ZeroZeroZero

by Roberto Saviano

  Bladimir was relentless; he wrote dozens of news stories, some of which were exclusives, thanks to his excellent contacts in the army and police. To pay for his oldest son’s college education he got a second job with another newspaper, La Voz de Durango.

  The first threat he gets is on his cell phone, in the middle of the night. A cavernous but clear voice utters two simple words: “Stop it.” His wife pretends to be asleep, but she hears everything and bites her pillow in silence. In the months that follow the phone calls become more frequent, always to his cell, always at night, always those two simple words: “Stop it.” Sometimes the speaker identifies himself as a Zetas member. Postcards start arriving at the newspaper, tropical beaches and beautiful women, and on the back, in childish lettering, that same command: “Stop it.”

  “They’re just words.” That’s how Bladimir dismissed the escalating intimidations. He started working even harder, using his articles to attack corrupt policemen in the state of Durango and reporting loudly the threats he was receiving in the media and to the State Attorney’s office. Lifting the veil on criminal organizations in Mexico and naming famous narco-trafficking accomplices became a sort of creed for him. In July 2009 he talked about the phone calls in a series of interviews with the Mexico City magazine Buzos. He also told of the failed attempt on his life: On April 28, 2009, a man shot at him in broad daylight in the middle of the street, but missed. But when you start talking about threats, the community around you is always ready to say you’re paranoid, you’re exaggerating. Bladimir reported the threats and the attempt on his life to the authorities, but they didn’t do anything. Bladimir was working with Eliseo Barrón Hernández on a story about some policemen in the pay of the cartels. With Eliseo, they did what they always do. They waited till he left his house with his family, humiliated him by kicking and punching him in front of his daughters and wife, then took him away. Then they put a bullet in his head. His mistake had been to stick his nose in a story of corrupt policemen. “We’re here, reporters. Just ask Eliseo Barrón. El Chapo and the cartel don’t forgive. Be careful, soldiers and reporters.” These were Chapo Guzmán’s words, which appeared on several narco-banners hung in the streets of Torreón on the day of Eliseo’s funeral. A clear claim of responsibility, the way terrorists do it. An unequivocal message. Another one arrives at Bladimir’s newspaper office a few hours later: “He’s next, that son of a bitch.”

  Bladimir rarely left his house. Almost never. He would write holed up inside. Some of his colleagues said he’d resigned himself to the idea that he’d be killed: The government offered no assistance; no inquiries were being conducted about the threats; no protection had been assigned to him. His biggest fear wasn’t being killed, though. It’s the same for everyone. But it’s not madness, or a secret suicide wish. You don’t go looking for death—you’d be a fool if you did. But you know it’s there.

  November 2, 2009: It happened very quickly. Kidnapped. Tortured. Killed.

  His colleagues’ efforts were all in vain. They were scandalized by the apathy of the forces of law and order, who had called Bladimir paranoid. The usual defamation technique: no investigations; no inquiries into what Bladimir had uncovered. There’s no investigative journalism in Durango anymore. It died along with Bladimir Antuna García.

  19.

  000

  I looked into the abyss and I became a monster. It couldn’t have gone any other way. With one hand you touch the origins of violence, with the other you caress the roots of ferocity. You’ve got one eye trained on the foundations of buildings, one ear tuned to the beat of financial flows. At first it’s all a dark cauldron; you can’t see a thing, just something simmering below the surface, teeming as if with worms, trying to break through the top crust. Then the figures start to take shape, but it’s still all confused, embryonic, superimposed. Drawing on all your skills and senses you push yourself forward and lean out over the abyss. The chronology of powers begins to make sense, the blood that before ran off in a thousand different directions now flows into one big river; the money stops fluttering around and comes to settle on the ground so you can count it. You lean out a little more. You hook your foot to the rock, practically suspended over the void now. And then . . . darkness. Like at the beginning, but this time there’s no simmering; there’s only a smooth, shiny surface, a mirror of black pitch. That’s when you realize you’ve gone over to the other side; now it’s the abyss that wants to peer inside you. Rummage around. Tear you to pieces. Break you apart. The abyss of narco-trafficking that looks inside you is not the—all things considered—reassuring rite of indignation. It is not the fear that nothing makes any sense. That would be too simple. Too easy. You’ve identified your target; now it’s up to you to strike, up to you to put things right. The abyss of narco-trafficking opens onto a world that works, an efficient world, a world with rules. A world that makes sense. Then you don’t trust anyone anymore: the media, your family, your friends. Everyone is talking about a reality that you know is bogus. Slowly everything starts feeling foreign to you, and your world fills with new protagonists. Bosses, massacres, trials. Killings, tortures, cartels. Dividends, stocks, banks. Betrayals, suspicions, accusations. Cocaine. All you know is them, and they know you, but it doesn’t mean that the world that was yours before disappears. No. You go on living in the midst of it. You keep on doing what you were doing before, but now the questions you ask yourself rise up out of the abyss. The businessman, the professor, the manager. The student, the dairy farmer, the policeman. Your friend, your relative, your girlfriend. Do they come from the abyss as well? And even if they’re honest, how much like the abyss are they? It’s not that you suspect they’re all corrupt, or mafiosi. It’s worse than that. You have looked humanity in the face, have seen how disgusting it is, and now you see similarities to that disgust in everyone you know. You see everyone’s shadow.

  I have become a monster.

  When everything around you starts fitting into this sort of reflection. When you insert everything into the universe of meaning you’ve constructed by observing the powers of narco-trafficking. When everything seems to make sense only on the other side, in the abyss. When all this happens you’ve become a monster. You scream, whisper, shout your truths, because you’re afraid that otherwise they’ll vanish. And everything you’d always considered to be happiness—going for a walk, making love, standing in line for a concert, swimming—becomes superfluous. Secondary. Less important. Negligible. Every hour seems pointless, wasted, if you don’t dedicate your energies to discovering, flushing out, telling. You’ve sacrificed everything not only in order to understand but to show, to point out, to describe the abyss. Was it worth it? No. It’s never worth abandoning any path that brings you happiness. Even a small happiness. It’s never worth it, even if you believe that your sacrifice will be rewarded by history, by your sense of ethics, by looks of approval. But it’s only a moment. The only possible sacrifice is the one that expects no reward. I didn’t want sacrifices, and I didn’t want rewards. I wanted to understand, to write, to tell. Tell everyone. To go door to door, house to house, day and night to share these stories, to display these wounds. Proud of having chosen the right words, the right tone. That’s what I wanted. But the wound of these stories swallowed me up.

  For me it’s too late. I should have kept a distance I wasn’t able to keep. That’s what Anglo-Saxon journalists often say to me: Don’t get involved; keep a clear gaze between your subject and yourself. But I’ve never been able to. For me it’s the opposite. Exactly the opposite. To have a primary, penetrating, contaminated gaze. To chronicle not the facts but one’s own soul. And to imprint on one’s soul, like on Play-Doh, the objects and the things one sees, so they leave behind a deep impression, but one that can be eliminated by remolding the Play-Doh. By kneading it. In the end all that remains of one’s soul is a frame that could have assumed a thousand different shapes but that hasn’t taken on even one.

  W
hen you follow the stories of narco-trafficking you learn to read people’s faces. Or at least you convince yourself you can. You learn to see if someone was loved as a child—truly loved. If he was looked after, if he was raised with someone at his side, or if he always had to run off with his tail between his legs. You understand right away what sort of life he’s had. If he was lonely, bullied, thrown out on the street. Or if, on the other hand, he was spoiled to the point of rotting in comfort. You learn. That’s how you learn to sum people up. But you never learn to distinguish the good guy from the bad guy. You don’t know who is screwing you or stealing your soul, who is lying to you in order to get an interview, or who is telling you what he thinks you want to hear in order to please you and so to be immortalized in your words. I carry that certainty inside me without too much self-indulgent melancholy: No one comes near you except for a favor. A smile is a way of lowering your defenses; a relationship aims to extort money from you, or a story to tell at dinner, or a photo to give someone, like a scalp. You end up thinking like a mafioso; paranoia becomes your line of conduct, and you thank the people of the abyss for teaching you to be suspicious. Loyalty and trust become foreign, suspect words. You are surrounded by enemies and people eager to take advantage of you. This is my life today. Congratulations to me.

  It’s too easy to believe what I believed in at the beginning of all this. To believe in what Thoreau said: “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” I believed that following these routes and rivers, sniffing around continents, sinking my legs into the mire would help me to get at the truth: renounce everything else in order to grasp the truth. But it doesn’t work that way, Thoreau. You can’t find it. The closer you come to thinking you’ve understood how markets move, the closer you come to the logic of he who corrupts those close to you, of he who makes restaurants open and banks close, of he who is prepared to die for money; the more you understand the mechanisms, the more you realize you should have taken a completely different route. Which is why I don’t have greater respect for myself, that I keep investigating, taking notes, filling agendas, preserving flavors. I don’t have greater respect for myself at the end of a journey that is unable to bring me happiness and to share it. And I may not even be aware of it. All I know is that I couldn’t have done anything else.

  And if I had done things differently? If I had chosen the straight line of art? The life of a writer whom some would define as pure, for example, with his bad moods, his psychoses, his normalcy. One who tells inspiring stories. Who’s all engaged in style and narrative technique. I didn’t know how to do that. Mine is the life of a fugitive, a story runner, a multiplier of tales. I am a monster, as is anyone who sacrifices himself for something he believed to be superior. But I still have some respect. Respect for those who read. For those who snatch important time from their lives so as to construct a new one. Nothing is more powerful than reading; no one is a greater liar than he who holds that reading a book is a passive gesture. To read, hear, study, understand—these are the only ways to construct life beyond life, life alongside of life. Reading is a dangerous act, because it gives shape and dimension to words, it incarnates and disperses them in all directions. It turns everything upside down and makes change and tickets and lint fall out of the pockets of the world. To get to know narco-trafficking, to get to know the connection between the rationality of evil and money, to rip open the veil that obscures the supposed familiarity with the world. To know is the first step toward change. My respect goes to those people who don’t throw these stories away, who don’t neglect them, but who make them their own. Those who feel the words on their skin, who carve them in their flesh, who build a new vocabulary—they are altering the direction of the world, because they have understood how to be in it. It’s like breaking one’s chains. Words are action, connection tissue. Only those who are familiar with these stories can defend themselves from them. Only those who tell them to their child, a friend, their husband, only those who carry them into public places, into living rooms and classrooms are articulating the possibility to resist. Being alone in the abyss is like being in a cage, but if lots of people decide to face the abyss, then the bars of that prison cell will melt. And a cell without bars is no longer a prison.

  In the Book of Revelation Saint John writes, “And I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it; it was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it my stomach was made bitter.” I believe that readers need to do this with words. Put them in their mouths, chew them, grind them up, and swallow them, so that the chemistry they are made of can work inside of us, can illuminate the dark night and draw a line between happiness and pain.

  You feel empty when your words seem to be enhanced by the threats they provoke, as if people are suddenly listening to every word you utter merely because they risk getting you killed. This is what happens: It happens that silence on these topics doesn’t exist. There is a buzz: news flashes, trials, a narco is arrested. Everything becomes physiological. And when everything becomes physiological, no one notices it anymore. And this is how someone writes: He dies writing; he is threatened writing; he stumbles writing. When the threat comes it seems that a part of the world notices what has been written, at least for a while. But then it forgets. The truth is that there’s no alternative. Cocaine is a carburant. Cocaine is a devastating, terrible, deadly energy. There never seem to be enough arrests. Policies to fight it always seem to miss the mark. As terrible as it may seem, total legalization may be the only answer. A horrendous response, horrible perhaps, agonizing. But the only one that can stop everything. That can halt the inflated earnings. That can put an end to the war. Or, at least, it’s the only response that comes to mind when in the end you ask yourself, now what?

  I have let myself be overwhelmed by voices every day for years. Voices that shout at the top of their lungs that alcohol is the substance that claims the most victims. Sharp, hammering voices that every now and then are silenced by other voices that boldly claim that yes, of course, alcohol is bad, but only if you abuse it, if that mug of beer on a Saturday night becomes a habit, and that there’s a big difference between alcohol and cocaine. Then the chorus chimes in, those who think that legalization is the lesser evil; all things considered, the voices suggest, legalized cocaine would come under the control of doctors. And so let’s legalize murder then! a portentous, baritone voice replies, momentarily silencing everyone. But the silence doesn’t last long, because then come those cawing reactions—like knife stabs—one after the other, of those who maintain that drug users really only harm themselves, that if you outlaw cocaine then you have to outlaw tobacco too, and that if you say yes, then the state is a pusher state, a criminal state. And what about weapons then? Aren’t they worse? At which point yet another voice—that calm voice with a know-it-all tone that gets stuck on consonants—affirms that weapons are necessary for self-defense, tobacco can be used in moderation, and . . . But in the end it’s an ethical problem, and who are we to curb a individual choice with rules and decrees?

  At this point the voices start to overlap and get all muddled. The confusion of voices always ends up this way. In silence. And I have to start all over again. But I’m convinced that legalization really could be the answer. Because it hits where cocaine finds its fertile terrain, at the law of supply and demand. If the requests were to dry up, everything above them would shrivel, like a flower without water. Is it a gamble? A fantasy? The ravings of a monster? Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s another fragment of the abyss that few have the courage to face.

  For me the word “narco-capitalism” has become a ball of cud that continues to swell. I can’t swallow it; every time I try it goes down the wrong way, and I risk choking to death. All the words I chew on stick to that cud, and the blob expands, like a tumor. I’d like to swallow it down so that it can be attacked by gastric acid. I would like to melt down this word and grab the heart of it. But I can’t. Besides, it’s pointless, becau
se I already know I would find a grain of white powder. Of cocaine. Regardless of the policies and seizures the demand for cocaine will always be huge: The faster the world moves, the more there’s cocaine; the less time there is for stable relationships, for authentic exchanges, the more there’s coke.

  I calm down; I have to calm down. I lie down and stare at the ceiling. I’ve collected quite a few ceilings over the years. From those so close to your nose that you can touch them if you stretch out your neck, to those so high up you have to squint to see if they’re frescos or humidity stains you’re looking at. I stare at the ceiling and imagine the entire globe. The world is a round ball of dough that is rising. It’s rising because of petroleum. It’s rising because of coltan. It’s rising because of gas. It’s rising because of the web. If you removed all these ingredients, the dough would risk falling, collapsing. But there’s one ingredient that works faster than all the others and that everyone wants. Cocaine. That plant that connects South America and Italy. Like an elastic band across the Atlantic, an elastic that can stretch infinitely without ever breaking. The roots there, the leaves here. Coke is the ingredient without which there could be no dough. Just as with flour, which in Italy and in South America is categorized by zeros, depending on its purity: The more zeros, the purer it is.

  Zeros like wounds through which to see the world. Zeros like abysses you could sink into.