You can say many things about the drug war in Mexico. You can provide a lot of statistics, which other Cornellians are providing today. You can ignore it. You can pretend nothing happens. But when all is said and done, my country is being held hostage and nobody even understands why. I mean, we understand it is because of drug cartels, but why is this happening?

And it is not an insignificant problem. While a lot of our cities might seem chaotic to the foreigner, they used to be just about the way we liked them. Maybe we could have used a bit more money, but who couldn’t? I enjoyed vividly several of them that are now under siege by a war we did not call for. Monterrey and Torreón, my cities, in particular, the ones I love and miss were carved out of the desert, with no capital or help, through massively hard work.

If I begin, I could hardly stop singing the praises of Monterrey. It is a vibrant city, that even while sitting in the middle of a war and a global economic recession it has been outgrowing the rest of Mexico (and the U.S.) And it is a city that was going through a cultural explosion that I have not seen anywhere else, and I could compare it to few places in the world, from what I hear or read.

In Monterrey we would work and play, enjoying both. We would study in its more than 82 institutes of higher learning, and spend our nights in the lively Barrio Antiguo (which, to the best of my understanding, put New Orleans’ French Quarter to shame). Such things are now either impossible or hardly possible. In what used to be the safest city in Latin America, it feels unsafe to go out at night.

Suddenly, somewhere in 2004 and 2005, we began to see things going awry in town. Groups of people armed with assault weapons started to use them on the freeways and in the squares. And these weren’t street thugs who happened to come by an AK-47. They were deserters from Mexico’s Special Forces, who, according to many rumors, were trained in the infamous School of the Americas in Georgia.

This was the time when Heriberto Lazcano came to head Los Zetas, and found the Federal Assault Weapon Ban expired. Pretty soon we were seeing similar things around the country. In Torreón, a former mayor was gunned down on the streets, barely making it out alive. In Monterrey, a Secretary of Public Safety was executed in front of a church. And we all grew scared. Very scared, because a single AK-47 spits 600 fiery wads of steel and lead a minute, and not every single one of them hit their intended target. People drive through freeways, walk the streets, go to churches. We all grew scared.

And then all these cartels began expanding into extortion, kidnapping and other sorts of racketeering. We grew in a place where you could work hard, carve out a business for yourself and prosper. And we became scared of prosperity. If you were wealthy enough, or looked wealthy enough, you could receive a call, where someone would inform you your spouse, mother, sister, son, father, daughter, cousin, aunt, friend, girlfriend, boyfriend or whatever person you might love, was in their hands. If you want to know just who would be guarding the love of your life, I suggest you read Harper’s Magazine, May 2009, the article by Charles Bowden. It is not for the impressionable.

We all grew even more scared.

In Bocoyna, Chihuahua, some people went into a Quinceañera, (say, like a sweet 16 party) and slaughtered 13 people. All younger than 23-years old, but the youngest 16-months old. Sixteen months old. And we didn’t know how to be more scared, so we thought that would only happen in the mountains, until it happened in Torreón, where a calm, nice bar got sprayed with lead and 13 (some say 40) students lost their life. And now we know not what to think. We love our country, where we grew up, we learned to talk, to love, where we prospered. What happened to us?

Why Mexico, if, after all, it is impossible to grow coca leaves there, and both opium and cannabis grow almost anywhere? It is mainly our association with the United States that places us in such an enviable position, I would guess. We can’t legalize drugs. We face too much international pressure. Nor is our consumption enough to fuel such madness. We hold automatic weapons to be illegal for civilians, and before the Assault Weapons Ban expired they were almost impossible to come by. And we share a very long border with the largest consumer of just about every illegal drug in this blue earth.

The drug trade is a global problem, and is not just a matter of Mexican-American relations. It is not likely to disappear. But the world continues to merrily snort its weekends away with no consideration for the trail of death fueled by its excesses. I’ve seen many a nose filled with cocaine paid with the blood of my brethren.

I don’t know how to fix these problems. But I know prohibition is not helping anybody but the cartels, who get to sell cocaine at several times the price of gold. I know a very large amount, if not most drug-related deaths have more to do with impurities than with the drugs themselves, or the use of loosely produced drugs, such as crack as a cheaper substitute. And I do know that in Mexico 23,000 mothers cry for the death of their children. If that doesn’t sound like much, imagine Madison Square Garden filled to capacity, everybody dead, and you still have upwards of 3,000 people more to go. You can’t have the high moral ground and the sin as well. You can’t have your cake and snort it too.

Rafael Acosta is a Ph.D. candidate in Spanish and Romance Studies. He may be contacted at rafael.acosta.morales@gmail.com. Guest Room appears periodically this semester.