The man who exposed the lie of the war on drugs
Roberto Saviano already lives under armed guard
after writing about the Neapolitan mafia. Now he
is determined to uncover capitalism’s complicity
with the narco-lords of South America
<http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/26/man-who-exposed-lie-war-on-drugs-roberto-saviano-ed-vulliamy#img-1>
Roberto Saviano
<http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/26/man-who-exposed-lie-war-on-drugs-roberto-saviano-ed-vulliamy#img-1>
Roberto Saviano: ‘The black market has become
the biggest market in the world.’ Photograph: Sintesi/Sipa/Rex Shutterstock
Ed Vulliamy
<http://www.theguardian.com/profile/edvulliamy>Ed
Vulliamy Saturday 26 December 2015 16.00 GMTLast
modified on Sunday 27 December 201513.56 GMT
Pablo Escobar was “the first to understand that
it’s not the world of cocaine that must orbit
around the markets, but the markets that must rotate around cocaine”.
Of course, Escobar didn’t put it that way: this
heretical truth was posited by Roberto Saviano in
his latest book
<https://bookshop.theguardian.com/zero-zero-zero.html>Zero
Zero Zero, the most important of the year and the
most cogent ever written on how narco-traffic
works. Here is a book that speaks what must be
told at the end of another year of drug war
spreading further and deeper, that tells what you
will not learn from
<http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/aug/28/pablo-escobar-narcos-netflix-drama-rise-to-power>Narcos,
<http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/breaking-bad>Breaking
Bad or the countless official reports.
The realisation that cocaine capitalism is
central to our economic universe made Escobar the
Copernicus of organised crime, argues Saviano,
adding: “No business in the world is so dynamic,
so restlessly innovative, so loyal to the pure
free-market spirit as the global cocaine
business.” It sounds simple, but it isn’t – it is
revolutionary and, says Saviano, it explains the world.
The City of London is a far more important centre
for laundering criminal money than the Cayman Islands
Roberto Saviano
Saviano – who lives in hiding
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/14/-sp-roberto-saviano-my-life-under-armed-guard-gomorrah>under
24/7 guard, after death threats arising
from<http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jan/12/crime.mafia>Gomorrah,
his book about the Neapolitan mafia – and I were
due to discuss Zero Zero Zero at the
<https://www.hayfestival.com/arequipa/en-index.aspx?skinid=18>Hay
Arequipa book festival in Peru this month. But
Saviano was unable to make it, because of
difficulties in arranging his movements. For
eight years, he has lived in undisclosed venues,
with a permanent dispatch of
seven<http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28254297>carabinieri
guards, rarely spending more than a few nights in
the same bed. A video link to Peru proved too
complicated, but what Saviano had to say was too
important to let go, too pressing and radical to
lose in the ether of the logistics. In the end we
spoke by telephone last weekend.
“Capitalism,” says Saviano, “needs the criminal
syndicates and criminal markets… This is the most
difficult thing to communicate. People – even
people observing organised crime – tend to
overlook this, insisting upon a separation
between the black market and the legal market.
It’s the mentality that leads people in Europe
and the USA to think of a mafioso who goes to
jail as a mobster, a gangster. But he’s not, he’s
a businessman, and his business, the black
market, has become the biggest market in the world.”
This is Saviano’s sagacious heresy. For decades,
writing on global mafia has presumed a Manichean
schism between cops and robbers; our healthy
society and law enforcement on one hand battling
organised crime on the other (with occasional
erring by the former). But the trail blazed by
Saviano and very few others demolishes that
account, backed by every recent development in
Mexico’s narco-nightmare, including and
especially the escape, again, of the heir to
Escobar’s mantle,
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/13/joachin-el-chapo-guzman-jailbreak-mexican-drug-lord-escape-prison>Joaquin
“Chapo” Guzman, from supposedly maximum-security
jail. Narco cartels like Guzman’s are not
adversaries of global capitalism, nor even
pastiches of it; they are integral to – and
pioneers of – the free market. They are its role model.
We hear much these days about the pros and cons
of legalising drugs, but very little about
narco-traffic as political economy. Now, Saviano
articulates and demonstrates what many of us who
write about mafia have been trying for years to
shout from rooftops, only none of us climbed high
enough, cried as loud, or crystallised it like he
does. Here it is, the lie of any dividing line
between legal and illegal. Here it is, laid bare:
cartel as corporation, corporation as cartel;
cocaine as pure capitalism, capitalism as
cocaine, known in its purest form as
zero-zero-zero – a wry reference to the name of
the best grade of flour, ideal for pasta.
Saviano writes in his own distinct style of
narrative literary reportage, at once factually
informative and impressionistic. He opens Zero
Zero Zero with a scathing tragicomic reflection
on who in your life uses cocaine: “If it’s not
your mother or father… then the boss does. Or the
boss’s secretary… the oncologist… the waiters who
will work the wedding… If not them, then the town
councillor who just approved the new pedestrian
zones.” Within three-score pages he has stripped
bare the system whereby – and why – the white
powder got up their noses. “Cocaine,” he
concludes, applying the logic of business school,
“is a safe asset. Cocaine is an anticyclical
asset. Cocaine is the asset that fears neither
resource shortages nor market inflation.” Of
course, cocaine capitalism – as brazenly as any
other commodity, possibly more so – has “both
feet firmly planted in poverty… [and] unskilled
labour, a sea of interchangeable subjects, that
perpetuates a system of exploitation of the many and enrichment of the few”.
“Cocaine becomes a product like gold or oil,” he
adds in conversation, “but more economically
potent than gold or oil. With these other
commodities, if you don’t have access to mines or
wells, it’s hard to break into the market. With
cocaine, no. The territory is farmed by desperate
peasants, from whose product you can accumulate
huge quantities of capital and cash in very little time.
“If you’re selling diamonds, you have to get them
authenticated, licensed – cocaine, no. Whatever
you have, whatever the quality, you can sell it
immediately. You are in perfect synthesis with
the everyday life and ethos of the global markets
– and the ignorance of politicians in the west to
understand this is staggering. The European
world, the American world, don’t understand these
forces, they don’t have the will to understand narco-traffic.”
In a previous book, soon to be translated, called
Vieni Via Con Me – Come Away With Me – Saviano
talked about the “ecomafia” for which it is
“always fundamental to be looking for terrain and
spaces in which to conceal and proliferate
itself”, just as a corporation carves out
markets. In Zero Zero Zero, he writes about what
might be called the genealogy of
narco-syndicates, from their paternalistic period
of “conservative capitalism” to the lean, mean
multinational corporations they have become:
buying failing banks, working the credit economy,
taking over interbank loans. Permeating the
system until they become indistinct from it,
until (writes Saviano in Vieni Via Con Me):
“democracy is literally in danger”, and we become
“all equal, all contaminated… in the machine of mud”.
“So the story of narco-traffic,” he says now, “is
not something that happens far away. People like
to think of this disgusting violence as something
distant, but it’s not. Our entire economy is infused with this narrative.”
For some reason, he says, the Anglo-Saxon world
is slower to understand the innate criminality of
the “legal” system than Latin societies. “I think
the Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-American world is infused
by a kind of Calvinist positivism; people want to
believe in the health of their society,” says
Saviano, even though “what this all means is
that, for instance, the City of London is a far
more important centre for laundering criminal money than the Cayman Islands”.
The mafia, he argues, has a particular way of
entrenching its presence and increasing its
strength, in a manner almost Darwinian,
evolutionary: “the force of the mafia is this. If
a mafioso messes up, he dies – and thus they
develop a system of survival. When they make a
mistake, they are killed and replaced by someone
even more ruthless, so that the organisation becomes even stronger.”
HSBC has form: remember Mexico and laundered drug money
At the start of this year, writing from New York,
Saviano
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/14/-sp-roberto-saviano-my-life-under-armed-guard-gomorrah>described
his threatened life under guard in our sister
paper, the Guardian, and in this book that
followed he asks himself, poignantly: “Is it really worth it?”
“I write about Naples, but Naples plugs her
ears,” he laments. It is, he writes, “my fault if
the articles I keep writing about the blood
spilled in the cocaine markets fall upon deaf
ears”. Any reporter or writer on these subjects
feels a version of these feelings, but – apart
from our colleagues in Mexico or Colombia – with
so much less to pay than Saviano has paid: with his liberty and security.
“Sometimes I think I’m obsessed,” he reflects in
the book, but “other times I’m convinced these
stories are a way of telling the truth”. Here we
have it. Whether obsessed or not, Saviano
realises the brutal truth: that to understand
narco-traffic is to understand the modern world.
“You can’t understand how the global economy
functions if you don’t understand narco-traffic”, he says in conversation.
A remarkable passage in Zero Zero Zero explains
why: a transcription of an FBI tape recording of
a seasoned Italian mafioso in New York schooling
young Mexican footsoldiers in the difference
between law and “the rules”. Laws are there to be
broken, he urges, but the rules of the
organisation are sacrosanct, on pain of death.
“The law is supposed to be for everybody,”
Saviano tells me, “but the rules are made by the
so-called men of honour. This is how
narco-traffic explains the world, by embracing
all the contradictions of the world. To succeed
in narco-traffic, you apply the rules to break
the law. And today, any big corporation can only
succeed if it adopts the same principle – if its
rules demand that it break the law.”
Zero Zero Zero is published by Allen Lane (£20).
<https://bookshop.theguardian.com/zero-zero-zero.html>Click
here to order a copy for £16
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Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
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