I am going to apologize in before hand for this blog post turning into a rant.

Although I found the readings by Allison Spedding on the Bolivian coca farming really interesting, the only thought that really came to me was how I despise the United States. I cannot understand that because they had failed in their attempt of creating a society in which people don’t fall into drug addiction, they go and destroy the means of living of the people elsewhere. Even if I know little about the mechanisms of how society might predispose its people to drug addiction, I can imagine that this issue could have been solved within the States without going to the Bolivian Andes. I mean, was it really the case that the Bolivian Indigenous people were at the heart of the US drug problem?? To me it just seems like a distraction from the fact that the politics within the United States was failing at solving the drug problem at their end and protecting people from ending up using drugs, so they outsourced their problem and put the blame on the Bolivian Indigenous coca farmers. It makes no sense. I hate it. I am also left wondering about the role of the Bolivian state in this situation. Why did they allow the US to carry out such measures in the Andes?

Anyway, moving forward from the rant, I found the Muehlmann’s article really engaging. I personally didn’t find it surprising that many corridos tell stories about narcos and violence, since I was already familiar with them in the context of the Mexican revolution. I was however curious about the connection between violence and these songs. I have taken a couple of classes where we have discussed if media/playing violent video games causes people to act violently, and it has always been concluded that there is no causality (even if there might be a positive correlation) between the two variables. Therefore, I thought these songs wouldn’t probably cause any more violence than a violent video game would. However, the author described a few instances where violence occurred when a corrido was playing, which indicates that they are directly connected to sensitive issues that provoke violence. The violence described in the article seemed quite blatant, and the author mentions few instances in which she was shocked by it. It is also mentioned, how everybody else dealt with violence in a completely normal and chilled manner. This left me wondering, if the people had merely “becoming desentisized” to violence, or if there is a missing piece of the puzzle that the Canadian author couldn’t figure out for her own positionality? For example, in the instance where there was a shooting in the concert and the singer shot into back into the crowd (didn’t this cause panic in the crowd??) and later how he was remembered as some type of a hero, makes me think that the violence was somehow performative. What do you think?