Presentation
book The hills of narco
De Javier Valdez Cardenas
... terrified of death,
excavated holes;
Javier Sicilia
I first ask-me why it is important to Javier Valdez book before us today. And I find no better way to approach an answer rhetoric and praise, I turn to the statistics of horror that are shaking the contemporary Mexico.
In a recently published study about the changes in mortality rates over the past 50 years, a team of researchers led by Dr. Russell Viner, the University of London, states that for the first time there is a drastic transformation in the patterns of mortality: "Death rates in 15 year olds are now higher than in those under 10 years in countries of high, medium and low income. The numbers of premature deaths are far higher in people aged 15 to 24 years. "causes, it says," are mainly violence, suicide and traffic accidents.
One of the scientists involved in the study states: "What is clear is that the greatest threats to the health of young people, plus live in extreme poverty and the 'hot spots' of disease infectious and war, arising from the conduct in which young people are engaged and the contexts in which they are. "
According to WHO (World Health Organization), Mexico's healthy life expectancy at birth was estimated in 63 years for men and 68 for women. According to the same source, today, the probability of dying between 15 and 60 years of age is 155 per 1000 inhabitants in the case of men and from 89/1000 in the case of women, ie these numbers indicate that 155 men and 89 women per thousand Mexican citizens may die before reaching the figure of the healthy life expectancy birth.
According to INEGI and Secretary of Health, deaths homicide in 2008 reached the figure of 14 768 people, representing a rate of 13.1 (per 1000), occupying the cause of mortality number 9, while suicides totaled 4681 cases, with a rate of 4.4 (per thousand) and ranks 29 among the causes of death. Disaggregating the data, we found that in the "school mortality" which views the population of 5 to 14 years, suicide stands at number 6 in the cause of death and killing the place number 7. To diversify the sources, I turn to measurements CONAPO (National Population Council) in 2007, accidents were the leading cause of death among youth aged 15 to 24, with 44% while the second was intentional injuries by 19.3%. Deaths from suicide increased from 3.5 deaths per hundred thousand young people in 1980 to 6.7 in 2007.
With respect to the states, CONAPO data indicate that states with higher incidence of juvenile mortality due to intentional injuries, which are Chihuahua and Quintana Roo, with rates 25% higher than those reported nationally.
And according to a study of the Latin American Institute (Instituto Latinoamericano United Nations Crime Prevention and the Treatment of Offenders), it is estimated that in Mexico, the prison population stands at 139,707 people, representing a rate of 153 detainees 100 000 inhabitants, with an estimated hay un 26% de sobrepoblación en las cárceles del país y que solamente el 42% de la población penal ha sido procesada.
Y según mis propias mediciones, armadas a través de una base de datos nacional con información de prensa que se cruza con datos oficiales, entre el 2009 y el 2011, 67% de las muertes vinculadas al narcotráfico corresponden a jóvenes menores de 29 años.
Las cifras son claves pero no son suficientes para dar cuenta de la situación que experimentan millones de jóvenes en el país: exclusión de los sistemas educativos y laborales; acceso a los servicios de salud precarios y desiguales, futuros sin certeza; desencanto y enojo.
El libro de Javier Valdez, un cronista the marginal, invisible, as sealed by the mainstream media has many merits including the destabilization of common sense that sees a direct link between exclusion, violence, poverty and crime. While recognizing the precariousness of many life stories that Javier reconstructed in his book, the author manages to place in key multidimensional linking young people with drug and structures of violence. And also gives us a broad picture of differential modes of affiliation or participation in these scenarios: the young thug, the sower, the carrying, the policeman, the recruiter, who does not understand but it sucks. Shades to acquire these life marked by drug trafficking, are many and with many nuances.
Walking through the 343 pages of this book, becomes visible and evident that when it touches the drug, its power lies not only in the power of death, but mainly in their power to alter and break different social orders and to provide himself as a route not only possible but desirable.
The "performances" of this power (rather than individual scenes) have confirmed the growing empowerment of the drug in various spheres of social life. In addition to the weakness and corruption of state institutions, suggest something much more profound: the compensation of a vacuum an absence and a crisis of meaning. In other words, the young people that Valdez portrays in his book, is a painful experience wear the symbols of the established order, while the players will show narco able to generate their own symbols: luxury, unchecked power, impunity . Codes, rules and rituals in a spiral of escalating violence.
From my own research, I said long ago in the context of dissolution, decomposition, thousands of young people in the country, have only one capital: selling risk is their only option. Javier Valdez's book, from the best tradition of investigative journalism, confirms this hypothesis. Risk and contingency as elements of the biography of "the hills of drug."
From different approaches, three European sociologists have pointed out that one of the perverse consequences of late capitalism in which up to the subjective constitution of contemporary identities, is called "inadequate biography of me." I refer to Bauman (2001), Beck (1998) and Giddens (1995). This "biographical inappropriate" to use the development of Bauman, refers to the subject's perception that they are responsible individually and from their own decisions in their living conditions, he or she is, which is inappropriate or inadequate to the social order that, in the words of the author means that "the blame away from institutions and put it on the inadequacy of the self, or help defuse the potentially disruptive anger or to be consolidated into the passions of self-censorship and contempt for oneself or even to re-channel to violence and torture against the body itself "(Bauman, 2001, 16).
This formulation certainly intersects with the condition of youth in contemporary Mexico, one of whose edges, Javier told in this indispensable book. Distinguishable features and uneven. The "inadequacy of the self", ie the failure biographical narrative precarized one's life, the feeling of being guilty of something ungraspable neatly applied to the expressions and testimonies of young people sentence by sentence, pause to pause, gesture to gesture are narrating their everyday Valdez.
I think the book The hills of the drug, light (in the sense Benjamin) this drama, you might call the individual solution to system failure. Faced with the growth of precarious economic and vital objective address the lack of opportunities, address the deterioration of social security, thousands of young people "choose" to migrate to the drug as a solution "individual", which is assumed as inevitable risk that looms as a destination "natural" in the context of his own biography. The systemic, ie, the articulation of processes, policies, institutions, invisible devices, no "partner" visible or agent responsible for the situation, at best displayed glimpses of formal references: the school that was abandoned due to inability or satiety The family that hides reality, attempts to resist the call of easy money, apparently.
It is therefore essential, in the face of challenges, problems and violence of different die setting and defining the country, to assume the centrality of the so-called sociopolitical condition of youth (and I define here as a multidimensional set of special forms, and culturally distinct "agreed" that confer, define, mark, set limits and parameters to the subjective experience and social and youth), as does Javier Valdez decisively. In his narrative, these and these young people make about this condition without naming it. For the careful reader, to the extent that run the stories, they are revealing positions, categories, classes, situations, practices, authorizations, prescriptions and proscriptions that tend to naturalize in this narco world order in place.
Thus, this book does not end with a collection of excellent reviews newspaper, on the contrary, without naming them explicitly Javier Valdez (the elusive "character" in the novel Balas de Plata, Elmer Mendoza, whom the beloved detective Mendieta, says he is a "gossip") refers to mechanisms structural and (especially) cultural framing the insertion of these specific subjects, young people, some as children, the dynamics of the drug.
In this logic, the question that forms the condition of youth and the sociological perspective of the "inadequacy of the self" is, in this book a better analytical angle I've been called the "expropriation the self ", a concept that could develop from the many interviews and ethnographies that I have made between 2004 and present, young American and Mexican prison conditions and conflict with the law. By subjectivity I mean expropriation youth become continuous tension. Instability in the context, conditions, start young people the certainty that his ego had not been the same failure to present the situation that leads to skipping ahead: they and they are defined by the "situation" (the encounter with the police, trading at the limit with a drug dealer, the death match with another young man participation in a criminal action), resulting in loss of control over the life course and becomes trapped by the contingency biographies. In the case of young men and women who give life to this book, the biography is in a complex history of expropriations, stories in which reality, contexts, imposed as a condition as unstable as tyrannical, as unpredictable as distressing , leaving little or no room for the agency and therefore to an action (or rather, practice) supported by the anticipation of "possibilities" and especially cancels or reduces the weight of the "capital" of a young person feels carrier or holder.
For these reasons, I believe that for many young people (precarious), the central challenge and the fight is to "reappropriate" or "reregister" his biography in the context of greater stability, with (minimum) certainties of place, loyalties, solidarities, guarantees and, especially, recognition. In other words, it tries to restore value to the political capital by way of the facts are denied, even though official programs, rhetorical interest in the situation of women and youth. Therefore
salute and applaud the book Javier Valdez, his work will certainly help to create the necessary awareness that we need to pursue a policy other institutions capable of taking responsibility for present and future.
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