Instead, he argues, the true jefes, those responsible for all the violence and in charge of the drug trade, are the politicians and businessmen of Mexico, who corrupt from the inside. They’re not caricatures of evil portrayed in movies like Sicario. Instead of showing chest, they button up, trading in snake-skin cowboy boots for freshly-shined Oxfords. These men don’t carry around gold-plated AKs. There are more powerful criminals than Pablo, and they’re being overlooked because they seem ordinary. The charismatic anti-hero – like Netflix’s Pablo Escobar – a macho man who keeps the state under his thumb, is written to entertain. Like Bolaño, whom he met one day in Paris, Zavala thinks narcos are misunderstood.
Bolaño’s realistic depiction of narcos in 2666 gave Zavala a way to pick apart what he calls “narcocultura”- a string of sensationalist novels, telenovelas, music, and movies that imagine the narcos’ powers too broadly. At its heart is an investigation into the femicide occurring in Santa Teresa, killings which were inspired by Ciudad Juárez’s own decade-long history of unsolved murders of women. Published in the years before the 2006-12 surge in the city’s murder rate – when more than 100,000 people died – the novel connects five interrelated stories that riff on a central theme of violence. Divided into five parts, 2666 centers around Santa Teresa, a fictionalized Mexican city based on Ciudad Juárez. I met Zavala recently at Caffe Reggio in Greenwich Village to talk about 2666, a posthumous, sprawling novel written by Robert Bolaño, the Chilean novelist many consider to be the greatest Latin American writer since Jorge Luis Borges. Spend enough time with him, talk about the drug trade long enough, and, more likely than not, you’ll come to realize that most of what you know about it is a myth. But that doesn’t stop him from trying to counter popular depictions of the US-Mexico drug trade whenever he can.
Zavala, who was born in Ciudad Juárez and is an associate professor at CUNY Graduate Center, understands that most people may never read any of his ideas, published mostly in academia, and may also never take the time to investigate narcotráfico as much as he does. When Oswaldo Zavala talks about the US-Mexico drug trade, he does so with a desperation common to those who study it.
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