Drug Cartels Do Not Exist by Oswaldo Zavala

Author:Oswaldo Zavala
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Drug Trafficking, Soldiers, and Police on the Border

IMAGINARY LINES OF POWER: POLITICS AND MYTHOLOGY IN THE LITERATURE ON CIUDAD JUÁREZ

It has become almost customary at this point for critics to quote Roberto Bolaño’s well-known answer to an interview question, what is hell like?: “Like Cuidad Juárez, which is our curse and our mirror, the unquiet mirror of our frustrations and of our vile interpretation of freedom and our desires.”1 The image proposed by Bolaño has an evident mythological background that reduces all social space in the city to its most exceptional levels of violence. For some critics, this reduction and other similar images appear mainly in his posthumous novel 2666. As discussed before, it is about the life of an enigmatic German writer who survives World War II and must travel to the border city of Santa Teresa—based on Ciudad Juárez—to help his nephew in prison accused of the murder of hundreds of women who have disappeared in the area for a decade. Some have negatively judged Bolaño’s work based on two complimentary forms: first, as the articulation of a mythologizing narrative that is based on meaning without history, and second, as a literary project devoid of a deliberate political intention, that is, either as a dehistoricized mythology or as a depoliticized narrative. I now want to discuss the scope and limits of these two criticisms, not only when it comes to Bolaño’s work, but also in relation to other literary projects that address the border region between Mexico and the United States. This will allow me a brief analysis of what in my opinion are some of the most effective forms of representation of recent violence in Ciudad Juárez, to conclude with a reflection on the general function of literature in the face of armed conflicts in contemporary society.

The Neutralized Critique

The critique that Bolaño represents Juárez in a mythological manner is prominent in the academic work of Ricardo Vigueras Fernández, who starts from “the undeniable fact that Juárez has become an imaginary construction based on realities that, when overstated, acquire a series of connotations that in principle they did not have. In the case of Juárez, all these connotations are misery, labor exploitation, ignorance, political corruption, femicides and, more recently, the high levels of daily violence that causes blood to flow in the streets without the authorities ever solving the crimes nor stopping the guilty.”2 For Vigueras, much of the imagined violence is already present in a city whose sociopolitical daily life is equally imagined. Thus, novelists end up creating their own fictions that their books propose as real.

The mythological representations of Ciudad Juárez, according to Vigueras, are the result of a very peculiar practice that he calls “juárica literature,” that is, literature “that is written outside of Juárez about Ciudad Juárez as a mythical space, not as a real location, and with natural ignorance of daily life and death in Ciudad Juárez.”3 Thus, Vigueras explains, Bolaño’s work has become the master signifier of this continuous mythologization of

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