Yes, so it is Jaime GonzΓ‘lez DurΓ‘n, known to his comrades as “El Hummer,” once a founding sinew in the anatomy of the ZETAS, that savage paramilitary spawn of the Gulf Cartel, has now received his reckoning. A reckoning not in fire or exile, not before his victims or the people of Tamaulipas, but in the cold, fluorescent light of an American court. There, today, after years of silence and evasion, after secret houses and coded transmissions, he bowed his head, not before truth, but before necessity and plead guilty.
The number, 35 years, was not drawn from the annals of justice but carved out in a plea, a pact of reduced punishment in exchange for confession. Not repentance. Confession. For tons of cocaine and marijuana ferried from the worn and bleeding body of Mexico to the insatiable corridors of the United States. $792 million not an abstract figure, not a line in a ledger, but a weight of the poison moved through families, across borders, beneath the silence of complicit skies.
He is 49 now. A man, yes, but not a man in the classical sense, but a functionary of death, regional jefe in Matamoros, Reynosa, Miguel AlemΓ‘n, cities that long ago ceased to be names on a map and became wounds in the geography of a people. He was not alone. He was part of something larger, darker, more methodical, a brotherhood in blood and ambition. The ZETAS. And their pact with the Gulf Cartel. That company, not of laborers, not of saints, but of executioners. Together, they did not rule but ravaged Tamaulipas, Zacatecas, Veracruz, Chiapas, not to govern, but to extract, to profit from the river of narcotics that flowed ceaselessly northward.
Do you remember Samuel? Yes, Samuel, one of the many. Their alliance was forged not in ideology or even greed, but in violence, its promise, its currency. The United States, from the safety of its vast distance, now attempts a kind of retrospective morality. It is the DEA that arrives after the damage, fingers through the ashes, listens to wiretaps from 2007 where “Hummer” arranged the laundering of $1.5 million, filthy, blood-washed money, from McAlester, Texas, back to Mexico.
They call it an investigation. But is it not an autopsy? This man, extradited in 2022, captured in 2015, has been known to us all along. Known by his deeds. By the trail of death, fear, and obedience he carved across our soil. And yet only now, behind foreign bars, does the law speak his name in judgment.
But what of the others? What of the system that birthed him, fed him, saluted him? He is but a single page torn from a thousand-volume chronicle of betrayal, of corruption, of forgetting. And so we are left with silence again. The silence of those who disappeared. The silence of the mothers. The silence between two gunshots at night.
This, too, will pass into forgetting, unless we remember, unless we write it down, unless we confess for ourselves what it is we allowed to happen.
.png)
No comments:
Post a Comment