Cocaine as pure capitalism

‘ZeroZeroZero’

Author: Roberto Saviano

Publishers: Penguin Current Affairs / 2013

Pages: 417pp

In 2019, famous Italian writer Roberto Saviano spoke and wrote many times about Malta and its connections with organised crime.

He was speaking and writing in the aftermath of the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia and the international echo of the murder.

He dedicated an entire programme on RAI 3 and also co-authored a book that Daphne was writing at the time of her murder.

Saviano is a journalist who for the past years has had to live under constant police protection due to threats on his life. But there were other persons similarly protected who were killed in spectacular murders by the Mafia and organised crime, such as Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

This police protection is no walk in the park, as he himself complains, even though it offers security. He cannot cross the street, cannot enter a bar, cannot converse with people, etc.

The book being reviewed today is a follow-up to Gomorrah, his most famous book.

Today’s book is not a re-hash of the earlier book. It makes two fundamental statements: Cocaine is everywhere around us. Saviano writes a terrible page – the people around us, those providing us with a service, the post-person, the policeman, maybe people related to us... Maybe unbeknown to us, they use drugs.

Cocaine is different from other drugs in that it does not leave any lasting effect on the user. (I do not know if it is habit-forming or not).

Secondly it has become a new world currency, far stronger than the Dollar and the Euro and the other main currencies of the world. We simply have no idea how many tons of cocaine are at this very minute leaving and entering countries, hidden in ships on the high seas. There are even specially built planes and even submarines being used.

Saviano then describes this world trade in intricate details. He begins from the birthplace of the drug – Colombia and Mexico – and tells how huge millions were made and how the cartels punished those who betrayed them. Man can be really inventive when devising ways to punish and kill. The details are terrible. It is not just the betrayer or the gang member who is punished but also journalists and innocent bystanders such as the busload of students kidnapped and killed in Mexico just because they were holding a protest.

The book also speaks about what the justice authorities around the world are doing in this world war such as the United States and that of Italy through such means as witness protection schemes etc. which have proved to be efficacious. All this depends on the government authorities themselves being not corrupt for if they prove to be open to corruption all the efforts by the anti-corruption forces would be in vain.

In his last chapter after enduring so much danger, after getting to know so many facts, after coming to realise the huge world power that the drug trade has come to be, the author comes very near to throwing the towel. He suggests that legalisation could be the solution – “it hits where cocaine finds its fertile terrain, at the law of supply and demand”. But even then he hesitates offering this as a solution.