Ioan Grillo Popular Books

Ioan Grillo Biography & Facts

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 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 currently a correspondent for Time as well as 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": Twenty seconds of shooting. Four hundred and thirty-two bullets. Five dead policemen. Four of the corpses sprawl over a shiny-new Dodge Ram pickup truck that has been pierced by so many caps it resembles a cheese grater. The cadavers are twisted and contorted in the unnatural poses of the dead; arms arch backward over spines, legs spread out sideways; the pattern of bodies that fall like rag dolls when bullets strike. After arriving at too many murder scenes, I often felt numb staring at the lead-filled flesh spread out on the concrete, dirt roads and car seats. The images all blur into one. But then little details come back: the twists of elbows over backs, heads over shoulders. It is these patterns that come into my mind when I think about the murder scenes; and these patterns then filter into bad dreams when I am sleeping in a bed a thousand miles away. This particular crime scene is on a sweaty December evening in Culiacán, Sinaloa. The state policemen had hit a red stop light next to a shopping center when the triggermen attacked. BANG. BANG. BANG. The assassins shoot from the side and back unleashing bullets in split seconds. A customized Kalashnikov with a circular clip can unload 100 rounds in 10 seconds. This is lightning war. People tend to shudder at the fact that Mexican gangsters have rocket-propelled grenades. But the AK-47 is far more lethal." 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: It all seemed like a bad dream. It may have been vivid and raw. But it felt somehow surreal, like Gonzalo was watching these terrible acts from above. Like it was 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 whisky 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. Excerpt 3 The Global Post published a portion of the book where Grillo interviews an American agent who infiltrates a drug cartel: Alongside other veterans, Daniel would buzz around the state in a helicopter carrying an M16 automatic rifle and raiding marijuana plantations. Most were run by Mexicans and located inside national parks and forests and included some huge farms with up to twelve thousand plants. During one bust, some thugs from Michoacán fired at them with Kalashnikovs. "I was getting close to the plantation and they fired. We hit the ground first, kneeling down and we fired back, and they were gone. These people have balls, they are crazy." Daniel's next job was in the U.S. Customs Service busting runners as they came over the border. Because of the huge quantity of traffic at Tijuana-San Diego, agents can only toss a tiny percentage of vehicles. So the key for Daniel and other agents w.... Discover the Ioan Grillo popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Ioan Grillo books.