Decapitated six-year-olds and overexposure to ‘cop dramas’

20/08/2010

Even if—like me, you live in North America and only have basic cable, the chances are pretty good you’ll find what can broadly be described as a ‘cop drama’ any night of the week. Off the top of my head: Bones, Law & Order (three of them?), Cold Case, Dexter, Criminal Minds, CSI (three of them?), Flashpoint, the Mentalist, NCIS, Southland, then of course there’s the non-fiction of COPS and America’s Most Wanted—and popular shows that went off the air fairly recently—the Shield, the Wire.

What is the North American obsession?

I’m sure there are psychological and sociological studies offering a plethora of explanations, but a comment my sister made the other night was enough to get me thinking.

I don’t remember what we were watching, but when it started to get fairly gruesome, she said: “Now that I have kids, I can’t watch these shows anymore.”

And I thought—really? This is pretty tame—even by primetime standards.

I started to wonder if I’d become so desensitized to the violence (I hate even having to write that) that I no longer appreciated how gruesome it all was.

Stab—yawn, blood—yawn, boring. But just when I was worried I was turning into Patrick Bateman, I read about Marleny Alejandra Galdámez and wanted to vomit.

Last week in Ciudad Arce, El Salvador, six-year-old Marleny was on her way to school when she was kidnapped by a group of men, tortured, decapitated, and dumped 500 metres from her house.

(http://www.elsalvador.com/mediacenter/show_gallery.aspx?idr=4332)

According to her mother, the motive was extortion: $US50—El Salvador having dollarized in 2001, the gangs or maras now extort exclusively in greenback.

In San Salvador, where in many neighborhoods extortion is commonplace for those doing something as innocuous as trying to take the bus, the nauseating details of the crime might not have provoked the same collective nausea—but this didn’t happen in the gratuitously violent capital—it happened in the Salvadorian version of the small town.

There’s a reason these cop dramas take place in Los Angeles and New York as opposed to Irvine or Binghamton.

“We haven’t marked this off as a gang area, but it appears gangs foreign to the area have appeared in the past few days,” said Jaime Granados Umaña, police chief in the zone known as La Libertad, the zone in which Ciudad Arce is located.

Even in a country as violent as El Salvador, which often has one of the highest homicide rates in Latin America, many still find solace in the belief there are pockets of relative safety. Marleny’s death has done a great deal to undermine that fragile optimism.

The Archbishop of San Salvador’s recent lament will surely draw some attention, and the Catholic Church—for all its faults—has experienced its own significant losses in its attempt to better the country: the murders in the 80s of the Maryknoll missionary nuns and Óscar Romero are the first who come to mind, though there are obviously more recent examples.

In this case, however, the Archbishop’s statement will only pressure the government into more ineffectual policy.

El Salvador, like President Calderón’s government in Mexico, is at its wit’s end. And as Salvadorians have learned, and as Mexicans surely will should they choose to return the PRI to power, new government won’t change tired solutions. When Antonio Saca and his right-wing ARENA party threw money and bodies at the problem, nothing improved; now current President Maurico Funes of the leftwing FMLN is using 1/3 of the army to support police efforts; the greatest achievement they can boast so far is a decrease in the July murder daily murder rate from 11 to 9.

The country only has 6 million people.

I have no policy suggestion of my own, and I don’t intend to proselytize, but I do know we’ve seen enough examples of violence begetting more violence through ‘crackdowns’ to know that bloody retribution won’t prevent another Marleny from a form of savagery that, tragically, is now deeply engrained.

I’ll come home from work, tired, watch any one of the shows I mentioned and continue to dismiss primetime’s murders as unrealistic. Having found his beautiful little girl in pieces, Marleny’s father might argue the only implausible part is the location.