Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [96]
The police captured one alleged culprit after another. First, the perpetrator was a known sex offender: an Egyptian chemist who had moved to Juarez from Midland, Texas. He was jailed, but the killing went on. Then police blamed it on a gang of teenage rapists, then on a bus driver. But the killing went on. A superb documentary, Senorita Extraviada by Lordes Portillo, presented evidence that linked elements inside the police to the rapes and murders.87 In the last few years, the storyline has shifted way beyond that: from dead women to a whole city dying. The violence now appears, at first glance, to be driven by turf battles and leadership struggles between infinite numbers of narcoleros. But it’s worse than that.
Charles Bowden, the longtime chronicler of Juarez, described the end-times quality of lawlessness that now obtains: “Imagine living a place where you can kill anyone you wish and nothing happens except that they fall dead. You will not be arrested. Your name will not be in the newspapers. You can continue on with your life. And your killing. You can take a woman and rape her for days and nothing will happen. If you choose, if in some way that woman displeases you, well, you can kill her after raping her. Rest assured, nothing will happen to you because of your actions.”88 Later, he explains it more abstractly: “For years, people have sought a single explanation of violence in Juarez. . . . We insist that power must replace power, that structure replaces an earlier structure. . . . Try for a moment to imagine something else, not a new structure but rather a pattern, and this pattern functionally has no top or bottom, no center or edge, no boss or obedient servant. . . . Violence courses through Juarez like a ceaseless wind. . . . Violence is now woven into the very fabric of the community and has no single cause and no single motive and no off button.”89
This lawlessness is the context in which climate change is beginning to have effects. It is also part of what makes Mexico highly vulnerable to climate change. So then, what is the history of the narcoviolence that now ravages northern Mexico?
The Pus of Free Trade
By most accounts, the Mexican cartels either had old roots in bootlegging or got their start as auxiliaries of Colombian organizations.90 During the second half of the 1980s, Mexico became a transshipment point for illicit drug imports to the United States following the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) crackdown on Florida smuggling routes starting in 1982. As Florida closed, Mexico opened.91 In 1988, cocaine seizures along the California border shot up 700 percent in one year as Colombians moved cocaine through traditional heroin and marijuana routes, known as the “Mexican pipeline.” The DEA estimated that 30 to 40 percent of all cocaine entering the United States now arrived via Mexico.92 That percentage would later rise dramatically.
For years the Mexicans merely facilitated transshipment of cocaine and marijuana on behalf of the more powerful Colombian cartels.93 In the mid-1990s conditions changed. The Colombian cartels began to fracture. First, the Medellin Cartel’s boss, Pablo Escobar, was jailed, then escaped and was killed by DEA commandos. With that, his organization began to splinter and was superseded by the Cali Cartel, which is said to have opened the route through Mexico; soon that cartel’s leaders were also rounded up.94
A month after Pablo Escobar was killed, the United States and Mexico signed NAFTA. The late Ken Dermota—a great American journalist who interviewed the imprisoned Pablo Escobar and covered the Columbian drug war better than most—reported how the Medellin Cartel awaited free trade with the enthusiasm of children on Christmas Eve. On hearing that NAFTA was coming, a trafficker named