Ioan Grillo - El Narco: Inside Mexicos Criminal Insurgency

Gods own medicine. Opium poppies in the Sierra Madre Occidental. (Fernando Brito)

Mixing up coca paste in a clandestine lab in Putumayo, Colombia. (Oliver Schmieg)

The finished product. A kilo brick of pure cocaine. The markings indicate which cartel it belongs to. (Oliver Schmieg)

Economy of scale. Soldiers tear up an industrial-size marijuana plantation in Sinaloa. (Fernando Brito)

Drug-ballad crooners Grupo Cartel pose outside the Humaya cemetery in Culiacn. The towering mausoleums are of deceased narcos. (Fernando Brito)

Holy Death. The faithful pray, dance, and smoke outside a shrine to the Santa Muerte in Tepito, Mexico City. (Keith Dannemiller)

Mexicos Eliot Ness. President Felipe Caldern explains his drug-war strategy. (Keith Dannemiller)

A soldier at the scene of a cartel killing in Sinaloa. (Fernando Brito)

Assassin Gustavo inside a cartel safe house in Medelln, Colombia. (Oliver Schmieg)

One move and youre dead. Colombian special forces bust a truckload of cocaine. (Oliver Schmieg)

Urban war. Soldiers run to a crime scene in Culiacn. (Fernando Brito)

A cartel murder victim in Sinaloa. (Fernando Brito)

Daily mourning. Family members lay to rest a murdered police officer in Sinaloa. (Fernando Brito)

Body messaging. A corpse decorated by gangsters in Sinaloa. (Fernando Brito)

Terror. A cartel victim dumped in a Sinaloan canal. (Fernando Brito)

Peace in the future? Schoolgirls in Culiacn march against violence. They carry photos of innocent victims. (Fernando Brito)

Copyright 2011 by Ioan Grillo

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information address Bloomsbury Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Published by Bloomsbury Press, New York

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Grillo, Ioan, 1973
El Narco : inside Mexicos criminal insurgency / Ioan Grillo. 1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Drug trafficMexico. 2. Drug dealersMexico. I. Title.
HV5840.M4G75 2011
363.450972dc22
2011007186

First published in the United States by Bloomsbury Press in 2011
Electronic edition published in November 2011

E-book ISBN: 978-1-60819-504-6 (ebook)

www.bloomsburypress.com

Contents

Part I:

Part II:

Part III:

CHAPTER 1

It all seemed like a bad dream.

It may have been vivid and raw. But it felt somehow surreal, as if Gonzalo were watching these terrible acts from above. As if it were someone else who had firefights with ski-masked federal police in broad daylight. Someone else who stormed into homes and dragged away men from crying wives and mothers. Someone else who duct-taped victims to chairs and starved and beat them for days. Someone else who clasped a machete and began to hack off their craniums while they were still living.

But it was all real.

He was a different man when he did those things, Gonzalo tells me. He had smoked crack cocaine and drunk whiskey every day, had enjoyed power in a country where the poor are so powerless, had a latest-model truck and could pay for houses in cash, had four wives and children scattered all over had no God.

In those days, I had no fear. I felt nothing. I had no compassion for anybody, he says, speaking slowly, swallowing some words.

His voice is high and nasal after police smashed his teeth out until he confessed. His face betrays little emotion. I cant take in the gravity of what he is sayinguntil I play back a video of the interview later and transcribe his words. Then as I wallow over the things he told me, I pause and shudder inside.

I talk to Gonzalo in a prison cell he shares with eight others on a sunny Tuesday morning in Ciudad Jurez, the most murderous city on the planet. We are less than seven miles from the United States and the Rio Grande, which slices through North America like a line dividing a palm. Gonzalo sits on his bed in the corner clasping his hands together on his lap. He wears a simple white T-shirt that reveals a protruding belly under broad shoulders and bulging muscles that he built as a teenage American football star and are still in shape at his age thirty-eight. Standing six feet two, he cuts an imposing figure and exhibits an air of authority over his cellmates. But as he talks to me, he is modest and forthcoming. He wears a goatee, gray hairs on his chin below a curved, black mustache. His eyes are focused and intense, looking ruthless and intimidating but also revealing an inner pain.

Gonzalo spent seventeen years working as a soldier, kidnapper, and murderer for Mexican drug gangs. In that time he took the lives of many, many more people than he can count. In most countries, he would be viewed as a dangerous serial killer and locked up in a top-security prison. But Mexico today has thousands of serial murderers. Overwhelmed jails have themselves become scenes of bloody massacres: twenty slain in one riot; twenty-one murdered in another; twenty-three in yet anotherall in penitentiaries close to this same cursed border.