Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Chasing the Scream, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Drug Legalization and U.S. Policy
Addiction and Human Connection
Prohibition and the Cycle of Violence
Stories and Human Psychology
Summary
Analysis
Rosalio Reta’s story represents the most extreme violence of the drug war, but Hari wants to understand how everyday Mexicans experience it. This is how he learns about a young woman from Ciudad Juárez named Rubi Fraire. When she was 11, on a family vacation, she accidentally got left behind at a diner. But she wasn’t worried: she knew that her mother, Marisela, would always come back for her. And she did. Three years later, Rubi fell in love with Sergio Barraza, a young man who worked at the family’s carpentry store. One day, she disappeared. Marisela eventually found her: she was pregnant and living with Sergio. Marisela and Rubi rekindled a relationship.
Just like Tiffany Smith, whose murder Hari described in Chapter 7, Rubi Fraire’s story represents the way that the drug war drags innocent ordinary people into peril. In particular, it makes all other conflicts more dangerous because it creates powerful criminal organizations that are willing to pursue their goals with lethal force. Fraire’s relationship with Sergio Barraza began as an ordinary teenage love story, but the fact that Fraire disappeared with Sergio suggests that their relationship eventually became dangerous.
Themes
Then, Rubi and Sergio mysteriously disappeared again. They left a note saying that they wanted to get away from Marisela. And for the first time, Rubi didn’t call or come back. After several months, Marisela visited Sergio’s family—and found Sergio and the baby, but not Rubi. Then, Sergio vanished with the baby. Marisela’s family started putting up flyers to look for him. Within weeks, an anxious young man named Angel called. He told Marisela that Sergio had picked him up and offered him a job—then forced him to help transport Rubi’s dead body.
Sergio was obviously responsible for Rubi’s disappearance, but Marisela could do nothing to stop him—and clearly didn’t expect the police to help her. When Angel finally contacted her, he gave her the information she needed, but his fear put Marisela’s case in jeopardy. He surely knew that the penalty for crossing people like Sergio was death, so reaching out to Marisela was selfless—but also extremely dangerous.
Themes
Angel and Marisela filed a police report, but nothing happened. Marisela started visiting the police station every day to demand action, then investigating Rubi’s death herself. She eventually found Sergio’s location and number. Just days after breast cancer surgery, she tracked Sergio down in another city, 16 hours away, and brought him to the local police. He confessed to murdering Rubi. The Juárez police found fragments of her body in a dump for slaughtered pigs. Marisela went digging through the dump, looking in vain for the rest of Rubi’s body.
The police did next to nothing to help Marisela investigate Rubi’s disappearance and bring Sergio to justice. Readers will rightly suspect a link between this police inaction and the war on drugs. Marisela persevered, but much like Angel when he contacted her, Marisela had little reason to expect that justice would be served (and every reason to expect she’d be punished for seeking it).
Themes
At Sergio’s trial, Angel testified about seeing Rubi’s body and said that Sergio threatened to kill him if he spoke out. From the stand, Sergio begged Marisela for forgiveness. But despite his confession, the judges inexplicably acquitted him. Then, Angel and his whole family were murdered.
Rubi’s case shows how, even when everything appears to go right, Mexico’s legal system fails to deliver justice, presumably because it functions entirely at the mercy of cartels. Meanwhile, Angel’s murder demonstrates that there’s no reward for standing up for justice—just further retaliation and violence. Angel’s death also gives the reader important context to help them understand how dangerous (and courageous) Juan Manuel Olguín’s angel protests are.
Themes
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Marisela started protesting in the streets every day, holding a picture of Rubi. Other mothers who had lost their daughters joined her. Eventually, she found another address for Sergio and tracked him down again in yet another city. She called the police, but Sergio escaped arrest. Finally, Marisela tried one more desperate measure: she marched from Juárez more than 1,000 miles through the desert to Mexico City and demanded action from the president. But he wouldn’t even meet with her.
Marisela used every conceivable tool to raise awareness about the injustice that she suffered. But at all levels, Mexico’s government remained completely indifferent and unresponsive to her protests. This shows how the drug war has normalized serious violence—while Marisela and Rubi’s story might seem extraordinary to Hari’s readers, it was utterly ordinary in Juárez during the drug war.
Themes
Then, Marisela learned why the police wouldn’t act: Sergio is in the Zeta Cartel, who run the Chihuahua state government. Just like Arnold Rothstein, the Zetas have “bought [themselves] a place above and beyond the laws.” Marisela went to the state capitol and called a press conference to announce what she learned about the Zetas controlling the government. The governor refused to meet with her, so she continued protesting. One evening, the capitol’s security detail mysteriously disappeared, and a hitman shot and killed Marisela.
The most obvious explanation for the government’s indifference ended up being the right one: the Zeta Cartel used its extreme power to shut down the legal process that could have brought Sergio Barraza to justice. Of course, the broader implications of this failure are profound: it shows that the war on drugs undermines democracy altogether by giving organized crime veto power over the elected government. Ultimately, Marisela’s tragic death suggests that justice cannot be served until the drug war ends—for now, cries for justice are more likely to be silenced than heard.
Themes
Marisela’s son now lives in the U.S. He tells Hari that the drug war has killed too many innocent people like his mother—and it hasn’t even reduced drug use. Instead, it has strengthened the cartels. If drugs were legalized, Marisela’s son says, the cartels would lose much of their power. This reminds Hari of how Prohibition backfired—something that even Harry Anslinger recognized. Two years after Marisela’s death, the police killed Sergio during a shootout. This means that he will never get a trial, and Marisela’s family will never learn the truth.
Just like the deaths of Deborah Hardin, Marcia Powell, and Tiffany Smith, Rubi Fraire and Marisela Escobedo’s deaths were utterly unnecessary and avoidable. Marisela’s son expresses the central idea of Hari’s book so far and foreshadows the ideas that he examines in the rest of it. Namely, all the available evidence indicates that the drug war has only worsened addiction, increased violence, and hollowed out the rule of law around the world. This means that modern countries must try legalizing and regulating drugs instead.
Themes
In Mexico, the drug war has killed countless people and badly weakened government institutions. But the Mexican people didn’t choose this drug war; the U.S. government imposed it on them. In the 1930s, Mexico put Leopoldo Salazar, a pro-legalization addiction doctor, in charge of national drug policy. Harry Anslinger furiously lobbied the Mexican government to fire Salazar—and succeeded. Later, when Mexico started giving addicts legal access to safe drugs, Anslinger blocked U.S. opiate exports to Mexican hospitals until the Mexican government gave up and started doing Anslinger’s bidding.
International audiences—and particularly Americans—tend to blame Mexico’s people and government for the severe drug violence that continues to plague the country. But the historical record shows this attitude to be ignorant and harmful at best, or underhanded and deceitful at worst. In reality, Anslinger coerced Mexico into adopting a drug policy that it knew wasn’t in the country’s best interests. And today, Mexico’s violence is still fueled by the flow of drugs to the U.S. If the U.S. government no longer limited drugs to the black market, then legal corporations would take the cartels’ place in manufacturing and supplying drugs to U.S. consumers.
Themes
Ever since, just like the cartels, the U.S. has given Mexico a dilemma: money or a bullet. If Mexico refuses to join the U.S.’s drug war, the U.S. will undermine Mexico’s economy. Hari can only imagine how Rubi Fraire, Juan Manuel Olguín, and Rosalio Reta’s lives would have been if the U.S. let Mexico “choose drug peace instead of drug war.”
Hari isn’t comparing the U.S. government to the cartels just to be facetious or provocative. Instead, he’s faithfully presenting the results of his reporting: the historical record clearly shows that the U.S. has inflicted at least as much violence and suffering on Mexico as the cartels—not least of all because the cartels could never exist without the U.S. drug war. It’s fitting that Hari ends the first half of his book in Mexico: the suffering caused by Anslinger’s drug war in Mexico is much greater, more overlooked, and harder to overcome than it is almost anywhere else.
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