DRUG CARTELS DO NOT EXIST: NARCO-TRAFFICKING AND CULTURE IN THE U.S. AND MEXICO - OSWALDO ZAVALA

Been waiting on this one for a while. This book got on my radar a few years ago when it was originally published, in 2018, mostly because of its provocative title, but I had to wait almost four years for someone to translate it into English, since my Spanish isn’t quite up to snuff. Either way, it’s here now and quite good. Zavala is a former reporter in Juarez and current professor in NYC who has an interesting and engaging take on the narco phenomena and its representation in the arts, specifically fiction. When I got this book I was hoping for more of a straight history and investigation of drug cartels and trafficking in Mexico and the involvement and manipulation by various US-based forces, a la Gary Webb. This book has some elements of that but it also includes long digressions into Mexican and world literature that engages with these topics. On the one hand, this is great. Zavala has given me a long list of Mexican novels I need to read, as well as wonderful passages about one of my favorite books of all time (and perhaps the best novel published in my lifetime) 2666. However, since many of these novels and plays have never been translated into English and I’m not a huge Latin American literature person in general (always fraught to read novels and poetry in translation) much of this was lost on me. All that being said, his main points about the interplay between narcos and the state are relevant and interesting. The popular narrative, that the cartels exist as a powerful, murderous force, at war with the goverments of Mexico and the US, is not only false, but constructed for the expressed purpose of being instramentallized by those governments for specific political ends. The figure of the cartel and the narco are great excuses to extend the logic of the War on Terror to areas south of the border. Far from being separate parallel entities who are competing with the legitimate Mexican government, the cartels are in fact enmeshed with the governments of both countries to further specific political ends. Initially to fight “communism” and leftism in Mexico, ex. the CIA and Mexican government’s involvement in the cartel torture/murder of DEA agent “Kiki” Camarena (and you can read Charles Bowden’s “Blood on the Corn” if you need to get up to speed on all that) or, much more recently, the use of cartel goons to murder leftist teacher/protesters in Ayotzinapa. Now, in addition to that, the cartels are also instrumentalized to  help both depopulate areas rich in natural resources and/or hydrocarbons, which explains both the 2019 massacre of the Morman fundamentalists in Northern Mexico as well as the emergence of the folk saint, El Niño Huachicolero. All that is to say that this book elucidates the paranoia and insight one gets speaking to Mexicans. I’ve long said that Mexicans are the most paranoid and suspicious people I’ve ever dealt with (I mean this completely as a compliment). I remember living in Mexico city and riding in cabs or going to markets and asking people about El Chapo or El Barbie or any of the other “kingpins” who were big in the news at the time and the people I’d speak to would, almost without fail, launch into a long speech about how these people weren’t real or overblown or in the pocket of the government. That the stories concerning them were bullshit and a distraction and that the government was much, much more enmeshed, through bribery and corruption, with these forces than the mainstream media would let on. I believed them then and believe it more now. This book is a great step in the right direction of cutting through government propaganda and getting a real understanding of the actual dynamics at play in the War on Drugs. 100,000 cartels