the drug war is the inevitable result of capitalism gone mad

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    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
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    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
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