THE+PART+ABOUT+THE+PHYSICAL+CENTER

Throw away holiness and wisdom, and people will be a hundred times happier. Throw away morality and justice, and people will do the right thing. Throw away industry and profit, and there won't be any thieves.

Why fictionalize Juarez? Bolaño often uses real settings or unnamed settings that seem to stand in for real settings (the campground in Antwerp might be the same Barcelona campground where Arturo Belano worked), but never to my knowledge does he wholly replicate a real-world setting and call it by a new name. What is the difference between Juarez and Mexico City, which is reproduced by its own name in The Savage Detectives? The universe of Arturo Belano seems to be geographically identical to our own universe, except that Bolaño’s contains a city called Santa Teresa instead of our Juarez. This suggests a “physical center” to Bolaño’s work. Santa Teresa is actually mentioned for the first time in __The Savage Detectives__. Ulises Lima claims that the Rimbaud poem “Le Coeur Volé” is about how Rimbaud was raped, while traveling on foot, by veterans of the 1865 French of the invasion of Mexico. He also claims that, during this war, a column sent to occupy Santa Teresa stopped sending back reports and the detachment sent to investigate was taken prisoner at Villaviciosa before solving the mystery. There they were raped and executed, except for three men who escaped, of whom one would live to tell the story. This is not the only case in which Bolaño constructs a (presumably) fictional history of sexual violence in the Sonora region, but that is a matter to which we will return in a moment. Had Bolaño begun to plan 2666 at the time he wrote The Savage Detectives? Did he set aside the fictional city of Santa Teresa as a stub for future expansion? Dunno. These questions aside, it seems to me as if Santa Teresa acts, in the universe of Lima and Belano, as a sort of epicenter of violence and violation. It is also a place of unsolved mysteries. This is the physical center to which a poet-detective would be drawn. To that physical center is drawn the orphan boy Lalo Cura. Lalo is like the “crazy and timid Indian” proposed in the Infrarealist Manifesto: stunned by world but not paralyzed by it, open to the ideas of others but not bound by them. “Lalo Cura” becomes //la locura//, “the lunacy.” He seems at first to be the Kid archetype of the cowboy Western: a deadeye hired from an orphanage to act as a bodyguard for a //narco//. Soon, however, he goes to work as a police officer in Santa Teresa (an example of the “revolving door” partly responsible for the climate of impunity). Here he proves himself unusually dedicated to his work. He spends time reading manuals on criminal investigation even though the others mock him for it. As they discuss the crimes, the following exchange occurs: How could Llanos rape her, one of them asked, if he was her husband? The others laughed, but Lalo Cura took the question seriously. He raped her because he forced her, because he made her do something she didn't want to do, he said. Otherwise, it wouldn't be rape. One of the young cops asked if he planned to go to law school. Do you want to be a lawyer, man? No, said Lalo Cura. The others looked at him like he was some kind of idiot.

No, he doesn’t want to be a lawyer. He wants to be a detective. Lalo himself never solves much; the incompetence and institutionalized corruption is too much for one man to overcome. He does serve to highlight the contrast between the attitudes of the other officers and the thought of the modern west. We also see here the beginning of the deconstruction of the idea of “rape”: “rape” is just a word, and its definition is socially constructed. Lalo’s definition is more “modern,” but the fact that it’s entirely out of place in a Santa Teresa police department makes him seem like a lunatic. Moreover, even his definition is lacking because he doesn't realize that not all rape requires force. Now to expand upon the aforementioned history of rape and violence in Santa Teresa. Lalo Cura, in late-night dazes of intense studying, hears voices who tell him the story of his lineage: he is the product of one hundred and fifty years of rape, seven generations of raped mothers, all of whom lived in what would become the Chihuahua region. Lalo is not the first to be born of consensual sex, but the other, Rafael, died avenging his sister’s rape. The story of Lalo’s conception is this: In 1976, the young Maria Exposito met two students from Mexico City in the desert who said they were lost but appeared to be fleeing something and who, after a dizzying week, she never saw again. The students lived in their car and one of them seemed to be sick. They looked as if they were high on something and they talked a lot and didn’t eat anything, although she brought them tortillas and beans that she snuck from home. They talked, for example, about a new revolution, an invisible revolution that was already brewing but wouldn’t hit the streets for at least fifty years. Or five hundred. Or five thousand.

She makes love to both boys and has a child who she names Olegario Cura Exposito, nicknamed Lalo Cura. Could these students be Arturo Belano and Ulysses Lima? This incident is not mentioned in __The Savage Detectives__, but it could very well have occurred. It would certainly explain Lalo’s predilection towards detection. What we have, then, is a fictional history in which sexual violence and subjugation figure at every turn. This establishes Sonora as an epicenter or gyre of destructive forces, often inflicted upon it by the world. To expand upon this possibility, I will now examine the economic situation faced by the Mexican border region. Mexico is presently in an odd situation. It is a significant exporter, but has consistently low current account numbers. At the moment, Mexico actually has a current account deficit of 2.8 bn USD (down from a surplus of $200 million in February of this year). This is probably because the nation's export profits are offset by a capital outflow of 9 bn USD. As a percent of GDP (-1%), this outflow is unhealthy but by no means the worst in the world (though it is rising). But why is money leaving a country which exports so much? Historical data indicates that Mexico's trade balances have fluctuated but its current account has been consistently negative since the mid-eighties (with a plunge after the signing of NAFTA, probably because the minimal tax rates on corporations doing business in Mexico means that less money stays in the country). The price of the peso against the dollar has been relatively constant since 2009 and Mexico’s budget balance is negative, but better than most, so there has been little reason for capital flight. This suggests to me that Mexico’s steady GDP growth in the years since the 1995 signing of NAFTA have been driven as much by consumer spending as by industrial production. This is consistent with information in Aihwa Ong's "The Gender and Labor Politics of Postmodernity" that factory masters encourage their female employees to engage in extracurricular activities involving commodity-consumption and beauty competition (offering make-up classes, for example), while providing them with sexual and idealized images of beauty and stocking company stores with various commodities. What’s strange is the relatively high availability of capital in Mexico. Ten year government bonds are presently yielding at 7.75% (this is very high). This would be understandable if Mexico had debts to service or an economy to stimulate, but growth has recovered vigorously since 2009 and its debt-as-a-percent-of-GDP is a healthy-by-today’s-standards 37. (Compare to Spain’s 69%, the USA’s 73%, and Japan’s 200%.) I think the high yield rates in Mexico might be a scheme to stimulate growth at the price of expansion of debt. Expansion of credit balanced by a low spending-as-a-percent-of-GPD is a pretty good plan for growth (or at least a common one), but it’s not a good plan for improving quality of life or ending the drug war plaguing your country. Mexico’s murder rate is 22 per 100,000 and Chihuahua’s is 77. If Chihuahua was a country, that would be the second highest in the world, next to Honduras. Ed Villiamy’s article in the Guardian reports that, It is beyond question that during its seven-decade reign over Mexico the PRI operated a modus operandi of conviviality with the cartels. The rationale was that individual politicians and law enforcement officers would benefit, of course, but there was a wider motive – that which in Italy is known as the pax mafiosa, the mafia's peace. Broadly speaking, this means that a modicum of understanding between the cartels and government – national, regional and local – allows for a sufficiently blind official eye to products rolling across the border into the US, in return for which the cartels maintain a balance of power between each other, respect each other's "plazas", or turf, and a general peace.

Might this peace have enabled the forming of bonds between police and //narcos// that later created the climate of impunity? The article goes on to add that the peace was broken when the US pressured Mexico to arrest Félix Gallardo, don of the Guadalajara Cartel. The result was a succession war and a modernization of the mafia model. 60,000 have died in the drug war. A 2009 Pentagon study suggests that Mexico is, “at risk of becoming a failed state,” though the Economist argues that this is “wildly wrong” and that the violence is "starting to abate." I have seen no evidence to this effect. In 2012, the PRI regained power for the first time since 2000 with the election of Enrique Peña Nieto to president, but he promised to, “launch a new national-security strategy to reduce violence and fight drug cartels.” This suggests that the new PRI intends to depart from the party’s old strategy of tacit peace with the //narcotraficantes//, presumably because of international pressure and because the drug war is already underway. Villiamy quotes Juárez journalist Ignacio Alvarez Alvarado as saying that the cartels have substituted the old pyramidal chain of command for the same concession or franchising system as any other corporation... Like a good modern capitalist, the cartel outsources, it puts contracts out to tender, to give other people a chance to compete. They're a business like any other, and the cartels have got much more democratic in the modern, capitalist sense: outsourced, meritocratic and opportunistic...” I suppose you might call this, “Capitalism with mafia characteristics.” It seems to be another machine whose operation depends on its allowing the destruction of life to continue. There’s evidence of something like this in Bolaño: certainly the holocaust counts, but the holocaust-machine seems primitive compared to the one at work here. //Here//, the operation is allowed to continue undisturbed because so few of the individuals caught up in the machine are aware of its affects or feel responsible for them. Upon taking office, Nieto wrote for the Economist on his plans. He said that he intended to, “[establish] policies that foster competition in all sectors,” “Labour reform” that will “increase flexibility without infringing the rights of workers,” expand public-private partnerships, “allowing Pemex (the national oil company) to remain an engine of development, without having to cede state ownership over our nation’s resources,” and to focus on international cooperation in terms of, “international migration, climate change, ... the fight against drug-trafficking and organised crime,” and “the co-ordination of economic policy.” Essentially a collection of vague promises of prosperity and a signaled devotion to a continuing neoliberal agenda. All this says to me one thing: Mexico is America’s bitch and it’s being fucked in the ass by NAFTA and our drug war, but it can’t do anything because its government is even more corrupt and incompetent than ours. How did Mexico come to this? In, "Mexico: Entrenched Insiders," Albero Díaz-Cayeros argues that the “failure of the Mexican political-economic arrangement to produce a qualitative leap leading to sustained economic growth is related to a social arrangement that in equilibrium has allowed elites to successfully create mechanisms to produce and preserve many types of rents,” most notably “derived from the control of natural resources such as oil in the public sector.” Mexico is known for its public-private partnerships, a way to preserve state control of resources (and public control, in theory, but access to political power is too limited for this to really be the case) while still allowing development. Mexico’s strategy is comparable to China’s: a hegemonic political party maintains control over the natural resources worked by private corporations which, in reality, are mostly controlled by the same insiders who control politics. This, at least, was the system under the Partido Revolutionario Institucional (PRI), which held power from 1929 to 2000, and has recently re-won the presidency due to the failure of Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) to create economic growth and win the drug war. Both parties, however, are "insiders," unlikely to make any major change. Díaz-Careros also notes that, although Mexico is still a democratic system, most observers suggest that parties have become too indifferent to citizen demands, enjoying public financing, free access to media for their campaigns, and little accountability, since the decentralized political setting allows them to shift blame for policy failures to other levels of government. In __2666__ and in Rodriguez, this lack of accountability most notably affects the quality of the police response, and it in turn creates a climate of impunity. This is very much a machine for the destruction of life. Though practically no part of the machine //intends// to destroy life, all parts unintentionally function towards that end and some parts must do so viewing the resultant suffering as a necessary evil. The Sonoran femicides, then, exist in a space enabled by broader socioeconomic conditions. One way to solve the problem, then, would be to adjust conditions in a way that causes that space to disappear. This could be achieved by an expansion of public programs (which the Mexican government’s expansion of credit could enable, provided it’s willing to increase its debt load), direct military intervention (which has proved destructive and inflammatory elsewhere in the drug war), or changes to NAFTA which make multinationals more responsible for the violence their industrialization creates (which seems politically unfeasible), to make it illegal for America to import from exploitative economies (i.e. those which demand labor without providing basic rights or rule of law; also a politically unfeasible measure), or even just to force the maquiladoras to pay more taxes (which some would argue defeats the point of NAFTA altogether). That’s to say nothing of the fact that the American economic system is itself exploitative, as access to information (declared by the UN to be a human right) is restricted on the basis of wealth and crimes are punished with fines. It is absurd to imagine that Mexico could extract the aforementioned concessions from American politicians concerned firstly (in public, at least) with keeping price levels low at home. This seems to put a damper on hopes for political-economic solutions. What all this suggests is that a radical approach is necessary. Protest group Ni Una Mas’ tactics of agitation are working in the right direction. Bolaño’s work is well suited for the construction of guerilla action. At a restaurant, Oscar Fate overhears a young journalist interview the renowned criminologist and professor Albert Kessler. (Kessler’s visit to Mexico is part of a much-touted exchange program, but he doesn’t know Spanish and is watched closely by the local law enforcement, so he gives a lecture and goes home without contributing much to the solving of the crimes.) He says: I'll tell you three things I'm sure of: (a) everyone living in that city is outside of society, and everyone, I mean everyone, is like the ancient Christians in the Roman circus; (b) the crimes have different signatures; (c) the city seems to be booming, it seems to be moving ahead in some ineffable way, but the best thing would be for every last one of the people there to head out into the desert some night and cross the border.

A trip across the border might indeed be best. This invisible line, this arbitrary line that somehow says people on one side deserve rule of law and people on the other don’t... The swarm of immigrant-hopefuls is no surprise. That the crimes have different signatures is less surprising. The scale of the murders is simply too great for them to be the work of a Jack the Ripper. The problem stems from the spread of an idea-virus that causes killing. This could be a gang ritual or a fad – something spreads from person to person under the proper conditions. But these things spread through society, so what does it mean to be "outside of society"? What is “society?” Kessler might mean “civilized society,” i.e. The First World, in which case the Roman metaphor makes sense. Prisoners of an empire, these Christians are lions too, devouring themselves and each other. To get out, to leave the arena pit and cross into the stands, would be “best” thing for the individual, but not really a solution to the whole problem. Thus the necessity of them all crossing at once – the populace moves into a political zone where laws are enforced, the idea-virus has no climate in which to replicate, and the spiral collapses. This is the sort of osmosis that would be natural, but national laws prohibit it. El Cerdo (The Pig) is a university professor and the foremost Mexican expert on Archimboldi. He considers leaving Mexico, but reminds himself that “distancing oneself from power is never good.” He has power in Mexico and thus wants to remain. The powerless masses want to leave, but lack the power to do so. Is it true that “distancing oneself from power is never good”? Well, it’s true that the desperate Mexican masses would be safer on the American side of the border, within the sphere of the epicenter of global power. Bolaño himself, however, was notable déclassé, so I'll note in his name that proximity to power is also proximity to illusion, a risk of intoxication. Consider a press conference where a reporter brings up the alleged production of snuff films in Sonora and suggests that it’s a symptom of corruption and the “problem of the drug trade and the heaps of money revolving around it.” A general replies dismissively that, “he [doesn’t] think corruption today was any worse than under past governments.” This sort of dismissal is the sort of intoxication to which I refer. From the position of power, one is inclined to view events historically or geopolitically. “People have always been starving, people have always been dying in wars,” the line goes, as if that’s some sort of argument against opposing direct or indirect violence. It doesn’t matter whether corruption is worse than it used to be. It matters that there’s too much corruption. Individuals in power are inclined to argue that the status quo should not change. Those who have power maintain it only by the passivity of those who don't. El Cerdo receives a call from Archimboldi, who has been accosted by several police officers. El Cerdo asks if they stole anything from him. No: they just wanted money. “’That's good,’ said El Cerdo in German. ‘That's progress.’” This narrow-minded cynicism, this Availability Heuristic’d pretend-progress, is the symptom of a man too invested in the system to demand change. He considers himself, “the unknown soldier in a doomed battle against barbarism,” though of course “barbarism” could mean anything. Pinochet’s soldiers battled barbarism. I see no hope in El Cerdo’s elitism, defeatism, and arrogance. This is the impotent bourgeoisie paralysis enabling the problem itself. These currents collide over Sonora. We have elements of culture suggested or hinted at: stubbornness, silence, piety, sacrophobia, gynophobia. We have economic interests, powerhouse monoliths of mind-boggling scale, imaginary political borders made real by the guns of their guardians, and the immediate realities of lives on starvation wages. Fate and Chucho drive through the city and Chucho turns on the radio: Fate heard an accordion and some far-off shouts, not of sorrow or joy but of pure energy, self-sufficient and self-consuming. Chucho Flores smiled and his smile remained stamped on his face as he kept driving, not looking at Fate, facing forward, as if he'd been fitted with a steel neck brace, as the wails came closer and closer to the microphones and the voices of people who Fate imagined as savage beasts began to sing or kept howling, less than at first, and shouting viva for no clear reason. "What is this?" asked Fate. "Sonoran jazz," said Chucho Flores.

At the boxing match Fate’s meant to cover, the Mexicans are sure their man will win. (In reality, the American wins with a knockout in the second round.) Before the match, they sing: Three thousand Mexicans up in the gallery of the arena singing the same song in unison. Fate tried to get a look at them, but the lights, focused on the ring, left the upper part of the hall in darkness. The tone, he thought, was solemn and defiant, the battle hymn of a lost war sung in the dark. In the solemnity there was only desperation and death, but in the defiance there was a hint of corrosive humor, a humor that existed only in relation to itself and in dreams, no matter whether the dreams were long or short. Sonoran jazz.

This corrosive humor is the Virgin’s wink, the death’s head’s laugh. A corrosive humor, a very Latin American sort of joke, a love of doom and a sense of incredible beauty in the apocalyptic landscape. Fighting a lost war by not fighting at all, fighting with faith or a burst of savage, directionless defiance at an enemy beyond comprehension, a monolith that rises above the clouds of its own creation and sends out mechanical spiders, invisible agents, invincible tides beyond even its own control to further ends as petty and animal any we can imagine. The sound of warring factions of howler monkeys: humanity. If there is hope, it comes from Oscar Fate and Lalo Cura and Sergio Gonzalez. Even that hope comes at a price. Fate writes an article about a Black Panther founder who gives a speech in a church. He describes the mother of another founder as faithful, industrious, kind, and common-sensical. She works at a factory. All these things draw her closer to the Mexican mothers, the members of Ni Una Mas, as those four traits are also “Mexican,” though they’re more positive. This mother is an example of why would-be warriors might choose passivity and silence. The successes of the Black Panthers came at a cost: the pain of those mothers who saw their children killed or imprisoned. “A mother is worth more than a Black Revolution,” he says. All the same: The Panthers had helped bring the change. With our grain of sand or our dump truck. We had contributed. So had his mother and all the other black mothers who wept at night and saw visions of the gates of hell when they should have been asleep.

The Panthers are warriors more than detectives, but their function is the same. They take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. This comes at a cost, as do all such wars, but a cost which perhaps is the only way to end Sonora and to prevent a new Auschwitz.

 Op. Cit. "Abandon Everything, Again"  Op. Cit. __2666__. Loc 10147, 49%. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __2666__. Loc. 12475, 60%. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> "Trade, Exchange Rates, Budget Balances, and Interest Rates." The Economist. April 6th, 2013. [] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> "Mexico." Trading Economics. [] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> "Trade, Exchange Rates, Budget Balances, and Interest Rates." The Economist. Feb 23rd, 2013. http://www.economist.com/news/economic-and-financial-indicators/21572211-trade-exchange-rates-budget-balances-and-interest-rates <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;"> Ong, Aihwa. "The Gender and Labor Politics of Postmodernity." Annual Review of Anthropology. Vol. 20 (1991). <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2155803> pp. 279-309 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> "2013 Macro-Economic Data." __2013 Index of Economic Freedom.__ The Heritage Foundation. []

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Villiamy, Ed. "Mexico elections: failure of drugs war leaves nation at the crossroads" The Guardian. < http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/23/mexico-elections-drugs-war> <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Ibid. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> "Mexico’s ‘failed state’ threat." The Week. January 16, 2009. http://theweek.com/article/index/92337/mexicos-failed-state-threat <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> "The rise of Mexico." The Economist. Nov. 24th, 2012. <http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21567081-america-needs-look-again-its-increasingly-important-neighbour-rise-mexico> <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> "Mexico's moment." The Economist. Nov 21st, 2013. <http://www.economist.com/news/21566314-enrique-pe%C3%B1a-nieto-mexicos-newly-elected-president-sets-out-his-priorities-mexicos-moment> <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|Op.] Cit. Villiamy. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Díaz-Cayeros, Alberto. “Mexico: Entrenched Insiders.” __In the Shadow of Violence__. Cambridge University Press. New York, 2013. Pg 244. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Ibid. Pg 244. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __2666__. Loc. 2596, 12%. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __2666__. Loc. 12047, 58%. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __2666__. Loc. 2563, 12%. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __2666__. Loc. 2906, 14%. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __2666__. Loc. 7184, 34%. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __2666__. Loc. 7365, 35%. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __2666__. Loc. 5751, 27%.