Photography by John Dickie

When a gram of coke is purchased in North America, much of the profit ends up blood-stained in the back pocket of a Mexican druglord (or more precisely, in one of his crates of greenbacks in a warehouse somewhere). And what will the druglord spend it on? Weapons and gold, mostly.
     On the seventh floor of army headquarters in Mexico City, some of the kingpins’ personal treasures are on show in a curious little bazaar of narco items called the Museo de Enervantes (Narcotics Museum). It’s not open to the public — it’s designed to complement the training of troops in the war on drugs, to help them get to know the enemy better — but PLANET managed to sneak inside and take a peek.
     On show is bounty captured from gangster safe houses, or culled from their cold, dead bodies. The permanent collection is truly astounding to behold: like a Gulf cartel boss’ cache of gold-plated, diamond-encrusted Colt pistols, elaborately engraved with initials, signatures, and pre-Colombian motifs. One has a Versace logo, though I doubt Gianni knew much about it. There’s even a solid silver AK-47, which is completely useless as a weapon — it starts to melt after three or four rounds are fired.
     The army says all the guns were custom decorated in the US and smuggled into Mexico along with all the other artillery imported by the cartels (samples of which are also on show in the museum: anti-tank 50-caliber Barrett guns, grenade launchers, bazookas). It’s the old adage: while the drugs flow north, the weapons and cash flow south.

Sin título / Untitled (prelude to sumer), 2005

I first became friends with Dr. Lakra a few years ago when I went to his studio in Oaxaca to get a tattoo. Stepping inside, it was like walking into a baby devil’s playpen: there were toys and dolls and weird shit everywhere, stuff he used in his art. Books, paintings, postcards and stickers covered the walls. We cleared a space on the floor so he could get to work on my flesh.
     Once finished, when he refused payment, I gave him a couple of poster-size photos of mine instead for him to intervene on, knowing that was one of his preferred mediums. He’d spent years tattooing skin, why not tattoo paper? At first, he just did it for fun, but soon the scrapbook turned into a unique body of work which I wrote about for PLANET several years ago. Now, RM Editorial has published a book of one of his collections of magazine interventions, titled Health and Efficiency.
     With an all-black velvet cover and beautifully printed inside, Health and Efficiency is a sexy little book. The pieces are all derived from a pile of old nudist camp magazines he picked up in Brick Lane market in East London. In the original clippings nubile porcelain-white maidens pose puritanically next to ponds and lillies. But in Lakra’s versions they have sailor tattoos and get skewered by monochrome skeletons and mugwumps. On the surface, the tattoo-scratched images appear gaudy and comical, like doodles in a textbook. But if you engage them, the shapes and figures he inserts have a mythical underworld quality.

Illustration by Peter Karpick

Five hundred years ago, Mexico City, then known as Tenochtitlán, was an island citadel of white limestone plazas, temples, and causeways that crowned the vast Lake Texcoco. With a population of around 300,000, it was one of the grandest cities on earth. When Spanish soldiers first set their eyes on the Aztec capital, they wondered if they were not dreaming.
The city’s ceremonial heart lay where the historic old town is today, where the last remnants of the great white city can be seen: just a few hundred square feet of ruins next to the Cathedral, itself built using the stones of dismantled pyramids. Somewhere near here, there stood a temple dedicated to Mictecacihuatl, the Queen of the Underworld, Goddess of Death. Forced underground by the Inquisition and out of sight for centuries, Mictecacihuatl, now transfigured, is on the rise once again, in almost exactly the same place where she was once revered by the Aztecs….

Illustration By Peter Karpick

Over the years, there have been countless random sightings of Manu Chao around the world. Someone saw him playing football in a village in El Salvador, or riding a bike in Serbia, or buying fruit at a market in Mexico City. Many claim to have seen him strolling the streets of the Barrio Gótico in Barcelona, where he allegedly has a small apartment. It seems that Manu, one of the biggest-selling artists in the history of European music, both highly recognizable and a complete chameleon, might appear anywhere, at any time. For Manu Chao, it’s all the same. One World.
     During this last summer, there were confirmed sightings in North America, where his official schedule took him on a month-and-a-half-long tour with his band, Radio Bemba. And there he was, backstage at the Prospect Park bandshell in Brooklyn. On a balmy afternoon just hours before the evening’s show, Manu’s short, compact frame saunters casually around, barefooted, topless, in calf-length shorts and a flatcap. His arms dangled freely at his sides, moving to the rhythm of his loose body. It’s with a rascal’s glee and impatience that he begs the engineers to crank up the volume during the soundcheck. “More, more, more,” he mouths, pumping his arm, finger pointing up to the sky. Indeed, talking to him, a childlike energy comes across: a curiosity, a wonder.