Let them dream

Let them dream

            By Jesús Héctor Betancourt (2009)

Night falls on Teotihuacan

On top of the pyramid the boys are smoking marijuana,

harsh guitars sound.

What weed, what living waters will give life to us,

Where shall we unearth the word,

the relations that govern hymn and speech,

the dance, the city and the measuring scales?

The song of Mexico explodes in a curse,

a colored star that is extinguished

a stone that blocks our doors of contact.

Earth tastes of rotten earth.

Octavio Paz, “Hymn among the ruins” (fragment)

Translation by William Carlos Williams (1948)

The Hymn

            Mexico, my country, my people: The country where first the races blended with their cultures –food, music, spirituality- is now searching to understand its maturity, to answer the questions deep inside our history. Once again, Mexicans are asking themselves Why?. This is an epoch for questions, and so will be this reflection about a reality that is shaking  my country as nothing before in the last 80 years of relative peace, the War on Drugs. Is the price for the present war to clash our freedom and create a police state? We do not understand how (in our quest for a better standard of living) did we arrive to this moment that is putting on risk the freedom fought by our grandfathers for we to enjoy  with relative comfort and peacefulness until now.

            My Mexico: A dream of harmony and freedom in the heart of the land where the first clash of civilizations began. You, boys in the top of Teotihuacan, smoking marijuana: you were dreaming of that, weren’t you? When Octavio Paz wrote this poem Hymn among the ruins, more than 60 years ago, he was asking the same: where are our dreams heading above these ruins: so many bones, and flesh, and blood. Is it a crime to dream, to sing, to imagine a better world in the top of a pyramid? Why do this alienated society cynically allows alcohol and tobacco, while condemns the pleasures of the ones that smoke pot?

            Since this weed arrived with the Spanish conquerors, marijuana has been part of Mexican culture for more than 500 years. It has been smoked since then by the farmers and the shamans, and also by a plethora of artists, writers, and even politicians. Also, it has been used as a medicine for many purposes before it was prohibited its sale and commerce in our communitarian markets as any other herb. Marijuana is the theme of one of the most popular songs, La cucaracha, which dates from more than a century ago –long before this herb was satanized by the moral prosecutors that forbid its commercial use. Why did this prohibition contributed the making of Mexico as one of the most violent places in the world? Far away from my land I can see the horror shaking its cities, the so-called War on Drugs, when it has claimed more than 10,000 lives since it began a little more than 2 years ago. The herb itself is innocent - so are the consumers. You can’t criminalize something that is int the core of one’s culture: like wine in the Christian countries, marijuana plays a role  in the cultural and social habits of many people in Mexico.

The ruins

            But I want to ask: Who created that monster enterprises which are the drug cartels, the ones who –according to the CIA- employ directly and indirectly more the 450,000 people alone in Mexico? If in the shadow of that number of men and women there are also their families, communities, making a living because of this illegal trade, then we are talking about millions of people who are related to this war, including many soldiers fighting against their own brothers. So it happens that this war is against ourselves. It is difficult to know someone in Mexico who is not related to anyone having a drug-addict in its family, or who knows a friend, a neighbor, or whatever, which is related to this business. Certainly, it is a very big business that has evolved wit the help of all of our traditional and centuries-long corruption, which alone is the only cause that we are still and undeveloped country even after such a progress in so many ways, and Mexicans suffer the stigma of a second-class citizenship in the global arena. This problem grew bigger with the help of many corrupt officials, governors, judges, lawyers, policemen, and ministers, who have benefited themselves of this prohibition, not only the drug traffickers.

            When we hear in the media the official standpoint about this War against Drugs, we listen the political correctness and hypocrisy behind the fact that drugs harm an individual’s health; but the government and media most of the times omit that this prohibition that led to this war itself has brought an even greater damage of the entire Mexican society, which is also becoming sick. It is not only drug trafficking and the drugs themselves (that instead of disappearing, they are becoming increasingly popular): it is organized crime, black businesses, the smuggling of weapons through our porous borders, and the promise of easy money among the most vulnerable and marginalized sectors of our youth. It is violence. For many people drug trafficking is the only way to get rid of poverty. They have seen how drug traffickers have been respected by the society when they become rich, how they are the idols of so many popular songs, even to the point that some of them became legends with an aura of heroism after their deaths in many small towns in the rural heartland of Mexico.

            With more fear than clarity, our society is waking up in the violent morning of this new century, where trust among citizens and paranoid thinking has replaced the most basic matters of coexistence in many cities, especially along the US border. But nobody dares to ask why there are consumers of all these illegal substances. Why do people want to “escape” this way of living the American dream in our Mexican version by using drugs? What are the faces of these users? Why do this society do not encourage other ways of socializing, and intoxication is so common in our troubled land?

The promenade

            It is Friday night in Coatzacoalcos. Facing the warm ocean, Francisco and Edith kiss each other with candor and rapture at the same time. They seem not to care about other people passing nearby, where they can watch a big oil vessel arriving at the port. Along the seashore and in the promenade walk, there are hundreds of youths walking, drinking beers at the side of their parked cars, with the music of the stereo going out of them, and with the smell of snacks here and there. Most of them seem to be happy. They do not know other place to enjoy the nightlife than this. In the city, there are some exclusive bars, only for the rich. For the rest, they have this promenade. This place is at the same time the disco, the restaurant, the social stage and the community center.

            Hiding at the back of the car, watching that no policeman is coming close, Francisco lights a marijuana joint and after giving a puff he rolls on the cigarette to Edith. Two, three smokes, then they quench if off, before they start again to kiss each other. He is about to leave her in two weeks. He is heading for el Norte, as they call anything across the Northern border of this country, where he thinks he will find a job. When they smoke, all the tension and the worries of not finding a job for so many months, is gone for some moments, and they see each other’s eyes, they feel the silence between their mouths, and conscience of their heart-bits arrive gradually. The smell of the sea gets deeper, and so the sensation of solitude and despair, which they want to avoid with the help of another hug, another kiss.

            A few blocks near the center of this place, the only theater of the city, languishes in decadence with no infrastructure to handle nothing, almost in ruins. The smog of the nearby refinery covers the city even in the windy days. The oil refinery is the main cause why this once sleepy small fishing port became a city of more than half a million inhabitants in less than 30 years. The effects of this industry are seen in in the river which is now dead at its mouth. It once had manatees and even dolphins which entered on it to feed in the fish-infested banks of its margins. Pollution has killed all faun in it.

            Coatzacoalcos is the place where Mexican famous Hollywood dive Salma Hayek was born. And in a city where so many thousands of young people live, there is nothing more than the promenade boulevard in the seafront with its more than 15 kilometers to walk and drink beer and nothing else to do. There are no major sport centers, not major cultural facilities, and the ones that are seem to be decadent and ruined off. Instead of them, there is the glimpse of the neon-lighted shopping centers that offer the same kind of shops than in any medium size city of the world: cafes, fashion, beauty parlors, and nothing more.

            Were are the place where the people can interact between all: children, youth, adults and elders as well, all together? What is the place of culture for the life quality of our society, in the Development plans of our technocratic leaders that measure our status only in terms of GDP and markets, as if a country were just money, an enterprise for the political elites, not a whole compound of ideas, ideals, feelings, wisdom, nature, history?

            But Coatzacoalcos is not very different from many of the cities of Latin America which have experienced growth and expansion over the last 30 years. In the outskirts of its downtown, a whole new compound of horrible housings stands new –with the least aesthetic sense of what should be an urban planning-, so that most of them are abandoned because no one wants to live there.

            This is the story of so many towns, so many cities, alienated by the way others decided that growth should be achieved. Never in the history of humanity, a very few individuals had the equivalent wealth of such great masses of poor people. The same few that have decided the destinies of humanity and our planet without considering the social and environmental costs of this model that now, in the present economic crisis, threatens us to a major collapse.

            This is the story of the pains of our development, of our new “industrialized” status, of our “upper-high index of human development”: a place where all of our traditional systems have been broken and replaced for modern ones that have made so many families and villages migrate to the misery belts of our great cities and to the United States. The present economic meltdown all around the globe is the harvest of the loss of our basic feelings of solidarity because of this strong individualism that is the signature of our epoch, consequence of the greed and the insane love of money above so many other important aspects of a human’s life. Frightened, we look now that for the upcoming years another model is required, a model that should be inclusive for all, constructed by all the people in the world. A model of survival with a global point of view, and with a human face: where environmental and social forces shall be the first priorities in the sense of our actions, without rejecting our feelings, fears, desires and dreams. Our present time is in many senses the good and bad dreams of our ancestors. So, don’t criminalize our marijuana youths that smoke for a little daydream. Maybe they are dreaming of a better, peaceful world.

            Now it is Edith who lights the joint. She is thinking deep inside of her that she really loves Francisco, and she will wait for him until he comes back. Francisco smiles to hear. He imagines he will live better in Isla del Padre, Texas, where a friend of him has managed to contract him as a cook assistant in a Mexican restaurant. He says that he will work hard and buy a home. She dream of working in something related to her career, tourism administration. After a long silence… why to worry about tomorrow? The perfumed smoke of cannabis arises in the night and they continue kissing each other, from time to time saying to each other words of love. Let them dream.

(Jesús Héctor Betancourt – Echo Magazine #52 – Indian Institute of Mass Communication. New Delhi,  May, 2009). Image: http://tychy.wordpress.com/2009/01/25/a-cigarette-in-the-bath/