Read To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War for Free Online Page B

every day. Those arrests lead to a minuscule number of convictions. According to Mexican federal reports analyzed by the investigative newsmagazine ContraLínea , of the 121,199 people that soldiers and police had detained in three and a half years of Calderón’s war, prosecutors brought charges against only 1,306 for having links to one of the eight cartels presumed to operate in Mexico. Judges sentenced 735 to prison for organized crime. In 2009, federal police arrested, amidst great fanfare, eleven mayors and twenty-four other officials in Michoacán state for alleged links to drug traffickers. By late September 2010, prosecutors dropped the cases and judges ordered all but one set free for lack of evidence. The mayors and officials all belonged to the opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and had been arrested six weeks before the midterm federal elections. In the drug war, detentions and arrests produce results on the television screen, not in the courtroom.
    And this is what they tell us: if you are found dead, shot through the face, wrapped in a soiled blanket, and left on some desolate roadside, then you are somehow to blame. You must have been into something bad to end up like that. Surely you were a drug dealer, a drug trafficker, or an official on the take. The very fact of your execution is the judgment against you, the determination of your guilt.
    Mexican political cartoonist Antonio Helguera published a drawing in La Jornada , in March 2010, that captures this official logic of death in Mexico’s and the United States’ drug war. The title of the cartoon is Morir en México , To Die in Mexico. Eight asymmetrically aligned gravestones fill the frame and read, clockwise from the left: “She must have been into something; It was a gang feud; They murdered amongst themselves; What was he doing at that hour?; It was a settling of accounts; She dressed provocatively; Who knows what he was getting into; She was a whore.”
    The official logic of death seeks to safeguard the legitimacy of the army and federal police, and through them Calderón and his enforcers, to cloak them in a layer of discursive Kevlar that deflects all scrutiny. In the drug war, the dead are guilty, ipso facto, of their own murder. And whosoever would seek to argue otherwise confronts the likelihood of looking, briefly, at an AK-47.
    But the drug war death squads make mistakes. And names wait with the dead.
    ONE SHOULD NOT FORGET that the United States invaded Mexico in 1846 and conquered half of its national territory. Mexicans do not forget this; many in the United States never learn it.
    The United States later invaded the port of Veracruz in 1914 during the Mexican Revolution to aid Venustiano Carranza in his war against Pancho Villa’s Northern Division and Emiliano Zapata’s Liberation Army of the South. U.S. intervention in Mexico is simultaneously a grounded historical fear-and-loathing in the population; a rhetorical device employed by all sectors of the political class to rally nationalist sentiment; and a brutish daily fact of Mexican life. The North American Free Trade Agreement and the drug war are examples of the latter.
    The blood and chaos that accompany drug trafficking from Mexico into the United States are inextricably related to the simultaneous demand within the U.S. population for the classic illegal products one can use to get high or seek oblivion, and the insistence of U.S. politicians on an ideological commitment to prohibition that seeks to veil prohibition’s use for social control.
    Social control? Might that be exaggerating, or conspiracy theorizing? Civil rights advocate and litigator Michelle Alexander recently published a study of the drug war’s impact on people of color, particularly African Americans, called The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness . She argues that slavery evolved through Reconstruction into a caste system based on racial discrimination that in