Drug trafficking is a problem that Mexico has been facing for decades and this phenomenon has always been determined by language, according to Mexican writer Oswaldo Zavala, author of the book “The War in Words” said Monday.
“The book is a thorough exploration of the official discourse, because everything we normally say, talk about, think about drug trafficking actually comes from official sources,” Zavala said in an interview with Efe.
“The war in words”, he indicated, is an intellectual history of drug trafficking in Mexico that spans four decades – from 1975 to 2020 – where it shows how the official discourse creates drug trafficking legends in response to political and anti-drug agendas. .
The volume is divided into four sections and begins with the first operation to eradicate marijuana and poppy plantations, continues with the murder of DEA agent Kiki Camarena in 1985, and follows other phenomena such as the reinvention of drug cartels and the rise of figures such as Amado Carrillo Fuentes.
The book reaches the war against drug trafficking of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) and the pacification proposed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024).
Zavala explained that for more than four decades the Mexican political system has managed to impose a narrative about the “narco” that society in general has accepted, such as organized crime being the dominant explanation for the high rates of violence in the country.
“The violence is real, but the dominant official explanation is political trickery, a fantasy that has allowed the authorities to exercise the cruelest government policy against the population, but always legitimized by the recyclable plot of the war on drugs. “, I consider.
IGNORANCE OF DRUG TRAFFICKING
Zavala pointed out that the idea of what is said, thought or imagined about drug trafficking “generally comes from official sources, not from direct knowledge of drug trafficking.”
These sources, he said, are mainly from Mexican and US authorities who, on many occasions, depend on certain interests.
The writer said that the language used to talk about the subject in art and journalism is often talked about, but that “it had remained pending to understand the very history of that discourse.”
So, he said, the idea of this book was to give a history of both official and unofficial language that has been built over 40 years, which describes the phenomenon of drug trafficking and also imposes a political meaning.
“It is an investigation of archives, of the presidential libraries of the United States, newspaper archives, academic and journalistic works to try to trace and understand how (the discourse) changed and even became radicalized in the following decades,” he pointed out.
THE DRUG TRAFFICKER, THE BAD
The also journalist and professor of Literature said that it is very difficult to determine what is the real participation that drug trafficking has in the violence that the country is currently experiencing because the official discourse shows an image of the power of organized crime that has little to do with reality.
“We are facing an avalanche of information that prevents us from knowing for sure who the actors of the violence are and who is doing what exactly,” he remarked.
Mexico in 2021 alone registered 33,315 homicides after the two most violent years in its history, under the mandate of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, with 34,690 murder victims in 2019 and 34,554 in 2020.
“What the official discourse does is give us a quick and standardized explanation where if there is a shooting, the trafficker is quickly blamed,” he said.
And he affirmed that one approach that the population should take is that “in a country with so much impunity, and with a rather dubious police system, it should be difficult to believe what official sources say that all this violence is the product of traffickers making war on each other. ”, he questioned.
During the development of the book, he explained, he found that many of the words used to talk about that world and that are used in television series have, for the most part, an official origin.
“The institutions themselves are the ones that speak in this way and are in charge of making them circulate, appearing in the imagination and attributing them to drug trafficking,” he pointed out.
And these words, he affirmed, have led to the drug trafficker being idealized as someone “powerful, as in the corrido ‘Chief of chiefs’ of the Los Tigres del Norte gang, which apparently speaks of a drug trafficker “although in reality it does not name him to 100 %”.
He also denied that there is “a verifiable or demonstrable relationship” between speech and violence.
“It’s not to say that the number of series about a character suddenly makes people naturalize or normalize violence. That is a way of blaming consumers of cultural products and thinking of them as having little intelligence”, she stated.
Finally, he remarked that his book is not a story about “narcos”, but about the language that turned them into internal enemies, a threat to “national security”.
“They are the myth that justifies the atrocities of the US security agenda instrumentalized in Mexico by the political-business class,” he concluded.
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