Released on the 31st anniversary of John Lennon’s death, Narco-Mania is Mexico-based filmmaker, journalist and teacher Greg Berger’s latest satire with his brand of Gringoyo sting that keeps shedding light on the War on Drugs and its devastation in Mexico. Actually, what Berger skillfully presents is a declaration of war on the War on Drugs.
Berger is a teacher and associate with Narco News. You can see his work and other Gringoyo videos at Narco News TV.
From Narco News publisher Al Giordano on Narco-Mania:
Greg began working on the idea for this video late last year, and the first scenes were filmed in Mexico City last February. And I have to say, to imagine family members of drug war victims chasing US Drug Enforcement Administration and Embassy agents out of Mexico seems a more hopeful and inspiring message than shouting and chanting slogans about 50,000 dead from their “war on drugs.”
The short film shows how the declarations of war by Mexican President Felipe Calderón in 2011 sound too much like US President Richard Nixon’s discourse 40 years ago, before our filmmaker Greg (affectionately known in Mexico as “Gringoyo”) was even born! Forty years of fighting the drug war the same way — a prohibition policy enforced by police and armies that deploy weapons and prisons and other punishments – without an iota of success. We noticed that so many of today’s leading drug warriors — from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich — were once the very sixties hippies that Nixon targeted with his drug war and look at them now: They’re doing the same things to the next generations, too.
In this video, the US State Department cooks up a plan from their drug-addled brains to break up the Mexican drug “cartels” by fixing up alleged “cartel boss” Chapo Guzmán with Yoko Ono. The “expert analyst” in the film, one Jorge Martín, explains: “We have to remember that the US State Department is led by aging baby boomer Hillary Clinton and lots of other former 1960’s youth. And they all suffer from one traumatic, collective memory: The break-up of the Beatles in 1970.”
Watch as the fab four US agents try every dumbass thing they can think of to play Cupid to Chapo and Yoko (including an Easter “Bed-In for War” on the Mexico City zócalo reminiscent of Beatle John Lennon and Ono’s Christmas “Bed-In for Peace” in 1969) and it may occur to you, as it did to us, that these bizarre tactics are no less absurd than every other hapless way they are waging the so-called “war on drugs” today.
The video began shooting weeks before a Mexican citizens mass movement to end the drug war rose up in April of this year — a nonviolent movement that last week saw one of its own fledgling leaders, Nepomuceno Moreno, gunned down in Hermosillo, capital of the state of Sonora — and if the movement is going to keep growing and stripping away the institutional rings of support for the drug war, it is going to have to do what all successful movements have done: Learn to laugh as well as cry, to triumph as well as mourn. Ridicule and humor are among the most powerful nonviolent weapons available to those of us who understand that you can’t beat gunfire with gunfire.
This video is also an appeal to the hearts and minds of those of you elder folks who were once rebellious youth but now fill the halls of government, media, business and every other power: Would you please get your generation under control and stop it already with the hypocrisy of claiming to love the rebel music and celebrities of your era while doing the same terrible things to today’s youth that Nixon et al — look in the mirror, you’ve become him! — did to you and yours. Remember that the Nixon White House tried, in 1972, to deport the British ex-Beatle, and the “drug war” (his 1968 guilty plea to misdemeanor marijuana possession) was the pretext they used to do it. Maybe you cried when Lennon was gunned down on this week of 1980, even if you didn’t know him personally. Imagine how family members of 50,000 Mexicans killed in the past five years of the US-imposed war on drugs have cried as a result of the policies that you prop up with your silent consent (or, even in the case of too many who do advocate ending the drug war, your ineffective self-indulgent forms of “activism”).
In the United States, you have not succeeded in organizing a mass movement against this war, despite decades of trying. Your steps are as repetitive and unimaginative as those of the drug warriors you oppose. But in nine months, Mexicans have already done the job you did not want to do. This video aims, from their creative foxhole, at the heart of your stinking war on drugs and its policy of prohibition. The events in this video are so ridiculous and yet at the same time tell an awful truth. You may not know whether to laugh or to cry. But perhaps if you can laugh with us, together we can wield the weapon of ridicule to weaken the prohibition policy and gain more heart and strength to organize ourselves for the nonviolent battle required — and long overdue — to defeat it once and for all.
This article appears in Dec 8-14, 2011.
That was pretty well done. Creative and fun, but against a backdrop of utter seriousness, including the dedication to the peace activist who was murdered.
Are you an international criminal? And are you wondering if it’s wise to maintain your affiliation to any one of the estimated sixteen currently-active Mexican Drug Cartels? Maybe you should consider the following information very carefully:
As a gesture of good will vis-a-vis cross-border relations, key members of the American Federal Government have recently pledged a solemn oath, declaring their commitment to encouraging people like yourself to increase performance and productivity. In particular, the United States Department of Justice will guarantee that you achieve a respectable level of technology in both military grade weapons and equipment while actively facilitating the laundering of that swirling cascade of cash that a business like yours invariably and continually generates.
Still not convinced that during prohibition the phenomenal benefits of remaining an international drug criminal far outweigh the remotely possible, negative consequences? Here’s another recent DOJ announcement, and this time written personally by their principal corporate attorney whose main priority at the moment is to avoid being tried for treason, gun-running, racketeering and murder:
“For nearly three years, I have been privileged to work closely with many of the most ruthless organizations to the south of our border. I am extremely proud of our record of abuse, fraud, waste, misconduct, and treason and I pledge a continuation of all such policies that will further weaken our national security and compromise all honest efforts of law enforcement.”
– Attorney General Holder.
Some people, it appears, have absolutely no problem being simultaneously absurd, and very, very evil.
Must we wait for a complete economic collapse to regain our unalienable rights?
Maybe it’s high time we all stood up and told our government that we’re pooped at being beaten and jailed in order that unconscionable Transnational Corporations, and their Media Enablers, can continue to abuse, addict and poison us for obscene profits?
“I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The “drug war” is a deliberately manipulated “political weapon” used to intimidate “we the people” into accepting an ever increasing tyrannical structure that invades the whole of private life with little to no escape.
Even with alcohol now officially recognized as the most dangerous the most destructive and the most deadly drug of all the drugs, do not expect the misfits and morons who desire a draconian police state to change their evil ways.