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Ioan Grillo Biography

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“ask how much the mafia pays to carry out murders. Fríjol tells me without stopping for a moment. One thousand pesos. That is about $85. The figure seems so ludicrous that I check it out in several other interviews up in the barrios with former and active gang members. They all say the same thing. One thousand pesos to carry out a killing. The price of a human life in Juárez is just $85. To traffic drugs is no huge step to the dark side. All kinds of people over the world move narcotics and don’t feel they’ve crossed a red line. But to take a human life. That is a hard crime. I can at least comprehend assassins killing to jump from poverty to riches. But for someone to take a life for just $85—enough to eat some tacos and buy a few beers over the week—shows a terrifying degradation in society. To try to get a handle on how this has happened, I talk to social worker Sandra Ramirez at a youth center in the westside slums. Sandra grew up in the barrios and worked on assembly lines before trying to steer young people away from crime. She says the teenage sicarios are the result of systematic alienation over the last two decades. The slums were a convenient place for factory workers but got nothing from the government. As the factory jobs slumped with the economy, the slums were left to rot. One 2010 study found that a stunning 120,000 Juárez youngsters aged thirteen to twenty-four—or 45 percent of the total—were not enrolled in any education nor had any formal employment. “The government offers nothing. It can’t even compete with a thousand pesos. It is only the mafia that comes to these kids and offers them anything. They offer them money, cell phones, and guns to protect themselves. You think these kids are going to refuse? They have nothing to lose. They only see the day-to-day. They know they could die and they say so. But they don’t care. Because they have lived this way all their lives.” ask how much the mafia pays to carry out murders. Fríjol tells me without stopping for a moment. One thousand pesos. That is about $85. The figure seems so ludicrous that I check it out in several other interviews up in the barrios with former and active gang members. They all say the same thing. One thousand pesos to carry out a killing. The price of a human life in Juárez is just $85. To traffic drugs is no huge step to the dark side. All kinds of people over the world move narcotics and don’t feel they’ve crossed a red line. But to take a human life. That is a hard crime. I can at least comprehend assassins killing to jump from poverty to riches. But for someone to take a life for just $85—enough to eat some tacos and buy a few beers over the week—shows a terrifying degradation in society. To try to get a handle on how this has happened, I talk to social worker Sandra Ramirez at a youth center in the westside slums. Sandra grew up in the barrios and worked on assembly lines before trying to steer young people away from crime. She says the teenage sicarios are the result of systematic alienation over the last two decades. The slums were a convenient place for factory workers but got nothing from the government. As the factory jobs slumped with the economy, the slums were left to rot. One 2010 study found that a stunning 120,000 Juárez youngsters aged thirteen to twenty-four—or 45 percent of the total—were not enrolled in any education nor had any formal employment. “The government offers nothing. It can’t even compete with a thousand pesos. It is only the mafia that comes to these kids and offers them anything. They offer them money, cell phones, and guns to protect themselves. You think these kids are going to refuse? They have nothing to lose. They only see the day-to-day. They know they could die and they say so. But they don’t care. Because they have lived this way all their lives.”

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Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“I ask how much the mafia pays to carry out murders. Fríjol tells me without stopping for a moment. One thousand pesos. That is about $85. The figure seems so ludicrous that I check it out in several other interviews up in the barrios with former and active gang members. They all say the same thing. One thousand pesos to carry out a killing. The price of a human life in Juárez is just $85. To traffic drugs is no huge step to the dark side. All kinds of people over the world move narcotics and don’t feel they’ve crossed a red line. But to take a human life. That is a hard crime. I can at least comprehend assassins killing to jump from poverty to riches. But for someone to take a life for just $85—enough to eat some tacos and buy a few beers over the week—shows a terrifying degradation in society. To try to get a handle on how this has happened, I talk to social worker Sandra Ramirez at a youth center in the westside slums. Sandra grew up in the barrios and worked on assembly lines before trying to steer young people away from crime. She says the teenage sicarios are the result of systematic alienation over the last two decades. The slums were a convenient place for factory workers but got nothing from the government. As the factory jobs slumped with the economy, the slums were left to rot. One 2010 study found that a stunning 120,000 Juárez youngsters aged thirteen to twenty-four—or 45 percent of the total—were not enrolled in any education nor had any formal employment. “The government offers nothing. It can’t even compete with a thousand pesos. It is only the mafia that comes to these kids and offers them anything. They offer them money, cell phones, and guns to protect themselves. You think these kids are going to refuse? They have nothing to lose. They only see the day-to-day. They know they could die and they say so. But they don’t care. Because they have lived this way all their lives.”

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Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“For the narcos, getting a ballad about them is like getting a doctorate,” Conrado says. Conrado tells me the story of one low-level trafficker who paid to get a particularly catchy ballad made about him. Soon everyone played it on his car stereo. “The crime bosses were like, ‘Bring me the guy from that song. I want him to do the job for me.’ So he rose through the ranks because of the song.” “So what has happened to him now?” I asked. “Oh, they killed him. He got too big. It was because of the song, really.”

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Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“The United States schooled Latin American soldiers throughout the late twentieth century in warfare and anti-insurgency tactics at the infamous School of the Americas in Georgia and at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. When the manuals given to Latin American students were declassified in 1996, they sparked outrage. Printed only in Spanish, the instruction books explained the use of psychological warfare to break insurgencies. One particularly controversial manual entitled Handling Sources instructs Latin American officers on how to use informants. In cold, clinical terms, it details pressuring informants with violence against both them and their families.”

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Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“The growing policy-reform movement is a broad church. It includes everyone from ganja-smoking Rastafarians to free-market fundamentalists and all in between. There are socialists who think the drug war hurts the poor, capitalists who see a business opportunity, liberals who defend the right to choose, and fiscal conservatives who complain America is spending $40 billion a year on the War on Drugs rather than making a few billion taxing it. The movement can’t agree on much other than that the present policy doesn’t work. People disagree on whether legalized drugs should be controlled by the state, by corporations, by small businessmen, or by grow-your-own farmers, and on whether they should be advertised, taxed, or just handed out free in white boxes to addicts.”

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Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“Evidence of police working for the insurgent Zetas was startling, but would soon become depressingly typical in Mexico. Time and time again, federal troops rolled into cities and accused local police of being deeply entwined with gangsters. Officers no longer just turned a blind eye on smuggling, but worked as kidnappers and assassins in their own right, a grave fragmentation of the state. To aggravate this problem, many federal officers were also found working for gangsters, normally different factions of the Sinaloa Cartel. So as federal troops rounded up Zetas, observers asked whom they were serving: the public or Sinaloan capos? These revelations underline a central problem in the Mexican Drug War. The PRI years featured a delicate dance of corruption; in the democratic years, it turned to a corrupt dance of death. In the old days, police officers were rotten, but at least they worked together. In democracy, police work for competing mafias and actively fight each other. Gangsters target both good police who get in their way and bad police who work for their rivals. For policy makers it becomes a Gordian knot. Added to this thorny issue of corruption is a more fundamental problem of drug-law enforcement. Every time you arrest one trafficker, you are helping his rival. In this way, when the federal police stormed Zetas safe houses, they were scoring victories for Sinaloans, whether they liked it or not. Arrests did not subdue violence, but only inflamed it.”

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Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“When you go back to Pablo Ecobar, this guy blew up a passenger plane, police headquarters, funded guerrillas to kill Supreme Court justices, and had the number one Colombian presidential candidate assassinated. Now there is no organization in Colombia that can go toe-to-toe with the government, that can threaten the national security of Colombia. In each successive generation of traffickers there has been a dilution of their power. “Pablo Escobar lasted fifteen years. The average kingpin here now lasts fifteen months. If you are named as a kingpin here, you are gone. The government of Colombia and the government of the United States will not allow a trafficker to exist long enough to become a viable threat.” In this analysis, drug enforcement can be seen as a giant hammer that keeps on falling. Any gangster that gets too big gets smashed by the hammer. This is known as cartel decapitation, taking out the heads of the gang. The villains are kept in check. But the drug trade does go on, and so does the war.”

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Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“But the dynamics of Mexican cartels have also developed in distinct ways from Colombia. Mexico has seven major cartels—Sinaloa, Juárez, Tijuana, La Familia, Beltrán Leyva, the Gulf, and the Zetas—so it is hard to decapitate them all at once. When leaders such as Osiel Cárdenas are taken out, their organizations have only become more violent, as rival lieutenants fight to become top dog. Groups such as the Zetas and Familia have also become powerful because of their brand names rather than the reputation of their capos. Even if Zetas leader Heriberto Lazcano, the Executioner, is arrested, the Zetas will likely continue as a fearsome militia. Whether the cartels will get weaker or not, everybody agrees that Mexico needs to clean up its police to move forward. Different corrupt cops firing at each other and working for rival capos is nobody’s vision of progress. Such police reform is of course easier said than done. Mexican presidents have talked about it for years, going through numerous cleanups and reorganization of forces, only to create new rotten units. A central problem is the sheer number of different agencies. Mexico has several federal law enforcement departments, thirty-one state authorities, and 2,438 municipal police forces. However, in October 2010, Calderón sent a bill to be approved by Congress that could make a real difference to the police. His controversial proposal was to absorb all Mexico’s numerous police forces into one unified authority like the Colombians have. It is a colossal reform with a huge amount of technical problems. But such a reform could be a key factor in pulling Mexico away from the brink. Even if drugs are eventually legalized, a single police force would be a better mechanism to fight other elements of organized crime, such as kidnapping. The approach has many critics. Some argue it would only streamline corruption. But even that would be a better thing for peace. At least corrupt cops could be on the same side instead of actively gunning each other down. Others argue an all-powerful force would be authoritarian. Maybe. But any such force would still be controlled by democratic government. The spiderweb of different police forces only worked because one party ran everything. In democracy, this arrangement needs reform. If a crucial cause of the breakdown in Mexico has been the fragmentation of government power, then a way forward could be to unify its police under one command. Some of the fundamental problems and core solutions lie in Mexico’s institutions.”

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Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“Escobar had drawn particular attention to himself by his terrorist tactics—he even bombed an airliner, killing 110 passengers, as pressure to stop his being extradited to the United States. His brutal violence against rivals also created so many enemies that victims formed a paramilitary group to get him. A curious alliance was formed of Colombian police, soldiers, and criminals, and American spies, drug agents, and troops, all after the big guy. Escobar was just waiting to die. Colombian police finally caught up with him in a residential Medellín house, shot him dead, and posed smiling with his corpse. Drug warriors learned a new modus operandi—sometimes it is better to forget about an arrest and go for the clean kill.”

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Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“It is still unclear exactly what inspired such brutality. Many point to the influence of the Guatemalan Kaibiles working in the Zetas. In the Guatemalan civil war, troops cut off heads of captured rebels in front of villagers to terrify them from joining a leftist insurgency. Turning into mercenaries in Mexico, the Kaibiles might have reprised their trusted tactic to terrify enemies of the cartel. Others point to the influence of Al Qaeda decapitation videos from the Middle East, which were shown in full on some Mexican TV channels. Some anthropologists even point to the pre-Colombian use of beheadings and the way Mayans used them to show complete domination of their enemies. The Zetas were not thinking like gangsters, but like a paramilitary group controlling territory. Their new way of fighting rapidly spread through the Mexican Drug War. In September the same year, La Familia gang—working with the Zetas in Michoacán state—rolled five human heads onto a disco dance floor. By the end of 2006, there had been dozens of decapitations. Over the next years, there were hundreds. Gangsters throughout Mexico also copied the Zetas’ paramilitary way of organizing. Sinaloans created their own cells of combatants with heavy weaponry and combat fatigues. They had to fight fire with fire. “The Beard” Beltrán Leyva led particularly well-armed death squads. One was later busted in a residential house in Mexico City. They had twenty automatic rifles, ten pistols, twelve M4 grenade launchers, and flak jackets that even had their own logo— FEDA—an acronym for Fuerzas Especiales de Arturo, or Arturo’s Special Forces.”

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Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“As drugs flow up into the United States, all kinds of people make money off them. People are subcontracted to ship, truck, warehouse, and finally smuggle the product over the border. To complicate this, drugs are often bought and sold many times on their journey. People actually handling these narcotics will often have no knowledge which so-called kingpin or cartel ever owned them, only knowing the direct contacts they are dealing with. Ask a New York cocaine dealer who smuggled his product into America. He would rarely have a clue. All this helps explain why the Mexican drug trade is such a confusing web, which confounds both journalists and drug agents. Tracing exactly who touched a shipment on its entire journey is a hard task. But this dynamic, moving industry has a solid center of gravity—turfs, or plazas. Drugs have to pass through a certain territory on the border to get into the United States, and whoever is running those plazas makes sure to tax everything that moves. The border plazas have thus become a choke point that is not seen in other drug-producing nations such as Colombia, Afghanistan, or Morocco. This is one of the key reasons why Mexican turf wars have become so bloody. The vast profits attract all kinds to the Mexican drug trade: peasant farmers, slum teenagers, students, teachers, businessmen, idle rich kids, and countless others. It is often pointed out that in poor countries people turn to the drug trade in desperation. That is true. But plenty of middle-class or wealthy people also dabble. Growing up in the south of England, I knew dozens of people who moved and sold drugs, from private-school boys to kids from council estates (projects). The United States has never had a shortage of its own citizens willing to transport and sell drugs. The bottom line is that drugs are good money even to wealthy people, and plenty have no moral dilemmas about the business.”

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Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“I ask Fríjol what it is like to be in firefights, to see your friends dead on the street and to be an accessory to a murder. He answers unblinkingly, “Being in shootouts in pure adrenaline. But you see dead bodies and you feel nothing. There is killing every day. Some days there are ten executions, others days there are thirty. It is just normal now.” Perhaps this teenager really is hardened to it. Or maybe he just puts up a shield. But it strikes me that adolescents experiencing such violence must go into adulthood with scars. What kind of man can this make you? I ask about this to school psychologist Elizabeth Villegas. The teenagers she works with have murdered and raped, I say. How does this hurt them psychologically? She stares back at me as if she hasn’t thought about it before. “They don’t feel anything that they have murdered people,” she replies. “They just don’t understand the pain that they have caused others. Most come from broken families. They don’t recognize rules or limits.” The teenage sicarios know the legal consequences for their crimes cannot be that grave. Under Mexican law, minors can only be sentenced to a maximum of five years in prison no matter how many murders, kidnappings, or rapes they have committed. If they were over the border in Texas, they could be sentenced for up to forty years or life if they were tried as an adult. Many convicted killers in the school will be back on the streets before they turn twenty. Fríjol himself will be out when he is nineteen.”

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Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“narcos, war on drugs, drug cartels, murder, crime, music, Mexico, violence Humaya Gardens has hundreds of other narco tombs in its sun-beaten soil. It is one of the most bizarre cemeteries in the world. Mausoleums are built of Italian marble and decorated with precious stones, and some even have airconditioning. Many cost above $100,000 to build—more than most Culiacán homes. Inside are surreal biblical paintings next to photos of the deceased, normally in cowboy hats and often clasping guns. In some photos, they pose in fields of marijuana; in other tombs, small concrete planes indicate the buried mafioso was a pilot (transporting the good stuff).”

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Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“Humaya Gardens has hundreds of other narco tombs in its sun-beaten soil. It is one of the most bizarre cemeteries in the world. Mausoleums are built of Italian marble and decorated with precious stones, and some even have airconditioning. Many cost above $100,000 to build—more than most Culiacán homes. Inside are surreal biblical paintings next to photos of the deceased, normally in cowboy hats and often clasping guns. In some photos, they pose in fields of marijuana; in other tombs, small concrete planes indicate the buried mafioso was a pilot (transporting the good stuff).”

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Author:Ioan Grillo
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“The most virulent expression of narco religion is by La Familia Cartel in Michoacán. La Familia indoctrinates its followers in its own version of evangelical Christianity mixed with some peasant rebel politics. The gang’s spiritual leader, Nazario Moreno, “El Mas Loco,” or the Maddest One, actually wrote his own bible, which is compulsory reading for the troops. This sounds so nuts I thought it was another drug war myth. Until I got my hands on a copy of his “good” book. It is not an easy bedtime read. But La Familia is only the most defined voice in a chorus of narco religion that has been rising in volume for decades. Other tones of the choir include some morphed rituals of Caribbean Santeria, the folk saint Jesús Malverde, and the wildly popular Santa Muerte, or Holy Death. Many who follow these faiths are not drug traffickers or gun-toting assassins. The beliefs all have an appeal to poor Mexicans who feel the staid Catholic Church is not speaking to them and their problems. But gangsters definitely feel at home in these new sects and exert a powerful influence on them, giving a spiritual and semi-ideological backbone to narco clans. Such a backbone strengthens El Narco as an insurgent movement that is challenging the old order. Kingpins now fight for souls as well as turfs.”

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Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“The award-winning American TV series Breaking Bad has a scene in its second season set in the murder capital of Ciudad Juárez. In this episode, American and Mexican agents are lured to a patch of desert just south of the border looking for an informant. They discover the informant’s head has been cut off and stuck on the body of a giant turtle. But as they approach, the severed cranium, turned into an IED, explodes, killing agents. The episode was released in 2009. I thought it was unrealistic, a bit fantastic. Until July 15, 2010. In the real Ciudad Juárez on that day, gangsters kidnapped a man, dressed him in a police uniform, shot him, and dumped him bleeding on a downtown street. A cameraman filmed what happened after federal police and paramedics got close. The video shows medics bent over the dumped man, checking for vital signs. Suddenly a bang rings out, and the image shakes vigorously as the cameraman runs for his life. Gangsters had used a cell phone to detonate twenty-two pounds of explosives packed into a nearby car. A minute later, the camera turns back around to reveal the burning car pouring smoke over screaming victims. A medic lies on the ground, covered in blood but still moving, a stunned look on his face. Panicked officers are scared to go near him. The medic dies minutes later along with a federal agent and a civilian. I’m not suggesting that Breaking Bad inspired the murders. TV shows don’t kill people. Car bombs kill people. The point of the story is that the Mexican Drug War is saturated with stranger-than-fiction violence. Mexican writer Alejandro Almazán suffered from a similar dilemma. As he was writing his novel Among Dogs, he envisioned a scene in which thugs decapitate a man and stick a hound’s head on his corpse. It seemed pretty out there. But then in real life some gangsters did exactly that, only with a pig’s head. It is just hard to compete with the sanguine criminal imagination. Cartel thugs have put a severed head in a cooler and delivered it to a newspaper; they have dressed up a murdered policeman in a comedy sombrero and carved a smile on his cheeks; and they have even sewn a human face onto a soccer ball.”

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Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“Many reports have gone into the social impact of such terror. But a central question is still hotly debated: Why? Why do cartel soldiers hack off heads, ambush policemen, and set off car bombs? And why do they throw grenades into crowds of revelers or massacre innocent teenagers at parties? What do they stand to gain by such bloodshed? Whom are they fighting? What do they want? This puzzle goes to the heart of the debate about what El Narco has become. For the gangsters’ motivations in many ways define what they are. If they deliberately kill civilians to make a point, that would make them, by many definitions, terrorists. If they are trying to win the monopoly of violence in a certain territory, that would make them warlords. And if they are fighting a full-on war against the government, many would argue it would make them insurgents. It’s a touchy issue. Words such as terrorists and insurgents set off alarm bells, scare away investment dollars, and wake up American spooks at night. The language influences how you deal with the Mexican Drug War, and how many drones and Black Hawk helicopters you fly in.”

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Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“To try to make sure gunmen do hit their targets, cartels have developed training camps. The first such camps were discovered in northeast Mexico and linked to the Zetas, but they have since been found all across the country and even over the border in Guatemala. Most are built on ranches and farmlands, such as one discovered in the community of Camargo just south of the Texas border. They are equipped with shooting ranges and makeshift assault courses and have been found storing arsenals of heavy weaponry, including boxes of grenades. Arrested gangsters have described courses as lasting two months and involving the use of grenade launchers and .50-caliber machine guns. A training video captured by police in 2011 shows recruits running across a field, taking cover on the grass, and firing assault rifles. Sometimes training can be deadly. One recruit drowned during an exercise that required him to swim carrying his backpack and rifle. The discovery of these camps has sparked the obvious comparison to Al Qaeda training grounds in Afghanistan. But however much schooling they give, cartels still love gunslingers with real military experience. In the first decade of democracy, up until 2010, one hundred thousand soldiers had deserted from the Mexican military. There is a startling implication: country and ghetto boys sign up for the army, get the government to pay for their training, then make real money with the mob.”

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Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“It is psychotic and hateful behavior. But such behaviour is typical in many war zones. Cartel thugs have gone beyond the pale because they are completely immersed in a violent conflict, living like soldiers in the trenches. Imagine the life of Zetas thugs in the war-torn northeast of Mexico, fighting daily with soldiers and rival gangs, moving from safe house to safe house, completely divorced from the reality of normal citizens. In these ghastly conditions they commit atrocities that the world finds so hard to comprehend. For many of these cartel soldiers on the front line, war and insurgency have become their central mission. While thugs have traditionally talked about fighting over drug smuggling, now many are talking about smuggling drugs to finance their war.”

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Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“Use of informants is ethically questionable. The DEA ends up paying money to dubious characters, albeit toward busting bigger drug loads and bigger criminals. In theory, agents cannot pay informants actively involved in criminal activities. In practice, agents try not to know what their informants are up to. As they admit, “these guys are not choirboys.” Agents are also worried the informant could be a double agent who is feeding info to the cartel. Or a triple agent. Daniel discovered you have to push into an informant’s mind to make sure he is playing straight.”

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Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“More such deals are likely to mark the future of the Mexican Drug War. Bargains could be waiting for other Mexican traffickers wanted in the United States, such as Benjamin Arellano Félix or Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, or—if he is ever caught—even Chapo Guzmán himself. This system has some obvious flaws. When major criminals make deals to get out early, it can be seen as a bad example. It is not such a deterrent when a criminal career ends with the villain dating beautiful soap-opera stars. A long list of drug traffickers have ended up as celebrities. Asset seizure is also controversial. American agents get to spend dirty drug dollars. They say they are making money for Uncle Sam, but then again, they are also paradoxically reaping the benefits of cocaine and heroin being sold. When agents make money busting traffickers, there is an added incentive to sustain the whole war on drugs. Nevertheless, once these capos have been extradited and made deals, they are truly out of the game. The greater good, agents argue, is to use them to nail more crooks. That is the central imperative of drug warriors: keep seizing, keep arresting.”

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Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“The export of cartel power into the USA is a sensitive issue. The discussion about Mexican cartels’ northward push gets pulled, often unfairly, into the flaming American immigration debate. The anti-immigrant brigade talk about Mexican laborers as an invading army; and they see all undocumented workers as potential cartel emissaries, using migrant communities to hide undercover ops. The Mexican Drug War, they say, is a reason to militarize the border. Residents of border states vex about the danger of spillover. If thugs are decapitating in Juárez, they fret, how long before they cut off heads in El Paso? Is the Mexican disease contagious? Down in Mexico, the argument is reversed. A common complaint by politicians and journalists is that there aren’t enough arrests of big players in El Norte. Why haven’t we heard of the capos in the United States? they ask. How come some Mexican fugitives live unharmed north of the border? Why has Mexico been goaded into a drug war while narcotics move freely around the fifty states of the union?”

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Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“But kidnapping is only one of the ways that the Zetas have diversified. They have also branched out into extorting bars and discos; taxing shops; taking money from prostitution rings; stealing cars; robbing crude oil and gasoline; getting money from migrant trafficking; and even pirating their own Zetas-labeled DVDs of the latest blockbuster movies. Drug-trafficking organization is no longer a sufficient term for them; they are a criminal paramilitary complex.”

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Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“Poor migrants may seem an odd target for a kidnapping. Surely they have no money. That is why they risk their lives migrating. But even poor people have relatives with savings, and the Zetas can often get $2,000 from kidnapping migrants. If you multiply that by ten thousand, you get $20 million—truly kidnapping en masse.”

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Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“The San Fernando massacre is a landmark in the Mexican Drug War. It surely woke up anyone who still doubted the existence of a serious armed conflict south of the Rio Grande. But for those following the mass attacks on migrants, it was a tragedy waiting to happen. San Fernando began just like all the rest of the mass kidnappings. Zetas gunmen stopped the victims at a checkpoint and abducted them, in this case from two buses. The group featured many of the usual Central Americans, but was atypical in that it also had large numbers of Brazilians and Ecuadorians. The Zetas marched the prisoners to the San Fernando ranch, which is in Tamaulipas state, just a hundred miles from the U.S. border. After a long, hard journey, the migrants were closer than ever to their destination. Then something went wrong, and the Zetas decided to murder everybody. The pure scale of death shocked the world. The seventy-two corpses were piled haphazardly around the edge of the breeze-block barn, arms and legs twisted over one another, waists and backs contorted. There were teenagers, middle-aged men, young girls, even a pregnant woman. This horror could not be ignored.”

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Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“Right as the Mexican Drug War rages, the debate is reaching the second great flux in its history. The first came in the seventies, with the Jimmy Carter White House. Legalization advocates, including various doctors, got into key government positions, their papers got play, their ideas gained currency. States began to decriminalize marijuana and cocaine was viewed in the media as a happy-go-lucky party drug. Reformers thought they had won the debate. They were wrong. In the eighties, America lashed back against narcotics with a vengeance, and in the nineties the drug war went on steroids. The crack epidemic broke out, celebrities died of overdoses, and lots of middle-class parents got concerned about lots of middle-class kids on smack, speed, and sensimilla. In the early 1990s, surveys found large numbers of Americans thought drugs were the number one problem the country faced. The media was packed with stories of crack babies, cracked-up gangbangers, and nice white kids turning into demons on drugs. But that was two decades ago. The pendulum has swung back again. For now. Most people don’t even list drugs in their top ten of America’s problems. The economy is most people’s priority, and terrorism, immigration, crime, religion, abortion, gay marriage, and the environment all spark more concern than narcotics. Meanwhile, drug-policy reformers have emerged strengthened with propositions to decriminalize, spread medical use, and finally fully legalize marijuana. Proposition 19 to legalize cannabis in California narrowly missed passing, getting 46.5 percent in the 2010 vote. Activists are determined it will pass in 2012. And if not, in 2014. Or 2016. They can just keep on going.”

PoliticsHistoryUsaWar On DrugsDrug PolicyDrug Legalization
Book:El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
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“Mexico has fairly strict gun laws. It actually has a right to bear arms in the Mexican constitution. But to do this - there's only one shop which sells them legally in the whole of Mexico, run by the army. You go, and then you have to present seven types of identification, including a letter from your employer and a clean criminal record. And the cartels, the gangsters, they don't use that way of getting guns 'cause they can get them so much more easily buying them in the United States.”

AmericaUnited StatesMexicoGunsCartelsDrug CartelsBorderIllegal GunsGun Purchases
Author:Ioan Grillo
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