Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

Hari travels to the U.S.-Mexico border to visit the city considered “the most dangerous in the world” (116) and explore the role of Mexican drug cartels in the war on drugs. The city, Ciudad Juárez, sits just across the border from El Paso, Texas. More than 60,000 people were killed in Ciudad Juárez over a five-year period in the 2000s because the city serves as “the most important smuggling route into the Unites States and the gangs were at war to control it” (117). Hari speaks to Juan Manuel Olguín, a 16-year-old who is part of what has become known as the Angels of Juárez. This group of kids joined forces to protest the murders in their city by going to murder scenes masqueraded in eight-foot-tall angel costumes with signs holding the murderers to account, often mentioning the drug lords by name. Hari admits that “most people in Juárez are amazed the angels have not been shot. They will tell you, wearily, that it is only a matter of time” (118).

Next, Hari attempts to describe what life is like inside a cartel, something that has been nearly impossible because of their secretive nature. Hari interviews Rosalio Reta, a former teenage hitman for the Zetas who is now incarcerated at a Texas prison. The Zetas are a particularly brutal Mexican cartel that received military training from the US government. As Hari explains it, “the United States government—determined to achieve Harry Anslinger’s mission of spreading the drug war to every country on earth—had decided to train an elite force within Mexico to win the war on drugs” (120). The America’s 7th Special Forces Group brought the Mexican force to the Fort Bragg, Carolina base, provided training, equipped them for battle, and sent them back to Mexico. Once back across the border, however, the men deserted en masse to work as the Gulf Cartel’s enforcement arm. Hari uses the analogy that “this would be as if the Navy Seals defected from the U.S. military to help the Crips take over Los Angeles” (121).

Reta grew up in the border town of Laredo, Texas, but he and his friends crossed the border often. He has claimed both that he joined the cartel because of the money and power it afforded and that he was forced into it—but either way, he began killing. He spent six months at a Zetas training camp in the mountains of Mexico, “slowly being turned into a human weapon” (120). Reta describes in detail the brutality with which the cartel operated, from beheading and burning rival cartel members alive to murdering the family members of anyone who betrayed them—all to gain a competitive advantage by being more brutal than other gangs. Reta was nearly murdered by the cartel but escaped and remains one of the few to do so. He willingly turned himself in to American police just to stay alive. Hari posits that the reasons drug gangs have successfully controlled Mexico but not the US are that the foundations of law and democracy are a new concept—and that in Juárez, “60 to 70 percent of the economy runs on laundered drug money” (127). 

In this chapter, Hari tells the heart-rending story of Marisela Escobedo, a Juárez woman who fought the cartel and the state for justice. When Marisela found a note from her daughter, Rubi, saying that she had run away from her family to be with her older boyfriend, Sergio, she found it odd. She visited Sergio’s mother and found him there with her new grandson but saw no sign of Rubi. Shortly thereafter, she visited again, and Sergio and the baby had disappeared as well. Marisela and her son began asking questions around Sergio’s neighborhood and soon found a teenager who admitted to having been paid to help dispose of Rubi’s body. The boy’s life had been threatened, but he finally agreed to go to the police. The police, however, did nothing, so Marisela did. Hari explains that “in the middle of the killing fields of Ciudad Juárez, she was going to become a freelance police force of one” (134).

When Marisela finally located Sergio in a town 16 hours away, she told the police, but “they refused to act” (134). Despite being diagnosed with breast cancer and undergoing an emergency double mastectomy, Marisela continued her pursuit. The local police finally acted and arrested Sergio, gaining a full confession from him. The teenager who had seen Rubi’s body testified against him at trial, but Sergio was acquitted because the judge said that the confession was not valid. When the teenager who testified was found dead, along with his family, it became clear that Sergio was a Zeta. Hari argues that “by joining the Zetas somewhere along the line, Sergio had placed himself above the law” (138). Marisela found Sergio once again, but the police let him escape. She decided then to march more than 1,000 miles, from Juárez to Mexico City, to speak to President Calderon personally. When the president refused to see her, Marisela played her last card by deciding to go public, to tell her story to the world. To do this, she traveled to Chihuahua City, the state capitol, an area that the Zetas control and one of Mexico’s most tightly secured places. One night, as she sat outside the capitol building, the heavily policed streets emptied, and a man approached Marisela and then shot and killed her.