GANGSTER WARLORDS
Drug dollars, killing fields and the new politics of Latin America
Ioan Grillo
Bloomsbury
350 pages; Rs 399
Also Read
The word "warlord", Ioan Grillo writes in Gangster Warlords, was probably coined in 1856 by Ralph Waldo Emerson in an essay in which he used the term to illustrate "the transformation of English aristocrats from violent feudal lords and buccaneers to statesmen", as the modern state was born. The term was used later by a British journalist to describe the regional chieftains who seized areas of China through force after the collapse of the central government in the 1920s - and yet more recently by a Reuters journalist to describe Somalia's ruthless militia leaders while reporting from that country in 1991. In Latin America, the media had used the terms drug lords and cartels since the 1980s.
Mr Grillo, a British-born journalist who lives in Mexico and has reported on that country since 2001, has now coined a new description for the leaders of drug gangs in Latin America and the Caribbean - "gangster warlords". They run crime rackets and command militias to help them rule their fiefdoms, guard the borders of their domains, collect extortion "taxes", conduct trials, enforce brutal punishments and carry out social work - in the slums of Rio, Sao Paulo, Kingston, and other cities in the Americas and the Caribbean.
Gangster Warlords is Mr Grillo's second book, coming five years after El Narco, in which he analysed Mexican drug cartels. The new criminal militias have emerged simultaneously in several Latin American countries, with their own cult followings and guerilla hit squads. "These super villains from Mexico to Jamaica to Brazil to Colombia are no longer just drug traffickers, but a weird hybrid of criminal CEO, gangster rock star, and paramilitary general."
Mr Grillo profiles four crime families after travelling across the Americas: the Red Commando in Brazil, the Shower Posse in Jamaica, the Mara Salvatrucha in the "Northern Triangle" (comprising Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala) in Central America, and the Knights Templar in Mexico. These "puzzling postmodern networks" that are a mix of mafias, death squads, religious cults and urban guerillas, have, over the past two decades, "taken over much of the world's trade in narcotics, guns, and humans as well as delved into oil, gold, cars and kidnapping."
As a result of the violence unleashed by the gangster militias, eight of the 10 countries with the highest homicide rates are now in Latin America and the Caribbean, as are 43 of the world's most violent cities. In Mr Grillo's chilling words, "When you tally up the total body count, the numbers are staggering. Between the dawn of the new millennium and 2010, more than a million people across Latin America and the Caribbean were murdered. It's a cocaine-fuelled holocaust."
How has this culture of violence come to be so entrenched in this region? Mr Grillo, who has shown remarkable courage in investigating this phenomenon by conducting hundreds of interviews with gang members - often at great risk to himself, having more than once been suspected of being a US drug enforcement agent - offers a convincing theory. As long as the Cold War raged, the CIA and successive US administrations propped up brutal right-wing dictatorships across much of South America. This in turn spawned left-wing guerilla movements that waged low-intensity wars against the dictatorships. As these regimes fell one by one, abandoned by Washington and bowing before pro-democracy movements, the guerillas found themselves with ample firepower but no targets. It was not long before they allied with criminal gangs and turned to drug trafficking.
In Brazil, the military generals who ruled between 1964 and 1985 calculated that common criminals and leftist guerillas incarcerated in the same maximum-security island prison would kill each other off in prison riots. In fact, it led to a fusion of the two and the formation of the Red Commando - the most feared gang in Brazil - because the guerillas who mainly comprised well-educated, middle-class intellectuals indoctrinated the crime gangs.
If the gangster militias are both products of violent cities and contributors to their increasing bloodiness, as Mr Grillo argues, how can the cycle of violence be broken? He offers three solutions: reforming drug policy, rebuilding justice systems and transforming the ghettos that are the gangs' strongholds by regenerating communities. Uruguay, Portugal and some state in the US have legalised marijuana, and the author argues that if more countries across the Americas follow suit, it will deny the gangs black-market profits and the wherewithal to acquire arms. Police and judicial reforms (such as scrapping existing police forces and recruiting and training new officers untainted by corruption, as one state in Mexico has done) are a work in progress, as is the effort to regenerate communities through a "hearts and minds" approach. The jury is still out on their feasibility and effectiveness.
Gangster Warlords is an absorbing work of reportage, a painstaking investigation - the result of unprecedented access to the gangs that Mr Grillo was able to gain. It also stands out for its insights. Latin America's unending tragedy, described in chilling detail, makes for grim reading. The one shortcoming is the relatively limited space devoted to discussing the three suggested solutions, which the author himself seems none too optimistic about. Clearly, Latin American's drug-fuelled holocaust is likely to endure.
