Book Review: El Narco by Ioan Grillo

There's incessant chatter in the United States about the War on Drugs, its strategies, its failures, its future, and plenty of great resources on recommended policies. But this chatter is incredibly parochial--not only in the sense that it refuses to learn from the experience of other countries, but also in its willful blindness to the important partners and contributors to the U.S. drug market: our southern neighbors in Mexico. Ioan Grillo's excellent book El Narco is a first effort to remedy this colossal oversight, and it contains invaluable information that North Americans would do well to absorb.

Grillo, originally British and a long-time resident of Mexico City, has been covering the drug trade as a journalist for years, a task rife with peril that requires know-how, sophistication, tact, and wisdom. But despite his journalistic heroism, Grillo does not feature himself at all in the book, as a hero or otherwise. Instead, he gives us a full and rich picture of the drug trade in Mexico and the deadly culture it has produced.

The first part of the book relates the history of the drug trade, from smalltime rural growers to cartels and powerful mafiosi. Grillo walks the reader hand in hand through Mexican politics, highlighting the role of U.S. drug enforcement officers in the escalation and diversification of the drug trade. The murder of a DEA agent is a pivotal point in the narrative. Also present is the Colombian trade, which after its heyday receded, with the fall of Pablo Escobar, due to lack of forward thinking, leaving the void to Mexican traffickers.

The second part exposes some of the culture involved in trafficking: special professions, the gruesome and frequent violence and homicide (including shocking interviews with young men who work as assassins for the cartel), the music scene known as narcocultura (of which there is a recent documentary), and the place of religion and faith in drug culture.

In the third part, Grillo attempts to chart a way out of the abyss that is the Mexican drug market. Notably, he believes that U.S. drug policy is key to addressing the puzzle. While there are some important things that Mexico needs to do on the political and economic level, the continued illegality and risk involved in drugs in the U.S. is what makes this market so lucrative, and, in combination with complex internal factors, so lethal.