Earlier in the week I compared the folk music genres of narcocorridos – Mexican gangland music – to the Calabrian mafia sound. The history of northern Mexico shares similarities to the history of southern Italy. The struggles for independence and the folk heroism of bandits, villains, thieves, and organized criminals. What I started to do but didn’t have the confidence to fully tease out concerns the impact of the similar topographies of northern Mexico and southern Italy.
But in his book El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency ($2.99 on Kindle, very much worth the price), Ioan Grillo goes there:
Like Sicily, Sinaloa has geographical traits that are conducive to organized crime. The state is a little smaller than West Virginia, but anyone who wants to disappear can move rapidly into the Sierra Madre and slip over peaks into Sonora, Chihuahua, or Durango. Beneath the highlands, Sinaloa boasts four hundred miles of Pacific coastline, where contraband has been smuggled in and out for centuries. Silver, muskets, opium, and pseudoephedrine pills to make crystal meth have all been sneaked across its shores. Between the sea and the mountains, Sinaloa has fertile valleys that have spawned great plantations – particularly in tomatoes and onions – and earth teeming with gold, silver, and copper. This natural wealth fueled the growth of the state capital, Culiacan, a lively city built where the gushing Tamazula and Humaya rivers meet, and the buzzing port of Mazatlan.
Commercial hubs are crucial for organized crime, providing headquarters and businesses to launder money. Again, such merchant centers mark a similarity between Sinaloa and other criminal hotspots. Sicily developed a mafia that bridged an unruly countryside and the commercial hub of Palermo, a port linking North Africa and Europe. Medellin in Columbia was a buzzing market city surrounded by bandit hills when its infamous son Pablo Escobar rose to be the world’s number one cocaine trafficker. Criminal conspiracies do not spring up in certain regions by pure chance.
And from Thomas Gallant in his essay “Brigandage, Piracy, Capitalism, and State-Formation“:
Military entrepreneurs literally and figuratively lived on the edge of society. When they operated without the sanction of the law as brigands rather than as enforcers, they often found themselves drawn and pushed into remote, inaccessible areas and frontier zones. Attracting them was the peculiar economic geography I discussed earlier and the fact that most of these men had their roots in rural society and, quite frequently, in that worlds’ most marginal quarters. Compelling them to move to the margins was the need to seek protection from their pursuers in areas with rugged, difficult topographies and social environments open to them but inhospitable to outsiders.
Just something I found interesting.
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Florida with its enormous coastline, huge swampland and proximity to the Caribbean islands is just about a perfect place for smuggling things.
Fred Reed on gun control in Mexico.
I’d add that difficulty of enforcing the law allows for protection racket gangsters to help the population but mostly act as police for the criminals to operate by the rules set by gangs.
The description reminds of the Mexico of romance, which i think was one more in the minds of Northerners, but now is not. Accurately they perceive that though the landscape remains, its denizens are now tarnished not with the goodness of the soil but the sins of the drug trade.
The land of that country is mythic and epic, by all accounts – there are fucking jaguars down there for god’s sake, and the cuss word in meaningful because i am talking breeding pairs and not wandering isolates which have made made it back into the Southwest – what it meant to previous generations one can hear in their songs and stories. The book All the Pretty Horses is set in Northern Mexico, just across the border from West Texas. His descriptions of the landscape are all that, i was surprised that his writing did match the popular praise; i found myself remembering that land. The characters were relevant, the stock of those people, of Northern Mexico, less Indio; bigger, stronger, caballero, more the descendants of the Iberian conquistadors, and the bloodstock of fighters and rebels, and now smugglers. McCarthy the author is a masculine writer, and thus his title All the Pretty Horses is not cute it is beautiful. Similar to Hemingway but better, or at least closer. The hero of that story was the white man cowboy Grady; the year was 1950. The ending was unresolved, it had him riding off into the western sun, noticed but ignored by the Indians, alone and uncertain, what to do, with his horse hard won.
Over a century ago Thomas Babington Macaulay described the Scottish Highlanders thus: -
“Had such an observer studied the character of the Highlanders, he would doubtless have found in it closely intermingled the good and the bad qualities of an uncivilised nation. He would have found that the people had no love for their country or for their king; that they had no attachment to any commonwealth larger than the clan, or to any magistrate superior to the chief. He would have found that life was governed by a code of morality and honour widely different from that which is established in peaceful and prosperous societies. He would have learned that a stab in the back, or a shot from behind a fragment of rock, were approved modes of taking satisfaction for insults. He would have heard men relate boastfully how they or their fathers had wreaked on hereditary enemies in a neighbouring valley such vengeance as would have made old soldiers of the Thirty Years’ War shudder. He would have found that robbery was held to be a calling, not merely innocent, but honourable. He would have seen, wherever he turned, that dislike of steady industry, and that disposition to throw on the weaker sex the heaviest part of manual labour, which are characteristic of savages. He would have been struck by the spectacle of athletic men basking in the sun, angling for salmon, or taking aim at grouse, while their aged mothers, their pregnant wives, their tender daughters, were reaping the scanty harvest of oats. Nor did the women repine at their hard lot. In their view it was quite fit that a man, especially if he assumed the aristocratic title of Duinhe Wassel and adorned his bonnet with the eagle’s feather, should take his ease, except when he was fighting, hunting, or marauding. To mention the name of such a man in connection with commerce or with any mechanical art was an insult. Agriculture was indeed less despised. Yet a highborn warrior was much more becomingly employed in plundering the land of others than in tilling his own. “