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Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America Hardcover – January 19, 2016
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In a ranch south of Texas, the man known as The Executioner dumps five hundred body parts in metal barrels. In Brazil's biggest city, a mysterious prisoner orders hit-men to gun down forty-one police officers and prison guards in two days. In southern Mexico, a meth maker is venerated as a saint while enforcing Old Testament justice on his enemies.
A new kind of criminal kingpin has arisen: part CEO, part terrorist, and part rock star, unleashing guerrilla attacks, strong-arming governments, and taking over much of the world's trade in narcotics, guns, and humans. What they do affects you now--from the gas in your car, to the gold in your jewelry, to the tens of thousands of Latin Americans calling for refugee status in the U.S. Gangster Warlords is the first definitive account of the crime wars now wracking Central and South America and the Caribbean, regions largely abandoned by the U.S. after the Cold War. Author of the critically acclaimed El Narco, Ioan Grillo has covered Latin America since 2001 and gained access to every level of the cartel chain of command in what he calls the new battlefields of the Americas. Moving between militia-controlled ghettos and the halls of top policy-makers, Grillo provides a disturbing new understanding of a war that has spiraled out of control--one that people across the political spectrum need to confront now.
- Print length384 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBloomsbury Press
- Publication dateJanuary 19, 2016
- Dimensions6.43 x 1.37 x 9.66 inches
- ISBN-10162040379X
- ISBN-13978-1620403792
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"A vitally important book." ―starred review, Library Journal
"A striking exploration of the horrors of mass violence in the Western Hemisphere, with the author offering hope that radical policies could provide positive change." ―Kirkus Reviews
"Grillo dissects Latin America’s narco world, both its mechanics and its culture, with a precision and firsthand knowledge that is astounding. There has quite simply never been a book like this before, one that not only examines the broader currents that allow the drug trade to flourish, but animates that discussion with intimate portraits of both its practitioners and victims. Taut and endlessly revelatory, Gangster Warlords is required reading for anyone who seeks to understand the drug wars taking place in Latin America today--and especially for any Americans who might imagine it’s just 'their' problem." ―Scott Anderson, bestselling author of LAWRENCE IN ARABIA
"Grillo's new book is steely-eyed and sensitive reporting on the criminal kings at the front-lines of the continental catastrophe called the war on drugs." ―Daniel Hernandez, author of DOWN & DELIRIOUS IN MEXICO CITY
"With El Narco, Mr. Grillo gave us an unprecedented glimpse into the vicious world of Mexican drug cartels. In Gangster Warlords, he masterfully expands the criminal landscape to include villains across Latin America and the Caribbean. The depth and detail he provides on fearsome organizations like the Red Commando in Brazil and the Shower Posse in Jamaica cast a much-needed spotlight on groups not regularly featured in US media. A sobering and fascinating look at deadly gangsters in often-neglected corners of our own hemisphere." ―Sylvia Longmire, author of CARTEL and BORDER INSECURITY
"Something new and terrible is happening in the Americas. It has murdered a million people in ten years, and yet we don’t fully understand it. Until now. Combining hair-raising reporting with erudite analysis, Grillo has written an indispensable guide to the new world disorder." ―Richard Grant, author of GOD'S MIDDLE FINGER
"Reading Gangster Warlords is a like riding shotgun through the darkest battlefields of the drug war with a hardboiled narcotics detective at the wheel. You won't want to get out of the car. With terrific storytelling and analytical sweep, Grillo’s guided tour lays bare the interconnected nature of 21st century crime and drug trafficking in the Americas. His warlords are the region's new insurgents, offering no ideology beyond power and riches. The ripples of their violence reach further than we tend to acknowledge. And they aren't going away any time soon." ―Nick Miroff, Latin American correspondent, The Washington Post
"The stories in Gangster Warlords offer a dramatic portrait of a region torn by poverty, dysfunctional politics and the bloody allure of crime. Grillo has written a riveting Latin American tragedy. If only it were fiction." ―León Krauze, Univision
"Superbly reported, Gangster Walords offers a searching look into crime groups across Latin America and examines how the region got into the violent mess it is in. Ioan Grillo delves deep to deliver grisly detail in sharp focus with the skill of a born raconteur. Just like El Narco, this is a page-turner, despite the tough subject matter." ―Jude Webber, Mexico and Central America correspondent, Financial Times
"Ioan Grillo captures the power and the horror of the Latin American drug cartels with unrivaled reporting and riveting writing. With Gangster Warlords, he once again proves his mastery of interweaving the broader context with vivid, on-the-ground journalism to provide readers with a street level view of a complex war fought without clear front lines." ―Matthew Heineman, director of CARTEL LAND
"Taking his readers for a walk through some of the world's most dangerous streets, Ioan Grillo has produced a crucial travel guide of the murky world of Latin America's criminal fiefdoms. Enriched by narcotics trafficking and other rackets, these mostly non-ideological capos and their armies of young gunmen threaten the region's often shaky governments and institutions, as much or more as the armed insurgencies of decades past. This is shoe leather reporting at its very best: honest, insightful and engrossing." ―Jose de Cordoba, correspondent, The Wall Street Journal
"Grillo’s remarkable new book takes us behind the blood soaked headlines in Mexico and courageously connects the footprints of a beast ravaging the continent, from Central to South America to the Caribbean. The haunting journey is chilling. The reporting first-rate. The lessons sobering, long after you finish Gangster Warlords." ―Alfredo Corchado, author of MIDNIGHT IN MEXICO
“Lays out in clear terms the contours of a world that has existed for years and only grown more barbaric as it's graduated to 'war' status.” ―Bookforum on EL NARCO
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Gangster Warlords
Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America
By Ioan GrilloBloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2015 Ioan GrilloAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62040-379-2
CHAPTER 1
This book is about the move from the Cold War to a chain of crime wars soaking Latin America and the Caribbean in blood. But it starts in the United States. Specifically, in a Barnes and Noble bookshop in a mall in El Paso, Texas.
I am sitting in the bookshop café, nursing my third cup of coffee and flicking through a pile of new books. As you do with new books, I am eyeing the photos, skimming the intros, and just feeling and smelling the paper. I am also waiting for a drug trafficker who has spent four decades delivering the products of Mexican gangsters to all corners of the United States.
The man I am waiting for is no criminal warlord controlling a fiefdom in Latin America. He's a white New Yorker with a university education. That is why I want to start the book here. Latin American journalists complain the U.S. side of the equation is never examined. Who are the partners of the cartels wreaking havoc south of the Rio Grande, they ask. Where is the American narco? Here, I found one.
A curious twist of fate led me to this meeting. A fellow Brit was cycling through the southwest United States on an extended holiday. Texas was nice, but he fancied something edgier, so he slipped over the border to Chihuahua, Mexico. Unwittingly, he entered one of the most violent spheres in the Mexican drug war, venturing into small towns to the west of Ciudad Juárez, at the time the world's most murderous city. He didn't do too badly, hanging out in cantinas and raising glasses with shady locals. Until gangsters held him in a house, threatened to cut his head off, and got him to call his wife in England and plead for a ransom payment.
Attacks on wealthy foreigners in Mexico are actually very rare, but there have been sporadic cases, some of them deadly. In this case, the thugs had jumped at an opportunity that fell in their lap. Thankfully, they released the Brit on receipt of the cash, and he made it home unscathed. He kept in contact with one of the people he had met on the border, an older man called Robert. While Robert knew the kidnappers, he apparently wasn't involved. He is the man I am going to meet now, one of the gangsters' U.S. connections.
The British cyclist had put us in touch, and I talked to Robert over e-mail and then phone to arrange the get-together. He lives on the Mexican side of the border in one of the Chihuahuan towns. But I told him I didn't want to go there after the kidnapping and suggested we meet in El Paso, a stone's throw from Juárez but one of the safest cities in the United States. In a Barnes and Noble bookshop. Who would hold you up in a Barnes and Noble?
As I finish my beverage, I spy Robert strolling toward me. He probably spotted me first. He is in his sixties, in jeans and a baseball cap, with sun-worn skin and a raspy voice. I get yet more coffee, and we chat. He's good company. Soon we decide we want something stronger and move on to a cowboy-themed bar in the mall where they serve local brews in ridiculous-size glasses. I hear Robert's tale as we sip from the flagons.
It goes back to 1968, when the United States was in the midst of the hippie movement and fighting its hottest Cold War battle in Vietnam; when dictatorships ruled most of Latin America, and a recently martyred Che Guevara inspired guerrillas across the continent. Robert is from upstate New York, but in 1968 he went to university in New Mexico. Here he had the fate of landing a roommate from El Paso who had a cousin in Ciudad Juárez. His roommate told him he could buy marijuana for forty dollars a kilo from his cousin. This lit a fuse in Robert's mind; he knew that back home in New York, this amount sold for three hundred dollars.
The basic business of importing is buying for a dollar and selling for two. But with drugs, Robert realized, he could buy for a dollar and sell for more than seven. And he didn't even need to advertise. This was after the summer of love, and American youngsters were desperate for ganja from wherever they could get it, feeding a mushrooming industry south of the border.
"I was young, I was broke, and I was hungry," Robert says. "Then marijuana came like a blessing ... We scraped our money together for the first load. When it came through, we bought another. Then another."
It is hard for most of us to fathom a business with a markup of 650 percent. You put in fifteen hundred bucks and you get back more than ten grand. You put in ten and get back seventy-five. And in two more deals you can be a multimillionaire. Narco finances turn economics inside out.
As Robert made regular drives back east with his car trunk stuffed with ganja, he could go through school without even having loans. "I was living like a rich kid, driving a nice car, living in a big place," he says.
When he graduated, he had a business to go into. He traveled to Chihuahua to buy bulk loads of marijuana and partied in Juárez discos with rising drug lords. He spread out his commerce to new horizons. He traveled to Mississippi and Alabama, where he sold to the Dixie Mafia, a network of villains in the Appalachian states. He went to San Francisco to sell to students on the lawns of Berkeley. He bought houses and nightclubs with suitcases of cash.
However, Robert's drug-dealing dream hit a wall in the late seventies when he got nabbed by agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration. The DEA did what it calls a "buy and bust." An undercover agent pretended to be a dealer and asked for three hundred pounds of grass from Robert's partner. After police nabbed the partner in his car, they stormed Robert's luxury house, arrested him in his swimming trunks, and grabbed sacks of weed from the kitchen and garage.
This is the flip side of narco economics. Robert splurged on lawyers, got his assets seized, and served close to a decade in federal prison. Yet after he got out, he went back into the trade, moving ganja and a little cocaine with a new generation of Mexican traffickers. This time, he kept a lower profile, shifting smaller amounts to stay off the radar. He carried on past middle age, through marriages and divorces, booms and busts, through the end of the Cold War and the opening of democracy across the Americas. By the time he hit his sixties, he suffered from chronic asthma and heart disease. And he was still smuggling weed.
When Robert started trafficking drugs, his Mexican colleagues were a handful of growers and smugglers earning chump change. They needed Americans like him to get into the market. But over the decades, the narco trafficking networks grew into an industry that is worth tens of billions of dollars and stretches from Mexico into the Caribbean to Colombia to Brazil. Mexican gangsters transformed into cartels and established their own people stateside, often their family members. Two of their biggest distributors were the Chicago-born twin sons of a Durango heroin king. While Robert had been a big shot back in the day, he fell to the position of a small-time smuggler.
South of the border, the cartels spent their billions building armies of assassins who carry out massacres comparable to those in war zones and outgun police. They have diversified from drugs to a portfolio of crimes including extortion, kidnapping, theft of crude oil, and even wildcat mining. And they have grown to control the governments of entire cities and states in Latin America.
"Back in the old days, it was nothing like this," Robert says. "They were just smugglers. Now they prey on their communities. They have become too powerful. And many of the young guys working for them are crazy fucking killers who are high on crystal meth. You can't deal with these people."
I ask Robert if he feels guilty about pumping these organizations with cash year after year. They could never have gotten so big without working with Americans.
He looks into his glass for a while and sighs. "It is just business," he says. "They should have legalized many of these drugs a long time ago."
Some months after I interview him, Robert is arrested again, driving over the border with a trunk full of ganja. He is sixty-eight. He spends four months in prison, pleads guilty, and is given supervised release on time served and medical grounds. He tells the judge his trafficking career is over.
Flip from El Paso over the Rio Grande and fourteen hundred miles south onto a hillside in southern Mexico. I am in the mountains in the state of Guerrero, close to where traffickers grow marijuana and produce heroin. The fate of these hills is locked with that of smugglers in Texas and drug users across America by the pretty green and pink plants here. It's the domain of a cartel called Guerreros Unidos, or Warriors United, a small but deadly splinter of an older trafficking network. The hill is beautiful, thick with pine trees and bright orange flowers. Strange crickets jump on the earth, and exquisite butterflies arc through the air.
The smell of death is overwhelming. It's like walking into a butcher's shop stuffed with decaying meat; putrid, yet somehow a little sweet. While I would describe the smell as sickening, it's not noxious. It's a movie cliché that people throw up when they see or smell corpses. That doesn't happen in real life. Corpses don't make you physically nauseous. The sickness is deep down, more an emotional repulsion. It's the smell and sight of our own mortality.
The stench of rotting human flesh is all over this hill from a series of pits where police and soldiers are pulling out corpses. They are dank, maggot-ridden holes that the victims probably dug themselves. The corpses are charred, mutilated, decomposed.
In Mexico, they call this a narcofosa, or drug trafficking grave. But many of the victims here are neither drug traffickers nor police officers, nor in any way connected to the world of narcotics. They are shopkeepers, laborers, students who somehow ran afoul of the Warriors' criminal empire. The troops dig up thirty corpses on this site, near the town of Iguala. And it's just one of a series of narcofosas dotting these hills.
Residents in close-by shacks describe in hushed voices how the Warriors brought their victims here. They would come at night in convoys of pickups, openly holding Kalashnikov rifles to their terrified hostages. Often they were with police officers. The Warriors were alleged to control most of the Iguala police force as well as the town's mayor and his wife.
Some of the corpses have been here for months, but no one came searching — until an atrocity that made world headlines. On September 26, 2014, Iguala's police and their colleagues, the Warrior gunmen, attacked student teachers, killing three and abducting forty-three.
The global media finally learned where Iguala was. How could forty-three students disappear off the face of the earth? It sounded like Boko Haram in Nigeria kidnapping schoolchildren, but this was right next to the United States. Thousands of troops poured in, uncovering mass graves like the one that I am standing in. But they still couldn't find the students.
After more than a month, they followed the trail to a garbage dump ten miles away. Mexico's attorney general said the Warriors murdered the forty-three there, burning their corpses on a huge bonfire with wood, tires, and diesel and throwing the remains into the nearby river San Juan. Police found charred bones in a bag, which was allegedly in the river, and sent them to a laboratory in Austria. It confirmed that the DNA in a bone fragment matched that of one of the disappeared.
However, family members and many journalists refused to believe the government's account. Mexican prosecutors have a history of cover-ups that have left widespread distrust. An independent report by experts also rejected many of the official conclusions. The families demanded police keep searching for the other forty-two students and further investigate the web of corruption that led to this atrocity.
Mexico seemed to have gotten numb to murder. Between 2007 and 2014, drug cartels and the security forces fighting them had killed more than eighty-three thousand people, according to a count by Mexico's government intelligence agency. Some claimed it was many more. I covered massacres where nearby residents seemed eerily detached. When an individual goes through a traumatic experience, the gut reaction is to block it out. Communities do the same. People became weary of killers, cartels, and carnage. Victims become statistics.
Iguala changed that. The fact that the victims were students, the blatant police involvement, the inept government response — all shook the heart of Mexican society. Maybe the moment had just come. At the end of 2014, people took to the streets in hundreds of thousands to protest narco corruption and violence. The faces of the disappeared students filled posters on Mexico City walls and were held up in solidarity from Argentina to Austria to Australia. They were humans, not numbers.
The attacks and protests shattered an illusion called Mexico's Moment. It was a mirage conjured up by the team of President Enrique Peña Nieto and bought by some American pundits and media. It said that drug cartel violence wasn't really that bad, that we could sweep it aside and talk about an expanding Mexican middle class, spring break in Cancún, and iPad sales.
Iguala put violence back on the front page. It highlighted the problems that had been building up for years — of cartels that have become an alternate power controlling mayors and governors, of their tenuous links to federal security forces, of the international community failing to change a disastrous drug policy. It made many realize that the problems will not go away if we ignore them but only if we confront them and change things.
In a painful irony, the disappeared students in Iguala had planned to attend a march commemorating a massacre of students in Mexico in 1968. This takes us back to the height of the Cold War, the era of dictatorships and Guevara guerrillas (and when Robert first bought weed in Juárez). As Mexico was about to open the Olympics that year, soldiers shot dead at least forty-four people at a protest in Tlatelolco square in Mexico City. The Iguala attack on students created an agonizing equation:
46 years after soldiers killed
44 protesters,
46 students were murdered or disappeared
* * *
Despite this dark similarity, the atrocities reflect the different worlds of the Cold War in the twentieth century and the crime wars in the twenty-first. The Tlatelolco massacre was almost certainly orchestrated from the top. The one- party government of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, dubbed the Perfect Dictatorship, was worried students would disrupt the first ever Olympics in Latin America. It massacred protesters to scare them off the streets. This was in line with authoritarian regimes across the continent in the era, fighting descent with bullets.
In contrast, Iguala reflected the brave and twisted new world of narco power. Mexico now has a multiparty democracy, and the supposed leftist opposition governed Iguala. But the real power was this mysterious cartel, smuggling drugs, controlling politicians, making alliances with security forces. It is a dark force of shady interests that we struggle to even see.
Whereas the motive for repressing protesters in the 1960s is clear, the Iguala attacks left many stupefied as to why a drug cartel would target students. The trainee teachers are known for disruptive protests and had commandeered buses from the local bus terminal. Were gangsters attacking students as a form of terror, working with corrupt authorities to clamp down on protests? Or did the students unwittingly take a bus in which the cartel had stashed a heroin shipment? Or in their paranoia, did the gunmen think the students worked with a rival cartel. Or were the corrupt police defending a public event of their narco mayor and his wife? Whatever the mechanics, the specter is of a town controlled by gangsters responding to a public order incident with mass murder.
As hundreds of thousands marched on the streets against the terror, protesters called Iguala a state crime, putting it alongside the massacres of dictators. It was a provocative point. There was no proof that President Peña Nieto was involved in the attack. But city police officers, who are agents of the state, were on the frontline of it. Journalists also raised questions about what soldiers and federal police were doing during the shooting. In other cases, federal agents have been convicted of working with drug traffickers in Mexico. It sparks a debate about the responsibility of government when chunks of state apparatus are captured by cartels.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Gangster Warlords by Ioan Grillo. Copyright © 2015 Ioan Grillo. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Bloomsbury Press; Illustrated edition (January 19, 2016)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 162040379X
- ISBN-13 : 978-1620403792
- Item Weight : 1.55 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.43 x 1.37 x 9.66 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,476,350 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #165 in Brazilian History
- #2,063 in Organized Crime True Accounts
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About the author

Ioan Grillo has reported on Latin America since 2001 for international media including TIME magazine, Reuters, CNN, the Associated Press, PBS NewsHour, the Houston Chronicle, CBC, and the Sunday Telegraph. His first book, El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency, was translated into five languages and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A native of England, Grillo lives in Mexico City.
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Customers find the book great, eye-opening, and excellent. They appreciate the well-researched, current, and in-depth information about the War Lords in Brazil and Central America. Readers also appreciate the writing style as well-written and easy to read.
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Customers find the book to be a great and eye-opening read. They also say it's excellent and the author did a wonderful job.
"...It was amazing history of the drug culture. A great eye opening book. it is a big problem and all the money makes it hard to solve...." Read more
"Good read, very good insider information on how the drug industry operates , very sad ." Read more
"...wonder what the hell is going on south of the boarder this is it, wonderful job !" Read more
"...The book simply takes off and becomes excellent when the author writes of Mexico." Read more
Customers find the book well-researched, current, and in-depth. They say it has good insider information on how the drug industry operates. Readers also mention the book is an excellent introduction to the world of gangster crime and accurate in terms of facts.
"what a sub culture. It was amazing history of the drug culture. A great eye opening book...." Read more
"Good read, very good insider information on how the drug industry operates , very sad ." Read more
"...However, in terms of research, Gangster Warlords is an excellent introduction to the world of gangster crime...." Read more
"...taught a course on the Drug Wars for a decade and this is the best book on the subject that I have read...." Read more
Customers find the writing style well-researched, easy to read, and hard to put down.
"Grillo’s writing style is direct, recording his gut reactions to violent surroundings...." Read more
"...A very well written book that is easy to read and hard to put down.I was little disappointed with his "solutions" to the issues...." Read more
""Gangster Warlords" is well researched and well written...." Read more
"...The book is extremely well written and very accurate in terms of facts/very well researched." Read more
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Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2016
Bill Clancy
Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 2018
Reviewed in the United States on July 1, 2020
I know the facts.
I do not understand.
And I think this book, Gangster Warlords, really is my first big step in trying to understand the dynamics in areas that I know the talking points about, on a much more in depth, human level. Ioan Grillo is an investigative journalist who has been reporting largely on the drug trade in Latin America since 2001. He knows his way around the industry, and has a birds eye view of the conflicts that so many of us just don’t. He’s watched this new kind of criminal rise up, and he’s watched them transform the social and political landscape of various Latin American countries. He knows how to write about all of this in a way that some bumbkin like myself can understand it, and not just understand it, but internalize it in a way I might not otherwise be able to.
Grillo focuses on a few different regions, namely Mexico, Jamaica, Guatemala, Brazil, and some others. Each of these areas is run a bit differently, but what binds the narrative together, really, is the business that drives them all: drugs. Specifically, cheap drugs that make a big profit once they make it north of the border, into the United States, where prices skyrocket. What goes for a dollar in a favela in Brazil, for example, will sell for $250 in New York. There are numerous factors that gave rise to this new kind of criminal organization, which he details nicely in the book.
“But as we look back on the last two decades, we can identify clear causes of the new conflicts. The collapse of military dictatorships and guerrilla armies left stockpiles of weapons and soldiers searching for a new payroll. Emerging democracies are plagued by weakness and corruption. A key element is the failure to build working justice systems. International policy focused on markets and elections but missed this third crucial element in making functional democracies: the rule of law. The omission has cost many lives.”
Essentially, these drug cartels and the wars they start and the turf they claim are all in on the business, so rather than just your typical criminal, you have an entire criminal class that has risen up and meshed CEO and gangster warlord together into this toxic stew that is tearing apart an entire region of the world, and leaving a bloody swath of destruction and sadness behind. Ultimately, this book shows the truth that there are no winners in war, regardless of what reasons that war is fought for.
The dynamic, however, was interesting to me, as many of these organizations have learned how to survive, or at least coexist, with the people who live on the land they claim as theirs. For example, in favelas in Brazil, the cartels will pay for things like roads, and electricity, protection and the like. In exchange, the people who live in their favela will not turn them over to the police when the police come knocking, and similar exchanges happen all over. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. The negative is that just about everyone takes part in the drugs. They are cheap and everywhere, and since there’s very few opportunities and you have to leave the favela to get a decent education and what have you, a lot of people end up working for the cartel/gang/whatever that is lording over their particular area, and most of them have seen firefights by the time they are in their teens. There aren’t enough opportunities elsewhere to make the easy money they find with the home crew worth the risk.
And with all this back and forth of loyalty and, in some cases, fear, it’s hard for officials to fight these criminals. Cartels, in essence, become their own law and their own police force. Their own mini-nations within nations and they can be nearly impossible to crack. How do you fight something that has become systemic? As the author succinctly puts it:
“This creates another paradox of Latin America’s crime wars. Prisons are meant to stop gangsters from committing crimes. But they became their headquarters.”
There are also manifestos, where entire criminal organizations have books and pamphlets written detailing the rules and style of their particular organization. A sort of criminal code of ethics, if you will. This manifesto is often what attracts young people to the industry. It gives them a sense of belonging, a feel like they exist in an organization that has rules and stipulations, that has a code of conduct. In exchange, they are always busy doing something, they make lots of money, and they can basically get high whenever they want.
This, of course, is not standard across all lines. Some organizations have no interest in maintaining roads, or protecting people. Some are more prone to marching people out to the middle of a field and dumping their bodies in a mysterious ditch somewhere. There are entire swaths cut across some areas, full of unnamed bodies. Parents who saw their children marched out for no real reason, knowing that they’d never see them again. The list of the missing, especially along certain cartel territories in Mexico, Honduras, el Salvatore and the like, are long indeed.
Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, has been known as the murder capital of the world, and there’s a reason for that. For a long time, it was where a war was taking place. There are other regions of Mexico where cartels have gone to war, and lots of people died. The reason I point this out is because, to my mind, I haven’t ever really thought of this as an actual war. Violent? Battles? Gang fights? Sure, but I never really conceptualized any of this as a “war” in my head. However, with the way Gallo describes the scene, all it’s lacking is the official declaration. If these hotspots were declared war zones, the entire way people could help sort these issues out would change. It would give nations power that they do not currently have. So why don’t they? Well, there are reasons for that, too.
There are intricacies, and parts of the social equation that I’d never really thought about before. For example, how does one fully combat these drug issues, when drugs make so much money for people who would likely not have anything without them? How do you keep people from running drugs, when the United States is the biggest buyer, and we pay so much for what they offer? It’s a problem that goes both ways, and there are no easy solutions, because without demand, there would be no reason to supply.
“Between the dawn of the new millennium and 2010, more than a million people across Latin America and the Caribbean were murdered. It’s a cocaine-fueled holocaust.”
What surprised me, mostly, was just how imbedded into the social structure of certain regions these organizations have become. In some areas, everyone is involved in some way, even if it’s just tangentially, because it’s literally impossible not to be connected somehow, and often, the only way to get away from all of it, is by running, which can put you in very real danger. Kids get conscripted as young as possible, which will keep parents in place. The government can be taking a piece of the pie. Loyalty may be a fraught topic, but sometimes it’s easier to just keep your head down and hope no one notices you.
Gallo’s reporting is really state of the art, and he goes out on a whole lot of limbs and risks everything to get the interviews he gets. Sometimes they are with people who refuse to be identified, but in a few cases he sits down with the head guy of huge organizations, and interviews them about how they operate. Or he’ll talk to assassins, or just kids manning the proverbial gate. Just about anyone, and while I bet it was an absolutely terrifying thing to do, it paid off because it gives readers an insider’s view of a topic that is so complex, and so multilayered and deep. I felt, by the time I ended this book, that nothing is what it seems. While this is a dark subject, and it often portrays dark deeds, it really does a great job at showing just how much I don’t understand, and how little I actually know.
I don’t have a clue.
We like to boil down immigration into good and bad, but this book shows that so much of what is pushing people north, is the very thing they are trying to get away from, and it’s all over up here, too. There are no easy answers, and there are none presented in these pages. The fact is, the cartels would not exist without the drugs the United States buys from them. I don’t have any solutions, but I did leave this book with a new understanding of just how two-sided this issue is. I fundamentally believe that we need more in-depth journalism like this to reach into the American consciousness.
Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2019
Each gang had its own unique reason for existing, but they all shared one common trait . . . brutality.
I stumbled upon Ioan Grillo’s work after an appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast. He told stories of interviewing murderers, dealers, psychopaths, and gangster warlords. The stories he told were hard to listen to and even harder to believe.
I did not purchase his book out of morbid curiosity. As someone who writes about female superheroes, I wanted to have a greater understanding of how criminal enterprises worked.
Unfortunately, after reading Gangster Warlords, I learned more than I wanted to know.
Gangster Warlords gives you an in-depth look on the birth and administration of an international gang. Grillo tells stories of a boy whose father was murdered at the hands of a street gang. The boy then joins a rival crew so that he could get revenge on the gang that killed his father. That boy then discovers a love of killing and becomes the top hitman for what is now known as MS-13.
In Jamaica, the citizens regard their gangster warlords as defenders of the poor.
King Dudus, the President, Jim Brown, these men were adored by their community. They brought food to the slums and kept the hungry satiated, all while defying the government. At the same time, these same men were responsible for the thousands of dead bodies that littered the streets.
Brazil is home to the Red Commando. In Gangster Warlords, Grillo interviews the founder of the gang and discovers how political prisoners imprisoned with gang members, led to the formation of the most powerful gang in Brazil. With their political upbringing, the Red Command create their own rule book which citizens in the ghetto must abide by.
If you steal, rape, or hurt from your fellow slum dweller, the Red Commando will brutally punish you. But when the Red Commando do the same, their actions are ignored.
The last destination in Gangster Warlords is Mexico. Here, Grillo details how a megalomaniacal gang leader transformed himself into a religious icon. He documented how the leader professed to exact religious justice on the unjust while ordering the execution of a small business owner in the same sentence. Grillo also explains what happens when the citizens revolt against the cartel and form their own vigilante militia.
Spoilers, it doesn’t end well for anyone involved. Without judicial systems in place, the cycle of corruption and violence continues anew. The heroes live long enough to see themselves become villains.
After reading this book, I found myself wondering how my fellow Americans choose not to take pity on migrants. They are literally trying to escape genocide and we are content with ignoring it. I can only imagine what the build a wall supporters would do if the roles were reversed.
I don’t like to get political in my reviews, but it’s impossible not to after reading Gangster Warlords. Ioan Grillo has done a masterful job of taking you into a world ruled by kingpins and business savvy murderers.
He shows you how hunger, poverty, and violence, can turn an innocent teenager into a greedy psychopath.
I cannot see how anyone can read this book for pure enjoyment. If it were fiction, this book would be considered the most brutal story of all time. However, in terms of research, Gangster Warlords is an excellent introduction to the world of gangster crime. I think this book is a must-read for people who don’t understand why migrants are drowning themselves in the Rio Grande.
If it wasn’t for fear of execution, none of these foreigners would be leaving their country.
My one criticism of Gangster Warlords is that the book felt long. This is ironic because the chapters are deceptively short and move at a brisk pace. But the amount of content and detail in the events that transpired made it feel as if I was reading The Stand from Stephen King. It wasn’t bad, but it was exhausting.
Minor nitpick aside, I have to give Gangster Warlords by Ioan Grillo . . .
5 Stars.


