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Chapter 8
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Chasing the Scream, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Drug Legalization and U.S. Policy
Addiction and Human Connection
Prohibition and the Cycle of Violence
Stories and Human Psychology
Summary
Analysis
In Ciudad Juárez, just across the U.S.-Mexico border from El Paso, a young man named Juan Manuel Olguín walks up to a dead body in the street. He’s dressed as an angel, holding a sign addressed at those responsible for Mexico’s drug violence: “Time Is Short […] Seek Forgiveness.” Because of the drug war, Ciudad Juárez is the most dangerous city in the world. Overall, Mexico has seen at least 60,000 murders in five years—and endless incidents of “unimaginable sadism”—because of the multi-billion-dollar illegal drug industry.
Hari’s trip to Ciudad Juárez gives him insight into the international dimensions of the U.S.’s drug war. He finds that U.S. policies have exported even more violence than they have created at home—and conditions are only getting worse, as the violence continues to gradually escalate over time. Olguín’s protest highlights the utter brutality and senselessness of this violence, which turns human life and death into nothing more than a tool for profit.
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When Hari visits Juárez, he immediately notices the posters of missing women. The city is a vast sprawl of houses in the desert, and he meets Olguín on the outskirts. After seeing his friends join cartels and fall into violence and addiction, Olguín “decided to become an angel.” Over time, people in Juárez have simply gotten used to seeing bodies in the street. People who protest the violence are often murdered, too. But Olguín and several friends from his church decided that the risk is worth it. Wearing their enormous silver angel costumes, they stand by the roadside with their protest signs.
Juárez’s femicide epidemic is well-documented in the international media, but most accounts don’t clearly connect it back to its true origins: U.S. drug policy, which has passed control of the world’s largest drug market to cartels (and continues to reward the most violent among them with the greatest power and influence). Through his angel costume, Olguín suggests that Juárez’s killers can answer only to God—as the worldly authorities are no longer capable of stopping them.
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Juárez is Arnold Rothstein’s dream city: there is no rule of law, and criminals run the show. Even though it’s far from Hari’s comfortable life in London, the two cities are intimately tied together through the drug war. Three people exemplify its story: “an angel [Juan Manuel Olguín], a killer [Rosalio Reta], and a girl in love [Rubi Fraire].”
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Hari wants to learn “what life is like inside a cartel,” but interviewing a cartel member would be impossibly dangerous. Instead, Hari visits a rural Texas prison to interview a young man named Rosalio Reta. When he was 15, Reta went to a summer camp in Mexico, where he learned how to behead, shoot, and kill with his bare hands. He was training to join the Zeta Cartel, which was founded by elite Mexican soldiers who received highly specialized training in the U.S., then went home, quit their jobs, and switched sides.
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Rosalio Reta grew up in Laredo, Texas, a poor city right on the border, across from the Zetas’ main base in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. He has told two conflicting stories about why he joined the Zetas, and nobody knows which is true. When he was arrested, he told the police that he joined the cartel because he admired its second-in-command, Miguel Treviño. According to this version, he visited Treviño’s ranch, then became a hitman, and he loved every second of it. But in his interview with Hari, Reta claims that he was forced to join against his will. After unwittingly following a friend’s brother to the ranch, he says, he witnessed the cartel murdering people. Having seen too much, he had a stark choice: join or get killed.
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Regardless of which story is true, Reta definitely joined the cartel that day, by murdering a man at the ranch. And once he was in, there was no way out. He became a professional hitman, killing at Treviño’s orders. And he didn’t tell anyone, least of all his family. During their interview, Reta avoids saying Treviño’s name and warns Hari not to talk about him. Like Arnold Rothstein and Chino Hardin—but to a much greater degree—Treviño used extreme, unpredictable violence to terrify his rivals and maintain control over the drug market.
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Reta lived in constant fear of this violence, including from people on his side. But he loved the job’s perks: he had access to all the women, drugs, and money he could possibly want. Treviño once paid Reta $375,000 for killing a man. In wiretapped conversations, Reta and his friend Gabriel bragged about beating their rivals’ relatives to death.
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Of course, this is all part of the cartel’s broader strategy: whichever group employs the most violence can scare its rivals and get a competitive advantage in the drug market. Over time, other cartels catch up by adopting the same strategies, and the cycle repeats. This is why the drug war consistently becomes more and more violent over time: drug prohibition rewards whoever uses “the most insane and sadistic violence.”
Treviño also bought off the police, military, and even federal officials through a combination of threats and bribes. The police even help the cartel kidnap and murder people. Mexico’s weak rule of law and outsized economic dependence on drug money have helped the gangs take over.
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Soon, Treviño’s men went after Reta. They attacked him in the woods and slashed him all over his body. According to one story, they were trying to stop him after he lost control and started killing random people for sport. But in their interview, Reta tells Hari that the cartel turned on him because he wanted to quit. Regardless, he managed to escape to the U.S. and turn himself in. He’s serving two life sentences and will probably die in prison. A rival gang has already tried to murder him, and he worries that the cartel will kill his family on the outside. He warns that it might go after Hari, too.
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Regardless of which story is true, Hari concludes, Reta never would have become a sadistic, ruthless killer if it weren’t for the war on drugs. After their interview, Treviño becomes the Zetas’ leader and is then captured by the police. There’s a new turf war for control of Nuevo Laredo, and the violence continues.
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