The New Bogeymen

Every few years a new criminal horror emerges that should cause us to hide in our homes, pray to our idols and hope the Evil Ones do not invade our neighbourhood. Remember all those stories about voodoo-chanting Jamaicans? The garishly tattooed Russians? How about when Hells Angels were blowing up small-town Quebec and slaughtering the innocent?

These days Mexican drug cartels with a decapitation fetish have captured the dark imagination of tabloid editors, Hollywood screenwriters and true crime aficionados. It isn’t that the old bogeymen are not still out there on the corner dealing drugs, death and general mayhem, but they are yesterday’s news compared to the carnage in cheap-flight tourist land.

Be afraid, be very afraid, Toronto-based journalist Jerry Langton warns. This latest menace is even more fearsome and homicidal: an endless army of Latin American psychopaths with a penchant for torturing and mutilating their victims.

In his new book, Gangland: The Rise of the Mexican Drug Cartels from El Paso to Vancouver, Langton provides a litany of their massacres, killings and assassinations—more than 45,000 body bags over the last five years. It is a very scary narrative that ends in a great wringing of hands that Mexico is a veritable failed state with only two options: either an unholy alliance with these sanguinary Satans or a descent into bloody anarchy thanks to a doomed-to-fail war on drugs and its burgeoning casualty counts.

But Langton’s is a view from 40,000 feet—a sweeping abbreviated recitation of post-colonial history, a gloss on the most lurid of myriad slayings and apocalyptic prognostications about hellish lawlessness. I am skeptical that Mexican democracy is as fragile as Langton suggests and I doubt that the ghastly violence presents such a stark dilemma. It is a far more complex situation, especially in a country that has been riven and fractured since the arrival of the Spanish nearly half a millennium ago.

First of all, if you work in a criminal enterprise, no matter where you live, you cannot turn to the cops or the courts for recompense when someone does you dirty; it is do-it-yourself justice. That is a given. And crime has always been dangerous—lucrative but fraught with fatal hazards and murderous jealousies.

More importantly, from the days of the Opium Wars to the French Connection to today, the profits of drug trafficking exacerbate the normal greed fueled betrayals of the underworld. The incredible money to be made from the insatiable hunger for illegal party favours and non-prescription get-me throughs is behind the savagery in Mexico. It is a riveting phenomenon—a moment of crisis that might even lead to the end of the modern criminal prohibition against marijuana and the non-medicinal use of other drugs, as it already has in Portugal.

But Langton does not really address the issues raised by the bloodbath because he thinks Mexico is probably past the tipping point.

His high-altitude perspective, however, smudges some details. A book about interdiction and law enforcement should not get the dreaded U.S. DEA’s name wrong: it is the Drug Enforcement Administration, not Agency. Purchasing and possessing marijuana in Canada remains illegal in spite of what Langton says. He is also wrong to say: “By 2011, although actual decriminalization for small amounts of marijuana for personal use was still rare, law enforcement in all of Canada and the more densely populated parts of the United States stopped charging people for possession of small amounts of marijuana.”

In fact, Statistics Canada says 58,000 Canadians were arrested for marijuana possession in 2010, 14 percent more than in 2009. Canadian police continue to lay pot charges and the Tory omnibus crime bill will significantly increase penalties for cannabis offences. In the United States, federal policing agencies continue to aggressively charge people with possession and trafficking, even picking on patients and dispensaries in states with medical marijuana programs. Also, again in spite of Langton’s claim, the bulk of the pot consumed in Canada is grown here. Very little is imported from Mexico; we are a net exporter.

Similarly, Langton compresses the history of cannabis in North America into a distorted cartoon. He even repeats the hoary anecdote that cocaine and B.C. Bud have traded somewhere pound for pound. That is like trading diamonds for zircons without factoring in the exponential price difference. A pound of coke uncut is worth between $30,000 and $45,000 wholesale; the most incredible jungle dope on the planet will not garner close to that—Triple A B.C. pot sells for more like $3,500 to $5,000 a pound.

I am not saying no one barters and trades, but it is not ounce for ounce. Brokers trade drugs in quantities of equal monetary value to minimize riskier cash-for-product transactions and the subsequent need for money laundering (especially foreign currency), which is the bane of a trafficker’s existence.

Moreover, Langton provides no substantive explanation about how the cartels work, decide strategy or set prices. This is very much an outsider’s perspective. The author seems concerned primarily with recording the nicknames, monikers and noms de guerre of the bad guys, how many bullets penetrated a body or how many corpses were dismembered and dissolved in acid.

Oh, and emphasizing that, like the dreaded African killer bees slowly making their way north, this Mexican scourge is infiltrating the U.S. and Canada.

Unfortunately, the evidence he offers is gruesome and frightening but unpersuasive. If there are more Latin Americans involved in drug crime north of the Rio Bravo, it is because more of them now live here. Cocaine from Central and South America has been available for more than a century. If nasty people with better connections now are running the illicit trade instead of motorcycle thugs, isn’t that capitalism?

Illicit drugs are big business and they engender unspeakable violence. Furthermore, the enormous profits are corrupting influences around the globe.

The U.S. inspired war on drugs has long been discredited and legalization is being debated in every western country. In Canada and the U.S., crime rates are falling to historic lows and the empirical data indicate education, health and social programs are a far better approach to combating gangs than prohibition, law enforcement and prison.

The same can happen in Mexico, but not unless there is confidence in its institutions and the rule of law is respected. Langton insinuates that corruption now is so rife that the country is doomed, that legalization or alternative policies are a mirage and will not help. Regardless of the success of rehabilitation and education, he says, people will still use drugs: “A rough analogy can be found with unplanned pregnancies: although sex education is universal and contraceptives are cheap and easily accessible, millions of North American women still experience unplanned pregnancies every year.”

I do not think you can compare pregnancy to illicit drug use. That is not a “rough analogy”; it is a non sequitur. But there is a germane parallel: tobacco. Public health authorities have waged a very successful campaign against smoking, driving down consumption and improving disease outcomes without outlawing cigarette breaks or throwing a single smoker in jail.

Ultimately, that is what is wrong with Langton’s shoot-’em-up, heads-in-coolers chronicle—it is too full of rat-a-tat, blam-blam-blam slayings without enough thoughtfulness about solutions. Instead of a diagnosis of Mexico’s open wound and the triage that might staunch the bleeding, Langton provides an updated Scarface with no Al Pacino.