by Katherine Powell
In the documentary “Cartel Land,” director Matthew Heineman portrays an unexpected side to the drug war.
His story goes a little something like this.
In early 2013, Dr. José Manuel Mireles Valverde of Michoacán took up arms with other town residents to form the Autodefensas. The group of vigilantes fought in the name of self-protection — to repel the Los Caballeros Templarios cartel from their community.
As they found ascendancy, the paramilitary faction aimed toward something bigger: to eliminate the cartel band from each city in Mexico.
The movement gained force. Cue federal dismantle.
Mexican officials gave them a choice: disband or join us as part of the Rural Defense Force. And hey, we’ll load you up with guns and vests if you choose the latter.
Most gave in. Some, like Dr. Mireles, refused.
Before long, the same men who joined the Autodefensas with wholesome intentions were out in a deserted field under a night sky tending to a big black pot of steaming meth. As the film ends, one of the cooks acknowledges — “We’re the lucky ones. For now.”
Writing for the New Yorker, Dan Slater reflects on Heineman’s film: “The drug war is typically depicted as a problem of hypocrisy and delusion in the United States, and of tumult in Mexico. It’s a matter of ‘corruption,’ one hears. But corruption… fails to convey the extent of the problem… there is no accountable government; no public trust exists that can be broken… in a void of central authority, evil moves through the poor communities of a narco state with a cancerous gravity, making every cell sick.”
Innocent people turned casualties of a war they wanted no part of.
Those who join the cartel typically do so for one of two reasons. The first, that it’s one of few means by which a person can escape poverty in rural Mexico.
Given the nature of their work, it’s hard to conceptualize that these drug producers might possess motives similar to our own — they are capitalists, seizing on a market.
The second, that joining the cartel is often the only way to escape the cartel. The gang has infiltrated our southern neighbor across all tiers of society: government, police, military and civilians alike.
Since 2007, some 236,000 homicides have been reported in the bureaucratic black hole. An estimated 27,000 are missing. Half live in poverty. Violence and torture related to organized crime run rampant.
Those who dare to rebel against the system do so nobly, but will likely end up either as another bad guy or as a subject of the bad guys’ manhunt, as was the fate of Dr. Mireles, who now sits in a Michoacán prison awaiting trial. As he once said, you can’t stop the cartel, no matter what you do.
Who are the real criminals of the drug war? Before pointing your finger toward Mexico, ask yourself: would you, given the chance, take revenge on the man who killed your mother, father, sister, brother, husband or wife? Would you join a cartel if not joining meant dying? If they were coming to your house, would you have the courage to rumble?
War by its nature is cyclical. Patterns of retaliation combined with deep-rooted institutional corruption make it hard to envision Mexico ever freeing itself from cartel-induced mayhem.
U.S. policy is largely responsible for the demand the cartel supplies. Indeed, as America’s war on drugs took full effect, we began to see the rise of cartels. Most trace their origin to the Guadalajara cartel, formed in 1980 by Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo.
Escalation of the drug war has only proven to make these drugs more valuable.
Sanho Tree, director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, broke this thought down for The Huffington Post’s Marc Lamont Hill: “Things like cocaine, heroine, marijuana — these are minimally-processed agricultural commodities,” he said. “They’re very easy to produce… They’re very cheap to produce. There’s no reason they should be worth this kind of money that people are willing to kill, and torture and massacre over.”
For the cartel, the riskier a transport, the more it’s going to cost — production fees that must be remade in sales and distribution, one might suppose.
To work toward eliminating illegal drug trade, drug decriminalization, like what’s beginning to happen with marijuana, is a good start.
Sufficient, widespread decriminalization would mean far less people in prison, unfortunate news for those who make billions annually off the incarcerated population — like the $70 billion private prison industry, or the Department of Justice’s Asset Forfeiture Fund, which collected $4.5 billion from state seizures of cash and property in 2014, according to their own report.
Ending the war on drugs would certainly lose such entities money, but it’s action well worth the cost if it helps to bring about peace in Mexico and on the border.
Mexico needs reform, as does the U.S. For them, it’s economic, political, social and institutional resuscitation. For us, it’s changes in policy that embrace drug treatment instead of punishment, impartiality instead of discrimination, empathy instead of callousness.
Overdose took 50,000 American lives in 2014.
Common forces drive people to abuse drugs. A study by the Kaiser Southern California Permanente Medical Group, for example, found that those who endure four or more traumatic childhood events (including but not limited to sexual abuse, violence against mother and living with a substance abuser) are 4 to 12 times more likely to experience alcoholism, drug abuse and depression than those who endured none.
Our government’s systematic response to drug use and abuse contains no compassion for such human tendencies. Instead, it serves to capitalize on our fallibilities, ultimately forgoing public well-being for the sake of profit and power.
Austin Urban Post 
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