Cecilia Lopez Badano - Drug Trafficking and Literature. Dangerous Liaisons

Drug Trafficking and Literature: Dangerous Liaisons
Author(s): Cecilia López Badano and Mariana Ortega Breña

Source: Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 41, No. 2, IMAGINED NARCOSCAPES:
NARCOCULTURE AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION (March 2014), pp. 130-143
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/24575502
Accessed: 15-03-2018 20:43 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Latin American Perspectives
This content downloaded from 186.136.31.89 on Thu, 15 Mar 2018 20:43:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Drug Trafficking and Literature
Dangerous Liaisons
h
Cecilia Lopez Bada.no
Translated by Mariana Ortega Brena
An exploration of the relationship between ethics and literary aesthetics based on an

Argentine intergenre text built on modem narrative techniques and realist police journalism—
Cristian Alarcôn's Si me querés, quereme transa—unravels the networks of South
American migration that sustain urban drug dealing and alter the profile of the city.
Recent narratives of drug trafficking such as this one represent a contemporary interna
tional and globalized literary genre that dilutes concepts such as nation, literary aesthet
ics, and fiction.
Una exploraciôn de la relaciôn entre ética y estética literaria basado en un texto inter
genérica argentina construido sobre técnicas modernas de narrativa y reportaje policial
realista-Si me querés, quereme transa, de Cristiân Alarcôn-revela las redes de migration
sudamericana que sustentan el trâfico de drogas urbano y alteran el perfil de la ciudad. Al
igual que otras narrativas recientes sobre el narcotrâfico, el libro présenta un género literario
contemporâneo globalizado que diluye conceptos como naciôn, estética literaria yficciôn.
Keywords: Literary ethics and drug trafficking, Interculturality, Violence, Argentine

drug dealing
Analyzing symbolic representations of drug trafficking, particularly those

related to narrative, inevitably leads to questions. This kind of work seems to
be a fad linked to a certain snobbery about the exhibitionist marketing of vio
lence in which the unprecedented power of extreme crime provides the signs
that govern the world. How are we to differentiate an ethical and aesthetic
representation of the evil and cruelty inherent in the commodifying world of
drug trafficking from the gruesome publications in which "thugs tell of their
misdeeds as feats," seeking to put a moral construction "on even their most
heinous misdeeds" through "books written to wash their hands clean" (Abad
Faciolince, 2008:516)? Is it possible to play out, via writing, the prevailing social
devastation without falling into the complacent bourgeois denunciation that
frees us from guilt, given the impossibility of any other kind of categorical
political intervention when even the perverse logic of certain systems of cor
ruption is unclear and very widespread?
Cecilia Lopez Badano is a researcher at the Centra de Investigaciones Lingüisticas y Literarias of

the Universidad Autonoma de Querétaro and the author of La novela historien entre dos siglos (2010)
and Inmersiones en el maelstrom de Roberto Bolano (2011). Mariana Ortega Brena is a freelance trans
lator based in Canberra, Australia.
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 195, Vol. 41 No. 2, March 2014 130-143
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X13509788
© 2013 Latin American Perspectives
130
Lopez I DRUG TRAFFICKING AND LITERATURE 131
The answer to these questions becomes more complex when, for the sake of
sales, bad manufactured narratives— "ready-made products"—are rewarded
(Herrero-Olaizola, 2007:45). Books are sometimes marketed via sensationalism
and dependent on the "fetishization of catastrophic realities ... that can easily
fit the circuits of the global market" (Rueda, 2009:71). This can be accomplished
through the sometimes crude eroticization of the protagonists—a strategy that,
mixed with violence, connects divergent social sectors "to make the characters
move across, without resolving them, the gaps created by aggression and
trauma" (Rueda, 2009:75). In many cases these books are the products of medi
ocre but effective writers who become established through the doubtful distinc
tion of their thematic pertinence to the "market" for violence or a poorly
understood "regionalism" (e.g., "writers from the North" or "from the Mexican
border," when there are writers in that area who do not necessarily write about
drug trafficking).
Despite the difficulty of finding valid answers (for some of these narratives
do contain a degree of social criticism, albeit only as much as an audience reluc
tant to tackle complex texts will accept), José Ovejero (2012: 86) establishes a
distinction between responsible narrative and what is "in the service of a dif
fuse and exploitative marketing of reality." He defines "ethical cruelty" as "that
which, rather than adapt to the expectations of the reader, disillusions him and
confronts him with those expectations. It is ethical in the sense that it intends a
transformation of the reader, promoting a change in his values, his beliefs, his
way of life" (61).
What, then, are the criteria for a "good" narrative, when in many cases the
aesthetic (and formal) autonomy that until a few years ago characterized
auratic belles-lettres has been lost without causing current production to cease
being called literary? As Mabel Morana (2004: 182) points out, "the 'quality
criterion' maintained by bourgeois belles-lettres is giving way to the need to
highlight and understand a production—canonical or not—that begins by chal
lenging, in increasingly evident ways, the representational and interpretive
models of a decaying 'order.'" This is evident in this type of literature, which is
sometimes very close to the documentation of everyday facts.
This posits differences between narratives ready-made for the market and
those that combine ethical wisdom with everyday aesthetics far from formal
refinements in presenting critical reflections on the phenomenon at hand. I
intend to address one of these recent fictional narratives on the trauma of drug
trafficking, since, as Maria Helena Rueda (2009: 69) says,
when we talk about works that include in their thematic some kind of violence,
the literature market seems to be, instead of a more or less neutral ground on
which expressive proposals are negotiated, a field of contention that is part of the
processing of multiple and substantial alterations that cause violent conflict in
the social fabric. Commercial demands intersect in this case with ethical, politi
cal, and aesthetic ones to determine which books are written, published, read.
The literary symbolization of this particular trade, then, points to conflicting

contemporary social relations. As Alberto Fonseca (2009:7-8) says:
The product of a global phenomenon such as drug trafficking, narco-narratives

manifest the divergences and fractures in neoliberalism, globalization, and
repressive policies in the struggle against drugs They enter a dialogue with
132 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
official discourse and create new ways of approaching the ideologies

underlie the drug traffic as well as the "war on drugs" in producing count
Many texts . . . represent the capitalist logic that sees drug trafficking as
economic dynamic of supply and demand following market guidelines. At t
same time, they criticize the consumption practices fostered by that very
talist system.... The narco-narratives of the last decade of the twentieth ce
tury employ literary representation to record and review the social
economic implications of this new scale of values from the time when "it rai
money" in Colombia and Mexico.
Why use fictional or fictionalized narratives as an interpretation whe

ity has a chilling immediacy that is often crueler than fiction? In his a
ning article on the empire of narco-terrorism, Juan Villoro (2008) cond
media for presenting the issue in extremist tones: "The mediaspher
'duty-free' of the narco, the area in which the actual outrage committed
a terror infomercial." At the same time, good literature on the subject
a thoughtful, critical view of the prevailing symbolism in drug traffic
its cruelty. As Ovejero (2012: 65) puts it,
The cruelty of the literature is found ... in its demystifying function, my

being understood as a fantastic explanation of reality that does not need pr
but, rather, rejects the need for it; it attacks the core of our intellectual hab
the routine of our hearts and brains. It chases us to our most private rooms
unveils what is hidden under the sheets that we would rather not see. More
important, the cruel book shows the distressing spectacle we make of our
selves while desperately trying to keep the sheets in place.
In Narrar el mal (Rethinking Evil), Maria Pia Lara (2009:16), citing Hannah
Arendt, posits that narratives open us to the understanding of the past (and,
obviously, the present) on a moral dimension that deepens with its social dis
cussion. In addition, "our sense of moral understanding of what has happened
. . . can serve as a reason for building political and legal institutions." What
intelligent, aestheticized narratives such as the one I have chosen facilitate is an
understanding of the moral dimension (in a normative and non-"moralistic"
sense) of the facts that frequently escapes us in superficial and pseudo-objective
media representation, highlighting a mode of informing via literature. "Reality
itself is worthless; it must be transformed into culture," says Pablo Villalobos,
author of the novel Fiesta en la madriguera (Down the Rabbit Hole, 2010), which
is written from the point of view of the only son of a drug lord. Iris Garcia,
another writer, adds, "We must create awareness of the reasons for evil. If there
is something in which fiction can go beyond reality it is in its ability to offer us
at least a hypothesis of how the world and human beings work, even at their
darkest" (quoted by Febén, 2010).
Mechanisms of fictionalization, through their expressiveness, uncover net
works of cruelty and reveal their nuances, and from this representation they can
be judged with greater freedom because things like this should not happen given
that "no fiction addresses merely the intellect Using characters ... immedi
ately generates identification, rejection, desire, curiosity, which go beyond rea
son" (Ovejero, 2012:68). As Lara (2009:31) says: "Words or concepts are created
[in these representations] to produce revealing perspectives that can enlighten us
about what was at stake in the experience of calculated cruelty. These aesthetic
(because expressive) and moral (because normative) connections are understood

as illocutionary effects produced by the revealing use of language."
Quality novels/novelizations are, in general, less well known than those
that acquire fame through TV or film. Pioneers include the Mexican Victor
Hugo Rascon Banda's Contrabando (Smuggling), which won the Juan Rulfo
Prize in 1991 and was published posthumously in 2008 precisely because of its
"marketability" in a context of increasing violence. Argentina, the Latin
American country with the least copious production in this regard, has Paula
Wajsman's Informe de Paris (Report from Paris, 1990), which mixes the horrors
of the dictatorship with drug trafficking through exiled characters who, in the
late 1970s, survive as dealers in Europe; a few years later (1995) came the
Colombian Dario Jaramillo Agudelo's Cartas cruzadas (Crossed Letters, 1999).1
These initiated a succession of "social" narratives in various countries from
which it is difficult to choose without omitting quality texts. The United States
is no exception: most recently there have been Cormac McCarthy's No Country
for Old Men (2005), made into a 2007 film by the Cohen brothers, and Don
Winslow's The Power of the Dog (2005)—both about Mexico, the one via the bor
der and the other documenting the political history of the past 40 years and
representing more than six years of research.
These recent narratives, often bypassed by Latin American literary criticism,
raise new ethical problems. Comparing approaches from various latitudes to
the way illegal drugs color literary production across several nations produces
some general hypotheses subject to confirmation: for example, that both North
American and Argentine storytelling, fictional or testimonial, overlook the
issues of education and social class so prominent in the Mexican and Colombian
cases to focus on foreignness. The drug problem is associated either with the
border or with Mexico in the former (as if demand depended on supply rather
than the reverse) and with the presence of foreigners in the latter (e.g., Bolivian
upper-class people dedicated to money laundering in Diego Paszkowski's El
otro Gomez [The Other Gomez, 2001], whose narrator is, in addition, Uruguayan,
and poor Peruvians, Bolivians, and Paraguayans in urban chronicles who,
expelled from their own countries by poverty, find a kind of social mobility in
the foreign drug market, just like Wajsman's exiled Argentines). This reveals,
in the former case, an attenuated legitimization of racism in spite of the mestizo
Drug Enforcement Administration agents in The Power of the Dog, racism that
in the second text, a testimonial narrative in which the narrator is a friend of
some of the main characters, is not so evident. In both it is ultimately suggested
that the problem of drug trafficking is something alien brought in from the
outside by migrants -even when the second avoid a clear incrimination of the
characters- and has little to do with local (at least marginal) citizens beyond
acquisition (which leads them to crime) and consumption (which destroys
them): willpower, in fact, seems to be beyond them.
In both cases, the narrative regarding drug trafficking is a discourse about
the "Other." According to Ovejero (2012: 51), "Books about 'the Other' help
build a picture of the community to which we belong, because the definition of
who we are is primarily found through our boundaries, where contact with
what we are not is possible: the border gives us an identity, whether geograph
ical, religious, political, racial, or a mix of all of these." In this construction of a
community image, the local is exempt from liability even if the foreigner is not
blamed: drugs are something that comes from the outside and defines a new
border between self and others. In both countries, national narrative in co

with the transnational shows a controversial story, one that allows peo
look at their society in a different way, no longer univocal but as a strugg
social (and also, obviously, ethnic) identities. In any case, what the narr
of these countries reveal is that the limitations of the genre—of biased vie
different regional or national messages—are also the product of limitation
the observation of an exclusive political reality. Winslow's novel, written f
both sides of the border, is perhaps the exception, portraying a reality th
each side, allows writing only about the tip of the iceberg.
The submerged is uncovered through comparison, which reveals the
links here and there; what 50 years ago was a localized regional issue i
expanding globally in a rapid, uncontrollable flow of money. The state can
guarantee the law in the midst of a flow of capital (and violence) that
regulated by any revenue office and, being "uncontrolled," generates it
circuit of corruption: "Alien to the concept of border, drug trafficking fl
travels from private lives toward increasingly remote areas of civilian life
not yet acquired" (Villoro, 2008). While, as Villoro argues, "drug traffickin
won cultural and information battles in a society that has protected itself
the problem through denial ('Assassins only kill each other'), local liter
are a resounding affirmation of how much corruption has permeated socie
The invisible connections of social macroworlds appear in the microw
shown in fictional stories, though these are not always perceived criti
when observing only local social realities. In spite of the need to addre
topic comparatively from the perspective of various regional narrative
methodology of my current research), this paper will be confined to a
case: a testimonial from Argentina. Ignoring the way it relates to othe
accounts on the same subject will leave this presentation incomplete, but t
issues can be pursued elsewhere.
THE VICEROYS OF THE SOUTH: DRUG TRAFFICKING

AND LITERARY POST-AUTONOMY IN CONTEMPORARY
ARGENTINE LITERATURE
During the past 30 years, the cartography of drug trafficking has

marily related to Mexico (with its long history of traffic along its b
the United States, the world's main consumer) and Colombia. Ther
two nations have a wealth of literature on the subject, as well as a
cussions on ways of talking about drug-related violence. Today the m
that traffic has extended to Argentina, where it has begun to appear
There are no "kings" yet, only modest transas (drug-dealing crooks) o
into fairly discrete clans without the ostentatious lifestyle that charac
narcoculture2 in Mexico and Colombia. Following the realist tradit
by local writers, the text in question is not a novel but a testimony th
the stylistic tools of fiction and thus conditions its own interpretati
querés, quereme transa, by Cristian Alarcön (2010), questions "asep
approaches and all pretensions of neutrality" (Bourgois and Alarcön
regarding the criminal world; the text is currently being read and an
both journalism and literature schools at the University of Buenos Ai
Lopez / DRUG TRAFFICKING AND LITERATURE 135
The author was born in Chile in 1970 and grew up in Argentina, where he
studied journalism and worked with prestigious local media. Before this book
he had written the well-received Cuando me muera quiero que me toquen cumbia:
Vida de pibes chorros (When I Die I Want Them to Play Cumbia: The Lives of
Young Crooks [reprinted several times since 2003]). As both witness and par
ticipant, the author avoids socio-anthropological digressions and forges an
emotional narrative, a melodramatic "nonfiction" the title of which refers to a
kind of Latin popular music. He appeals to cumbia not only for the social class
of the subjects/characters, but also for increasing the value of melodrama,
because he thinks that cumbia, in spite of its zest of happiness, hides the sadness
of bolero. This text was awarded the Samuel Chavkin Prize for journalistic integ
rity in Latin America by the North American Congress on Latin America.
Both texts show the literary influence of the South American canon—certainly
of the work of Rodolfo Walsh (1927-1977, murdered by the dictatorship) in
texts such as Operation masacre (Operation Massacre, 1957), published eight
years before the appearance of what critics consider the first manifestation of
this genre, Tom Wolfe's The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1964),
and introducing to literature "dirt, uncertainty, and fear, the chosen aspects of
an era that had a wealth of all three" (Pron, 2010), as well as iQuién mato a
Rosendo? (Who Killed Rosendo?, 1968) and the masterful "Esa mujer" (That
Woman, 1965), about Eva Peron's corpse and considered by many Argentina's
best political narrative. In all of these, political and police elements are com
bined. Walsh, as Alarcon acknowledges, influenced the deconstruction and
reconstruction of a political event to make it more literary by applying narra
tive techniques from fiction. This revolutionized the Latin American journalis
tic genre before Truman Capote's (1966) In Cold Blood. Alarcon does the same as
Walsh without losing respect for the "truth" (which is not the same as "verisi
militude") of what his "characters" said. He considers the literary construction
more "real" than a transcript and reinterprets events in a melodramatic key
inspired by Manuel Puig's use of orality and popular genres.
This use of popular genres and departure from traditional genres such as the
chronicle also echoes the work of the Chilean Pedro Lemebel, another urban
chronicler of a chaotic world who distrusts straight testimonies and aseptic
objectivity. Alarcon (2003) says:
In that process I left melodrama in the subtext, perhaps because I was involved
in the melodrama: I attended the baptisms, birthdays, and funerals of the
book's protagonists. I guess the title has to do with that. It's from a Colombian
cumbia, El Frente's [his protagonist's] favorite song. I established this with
Pedro Lemebel: we talked for two hours about why one may seek a title in a
song as he did in Tengo miedo torero [2001].
Loco afân (Mad Desire, 1996), also by Lemebel, is named after a tango.
The first book started as research on the so-called trigger-happy policemen
who, in the late 1990s, were killing poor youths in the Buenos Aires provincial
area. The second is derived from it and reflects the journalist's becoming aware
of the ways in which "terror and systematic elimination have survived [after
the dictatorship] hidden behind police structures and drugs 'for the poor.' The
truth behind the death squads and the ravages of paco3 among the poorest sec
tors" (Alarcon, quoted by Garcia, 2006). At the same time, he realized that the
defiant, pseudo-courageous epic of the young thieves and the

accounts of their families and protectors in their deprived neig
Greater Buenos Aires shantytown) seek their legitimation in th
ambitious capitalist immorality of the dealers, making the thieves
regarding their provocative and liminal lifestyle, in constant dange
in contrast with what they know or imagine regarding the lives of
In this book the opposition between thieves and dealers appears t
voices that establish a popular Manichaeism: the supposed coward
of the dealers, making addicts of youths who resort to theft to ma
drug habits—a booty that the dealers presumably take without i
personal risk, given that, protected by police in exchange for mone
ciations, they lead an easy life. These arguments justify the war
two sides. A key example that would eventually lead the author
book is that of a thief separated from his wife (Alarcön, 2003:53):
I don't go to her neighborhood very often, a long time can go by duri

I don't see the babies, because you go up there and chances are y
attacked, get punked. They sell a lot of drugs there, they're dealers, an
between the thieves and dealers are all screwed. You have to put yo
risk using weapons to feed them. Meaning, if you want to do drugs, w
you give money to? Them. And sometimes it pisses one off, having to
dealers. There's good people and bad people; well, they're bad.
shameless. I think they're very resentful. They went wrong inside and
take revenge on people. Yesterday they killed a guy there. Stabbed him
ple of times. And so it is every day. They rule there, and it's bad. That
yesterday we were armed, had the leather jacket and a piece under
another kid who was also working. We always have to be careful
these fools will shoot you in the back I don't trust them, they're treac
Alarcon will begin to gain a foothold in the area indicated b

ments with personal reflections such as "It is almost a rule: deal
not only because they are, for the thieves, the trap to which they ar
by their addiction but because the vast majority of them have polic
to do their business" (2003:54). And later (71):
The boys from Twenty-five4 and ... the Toritos de Santa Rosa had know
other for a while. They exchanged no shots, but this was not merely b
any kind of benevolence between them but because of the mismatch b
them, one group being thieves and the other dealers, local merca distr
This is a strange antinomy founded on the resentment of the consume
puts his body and life at risk to get the money he needs to buy drugs, th
from which benefits only the dealer and the police protecting him. That
several of these structural rivalries played out when Cabezon stoo
shack door and heard them saying inside that they would not sell t
thing. "The Toritos were always dealers, and there is no respect for
They could make money stealing, with guns, but they sit there selling c
ruins the life of other people. I'm not saying anything—let each do wh
do—but it's not something I'd do because that'd be changing sides, b
another person," says Javi, who has kept away from crime since he lef
and who survives as a cartonero5 like his mother.
In Si me querés, quereme transa, mechanisms of literary fictionalization are

evident from the opening, where the author states that he does not intend to
collaborate with the courts or the police: "Locations and time and space coor
dinates have been modified or omitted. The identities of the witnesses of the
crimes have been protected: in some cases, a single individual has been split
into one or more pseudonyms or two people have been covered by a single
one" (Alarcon, 2010:13). After the publication of the book, he acknowledged:
"I made a literary and journalistic bet, broke with certain rules of journalism
and the place of literature in journalism" (Bourgois and Alarcon, 2010: 363).
Through those fictionalizing narrative procedures, combined with techniques
from other fields (such as TV "testimonials" and historical or anthropological
documentary), Alarcon presents a deep and real narrative linked to urban mar
ginality and narco crime, with its mafia-style vendettas. It betrays no one and
moves between the vertigo of noir, with its crudity and cruelty, and popular
melodrama, both in the feelings aroused by the crimes and the journalist's vis
ceral involvement with the protagonists, whose parties and funerals he ended
up attending. As he says (quoted by Enriquez, 2003),
There is a political decision to sustain subjectivity as a condition to make the

reader responsible for what is at stake. Interacting with them filled me with
questions. The book does not take a stand for or against. Sometimes I'm
ashamed, other times afraid, other times suspicious or angry. In many cases I
do not agree with what is happening, and I do not condone violence. One is in
conflict with such violence when one is so close to it. The chronicler is also
ambiguous; I constantly change my stance. At some point I was also fascinated,
and fascination was what hurt me the most when trying to put the story
together.
This gesture also recalls a kind of participant observation that reconstructs

the dialogic relationship without dehumanizing the players, keeping their
voices in the first person. This way, the chronicle is transformed into an experi
ence that relies not only on the point of view of the observer, the reader of a
reality, but on the reflective resignification of what is said. The author thus
allows for the discovery of another reality through a responsible relationship
with literature: literature provides greater flexibility than straight journalism,
for, as Alarcon (2011) says, "there is no pattern in literature, no control, no
State."
The placing of the self in the narrative and the apparent transparency of the
subjects of enunciation combines literature and journalism—the journalist and
a fictional narrator offering an intimate confession rather than mere testimony.
As in Walsh's work, this has an advantage both for the aesthetics of the creative
rhetoric and for the documentary element and the rationality of its interpretive
logic. The use of vanguard fictional techniques is perhaps an answer to the
cultural critic Dominick LaCapra's (1983) plea that historians become "carni
valesque historians" by using the dialogic techniques of the modern novel
(Madame Bovary or Ulysses).
Alarcön's emphasis on elements of literary rhetoric reveals a literary capabil
ity that gives the novel more credibility than plain journalistic discourse in that
its aestheticized, not wholly fictional prose is more seductive and persuasive.
This innovative genre has learned to speak within the silences of journalistic
discourse, critically witness its unsustainable objectivist pride by revealing a
history that, though not "objectively" real, becomes more "authenti

psychological/anthropological approach. This fluctuation is relevan
regard to the implicit target audience, which becomes much broader th
for purely documentary writing.
This indeterminacy of genre recalls Ricardo Piglia's take on contem
writers (quoted in Reinoso, 2012): "One is the tribe's informant and
pologist; this way one can hear some other voices because one pays more
tion to legendary texts that are not in the foreground." Accordin
chronicler places his text in the tense gap between information and nar
where literature "is an attempt to organize information, order it," a
erature is meant to do, expand the field of experience reaching a w
ence. Piglia says that "in contemporary information the meaning
incoming. Information is not linked to the subject who is becoming inf
This writing, then, supports the claim that "in narration—unlike what
in the contemporary informational hodgepodge that makes us believ
informed—the subject becomes involved." In Cuando me muera, Alarcön
structs the mythical-popular biography of the teenager "El Frente" Vit
me querés those of poor South American migrants turned drug dealers.
The interviews acquired after gaining the trust of the protagon
inserted between blocks of narration address the marginal Peruvian, Bo
and Paraguayan communities that, for the past 15 years, have live
Greater Buenos Aires area some 10 to 20 kilometers from the city limit
allows them to have a local clientele and live relatively unnoticed. T
modest in comparison with the bombast of their Colombian or Mex
leagues," is the reason I call them "viceroys" rather than "kings": the ki
these paranoid and threatened Midases can be called kings, are not in th
With this material, Alarcon weaves a translocal story in the midst of
ized "neoliberal" economic policies.6 The characters move from the m
or the Peruvian jungle to Lima. Some are already part of the lower eche
the Shining Path and take over poor and abandoned, sterile spaces i
they employ new methods of territorial control. From there they go to
Buenos Aires, where, following a transnational logic and in an organ
violent fashion learned from the guerrillas,7 they distribute the opport
generated by the drug market. These include, for example, "their m
cessful policy: autonomy within prisons by removing guards from
areas—the power that comes with the extreme territoriality of a gr
controls its conditions of confinement, when the jailers are more af
the detainees" (2010:157). They have killed other drug dealers in the
towns (in Peru they killed political leaders; here they kill the leaders of
bands) to generate a power vacuum and gradually take control of th
through "blood payment" (thus named by Abimael Guzman or "Go
the Shining Path's main leader) to cross and take over the other shore (a
phrase from the guerrilla rhetoric). Alongside the story of a Bolivia
(Alcira) is the story of two Peruvian brothers. The first is Teodoro, wh
youth had already worked under his uncle in cocaine production in t
and whose story is interwoven with the emergence of the Shining Path
Peruvian political landscape (37-55). The other goes by the moni
Lauda (143-144),
a late name. Porfirio Reyes received it when he was already thirty-eight years
old, in Villa del Senor.... He had left Lima in the midst of his country's great
est diaspora Like thousands of Peruvians, he had filed before the Office of
the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to be granted asylum. He
tried to enter Buenos Aires as a refugee. His neighbors Aranda, Marlon, and
Cali [other dealers], as well as Teodoro, the brother with whom he would rec
oncile after 11 years, were already there He was the only trafficker in Villa
del Senor charged with judicial evidence of being a former Shining Path sol
dier. This was confirmed by a fax from Interpol that reached the Federal
Police's Antiterrorism Bureau. Although it seemed more of a myth than truth,
for six months I investigated whether this was real, whether it was at least
plausible that a member of the Maoist guerrilla had been recycled as a narco
thug. The Shining Path was in Argentina. Several of its leaders and intermedi
ate members had gone into exile, and many had gotten in as refugees with the
assistance of the Church and the United Nations. Niki Lauda was the only
narco from Villa del Senor who came to Buenos Aires as a political refugee.
In his quest, Alarcön first contacts the elder brother, who confirms the story
of militancy (50). He talks to other exiled guerrillas; one, a survivor of the 1992
massacre of 42 Maoist youths in the Castro Castro jail and a street hawker,
denies knowing him from the Shining Path (145). The author then receives
information from a colleague who had interviewed him that Niki denied
belonging to the Shining Path and rejected their methods (146). He travels to
Peru and, after an Odyssey through the Lima courts, finds Niki's "terrorist" file,
which ends with a 1986 statement by Reyes against his fellow group members
(including his erstwhile partner)—a document whose features, some of them
invalid, he describes (148-159). The story comes to a conclusion thus: "He was
killed in April 2006 by some Peruvians who wanted to take over the Villa Padre
Mugica corridor where Niki Lauda controlled the sale of cocaine" (159).
During his research, Alarcön also interviews a former Antiterrorism Bureau
member who confirms the information (2010: 173-184): "We got the case
because of this issue of terrorists dealing drugs For us, who were so igno
rant of Peruvian reality at the beginning, the Shining Path and drugs appeared
a strange combination for Buenos Aires" (175). This informant also reveals
another Shining Path technique applied in drug distribution corridors: torture
with muriatic acid. "The Peruvian antiterrorism cops told us that this was no
news to them. Commissioner Manco Barranco, who followed them in their
country, told us that this was one of the practices used by Shining Path soldiers
in the war, meant to injure and terrify" (183).8
What becomes evident with the entry of all these characters into the narra
tive is a radical change in the conception of Argentine literature, which thus
becomes transnational. Formerly, it extended toward Europe or focused on the
national, hardly ever including neighboring Latin American popular world
views. Speaking of post-1990s narrative universes, Josefina Ludmer (2010:127)
states:
Other territories and subjects, other temporalities and narrative configurations

are seen clearly: other worlds that do not fit traditional bipolar molds. They
absorb, pollute, erase difference from the separate and the opposite while
drawing other boundaries. Urban and rural literature, for example, are no lon
ger opposed but variously merge and combine; the Latin American city absorbs
the countryside and is retraced.
The area of drug trafficking, where risk is another form of capital, is

leads to this erasure of difference: militant Maoists and anti-Maoists are tra
formed into drug traffickers; army children, formerly beautiful danc
high-rated television programs, turn into assistant dealers in their efforts
paco at lower cost; a Bolivian housewife with a nineteenth-century rur
ception of gender is transformed into a coke dealer, and an Argentine
family matriarch turns Umbanda mai possessed by spirits that speak thro
her in a dialect very close to Buenos Aires slang—Orisha rituals and off
on the banks of the Rio de la Plata.
Everything is possible in the time/space of this insular place, its territo
social regime mingling different worlds in which "the global is emb
nationally" (Saskia Sassen, quoted in Ludmer, 2010:128). As Ludmer, t
about the regime of insularity present in contemporary literature, points
"In that territory, topographic relations are complicated into topologic
tions, and the limits or divisions identify the island as an inside/outside a
a territory within the city (and, therefore, society) and at the same time ou
of it, on the division itself" (131). Alarcon seeks to decipher the codes o
urban island and reveal the secret life of communities that were prev
invisible.
There, the Latin American diaspora of those dispossessed by the cond
of "liquid life" (Bauman, 2006) is redesigned. Previously impoverished
ants now star in this urban chronicle. "Residual humans," "the residue
balization" (Bauman, 2008: 80-81), they show characteristics that Lud
(2010:131) identifies for the characters of some post-1990s island fictions:
They seem to have lost society or something that represents it in the form o
family, class, work, reason and law, and, sometimes, nation. They are defined
as a group and form a community that is not that of family, work, or social cla
but something different that can include all of these categories, synchronized
and fused, at the same time.
This leads to a new map of overlapping South American territories

nationalities brought together by drugs—the only way of changing sta
commerce-based capitalism, with its exaggerated mercantilism and abs
commodification of the Other. This is a world of identities designed bo
drugs and their effects (i.e., the addict) and by the ambitious, econom
sound immorality of drug trafficking. Spaces are divided by a postmo
urban apartheid, and the cost of getting sucked into the business (i.e., beco
addicted) and invasion (i.e., expanding the business) is death.
What does this mixed genre, this product of literary post-autonomy, of
us? Socially, it recovers subjects rendered invisible by the contemporary m
media and focuses on them and their practices. It speaks to us of new o
ping global maps that ignore ancient though until recently extant cartograp
maps redesigned by the ubiquity of drugs, abandoning the no longer susta
variables of social class, citizenship, and territoriality. From the "status of
literary," which had already been problematized in Argentina by writings
to journalism that nevertheless did not neglect cultured, canonical aca
standards (e.g., those of Rodolfo Walsh and Tomas Eloy Martinez), Alar
text exists in a middle ground. On the one hand, it "de-auratizes" the liter
erasing the difference between literature and life in the "antisublima
description of these subjects/characters, working on the real with fictional pro

cedures. On the other hand, it expands the field of the literary, interweaving
discursive modalities whose written expression preserves human experience
in a vivid way: without abandoning pure presence (first-person narratives) it
is not obscured by aestheticized language (the chronicler's reflections). As
Florencia Garramuno (2009: 31) says, speaking of texts that stand between the
aesthetic and the nonaesthetic:
The postulation of a type of writing that pushes the boundaries between what
is and what is not "literary" clearly opposes the use of literature as a mark of
distinction and dilettantism. More than by a series of procedures, this non
auratic writing is distinguished by proposing a differentiated role for art aimed
at defetishizing the object and an idea of art as support for experience.
The text, then, acts as a "factory of the present" (Ludmer, 2010:149), and this
gives it its meaning, whether it is literature or not. This battery of resources—
this genre ambiguity—is directed toward a kind of social problematization
demanded by a new readership that wants not formal games but (especially
with regard to drug trafficking) efficiently narrated up-to-date information.
NOTES
1.1 am deliberately excluding the much more widespread sicaresca fiction and the we
and highly praised work of Laura Restrepo to concentrate on works that are unknown
tionally.
2. Or, according to some Mexicans, the "nacocultura." The epithet naco means "rude," "vulgar,"
and "flamboyant." It has a strong ethnic connotation, since it is unlikely to be applied to a giiero
(white person) but is often used for mestizo or indigenous people who have improved their social
position and behave like upstarts without manners. Many drug traffickers fit that mold with their
flamboyant tastes and defiant attitudes.
3. Paco is the Argentine term for the cheap and highly addictive and toxic drug produced with
cocaine waste known in Colombia as bazuco and elsewhere as quete and Cjueirolo.
4. One of the Greater Buenos Aires villas miserias or shantytowns in which the story unfolds.
5. Cartoneros go through the trash from middle- and upper-class apartment buildings searching
for recyclable materials. Most of them come from nearby urban developments. They became so
plentiful under the Menem administration and its economic policies that old trains along the
urban network were set up to service them, leaving at an assigned time and returning late at night,
in exchange for a biweekly payment. The train seats were removed so that they could transport
bags with some comfort. For more see the 2003 documentary El tren bianco, by Nahuel and Ramiro
Garcia; for the conflicts caused by the gradual suspension of the service between 2006 and 2008,
see http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartonero (accessed January 3,2013).
6.1 use quotes to refer to the perverse use of the term in Latin America for socially disenfran
chised governments with little economic participation and partial to privatization and so-called
labor flexibilization. For a history of the use of the term, see Ghersi (2004).
7. Researchers like Eneas Biglione of the Hispanic American Center for Economics Research
have identified the Shining Path's links to drugs during the southern expansion of the group in the
coca-growing Huallaga region in 1985, which, according to him, helped fund their war (1988: 7).
8. It should be noted that, according to the book, former Peruvian guerrillas are not the only
ones who traffic drugs. In the Buenos Aires jail, Alarcön managed to interview another Peruvian
imprisoned for drug trafficking: one of the leaders of the Peasant Self-Defense Forces in the Valley
of the Rivers Apurimac and Ene blamed for the deaths of at least 100 Shining Path members, who
did not regret the massacre given that the group had killed part of his family (Alarcon, 2010:153).
While the Shining Path had violent methods, these produced state replicas and no less violent
peasant ones; obviously, both types of strategy shifted toward drug trafficking when the survivors
changed territories. Likewise, and maintaining objectivity insofar as this is possible, some former
Shining Path interviewees deny links with the drag trade and claim that their philosophy is
of Revolution, not of individual salvation" (146).
REFERENCES
Abad Faciolince, Héctor

2008 "Estética y narcotrâfico." Revista de Estudios Hispânicos 42:513-518.
Alarcön, Cristian
2003 Cuando me muera quiero que me toquen cumbia: Vidas de pibes chorros. Buenos Ai
Editor Norma.
2010 Si me querés, quereme transa. Buenos Aires: Grupo Editor Norma.
2011 "En la literature no hay patron, no hay Estado, no hay gobierno." Interview in Espana,
November 28. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91yL-fORQd8 (accessed December 20,
2012).
Bauman, Zygmunt
2006 Vida liquida. Buenos Aires: Paidös.
2008 Vidas desperdiciadas: La modemidad y sus parias. Buenos Aires: Paidös.
Biglione, Eneas
1988 "Sendero Luminoso, fragilidad institutional y socialismo del siglo XXI en el Perü." http://
www.hacer.org/pdf/Biglione05.pdf (accessed May 15,2012).
Bourgois, P. and C. Alarcon
2010 "Narrar el mundo narco: diâlogo con Cristian Alarcon y Philippe Bourgois." Salud
Colectiva 6 (3). http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=73115348008 ISSN (Version impresa)
1669-2381 (accessed August 5,2012).
Capote, Truman
1966 In Cold Blood. New York: Random House.
Enriquez, Mariana
2003 "Silban las balas: entrevista a Cristian Alarcôn." Pâgina 12, September 28. http://www.
paginal2.com.ar/diario/suplementos/libros/10-754-2003-09-28.html (accessed August 7,
2012).
Febén, Ruy
2010 "El narcotrâfico a la literatura, siete escritores jovenes." CNNMéxico, December 3. http://
mexico.cnn.com/nacional/2010/12/03/los-autores-de-la-literatura-enfocada-al-narcotrafico
(accessed April 9,2012).
Fonseca, Alberto
2009 "Cuando lloviö dinero en Macondo: literatura y narcotrâfico en Colombia y México."
Ph.D. diss., University of Kansas.
Garcia, Facundo
2006 "Premio para Cristian Alarcon: 'Hay que entender qué es lo que da pie a la violencia.'"
Pâgina 12, April 4.
Garramuno, Florencia
2009 La experiencia opaca: Literatura y desencanto. Buenos Aires: FCE.
Ghersi, Enrique
2004 "El mito del neoliberalismo." Estudios Püblicos: Revista de Polîticas Publicas, no. 95,293-313.
Herrero-Olaizola, Alejandro
2007 "'Se vende Colombia, un pais de Delirio': el mercado literario global y la narrativa colom
biana reciente." Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 61 (1): 43-56.
Jaramillo Agudelo, Dario
1999 Cartas cruzadas. Mexico City: Ediciones Era.
LaCapra, Dominick
1983 "A poetics of historiography: Hayden White's Tropics of Discourse," pp. 72-83 in Rethinking
Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Lara, Maria Pia
2009 Narrar el mal: Una teorîa postmetafîsica del juicio reflexionante. Barcelona: Gedisa.
Lemebel, Pedro
1996 Loco afân: Crônicas del sidario. Barcelona: Anagrama.
2001 Tengo miedo torero. Barcelona: Anagrama.
Ludmer, Josefina
2010 Acjuî América Latina: Una especulaciôn. Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia.
McCarthy, Cormac
2005 No Country for Old Men. New York: Random House.
Morana, Mabel
2004 "Critica literaria y globalizaciön cultural/' pp. 179-190 in Critica impur a. Madrid:
Iberoamericana.
Ovejero, José
2012 La ética de la crueldad. Barcelona: Anagrama.
Paszkowski, Diego
2001 El otro Gômez. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana.
Pron, Patricio
2010 " [Quirn matô a Rosendo? de Rodolfo Walsh." Letras Libres, March. http://www.letraslibres.
com/revista/libros/quien-mato-rosendo-de-rodolfo-walsh (accessed April 9,2012).
Rascon Banda, Victor Hugo
1991 Contrabando. Mexico City: Editorial Planeta Mexicana.
Reinoso, Susana
2012 "La literatura actual va mas alla de la experiencia." Clarin, May 6.
Rueda, Maria Helena
2009 "Dislocaciones y otras violencias en el circuito transnacional de la literatura
Latinoamericana." Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana 35:69-90.
Villalobos, Juan Pablo
2010 Fiesta en la madriguera. Barcelona: Anagrama.
Villoro, Juan
2008 "La alfombra roja: el imperio del narcoterrorismo." Clarin, November 29. http://edant.
revistaenie.clarin.com/notas/2008/ll/29/_-01811480.htm (accessed September 9,2012).
Wajsman, Paula
1990 Informe de Paris. Buenos Aires: De la Flor.
Walsh, Rodolfo
1957 Operaciôn masacre. Buenos Aires: De la Flor.
1965 "Esa mujer," in Los oficios terrestres. Buenos Aires: De la Flor.
1968 iQuién matô a Rosendo? Buenos Aires: De la Flor.
Winslow, Don
2005 The Power of the Dog. New York: Vintage.
Wolfe, Tom
1964 The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Cecilia Lopez Badano - Drug Trafficking and Literature. Dangerous Liaisons

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Cecilia Lopez Badano - Drug Trafficking and Literature. Dangerous Liaisons

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Drug Trafficking and Literature: Dangerous Liaisons

Author(s): Cecilia López Badano and Mariana Ortega Breña

An exploration of the relationship between ethics and literary aesthetics based on an

Keywords: Literary ethics and drug trafficking, Interculturality, Violence, Argentine

Analyzing symbolic representations of drug trafficking, particularly those

Cecilia Lopez Badano is a researcher at the Centra de Investigaciones Lingüisticas y Literarias of

The literary symbolization of this particular trade, then, points to conflicting

The product of a global phenomenon such as drug trafficking, narco-narratives

official discourse and create new ways of approaching the ideologies

Why use fictional or fictionalized narratives as an interpretation whe

The cruelty of the literature is found ... in its demystifying function, my

(because expressive) and moral (because normative) connections are understood

border between self and others. In both countries, national narrative in co

THE VICEROYS OF THE SOUTH: DRUG TRAFFICKING

During the past 30 years, the cartography of drug trafficking has

defiant, pseudo-courageous epic of the young thieves and the

I don't go to her neighborhood very often, a long time can go by duri

Alarcon will begin to gain a foothold in the area indicated b

In Si me querés, quereme transa, mechanisms of literary fictionalization are

There is a political decision to sustain subjectivity as a condition to make the

This gesture also recalls a kind of participant observation that reconstructs

history that, though not "objectively" real, becomes more "authenti

Other territories and subjects, other temporalities and narrative configurations

The area of drug trafficking, where risk is another form of capital, is

This leads to a new map of overlapping South American territories

description of these subjects/characters, working on the real with fictional pro

Abad Faciolince, Héctor

You might also like