ORGANISED CRIME: El Narco: The Bloody Rise of Mexican Drug CartelsBy Ioan Grillo Bloomsbury, 321pp. £12.99
OCTAVIO PAZ, writing of his beloved Mexico in The Labyrinth of Solitude, described his countrymen as having arrived at the feast of modernity just as the lights are about to be put out. The Mexican people have suffered colonial and home-grown tyrants and rampant inequality and poverty for centuries. Now, having arrived so belatedly at the feast, el narco threatens to eject them and reduce them again to misery and subservience.
El narco– short for narcotráfico– is the term used in Mexico for the drug cartels, organisations of ruthless traffickers, structured hierarchically from shadowy billionaire capos at the top down to the pitiful mules who deliver the drugs across the Rio Grande. Grillo has interviewed many young men on the lower rungs of the cartels who explain the irresistible lure that money and status have for poor Mexicans. One testimony is by a sicario, a professional assassin, who has lost count of his victims and relaxes between commissions by watching English soccer on television. El narcois estimated to make more than €20 billion a year smuggling cocaine, marijuana, heroin, and crystal meth into the US. "It attacks like a wraith under the noses of thousands of police and soldiers patrolling city streets."
It would be difficult to exaggerate the horrors of Mexico's drug war. Grillo traces the complex history of the seven main cartels, stressing the escalations in 2004 and 2008, when turf wars became so violent that they became a full-scale criminal insurgency, as Hillary Clinton, glancing nervously over the border, controversially called it. The cartels have graduated to car bombs and "taxing" businesses, even Mexico's huge mining and oil companies. Nearly 50,000 people have died since President Felipe Calderón declared war on el narcoon his election in 2006. As few as 22 narcotraficanteshave been sentenced.
Grillo recites the horrific litany of mutilated corpses, massacres, mass kidnappings and unbelievable cruelty. In the Calderón era, more than 2,500 public servants have been murdered by the cartels. In a recent El Paísarticle, Jorge Castañeda forecast that Calderón's party, the Partido Acción Nacional, will lose the presidential election in July but, more importantly, will be condemned morally by the Mexican people.
The individual stories that Grillo tells are heartbreaking. In Culiacán, the heartland of the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel, gunmen sprayed hundreds of bullets around a car workshop, killing nine people in seconds, including the entirely innocent son of Alma Herrera. This brave woman, who has campaigned since for justice, tells Grillo that “our sons have been shot dead in their prime. Their lives have been stolen so early. And we see no justice.” Grillo can scarcely watch a video of a 13-year-old kidnap victim being tortured. He cannot imagine the pain of that boy and of his parents who had to watch it. Another brave woman, María Elena Morera, suffers as her husband’s fingers are sent to her one by one. She forces the police to trace the kidnappers’ calls. Later, she and her husband make a video for the group Mexico United Against Crime. Throughout the book, the author uses the words “sanguine” and “sanguinary” – and not in the sense of “hopeful”.
Grillo does not shy from an attempt to understand what has gone wrong in Mexico. He calls the election of Vicente Fox in 2000 the start of democracy after 71 years of dominance by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. He argues that neither Fox nor his successor, Calderón, could control the federal and state police forces; the party understood the mechanics of power, seeing itself as embodying the state, what Mario Vargas Llosa called “the perfect dictatorship”. The party’s “delicate dance of corruption” has, says Grillo, been replaced by a “corrupt dance of death”.
What hope is there? Apart from creating a loyal and efficient army and police force – no easy task – and investing in inner-city and slum renewal, as was done successfully in Medellín, in Colombia, and Palermo, in Sicily, the main proposal here is to decriminalise or legalise marijuana. Fox himself is now strongly in favour, arguing that it would remove much of the traffickers’ motivation and opportunity. This view is shared by the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, an organisation set up by victims of the violence; it now has a national profile and has organised protest marches throughout Mexico. It offers a glimmer of hope.
El Narcois a fine work of journalism. Grillo has covered drug trafficking for a decade. He is generous in his thanks to his Mexican journalist colleagues who "resist attacks and intimidation to expose corruption and search for justice". Grillo singles out the heroic Jesús Blancornelas, who covered the cartels' doings for 30 years. Two of Blancornelas's closest colleagues were assassinated, and he was himself hit by four bullets in an attempt by the gangsters of Tijuana to silence him. Grillo's journalism follows in this noble tradition.
Tom Moriarty is an Irish Timesjournalist
