Does Ghost Recon: Wildlands Miss the Point?

For those of you who, like me, have been living underneath a fairly large rock (or too busy crying into your dissertation notes to pay attention), everyone’s favourite massive-yet-empty-sandbox-game-creator Ubisoft did it again with Ghost Recon: Wildlands! Taking the Ghosts into a co-op open world environment for the first time, GR:W has the player and 3 friends/AI buddies combating a powerful drug cartel in a fictionalised Bolivia.

Despite the lacklustre reviews and repetitive gameplay, I am pleasantly surprised with GR:W. Setting the game in South America was a good investment, as like Central Asia or Africa, this part of the world has been largely forgotten by video games. The vibrant histories and stories these places have to tell have massive potential, as do their unique and astounding environments (Top Gear’s Bolivian Special, anyone?).

But instead of an Assassin’s Creed game about Simon Bolivar’s triumph against the Spanish, or tales of a God drowning the race of wooden people He created because they kicked dogs, Ubisoft chose to focus on and glorify a stain on not just South America’s history, but a stain on US history too: the War on Drugs. This war was declared by Richard Nixon in the 1970s and has been waged by president after president ever since. The War on Drugs has touched not just headline grabbers like Mexico or Columbia, but many other Latin and South American nations like Nicaragua, Panama, and Venezuela.

Ghost Recon: Wildlands puts the player into a Bolivia that has undergone a sensationalised version of what happened to Mexico and Columbia – a cartel, drawn to Bolivia as the only nation on Earth where growing coca leaves is legal, has grown so powerful that it is able to influence law enforcement and control a national government. After years of this corruption the US Embassy in Bolivia is bombed and a DEA agent is abducted, tortured, and murdered by the cartel, serving as the game's Kiki Camarena, the United States decides to act: the Ghost Recon team is sent in to covertly tear down the cartel and free the Bolivian people.

But this is where the game begins to disregard all that can be learnt about the War on Drugs and American imperialism.

(Yes, America had an imperialist phase and arguably still does. John Green is your man for that.)

The idea that South America is America’s back garden, and is therefore the United States responsibility, or right, to intervene in the countries of the Western Hemisphere stems from 19^th century ideas such as Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine. Understandably, this is a deeply problematic idea and has resulted in some extremely hot topics like the war against the Native American tribes and the Spanish-American War.

But it’s not just historical acts of aggression – the invasion Grenada in 1983, the invasion of the Bay of Pigs in 1961, along with the various coups and insurgencies funded by the United States government throughout the 20^th century demonstrates the fact that this attitude is alive and well. Ghost Recon: Wildlands takes this into the 21^st century, covertly inserting US Special Forces troops into the country, but again this reflects reality – the Pentagon, the CIA, and the DEA have been involved in operations in Mexico, Guyana, and Honduras for some time, and have been ramping up their involvement despite high profile mistakes.

With all of this history behind the War on Drugs, how does the player know that they are the good guys? As you load the game onto the hard drive, there is a slideshow presented to you delivering the back story of this world created by Ubisoft, and an insight into what the Ghosts are supposed to be: working with local rebel forces and working more behind the scenes; “The Ghosts are not a hit squad”, the subtitles inform you. It is a shame, then, that the first thing the game has you do is track down two of the cartel’s torturers and murder them in their home. There is no due process. There is no jury. Despite the evidence of their crimes, this is the extra-judicial killing of two Bolivian nationals by foreigners who are in the country illegally.

There is also the curious notion that the US government is aiding a Communist guerrilla group in the fight against the Santa Blanca cartel. This is unheard of in US geopolitics, especially in South America. In fact the US government has spent most of its time meddling in South American affairs in order to suppress left wing groups: the CIA aided Manuel Noriega (the Panamanian dictator who you might remember from Black Ops 2) in his drug smuggling operations to keep him and his army fighting Communists, because the War on Communism was more important than the War on Drugs!

But it’s not just Noriega, but the long standing feud with Cuba, the multiple assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, the DEA working with a right wing terror group called “Los Pepes” in the fight against Pablo Escobar and the Medellín Cartel, which had links to Communist rebels like M-19. I don’t know what’s going on with Ghost Recon: Wildlands narrative for the US to suddenly become accepting of socialism and communism, maybe it is set in a universe where the presidents went Al Gore, Obama, and Bernie. But on its own, it is bordering on revisionism, or at least an unwillingness to discuss some of the terrible decisions made by US foreign policy.

And finally, in the trifecta of missed points, is the fact that the War on Drugs is portrayed as a blinding success by Ghost Recon: Wildlands, where as it has actually been making the problem worse. There is an argument that, like alcohol in the 1930s, prohibiting drugs and taking violent action against the narcos has not weakened the cartels, but made them more effective and more profitable. In the book After Prohibition, former federal narcotics officer Michael Levine states that the narcos counted on the War on Drugs to “increase the market price and weed out the smaller, inefficient drug dealers” and would have only feared “an effective demand reduction program”. In the same book, former cartel member Jorge Roman called the drug war “a sham put on for the American taxpayer” that was actually “good for business”.

Despite being a fun game and a satisfying co-op experience, Ghost Recon: Wildlands has some major thematic and historical issues that I don’t think should be ignored. Believing the War on Drugs to have been a success after nearly 70 years of increasing horror, terror, and more dangerous substances becoming available is laughable, and to imply that the US government hasn’t brought incredible suffering on Latin and South America is short sighted on Ubisoft’s part, and I hope one day this is rectified.