A kidnapping target in her native Colombia, journalist Silvana Paternostro returned there to document life beyond the drug war.
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A kidnapping target in her native Colombia, journalist Silvana Paternostro returned there to document life beyond the drug war. In 1999, 22 years after she left to come to the United States, Paternostro decided to “open up the Pandora’s box” of her past. What followed was a series of trips that became the material of “My Colombian War,” a book she calls “a mix of memoir and reportage about Colombia and all its complexities.”
As a reporter for publications such as the New Republic, the Paris Review and Newsweek, Paternostro knows that Americans rarely stop to think about the legacy of the war that disappeared from view after 9/11: the drug war. Like the billions of dollars in military and humanitarian aid the U.S. has spent in Colombia, Paternostro’s book provides no happy endings. It’s not giving away too much to quote her conclusion that, for Colombia and for her, things “did not work out between us.”
Not for lack of trying. In September of 2001, Paternostro returned to her family farm, El Carmen, in the north, for a New York Times Magazine story. As the daughter of wealthy landowners and thus, Colombian logic goes, a target for kidnapping, she required heavily armed escort for her trip that lasted only four hours. “My Colombian War” explores the “feudal dynamics” that result in such brutal reality. Paternostro’s earlier book, “In the Land of God and Man” (1999), established her reputation for turning a critical eye to her own culture, as a woman who dared to take on the sacred cows of Latin American Catholicism, machismo and patrician values, from within.
NNow, as a self-described outsider and yet still a member of the Colombian elite (Paternostro’s mother descends from French aristocracy who fought on the Conservative government side of the same war Gabriel García Márquez depicts in “One Hundred Years of Solitude”), Paternostro’s tangled relationships with the places and people of her Colombian past provide an apt metaphor for the sticky complexities of the country itself, and American involvement there. Colombia remains exceedingly violent — the UNHCR counts 2 million to 3 million internally displaced persons, second only to Sudan — and “My Colombian War” comes out this month in the U.S. with names changed to protect “the privacy and safety of the Colombians still living amid violent conflict.”
Paternostro spoke with Salon in New York (with an interruption to field a phone call from Aleida March, Che Guevara’s widow) about Colombia, her involvement in Steven Soderbergh‘s pair of Che biopics, and the literary genre she calls “nonfiction magical realism.”
In a recent speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Condoleezza Rice declared that “Colombia is on a trajectory of positive change — politically, economically and socially,” marveling that “Colombia’s transformation in less than a decade from failing state to thriving democracy is one of the greatest victories for the cause of human rights in our world today.” Why is Washington’s Colombian war so different from yours?
A lot of Colombians probably agree with that, and would be happy to have their country seen that way. There are glimpses of concrete change, local political machinery being challenged. Still, Rice’s comment is wishful thinking, and something that we will achieve, but we’re not there yet. And there are things in the social, fiscal, educational and foreign policies, and in the legal world of the country, that need to change before we achieve this perfect state that she refers to.
The overarching narrative journey in your book is framed by encounters with a U.S. army serviceman called “Charlie” who has volunteered to go to Colombia because, as the son of a drug addict, he says he wants to “kill each and every motherfucking drug dealer with [his] own hands.” How does he fit into this story?
Charlie became an important part of my journey of going back and writing this book. He was going to Colombia as U.S. military, but also to fight his own personal war. When I met him he was on his way. After his time there, he recognized how much more complicated it is, and how [U.S. involvement in Colombia] creates more problems than it solves.
Colombia is seen as the country that has only drug problems. I am always surprised to see how little the fact that Colombia is a drug-producing country plays out in the day-to-day of politics, of the quotidian life there. Charlie realized this, and to me he represents Washington’s narrow focus and how they see this very complex country.
Are you saying that narcotics trafficking isn’t important in Colombia?
It’s not what carries the political discourse of Colombia. It is not what Colombians are preoccupied with, although it is a large part of how the country works.
Isn’t drug trafficking the source of the kidnappings, the violence, the injustice?
The violence in Colombia was not brought about by drug trafficking. We had a period called “La Violencia,” in the 1950s, for example. Colombia has a situation that is complicated by drugs, and although it’s important to focus on what effect drug trafficking has on Colombian society, I’m more interested in human dynamics, the relationships between employer and employee, between man and woman, teacher and student, government and citizen, artists and civil society. That’s what my book wants to show: how that Colombia works. A lot of the way people treat each other leads to me calling Colombia, [in the book,] “a fiefdom of dysfunction under one flag.”
In the book, you spend some time living at your grandmother’s in Barranquilla, a coastal capital, and find that you have very little in common. What makes you different?
My grandmother had this slew of granddaughters who were sent to American schools and wore clothes that were maybe a little inappropriate to her. She lived in a very rigid world where, if it wasn’t how her world worked, she was not interested, even if it was her grandchildren. So we lived these parallel lives, and in a way that’s a metaphor for Colombia: The feudal and the modern never sit down to talk at a table. Maybe we’re starting to now.
Since reporting this book, you’ve been researching the biography of an iconic figure of Latin American revolution, Che Guevara. Why?
I started without any intentions of getting so involved in the life of Che Guevara, but in 2001 I had taken a trip to Cuba. Things were different. There was a cultural relationship between Cuba and the United States, and as a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, I had a license to go as a journalist.
I brought the three people who had just come out from doing the movie “Traffic”: Laura Bickford, the producer; Steven Soderbergh, the director; and Benicio del Toro, who won an Oscar for his performance. They had all informally spoken about doing a movie about Che Guevara. So now I’m writing a book on Che and also have been helping research and produce the film that we are shooting right now. Benicio del Toro knows so much about Che Guevara that together we’ve become almost like a research team, and we have visited and interviewed all the principal characters of the Che Guevara story who still live.
And you actually appear on-screen in the film?
About two years ago, we shot here in New York at the U.N. This was a trip that Che Guevara made to speak at the General Assembly in December of ’64. We wanted to re-create that visit, actually the last time he was seen in public. As we were going through all the archival material, literally three days before we started shooting, I saw a picture of Che sitting at the desk at the General Assembly, probably taken minutes before he went up to the podium to speak, sitting between two men, the ambassador and the secretary at the U.N. mission. And right behind him I saw this woman sitting with them.
When I looked at the script, we only had the two men in it. So I asked the director if there was any chance that a woman could be sitting there, and I asked him if it could be me. He said yes. That turned into a whole series of scenes with me as this woman [Cuban revolutionary leader Alba Griñan Nuñez]. But sometimes I think that Steven was just playing a joke on me, shooting with no film. You know, when you’re 4 years old and you tell your mother, “Oh, Mommy, take a picture of me!” and there’s no film in the camera? So I have to see if I make the cut.
You have been quoted as saying, “What I’m writing is like the nonfiction version of what Gabriel García Márquez did with ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude.’” (You even borrow the first three words, “Many years later…” for your opening.) What do you mean by that?
I call it “nonfiction magical realism.” Magical realism has become a way to describe a literature that lightens or makes quaint the problems and the dynamics of a society. For me magical realism prettifies the problems that we live with. I don’t think that was García Márquez’s intention, but I think that’s what it has become. Magical realist things, as they’ve come to be known in Latin American literature, happen in my reporting. The fact that there are [guerrilla-run] checkpoints [that lead to kidnappings] and that people call them “miraculous fishing” — that is an example of magical realism, but it’s true.
How Americans really feel about drugs
A NYT op-ed uses "moderate" double-speak to deny the truth: Most people want marijuana legalized
Marijuana activist Carrie Sandoval at a protest in Denver on Wednesday, Sept 22, 2010 (Credit: AP/Kristen Wyatt)
Almost exactly eight years ago, I wrote an essay for the Nation magazine looking at how terms such as “centrism” and “moderate” were beginning to be deftly manipulated to shape the parameters of America’s political discourse. In almost every policy debate, these words were being used in with-us-or-against-us fashion to delineate what was — and what was not — acceptable. Through such linguistic propaganda over the last decade, America was gradually taught that anything called “centrist” or “moderate” was Good and Serious because it supposedly represented “mainstream” thinking in America — even as “centrism” was being used to describe policies and politicians that, based on empirical data, increasingly diverged from the actual center of our nation’s public opinion. By contrast, anything positioned in opposition to that branding was wild-eyed “leftist,” “extremist,” “ideological,” “fringe” — and most of all, Evil and Unserious.
As dishonest as this kind of agitprop is, it unfortunately — but predictably — continues unabated. This is, after all, the golden era of agitprop — a moment in which wars are no longer wars, corporations are people, and top New York Times scribes are given a national platform to declare that a key architect of the Republican Party’s infamous K Street Project “is not a representative of the corporate or financial wing of the party.” And so when it comes to who is a “centrist” or “moderate,” the distortions persist without so much as a peep of editorial protest.
The latest example of this insidious framing comes in the form of a Monday New York Times Op-Ed. The piece is written by Kevin Sabet, formerly one of President Obama’s top drug policy officials. Titled “Overdosing on Extremism,” he employs the “centrist” and “moderate” code words to criticize those pressing for reforms that, for purposes of law enforcement, would treat currently outlawed drugs such as marijuana just like far more dangerous yet legal drugs such as alcohol. With the possibility of these reform proposals roiling the presidential race and appearing on statewide ballots in 2012, a breathless and hysterical Sabet sounds an old fear-mongering alarm, writing (emphasis added):
Unless we change the tone of the debate to give drug-policy centrists a voice, America’s drug problem will only get worse.
Indeed, moderates have historically been key contributors to both the debate and the practice of effective drug policy. In 1914, Representative Francis B. Harrison, a New York Democrat, worked with Republicans and President Woodrow Wilson to pass the first major piece of federal anti-drug legislation, in response to a surge in heroin and cocaine use.
Other moderates, from Theodore Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy, made drug policy an important part of their domestic agendas. President Bill Clinton worked closely with Bob Dole, the Republican Senate majority leader, on sensible measures like drug courts and community policing…
So where are the moderates now? … A few tough-on-crime conservatives and die-hard libertarians dominate news coverage and make it appear as if legalizing drugs and “enforcement only” strategies were the only options, despite the fact that the public supports neither …
There is no magic bullet for America’s drug problem. The magnitude and complexity of our drug problem require us to constantly refine and improve our policies through thoughtful analysis, innovation and discussion.
Moderates should lead that conversation. To remain silent not only betrays widely shared values of compassion and justice for the most vulnerable. It also leaves policy in the hands of extremists who would relegate a very serious and consequential discussion to frivolous and dangerous quarters.
If ever a college taught a class in how modern political propaganda works — and how it proceeds without any connection to a shred of fact — this article should be required reading because it is such a pure example.
Mere weeks after Gallup’s new poll showed a majority of Americans support full legalization of marijuana, Sabet insists that it’s a “fact” that the public doesn’t support legalization. And mind you, it’s not just Gallup’s surveys that show public support for legalization — in state-based polls in politically diverse states like Massachusetts and Colorado, it’s essentially the same thing: widespread public support for pot legalization.
This, of course, says nothing of the fact that the very man Sabet earned his official government title from, Barack Obama, was elected to the Senate promoting marijuana decriminalization and then overwhelmingly elected to the White House after a campaign in which he pledged to respect states’ decisions to reform their drug laws. It also says nothing of the rise of Ron Paul, an oft-ignored candidate who has been able to overcome media scorn to wage an unexpectedly spirited race for the Republican presidential nomination thanks, in part, to his push to end the Drug War.
None of these facts about public opinion and the drug war are all that surprising; after all, in a recent national television ad campaign, Sabet’s own Office of National Drug Control Policy has deemed marijuana “the safest thing in the world.” Yet, Sabet says it’s a “fact” that the public doesn’t support any form of legalization.
How, you ask, can he justify such an assertion? How can he defend his claims considering those poll numbers, the results of the 2008 presidential election, or the rise of anti-drug warrior Paul in the traditionally “just say no” party’s presidential primary? He can’t, but he doesn’t need to in an era where facts no longer matter.
Instead, he (and the New York Times editors and headline writers who published his piece) wholly ignores the indisputable facts and simply deems the millions of Americans in this pro-legalization majority as “extremists” — that is, he pretends that the position in the actual center of public opinion is on the extreme edge of that public opinion. He then asserts that true “centrists” and “moderates” are those who do not support legalization — even though those voices are empirically the extremists whose positions put them far away from the mainstream center of public opinion. And, just for good measure, he employs a bit of ad hominem, suggesting it’s just “a few … die-hard libertarians” who support legalization — ignoring not only the American majority, but the scores of top law enforcement officials who are fighting to end the drug war.
Taken together, Sabet’s goal in his Op-Ed is obvious: He’s a committed drug warrior with a vested (and, based on his Times billing as a “drug policy consultant,” possibly financial) interest in marginalizing those trying to end the drug war. To do that, he’s employed the most tried and true instruments of marginalization — the newly redefined notions of “centrism” and “moderate” policymaking. And he’s employed them even though the actual facts show that, in comparison to the mass public, he’s the fringe extremist.
Now sure, it’s certainly true that polls showing strong — and growing — support for legalizing marijuana cannot be fully equated to Americans’ views of policies for all drugs. However, marijuana-themed polls and election results are also hardly wholly unrelated to that conversation — and at the very least, those polls and election results should mean that the burden of proof is on someone like Sabet when he declares that being for legalization is the definition of “extremism” and the opposite of “centrism.”
But that burden of proof is nowhere to be found because in the 21st century, “centrism” and “moderate” still have nothing to do with the center of any political debate, or the moderate middle of any policy discussion. They remain political weapons deployed by attention-seeking fabulists against the real centrists and moderates in the American majority.
David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota
Adventures in drug war logic
Laundering money for cartels: Good! Arguing for legalization: A fireable offense
A U.S. Border Patrol agent walks along the U.S./Mexico border fence near San Diego. (Credit: AP/Lenny Ignelzi)
It’s time for an important lesson in proper, civilized behavior. Drug war soldier Gallant launders vast sums of money for the Mexican drug cartels. Drug war soldier Goofus expresses skepticism at the size and scope of this expensive and deadly boondoggle. Goofus gets canned. Gallant is the Drug Enforcement Agency.
Sorry, what’s our DEA doing this time?
Today, in operations supervised by the Justice Department and orchestrated to get around sovereignty restrictions, the United States is running numerous undercover laundering investigations against Mexico’s most powerful cartels. One D.E.A. official said it was not unusual for American agents to pick up two or three loads of Mexican drug money each week. A second official said that as Mexican cartels extended their operations from Latin America to Africa, Europe and the Middle East, the reach of the operations had grown as well. When asked how much money had been laundered as a part of the operations, the official would only say, “A lot.”
“If you’re going to get into the business of laundering money,” the official added, “then you have to be able to launder money.”
Yes, but how do the feds decide which cartels to launder money for? Should the government really be picking “winners and losers” when it comes to Mexican drug cartels?
An expensive boondoggle like the ongoing war on drugs has its own nutty logic that may not make much sense to outsiders. Outsiders, for example, might think that laundering “a lot” of money for cartels in order to eventually follow that money to someone in a position of authority is a huge waste of time and resources that only makes the deadly gangs even stronger. But the agencies waging the war don’t seem to have a lot of tolerance for opinions along those lines.
When Border Patrol agent Bryan Gonzalez told a colleague that legalizing marijuana would probably lessen violence in Mexico, his colleague reported Gonzalez to their bosses, and Gonzalez was fired.
Those remarks, along with others expressing sympathy for illegal immigrants from Mexico, were passed along to the Border Patrol headquarters in Washington. After an investigation, a termination letter arrived that said Mr. Gonzalez held “personal views that were contrary to core characteristics of Border Patrol Agents, which are patriotism, dedication and esprit de corps.”
Gonzalez is now with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, and the ACLU has filed a suit on his behalf.
But LEAP’s membership drives are slightly handicapped by the fact that law enforcement agencies see any sort of skepticism regarding the efficacy and morality of the drug war as dangerous and, apparently, unpatriotic. “We all know the drug war is a bad joke,” an unidentified police officer told the Times. “But we also know that you’ll never get promoted if you’re seen as soft on drugs”
Its this institutional unwillingness to question the mission that leads to the DEA “combating” drug cartels by laundering their money and selling them weapons. Drug war logic means rural Oregon Washington needs a million dollars in federal grants going to a a “task force” that busts small-time dealers and raids houses of medicinal marijuana users with paramilitary weaponry and tactics. Does that seems extreme and wasteful? What are you, some kind of unpatriotic hippie?
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene
On “Weed Wars,” drug clichés go up in smoke
A new reality show depicts an Oakland, Calif., medical marijuana clinic as just another small business
Small businessman Steve D'Angelo, executive director of Oakland's Harborside Health Center, samples his product in "Weed Wars." (Credit: Discovery)
“I run a family business, and the business is cannabis,” says Steve D’Angelo, a central character in Discovery’s new series “Weed Wars” and the co-founder and executive director of Oakland’s Harborside Health Center, which distributes medical marijuana to almost 100,000 customers. D’Angelo’s matter-of-fact statement sums up the tone of this series, which treats the Harborside Heath Center as just another family-owned (albeit nonprofit) business, ultimately not too different from a veterinary clinic, a hair salon or a tattoo parlor.
Well, OK, there is one major difference: Although the clinic’s main product can be sold legally to any California resident with a medical permit to buy it, the federal government still considers marijuana a Schedule 1 narcotic, as dangerous to the republic as crack cocaine. That means that in addition to the usual entrepreneurial headaches, D’Angelo and his brother Andrew, the clinic’s general manager, live in fear of a massive bust by the DEA on whatever pretext — a catastrophe that would wipe out everything they’ve built.
And there are other hassles, most of which could be grouped under the umbrella heading of, “The government fears and loathes us, but is happy to use us as a cash machine.” The pilot — which premieres Thursday night at 10 p.m./9 Central — finds the D’Angelos sweating a $1.1. million tax bill suddenly levied by the city. The bill came about because Oakland voters passed an ordinance drastically raising the city’s “cannabis tax” and stipulating that the entire bill for a given fiscal year be paid in advance. Although the clinic grosses about $20 million a year, it’s a nonprofit that plows any income beyond costs back into the business. They don’t have a million dollars lying around.
If you’re repelled by the prospect of watching a series whose premiere revolves around a tax bill, “Weed Wars” isn’t for you. The details of legal marijuana distribution are intriguing, and many of the show’s characters are agreeably eccentric — the business’s co-founder and treasurer is a “pagan wizard” known as Dave Wedding Dress, who has a giant beard and wears a purple tie-died sundress — but there’s ultimately nothing glamorous, or even all that funny, about the events depicted on this show. The D’Angelos and their employees work hard and spend most of their days dealing with tedious but necessary chores. The clinic’s display floor, which features varieties of cannabis behind glass, might as well be a deli counter. The flavors have pungent names such as Julius Caesar, Deep Purple and Jack the Ripper, but they’re just clumps of bud in plastic jars and bags, visually indistinguishable from each other to anyone who’s not an expert. One of the clinic’s employees, Terryn, is raising his own crop in his basement help from an expert grower named Jon, but it’s not the easy-money sidelight he imagined when he got into it. In the pilot we watch Terryn lose part of a crop to an aphid infestation and grouse that when you decide to grow marijuana, you’re deciding to become a small farmer, and that it’s a 60-hour-a-week job.
The very existence of “Weed Wars” is more remarkable than the show itself. Marijuana is still mostly illegal in this country, but public perception (and opinion polls) have shifted plenty over the past two decades, to the point where Showtime’s “Weeds” can run for eight seasons, stoner comedy can become a mainstream movie subgenre, and politicians can feel emboldened to answer the question “Have you ever smoked it?” with a simple “yes” instead of “I experimented with it.” Proposition 215 legalized medical marijuana in California 15 years ago, but it’s hard to imagine any major cable channel circa 1996 — or even 2006 — chronicling the day-to-day operations of a clinic in the no-fuss manner of “Weed Wars.” (MTV’s “Real Life” ran a series last summer titled “I’m In the Marijuana Business,” but it was more along the lines of “Jersey Shore” with weed, if that’s not redundant.) The series is sympathetic to the D’Angelos and their enterprise, treating them as underdogs in a war of perception that they and their allies will ultimately win, if the day-to-day b.s. doesn’t grind them down first. “I believe in this plant,” Steve D’Angelo says. “I believe in what it can do for people.”
Newt Gingrich talks about inventive new ways to punish drug users
The GOP front-runner continues to tour America's bookstores, babbling away
Newt Gingrich (Credit: AP)
The thing reporters always loved about Newt Gingrich — and the thing that led many of them to mistake his free-associative rambling for intellect — is that he will just babble, at length, on any given topic, to any reporter who’ll listen. So Yahoo’s Chris Moody chatted with the unlikely GOP nomination front-runner at a Books-a-Million in Florida, and Moody got Gingrich to go on for a while about drugs, for some reason, which I’m guessing is not at the top of the Gingrich campaign’s list of issues to hit in interviews. (At the top of that list is actually “The Battle of the Crater,” a powerful Civil War historical novel by Gingrich and William F. Forstchen, available now at fine booksellers everywhere.)
Here are Newt Gingrich’s nuanced, compassionate drug policy ideas: Constant drug testing for everyone (especially poor people) and stiff “economic penalties” for use. (Yes, obviously, what poor people need are more ways to incur economic penalties and more barriers to either aid or employment. Newt Gingrich has so many IDEAS.) Also, the U.S. should be more like Singapore, where people carrying enough drugs to qualify for “trafficking” charges are put to death.
I think that we need to consider taking more explicit steps to make it expensive to be a drug user. It could be through [drug] testing before you got any kind of federal aid. Unemployment compensation, food stamps, you name it.
It has always struck me that if you’re serious about trying to stop drug use, then you need to find a way to have a fairly easy approach to it and you need to find a way to be pretty aggressive about insisting — I don’t think actually locking up users is a very good thing. I think finding ways to sanction them and to give them medical help and to get them to detox is a more logical long term policy.
This self-contradictory word-salad leads Mike Riggs to call Newt Gingrich a “nitwit,” which seems unfair to perfectly harmless nitwits everywhere.
But Newt couched his explicit endorsement of incredibly punitive and draconian anti-drug efforts in the language of a reformer, so expect conservatives opposed to the Gingrich surge to paint him as a crazy heroin-loving fruitcake, as they have Ron Paul, and just as they painted his orthodox Republican immigration policy (let’s not deport literally everyone, right away) as unacceptable amnesty.
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene
“El Narco”: The drug war next door
An in-depth look at the Mexican cartels that have killed thousands and threaten the government itself
Rifles, guns, hand grenades, uniforms of the Mexican navy and the U.S. Army, cartridges and cocaine were seized in an operation against the Zetas drug cartel in Coahuila and Nuevo Leon in the north of Mexico. (Credit: Jorge Lopez / Reuters)
Among the many striking facts that journalist Ioan Grillo recounts in his new book, “El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency,” is that the Mexican city of Juarez became the murder capital of the world last year, beating out Mogadishu and Cape Town, South Africa, for per-capita homicides. Some 3,000 people were killed in Juarez in 2010, yet in El Paso, Texas, the U.S. city right across the river — almost a literal stone’s throw away — there were only five murders.
Some would say this proves that better law enforcement is all Mexico needs to end the drug-cartel violence currently drenching its northern states in blood. Or maybe, as Grillo suggests, it merely shows that when the cartels and their associates want to kill someone in El Paso, they first take their victim across the border where, chances are, the murder will never be properly investigated.
Whatever the case, the contrast suggests why the rampant carnage in Mexico’s border states seldom makes the front page in the U.S.; it seems far away, despite being right next door. However, cables made available by WikiLeaks indicate that American officials — including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — are worried that the cartels are taking on aspects of an “insurgency,” which could make them a threat to the Mexican government. Narco tactics now include car bombs, videotaped executions, the deliberate targeting of civilians and many, many attacks on policemen, soldiers, federal officials and elected leaders (one mayor was stoned to death on the main street of his own town) — all startlingly reminiscent of militant and terrorist campaigns prosecuted elsewhere on the planet.
Grillo is a Briton living in Mexico City who has been reporting on Latin America for a decade. “El Narco” lays out the history of drug smuggling in the region over the past 100 years or so, and then homes in on the rise of the Northern Mexican cartels during the 2000s. This flourishing was partly a result of U.S.-aided crackdowns on the Colombian cocaine industry, a phenomenon described by the “balloon theory”: If you squeeze the drug trade in one area, it pops up someplace else. But Grillo also believes that the fall in 2000 of the PRI (the Institutional Revolutionary Party, a one-party oligarchy that ruled Mexico for over 70 years) led to the kind of organized-crime free-for-all that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Drug smuggling is so lucrative and Mexican police and soldiers are so poorly paid that corruption has always been a feature of the landscape. But there’s stable corruption — where everyone knows who’s in charge and who must be paid — and unstable corruption, in which the power structure becomes uncertain and ambitious criminals see the opportunity to increase their slice of the action. The cartel violence in Mexico centers around clashes between rival syndicates (each with its own set of bought officials), who vie for key cross-border routes, called “plazas,” while fighting off the relatively weak efforts of law enforcement to crack down. The result is a crazy, upside-down world that often sees state police (on the local cartel’s payroll) battling federal officers (who may or may not belong to another mob).
In the late 1990s, an ambitious drug lord in the town of Nuevo Laredo hired a former special-forces commander to assemble a militia of men with similar experience. They became the Zetas, a brutal, but well-organized team of enforcers for the Gulf Cartel. The cartel leader, Osiel Cárdenas, then felt powerful enough to take the unusual step of fighting back when the federal government came to arrest him, becoming, as Grillo puts it, “the first narco insurgent.” Cárdenas lost, but not before what was once a cops-and-robbers conflict had become militarized. The cartels now have automatic weapons, grenade launchers and explosives, and no compunction about using them when innocent bystanders are around. It’s estimated that the current drug wars have claimed 35,000 lives.
The cartels have also spawned their own culture: the famous narcocorridos (ballads about gangsters and their exploits, often commissioned by the subject himself for a handsome fee), a low-budget video industry cranking out titles like “Me Chingaron Los Gringos” (“The Gringos Fucked Me”) and a clothing style called “buchones,” which, Grillo writes, “mixes urban and rural, traditional and modern. Buchones like cowboy hats and ostrich-skin boots, but also sneakers and brightly colored baseball caps.”
The narcos even have their own flavors of quasi-Catholic folk religion, with such patron saints as Santa Muerte, a cross between the Grim Reaper and the Virgin Mary, and a possibly apocryphal early-20th-century outlaw named Jesus Malverde. (In one of the book’s rare funny moments, Jesus Malverde’s shrine keeper asks Grillo if his country has a similar Robin Hood figure, and Grillo explains that, actually, they have Robin Hood.) Strangest of all, the La Familia cartel embraced as its bible a book on “muscular Christianity” titled “Wild at Heart” (by an American writer once described as “the Robert Bly of evangelicalism”) — until, that is, the cartel’s leader wrote his own spiritual guidebook.
The strength of “El Narco” lies in its shoe-leather reporting; Grillo interviews everyone from a former cartel assassin to DEA agents to grieving families, snitches, pot and poppy farmers, illegal immigrants and gangbangers. He’s the sort of journalist who’ll pop into a plastic surgery clinic or taqueria if it turns up on a list of cartel-linked businesses, just to see what he can see. Writers this knowledgeable about the subject and with no particular ax to grind are rare because covering the cartels can be dangerous. Last fall, the main newspaper in Juarez, El Diario, published an open letter to cartel leaders (“the de facto authorities in this city”), titled “What Do You Want From Us?” in an effort to figure out whatever it was that caused several of their staffers to be killed. Lately, the Zetas have taken to hanging corpses labeled “Internet snitches” from railway overpasses.
So, perhaps top-notch writing is too much to hope for as well, though there are times when you want to shout, “Raise your hands and step away from the thesaurus!” Grillo’s many references to “severed craniums” had me baffled (do cartel thugs pack bone saws?) until I realized that he means “heads,” and unless Mexico is brimming with cheerful drug dealers, he’s got the word “sanguine” confused with “sanguinary.” At times, though, Grillo’s malaprops can be grimly amusing, as when he describes a gang who makes a practice of “devouring bodies in acid.” Not just narco killers, but cannibals with cast-iron stomachs!
Nevertheless, these are minor glitches, and a solid, comprehensive popular book on the current drug wars is much needed. Americans ought to be better informed about the cartels who are challenging Mexico’s government for supremacy in the border states. American citizens buy the drugs that fund the cartels’ reign of terror and American gun shops sell them the outrageously lethal weapons they use to enforce it. So far, the slaughter has barely lapped our own border, but it is nevertheless of our making. If more of us acknowledge this truth, then there’s a better (though still slim) chance that we can replace the failed War on Drugs with a more realistic and humane drug policy — and do it before that lapping becomes a flood.
Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller
Page 1 of 68 in Drugs
The (Condensed) Grammy Award Broadcast 
Mother Blame, and the Special Needs Child 
Paul Gauguin’s Polynesian “paradise” 
Taking sex out of the city 
“Walking Dead” creator: Get ready for breakneck pace 
Female soldiers fight the brass ceiling 
Catholic tribalism and the contraceptive flap 
Salman Rushdie fears nothing 
The two Americas clash at CPAC 
Making the perfect cover girl 
A birth-control compromise could divide the right 
Unions in a “death spiral”? Not on my job site 
