ZeroZeroZero

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Andean folk art paintings

January 21, 2005, Fiumicino airport: A Guatemalan citizen is detained. Five paintings with pre-Columbian motifs are found in his luggage. Behind each painting is an envelope containing a kilo of 92 percent pure cocaine. Total value: €1 million.

Treated and partially treated calfskins

September 14, 2005, port of Livorno: The ship Cala Palma, which sailed from the Venezuelan port of La Guaira is impounded. Found among the calfskins are 691 kilos of 98 percent pure Colombian cocaine.

Statues of the Virgin Mary

March 30, 2006, Brooklyn: The DEA arrests eleven people for cocaine smuggling. They had hidden the precious merchandise—194 kilos of it — inside statues of the Virgin Mary, destined for various churches and cemeteries.

Wooden doors

February 24, 2007, Guildford, Surrey, Great Britain: Paul Sneath, an English bloke from a good family, is sentenced to eighteen years for bringing 17 kilos of cocaine into the country. He had purchased handcrafted wooden doors carved with exotic parrots and had them stuffed with sheets of plywood soaked in liquid cocaine. On the market the drugs would have brought about £3 million.

Statue of Jesus Christ

May 30, 2008, on the Nuevo Laredo border crossing, across from Texas: A Mexican woman is detained at customs. Agents find 3 kilos of cocaine hidden inside the large statue of Jesus Christ in her luggage.

Fake pineapples

August 22, 2008, Naples: The ROS, which deals with organized crime, seizes 100 kilos of pure cocaine hidden in wax pineapples in a house in Poggiomarino. Value: €40 million.

Squid

January 2009, port of Naples: During routine controls, the Finance Guard discovers 15 kilos of cocaine hidden among 1,600 cans of squid shipped from Peru.

Children’s books

April 9, 2009, Christopher Columbus airport in Genoa: An Italian woman, twenty-one years old, is arrested after picking up a package of children’s books sent from South America. Inside are 300 grams of cocaine.

Ceiba speciosa

April 30, 2009, port of Vado Ligure, Savona: The Naples Finance Guard intercepts a shipment of Ceiba speciosa, a tropical tree known in Latin America as Palo Borracho, or drunken tree. Noted for their irregular, bulging trunks, the trees concealed 250 kilos of cocaine.

Suitcases

June 2, 2009, Santiago de Chile airport: Sandra Figueroa, a twenty-six-year-old Argentinian woman, catches the customs officers’ attention: The bags she is dragging along are too heavy. A chemical analysis reveals that her luggage is made of fiberglass, resin, and 15 kilos of cocaine.

Frozen sharks

June 17, 2009, port of Progreso, Yucatan, Mexico: The Mexican navy seizes eight hundred blocks of cocaine, hidden inside twenty or so frozen shark bodies.

Containers

June 21, 2009, Padua: The Carabinieri of Padua, with the help of antidrug dogs, discover about 400 kilos of cocaine in containers of bananas and pineapples on a trailer truck.

Trunks of precious wood

July 22, 2009, Calabria: The Maesano Brothers’ network is uncovered. Thanks to their import-export business they were shipping a container a month to Bolivia, with tools for cutting down forests. The container would be sent back full of precious tree trunks stuffed with blocks of cocaine, each weighing at least 100 kilos.

Transportation trailers

November 12, 2010, port of Gioia Tauro, Calabria: In the context of Operation Meta 2010 an undocumented container from Brazil filled with trailers for agricultural transport is inspected. Sophisticated tests reveal anomalies in the metal tubes that make up the frames. The tubes are opened with gas torches and one thousand blocks are extracted: 1,000 kilos in all.

Airplane cockpit

February 1, 2011, Fiumicino airport: Two airport technicians, grilled by customs officers made suspicious by their behavior, confess their desire to steal precious objects from the hold of a plane that has just landed from Caracas. But the investigators, alarmed by the antidrug dogs’ agitation, discover thirty blocks of cocaine—35 kilos — stuffed behind the instrument panel in the cockpit.

Frozen fish

March 19, 2011, port of Gioia Tauro: A container that arrived by cargo ship from Ecuador is intercepted. Hidden inside, among the frozen fish, are 140 kilos of pure cocaine.

Palm hearts

April 8, 2011, port of Livorno: The Rome Carabinieri seize a container filled with cans of palm hearts on a ship from Chile. In the cans they find 1,200 kilos of cocaine.

Cookbook

October 2011, Turin: A package sent from Peru via Frankfurt is seized. Inside is a cookbook, the pages of which are stuffed with cocaine. It weighs 500 grams. The person to whom the package is addressed, an Italian, is arrested in his home. In addition to cocaine, investigators find equipment for preparing individual doses, scales, and a press for packaging blocks. Subsequent investigations uncover a criminal network that was trafficking cocaine from Peru to Italy by way of Germany.

Coffee

October 27, 2011, port of Barcelona: The Civil Guard score the biggest drug seizure ever in the port of Barcelona: 625 kilos of cocaine hidden in a container transporting coffee.

Canned asparagus

December 10, 2011, Lima, Peru: Five hundred liters of liquid cocaine worth $20 million are seized in a home in a Lima suburb. The drug was in the brine of canned asparagus.

Artificial breasts and buttocks

December 21, 2011, Fiumicino airport: A Spanish model coming from São Paulo in Brazil is detained. A search reveals 2.5 kilos of pure cocaine crystals inserted in her artificial breasts and buttocks.

Valentine’s Day flowers

February 2012, port of Hull, England: Eighty-four kilos of cocaine hidden in boxes of flowers that an English florist purchased for Valentine’s Day are seized. The man had gone to Holland to buy them himself, and sailed from Rotterdam. He was loading his truck when the British police noticed that three boxes weighed five times more than the others.

Genitals

April 2012, Folcroft, Pennsylvania: Ray Woods, twenty-three years old, from Philadelphia, is detained by the police in an area known for drug dealing. When he is searched they find forty-eight doses of cocaine in a bag strapped to his penis.

Legumes, aluminum, foodstuffs

June 7, 2012, port of Gioia Tauro: The Finance Guard seizes 300 kilos of pure cocaine onboard the MSC container ship Poh Lin, which had set sail from South America. The drugs were found in three containers — in nine large black bags hidden among foodstuffs, legumes, and scrap aluminum — on their way to northern Italian businesses that do not usually import such products.

Peanuts

June 8, 2012, port of Gioia Tauro: Discovered in a container from Brazil are 630 kilos of cocaine. It was divided into 580 blocks and stuffed in sixteen bags hidden inside a shipment of peanuts.

Medical supplies for earthquake-damaged areas

June 8, 2012, port of Genoa: The Carabinieri find over €1 million worth of cocaine hidden among medical instruments being shipped to a business in Emilia that had suffered serious earthquake damage. The container, which arrived from the Dominican Republic, immediately raised suspicions because such medical equipment usually comes from China.

Sugar

June 15, 2012, port of London: Just outside the capital city, in one of the harbor terminals on the Thames, 30 kilos of cocaine hidden in a load of sugar that had arrived on a cargo ship from Brazil are seized.

Skins

July 22, 2012, Portugal: The Portuguese police arrest a businessman from Vicenza who works in the tanning industry. The investigators find 120 kilos of cocaine in the container of skins sent from Brazil.

Cocoa

August 23, 2012, port of Anversa: Belgian authorities discover just over two tons of cocaine in jute sacks filled with cocoa seeds onboard a container ship from Ecuador. The cocaine, worth €100 million, was on its way to a warehouse in Amsterdam.

Parquet

August 23, 2012, port of Caacupe-mí, Paraguay: Hidden among irregularly cut pieces of wood for parquet floors are 330 kilos of cocaine; they are seized on a container ship ready to set sail from the private port in Caacupe-mí, on the Paraguay River. A corrupt customs officer is arrested.

Roast chicken

September 3, 2012, Lagos, Nigeria, airport: A Nigerian engineer returning from São Paulo, Brazil, where he had worked for the past five years, is detained at customs. The police find 2.5 kilos of cocaine hidden among the leftover roast chicken he brought to eat during the flight.

Hair

September 26, 2012, JFK airport, New York: Kiana Howell and Makeeba Graham, two girls who have just arrived from Guyana, a former British colony between Venezuela and Brazil, arouse the customs officials’ suspicion. When they are searched, each is found to have a block of cocaine, weighing about 1 kilo, hidden in her hairdo.

Chickpeas

October 12, 2012, port of Gioia Tauro: 100 kilos of cocaine sent from Mexico on the ship Bellavia are intercepted. The drug was hidden in sacks of chickpeas, officially destined for Turkey.

Balloons

October 14, 2012, port of Limón, Costa Rica: During routine checks of a cargo ship anchored in the port of Limón, which leads into the Caribbean, antidrug agents discover 119 kilos of cocaine hidden among multicolored balloons usually used for children’s birthday parties.

Shrimp and bananas

October 18, 2012, Milan: The Milan DDA arrests about fifty people tied to a huge cocaine network importing into Italy, Belgium, Holland, Austria, and Germany. The loads, hidden among frozen shrimp and cartons of bananas, arrived from Colombia and Ecuador, either in ships that docked at the Hamburg and Anversa ports or in planes that landed at the Vienna airport. The trafficking was managed by the Lombard branches of the most powerful Calabrian families: the Pelles of San Luca, the Morabitos of Africo, the Molès of Gioia Tauro.

Sweet potatoes

October 19, 2012, Paramaribo, Suriname, airport: Customs officials, whose suspicion was aroused by the excessive weight of six sacks of sweet potatoes leaving the Johan Adolf Pengel airport, the main airport in this former Dutch colony in South America, discover 60 kilos of cocaine inside the tubers.

Carpets

November 27, 2012, Milan: The Carabinieri of the province of Milan arrest fifty-three Italian and Colombian citizens, accusing them of drug trafficking, unlawful possession of weapons, receiving stolen goods, and money laundering. The network, based in Cesano Boscone, was impregnating imported carpets with liquid cocaine. Once the carpets arrived in Milan they were washed with special products to release the drug from the wool fibers, which was then dried.

15. FORTY-EIGHT

You’re dreaming. Another life, more profoundly yours. Money or sex. You dream about your children and your dead, who come back to life. You dream you’re falling forever. That you’re being strangled. That someone is trying to get in the door, or has already come in. You dream of being trapped, no one comes to free you, you can’t get out. You dream that they want to arrest you, but you haven’t done anything wrong.

There’s nothing uniquely yours about your dreams and nightmares. They’re so much like everyone else’s that in Naples you use them to play Lotto, the Italian lottery, with the numbers from the Smorfia Napoletana: ’E Gguardie, the police, 24; ’E ccancelle, prison, 44; ’O mariuolo, the thief, 79; ’A fune nganno, the noose around your neck, 39; ’A caduta, the fall, 56; ’O muorto, the dead man, 47; ’O muorto che parla, the dead man talking, 48; ’A figliolanza, offspring 9; ’E denare, money, 46. For sex, you’re spoiled for choice. For example: Chella ca guarda ’nterra, she who looks at the ground, which means cunt, 6; ’O pate d”e criature, the father of babies, or penis, 29; ’O totaro dint’ ’a chitarra, a fish inside a guitar, which means intercourse, 67.

I have them too, those dreams. When they start off well, they turn into nightmares. When they’re nightmares right from the start, there’s little that is dreamlike about them. My days invade my nights, the more or less 3,196 days as of this writing since I’ve been living under police protection. I’ve learned to forget my dreams. When they wake me, at most I get up and drink a glass of water. I have trouble falling back to sleep, but at least I’ve chased away my nightmares with a few sips. All but one nightmare.

I’m screaming, I can’t stop screaming, louder and louder. No one seems to hear me. It’s a variation on the nightmare in which you want to scream but no sound comes out. Do you know that one? I wouldn’t know what number to tell you to play, though. There’s 65 for cry, 60 for lament, and 90 for fear. But there’s no number for screams in the cabala of the city where everyone screams all the time. Maybe try betting on the mouth, 80. I’m not betting anything.

I write about Naples. But Naples plugs her ears. Who am I to draw attention to things I’ve not experienced firsthand in some time? I can’t possibly understand; I have no right to speak. I’m no longer part of the body of that mother city who welcomes you with her gentle, resplendent warmth. Naples has to be lived, that’s all. Either you’re in Naples or you’re not. And if you’re not, you’re no longer from Naples. Like some African or South American cities, Naples offers you citizenship right away. A citizenship that you lose, however, when you leave, when you put some distance between your skin and your judgment. At that point, you can’t talk about Naples anymore. It’s prohibited. You have to stay in Naples, stay inside Naples; if not, you’ll always get the same response: “What do you know?”

I know that in Naples the surest number to bet is 62, ’o muort’ acciso, death by murder. I know that Naples treats those murder victims almost as if they were the number 48—the dead man talking — which is what I feel I have become to her. Naples cuts them out, expels them. They’re people on the outside, people from Scampia, Secondigliano, or other towns to the north of Naples that have been hit by the feud that exploded after years of steady homicides. Like Andrea Nollino, killed instantly by the burst of gunfire from a motorcycle as he was opening his café in Casoria. June 26, 2012, 7:30 A.M. Or Lino Romano, who on October 15, 2012, goes to the station to pick up his girlfriend, Rosanna, who’s on her way back from the wedding of a cousin in Modena, from the same kind of celebration that he hoped to be able to offer her soon. He takes her home and goes in to say hi to Rosanna’s parents. Right after he leaves they hear the roar of gunfire, very close, out front in the street. Lino dies while starting up his car, on his way to play soccer with his friends. 9:30 P.M.: It’s dark, it’s raining, his black Clio looks like all the other black Clios around. Maybe you drive one too, but you didn’t get engaged to a girl from Marianella, that clump of apartment complexes in the line of fire between Secondigliano and Scampia.

It seems like a film you’ve already seen, a story you’ve already heard. You’ve read the story of a young man with almost the same name, Attilio Romanò, killed in the cell phone store where he worked. You’ve seen how they deal coke inside the “Vele” apartment complex in Scampia, how they kill without the least drama, how they betray one another. The scene from Gomorrah in which the kids are trained to be shot at really upset you. Those kids are no longer ten, twelve years old, though. Now they’re the ones doing the shooting, and the dying.

But you’re done with it, you can live with yourself. And I’m done with it too. I wrote a book; they made a film from it. It’s my fault if I keep screaming now, if it feels to me as if no one is willing to listen anymore. My fault if the articles I keep writing about the blood spilled in the cocaine markets fall on deaf ears. People can’t keep their attention trained on the same scene for so many years; there are other things that are more important, or simply new. My fault if permission is denied to film the fictional TV show based on my first book, Gomorrah, on site, with a big protest banner that plays on the name of the town: “SCAMPIAmoci da Saviano,” “Let’s flee from Saviano.” And posters all over the place that shout: “He who takes advantage of Naples is guilty of everything!” I bathed the ears of the world in Naples’s blood, but in Scampia nothing has changed. So I’m guilty. Guilty of the new killers whose bodies, brimming with the savagery of youth bolstered by cocaine, go out and murder the umpteenth relative of some affiliate from a rival group. Guilty of the millions in profit for which all those lives continue to be erased. Guilty even of victims like Lino and Andrea.

The entire neighborhood, and even a wider swath of the city, gathered around them. Thousands screamed their innocence; they didn’t abandon them — they accompanied them in their final voyage, which followed the final injustice. It’s not true that mafia wars only generate fear, cynicism, omertà, and indifference. They also generate a special, primitive empathy, because you’re forced to see yourself in Lino, in Andrea, in Rosanna, in their parents, siblings, friends, and colleagues. Maybe you too have a cousin who is a cousin of one of the “scissionisti,” or secessionists, or to one of Girati, as one of the groups that broke away from the winning cartel in the feud against the Di Lauro clan is called. Your turn could be next. It could have been your son or daughter that December 5, 2012, when Luigi Lucenti, known as ’o Cinese, the Chinese, tried to escape an ambush by holing up in the courtyard of the Eugenio Montale nursery school in Scampia, while the children were rehearsing a Christmas play. He was supposed to reopen the Cianfa di Cavallo open-air drug market on via Ghisleri, and they killed him. If it had happened just a little later, when the children who don’t stay for lunch are picked up by their mothers or grandmothers, a few nursery schoolchildren very likely would have been killed. You could have lost a child, a wife, a mother. It went okay for you that time; now you just have to worry about your child’s nightmares, or maybe his wetting the bed just when you’d managed to potty train him. Thank heavens, you keep telling yourself, nothing happened. But it’s not enough. So when the occasion arises you find the energy to react, to join forces, to shout along with the others that the blood that flowed was of someone who deserved to live, not to die.

Those screams are about Naples, for Naples. The body of Naples that closes over the wound. Despite everything I’m relieved to know that this happens too, a flow of vital energy that pours from the flood of rage and fear and not just from the spastic contraction with which the intrusive element that went down the wrong way is spit out. Yet the logic by which I am guilty is not all that different from the logic that drives the people in the street to rebel. It’s the logic of who’s in and who’s out. In and out is not determined merely by a certificate of residency. It is determined by the experience of the feud. Only those who live through it can understand; only those who go through it are included, are in.

I tried to find a way to live with the knowledge that, on the one hand, what I have to say about Naples echoes less and less no matter how loudly I scream, and the more painful knowledge that my words are rejected as illegitimate by Naples itself. And so I have spent years studying and chasing the trail that leads out from Scampia and Casal di Principe, to broaden my horizons, to let my investigation take in the whole world. This seems the only escape route available to me, the only way forward.

What are those Scampia area murders compared to those in Ciudad Juárez? How much is the only open-air drug supermarket in Europe worth in comparison with the trafficking managed by the Calabrian families? An ’ndranghetista might not even bother to respond. Wiretappings reveal that the Calabrians despise the Neapolitans. They butcher each other too often and for too little. I hear a laugh coming from Aspromonte. Carried on the wind toward the Tyrrhenian, it reaches Mount Vesuvius and it descends from there.

The Neapolitans despise me more than the Calabrians despise them. But I’ve never really left Naples. I am always there. To speak about Naples is to betray it a little, but it is in this betrayal that I find my home. The only home, at least for now, that is allowed me.

For me, the pain of the blood that fills the piazzas, the pain of the names that make the lists of the dead grow longer is a sting that doesn’t go away, even if I blow on it as hard as I can. A pain that doesn’t heal even if I put iodine tincture on it, even if I have it stitched up. This pain has to do with me, for all things that cause us the deepest pain have to do with ourselves, like our flesh, our children, the most untouchable parts of ourselves. All I can do, until someone or something kills me, is to keep betting on my number.

16. DOGS

A Neapolitan doctor I know finally gave in to his son’s pleading and gave the boy a dog. A small dog, relentlessly friendly, with a sweet face. One day he asked his son to go out onto the balcony with him, he had a surprise for him, and in the meantime he went over the little speech he’d prepared in his head. A dog is a delicate creature, you have to respect him, train him, you have to be patient but severe, and above all you have to make him understand that you are the leader of the pack. Liberty, sure, but with hard and fast rules. Necessary preconditions, especially as we’re talking about a Jack Russell terrier, a breed that hunters use even today to flush out foxes. Dealing with the dog’s daring and explosive temperament would prove to be an important undertaking for his son; it would force him to face one of the basic challenges for a human puppy: to go beyond appearances. Behind those puppy eyes and silly demands to be pet and played with is an unpredictable character that needs to be disciplined.

“Do you understand?”

“Sure, Papà.”

Things worked out well. The boy cleaned up after the dog, walked him, played with him, taught him some basic commands: “Stay!” “Sit!” “Heel!” His father swelled with pride, even though his son was sneezing too much and his eyes were always red. He’s a doctor, he knows what those symptoms mean: allergy to dog fur. They had no choice. The dog, who had already become a full member of the family, had to go. But for the son the separation would be excruciatingly painful, and it risked undoing everything that they had achieved together: the education of a young boy through the education of a young animal. From now on the child could either fill the emptiness by clinging to his grief and the memory of shattered happiness, or he could overcome the wrenching loss, thus undergoing the most difficult test a human puppy must face: getting used to loss.

Today that dog serves in the canine unit of the Naples police: that is where the family friend to whom he was entrusted works. Pocho, like the soccer player Lavezzi, is the terror of the Scampia and Secondigliano pushers, the “top dog” in the canine unit charged with fighting the Camorra. In contrast to his colleagues, little Pocho can worm his way into the narrowest passageways and slip through the tiniest openings. Innate talent and body type have made him a precious resource, but first he had to go through rigorous training. Play, lots of playing. Because for drug-sniffing dogs, finding a packet of cocaine jammed in a crack in a wall is a game. Great fun. They start with a tennis ball or a rolled-up towel. They play tug-of-war. This is the “attachment stage,” in which the dog bonds with objects and its handler. The phase in which an inseparable human-dog couple is formed. During the second phase small quantities of a drug, or a laboratory-created substance that reproduces the odor of a drug, are added to the toy object. This is where an association between toy and drug, between prize and reward, is created. At that point it’s time to turn the game into work. Essential work, thus full of gratification. But also full of danger.

Without Mike, that spent eight years with the canine unit of the Volpiano Carabinieri in Turin province, the more than a kilo of cocaine buried under a lamppost would never have been discovered. Without Labin, the Florence Finance Guard’s splendid female German shepherd which while sniffing car seats did not let herself be fooled by a false bottom spread with tar, another 12 kilos would have gone undetected. Ragal — same breed, same profession, Labin’s colleague at the port of Civitavecchia — started barking furiously at a car that had just come off a ferry from Barcelona, shattering the Neapolitan driver’s presumption that sniffer dogs would not be able to detect his 11 kilos of pure cocaine under the smells of mustard, coffee, and diesel oil. Ciro pointed right at a trailer truck from the Costa del Sol, drawing the curses and clenched teeth of the driver from Castel Volturno. Ufa, who patrols Fiumicino airport, jumped onto a garment bag on the baggage carousel in which were found 2.5 kilos of cocaine. Nearly eight hundred people arrested had failed to reckon with Eola, a veteran awarded for her twelve years of service and more than 100 kilos of cocaine seized.

Agata’s existence was much more trying. She was young when she started working at the Leticia cargo airport in the Amazon jungle in Colombia, an important junction for cocaine from Brazil and Peru on its way to the United States. The narcos, tired of seeing cargo planes stopped by that docile-looking Labrador with golden fur, put a price on her head: ten thousand dollars. From that moment until she retired Agata was under twenty-four-hour protection and could no longer accept tasty morsels from strangers. Boss, a chocolate Lab in Rio de Janeiro, has met the same fate. Nine police officers take turns watching over him ever since the order to eliminate him was intercepted, that “little chocolate” who can’t be tricked by fake walls or the sewer stench of the favelas. When detection dogs dig excitedly, bark, scratch, or paw at an object, it’s their way of saying that the drug is right here. It’s the signal that they’ve won the game and are ready to start playing all over again. But for others, there is no game. There’s only the humiliation of being flesh and blood. Like Pay de Limón — Lemon Cake — who, along with dozens of other dogs like him, was mutilated and dismembered by Mexican narcos. It’s useful to practice on one of them before cutting off the finger of an extortion victim.

Labs, German shepherds, Belgian shepherds, but often even abandoned mutts like Kristal, who risked meeting the unhappy end of a stray but is now one of the most formidable sniffer sleuths in Grosseto. The history of sharp-nosed dogs goes back much further than their specialization in detecting white powder, though. Almost a century of successes in Italy, including that of August 16, 1924, when a stench drew Carabinieri sergeant Ovidio Caratelli’s dog into the Macchia della Quartarella woods: There was the body of Giacomo Matteotti, an Italian socialist antifascist politician kidnapped two months earlier by Mussolini’s black shirts.

Yet their noses and animal instincts also come in handy for those who, like the Camorra, are on the other side. The Scampia clans kept three German shepherds and a Rottweiler in a condominium courtyard in the Case Celesti neighborhood. Accustomed to the brutality of rusty cages, raised amid broken glass and food scraps, their job was to alert their drug-pusher owners when the cops were coming. Animals in the service of criminal organizations aren’t merely faithful watchdogs, though. They are also used as mules, unsuspected couriers, transporting huge amounts of drugs from one continent to the other. Females are ideal: It’s hard to say whether that bulge is due to a pregnancy or pellets. Frispa, a black Lab, and Rex, a yellow Lab, were unloaded in Amsterdam from a cargo plane coming from Colombia in 2003. One of the dogs was very agitated and aggressive, the other weak and apathetic. The authorities grew suspicious and had them checked out. They found scars on the dogs’ bellies, and X-rays confirmed their suspicions. Eleven packets of cocaine as long as sausages in Rex’s stomach, ten in Frispa’s. Frispa, the black Lab, had to be put down, because some of the linings had broken, whereas Rex, after another operation and a long convalescence, was saved. One for the many — far too many — sacrifices of man’s best friend.

In the summer of 2012 a man went for a walk in a pretty countryside near Livorno. He suddenly noticed a strong stench that led him to make a macabre discovery: a dismembered, disemboweled Labrador lying in the middle of the field. The man, who thought it must have been the work of a sadist or a group of satanists, called the police. But not even a week went by before the stench of fresh death returned: This time the dog, a cross between a Dogue de Bordeaux and a pit bull, had his snout taped shut and a plastic bag sticking out of his cut-open stomach. It’s not a coincidence, it’s not black magic, merely the tragic end that the white powder commonly deals its involuntary four-legged couriers. It’s too hard to make them expel the packets naturally; much easier just to gut them and recover the stuff. Dogs are both victims and soldiers in a global ordeal that for them is still what it has always been: a test of loyalty passed off as a game.

17. DYING TO TELL

What does one risk by reading? A lot. It’s a dangerous thing to open a book and leaf through the pages. Once you’ve opened a work by Émile Zola or Varlam Šalamov, there’s no turning back. I truly believe this. But often the reader is unaware of the risk involved in coming to know these stories; he doesn’t realize the impact they’ll have. If I could truly quantify the damage that knowing eyes, the damage that people who want to understand, can inflict on the powerful, I’d try to diagram it. For the mafiosi the risk of being arrested, put on trial, and sent to prison is nothing compared to the danger that comes from people knowing the truth, understanding how things actually work — the facts.

If you choose to talk about criminal power, if you choose to stare its secrets in the face, to keep your eyes on the road and on the money, well then, there are two ways to go about it: a right way and a wrong way. Christian Poveda knew them both. He knew the differences — and above all the consequences — of each way. He knew that if you decide to be the extension of your work — a pen, a computer, a lens — then you don’t run any risks: You will finish your assignment and come home with the loot. But Christian knew something else as well: If you decide that the extension of your work — a pen, a computer, a lens — is a means rather than the end, then everything changes. Suddenly what you’re looking for — and what you find — is no longer a dark dead end but a door that opens onto other rooms, that leads to more doors.

“He went looking for it.” “What was he expecting?” “Like he didn’t know beforehand?” Callous, cruel questions, yet also legitimate. Cynical maybe, but all things considered, correct. Unfortunately there’s no answer. There’s only guilt, because you knew the consequences would be terrible, for you and your family. You knew, but you did it anyway. Why? There’s no answer to that question either. You see something and behind it you see a hundred other things. You can’t simply stop dead in your tracks; you have to keep going, to dig deeper. Maybe you know what awaits you, maybe you know perfectly well, but you’re neither reckless nor crazy. You smile at your friends, at your colleagues too, and maybe you share your worries with them, but your outer image doesn’t correspond in the least with your inner torment. It’s as if two opposing forces were pulling you in different directions. A struggle over where to stand, and the battlefield is your own stomach, because that’s where you feel the push and pull, an endless tug-of-war that ties your innards in knots.

Christian Poveda knew this feeling well. He was born to Spanish Republican parents who took refuge in Algiers during the Franco regime, and when he was six he moved with his family to Paris. Curious, questioning, he embraced early on his life profession: journalism. With its extensions — pen, computer, lens — he travels in Algeria, the Caribbean, Argentina, Chile. He covers the war in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon. His reports are different from the sorts of stories you have to file for the TV news. A different quality, you could say, as if he didn’t have a job to do. Behind every photo, between the lines of every article there’s always a human story that breathes, demanding more oxygen and space.

Christian decides to focus on making documentaries, a new extension of his curiosity, an extension that unites all the existing ones — pen, computer, and lens — and that finally allows him to observe the animal in the wild. He makes his first documentary in 1986, Shadow Warriors, about the Chilean rebel group Mapu Lautaro, which opposed Pinochet’s fascist regime. But it’s when he goes to El Salvador that he seems to find the land he’d been looking for. The place where he was really needed, where everything he’d wanted and all he had trained himself to be converged. El Salvador. A country tormented by a lengthy civil war that Christian himself first documented in 1980, together with the journalist Jean-Michel Caradec’h. He was the first photojournalist to cover El Salvador’s guerrilla warfare from the inside. “He went looking for it.” “It was his fault.” “If you play with fire, you’ll get burned.” The same remarks, still fair, still pertinent.

Years go by, you accumulate experiences, you build up a protective shell, but the knot in your gut is still there. Christian feels them inside him now, those stories he tells on film. They bite and claw at him from within. And when a story moves inside you it’s like your soul is in labor, restless nights, not a moment of peace until you manage to give birth.

His first documentary about El Salvador comes out in 1991. The name Poveda echoes throughout the country. Then the civil war ends; peace treaties are signed. These are years of renewed hope, years in which many El Salvadorans who had taken refuge abroad return home. During the war thousands of children had fled to the United States without their families — either their parents were murdered or their mothers preferred to have them safer far away from a poor land devastated by civil war. Deserters and ex-guerrillas flee as well. That is how the maras are born, the El Salvadoran gangs in Los Angeles that model themselves after all the other gangs there — African American, Asian, and Mexican. The maras are the new families for El Salvadoran kids that form on the streets of California. They start out as a form of self-defense, to protect themselves against the other gangs that target the new immigrants. Many of the people who organize gangs by gathering groups of kids are former guerrillas or paramilitaries: It’s not surprising that the structures and modes of operation of these groups resemble military practices. The Mexican gangs are soon defeated, and shortly after, the Salvadoran gangs split into two large families of mareros, which distinguish themselves by their “street number”: Mara 13, better known as Mara Salvatrucha, and Mara 18, a dissident branch. Then the civil war in El Salvador ends. The country’s on its knees; poverty is rampant, creating an opportunity for the gangs to go home. For many of them it’s a choice; for others their return is decided by the U.S. government, which frees itself of the thugs who’d served time in American jails.

Today the maras have cells in the United States, Mexico, all over Central America, in Europe, and the Philippines; about 15,000 members in El Salvador, 14,000 in Guatemala, 35,000 in Honduras, 5,000 in Mexico. The highest concentration is in the United States, with 70,000 members. Mara 18 is considered to be the biggest criminal gang in Los Angeles. It was the first to accept ethnic diversity and to allow people from other countries to join. For the most part they’re kids between thirteen and seventeen years old. This army of children primarily pushes cocaine and marijuana on the streets. They don’t handle big orders, they aren’t rich, and they don’t corrupt institutions. But on the street they guarantee immediate money and power. They’re the retail drug cartel and are also involved in activities such as extortion, car theft, and murder. According to the FBI, the maras are the most dangerous street gangs in the world.

Everything is codified within the organization: hand signals, face tattoos, hierarchy. Everything they do is filtered through rules that create and control their identity. The result is a compact organization that knows how to move quickly. In El Salvador mara means group, or crowd. The word implies disorder, but in truth these groups — thanks to their rules, and to the punishments with which infractions are met — have been able to become reliable partners to global criminal organizations. The origin of the name Mara Salvatrucha is disputed. A “salvatrucho” is a young Salvadoran fighter, but the word is composed of “salva”—in homage to El Salvador — and “trucha,” which means cunning. You have to pass really challenging tests in order to become a member: The boys have to endure thirteen seconds of brutal, uninterrupted beating — punches, kicks, slaps, and kneeings — which often leave the new recruits unconscious. The girls are often gang-raped as well. The recruits are getting younger and younger, and for them there is just one rule of life: the gang or death.

Christian Poveda wanted to make a feature film about the maras. He wanted to understand. To live with them. To discover why twelve-year-old kids become murderers willing to die before they turn twenty. And they welcomed him. As if they’d finally found the person who could tell about them, the maras. “Why couldn’t he just have stayed home?” “What did it get him?” “Doesn’t he care about the people close to him?” At a certain point these questions don’t bother you anymore; they’re as annoying as a mosquito bite. They itch for a while, and then they fade away, gone for good.

Filming for La vida loca takes sixteen months. For nearly a year and a half Christian follows the criminal bands in search of answers to his questions. He attends initiation rites, studies their facial tattoos, is at their side while members — male and female — get high on crack and cocaine, plan a murder, attend a friend’s funeral. Every mara operates differently, depending on the country it’s in. “It’s not the same thing selling drugs in the central market of San Salvador as it is selling drugs on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles,” Christian says. Theirs are lives of shootouts, homicides, reprisals, police checks, funerals, and prison. Lives that Christian describes without being morbid in the least. He tells the story of “Little One,” a nineteen-year-old mother with an enormous 18 tattooed on her face, from her eyebrows to her chin. He tells the story of Moreno, twenty-five, who wanted to change his life and started working in a bakery set up by a nonprofit called Homies Unidos. But the bakery closes when its owner is arrested and sentenced to sixteen years for homicide. He tells of La Maga, another young mother, she too a gang member who lost an eye in a fight. Christian follows her to her doctor’s appointments, to her surgery to replace the damaged eye with a glass one. A pointless operation, though, because she’s shot dead before he finishes shooting the movie, one of many Mara 18 members killed while he worked on the documentary.

“He’s crazy!” “Reckless!” “Out of his mind!” Words thrown to the wind, which Christian Poveda fights with other words. “Most maras members are victims of society, of our society,” Poveda says. Because society and the state find it easier to point a finger at their violence, which is so recognizable, rather than to offer opportunities. Maras members look like the dregs of society, like trash; they’re revolting. It’s easy to consider them public enemy number one. Easy to underestimate them. But Poveda’s work dismantles such attitudes.

This is the ultimate meaning of Christian’s work. Behind the door of the violence flaunted by the gangs he saw an inaccessible path that leads right to the root of the problem. To get a byline in the newspapers or his name on the opening credits of a documentary it would have been enough simply to affix evil to celluloid, and to speculate a bit. But Christian decides to get to the bottom of things. He wants to truly understand.

On September 2, 2009, Christian Poveda’s body is found next to his car, between Soyapango and Tonacatepeque, a rural area north of the capital of El Salvador, with four bullets to the head. His film equipment is lying next to him; it has not been touched. “I told him.” “He got what he deserved.” “At any rate, he went too far.” So say the same old voices over his dead body.

In 2011, eleven people, all Mara 18 members, are arrested and convicted of the murder of Christian Poveda. José Alejandro Melara and Luis Roberto Vásquez Romero are sentenced to thirty years for planning and carrying out the homicide; a third person, a woman, is sentenced to twenty years as an accomplice. Other gang members have to spend four years behind bars for covering up the crime. In August 2013 three more mareros are sentenced to ten years for conspiracy to commit murder: They took part in the meeting at which Poveda’s death was planned.

Christian was sure he wasn’t taking any risks. He had entered into the community of the maras, into their lives. He felt he’d found a sure, safe way in and thought he’d made friends with many of them. But it’s a fantasy to think you’re ever safe when you’re covering a criminal organization.

In Christian’s story, bad luck plays a role as well. It seems, in fact, that Juan Napoleón Espinoza Pérez, a former police officer, met a Mara 18 member while under the influence of alcohol and told him that Poveda was an informer, that he had turned his videos over to the Soyapango police. So the gang gathers, and after three long meetings in the El Arbejal farm in Tonacatepeque, decides to condemn Poveda to death.

There are lots of rumors about those meetings, whole orchestras of whispers, symphonies of accusations. Some mara members defend Christian, saying he is honest, that he did a good thing telling about the maras from their point of view. Others are envious: He’ll get rich by looking like the good guy against us bad guys. The women defend him. A lot. Or so it seems. The most authoritative members, those who had agreed to be filmed, are frightened by the documentary’s success. Too many people are talking about it. It makes its way to the web. So maybe that cop Espinoza wasn’t lying, maybe Christian did sell the video to the police. But the sense is that anyone who says too much about the maras, anyone who has in a certain sense taken advantage of them, has to be punished.

On August 30, 2009, the group decides to kill Christian. At the time he’s acting as an intermediary for a French journalist who writes for Elle magazine and wants to interview some of the girls in the gang. For the first time his contacts ask him for a fee, ten thousand dollars. Even though Christian doesn’t like it, he accepts. The magazine has the money and can afford to pay. Christian meets Vásquez Romero in El Rosario. But a little after noon Vásquez Romero gets behind the wheel of a gray Nissan Pathfinder 4 x 4 and drives Christian onto the bridge over the Las Cañas River. That’s where they kill him. I can’t imagine those final seconds. I’ve tried. Did Christian realize, even for a moment, that it was a trap? Did he try to defend himself, to explain that killing him was unjust? Or did they shoot him in the back of the head, like cowards? A moment. They must have pretended to be getting out of the car, and in that moment when Christian lifts the handle to open the door they must have fired. I don’t know; I’ll never know. But I can’t keep from asking myself these things.

If the ex — police officer hadn’t been drunk that day, if he hadn’t told a bunch of lies, would Christian still be alive? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe they would have eliminated him just the same, because some of the gang members were unhappy with how Christian had portrayed them in his film. Despite his assurances that the documentary would not be released in El Salvador, some pirated versions were making the rounds. Maybe they would have killed him anyway, because the new generation of Mara 18 leadership was even more violent and ferocious than the previous one. According to Carole Solive, Christian’s French producer, his mistake was to stay on in El Salvador after he’d finished shooting. Maybe he’d come to know too much about the negotiations between Salvatrucha and 18, two rival bands that were trying to reach an understanding, and that knowledge condemned him to death. No matter how much he trusted those kids Christian never forgot to take certain basic safety precautions. He had a cell phone that he used only to contact maras members. But it wasn’t enough.

Christian Poveda believed in the power of images to influence events. That’s why he worked as a photojournalist and documentary filmmaker. He devoted all his efforts to chronicling extraordinary political and social situations, making sixteen documentaries that were well received at the world’s most prestigious film festivals. I often look for La vida loca when I’m in a bookstore, or when I go to someone’s home, in the stacks of DVDs next to the TV. I almost never find it. What did you die for, Christian? The question rises up in me like some melodramatic lullaby. What did you die for? Would your life have made more sense if that documentary were in every home? I don’t think so. No work of art can make sense of or justify death with a gun to your head. Your last words are more eloquent than any epigraph could be: “Government authorities have no idea of the monster facing them. Now the 18 is full of crazy people. I am very worried… and sad.”

18. ADDICTED

Writing about cocaine is not so different from using it. You always want more — more news, more information — and the stuff you do find is so potent you can’t live without it. It’s addicting. These stories, even when they conform to an overarching plot you’ve already grasped, continue to fascinate in their particulars. And they stick in your head until another one — incredible but true — takes its place. You see that your stimulation threshold is on the rise, and you pray you don’t ever go into withdrawal. Which is why I keep collecting stories ad nauseam, more than are needed; I can’t bring myself to stop. One evening, long before El Chapo’s actual capture, I got a phone call from Guatemala with the news that he was killed in a shootout. I didn’t know whether to believe it or not; it wouldn’t be the first time that false information about drug lords was circulated. Still, these bits of information roar in my ear. But relatively few others hear the noise. The further I descend into these infernal circles whitewashed with cocaine, the more I realize how much people don’t know. There’s a river that runs under big cities, a river that starts in South America, flows through Africa, and spreads everywhere. Men and women stroll down Rome’s via del Corso, along Parisian boulevards, meet up in Times Square, walk with heads lowered along London streets. Don’t they hear anything? How can they stand all this noise?

That old story of Griselda, for example, the most ruthless female narco of all the Colombian drug traffickers. As a child she learned that all men are means, tools to manipulate so as to reach your goals. A reasonable theory if you grow up with a mother who got pregnant by a half-Indian guajiro landowner called Señor Blanco, who threw her out on the street as soon as the baby was born. An alcoholic, poor, abused, and desperate, Griselda’s mother dragged her daughter through the putrid streets of Medellín, forcing her to beg. A couple of miserable, human beggars who’d part ways only when the mother got herself pregnant by the umpteenth guy she’d picked up who knows where, only to join up later, now with the addition of a half brother or sister. These are the years of La Violencia in Colombia. Brutality is the order of the day, and if you want to survive, you have to be brutal too. Griselda turns thirteen, she starts to prostitute herself. The men she goes with are pieces of meat who vent themselves on her body, and who pay her just enough to get by till the next day. Her amber skin collects bruises and cuts, bites and scars. They don’t hurt, though; they’re just nicks on her thick armor. Men are a means. Nothing more. Griselda learns the art of pickpocketing to round out her income. She’s quick with her hands and doesn’t permit herself to steal from her clients, because she doesn’t want to risk ruining her beat. For her love is a foul-smelling bed she lies on, waiting while the sweaty creature on top of her does his duty. But one day she meets Carlos. Another man, one of many, and Griselda gives him the usual treatment: indifference. Carlos is a small-time criminal in Medellín, an expert pickpocket and thief who has a thriving partnership with a narco named Alberto Bravo. A long courtship begins between Griselda and Carlos. He brings her a different flower every day, which every day she throws away after accepting it with false courtesy. She never looks him in the eye, but he, unperturbed, makes the rounds of all the florists in Medellín, looking for different varieties. He teaches her a few tricks to make ends meet; she pretends not to listen but is actually memorizing everything he says. This skirmish lasts a long time, until Carlos’s stubborn perseverance breaks through, and Griselda surrenders. For the first time in her life a man has shown her that a relationship does not necessarily have to expire, that there exists a word she has never heard before: trust. They get married, they love each other, they make big plans. He introduces her to Alberto Bravo, who makes her see that the real money is in narco-trafficking. She is young but quick-witted, and doesn’t hesitate to set foot in that world. And besides, she has Carlos, who always says yes whenever she asks him if they will be together their whole lives. They move to New York, to Queens, where Colombians are starting to settle and the drug market is really flourishing. A new life. The city that never sleeps welcomes Griselda and Carlos like royalty. Things are going really well, and Carlos keeps saying yes whenever Griselda asks him: “Will we be together our whole lives?” Yes, yes, yes. But then Carlos gets sick — cirrhosis of the liver — and dies in the hospital. Griselda stays at his side till the end, and when her husband dies she doesn’t feel a thing, just as she used to feel nothing when she came home after a long night working and counted her new bites and scars in the mirror. Carlos didn’t honor their pact to stay together their whole lives; Carlos is just like every other man; men are a means.

She marries Alberto Bravo, but when he goes to Colombia on a work trip and she doesn’t hear from him for a while, a furious Griselda catches up with him and kills him in a shootout. By 1971 Griselda has her own narco-trafficking network in the United States. She has understood that the line connecting New York, Miami, and Colombia is the future. She has a lingerie shop in Medellín, where she sells her own designs, which she also has her mules wear. They’re the ones who hide 2 kilos of cocaine under their clothes on the Colombia — United States flight. Her name appears in the DEA files for the first time in 1973. She’s described as “a new threat for the United States.” Business is booming; she’s now one of the most important Colombian traffickers. Despite being a woman — no small handicap in a society where there’s no feminine version of the word “narco-trafficker”—Griselda proves to her Colombian colleagues that she can do the job and do it with such violence that she terrorizes people. Her reputation as a wicked woman without scruples precedes her everywhere she goes.

In 1975 she is accused of drug trafficking as part of an investigation in New York, but she manages to take refuge in Colombia. She has already amassed a fortune, $500 million. She returns to the United States a few years later, when things have calmed down, this time to Florida. She founds the Pistoleros, her own army of killers. Among them is Paco Sepúlveda, who slits his victims’ throats and then hangs them upside down until the blood has drained out: “The bodies are lighter that way, and it’s easier to move them.”

The stories about Griselda multiply: hypochondriac, druggie, bisexual, lover of orgies, paranoid, collector of luxury goods. Along with the rumors that feed the myth, Griselda starts collecting nicknames: Godmother, the Queen of Cocaine in Miami, the Black Widow. It’s rumored that she slit the throat of some men she’d gone to bed with. She gets married four times, always to narco-traffickers. Marriage is a lever for moving up in the hierarchy of power, and when a husband puts a spoke in her wheels, she has him eliminated. Like Dario Sepúlveda, who contests the custody agreement for their son, whom they named, of all things, Michael Corleone, and so she has him killed.

Griselda’s drug empire in Miami takes in $8 million a month. She plays a fundamental role in what will be called the Florida Cocaine War, also known as the Cocaine Cowboys War. Miami is flooded in money, estimated at about $10 billion a year.

In 1979 Griselda orchestrates the Dadeland Mall massacre. Two people are killed in a liquor store in that Dade County mall: Germán Jiménez Panesso, a Colombian drug trafficker who does business with Griselda’s organization, and who is the target of the shootout, and his bodyguard. In the 1970s homicides were a private matter. Sure, there were tortures, stranglings, mutilations, decapitations. But they were ways to settle the score. The Dadeland massacre signals instead the beginning of a long series of shootouts in Miami, of battles fought in public places, in the light of day. So-called collateral damage doesn’t matter anymore. Now people are shot in the street, in shopping malls, stores, restaurants, crowded locales at the busiest times of day. It is said that Griselda is responsible for the majority of murders committed in southern Florida during that time.

Griselda’s ruthlessness reaches epic proportions. Numerous episodes, told as if part of a legend, are passed from one person to the next.

Griselda walks into a bar just for men. Girls are dancing provocatively on their platforms. All heads turn to look at her. A woman who comes into a place like this? Unheard of. What’s more, a woman who looks like that: stoned, slovenly, haunted eyes. She sits down, orders a drink, observes the gyrating bodies. She seems about to touch those long legs. Then all of a sudden she gets up and fires a gun. One by one the girls fall to the ground. “Whores!” she screams. “Whores! All you know how to do is wiggle your asses for the men.” Griselda is obsessed with those women. For her they don’t deserve to live. Another obsession is hunting in bars. She liked to choose her men, and if they didn’t go along, they were dead. One time a kid, younger than her, sitting a few tables away, attracts her attention. Griselda wants him and fixes her eyes on him. He avoids her gaze, but Griselda insists. So the kid heads to the bathroom, and she follows, going into the women’s room. “Help!” she starts screaming. “Help!” and the kid comes running; maybe that weird woman is sick. Griselda is waiting for him, naked from the waist down. “Lick me,” she commands. The kid steps away, his back to the door, but Griselda takes out a pistol and repeats, “lick me.” So he does, the barrel of her gun glued to his head.

Griselda holes up in her bedroom, looked after by her German shepherd, Hitler; she’s a drug addict by this point. Drugs and the police are only two of her enemies. Rival organizations try to kill her several times. On one occasion she tricks her killers by staging her own death: She ships an empty coffin to Colombia from the United States. In 1984, to escape the continual attacks, she moves her base to Irvine, California, where she lives with her youngest son, the aforementioned Michael Corleone. But she is arrested in February 1985, right in Irvine, accused of drug trafficking by the DEA. She is sentenced to ten years in prison, but even as an inmate she continues to manage her affairs. The Godmother buys herself a luxury prison. From behind bars she comes up with new projects, such as the one — aborted, thanks to wiretappings — to kidnap John F. Kennedy, Jr. In prison she receives jewels, perfume, men.

The Miami-Dade Office of the State Attorney pressures one of her right-hand men, Jorge “Riverito” Ayala, to collaborate, and in 1993 he agrees. They gather sufficient proof to incriminate Griselda for multiple homicide. But it’s 1998, and the Miami-Dade Office of the State Attorney is about to be buried in scandal. The man who turned on Griselda is in a witness protection program. He can’t take it anymore. The life of luxury and drugs he’d been used to is now just a distant memory, and all the discipline is killing him. He finds a way to put a lot of money into the hands of the DA secretaries. He doesn’t want information or cocaine or an escape plan. The money is for sex. Telephone sex, but for him it’s still sex. The heavy breathing and moans go on for a while, but in the end an inquiry uncovers the secret hotline, and the DA’s authority is undermined. The scandal saves Griselda, who escapes the electric chair as a result. She is freed on June 6, 2004, after almost twenty years in prison, and sent back to Colombia.

September 3, 2012: Griselda, now sixty-nine, is coming out of a butcher shop in Medellín with a friend. Two men on a motorcycle pull up and shoot her twice in the head. The Godmother dies in the hospital a few hours later, killed via the same technique — motorcycle murder — that she herself imported to Miami.

Or take the story of another woman, Mexican this time: Sandra Ávila Beltrán, queen of cocaine. And a sentence I couldn’t get out of my head: “The world is disgusting.” Sandra couldn’t stand hearing that sentence. And if it was uttered by one of her uncle’s men, who was none other than El Padrino Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, Sandra felt the blood rush to her head and pound against her temples. Born into a narco family, raised in the presence of the greatest of them all, immersed in a macho culture since she was a little girl: How could it be that those same men who boasted in front of her uncle about their female conquests and their barbaric slayings of enemies, amongst themselves then would say “The world is disgusting”? Braggarts in front of the boss, cowards as soon as he turned his back. And if little Sandra happened to hear them, well, it really didn’t matter much; she was just a girl.

Education is often the drop of water that wears away the stone. Patient and tenacious, El Padrino’s lackeys’ words dig into Sandra’s conscience. They make their way deep down, creating an emptiness that can no longer be resolved with simple rage. She has to look for other answers. She has to find a lifestyle that contradicts that inescapable sentence. Sandra divides the world into two categories. On one side are people like her uncle’s men. On the other are those who want to change the world, to win. She can boast of her birthright, the ideal genetic résumé for a narco-trafficker. But she’s a woman; her body bears the indelible mark of the ineptness of command. Breasts, wide hips, an ass like a mandolin. These things can’t be erased, can’t be passed off as something else. So breasts, wide hips, and mandolin ass become weapons to hone, things she can depend on: fingernails, shoes, hair, perfume, clothes. For Sandra they are all necessary to make her femininity — her sensuality and power — explode. Because the more woman she is, the more the men are going to have to pay attention to her. The very logic that is used against her, to subjugate her femininity, she will bend to her advantage, and will teach all women that there is another way to live in the world.

Men are pawns, to be classified by their usefulness. Sandra gets sentimentally attached to two federal judicial police commanders, long a breeding ground for narcos. Then she moves on to seducing important Sinaloa bosses such as El Mayo Zambada and Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel. And finally the big coup: She gets engaged to Juan Diego Espinoza Ramírez, known as El Tigre, or the Tiger. Diego is a Colombian narco belonging to the Norte del Valle cartel and the nephew of Don Diego, the famous narco Diego Montoya. Sandra is a princess, constantly choosing whom to tie herself to so as to rise in power and social standing. With El Tigre she makes a qualitative leap that allows her to negotiate directly with the Colombian suppliers. So Sandra, El Padrino’s niece, becomes la Reina, the Queen. The Queen of the Pacific knows how to exploit clichés. A woman is weak, so there’s no point in threatening her: For the Queen this means freedom of movement. A woman doesn’t know how to negotiate with men: The Queen takes advantage of the cartel emissaries’ embarrassment when faced with a beautiful woman in a low-cut dress.

Now they all have to kneel to her, honor her. She coordinates shipments from Colombia from her luxurious headquarters in Guadalajara and launders the earnings, which get bigger every year. All that money is needed to carry out her most ambitious plan: to give women power. According to the Queen, women need to earn approval and respect, and the fastest, surest way to do that is through beauty. She invests the proceeds from cocaine in beauty clinics, both deluxe and plain, because all women have the right to lovers and husbands, jobs and suitable social standing. It’s tangible things she invests in. Bodies and buildings. Breasts and houses. Derrieres and villas. Smooth skin and apartments. Seated on her throne, Sandra rules an army of men who can climb the ranks only to a certain point, because above them, undisputed, is the silent Queen, who never exposes herself, never gets her hands dirty, does not allow her name to appear in the newspaper or, worse, in police reports.

Then one day everything changes. An important shipment has just arrived in the port of Manzanillo, in the state of Colima, on the Pacific: ten tons of cocaine worth more than $80 million. The authorities block it and seize the drugs. For the first time the Queen’s name appears in the media. She is now a public figure, and it may not be pure coincidence that a few months later her only son, sixteen-year-old José Luis Fuentes Ávila, who lives in the exclusive Puerta de Hierro neighborhood in Guadalajara, is kidnapped. His captors demand $5 million in ransom. The Queen panics. The only man that really matters to her is in the hands of ruthless killers who threaten to skin him alive. She goes to the authorities. But that turns out to be a serious mistake, because from that moment on the police monitor her phone calls and movements. Which is how they discover that the ransom was paid directly by El Mayo Zambada, because after the shipment was seized in the port of Manzanillo, the Queen is short on cash.

While the Queen embraces her son again after seventeen days in captivity, AFI commander Juan Carlos Ventura Moussong announces that he has proof that the kidnapping was a setup to weaken the Queen’s power. Is it really credible that the son of one of the most important bosses can be kidnapped like that? For Moussong, those responsible must be sought among the Queen’s own men, who are eager to construct an independent microcartel and, above all, to free themselves of that woman. The AFI director’s suspicions are valid, but a short time later he is killed, shot point-blank on the street while coming back from a meeting with the other federal district commanders.

Still, power such as hers cannot easily be defeated, even when it is forced between the walls of the female prison in Santa Martha Acatitla, on the outskirts of Mexico City. It’s here that the Queen of the Pacific ends up after being snagged by the police in a fancy Thai restaurant, eating lunch with her companion El Tigre. She’d been going about incognito and using a fake name for years. After her son’s kidnapping, things got more difficult for her, but that doesn’t mean she is going to give up dining in expensive restaurants or buying the latest Chanel outfit. “I’m a housewife who earns a living selling clothes and houses.” In prison she carries on doing what she has always done: fighting for women’s emancipation. She teaches her cell mates not to neglect their bodies or their looks even in prison. “If you lose your body, you lose your soul. If you lose your soul, you lose your power. If you lose your power, you lose everything,” she keeps telling her new “affiliates,” and she tries to set a good example. Apparently she even infects the prison director — a woman. One day some doctors are caught bringing Botox into the prison. The guards immediately think it’s for that prisoner who is obsessed with beauty, for the Queen and her new friends. Not true: The Botox is for the prison director. The Queen managed to convince even her that sensuality comes first, before everything else. Sandra parades in the hallways, showing off her big, dark, movie star glasses, and she never complains: never an attack of nerves; never a hysterical crying fit; never a protest other than for the slop the prison guards pass off as food. The Queen smiles at her misfortune and keeps fiery looks for the women who dare to complain to her about the world’s injustice: “If it’s disgusting to you, then change it!”

August 10, 2012: Sandra Ávila Beltrán is extradited to the United States to face drug-trafficking charges. But at the end of the trial all but one charge is dropped: providing money to her boyfriend, El Tigre, to help him avoid arrest. She is sentenced to seventy months in prison, a term she had already served almost entirely in her previous incarceration in Mexico. In August 2013 she is deported to Mexico, where she is immediately taken into custody in a penitentiary in Nayarit on money-laundering charges. But just after a few months a Mexican federal judge throws out a five-year sentence for money laundering, using the argument that she has already been tried for the same crime in both Mexico and the United States, and orders her immediate release. On February 7, 2015, at 10 P.M., the Queen leaves prison: Three SUVs are waiting for her outside. She climbs into one of them, a white BMW X5, and drives away. She is free. Will she go back to her throne?

• • •

Then there’s the story of a very special recipe.

“El Teo would bring me the corpses. I’d have everything ready: barrels, water, a hundred pounds or so of caustic soda. Latex gloves, gas mask. I’d fill the barrels with fifty gallons of water and two bags of caustic soda and heat them up. When the mix started to boil, I’d strip the bodies and throw them in. Cooking time’s about fourteen, fifteen hours. In the end all that’s left is the teeth, but it’s easy to get rid of those.”

The originator of this recipe is Santiago Meza López, nicknamed, not coincidentally, El Pozolero. Pozole is a typical Mexican meat stew. El Pozolero had long been on the FBI’s twenty most wanted list, and was arrested in January 2009. He confessed to dissolving three hundred bodies of members of a rival gang. The Tijuana cartel paid him six hundred dollars a week. Teodoro García Simental El Teo, head of a bloodthirsty gang tied to the Tijuana cartel, delivered the corpses and the cash.

“Never a woman, though. Only men,” El Pozolero insisted at the end of his interrogation.

• • •

Stories, stories, stories. I can’t get away from them. Stories of people, of torturers and victims. Stories of reporters who would like to tell about them and sometimes end up dead. Like Bladimir Antuna García, who had become a ghost of his former self. Haggard, prematurely gray around the temples and beard, which only took half a day to grow in. His weight fluctuated; his physique went haywire: two sticks instead of legs, protruding stomach. The prototypical drug addict. A consequence of his work, because Bladimir knew how to tell stories, and knew how to investigate, a difficult occupation in a place like Durango. He had crawled through the grimiest canals, the ones that collect wastewater stories, stories of sewers and of power. But those stories start to gnaw at your insides, you slam into the disgust, and when you can’t understand it, you trip, and then look for an explanation elsewhere. Whiskey and cocaine seemed like the solution. But Bladimir decided to leave all that behind; he wanted to go back to being considered one of the best reporters in Durango. He cleaned himself up, found work as a busboy in a tavern in the center of town. He did everything. Humble tasks, but not for Bladimir, who, thanks to his stories, had discovered just how ephemeral the boundaries of human dignity are. Meanwhile he tried to get back into the world of journalism. But the editors didn’t want anything to do with him; he was too unreliable, too well known, but for the wrong reasons. Sure, he’d been a talented reporter, but what if they found him crouched over a table again, his nose buried in a line of cocaine? For people who’ve seen you messed up, even if it was only once, you’re always a drunkard and an addict. But a new paper opened in Durango, El Tiempo, edited by Víctor Garza Ayala. The paper wasn’t doing so well. Maybe some crime stories, which readers really love, could help turn things around. Garza decided to hire Bladimir to cover the crime beat, but just in case, he relegated his section to the back, to the back page, so as not to cut into the politics section on the front page, which is what really matters to him. It’s that way all over the world. If a judge is killed or a car bomb explodes, the story conquers the most important pages. Otherwise crime gets relegated to the back. But Bladimir didn’t care; what mattered to him was the chance to start writing again, writing about cartels and the Zetas. And avoiding, at least at first, causing too much of a stir. But at a certain point the newspaper vendors started displaying the paper backward, with the last page in full view. Sales went through the roof.

Bladimir was relentless; he wrote dozens of news stories, some of which were exclusives, thanks to his excellent contacts in the army and police. To pay for his oldest son’s college education he got a second job with another newspaper, La Voz de Durango.

The first threat he gets is on his cell phone, in the middle of the night. A cavernous but clear voice utters two simple words: “Stop it.” His wife pretends to be asleep, but she hears everything and bites her pillow in silence. In the months that follow the phone calls become more frequent, always to his cell, always at night, always those two simple words: “Stop it.” Sometimes the speaker identifies himself as a Zetas member. Postcards start arriving at the newspaper, tropical beaches and beautiful women, and on the back, in childish lettering, that same command: “Stop it.”

“They’re just words.” That’s how Bladimir dismissed the escalating intimidations. He started working even harder, using his articles to attack corrupt policemen in the state of Durango and reporting loudly the threats he was receiving in the media and to the State Attorney’s office. Lifting the veil on criminal organizations in Mexico and naming famous narco-trafficking accomplices became a sort of creed for him. In July 2009 he talked about the phone calls in a series of interviews with the Mexico City magazine Buzos. He also told of the failed attempt on his life: On April 28, 2009, a man shot at him in broad daylight in the middle of the street, but missed. But when you start talking about threats, the community around you is always ready to say you’re paranoid, you’re exaggerating. Bladimir reported the threats and the attempt on his life to the authorities, but they didn’t do anything. Bladimir was working with Eliseo Barrón Hernández on a story about some policemen in the pay of the cartels. With Eliseo, they did what they always do. They waited till he left his house with his family, humiliated him by kicking and punching him in front of his daughters and wife, then took him away. Then they put a bullet in his head. His mistake had been to stick his nose in a story of corrupt policemen. “We’re here, reporters. Just ask Eliseo Barrón. El Chapo and the cartel don’t forgive. Be careful, soldiers and reporters.” These were Chapo Guzmán’s words, which appeared on several narco-banners hung in the streets of Torreón on the day of Eliseo’s funeral. A clear claim of responsibility, the way terrorists do it. An unequivocal message. Another one arrives at Bladimir’s newspaper office a few hours later: “He’s next, that son of a bitch.”

Bladimir rarely left his house. Almost never. He would write holed up inside. Some of his colleagues said he’d resigned himself to the idea that he’d be killed: The government offered no assistance; no inquiries were being conducted about the threats; no protection had been assigned to him. His biggest fear wasn’t being killed, though. It’s the same for everyone. But it’s not madness, or a secret suicide wish. You don’t go looking for death — you’d be a fool if you did. But you know it’s there.

November 2, 2009: It happened very quickly. Kidnapped. Tortured. Killed.

His colleagues’ efforts were all in vain. They were scandalized by the apathy of the forces of law and order, who had called Bladimir paranoid. The usual defamation technique: no investigations; no inquiries into what Bladimir had uncovered. There’s no investigative journalism in Durango anymore. It died along with Bladimir Antuna García.

19. 000

I looked into the abyss and I became a monster. It couldn’t have gone any other way. With one hand you touch the origins of violence, with the other you caress the roots of ferocity. You’ve got one eye trained on the foundations of buildings, one ear tuned to the beat of financial flows. At first it’s all a dark cauldron; you can’t see a thing, just something simmering below the surface, teeming as if with worms, trying to break through the top crust. Then the figures start to take shape, but it’s still all confused, embryonic, superimposed. Drawing on all your skills and senses you push yourself forward and lean out over the abyss. The chronology of powers begins to make sense, the blood that before ran off in a thousand different directions now flows into one big river; the money stops fluttering around and comes to settle on the ground so you can count it. You lean out a little more. You hook your foot to the rock, practically suspended over the void now. And then… darkness. Like at the beginning, but this time there’s no simmering; there’s only a smooth, shiny surface, a mirror of black pitch. That’s when you realize you’ve gone over to the other side; now it’s the abyss that wants to peer inside you. Rummage around. Tear you to pieces. Break you apart. The abyss of narco-trafficking that looks inside you is not the — all things considered — reassuring rite of indignation. It is not the fear that nothing makes any sense. That would be too simple. Too easy. You’ve identified your target; now it’s up to you to strike, up to you to put things right. The abyss of narco-trafficking opens onto a world that works, an efficient world, a world with rules. A world that makes sense. Then you don’t trust anyone anymore: the media, your family, your friends. Everyone is talking about a reality that you know is bogus. Slowly everything starts feeling foreign to you, and your world fills with new protagonists. Bosses, massacres, trials. Killings, tortures, cartels. Dividends, stocks, banks. Betrayals, suspicions, accusations. Cocaine. All you know is them, and they know you, but it doesn’t mean that the world that was yours before disappears. No. You go on living in the midst of it. You keep on doing what you were doing before, but now the questions you ask yourself rise up out of the abyss. The businessman, the professor, the manager. The student, the dairy farmer, the policeman. Your friend, your relative, your girlfriend. Do they come from the abyss as well? And even if they’re honest, how much like the abyss are they? It’s not that you suspect they’re all corrupt, or mafiosi. It’s worse than that. You have looked humanity in the face, have seen how disgusting it is, and now you see similarities to that disgust in everyone you know. You see everyone’s shadow.

I have become a monster.

When everything around you starts fitting into this sort of reflection. When you insert everything into the universe of meaning you’ve constructed by observing the powers of narco-trafficking. When everything seems to make sense only on the other side, in the abyss. When all this happens you’ve become a monster. You scream, whisper, shout your truths, because you’re afraid that otherwise they’ll vanish. And everything you’d always considered to be happiness — going for a walk, making love, standing in line for a concert, swimming — becomes superfluous. Secondary. Less important. Negligible. Every hour seems pointless, wasted, if you don’t dedicate your energies to discovering, flushing out, telling. You’ve sacrificed everything not only in order to understand but to show, to point out, to describe the abyss. Was it worth it? No. It’s never worth abandoning any path that brings you happiness. Even a small happiness. It’s never worth it, even if you believe that your sacrifice will be rewarded by history, by your sense of ethics, by looks of approval. But it’s only a moment. The only possible sacrifice is the one that expects no reward. I didn’t want sacrifices, and I didn’t want rewards. I wanted to understand, to write, to tell. Tell everyone. To go door to door, house to house, day and night to share these stories, to display these wounds. Proud of having chosen the right words, the right tone. That’s what I wanted. But the wound of these stories swallowed me up.

For me it’s too late. I should have kept a distance I wasn’t able to keep. That’s what Anglo-Saxon journalists often say to me: Don’t get involved; keep a clear gaze between your subject and yourself. But I’ve never been able to. For me it’s the opposite. Exactly the opposite. To have a primary, penetrating, contaminated gaze. To chronicle not the facts but one’s own soul. And to imprint on one’s soul, like on Play-Doh, the objects and the things one sees, so they leave behind a deep impression, but one that can be eliminated by remolding the Play-Doh. By kneading it. In the end all that remains of one’s soul is a frame that could have assumed a thousand different shapes but that hasn’t taken on even one.

When you follow the stories of narco-trafficking you learn to read people’s faces. Or at least you convince yourself you can. You learn to see if someone was loved as a child — truly loved. If he was looked after, if he was raised with someone at his side, or if he always had to run off with his tail between his legs. You understand right away what sort of life he’s had. If he was lonely, bullied, thrown out on the street. Or if, on the other hand, he was spoiled to the point of rotting in comfort. You learn. That’s how you learn to sum people up. But you never learn to distinguish the good guy from the bad guy. You don’t know who is screwing you or stealing your soul, who is lying to you in order to get an interview, or who is telling you what he thinks you want to hear in order to please you and so to be immortalized in your words. I carry that certainty inside me without too much self-indulgent melancholy: No one comes near you except for a favor. A smile is a way of lowering your defenses; a relationship aims to extort money from you, or a story to tell at dinner, or a photo to give someone, like a scalp. You end up thinking like a mafioso; paranoia becomes your line of conduct, and you thank the people of the abyss for teaching you to be suspicious. Loyalty and trust become foreign, suspect words. You are surrounded by enemies and people eager to take advantage of you. This is my life today. Congratulations to me.

It’s too easy to believe what I believed in at the beginning of all this. To believe in what Thoreau said: “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” I believed that following these routes and rivers, sniffing around continents, sinking my legs into the mire would help me to get at the truth: renounce everything else in order to grasp the truth. But it doesn’t work that way, Thoreau. You can’t find it. The closer you come to thinking you’ve understood how markets move, the closer you come to the logic of he who corrupts those close to you, of he who makes restaurants open and banks close, of he who is prepared to die for money; the more you understand the mechanisms, the more you realize you should have taken a completely different route. Which is why I don’t have greater respect for myself, that I keep investigating, taking notes, filling agendas, preserving flavors. I don’t have greater respect for myself at the end of a journey that is unable to bring me happiness and to share it. And I may not even be aware of it. All I know is that I couldn’t have done anything else.

And if I had done things differently? If I had chosen the straight line of art? The life of a writer whom some would define as pure, for example, with his bad moods, his psychoses, his normalcy. One who tells inspiring stories. Who’s all engaged in style and narrative technique. I didn’t know how to do that. Mine is the life of a fugitive, a story runner, a multiplier of tales. I am a monster, as is anyone who sacrifices himself for something he believed to be superior. But I still have some respect. Respect for those who read. For those who snatch important time from their lives so as to construct a new one. Nothing is more powerful than reading; no one is a greater liar than he who holds that reading a book is a passive gesture. To read, hear, study, understand — these are the only ways to construct life beyond life, life alongside of life. Reading is a dangerous act, because it gives shape and dimension to words, it incarnates and disperses them in all directions. It turns everything upside down and makes change and tickets and lint fall out of the pockets of the world. To get to know narco-trafficking, to get to know the connection between the rationality of evil and money, to rip open the veil that obscures the supposed familiarity with the world. To know is the first step toward change. My respect goes to those people who don’t throw these stories away, who don’t neglect them, but who make them their own. Those who feel the words on their skin, who carve them in their flesh, who build a new vocabulary — they are altering the direction of the world, because they have understood how to be in it. It’s like breaking one’s chains. Words are action, connection tissue. Only those who are familiar with these stories can defend themselves from them. Only those who tell them to their child, a friend, their husband, only those who carry them into public places, into living rooms and classrooms are articulating the possibility to resist. Being alone in the abyss is like being in a cage, but if lots of people decide to face the abyss, then the bars of that prison cell will melt. And a cell without bars is no longer a prison.

In the Book of Revelation Saint John writes, “And I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it; it was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it my stomach was made bitter.” I believe that readers need to do this with words. Put them in their mouths, chew them, grind them up, and swallow them, so that the chemistry they are made of can work inside of us, can illuminate the dark night and draw a line between happiness and pain.

You feel empty when your words seem to be enhanced by the threats they provoke, as if people are suddenly listening to every word you utter merely because they risk getting you killed. This is what happens: It happens that silence on these topics doesn’t exist. There is a buzz: news flashes, trials, a narco is arrested. Everything becomes physiological. And when everything becomes physiological, no one notices it anymore. And this is how someone writes: He dies writing; he is threatened writing; he stumbles writing. When the threat comes it seems that a part of the world notices what has been written, at least for a while. But then it forgets. The truth is that there’s no alternative. Cocaine is a carburant. Cocaine is a devastating, terrible, deadly energy. There never seem to be enough arrests. Policies to fight it always seem to miss the mark. As terrible as it may seem, total legalization may be the only answer. A horrendous response, horrible perhaps, agonizing. But the only one that can stop everything. That can halt the inflated earnings. That can put an end to the war. Or, at least, it’s the only response that comes to mind when in the end you ask yourself, now what?

I have let myself be overwhelmed by voices every day for years. Voices that shout at the top of their lungs that alcohol is the substance that claims the most victims. Sharp, hammering voices that every now and then are silenced by other voices that boldly claim that yes, of course, alcohol is bad, but only if you abuse it, if that mug of beer on a Saturday night becomes a habit, and that there’s a big difference between alcohol and cocaine. Then the chorus chimes in, those who think that legalization is the lesser evil; all things considered, the voices suggest, legalized cocaine would come under the control of doctors. And so let’s legalize murder then! a portentous, baritone voice replies, momentarily silencing everyone. But the silence doesn’t last long, because then come those cawing reactions — like knife stabs — one after the other, of those who maintain that drug users really only harm themselves, that if you outlaw cocaine then you have to outlaw tobacco too, and that if you say yes, then the state is a pusher state, a criminal state. And what about weapons then? Aren’t they worse? At which point yet another voice — that calm voice with a know-it-all tone that gets stuck on consonants — affirms that weapons are necessary for self-defense, tobacco can be used in moderation, and… But in the end it’s an ethical problem, and who are we to curb a individual choice with rules and decrees?

At this point the voices start to overlap and get all muddled. The confusion of voices always ends up this way. In silence. And I have to start all over again. But I’m convinced that legalization really could be the answer. Because it hits where cocaine finds its fertile terrain, at the law of supply and demand. If the requests were to dry up, everything above them would shrivel, like a flower without water. Is it a gamble? A fantasy? The ravings of a monster? Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s another fragment of the abyss that few have the courage to face.

For me the word “narco-capitalism” has become a ball of cud that continues to swell. I can’t swallow it; every time I try it goes down the wrong way, and I risk choking to death. All the words I chew on stick to that cud, and the blob expands, like a tumor. I’d like to swallow it down so that it can be attacked by gastric acid. I would like to melt down this word and grab the heart of it. But I can’t. Besides, it’s pointless, because I already know I would find a grain of white powder. Of cocaine. Regardless of the policies and seizures the demand for cocaine will always be huge: The faster the world moves, the more there’s cocaine; the less time there is for stable relationships, for authentic exchanges, the more there’s coke.

I calm down; I have to calm down. I lie down and stare at the ceiling. I’ve collected quite a few ceilings over the years. From those so close to your nose that you can touch them if you stretch out your neck, to those so high up you have to squint to see if they’re frescos or humidity stains you’re looking at. I stare at the ceiling and imagine the entire globe. The world is a round ball of dough that is rising. It’s rising because of petroleum. It’s rising because of coltan. It’s rising because of gas. It’s rising because of the web. If you removed all these ingredients, the dough would risk falling, collapsing. But there’s one ingredient that works faster than all the others and that everyone wants. Cocaine. That plant that connects South America and Italy. Like an elastic band across the Atlantic, an elastic that can stretch infinitely without ever breaking. The roots there, the leaves here. Coke is the ingredient without which there could be no dough. Just as with flour, which in Italy and in South America is categorized by zeros, depending on its purity: The more zeros, the purer it is.

Zeros like wounds through which to see the world. Zeros like abysses you could sink into.

Zero, like the lens of the telescope through which you can observe the mirage of white gold, the best cocaine: 000.