Ciudad Juárez

Ray kicked back in his waiting-to-heal bed, his chest patched up with surgical tape, 3M Steri-Strip antimicrobial skin closures, with pressure-sensitive adhesive containing an iodopher germicide, diatomic iodine complexed with an ordinary amphiphilic surfactant, and a nonwoven backing, reinforced with filaments of polyethylene terephthalate, for tensile strength and energy absorption, and finer wound-edge approximation; the deep wounds over his heart and lungs had been neatly mattress-stitched, though not as we might have hoped, with Ethibond Excel green-braided polyester, but with Ethicon Monocryl monofilament sutures, and covered with a DuoDERM hydrocolloid dressing, an opaque, biodegradable, and nonbreathable admixture of carboxymethylcellulose gelatin, elastomers, and pectin, which turns into a gel when exudate is absorbed, promoting a natural debridement, whatever the hell that is, if you have to look it up, etc., etc., you probably, deep down, just don’t want to know, unless of course the wound tissue has already gone wildly necrotic, and they’ve started suggesting maggot therapy as a logical alternative; and his head was resting comfortably on basically plain old pillows, the sort of thing you rest your head on, when you can barely lift your head. He was back once again in the land of the free, in trademark-registered name-brand-equity Patent-Pending America, no doubt barely viable, and with his X-marks-the-spot X on his chest, probably unaware of some possible copyright infringements, but glad to be resting in a comfortable bed, just happy to be alive and in possession of his selfhood.

As Gene had reached the corner of El Paso Street and Paisano, and been forced to make a choice, under the adversarial circumstances, between a left toward Providence Memorial, on the campus of the University of Texas El Paso, entailing a likely stay for overnight observation, and a right toward the slightly less orthodox, though certainly still educational, approach, which didn’t entail much of anything, and was a bit off the beaten path for weapons-grade observers, he’d taken the obvious right, and arrived at the Abrigado Animal Clinic. After overcoming a certain amount of species incredulity, and patching Ray up with animal products, the Clinic had detected an impedance mismatch, between Raymond’s homo sapience and the minimal capacitance of the overnight pet care cages, and rather than attempting a complex conjugate, they’d released him to walk rather meekly away, while resisting the urge to loan Gene a leash, and offer Raymond a doggie biscuit.

Ray and Gene had a rented house, a mustard-yellow double-decker wreck of a place, a safe house if you will, in that Gomez didn’t know of its Magoffinesque existence, and that’s just where they went to get away from it all, stashing the truck in the garage at the back, hauling Ray off to an upstairs bedroom, and loading him up on goldfish antibiotics. Unaware that the Ethicon sutures in his chest were possibly better suited to a schnauzer’s bladder, but cognizant of the fact that even the slightest movement caused far more trouble than it was currently worth, Ray wasn’t moving around all that much, and had time on his hands to think things over. His first thought, sleep, was apparently not an option: it felt like whoever’d lashed his chest-parts back together must have installed some sort of motion detector, and wired it to a stretch of electrified fencing that was torque-wrenched tight using bolts through his rib cage, and whatever was in these canine pain pills was no match at all for his razor-toothed chest-wound, and taking deep breaths was not real bright, with a roll of concertina wire coiled around his torso, so this seemed like a good time to maybe just sit tight, try to shed a little light on some points of confusion, sort of sort out one or two of his immediate problems, and who knows, why not, just go ahead and solve them. It was, admittedly, pitch-black in the room, with maybe a little moonlight leaking in around the shades, and he didn’t have a clue what the hell the time was, somewhere in that dead-of-night gap before morning, and this whole think-things-over approach to solving problems wasn’t really part of Ray’s normal routine, but here, in a nutshell, was Ray’s current thinking: there was a massive fucking drug war going on in Juárez, and he, meaning Raymond, was now caught in the crossfire, and it was high time that someone, meaning Raymond once again, got the whole damn thing straightened out in his head. If you can picture Ray standing at his own mental whiteboard, drawing up org charts, and color-coded merger histories, and dotted-line arrows from cartel to cartel showing the current state of play among the constantly shifting business alliances, and plaza-sharing deals that would need to be restructured, and reseller channel-conflicts yet to be resolved, with a little stick-figure portrayal of Raymond himself, showing dotted-line arrows going straight through his head, you’ve got a pretty good picture of the problems Ray’s facing, but no sense at all of Raymond Edmunds; Raymond’s a gunman, not a McKinsey consultant, and it is, after all, pitch-black in the room, and even the McKinsey guy hasn’t quite got the picture; not only is his drawing several weeks out of date, but with Gomez and Ray no longer speaking, and the Thetas carving cryptonyms deep into his rib cage, we might be better off, org-chart-wise, portraying Dr. Edmunds as a seated-type duck, about to get dry-erased from the whiteboard itself, leaving a ghostly-looking shade of a sort of Moonlight Yellow feather-pile that might once have been a duck on the porcelain-steel surface. Raymond kicked back in his waiting-to-heal bed, with his boots off and his feet up and his chest full of violet-dyed Monocryl sutures, with a half-lit moon still rising in the east and two hours from its zenith in the black El Paso sky, which would make the time, am-wise, around 3:45, on April the 16th, meaning a few days past Easter, and a little late now to be filing his taxes, just staring into the dark there, thinking things over, and growing more and more confused about the war in Juárez. Since the best they could do at the pet care clinic was 100 mg Tramadol tablets, Ray was perhaps a little fuzzy from the pain, and eating domestic-animal opiates by the half-dozen handfuls, although even in a state of McKinsey-like lucidity, the drug war battle lines could still be disorienting, and with Ray basing his dosage levels on toy Yorkshire Terrier multiples, and chasing the pills down with the occasional pull from a liter-style bottle of Old Grand-Dad Bonded, he'll soon be having trouble making sense of his own wall treatments. Raymond, in short, has certain practical difficulties, and one or two rudimentary epistemological problems that will need to be addressed before he moves on: if he’s hoping to make sense of the war in Juárez, Ray’s own thoughts will be no help at all; and even if he’s only searching for some inside information, the last place hell find it is inside his own head.

First of all, the man that he works for, Gomez of El Paso, a man of Shakespearean-wit-brevity and marquetry-chronometer-collection fame, was more of a kind of concept to Ray than anything resembling an actual human, and other than posing a threat to his corporeal existence, Ray had no real idea what the man did for a living. To Ray’s way of thinking, Gomez laundered money, while running Ray ragged, and frequently down, to supplement his apparently limitless ego, though he is in fact the Treasurer and CFO for the massive-cash balance sheet of the Juárez Cartel, under Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, or maybe it was Ricardo Garcia Urquiza, or Vicente Carrillo Leyva, or José Luis Fratello, a man who in fact runs the Cartel’s sicarios, a word that goes back to the destruction of Jerusalem, and the slitting of Roman throats using sicae, meaning daggers, though the Cartel’s assassins are known as La Linea, a word that goes back to the “firing line” for cannons, or perhaps it was Rafael Munoz Talavera, who unbeknownst to Raymond has been dead for ten years, found time-travelling backwards through the streets of Juárez in the left rear seat of an armored Jeep Cherokee, with his mind fixed firmly on the rearview mirror, and his bullet-riddled head double-doggie-bagged in plastic, or then again it might as well be Juan José Esparragoza Moreno, known by his nickname, “El Azul,” a word that goes back, via Arabic and Persian, to all the Throne-of-God sky-shades of lapis lazuli, from powder blue to azure to a deep midnight indigo, though calling a born killer such a celestial shade of something would seem to defy all predicate logic, and most conventional color theories with regard to human flesh tones; the truth is, even if we skipped the etymonics, Raymond wouldn’t even know the rudimentary basics here, like who the hell was running his own brigade, or who reported to who with all these psycho Cartel warlords, and as to where the battle lines were drawn, or whose side was whose in War Zone Juárez, he had no better idea than did the DEA or ICE, and they didn’t have enough between the two of them to constitute so much as a whisper of a clue. Ray thought this over, searching for clues, among the baffling contradictions he’d read in the papers, and sort of threw up his hands, metaphorically speaking, since strictly speaking, he could barely fucking move: if he wanted to get out of this jam he was in, he was going to have to give this a whole lot more thought. While it might be educational to listen in on Raymond’s thoughts, regarding the drug war battle lines in Ciudad Juárez, as a massive dose of a tramadol-hydrochloride opioid analgesic slowly eases its way through the blood-brain barrier, and makes itself at home, metaeuphorically speaking, among the opiate receptors of Ray’s human head, we need to keep in mind that Raymond himself barely knows the names of the people in question; just because a man is really and truly high doesn’t mean he’s some sort of paronomasial claircognizant. We’d probably be better off, once the Tramadol takes hold, having a little chat with some of those plump pink cherubs that are about to show up on Raymond’s powder-blue walls.

So how do we make sense of this war in Juárez? Do we need another consult with our claircognizant angelologist, one of those storefront exonymic Gypsy-type Romanis who reads greased palms, and does Tarot-divination using bank-strapped currency, and makes crystal-clear forecasts out of eightballs of meth? To be perfectly honest, we could probably go straight to the Théophanie Angel Himself, with trumpets blaring away up on top of Mount Sinai, and lightning-filled columns of noumenal phenomena, and the whole flaming mountain about to go up in a pyrolytic feeding-frenzy carbonized rush, and we’d likely get one of those why is there evil shrugs, like Ciudad Juárez isn’t exactly His department. So how do we make sense of this war in Juárez? The same way we’d deal with a Juárez intersection: look both ways and then hazard a guess.

Hazard it this way. It had probably started out simply enough, with the Juárez Cartel attempting to defend its own home turf and eponymous plaza, the shipping lanes north via the Port of El Paso into the mood-enhanced States of Operation Dime Bag, against an all-out assault from the Gulf Cartel, of Matamoras, Mexico, in the northeastern corner of the state of Tamaulipas, with its mosquito-infested coastal swamps, and its out-of-the-way plaza, via Highway 2, into Brownsville, Laredo, and McAllen, Texas, and its death-squad army of merciless mercenaries that didn’t much care for the rules of polite society, much less hanging around in a dump like Matamoros, waiting for some sort of calligraphic-invite to the drug-plaza party along the whole U.S. border. If we want to get a handle on this war in Juárez, we’re going to have to come to grips with these merciless mercenaries, as their anti-anodyne methods became the standard of care for every last patient ever touched by the drug war. Los Zetas, as they were known, after the police-band code name of their original founder, were NATO-armed-and-disciplined paramilitary types, with particular expertise in communications and savagery, that the Gulf had recruited, using U.S. currency, out of the Mexican Army, specifically the elite Airborne Special Forces, following training at Fort Bragg and the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia; with their terrorize-the-enemy approach to the human body, and their counter-insurgency training in high-tech munitions, and their unfathomable nicknames, like “El Winnie the Pooh,’’ the Zetas were a little different, that’s all there was to it; the Zetas were innovators, true battlespace visionaries, and the cartels of the ’90s were still fighting the last war. If you pictured a man dressed in dead-of-night black, wearing jungle-warfare facepaint, and spit-shined jump boots, making a minor adjustment to the heterodyning generator on a Stinger Surface-to-Air Missile’s focal plane array, while testing the utility of a hickory-handled framing hammer for removing the genitalia from some grave disappointment, you’d have a pretty good picture of the paradigmatic Zeta, and all the more reason to stop fighting the last war. Ray’s whole approach to dealing with the Zetas was based on a strategy of situational avoidance, like if a situation arose where the Zetas were present, Ray double-checked to make sure that he was absent. This particular methodology, with its redundancy algorithm, doesn’t, admittedly, sound altogether rational: why would a man have to check twice to make a clear determination as to his presence or absence? A man’s either there, facing a situation, or he’s somewhere else, and a quick visual check of his immediate surroundings should more than suffice to resolve any questions. It’s not like a man can be two places at once; we’re talking about a human being here, not some sort of introspective quantum automata; the cartels of the ’90s were a little low-tech, but the Zetas were still years from having quantum computers, using Schrodinger superposition in qubit arrays, where a bit may be set at either zero or one, or both zero and one simultaneously; a man, needless to say, is either present or absent, and he can’t be both at the exact same instant; this sort of living-dead moment may be fine for Schrodinger’s cat, but its no way to deal with an ordinary human. Since Raymond himself was more or less rational, and this part of the war was supposed to be simple, something’s gone wrong here; we must not quite be getting the full picture. Ray had his truck, an aging and rust-eaten K-series long-box, parked on a little knoll, above a streambed ravine, out in the scrub-brush of the empty Chihuahuan desert; three guys in black pulled a fourth from behind the wheel of a green and white taxi that could maybe use a paint job, removed his straw hat, his wallet, and watch, and gave Ray a brief but impressive demonstration of the Zetas’ unique approach to the presence-absence paradox, and it had nothing at all to do with quantum automata. By the time his GMC had driven itself home, quite possibly over the bottom of the bone-dry Rio, Ray found himself doing a quick double-check, feeling around for his face-bones, and searching for his watch-face, not altogether sure, right at the moment, that his head, hands, and watch were even in the same time zone. By now, of course, this where-am-I demonstration is a common occurrence in every war zone in Mexico, but it’s based on a trademarked Zeta innovation: the severed, but still living, missing human head. For all you know, for a few moments at least, you could be staring straight up at the blue Chihuahua sky, just kicking back, sort of watching the crows fly, at a 40-foot remove from the rest of your body. It’s not like Ray started wandering around Juárez, double-checking his math on Schrodinger’s equation; when it came to the Zetas, however, you were far better off being slightly redundant than finding yourself staring straight up at the sky, not so much, at this point, double-checking your watch-face, as doing a slow fade on some serious second-guessing. So when word filtered down that peace was at hand, and that the Gulf, Zetas, and Juárez Cartel were now on the same side, joining forces in the battle against the Sinaloa Cartel, supposedly headed by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Ray basically shrugged, and took a “wait and see” attitude toward his immediate situation, like wait in El Paso, at pre-checked coordinates, and see if the Zetas started crossing the border.

Phase II of the war, where the Juárez Cartel joined the Zetas and Gulf to fight off the newly formed Sinaloa Alliance, appeared, on the surface, to be a pitched-battle standoff, having nothing to do with the citizens of Juárez, though with both sides of the conflict composed of irregulars, the designation of combatants entailed a certain amount of guesswork, particularly for those who, for one reason or another, preferred to think of themselves as so-called “civilians.” Let’s hazard a guess that the year was 2004, when an unprovoked attack by the Sinaloans on the Gulf, no doubt eager to get their hands on the Gulf Cartel’s Navy, and supplement their Air Force of Boeing 747s with one of the world’s finest assortments of cocaine submarines and crystal-meth submersibles and heroin torpedoes, led to a major realignment of forces in Juárez. At this point the battle was certainly body-bag intensive, but the battle lines themselves were neatly drawn, think trench-war fieldworks at the Battle of Verdun, with their battered and empty stretches of utterly barren ground serving as a signpost, and a warning to civilians, to stay out of No-Man’s-Land, and mind your own business, just as a barren stretch of suddenly empty Juárez pavement marks the middle of a side street as a bad place to stand, the sort of place that no civilian would even think to be caught dead in. Not that true civilians were actually dying in Juárez; according to conservative Government estimates, 97% of the Juárez dead were designated combatants, and the remainder were common criminals or complete nonentities, the sort of people who tend to die while being no one in particular. You can’t expect much sympathy from the local police if you’re the sort of nobody who ignored all the warnings, and the No-Man’s-Land signposts of opaque tinted windows in a frictionless display of chrome-spinner indifference to the pointless minutiae of your so-called existence, and having hazarded a guess that the street was safe to cross, you stepped off the sidewalk, into minutiae-free oblivion; if you want to be buried with full civilian honors, stop wasting time on your anonymous existence, and don’t bother dying as yet another faceless Mexican, because you’re not a true civilian in War Zone Juárez, unless your death makes the headlines reserved for the prominent, well-known political figures and red-blooded Americans. As for the rest of you, you know who you are, questioning authority with your hazardous guesses: don’t look at us if you turn out to be criminals. Children caught playing in the middle of the street, and mowed-down by the busloads in the Kalashnikov crossfire, might have fooled some, with their soccer balls and cleats, but the street-sawy agents who patrol the Ciudad know that all dead children are, without exception, either lookouts or runners for the narco brigades; when asked what they were doing in the middle of the street, they all gave the same sort of childish excuses, “I guess I thought I was playing soccer.” The disappearing women that kept cropping up, and proved so baffling to local authorities, was a problem of a somewhat different nature; perhaps they were streetwalkers posing as civilians. Why hundreds of young women, many of whom were last seen walking the streets, cleverly disguised as ordinary maquila workers, vanished altogether from Ciudad Juárez, only to turn up later as No-Woman’s-Land lamp posts, was a mystery the young women must have taken to their graves, as a warning to women everywhere against disguising themselves as women, and wandering around Juárez, hazarding guesses, like “I guess it would be OK if you drove me home to the barrio,” or “I guess I blame myself for being gang raped by the Juniors,” or “I guess it’s only natural that my unemployed husband finally beat me to death when he discovered my paystub.” News correspondents, while technically civilians, probably deserved to die for being down there in the first place; the reporters from El Diario or Una Mas Una or even, God knows why, from the El Paso Times, who should have known better than to die by the dozens for continually hazarding the exact wrong guesses, turned out to be guilty of some serious misdemeanors, rattling the decent citizens of Ciudad Juárez by wandering around at night with their Krylon spray cans, paint-bombing political posters with their nihilistic warnings, vandalizing villa walls, tagging them with bylines, wildstyling LIES on Government property, and just generally intent, for no apparent reason, on posting signed copies of their own personal death warrants; reporters, obviously, were not true civilians. The drug war, as we were saying, had neatly drawn lines, and you can’t blame the authorities if people kept crossing them. Rejoining the real battle, already in progress, the Sinaloans were proving to be a formidable foe: El Chapo not only had his own private army, known as Los Negros and led by Edgar Valdez, but the Sinaloans had, in turn, heavily partnered up, first merging operations with the Guadalajara Cartel, headed by Ismael Zambada Garcia, and then loosely aligning themselves with the Tijuana forces of Arellano-Felix, and the meth-masters of Colima, and the Beltran-Leyva Sonora Cartel, though these alliances were prone to breaking down now and then, in a shitstorm of bullets and pedestrian cadavers. Didn’t we tell you to mind your own business? No law-abiding citizen would set foot in Juárez.

And then, in due course, as the pitched-battle raged, and the dead were discovered to be more and more guilty, guilty of being a lawyer while believing in fair trials, guilty of drinking beer while wearing a blouse with a missing button, guilty of counseling patience in a rehab facility, while a burst-fire cure-all was sprayed all over everything, just generally guilty of being young and alive, while living in Juárez, where youth is wasted on the lifeless; and then, as we were saying, with the death of the innocent at an all time low, and the drug distributors locked in a pitched-battle stalemate, the Mexican Federal Government, finding the national interests to be at risk, and the rule of law threatened by the cycle of violence, decided to intervene, and bring its full might to bear, by marching on Michoacan, and declaring War on Mexico. While we’ll readily admit that this particular declaration, one of numerous possibilities among the national-security naming-conventions and This-Means-War nomenclature so popular with our leaders, sounds somewhat, shall we say, morphologically ill-conceived, the Mexican Federal Government was in an unusual situation, and may have had very little choice in the matter. Consider the alternatives: a War on Drugs, which is by far the most peculiar, a war on a group of inanimate molecular structures that produce, protect, and distribute a sense of fitness and well-being among the psychically impoverished, many of whom, for accounting purposes, just happen to be poor, turns out to be a fight that no sane Government would even begin to consider, particularly if they’ve been following that exercise in futility known to Rhetorical War historians and sociosemiotic linguistic morticians as the “U.S. War on Drugs,” initially declared and launched under the Nixon administration, where after 50-some years in a war of attrition, and a $2.5 trillion treasury-draining expenditure, the Drugs were not only winning, but not a single Drug had died; a War on Drugs, which sounds so simple, as though you’ve found yourself at war with an inanimate enemy that couldn’t, in your wildest dreams, possibly be armed, like how the hell would a drug even learn to drive an automobile, much less tweak the guidance system on a Stinger Surface-to-Air Missile, turns out to be an expensive lesson in the dangers of mixing discourse worlds, because you might wind up talking your way into something you can’t get out of, like waking up one morning, somewhere way off the grid, in a one-man combat tent in Molecular Asia, and finding that what you’re up against is the world’s ultimate fighting force, not just the Viet Cong of Covalent Bonding, but the entire People’s Liberation Army of Entheogenic Chemicals; a War on Drug Use, which almost sounds winnable, waging a simple Just-Say-No public-relations campaign, or a War on Drug Users, which has also been attempted, filling every last vacancy in our vast U.S. prison system, might well have worked, under ordinary circumstances, if it weren’t for the fact that both the drug use and users fell, for the better part, under U.S. jurisdiction; a War on Drug Traffickers, which on the surface sounds plausible, a war on a group of animate criminal structures that produce, protect, and distribute drug molecules, structures that just happen to include the entire Mexican Government, from the tiniest town-halls in the poppy fields of Sinaloa, to the Congress de la Union and the Mexican National Security Service, has the unfortunate connotation that this particular Government, one of the largest of these animate criminal structures, would be willing to declare a War on Itself which while thoroughly appropriate given conditions on the ground, involves unacceptable levels of collateral damage; and a War on Drug Violence, a sort of War on The Horror, which sounds like the kind of war, like the War on Terror, that no rational person could possibly oppose, turns out to be something of a empty vicious circle, as adding violence to violence, and terror to terror, has a nasty tendency to exacerbate the problem, like a man trying to solve his drug use problems by using a whole lot more of the drugs that he’s using, as though killing the patient were an acceptable cure, though we’ll readily admit that declaring War on Mexico would appear to represent a very similar solution, destroying the nation in order to preserve it, which may not reduce the mounting pile of the cured. All things considered, it would be difficult not to empathize with the Government’s position: with the Drugs still controlling the territory to its north, where the world’s greediest drug users and world’s largest weapons suppliers just happened to reside, in a state of euphoric and blissful ignorance as to what both their drug use and weapons were up to, the Drugs were secretly planning a covert operation to finance and equip, with $50 billion-pallet-loads of hard-currency cash and NATO-grade shitloads of munitions and armaments, the worlds most vicious and animate criminal structures, meaning not just the Cartels in their war against the Government, but the Government itself, which will soon find itself in a War against Itself; there was also the problem, easily overlooked, that many of the foot soldiers employed by the Cartels were pulled from the ranks of the nation’s treacherous unemployed, including 20 million half-starved Mexican campesinos, expelled from their lands under the trade rules of NAFTA, and told to move north to work in the maquilas, where their heavily calloused hands and inflexible fingers refused to fit the form-factors of modern electronics, and were a far better fit for the steering wheels of trucks; under chemical attack along its entire northern border, and surrounded on all sides by a traitorous peasantry, and unwilling to face that fact that its substance abuse problems, including a $100-billion-a-year drug-exports addiction and a chronic dependence on drug cartel payoffs and a nasty habit, nearly impossible to detect, of hauling drugs north under color of authority, were rapidly escalating and compounding its other problems, its a wonder that the Government could even continue to function, much less govern the nation it was chosen to govern, when the Government itself was becoming completely ungovernable, passing rapidly through the stages of prodromal paranoia, to a bizarre but still plausible delusional disorder, to a drug-induced psychosis and violent psychotic break and the catastrophic onset of acute schizocaria, before the people of Mexico were finally forced to intervene. Unfortunately, in this case, as so often happens, particularly in so-called democratic societies, when the Mexican people at long last intervened, and had every last one of its elected officials locked up for their own good in a mental institution, on December 1, 2006, it just so happened that the particular institution in question, jampacked with criminals and senior government officials in an advanced state of pathological cognitive disintegration, turned out to be the recently elected Mexican Federal Government, which 10 days later taught the people a lesson about ever again interfering in Government business, by turning on Michoacan, and declaring War on Mexico. In reality, of course, as the actual invasion drew near, and any slim possibility for a negotiated settlement with its own belligerence failed to logically cohere, the Government found itself in an intolerable situation: while the declaration itself sounded truly majestic, no one in the Government actually knew what it meant. After severed heads rolled on a dance floor in Morelia, and past the showroom windows of a car dealer in Zitacuaro, and down a dusty road in the Michoacan mountains, you could certainly sell the war, at least to the public, as a War on the Narcos, a kind of War on Weapons of Body-Mass Destruction, just as long as you steered clear of getting too specific as to how in God’s name you thought you could win it; real politicians, however, serious men with a war to be waged, knew with some certainty that this Narco-construction was perfectly meaningless, since without the Narcos’ campaign contributions, and their willingness to permit duly elected officials to die for their country as a matter of principle, no true politician would be in any position to even climb down off a morgue slab, much less wage a war on his wealthiest constituents. With 40,000 and counting preparing to die as a direct result of the impending invasion, and with only a precious few of the nearly departed prepared to be dead for no particular reason, and yet with Government officials still utterly baffled as to why they were intent on invading their own country, and turning their whole nation into its own worst enemy, the dying, clearly, would need to start soon, or there might be no need for the dying to continue. Seasoned politicians, serious men who know the meaning of a war just as soon as the body-bags begin to pile up on the tarmac, all know the reason that the dying must continue: to ensure that the dead hadn’t died without a cause. All wars are just, and inherently self-explanatory, just as long as you can find a way to get the dying to commence, since no one with any true human feeling would ever tell the widower, and his bewildered-looking children, that Mommy just died for absolutely nothing. In the end, as we now know, the War on Mexico proved particularly brutal, perhaps the ultimate test, outside Molecular Asia, of a Government’s ability to declare and sustain inexplicable wars, a war simultaneously impossible to initiate, since you couldn’t expect your people to want to die for their country when theirs was the country hell-bent on destroying them, and yet, tautologically, impossible to terminate, since as with all just wars, it was inherently self-perpetuating, and neither side of the conflict could truly afford to win. With no one about to die fighting a war on themselves, a war only a corpse would ever bother trying to wage, and yet with 40,000 and counting about to die trying, if only to prove the point that any duly elected Government can wage pointless wars whenever the hell it chooses, something’s gone wrong here, we’ve hit yet another of these living-dead ends, and yet another instance of the presence-absence paradox, a nation both at peace and at war with itself, in a war without end that just never got started, and must not, once again, quite be getting the full picture. On December 11, 2006, as the Mexican Federal Government prepared to march on Michoacan, and effectively declare, to all intents and purposes, the First National War on the Nation of Mexico, like the first qubit war in the history of modern warfare, a kind of quantum superposition of Mexico with itself, just, as we were saying, as the troops prepared to march, and the War on Mexico, which both did and did not really happen in the first place, looked to be inevitable, the Government must have somehow come to terms with the nation, and reached a lasting peace that even the dying could live with, granting 40,000 and counting living-dead bodies the right to quantum-decohere into everlasting peace, because just at the moment when war was declared, leaving the streets of Morelia ready to burst with the missing, and the empty desert floors digging holes for the emptied, and the severe-clear azure of the Mexican-blue skies turning a glassy-eyed sky-shade of perfectly ghastly, every last War Zone, from the poppy fields of Sinaloa to the swamps of Matamoras to the hallways of Mexico’s Supreme Court of Justice to the chrome-spinner side streets of Ciudad Juárez, knowing that only peace could save the Mexican people, made final preparations to surrender to violence.

And thus it was that Phase III began, on December 11, 2006, with 7,000 troops preparing to march on Michoacan, and 40,000 waiting for their birth-death certificates, and everything taking a turn for the terminally weird, with everyone involved, including the Government, not only fighting on any and all sides of the battle, but simultaneously at peace and at war with themselves, which didn’t make much sense, particularly to Raymond, which in turn led to another of those Raymond-type shrugs, and yet another assumption of the “wait and see” attitude, like wait at elevation on a hilltop in El Paso, and see if all of Mexico got wiped off the map.

On the glass-half-full side, when the Mexican Army had invaded their land, Zambada Garcia had called for a truce among Cartels, and brokered a simple peace pact between the warring factions, which resulted in a coalition called La Federacion, not to be confused with La Federacion, also known as La Alianza de Sangre, much less La Nueva Federacion, which in turn should not in any way be confused with itself, since La Familia Michoacana both did and did not want anything to do with it; this might be a good time to stop thinking trench warfare, with nice clean battle lines, and barren-stretch No-Man’s-Land warnings to civilians, and start thinking back to the Peloponnesian War, and battle lines drawn in the shifting currents of the Aegean, while trying to keep in mind that what Thucydides meant by stasis was a steady-state condition of constant civil war, a condition maintained, fortunately for historians, through the ceaseless suppression of any sort of impulse toward decency and moderation and a sense of shared humanity, which even on paper sounds hopelessly bland, in favor of unleashing the far more interesting forces of greed, fanaticism, and human depravity, without which human history would be a far different story; imagine a world without greed and depravity, and the next thing you know, you’ve never heard of Thucydides, you’ve just reduced one of the world’s great historians to the status, let’s face it, of a complete nonentity, just another nameless Greek, really no one in particular, kicking back on his sunlit porch sipping a kylix of Chian wine, staring off at the blue Aegean and the vast Alimos sky, caught up, just for a moment, in one of those out-of-the-blue moments where everything that is is just as it should be, and even his own rather ordinary gardens, full of lavender shades of agnos blossoms and crimson anemone and pure white asphodelos, are in harmony with themselves, and momentarily timeless, and then unleashing a sudden impulse to take his kids for a swim. Fortunately for Thucydides, as far as the drug wars are concerned, he won’t have to worry about taking the kids for a swim, because greed and depravity are basically immortal, and any sudden outbreak of a sense of shared humanity won’t last long unless it’s heavily armed. Zambada Garcia’s anti-Army Federation was a kind of Lions Club for Drug Lords, purblind knights in the crusade for utter darkness, or a let-the-free-market-function Chamber of Commerce, with yet another long list of inscrutable nicknames. In harmony at last, in a steady-state of stasis, the drug lords were now working together, to fight off the poorly paid and under-equipped Army, and when that didn’t work, they recruited their workers, using banners that criss-crossed the Sinaloa and Sonora and Chihuahua state highways, advertising better wages and working conditions: GOOD PAY, FOOD, AND HELP FOR YOUR FAMILIES. It probably goes without saying, just for the record, that senior Mexican Government officials have a whole different deal, based on a formula that goes back to antiquity, and with an entirely different approach to cost-of-living adjustments: Dónde están mis dólares putas? which translates loosely to Where’s my fucking money? and amounts to a, give or take, lifetime contract. On the glass-blown-to-shit side, peace is for lightweights, there’s not much point in amassing ungodly firepower and armaments exotica and overwhelming quantities of weaponry paraphernalia, unless it’s put to use for the betterment of man, through establishment of more open and democratic societies, and markets free to function without excessive intervention, bringing freedom and prosperity to our brothers in the fight, and raining a fucking shitstorm on the rest of you pussies: Los Zetas found themselves like a landlocked country, a drug cartel without its own plaza, and having also discovered that they were deeply tired of swatting at mosquitos in coastal Matamoras, they decided to tackle both problems at once, first filling in the swamps with the cranial debris of Gulf Cartel trade reps in Neuvo Laredo, and then seizing the shipping lanes into Laredo itself, which hadn’t looked like much when viewed from the air, but has like 9,000 trucks, and 40% of Mexico’s exports, passing through it daily, jampacked with drugs; La Familia Michoacana, an evangelical religious group, whose spiritual leader, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, had long been heeding the call to the cloth and divine retribution and eternal salvation, through the beheading of nonbelievers in his family-values cause, became deeply disturbed by Federal Government depravity, having caught them in the act of committing the mortal sin of competing with La Familia in the methamphetamine business, and sent word of their disillusionment back to Mexico City, via twelve Federal agents who were so wracked with guilt that their mutilated bodies had to be shoveled-up and dime-bagged from the dust around a Michoacan roadside shrine, where they had come to do penance and atone for their sins, before traveling home with pieces of La Familia’s tortuous message; the Beltran-Leyva Sonora Cartel grew wary of supporting a tyrant named Shorty, perhaps as a result of El Chapo himself dropping a so-called dime on his partner, Alfredo Beltran, leading to a most unfortunate encounter between Edgar Guzman, El Chapo’s son, and 15 or 20 of the omnipresent Zetas, apparently still For Hire for special occasions, and by the time the Zetas had lightened their load of AK-47 8M3 hollow-points, and dropped off their smoking RPG-7s, now rendered grenadeless, in a Guzman-family shopping cart, it turned out that Edgar, El Chapo’s heir apparent, was about half the size of his own “Shorty” father; and to add insult and injury to grievous bodily harm, Los Negros abandoned their principles altogether, becoming the drug-war equivalent of Blackwater/Xe, killing Sinaloans, Zetas, Matamorans, Beltran-Leyvians, hanging severed human heads from the bridges of Cuernavaca, providing risk management consulting to every war zone in Mexico, and had to be replaced by the Thetas Ray’d encountered, in an excess of X’s and lager-bottle fragments and the plaguing of philosophers with arithmetical esoterics, having something to do with the subtraction of human limbs.

While their aims and ideals were no doubt pure, and both the Drug Lords and Government slept with the clear conscience of all perfectly ordinary socio-psychopaths, from serial murderers to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the inevitable result of this Reap the Whirlwind Doctrine was a certain amount of confusion among veteran vexillologists and students of emblemology and normative blazonry prescriptive grammarians: the corpse-size Hefty Bag became the state tree of Tamaulipas, planted by the hundreds along the road to Reynosa, while the new state insect, the greenbottle blowfly, waited in San Fernando for the corpses to decompose; per fess azure and sable, three human heads caboshed, displayed senestré of the sun in splendor, became the mutilated blazonry of the Sinaloa Coat of Arms; the Mexican National Flag tore itself in half, right through the middle of the Eagle gripping the Serpent, and the two halves of the flag began feeding on each other, which didn’t leave much for the vexillologists to ponder; and a new aerial pennant was designed for the Airborne, trucking the body-parts to their homes in the empty Chihuahuan desert, a nasty piece of work, with the Agnus Dei lamb, no doubt slaughtered for Easter, lying beside a crozier flying a banner made of paper, the pink-and-black cross of a Juárez lamp post. If you’re hoping to understand the dynamics of the drug wars, or thinking about becoming a Juárez vexillologist, you might want to consider spending 8 or 10 years trading counterfeit currency for mortars in Mogadishu, while leafing through Wittgenstein on the mythos of volition. If you’re thinking that maybe the current alignment will hold, with Juárez, Zeta, Beltran-Leyva, and Tijuana Cartels on one side of the produce aisle, and Sinaloa, Gulf, La Familia Michoacana, and the Theta philosophers over there on the other, remember how well the Athenian Empire held together, and then loan us a dime, and we’ll blow the whole supermarket. If you believe that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and that a Government cannot endure, at war with itself, welcome to Mexico, and God Bless America, who the hell said anything about needing a fucking Government. If you’re deeply troubled by the rate of civilian death, and the destruction of human life in acts of random violence, and the loss of the innocent and wide-eyed and wondrous to democidal maniacs too hideous to fathom, a bunch of beady-eyed weapons-crazed indiscriminate killers, you should download some photos of how we firebombed Japan. If none of this stuff makes any sense at all, and you’re not feeling all that, what’s the word, lucid, we could try doing a rewrite, or changing your meds, but as far as making sense of the war in Juárez, or even beginning to comprehend why it is that human leaders, members of a purportedly sapient species, tend to act, with some frequency, like messianic robots, our attitude is: frankly, why bother?