Moral failure: a jeremiad of the war on drugs in Guatemala

Abstract

The current consensus among social scientists and political pundits is that the war on drugs failed, with a raft of failed programmes, failed interventions, failed policies, and even failed states. But these critics have tended to overlook a more existential form of failure that plays a key role in the ongoing effects of the war on drugs. This failure, which anthropologists of Christianity are well positioned to understand, is the perceived failure of Pentecostal Christians to make right with the Lord. Based on extensive fieldwork in Guatemala, a country profoundly transformed by the illicit movement of cocaine from the Andes to the United States, this article assesses how and to what effect a sense of moral failure among the country's Christian communities sustains a now expansive network of Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centres. Reading one such centre's archive of intake forms as a jeremiad – a Christian lament that bemoans the failures of society to keep its covenant with God – this article concludes that a sense of moral failure sustains the fading edges of today's war on drugs.

Writing failure: knowledge production, temporalities, ethics, and traces

“…Clifford Geertz (1957) famously used a failed ritual to criticize functionalist understandings of social order, highlighting how it ushered in change (see also Hüsken 2007). The anthropologies of religion and ethics also show how sensing and responding to failure are central to many practices of self‐cultivation, whether acknowledging sinfulness or aiming to correct – or learn to relinquish responsibility for – what are believed to be moral failures (Beekers & Kloos 2017; Fahy 2017; Hüsken 2007; Mautner 2020; O'Neill 2022). These studies excavate the subtle range of responses to and moral valences of failure that surpass ideas of things gone wrong, blame, and accountability.…”