Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World

THE TEACHING OF FEAR

In a world that prefers security to justice, there is loud applause whenever justice is sacrificed on the altar of security. The rite takes place in the streets. Every time a criminal falls in a hail of bullets, society feels some relief from the disease that makes it tremble. The death of each lowlife has a pharmaceutical effect on those living the high life. The word “pharmacy” comes from pharmakos, the Greek name for humans sacrificed to the gods in times of crisis.

THE GREAT THREAT OF THE FIN DE SIÈCLE

At the end of 1982 a routine event occurred in Rio de Janeiro. The police killed a man suspected of robbery. The bullet entered the man’s back, as tends to happen when officers of the law kill in self-defense, and the case was filed away. In his report, the chief explained that the suspect was “a true social microbe,” who had been “absolved on this planet by his death.” The papers, radio, and TV in Brazil often use a vocabulary drawn from medicine and zoology to describe criminals: “virus,” “cancer,” “social infection,” “animals,” “predators,” “insects,” “wild beasts,” even “small beasts” when referring to children. These terms always allude to poor people. When criminals aren’t poor, the story leaps to the front page: “Young Mugger Killed Was Middle-Class,” went a Folha de São Paulo headline of October 25, 1995.

Not counting the many victims of gangs linked to the police, officially the São Paulo state police killed four people a day in 1992; by year’s end the total was four times the number killed by the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil for fifteen years. At the end of 1995, the Rio police were given a raise for “bravery and fearlessness.” That pay hike brought another sort of raise in its wake: the number of “alleged criminals” shot dead. “They aren’t citizens, they’re bandits,” explained General Nilton Cerqueira, once a star of the military dictatorship and now responsible for public security in Rio. He has always believed that, like good soldiers, good policemen shoot first and ask questions later.

After the earthquake of the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Latin America’s armed forces turned their attention from the traditional role of defending borders to “internal enemies”: guerrilla subversion and its many incubators. With the free world and democratic rule at stake, these militaries were inspired to do away with freedom and democracy. In just four years, between 1962 and 1966, there were nine coups d’état in Latin America. Following the doctrine of national security to a tee, the brass continued to overthrow civilian governments and massacre people for years thereafter. Time has passed, civilian rule has been reestablished. The enemy remains “internal” but isn’t what it used to be. Now the armed forces are taking up the fight against so-called common crime. Instead of the doctrine of national security, we have the hysteria of public security. Generally speaking, the officers don’t like it one bit that they’ve been demoted to mere policemen — but reality insists.

Global Fear

Those who work are afraid they’ll lose their jobs.

Those who don’t are afraid they’ll never find one.

Whoever doesn’t fear hunger is afraid of eating.

Drivers are afraid of walking and pedestrians are afraid of getting run over.

Democracy is afraid of remembering and language is afraid of speaking.

Civilians fear the military, the military fears a shortage of weapons, weapons fear a shortage of wars.

It is the time of fear.

Women’s fear of violent men and men’s fear of fearless women.

Fear of thieves, fear of the police.

Fear of doors without locks, of time without watches, of children without television; fear of night without sleeping pills and day without pills to wake up.

Fear of crowds, fear of solitude, fear of what was and what could be, fear of dying, fear of living.

About thirty years ago the establishment had enemies of all colors, from pale pink to fire-engine red. The work of chicken thieves and knife-carrying slum dwellers was of interest only to crime-page readers, devotees of cruelty, and experts in criminology. Today, “common crime” is a universal obsession, democratized and within the reach of all: many practice it, everyone suffers from it. Crime is the most potent source of inspiration for politicians and journalists who scream for an iron hand and the death penalty, and it gives certain military officers a golden opportunity to pursue civilian careers. Maybe the collective terror that identifies democracy with chaos and insecurity helps explain why some Latin American generals who only a few years ago were running bloody dictatorships have been so successful as politicians. General Ríos Montt, the exterminating angel of Guatemalan Indians, led the polls until his presidential candidacy was ruled illegal, and the same happened with General Oviedo in Paraguay. General Bussi, who killed suspects with one hand while with the other depositing the sweat of his brow in Swiss banks, was elected and reelected governor of the Argentine province of Tucumán. Another uniformed assassin, General Banzer, was rewarded with the presidency of Bolivia.

The experts at the Inter-American Development Bank, who can translate life and death into dollars and cents, calculate that Latin America loses $168 billion a year to crime. We are winning the World Cup of crime. Latin America’s murder rate is six times the world average. If the economy only grew like crime, the region would be the most prosperous on the planet. Peace in El Salvador? What peace? At the rate of a murder an hour, El Salvador is keeping pace with the worst years of the war. Kidnapping is the most lucrative industry in Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico. In our large cities, no one would be considered normal if he hadn’t been mugged at least once. There are five times as many murders in Rio as in New York. Bogotá is the capital of violence, Medellín the city of widows. Elite cops, members of “special groups,” have begun to patrol the streets of some Latin American cities outfitted from head to toe for World War III. They have infrared night visors, headphones, microphones, and bulletproof vests; on their belts they carry pepper spray and bullets; an automatic rifle is in their hands and a pistol on their thighs.

Typical Scenes from Latin America

States stop running businesses and concentrate on running jails.

Presidents become local managers of foreign companies.

Finance ministers make good translators.

The captains of industry become importers.

The many more depend more and more on the leftovers of the ever-fewer few.

Workers lose their jobs.

Peasants lose their plots.

Children lose their right to be children.

Youth lose the capacity to believe.

Old folks lose their pensions.

“Life is a lottery,” say the winners.

Of every hundred crimes committed in Colombia, ninety-seven are never solved. The proportion is similar in the barrios of Buenos Aires, where the police spend most of their time committing crimes and killing young people. From 1983, when democracy was restored, to the middle of 1997, the police blew away 314 suspicious-looking boys. In the course of a police shake-up at the end of 1997, the press discovered that nobody knew what five thousand officers on the payroll did or where they were. Polls showed that few Argentines or Uruguayans would turn to the police if they had a serious problem. Six out of ten Uruguayans favored taking justice into their own hands, and some had signed up for shooting lessons.

In the United States four out of every ten people admit to having changed their routines because of crime, and south of the Rio Grande people talk about muggings and robberies as much as about soccer or the weather. The public opinion industry throws oil on the fire, doing its best to turn public security into public obsession, but the fact is, reality does more. Reality assures us that violence is rising even faster than the statistics confess. In many countries people don’t report crimes, because they don’t trust the police or they fear them. The Uruguayan papers call gangs that pull off spectacular robberies “supergangs,” and those who have police officers among their members are called “poligangs.” Of every ten Venezuelans, nine believe the police commit crimes. In 1996, the majority of Rio de Janeiro’s finest admitted that they had been offered bribes, while their chief said that “the police were created to be corrupt” and that a society “that wants corrupt and violent police” is to blame.

An internal police report leaked to Amnesty International shows that six out of every ten crimes in Mexico City are committed by the police. To catch a hundred criminals in a year, it takes 14 police in Washington, 15 in Paris, 18 in London, and 1,295 in Mexico City. “We have allowed the police to become excessively corrupt,” the mayor of that city admitted in 1997. “Excessively?” asked the ever-curious Carlos Monsiváis. “What’s wrong with them? Are they corrupt or are they getting away with honesty? Put them to work.”

At century’s end, everything is becoming globalized and everything is becoming alike: clothes, food, the lack of food, ideas, the lack of ideas, and crime, too, not to speak of the fear of crime. Throughout the world, crime is rising faster than the numbers can sing, even though they sing with gusto. Since 1970, reported crimes have grown three times faster than the world’s population. In Eastern Europe, while consumerism buried Communism in the 1990s, daily violence multiplied at the same rate that wages fell: by three in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Organized and disorganized crime have taken over Russia, where juvenile crime is flowering as nowhere else. The kids who wander the streets of Russian cities are called “the forgotten”; “We have hundreds of thousands of homeless children,” admitted President Boris Yeltsin.

At the end of 1997, terror of assaults was written into law in most eloquent fashion in Louisiana, where drivers were authorized to kill anyone who tried to rob them, even if the crook was unarmed. This no-holds-barred approach was then promoted on TV thanks to the toothy smile of the reigning Miss Louisiana. Meanwhile the popularity of New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani rose spectacularly when he hit criminals hard with a “zero tolerance” policy. The crime rate dropped in the same measure as charges of police brutality rose. Beastly repression, a magic potion adored by the media, fell savagely on blacks and the other “minorities” that make up the majority of New York’s residents. “Zero tolerance” quickly became a beacon for Latin America’s cities.

Presidential elections in Honduras, 1997: crime is the key issue in the speeches of all the candidates, every one of whom promises security to a people cowering in fear. Legislative elections in Argentina, the same year: candidate Norma Miralles comes out for the death penalty, but not if it’s painless: “It’s no big deal to kill a condemned man, because he doesn’t suffer.” Not long before, Rio de Janeiro mayor Luiz Paulo Conde said he preferred life sentences or forced labor, because the death penalty has the drawback of being “a very quick thing.”

But no law can stop the invasion of those who live outside the law. The frightened only multiply in number, and they can be more dangerous than the danger that frightens them. Not only do the hustlers and spongers who live in prosperity feel threatened, so do many who survive in scarcity, poor people who suffer the attacks of people poorer or more desperate than themselves. “Frenzied Mob Burns Child Alive for Stealing an Orange,” reads the headline. The blind fury of poor against poor: between 1979 and 1988 the Brazilian press reported 272 lynchings by people who had no money to pay the police to do the job for them. Poor, too, were those responsible for the 52 lynchings that occurred in Guatemala in 1997 and the 166 lynchings between 1986 and 1991 in Jamaica. During those same five years, quick-triggered Jamaican police killed over a thousand suspects. A poll found that a third of the population believed delinquents should be hanged, since neither street vengeance nor police violence did the trick. Polls in 1997 in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo revealed that more than half the people considered lynching criminals to be “normal.”

A good part of the population also openly or discreetly applauds the death squads that mete out capital punishment even when it’s against the law and do so with the participation or complicity of the police and the military. In Brazil they started by killing guerrillas. Then they moved on to adult criminals, later to homosexuals and panhandlers, and finally to teenagers and children. Silvio Cunha, the president of a merchants’ association in Rio, said in 1991, “Killing a young slum dweller is a service to society.” The owner of a shop in the barrio of Botafogo was robbed four times in two months. A policeman explained why: there’s no point arresting children today, since the judge will set them free to rob tomorrow. “It’s up to you,” the policeman said. And for a reasonable price he offered to take care of things when he was off-duty, “to get rid of them,” he said.

“Get rid of them?”

“That’s right.”

Under contract to store owners, the death squads in Brazil, which like to call themselves “self-defense groups,” clean up the cities while in the countryside their colleagues under contract to big landowners gun down landless peasants and other bothersome people. According to the May 20, 1998, issue of Isto é magazine, in the state of Maranhão the life of a judge is worth five hundred dollars, that of a priest four hundred. It’s only three hundred to knock off a lawyer. Murderers for hire offer their services by Internet, with discounts for subscribers.

Public Enemy/1

In April 1997, Brazilian television viewers were invited to vote on the fate of a young perpetrator of a violent assault. Execution won by a landslide, two to one over prison.

According to researcher Vera Malaguti, the image of public enemy number one is modeled on a great-grandchild of slaves who lives in the favelas, can’t read, adores “funk” music, uses or sells drugs, is arrogant and pushy, and fails to show the least remorse.

Death squads in Colombia — known officially as “self-defense groups,” they call themselves “social cleansing groups”—also began by killing guerrillas and now, under contract to store owners, landowners, or whoever will pay, they’ll kill anyone. Many of their members are policemen or soldiers without uniform, but they also train young executioners. In Medellín, several schools for hit men attract teenagers with offers of easy money and cheap thrills. These fifteen-year-olds trained in the arts of crime are sometimes hired to kill other children as dead of hunger as they are. Poor against poor, as usual: poverty is a blanket that’s too narrow, and everyone pulls it to his own side. But the victims might also be prominent politicians or famous journalists. The chosen target is called a “dog” or a “package.” The young assassins get paid according to the importance of the dog and the risks of the operation. Often the executioners are protected by the legal mask of security companies. At the end of 1997, the Colombian government acknowledged that it had only thirty inspectors for three thousand private security firms. Last year in an exemplary operation that lasted a week, one agent inspected four hundred “self-defense groups.” He found nothing out of the ordinary.

Public Enemy/2

At the beginning of 1998, journalist Samuel Blixen made an eloquent comparison. The take from fifty muggings carried out by the best-known criminal gangs in Uruguay added up to $5 million. The take from two muggings carried out without a shot by a bank and a financier totaled $70 million.

Death squads leave no fingerprints. Rarely is the silence broken. An exception occurred in Colombia in mid-1991: sixty beggars were shot dead in the city of Pereira. The murderers weren’t arrested, but fifteen police officers, two of high rank, were “disciplined” and forced to retire. Another exception occurred in Rio de Janeiro in mid-1993: fifty homeless children sleeping at the gates of Candelaria Church were shot; eight of them died. The massacre was news around the world and, in the end, two of the military police who carried out the operation went to jail. A miracle.

Afanásio Jazadji was elected to the legislature with the largest vote in the history of the state of São Paulo. He earned his popularity preaching on the radio, day after day, microphone in hand. Enough talk of problems, he said, it’s time for solutions. Overcrowded jails? “We should take all those incorrigible prisoners, put them up against the wall, and incinerate them with a flamethrower. Or set off a bomb. Boom. Problem solved. Those bums are costing us millions.” Interviewed in 1987 by Bell Chevigny, Jazadji explained that torture is okay because the police torture only the guilty. Sometimes, he said, the police don’t know what crimes the crook has committed and can find out only by beating him, just like a husband when he beats his wife. Torture, he concluded, is the only way to discover the truth.

Back in the year 1252 Pope Innocent IV authorized the torture of those suspected of heresy. The Inquisition invented new techniques for the production of pain, which twentieth-century technology has elevated to industrial perfection. Amnesty International has documented the systematic practice of electric-shock torture in fifty countries. In the thirteenth century the powerful called a spade a spade; now torture is committed but not discussed. Power avoids bad words. At the end of 1996, when the Israeli Supreme Court authorized the torture of Palestinian prisoners, the justices called it “moderate physical pressure.” In Latin America torture is called “legal compulsion.” Common criminals, or those who look like them, have always suffered “compulsion” in the police stations here. It’s a custom, considered normal, for the police to extract confessions by the same means of torment that military dictatorships recently used on political prisoners. The difference is that many of those political prisoners were middle-class, some upper-class, and social class is the only boundary impunity occasionally acknowledges. During the military horror, campaigns by human rights groups didn’t always ring like a wooden bell; sometimes they struck a chord in the closed environment of life under dictatorship and even in the world beyond. Who, in contrast, will listen to common criminals, socially despised and legally invisible? When one of them commits insanity by announcing that he’s been tortured, the police send him back for more intensive care.

Filthy jails, prisoners like sardines in a can — most of them have not been convicted, many haven’t even been tried. They’re just there and nobody knows why. Compared with these seething prisons, Dante’s Inferno looks like Disneyland. Riots break out continually, and the forces of order spray the disorderly with bullets, in the process killing as many as they can to ease the overcrowding. In 1992, there were over fifty uprisings in Latin America’s most overcrowded prisons. Nine hundred were killed, most of them in cold blood.

Thanks to torture, which makes the mute sing, many are imprisoned for crimes they did not commit, since it’s better to have an innocent behind bars than a criminal walking free. Others confess to murders that are child’s play compared with the feats of certain generals or to robberies that are jokes compared with the frauds run by businessmen and bankers or the commissions charged by politicians every time they sell off another piece of the country. The military dictatorships are gone, but the jails of Latin America’s democracies are filled to bursting. The prisoners are poor, as you’d expect, because only the poor go to jail in countries where nobody goes to jail for the collapse of a brand-new bridge, the bankruptcy of a looted bank, or the crumbling of a building with no foundation.

The system of power that creates poverty is the same one that wages war without quarter on the desperate people it begets. A century ago, Georges Vacher de Lapouge demanded more guillotines to purify the race. This French thinker, who believed that all geniuses were German, was convinced that only the guillotine could correct the errors of “natural selection” and end the alarming proliferation of incompetents and criminals. “A good crook is a dead crook,” say those who today demand ironhanded social therapy. Society has the right to kill in legitimate defense of public health, given the danger posed by slums infected with ne’er-do-wells and drug addicts. With social problems reduced to police problems, there is a growing clamor for the death penalty, a fair punishment that will reduce the cost of prisons, have a healthy, intimidating effect, and solve the problem of recidivism by eliminating potential repeat offenders. You learn by dying. In most Latin American countries the law does not allow capital punishment, but it gets carried out every time a police warning shot enters the back of a suspect’s neck or death squads kill with impunity. With or without the law, the state practices premeditated homicide, treachery, and discrimination. Yet no matter how many people the state kills, it can’t seem to do a thing about the no-man’s-land the street has become.

Power keeps hacking away at the weeds, but it can’t pull out the roots without threatening itself. Criminals get sentenced but not the machine that keeps churning them out, just as drug addicts get sentenced but not the lifestyle that cries out for chemical consolation and an illusion of escape. Society is thus exonerated from responsibility. The law is like a spider’s web, says author Daniel Drew, spun to trap flies and other small insects, not to block the way of larger species. Over a century ago, the poet José Hernández compared the law to a knife that never turns on those who wield it. Official speeches invoke the law as if it applied to everyone, not just to the unfortunates who can’t evade it. Poor criminals are the bad guys in this movie; rich criminals write the script and direct the action.

In other times, the police served an economic system that needed abundant docile labor. The justice system punished vagrants by forcing them into factories at bayonet point. That’s how European society industrialized the peasantry and managed to impose the work ethic in its cities. But today the question is how to impose the unemployment ethic. What mandatory obedience techniques are there to manage the growing multitudes who have no work or hope of ever getting any? What can be done to keep all those who have fallen overboard from trying to climb back in and capsizing the ship?

The raison d’être of the state today is the same as that of the financial markets that rule the world and produce nothing but speculation. Subcommandante Marcos, the spokesman for the Indians of Chiapas, described the process aptly: we are witnessing, he said, a striptease. The state takes off everything down to its underwear, that indispensable intimate garment which is repression. The moment of truth: the state exists only to pay the foreign debt and guarantee social peace.

The state murders by omission as well as commission. At the end of 1995, there were these items of news from Brazil and Argentina:

Crime by commission: the Rio de Janeiro military police killed civilians at eight times the rate of the previous year, and the police in Buenos Aires barrios hunted young people as if they were wild beasts.

Crime by omission: forty kidney patients lay dying in the town of Caruarú in northeast Brazil after a public hospital used polluted water for dialysis, while in Argentina’s northeast province of Misiones, pesticide-laced drinking water was producing babies with leprous lips and deformations of the spinal medulla.

In the favelas of Rio, women carry cans of water on their heads like crowns, while children fly kites in the wind as warnings that the police are coming. At carnival time, black-skinned queens and kings come down from the hills in wigs of white curls, collars of lights, silken coats. On Ash Wednesday, when carnival ends and the tourists depart, anyone still in costume gets thrown in jail. And every other day of the year, the state makes sure the plebeians who were monarchs for a moment toe the line.

At the beginning of the century there was only one favela in Rio. In the forties, by which time there were a few, writer Stefan Zweig paid them a visit and found neither violence nor sadness. Today, there are over five hundred favelas in Rio. Many working people live there, cheap hands who serve tables or wash cars and clothes and bathrooms in wealthy neighborhoods. There, too, live many who are shut out of any market, a number of whom find in drugs some income or relief. From the point of view of the society that created them, favelas are no more than a refuge for organized crime and the cocaine trade. The military police invade them frequently in Vietnam War — lookalike operations, and dozens of death squads work them as well. The dead — illiterate children of illiterates — are mostly black adolescents.

A century ago, the head of a reform school in Illinois concluded that one-third of his internees could not be redeemed. They were future criminals who loved the world, the flesh, and the Devil. It was not clear what could be done with them, but back then a few scientists like the Englishman Cyril Burt proposed fighting crime at the source by eliminating the poorest of the poor, “impeding the propagation of their species.” A hundred years later, the countries of the South treat the poorest poor as if they were toxic waste. The countries of the North export their dangerous industrial waste to the South, but the South can’t return the favor. What then can be done with its dangerous human waste that cannot be redeemed? Bullets do their best to impede “the propagation of their species,” and indeed the Pentagon, military vanguard of the world, says that the wars of the twenty-first century will require ever more specialized weapons for street riots and looting. In some cities of the Americas, like Washington and Santiago de Chile, as in many British cities, video cameras keep a watchful eye on the streets.

Let’s Tell It Like It Is

The first South American Police Congress met in Uruguay in 1979 under the military dictatorship. The congress decided to continue its work in Chile under the military dictatorship, “to benefit the high interests that sparkle along the path of the peoples of America,” as the final resolution put it.

The delegation from Argentina, also under military dictatorship, highlighted the role of the forces of order in the struggle against child and youth crime. Its report was eloquent, as only the police can be: “Although it may seem simplistic, to get to the root of the problem, to its essence in the animating substratum of its dynamism and evolution, we will state and reiterate that the minimal common base is family reality, which has little to do with the socioeconomic-cultural side.… Needy adolescents try to find models of identity in other subcultures (hippie, criminal, etc.), thereby causing an interruption in the socialization process.… The maintenance of public order transcends the interindividual level and, reaching the intraindividual level, takes up that unique and indivisible reality of the individual being and the social being.… If some minors have demonstrated conduct that could degenerate into inadequate behavior presenting an individual-social threat, they have been easily detected and reoriented, and the problem resolved.

Consumer society consumes people and things like so many shooting stars. Things made not to last die soon after birth, and more and more people are condemned from the moment they peek out of the womb. Abandoned children on the streets of Bogotá used to be called “gamines”; now they’re called “disposable kids” and they’re marked to die. In the technocratic language of the moment, the many nobodies are “economically inviable.” What fate awaits these human leftovers? The world invites them to disappear, saying, “You don’t exist because you don’t deserve to exist.” Official reality tries to ignore them: the fastest-growing slum in Buenos Aires is called Hidden City, while in Mexico City the barrios of tin and cardboard sprouting in gullies and garbage dumps are called “lost cities.”

Covenant House interviewed more than 140 orphans and abandoned children living on the streets of Guatemala City: all of them sold their bodies for coins, all had venereal disease, all sniffed glue or solvents. One morning in the middle of 1990, some of those children were talking in a park when several armed men took them away in a truck. One girl escaped by hiding in a garbage can. Four of their bodies turned up a few days later without ears, without eyes, without tongues. The police had taught them a lesson.

In April 1997, Galdino Jesús dos Santos, an indigenous leader visiting Brasilia, was burned alive as he slept at a bus stop. Five teenagers from good families, out on the town, had sprayed him with alcohol and set him alight. They justified what they did by saying, “We thought he was a beggar.” A year later they received light prison sentences; after all, it wasn’t a case of premeditated homicide. As the spokesman for the federal district court explained, the boys used only half the fuel they were carrying, which proved they acted “with the intention of having a good time, not of killing.” The burning of beggars is a sport practiced by the youth of Brazil’s upper class with some regularity, but the news doesn’t usually reach the papers.

Leftovers: street kids, vagrants, beggars, prostitutes, transvestites, homosexuals, pickpockets, small-time thieves, drug addicts, drunks, squeegee kids. In 1993, Colombia’s “disposable kids” crawled out from under their rocks to protest. The demonstration erupted when it hit the news that “social cleansing groups” were killing beggars and selling the bodies to anatomy students at the Free University of Barranquilla. At the demonstration, storyteller Nicolás Buenaventura told those vomited up by the system the real story of the Creation: every time God created something, he had a little bit left over. While the sun and the moon, time and the world, the seas and the jungles were being born from his hand, God kept tossing the leftovers into the abyss. But God, being rather scatterbrained, forgot to make the first woman and man, and they had no choice but to make themselves. Way down there in God’s garbage dump, at the bottom of that abyss, the first woman and the first man made themselves out of God’s leftovers. We human beings were born from garbage, and that’s why we all have a bit of day and a bit of night, and we’re all time and earth and water and wind.

THE INDUSTRY OF FEAR

Fear is the raw material that sustains the flourishing industries of private security and social control, and it’s in steady supply. Demand in these industries is growing as fast as or faster than the crime rate that drives it, and experts predict that it’s going to keep on climbing. The market for private police and private jails is booming, while all of us — some more, some less — are turning into guards and prisoners: guards keeping an eye on whoever’s nearby and prisoners of fear.

TIME OF CAPTIVE JAILERS

“The TV news is our best ad,” say security salesmen, and they ought to know. In Guatemala there are 180 security firms, in Mexico 600, and in Peru 1,500. There are 3,000 in Colombia. In Canada and the United States twice as much is spent on private security as on public security. At the turn of the century there will be two million private police in the United States. In Argentina security is a billion-dollar-a-year business. Every day in Uruguay there are more homeowners who lock four locks instead of three, making some doors look like knights from the Crusades.

A Chico Buarque song starts out with the wail of a police siren: “Call the thief! Call the thief!” pleads the Brazilian singer. In Latin America the crime-control industry feeds on an incessant torrent of news about assaults, kidnappings, rapes, and other crimes. But it also relies on the poor reputation of the public police, who commit crimes with enthusiasm and pursue criminals with suspicious inefficiency. The homes of everyone who has anything to lose, however little, are already behind bars or barbed wire. And even we atheists call on God before we call the police.

In countries where the public police are more effective, alarm at the specter of crime also leads to the privatization of panic. Not only is the number of private policemen in the United States skyrocketing, but so is the number of guns on night tables and in glove compartments. The National Rifle Association, presided over by actor Charlton Heston, has nearly three million members and cites Scripture to justify bearing arms. You can’t blame its leaders for swelling with pride when they proclaim that there are 230 million firearms in the hands of U.S. citizens, an average of one weapon per soul, leaving aside babies and toddlers. In reality, this arsenal is held by a third of the population. For that third, a gun is like a lover or a credit card: without it you can’t sleep or leave home.

All over the world, fewer and fewer dogs enjoy the luxury of just being pets; ever more of them earn their bone by frightening strangers. Car alarms sell like hotcakes, and so do the little personal alarms that shriek in a woman’s handbag or a gentleman’s pocket. Same story with portable electric cattle prods, the “shockers” that knock out suspects, and with sprays that paralyze from a distance. A security company recently began marketing an elegant coat that attracts glances and repels bullets. Protect yourself and your family, counsels the Internet ad for these sporty leather cuirasses. (In Colombia, the flourishing bulletproof-vest industry sells more and more in children’s sizes.)

Let the Children Come unto Me

The sale of guns to minors is against the law in the United States, but advertising targets that clientele anyway. National Rifle Association literature sees the future of shooting sports in the hands of our grandchildren, and a pamphlet from the National Shooting Sports Foundation explains that every ten-year-old alone at home or traveling alone to the store ought to have a gun. In the New England Firearms catalog, too, children are the future of the sport.

According to statistics from the Violence Policy Center, every day in the United States, through crime, suicide, or accident, bullets kill fourteen children under the age of nineteen. The country grunts in disgust and shakes its head at the frequency with which schools are turned into battlefields. The killers are usually not black boys from the slums but white, freckled suburbanites.

Electronic monitoring via closed-circuit TV and other devices keeps an eye on things in many places. It’s undertaken by individuals and businesses, not to mention the state. In Argentina the ten thousand employees of state intelligence agencies spend two million dollars a day spying on people: they tap phones, they film, they record.

No country fails to use public security as an alibi or a pretext. Hidden cameras and microphones are placed in banks and supermarkets, offices and stadiums, and sometimes they follow people right into their bedrooms. Is there an eye hidden in the TV remote control? Ears listening from the ashtray? Billy Graham, who makes millions preaching the poverty of Jesus on TV, has acknowledged that he is careful when he talks on the phone and even when he talks to his wife in bed. “Our business isn’t to promote Big Brother,” a spokesman for the U.S. Security Industry Association insists defensively. In his prophetic novel written half a century ago, George Orwell imagined a city where Big Brother used TV to keep tabs on everyone. He called it 1984, but perhaps he didn’t get the date quite right.

Who are the jailers and who the jailed? In one way or another we’re all imprisoned, those in jail and those of us outside. How can the prisoners of need be free, since they live to work and can’t afford the luxury of working to live? And the prisoners of desperation, who have no work and never will and who survive only by robbery or by miracle? What about the prisoners of fear, are we free? Aren’t we all prisoners of fear, those on top, on the bottom, and in the middle, too? In societies obliged to live by everyone-for-himself, we’re all prisoners, the guarded and the guards, the chosen and the pariahs. The Argentine cartoonist Nik drew a reporter interviewing a man gripping the bars of a window in his house:

“We’ve all installed bars, TV cameras, floodlights, double locks, and tinted glass.…”

“Don’t your relatives come over?”

“Yes, I have visiting hours.”

“And what do the police say?”

“If I keep up my good behavior, Sunday morning I can go out to the bakery.”

I’ve seen bars on shantytown hovels made of scrap wood and tin, poor people defending themselves from other poor people. Urban development metastasizes inequality: in the suburbs, hovels and gardens spring up side by side. Rich suburbs tend to be not too far from the shantytowns that supply them with maids, gardeners, and watchmen. In places of despair, those who eat only now and then lie in wait. In places of privilege, the rich live under house arrest. On a private block in San Isidro in Buenos Aires, the man delivering newspapers jokes, “Live here? No thanks. If I have nothing to hide, why would I?”

Helicopters cross the skies above the city of São Paulo, coming and going between luxury prison homes and downtown rooftops. The streets, kidnapped by thugs and poisoned by pollution, are a trap to be avoided. Fugitives from violence and smog, the rich are obliged to live in hiding. Paradoxes of exhibitionism: opulence is concealed behind ever-higher walls in houses without faces, invisible to the envy and covetousness of everyone else. Microcities rise up on the edges of the great cities. There mansions huddle, protected by complex electronic security systems and armed guards who patrol their borders. Just as malls are like the cathedrals of other times, these castles of our days have watchtowers, cressets, and embrasures to spy the enemy and keep him at bay. On the other hand, they have neither the magnificence nor the beauty of those old stone fortresses.

Family Chronicle

Nicolás Escobar’s aunt died in her sleep, peacefully, at home in Asunción, Paraguay. Nicolás was six and had already logged thousands of hours of television when he learned that he had lost his beloved elderly relative. He asked, “Who killed her?”

The captives of fear don’t realize they are prisoners. But the prisoners of the penal system, who wear numbers on their chests, have lost both their freedom and the right to delude themselves. The most modern jails, the latest thing in fashion, tend to be maximum-security prisons. No one suggests returning criminals to society, saving those who have lost their way, as it was once so quaintly put. Nowadays, the only desire is to shut them away forever, and no one bothers to preach lies. Justice blindfolds herself to keep from seeing where a criminal comes from or why he committed a crime, which ought to be the first step toward his possible rehabilitation. The model fin-de-siècle jail is not the least concerned with redemption or even with teaching a lesson. Society locks up public menaces, then throws away the key.

In some new prisons in the United States, the cell walls are steel and windowless; the doors open and close electronically. The U.S. penitentiary system is generous only when it hands out televisions, for their narcotic effect, and a growing number of prisoners have little or no contact with other prisoners. A prisoner might see a guard once in a while, but even guards are growing scarce. Today’s technology allows a single employee in a control room to keep watch over a hundred prisoners. Machines take care of everything.

Those under house arrest have also been controlled by electronic means, ever since a judge named Love, Jack Love, invented a lovely remote-control bracelet. Attached to the criminal’s wrist or ankle, it keeps track of his movements and knows if he’s trying to take it off, or if he drinks alcohol, or if he leaves the house. At this rate, predicts criminologist Nils Christie, trials will soon be held by video with the accused never seen in person by the prosecutor, the defense attorney, or the judge.

In 1997, there were 1.8 million prisoners in U.S. jails, more than double the number ten years earlier. But that figure would triple if it encompassed those under house arrest, out on bail, or on parole. That total would include five times as many black prisoners as all those imprisoned under apartheid at its height, a number equal to the entire population of Denmark. This gigantic clientele, tempting for any investor, has encouraged privatization. Private jails continue to sprout in the United States, even though they’ve shown themselves to be purveyors of horrible food and poor treatment — eloquent proof that for the taxpayer private jails are no cheaper than public ones, since their huge profits far outweigh their low costs.

Back in the seventeenth century, English jailers bribed judges to get more prisoners. When their sentences were up, prisoners were so deep in debt that they had to work for their jailers, often as beggars, for the rest of their lives. At the end of the twentieth century, a private U.S. prison company, Corrections Corporation of America, was one of the five highest-priced companies on the New York Stock Exchange. Founded in 1983 with capital from Kentucky Fried Chicken, the company made it clear from the start that it intended to sell jails like chicken dinners. By the end of 1997, the value of its stock had multiplied seventy times, and the company had set up prisons in England, Australia, and Puerto Rico. But the domestic market is the meat and potatoes of its business. In the United States, where prisoners are always plentiful, jails are hotels that never have a vacancy. In 1992, over a hundred companies were designing, building, or administering prisons.

In 1996, World Research Group sponsored a conference on how to maximize the profits of this dynamic industry. The invitation read: “While arrests and convictions are on the rise, profits are to be made — profits from crime.” The fact is that the incidence of crime in the United States has been falling in recent years, but the market still serves up ever more prisoners. He who is not jailed for what he has done is jailed for what he might do. There’s no reason why falling crime statistics should disturb the brilliant growth of this enterprise. Besides, as executive Diane McClure assured investors in October 1997, “Our market analysis shows that juvenile crime will continue growing.”

In an interview at the beginning of 1998, novelist Toni Morrison pointed out that “the brutal treatment of prisoners in private jails has grown so scandalous that even Texans are concerned. Texas, a place not known for its big heart, is rescinding contracts.” But the prisoners, the unfree, must serve the free market. They don’t deserve better treatment than any other commodity. The National Criminal Justice Commission estimates that at the current rate of change in the prison population, by the year 2020 six out of every ten black men will be behind bars. Over the past twenty years, public spending on prisons has grown by 900 percent. That hasn’t alleviated public fears one bit, but it has done lots for the health of the prison industry.

For Sale

Here are some of the ads published in the April 1998 issue of the U.S. magazine Corrections Today:

Bell Atlantic offers the “most secure phone systems” for monitoring and screening calls: “Full control over who, when and how inmates call.”

The ad for US West’s inmate telephone service shows a crouching prisoner with a cigarette butt hanging from his lips: “He could cut you up. Somewhere, there could be a hardened criminal concealing a sharpened weapon.”

On another page a threatening shadow, another prisoner, lies in wait: “Don’t give an inch,” warns LCN’s ad for high-security closers. “Any door, not fully latched, is an open invitation to trouble.”

“Inmates are built tougher than ever before,” warns Modu-Form. “Fortunately, so is our furniture.”

Motor Coach Industries shows off its latest-model jail on wheels, something akin to a doghouse divided into steel cages. “Save time. Save dollars,” suggests Mark Correctional Systems, a builder of prisons. “Economy! Quality! Speed! Durability! Security!”

“After all, jail means money,” concludes Nils Christie. And he tells the story of a British parliamentarian, Sir Edward Gardner, who in the 1980s crossed the Atlantic at the head of a European commission to study prison privatization in the United States. Sir Edward was an enemy of private prisons. When he returned to London, he had changed his mind and so became president of the company Contract Prisons, PLC.

SEWING: HOW TO MAKE ENEMIES TO MEASURE

Never have so many economic resources and so much scientific and technological knowledge been brought to bear on the production of death. The countries that sell the world the most weapons are the same ones in charge of world peace. Fortunately for them, the threat of world peace is receding. The war market is on the rebound and the outlook for profits from butchery is promising. The weapons factories are as busy as those producing enemies to fit their needs.

THE DEVIL’S AMPLE WARDROBE

Good news for the military economy, which is to say, good news for the economy: the weapons industry, selling death, exporting violence, is flourishing. Demand is steady, the market is growing, and good harvests continue to be reaped from the cultivation of injustice across the globe. Crime and drug addiction, social unrest, and national, regional, local, and personal hatred are all on the rise.

After a few years of decline at the end of the Cold War, arms sales have turned around. The world market in weaponry, with total sales of $40 billion, grew 8 percent in 1996. Leading the list of buyers was Saudi Arabia at $9 billion. For several years that country has also led the list of countries that violate human rights. In 1996, says Amnesty International, “reports of torture and ill-treatment of detainees continued, and the judicial punishment of flogging was frequently imposed. At least 27 individuals were sentenced to flogging, ranging from 120 to 200 lashes. They included 24 Philippine nationals who were reportedly sentenced for homosexual behavior. At least 69 people were executed.” And also: “The government of King Fahd bin ’Abdul ’Aziz maintained its ban on political parties and trade unions. Press censorship continued to be strictly enforced.”

For many years that oil-rich monarchy has been the top client for U.S. weapons and British war planes. Arms and oil, two key factors in national prosperity: the healthy trade of oil for weapons allows the Saudi dictatorship to drown domestic protest in blood, while feeding the U.S. and British war economies and protecting their sources of energy from threat. A skeptic might conclude that those billion-dollar purchase orders bought King Fahd impunity. For reasons that only Allah knows, we never see, hear, or read anything about Saudi Arabia’s atrocities in the media, the same media that tend to get quite worked up about human rights abuses in other Arab countries. Best friends are those who buy the most weapons. The U.S. arms industry wages a struggle against terrorism by selling weapons to terrorist governments whose only relation to human rights is to do all they can to trample them.

Points of View/7

On a wall in San Francisco: “If voting changed anything, it would be illegal.”

On a wall in Rio de Janeiro: “If men gave birth, abortion would be legal.”

In the jungle, do they call the habit of devouring the weakest the “law of the city”?

From the point of view of a sick people, what’s the meaning of a healthy currency?

Weapons sales are good news for the economy. Are they also good news for those who end up dead?

Points of View/8

Until not so many years ago, historians of Athenian democracy never mentioned slaves or women, except in passing. Slaves were a majority of the Greek population and women half of it. What would Athenian democracy have looked like from their point of view?

The U.S. Declaration of Independence declared in 1776 that “all men are created equal.” What did that mean from the point of view of the half a million black slaves whose status remained unchanged after the declaration was made? And to women, who still had no rights? To whom were they created equal?

From the point of view of the United States, engraving the names of citizens who died in the Vietnam War on an immense marble wall in Washington was a just act. From the point of view of the Vietnamese killed in the U.S. invasion, there are sixty walls missing.

In the Era of Peace, the name applied to the historical period that began in 1946, wars have slaughtered no less than twenty-two million people and have displaced from their lands, homes, or countries over forty million more. Consumers of TV news never lack a war or at least a brushfire to munch on. But never do the reporters report, or the commentators comment, on anything that might help explain what’s going on. To do that they would have to start by answering some very basic questions: Who benefits from all that human pain? Who profits from this tragedy? “And the executioner’s face is always well hidden,” Bob Dylan once sang.

In 1968, two months before a bullet killed him, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared that his country was “the world’s greatest purveyor of violence.” Thirty years later the figures bear him out: of every ten dollars spent on arms in the world, four and a half end up in the United States. Statistics compiled by the International Institute of Strategic Studies show the largest weapons dealers to be the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Russia. China figures on the list as well, a few places back. And these five countries, by some odd coincidence, are the very ones that can exercise vetoes in the UN Security Council. The right to a veto really means the power to decide. The General Assembly of the highest international institution, in which all countries take part, makes recommendations, but it’s the Security Council that makes decisions. The Assembly speaks or remains silent; the Council does or undoes. In other words, world peace lies in the hands of the five powers that profit most from the big business of war.

So it’s no surprise that the permanent members of the Security Council enjoy the right to do whatever they like. In recent years, for example, the United States freely bombed the poorest neighborhood in Panama City and later flattened Iraq. Russia punished Chechnya’s cries for independence with blood and fire. France raped the South Pacific with its nuclear tests. And every year China legally executes ten times as many people by firing squad as died in Tienanmen Square. As in the Falklands war the previous decade, the invasion of Panama gave the air force an opportunity to test its new toys, and television turned the invasion of Iraq into a global display case for the latest weapons on the market: Come and see the new trinkets of death at the great fair of Baghdad.

Enigmas

What are those skulls laughing at?

Who is the author of anonymous jokes? Who is that old guy making wisecracks and spreading them about the world? What cave does he hide out in?

Why did Noah let mosquitoes on the Ark?

Did Saint Francis of Assisi love mosquitoes too?

Are the statues we ought to have as numerous as the ones we have and don’t need?

If communications technology is more and more advanced, why do people communicate less and less?

Why is it no one understands communications experts, not even God?

Why do sex education books make us want to give up sex for several years?

In wars, who sells the weapons?

Neither should anyone be surprised by the unhappy global imbalance between war and peace. For every dollar spent by the United Nations on peacekeeping, the world spends two thousand dollars on warkeeping. In the ensuing sacrificial rites, hunter and prey are of the same species and the winner is he who kills more of his brothers. Theodore Roosevelt put it well: “No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war.” In 1906, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

There are thirty-five thousand nuclear weapons in the world. The United States has half of them; Russia and, to a lesser degree, other powers, the rest. The owners of the nuclear monopoly scream to the high heavens when India or Pakistan or anyone else achieves the dream of having its own bomb. That’s when they decry the deadly threat of such weapons to the world: each weapon could kill several million people, and it would take only a few to end the human adventure on this planet and the planet itself. But the great powers never bother to say when God decided to award them a monopoly or why they continue building such weapons. During the Cold War, nuclear arms were an extremely dangerous instrument of reciprocal intimidation. But now that the United States and Russia walk arm in arm, what are those immense arsenals for? Whom are these countries trying to scare? All of humanity?

Every war has the drawback of requiring an enemy — if possible, more than one. Without threat or aggression — spontaneous or provoked, real or fabricated — the possibility of war is hardly convincing and the demand for weaponry might face a dramatic decline. In 1989, a new Barbie doll dressed in military fatigues and giving a smart salute was launched onto the world market. Barbie picked a bad time to start her military career. At the end of that year the Berlin Wall fell; everything else collapsed soon after. The Evil Empire came tumbling down and suddenly God was orphaned of the Devil. The Pentagon and the arms trade found themselves in a rather tight spot.

Enemy wanted. The Germans and the Japanese had gone from Bad to Good years earlier, and now, from one day to the next, the Russians lost their fangs and their sulfurous odor. Fortunately, lack-of-villain syndrome found a quick fix in Hollywood. Ronald Reagan, lucid prophet that he was, had already announced that the Cold War had to be won in outer space. Hollywood’s vast talent and money were put to work to fabricate enemies in the galaxies. Extraterrestrial invasion had been the subject of films before, but it was never depicted with much sorrow or glory. Now the studios rushed to portray ferocious Martians and other reptilian or cockroachlike foreigners with the knack of adopting human form to fool the gullible or reduce production costs. And they met with tremendous box-office success.

Points of View/9

From the point of view of the economy, the sale of weapons is indistinguishable from the sale of food.

When a building collapses or a plane crashes, it’s rather inconvenient from the point of view of those inside, but it’s altogether convenient for the growth of the gross national product, which sometimes ought to be called the “gross criminal product.”

Meanwhile, here on earth, the panorama improved. True, the supply of evils had fallen off, but in the South there were longstanding villains who could still be called on. The Pentagon should put up a monument to Fidel Castro for his forty long years of generous service. Muammar al-Qaddafi, once a villain in great demand, barely works anymore, but Saddam Hussein, who was a good guy in the eighties, became in the nineties the worst of the worst. He remains so useful that, at the beginning of 1998, the United States threatened to invade Iraq a second time so people would stop talking about the sexual habits of President Bill Clinton.

At the beginning of 1991, another president, George Bush, saw there was no need to look to outer space for enemies. After invading Panama, and while he was in the process of invading Iraq, Bush declared: “The world is a dangerous place.” This pearl of wisdom has remained over the years the most irrefutable justification for the highest war budget on the planet, mysteriously called the “defense budget.” The name constitutes an enigma. The United States hasn’t been invaded by anybody since the English burned Washington in 1812. Except for Pancho Villa’s fleeting excursion during the Mexican Revolution, no enemy has crossed its borders. The United States, in contrast, has always had the unpleasant habit of invading others.

A good part of the U.S. public, astonishingly ignorant about everything beyond its shores, fears and disdains all that it does not understand. The country that has done more than any other to develop information technology produces television news that barely touches on world events except to confirm that foreigners tend to be terrorists and ingrates. Every act of rebellion or explosion of violence, wherever it occurs, becomes new proof that the international conspiracy continues its inexorable march, egged on by hatred and envy. Little does it matter that the Cold War is over, because the Devil has a large wardrobe and doesn’t dress just in red. Polls indicate that Russia now sits at the bottom of any enemy list, but people fear a nuclear attack from some terrorist group or other. No one knows what terrorist group has nuclear weapons, but as the noted sociologist Woody Allen points out, “Nobody can bite into a hamburger anymore without being afraid it’s going to explode.” In reality, the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history took place in 1995 in Oklahoma City, and the attacker wasn’t a foreigner bearing nuclear arms but a white U.S. citizen with a fertilizer bomb who had been decorated in the war against Iraq.

A Star Is Born?

In mid-1998, the White House put another villain up on the global marquee. He uses the stage name Osama bin Laden; he’s an Islamic fundamentalist, sports a beard, wears a turban, and caresses the rifle in his lap. Will this new star’s career take off? Will he be a box-office hit? Will he manage to undermine the foundations of Western civilization or will he only play a supporting role? In horror movies, you never know.

Among the ghosts of international terrorism, “narco-terrorism” is the one that’s most frightening. To say “drugs” is like saying “the plague” in another epoch: it evokes the same terror, the same sense of impotence, of a mysterious curse from the Devil incarnate, who tempts his victims and carries them off. Like all misfortune, it comes from outside. Not much is said anymore about marijuana, once the “killer weed,” and perhaps that has something to do with the way it has become a successful part of local agriculture in eleven states of the Union. In contrast, heroin and cocaine, produced in foreign countries, have been elevated to the category of enemies that erode the very foundations of the nation.

Official sources estimate that U.S. citizens spend $110 billion a year on drugs, the equivalent of one-tenth the value of the country’s entire industrial production. Authorities have never caught a single U.S. trafficker of any real importance, but the war against drugs has certainly increased the number of consumers. As happened with alcohol during Prohibition, outlawing only stimulates demand and boosts profits. According to Joe McNamara, former chief of the San Jose police force in California, profits can be as high as 17,000 percent.

Desire

A man found Aladdin’s lamp lying around. Since he was a big reader, the man recognized it and rubbed it right away. The genie appeared, bowed deeply, and said: “At your service, master. Your wish is my command. But there will be only one wish.”

Since he was a good boy, the man said, “I wish for my dead mother to be brought back.”

The genie made a face. “I’m sorry, master, but that wish is impossible. Make another.”

Since he was a nice guy, the man said, “I wish the world would stop spending money to kill people.”

The genie swallowed. “Uhh … What did you say your mother’s name was?”

Drugs are as “American” as apple pie — a U.S. tragedy, a U.S. business, but they’re the fault of Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Mexico, and other ingrate nations. In a scene straight out of the Vietnam War, helicopters and planes bomb guilty-looking Latin American fields with poisons made by Dow Chemical, Chevron, Monsanto, and other chemical companies. Devastating to the earth and to human health, the sprayings are next to useless because the drug plantations simply relocate. The peasants who cultivate coca or poppies, the moving targets in these military campaigns, are the smallest fish in the drug ocean. The cost of the raw materials has little effect on the final price. From the fields where coca is harvested to the streets of New York where cocaine is sold, the price multiplies one hundred to five hundred times, depending on the ups and downs of the underground market for white powder.

Is there a better ally than drug trafficking for banks, weapons manufacturers, or the military hierarchy? Drugs make fortunes for the bankers and offer useful pretexts for the machinery of war. An illegal industry of death thus serves the legal industry of death: vocabulary and reality become militarized. According to a spokesman for the military dictatorship that razed Brazil from 1964 on, drugs and free love were “tactics of revolutionary war” against Christian civilization. In 1985, the U.S. delegate to a conference on narcotic and psychotropic drugs in Santiago, Chile, announced that the fight against drugs had become “a world war.” In 1990, Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates suggested that drug users be riddled with bullets “because we are at war.” Shortly before that, President George Bush had exhorted the nation to “win the war” against drugs, explaining that it was “an international war” because the drugs came from overseas and constituted the gravest threat to the nation. This war is the one subject never absent from presidential speeches, whether it’s the president of a neighborhood club inaugurating a swimming pool or the president of the United States, who never misses a chance to exercise his right to grant or deny other countries certification for their good conduct in it.

A problem of public health has been turned into a problem of public security that respects no borders. It’s the Pentagon’s duty to intervene on any battlefield where the war against “narco-subversion” and “narco-terrorism” (two new words that put rebellion and crime in the same bag) is being waged. After all, the National Anti-Drug Strategy is directed not by a doctor but by a military officer.

Frank Hall, former head of the New York police narcotics squad, once said, “If imported cocaine were to disappear, in two months it would be replaced by synthetic drugs.” Commonsensical as that might seem, the fight against the Latin American sources of evil continues because it offers the best cover for maintaining military and, to a large degree, political control over the region. The Pentagon wants to set up a Multilateral Anti-Drug Center in Panama to run the drug war waged by the armies of the Americas. For the entire twentieth century, Panama was a major U.S. military base. The treaty that imposed that humiliation on the country expired on the final day of the century, but the drug war could well require that the country be rented out for another eternity.

For some time now drugs have been the major justification for military intervention in the countries south of the Rio Grande. Panama was the first to fall victim. In 1989, twenty-six thousand soldiers burst into Panama, guns blazing, and imposed as president the unpresentable Guillermo Endara, who proceeded to step up drug trafficking under the pretext of fighting it. In the name of the war on drugs, the Pentagon is making itself at home in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. This sacred crusade — Get thee hence, Satan! — also gives Latin America’s armies another reason for existing, hastens their return to the public stage, and provides them with the resources they need to deal with frequent explosions of social protest.

General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, who headed up the war on drugs in Mexico, no longer sleeps at home. Since February 1997, he’s been in jail for trafficking cocaine. But the helicopters and sophisticated weaponry the United States sent him to fight drugs with have proved quite useful against upstart peasants in Chiapas and elsewhere. A large portion of U.S. antidrug aid to Colombia is used to kill peasants in areas that have nothing to do with drugs. The armed forces that most systematically violate human rights, like Colombia’s, are those that receive the most U.S. aid in weapons and technical assistance. For years, they have been making war on the poor, enemies of the established order, while defending the established order, enemy of the poor.

After all, that’s what it’s about: the war on drugs is a cover for social war. Just like the poor who steal, drug addicts, especially poor ones, are demonized in order to absolve the society that produces them. Against whom is the law enforced? In Argentina, a quarter of the people behind bars who have not been sentenced are there for possession of less than five grams of marijuana or cocaine. In the United States, the antidrug crusade is focused on crack, that devastating poor cousin of cocaine consumed by blacks, Latins, and other prison fodder. U.S. Public Health Service statistics show that eight out of ten drug users are white, but of those in jail for drugs only one in ten is white. Several uprisings in federal prisons labeled “racial riots” by the media have been protests against unjust sentencing policies. Crack addicts are punished a hundred times more severely than cocaine users. Literally one hundred times: according to federal law, a gram of crack is equivalent to one hundred grams of cocaine. Practically everyone imprisoned for crack is black.

In Latin America, where poor criminals are the new “internal enemy,” the war on drugs takes aim at a target described by Nilo Batista in Brazil: “black teenagers from the slums who sell drugs to well-off white teenagers.” Is this a question of drugs or of social and racial power? In Brazil and everywhere else, those who die in the war on drugs far outnumber those who die from an overdose.

I’m Curious

Why do people mix up coca and cocaine?

If coca is so perverse, why is one of the symbols of Western civilization called Coca-Cola?

If coca is outlawed because it is used for bad ends, why isn’t television outlawed too?

If the drug industry is outlawed because it’s a murderous business, why don’t they outlaw the arms industry, which is the most murderous of all?

By what right does the United States act as the world’s drug police, when it buys half of all the drugs the world produces?

How is it that small planes loaded with drugs enter and leave the United States with such astonishing ease? How come state-of-the-art technology that can photograph a flea on the horizon can’t detect a plane flying by the window?

Why hasn’t a single one of the snow kings who reign over the drug trade in the United States ever been caught?

Why do the mass media talk so much about drugs and so little about why people take them? Why do they condemn drug addicts instead of the lifestyle that ratchets up anxiety, anguish, loneliness, and fear or the consumer culture that leads people to seek chemical consolation?

If an illness is made into a crime and that crime is made into a business, is it fair to punish those who are sick?

Why doesn’t the United States wage war on its own banks, the ones that launder all those drug dollars? Or against the Swiss bankers who wash them whiter yet?

Why are the drug dealers the most fervent supporters of antidrug laws?

Doesn’t the free circulation of goods and capital favor illegal trafficking? Isn’t the drug business the most perfect prototype of neoliberal thinking? Aren’t the traffickers just following the golden rule of the market, that every demand will be met by a supply?

Why is it that the most popular drugs today are the drugs of productivity? The ones that hide exhaustion and fear, that fake omnipotence, that help you produce more and earn more? Couldn’t we read in that a sign of the times? Could it just be happenstance that unproductive hallucinogens like LSD, the drugs of the sixties, have receded into prehistory? Were the desperate of those times different? What about their desperations?