Act One - The King
Escobar rose out of almost nothing and was elevated to a position of power by the chance of seeds growing beneath his feet. He awoke and looked down, the roots planted in his small-scale smuggling operation now hypertrophying far beyond their natural capacity. Before it could be comprehended, the gang of thuggish Medellin gangsters were elevated to a status to which their egos struggled to grow in kind with. Escobar matched his scale of growth by doubling down on what he and his affiliates had always known, thus ensuing the construction of Hacienda Napoles and Escobar’s failed bid for political office. And like all things Monarchical, the fragility inherent was the destruction of the thing contained within itself. The vertical order before it was created already contained “The Tower” and lightning struck, as it was always destined to. Hacienda Napoles was razed and Escobar, going out in a tantrum of bombings, was tracked down by anonymous death squads and American law enforcement, finally winding up shot dead on an urban roof, his body posed over like a trophy kill.
Act Two - The Company
In contrast to the model of the monarchical Medellin Cartel, the Cali Cartel took a more modernist approach. Modeling itself after any public corporation, it diversified its holdings, ran itself above board, and made its existence as anonymous as possible. And in doing so, its own destruction occurred in the thing which it had inbuilt into its own fragility. As Escobar was laid out and slain as a trophy, Cali was dismantled thoroughly with light. Information exposed and tensions pushed to their breaking point, to eventually rend and grind them down to nothing. its leader died in prison, in a hopeless jungle.
Both Medellin and Cali suffered an identical problem - they were all built on the organizational level at the point of primary production. This is untenable for an organization which suffers the problems of the narcotics trade. The narcotics demand will always exist, no law can legislate away natural pathways of chemical ingestion, yet legal arms can reach easily to burn fields or raze labs. The narcos who survive do so as close as possible to the consumer, as close as possible to that which will never be removed from existence - the user and their demand for the substance. When the cartels adapted past the mistakes of these cartels, it was by moving forward, down the supply chain to that which formed the actual foundation of the very existence of their market. No wonder then that the porous US-Mexican border and the cartels which straddled, forming their business around transportation and distribution became the easy successors to Colombia’s once undeniable dominance.
Act Three - The Nation
In the first two meetings between Felix and the Minister of Defense in Narcos: Mexico, a tactic is employed by the Minister to twist the knives of power within Felix. Forcing Felix to wait for an extreme length of time as he deliberately delays him, he forces Felix to bend to his wishes. Felix has come to him and thus he will make Felix supplicate by waiting as well as trapping Felix within his grasp for as long as possible, keeping him entrapped to be used and manipulated. Such echoes the techniques of Phillip II, the Habsburg ruler of the newly formed Kingdom of Spain. A newly confederated kingdom, the smaller regional territories held by the crown were still tenuous in their allegiance to the central authority. Phillip II overcame this by forcing them all into his stiff machines of etiquette, drawing out procedures as long as possible, deliberately delaying, and strategically choosing when, where, and what, to either grind down or expedite. In doing so, all things in the Kingdom were forced through the narrow straw of the crown, thus forcibly centralizing all things upon the impassive face of the royal authority.
This is prophetic, in an occult way, to the downfall of the Guadalajara cartel. Felix, over time, became ingratiated into the realm of the centralized state, fulfilling like-attraction between them and his own role leading the Guadalajara cartel. Federalizing and centralizing the disparate plazas into a unified organization, his downfall was in the same which destroys other similar projects. A disunited patchwork is centralized, only for its inborn factionalism and chaos to come back with a vengeance as those old disunities are forged into larger, far more powerful chunks of power. Such happened to Felix, where each boss deserted him, leaving him alone as all of Mexico was divided into half a dozen or so nation-states of cartel activity.
It was this nature of the cartel that was seized upon and shown by the rise and fall of Los Zetas. Trained originally in the special forces (GAFE) by various BLUFOR powers (United States and IDF most prominently) they rose up quickly, taking advantage of the new way of things. In 2004, the state in which they were active was declared to be “lost” by the Mexican government - their power at such a level, that they had become equivalent to a breakaway-within. The same occurs time and time again now, as similar incidents happen across Mexico, with only increasing intensity as the central authority cedes more of its violence-monopoly (and thus its territory) to the cartel-nations.
Act Four - The Market
El Chapo’s success was in large part due to utilizing the same fitness-mechanisms inbuilt to every market against his rivals. In this case, the strategic deployment of information and tips to American law enforcement in order to get himself rid of his rivals, and using factional disputes as opportunities to insert himself as the power-that-is in the wasteland after war.
In all of these cases as in every evolutionary struggle, there are certain natural pressures that force the organisms in play to adapt. A history of the drug trade is a history of adaptation to id and superego of the self in pursuing its ultimate goal, teleological to its biological structure. As an animal desires food in discourses of constructed “wilderness”, the human mind is built to chase reward. Narcotics are the perfect match for humanity, the ultimate end of its biological being fulfilled in all ways. The compatibility is mutual, with all actions of narcotics being the satisfaction of certain mechanisms deliberately left constantly-hungry in order to provide the energy that must be sublimated into labor.
In the same fashion, the machine which desires to produce narcotics faces its own versions of these pleasures. The endless egos, libidinal fury of the sicaros compete for internal dissolution, just as the DEA and attendant organizations of the sublimating order compete for destruction from the outside. This tension is perfectly summarized in the dueling-competition between Rafa and the DEA agents in season one of Narcos: Mexico. Rafa finds himself destroyed by his passions, destroying himself in a blazing fire of lust in every fashion. His field meanwhile is targeted and destroyed, an act which is celebrated by a celebration of superegoic death-worship. After the destruction of 1/3 of the United States marijuana market, the largest seizure in history, the agents retire to a middle class suburban backyard to celebrate with 5% ABV beers and charred ground beef. Made bare here is the tension, that of the appetites inherent to the id and the social desire to destroy and limit at all costs their expenditure.
Those on the side of labor are always against narcotics for this exact reason, just as the human organism will find itself hollowed out and destroyed by that which can complete it. Civilization is built upon the healthy glow of starvation, the piercing stare of hollow cheekbones, muscles eaten from the inside to feed the eyes. The superego, the linguistic mechanic working to sublimate libidinal energies into social machines, is in hatred of both the desires existing and even moreso, their finding completion and thus starving the machines which were dependent on the libidinal input of the drug user. The history of the narcotics trade is through all of this, history of ancient tensions within all organisms and the evolutionary mechanism of organisms adapting against their dual pressures.
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