All the gold you’re wearing
It’s been a bit hectic over here. Not for any real reason other than the fact that I’ve been keeping abreast of the news. What the fuck, man? At this point I’m just waiting for martial* law. Or a new world order. It’s not just the domestic election. I’m mostly fascinated with what’s going down in Mexico concerning the drug cartels and border towns, specifically Tijuana.
*Why can’t the internet agree on one spelling of martial when concerning marshall law? I’m going with the single “l” because double consonants with no difference in pronunciation are so colonial. (If it sounds like I just made that up, it’s because I did, but it feels like I’m on to something.)
Tijuana is a study in world politics in itself. Yes, it’s ghetto, dirty, corrupt and the birthplace of the donkey show. But it also has wealth, world class culture, education and is an incredibly important border town, it is one of a few major US/Mexico border cities. Also, it was the first foreign city I ever visited. What happens in Tijuana happens in the US, environmentally and politically. More importantly, it happens where my mom lives. When I was growing up, late at night we would periodically hear a flock of helicopters circling a mansion close by. Inevitably the morning news told of the latest drug bust and the now incarcerated ring leader with helicopter footage of the carefully kept grounds. Once, a body was found a half mile from our house. That was the closest it ever got, but there have been many, many within a 5 mile radius.
Tijuana gets dismissed as a dusty, drunken party to be left before the buzz wears off. TJ though, is special in ways I can’t even explain. I’m no expert but it is a dialectic between so many things: Anglo/Latin worlds, poverty/wealth, depravity/culture the list is endless. When all these things get mashed together, and the fact that it’s the last stop between Colombia and the huge cocaine market of the “wealthy” Americans, you get Tijuana. It couldn’t exist in its current form under any other circumstances. There is a reason it’s world famous.
As best I can understand it, the deal is this: there are two major drug cartels (Arellano-Felix Cartel and the Jaurez Cartel) a leader of Juarez died, now the AFC is trying to overtake them and their territory. This is what the movie Traffic was about, and shit has only gotten worse since then. At first the bodies were dumped behind buildings in the middle of the night. Now full blown shoot outs happen in the middle of the day on crowded streets. Innocent people die because they were in the line of fire. They aren’t small crime scenes either, these battles leave 10-30 bodies in the street at a time. What’s more, the cartels spend over $1 million a week in police bribes and they have sophisticated military grade weapons. They’re no joke.
TJ isn’t the only Mexican city to deal with violent drug cartels, cocaine has to travel up from Colombia somehow. Unfortunately, the news of all this gives people the impression that traveling to Mexico will get you killed. And that may be true of a visit to Tijuana but overall, that couldn’t be further from the truth. So when people joke about the shit hole that is Mexico, on the surface it’s true. But on a deeper level it bothers me because its been colonized several times over and each colonizer has taken what they wanted and left the aftermath to work itself out. And what we’re seeing now is still the aftermath. I think that’s a point people miss sometimes. The gold and silver mined from Mexican soil created rich economies in Europe especially Spain. Those cathedrals drenched in gold? Yeah that’s from some Latin country, most likely Mexico (or what used to be Mexico).
Consider the violent parallels of the colonial oppressors and the native drug cartels. I mean the country has been almost completely stripped of its mineral wealth so it’s only natural that people make money off the land in other ways. If cocaine weren’t regulated by the United States, we wouldn’t see these drug wars. So in a way there is still a colonial presence, except it’s not involved in violence directly but it’s complicit in it.
In an effort to keep my mind off my UCSF application I’ve become more and more obsessed with Mexican goings on. But I’ve just replaced one stressor with another. I mean, faaahck, it’s a bloody soap opera and my mom is like right there giving me a play by play. She even sees victims of the fallout in the ER where she works.
The Millionizer is at Flashcamp