Narcos Quotes

Isn’t that funny?’ Ramy glanced sideways at him. ‘The British are turning my homeland into a narco-military state to pump drugs into yours. That’s how this empire connects us.

My birthday was right around the corner. I’d be seventeen and have my full power, and then I’d see that Narco hothead again. Treaty Act my ass. ~ Dez Harkly

In the new American ghetto, the nightmare engine is bubble economics, a kind of high-tech casino scam that kills neighborhoods just like dope does, only the product is credit, not crack or heroin. It concentrates the money of the population in just a few hands with brutal efficiency, just like narco-business, and just as in narco-business the product itself, debt, steadily demoralizes the customer to the point where he’s unable to prevent himself from being continually dominated.

El tamaño del narcotráfico en México equivale a la magnitud de la corrupción.

The joke Colombians told was that God had made their land so beautiful, so rich in every natural way, that it was unfair to the rest of the world; He had evened the score by populating it with the most evil race of men.

The two most popular opium brands here are called Patna and Malwa. Both regions in India. From my home straight to yours, Birdie. Isn’t that funny?’ Ramy glanced sideways at him. ‘The British are turning my homeland into a narco-military state to pump drugs into yours. That’s how this empire connects us.

Mejor que se mataran entre ellos. La ley darwiniana aplicada a la lucha contra el narco. Que entre ellos limpiaran la basurita.

Violence was no longer a way of control but a basic language of communication.

He understood that alienated youth can be won by little more than a decent salary and a sense of purpose.

The Doper's Dream Last night I dreamed I was plugged right in To a bubblin' hookah so high, When all of a sudden some Arab jinni Jump up just a-winkin' his eye. 'I'm here to obey all your wishes,' he told me. As for words I was trying to grope. 'Good buddy,' I cried, 'you could surely oblige me By turning me on to some dope!' With a bigfat smile he took ahold of my hand, And we flew down the sky in a flash, And the first thing I saw in the land where he took me Was a whole solid mountain of hash! All the trees was a-bloomin' with pink 'n' purple pills, Whur the Romilar River flowed by, To the magic mushrooms as wild as a rainbow, So pretty that I wanted to cry. All the girls come to greet us, so sweet in slow motion, Mourning glories woven into their hair, Bringin' great big handfuls of snowy cocaine, All their dope they were eager to share. We we dallied for days, just a-ballin' and smokin', In the flowering Panama Red, Just piggin' on peyote and nutmeg tea, And those brownies so kind to your head. Now I could've passed that good time forever, And I really was fixing to stay, But you know that jinni turned out, t'be a narco man, And he busted me right whur I lay. And he took me back to a cold, cold world 'N' now m'prison's whurever I be... And I dream of the days back in Doperland And I wonder, will I ever go free?

Se ha dicho que cada gobierno tiene su capo.

Cuando terminas de comprar todo lo material, comienzas a comprar personas

el artista se mete donde el narco no puede”,

Yo le tengo más miedo a un político que a un narco. Con los ojos cerrados te corren del trabajo.

The British are turning my homeland into a narco-military state to pump drugs into yours. That’s how this empire connects us.

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World.

he tenido que huir desde antes de nacer y desde que tengo memoria; desde que era niño me han tratado como si hubiese sido el mismísimo autor de la totalidad de los crímenes de mi padre.

A lo lejos escuchó una vaca mugir con desesperación. En la balacera le habían matado a su becerro y ahora deambulaba por las calles mugiendo para encontrarlo. Los daños colaterales de la guerra del narco.

The growing policy-reform movement is a broad church. It includes everyone from ganja-smoking Rastafarians to free-market fundamentalists and all in between. There are socialists who think the drug war hurts the poor, capitalists who see a business opportunity, liberals who defend the right to choose, and fiscal conservatives who complain America is spending $40 billion a year on the War on Drugs rather than making a few billion taxing it. The movement can’t agree on much other than that the present policy doesn’t work. People disagree on whether legalized drugs should be controlled by the state, by corporations, by small businessmen, or by grow-your-own farmers, and on whether they should be advertised, taxed, or just handed out free in white boxes to addicts.

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.

No sólo los narcos desaparecen y matan a los fotógrafos, los redactores, los periodistas. También hacen su tarea de exterminio los políticos, la policía, la delincuencia organizada coludida con agentes, ministerios públicos, funcionarios

This path is only for people who have no choice, no other option, only violence and misery behind you. And your journey will grow even more treacherous from here. Everything is working against you, to thwart you. Some of you will fall from the trains. Many will be maimed or injured. Many will die. Many, many of you will be kidnapped, tortured, trafficked, or ransomed. Some will be lucky enough to survive all of that and make it as far as Estados Unidos only to experience the privilege of dying alone in the desert beneath the sun, abandoned by a corrupt coyote, or shot by a narco who doesn’t like the look of you. Every single one of you will be robbed. Every one. If you make it to el norte, you will arrive penniless, that’s a guarantee.

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.

I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.

After the peace agreements between the government and the guerillas had been signed in 1992, the civil war came to an end officially, but the violence never ceased. Criminals and narcos, fully tattooed, packed the prisons but were protected by membership in the maras, the ruthless gangs that no government had been able to dismantle.

She knows how dangerous it is to trust anyone on La Bestia. There are thugs and rapists and thieves and narcos hidden in the ranks of la policía in every town, but it’s not only the police who deserve their suspicion. It’s every single person they meet—shopkeepers, food vendors, humanitarians, children, priests, even their fellow migrants.

Everything is working against you, to thwart you. Some of you will fall from the trains. Many will be maimed or injured. Many will die. Many, many of you will be kidnapped, tortured, trafficked, or ransomed. Some will be lucky enough to survive all of that and make it as far as Estados Unidos only to experience the privilege of dying alone in the desert beneath the sun, abandoned by a corrupt coyote, or shot by a narco who doesn’t like the look of you. Every single one of you will be robbed. Every one. If you make it to el norte, you will arrive penniless, that’s a guarantee. Look around you. Go ahead—look at each other. Only one out of three will make it to your destination alive. Will it be you?

Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.

You tell everyone, you spread the word – Chapo is in charge here. Chapo’s the law. There is no law but Chapo. Chapo is boss. Not Mochomo, not El Barbas. Chapo is the law.

—Me da pena por usted, pero yo no hago negocios lícitos.

Quien se meta al negocio de la droga bien habrá de saber que en pocos años alcanzará la paz más apacible.

Es nuestro padre y un Rey Y por esta que es muy bueno Bajo su brazo es de ley Cumplir los trabajos del reino

Si "militar" es lo contrario de "civil", ¿entonces "militarización" es lo contrario de "civilización"?

Durante la década de 1980 el gobierno de Estados Unidos crió a los cuervos que hoy le sacan los ojos.

Ecuador era uno de los centros de operación clave del cártel por su cercanía con Colombia, Perú y Bolivia, los tres países productores de cocaína, y por su salida directa al Pacífico

Look ma’am, those narcos that mutilate, torture, and kill others are no longer a part of us. They’re no longer part of any family or community; they act against everyone. They are worth nothing. But when you bury a narco, you allow him to be a part of you again. He becomes dust, food, our brother once more. His body—dissolved in the earth—now sustains life again, instead of destroying it.

It’s the new face of narco gang war, isn’t it? They’re becoming media savvy. They used to hide their crimes, now they publicize them. I wonder if they haven’t taken a page from Al Qaeda. What good is an atrocity if no one knows you did it? And maybe that’s the lede on my story. “The crimes that used to lurk in shadows now seek the sunlight,” or is that a little too “pulp”? Óscar will decide.

Reagan’s Drugs Czar, Carlton Turner, said that kids deserved to die as a punishment for smoking poisoned weed, to teach them a lesson. Two years later, he called for the death penalty for all drug users. On

So the Juárez/El Paso area before the recent drug violence was not a bilingual, bi-national, bicultural Zion, but it was one world. One entity. One place. One city where you could live in between worlds, and have the hope of creating something new. A third way to be, not along the border, but on the border. That is what the violence has destroyed, that unity, however tenuous it ever was. It has destroyed the idea of that unity and the reality of living so uniquely astride an international border. This ‘real idea’ was always a work-in-progress, and for the moment it is lost. Yet that real idea of unity had great value.

El gobierno estadounidense ha advertido que en México hay una forma de contrainsurgencia encabezada por los cárteles del narcotráfico, que en potencia podrían tomar el gobierno; esto haría necesaria una respuesta militar por parte de EEUU, ya que la fuerza militar y policiaca de México es escasa e inadecuada. Hay allí un doble juego de discurso y prácticas formales e informales, la explicitación de su pensamiento interno y las retractaciones ante el protocolo de las relaciones bilaterales. Para usos públicos el discurso cumple un asedio geopolítico. Mientras tanto, sus distintas agencias operan su propia agenda.

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.

Then he offered the colonel $6 million, a bribe from Pablo Escobar to call off the hunt. Better yet, the officer explained, “Continue the work, but do not do yourself or Pablo Escobar any real damage.” Pablo also wanted a list of any snitches inside his own organization. Sometimes the fate of an entire nation can hinge on the integrity of one man.

A half century later, La Violencia bred a new colorful menagerie of outlaws, men who went by names like Tarzan, Desquite (Revenge), Tirofijo (Sureshot), Sangrenegra (Blackblood), and Chispas (Sparks). They roamed the countryside, robbing, pillaging, raping, and killing, but because they were allied with none of the major factions, their crimes were seen by many common people as blows struck against power.

Most chemicals that give humans a buzz evolved to disrupt insect nervous systems. If our brains used different chemicals, we would not be so vulnerable. However, we have common ancestors with insects. It was long ago, about 500 million years ago, when our ancestors split off from the arthropod lines that became modern insects. However, our neurochemicals remain about the same as theirs. Fortunately, most plant neurotoxins don’t kill us. We have evolved to eat plants, and we are much larger than insects, so low doses are not fatal. But drugs can hijack our motivation mechanisms and take control of our lives.

Criminalization and interdiction have filled prisons and corrupted governments in country after country. However, increasingly potent drugs that can be synthetized in any basement make controlling access increasingly impossible. Legalization seems like a good idea but causes more addiction. Our strongest defense is likely to be education, but scare stories make kids want to try drugs. Every child should learn that drugs take over the brain and turn some people into miserable zombies and that we have no way to tell who will get addicted the fastest. They should also learn that the high fades as addiction takes over.

On December 1, 2006, federal deputies were brawling in Mexico’s Congress hours before Felipe Calderón was due to enter the chamber to be sworn in as president. It was a fight for space. The leftist deputies claimed their candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had really won the election but been robbed of his rightful victory. They were trying to gain control of the podium to stop Calderón from taking the oath and assuming office. The conservative deputies were defending the podium to allow the presidential accession. The conservatives won the scrap. There were more of them, and they seemed to be better fed. Among those attending the ceremony were former U.S. president George Bush (Bush the First) and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. I was covering the Congress door, snatching interviews as guests went in. The elderly Bush hobbled past with six bodyguards with bald heads and microphones at their mouths. I asked him what he thought about the ruckus in the chamber. “Well, I hope that Mexicans can resolve their differences,” he replied diplomatically. Schwarzenegger strolled past with no bodyguards at all. I asked what he thought about the fisticuffs. The Terminator turned round, stared intensely, and uttered three words: “It’s good action!” I phoned the quote back to headquarters and it went out on a wire story. Suddenly, Schwarznegger’s statement was being bounced around California TV stations. Then the BBC led their newscast with it: “It takes a lot to impress Arnold Schwarznegger but today when he was in Mexico …” I got frantic phone calls from the governor’s office in Los Angeles. Was his quote perhaps being used out of context? Well, I replied, I asked him straight and he told me straight.

When you go back to Pablo Ecobar, this guy blew up a passenger plane, police headquarters, funded guerrillas to kill Supreme Court justices, and had the number one Colombian presidential candidate assassinated. Now there is no organization in Colombia that can go toe-to-toe with the government, that can threaten the national security of Colombia. In each successive generation of traffickers there has been a dilution of their power. “Pablo Escobar lasted fifteen years. The average kingpin here now lasts fifteen months. If you are named as a kingpin here, you are gone. The government of Colombia and the government of the United States will not allow a trafficker to exist long enough to become a viable threat.” In this analysis, drug enforcement can be seen as a giant hammer that keeps on falling. Any gangster that gets too big gets smashed by the hammer. This is known as cartel decapitation, taking out the heads of the gang. The villains are kept in check. But the drug trade does go on, and so does the war.

Evidence of police working for the insurgent Zetas was startling, but would soon become depressingly typical in Mexico. Time and time again, federal troops rolled into cities and accused local police of being deeply entwined with gangsters. Officers no longer just turned a blind eye on smuggling, but worked as kidnappers and assassins in their own right, a grave fragmentation of the state. To aggravate this problem, many federal officers were also found working for gangsters, normally different factions of the Sinaloa Cartel. So as federal troops rounded up Zetas, observers asked whom they were serving: the public or Sinaloan capos? These revelations underline a central problem in the Mexican Drug War. The PRI years featured a delicate dance of corruption; in the democratic years, it turned to a corrupt dance of death. In the old days, police officers were rotten, but at least they worked together. In democracy, police work for competing mafias and actively fight each other. Gangsters target both good police who get in their way and bad police who work for their rivals. For policy makers it becomes a Gordian knot. Added to this thorny issue of corruption is a more fundamental problem of drug-law enforcement. Every time you arrest one trafficker, you are helping his rival. In this way, when the federal police stormed Zetas safe houses, they were scoring victories for Sinaloans, whether they liked it or not. Arrests did not subdue violence, but only inflamed it.

But the dynamics of Mexican cartels have also developed in distinct ways from Colombia. Mexico has seven major cartels—Sinaloa, Juárez, Tijuana, La Familia, Beltrán Leyva, the Gulf, and the Zetas—so it is hard to decapitate them all at once. When leaders such as Osiel Cárdenas are taken out, their organizations have only become more violent, as rival lieutenants fight to become top dog. Groups such as the Zetas and Familia have also become powerful because of their brand names rather than the reputation of their capos. Even if Zetas leader Heriberto Lazcano, the Executioner, is arrested, the Zetas will likely continue as a fearsome militia. Whether the cartels will get weaker or not, everybody agrees that Mexico needs to clean up its police to move forward. Different corrupt cops firing at each other and working for rival capos is nobody’s vision of progress. Such police reform is of course easier said than done. Mexican presidents have talked about it for years, going through numerous cleanups and reorganization of forces, only to create new rotten units. A central problem is the sheer number of different agencies. Mexico has several federal law enforcement departments, thirty-one state authorities, and 2,438 municipal police forces. However, in October 2010, Calderón sent a bill to be approved by Congress that could make a real difference to the police. His controversial proposal was to absorb all Mexico’s numerous police forces into one unified authority like the Colombians have. It is a colossal reform with a huge amount of technical problems. But such a reform could be a key factor in pulling Mexico away from the brink. Even if drugs are eventually legalized, a single police force would be a better mechanism to fight other elements of organized crime, such as kidnapping. The approach has many critics. Some argue it would only streamline corruption. But even that would be a better thing for peace. At least corrupt cops could be on the same side instead of actively gunning each other down. Others argue an all-powerful force would be authoritarian. Maybe. But any such force would still be controlled by democratic government. The spiderweb of different police forces only worked because one party ran everything. In democracy, this arrangement needs reform. If a crucial cause of the breakdown in Mexico has been the fragmentation of government power, then a way forward could be to unify its police under one command. Some of the fundamental problems and core solutions lie in Mexico’s institutions.

Instead of hiding bodies in mass graves, corpses were triumphantly displayed, as when the Jalisco New Generation (while still part of El Chapo’s Sinaloa cartel) dumped the thirty-five bodies on an avenue in Veracruz in September 2011. In reply, the Zetas scattered twenty-six corpses in Jalisco and a dozen in Sinaloa. On closer inspection, the bodies were those of ordinary citizens, not criminals: they were workers and students who had been abducted and murdered and displayed in order to strike fear in the heart of anyone who doubted the murderous resolve of the Zetas... In To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War, John Gibler writes about a related series of bizarre and violent episodes that took place in Torreón, in Coahuila state, bordering Texas: “Who would believe, for example, that the warden of a state prison would let convicted killers out at night and loan them official vehicles, automatic assault rifles, and bulletproof vests, so that they could gun down scores of innocent people in a neighboring state and then quickly hop back over the state line and into prison, behind bars, a perfect alibi. Who would believe that a paramilitary drug-trafficking organization formed by ex−Special Forces of the Mexican Army would kidnap a local cop and torture him into confessing all of the above details about the prisoners’ death squad, videotape the confession, execute the cop on camera with a shot to the heart, and then post the video on YouTube? Who could fathom that the federal attorney general would, within hours of the video-taped confession and execution being posted online, arrest the warden, and then a few days later hold a press conference fully acknowledging that the prisoners’ death squad had operated for months, killing ten people in a bar in January 2010, eight people in a bar in May 2010, and seventeen people at a birthday party in July?” Yet all of this actually happened. During April 2012, when El Chapo was at war with the Zetas, fourteen torsos — armless and legless bodies — were found in a car by the side of the road in Nuevo Laredo. Dead Zetas. Some of the torsos were in the trunk, for which there is a specific narco term: encajuelado (“trunked”; therefore, trunks trunked). Soon after, in Michoacán state, the Zetas met their match in the person of Nazario Moreno (called El Más Loco, the Craziest One), leader of the ruthless Templarios, the Knights Templar cartel, whose recruits were required to eat human flesh—their victims’— as part of their initiation rites. When Moreno was gunned down by the Mexican army in 2014, the Zetas flourished, and remain dominant. But there was a posthumous bonus for the Craziest One: he was promoted to sainthood. In and around his birthplace in Apatzingán, shrines and altars were erected to Saint Nazario, the dead capo represented as a holy figure in robes, venerated by credulous Michoacanos.

pirobo.

armoured

completamente militarizado y bajo el mando del ejército. El secretario de Seguridad, Alfonso Durazo, quiso aclarar la confusión que se creó con un juego de palabras, y dijo que se iba a “policializar al ejército, no militarizar a la policía”. Es decir, el ejército iba a realizar funciones policiacas. La “nueva política” es contradictoria: por un lado, militariza las funciones policiales y legaliza la intervención del ejército en tareas civiles, y por otro lado frena la fuerza militar con el pretexto de mantener la paz y la tranquilidad. En consecuencia, como ocurrió en Culiacán, se tiende a evitar confrontaciones con los cárteles de narcos y las mafias criminales. Es la famosa política de “abrazos, no balazos” que en la práctica cotidiana equivale a castrar a las fuerzas encargadas de mantener el Estado de derecho para que se comporten mansamente, como los bueyes.

Felipe Calderón, el presidente que declaró la guerra contra los narcos y la perdió, entregó concesiones por nada menos que veinte millones de hectáreas a un puñado de empresas mineras, entre ellas varias canadienses. Entre 2018 y 2020 Peña Nieto había pactado otros 65 nuevos proyectos, en su mayor parte minas a cielo abierto con un fuerte impacto medioambiental.

Si bien, me declaro seguidor de las mejores propuestas del presidente Álvaro Uribe Vélez, también es cierto que en su momento critique duramente factores clave de su gobierno como las chuzadas, los falsos positivos, la para política, entre otros aspectos negativos que tuvo en el ejercicio de sus dos periodos de mandato

You should appreciate turning out as well as you did." He took her hand and squeezed gently. "You grew up in a narcissistic, boozy, scandalous Hollywood household. But with a lot of hard work and determination, you freed yourself. Now you're engaged to a narcissistic, narco-terrorizing, double crossing Hollywood movie star. Isn't that progress?

La cuota que pagaban era alta: la canija certeza de que más temprano que tarde se los iban a tronar. Una certeza que termina por botarle a uno la canica. Los narcos no negaban su condición de malandros y ojetes. En cambio, Galicia era un carroñero repugnante. Le pagaban por cuidar a la raza, no por joderla y vaya que la jodía. Comía de los muertos, el muy cabrón. Un Draculín (más culín que Dra), megagandul y gacho. Plaguitas como él debían ser exterminadas y por eso JC decidió darle pase gratis al panteón.

In sum, it was the Dutch who led the way in enmeshing opium with colonialism, and in creating the first imperial narco-state, heavily dependent on drug revenues

Era el único lugar donde nunca nadie había podido entrar, salvo durante la pandemia, cuando parte de los trabajadores del programa se habían camuflado con barbijos, cofias y capas entre los enfermeros que ingresaban a vacunar contra el covid. La torre once era la contracara de lo que se había avanzado en el resto del barrio. El edificio tiene once pisos. Y el único acceso es por la escalera, porque el ascensor fue desmantelado. Solo quedó el hueco vacío, que se transformó en una especie de compost vertical, porque los habitantes de los departamentos, en su mayoría usurpados, lo usaban de basurero. El olor era nauseabundo porque los residuos ocupaban varios pisos.

At trial, it became clear that in the macho, mustache-man world of drug-trafficking, Chapo had as much use for women, seducing them with saccharine forevers, then putting them to work in his stable—as buyers, as Blackberry-tapping go-betweens to preserve his anonymity on deals—involving their family members because there’s no glue stronger than blood.

El propio Arturo Beltrán Leyva era escoltado con regularidad por elementos policiacos, así como los cargamentos de droga que traficaba a través de México.

Con la declaración de Dámaso, la imagen de esposa amorosa de ojos de muñeca con pestañas gigantes que ladeaba la cabeza una y otra vez negando que supiera del involucramiento de su esposo en el narcotráfico y de su fuga, pasó a ser la de Judy, la triste marioneta esposa de Punch, que forma parte del tradicional teatro inglés de títeres de cachiporra. El argumento principal es el de una comedia negra en la que Punch es violento y abusivo, y siempre está dando garrotazos igual a bestias salvajes que a la autoridad, pero principalmente a su esposa Judy, quien es su comparsa.

Mujeres que forman parte de la corte en el reino de los narcos y se amoldan a las reglas machistas que les son impuestas y en “recompensa” disfrutan del botín obtenido de masacres, corrupción y violencia, cuyas principales víctimas son otras mujeres.

Along the way they will be preyed upon by cartels, police, Mexican immigration authorities, maras and random rural gangs, robbed, enslaved, forced into narco assassin squads, and raped—an estimated eight out of ten migrant women who attempt to cross Mexico suffer sexual abuse along the way, sometimes at the hands of fellow migrants. Migrants are kidnapped en masse by Zetas, with the complicity of corrupted and terrorized local police and other authorities and of treacherous coyotes, so that their families back home or awaiting them in the US can be extorted; meanwhile the captives are tortured, raped and sometimes massacred. Thousands upon thousands of migrants have been murdered in Mexico, and many others die by falling from “La Bestia”; as many as seventy thousand, some experts estimate, lie buried along the “death corridor” of the migrants’ trail.

This is a case about power. About corruption

Es tan torrencial el dinero que surge de la instalación de laboratorios de cocaína, las cocinas donde localmente sale la sustancia terminada, que algo jamás visto irrumpe. La sed por beber de ese río de dinero incesante y sin bordes moviliza a cada sector de la policía. Y termina por anarquizar algo que hasta las instituciones más carcomidas por la corrupción deben mantener para sobrevivir: el don de mando. Eso que pasa en Rosario no tendrá parangón en el país. El manantial de la droga desordena la calle y el flujo de efectivo que genera se devora en cinco años la capacidad policial de gobernar el orden público. El fervor desordenado de la policía por recaudar genera un caos. Cada área de la fuerza saca dinero de los narcos.

For the narcos, getting a ballad about them is like getting a doctorate,” Conrado says. Conrado tells me the story of one low-level trafficker who paid to get a particularly catchy ballad made about him. Soon everyone played it on his car stereo. “The crime bosses were like, ‘Bring me the guy from that song. I want him to do the job for me.’ So he rose through the ranks because of the song.” “So what has happened to him now?” I asked. “Oh, they killed him. He got too big. It was because of the song, really.

Humaya Gardens has hundreds of other narco tombs in its sun-beaten soil. It is one of the most bizarre cemeteries in the world. Mausoleums are built of Italian marble and decorated with precious stones, and some even have airconditioning. Many cost above $100,000 to build—more than most Culiacán homes. Inside are surreal biblical paintings next to photos of the deceased, normally in cowboy hats and often clasping guns. In some photos, they pose in fields of marijuana; in other tombs, small concrete planes indicate the buried mafioso was a pilot (transporting the good stuff).

More such deals are likely to mark the future of the Mexican Drug War. Bargains could be waiting for other Mexican traffickers wanted in the United States, such as Benjamin Arellano Félix or Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, or—if he is ever caught—even Chapo Guzmán himself. This system has some obvious flaws. When major criminals make deals to get out early, it can be seen as a bad example. It is not such a deterrent when a criminal career ends with the villain dating beautiful soap-opera stars. A long list of drug traffickers have ended up as celebrities. Asset seizure is also controversial. American agents get to spend dirty drug dollars. They say they are making money for Uncle Sam, but then again, they are also paradoxically reaping the benefits of cocaine and heroin being sold. When agents make money busting traffickers, there is an added incentive to sustain the whole war on drugs. Nevertheless, once these capos have been extradited and made deals, they are truly out of the game. The greater good, agents argue, is to use them to nail more crooks. That is the central imperative of drug warriors: keep seizing, keep arresting.

But kidnapping is only one of the ways that the Zetas have diversified. They have also branched out into extorting bars and discos; taxing shops; taking money from prostitution rings; stealing cars; robbing crude oil and gasoline; getting money from migrant trafficking; and even pirating their own Zetas-labeled DVDs of the latest blockbuster movies. Drug-trafficking organization is no longer a sufficient term for them; they are a criminal paramilitary complex.

El momento presente, alejado tanto de un ideal como del otro, se caracteriza por algo que puede llamarse -era del sucedáneo-, con tasas nunca vistas de envenenados por distintos adulterantes, drogas nuevas que lanzar sin cesar laboratorios clandestinos y incontables personas detenidas, multadas, encarceladas y ejecutadas cada año en el planeta.

Use of informants is ethically questionable. The DEA ends up paying money to dubious characters, albeit toward busting bigger drug loads and bigger criminals. In theory, agents cannot pay informants actively involved in criminal activities. In practice, agents try not to know what their informants are up to. As they admit, “these guys are not choirboys.” Agents are also worried the informant could be a double agent who is feeding info to the cartel. Or a triple agent. Daniel discovered you have to push into an informant’s mind to make sure he is playing straight.

Poor migrants may seem an odd target for a kidnapping. Surely they have no money. That is why they risk their lives migrating. But even poor people have relatives with savings, and the Zetas can often get $2,000 from kidnapping migrants. If you multiply that by ten thousand, you get $20 million—truly kidnapping en masse.

The export of cartel power into the USA is a sensitive issue. The discussion about Mexican cartels’ northward push gets pulled, often unfairly, into the flaming American immigration debate. The anti-immigrant brigade talk about Mexican laborers as an invading army; and they see all undocumented workers as potential cartel emissaries, using migrant communities to hide undercover ops. The Mexican Drug War, they say, is a reason to militarize the border. Residents of border states vex about the danger of spillover. If thugs are decapitating in Juárez, they fret, how long before they cut off heads in El Paso? Is the Mexican disease contagious? Down in Mexico, the argument is reversed. A common complaint by politicians and journalists is that there aren’t enough arrests of big players in El Norte. Why haven’t we heard of the capos in the United States? they ask. How come some Mexican fugitives live unharmed north of the border? Why has Mexico been goaded into a drug war while narcotics move freely around the fifty states of the union?

The San Fernando massacre is a landmark in the Mexican Drug War. It surely woke up anyone who still doubted the existence of a serious armed conflict south of the Rio Grande. But for those following the mass attacks on migrants, it was a tragedy waiting to happen. San Fernando began just like all the rest of the mass kidnappings. Zetas gunmen stopped the victims at a checkpoint and abducted them, in this case from two buses. The group featured many of the usual Central Americans, but was atypical in that it also had large numbers of Brazilians and Ecuadorians. The Zetas marched the prisoners to the San Fernando ranch, which is in Tamaulipas state, just a hundred miles from the U.S. border. After a long, hard journey, the migrants were closer than ever to their destination. Then something went wrong, and the Zetas decided to murder everybody. The pure scale of death shocked the world. The seventy-two corpses were piled haphazardly around the edge of the breeze-block barn, arms and legs twisted over one another, waists and backs contorted. There were teenagers, middle-aged men, young girls, even a pregnant woman. This horror could not be ignored.

Right as the Mexican Drug War rages, the debate is reaching the second great flux in its history. The first came in the seventies, with the Jimmy Carter White House. Legalization advocates, including various doctors, got into key government positions, their papers got play, their ideas gained currency. States began to decriminalize marijuana and cocaine was viewed in the media as a happy-go-lucky party drug. Reformers thought they had won the debate. They were wrong. In the eighties, America lashed back against narcotics with a vengeance, and in the nineties the drug war went on steroids. The crack epidemic broke out, celebrities died of overdoses, and lots of middle-class parents got concerned about lots of middle-class kids on smack, speed, and sensimilla. In the early 1990s, surveys found large numbers of Americans thought drugs were the number one problem the country faced. The media was packed with stories of crack babies, cracked-up gangbangers, and nice white kids turning into demons on drugs. But that was two decades ago. The pendulum has swung back again. For now. Most people don’t even list drugs in their top ten of America’s problems. The economy is most people’s priority, and terrorism, immigration, crime, religion, abortion, gay marriage, and the environment all spark more concern than narcotics. Meanwhile, drug-policy reformers have emerged strengthened with propositions to decriminalize, spread medical use, and finally fully legalize marijuana. Proposition 19 to legalize cannabis in California narrowly missed passing, getting 46.5 percent in the 2010 vote. Activists are determined it will pass in 2012. And if not, in 2014. Or 2016. They can just keep on going.

The trajectory is clear: our minds have always been vulnerable to capture by alcohol, marijuana, tobacco, coca, and opium, but problems with them have escalated as advances in chemistry, transportation, and technology have increased the diversity, purity, and availability of drugs. The mismatch was bad before; now it’s getting much worse.

Escobar had drawn particular attention to himself by his terrorist tactics—he even bombed an airliner, killing 110 passengers, as pressure to stop his being extradited to the United States. His brutal violence against rivals also created so many enemies that victims formed a paramilitary group to get him. A curious alliance was formed of Colombian police, soldiers, and criminals, and American spies, drug agents, and troops, all after the big guy. Escobar was just waiting to die. Colombian police finally caught up with him in a residential Medellín house, shot him dead, and posed smiling with his corpse. Drug warriors learned a new modus operandi—sometimes it is better to forget about an arrest and go for the clean kill.

The United States schooled Latin American soldiers throughout the late twentieth century in warfare and anti-insurgency tactics at the infamous School of the Americas in Georgia and at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. When the manuals given to Latin American students were declassified in 1996, they sparked outrage. Printed only in Spanish, the instruction books explained the use of psychological warfare to break insurgencies. One particularly controversial manual entitled Handling Sources instructs Latin American officers on how to use informants. In cold, clinical terms, it details pressuring informants with violence against both them and their families.

It is still unclear exactly what inspired such brutality. Many point to the influence of the Guatemalan Kaibiles working in the Zetas. In the Guatemalan civil war, troops cut off heads of captured rebels in front of villagers to terrify them from joining a leftist insurgency. Turning into mercenaries in Mexico, the Kaibiles might have reprised their trusted tactic to terrify enemies of the cartel. Others point to the influence of Al Qaeda decapitation videos from the Middle East, which were shown in full on some Mexican TV channels. Some anthropologists even point to the pre-Colombian use of beheadings and the way Mayans used them to show complete domination of their enemies. The Zetas were not thinking like gangsters, but like a paramilitary group controlling territory. Their new way of fighting rapidly spread through the Mexican Drug War. In September the same year, La Familia gang—working with the Zetas in Michoacán state—rolled five human heads onto a disco dance floor. By the end of 2006, there had been dozens of decapitations. Over the next years, there were hundreds. Gangsters throughout Mexico also copied the Zetas’ paramilitary way of organizing. Sinaloans created their own cells of combatants with heavy weaponry and combat fatigues. They had to fight fire with fire. “The Beard” Beltrán Leyva led particularly well-armed death squads. One was later busted in a residential house in Mexico City. They had twenty automatic rifles, ten pistols, twelve M4 grenade launchers, and flak jackets that even had their own logo— FEDA—an acronym for Fuerzas Especiales de Arturo, or Arturo’s Special Forces.

As drugs flow up into the United States, all kinds of people make money off them. People are subcontracted to ship, truck, warehouse, and finally smuggle the product over the border. To complicate this, drugs are often bought and sold many times on their journey. People actually handling these narcotics will often have no knowledge which so-called kingpin or cartel ever owned them, only knowing the direct contacts they are dealing with. Ask a New York cocaine dealer who smuggled his product into America. He would rarely have a clue. All this helps explain why the Mexican drug trade is such a confusing web, which confounds both journalists and drug agents. Tracing exactly who touched a shipment on its entire journey is a hard task. But this dynamic, moving industry has a solid center of gravity—turfs, or plazas. Drugs have to pass through a certain territory on the border to get into the United States, and whoever is running those plazas makes sure to tax everything that moves. The border plazas have thus become a choke point that is not seen in other drug-producing nations such as Colombia, Afghanistan, or Morocco. This is one of the key reasons why Mexican turf wars have become so bloody. The vast profits attract all kinds to the Mexican drug trade: peasant farmers, slum teenagers, students, teachers, businessmen, idle rich kids, and countless others. It is often pointed out that in poor countries people turn to the drug trade in desperation. That is true. But plenty of middle-class or wealthy people also dabble. Growing up in the south of England, I knew dozens of people who moved and sold drugs, from private-school boys to kids from council estates (projects). The United States has never had a shortage of its own citizens willing to transport and sell drugs. The bottom line is that drugs are good money even to wealthy people, and plenty have no moral dilemmas about the business.

ask how much the mafia pays to carry out murders. Fríjol tells me without stopping for a moment. One thousand pesos. That is about $85. The figure seems so ludicrous that I check it out in several other interviews up in the barrios with former and active gang members. They all say the same thing. One thousand pesos to carry out a killing. The price of a human life in Juárez is just $85. To traffic drugs is no huge step to the dark side. All kinds of people over the world move narcotics and don’t feel they’ve crossed a red line. But to take a human life. That is a hard crime. I can at least comprehend assassins killing to jump from poverty to riches. But for someone to take a life for just $85—enough to eat some tacos and buy a few beers over the week—shows a terrifying degradation in society. To try to get a handle on how this has happened, I talk to social worker Sandra Ramirez at a youth center in the westside slums. Sandra grew up in the barrios and worked on assembly lines before trying to steer young people away from crime. She says the teenage sicarios are the result of systematic alienation over the last two decades. The slums were a convenient place for factory workers but got nothing from the government. As the factory jobs slumped with the economy, the slums were left to rot. One 2010 study found that a stunning 120,000 Juárez youngsters aged thirteen to twenty-four—or 45 percent of the total—were not enrolled in any education nor had any formal employment. “The government offers nothing. It can’t even compete with a thousand pesos. It is only the mafia that comes to these kids and offers them anything. They offer them money, cell phones, and guns to protect themselves. You think these kids are going to refuse? They have nothing to lose. They only see the day-to-day. They know they could die and they say so. But they don’t care. Because they have lived this way all their lives.” ask how much the mafia pays to carry out murders. Fríjol tells me without stopping for a moment. One thousand pesos. That is about $85. The figure seems so ludicrous that I check it out in several other interviews up in the barrios with former and active gang members. They all say the same thing. One thousand pesos to carry out a killing. The price of a human life in Juárez is just $85. To traffic drugs is no huge step to the dark side. All kinds of people over the world move narcotics and don’t feel they’ve crossed a red line. But to take a human life. That is a hard crime. I can at least comprehend assassins killing to jump from poverty to riches. But for someone to take a life for just $85—enough to eat some tacos and buy a few beers over the week—shows a terrifying degradation in society. To try to get a handle on how this has happened, I talk to social worker Sandra Ramirez at a youth center in the westside slums. Sandra grew up in the barrios and worked on assembly lines before trying to steer young people away from crime. She says the teenage sicarios are the result of systematic alienation over the last two decades. The slums were a convenient place for factory workers but got nothing from the government. As the factory jobs slumped with the economy, the slums were left to rot. One 2010 study found that a stunning 120,000 Juárez youngsters aged thirteen to twenty-four—or 45 percent of the total—were not enrolled in any education nor had any formal employment. “The government offers nothing. It can’t even compete with a thousand pesos. It is only the mafia that comes to these kids and offers them anything. They offer them money, cell phones, and guns to protect themselves. You think these kids are going to refuse? They have nothing to lose. They only see the day-to-day. They know they could die and they say so. But they don’t care. Because they have lived this way all their lives.

I ask how much the mafia pays to carry out murders. Fríjol tells me without stopping for a moment. One thousand pesos. That is about $85. The figure seems so ludicrous that I check it out in several other interviews up in the barrios with former and active gang members. They all say the same thing. One thousand pesos to carry out a killing. The price of a human life in Juárez is just $85. To traffic drugs is no huge step to the dark side. All kinds of people over the world move narcotics and don’t feel they’ve crossed a red line. But to take a human life. That is a hard crime. I can at least comprehend assassins killing to jump from poverty to riches. But for someone to take a life for just $85—enough to eat some tacos and buy a few beers over the week—shows a terrifying degradation in society. To try to get a handle on how this has happened, I talk to social worker Sandra Ramirez at a youth center in the westside slums. Sandra grew up in the barrios and worked on assembly lines before trying to steer young people away from crime. She says the teenage sicarios are the result of systematic alienation over the last two decades. The slums were a convenient place for factory workers but got nothing from the government. As the factory jobs slumped with the economy, the slums were left to rot. One 2010 study found that a stunning 120,000 Juárez youngsters aged thirteen to twenty-four—or 45 percent of the total—were not enrolled in any education nor had any formal employment. “The government offers nothing. It can’t even compete with a thousand pesos. It is only the mafia that comes to these kids and offers them anything. They offer them money, cell phones, and guns to protect themselves. You think these kids are going to refuse? They have nothing to lose. They only see the day-to-day. They know they could die and they say so. But they don’t care. Because they have lived this way all their lives.

I ask Fríjol what it is like to be in firefights, to see your friends dead on the street and to be an accessory to a murder. He answers unblinkingly, “Being in shootouts in pure adrenaline. But you see dead bodies and you feel nothing. There is killing every day. Some days there are ten executions, others days there are thirty. It is just normal now.” Perhaps this teenager really is hardened to it. Or maybe he just puts up a shield. But it strikes me that adolescents experiencing such violence must go into adulthood with scars. What kind of man can this make you? I ask about this to school psychologist Elizabeth Villegas. The teenagers she works with have murdered and raped, I say. How does this hurt them psychologically? She stares back at me as if she hasn’t thought about it before. “They don’t feel anything that they have murdered people,” she replies. “They just don’t understand the pain that they have caused others. Most come from broken families. They don’t recognize rules or limits.” The teenage sicarios know the legal consequences for their crimes cannot be that grave. Under Mexican law, minors can only be sentenced to a maximum of five years in prison no matter how many murders, kidnappings, or rapes they have committed. If they were over the border in Texas, they could be sentenced for up to forty years or life if they were tried as an adult. Many convicted killers in the school will be back on the streets before they turn twenty. Fríjol himself will be out when he is nineteen.

narcos, war on drugs, drug cartels, murder, crime, music, Mexico, violence Humaya Gardens has hundreds of other narco tombs in its sun-beaten soil. It is one of the most bizarre cemeteries in the world. Mausoleums are built of Italian marble and decorated with precious stones, and some even have airconditioning. Many cost above $100,000 to build—more than most Culiacán homes. Inside are surreal biblical paintings next to photos of the deceased, normally in cowboy hats and often clasping guns. In some photos, they pose in fields of marijuana; in other tombs, small concrete planes indicate the buried mafioso was a pilot (transporting the good stuff).

Many reports have gone into the social impact of such terror. But a central question is still hotly debated: Why? Why do cartel soldiers hack off heads, ambush policemen, and set off car bombs? And why do they throw grenades into crowds of revelers or massacre innocent teenagers at parties? What do they stand to gain by such bloodshed? Whom are they fighting? What do they want? This puzzle goes to the heart of the debate about what El Narco has become. For the gangsters’ motivations in many ways define what they are. If they deliberately kill civilians to make a point, that would make them, by many definitions, terrorists. If they are trying to win the monopoly of violence in a certain territory, that would make them warlords. And if they are fighting a full-on war against the government, many would argue it would make them insurgents. It’s a touchy issue. Words such as terrorists and insurgents set off alarm bells, scare away investment dollars, and wake up American spooks at night. The language influences how you deal with the Mexican Drug War, and how many drones and Black Hawk helicopters you fly in.

To try to make sure gunmen do hit their targets, cartels have developed training camps. The first such camps were discovered in northeast Mexico and linked to the Zetas, but they have since been found all across the country and even over the border in Guatemala. Most are built on ranches and farmlands, such as one discovered in the community of Camargo just south of the Texas border. They are equipped with shooting ranges and makeshift assault courses and have been found storing arsenals of heavy weaponry, including boxes of grenades. Arrested gangsters have described courses as lasting two months and involving the use of grenade launchers and .50-caliber machine guns. A training video captured by police in 2011 shows recruits running across a field, taking cover on the grass, and firing assault rifles. Sometimes training can be deadly. One recruit drowned during an exercise that required him to swim carrying his backpack and rifle. The discovery of these camps has sparked the obvious comparison to Al Qaeda training grounds in Afghanistan. But however much schooling they give, cartels still love gunslingers with real military experience. In the first decade of democracy, up until 2010, one hundred thousand soldiers had deserted from the Mexican military. There is a startling implication: country and ghetto boys sign up for the army, get the government to pay for their training, then make real money with the mob.

It is psychotic and hateful behavior. But such behaviour is typical in many war zones. Cartel thugs have gone beyond the pale because they are completely immersed in a violent conflict, living like soldiers in the trenches. Imagine the life of Zetas thugs in the war-torn northeast of Mexico, fighting daily with soldiers and rival gangs, moving from safe house to safe house, completely divorced from the reality of normal citizens. In these ghastly conditions they commit atrocities that the world finds so hard to comprehend. For many of these cartel soldiers on the front line, war and insurgency have become their central mission. While thugs have traditionally talked about fighting over drug smuggling, now many are talking about smuggling drugs to finance their war.

The most virulent expression of narco religion is by La Familia Cartel in Michoacán. La Familia indoctrinates its followers in its own version of evangelical Christianity mixed with some peasant rebel politics. The gang’s spiritual leader, Nazario Moreno, “El Mas Loco,” or the Maddest One, actually wrote his own bible, which is compulsory reading for the troops. This sounds so nuts I thought it was another drug war myth. Until I got my hands on a copy of his “good” book. It is not an easy bedtime read. But La Familia is only the most defined voice in a chorus of narco religion that has been rising in volume for decades. Other tones of the choir include some morphed rituals of Caribbean Santeria, the folk saint Jesús Malverde, and the wildly popular Santa Muerte, or Holy Death. Many who follow these faiths are not drug traffickers or gun-toting assassins. The beliefs all have an appeal to poor Mexicans who feel the staid Catholic Church is not speaking to them and their problems. But gangsters definitely feel at home in these new sects and exert a powerful influence on them, giving a spiritual and semi-ideological backbone to narco clans. Such a backbone strengthens El Narco as an insurgent movement that is challenging the old order. Kingpins now fight for souls as well as turfs.

The award-winning American TV series Breaking Bad has a scene in its second season set in the murder capital of Ciudad Juárez. In this episode, American and Mexican agents are lured to a patch of desert just south of the border looking for an informant. They discover the informant’s head has been cut off and stuck on the body of a giant turtle. But as they approach, the severed cranium, turned into an IED, explodes, killing agents. The episode was released in 2009. I thought it was unrealistic, a bit fantastic. Until July 15, 2010. In the real Ciudad Juárez on that day, gangsters kidnapped a man, dressed him in a police uniform, shot him, and dumped him bleeding on a downtown street. A cameraman filmed what happened after federal police and paramedics got close. The video shows medics bent over the dumped man, checking for vital signs. Suddenly a bang rings out, and the image shakes vigorously as the cameraman runs for his life. Gangsters had used a cell phone to detonate twenty-two pounds of explosives packed into a nearby car. A minute later, the camera turns back around to reveal the burning car pouring smoke over screaming victims. A medic lies on the ground, covered in blood but still moving, a stunned look on his face. Panicked officers are scared to go near him. The medic dies minutes later along with a federal agent and a civilian. I’m not suggesting that Breaking Bad inspired the murders. TV shows don’t kill people. Car bombs kill people. The point of the story is that the Mexican Drug War is saturated with stranger-than-fiction violence. Mexican writer Alejandro Almazán suffered from a similar dilemma. As he was writing his novel Among Dogs, he envisioned a scene in which thugs decapitate a man and stick a hound’s head on his corpse. It seemed pretty out there. But then in real life some gangsters did exactly that, only with a pig’s head. It is just hard to compete with the sanguine criminal imagination. Cartel thugs have put a severed head in a cooler and delivered it to a newspaper; they have dressed up a murdered policeman in a comedy sombrero and carved a smile on his cheeks; and they have even sewn a human face onto a soccer ball.

Six

Spider

Leading the propaganda blitz was Marco Rubio, the Florida senator born into Miami's notoriously reactionary Cuban expat community. A middle-aged career politician with boyish looks and cowlick-y hair, Rubio was once considered a rising Republican star — despite a questionable past. In 2011, the Washington Post revealed that Rubio had based his entire political coming-of-age story on a lie. Though he repeatedly spouted a clichéd south Florida tale of his parents' escape from Fidel Castro's socialist hellscape, immigration records demonstrated that the Rubios had in fact gained permanent US residency nearly three years before Cuba's 1959 revolution — meaning they had actually fled the regime of the country's US-backed military dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Aside from pathetic dishonesty, Rubio's character was tarnished by revelations that throughout the 1980s, his brother-in-law, Orlando Cicilia, directed a $75 million cocaine smuggling ring out of his home in West Kendall, Florida. Cicilia was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison in 1989, but released early in the year 2000. In his 2013 memoir, Rubio — who by then had featured Cicilia at numerous campaign events — claimed that he was unaware of his brother-in-law's criminal activity and had been "stunned" by news of his arrest. Yet a 2016 investigation by the Miami New Times cast doubt on the senator's account, revealing that as a teenager, Rubio had actually lived in the home at the center of Cicilia's drug operation. "For anyone to argue that teens or adults living at this time in Miami didn't know their family members were in the coke business is total horseshit," a former Miami-Dade detective told the publication in response to Rubio's claims of ignorance. Though Rubio declined to comment on the story, it earned him the nickname "Narco Rubio" among Venezuelans, including government officials whom the senator repeatedly accused of trafficking drugs. The senator's most well-known moniker, however, was "Little Marco," an alias bestowed upon him by then candidate Trump during the 2016 Republican primary, when the future president publicly mocked Rubio's affinity for high-heeled boots — an apparent product of his dearth of height.

There is a saying in the Mexican drug trade that it is better to live one good year than ten bad ones. Many young men enter the industry expecting to enjoy a decadent life for a short time before being incarcerated or killed. Young narcos behave recklessly: they go to night clubs, they race Bentleys, and they post pictures of themselves online with their co-conspirators (and with the occasional dead body). The only traffickers in Sinaloa who beat the odds are those who are content to follow a more austere life in the mountains.

The Qing Empire was about to feel the full force of history’s most successful narco-state: the British Empire.

¡Ah, los '90, años de sufrires sencillos tan alternativos! cuando entonces las guerras del crimen organizado (gobierno y narco) aún hibernaban.

uno se pregunta hasta donde ha llegado la metástasis de la corrupción. Al mirar a los jóvenes europeos y norteamericanos disfrutar de sus drogas sin culpa, al mirar algunos intelectuales mexicanos acusar de asesino al presidente mientras consumen drogas sin sentir que contribuyen de alguna manera al problema, me llega un profundo desaliento.

Espero el dia que podamos recuperar la cuidad y salgamos, bailemos, cantemos, juguemos en sus calles. Anhelo el día que podamos amar, reír y vivir de nuevo en Cuidad Juarez, en Mexico.

—Cuando muera, lo único que quiero es que me sepulten aquí y siembren una ceiba encima. Ah, y no quiero que vengan a visitarme nunca, porque el cuerpo es una herramienta que nos dan para estar en la tierra.