"The narcos have become an explanation to almost any crime in Mexico"

Translated by El Profe for Borderland Beat from Horizontal 

                   

Interview with Oswaldo Zavala, author of 'The cartels do not exist'

The book The Cartels do not exist. Drug trafficking and culture in Mexico (Malpaso Ediciones, 2018) has started a discussion in the last few months about violence in Mexico. Its author, journalist and academic Oswaldo Zavala, defends in its pages that the "war on drugs" is a fantastic narrative created by the authorities - and reproduced uncritically by many journalists and media - to hide another reality: a state strategy aimed at political control and the appropriation of territories rich in natural resources.

 

Your work questions the existence of 'cartels' as a group in conflict to the State, in fact, you point to the State itself as responsible for the violence, as the protagonist of a dispossessed capitalism that seeks to appropriate natural resources. Where does violence come from to stay and perpetuate itself?
 
The so-called 'war on drugs' is the public name of a violent state strategy that has had multiple uses in Mexico: from the illegal appropriation of territories rich in natural resources to the mediation of disputes between rival political groups. The most emblematic case, reported by journalists like Ignacio Alvarado and Dawn Paley, but also studied by academics such as Guadalupe Correa, is located in the state of Tamaulipas, where militarization has facilitated the spoliation of natural gas shale by transnational conglomerates. 


Something similar has happened with the militarization of the border strip near Ciudad Juárez, where another important natural gas field is also located. But in the same state of Chihuahua it is important to note how the so-called 'cartel wars' have also been used as a method of political sabotage. At the end of my book I analyze how during the outgoing governorship of César Duarte -now a fugitive from justice-, we were warned about a new war that would star Rafael Caro Quintero, the aging eighties trafficker released in 2013.

In July 2016, Mexican military intelligence said Caro Quintero planned to invade Ciudad Juárez to snatch control of the 'Plaza' from the 'Sinaloa cartel'. It was enough of an interview that Caro Quintero granted to the magazine Proceso that same month that suddenly the attorney general of Chihuahua accused the Jalisco New Generation Cartel of starring in the next war, although there had even appeared a menacing ' narcomanta ' allegedly signed by Caro Quintero.

 
By October of 2017, the story took a turn: the DEA reported that Caro Quintero had actually joined the 'Sinaloa Cartel' to collaborate with characters like Ismael 'El Mayo' Zambada. In April 2018, the FBI escalated the alarm by offering a reward of 20 million dollars for the capture of Caro Quintero, an unprecedented sum in the United States, including that offered for the capture of Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán, who at the time was considered the greatest trafficker of all time. How is it possible that Caro Quintero, who spent 28 years in prison, suddenly becomes the 'most wanted' in a changing plot of 'warring cartels'?
 
Even more problematic is the announcement in the month of August 2018: the FBI, the Chicago Police and the 10 DEA offices in Mexico organized a joint operation with the Mexican army and federal police to capture Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes. ' El Mencho ', supposed leader of the 'New Generation Jalisco Cartel'. Despite the inconsistent intelligence information, entertaining in announcing 'wars' between interchangeable 'cartels', the truth is that these security alerts could have a greater objective: to maintain in Mexico the justification of the security strategy by means of which, since the presidency of Calderón, the army has occupied many regions of the country.
 
And who really suffers from all this? The poorest sectors of the country, young gang members, the unemployed and uneducated that make up the most recurrent profile of homicide victims. Meanwhile, the upper class and the multinationals continue the plundering of natural resources where, curiously enough, violence does not bother extractive companies.
 
Are there ways to discard the screen with which the State maintains its war narrative against drugs? Is it possible to unmask the true people responsible for what happens in Mexico?
 
The first step to cracking the narrative of the State involves a consistent effort to question and finally suspend the reproduction of the official version. We have become accustomed to blaming the 'narcos' and their wars because we have uncritically accepted what our government says to explain the radical violence that afflicts us. This work will have to start from journalism before any other field. Journalism is key at this point because it is through 'independent' information that the government legitimizes the official narrative.
 
Most of our journalists reproduce with too much docility the intelligence reports, the police reports and the statements of officials who deftly insist on attributing all expression of violence to the 'narcos' who, although they do not stop killing each other, while maintaining a implausible control not only of the drug market in Mexico but also in the United States and in many countries in Europe, Asia and Africa.
 
The official narrative, as I mentioned before, is full of inconsistencies, exaggerations, inaccurate data or flat fantasies. It is enough to carefully follow the dimension of these supposed wars in the media to warn the illogical leaps in the argumentation of these stories.
 
That is why much of what we are told of the world of 'narco' is ideal material for fiction, which is why there are countless movies and television series that are entertained repeating the fantasies of official discourse. It is so expansive the hegemonic narrative about the 'narcos' that the variations on those characters have already become the standardized explanation for almost any criminal act in Mexico.
 
The critical recognition of this phenomenon is just the beginning to unmasking it. From there begins the real journalism.
 
Is it possible to think that the new federal government breaks with this fabric?
 
The presidential campaign of AMLO was distinguished by the articulation of a discourse of pacification of the country that included, among its most relevant points, two crucial proposals to alter the security policy. First, AMLO has affirmed the need to demilitarize the so-called 'war against the narco' closing the army's spaces within the civil government, and second, reviewing the beneficial contracts that have been granted with the energy reform to transnationals that seek the looting of the regions where violence has been most experienced as a method of forced displacement.
 
This shift, which also contemplates the possibility of amnesty for traffickers who have not committed serious crimes, would undoubtedly entail the deactivation of the most violent mechanisms that have allowed crimes against humanity committed in the name of national security.
 
Now, the army is already giving clear indications that it will not abandon its power point so easily. AMLO recently announced, after a meeting with the secretaries of defense and navy, that at least in the first months of his administration it is not feasible to withdraw the army from the security strategy because supposedly the federal police are not "in a position" to replace them.
 
Note the haste with which they are trying to convince AMLO to renounce their campaign proposals, in addition, in a context manufactured by the military intelligence of Mexico and the US authorities to give the impression of a continuous emergency of national and hemispheric security. I wonder if AMLO's concessions will be maintained once he takes power or if, as President Lázaro Cárdenas once did, once in power, his presidency will be proposed as a radical program of change.
 
What are the limits of this state narrative?
 
The official narrative has no limits. It is based on what Pierre Bourdieu called the 'monopoly of symbolic violence' that allows the State to articulate not only its strategy of fighting 'narco' but also to fabricate the image of the narcos themselves. As we have witnessed in the last two years, the multiplicity of alleged 'cartels' and their capos, -'El Chapo', 'El Mayo', 'El Mencho', Caro Quintero, etc.- are inexhaustible material to entertain the attention of journalists and security 'experts' who make their living legitimizing official information through reports and analysis that reproduce the official version point by point.
 
While there is a political and cultural hegemony that maintains this narrative as an expression of the supposed reality of "organized crime", the State can use it at its convenience where it is necessary to depopulate territories, repress or even kill individuals and resistant groups. Although it is contradicted or even as implausible as a fiction novel, the narrative is sustained because in the face of the brutality of violence it is very difficult to maintain a critical conscience. The State bets that before the spectacle of the murders to the civil society it is only left to condemn to the most evident enemy, the 'narco', while it cries for the aid of the army and the federal police. As long as the bloody wave of violence continues, the 'narco' will continue to be the sole culprit of crimes against humanity.

It is thought that the decriminalization of drug use would end the wave of violence, but I am not so sure about it. The 'narco' is the central object of the current national security discourse but it certainly is not, nor has it been, the only one. Recall that the emergence of securitarismo began in 1947 in the United States to build the anti-Communist strategy after the Second World War. However, once the phantom of communism was exhausted after 1989, the United States, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, reoriented the security apparatus, constructing the imaginary "narco" as a global threat.
 
If we eliminate 'narco' as a threat to the decriminalization of drugs, the United States can easily replace one enemy with another. In fact, he is already trying: President Trump's speech that criminalizes undocumented immigration as waves of bad men has attempted to interweave the supposed terrorist threat that represents the border between Mexico and the United States.

Together with the undocumented migrants, we are warned, Islamic terrorists could cross the border, confused by the same skin tone. We must not forget, on top of that, that this racist and xenophobic strategy has been adopted by both Republicans and Democrats in the United States, including Hillary Clinton herself when, from the US Congress, she warned about border 'narco-terrorism'.
 
What kind of journalism is necessary?
 
Our journalism could do what it has always done or should do: critically report verifiable information. The problem, nevertheless, has been that the journalism that covers the violence has been divided in two main currents: the one that reports on victims and the one that investigates on the alleged perpetrators.
 
In both cases, reporters abdicate the essential function of their work as journalists, because they limit their attention to subjects that by themselves do not explain the systems of violence in Mexico. Those who cover the victims, often do so from an indignant journalism that is confused with the activism and militant work of the human rights.
 
This type of journalism extends then in the chronicle of the pain and the reproach, but not on the causes that produced the violence in itself. On the other hand, those who approach the supposed victimizers are responsible for promoting the official information that most of the time determines a priori the identity of the rival traffickers in any shooting.
 
It never ceases to amaze me the brazenness of the police corporations that blame this or that narco, but leave unpunished a very high percentage of the most elementary crimes. Not even one day has passed after a homicide, but the authorities already know what hit man from which cartel he attacked which rival. This strategy of (dis) information is of course designed to exculpate the armed forces of the country and to place all responsibility on people and organizations without more evidence than military or police 'intelligence'.
 
Really critical journalism will require an approach without assumptions, will question the political uses of official discourse at the outset and will try to find the connections between violence and electoral processes, the geopolitics of the exploitation of natural resources and the circulation of arms and money between Mexico and the United States.
 
The reactions of the journalistic guild about my book have been mostly very positive. I think that journalists in general have a greater capacity for self-criticism than, for example, academic researchers or fiction writers. A trained journalist is interested above all in refining their information and in understanding the sociopolitical processes in depth.
 
I have been able to converse with numerous colleagues in Mexico since the publication of my book and have had very productive exchanges. This is partly because my book draws on the brave and important work of reporters like Ignacio Alvarado, Dawn Paley, Federico Mastrogiovanni and Julian Cardona, among others, who have been the pioneers in analyzing the anti-drug policy and national security discourses. I am sure that, above all, the new generations of journalists will be able to take a critical distance from the hegemonic imaginary of 'narco' in the next decade, largely thanks to the work of all these indispensable reporters.