by Beck, Glenn
Writer P. J. O’Rourke answered that the “Pursuit of happiness is the distinctly American Dream, proclaimed front and center in our Declaration of Independence. You’ll find no such aspiration announced in the credo of any other nation, state, society or people.”
But leave it to a nonpolitician, non-elite to deliver the best answer. Olympics figure skater Sasha Cohen hit it out of the park when she said: “To me, the American Dream is something deep inside that drives you to be who you are.”
The American Dream, like real dreams, can’t be defined or explained by anyone but you.
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(By the way, the IBM computer answered them like this: “That all men shall be free to seek a better life with free worship, thought, assembly, expression of belief and universal suffrage and education.”)
We all know that America has changed, and sometimes it’s easy to fall into the trap of feeling that things are somehow different than they ever have been before; that no other generation of Americans endured a terrible economy, a terrible job market, an enormous price tag for education, and a declining view of their future, all at once. But that’s just not true—every generation has its battles, many of which seem insurmountable at the time. And while they always feel unique, the truth is that life is a series of ups and downs. If we tossed aside the Dream every time there was a down period, then it would never have made it out of the 1700s.
Here’s a column from John Cunniff that I think proves my point:
What seems to be missing from the lives of many Americans is the dream—the vision that tomorrow could only be better, the soul-deep conviction that they would participate in the future.
Like a kite flying out ahead, the dream tugged the dreamer into a new material reality: a new house, more money, education, a second car, a color TV set.
All through the last decade families found that it paid to dream because there was an excellent chance of turning dreams into reality. America was always on the verge of something exciting.
The credit suppliers realized that money was needed to translate the dream, and so they made the down payment smaller, the terms easier. Buy now, pay later.
The stock market was like an elevator, lifting many people to new financial achievements. Everyone was playing the game.
Do you think that was written this year? Or maybe in 2010?
Nope, it was written in 1974.
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Defining the Dream: 2011
“[W]e should have no doubt about the American dream. For four centuries, it has rested on the idea that government should do all it can to narrow the divide between those at the top and those at the bottom of society.”
—NICOLAUS MILLS, PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN STUDIES, SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE
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The Dream survived the 1970s and all the pessimism that op-ed captured. It survived—and, at times, flourished, in the 1980s and ’90s. The turn of the century brought us a collapse, a recovery, and another collapse. And so here we are again, another crossroads in time; another chance to fall for the seductive rhetoric of those like Van Jones who say that the Dream is turning into “the American nightmare.” With each downturn in the economy, there are seemingly fewer and fewer who are willing to stand up, dig in their heels, and remind everyone that the Dream is not something that can be owned. It can’t be bought or sold, reclaimed or refurbished. You can’t give it away, take it back, tear it to shreds, or outsource it.
You can’t do any of those things because the American Dream that is packaged up and served to us by the press and our politicians is a lie.
The truth is that there is only one thing that you can do with whatever you define your American Dream to be: live it.
“So today I say to the cartels: Don’t even think about bringing your violence and tactics across this border. You will be met by an overwhelming response.”
—Janet Napolitano, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary, January 2012
THE DECADES we’ve spent arguing about immigration reform and border security have resulted in a lot of accusations of hate and racism—but very little progress. Unfortunately, while we’ve been yelling and screaming at each other we’ve created a vacuum—and you know how the old saying goes: “Mexican drug cartels abhor a vacuum.”
There is a national emergency brewing on our side of the border. A war, actually. It’s already in full swing just to our south, where at least 34,000 people have died in the last five years—15,000 last year alone (though, let’s be honest, it’s hard to count the dead accurately when bodies are burned or put into buckets of quicklime so that they are impossible to identify). Despite all of that, along with the obvious national security implications for America, our only strategy seems to be to issue stern warnings to the cartels about how serious we’ll get if the violence crosses some imaginary line in the sand.
It’s time for a new strategy. This is not about stopping illegal immigration or coming up with that elusive “comprehensive immigration reform” bill—it’s about stopping the culture of drugs and violence that has become almost routine. And it all starts by doing what the media and most politicians would prefer not to: telling Americans the truth about what is really going on along our southern border.
A BAD TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE
What do thousands of Chinese immigrants, a Mexican woman, and heroin have in common? No, this isn’t a “so-and-so walks into a bar” joke. The truth is that, together, they formed the foundation of drug trafficking in Mexico, dominating its history for almost seventy years.
Back in the 1860s, the Chinese started to arrive in Mexico in droves to serve as railroad and agricultural workers. No one knew it at the time, but these workers would change the course of Mexico’s history by bringing with them a seemingly innocuous crop: the opium poppy. It turns out that poppies grow remarkably well in Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountain range, and particularly well in the state of Sinaloa, where the Chinese population exploded at the turn of the century.
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Girl Gone Wild
All of this success didn’t go unnoticed by the locals. In the 1920s, a Mexican woman by the name of Ignacia Jasso La Viuda de González (thankfully she went by the shorter nickname of “La Nacha”) entered the drug trade with her husband in Ciudad Juárez, directly across the border from El Paso, Texas. After he died, she continued to sell drugs from her home, supplying El Paso and other U.S. cities for decades. La Nacha controlled much of the Juárez heroin, morphine, and marijuana trade until her death (as a free woman) in the 1980s.
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As you might imagine, the success of the poppy meant that Chinese traffickers soon became major players in the opium trade. Fast-forward a few decades and their role expanded even more when the U.S. government started ordering huge quantities of morphine for soldiers returning from World War II.
The landscape of drug trafficking in Mexico was dramatically altered again during the “hippie era” of the 1960s. As it just so happens, marijuana also grows extremely well in many parts of Mexico. As American demand for marijuana exploded, the drug trade evolved into a Mexican family business.
The next two decades turned into the golden era as powerful drug lords with nicknames like “the Godfather” and “the Lord of the Skies” emerged, living like kings in some Mexican version of the Don Corleone saga. This new breed of drug lords started out dealing in heroin and marijuana because cocaine isn’t produced in Mexico. (And, not incidentally, also because cocaine was under the purview of the legendary Pablo Escobar and his buddies in Colombia—a group that didn’t exactly have a reputation for tolerance when it came to competition.)
Things were going along fine for everyone in the trade when suddenly, in the 1980s, a funny thing happened: the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s efforts against the Colombian cartels actually began to work. Trafficking routes from Colombia to the United States across the Florida straits into Miami were virtually shut down, leaving cocaine exporters in a jam: How could they continu
e to supply John Belushi without access to the United States?
Fortunately for the Colombians, Mexican “logisticians” were ready to step in and help. They began to develop a cocaine “trampoline” by which they would bring cocaine in from Colombia and transport it through Mexico and across the border into the States. Mexican traffickers became so adept at this trampoline so quickly that they began to dictate terms to the Colombians instead of the other way around.
And that is how the modern Mexican drug trade was born.
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Juan Is the Loneliest Number
Oddly enough, the man who developed this method of bouncing Colombian cocaine off of Mexico and into the United States wasn’t Mexican or Colombian; he was Honduran. His name is Juan Matta Ballesteros and, these days, he’s pretty easy to find: he’s living in the supermax prison in Colorado, where he’s serving three consecutive life terms for drug and kidnapping charges.
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THE GOOD OLD BAD OLD DAYS
It may be hard to believe given all of the modern-day violence, but Mexican drug traffickers actually got along (more or less) in the 1980s. There were no such things as “cartels” back then (a term that is actually a misnomer since traffickers don’t conspire to set drug prices), and traffickers never referred to themselves as such. No, back in the good old bad old days, one man pretty much ran the whole show: Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, aka “the Godfather.”
Things went smoothly for Félix Gallardo for a while, but then, in 1985, he made a big mistake: he became involved in the kidnapping and murder of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena.
Feeling the increasing heat from U.S. and Mexican authorities, Félix Gallardo decided to hold a narco powwow in the resort city of Acapulco. It was there that he made the historic decision to divide up his drug empire into five pieces, placing trusted and lesser-known (at least to the DEA) bosses in charge of each drug corridor.
Those five pieces lived and worked under the same unwritten and unspoken code as the Italian Mafia here in the United States: business is business, settle accounts professionally, and stay away from the wives and children. Alliances and partnerships between the cartels came and went, girlfriends and wives caused tempers to flare, but, for the most part, there was relative peace.
Then democracy came to Mexico, and everything went to hell.
It sounds like a strange thing to say, but Mexican politics had everything to do with transforming the fairly benign drug “trade” into the daily carnage we see today. From 1929 until 2000 there was one political party in power—the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). During that time it ruled Mexico with a very tight grip, and it had a nasty reputation for extreme corruption. It was an open secret that the PRI was in bed with the cartels, ignoring their illicit activities in exchange for having their bread buttered under the table with narco dollars.
But this is the crucial detail that people need to understand: the Mexican government had ultimate control over the cartels. If the drug lords or their underlings got out of hand and let things get too ugly, the government would immediately step in, make some arrests, or “disappear” some key people. The bad guys would step back into line, and everyone went back about their day in peace and harmony.
But in 2000 everything changed. The PRI got the boot, and Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN) was elected president. With Fox’s win it wasn’t just the PRI’s total dominance of Mexican affairs that went out the window; so did the implicit agreement between the Mexican government and the cartels. As a result, the Pax Mafiosa was officially over.
Now the cartels were in charge.
THE GAME CHANGER
In the mid-1990s, Osiel Cárdenas Guillén—then the head of the Gulf cartel—decided that he needed to raise his own private army to defend his territory and operations along the Texas border in northeast Mexico. To ensure he had the best of the best in his army, he turned to Mexican Special Forces troops and made them offers they couldn’t refuse: Leave the army, come work for me, and I’ll make you rich beyond your wildest dreams. It was not a difficult sell.
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Real-Life Hunger Games
There were originally thirty-one Zetas recruited by Cárdenas Guillén. Authorities believe that only three of them are still alive today.
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And, with that, Los Zetas—the most fearsome, ruthless, brutal, and bloodthirsty killing machine that Mexico has ever seen—was born.
Now, fast-forward to 2006. Vicente Fox’s term was coming to end, and while he had taken down the full leadership of the Tijuana cartel and the head of the Gulf cartel, he never did stage a dramatic fight against the cartels. Outside of a few skirmishes, there was no major escalation in violence.
Things, however, were about to change.
That year, the PAN continued its winning streak with the election of Felipe Calderón. Calderón hadn’t run on an antidrug or antiviolence platform, but it didn’t take long for him to make the drug war the focus of his administration. He adopted a strategy of “hit ’em hard” and “give them no quarter,” dispatching tens of thousands of army soldiers to various narco hot spots throughout Mexico. Calderón felt (with very good reason) that he couldn’t rely on the extremely corrupt state and local police to take care of business.
Needless to say, the cartels weren’t exactly thrilled with his decision. It was bad enough that the government was no longer ignoring their activities or accepting their hush money; they were now actively fighting them. If the cartels wanted to keep the drug profits rolling in (and, believe me, they did), then they only had one choice: fight back, and fight back hard.
So that’s exactly what they did.
The U.S. government once called Los Zetas “the most technologically advanced, sophisticated and dangerous cartel operating in Mexico.” I think that’s a massive understatement. The Zetas had an insane amount of urban and guerrilla warfare training, knowledge of surveillance and countersurveillance techniques, and expertise with weapons and explosives.
But they also had something else: no soul.
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What’s in a Name?
The “Zetas” name was derived from their founding member: Arturo Guzmán Decena, whose military call sign was “Z1.” Over the last fifteen years, the older members have passed down their skills to younger members, although many of them lack the extensive training and discipline of older members.
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Around 2004, Los Zetas introduced a tactic into the fight that soon became the hallmark of drug war violence: decapitation. While the number of murders in Nuevo Laredo, a Mexican city across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Texas, during that time wasn’t as high as it is now in places like Ciudad Juárez, Los Zetas made up for it with the sheer viciousness of their kills. The rules of the game had changed.
From that point on, it became a ruthless cartel game of keeping up with the Joneses. It was almost as if they were following the script from The Untouchables: “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.” If Los Zetas cut off someone’s head and hung the body from a bridge, their competitors had to do the same thing (or worse) to show they were just as fearless and intimidating. Of course, as time went on, and Calderón continued to pour fuel on the fire that democracy had started, the violent acts got continually worse.
In 2006, a new cartel called La Familia Michoacana emerged. Their “coming out” party consisted of rolling five severed heads onto the dance floor of a nightclub in the city of Uruapan.
In January 2010, a cartel murdered and dismembered a thirty-six-year-old man, putting his body parts into a few containers and leaving them in different places across the city of Los Mochis. Upping the ante even more, they sent a memorable message by separating the man’s face from his skull and sewing it onto a soccer ball.
In September 2011, members of the Sinaloa Federation posted a video on YouTube of two men—accused of being snitches—being deca
pitated with a chain saw. While they were still alive.
THE CARTELS GET CREATIVE
All of the violence is, of course, only about one thing: money. More specifically, the billions of dollars American drug users spend every year on the four drugs that Mexican cartels specialize in: marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. The United Nations estimates they’re raking in anywhere from 8 to 30 billion dollars annually on these drugs, although this is just a mildly educated guess; it’s not like PricewaterhouseCoopers is doing their books. As with any black market activity, we can only make educated ballpark estimates.
In 2010, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) seized more than 1,725 tons of marijuana, heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine along the southwest border. For comparison, that’s the typical weight of a loaded Ariane 5 rocket, or four standard locomotive trains. Worse, the consensus among law enforcement agencies is that they’re only catching about 10 percent of the drugs that are actually coming across the border. In other words, for every four train cars full of drugs that we’re catching, thirty-six more make their way in without a hitch.
Much of those drugs come across our border in the “traditional” way—in the trunks or hidden compartments of cars and trucks at the ports of entry, on the backs of human mules traversing the desert in between the checkpoints, etc. Smugglers still use Miami Vice–style boats and planes, but they are much less common these days. What are becoming more common, however, are border tunnels, drug submarines, and ultralight planes.