by DAWN PALEY
Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords And Their Godfathers, by Anabel Hernández, Verso. Forthcoming: September 2013. (Epub edition).
If there is a sacred cow grazing in the fertile pasture of Mexican writing about the drug war, Los Señores del Narco is it. Written by investigative journalist Anabel Hernández and published in Mexico in 2010, it will come out this fall in English as Narcoland with Verso.
Backed up by secret files obtained by the author, high-level interviews conducted over a five-year period, and access to deeply involved informants, Hernández sets out a version of the drug war that has become an increasingly popular interpretation of the events that have transformed Mexico over the past years.
After former president Felipe Calderón declared a war on drug traffickers in December 2006, the army and federal police were deployed throughout the country on the premise of combatting narcotrafficking. Over the same six years, the murder rate spiked, and at least 120,000 people were murdered, as well as over 27,000 disappeared. Since 2007, the US and Mexico have tightened security cooperation, and Washington stepped up anti-drug funding to Mexico through the Mérida Initiative.
Dense, sprawling and detailed, Narcoland is a worthwhile read, though the narrow, sometimes moralistic bent of Hernández’ analysis can result in an oversimplification of the actors – and victims – of this war. Her version of events implicates high-level officials in acts of corruption and complicity that have favored one particular drug trafficking organization: the Sinaloa cartel, run by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera.
“During its so-called war on drugs, the Calderón government dealt some much-publicized blows to members of the Sinaloa cartel, in an attempt to distract public attention away from the many clues to its complicity with that organization,” writes Hernández. Regardless, she writes, the government only went after mid-level players and “never struck at the heart of the cartel: its top leaders and its core business.” Narcoland explains how to this day, the Mexico City airport remains the “main artery” of the Sinaloa Cartel’s trafficking activities, with the government failing to act on intelligence that the group is operating from there.
Upside Down World for more