Richard Walker

Poverty + anarchy + drug dollars = Mexico

According to Ioan Grillo’s Gangster Warlords we are now all in thrall to Latin America’s drug cartels for just about every commodity

You may not have heard of the Maras. Or Barrio 18. Or the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or the Zatas, or the Knights Templar, or the Shower Posse. But you should have heard about them, says Ioan Grillo in his new book about transnational drug and crime gangs, because any one of them may have played a profitable and blood-drenched role in bringing you not only your weekend baggie of recreational powder, but also the gold in your earring, the lime in your gin and tonic, the avocado in your salad and even the steel in your Volvo.

These ‘gangster warlords’ are the new century’s international mafias. They originate in Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean, although now they have trading subsidiaries everywhere from Bombay to Brixton. It’s a business model that brings new force to the word ‘disruptive’, based as it is on bribery, torture, murder and ultra-pure crystal methamphetamine. And to date, they are unstoppable.

It is next to impossible to estimate accurately the extent of the warlord economy, and the number of lives it has consumed. The UN claims that the total illegal drug industry is worth $320 billion a year. In Mexico alone, government figures show that the crime cartels whose revenues come largely from drugs have been responsible for over 83,000 murders in the last nine years. Although all these figures contain an element of guesswork (and governments often overstate the size of their drug problems in order to squeeze more war-on-drugs funding from Washington), there is no doubt that since the 1980s something has turned a long-standing problem of localised Latin American gangsterism into a global phenomenon.

It started with cocaine. It was cocaine from Colombia and the fabulous profits it generated that built the multi-billion- dollar empires of the Medellin drug cartel, headed by the late Pablo Escobar; the Cali Cartel; and the Norte del Valle Cartel.

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