PHOTO: Screen Shot
Since our first article in the series, more operations against drug trafficking gangs—or rather street operatives and gangs of pushers and hit men—continue to be carried out in the narco-territory of the Puerto Rican archipelago. The so-called “war against drugs” continues to be featured in the Island’s news. However, the head of the Puerto Rican police himself has recognized that once a so-called drug distribution spot (punto de drogas) is broken up, drug traffickers reorganize and set up another one.
There’s a more complex and significant social plot being played out behind the curtain of the vast news set.
In face of the shrinking opportunities and labor market of the so-called “illegal” economy, the informal, or “illegal”, labor market becomes the most accessible and attractive way out for many young people.
Example: Manufacturing plants (nearly 2,000 in 2014) employed about 75,200 people. By way of contrast, the business of drug trafficking ran about 1,600 points that linked some 175,000 workers. In fact, it is estimated that drug trafficking in Puerto Rico fuels one third of the local economy.
The supposed “war against drugs” is a smokescreen to keep us blind and terrified and asking the plutocracy and political and economic mafia deciding our fates for order and military protection. This war carries out the following sentence: if you’ve been excluded and impoverished by the reigning economic and legal political system; if you’ve had to opt for an illicit way out economically; if you work in illegal drug trafficking, you’ll become a victim or an executioner in the violent social war caused by the very situation you’re living in. If you are a criminal, you’ll become a client of the prison system.
Once a person is criminalized by participating in the drug traffic economy (as an agent of the supply chain or a consumer), that person becomes a client that feeds and, in turn, reproduces the judicial/prison/industrial complex, the system that classifies and sentences him or her as a criminal. According to the official police record, seventy per cent of the crimes committed on the Island are directly related to drug trafficking.
It is clear that in Puerto Rico, as in other part of the world, illegal drug trafficking is a deadly problem and a deadly solution. For the growing number of young Puerto Ricans who serve as cannon fodder for drug trafficking, whether as foot soldiers in the internecine wars or soldiers in the diversionary war against the illegal trade, their destiny is either to die or to kill for the profits of multibillionaires, who, either way, win. More young Puerto Ricans die in drug trafficking’s territorial wars (about 2,100 in 2010-2013) than in the so-called “war against terrorism” for political hegemony, oil, and other natural resources in countries such as Afghanistan (123 in 2002-2014).
The fundamental question then is the following: How do we deal with and resolve the problem that continues to push Puerto Rican youth and the youth of other peoples into such fatal “ways out”?
