Andrew O'Hehir: While America Got High, Thousands in Mexico Died Andrew O'Hehir - Salon
go to original November 24, 2013

Just outside the city of Culiacán, near the northwestern coast of Mexico, sits an impressive new development, a boomtown where construction never stops. It’s a monument to the neoliberal reshaping of our southern neighbor’s economy, and to the social and cultural interpenetration between America and Mexico in a paradoxical era of supposed closed borders and supposed free trade. This burgeoning new city bristles with all the incoherent architectural detail of an upscale suburb outside Houston or Phoenix – Tudor meets Gothic meets Mission meets ranch – but is eerily, deadly quiet. That’s because none of its residents are actually alive.

This is the Culiacán cemetery, crowded with hundreds of young men who got rich and died young in Mexico’s drug wars, to be interred behind bulletproof glass in McMansion-style crypts, alongside their customized Silverado pickups, their kitsch-heroic color portraits, their stuffed animals and religious icons, their AK-47s. Every army honors its fallen in its own way, and as we see in Shaul Schwarz’s arresting documentary “Narco Cultura,” this place is hallowed ground for warriors of the Sinaloa Cartel, which is probably the dominant criminal organization in Mexico, North America and the world. If you’ve purchased marijuana or cocaine or crystal meth or almost any other illegal drug during the past decade or so, then you helped pay for this place, and helped put people in it too.

I know that’s harsh. I’m not actually saying that ordinary Americans’ desire to get high is the fundamental problem behind the nihilistic cycle of Mexico’s drug wars, only that this is one of those situations where there’s more than enough blame to go around. America’s demented drug policy and its voracious appetite for drugs have fueled the violence, as has the unresolved social and political crisis in Mexico, a nation corrupted and distorted from top to bottom by drug money. One could argue that the real villain is neither Mexican nor American, but a global free-trade ideology that pretends to be neutral and apolitical. Schwarz’s film is about how the drug trade and the drug war have transformed Mexican culture on both sides of the border, but what we see in that Culiacán graveyard is that the values of the drug war, and indeed the values of organized crime more generally, are just the values of capitalism pushed to a grotesque extreme.

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