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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 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 Narcos, 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.
Saviano – who lives in hiding under 24/7 guard, after death treats arising from Gomorrah, his book about the Neapolitan mafia – and I were due to discuss Zero Zero Zero at the 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 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, 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.
“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.”
At the start of this year, writing from New York, Saviano 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). Click here to order a copy for £16
Courtesy the Guardian
The Benjamin Bissan Shekari Lives on Foundation End of Year Fiesta Comes up as follows: DATE 30th DECEMBER 2915 TIME: 9:00 AM VENUE: BBSLOF Youth Centre M/Rido
So smart by Adele! When you have one of the best voices in the world, you should do everything you can to keep it that way — and the Hello singer is doing just that! She will not allow cigarette to destroy it She reveal to The Daily Mirror, that she want her carrier to be long and also have some family concern on the issue.
