{"id":68417,"date":"2016-01-04T12:00:52","date_gmt":"2016-01-04T12:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=68417"},"modified":"2016-01-03T15:48:46","modified_gmt":"2016-01-03T15:48:46","slug":"the-man-who-exposed-the-lie-of-the-war-on-drugs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/01\/the-man-who-exposed-the-lie-of-the-war-on-drugs\/","title":{"rendered":"The Man Who Exposed the Lie of the War on Drugs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Roberto Saviano already lives under armed guard after writing about the Neapolitan mafia. Now he is determined to uncover capitalism\u2019s complicity with the narco-lords of South America.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Roberto<\/a>

Roberto Saviano: \u2018The black market has become the biggest market in the world.\u2019 Photograph: Sintesi\/Sipa\/Rex Shutterstock<\/p><\/div>\n

26 Dec 2015 – <\/em>Pablo Escobar was \u201cthe first to understand that it\u2019s not the world of cocaine that must orbit around the markets, but the markets that must rotate around cocaine\u201d.<\/p>\n

Of course, Escobar didn\u2019t put it that way: this heretical truth was posited by Roberto Saviano in his latest book Zero Zero Zero<\/em><\/a>, the most important of the year and the most cogent ever written on how narco-traffic works. Here is a book that speaks what must be told at the end of another year of drug war spreading further and deeper, that tells what you will not learn from Narcos<\/em><\/a>, Breaking Bad<\/em><\/a> or the countless official reports.<\/p>\n

The realisation that cocaine capitalism is central to our economic universe made Escobar the Copernicus of organised crime, argues Saviano, adding: \u201cNo business in the world is so dynamic, so restlessly innovative, so loyal to the pure free-market spirit as the global cocaine business.\u201d It sounds simple, but it isn\u2019t \u2013 it is revolutionary and, says Saviano, it explains the world.<\/p>\n

Saviano \u2013 who lives in hiding under 24\/7 guard<\/a>, after death threats arising from Gomorrah<\/em><\/a>, his book about the Neapolitan mafia \u2013 and I were due to discuss Zero Zero Zero<\/em> at the Hay Arequipa book festival<\/a> in Peru this month. But Saviano was unable to make it, because of difficulties in arranging his movements. For eight years, he has lived in undisclosed venues, with a permanent dispatch of seven carabinieri<\/em><\/a> guards, rarely spending more than a few nights in the same bed. A video link to Peru proved too complicated, but what Saviano had to say was too important to let go, too pressing and radical to lose in the ether of the logistics. In the end we spoke by telephone last weekend.<\/p>\n

\u201cCapitalism,\u201d says Saviano, \u201cneeds the criminal syndicates and criminal markets\u2026 This is the most difficult thing to communicate. People \u2013 even people observing organised crime \u2013 tend to overlook this, insisting upon a separation between the black market and the legal market. It\u2019s the mentality that leads people in Europe and the USA to think of a mafioso who goes to jail as a mobster, a gangster. But he\u2019s not, he\u2019s a businessman, and his business, the black market, has become the biggest market in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Roberto<\/a>

Roberto Saviano and bodyguards attend the 2013 Giffoni film festival in Italy. Photograph: Stefania D’Alessandro\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

This is Saviano\u2019s sagacious heresy. For decades, writing on global mafia has presumed a Manichean schism between cops and robbers; our healthy society and law enforcement on one hand battling organised crime on the other (with occasional erring by the former). But the trail blazed by Saviano and very few others demolishes that account, backed by every recent development in Mexico\u2019s narco-nightmare, including and especially the escape, again, of the heir to Escobar\u2019s mantle, Joaquin \u201cChapo\u201d Guzman,<\/a> from supposedly maximum-security jail. Narco cartels like Guzman\u2019s are not adversaries of global capitalism, nor even pastiches of it; they are integral to \u2013 and pioneers of \u2013 the free market. They are its role model.<\/p>\n

We hear much these days about the pros and cons of legalising drugs, but very little about narco-traffic as political economy. Now, Saviano articulates and demonstrates what many of us who write about mafia have been trying for years to shout from rooftops, only none of us climbed high enough, cried as loud, or crystallised it like he does. Here it is, the lie of any dividing line between legal and illegal. Here it is, laid bare: cartel as corporation, corporation as cartel; cocaine as pure capitalism, capitalism as cocaine, known in its purest form as zero-zero-zero \u2013 a wry reference to the name of the best grade of flour, ideal for pasta.<\/p>\n

Saviano writes in his own distinct style of narrative literary reportage, at once factually informative and impressionistic. He opens Zero Zero Zero<\/em> with a scathing tragicomic reflection on who in your life uses cocaine: \u201cIf it\u2019s not your mother or father\u2026 then the boss does. Or the boss\u2019s secretary\u2026 the oncologist\u2026 the waiters who will work the wedding\u2026 If not them, then the town councillor who just approved the new pedestrian zones.\u201d Within three-score pages he has stripped bare the system whereby \u2013 and why \u2013 the white powder got up their noses. \u201cCocaine,\u201d he concludes, applying the logic of business school, \u201cis a safe asset. Cocaine is an anticyclical asset. Cocaine is the asset that fears neither resource shortages nor market inflation.\u201d Of course, cocaine capitalism \u2013 as brazenly as any other commodity, possibly more so \u2013 has \u201cboth feet firmly planted in poverty\u2026 [and] unskilled labour, a sea of interchangeable subjects, that perpetuates a system of exploitation of the many and enrichment of the few\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cCocaine becomes a product like gold or oil,\u201d he adds in conversation, \u201cbut more economically potent than gold or oil. With these other commodities, if you don\u2019t have access to mines or wells, it\u2019s hard to break into the market. With cocaine, no. The territory is farmed by desperate peasants, from whose product you can accumulate huge quantities of capital and cash in very little time.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re selling diamonds, you have to get them authenticated, licensed \u2013 cocaine, no. Whatever you have, whatever the quality, you can sell it immediately. You are in perfect synthesis with the everyday life and ethos of the global markets \u2013 and the ignorance of politicians in the west to understand this is staggering. The European world, the American world, don\u2019t understand these forces, they don\u2019t have the will to understand narco-traffic.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a previous book, soon to be translated, called Vieni Via Con Me<\/em> \u2013 Come Away With Me<\/em> \u2013 Saviano talked about the \u201cecomafia\u201d for which it is \u201calways fundamental to be looking for terrain and spaces in which to conceal and proliferate itself\u201d, just as a corporation carves out markets. In Zero Zero Zero<\/em>, he writes about what might be called the genealogy of narco-syndicates, from their paternalistic period of \u201cconservative capitalism\u201d to the lean, mean multinational corporations they have become: buying failing banks, working the credit economy, taking over interbank loans. Permeating the system until they become indistinct from it, until (writes Saviano in Vieni Via Con Me<\/em>): \u201cdemocracy is literally in danger\u201d, and we become \u201call equal, all contaminated\u2026 in the machine of mud\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo the story of narco-traffic,\u201d he says now, \u201cis not something that happens far away. People like to think of this disgusting violence as something distant, but it\u2019s not. Our entire economy is infused with this narrative.\u201d<\/p>\n

For some reason, he says, the Anglo-Saxon world is slower to understand the innate criminality of the \u201clegal\u201d system than Latin societies. \u201cI think the Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-American world is infused by a kind of Calvinist positivism; people want to believe in the health of their society,\u201d says Saviano, even though \u201cwhat this all means is that, for instance, the City of London is a far more important centre for laundering criminal money than the Cayman Islands\u201d.<\/p>\n

The mafia, he argues, has a particular way of entrenching its presence and increasing its strength, in a manner almost Darwinian, evolutionary: \u201cthe force of the mafia is this. If a mafioso messes up, he dies \u2013 and thus they develop a system of survival. When they make a mistake, they are killed and replaced by someone even more ruthless, so that the organisation becomes even stronger.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the start of this year, writing from New York, Saviano described his threatened life under guard<\/a> in our sister paper, the Guardian<\/em>, and in this book that followed he asks himself, poignantly: \u201cIs it really worth it?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI write about Naples, but Naples plugs her ears,\u201d he laments. It is, he writes, \u201cmy fault if the articles I keep writing about the blood spilled in the cocaine markets fall upon deaf ears\u201d. Any reporter or writer on these subjects feels a version of these feelings, but \u2013 apart from our colleagues in Mexico or Colombia \u2013 with so much less to pay than Saviano has paid: with his liberty and security.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes I think I\u2019m obsessed,\u201d he reflects in the book, but \u201cother times I\u2019m convinced these stories are a way of telling the truth\u201d. Here we have it. Whether obsessed or not, Saviano realises the brutal truth: that to understand narco-traffic is to understand the modern world. \u201cYou can\u2019t understand how the global economy functions if you don\u2019t understand narco-traffic\u201d, he says in conversation.<\/p>\n

A remarkable passage in Zero Zero Zero<\/em> explains why: a transcription of an FBI tape recording of a seasoned Italian mafioso in New York schooling young Mexican footsoldiers in the difference between law and \u201cthe rules\u201d. Laws are there to be broken, he urges, but the rules of the organisation are sacrosanct, on pain of death. \u201cThe law is supposed to be for everybody,\u201d Saviano tells me, \u201cbut the rules are made by the so-called men of honour. This is how narco-traffic explains the world, by embracing all the contradictions of the world. To succeed in narco-traffic, you apply the rules to break the law. And today, any big corporation can only succeed if it adopts the same principle \u2013 if its rules demand that it break the law.\u201d<\/p>\n

_____________________________________<\/p>\n

Ed Vulliamy is a writer for the <\/em>Guardian and <\/em>Observer, and author of<\/em> Amexica: War Along the Borderline<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theguardian.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe City of London is a far more important centre for laundering criminal money than the Cayman Islands.\u201d Roberto Saviano already lives under armed guard after writing about the Neapolitan mafia. Now he is determined to uncover capitalism\u2019s complicity with the narco-lords of South America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-focus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}