Ghosts, Spooks, and Martyrs. Historical Hauntings in Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands

Abstract

In 1985, a United States undercover Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent, Enrique Kiki Camarena, was abducted, tortured, and murdered in Guadalajara, Mexico by an alleged drug cartel. The ensuing international murder investigation saw breaches in extradition procedures, accusations that Mexican officials had destroyed key evidence, and allegations that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had targeted Camarena to cover evidence of CIA covert involvement in Nicaragua. Camarena’s death and subsequent martyrdom took form in national anti-drug campaigns, DEA awards, and the drug war foreign policy. More recently in 2017, French video game company Ubisoft released a massively popular video game, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands (2017), which fictionalizes Camarena’s death and draws its players into a history of the United States drug war, complete with CIA Spooks, agrarian militias, and Mexican drug lords. In conversation with historical epistemologies, game studies, and with close attention to the obscured record of covert operation, this article investigates how cultural artifacts, specifically interactive ones, not only create history, but place their audience within in a history only now freshly unearthed and resurrected. Camarena’s many resurrections in popular politics and media are salient examples of the participatory nature of history and the narratives we use to place ourselves within murky pasts.