by John Gibler
Calderón sent the army into the streets to protect him, seeking to grasp through the exercise of violence the social legitimacy he never achieved through the ballot box. The army meanwhile does what it has always done with drug traffickers; sell the plaza to one group and eliminate that group’s rivals.
And in the United States, what is all this talk of prohibition as the only way to address health concerns, crime rates, and keeping children safe where decades of narcotics prohibition has produced the highest number of drug users in history, the largest prison population in the world—disproportionately people of color—and police forces that subsidize themselves from assets seized during drug-busts? In these battlefields, all discourse about prohibition as a public safety policy is self-serving, fundamentalist lies tantamount to complicity in the intellectual authorship of perpetual mass murder.
Let us be clear, absolute prohibition is legislated death.
So what do we know? After decades of a multinational drug war imposed by the United States government, illegal plants, fungi, and chemicals are more plentiful and more people consume them than ever before. Profits generated by this illegal market pulse through the legal capitalist economy and keep it afloat when speculative markets crash. The United States has the largest prison population in the world. And Mexico—the gateway to the United States drug market—is being bludgeoned with murder.
U.S. policy has not stopped the flow of drugs, but it has outsourced most of the killing. Judging by the drug war’s own proclaimed objectives, there is no better case study in failure. But it is not a failure, of course; illegality increases the value of the commodity, and illegality allows for massive funding of police and military repression and mechanisms of social control. The drug war is a horrid success of state violence and capitalist accumulation, a cash-intoxicated marketplace that simply budgets for murder and political graft to keep things running smoothly.
And if the myths and rhetoric of good guys and bad, cops and robbers, are so completely inadequate for gaining any understanding of the scale and nature of the misery, murder, and destruction of the drug war, what reorientation could lead to understanding and thus possible solutions? What questions could prove helpful? What if the persistent and colossal failure of the drug war reveals less about the lengths people will go to get high, the relationship between people and psychoactive alkaloids, effective law-enforcement strategies, or criminal behavior than it does about endemic problems in the structures of our basic economic and political systems? What if illegal drug businesses are not a threat to the state and capitalism, but a covert and powerful lifeline? If people agree on finding a way to end the abhorrent brutality of the drug war, then doesn’t the fact that states and capital markets benefit so tremendously from that war warrant serious analysis?
And so we come to the various proposals for decriminalization, legalization, and regulation. The end of prohibition, however, does not signal the disappearance of very real problems associated with substance abuse and chemical addiction. Legalization will address the problems created by prohibition: rampant murder, regions of absolute impunity, mass incarceration, disguised repression, and a pretext for U.S. interference in drug-producing countries, among others. Opponents of legalization will list the social and individual problems associated with drug abuse as reasons for prohibition. We now know that such an argument is ridiculous. Prohibition enjoys a track record of failure spanning more than a century, during which time it has set in motion a host of devastating problems far worse than the ones its advocates claim to solve. Unfortunately, prohibition and the drug war propagated to enforce it are good politics for Democrats and Republicans who want to appear “tough on crime,” even though prohibition propels far more crime than the mere use of marijuana, cocaine, or heroin.
Legalization is not a fringe proposal. The Economist magazine, Yale law professor Steven B. Duke writing in the Wall Street Journal, former Mexican presidents Ernesto Zedillo and Vicente Fox, and the centrist Mexican magazine Nexos have all advocated for various legalization proposals. Legalization will solve one set of problems, but it will leave two other spheres untouched. First, individuals and communities will continue to suffer from substance abuse, as they do now with problems related to consuming legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco. However, with prohibition and the drug war over, real issues of substance abuse could be addressed through education, harm reduction, and public health measures without having to hide, scrounge for funding, or risk jail time for giving someone a clean syringe.
Legalization will do nothing, however, to address the second problem, the underlying economic and social violence that has motivated U.S. prohibition efforts and drug wars throughout the twentieth century. Bringing pot and cocaine into the legal market economy’s open arms will stop the gangland murders but leave Mexico, for example, to the good old days of living under a bloody authoritarian regime that bows to U.S. economic bullying, concentrates wealth in a tiny fraction of the population while sinking the majority in destitution and misery, prompts the mass exodus of nearly half a million jobless souls annually, and brutally crushes organized resistance. One can imagine a new wave of child laborers fleeing economic destitution and political violence in Guerrero to pick marijuana buds in Sinaloa (where they already pick tomatoes) for a company owned by the world’s richest man, Carlos Slim (who already controls Mexico’s tobacco industry) and sold abroad in slick $20 packs of rolled joints.
And this is what should be fought: a future of hunger, forced migration, and thinly disguised slave labor. Not the drug war. For the drug war—as designed, waged, and imposed on other nations by the U.S. government—is not a war of political beliefs, of manifestos and declarations, a war for homeland, defense of nation, or liberation. The drug war is a proxy war for racism, militarization, social control, and access to the truckloads of cash that illegality makes possible. The drug war itself is a violent criminal enterprise. To stand by and watch it rage is to step inside the silence that hangs over every anonymous death, bow our heads, and wait our turn.
IT WOULD TAKE A NAME. Police got the call at 6:20 a.m. on March 28, 2011. They drove out to the scene and pulled seven dead bodies from a Honda sedan on Brisas de Tampico Street near the Cuernavaca-Mexico City highway. Bodies were stuffed in the front and back seats. Bodies were stuffed in the trunk. Their hands and feet were bound. Asphyxiated, the autopsies would conclude. The police reported finding a poster board sign in the car threatening the Mexican military and signed “CDG.” (Later that night banners signed CDG would appear in Cuernavaca denying responsibility for the killings.) The police did not release the exact words written on the poster board. But the intended message—whoever its authors were—was clear: death. Nameless death.
But the names were waiting there in that car. And one name would break the siege of custom and silence, Juan Francisco Sicilia Ortega.
Juan Francisco’s father is Javier Sicilia, a well-known and respected novelist, journalist, and poet. Juan Francisco, age 24, was not another nameless dead youth. He was, in the eyes of Mexico’s mass media, the son of a poet. The first news reports informed that seven bodies were found dead, but gave only one name. Mexico City’s El Universal wrote on March 29, 2011, “The Morelos state Attorney General confirmed that Juan Francisco Sicilia Orteda, 24 years-old, son of the journalist and writer Javier Sicilia, was among the victims.” The names of these six victims were left out: Julio César Romero Jaimes, Luis Antonio Romero Jaimes, Álvaro Jaimes Avelar, Jaime Gabriel Alejo Cadena, María del Socorro Estrada Hernández, and Jesús Chávez Vázquez.
The Morelos state authorities first announced that the killings appeared to have been a “settling of accounts” between drug traffickers. They soon rushed to clarify that Jose Francisco was not involved in any illicit activity. Two days after the killings the local Cartel del Pacifico Sur, or CPS, hung banners in town denying responsibility. One local blog (http://notaroja-koneocho.blogspot.com) posted that two of the young men killed, Gabriel Alejo and
Luis Antonio Romero Jaimes, had been beaten and robbed by armed men who identified themselves as state police officers and threatened to kill the young men if they reported the crime. One local police officer commented that the victims appeared to have been asphyxiated slowly, using tourniquets, a method, he said, unseen before in executions in Cuernavaca. Rumors flew that the Army was involved. But the official reaction was again that of the presumed guilt of the dead; “it was a settling of accounts.”
In a classist political culture the poor mothers and fathers of the dead are almost as nameless as their murdered children. Rarely will the microphones and cameras seek them out. And rarely will they wish to speak in a place where the killers act with absolute impunity. The poet was different. The microphones and cameras sought and found him. And he spoke out.
On March 28, 2011 Javier Sicilia was attending a poetry conference in Manila when he heard that his son had been murdered. On his long trip to Manila he had a fourteen-hour layover in Amsterdam. He walked through the red light district and saw people buying and selling drugs. He did not see anyone firing AK-47s. He did not see any dead bodies being pulled from the trunks of cars. He would describe this vision to President Felipe Calderón, who asked to see him upon his return. He would tell Calderón that in Amsterdam people buy and sell drugs and they do not kill each other; what Calderón has done with his drug war is shameful and has no pardon. Calderón would respond, in so many words, you are right; I was mistaken, but there is no turning back now.
Javier Sicilia would not turn back. In that rare media opening that gave him the opportunity to speak to millions, he said his son’s name and the names of his son’s friends, and in so doing reminded a wounded nation that behind the swelling statistic human beings with names and loved ones lie dead. And then he decried the murder, the impunity, the idiocy of prohibition; he railed against the United States government’s blind eye toward arms trafficking into Mexico and Felipe Calderón’s entirely failed war. He wrote an “open letter to politicians and criminals” widely reprinted and discussed across Mexico in which he told them that he and his nation were completely fed up, exhausted, and repulsed with all the murder and impunity, that they had had enough. He called for people to take to the streets on April 6, 2011 and march against violence, march against the so-called drug war.
Tens of thousands of people in some forty Mexican cities answered his call. In Cuernavaca alone, more than 20,000 people filled the streets in one of the largest demonstrations in that city’s history. One of the many signs held up during the April 6 march in Cuernavaca read, “Mexico, wake up! Indifference kills.” Another read, “If they don’t kill me, the fear will.” Another read, “Our deceased demand our justice. Legalize drugs now!” And yet another, “Some parents are poets, but all the children are poetry. No more blood.” The march paused in front of the military base in Cuernavaca, where Javier Sicilia stood on top of a truck and addressed the crowd, “Our dead are not statistics,” he said, “they are not numbers. They are human beings with names.”
Javier Sicilia used his position of fame and unspeakable pain to carve his son’s name into a wall of indifference, to wedge his son’s name into a country’s misery and in so doing pry open a space for all the names of the dead to be spoken, for the indifference to fall. On April 12, 2011, on the walls of the state government palace in Cuernavaca, Sicilia drilled a metal plaque bearing his son’s name into the stone. He then drilled six other plaques into the wall bearing the names of those killed with his son. He called on the people of Morelos to come and drill more names of people killed in the so-called drug war into this same wall. Within hours others had put up ninety-six plaques. He called on people across Mexico to drill similar memorials into the walls of government palaces throughout the country. He called on people everywhere in Mexico to stand up and demand an end to the murder, an end to the prohibition regime, an end to the drug war.
A rebellion of names in a war of anonymous death.
A war that rages on. In April 2011, while Javier Sicilia spoke names into the drug-war dark, forensics teams were searching out mass graves in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, the same city of 60,000 where drugland killers executed seventy-two migrants in a barn in August 2010. By the end of April 2011, the forensics workers dug out 183 bodies. Most of the dead had been traveling by bus on a toll-free highway. Armed men stopped the buses at military-style roadblocks, removed the passengers they wanted, robbed them, perhaps tried to recruit them, killed them with sledgehammer and iron-rod blows to the head, and then buried their bodies in huge mass graves. Nameless dead.
Journalist Marcela Turati traveled to the morgue in Matamoros, Tamaulipas to interview family members of missing persons standing in line to learn the identities of the recovered bodies. In an article published in Proceso on April 17, 2011, Turati quotes a woman bringing bottled water to the out-of-state people waiting in line who said furiously, “There have been many denunciations [of what was happening along the highway] but no one heard us, it was like speaking under water.” Morgue officials asked the more than 400 family members waiting in line to prepare descriptions of their loved ones’s clothing, jewelry, or tattoos. The bodies were “no longer recognizable due to the passing of time and the conditions of their deaths.” One morgue official told Turati that the dead were all of the marginalized class. “They didn’t have the money to pay the toll fees and take faster highways, and no one wanted to learn what was happening because they weren’t the sons of anyone famous,” the man said.
Murder, impunity, and the mass grave of indifference. This is precisely what Javier Sicilia and people throughout Mexico are up against. And from their grief and rage a movement is growing. The movement has roots in Ciudad Juárez where for more than two years people have taken to the streets in marches and organized community-based refuges from the violence. It has roots in the work of journalists who risk everything to report stories that pierce the silence. It has roots in women like Alma Trinidad who refuse to go home and cry. And it has roots in people like Salomón Monárrez and Meché Murillo who look death in the face and keep fighting.
A name and a poet’s courage have taken on the indifference surrounding drug war murder. It will take a movement to stop it. That movement has begun.
SOURCES
Most of the material in this book comes from interviews and observations. Source information for quoted or referenced material is provided in the body of the text. I used the following Mexican media outlets to corroborate facts gathered in interviews as well as to monitor the daily and weekly news events: El Diario de Juárez, El Sur de Guerrero, El Universal, La Jornada, Milenio, Proceso, and Riodoce.
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