When Society Fails

This past friday, a car bomb was set off in Ciudad Juarez, making the latest in a long chain of violent events engulfing the city where my parents met, where I grew up, where my dad worked for over 30 years. Trying to describe the mixed feelings of anger, sadness, helplessness, and even detachment becomes hard, so I will mostly try to ask the question, “how did Juarez end up in this situation?”

Without going into too much detail about the specifics and complexities of social dynamics in Juarez, we can summarize that the source of the violence comes from the power struggle between different drug trafficking cartels in the city. Solving the problem of how to alleviate those struggles is an issue that authorities have been working on solving for a while and I have little to say on this. What I want to talk about is the fact that society has failed in providing safety which is one the basic foundation, if not “the” basic foundation of society.

We could begin by asking who is to blame. Most people’s first reaction would be to point to the government; and that is exactly what is happening for the most part among the residents of Juarez, Mexico in general. There is an overall sentiment of demanding from the government to use all of its resources to bring a sense of safety back to its citizens. In my opinion, the time has come when that request, as valid as it is, is impossible to be fulfilled. But saying that the government has sole responsibility would be naive and over simplified. What about the people that are actually doing the killing? Well of course they are directly responsible and there is no way of excusing their behavior. The people that are committing these crimes have lost sense of the moral values that are required to be part of a human society. Now, once again, putting all blame in one specific group would be simplistic. One could make the argument that the economic environment is what drove some people into believing that the only way to prosper was to get involved in illicit activities. In a culture where the jump from lower class to upper class seems impossible without any connections or family relations, when people saw an opportunity to make this transition, illicit as it was, they took it. So is the socio-economic structure of Mexico’s society to blame? In part, I believe. In every society there are individuals who long for the opportunity to live a life like they see others live. In other societies, hard work, education, or talent can lead you to those places. Some other societies lack this opportunity, so when an option arises, those individuals that desire financial success will jump right in.

Since we are already in the process of distributing blame, who else can we add to list? Well let me suggest the consumers. It is well known that the reason why Mexico is such a high commodity for drug trafficking is because of its geographical location, right between the production site and the retail site. U.S. is the biggest consumer market for the drugs being trafficked through the streets of Juarez. Yet, the bulk of American culture seems to be unaware of, or at least not preoccupied by, the third party effects of drug consumption. In U.S. culture, the consequences of drug use and abuse are limited to the user. I find it interesting that I have heard plenty of celebrities going to rehab to clean up their lives, but not once have I heard a mention the effects that the use had in the societies involved in making the use available in the first place.

My point in general is to say that this issue is way more complicated and that to blame a single source would be simplistic. There are plenty of people in Juarez that are now trapped in a horrible situation that was completely outside of their control. For those people, society has failed and something needs to be done; exactly what, I don’t know, nobody knows... and that is the scary part.