Jorge Volpi returns to investigate the origins of evil. The Mexican writer catapulted himself into literary Olympus two decades ago with the novel In Search of Klingsor, set in Nazism and its scientists, an inquiry into a regime that embodied evil and attracted the darkest parts of many stalwart citizens. He now publishes War Parties (Alfaguara), a story of violence, imposture and betrayal set on the border between Mexico and Guatemala in which some emigrants discover the body of a 14-year-old girl. It soon becomes clear that criminals are children, and neuroscientists come to investigate why a child becomes a criminal. But the secret lives of the leader of the investigators also appear.
“The children are the barbarians and the scientists are the civilized ones who go to study the savages, but in the process it is discovered that some are mirrors of the others, and those who seem sensible and rational are a group full of secrets, meanness, fights and violence”, explains Volpi, who recalls that in his research on evil he long ago wanted to have both neuroscientists and children as protagonists. “I wanted to investigate what makes some children or adolescents can become murderers, that a society becomes so violent, but seen from the microcosm of some children, and in turn from the microcosm of a small town on the border between Mexico and Guatemala. This novel is my own investigation through the eyes of the narrator.”
On violence, he remarks that there are “many studies on what neurological, psychological and psychiatric factors can contribute to higher rates, and in this case that added to the conditions of violence in Mexico gave an interesting perspective. In the end, when a critical mass of conditions is created, the individual or society can launch into outbursts of violence that were not normal before, like these children or like Mexico from 2006,” says Volpi, who recalls that after spending nine years in his country in recent times, although he lives again in Madrid, he has already written three books “about violence and evil, inevitably in the face of the reality that we live there”.
The reality: drug violence… and the responsibility of the government. “The war against drugs – she says – never was. Nor is it. One of the main problems of the violence of these years in my country is the moment in 2006 when President Felipe Calderón launches what he calls the war against drugs. From the word itself, the strategy was wrong, thinking that it was the war of the State, the good guys, against the drug traffickers, the bad guys. Without understanding that the phenomenon of drug trafficking was infinitely more complex and rooted in numerous aspects of Mexican life that could not be resolved by sending in the army. It is one of the many wars we are experiencing, brutal violence, with 250,000 deaths, 100,000 official disappearances and millions of internally displaced persons since 2006”.
And he denounces that “in this speech in which the figure of the narco is enthroned as absolute evil, there is a fictionalization that comes from the interest of power in locating the enemy instead of assuming its responsibility for the dead we have. Until 2006, Mexico was a country of hidden but relatively peaceful violence, more so than Europe in the 20th century. Since the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1930 it had a relative calm of explicit violence. In 2006 it explodes and although the discourse has changed with the following presidents, the policies are not very different because the numbers of violence increase”.
“The State – he continues – did something to turn a relatively peaceful country into hell. And all for the worst and most absurd reasons, because this entire war on drug trafficking derives from two things: from the puritanical American policy of believing that adults are not responsible and cannot use drugs if we choose, an infantilization of adults, and that in 2006 there was a terribly strong post-electoral conflict situation between Calderón and López Obrador, and Calderón needed an additional enemy.”
And he concludes that “the price of drugs in the US has not risen, the deaths are due to an absurd cause. And now legalizing drugs would be only a partial solution because the crime that has arisen from this war is not only dedicated to drug trafficking, but also to people and, above all, to kidnapping, bribery… The other central problem is that all this happens in a country where the rule of law does not exist. In Mexico, 0.5% of the crimes that are reported are resolved”. And he warns: “Now with López Obrador as president, the discourse has changed, but the militarization has been taken to more extreme degrees. The army in an absolutely surprising way, and those of us who voted for it never imagined it, is involved in areas of civil life that it had never had before, from infrastructure construction to housing, customs, ports, the Mayan train, the airport… It had never happened. López Obrador found one of the few unconditional allies in the army, he always wants absolute loyalty and began to give him more power. And it will be difficult to take it from him when he leaves the Government.”
