[BretLudwig]

Out of Mexico€”A British Journalist Survives The Lawless Mountains Of
Mexico

By Bellamy London

"The British have always been an adventuring people. Since they are a
literary people also, it is not surprising that they should excel at the
art of travel writing. In modern times, George Borrow, Richard Francis
Burton, Charles Doughty, T.E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, Evelyn Waugh, and
Graham Greene spring to mind as exemplars of that art. And now there is
Richard Grant, a British citizen residing in Tucson, Arizona, who came to
the United States as the British correspondent for an American magazine
and stayed on to write books about the kind of nomadic misfits in which
America has always abounded.

Fifteen years ago, Mr. Grant developed a fascination also for misfits
south of the border who, by the success they have achieved in the
northwestern states of the Peoples Republic of Mexico, are misfits no
longer but rather the dominant majority.

These are the denizens of the Sierra Madre Occidental who grow the
fabulously lucrative drug crops raised in the sierra, smuggle them within
Mexico and into El Norte, defend these growers and smugglers against their
rival narcotraficantes, and battle that portion of the police and the
federal army that remains unbought by them. Together, they have created
the drug culture that has become the mainstream culture of Chihuahua,
Sonora, Sinaloa, and Durango states.

Rashly€”almost insanely€”Richard Grant decided that he must and would
travel the length of the Sierra de la Madre to experience the reality of
this surreal region for himself.[Watch a clip in Youtube.]

He began by paying a visit to J.P.S. Brown, the novelist and sometime gold
prospector who had spent almost forty years traveling horseback in the
Sierra, at his ranch in Patagonia, a small town northeast of Nogales on
the Arizona-New Mexico border.

Brown had two questions for his guest. Can you ride a horse? And, Can you
speak Spanish? Grant answered no to both questions. Well, said Brown, in
that case I dont see how you can possibly come out of that place
alive.

Brown himself taught Richard Grant to ride a horse, and Grant enrolled in
a month-long Spanish immersion course in the city of Guanajuato in
Mexicos central highlands. The riding lessons, as it happened, were
largely unnecessary, as Grant reports having ridden a horse only once in
Mexico. The Spanish lessons, on the contrary, probably saved his life.
Fluency in Spanish and an initial caution, plus a generous measure of good
luck, combined to bring him safely through his travels.

When that caution was eroded in the end by over-confidence, and the good
luck abruptly ran out, Grant came perilously close to becoming another
victim of the culture of the Sierra Madre in which murder is no more than
a pastime, "to please the trigger finger", as the locals down there say.

Richard Grant describes his Mexican sojourn in Gods Middle Finger: Into
the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre (Free Press, 2008). The book is
audaciously conceived and brilliantly executed. The setting and characters
are observed closely and in telling detail, the language and style are
masterful, the dramatic and narrative pacing flawless. As a work of travel
literature, it is quite simply at the top of its class. The book is also,
in its implications, a disturbing geo-political document.

Grant is fascinated by Mexico and by the Mexican people, of whom€”despite
the books deeply disillusioned ending€”he remains a friend. He knows
both the fascination and the horror that so many non-Mexicans have always
felt for Mexico, and he is deeply aware of his conflicting feelings and
impulses.

Gods Middle Finger affords no clue to the authors opinions regarding
Mexican immigration, legal or illegal, to the United States. (Mr. Grant,
after all, remains a British subject.) And so I have no intention of
attributing to him whatever conclusions I myself draw from his book.
Whoever has an interest in Mexico, or in literature, or simply in a
fascinating narrative compellingly told, should read Gods Middle
Finger. So should people with a care for what moves north from Mexico, and
into this country.

"Everything that happens in Mexico turns to sh-t", a local acquaintance in
southern Sonora told Grant. Grant asked another friend whether he agreed
with that assessment:

"€˜Absolutely, said Gustavo. €˜Thats why we dont believe in the
future. We dont plan and build to make a better future for ourselves
because our history and our experience teaches us that everything always
turns to ****."

Later, the man expands on this remark.

"The thing about Mexico is that everyone is out to get everyone else,
except within your family and your closest friends€¦.We live with our
senses and suspicions on full alert because who knows where the next plot
against you might come from? Maybe someone thinks your wife is prettier
than his wife so he whispers something to the police, or the mafia, and
the next thing you know the police are planting drugs in your truck and
youre going to jail for ten years or theres a bullet in your head
and you may never know why."

The drug culture of the Sierra Madre, which developed in part from one in
which "everything turns to sh-t", is both the epitome of, and the
synechdoche for, that broader culture in which **** always happens. "Our
art movement is not needed in this country", said André Breton, the
French surrealist, when he visited Mexico. Mexico has always had a strong
surrealist component. But the Sierra Madre is pure surrealism; indeed, it
is surrealism raised to the level of supra-surreality.

The Old American South served King Cotton. In the sierra, King Pot reigns
over all. Marijuana is known as "the crop that pays". Cocaine pays, too,
as do murder and every form of illegality.

And in the sierra, everyone makes a business of getting everyone, if only
because nobody knows who really is who, or on which side, given the
extreme fluidity of identities and of roles. Federal police sent by Mexico
City each fall to burn out the marijuana fields€”but not too many of them,
and chiefly for the purpose of reassuring Washington, D.C. that the Mexican
government is "doing something" about drugs€”may actually be in league
with the growers themselves. Police officers in cantinas in cities between
the mountains and the Pacific coast drink beer by the quarter-gallon while
blasting parakeet (snorting cocaine) and smoking mota (marijuana). (he
house rule, which the cops dont always trouble themselves to observe,
is, Go into the baño to do a line. Soldiers kill growers, and growers
kill soldiers, whose comrades may be paid off by growers. The drug mafiosi
and narcotraficantes kill each other. The roads are full of asaltantes
(bandits) robbing people and killing as an afterthought, or to please that
trigger-finger. (Tourists are usually spared, so long as they keep to the
beaten track, since the federal and state governments have determined that
killing them is bad for the national tourist industry.)

In the Sierra Madre, where men wear t-shirts and baseball caps printed
with marijuana leaves and AK-47s, what might be taken as a fashion
statement is really a statement of a different sort. There, and in the
lowlands, towns, and cities surrounding the mountains, legal anarchy and
corruption have led to anarchy and corruption in morals. Or perhaps it is
the other way around. Or perhaps it is impossible to say which has led to
which. The point is, society and government scarcely exist in Sonora,
Chihuahua, Sinaloa, and Durango.

Nor does moral restraint in any form. Appetites and impulses are freely,
recklessly, suicidally indulged. And not the drug appetite only. "¡El
hÃ*gado no existe!"€”"The liver does not exist!" (Mr. Grant calls this
"the most Mexican of all drinking toasts".) Sexual morality too seems
non-existent in Sierra Madre culture, where fervent supplications to the
Mother of God have been replaced by rhetorical invocations of the Grand
Raped Whore and the Great Fornicated Bitch. (Grant explains that the lady
in question is probably the Aztec Indian princess who served as
Cortéss interpreter. If she also served him in another capacity, that
would establish her as the mother of Mexicos subsequent mestizo
majority).

If the Estados Unidos were one day to legalize drugs, the economy of
Mexico would be instantly destroyed, more completely than if its oil
reserves were suddenly to dry up.

As the situation stands today, whenever the Mexican army burns a farmer
out of his "crop that pays", everyone dependent on that crop heads north
to the border, where the illegal crossing is greatly facilitated by
friends and relatives, in Mexico and the U.S., with mucha experiencia
smuggling drugs onto American soil. In this way, the violent, murderous,
treacherous, immoral, and hideously destructive narco-culture of the
Sierra Madre is gradually extending itself northward, into the American
Southwest where it has already succeeded in infiltrating Los Angeles,
Phoenix, El Paso, and many other places.

If the process continues, Gods middle finger will inexorably penetrate
deeper into American territory and the American political and social
fabric alike, with results dreadful to contemplate.

I will not spoil Richard Grants climactic scene for interested readers
by giving the story away here, but a passage from the final paragraph may
be quoted without harm.

"I drove out of the mountains and then north across the plains and deserts
and I didnt stop driving for fifteen hours until I was in striking
distance of the U.S. border. I was willing to write about celebrity
bathroom fixtures for a living, designer footwear, what your window
treatments say about you. Some other fool could go into Sinaloa. I never
wanted to set foot in the Sierra Madre again. The mean drunken hillbillies
who lived up there could all feud themselves into extinction and burn in
hell."

My guess is that Richard Grant remains fascinated by Mexico. I suspect
further that he is glad that such a place as Mexico exists, and not too
far from Tucson, either.

But I feel absolutely certain that he is grateful that a place that is
emphatically not Mexico still remains "in striking distance" of the
Peoples Republic.

If he is as intelligent a man as his book suggests, he wants to keep
things that way.

And so do I."

Bellamy London [Send him mail] travels frequently in northern Mexico.

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