Drug Cartels Do Not Exist , livre ebook

Drug Cartels Do Not Exist
CRITICAL MEXICAN STUDIES
Series editor: Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
Critical Mexican Studies is the first English-language, humanities-based, theoretically focused academic series devoted to the study of Mexico. The series is a space for innovative works in the humanities that focus on theoretical analysis, transdisciplinary interventions, and original conceptual framing.
Other titles in the series:
The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation , by Cristina Rivera Garza
History and Modern Media: A Personal Journey , by John Mraz
Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures: Feminist Living as Resistance , by Irmgard Emmelhainz
Unlawful Violence: Mexican Law and Cultural Production , by Rebecca Janzen
Drug Cartels Do Not Exist
Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture
Oswaldo Zavala
Translated by William Savinar
Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee
Originally published in 2018 as Los cárteles no existen. Narcotráfico y cultura en México by Malpaso Editorial.
Copyright 2022 Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved
First printing 2022
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Zavala, Oswaldo, 1975- author. | Savinar, William, 1990- translator.
Title: Drug cartels do not exist : narcotrafficking in U.S. and Mexican culture / Oswaldo Zavala ; translated by William Savinar.
Other titles: Cárteles no existen. English
Description: Nashville : Vanderbilt University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021050482 (print) | LCCN 2021050483 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826504661 (paperback) | ISBN 9780826504678 (hardback) | ISBN 9780826504685 (epub) | ISBN 9780826504692 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Drug traffic—Mexico—History—20th century. | Drug control—Mexico—History—20th century. | Drug traffic—United States—History—20th century. | Drug control—United States—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC HV5840.M6 Z3813 2020 (print) | LCC HV5840.M6 (ebook) | DDC 364.1/33650972—dc23/eng/20211021
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021050482
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021050483
For Ignacio Alvarado and Julián Cardona, who knew it first and better than anyone else.
Contents
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION. The Invention of a Formidable Enemy
1. Narco Culture Depoliticized
2. Drug Cartels Do Not Exist (but State Violence Does)
3. Four Writers Subverting the Narco Narrative
4. Drug Trafficking, Soldiers, and Police on the Border
EPILOGUE. The New “Cartel War” Is Not New, nor a War, nor between Cartels
Afterword for the English Edition
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been written without the indispensable work of juarense journalists Ignacio Alvarado and Julián Cardona, whom I was fortunate to learn from during my years as a reporter for El Diario in Ciudad Juárez. With them I first comprehended the scope of the official discourse and mythology surrounding the “cartels.” I appreciate their generosity, friendship, professional integrity, and combative reporting, which continues to be one of the best examples of investigative journalism in Mexico and Latin America to this day.
Journalism has been and will always be a crucial function of my intellectual work. The ideas on these pages have been inspired and improved upon—perhaps for them inadvertently—by the dialogue and friendship of the journalists of Proceso magazine, especially Homero Campa, Rafael Rodríguez Castañeda, Alejandro Gutiérrez, Arturo Rodríguez, Alejandro Saldívar, Álvaro Delgado, and José Gil Olmos.
I also appreciate the stimulating exchange of ideas and the friendship of journalists Sergio Rodríguez Blanco and Federico Mastrogiovanni, who offered me the invaluable opportunity to teach journalism and literature seminars at the Ibero-American University during the 2016–2017 academic year. These seminars, addressed in part to the intelligent and inquisitive journalists of Ibero’s extraordinary Press and Democracy (PRENDE) program, were key to the development of many of the ideas put forth in this book.
This project is also a direct result of my academic work as professor of contemporary Latin American literature and culture at City University of New York (CUNY). My ideas owe much to the generous support, rich dialogue, and insightful observations of my colleagues and friends Magdalena Perkowska, José del Valle, Fernando Degiovanni and Álvaro Baquero. In the academic world outside of CUNY, my work has benefited from the bright conversation and friendship of Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Oswaldo Estrada, Irma Cantú, Cristina Carrasco, Tamara Williams, Viviane Mahieux, José Ramón Ruisánchez, Dante Salgado, Marta Piña, Jorge García, Mabel Moraña, Sara Poot-Herrera, Raquel Serur, Jacobo Sefamí, Stuart Day, Pedro Ángel Palou, Sophie Esch, Brian Price, Rafael Acosta, and Bruno Ríos.
In Mexico City, while I was finishing the manuscript, my main interlocutors were Juan Villoro and David Miklos. Their comments gave my book intellectual depth, and their friendship made the writing experience significantly happier.
I am grateful for the friendship, camaraderie, and brilliant editorial work of Rafael Lemus, which substantially improved every page of the original manuscript in Spanish.
This book could not have found a better editorial home than Vanderbilt University Press. I am indebted to the brilliant and tireless work of Ignacio Sánchez Prado and feel fortunate to be part of the Critical Mexican Studies series. I am equally grateful for the professionalism and commitment of Zack Gresham, acquisitions editor at Vanderbilt, whose kind support and guidance brought new life to this book in its English-language avatar. This translation was made possible in part thorough the generous funding of the PSC-CUNY Research Award Program.
My teachers are always present in my writing: Rosario Espinoza, Rosendo Zavala, and Ricardo Zavala.
Without the love of Sarah Pollack, Ximena Zavala, Mateo Zavala, and Diana Zavala, not a word would ever make sense.
Drug Cartels Do Not Exist
I don’t believe in fucking conspiracy theories.
I’m talking about a fucking conspiracy.
Gary Webb
INTRODUCTION
The Invention of a Formidable Enemy
On February 19, 2012, then President Felipe Calderón gave his final speech while in power on the anniversary celebration of the founding of the Mexican Army and Air Force. Something extraordinary happened that day that Luis Astorga, a sociologist and expert in drug trafficking and security issues, noted. A group of soldiers acted out the procedure for checking a car for drugs. Astorga writes:
In a vehicle where marijuana was presumably concealed, the soldier who played the trafficker was dressed according to his archetypal image, an image that is shown even in the [National Defense Secretariat] (SEDENA) museum dedicated to drug trafficking; cowboy boots and a sombrero, listening to narcocorridos : “The scene made Calderón, his wife Margarita Zavala, and the secretaries of National Defense and Navy, General Guillermo Galván, and Admiral Francisco Saynez, burst into laughter,” according to the newspaper story covering the event. 1
The military carried out a performance of their activities against drug trafficking, embodying the figure of the trafficker that the Mexican political system has constructed for a specific purpose: a man dressed as a cowboy listening to narcocorridos , or drug ballads. That image, as Astorga points out, has been built into SEDENA’s Museo del Enervante (Museum of Drugs). In this museum, popularly known as the narco museum, a mannequin is dressed like that same narco that the military put on display that day: a rancher vulgarly flaunting his sudden wealth generated by drug trafficking in the form of the unavoidable Versace shirt, crocodile skin boots, and that ever-present sombrero, without which his image would not be recognizable. The museum even adds objects to strengthen the legendary Mexican narco character: gold-plated, diamond-encrusted weapons with the drug lord’s engraved initials. 2
This military performance gives us a rare glimpse into how 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. For the Army, however, the narco requires, if not a uniform, a uniformity that distinguishes the soldiers from the narcos whom, in the name of government, the soldier must eliminate.
Astorga observes that the archetypal clothing of the narco coincides with many of the inhabitants of rural Mexico. How does the military manage to distinguish criminals among the country’s ranchers? During President Calderón’s “war” against the narco, according to official data, around 121,683 people were murdered. 3 But if the narco staged by the military provoked the laughter of the president, his wife, and the Defense of Navy secretaries, it was due to the caricature of the phenomenon, with obvious similarities to narcos in movies or television series. In reality, the average appearance of both victimizers and victims of the alleged war is radically different. A November 2012 study conducted by the independent think tank México Evalúa showed that the recurring profile of victims of intentional homicide during the Calderón administration was that of single, poor men between twenty-five and twenty-nine, with little to no formal education. Far from being ranchers or cowboys, they resided in cities such as Ciudad Juárez, Monterrey, or Tijuana. The usual perpetrator during the alleged clashes between “cartels” did not resemble the narco played by the soldiers. It wasn’t the country drug trafficker who killed his enemy in cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat while listening to Los Tigres del Norte as a soundtrack to a low-budget film directed by the Almada brothers. Instead, we see that same poor, uneducated man