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Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El Paso and Juárez

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The US Mexico Border is one of the most unique among anthropological spaces. Apart from being bi-national, it is enormously complex in the variety and interplay of cultures and social classes. The area, now affected by a drug war in Mexico, remains "safe" on the US side and anarchic on the Mexcian side. Yet the communities of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez are deeply intertwined and inextricable. In this context, the author delves into the sub-cultures and groups that are part of the drug war. He interviews police officers, drug dealers, border patrol agents and a host of social actors who play out this complex and dangerous drama. The author spends a great deal of time framing the border context and then lets his subjects tell their stories. For those who want to see good anthropology in action, this is a great example. For others, who just want to try to understand what is going on in the trenches of the drug war, the book is indispensible.

"Like the oral historian Studs Terkel, Howard Campbell-a professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso- aims to "record the voices of the common workers". The common workers in this case are all intimately connected -as drug traffickers, law enforcement officials and innocent bystanders - to the drug trade between Mexico and the United States. By anchoring his work in both the US city of El Paso and the Mexican city of Juarez, Campbell is able to present lengthy, firsthand accounts of life on both sides of this violent, otherworldly "drug war zone".
Few previous works have explored the complex dynamics and consequences of cross-border drug trafficking as absorbingly as this book. Among the fascinating characters we meet are a self-proclaimed anarchist dealer who cites Margaret Mead in support of his belief that drugs should be legalized; a historian who recites the legend of La Nacha, who outwitted her rivals to become one of the most powerful drug dealers on the US-Mexico border; an innocent Lebanese Mexican who sold scuba diving gear to ambitious drug smugglers; and a "dyed-in-the-wool Republican" from Texas who used to work for the border patrol but now believes that the drug war is futile. Campbell also seeks to familiarize readers with the complex vocabulary and culture of the drug trade. We learn that, in Mexico, territories controlled by specific drug cartels are known as "plazas", while "tienditas" are the shops, privates homes, or street-vendor outlets where drugs are sold. "Narcocorridos' are the popular ballads written about the lives of drug traffickers and "narco-mantas" are the frightening placards which display messages from drug cartels in publics places.

Although Campbell clearly defines all of the unfamiliar terms used in the interviews, the inclusion of a glossary of key words and phrases would have been useful. More maps would have helped too. However, Campbell helpfully offers some context and background information before each interview and his concluding chapter effectively brings together themes from all the interviews, while adding more information and analysis. His introduction solidly grounds the research in anthropological and sociological theories and reveals Campbell's ample knowledge of previous work in this area.

Campbell writes, at the time his book went to press, more that 1,600 killings had been reported in Ciudad Juarez in 2008, making in the bloodiest year in the city's recorded history. Sadly, this record no longer stands, as 2009 saw more than 2,500 killings. Drug War Zone is a valuable attempt to understand the causes and consequences of these statistics."

---Tiffany Bergin, Times Literary Supplement (February 12, 2010)

The book is extremely interesting and approaches the issues surrounding the drug war in the border area from a very informative perspective. The stories, many times, are as interesting as anything Hollywood can produce but have the added value of sharing real life experiences. It was a difficult book to read because it makes you face the harsh economic and social realities of many residents of these border towns, but it is very difficult to put the book down. To me, the most fascinating part of this book is the fact that the complicity, or at the very least lack of real attempts to stop the drug trade, of the Mexican and American authorities is openly stated and demonstrated throughout the book. It is something that the general population here in the US has yet to come to accept or believe and makes it difficult for many American's to analyze the impacts of the drug war on both sides of the borders.

A very detailed, gritty look at the ongoing "war" against drugs that takes place primarily on the U.S. Mexico border. The strength of this book most certainly lies in its ability to tell the story from multiple points of view that come from a myriad of players in the drug trafficking realm. Each individual story helps to shed light on the war on drugs in a different way, but in the end, the whole picture is illuminated and presented to the reader in astounding clarity. Every individual involved offers a different perspective or opinion; and when they come together, they offer one of the most comprehensive, complete descriptions available. This book is required reading to anyone, such as myself, who has an insatiable curiosity about the political, criminal, and personal aspects of drug trafficking. Well done Dr. Campbell!

DRUG WAR ZONE: FRONTLINE DISPATCHES FROM THE STREETS OF EL PASO AND JUAREZ is based on access to the drug smuggling world of the border and studies the drug war through the lives of direct participants. Half the book consists of oral histories from drug traffickers, the other from law enforcement officials. The detail and personal 'insider' viewpoints from both sides make this a 'must' for any library at the college level studying border issues in general and drug law enforcement in particular.

Campbell, Howard. Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El Paso and Juárez. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. vi, 310.

Howard Campbell's Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El Paso and Juárez is an ethnographic study which offers multiple points of view that elucidate the complexity of America's "War on Drugs" in relation to narcotics trafficking and violence on the U.S.-Mexico border. Presenting an eclectic array of voices, Campbell illustrates and connects the experiences and agendas of narcotics traffickers and addicts, law enforcement and military officials, and civil participants in various segments of society. Revealing the convergences and divergences between these diverse social groups, Campbell defines the Drug War Zone (DWZ) as a space of collusion and contestation in which drug traffickers and law enforcement conflict, connect, intersect, and interact globally and economically. He writes that the DWZ "is the transnational, fluid cultural space in which contending forces battle over the meaning, value, and control of drugs"(6). Within this space, Campbell brings out the hybridity within the "drug-antidrug" dichotomy by illuminating government officials' complicity with narcotics traffickers, revealing the DWZ as a space in which the two polar opposites merge and become the other through economically motivated negotiation and resistance at both the global and regional-El Paso-Juárez-levels.

Drug War Zone evidences the fallacy of the "War on Drugs" by investigating the complicity between capitalism and narcotics trafficking. Using pseudonyms to represent his subjects, Campbell deconstructs the paradigms that justify U.S. drug policy and verifies how those policies are paradoxically reinforced by the perpetuation of illegality in reference to narcotics and individual choices in which supply and demand necessitate involvement by multiple social actors through various economic determinants. Connecting the local with the global, Campbell offers an excellent post-structuralist view of the global-narcotics economy and its interactions with drug policy enforcement on the border. He writes that

"The Cultural dynamics of border law enforcement operate in relation to both Mexican narco-culture and the larger structures of the Mexican state and civil society (and their U.S. counterparts). Border law enforcement culture thus must be understood as embedded in an overarching political economy, one that reinforces global inequalities and enforces U.S. political and cultural power in relation to Mexico, but that also confronts opposition, resistance, and counterhegemony." (176)

Within this framework Campbell describes the power struggle between the Juárez, Gulf, and Sinaloa cartels of Mexico, and the various law enforcement agencies of both Mexico and the United States. Defining the El Paso- Juárez region as a plaza, or place of contestation over economic access to consumers of narcotics, Campbell's work explains the recent violence in Juarez and exemplifies its roots through interviews, as well as other primary and secondary sources.

Theoretically, Campbell's work connects with Homi K. Bhabha's The Location of Culture in that it reveals the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as a peripheral space in which polemical opposites and hierarchical extremes merge, diverge and simultaneously challenge and conspire with one another for access to and control of power and wealth. Hegemony, counterhegemony, and ambivalent cultural dynamics all interact at the global and local scale within this dynamic. Thus, Campbell's DWZ parallels Bhabha's "third space" of hybridity in that the plaza becomes a space in which the metaphysical borders of constructed legal and cultural meanings are blurred by the economic realities that are created by globalization and neoliberalism themselves. In this vein Campbell's Drug War Zone allows not only for a clear interpretation of the nuances behind the recent violence that plagues Juárez, Mexico, but also allows for a rearticulation of U.S. drug policy, and an introspection into the reasons why the "War on Drugs" is not a realistic solution for the dilemmas posed by the sale and transport of narcotics in North America today.


The University of Texas at El Paso Scott C. Comar

I didn't think this book was interesting at all - ethnographic or not. Alma Guillermoprieto is a much better writer and has written some terrifically compelling pieces about drug wars along the US-Mexico border.

Did not enjoy the book as much as I expected. Seem to focus too much on the individuals involved. For me it was hard to follow the story. Never finished the book.