Breathe
By Yuriria Rodríguez Castro
- To Karla, because in those years love opened my eyes to terror and after surviving together, I could not close my heart or my eyes anymore.
"Life appears to me as an instinct of growth, of survival, of accumulation of strength, of power; where the will to power is lacking, decadence appears. I affirm that in all the highest values of humanity this will is missing, that under the most sacred names prevail values of decadence, nihilistic values...", The Antichrist, by Friedrich Nietzsche.
At least a decade ago we anticipated that terrorism and drug trafficking would be one and the same criminal behavior, leading to the designation of certain criminal organizations as terrorists by the United States.
Since then, we noticed that Mexico had to work on this phenomenon in a preventive manner and that the concept of "cartel" did not define Mexican drug trafficking in the 21st century. This vision is not new: intelligence reports, legislations and many books have been written understanding the terrorist phenomenon within drug trafficking, the only different thing is that the Mexican State has always denied it, so Donald Trump does not adopt an aggressive criminal policy in this sense, he only recognizes the symbiosis of terrorism and drug trafficking.
On January 20, what we already knew would happen came true: Donald Trump, president-elect of the United States, signed the decree designating Mexican drug trafficking groups, the Mara Salvatrucha (M-13) and the Aragua Train as terrorists.
If Trump had not decreed it, perhaps it would be considered a triumph of the rule of law, but it is difficult to recognize a legal success in a president so questionable for his characteristic illegal behavior, although it would seem that this double facet makes him the ideal for these times of famous impostors where a criminal in power, at the top of the presidency, is the only one who boasts of returning peace to the world, and the cruel irony is that this is probably the case.
Trump seems to be the criminal most feared by criminals: it could be that the end of violence is in the hands of the violent, who resolve differences with almost identical threats.
Tariffs or floor fees
Reactions in Mexico range from nationalistic and sovereign messages, to a discreet support from those who have suffered the siege of drug trafficking with murders, disappearances, and "cobro de piso".
Three days before his death and from the hospital, the specialist Alejandro Hope said at the presentation of my book Transnational Terrorism and Drug Trafficking in Mexico: "It will be a matter of time before the U.S. government designates Mexican drug traffickers as terrorists, as Dr. Yuriria's book points out". The link with Hope was brief but very clear; since then we became even more convinced to be firm in pointing out the consequences that this would bring.
From Al Qaeda, then with the emergence of ISIS (self-proclaimed "Islamic State") and in the midst of this terrorism that was advancing with the help of new communication and information technologies, an extreme and very mediatic violence of Mexican drug trafficking burst in, through a global campaign of videos with beheadings, when they became a single criminal phenomenon: terrorism and drug trafficking were already inseparable, but the complicated thing was to know - to date we do not know precisely - who emulated whom; what was evident was that in an almost identical manner, drug trafficking organizations and Islamic terrorism exploded with macabre images, surpassing the public murder of classic terrorism.
This was the giant step in terms of transnational and global criminal organizations, something that not even the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 would have achieved on its own; those emblematic attacks would be irrelevant without the sustained accompaniment of videos and photographs on the Internet with explicit messages of beheadings and dismemberments.
Previously, financial and operational links between Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Los Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel had been confirmed; some have been extensively documented in previous investigations by international agencies. However, all of this did not come to concern the United States until fentanyl became something akin to a chemical weapon disguised as a recreational narcotic.
Terrorism has pretended for centuries to be the opposite of the State, but in practice it ends up favoring the States it attacks, so there is no State terrorism if terror does not approve of it: what terrorism questions is the effectiveness of the State without effective violence.
If the crimes were isolated, we could not speak of organized crime, but for group crime to take place, there must be a criminal group and not a solitary attack; another evasion invented by the United States when it tries to reduce the attack to the behavior of a "lone wolf". Not even in homicide motivated by impulse and emotion could the absolute solitude of the murderer be assured, since his mind is also plagued by ideologies and thoughts that are not his own. This is why terrorism is not a criminal organization, but the amalgam of any powerful criminal organization.
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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