Book Review: “El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency”

El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency, by Ioan Grillo, Bloomsbury Press, 2011, 291 pages

Review by Curt Prendergast

Millions of eyes around the world are watching a wave of violence sweep through Mexico, leaving a trail of beheadings and dismembered bodies in its wake.

Without an understanding of the historical roots and cultural context of the violence, it’s easy to imagine that the zombie plague has arrived in Mexico. And that, of course, is simply not the case.

Ioan Grillo, a British journalist who has reported on the drug trade in Mexico since 2001, writes: “This is not a random explosion of violence. Residents of northern Mexico have not turned into psychotic killers overnight after drinking bad water. This violence exploded and escalated over a clear time frame. Identifiable factors have caused the conflict. Real people made of flesh and blood have pulled the strings of armies, made fortunes from the war, or pursued failed policies from government towers.”

His view on the conflict comes from interviewing people along the drug-smuggling lanes that stretch from Colombia to the United States. His sources include cartel assassins, grieving mothers, narco-priests, police and military officers, musicians, and politicians. What emerges is an insightful, well-rounded account of both the violence and the culture behind it.

He argues that the drug cartels have transformed from ”drug smugglers into paramilitary death squads.” With this transformation, he says, “these gangsters have become a criminal insurgency that poses the biggest armed threat to Mexico since its 1910 revolution.” This insurgency is not a well-defined group of people with a specific political ideology. Instead, Grillo describes it as “an enormous ghostlike form leering over society,” and refers to it with the term used by Mexicans throughout the country: El Narco.

The most recent incarnation of El Narco began in the 1980s when U.S. law enforcement blocked the flow of Colombian cocaine through Miami. Colombian druglords needed another route to the U.S. market and chose the “Mexican trampoline.” Over the years, Mexican smugglers took over the trade and now manage a northward movement of drugs and a southward movement of money and guns.

However, Grillo writes, the Mexican drug trade is not a new phenomenon. The opium trade in Mexico was born in the 1880s when Chinese immigrants began growing poppies in Sinaloa, Mexico. The black-market opium trade was born in 1914 when the U.S. banned opium. A few years later, the U.S. prohibited alcohol and Mexican bootleggers filled the demand. During World War Two it was rumored that the U.S. government turned a blind eye to opium smugglers because U.S. forces needed morphine. Since then, the Mexican drug trade has supplied marijuana, cocaine, and heroin to successive generations of hippies, yuppies, and Generation X-ers in the United States and Europe.

Grillo is careful to note that the current wave of violence “is inextricably linked to the democratic transition.” Although Mexico has been a democratic republic for most of the 20th century, the domination of the Institutional Revolutionary Party effectively stymied participatory democracy. It also solidified a system of government corruption that kept the peace with El Narco. It was only in 2000, with the election of Vicente Fox from the National Action Party, that this system was dealt its first major blow. In the past decade Mexico has struggled both with establishing a participatory democracy and with managing the suddenly chaotic relationship between the authorities and El Narco.

The main contribution of this book is that Grillo shows sides of the Mexican drug trade that are largely absent from news accounts and policy papers in the U.S. This book is like reading the best articles from The Nation, L.A. Times, New York Times, and the Mexican newsmagazine Proceso all rolled into one. Readers will be introduced to the Santa Muerte and Jesus Malverde cults that serve the spiritual needs of drug traffickers. They will also learn about the clothing styles, musical tastes, and architectural flair of drug trafficking capos.

A few more of these books and the global public will begin to understand the world that is unfolding behind the grisly images seen in Mexican newspapers. Given the historical evolution of the drug trade and the massive amounts of money involved, these images are not likely to stop anytime soon. As Grillo puts it: “Kingpins rise and fall, teenagers experiment, and old addicts overdose, and all the time the drug machine keeps ticking on with the steady rhythm of the earth circling the sun.”

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