The big man

Over the past couple of years I have watched Narcos and El Chapo on Netflix.  Both are dramatized stories of true events focusing on drug dealers of a few decades past - Pablo Escobar in Colombia and El Chapo in Mexico.

It turns out I really like stories about drug dealers, at least in part because I get to watch stories about people who live in worlds I have never touched.  The thing that really blows my mind is the henchmen.  I watch stories where the military attacks a place where a drug lord is hiding and the drug lord's bodyguards stand there and fight the military to the death.  The henchmen are facing an enemy that has more people, bigger guns, armour, communication, and even helicopters and tanks for backup.  The henchmen are just dudes with guns. 

And yet they stand there and fight, dying like flies.

It isn't just the dying.  There is an attitude there that I find totally baffling - like somehow it is an honour to fight and die for the boss.  The bosses clearly expect people to place themselves and their families on a pedestal and be eager to die to protect them.  It is a class thing, I think, like the bosses are one class, their henchmen are the next one down, and below them is everybody else.  Like royalty before them these bosses think that they somehow deserve people's undying loyalty and gratitude.

That loyalty boggles my mind.  I mean, they can see that the boss doesn't have loyalty to them.  They know that the boss regularly murders anyone he wants to, including any of his henchmen who annoys him.  I guess I can understand loyalty a little bit when it goes both ways, but when one person clearly thinks of the other as disposable, expendable, interchangeable, it is hard for me to understand that willingness on the part of the henchman to die.

Certainly some among the henchmen are just evil, violent people who thrive on being part of a power structure that lets them hurt other people with impunity.  But some of them spend their days just standing around protecting the boss, doing nothing, knowing that the only thing they are there to do is to die to protect someone who will be running away. 

It doesn't make any sense to me.

I know that there are tremendous differences between these men and me.  They are mostly drawn from desperately poor group of people and had little in the way of options.  The choices available to them were likely manual labour, unemployment, or crime and in that situation crime starts to look pretty good.

So there is an element of economic sense for many of the henchmen because they had so few options.  They just hope that they are one of the ones who makes a good living working for the boss and doesn't end up catching a bullet. 

But there is something in them that isn't just necessity or desperation.  There is some love for the boss that transcends mere employment.  Stockholm syndrome, almost, where once you work for a violent, selfish, evil man for long enough you eventually come to love him despite the fact that he would kill you for any reason at all and not think twice about it.

My parents always told me that while I might make a good general I would never make it through the military because I don't have it in me to obey.  I think being the henchman of a drug lord is pretty much the same thing.

Though clearly it works for an awful lot of people, following orders just isn't my thing.