Hell, Los Angeles and the 'American Dream'

The prosperous state of California is perhaps one of the most contrasting places in the United States. Here the abundance of natural resources, the most fertile agricultural lands, the most advanced technology and the most successful billionaires in the world coexist with the most atrocious misery, extreme poverty, begging, drug addiction, mental illness and extreme labor exploitation. Cities like San Diego, Los Angeles or San Francisco are a faithful example of these enormous contradictions that disgust and manifest themselves in a disgusting way. Likewise, they are the faithful reflection of a hypocritical system, the product of extreme inequality, greed and the latest generation of capitalism.

I visited the city of Los Angeles in recent days and stayed in the center of the city, an area where you only walk a few steps and find yourself with a homeless person or a habitual consumer of alcohol or drugs (several) who looks already lost , for a long time, any trace of reason. At night you hear screams, street fights and attacks of all kinds. Listening to the police cars going around the city, I would reflect on what it must be like to be part of the LAPD; It must be quite a difficult job. And thanks to John Sullivan—who guided me through some of the most iconic and difficult parts of the city—I learned a little about the complexity of that institution and the work of its members.

I also had to live a very interesting and at the same time quite depressing experience. I had the opportunity to take a walking tour through the streets of the area known as Skid Row and MacArthur Park in the company of Agustín Duran, an experienced journalist (now an editor at La Opinión newspaper in Los Angeles), who knows every corner of that complex city, where the most obscene wealth, drugs and begging coexist. On this occasion, Agustín asked me if he wanted to walk through those difficult streets, whose invitation I could not refuse. It is not the same to talk about the fentanyl crisis or the drug market in the United States from the desk than to directly feel this sad reality.

On both Skid Row and MacArthur Park, addicts used their “drug of choice” without restriction—even in the presence, or rather near, of the city police. The physical, mental and moral destruction of these human beings seemed evident; it was heartbreaking to see them like this. Also apparent was the loss of awareness of his own humanity and one might even say of part of his dignity. What is seen there is extremely sad and hopeless; men and women living together in a hell that they partly chose, but into which they were also partly thrown. Indeed, most of these people are victims of an extremely unfair system that allows less than 1% to concentrate the vast majority of world wealth.

And in the midst of the tragedy, many politicians in that country blame what they call Mexican or Chinese drug cartels for flooding the citizens of that country with precursors and narcotics. Walking with Agustín, I reflected on the issue of drug addiction and the crisis they call fentanyl. First of all, after talking to a few people, I realized that some do not react immediately to the word “fentanyl” and that many take other drugs of their choice—and there are quite a few drugs, synthetic and not, those that contain fentanyl and the ones that don’t Talking about the opiate and opioid epidemic and then the fentanyl crisis would seem to be part of the marketing of American drug policy that is implemented for geopolitical purposes and geostrategic control, and that ultimately leads to imperialism and the criminalization of poverty and underdevelopment in the south of the continent, from Mexico to Patagonia.

In places like Skid Row you can get whatever drug you like and can afford—yes, any drug—even if you’re only a few meters from the police station, which is located in the heart of this area. I think that in the United States there are open drug markets, where the authority seems to certify the dynamics and the confinement so that the tolerance zones do not extend beyond a certain territory and do not get out of control.

Under this scheme, drugs would appear to be a form of social control in the American Union. So blaming the Mexican cartels for the drug addiction crisis in the United States seems to be a superlative hypocrisy and a joke given that the root problem is actually in that very country and is combined with the geopolitical and geostrategic interests of that nation. .

The drug addiction crisis in the United States is actually a public health crisis and has deep roots in a hyper-capitalist or meta-capitalist model that sharpens the contradictions in a society where pharmaceutical companies and real estate corporations seem to bear the greatest responsibility, by generating addictions and create the conditions for thousands of people to become homeless.

As Oswaldo Zavala assures, drug cartels “do not exist” and according to the basic definition, the groups that are dedicated to drug trafficking in Mexico are not really cartels, since they do not sit down at the table to negotiate the amount of drugs to produce to maximize profits in an oligopolistic market structure. On the contrary, these groups fiercely fight for the square and kill each other in the fight for control of the drug markets and the routes for their transportation. On the other hand, the big pharmaceutical companies do indeed form a cartel, a sinister cartel that generates addictions first and then offers reduced damage in exchange for higher doses of other of their products.

On this last point, my visit to Skid Row made me reflect a lot. Before, I did not understand the existence of these drug-free market zones in the United States—where tolerance for the consumption and sale of drugs is complete and even seems certified by the police in a country that imposes prohibitions for convenience, inside and outside the country. its borders. Now I understand better some macabre instruments of social control combined with the existence of NGOs that carry out a “laudable” job in providing humanitarian aid to the homeless and in the “management” of addictions.

They tell me that Skid Row attracts so many addicted and homeless people because it is there that they meet their most basic needs thanks to the extensive network of NGOs that operate there. Some refer to this network as a cartel of philanthropy entrepreneurs who receive large donations and federal resources to provide endless aid. I understand that these denominations could be considered controversial and even inappropriate in spaces of extreme poverty and beggary, in which any resource or human and material support that maintains the life and dignity of those who have less is valid and essential.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, the billionaire resources disbursed for decades and the failed policies that in practice have never solved the problem are missed. However, they only contain some effects of a true human tragedy, while it is spreading massively and seems to have no end. They also miss harm reduction policies (harm reduction), highly recommended by mainstream addiction experts, which in theory seem adequate and focused on human rights, but do not solve the problem, only maintain it. But yeah, better that than the criminalization of mental illness and addiction. It would be worth taking a closer look at this topic and assessing the advantages and disadvantages of this scheme.

Strangest of all, harm reduction policies are fundamentally supported by the drug industry cartel, which visibly benefits from spending billions of dollars in federal programs to “maintain” a crisis created in the first instance by the big drug companies themselves. . Their role becomes clear when looking at the generation of the opiate and opioid epidemic that developed in the context of a rotten and corrupted health system using prescriptions and insurance companies. It is there that may be the cartels against whom some Republicans linked to what is known as the Make America Great Again (MAGA) project want to declare war. So I think it would make sense to do so.

All this I thought when crossing the streets of downtown Los Angeles and especially Skid Row and MacArthur Park, where drugs, mental illness, misery and desolation abound, where a gruesome scene of what seems to be hell can be seen in the midst of a lavish city of glittering skyscrapers and impressive infrastructure driven by the massive development of technology and created by the quasi-slave labor of millions of undocumented immigrants (many of them Mexican).

In the most complicated areas to live in Los Angeles, the world of drugs, gangs and undocumented immigration are intertwined; but this last phenomenon is not explained by the first ones, they only coincide. I was surprised to see in the middle of Skid Row a shelter for women and children (many of them immigrants). There we met Gloria, a woman from El Salvador who had come to the United States with her two small children four years ago. She had recently had to move out of the apartment where she lived because her rent had gone up $300 at one time and she was no longer able to pay it. With tears in her eyes, and unjustified shame, she told us that her family in El Salvador did not know that she was there. I thought it would be hard for her and hers children to adjust to life and feel safe walking Skid Row.

Something that I confirmed on my last trip to Los Angeles is that all undocumented immigrants work and pay their taxes; nothing for them is free. Gloria worked whatever it was, even taking care of the children of other hostel mates. But Gloria also worked for American homes and businesses. People like her are thought to evade taxes and take advantage of the system. Nothing more false than that.

In order to work in the United States (and here any immigrant must do it because only then can they survive) it is necessary to have a social security number, obtained legally or illegally. There is a black market for those numbers—and for other documents proving the stay in the country irregularly—that works perfectly and is also fully (informally) accepted by the US authorities.

Even though the immigrant acquires a social security number illegally, the system allows them to work and receive their taxes. But, although he punctually pays his taxes when deducted from his salary, the immigrant will not be entitled to receive a pension or the relevant basic support. Thus, undocumented migrants in the United States contribute not only to “Make America Great” but also to retirement funds and other benefits for US citizens.

MacArthur Park is a zone of tolerance for drug addicts and for the illegal markets of documents that accredit the stay in the country for immigrants. By the way, it is an irony that the Mexican consulate is in front of that park. The way the illegal drug and labor markets work in the United States is impressive. The foregoing depicts the hypocrisy of those who imposed anachronistic prohibitions to exploit them in different ways, either for the purpose of geopolitical or geostrategic control or with the aim of making even more cheap—and therefore exploit—the labor force coming from the “periphery” of what some today call the Global South.

Thus, in the most difficult and violent parts of Los Angeles, gangs, drug addicts, the homeless and the poorest immigrants coexist. In MacArthur Park I lived with that reality and I talked, thanks to Agustín, with a countryman who had just arrived and was trying to adapt to his new reality. He was a young boy, of Mexican nationality and from the state of Chiapas. I saw him a little scared in the middle of that park from hell. He was very tired from the grueling hours of work (underpaid) and with the burden of debt to a coyote on his back, who had helped him achieve (for a hefty fee), his American dream.

Note: Thanks to Agustín Durán and John Sullivan for their time, their friendship and infinite generosity in showing me an important part of their complex city, Los Angeles California.