El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency Paperback – November 13, 2012

El Narco is a gripping history of the Mexican drug cartels. Grillo is an experts on the drug cartels and their history. Although Grillo is British he seems to have spent much of his life covering the cartels. A Mexican writer who penned such an exhaustive history would probably have been killed. Perhaps because Grillo writes in english, he has not been targeted.

In the United States we have a number of euphemistic wars. We have wars on poverty and cancer. President Richard Nixon was the first to proclaim the war on some drugs. In Mexico the drug war is not a euphemism. Tens of thousands of people have died in Mexico as a result of the drug cartels, many of them killed in horrible ways.

Years ago, when the Mexican PRI political party was still solidly in control of Mexico, I traveled in Mexico on several occasions. I have also known many Mexican people in the United States. The Mexican culture and people are not a culture that I would think of as being capable of extreme barbarity. Yet El Narco is a story of the extreme barbarity that has warped Mexican society. The barbaric acts that the Islamic State has become infamous for, beheading, mass execution and exploitation of women, may have been pioneered by the drug cartels.

El Narco is an account of a failed state that is unable to resist the drug cartels. El Narco is a story of the complete corruption of the Mexican state, on a Federal level and, especially, on a local level.

Mexicans sometimes lay the blame for the drug war on the United States, which is the source of the vast amounts of money that flow into the drug cartels, corrupting Mexican society. There is obvious truth in this assertion. But this river of illegal money does not necessarily lead to the mass barbarism of the drug cartels. Grillo recounts that tens of thousands of South American migrants have been kidnapped and held for ransoms of $1000 or so. The fate of some of those kidnapped have been mass graves. The river of illegal money does not necessarily lead to thousands of torture killings. As Grillo points out, cultures are unique. Mexico is not the same as Columbia. The barbarity and corruption of the cartel insurgency in Mexico cannot be entirely blamed on external forces.

There was a time when the Mexican government made sure that serious crime did not impact the tourist areas. Those days are over. Gun battles have taken place in ll of the major tourist areas, either between the drug cartels or between a cartel and the Federal government. Scaring away tourists may not matter much to the Mexican economy anymore since the flow of money from drugs is larger than tourism. The Mexican government also seems to be powerless to do anything about the violence. I visited Ensenada last year. I will never step foot in Mexico again.

When I was traveling through Ensenada the tour guide pointed to a seaside housing development. She said that the houses cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and many belonged to Americans. Buying expensive real estate in a compromised state like Mexico seems to be either an act of ignorance of denial ("the drug war will not affect me").

The narco insurgency (as Grillo describes it) is easy to ignore since on the surface Mexico seems like a functional second world country. Stores sell international brands like Samsung and people go about their day to day lives. Until the narco insurgency reaches out and touches your life.

Grillo writes about the narco cartels branching out from narcotics into kidnapping and protection. In the cities where the cartels are active, according to Grillo, businesses are forced to pay a "tax" to the cartels.

The thought experiment that I suggest for a North American who has or is thinking about buying real estate in Mexico is this: If someone comes to you and tells you that you will be paying a monthly "mordida", what recourse do you have other than paying? Going to the police will probably be ineffective since they may be working for the people shaking you down.

An even worse scenario could be that you or someone in your family is kidnapped. Grillo has terrifying and tragic accounts of Mexican families who have had a family member kidnapped. Being an North American is does not immunize you crimes like this.

The Mexican government bitterly objects to the characterization of Mexico as a failed state. While Mexico will probably never reach the level of failure that Somalia has, the rule of law, which is the foundation of a functioning state, has failed in the Mexico described by Ioan Grillo.

The United States and Mexican governments do manage to capture or kill drug lords. What El Narco makes clear is that as each drug lord is taken out, a new one takes their place. As the South American cocaine producers and the Mexican Narcos have become more efficient, the cost of drugs had dropped. The billions that the United States DEA spends combating drugs has had no effect in the decades since President Nixon first declared the start of the War on Drugs. El Narco is not only a history of violence but a history of massive policy failure.

At the end of El Narco Ioan Grillo writes that the only thing that has succeeded in reducing the money that the cartels take in is the legalization and decriminalization of Marijuana. Medical Marijuana is available in a number of states and several states of legalized it. As this has happened, the market for smuggled Marijuana has started to dry up.

Ioan Grillo's book El Narco is well worth reading. For those who would prefer an accurate fictional account, I highly recommend Don Winslow's books The Power of the Dog and its sequel The Cartel. Don Winslow's book so closely follow the events recounted in El Narco that they could be labeled historical fiction.

I originally read this book years ago and have since also read "Sicario", which is an excellent book on the Narcos and their inner workings.

Since I first read it I decided to skim through it again and it still stands I think as one of the best books out there on the ongoing Mexican Drug War. Grillo digs deep, really deep, to unearth as much as they can about the Narco gangs. He collected a lot of information and got it from a wide variety of sources. From lowest ranks of the cartels; the mules and the street dealers up to the enforcers, to the people who battle them from Mexican journalists to American DEA agents. What is revealed is a very bloody machine that continues to make Mexico one of the deadliest places in the world.

First he starts with the earliest traces of drug smuggling in Mexico's history which is really fascinating. We see the introduction of opium to Mexico by Chinese smugglers and eventually the earliest smuggling of marijuana (which was the Cartel's biggest cash cow) during the Mexican Revolution of the 1900s. As well as the older "dons" from Sinaloa who controlled Mexico's narcotic black market in the 1980s and 90s during the big cocaine boom of the time. However, that beast was completely different from the one we see now. Somewhere along the line this old power structure died and violence just exploded in Mexico putting it on part with the violence in Afghanistan.

Thats about the time when Grillo first entered the scene. He goes into Mexico from Texas to learn as much as he can. He talks to street dealers in Mexico's border towns, interviews a an ex-police officer turned Cartel enforcer in prison, he talks to mules and hitmen in Colombia. Its really fascinating in a morbid way to see this Narco culture at a ground level. Some of the more eccentric details of the Narco lifestyle involve commissioning Corrido folk bands to make ballads for them, the lavish mausoleums they build for themselves (knowing it seems what their line work inevitably leads to).

Some of the most shocking revelations though are the levels of corruption we see in Mexico that make this bloody ecosystem of open street warfare possible. Cops routinely end up dead often because it turns out they are Cartel enforcers themselves. Corrupt politicians aid the gangs however they can while honest politicians are assassinated in broad daylight. Despite the monumental efforts of American agencies like the DEA their task seems almost pointless. Which lead to a question I had when I first got this; what does America have to do with it? Grillo seems to answer, a lot. To put it bluntly the economy that helps the Cartels stay afloat and profitable is this; Mexican marijuana and heroin go north, American dollars and guns go south.

Since this book was released Grillo seemed to be correct in that legalization would effect the bottomline of the Cartels. Since US states like Colorado have legalized recreational use of it, which is a growing trend in American politics, the Cartels have taken a massive hit in their profit margins. Still though the war rages. Despite the dramatic "Zero Dark Thirty"-esque capture of El Chapo Guzman the Sinaloa gangs continue to thrive. With the assassination of Javier Valdez and the kidnapping of student protesters; its apparent the Cartels are still very much alive.

If you'd like to get a better understanding of the Mexican Drug War, I recommend picking up El Narco.

I strongly advise not reading this book before a vacation trip to Mexico. We've been hearing horror stories about the increasing drug-related anarchy in Mexico, including the gun battles with the Zeta drug gang near Brownsville, Texas and the brutal killing in Ciudad Juarez, but this book gathers all of that quickly forgotten news into its genuinely ugly context and outlines exactly why Mexico has suffered such a tragic decline in its social stability and respect for law. There are sections of this book that made me wonder how the author was able to get out with his skin intact.

There is so much crime reporting in this book that sometimes I wonder if the writer isn't gilding the lily a little to make it seem worse than it actually is; unfortunately, I don't think he is. He thoroughly describes the gradual growth of the drug cartels from their obscure beginnings in the Mexican state of Sinaloa much earlier in the 20th century, through uneasy cartel relationships with the Mexican PRI dictatorship, to the explosion of violence beginning with the flowering of Mexican democracy less that 15 years ago, and continuing to the present day. It is clear that Mexico is in the grip of a criminal insurgency, fueled largely by American desire for the products from south of the border, and further boosted by American willingness to sell massive quantities of high-caliber firearms and assault weapons to anyone. I have not quite finished the book yet (I'm in the third of three parts) and all I can say is, if you want something that will keep you up at night, this is the book to read.