El Patron in The House of the Scorpion

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El Patron in The House of the Scorpion

What if there was a world with clones? There would be a way to live for up to 100 years effortlessly, have easy transplants, and maintain a precise memory. But, the recipient would be taking organs from someone else. "So what", he or she may justify, "they're clones, they are inferior. They don't matter because they are stupid." But what if someone had the power to allow them to be of normal intelligence? He or she might think that he or she is doing the clone a favor, but when the clone is killed for spare parts it's an even worse situation than with a retarded clone. Not for this "bandido" (Farmer 37). El Patron is a cruel, selfish, heartless man who clawed his way to power in his youth and rules people with fear, though he is powerful, he is always nagged by the fact that he may lose everything. There is no way on earth he would let that happen.

El Patron believes he is doing the clones a favor by allowing them to be smart, but in the end he uses them just like all the other clones in the world - for his own personal use. Esperanza, a fierce No Drug activist, once wrote that “a more evil, vicious, and self-serving man (than El Patron) could hardly be imagined” (Farmer 170). Though the practice of murdering clones is widely accepted in the book, it is morally wrong, and most people would at least have second thoughts about killing someone. Even with his dragon hoard, which he just lets sit there untouched and deeply protected, El Patron becomes outraged with even the slightest of a suggestion towards giving anything away. He is so self-centered, in fact, that at his death greed took over and all of the people inhabiting his part of Opium were silenced and added to his hoard.

Power is what El Patron has worked for and what he fears of losing. Unthinkingly describing the drug lord word for word, Tam Lin once said that “Power is a drug, and people like me crave it” (Farmer 243). Though his business is illegal to the rest of the world, he never seems to show any concern about what everyone else’s laws are and he proceeds with what he had planned. Matt and all of the other clones he had created are mere examples of this.

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