Méxicas & Narcos

Last week, when I had finished reading the classic Chinese novel "The Monkey" (by Wu Cheng-En; c. 1550, translated 1942 by Arthur Waley), I bought the "Historia de México; tomo I, (1519 - 1761)", a collection of essays and rumination on the subject by Guillermo Torva de Teresa. I learned that the Méxica tribe (i.e. the Aztecs) rose to power and wealth in the 14th century principally by extorting tribute from their neighbouring tribes – e.g. the Tlaxcala, Teotitlan, Mixteca, and Zapoteca – in a well-organised and well-documented system. The Méxica did grow their own food and they traded both near and far, but their extraordinary wealth derived from this tribute, and thus from extortion. 

Each tribe or region had to deliver what was requested. If too much was requested, they might rebel (and periodically did so), but that meant war, and defeat, slavery and human sacrifice. According to the complicated religious system imposed by the priests, the human sacrifices were necessary to maintain stability. And this claim was not without basis and, indeed, proof. The horror inspired by the blood-letting overawed everyone from the emperor down through the ranks of the elite, to the peasants and the slaves.

The killing of sacrificial victims was common practice in other early societies. Witness, Iphigenia and Isaac as two proposed victims from the ancient Greek and Arabic worlds respectively. And, from the world of medieval China, one of Monkey's tasks (on the road to India to bring back Buddhist scriptures) was to save a village from the scourge of providing a boy and a girl sacrifice each year to a extortionist daemon (in truth an angry goldfish escaped from the fishpond of the Bodhisattva 'Kuan-yin'). 

All very scary, I thought; and how glad I am that we have put such things behind us. The scriptures arrived, and human societies learnt the sin of killing for profit. That is to say, most civilised societies. For extortion under threat of death is exactly what is happening in large parts of present-day Mexico (See my recent post and the map quoted.). 

So, even today the real threat of violence does lead to wealth, and to a sort of insidious 'stability', for the use of bribes brings a great number of people in the class of 'those who profit from extortion and the threat of violence'. What a perilously thin membrane divides the civilised from the uncivilised! What a dilemma: to fight them or to join them?