Ed Vulliamy’s name has been well known to readers of the London-based Observer newspaper for a very long time, notably for his enterprising dispatches from his former base in the US, a country for which he clearly has a great, though not unquestioning, affection. His words have over the years brought to life the politics and the social scene in that tortured and paradoxical country, and in other places too.
Never one to hide his own views, Vulliamy last year delivered a fierce attack on attitudes to the war in Bosnia aimed at Amnesty International and at Noam Chomsky. He took issue with Chomsky’s “revisionism in the story of the concentration camps in northwest Bosnia, which it was my accursed honor to discover.”
With a great sense of timing, Vulliamy now comes out with the most vivid book so far published in English on the bloody calamity that has been visited on Mexico’s northern border lands — and on many on the US side of it — by the initiative of politicians in both countries to extend the “war on drugs” by fire and sword. Anyone who has a passing acquaintance with the debacle of the US’ post-World War I attempt to outlaw alcohol — still by far the world’s most dangerous drug — could have foreseen that this project would fail.
Far from controlling the trade in non-alcoholic narcotics, this “war” has put money into the pockets of the traffickers. Far from relieving the sufferings of the addicts, it has cut health standards wherever it has been practiced. Far from bringing a flowering of civic virtue, it has spread corruption in all strata of US and Mexican society, from the humblest youth making a turn with a spliff or two on a street corner to the most senior officials and bankers concerned with the “war.” Far from bringing peace to the streets, it has produced a cash bonanza for weapons manufacturers in the US and retailers in Mexico. And far from oiling the wheels of diplomacy between the two neighbors, it has tempted the richer — and more confused — one to interfere in the politics of the poorer.
This was already apparent 25 years ago when Mexican men of violence, known to and possibly trained by the CIA, tortured and killed Enrique Camarena, an agent of the US Drug Enforcement Administration operating illegally in Guadalajara. Camarena’s killing, Vulliamy says, was the trigger for a series of maneuvers that pitted drugs criminals against the government, an important first step towards the chaos that engulfs Mexico today.
Since December 2006, when, under former US president George W. Bush’s instructions, Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched the Mexican military against the narcos, the author reports more than 24,000 people have been killed, many mutilated and exhibited to convey some message or threat.
Much of this absorbing book consists of a journey along the frontier, hopping continually from one side to the other, from the Pacific Ocean and San Diego in the west across the Sierra Madre and down the Rio Grande to Matamoros on the Gulf of Mexico. Vulliamy takes us to some bizarre places — for instance, the US Air Force Barry Goldwater bombing range in Arizona, named after an unsuccessful US Republican politician. At the same time, he does not ignore the spectacular beauty of this land that has for decades thrilled this reviewer. He takes us to some terrifying places, too — Ciudad Juarez, for instance, one of the world’s most violent cities, with a murder rate of 191 citizens per 100,000 per annum, where scores of children, women and men are killed in the most revolting manner. In January last year 5,000 soldiers were deployed there. In March came 3,200 more, together with 700 federal police. By the end of last year, despite wave after wave of military reinforcements, 2,657 had died in the city. Vulliamy comments: “The Mexican government’s insistence that an increased military presence is the only way to confront the drug violence makes Juarez the litmus-test city of the policy. It is a test that spectacularly failed.”
The author has done a great deal of painstaking work in investigating and describing the blood-soaked frontier and the political cross-currents in both regions. Who will forget the words of one such as Mike Flores from Arizona who despises the US border guards — “They come from Texas, South Carolina, upstate New York, and they don’t know jack shit about this land. They act the tough guy but if you put any of ’em out on the land without their toys they’d be dead in two days”?
Yet one puts down Amexica a little disappointed, and not just by the frequent mangling of the Spanish language. Vulliamy does not really analyze how such a strategy — concocted by former US president Richard Nixon — took hold of the US and those parts of the world where it remains influential, and how it still survives. It would have been fascinating to read his judgment, too, on the popularity or otherwise in Mexico of the war option. Yet as it stands this is a fascinating introduction to the bloody last act of the “war on drugs,” which must surely soon pass unlamented into history.
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