Doesn’t the free circulation of goods and capital favor illegal trafficking? Isn’t the drug business the most perfect prototype of neoliberal thinking? Aren’t the traffickers just following the golden rule of the market, that every demand will be met by a supply?
Why is it that the most popular drugs today are the drugs of productivity? The ones that hide exhaustion and fear, that fake omnipotence, that help you produce more and earn more? Couldn’t we read in that a sign of the times? Could it just be happenstance that unproductive hallucinogens like LSD, the drugs of the sixties, have receded into prehistory? Were the desperate of those times different? What about their desperations?
SEMINAR ON ETHICS
A baby who doesn’t cry gets no milk, and a man who doesn’t hustle is a fool.
PRACTICUM: HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS AND SUCCEED IN LIFE
Crime is the mirror image of order. The criminals who fill jails are poor and nearly always use small arms and crude methods. If not for those defects of poverty and preindustrial technology, slum criminals could well be wearing the crowns of kings, the wide-brimmed hats of gentlemen, the miters of bishops, or the caps of generals, and they would be signing government decrees instead of placing their thumbprints on confessions.
IMPERIAL POWER
Queen Victoria of England gave her name to an epoch that was indeed victorious, a time of splendor for an empire that ruled the seas and a good part of the lands as well. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us under the letter V, the queen led her subjects by the example of her austere life, always upholding strict morals and good habits, and it is to her in great measure that we owe the spread of concepts like dignity, authority, and respect for family, which were characteristic of Victorian society. In portraits she always wears a scowl, due perhaps to the difficulties she faced and the boredom she suffered in pursuit of the virtuous life.
Although the Encyclopaedia Britannica doesn’t mention this detail, Queen Victoria was also the greatest drug trafficker of the nineteenth century. Under her long reign, opium became the most valuable commodity of imperial trade. Large-scale poppy cultivation and opium production were developed in India at British initiative and under British control. A large portion of that opium entered China as contraband, and the drug industry pried open a growing consumer market. The number of addicts was said to have grown to about 12 million by 1839, when, observing its devastating effects on the population, the Chinese emperor outlawed the trafficking and use of opium and ordered the cargoes of several British ships impounded. The queen, who never in her life uttered the word “drug,” decried that unpardonable sacrilege against free trade and sent her fleet of warships to the coasts of China. During the two decades, with a few interruptions, that the opium war lasted, the word “war” was also never uttered.
On the tail of the warships came cargo ships loaded with opium. At the conclusion of each military action, commercial operations resumed. In one of the first battles, the taking of the port of Tin-hai in 1841, three Britons died and so did more than two thousand Chinese. The balance of losses continued more or less like that in the years that followed. The first truce ended in 1856, when the city of Canton was bombarded by order of Sir John Bowring, a devout Christian who liked to say, “Jesus is free trade, and free trade is Jesus.” The second truce ended in 1860, when Queen Victoria’s patience ran out. It was time to put an end to the obstinacy of the Chinese. Peking fell under cannon fire and the invading troops assaulted and burned the imperial summer palace. After that, China accepted opium, the number of drug addicts skyrocketed, and British merchants lived happily ever after.
THE POWER OF SECRECY
The richest countries in the world are Switzerland and Luxembourg. Two small nations, two large financial markets. About minuscule Luxembourg, little or nothing is known. Switzerland, in contrast, is famous for the marksmanship of William Tell, the precision of its watches, and the discretion of its bankers.
The prestige of Swiss banks is long-standing; a seven-century tradition guarantees their seriousness and security. But it was during World War II that Switzerland became a great financial power. Loyal to its equally long tradition of neutrality, Switzerland did not take part in the war. It did, however, take part in the business of war, selling its services, and at a very good price, to Nazi Germany. The deal was brilliant: Swiss banks took the gold that Hitler stole from the countries he occupied and from the Jews he trapped, including gold teeth from the dead in gas chambers and concentration camps, and turned it into convertible currency. The gold crossed into Switzerland without any problem, while people persecuted by the Nazis were turned away at the border.
Bertolt Brecht used to say that robbing a bank is a crime but the greater crime is to found one. After the war, Switzerland became the cave of Ali Baba for the world’s dictators, crooked politicians, tax-evading acrobats, and traffickers in drugs and arms. Under the resplendent sidewalks of the Banhofstrasse in Zurich and the Corraterie in Geneva lie the fruits of looting and fraud, transformed into stacks of gold bars and mountains of bills.
Besieged by scandals and lawsuits, numbered accounts are not what they used to be, but for better or worse the engine of national prosperity hums along. Money still has the right to wear a costume and a mask in this never-ending carnival, and referendums have proved that the majority of the population finds nothing wrong with that.
Though the money arrives as dirty as can be and the washings are incredibly complicated, this launderette leaves it spotless. In the eighties, when Ronald Reagan presided over the United States, Switzerland was the center of operations for the many-faceted manipulations of Oliver North. As Swiss journalist Jean Ziegler discovered, U.S. arms went to Iran, an enemy country, which paid for them in part with morphine and heroin. From Switzerland the drugs were sold and in Switzerland the money was deposited that later financed the mercenaries who bombed cooperatives and schools in Nicaragua. Back then, Reagan liked to compare those mercenaries to the U.S. Founding Fathers.
Whether temples with high marble columns or discreet chapels, Swiss sanctuaries dodge questions and proffer mystery. Ferdinand Marcos, despot of the Philippines, kept between $1 billion and $1.5 billion in forty Swiss banks. The Philippine consul in Zurich was a director of Crédit Suisse. At the beginning of 1998, twelve years after Marcos’s fall and after many suits and countersuits, the Federal Tribunal ordered $570 million returned to the Philippine government. It wasn’t everything, but it was something and an exception to the rule: normally, stolen money disappears without a trace. Swiss surgeons give it a new face and name, fabricating a new legal life and a fake identity for it. Of the booty looted by the Somoza dynasty, vampires of Nicaragua, nothing at all turned up. Practically nothing was found, and nothing at all was returned, of what the Duvalier dynasty stole from Haiti. Mobutu Sese Seko, who squeezed the last drop out of Congo, always visited his bankers in Geneva in a fleet of armored Mercedes. Mobutu had between $4 billion and $5 billion: only $6 million could be found after his dictatorship fell. The dictator of Mali, Moussa Traoré, had a little over $1 billion; Swiss bankers returned $4 million.