Juárez: the New Vice City

For years I have grown up exposed to the Grand Theft Auto franchise. I have every edition of the game, played out through multiple fictional cities. The game has been in my life for so long that everything contained within it passes through my mind as a norm, which disturbs me when I think about it, but I am disturbed even more when I think that it is based on things that happen in some cities in real life.

Horrid things like prostitution exist in most cities all around the world, and as does crime, however I saw a cringe-worthy documentary on the ABC channel just moments ago, Ross Kemp: Extreme World: Juárez, Mexico which altered the way I think about Grand Theft Auto and its effect on me and other video game players around the world. I have never witnessed such trepidation until I viewed most that goes on in Juárez in this documentary. I imagined myself placed in that city and wondered how it would be to go about my usual activities whilst cartel members or enemies or betrayers are being shot down or sliced up and dumped on roads near me, members who could also my members of my family. It is insane to think that this is a norm. That somewhere in the world, within Mexico, gang wars are a norm.

I hear about drug addictions and I begin to sympathise towards all those addicted. The demand for drugs must be so high. I would have never imagined the drug market to be so rapid in money gain and so dominant in a city not that significantly large in size. I know that the drug market brings one good money but hearing about one ex cartel member earning just under seven-hundred thousand dollars from one run then legitimises these peoples' actions, in my eyes, in terms of why they partake in these dangerous ways of life. People who struggle to acquire an education, to acquire a career and to bring money to their households, assuming if there are any, would no doubt turn to selling drugs or joining  cartel.

I do not blame these people. I blame the government. I blame the rich. I blame the world for not believing in equality in every possible way. I believe in he who first created money to be used as a tender and to be valued more than a human's life. Take the movie The Box starring Cameron Diaz as Norma Lewis, for example. This strange human arrives at Norma's doorstep and drops off a box with a big red button. If she was to press the button, she would immediately acquire a million dollars, under one condition: a spontaneous human dies right as the button is pressed; money or a life? She chose the money. That reminds me of the cartel and of society in general.

In a way all those not in the cartel act in a similar way. Take those working on Wall Street for example. Those who exploit others to make fortunes. Or the wolf himself, Jordan Belfort. Exploitation does not only exist in prostitution or drug dealing, rather in big money corporations. Remember that Joseph Kony hoax? Or how about a little hoax that happened quite locally, where a mobile phone recycling company asked students at my school to rid themselves of the burden of keeping their useless old mobile phones. These phones contain fragments of gold, which are the best conductor to place in these devices. This company has so many phones that it pulls out kilograms of gold and other metal goods and sells them to other companies in order to make money off people who do not have a clue about what is happening.

How about those people who act like the homeless? Like that old Asian man who knelt and looked as though he had no feet, and somebody scared him off in a way I could not remember so he stood up revealing his feet and ran away? I wonder how much money he made off people. Or that lady who was caught out asking for money to get back home at petrol stations, but then gets back into the car with her boyfriend and drives off with all of the money she obtains, only to return the next day and the day after for more?

But that Ross Kemp documentary really got to me because of the amount of dead bodies it shows. Grand Theft Auto does not have realistic graphics when it comes to dead bodies, nor do I think it ever will due to how gruesome they would be, however they do, in their simplicity, create a visual world where the goings on in places like Juárez become the norm for the game player.