El Chapo embodies all of America's misguided anxieties about Mexico

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/13/el-chapo-escape-mexico-anxieties

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Americans need Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman like a machine needs grease. We don’t need the flesh and blood of the infamous Mexican drug lord, who escaped from prison for a second time on Saturday, himself, so much as we need the idea – the story – of him.

We need El Chapo in the abstract like we need the guiding principles of freedom or liberty or free speech, because the Sinaloa cartel kingpin is one of our great American institutions: he exemplifies our story of Mexico as impoverished, backward, violent, dirty, dumb, a corrupt state, a failing state, a failed state. (That sort of rhetoric has overtaken my Facebook feed since Chapo disappeared from a maximum security prison late Saturday night.)

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No matter where Americans stand ideologically, El Chapo confirms what they know to be true about their southern neighbor. For the American right, Guzman confirms Donald Trump’s blanket indictment of Mexicans, when he called them drug traffickers, rapists and criminals in his presidential candidacy speech. The American left needs El Chapo as a way to restore or affirm our liberal sense of identity and, perhaps, our very purpose in life: to better the lives of people in narcoviolence-ridden Mexico and clear our conscience. El Chapo personifies the ultimate American anxiety of the great brown invasion.

My initiation into this perspective came in third grade in North Austin, Texas, when our class watched the John Wayne film The Alamo. For the uninitiated, the 1960 film is basically Wayne killing brown people for two hours. I remember sitting through the film and watching people who looked like my father, my cousins, my uncles, my brother getting killed en masse onscreen. They were shot, slashed, pierced, crushed, gouged, exploded by cannon fire.

I took away the fact that because I was Mexican-American, I was an undesirable. I was historically, genetically, the enemy of the state. I was like the guy who killed John Wayne, supposedly the most American of men. When we “remember the Alamo,” we’re remembering the end-game of what unchecked Mexican power looks like: barbarous and violent.

There’s no denying Chapo Guzman is both of those things. But this fear of Mexico has long exceeded the actions of one man, informing the laws behind prohibition, the outlawing of marijuana, Nixon’s war on drugs, Reagan’s war on drugs and finally, the Merida Initiative in 2008, a pact between Mexico and the United States designed to fight organized crime.

Evidence now shows that this long-term undermining of the Mexican state may have inadvertently propelled Guzman into power. It was our drug wars that pushed the prices of his commodities through the roof, our drug habits that have fuelled his empire. But we need him to point to the ongoing failure of Mexico even though he more accurately represents the result of our own failed policies.

So as Americans obsess about containing Chapo, the man, that focus is also a misplaced anxiety about containing the border, containing drugs and containing the movement of people when we should be focusing on reforming our own dangerous policies and attitudes. This single story of Mexico, designed to resonate with our anxieties, is more dangerous than anything that might actually cross our southern border. And the story of Mexico and America is more complex than a single bogeyman.