ENCOBIJADOS AND ENCAJUELADOS ARE NOT TEX-MEX MENU ITEMS

In our country we’ve also had a proliferation of drug jargon over the years. While most parents don’t have a clue, their teenaged kids dig the dopers' language.

MEXICO BATTLES PROLIFERATION OF DRUG LANGUAGE
By Mark Stevenson

Associated Press
April 14, 2011

There are a half dozen words for drug cartel informants, and double that for drug war dead. "Narco" has become a general prefix. The trend has people worrying that Mexico is developing a kind of offhand jargon that anesthetizes people by making escalating violence seem routine.

Some experts, however, say slang and euphemisms can help people deal with the horrors around them.

Slang for those killed in Mexico's bloody drug war depends on how the victims are found. "Encobijados" are bodies wrapped in a blanket. "Encajuelados" are those stuffed in a car trunk. "Encintados" are suffocated in packing tape.

"Narco" is strewn through everyday speech. "Narco-fosas" are pits where cartels dump victims. "Narco-mantas" are the banners strung by gangs from highway overpasses with threatening messages. "Narco-tienditas" are small drug-dealing locations also sometimes known as "picaderos," if heroin is sold there.
Contract killings are "jobs," kidnap-murders are "pickups," and "settling of accounts" means drug-dealer killings by rival gangs.

"I think they had a falcon on me," Jaime Rodriguez, the mayor of a suburb of the northern city of Monterrey, said after several dozen gunmen ambushed his convoy, killing one of his bodyguards and wounding several others.

He meant a "halcon," a kind of cartel informant, often a taxi driver, who follows targets around.

Informants who stand around on street corners have a different name - "posts" or "stakes." And there are "ventanas," or "windows" - informants who walk around, marking houses of intended targets with advertising fliers or graffiti.
Some Mexicans are so terrorized by the especially brutal Zetas gang that they refer to the cartel in hushed tones as "The Last Letter," or merely "The Letter."

It's not unlike Sicilians adopting "Cosa Nostra," or "Our Thing," the harmless name that the Mafia created for its syndicate of crime and violence.

Anti-crime activists like Isabel Miranda Wallace view such language as a dangerous kind of avoidance, leaving little room for outrage at the violence engulfing Mexico.

"Calling it a 'pickup' takes away from the seriousness of it," said Wallace, who led a successful decade-long fight to bring her son's kidnappers to justice, though his body still has not been found. "You become inured to the pain and suffering of these images."

But having a word for a horrific event can make it easier to handle, counters Ricardo Ainslie, a University of Texas professor who has studied the psychological effects of violence in the border city of Ciudad Juarez.

"Language helps you absorb things that are overwhelming ... people need the language because it structures the experience," Ainslie said, noting that residents of Juarez often refer to cartel victims as "muertitos" - literally "little dead ones."

"There's something kind of normalizing about the language," he said. "You've got this tension, and one of the ways you handle it is by trivializing it."