the drug war is the inevitable result of capitalism gone mad

8/6/2019 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
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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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the drug war is the inevitable result of capitalism gone mad

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