40,000 lives, mostly civilians and all the rules changed. This is warfare for the 21st century,
and another creature altogether.
Mexico's war is inextricable from everyday life. In Ciudad Juarez, the most murderous city in
the world, street markets and malls remain open; Sarah Brightman sang a concert there
recently. When I was back there last month, people had reappeared at night to eat dinner and
socialise, out of devil-may-care recklessness and exhaustion with years of self-imposed
curfew. Before, there had been an eerie quiet at night, now there is an even eerier semblance
of normality punctuated by gunfire.
On the surface, the combatants have the veneer of a cause: control of smuggling routes into
the US. But even if this were the full explanation, the cause of drugs places Mexico's war
firmly in our new postideological, postmoral, postpolitical world. The only causes are profits
from the chemicals that get America and Europe high.
Interestingly, in a highly politicised society there is no rightwing or Mussolinian "law and
order" mass movement against the cartels, or any significant leftwing or union opposition.
The grassroots movement against the postpolitical cartel warriors, theNational Movement forPeace, is famously led by the poet Javier Sicilia, who organised a week-long peace march
after the murder of his son in the spring. This very male war is opposed by women, in the
workplaces and barrios, and in the home.
But this is not just a war between narco-cartels. Juarez has imploded into a state of criminal
anarchy the cartels, acting like any corporation, have outsourced violence to gangs affiliated
or unaffiliated with them, who compete for tenders with corrupt police officers. The army
plays its own mercurial role. "Cartel war" does not explain the story my friend, and Juarez
journalist, Sandra Rodriguez told me over dinner last month: about two children who killed
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/may/18/reporting-mexico-murder-capitalhttp://www.chihuahuanfrontier.com/events/festival/97-brightman.htmlhttp://www.chihuahuanfrontier.com/events/festival/97-brightman.htmlhttp://www.chihuahuanfrontier.com/events/festival/97-brightman.htmlhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/09/mexico-anti-violence-caravan-javier-siciliahttp://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/09/mexico-anti-violence-caravan-javier-siciliahttp://www.chihuahuanfrontier.com/events/festival/97-brightman.htmlhttp://www.chihuahuanfrontier.com/events/festival/97-brightman.htmlhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/09/mexico-anti-violence-caravan-javier-siciliahttp://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/09/mexico-anti-violence-caravan-javier-siciliahttp://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/may/18/reporting-mexico-murder-capital -
8/6/2019 The Drug War is the Inevitable Result of Capitalism Gone Mad
2/3
their parents "because", they explained to her, "they could". The culture of impunity, she said,
"goes from boys like that right to the top the whole city is a criminal enterprise".
Not by coincidence, Juarez is also a model for the capitalist economy. Recruits for the drug
war come from the vast, sprawling maquiladora bonded assembly plants where, for rock-
bottom wages, workers make the goods that fill America's supermarket shelves or become
America's automobiles, imported duty-free. Now, the corporations can do it cheaper in Asia,
casually shedding their Mexican workers, and Juarez has become a teeming recruitment pool
for the cartels and killers. It is a city that follows religiously the philosophy of a free market.
"It's a city based on markets and on trash," says Julin Cardona, a photographer who has
chronicled the implosion. "Killing and drug addiction are activities in the economy, and the
economy is based on what happens when you treat people like trash." Very much, then, a war
for the 21st century. Cardona told me how many times he had been asked for his view on the
Javier Sicilia peace march: "I replied: 'How can you march against the market?'"
Mexico's war does not only belong to the postpolitical, postmoral world. It belongs to the
world of belligerent hyper-materialism, in which the only ideology left which the leaders of
"legitimate" politics, business and banking preach by example is greed. A very brave man
called Mario Trevino lives in the city of Reynosa, which is in the grip of the Gulf cartel. He
said of the killers and cartels: "They are revolting people who do what they do because they
cannot be seen to wear the same label T-shirt as they wore last year, they must wear another
brand, and more expensive." It can't be thatbanal, I objected, but he pleaded with me not to
underestimate these considerations. The thing that really makes Mexico's war a different war,
and of our time, is that it is about, in the end, nothing.
It certainly belongs to the cacophony of the era of digital communication. The killers post
their atrocities on YouTube with relish, commanding a vast viewing public; they are busy
across thickets of internet hot-sites and the narco-blogosphere. Journalists find it hard that
while even people as crazy as Osama bin Laden will talk to the media they feel they have a
message to get across the narco-cartels have no interest in talking at all. They control the
message, they are democratic the postmodern way.
People often ask: why the savagery of Mexico's war? It is infamous for such inventive
perversions as sewing one victim's flayed face to a soccer ball or hanging decapitated corpses
from bridges by the ankles; and innovative torture, such as dipping people into vats of acid so
that their limbs evaporate while doctors keep the victim conscious.
I answer tentatively that I think there is a correlation between the causelessness of Mexico's
http://geography.about.com/od/urbaneconomicgeography/a/maquiladoras.htmhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/27/mexico1http://geography.about.com/od/urbaneconomicgeography/a/maquiladoras.htmhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/27/mexico1 -
8/6/2019 The Drug War is the Inevitable Result of Capitalism Gone Mad
3/3
top related