Chasing the Scream

by Johann Hari

  She was approached by rival cartel members who said they could deal with Sergio if she wanted. Some of her family were tempted—but Marisela refused. She believed in justice, not violence.

  She went to interview everybody who had ever known Sergio, to beg them for information—and finally, somebody gave her an address in Fresno, a city nine hundred miles away.

  Almost as soon as she arrived on the block, somebody fired bullets into the air, to scare her off. She refused to run. She rented a house nearby, and then—one day—she saw him, in the street, just as she had expected.

  She was perfectly still. She didn’t want him dead; she wanted him brought to justice.

  Years after this, in a shack in Juárez, I asked her best friend Bertha Alicia Garcia—weren’t you afraid? “We are always afraid,” she said, “but sometimes, the love of your children is stronger than fear itself.”

  Marisela called the police and told them everything. They sent three cops, who arrived noisily at the front of the house—while Sergio escaped out the back.

  They let him get away. Again.

  Was this incompetence? Corruption? Fear?

  Marisela tried to follow his trail, asking questions in the surrounding small towns, but this area was totally controlled by the Zetas, and they don’t like people asking questions. So Marisela decided to walk from Juárez to Mexico City—a journey of more than a thousand miles—to beg the president himself to act. In terms of distance, this is like walking from Paris to Kosovo, or from Los Angeles to Denver. It was the last option she had left.

  So Marisela began her long march through the desert. In this heat, animals burrow into the ground and only come out at sunset. Marisela walked through it all, across sand dunes, and mountains, and dust storms. She had spent her life savings by now. Some days she and the other mothers marching with her went hungry; some days they ate only bread smeared with mayonnaise. They slept where they could. Sometimes people let them into their homes, or allowed them to lie down in their trucks.

  The heat on these roads5 is so intense that it looks as though the tarmac in front of you has melted into shimmering black pools. The dust and the glare were so bad that her son Juan’s eyes became infected, and for two days he was blind; he walked holding his mother’s shoulder.

  It was as if she thought she could outpace her grief. Everybody in the country was watching and asking—If a nurse with no resources and no money can find a murderer, how come the police can’t find him, with everything they’ve got? What is happening to our country?

  When after three months of walking she made it to Mexico City, President Calderon refused to see her. In the video clips from this time, you can see her face becoming slowly misshapen by grief.

  That is when Marisela heard rumors that started to make it possible to make sense of this whole story. Sergio, she was told, is a Zeta. That is why the police would not touch him. That is why he kept escaping. When Marisela got her final lead on where Sergio was, the police were finally honest with her. “If he’s with the Zetas, we’re not going to be able to do anything, because they run the state,” they told her. “If we do a bust, it’s because they allow us to do it. We don’t bust people just like that.” They were apologetic, but they explained that the Zetas give them money if they serve them and death if they don’t.

  I found myself thinking back to the start of this war. Arnold Rothstein was allowed to shoot at cops and walk away a free man. The wealth that came from controlling the market in criminalized drugs bought more than fancy fur coats for Carolyn. It bought him a place above and beyond the law. At first, he bought freedom from being prosecuted for the crimes involved in running his drug business. And then it spread from there, buying him immunity for the laws surrounding theft and extortion and murder, like an oil slick that slowly covers the whole society in its goop. This oil slick, I began to see, covers Mexico today.

  First the drug dealers bought immunity from the drug laws. Then they bought the law itself. By joining the Zetas somewhere along the line, Sergio had placed himself above the law. This is what the desire to repress drugs has wrought.

  But Rubi always knew her mother wouldn’t abandon her.

  Marisela believed she had one card left to play. Go public. Tell the world everything. She went to the state capitol in Chihuahua City and announced to the world’s press everything she had found—that the Zetas now ran the state and could do what they liked.

  The governor publicly dismissed her. She had arrived in early December, and she invited the governor to Christmas dinner on the doorstep of the state capitol building, because she wasn’t leaving until Sergio was arrested. “What’s the government waiting for—that he come and finish me?” she said. “Then let him kill me,6 but here in front, to see if it makes them ashamed.”

  This was one of the most tightly policed places in Mexico, guarded by the federal police, the local police, and the military.

  But one night, at eight o’clock, the gates to the capitol started to close, and the area suddenly emptied of police and soldiers.

  A man approached her now, right in front of the security cameras, in the shadow of the offices of the city police.

  He took out a gun. He put the gun to her head. He pulled the trigger.

  But the gun didn’t go off. Something had jammed. Marisela’s brother tried to throw a chair at the hit man; Marisela ran.

  The hit man ran after her. As they were both running, he pulled out another gun, and this time, he shot her7 straight in the head.

  On the morning of her funeral, her business was burned down, and a man who resembled Marisela’s boyfriend was kidnapped off the street nearby, suffocated to death, and dumped for everyone to see.

  Those searching for the disappeared disappear; those seeking justice for the murdered are murdered, until the silence swallows everything. This is all happening in a city with a Walmart and a Pizza Hut and several KFCs.

  Marisela’s eldest son, Juan, made it to the United States. I met him in a city there that he has asked me not to name, for his own safety.

  “I just want for you to understand,” he said, “who the real victims are in this war. It’s not the cartels, it’s not the police, but the people coming between [them in] this war.” When you picture the seventy thousand dead, don’t picture a drug dealer, or a drug user—picture Marisela. She is more representative. And it is all, he says, for nothing. “Since the war started, the cartels have got stronger. The drugs, they won’t stop—if you walk the streets of Mexico and the United States, drugs are still selling on the streets, drugs are still in the schools. They haven’t stopped anything at all.”

  “Of course the control of the drugs, the routes, is what gives them the money to pay off cops, military, federal police—everyone,” Juan told me. “If you legalize drugs they are going to lose a lot of money.” When they legalized alcohol in the United States, lots of gangsters were bankrupted. Would it be similar in Mexico, I ask him, if drugs were legalized? “Of course. There’s going to be less sources of money.” But he feared that now, the cartels’ control8 is so deep they would simply transfer to other forms of crime.

  As he spoke, I found myself thinking back to the start of this war. Harry Anslinger himself wrote9 in the 1960s: “Prohibition, conceived as a moral attempt to improve the American way of life, would ultimately cast the nation into a turmoil. One cannot help but think in retrospect that Prohibition, by depriving Americans of their ‘vices,’ only created the avenues through which organized crime gained its firm foothold.”

  Marisela’s other son, Paul, is severely autistic, so he can’t fully understand what happened. But when we met, he wanted to show me something. It is Google Maps, on a laptop. He looks obsessively at the house where he lived with Marisela. He says, staring at the screen: “It’s dangerous. I can’t go back. But my house is fine. Nothing’s going to happen. I hope they don’t burn it. I hope they don’t burn my house. Everything’s going to be fine over there.” And he smiles, awkwardly, looki
ng away from me.

  Difficult questions continued to be asked about the case, and what it revealed about the drug war and corruption in Mexico. In November 2012, the Mexican police surrounded a house in the state of Zacatecas. Four men were shot dead. One of them was Sergio.

  It is not what the family10 wanted. Now there will be no trial, and there will be no opportunity to ask any uncomfortable questions.

  Before all this happened, back when she was a nurse, Marisela had something she loved to do. She would take a break from looking after her kids and working hard for them, and she would climb onto her motorbike and ride far out into the desert, with the sand and the breeze in her hair.

  As I traveled across Mexico, I kept asking myself—If it is condemning sixty thousand of their countrymen to violent murder and has butchered the rule of law, why is this country fighting the drug war at all?

  The most articulate analyst of the drug war I could find is Sandra Rodriguez, a journalist in her early forties. She has remained at her post as chief crime reporter for the Juárez newspaper El Diario even as her colleagues are murdered all around her. Over a glass of wine in a friend’s apartment in Juárez, I asked her why this was happening to her city, and she said straight off: “Mexico is not deciding this policy . . . This war, this criminalization strategy, is imposed by the U.S. government.”

  I only really understood what she meant later, when I started researching the history of how this happened.

  In the 1930s, Mexico watched its neighbor to the north launch drug prohibition, and they saw that it wouldn’t work—so they decided to choose a very different path. In Mexico City, the country’s leading expert on drugs11 was a sober-minded doctor named Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, who ran a hospital treating drug addicts, so he was considered to be a good person to put in charge of the country’s drug policy. The president appointed him chief12 of the Alcohol and Narcotic Service.

  This Mexican started to make the same discoveries13 as the silenced California doctor Henry Smith Williams, at precisely the same time. He published a fourteen-year study demonstrating that cannabis does not cause psychosis,14 and talking about the “myth of marijuana,”15 and when it came to other drugs, he explained: “It is impossible16 to break up the traffic in drugs because of the corruption of the police and also because of the wealth and political influence of some of the traffickers.” Unless, that is, you resist the whole idea of the drug war. Keep drugs legal, he said. Have their sale controlled and supplied by the state, so it can regulate their use, purity, and price. This would prevent criminals17 from controlling the trade and so end drug trafficking and the violence and chaos it causes.

  Just as Henry Smith Williams had to be crushed by Anslinger for showing there was a better alternative to prohibition, so did Leopoldo Salazar. Harry started demanding that he be fired. He instructed Mexico’s representative at the League of Nations that addicts “were criminals first18 and addicts afterwards”—and before long, on American orders, he was forced from office.19

  But Mexico wouldn’t surrender its convictions for long: a few years later, it resumed providing narcotics legally to addicts who needed them, in order to smother the new rise of the cartels. Harry responded by immediately cutting off the entire country’s supply of opiates for pain relief in its hospitals. Mexicans literally writhed in agony.20 Mexico now had no choice. Its government started to fight the drug war obediently, and the U.S. Treasury’s officials declared: “This is a notable victory for Harry21 Anslinger.” The first step of Marisela’s long march was taken on that day.

  The U.S. government has approached Mexico with the same threat as the cartels—plato o plomo. Silver or lead. We can give you economic “aid” to fight this war, or we can wreck your economy if you don’t. Your choice.

  What is never an option is to pursue a rational drug policy.

  In 2012, not longer after Marisela was killed, Michele Leonhart, the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said that the level of violence and death in Mexico is in fact “a sign of success22 in the fight against drugs.”

  On one of my final days in Juárez, I was driven out to the sand dunes that lie just beyond the city’s sprawl, and I looked back over the flat, semi­abandoned city where Rubi met Sergio, and Marisela found her in the pile of pig bones.

  I ran my fingers through the prickly-hot white sand and tried to picture these three teenagers I have learned so much about sitting together at a party in a Mexico that had been allowed to choose drug peace instead of drug war. Lady Gaga is playing in the background. Rubi is texting her mother, laughing. Juan, stripped of his angel wings, is chatting with Rosalio about World of Warcraft. They might, I like to think, have been friends.

  Part IV

  The Temple

  Chapter 11

  The Grieving Mongoose

  Sometimes, after journeying to the front lines of the drug war in Brownsville or in Juárez or in Tent City, I would go back to an anonymous hotel room and ask myself one question. Why? Why are these people being shot or beheaded or cooked? What is the purpose of this war?

  I looked again at the official reasons. The United Nations says the war’s rationale is to build “a drug-free world1—we can do it!” U.S. government officials agree, stressing that “there is no such thing2 as recreational drug use.” So this isn’t a war to stop addiction, like that in my family, or teenage drug use. It is a war to stop drug use among all humans, everywhere. All these prohibited chemicals need to be rounded up and removed from the earth. That is what we are fighting for.

  I began to see this goal differently after I learned the story of the drunk elephants, the stoned water buffalo, and the grieving mongoose. They were all taught to me by a remarkable scientist in Los Angeles named Professor Ronald K. Siegel.

  The tropical storm in Hawaii had reduced the mongoose’s home to a mess of mud, and lying there, amid the dirt and the water, was the mongoose’s mate—dead. Professor Siegel, a silver-haired official adviser to two U.S. presidents3 and to the World Health Organization, was watching this scene. The mongoose found the corpse, and it made a decision: it wanted to get out of its mind.4

  Two months before, the professor had planted a powerful hallucinogen called silver morning glory in the pen. The mongooses had all tried it, but they didn’t seem to like it: they stumbled around disoriented for a few hours and had stayed away from it ever since. But not now. Stricken with grief, the mongoose began to chew. Before long, it had tuned in and dropped out.

  It turns out this wasn’t a freak occurrence in the animal kingdom. It is routine. As a young scientific researcher, Siegel had been confidently told by his supervisor that humans were the only species that seek out drugs to use for their own pleasure. But Siegel had seen cats lunging at catnip—which, he knew, contains chemicals that mimic the pheromones in a male tomcat’s pee—so, he wondered, could his supervisor really be right? Given the number of species in the world, aren’t there others who want to get high, or stoned, or drunk?

  This question set him on a path that would take twenty-five years of his life, studying the drug-taking habits of animals from the mongooses of Hawaii to the elephants of South Africa to the grasshoppers of Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia. It was such an implausible mission that in one marijuana field in Hawaii, he was taken hostage by the local drug dealers, because when he told them he was there to see what happened when mongooses ate marijuana, they thought it was the worst police cover story they had ever heard.

  What Ronald K. Siegel discovered seems strange at first. He explains in his book Intoxication:

  After sampling5 the numbing nectar of certain orchids, bees drop to the ground in a temporary stupor, then weave back for more. Birds gorge themselves on inebriating berries, then fly with reckless abandon. Cats eagerly sniff aromatic “pleasure” plants, then play with imaginary objects. Cows that browse special range weeds will twitch, shake, and stumble back to the plants for more. Elephants purposely get drunk off fermented fruits. Snacks of “magic
mushrooms” cause monkeys to sit with their heads in their hands in a posture reminiscent of Rodin’s Thinker. The pursuit of intoxication by animals seems as purposeless as it is passionate. Many animals engage these plants, or their manufactured allies, despite the danger of toxic or poisonous effects.

  Noah’s Ark, he found, would have looked a lot like London on a Saturday night. “In every country,6 in almost every class of animal,” Siegel explains, “I found examples of not only the accidental but the intentional use of drugs.” In West Bengal, a group of 150 elephants smashed their way into a warehouse and drank a massive amount of moonshine. They got so drunk7 they went on a rampage and killed five people, as well as demolishing seven concrete buildings. If you give hash to male mice, they become horny and seek out females—but then they find “they can barely crawl8 over the females, let alone mount them,” so after a little while they yawn and start licking their own penises.

  In Vietnam, the water buffalo have always shunned the local opium plants. They don’t like them. But when the American bombs started to fall all around them during the war, the buffalo left their normal grazing grounds, broke into the opium fields, and began to chew. They would then look a little dizzy and dulled. When they were traumatized, it seems, they wanted—like the mongoose, like us—to escape from their thoughts.