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
In Ciudad Juárez, just across the U.S.-Mexico border from El Paso, a young man named Juan Manuel Olguín walks up to a dead body in the street. He’s dressed as an angel, holding a sign addressed at those responsible for Mexico’s drug violence: “Time Is Short […] Seek Forgiveness.” Because of the drug war, Ciudad Juárez is the most dangerous city in the world. Overall, Mexico has seen at least 60,000 murders in five years—and endless incidents of “unimaginable sadism”—because of the multi-billion-dollar illegal drug industry.
Hari’s trip to Ciudad Juárez gives him insight into the international dimensions of the U.S.’s drug war. He finds that U.S. policies have exported even more violence than they have created at home—and conditions are only getting worse, as the violence continues to gradually escalate over time. Olguín’s protest highlights the utter brutality and senselessness of this violence, which turns human life and death into nothing more than a tool for profit.
Themes
When Hari visits Juárez, he immediately notices the posters of missing women. The city is a vast sprawl of houses in the desert, and he meets Olguín on the outskirts. After seeing his friends join cartels and fall into violence and addiction, Olguín “decided to become an angel.” Over time, people in Juárez have simply gotten used to seeing bodies in the street. People who protest the violence are often murdered, too. But Olguín and several friends from his church decided that the risk is worth it. Wearing their enormous silver angel costumes, they stand by the roadside with their protest signs.
Juárez’s femicide epidemic is well-documented in the international media, but most accounts don’t clearly connect it back to its true origins: U.S. drug policy, which has passed control of the world’s largest drug market to cartels (and continues to reward the most violent among them with the greatest power and influence). Through his angel costume, Olguín suggests that Juárez’s killers can answer only to God—as the worldly authorities are no longer capable of stopping them.
Themes
Juárez is Arnold Rothstein’s dream city: there is no rule of law, and criminals run the show. Even though it’s far from Hari’s comfortable life in London, the two cities are intimately tied together through the drug war. Three people exemplify its story: “an angel [Juan Manuel Olguín], a killer [Rosalio Reta], and a girl in love [Rubi Fraire].”
Juárez shows that, far from strengthening the government, Anslinger’s drug war ultimately hollows it out by concentrating virtually limitless resources in the hands of criminal gangs. While Reta represents the informal cartel government that actually runs Juárez, Olguín represents the public that is forced to deal with a complete lack of public security and functional government. Finally, Fraire represents thousands more of the drug war’s innocent victims.
Themes
Hari wants to learn “what life is like inside a cartel,” but interviewing a cartel member would be impossibly dangerous. Instead, Hari visits a rural Texas prison to interview a young man named Rosalio Reta. When he was 15, Reta went to a summer camp in Mexico, where he learned how to behead, shoot, and kill with his bare hands. He was training to join the Zeta Cartel, which was founded by elite Mexican soldiers who received highly specialized training in the U.S., then went home, quit their jobs, and switched sides.
Reta’s training with the Zetas shows how the drug war normalizes an extreme level of violence. Similarly, the story behind the formation of the Zetas shows how the drug war has given cartels enough resources to make joining them a far more appealing option than even prestigious government jobs like the elite ranks of the military. In fact, the U.S. quite literally gave criminal cartels the training and tools to fight the drug war. Thus, the drug war has incentivized violence and funneled vast resources to anyone willing to commit it.
Themes
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Rosalio Reta grew up in Laredo, Texas, a poor city right on the border, across from the Zetas’ main base in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. He has told two conflicting stories about why he joined the Zetas, and nobody knows which is true. When he was arrested, he told the police that he joined the cartel because he admired its second-in-command, Miguel Treviño. According to this version, he visited Treviño’s ranch, then became a hitman, and he loved every second of it. But in his interview with Hari, Reta claims that he was forced to join against his will. After unwittingly following a friend’s brother to the ranch, he says, he witnessed the cartel murdering people. Having seen too much, he had a stark choice: join or get killed.
Like Chino Hardin, Rosalio Reta grew up surrounded by the drug war: the Zetas had a powerful presence in both Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, and joining the cartel was clearly one of Reta’s best chances at moving up in life. While readers can’t know which of Reta’s two stories about joining the cartel is actually correct, there’s clearly a kernel of truth in each. Reta didn’t fully understand what he was getting into when he joined the Zetas, and once he joined, getting killed would be his only way out.
Themes
Regardless of which story is true, Reta definitely joined the cartel that day, by murdering a man at the ranch. And once he was in, there was no way out. He became a professional hitman, killing at Treviño’s orders. And he didn’t tell anyone, least of all his family. During their interview, Reta avoids saying Treviño’s name and warns Hari not to talk about him. Like Arnold Rothstein and Chino Hardin—but to a much greater degree—Treviño used extreme, unpredictable violence to terrify his rivals and maintain control over the drug market.
Treviño’s behavior shows that the Zeta Cartel has taken the drug war’s “culture of terror” further than anyone else. It forced Reta to participate in a level of violence far more severe than even what Chino Hardin experienced on the streets of New York. The Zetas’ rise to power thus fits Hari’s hypothesis that the drug war has inevitably become more and more severe over time, because whoever is most brutal gets to take over the market. The Zeta Cartel has clearly succeeded in one-upping its rivals through greater violence.
Themes
Reta lived in constant fear of this violence, including from people on his side. But he loved the job’s perks: he had access to all the women, drugs, and money he could possibly want. Treviño once paid Reta $375,000 for killing a man. In wiretapped conversations, Reta and his friend Gabriel bragged about beating their rivals’ relatives to death.
The benefits of working for the cartel don’t clearly outweigh the downsides, but they are extraordinary enough to make it obvious why young people like Reta would choose to embrace a life of violence. Meanwhile, Reta and Gabriel’s conversations indicate that another important reward for them was the sense of power and importance that they derived from killing.
Themes
Of course, this is all part of the cartel’s broader strategy: whichever group employs the most violence can scare its rivals and get a competitive advantage in the drug market. Over time, other cartels catch up by adopting the same strategies, and the cycle repeats. This is why the drug war consistently becomes more and more violent over time: drug prohibition rewards whoever uses “the most insane and sadistic violence.”
Hari elaborates on the thesis about drug violence that he first sketched in his chapters on Arnold Rothstein and Chino Hardin. Namely, drug prohibition locks criminals in a never-ending contest to seize power through more and more extreme violence. This thesis has disturbing implications: it suggests that drug violence will only get worse and worse over time, no matter how hard law enforcement fights it, until politicians finally agree to legalize the drug trade.
Themes
Treviño also bought off the police, military, and even federal officials through a combination of threats and bribes. The police even help the cartel kidnap and murder people. Mexico’s weak rule of law and outsized economic dependence on drug money have helped the gangs take over.
The drug war has given gangs so much power that, in places like Nuevo Laredo, they have even overtaken the government. Indeed, the Zetas’ special forces training indicates that there’s no longer a clear separation between the state and organized crime in Mexico. This is the scenario that Henry Williams first imagined in the 1930s. Yet it isn’t particularly different from the U.S. today, where drug gangs and law enforcement are technically on opposite sides, but ultimately have the same effect: they both significantly escalate drug-related violence.
Themes
Soon, Treviño’s men went after Reta. They attacked him in the woods and slashed him all over his body. According to one story, they were trying to stop him after he lost control and started killing random people for sport. But in their interview, Reta tells Hari that the cartel turned on him because he wanted to quit. Regardless, he managed to escape to the U.S. and turn himself in. He’s serving two life sentences and will probably die in prison. A rival gang has already tried to murder him, and he worries that the cartel will kill his family on the outside. He warns that it might go after Hari, too.
Again, Reta’s testimony is highly unreliable: it’s unclear whether he merely fled from sadistic murderers or actually became one himself. But regardless, his story still captures important truths about the drug war and the endless, brutal violence it fosters. During his time in the cartel, violence became both more commonplace and higher-stakes. The longer he spent in the cartel, the more violence he committed, the less significant each act of violence became to him, and the more likely it became that he would eventually become a victim—whether because of a misstep or because he started to threaten the people he worked for. Finally, Reta’s warning for Hari is a testament to how deeply invested drug cartels are in continuing the drug war and preventing more progressive drug policies from taking hold.
Themes
Regardless of which story is true, Hari concludes, Reta never would have become a sadistic, ruthless killer if it weren’t for the war on drugs. After their interview, Treviño becomes the Zetas’ leader and is then captured by the police. There’s a new turf war for control of Nuevo Laredo, and the violence continues.
Hari doesn’t deny that Reta might have been unstable and prone to crime no matter how he grew up—he merely argues that the drug war channeled Reta’s worst impulses into a life of extreme violence. Meanwhile, following the pattern that Leigh Maddox observed in Baltimore, Treviño’s capture did nothing to reduce drug violence—it just gave new gangsters a chance to rise to the top.
Themes
