Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade
Chiva paints a picture of Chimayó New Mexico, number one per-capita consumer of heroin in the number one per-capita consumer state in the United States. The book also offers a well-researched history of the global heroin trade from past to present. The picture is ugly indeed.
For those advocating legalization (of hard drugs) as the remedy to this problem, I suggest reading this and then asking yourself: is this the kind of country I want to live in? And for those that think the current plan in the war on drugs is working, I have the same suggestion. Quite obviously it is not working and will not cure the problem.
The author points out that at one time heroin was legally introduced to China. The result: over one quarter of the adult population became hopelessly addicted. In Chimayó, the supply was plentiful, with an individual dose costing $15, but anything not nailed down was likely to be stolen. Overdoses and shootings were common events. A friend of mine from a barrio full of tecatos in Juarez speaks of the same.
Anywhere heroin has been introduced without control to a population, usage of the drug has increased exponentially. With disastrous consequences.
The writing is good and kept me interested from start to finish. But I think the weakness of the book comes near the end where solutions to the problem are offered. There, you’ll find more questions than answers.
I highly recommend Chiva to anyone interested in the drug problem or the region described in the book.
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Chellis Glendinning
Submitted on May 14th, 2005 by Don Henry Ford Jr.And a few excerpts:
A sprawling village, home to about 3,000 people, Chimayo is the spiritual centre of the Río Grande in the upland desert of northern New Mexico. Every Easter thousands of pilgrims trek by foot to the edge of Chimayo where they rest at a Christian sanctuary (El Santuario) to pray. It's a procession rooted in the earthly pagan history of the village.
On a Saturday morning in May 1999, a new date was etched into the spiritual history of Chimayo. The villagers -- despairing that their village had the most drug dealers and users in the county, Río Arriba, with the most drug overdose deaths per capita in the U.S. and increasing numbers of drug-related killings -- came together on an interfaith procession to pray for the end of the violence from drugs and alcohol. Catholic, Tewa, Jewish, Sikh, Muslim, Aztec, Pentacostal and Protestant marched along the highway to the Santuario, 450 people with a collective voice that screamed, needing to be heard.
Yet the local, state and federal authorities didn't hear the scream, didn't seem to care and didn't appear to want to do anything about the drug culture in Chimayo -- the drug-related robberies, the deaths, the murders, the fear. Then, out of the wide blue sky beyond the desert -- four months after the procession, on Sept. 29, 1999, an army of 150 officers -- local, state, Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI -- raided the homes of five drug dealers. Some say it changed Chimayo forever. Some say it was a watershed for drug-culture USA...
...Glendinning's approach was to take the local (the victimization of the users and the exploitation of the growers) and place them in the context of globalization. The heroin trade, Glendinning quickly realized, was not a social sideshow on the periphery of society. She writes: "Through a daunting history of collusion between traffickers, business and banking institutions, governments and military dating back to the British Empire, the illicit drug trade has come to be essential to the accumulation of capital that fuels the expansion and plunder we call corporate globalization."...
...If the story of the community response to the drug epidemic in Chimayo is controversial, this is because, she argues, of the entrenchment of drug epidemics in society. "Like that of any imperial system, [it] always has the effect of fragmenting community into opposing predicaments, survival strategies, and factions. What we've done in New Mexico occurred by a convergence of domestic 'drug war' advocates, legalization activists, prohibitionists, police, federal drug agents, a right-wing governor, 12-step recovery professionals, department of health officials, behavioural health workers, drug addicts, former dealers, teetotalers, Aztecs, Catholics, aetheists, mothers of children killed by drug violence, you-name-it. My job was to reflect what the community did and its many perspectives."...
...As a writer and thinker she has been influenced by Lewis Mumford, Paul Shepard, Emiliano Zapata, A.A. Milne, Che Guevara, Susan Griffin, Subcomandante Marcos, Samuel Hahnemann, Eduardo Galeano, Suzan Harjo, Jeannette Armstrong, Michael Ruppert, Kirkpatrick Sale, E.F. Schumacher and Frantz Fanon among many others. "I've been indelibly marked by all the movements I've been part of," she says, while acknowledging the influence of the Chicano culture of northern New Mexico....
..."I wish to hold up Chimayo and northern New Mexico as a model for other communities who wish to stage an uprising against drug epidemics. Or against any insidious penetrations. And I wish to alert us all to the global nature of the heroin trade. I have come to believe that the purveyors of illicit narcotics are as ambitious -- and ruthless -- in their dream of world domination as are Wal-Mart, Citibank, or Exxon. Right now the illicit drug business takes up a whopping eight percent of the global economy. That's more than automotive, tourism, textiles, and legal pharmaceuticals!"