'War' is no exaggeration in discussing the bloodshed that has terrorized Mexico in the past decades. As rival cartels battle for control of a billion-dollar drug trade, the body count - 23,000 dead in five years - and sheer horror beggar the imagination of journalistic witnesses. Cartel gunmen have attacked schools and rehabilitation centers, and murdered the entire families of those who defy them. Reformers and law enforcement officials have been gunned down within hours of taking office. Headless corpses are dumped on streets to intimidate rivals, and severed heads are rolled onto dancefloors as messages to would-be opponents. And the war is creeping northward, towards the United States. El Narco is the story of the ultraviolent criminal organizations that have turned huge areas of Mexico into a combat zone. It is a piercing portrait of a drug trade that turns ordinary men into mass murderers, as well as a diagnosis of what drives the cartels and what gives them such power. Veteran Mexico correspondent Ioan Grillo traces the gangs from their origins as smugglers to their present status as criminal empires. The narco cartels are a threat to the Mexican government - and their violence has now reached as far as North Carolina. El Narco is required reading for anyone concerned about one of the most important news stories of the decade.

El Narco: The Bloody Rise of Mexican Drug Cartels

Ioan Grillo

Bloomsbury Publishing

The gripping account of the out-of-control drug wars that have brought chaos to Mexico--and are now spilling into the United States.

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

The world has watched stunned at the bloodshed in Mexico. Thirty thousand murdered since 2006; police chiefs shot within hours of taking office; mass graves comparable to those of civil wars; car bombs shattering storefronts; headless corpses heaped in town squares. The United States throws Black Hawk helicopters and drug agents at the problem. But in secret, Washington is confused and divided about what to do. "Who are these mysterious figures tearing Mexico apart?" they wonder. What is El Narco? This book draws the first definitive portrait of Mexico's drug cartels and how they have radically transformed in the last decade. El Narco is not a gang; it is a movement and an industry drawing in hundreds of thousands from bullet-ridden barrios to marijuana-growing mountains. And it has created paramilitary death squads with tens of thousands of men-at-arms from Guatemala to the Texas border. Journalist Ioan Grillo has spent a decade in Mexico reporting on the drug wars from the front lines. His piercing book joins testimonies from inside the cartels with first-hand dispatches and unsparing analysis. The devastation may be south of the Rio Grande, El Narco shows, but America is knee-deep in this conflict.

El Narco

Biographies & Memoirs

True Crime

Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio

In a ranch south of Texas, the man known as The Executioner dumps 500 body parts in metal barrels.In Brazil's biggest city, a mysterious prisoner orders hit men to gun down 41 police officers and prison guards in two days.In Southern Mexico a meth maker is venerated as a saint while enforcing Old Testament justice on his enemies.A new kind of criminal kingpin has arisen: part CEO, part terrorist, and part rock star, unleashing guerrilla attacks, strong-arming governments, and taking over much of the world's trade in narcotics, guns, and humans. What they do affects you now - from the gas in your car to the gold in your jewelry to the tens of thousands of Latin Americans calling for refugee status in the US.Gangster Warlords is the first definitive account of the crime wars now wracking Central and South America and the Caribbean, regions largely abandoned by the US after the Cold War.Author of the critically acclaimed El Narco, Ioan Grillo has covered Latin America since 2001 and gained access to every level of the cartel chain of command in what he calls the new battlefields of the Americas. Moving between militia-controlled ghettos and the halls of top policy makers, Grillo provides a disturbing new understanding of a war that has spiraled out of control - one that people across the political spectrum need to confront now.

Gangster Warlords

History

Americas

Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and Cartels

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Books by Ioan Grillo