Cartel Quotes

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

He didn't want to give the cartel any time to persuade Emiliana into accepting a more enticing offer. He had reservations about her loyalty and feared she might make a deal without Elpidio's consent.

See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true.

She had tried to steer me towards vertiginous heels again - why are these people so incredibly keen on crippling their female customers? I began to wonder if cobblers and chiropractors had established some fiendish cartel.

We have nothing to fear but fear itself," Otto replied. "Oh, and a megalomaniacal headmaster, the world's deadliets assassin, giant mutated plant monsters, an international cartel of supervillains, and the security forces of every country on earth, but other than that...just fear.

Violence was a slippery slope, lubricated by a lot of blood, if history had any lessons to teach.

The spring breeze felt like the warm breath of a child on Kumiko’s face. It played delicately with her hair like tiny fingers, and made the trees whisper a breathless song.

Hungry stomachs growl the same tune.

The regular choreography, entrances and exits of blooms in stages such that the garden looked like an ever-evolving carousel of swirling rainbows and radiant butterflies, seemed condensed. All of the flowers still obeyed some silent urgent command to make their debut. But this year, it definitely unfolded more quickly, as if racing to meet a new compelling deadline.

The optimism was like the sun after a long spell of clouds and rain, a euphoric rush which produced both envy and awe in anyone who had become jaded, resigned, who had given up on their dreams.

Even adults who were stiffened by the starch of their miserable lives, for whom breaking the stony discipline of austere and judgmental intolerance was usually off the table, melted in the magical luminescence and energetic charm of the pre-pubescent Ruka.

The myth of "free choice" begins with "free market" and "free trade". When five transnational corporations control the seed market, it is not a free market, it is a cartel.

... as long as American life was something to be escaped from, the cartel would always be assured a bottomless pool of new customers.

It was the fundamental bifurcation of the masses of human meat into two starkly opposite classes: the haves and the have-nots. The have-nots had barely anything. The haves had it all. The haves had everything except concern and compassion for the have-nots, who they regarded as little more than cockroaches.

It's obsequious little nicety-nice girls like me who allow assholes to run the world: Miss Harlot O'Harlots, billionaire phony tree huggers, hypocrite drug-snorting, weed-puffing peace activists who fund the mass-murdering drug cartels and perpetuate crushing poverty in dirt-poor banana republics. It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.

Keep The Drama In Your Books, Not Your Life." - The Cartel Publications.

Oh dios mio, she makes me burn, she makes me need. She is etching herself into mi alma

Our fate lies in the hands of the things we love, and sometimes the things we love are the things that lead us to the destruction of ourselves. r.m. drake

Somewhere along the line, it occurred to him that he hadn't spoken to Virgil Flowers. He'd probably taken the day off, and knowing Flowers, he'd done it in a boat. The thing about Flowers was, in Lucas's humble opinion, you could send him out for a loaf of bread and he'd find an illegal bread cartel smuggling in heroin-saturated wheat from Afghanistan. Either that, or he'd be fishing in a muskie tournament, on government time. You had to keep an eye on him.

Maybe money can’t buy happiness, but it can rent it for a long time.

It's too late, mate. There's no saving someone once the cartel has them in the crosshairs. You just fucking pray." Nick popped the handle on his door and drew his gun. "I'm Catholic. I don't pray, I just ask for forgiveness after.

When you ask people, “What’s America’s longest war?” they usually answer “Vietnam” or amend that to “Afghanistan,” but it’s neither. America’s longest war is the war on drugs.

There are two ways to lose you sanity in Juarez. One is to believe the violence results from a cartel war. The other is to claim to understand what is behind each murder.

CIA. NSA. FBI. DEA. ICE. Cartels. Mafia. Yakuza. Bratva

At the highest levels of the medical cartel, vaccines are a top priority because they cause a weakening of the immune system. I know that may be hard to accept, but its true. The medical cartel, at the highest level, is not out to help people, it is out to harm them, to weaken them. To kill them. At one point in my career, I had a long conversation with a man who occupied a high government position in an African nation. He told me that he was well aware of this. He told me that WHO is a front for these depopulation interests

-Cuando veníamos en los coches hacia aquí, he visto un par de carteles que anunciaban un evento nocturno cera de ese Dumbledor. -Drumnadrochit -la corrigió Bryn-. Dumbledor es el profesor de Harry Potter. -Sí, lo que tú digas. Lo que vi en el cartel es algo relacionado con una especie de autocine.. Róta y Bryn

Drug cartels have taken the driver’s seat, training our young men and women on how best to self destruct, while the larger community watches on helplessly as these bands of renegades lead our people towards the path of self annihilation

Ahora me gusta, me gusta tanto, ahora soy yo, reincidentemente yo, el idiota perfecto en su idiotez que no sabe que es idiota y goza perdido en su goce, hasta que la primera frase inteligente lo devuelva a la conciencia de su idiotez y lo haga buscar presuroso un cigarrillo con manos torpes, mirando al suelo, comprendiendo y a veces aceptando porque también un idiota tiene que vivir, claro que hasta otro pato u otro cartel, y así siempre.

This is not a war on drugs. This is a war on the poor. This is a war on the poor and the powerless, the voiceless and the invisible,

I have the body of an 18-year-old, but it's in the trunk of my car and it's starting to smell.

That’s when I met Adelita.” “And what? Klan Romeo and Cartel Juliet fell madly in love?” Ky’s shitty attitude pissed me the fuck off.

Make no mistake. The greatest destroyer of ecology. The greatest source of waste, depletion and pollution. The greatest purveyor of violence, war, crime, poverty, animal abuse and inhumanity. The greatest generator of personal and social neurosis, mental disorders, depression, anxiety. Not to mention the greatest source of social paralysis, stopping us from moving into new methodologies for personal health, global sustainability and progress on this planet, is not some corrupt government or legislation. Not some rogue corporation or banking cartel. Not some flaw of human nature and not some secret cabal that controls the world. It is the socioeconomic system itself at its very foundation.

He tells his guys, you change the oil in a Nissan, you just can't kill it. You'll die before that car will.

Wherever something is wrong, something is too big. If the stars in the sky or the atoms of uranium disintegrate in spontaneous explosion, it is not because their substance has lost its balance. It is because matter has attempted to expand beyond the impassable barriers set to every accumulation. Their mass has become too big. If the human body becomes diseased, it is, as in cancer, because a cell, or a group of cells, has begun to outgrow its allotted narrow limits. And if the body of a people becomes diseased with the fever of aggression, brutzdity, collectivism, or massive idiocy, it is not because it has fallen victim to bad leadership or mental derangement. It is because huma beings, so charming as individuals or in small aggregations, have been welded into overconcentrated social units such as mobs, unions, cartels, or great powers.

Dagny and Fransisco d'Anconia?" she said, smiling ruefully, in answer to the curiosity of her friends. "Oh no, it's not a romance. It's an international industrial cartel of some kind.

[Author's Note:] When I was sixteen, two of my cousins were brutally raped by four strangers and thrown off a bridge in St. Louis, Missouri. My brother was beaten and also forced off the bridge. I wrote about that horrible crime in my first book, my memoir, A Rip in Heaven. Because that crime and the subsequent writing of the book were both formative experience in my life, I became a person who is always, automatically, more interested in stories about victims than perpetrators. I'm interested in characters who suffer inconceivable hardship, in people who manage to triumph over extraordinary trauma. Characters like Lydia and Soledad. I'm less interested in the violent, macho stories of gangsters and law enforcement. Or in any case, I think the world has enough stories like those. Some fiction set in the world of the cartels and narcotraficantes is compelling and important - I read much of it during my early research. Those novels provide readers with an understanding of the origins of the some of the violence to our south. But the depiction of that violence can feed into some of the worst stereotypes about Mexico. So I saw an opening for a novel that would press a little more intimately into those stories, to imagine people on the flip side of that prevailing narrative. Regular people like me. How would I manage if I lived in a place that began to collapse around me? If my children were in danger, how far would I go to save them? I wanted to write about women, whose stories are often overlooked.

It is a testament to the success of cartels in laundering their images that millions of consumers buy drugs each year without giving a moment’s thought to the fact that they are funding unimaginable suffering

I had a sudden violent daydream of murdering him with a stapler as I started the coffee machine in the kitchen.

dispatcher, Alfredo Suarez, had to check the weather.

In the middle of a war, there’s no room for weakness. Love will get you killed,

But now the cartels murdered a Mexican journalist every few weeks, and Lydia recoiled from her husband’s integrity. It felt sanctimonious, selfish. She wanted Sebastián alive more than she wanted his strong principles.

We judge the street corner hustler or working-class criminal – from East Glasgow to East London – but we see a job as an investment banker, even in firms that launder the profits of drug cartels, fund terrorism, aid the global flow of arms, fuel war, oil spills, land grabs and generally fuck up the planet, as a perfectly legitimate, even aspirational occupation.

Mining might convey an image of industry or technology, but I found this was not the case in the Congo. In the so-called ‘mines’, a brutally primitive process was in place involving what was effectively slave labour clawing minerals from the earth so that they could be shipped to eager cash buyers in the developed world. President Kabila headed what was effectively a cobalt and diamond cartel, while two rival factions (one backed by neighbouring Uganda, the other by Rwanda) divided up the rest of the country’s resources. Crudely, Uganda got gold and timber, and Rwanda got tin and coltan – a mineral used in mobile telephones.

you do not avenge a murder by killing—you avenge it by living.

Seth wasn't the kind of person who made deals with cartels. He was the kind of person who made waffles with whipped cream and bananas.

Pervasive. Anyone with a brain knows there are only two ways to protect yourself and your family. Either stay the hell out of the way, or join the cartels. Well,

Just across the bridge is the gigantic marketplace, the insatiable consumer machine that drives the violence here. North Americans smoke the dope, snort the coke, shoot the heroin, do the meth, and then have the nerve to point south (down, of course, on the map), and wag their fingers at the “Mexican drug problem” and Mexican corruption.

Betrayals start that way, with lies hidden in the shadows of silence.

When the devil comes, he comes on angel’s wings.

Americans take their strength in victories, Mexicans’ strength is in their ability to suffer loss.

Left-wing lesbians are perfectly natural,” Giorgio says, “but there’s something about a right-wing lesbian that’s, I don’t know…almost North American. Sort of Fox News–ish.

Now he seeks truth in silence. He seeks God in the same, although he has come to believe that truth and God are the same. Truth, stillness, and God.

We will go to heaven or we will go to hell, but we will go together.

In matters of the heart, you can’t compete where you don’t compare.

The world’s biggest religion is capitalism: money is our god, greed is our priest, banks are our temples, and shopping is how we express our worship. The world’s biggest cartel is politics: democracy is our god, elections are our priest, voting booths are our temples, and ballots are how we express our worship. The world’s biggest idol is stardom: celebrities are our gods, fame is our priest, tabloids are our temples, and applause is how we express our worship. The world’s biggest faith is hedonism: sex is our god, lust is our priest, brothels are our temples, and fornication is how we express our worship.

The rules of the game have changed. The number of players has increased. New cartels spring up quickly, devouring territories and entire regions. It’s crazy making, all these new cartels. More flexible structures, faster responses, familiarity with new technology, ostentatiously lurid killings, and obscure, pseudoreligious philosophies. It is altogether a new level of frenzy.

Uno empieza siendo idealista, moralmente fuerte, si se quiere, pero entonces la ropa de tu fuerza moral se va desgastando poco a poco hasta que ya no puedes más y haces cosas que nunca pensaste que harías, o no haces cosas que siempre pensaste que harías.

I was a good man once, but there's just no getting past the truth. I began by fighting monsters but in the process, I became one myself. There's no going back. The darkness still lies inside me. Sated by a lake of blood, and a universe of screams, it will always be there, black and brooding evil. AJ Adams, Dark Hunter

So I assume that those of you who are married and thus purchased a diamond for your wife are aware of how evil and corrupt the diamond cartel is. I was not. Apparently, diamonds are almost worthless other than the value attached to them by the silly tramps that DeBeers has brainwashed into thinking 'diamond equals love.' Congratulations, ladies, your quest for the perfect princess cut not only supports terrorism and genocide, but has managed to destroy an entire continent. - speaking of blood diamonds, what the hell is going on here? Everyone is upset about African children losing their limbs? Perhaps I missed their concern about these same children during the Rwandan genocide. Here's a solution: Stop buying diamonds. No no, the avarice of the entitled whore cannot be contained. And if blood diamonds are so fucking bad, why can't I by them at a discount? Or at least get them with a death certificate or an appendage or some sort of cogent backstory that might indicate an actual meaning to this useless little cube of carbon. Clearly the diamond market is broken on multiple levels.

Well, that’s a big chunk of truth, Eddie thinks. The Mexicans have finally found a drug that white trash likes and can afford. And one thing you ain’t never gonna run out of is white trash. That stuff makes itself. They get made in the backseats of junk cars, and then they live in them.

We'd fought and fucked, but I'd never kissed Rip before. At first he froze, completely astonished, and then his arms were synching around me, pulling me close. His lips were warm, firm, and sweetly exploring. It felt absolutely, totally right. I sank into that kiss, feeling as if I'd come home.

He became his own blues song, a Tom Waits loser, a Kerouac saint, a Springsteen hero under the lights of the American highway and the neon glow of the American strip. A fugitive, a sharecropper, a hobo, a cowboy who knows that he’s running out of prairie but rides anyway because there’s nothing left but to ride.

A Philippine-brothel-owning member of the House of Lords was staying at the house of a Spanish Chief Inspector of Police. The Lord was being watched by an American CIA operative who was staying at the house of an English convicted sex offender. The CIA operative was sharing accommodation with an IRA terrorist. The IRA terrorist was discussing a Moroccan hashish deal with a Georgian pilot of Colombia's Medellín Cartel. Organising these scenarios was an ex-MI6 agent, currently supervising the sale of thirty tons of Thai weed in Canada and at whose house could be found Pakistan's major supplier of hashish. Attempting to understand the scenarios was a solitary DEA agent. The stage was set for something.

Suspiro y me muevo a estudiar los carteles de películas: el Sr. Darcy con su mano en la mejilla de Elizabeth hace nada por mí, más que querer escupir. Puede ser que la ame, pero durante toda su vida, Sr. Darcy quiso ser un desgraciado irritable. Edward Cullen, con sus brazos alrededor de Bella protectoramente mientras Jacob mira hacia ellos, me hace querer vomitar. ¿Y ellos llamaron a su bebe Renesme? POR FAVOR. Jack y Rose del Titanic me tienen apretando los puños. Rose debió abandonarlo ese día. Si lo hubiera hecho, podrían haber llegado a la balsa salvavidas. Romeo y Julieta se ven como idiotas para mí ahora. Ellos sabían que no funcionaria. Romeo nunca debería haber vuelto a su balcón. Fue su estúpida culpa. Él lo sabía. Si él simplemente no hubiera intentado, ambos habrían vivido. ¿Y quién bebe estúpido veneno para resolver sus problemas? Lamentable. Patético. Todos ellos.

He who speaks least has the most power.

You can either love,” Pablo says, “or you can talk about it. You can’t do both.

Juárez is surprisingly cold in the winter, miserably hot in the summer, and you just hope that either spring or autumn falls on a weekend so you get to enjoy it.

I am the happily ever after in your twisted tormented tale of your Cinder-fuckin-rella dreams.

Their only weapon is shame, if the powerful can even feel it.

You shop in malls instead of mercados, you watch football instead of fútbol, you become another consumer in a giant machine that consumes consumers.

Don’t you ever want to hurt yourself because you can’t hurt the person who fucked everything up?

But he wasn’t an ordinary man. Somehow I already knew this from our brief interaction earlier. He didn’t avert his eyes or stay away from me.

Giorgio cannot leave a bottle undrunk or an attractive woman unfucked, and those activities tend to get in the way of revolution.

Satan can only tempt you with what you already have.

Life, he muses, always gives you an excuse to take what you want anyway.

Maybe, Keller thinks, I’ve become too used to solitude. Maybe I like it too much.

A man does the right thing, does his duty and does it bravely.

Keller has long believed that you have to be lucky to be good, but not good to be lucky.

Lydia is constantly reminded that her education has no purchase here, that she has no access to the kind of information that has real currency on this journey. Among migrants, everyone knows more than she does. How do you find a coyote, make sure he’s reputable, pay for your crossing, all without getting ripped off? Thankfully, Rebeca is flush with insight. “Loads of people from our village used him before. He was recommended. Because you can’t just pick any coyote. A lot of them will steal your money and then sell you to the cartel, you know?

Emilia typed in her password and checked her inbox. A review by the Secretariat de Gobernación of drug cartel activities across Mexico. A report of a robbery in Acapulco’s poorest barrio neighborhood that would probably never be investigated. Notice of a reward for a child kidnapped in Ixtapa who was almost certainly dead by now. Her phone rang. It was the desk sergeant saying that a Señor Rooker wished to see her. Emilia avoided Rico’s eye as she said, yes, the sergeant could let el señor pass into the detectives’ area. A minute later Rucker was standing by her desk, sweat beaded on his forehead. The starched collar of his shirt was damp. “There’s a head,” he said breathlessly. “Someone’s head in a bucket on the hood of my car.

Adam and I left the party, and we got into bed and tried to get through another episode of the drug cartel show we were watching that everyone said got really good at the end of the third season, but we were only up to the second, and we had existential angst about whether we should be watching something that only promised to be good but wasn’t yet. We agreed the answer was yes, that hope was good, and in those moments—the ones when we endured, the ones where we agreed, the ones where we disagreed and found the other person’s point dumb enough to laugh out loud, the ones where he still agreed to do our fully choreographed wedding dance in the kitchen for no reason at all and to no music, the ones where he showed me a window into how much smarter he was than I was and how even though he was that smart he never needed to flaunt it, the ones where we rolled our eyes at how dumb everyone else was, the ones where he evacuated me from my misery and made me a cheese omelet because I was stoned and wanted something warm and milky, that was when I remembered the most essential thing about Adam and me, which was that I never once doubted if I should be with him.

Nowhere do “politicians” form a more separate and powerful section of the nation than precisely in North America. There, each of the two major parties which alternatively succeed each other in power is itself in turn controlled by people who make a business of politics, who speculate on seats in the legislative assemblies of the Union as well as of the separate states, or who make a living by carrying on agitation for their party and on its victory are rewarded with positions. It is well known how the Americans have been trying for thirty years to shake off this yoke, which has become intolerable, and how in spite of it all they continue to sink ever deeper in this swamp of corruption. It is precisely in America that we see best how there takes place this process of the state power making itself independent in relation to society, whose mere instrument it was originally intended to be. Here there exists no dynasty, no nobility, no standing army, beyond the few men keeping watch on the Indians, no bureaucracy with permanent posts or the right to pensions. And nevertheless we find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends – and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality dominate and plunder it.

Perhaps loneliness—it is that loneliest time of the night, the predawn darkness when the worst dreams come, the sunrise seems far off, and the creatures that inhabit both the real world and the darker edges of the unconscious prowl with the impunity of predators who know that their prey is helpless and alone.

Tell me you don’t want to do those women on Fox News,” Jimena says. “Tell me you don’t,” Giorgio counters. “Anyway, of course I do. I want to convert them through the subversive power of the orgasm.” “So it would be a political act,” Jimena says. “I am willing to sacrifice myself for the cause,” Giorgio answers.

You listen to me and you listen good, girl. I am a dark, twisted, and very fucked up man. Do you know what a sadist is? I don’t give her time to answer. “I enjoy inflicting pain on women. Now granted, I have access to women that enjoy that side of my dark psyche but you, little girl, are treading on very dangerous ground. You are awakening a monster. If you feed that monster, there will be no possibility of caging the beast.

Like a vast, random experiment targeting the environment with health doomed to be collateral damage, chemicals have been released into the air, soil, and water since nineteenth-century industrialism. While some may shrug that the aerial release of chemical nanoparticles and nano-sensors, microprocessors, and biologicals under the classified Project Cloverleaf is just more of the same, nanoparticles able to breach the blood-brain barrier make it uniquely diabolical, as does the global conspiracy of power to turn the entire planet into an electromagnetic grid and plug everyone into it. War has gone corporate and all of life reframed as a battlespace of disposable noncombatants (civilians) redefined as potential “terrorists.” The military is no longer a protector but partnered with giant transnational corporations and wealthy dynastic cartels like that of Big Pharma and Big Oil.

As for corruption, who’s more corrupt—the seller or the buyer? And how corrupt does a society have to be when its citizens need to get high to escape their reality, at the cost of bloodshed and suffering of their neighbors?

Mexico is a lawless place. I don’t care what the UN says, or what the State Department travel advisories tell you. The fact is that Mexico, as a whole, is a narco-state run by powerful regional cartels, with a hollow and largely irrelevant central government that is nothing more than window-dressing to appease the international community. Freedom is for those who can afford it, law is for sale, and what is fair is determined by who is most powerful. That’s the reality of Mexico. Cancun, Playa, Cabo, Puerto Vallarta- they are all much better than the interior of Mexico, but that is only because their survival depends on a steady flow of tourists with money to burn. To protect that, the government does a good job maintaining the appearance of western-style law and order through the direct threat of massive military intervention. Underneath it all, those places are not much different from the rest of Mexico.

the Times says there's a heroin epidemic, Malone thinks, which is only an epidemic of course because now white people are dying. Whites started to get opium-based pills from their physicians: oxycodone, vicodin... But, it was expensive and doctors were reluctant to prescribe too much for exactly the fear of addiction. So the white folks went to the open market and the pills became a street drug. It was all very nice and civilized until the Sinoloa cartel down in Mexico made a corporate decision that it could undersell the big American pharmaceutical companies by raising production of its heroin thereby reducing price. As an incentive, they also increased its potency. The addicted white Americans found that Mexican ... heroin was cheaper and stronger than the pills, and started shooting it into their veins and overdosing. Malone literally saw it happening. He and his team busted more bridge-and-tunnel junkies, suburban housewives and upper Eastside madonnas than they could count....

Food has become a cause of disease rather than a guardian of health in the modern world. Once regarded as the central pillar of life and the most effective of all medicines, food is now a major contributing factor in cancer, heart disease, arthritis , mental illness, and many other pathological conditions. Virtually monopolized by agricultural and industrial cartels, public food supplies, are processed and packaged to produce profits and prolong shelf life, not to promote health and prolong human life. It seems incredible that public health authorities permit the unrestricted use of hydrogenated vegetable oils, refined sugar, chemical preservatives, toxic pesticides, and over 5,000 other artificial food additives that have repeatedly been proven to cause cancer, impair immunity, and otherwise erode human health, while restricting the medical use of nutrients, herbs, acupuncture, fasting, and other traditional therapies that have been shown to prevent and cure the very diseases caused by chemical contaminants in food and water.

It infuriates him, this killing, this death. Infuriating that this is what we’re known for now, drug cartels and slaughter. This my city of Avenida 16 Septembre, the Victoria Theater, cobblestone streets, the bullring, La Central, La Fogata, more bookstores than El Paso, the university, the ballet, garapiñados, pan dulce, the mission, the plaza, the Kentucky Bar, Fred’s—now it’s known for these idiotic thugs. And my country, Mexico—the land of writers and poets—of Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Garro, Jorge Volpi, Rosario Castellanos, Luis Urrea, Elmer Mendoza, Alfonso Reyes—the land of painters and sculptors—Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Gabriel Orozco, Pablo O’Higgins, Juan Soriano, Francisco Goitia—of dancers like Guillermina Bravo, Gloria and Nellie Campobello, Josefina Lavalle, Ana Mérida, and composers—Carlos Chávez, Silvestre Revueltas, Agustín Lara, Blas Galindo—architects—Luis Barragán, Juan O’Gorman, Tatiana Bilbao, Michel Rojkind, Pedro Vásquez—wonderful filmmakers—Fernando de Fuentes, Alejandro Iñárritu, Luis Buñuel, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro—actors like Dolores del Río, “La Doña” María Félix, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Salma Hayek—now the names are “famous” narcos—no more than sociopathic murderers whose sole contribution to the culture has been the narcocorridas sung by no-talent sycophants. Mexico, the land of pyramids and palaces, deserts and jungles, mountains and beaches, markets and gardens, boulevards and cobblestoned streets, broad plazas and hidden courtyards, is now known as a slaughter ground. And for what? So North Americans can get high.

FOR THE VOICELESS by El Niño Salvaje I speak for the ones who cannot speak, for the voiceless. I raise my voice and wave my arms and shout for the ones you do not see, perhaps cannot see, for the invisible. For the poor, the powerless, the disenfranchised; for the victims of this so-called “war on drugs,” for the eighty thousand murdered by the narcos, by the police, by the military, by the government, by the purchasers of drugs and the sellers of guns, by the investors in gleaming towers who have parlayed their “new money” into hotels, resorts, shopping malls, and suburban developments. I speak for the tortured, burned, and flayed by the narcos, beaten and raped by the soldiers, electrocuted and half-drowned by the police. I speak for the orphans, twenty thousand of them, for the children who have lost both or one parent, whose lives will never be the same. I speak for the dead children, shot in crossfires, murdered alongside their parents, ripped from their mothers’ wombs. I speak for the people enslaved, forced to labor on the narcos’ ranches, forced to fight. I speak for the mass of others ground down by an economic system that cares more for profit than for people. I speak for the people who tried to tell the truth, who tried to tell the story, who tried to show you what you have been doing and what you have done. But you silenced them and blinded them so that they could not tell you, could not show you. I speak for them, but I speak to you—the rich, the powerful, the politicians, the comandantes, the generals. I speak to Los Pinos and the Chamber of Deputies, I speak to the White House and Congress, I speak to AFI and the DEA, I speak to the bankers, and the ranchers and the oil barons and the capitalists and the narco drug lords and I say— You are the same. You are all the cartel. And you are guilty. You are guilty of murder, you are guilty of torture, you are guilty of rape, of kidnapping, of slavery, of oppression, but mostly I say that you are guilty of indifference. You do not see the people that you grind under your heel. You do not see their pain, you do not hear their cries, they are voiceless and invisible to you and they are the victims of this war that you perpetuate to keep yourselves above them. This is not a war on drugs. This is a war on the poor. This is a war on the poor and the powerless, the voiceless and the invisible, that you would just as soon be swept from your streets like the trash that blows around your ankles and soils your shoes. Congratulations. You’ve done it. You’ve performed a cleansing. A limpieza. The country is safe now for your shopping malls and suburban tracts, the invisible are safely out of sight, the voiceless silent as they should be. I speak these last words, and now you will kill me for it. I only ask that you bury me in the fosa común—the common grave—with the faceless and the nameless, without a headstone. I would rather be with them than you. And I am voiceless now, and invisible.

Look at the evolution of the price of a kilogram of the drug, as it makes its way from the Andes to Los Angeles. To make that much cocaine, one needs somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 kilograms of dried coca leaves. Based on price data from Colombia obtained by Gallego and Rico, that would cost about $385. Once this is converted into a kilo of cocaine, it can sell in Colombia for $800. According to figures pulled together by Beau Kilmer and Peter Reuter at the RAND Corporation, an American think tank, that same kilo is worth $2,200 by the time it is exported from Colombia, and it has climbed to $14,500 by the time it is imported to the United States. After being transferred to a midlevel dealer, its price climbs to $19,500. Finally, it is sold by street-level dealers for $78,000.10 Even these soaring figures do not quite get across the scale of the markups involved in the cocaine business. At each of these stages, the drug is diluted, as traffickers and dealers “cut” the drug with other substances, to make it go further. Take this into account, and the price of a pure kilogram of cocaine at the retail end is in fact about $122,000.

The cops aren’t the only ones who hunt for cannabis farms in this way: criminals in Birmingham, England, have been caught using drones equipped with infrared cameras to spot hidden grow-sites, to rob or extort the owners. “They are fair game,” a drone-using extortionist told the local Halesowen News. “It is not like I’m using my drone to see if people have nice televisions. I am just after drugs to steal and sell. If you break the law then you enter me and my drone’s world.

Under conditions of extreme deprivation people will continue to grow crops that promise economic relief, and they will continue to trade in those crops and their products. The ultimate beneficiaries are neither the impoverished Afghan or Columbian peasant nor the street-corner pusher in the U.S. ghetto or on Vancouver’s skid row. The illegality of mind-altering substances enriches drug cartels, crime syndicates, and their corrupt enablers among politicians, government officials, judges, lawyers, and police officers around the world. If one set out deliberately to fashion a legal system designed to maximize and sustain the wealth of international drug criminals and their abettors, one could never dream up anything to improve upon the present one—except, perhaps, to add tobacco to the list of contraband substances. That way the traffickers and their allies could profit even more, although it’s unimaginable that their legally respectable counterparts—tax-hungry governments and the nicotine pushers in tobacco company boardrooms—would ever allow that to happen.

The U.S. government has in recent years fought what it termed wars against AIDS, drug abuse, poverty, illiteracy and terrorism. Each of these wars has budgets, legislation, offices, officials, letterhead—everything necessary in a bureaucracy to tell you something is real. —Bruce Jackson Keynote address “Media and War” symposium, University of Buffalo November 17–18, 2003

But the ugly truth is that a huge number of weapons made or sold in the United States go to Mexican cartels. This is an irrefutable fact. Mexico itself has almost no gun stores and weapons factories and gives away few licenses. Almost all weapons in the hands of cartel armies are illegal. In 2008, Mexico submitted the serial numbers from close to six thousand guns they had seized from gangsters to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. About 90 percent, or 5,114 of the weapons, were traced to American gun sellers. The ATF and Obama administration acknowledged America’s responsibility in this tragedy. But the gun lobby still refused to concede the point. What about tens of thousands of other seized weapons in Mexico that hadn’t been traced? gun activists said. The Mexican government, they alleged, was only tracing guns that looked as if they had come from America to sway the debate. So to make it easier to trace weapons seized in Mexico, the ATF introduced a new computer system. Between 2009 and April 2010, this traced another 63,700 firearms to U.S. gun stores.18 And those are only the ones they have captured. People can argue endlessly about the exact percentages, but the underlying fact is that tens of thousands of guns go from American stores to Mexican gangsters.

I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen—I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theatres from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, life is a cruel joke and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

The conversation swings from the brothers Bush to the war in Iraq to the emerging rights of Muslim women to postfeminism to current cinema—Mexican, American, European (Giorgio goes spasmodically mad over Bu-ñuel), and back to Mexican again—to the relative superiority of shrimp over any other kind of taco to the excellence of Ana’s paella, to Ana’s childhood, then to Jimena’s, to the changing role of motherhood in a postindustrial world, to sculpture, then painting, then poetry, then baseball, then Jimena’s inexplicable (to Pablo) fondness for American football (she’s a Dallas Cowboys fan) over real (to Pablo) fútbol, to his admittedly adolescent passion for the game, to the trials of adolescence itself and revelations over the loss of virginity and why we refer to it as a loss and now Óscar and Tomás, arms over each other’s shoulders, are chanting poetry and then Giorgio picks up a guitar and starts to play and this is the Juárez that Pablo loves, this is the city of his soul—the poetry, the passionate discussions (Ana makes her counterpoints jabbing her cigarette like a foil; Jimena’s words flow like a gentle wave across beach sand, washing away the words before; Giorgio trills a jazz saxophone while Pablo plays bass—they are a jazz combo of argument), the ideas flowing with the wine and beer, the lilting music in a black night, this is the gentle heartbeat of the Mexico that he adores, the laughter, the subtle perfume of desert flowers that grow in alleys alongside garbage, and now everyone is singing— México, está muy contento, Dando gracias a millares… —and this is his life—this is his city, these are his friends, his beloved friends, these people, and if this is all that there is or will be, it is enough for him, his world, his life, his city, his people, his sad beautiful Juárez… —empezaré de Durango, Torreón y Ciudad de

Heroin has a frightening reputation, and rightly so: the margin between an effective dose and an overdose is narrower than that of any other mainstream narcotic. A paper in Addiction, an academic journal, estimated the quantity of various drugs needed to get an average person high versus the amount required to kill them.5 In the case of alcohol, it found that the ratio was about ten to one—in other words, if a couple of shots of vodka are enough to make you tipsy, twenty shots might kill you, if you can keep them down. Cocaine, it found, was slightly safer, with a ratio of fifteen to one. LSD has a ratio of 1,000 to one, whereas marijuana is safest of all: it is impossible to die of overdose, as far as anyone can tell. Even with the edibles, there is no evidence that one can die of overdose—you simply have a stronger and longer-lasting effect than you may have wanted. For heroin, the ratio between an effective dose and a deadly one is just six to one. Given that batches vary dramatically in their purity, each shot is a game of Russian roulette. Dealers