2666 is a transformative work that can teach us a lot about our mythology

“No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.”

A friend once told me that “These cartels are so scary, they’re even more powerful than the governments!” I asked a relative what we should do about climate refugees in the future, should we just cover the southern border in guns and stack up the bodies of the poor? “If that’s what it takes then hell yeah!” When I mention wanting to travel to South America, I get asked “Aren’t you afraid? It’s so dangerous down there.” The only connection I know between these people, is that they’ve never been anywhere they are talking about, and they don’t speak the language of people who actually live in any of these places. Their reality and opinion has been mediated by the screen of a television or monitor.

This screen is yellow. Sand, cacti, skin, guns, tattoos, bodies, they are blanketed by a yellow haze. The image looks like something dangerous, this is not the inviting yellow of a wooded summer glade, this is not a familiar yellow light. The sun does not bring down warmth and light, the sun here seems cruel. It is different, it is an other sun, in an other place, different from the safe world that we know. We are looking at Mexico. It is a tv show, or a movie, but we know we are looking at somewhere outside of our home. Somewhere different, dangerous, untamed, wild, terrifying. It is nothing but color correction, post production.

The “Mexico filter” has moved beyond visual shorthand in film, it has become fodder for jokes, think pieces, and is a phenomenon that people are now generally aware of, or is immediately noticeable once it has been pointed out. It has appeared in many popular pieces of media, from tv shows like Breaking Bad to films like Sicario. This filter designates a place that exists outside the bounds of the safety of the United States, a place where “the law” does not rule, where life is cheap. This is a common refrain from the United States regarding places that exist beyond it. This visual shorthand also appears in films that take place in other parts of the world, like the Middle East, places where the American public is primed to view as a place where violence is common. Places where “they don’t value human life like we do’’ as has been stated numerous times about places where states have been instrumental in violence, from the mouths of such figures from General William Westmoreland to Benny Morris. Figures of authority, who paint cultures as intrinsically violent, or that the violence is the result of a singular enemy that needs to be defeated. This thrilling, simple narrative is a favorite way for our media to interpret and present the world to us, and one that is worth interrogating through our own eyes, and the eyes of other works of art.

2666 (2004) is a landmark work of literature, written by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. It is a massive work of fiction, made of five books compiled into one, each named under a similar pattern The Part About The Critics/Amalfitano/Fate/The Crimes/Archimboldi and examines a multitude of aspects of life in both the “safe” parts of the world as we see them in our media, and the “dangerous” places of the world. It draws influence from a wealth of literature and world history. It is an incredibly dense work of art, taking us on a journey into dread and depravity through a multitude of stories in a manner often compared to other authors with this maximalist style like Thomas Pynchon’s own massive tome, Gravity’s Rainbow. It is so dense and layered that it defies interpretation and categorization, or at least a singular vision for any critic, nesting layers of meaning upon itself to create something that means more than the sum of the massive whole. The book centers on the fictional city of Santa Teresa (a facsimile of the city Juarez) in northern Mexico, and follows a diverse cast through separate ventures that place them in the center of the violence of modernity and the femicides (The massive killing of women) that have now rocked Mexico for decades. While this book is about the brutality that has manifested in Mexico, it interrogates how this violence is not just native to the land or people, but continues because the people who suffer it do not matter, and the beneficiaries both direct and indirect do not have to care about them. As stated in the work, it is about the secrets of the world, and in the journey of reading it the reader is led to these secrets along with uncovering the fictions that overlay them.

The book begins outside of Mexico, in Europe, as we travel through the adventures of some of the most insufferable people on the planet. Academic literature critics. I joke, but truly Bolaño has it out for at least a subsection of this group. Bolaño’s work is suffused with a love of literature, and his work has clearly led him to thinking long, hard, and critically about the role of institutions of higher learning in the arts and society. In this first part — The Part About The Critics — we watch these critics, explore their banal lives and petty dramas, witness their love-triangles (or quadrangles) and experience an increasing sense of dread as they are pulled, ever so slowly, towards Santa Teresa in search of reclusive writer Archimboldi that they have staked their professional careers on. Bolaño crafts this first section to help his reader understand that he is on the offense in this novel, against the global system that most benefits what people call “The West” and the institutions that uphold it, including the university. Martin Paul Eve has written about how this section of the novel serves as a critique of how the world of the academy serves to work with and uphold violent systems. He notes that while universities claim or even seek to pursue sociological ends that will lead to a better world, they are institutions that exist within and reinforce the structures of power that already exist, which is part of Bolaño’s critique. The character Amalfitano has a monologue to the critics in this section of the book where he says “In Mexico . . intellectuals work for the state. . . the state feeds him and watches over him in silence . . .it puts this giant cohort of essentially useless writers to use.” (2666, 121) This use, Amalfitano explains, is in “exorcizing demons” or altering social climates. While Amalfitano specifies that he is talking about Latin America, the critique of world systems present throughout the book, and the contemptible nature we see in the critics reveals that this is not just a critique of the failings of intellectuals in one region, but intellectuals linked to state power the world over. It is difficult for institutions ensured by power to challenge power.

There is another layer to this critique, again outlined by Eve, which is that some intellectuals divorce their work from the sociological entirely, venturing purely into aesthetics. This breed of critic is the one embodied by the four critics in this novel. Their analysis of Archimboldi is centered on his aesthetics, and the hollowness of this pursuit, and the hollowing effect it has on them is explored throughout the novel. While they profess to be enlightened and cosmopolitan, they demonstrate cowardice, cruelty, and even violence under their cloak of sophistication. Most stunningly, when two of them viciously beat a Pakistani taxi driver in England for an insult, all the while exclaiming statements of their “enlightened” milieu.

“Shove Islam up your ass, which is where it belongs, this one is for Salman Rushdie (an author neither of them happened to think was much good whose mention seemed pertinent), this one is for the feminists of Paris (will you fucking stop, Norton was shouting), this one is for the ghost of Valerie Solanas, you son a bitch, and on and so on, until he was unconscious and bleeding from every orifice in the head, except the eyes.” (p. 74)

This crime is something the critics struggle with momentarily, doubting themselves for a little while, before their personal ambitions pull them back to their “ordinary” lives in the pursuit of academic prestige. It is savage, cruel, petty, presented almost like a piece of slapstick comedy through the narration. It is never addressed again. The violence of the critics never touches them, beyond a few moral twinges.

After they enter Santa Teresa, the critics start to become more unhinged in different ways, disturbing dreams haunt them, their obsessions morph and twist into new forms as their hunt for their mysterious author grows more fruitless. One abandons the search, another becomes a monomaniacal aesthete obsessed with reading and re-reading the same books, and another begins an inappropriate relationship with an underage girl (whose family accepts due to their poverty and his relative high social standing) who he eventually abandons. These are the capstones of Bolaño’s total scorn for these characters, and through them what he sees as the myopic institutions they represent. The critics serve as totems for the academic institutions of the West, the colonial attitudes of Westerners, and the hidden violence of world institutions that prioritize the traditional seats of power. The professors receive no comeuppance except what they inflict on themselves through their own neuroses. They believe themselves to be above and different compared to a place like Santa Teresa — throughout their visit they are scornful and dismissive of the local university as “provincial” — but this superiority is contrasted with the more sympathetic and aware Amalfitano. This illusion of perceived difference is one that I think a reader from the United States should consider when thinking about “other places” in their own lives.

The Mexico of the American imagination is a land of lawlessness, powerful and ruthless drug cartels, a weak state, and intense violence. The mass killings of people, the narco culture, the inability of the state to control these cartels all factor into this “new frontier” that exists in the American imagination. But it is arguably not “lawlessness” that defines the Mexican situation or the spread in violence within the region, but the militarization of both Mexico and the United States that has influenced the upswing in violence. Oswaldo Zavala demonstrates this in the groundbreaking work Drug Cartels Do Not Exist (2022) where he examines the origins of the modern idea of the cartels in fiction and press briefings across all of North America, contrasting that with the reality. To quickly summarize, the idea of “The Cartels” was birthed during the reorientation to a new enemy for national security states during the twilight of communism under the Reagan administration. Zavala traces the official designation of the drug traffickers, who are much more of a loosely linked series of neworks of organized crime at different levels of coordination or organization, each with their own relationship to different state actors as historic organized crime always has had, into “The Cartels.” That is a narrative of massive, highly funded, explicitly corporatized and ruthless entities that wish to usurp the state and demand intense military force to destroy is the origin of rise in violence across Mexico, and created the environment that is so violent today. It is an aestheticized image, divorced from reality for the sake of the narrative.

“All formation of hegemonic discourse is produced from the articulation of a metaphor that essentially summarizes a specific political project. The metaphor works thanks to an erasure of the contingent conditions of its own enunciation” (Drug Cartels Do Not Exist, p. 119)

This concept of “The Cartels” places us in the situation we find in our own media, where we see references to them on the news, in our television shows, and in film. “The Cartels” serve as an eternal enemy that requires all measures and methods to defeat, and eternal justification for violent reaction. They are an ever-present threat, a boogeyman, a tool to ensure that people want more police, they want walls, they want safety from an enemy. But these cartels are not what we are told they are, and the reality of their influence is not one that exists outside of state actors. This is most striking in Juarez, the real city that is represented by Santa Teresa. While Juarez was by no means the safest city in the world, its murders shot up by massive numbers once it was occupied by the Mexican military during the Calderon presidency’s war on the cartels. It was the imposition of this war footing, and the perpetual “state of exception” (a time when we must make exceptions to normal legality and perhaps morality) that led to this point according to Zavala’s analysis of the data and reporting of many journalistic outlets.

This time of exception appears all over, across all sorts of political actions and in all sorts of media products. An American audience should be highly familiar with the exception, the good guy must do something wrong to stop the bad guy, or save the people he loves. It is a keystone to many modern works of entertainment. And we should ask ourselves, why must we accept that? The killer Alejandro in Sicario murders with impunity for the sake of stopping the cartels, but he does nothing to solve the condition of violence. The DEA ensures the deaths of many, many people trying to catch Pablo Escobar, and cocaine still flows from Colombia in both reality and media products like Narcos. Guantanamo Bay is still open. 2666 does not give us an answer to this issue, but rather helps us trace the shape of the problem. We are told this when Oscar Fate is told in The Part about Fate “Nobody pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.”

The ones killed in the Commune weren’t part of society, the dark-skinned people who died on the ship weren’t part of society, whereas the woman killed in a French provincial capital and the murderer on horseback in Virginia were. What happened to them could be written, you might say it was legible. (2666, 266–267)

The most difficult part of 2666 to talk about is the most substantial in the five book sequence. The Part About The Crimes is a grisly dive into the femicides that have turned Juarez inside out and sparked revulsion and horror worldwide since they were first recorded in 1993. Supposed serial murders across Juarez, targeting women of all backgrounds, but capturing the public imagination through the image of the poor workers of the maquiladoras, the factories that employ the impoverished peasant class of Mexico to make goods in Juarez with favorable export rates for the multinational corporations that own them after the implementation of NAFTA. These murders have never stopped. Bolaño approaches this topic with a cold fury and numbed clinical eye, endlessly listing the circumstances of dozens upon dozens of women’s murders and the discovery of their abused corpses as the narrative travels from the first recorded femicide up to 1997. It is a profoundly upsetting part of the novel, where the carelessness of the state is as much a centerpiece as the murders or investigations. There is no heroic narrative here, and there is not even an individual culprit, though there are fingers pointed in all directions. There is no mythologized narco lord leading bands of depraved killers, there are not secretly decadent politicians orchestrating sick rituals despite rumors to that effect, it happens because the conditions of Santa Teresa allow it to happen. The book hammers this home, with every perpetrator of an individual femicide caught — when they are caught — a new accusation pops up, a new lead in a new case, but then another murder happens. Unconnected, unlinked. Another woman is dead. There is no closure, no triumph, no change in the structure, and no change in conditions. As the police and media seek to pin murders onto individual men, looking for a monster, something from outside the system, to blame women continue to be murdered in Santa Teresa. This is a mirror of the constant game of whack-a-mole that authorities play with violent narcotics traffickers. Just like places like Juarez in reality, Santa Teresa is a product of the world system. Poverty, desperation, exploitation, and the security state that exists to police with violence does not fix things, because in so many ways these women do not matter while the system does. They have no use, or their use is totally interchangeable with any other person. This is one of the secrets of the world, that the killings are just a part of a system where some people don’t matter, where violence against them doesn’t matter. Yellow places. Other places.

2666 does not give us an easy answer or solution to the issue of femicide, or of state violence, or the attempt to pin these ills on individual actors. There is no easy villain, or even a true solution within the pages of the novel, because it is about the world we live in today. It is about the places that the violence of our social order is sublimated in, and the places it bubbles up to the surface in horrifying brutality. Santa Teresa is Juarez, but it is not just Juarez. It is the cobalt mines in the Congo. It is Venezuela. It is Iraq. It is Tigray. It is everywhere there are people dying on the streets of opioid addiction and homelessness. It is about the people who do not count, except when it becomes useful to count them.

For a citizen of the United States, this is an important thing to remember. Our cultural products, the things that entertain us and tell us about the world, about the places that we are told not to go to, the places that are dangerous, they are not so disconnected from us. Zavala teaches us that the cartel wars were the direct consequence of our own government putting pressure on Mexico, and the complicity of the Mexican government in affirming that narrative, and institutions validating that narrative. Our politicians and screen-writers and pundits point to these dangerous places again and again and ask us to be terrified. To ask for higher walls, more guns, more “safety”. Recognizing that this enemy, this call for safety, and for hard men to ensure it, is nothing more than a process of rhetorical mythmaking is vital to seeing the world for what it is. Cultural products are not the world as it exists, but the world as it has been told to us. Narcos, The Mule, Scarface, Sicario, these are all just one type of story, that show us one way of seeing, and all of them are fictional. If we are to inform our understanding of the world through fiction, a diversity of stories that try to show us the truth, to grapple with something difficult instead of an easy narrative would be better for our collective psyche and actions, and could maybe lead to a better world. 2666 is not an easy read, but it is one that grapples its way towards a truth.

Citations

Bolaño, Roberto, and Natasha Wimmer. 2666. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

Eve, Martin Paul. “Keep Writing: The Critique of the University in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.” Textual Practice, vol. 30, no. 5, 2016, pp. 949–64, https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2015.1084363.

Zavala, Oswaldo, and William Savinar. Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture. 1st ed., Vanderbilt University Press, 2022, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2kcwn8w.