Narrating Narcos: Culiacán and Medellín

Epilogue

172 In 2010, while doing research for this book, I went to a conference at Brown University and attended a panel in which one of the presenters read a paper on “Recortes de prensa” (“Newspaper clippings”), Julio Cortázar’s short story about violence and the impossible predicament of its representation. The analysis was brilliant, and the author said something that haunted me for several months. He argued that Cortázar’s story was a paradigmatic text that revealed everything about the difficulties of representing violence. Back at home, I read the short story again and realized that my colleague was right. From a theoretical perspective, the short story addresses the universal concerns about the representation of violence. It would work perfectly in an undergraduate class, to get students thinking about the problems of violence, the blurred distinctions between victims and victimizers, the complexities of defining the role of a witness, and the general insurmountable difficulty of its representation. Theoretically, there is little that remains to be said about the topic. When representing violence, authors, artists, journalists, and others inevitably run the risk of either glamorization or glossing over the depths of its effects. This may lead to the trivialization and naturalization of violence. Either way, they could be trapped, and—as Cortázar seems to say—the circle would never end: writing about violence, representing it, always carries (or is in itself) an act of violence. Certainly a work representing violence is not comparable to the violence of a massacre , a rape, a violent assassination, or a disappearance, but the fact that a society has to deal with such acts, that a journalist has to report them, and that an artist feels the need to represent them are all manifestations of a common experience of violence. Cortázar clearly shows this in his short story, and in that sense the works studied in this book may not be original. But the main problem when either representing or Epilogue ePIloGue 173 studying violence and its forms of representation is not the search for originality or lack thereof. Nor is it the way in which artists overcome the difficulties of representing violence. The true dilemma is to show (even a hint of) the humanity that has been taken away from the people involved in a given act of violence either as victims, witnesses, or perpetrators. In this book I have looked at the representation of the traffic of illegal drugs and its physical, psychological, structural, and symbolic forms of violence as well as the representation of its normalized and routinized forms of violence. I conducted fieldwork in Medellín and Culiacán to understand the dynamics of local cultural fields and the position the analyzed authors and artists occupy within those fields. Thus all the claims in this book concern the representations of narco trafficking, as it certainly is one of the most violent phenomena of our times, but they respond to specific contexts. Having the short story “Recortes de prensa” fresh in my mind, I went back to the stories about narcos; I went back to my curiosity about the origins and development of narco trafficking in Colombia and Mexico, and to the place Medellín and Culiacán occupy within those histories. I went back to the paisa and culichi artists who represent the phenomenon; I found that Cortázar’s short story did not shed light on those realities in any meaningful way. First, the physical environments where the characters of the novels I read dwell are extremely different from the urban setting Cortázar describes in his story. Second, culichi writers’ language is completely different from that of the paisas, let alone the language used by Cortázar. Third, even the violence itself is assembled to show worlds ruled by other codes and values. Last but not least, the trap of Cortázar’s character when representing violence did not help me understand the uncertainties—and dangers— that the writers of the works I analyzed have to confront. The anecdote about “Recortes de prensa” may seem trivial, but it underscores one of my main arguments. To understand and engage in current discussions regarding the representation of violence when analyzing contemporary works of art, it is necessary to look at the historical contexts and the specific situations that writers (and artists) experience. By no means does hypercontextualizing (to borrow Pierre Bourdieu’s word) the works imply that such contextualization is what enables us to render the works legitimate...