Breathe
By Yuriria Rodríguez Castro
To Father Marcelo, murdered in Chiapas
To the victims of organized crime
The trial of Genaro Garcia Luna is insignificant in comparison to the destructive bond between Mexico and the United States that is summed up in how we have killed each other throughout the history of both countries; it is an open secret that the authorities of both nations used to conceal: that the drug trafficking industry is the main source of income. Centuries have passed and legality is not the best business to keep us together.
Mexican drug trafficking managed to penetrate all areas of Mexican political and social life, first it was called smuggling, a phenomenon that made New Spain flourish, because everything was trafficked in the midst of a hypocritical and puritanical society, even the writer Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz bought books, musical instruments and scientists to the New Spain smugglers, The Baroque would not have been possible without illicit trade and criminal organizations, but neither would the war of independence have been consolidated, nor an irregular army for the Mexican revolution, which historians such as Leslie Bethell consider to be one of the factors that made these armed struggles possible.
But Mexico is proud of what its violence produces to the point of pretending that its earnings from tourism are due to the paradisiacal places and archaeological ruins, with income amounting to about 30,809 million dollars, something like one of the activities that leaves more profits in the presumably formal economy, because according to official information in this 2024 tourism represents about 8 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), with all and catastrophic hurricanes in the areas of greatest affluence.
Something I insist to my disciples is the demonstration that organized crime can have non-criminal activities in the formal economy that do not represent an apparent crime, but are sustained by criminal activities. Even so, there is no shortage of people who believe the supposed utopian version that the beauty of our country alone attracts foreign tourists, to whom we sell drugs inside and outside the country.
Next we will see how the geographical points of more tourism and tradition in Mexico coincide with the headquarters of organized crime and a route of excesses in lawless regions that make us much more attractive than our piles of ancient stones and the most paradisiacal places that other countries also have at a lower cost, only they lack our offer of narcotics and party of unlimited violence without legal restriction: "Feel the freedom to die in ecstasy. We are the country of the dead at any time of the year", should be the tourist slogan. So, welcome to the remittances from drug traffickers who end up as drug dealers or money launderers in the United States, as well as all that drug tourism that has witnessed cases of guests dying from overdoses in their rooms, calling them "isolated cases", instead of thoroughly investigating what hotel employees and businessmen, as well as government authorities, have done to prevent drugs from arriving as room service, as if they were ordering a club sandwich.
Drug trafficking had traffickers in the Mexican presidency since its beginnings and therefore has its progenitor in the State:President Abelardo Rodriguez was the first state smuggler who flooded the US with alcohol during Prohibition in the 1920s, but the short-lived president also extended gambling and casinos in the Agua Caliente Hotel, which some sources say was part of his alliances with Al Capone, Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky. Then came Lázaro Cárdenas, who temporarily and briefly legalized drugs, releasing drug dealers from prison in March 1940, while making Mazatlán official as a smuggling port -although unofficially it had been so since the Viceroyalty- thus turning all of Sinaloa into a poppy plantation at the service of the U.S. Marines. There is even a declassified document with Cárdenas' signature that historian Luis Astorga published in his book Drogas sin fronteras (Drugs Without Borders).
The internal relationship between the Mexican State and the drug trafficking business continued to be evidenced in the family tree of the inevitable marriage between Mexico and the United States, where the US had always thought it could control this dysfunctional marriage, until recently when fentanyl is the most uncontrollable and genocidal drug of extermination, producing more casualties among its own than any other of its wars or pandemics. If COVID-19 were a criminal group, it would be lost because of its ineffectiveness in ending the lives of U.S. citizens compared to Mexican criminal syndicates.
The U.S. has been getting the drug in its country from Mexican hands since at least the 1990s, suffice it to mention the first black tar heroin dealers - of the worst and deadliest quality - introduced by the Xalisco boys, as reported by journalist Sam Quinones in his book Tierra de sueños. The true story of the opiate epidemic in the United States.
The Boys of Xalisco - from the Nayarit town of that name, a region now controlled by the Jalisco Cartel - not only exported the drug to the US, but even to dealers, who were sent as temporary laborers to distribute via text message to mobile devices this heroin that is the immediate antecedent of the experiment with fentanyl, which would later be exploited by Chapo Guzman's own sons.
However, in Mexico the foreign and national addict can also get all kinds of drugs. Let's not fool ourselves anymore; it is enough to mention some examples such as the hippie movement and the waves of addicts that turned border cities like Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua into their lawless and easily bribed urderground center; to others where shamanism, mushrooms, nudism and marijuana made drug addiction something picturesque, such is the case of Oaxaca in Zipolite and Mazunte, as well as the mushroom route in the State of Mexico and that copy of excesses that was the Avándaro Festival (Tanantongo, mushroom capital), trying to emulate Woodstock; or geographical points where the desert and peyote promised an introspective journey in San Luis Potosí, Sonora and Chihuahua; the same happened with the marijuana that arrived in Veracruz from the Spanish Conquest coming from the African slave regions, or the role of the port of Mazatlan in the smuggling coming from Europe, which dates back to the viceroyalty; or Acapulco with the local hippies, the discotheques full of cocaine first, then heroin and the hallucinogenic trips recorded in the literature of the Onda; not to mention the Mexican capital, especially neighborhoods such as Tepito, which was already famous since pre-Hispanic times for its marginal commerce and street vending, characteristic of the fayuqueros, which later became a drug distribution center.
Nor can we leave out the opium dens in the Chinatown in the historic center of the then Federal District, now Mexico City; or the large neighborhoods such as Tacubaya, where everything was also traded without restriction and in the vicinity of which the La Castañeda asylum was installed to isolate delirious addicts among the insane, As well as the Roma neighborhood where the sex tourism of the Zona Rosa accompanied the drugs from the 60s until the heyday of cocaine in the 80s, just read the chronicle of Mexican journalist Guillermo Osorno, who narrates the nightlife of the Red Zone turned pink by the closet and the gay subculture in his book Tengo que morir todas las noches (I have to die every night).
This is how the hippies and hipsters, that alternative tourism of the countercultural movements such as the Beat Generation, stopped arriving to give way to the neophyte and reggaeton arrival of the sprin breakers: naked in the swimming pools, bathed in alcohol and drugs, while they are seen dancing to the rhythm in the five star hotels(all included) of Mazatlan, Cancun, Puerto Vallarta, Oaxaca, as well as on the beaches of Colima and Nayarit; then it is demonstrated that natural paradises and our ancestral culture are not one of our main economic attractors; we must not fool ourselves anymore, it is drug tourism and the migrations of drug trafficking.
When I was a drug addict
In my upcoming book Theory of Violence I accept that as a teenager, almost a child, I was addicted to drugs, especially opiates, methamphetamines and marijuana. I was in art high school when I had to travel with my family to Mazatlan, I remember being too afraid to do what I did on other occasions of hiding drugs in a sanitary napkin, partly because the dose would not be enough, but mostly because after 9-11 all the checks became stricter.
I confess that I escaped from the hotel to the popular area of the market and I was shamelessly asking where I could get drugs and they sent me to the popular beach. It was starting to get dark and between anxiety and adrenaline I broke out in a cold sweat: an underage girl alone on the beach where there were no hotels nearby; I stood for about 3 minutes and saw a boatman nearby, I asked him if he could get me drugs and he said yes, he even offered me cocaine, but I was afraid to risk more money that he would leave and never come back, so I preferred to risk buying weed; no more than 20 minutes passed and he returned with my order.
Back in the then Mexico City, I met many neighborhoods that had the facade of being dedicated to street dealing, but they sold all kinds of drugs, especially crystal meth. Even now, completely rehabilitated, I can't forget that in one of those neighborhoods with closet doors and rooms the size of a closet, there was a one-eyed girl selling drugs and the head of that group of drug dealers was a very pretty blonde woman. Seeing that girl selling me drugs was one of the most painful experiences that made me decide to make a 360-degree turn in my life, because it made me confront my own childhood trapped in the consumption of narcotics. I am sincere because I think it is important to make personal changes an example for those who think that in Mexico there are no addicts, much less national addicts; with this I mean that it is very easy to get drugs in Mexico. I know it since then and now that I am no longer an addict, I know dealers and I know that new technologies allow them to hide their activities better, as well as to make delivery times more efficient, but I also know that those same social networks sometimes make them vulnerable.
To get out of my addictions, I dropped out of school for three years before, I rehabilitated myself with a lot of discipline and therapy, then I not only finished school, but that past and another very tragic episode personally, decided me to turn that experience into a conscious, intellectual and academic struggle, so I got a doctorate to specialize in the investigation of criminal phenomena. But when I was still a child and began to use hard drugs like crystal or opium, I remember stages in Mexico that seemed unreal, like when President Carlos Salinas and then Ernesto Zedillo, aligned themselves with the drug war campaign that came from U.S. President Ronald Reagan to the anti-drug policy of the Clintons, as well as I can still remember the first campaigns "Live without drugs" to the rhythm of rap on Mexican television, I also remember that Raul Salinas de Gortari, the president's brother, was arrested for illicit enrichment and money laundering, as well as the murder of Luis Donaldo Colosio and the arrest of the governor of Tabasco, Mario Villanueva, for being considered an ally of drug traffickers. All this happened while my career as a child actress was cut short by the use of narcotics that pushed me to take drugs even in vacant lots and dark alleys. I also don't forget the damage I did to my parents, especially my mother, who chose to tolerate me getting high at home instead of worrying about where her daughter would be.
That decade of the 90s was the beginning of the violent chaos caused by drug trafficking in Mexico, because it was also in that confusing period when the terrorist attack in the Guadalajara airport that killed Cardinal Posadas Ocampo took place and where the first transnational drug trafficking organizations of the Arellano Felix and Chapo Guzman's group were involved, In their confrontation with the Arellano family mafia, they broke for the first time the "pact" with Mexican politicians that delimited tolerance zones and precise limits so that violence would not reach society. We now know that this pact was abolished. Between 1998 and the beginning of 2000, many teenagers like me fell into addictions, while the official discourse was that in our country drugs were only passing through, but supposedly they did not stay to generate a market of addicts, nor did they attack society as it happened in the streets of Colombia where civilian targets were attacked. How sorry I am now to say that organized crime gets involved with any of us, so much so that I am writing these lines against time, with the feeling that I am late, that they are killing those who denounce them without being able to stop and think about the casualties. In any case, I would like to clarify that my denunciation is not particular, but generalized. We all are and have been responsible for this criminal system.
Drug trafficking, the prodigal son of the Mexican State
Let's continue with this family story where the State created an insolent son who emancipated himself and now, instead of visiting his father's house to bring something in return to the old regime, he goes and charges him for an apartment. Organized crime is even parricidal, the example is in that negotiator called García Luna who today is serving a 38-year sentence in a US prison.
The Mexican State never had a healthy relationship with its prodigal son organized crime; this was like almost every violent relationship in our family culture, because it is known that even between lovers or boyfriends when a relationship leaves you only the possibility of being victim or executioner, independence or love will never be possible, the only thing they can share are feelings of violence such as guilt, jealousy, fear, threat, codependence, or the "mooring" of those who even practice witchcraft to stay together or separate with the same violence that always united them. This is how it was from the beginning that the Mexican State had its drug trafficking offspring tied up in a dark room with childish abuses, but one day this child grew up; we can't say that he matured, but rather that the fear, subjugation and cruelty he received accumulated into resentment and one day he showed his abuser father that he had learned enough to be an abuser by his own means, so he tried to be cruel and violent without asking his father to be his provider, This stage occurred during the Vicente Fox government, when the drug trafficking emancipated itself without achieving its independence, because it only demonstrated that it could supply violence and drugs without daddy's permission, repeating and even improving the violence that his father taught him.
At that point, the son seems to do it all alone: He rapes, extorts and kills; he will even kill the father if necessary, but without breaking ties with the paternal family because in Mexico "the family is the omertá and is the most important thing", even if he kills slowly or quickly, that family that is now at the service of this retarded adolescent and in constant rebellion, that family that was once his manipulative executioner by using him as his camel - the pawn of drug trafficking - is now kneeling and at his orders; now the roles have changed: the father State is the mistreated and unloved son of the drug trafficker.
Organized crime in Mexico is the story of a deceitful emancipating revolution, because strictly speaking it would be the most successful institution created and protected by the State itself in practically all its governments: it is a son who reached adulthood with childish and vengeful feelings, a son who already earns more than his father, who gives him orders and moves him as he pleases, but who is not self-sufficient because he still needs the father's house to cook the drugs and move them to the neighbor. This son now subjugates the father, charges him a floor fee in his own home, so he does not let go of the key to the house, the garage, the transport and still resorts to his father's endorsement. The paternal State used to be called PRI, then PAN, now MORENA; the first was the biological father, the following were his stepfathers.
The son does not change, he is still in charge, the State does, it is increasingly degraded in its already practically symbolic political authority, since governments and parties may change, but when he takes the chair at the head of the long table of that house called Mexico, this idiot father knows -whomever the one who will occupy it may be- that at the other end will be that little tyrant that he himself miseducated, That child, as abused as he is pampered, is now in charge and against this relationship there is nothing else to do but pretend that he is not his, that he never was, that he can even get a DNA test because the guilty party was the other corrupt government, and then the biological father will say that he never wanted him, that he was a forced child, that his stepfathers were the best ones to adopt him, but nobody will recognize him as his own, and in this eternal denial is that we will not be able to fight the most demonstrable causes of this ailment. Then, the U.S. State that asked us for that son as a proof of love to maintain our powerfully unhealthy relationship, will continue to deny its responsibility with ridiculous judgments in the cinematic style of The Joker 2.
This is how scapegoat after scapegoat will pay for all this without resolving anything of substance and will only further aggravate a crisis of insecurity and drug trafficking that leaves both States with a satisfactory economic or political situation, for which we cannot accept mutual responsibilities that would allow us to reduce the human losses and the undeniable violence.
We will continue to blame ourselves thanks to that intimate enemy that is drug trafficking, that son that governs us with its violence and death; We will continue blaming ourselves without assuming responsibility, we will continue making our borders a diaspora, we will continue denying that terrorism is already part of the repertoire of this offspring, we will continue making a sort of Gaza strip in each Mexican region where drug trafficking dominates, we will continue offering sacrificial lambs to be condemned in U.S. territory, while the vanity of evil is judged in García Luna who recalls that Eichmann in Jerusalem and the description of his bureaucratic perversity made by Hannah Arendt.
Other gray officials and other colorful drug traffickers will be tried, while everyone screams in ecstasy that the drug party will continue. Our people will continue to die from drug violence and theirs will die there with the drug that our drug traffickers cook and sell them to consume in a much more deadly, but much more discreet way than all the opiates and methamphetamines combined.
Then everything will remain in the shadow of the genocidal consciences of these two paternalistic States -Mexico and the United States- that do not want to go to therapy, that do not recognize that they are at the center of the problem, although the problems are within us and accusing, making arrests and spectacular operations will not solve anything.
The U.S. already has almost all the leaders of what is left of the Arellano Felix family, practically everything that survived of the Beltran Leyva family, almost the entire Sinaloa organization chart, even the family's uncle-in-law, an irrelevant Garcia Luna, and what's the point if these parents don't prosecute themselves? It is of no use if these children already have their own equally resentful offspring, with similar subjugation and equally broken self-esteem, it is these "cell" children who are now eager to empower themselves in a never-ending generational relay.
The Beltrán Leyva no longer exist, but their sons Los Ardillos and Los Rojos are like Cain and Abel disputing routes and passenger trucks like those taken by the Ayotzinapa students; the hegemony of the Michoacan family is over and in some regions of the State of Mexico there are cells of this group (organic sons) operating in the collection of money; in theory, the Sinaloa mafia of Chapo Guzmán and "Los Chapitos" is over, but some survivors of Ismael Zambada's family branch could dispute with what is left of Guzmán Loera's sons; leaders and operators of the CJNG have been captured, but the structure continues to consolidate. The descendant cells of these apparently extinct groups kill religious leaders, cattle ranchers, industrialists, environmental activists, journalists, lawyers, judges, prosecutors, dozens of mayoral candidates, and those they could not kill before the election, they kill them a few days later as happened with the mayor of Chilpancingo.
The criminal groups of before and not so long ago - the Arellano Felix, then the Sinaloa Cartel, La Familia Michoacana, Los Zetas, Gulf Cartel and Jalisco Cartel - were thought possible in the north and west of the country, But in just two decades they had their offspring now rebelling with more violence than they themselves can inflict in regions as unthinkable as the Mexican capital and more recently in El Bajío, as well as, incredibly, in Chiapas and Quintana Roo.
These fathers of organized crime that at the time we misnamed "cartels" - they are not because they have neither the respect for a hierarchical authority, nor the permanence of the links that a pyramidal structure demands -, now suffer what their father the State suffered with them and in the same way, they cannot control their multiple descendants that reproduced themselves only in Mexico City in La Unión Tepito, Cartel de Tláhuac, Fuerza Anti Unión, Los Rodolfos, Los Canchola, Los Tanzanios, Los Maceros, Ronda 88, Los Molina, Juan Balta, El Maestrín and La Nueva Familia Michoacana, just to mention a few, because faster than almost any organism or system, criminal cells reproduce by beating me in speed of thought and writing.
The Sinaloa Cartel and the CJNG saw the boom in the global migratory phenomenon as a growth opportunity for their business, since extortion often brings in more money than drug sales; Thus, human beings are merchandise for kidnapping and bribery, where groups such as Los Pelones, the Caborca Cartel, La Familia Valencia Salgado, Pura Gente Nueva, Los Huistas, Los Maras of the MS-13 and MS-18, Los Motonetos, and the Chamula Cartel are fighting over an ethnic diaspora that separates and allies with each other under the name of the Chiapas-Guatemala Cartel (CCyG). Although it seems almost unimaginable, Chamula and Tzotzil indigenous people displaced by the migratory waves, who used to resign themselves with pacifist abnegation to almost everything, now ride motorcycles and work as hired killers to survive the violence, as they find in increasing it the only way to survive, eat and protect themselves.
We will see more and more "founding fathers" of drug trafficking of the so-called "cartels" and public officials linked to criminal activities parading in American courts because some strategy like that of Felipe Calderon bet that the big cartel controls the small one and it turned out that no, it was asymmetric and the small fish swallowed the shark, while Mexicans in different regions continue to die in criminal attacks and Americans continue to lose their lives from fentanyl overdoses.
The 38 years of imprisonment of García Luna will not be enough of an example and increasingly it seems that there is no useful example to inhibit the emergence of a new generation. There is always a generational replacement at the service of drug trafficking, at the service of criminal violence. Surely, as I write these lines, another criminal cell will emerge, even in the most remote places of Mexico, now even in not so urbanized areas, as has happened in Chiapas. Poor our countries so trapped within themselves and embracing the same tragic destiny.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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