El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency is a non-fiction book of the Mexican drug war written by Ioan Grillo. In El Narco, Grillo takes a close look at the Mexican illegal drug trade, starting with the term "El Narco", which has come to represent the vast, faceless criminal network of drug traffickers who cast a murderous shadow over Mexico. The book covers the frontline of the Mexican drug war. It seeks to trace the origins of the illegal drug trade in Mexico, the recent escalation of violence, the human cost of the drug trade and organized crime in the country. The book takes a critical stance on the unsuccessful efforts made by the Mexican government and the United States to confront the violence and its causes.
Grillo's book draws a portrait of the Mexican drug cartels and how they have radically transformed in the past couple of decades. For the author, the criminal organizations in Mexico are not gangs; they are a "movement and an industry drawing in hundreds of thousands from bullet-ridden barrios to marijuana-growing mountains". The book explains how the cartels have created paramilitary death squads with tens of thousands of armed men from the country of Guatemala to the Texan border. It contains testimonies from members inside of the cartels; and while El Narco shows that the "devastation" of the Mexican drug war may be south of the U.S. border, Grillo pinpoints that the United States "is knee-deep in this conflict".
In the British edition, published in September 2011, the book bore the subtitle, "The Bloody Rise of Mexican Drug Cartels". The US edition came out two months later, bearing a different subtitle. A Spanish-language version of the book titled "El narco: En el corazón de la insurgencia criminal mexicana" has also been released.
Author's background Ioan Grillo is an English journalist and author of the book El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency. He has been reporting on the Mexican drug war and the Latin American illegal drug trade since 2001. He is a producer of TV special reports and documentaries for stations including PBS and Channel 4 of the United Kingdom. Grillo has also worked as a reporter for CNN, the Houston Chronicle, and Sunday Telegraph, where he has witnessed military operations, mafia killings, and drug seizures in his work. He has reported on Al Jazeera, France 24, The Sunday Times, Gatopardo, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He currently lives in Mexico City.
According to the biography section in his official webpage, Grillo grew up in the coastal city of Brighton, England. According to the author, few people there realize where the drugs they are taking come from or what they might give or takeaway from those countries. Moreover, Grillo began working as a drug war journalist after being fascinated "by the riddle of these ghost-like figures" who make more than $30 billion a year and are idolized in popular songs known as narcocorridos and chased by the Mexican and U.S. authorities. For over a decade, Grillo has followed the end-less murder scenes in "bullet-ridden streets, mountains where drugs are born as pretty flowers, and scarred criminals from prison cells to luxury condos". Grillo has discussed the drug war with two Mexican presidents, three attorneys general and a U.S. ambassador, among others.
Book's excerpts Excerpt 1 The following excerpt from the book is set in Culiacán, capital city of the Sinaloa, the northwestern state that is home to the Sinaloa Cartel and is known as the "cradle of Mexican drug smuggling":
Excerpt 2 Below is an excerpt from Time magazine published on October 23, 2011. It is the confession of a cartel member that is imprisoned:
Excerpt 3 The Global Post published a portion of the book where Grillo interviews an American agent who infiltrates a drug cartel:
Critical reception According to Blogcritics, El Narco is a "tough, straightforward, kick-in-the-nuts reportage by a man who is determined to ignore all the ideological gibberish and see for himself what's really going on in Mexico". They noted that El Narco is also a "really ugly book full of really ugly facts related by a terse, insightful writer who knows how to shape a powerful and compelling story into a powerful and compelling argument". Moreover, The Boston Globe said that Grillo is one of those authors that "does not forget" the newspaper headlines in Mexico's drug war that often "feel unreal" and go "beyond comprehension". He is also an author who "takes the advantage" of his sources to provide insight for the drug war from "nearly every angle", from America's attempts to stifle drug trafficking to a nation's history and drug culture. His book, El Narco, is filled with "sort of unforgettable details" in which only a reporter who has been behind the Mexican drug war for years "would be privy". Dudley Althaus of the Houston Chronicle stated that Grillo "traces the beast's footprints with meticulous research" and with "courageous reporting on some of [Mexico's] meanest streets". In addition, William Booth of The Washington Post said that Grillo "goes much, much deeper" in reporting the "crazy death spiral of drug violence" in Mexico's drug war. But most importantly, Booth mentioned that El Narco "tells us how we got here". The Powell's Books bookstore chains commented that the book is a "propulsive account of the blood-soaked machinery of 'El Narco,' the shadowy complex of drug cartels, street gangs, and paramilitary death squads that have littered Mexican streets with bodies and AK-47 shells". Grillo also explains how the violence is traced back to the vacuum left by the demise of the Institutional Revolutionary Party's (PRI) single-party rule "but delicately balanced system of corruption, painting a grim portrait of the corrupt police, soldiers, and officials who, figuring they can't beat the crime, make a tidy fortune by joining it".
Tim Padgett of Time magazine noted that Grillo "explores that world as deeply as few journalists have dared"; nonetheless, Padgett said that the historical context of the book not only indicts "Mexican and Latin American politicos but U.S. policymakers as well". Publishers Weekly, while noting that the book was a "propulsive account of the blood-soaked machinery", concluded that Grillo pinpoints that "America's hard-line rhetoric has failed." The magazine stated that Grillo's book can be as "perceptive as his high-octane reportage". Kirkus Reviews noted that the book emphasizes the "chilling account of the murderous growth of Mexican drug cartels", and concluded that El Narco is a "valuable contribution to the literature of the Drug War". The weekly television show known as Dan Rather Reports, that airs on HDNet, noted that El Narco is "riveting, authoritative reporting from the front lines of the Mexican drug wars". It argued that the book shows how the Mexican drug war has "explosive potential consequences for every American, and Ioan Grillo's book shows you why". The West Australian said that El Narco is an essential reading for those wishing to understand "how a violent criminal insurgency can take root in an advanced country with a trillion-dollar economy". But, it said that the book is not "for the faint hearted". According to the newspaper, the book engulfs an account of the "rivers of blood in which its citizens are drowning", since Mexico's drug war "is a case study in the way brutal mafia capitalism has morphed into a criminal insurgency, the like of which is spreading 'like bushfire' in the Americas".
Reforma, a Mexican newspaper, said that Grillo used the "closest information possible to his object of work", which means that he ran through serious "threats" to get his work done. Due to Grillo's experience and professionalism, Reforma argues that El Narco is both "horrifying and useful". The San Antonio Express-News claims that the book "delivers the first authoritative and comprehensive examination" of the mafia killings in Mexico. The newspaper explains that Grillo's book can help readers "understand the homicidal madness just across the river". It concluded by comparing the book with a "big canvas" that traces the rise of the Mexican drug trafficking organizations from the quaint 19th-century origins. The New Yorker wrote a review for El Narco and noted that the reading was "terrific—full of vivid front-line reporting; diverse interviews; a sense of history; a touch of social science; clarifying statistics; and realistic reviews of what might be done to improve things, none of it easy". The magazine said it is an "essential reading". It argued that it is America's "weak control of automatic weapons" and its "supply [of] guns and money" that fuel the bloodshed in Mexico. The Globe Corner Bookstore said that El Narco "draws the first definitive portrait of Mexico's drug cartels and how they have radically transformed in the last decade". In addition, it mentioned that "the devastation may be south of the Rio Grande, but America is knee-deep in this conflict." The Independent noted that Grillo and his book have "achieved extraordinary access to gangsters and police (often the same people)". And, the author shows how the Mexican drug cartels originated in the western state of Sinaloa, where the conditions for growing opium poppy were ideal, in the late 19th century. The New York-based magazine known as the Bookforum said that several books have been written in Spanish about Mexico's drug war, but Grillo's book is perhaps the "first attempt in English for a popular audience". The magazine noted that Grillo has spent years traveling to Mexico's drug war hotspots: "Sinaloa, Michoacán, Ciudad Juárez—recording interviews with cops and narcos, visiting grave sites and murder scenes". Bookforum concludes that Grillo's book was an attempt to dig more and beyond the "reigning mythology of the Mexican drug war".