Antonio Navalón
Since the time of Ronald Reagan, Ambassador John Gavin made the everlasting theme of drug trafficking fashionable, of the corruption that surrounded it, of its penetration and dominance in Mexico, a new stage has been making its way into national life. Under the inference that “if it squawks like a duck, walks like a duck and behaves like a duck, then surely it is a duck,” the reality of drug trafficking began to be a constant in our country.
We must not forget that we have been fortunate to have characters who –beyond words and semantics– have managed to establish themselves as characteristic and emblematic symbols in Mexico. The best example is the great Mexican philosopher Mario Moreno Reyes, better known as Cantinflas. A character who stood out for the construction or deconstruction of the message that he sought to say and stood out for his ability to express himself without using words and do everything through approximations.
In the country, at the level of the people, we Mexicans live on four levels: at the level of what we speak, at the level of how we speak, at the level of what we seem to believe, and at the level of what deep down we know that It’s true. We are a country of words. From the beginning, in Mexico, the words have always been the rosary – many times the chain and other times the bells of freedom – of what it means to be Mexican. Hence – beyond its historical and cultural importance – it is advisable to know and understand Nahuatl since, in this way, we can always survive using a different language.
With the enormous capacity that Mexicans have for fabulation, to live with the security of the truth installed in the clothing of certainty over the apparent, in Mexico today, everything depends on what is said. We depend on how and what is said in the mornings and on presidential wisecracks. Everything is words. I can be told that – for both good and bad – in the end, we all use words. With words, we declare to love, or we sow war. Also, with words – those that we say or those that we hide – we construct the areas of our life, but, above all, the limits of our ability to face the problems that overwhelm us.
First came the Revolution, then came the construction of the national spirit and the preservation of revolutionary democratic and social values in a process in which every day there were more big words and more human behaviors that betrayed words. But everything was developed and made on the agreed value of our people that this always is and will always be the case. In this sense, I reiterate, Cantinflas was a great national philosopher. He was someone who knew how to say things without necessarily using words. However, one thing is what is said – or is intended to be said – and another thing is what is done.
For a long time, the word narco became part of the language and dictionary of the country’s reality. Among the ascending and increasingly worrying figures of violence, the big question arises: how far and how will the narco go? We have reached a point where it is essential to determine whether it is crucial to continue breaking the daily records of the number of deaths that constitute the country daily. We have to decide whether, despite the violent reality, this time can be considered a success. It is essential to understand that we live in a situation in which it is a reality that we know, but that the first thing that one learns when one is a Mexican by vocation and not by birth is that Mexico is a country whose symbol is to banish the word no and hymn the song of the Negrita de mis pesares. A song that expresses, “tell everyone yes, but don’t tell them when.” In this sense, the truth of the penetration of drug trafficking and its importance already transcends the will of politicians and government leaders and any doubt or concern. The big question is, will we be able to get used to the genocide that the narco means in our country?
We need to define or know how long we can continue to live as if the possibility of being mugged, robbed, murdered, and put in a clandestine grave is really part of the landscape or – like the rainy season – is part of living in Mexico. Words don’t kill. However, the administration of these to ignore reality or postpone what we know ends up being the clandestine cemetery of Mexican reality. I repeat, I am not an alarmist, nor do I have a conspiratorial view of history. But it is true that, if one looks carefully at the maps, it will be evident that it is not that the narco has bought a political party but that it does not need it. It gives the impression that what the narco has bought is the entire country.
If you pay enough attention, you will be able to realize that the combats and the chronicles of confrontations between the Army and the forces of the drug traffickers have apparently disappeared. In the end, the social roots and the narco domination have also changed, and now it is less vulgar and showy than it was before. The issue does not lie in the action of capturing trucks full of cocaine, nor is it about assaulting the bad guys who try to rampage our lives with the regular troops, the only legitimate violence of the State –which is the one made up of the police and the military–. This problem has taken a qualitative leap, and drug traffickers no longer need to display weapons or be fighting for the roads or routes. In the end, the drug traffickers have managed to build a reality in which – based on traffic and the trick of knowing, but not saying – the only constant thing is to hope that, like everything that happens to us Mexicans, this will also pass.
Another problem that afflicts us is the fact that Mexico is not an isolated planet in the cosmos. We are part of planet Earth, and unfortunately, we also have neighbors. You don’t choose your family, your neighbors, or the place where you are born. In this sense, we also do not have the ability to choose with whom we share water, fear, the dead, and weapons. It is one thing for our people to look elsewhere and ignore the situation, and another is to deny the most obvious reality. And in this case, this reality is constituted by the fact that our neighbors, those who do not understand or have confidence about their ability to survive whatever it is – as we Mexicans have – are also neighbors who tend to get nervous about the situation we go through. But it is not their fault; the reason for their nervousness lies in his lack of experience in suffering, which in turn is the consequence of the narco dominance over national life.
Those of us who live in Mexico and love our nation know that we take reality to the level of the spinal cord. But what we show, say, teach, or live will always be based on what we can do in each moment. And at this moment, what we Mexicans have to do is accept reality. A reality in which the word narco has become one more term in our daily lives. However, the narco does not define our situation. If Mexico, the Republic of words, were already a country ruled by drug traffickers, then everything we do, live, and say would be part of fiction. And apparently, this is not so.
