Free Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari Page B

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 her 7 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.