Eduardo Galeano - Upside Down - A Primer for the Looking-Glass World

In Latin America, where poor criminals are the new “internal enemy,” the war on drugs takes aim at a target described by Nilo Batista in Brazil: “black teenagers from the slums who sell drugs to well-off white teenagers.” Is this a question of drugs or of social and racial power? In Brazil and everywhere else, those who die in the war on drugs far outnumber those who die from an overdose.

I’m Curious

Why do people mix up coca and cocaine?

If coca is so perverse, why is one of the symbols of Western civilization called Coca-Cola?

If coca is outlawed because it is used for bad ends, why isn’t television outlawed too?

If the drug industry is outlawed because it’s a murderous business, why don’t they outlaw the arms industry, which is the most murderous of all?

By what right does the United States act as the world’s drug police, when it buys half of all the drugs the world produces?

How is it that small planes loaded with drugs enter and leave the United States with such astonishing ease? How come state-of-the-art technology that can photograph a flea on the horizon can’t detect a plane flying by the window?

Why hasn’t a single one of the snow kings who reign over the drug trade in the United States ever been caught?

Why do the mass media talk so much about drugs and so little about why people take them? Why do they condemn drug addicts instead of the lifestyle that ratchets up anxiety, anguish, loneliness, and fear or the consumer culture that leads people to seek chemical consolation?

If an illness is made into a crime and that crime is made into a business, is it fair to punish those who are sick?

Why doesn’t the United States wage war on its own banks, the ones that launder all those drug dollars? Or against the Swiss bankers who wash them whiter yet?

Why are the drug dealers the most fervent supporters of antidrug laws?

Doesn’t the free circulation of goods and capital favor illegal trafficking? Isn’t the drug business the most perfect prototype of neoliberal thinking? Aren’t the traffickers just following the golden rule of the market, that every demand will be met by a supply?

Why is it that the most popular drugs today are the drugs of productivity? The ones that hide exhaustion and fear, that fake omnipotence, that help you produce more and earn more? Couldn’t we read in that a sign of the times? Could it just be happenstance that unproductive hallucinogens like LSD, the drugs of the sixties, have receded into prehistory? Were the desperate of those times different? What about their desperations?

Crime is the mirror image of order. The criminals who fill jails are poor and nearly always use small arms and crude methods. If not for those defects of poverty and preindustrial technology, slum criminals could well be wearing the crowns of kings, the wide-brimmed hats of gentlemen, the miters of bishops, or the caps of generals, and they would be signing government decrees instead of placing their thumbprints on confessions.

IMPERIAL POWER

Queen Victoria of England gave her name to an epoch that was indeed victorious, a time of splendor for an empire that ruled the seas and a good part of the lands as well. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us under the letter V, the queen led her subjects by the example of her austere life, always upholding strict morals and good habits, and it is to her in great measure that we owe the spread of concepts like dignity, authority, and respect for family, which were characteristic of Victorian society. In portraits she always wears a scowl, due perhaps to the difficulties she faced and the boredom she suffered in pursuit of the virtuous life.

Although the Encyclopaedia Britannica doesn’t mention this detail, Queen Victoria was also the greatest drug trafficker of the nineteenth century. Under her long reign, opium became the most valuable commodity of imperial trade. Large-scale poppy cultivation and opium production were developed in India at British initiative and under British control. A large portion of that opium entered China as contraband, and the drug industry pried open a growing consumer market. The number of addicts was said to have grown to about 12 million by 1839, when, observing its devastating effects on the population, the Chinese emperor outlawed the trafficking and use of opium and ordered the cargoes of several British ships impounded. The queen, who never in her life uttered the word “drug,” decried that unpardonable sacrilege against free trade and sent her fleet of warships to the coasts of China. During the two decades, with a few interruptions, that the opium war lasted, the word “war” was also never uttered.

On the tail of the warships came cargo ships loaded with opium. At the conclusion of each military action, commercial operations resumed. In one of the first battles, the taking of the port of Tin-hai in 1841, three Britons died and so did more than two thousand Chinese. The balance of losses continued more or less like that in the years that followed. The first truce ended in 1856, when the city of Canton was bombarded by order of Sir John Bowring, a devout Christian who liked to say, “Jesus is free trade, and free trade is Jesus.” The second truce ended in 1860, when Queen Victoria’s patience ran out. It was time to put an end to the obstinacy of the Chinese. Peking fell under cannon fire and the invading troops assaulted and burned the imperial summer palace. After that, China accepted opium, the number of drug addicts skyrocketed, and British merchants lived happily ever after.

THE POWER OF SECRECY

The richest countries in the world are Switzerland and Luxembourg. Two small nations, two large financial markets. About minuscule Luxembourg, little or nothing is known. Switzerland, in contrast, is famous for the marksmanship of William Tell, the precision of its watches, and the discretion of its bankers.

The prestige of Swiss banks is long-standing; a seven-century tradition guarantees their seriousness and security. But it was during World War II that Switzerland became a great financial power. Loyal to its equally long tradition of neutrality, Switzerland did not take part in the war. It did, however, take part in the business of war, selling its services, and at a very good price, to Nazi Germany. The deal was brilliant: Swiss banks took the gold that Hitler stole from the countries he occupied and from the Jews he trapped, including gold teeth from the dead in gas chambers and concentration camps, and turned it into convertible currency. The gold crossed into Switzerland without any problem, while people persecuted by the Nazis were turned away at the border.