Pubdate: Sat, 30 Jan 2016
Source: Dominion Post, The (New Zealand)
Copyright: 2016 The Dominion Post
Contact:  http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2550

THE WAR OF DRUGS

Gangster Warlords, by Ioan Grillo, Allen & Unwin, $32.99

In May 2010 a state of emergency was declared in the Jamaican capital 
of Kingston. Schools and businesses were closed as armed vigilantes 
were seen patrolling the ghetto streets. In Tivoli Gardens, a west 
Kingston housing estate, gang members stockpiled weapons to prevent 
the arrest of their leader Dudus (Michael Christopher) Coke, revered 
locally as a Robin Hood figure but reviled in the US as a master of 
drug cartels.

Ioan Grillo's exploration of the drug trade in the Caribbean, Central 
and South America, a follow-up to El Narco (2011), charts the rise of 
newlook drug barons such as Dudus, who see themselves partly as 
combatants in a war zone, partly as an alternative state-within-a-state.

The power wielded by Dudus over the people of Kingston evolved in the 
face of their oppression by the police and military. With state 
provision inadequate, Dudus had settled local disputes, set up ghetto 
schools and employment schemes. In short, he provided public services 
that the Jamaican government did not.

In a journalist's pedestrian prose, Grillo chronicles the 
depredations wrought in the 21st century by capitalist 
narco-laundering. Cartels are now so deeply ingrained in the 
political fabric of the US-Mexican border, he suggests, that not a 
single bar or shop remains "un-narcotised". To live in Ciudad Juarez, 
Mexico's second largest border city, calls for special qualities of endurance.

Some 90 per cent of the cocaine currently consumed by Americans is 
thought to come across Mexico's frontier. Run by a computer-literate 
management, the frontier cartels kill reporters, women, magistrates 
and police  anyone who dares to obstruct their business. The total of 
those murdered in Mexico in 2015 alone reached 7428. Grillo, a 
British-born resident of Mexico City, portrays a nation that has lost 
its moral bearings.

Grillo's investigations into the brokers, dealers and professional 
killers who manage the supply and demand of cocaine involves him in a 
degree of danger. On at least one occasion he is mistaken for a US 
government narc; El Narco, his expose of Mexican drug trafficking, 
was no less harum-scarum.

Though Gangster Warlords lacks the locker-room snooping and legwork 
that made El Narco such a visceral masterwork, it remains an 
absorbing work of reportage. Throughout, Grillo turns an appalled eye 
on the methods used to grow, stock, transport and protect shipments 
of narcotics. Corrupt Mexican policemen are now mixed up in the 
transborder drug killings which, says Grillo, have become 
increasingly lurid. Bodies are no longer quietly dumped in the 
desert; they are displayed for all to see, and in some cases flayed 
or decapitated.

In place of the old Cold War certainties of "good against evil", 
Latin America today offers no such clarity and seems only to mix 
crime and war together. Disconcertingly, the drug lords and their 
foot soldiers are often deified by the poor.

A sainted, black-hooded reaper figure known as Nazario is worshipped 
alongside the darkskinned Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's first indigenous saint.

The quasi-religious Nazario is named after the real-life Mexican meth 
trafficker Nazario Moreno, who headed the bizarrely named Knights 
Templar Cartel until he died in a shoot-out with the police in 2014.

Wretchedly, the rural dispossessed worship Nazario as if he were one 
of their own. Grillo argues that their baroque hybrid of Catholic and 
MesoAmerican Indian belief accords well with the narco-traffickers' 
cult of death.

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