INTRODUCTION

In __2666__, Roberto Bolaño writes about Santa Teresa, an industrial town on the Mexican-American border where women and girls are routinely raped, murdered, and left in the desert or in garbage dumps. Bolaño's story is a kind of mystery, because it's not publicly clear who's committing what the people come to call "//los crimines,"// "the crimes," nor is it clear why nobody has caught them. Protestors demand, "end impunity." Santa Teresa is analogous to the real-world town of Juarez – both names refer to the largest population center on the Mexican side of the border region. The main difference between the two towns is this: in the years since the publication of __2666__ and the death of its author, the real-world mystery has mostly been solved. The suffering, however, continues. I don't want to refer to what's going on in Juarez or Santa Teresa as "the crimes," because this defines the incidents in terms of legal transgression in a land where rule of law does not actually exist. Some people use the word "femicide," which literally means "the killing of women," but implies "the killing of women //because they are women//." This makes it a sort of hate crime, though I think the more appropriate parallel is to "genocide." You and I are looking at the systematic extermination of women. The femicides are chaotic on the surface, so "systematic" might seem like the wrong word. This localized violence looks like a storm: a conflux of factors that together create violence. These factors constitute a machine for the killing of women or a machine whose byproduct is the killing of women or a machine that needs to kill women in order to continue existing in its present form. In the same way a gas-powered automobile needs an exhaust pipe, the world needs Juarez. One can't simply plug up the gas pipe to stop carbon emissions and one can't simply stop the femicides. To stop the femicides, one would have to either transform the culture of Juarez or end impunity for the killers – the former is a gargantuan task (as I will demonstrate in "The Part About Power and The Female") and the latter is directly related to Juarez's role as a conduit for drugs (as I will demonstrate in "The Part About Santa Teresa and Juarez"). (There is an even simpler solution to the femicides: stop raping.) What I'm describing is a matrix of interlocking bio-mechanical systems that prefer to deposit their waste in Juarez. Where does Bolaño come into this? In investigating the femicides, he samples elements from modes we call "genre." Specifically, he works with detectives and horror. The use of horror is appropriate here not only because of the revolting nature of what's going on, but genre's golden rule is "Don't show the monster." This is appropriate and even necessary because the massive indeterminacy of reality creates a situation in which it's impossible to show the monster. "The monster," I remind you, is not a literal entity – some cabal of rape illuminati or evil imperialist power or crime lord – it's a convergence of the darkest aspects of humanity. It is onto this stage that the detective steps. Bolaño invents a number of detectives, and he himself once said, "I should have liked to have been a homicide detective much better than being a writer. I am absolutely sure of that. A string of homicides. I'd have been someone who could come back to the scene of the crime alone, by night, and not be afraid of ghosts." The joke, to me, is that Bolaño was engaged in detection the whole time, just on a larger scale. By examining the violence of Juarez, he examines the entire human mechanism of violence. Is Bolaño's investigation successful? __2666__ ends with the mystery unsolved, but it presents a wealth of evidence (mostly of the sort that a journalist or a sociologist or a cop couldn't collect) and presents a framework for future investigation. I argue that the act of investigation itself, in a world of apathy, distraction and masturbation, is productive whether or not the mystery is solved. Future investigators will find insight and passion here. Perhaps most essential are the cases where the texts call us to action. Bolaño's source much of the real-world information used in __2666__ was Sergio González-Rodríguez, a Mexican journalist. He appears to have obeyed the command that one of Bolaño's characters issues to the fictional Mexican journalist Sergio González: "I want you to strike hard, strike human flesh, unassailable flesh ... I want you to sink in your teeth ... stir up the hive." The work of the detective, like the work of the artist, is a collaborative project. In his recent book, The Femicide Machine, González-Rodríguez appears to have achieved a pretty clear perspective: In Ciudad Juárez, a territorial power normalized barbarism. This anomalous ecology mutated into a femicide machine: an apparatus that didn't just create the conditions for the murders of dozens of women and little girls, but developed the institutions that guaranteed impunity for those crimes and even legalized them. A lawless city sponsored by a State in crisis.

What does he mean when he says "territorial power" and "State in crisis"? The State is a political organization, believed to have sovereignty over territory. Gonález-Rodríguez is probably talking about Mexico. However, we should also wonder if the "State" as an construct might be at crisis as well. What is "Mexico"? The loci of power in that country are the //narcotraficantes// and the Meridia Initiative (an alliance against organize crime between the government and the United States, responsible for Operation Fast and Furious). In Mexico, idea of a "government authority" is a little ridiculous because so many individuals in the employ of the government serve other masters first. This is what creates the climate of impunity – the police and //narcos// are entangled in a drug-trade alliance, so the police will refrain from prosecuting the femicides so as to preserve the alliance. The state is no longer the primary geopolitical structure. (That's going to have some interesting implications in the next century.) Impunity is not the only environmental condition required for the femicide machine to evolve. There must be a firm foundation of macho misogyny and the heat of extreme poverty. This all creates a climate conducive to the replication of an idea along the lines of, "If you can get away with rape and murder, it's okay." Such an idea has strange corollaries. In Santa Teresa and Juarez, we find strange mixtures of the sacred and the profane, a bizarre symbology of ritual murder elevated to the status of art. This is caught up with social and economic pressures to create a worsening or decaying cycle, a widening spiral. This brings us back to the problem of "the monster." The editor's epilogue to __2666__ reveals that Bolaño's notes suggest "the existence in the work of a 'hidden center,' concealed beneath what might be considered the novel's 'physical center,'" and goes on to theorize that the 'physical center' is Sonora and the 'hidden center' is the date 2666 AD, a sort of vanishing point in the distant future. Natasha Wimmer, who translated the novel into English, said that the title of __2666__ symbolizes a vanishing point and a “remote, incomprehensible malevolence.” I once thought that this "malevolence" was some idea Bolaño wanted to hint at, but I now suspect that it was the unreached objective of his investigation. Not that I fault him – a complete understanding of our own capacity for evil is arguably impossible. We can make some sense of this if we take a look at what narrator-combo Arturo Belano / Bibiano O'Reilly write of an //estadounidense// in __Distant Star__: “like a true North American he had a firm and militant belief in the existence of evil, absolute evil.” I don't want you to take me for such a person. In fact, at no point in this essay should you take me to really believe in evil or machines or nations. “Evil” can mean anything from the brutality of natural law (which I also don’t believe in) to the sadism of a psychopath who kills for art. “A malevolence” is simply an anthropomorphization of what’s really a field of destructive aspects of human psychology: greed, arrogance, apathy, schadenfreude, sadism, learned helplessness, the bystander effect, and ignorance, both of our own psychology and in general. It ascribes intentionality to a problem that is intentional only in a small number of cases so as to make it easier to discuss in poetry. This should not be problematic, so long as you remember that this text aspires to be poetic rather than scientific. What I mean to say is this: I'm not just writing criticism. I'm not just interpreting Bolaño. I take him to be saying, "Go out and investigate" or rather "You'll sleep better if you investigate more," but I don't intend to devote the entirety of this text to defending that assertion. Instead, I intend to go out and investigate. Bolaño provides us with numerous tools usable in this task, so I will, of course, continue to reference him. I'll also draw in figures like González-Rodíguez, people who can give us more information about the real-world problems we face, and thus bring us closer to comprehending this remote malevolence.

** NOTES ** [i] Bolaño, Roberto. Interview. "The Last Interview." __The Last Interview.__ By Mónica Maristain. Brooklyn, New York: Melville House Publishing. // Kindle file. Loc. 991, 97%. //  Herlinghaus, Hermann. "From 'Pharmakon' to Femicide." __Narcoepics__. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Pg 229.  Bolaño, Roberto. "2666." New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle file. Loc. 13896-13926, 67%.  González-Rodríguez, Sergio. "The Femicide Machine." Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Pg 7.  Op. Cit. "2666." Loc. 20486, 99%.  Page, Alan. “Natasha Wimmer on Translating 2666.” Vulture. Nov. 14 2008. http://www.vulture.com/2008/11/natasha_wimmer_on_translating.html  Bolaño, Roberto. "Distant Star." Trans. Chris Andrews. New York: New Directions. Pg 102.