To Die in Mexico

by John Gibler

  In 1998, only days after the San Jose Mercury News announced Webb’s resignation, the CIA published a statement vindicating the agency of collaboration with drug dealers. A month later the CIA released the first volume of a report supporting that claim. A few months later the CIA released the second volume of the report, contradicting what agents had previously said and written, and admitting that between 1982 and 1995 its agents worked with known drug traffickers supporting the Contras and had maintained an agreement with the Justice Department to not report drug dealing by its “assets.” There was no scandal, there was no outcry. The major papers did not assign teams of investigative reporters to probe further into the prior twelve years of CIA lies and complicity in drug trafficking. Silence.

  One does not need to talk of conspiracy theories or even conspiracies; the acknowledged facts are poignant enough. One does not need to ponder the possible plans or intentions of Ronald Reagan and his administration officials with the 1982 declaration of war. Thirty years later mass incarceration through drug laws has become the new Jim Crow caste system of racial discrimination in the United States, and the murder and chaos that always accompany illegal drug trafficking have been pushed over the border into Mexico.

  If there were really a war on drugs, the drugs would be winning: the 2009 U.S. National Survey on Drug Use and Health estimated that 21.8 million people aged twelve or older had consumed an illicit drug within the past month. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime ventured a guess in its 2009 World Drug Report that between 170 million and 250 million people use illicit drugs worldwide. The United States is the world’s largest consumer of every drug on the market. In 2009, more people in the United States got blasted than any year prior, while 2009 was also the bloodiest year then on record in Mexico’s drug war. The direct correlation between U.S. recreational drug use, prohibition, and the murder and terror unleashed throughout Mexico cannot be avoided. Some drugs may cause harm, but prohibition kills.

  With full support from the U.S. Congress, successive presidential administrations have used drug war programs such as extradition and the annual certification reviews that threaten loss of foreign aid and sanctions for decertified countries as tools to bend less powerful nations into compliance with prohibition and U.S. intervention. As Richard Davenport-Hines writes in The Pursuit of Oblivion, “Prohibition policies have turned licit, if dangerous, medicines into the world’s most lucrative and tightly organized black market. Essentially prohibition has been a technique of informal American cultural colonisation.”

  DEATH IS ESSENTIAL IN MEXICO. Troubled, fractured, beleaguered, and contested, like the nation itself, representations of death are an inextricable feature of Mexican daily life, popular culture, and national identity.

  Take Day of the Dead, November 2, when the souls of the dead visit and family and friends honor them with their favorite foods and candlelit altars. In some regions, like communities in parts of Oaxaca, Day of the Dead is the most important spiritual day of the year. The celebrations are national events that draw the participation of millions. The rituals have also become prime attractions for international tourists as a singularly Mexican experience. Mexicans and Chicanos in the United States hold Day of the Dead ceremonies as acts of affirmation of Mexican national pride and cultural identity. The dominant image in Day of the Dead sculptures, offerings, and art is the skull, especially the edible sugar skulls elaborately decorated in the brightest hues.

  Then there is la nota roja, the crime beat or blood news, an entire newspaper industry built on publishing daily, gruesome front-page photographs of the newly dead: car accidents, stabbings, beatings, and recently, with great frequency, executions. In Mexico City and other cities, newsstand sellers string these papers up at intersections where pedestrians gather and gawk throughout the day. In some small towns, distribution amounts to someone driving through city streets in a Volkswagen Beetle with megaphones mounted on the roof, blaring enticements with a vendor’s rehearsed excitement, shouting calls like this one I once heard in Tlapa, Guerrero, “¡Mira la sangriente muerte que tuvo!” (“See how bloody her death was!”)

  One of the most immediately recognizable icons of Mexican popular art is the skeleton. The engraver Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852–1913) used skulls and skeletons both to mock the Mexican elite during the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship and to celebrate popular traditions like the fandango. Posada influenced Mexico’s famed muralists Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, who also deployed skeletons in their otherwise social realist murals. In Posada’s work, like the Day of the Dead sugar skulls, images of death are at times festive, at times ironic, but never gruesome.

  Mexico’s most celebrated novel, Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, takes place in a village of the dead. The protagonist, Juan Preciado, promises his dying mother that he will seek out his father, Pedro Páramo, in Comala. His father has been dead for years, murdered by an unrecognized son to whom he had refused to give money to pay for the burial of the son’s dead wife. Preciado himself dies as he grasps the truth of Comala: everyone there, all the people he has met and spoken with, those from whom he has learned the story of his father’s life and death, everyone there is dead.

  Thousands of people across Mexico worship, La Santa Muerte, Holy Death. Some pray that she take care of relatives making the trek across the Arizona desert to look for work or return to jobs they’ve held for years. Some pray that she protect relatives in prison. Some pray that she ward off violence. Some pray that she help them on college entrance exams. Some pray for jobs, luck, or love. Many tattoo her image on their chests, shoulders, or backs. The tall, gaunt skeleton, robed in black or white or red, holds the world, or a scythe, or a scale, or some combination of them in her hands.

  And while La Santa Muerte is famed as the patron saint of killers, drug lords, and thieves, a visit to one of her main altars in Mexico gives a different impression. One July day in 2010, I spoke with Enriqueta Romero Romero, who tends La Santa Muerte’s altar in the Mexico City tough, working class barrio of Tepito. Romero speaks of death and La Santa Muerte with reverence and tenderness. “Death has always existed,” she said, “it is something beautiful about life, that we are born and we die.” She calls La Santa Muerte mi doña flaquita (roughly, “my dear skinny lady”) and smiles wide when her visitors use the same name. While we were talking one of her daughters dropped by with her newborn, and Romero whisked the little baby into her arms and held her up, kissing her and holding her up again, saying, “my little princess, precious little thing.” The feeling at Romero’s altar to La Santa Muerte in Tepito was one of sweetness.

  When Emily Rodríguez, a 28-year-old public servant in Mexico City’s district attorney’s office, came up to buy a Santa Muerte candle, she was wearing blue jeans and a black SANTA MUERTE T-shirt. She visits every year on Day of the Dead and leaves a bottle of brandy for La Santa Muerte. She also has a small altar at home where she prays daily. I asked her why she believes in La Santa Muerte. “When you look in her eyes, well, she doesn’t exactly have eyes, but if you look in her cavities, she inspires trust,” Emily said. “In our pre-Hispanic culture we had our gods of death. We feel like death is a part of life, there is no reason to satanize it.” I asked her about the culture of drug gangs and gunmen who proclaim belief in La Santa Muerte. “If you use La Santísima Muerte [Most Holy Death] for bad things, they’ll come back to haunt you,” she said. For her, La Santa Muerte embodies trust, not murder. “She inspires trust in me and that’s why I believe in La Santísima Muerte. I personally don’t believe in people who become saints; I don’t believe in that. But death is certain.”

  A visit to the altar of La Santa Muerte offers some insight into particularly Mexican feelings about death, but nothing here could help one explain the wicked cruelty of drug war murder.

  “During Mexico’s twentieth century,” anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz writes in his book Death and the Idea of Mexico, “a gay familiarity with death became a cornerstone of national identity
.”

  “The nationalization of an ironic intimacy with death is a singularly Mexican strategy,” Lomnitz notes, and its roots in Mexican social history are deep: “The cult of death could be thought of as the oldest, seminal, and most authentic element of Mexico’s popular culture.”

  Mexican death symbolism, Lomnitz argues, reflects differences between strong and weak states, imperial and post-colonial states, and that Mexico’s place in that difference is unique: “As the largest and richest of Spain’s New World colonies, Mexico at independence had real imperial aspirations. As the United States’ next-door neighbor, it was the first to become the booty of that republic.”

  Lomnitz continues: “If death has become a looming presence in Mexican political discourse, it is because the political control over dying, the dead, and representations of the dead and the afterlife has been key to the formation of the modern state, images of popular culture, and a properly national modernity.”

  If “the political control over dying . . . has been key to the formation of the modern state,” what does the explosion of vicious, uncontrolled murder say about the contemporary Mexican state? What does the state’s unofficial authorship of so much of that murder say? If it says that the state is somehow weak, where does the fracture lie? Or, we might ask, what is the nature of the injury or ailment that causes this weakness?

  And yet for all the cultural depth and uniqueness in attitudes, representations, and rituals of death in Mexico, it would be a mistake to look exclusively into Mexican history and culture to explain the particularly cruel and gruesome character or the increasing prevalence of drugland executions in Mexico.

  “Any attempt to view it all with uniquely Mexican roots, rather than as part of something horizontal, global, is in error,” Claudio Lomnitz told me one afternoon in Mexico City. “In analyzing the forms of narco violence, Mexican history is not irrelevant, but it is necessary to know where it is relevant. Narco violence is related to other forms of violence and also influences them; the narcos import, but they also export. There is a dimension that is in dialogue with a globalized culture.”

  The Zetas, widely considered the most spectacular, brazen, and heinous of all the hit men working in the narcotics marketplace, serve as a perfect example of Lomnitz’s point. The Zeta assassins first studied counterinsurgency strategies in the United States and Israel as part of the Mexican Special Forces. They also hired Guatemalan Special Forces soldiers known as Kaibiles—an institution that received decades of training in counterinsurgency tactics from the United States army—to serve in their ranks. The Zetas adopted Al Qaeda’s practice of video recording beheadings and posting the footage on YouTube. Other cartel assassins across Mexico soon followed their example.

  It is an error to think that Mexico is either the principal location of or an isolated battlefield in the fiercely competitive global marketplace for illegal narcotics. Just like the trafficking of the drugs themselves and the prohibition policies against them, the drug market is transnational. Mexico’s current position in the so-called drug war can only be understood in a global context, taken together with the countries from which certain drugs originate and those where most drugs get sold to users and consumed, namely Colombia and Peru on the one hand, and the United States on the other, but also countries as far from Mexico as Argentina and Australia. Wherever drugs are banned by law and also grown, shipped, sold, smoked, swallowed, snorted, or injected the drug war zone extends its reach.1

  1 I take the term “drug war zone,” from Howard Campbell, professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso, who defines the zone as “the transnational, fluid cultural space in which contending forces battle over the meaning, value, and control of drugs.”

  Campbell’s 2009 book Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El Paso and Juárez contains in-depth interviews with direct participants in what is now the bloodiest corner of the global drug war zone. Campbell speaks with retailers, wholesalers, smugglers, police, consumers, and witnesses to executions, all from varying backgrounds and life experiences. His introduction provides lucid definitions of several key concepts in the drug war zone, rare clarity that is useful in stepping into a world where, as Campbell writes, “The conflict is waged sometimes in the open, but more often in a clandestine, subterranean world, a social space in which truth is elusive and relative and in which paranoia, fear, and mystery are the orders of the day.”

  First, consider the notion of “drug trafficking” itself, which, Campbell writes, “is an illegal form of capitalist accumulation. In some cases, it is an almost caricatured celebration of consumerism and wealth . . . facilitated by neoliberalism and collusion with elements of the state. . . . I argue that ultimately the drug trade is part of the U.S. and Mexican economic systems.” This should not come as much of a shock, but it is useful to keep at hand as a simple, clear definition of a complex and purposefully obfuscated transnational phenomenon.

  Campbell also provides very helpful descriptions—worth quoting at length—of two central and little understood drug war categories: cartels and their special breed of territorial control. Drug cartels, he writes, should be thought of as “shifting, contingent, temporal alliances of traffickers whose territories and memberships evolve and change because of conflicts, imprisonment, deaths, changing political circumstances, etc., and whose fortunes and strengths wax or wane or die out over time. . . . Moreover, many of the functions of a cartel are in fact carried out by cells, which are groups of outsourced growers, packagers, drivers, warehouse guards, gunmen, street sellers, etc., who have little or no connection to the larger drug organization . . . and whose services are bought and paid for with cash or drugs.”

  To grasp the phenomenal success of Mexican drug-trafficking organizations in moving their product, gathering cash payments, and depositing billions of U.S. dollars in illicit cash into the legal economy in spite of a multinational war against them, one must establish a clear understanding of the concept of the plaza. Campbell’s succinct, general description of this fundamental drug war concept is excellent.

  “Transportation routes and territories controlled by specific cartels in collusion with police, military, and government officials,” writes Campbell, “are known as plazas. Control of a plaza gives the drug lord and police commander of an area the power to charge less-powerful traffickers tolls, known as pisos. Generally, one main cartel dominates a plaza at any given time, although this control is often contested or subverted by internal conflict, may be disputed among several groups, and is subject to rapid change. Attempts by rival cartels to ship drugs through a plaza or take over a plaza controlled by their enemies [have] led to much of the recent violence in Mexico. The cartel that has the most power in a particular plaza receives police or military protections for its drug shipments. Authorities provide official documentation for loaded airplanes, freight trucks, and cars and allow traffickers to pass freely through airports and landing strips, freeway toll roads and desert highways, and checkpoints and border crossings.

  “Typically, a cartel purchases the loyalty of the head of the federal police or the military commander in a particular district. This official provides officers or soldiers to physically protect drug loads in transit or in storage facilities, and in some cases to serve as bodyguards to high-level cartel members. Police on the cartel payroll intimidate, kidnap, or murder opponents of the organization, although they may also extort larger payments from the cartel with which they are associated. Additionally cartel members establish relationships [or] connections with state governors or mayors of major cities, high-ranking officials in federal law enforcement, military and naval officers and commanders and other powerful politicians and bureaucrats. These national connections facilitate the use of transportation routes and control of a given plaza. In addition to large-scale international smuggling, cartels distribute huge quantities of drugs for domestic consumption.”

  In the logic of the drug war, to die in Mexico is to be guil
ty of your own death. But, the bare facts—when they can be rescued from oblivion—shatter the sordid drug war myths of cops and robbers, of Robin Hood drug lords, of an honest United States of America and a corrupt Mexico. Through the stories of the dead and those who resist the laws of silence, we may begin to approach an understanding of the killings and look for a way out.

  TWO

  Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer; they still perform a vital function. The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing—may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget.

  —Susan Sontag

  ERNESTO MARTÍNEZ, KNOWN AS PEPIS (pronounced PAY-peace) is a tall, lanky, wisecracking 40-year-old who has been working the nota roja for thirteen years. He has seen more death than most morticians.

  Primera Hora is a daily blood news tabloid based in Culiacán, Sinaloa, and published by the newspaper Noroeste, Culiacán’s main broadsheet daily. The Primera Hora newsroom is a small windowless box with five computers, a few filing cabinets, and a powerful air conditioner. To get here you must go around to the back of the Noroeste building, pass through a security checkpoint, and walk down a long hall in what appears to be a desolate storage basement. When I arrive at five in the afternoon, Pepis, a staff photographer and writer says, “Welcome to the bunker.”