El Narco

El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
© 2012 Ioan Grillo
336 pages

El Paso, Texas, can boast one of the lowest metropolitan crime rates in the United States. Immediately opposite it on the Rio Grande, however,  Ciudad Juarez, has until recently been regarded as North America's murder capital.  Juarenses are not exceptionally violent people. but their city is one of the battlegrounds in a decade-long melee for money.  El Narco, the product of a journalist who has reported on Mexico for years, covers the origins and growth of drug-trafficking  gangs in this country so far from God and so close to the United States.   Grillo's review of the guerra contra los drogas  reveals how far-reaching the cartel wars are, not only creating a horrific bodycount, but eroding the legitimacy of government and civil order, and creating subcultures obsessed with death.

In the beginning, Mexico's narcotics farmers were surprisingly like Appalachian hill people,   who found corn liquor a lot is easier to make money off of than corn. Like America's hill people, they were organized by familial clans and sometimes competed for territory.  Prohibition in both the United States and Mexico led, in due time, to organized groups superseding the clans in many respects, but not until the end of Mexico's one-party state did the cartels run wild.   From 1929 to 1994, the 'institutional revolutionary party' held complete command in Mexico, with control so complete  that Grillo maintains throughout the book that Mexican democracy only began in 1994.  When they finally ceded power, however, their systems for maintaining order -- corrupt as they were -- disappeared with them, and ever since Mexico's leaders have been trying to fill the vacuum.

I don't live anywhere near the US-Mexican border, but in an age of global news it's hard to miss occasional stories of massacres. The most bloody violence pools around the main routes northward, as Mexico's gangs are not only moving their own goods but transporting merchandise from South America.  Because the industry is so lucrative, it's highly attractive to men and women from economically depressed areas, despite the violence. Gangland allure works its usual magic,  as disadvantaged people are drawn to the spectre of wealth, influence, and the aura of being a tough guy.  That aura is aggrandized by the Mexican tradition of corridos,  ballads that tell stories and celebrate or mourn the lives of their subjects.   Cartel smugglers and gunmen have become the heroes of a growing  library of narcocorridos,  celebrated as poor men who have made it rich by defying the man.  Considering how much of Mexico's local and state governments in the contested areas are compromised by the cartels -- sometimes local police work directly for the gangs --  one wonders how much of the man there is to defy.   Certainly the federal government and army are doing their best, but the narcos are creating their own variants of Mexican culture: one  cartel seems to have its own cult,  and another psuedo-catholic cult is centered on the worship of a female Death Angel.  As the cartels branch out into other areas of crime, like extorting protection money and kidnapping for ransom, Grillo warns that what Mexico is facing is less than a prolonged spat of gang fighting, and more like a Syrianesque insurgency.

As Grillo documents, Mexico has tried valiantly to crush the narcos through sheer force,  targeting leaders and using the movement of money to trap them.  Grillo believes that prohibition ultimately creates the financial incentive fueling these gangs, but there's little grounds for hope that drug prohibition in the US will end anytime soon: while many states are giving up on marijuana, the present attorney general is an implacable supporter of the drug war police state.  And even if a miracle happened, how long would it take for Mexico to recover from this poison that has been seeping into its soil for twenty years?

Disturbing but gripping reading.

Rogue Lawyer

Rogue Lawyer
© 2015 John Grisham
344 pages

("Wait for 2016", I said.  What can I say?)

Rogue Lawyer ranks with The Appeal as one of John Grisham's most cynical and bitter pieces of fiction. Its lead character, Sebastian Rudd, is vaguely reminiscent of  A Time To Kill and The Last Juror's Lucien Wilbanks,  a long-haired warrior for justice who lives for picking fights.  He works for the dregs of the legal system -- not the poor, but the despicable,  like a wannabe gangster who had his last lawyer killed. Part of this is idealism, but more pervasive is a contempt for practically every aspect of the legal system.   Rogue Lawyer begins with a series of disjointed sections, some of which finally converge into a more novel-worthy tale, though none of it makes for edifying reading.  Rudd spends the entire novel immersed in degradation. His clients are satanists, crimelords, and human traffickers, and when he is not with them he is attempting to manage a young San Salvadoran cage fighter, striking deals with petty crooks and pettier civil servants, or trading bitter courtroom blows with his ex-wife, as they work on their joint project of raising an emotional trainwreck of a child who will, if he survives being kidnapped by his father's enemies to settle a score, have serious issues.  The majority of adults in this novel  spend their time plotting to  manipulate,  shake down,  or physically injure one another. The ending is suitably unsatisfying,. While it's not as bad a novel as The Racketeer,   Grisham did street law much better in The Street Lawyer,  which saw ordinary decency matched against the inhumanity of the legal system. The problem here is there is little decency or humanity to be found. It's nonstop violence, despair, and brooding, with the one moment of hope in the bleak collection of tragedy coming when the main character ponders packing up and leaving his life behind to go play golf.  Aside from a lead lawyer who is worlds away from Grisham's usual main characters,  Rogue doesn't impress.

Rise of the Warrior Cop

Rise of the Warrior Cop: the Militarization of America's Police Forces
© 2013 Radney Balko
400 pages

A man's home is his castle...but now the cops have bettering rams.. Among the sins of George the III, according to the Declaration, was his practice of keeping a standing army.  Militias might be raised to defend against outside invasion, but they dispersed upon peacetime; standing peacetime armies were regarded always the weapons of tyrants. In Warrior Cop,  author argues that the nation’s civil police forces have been turned into a standing army, beginning in the 1970s after the Watts Riots but even more quickly in the 9/11 era.    Police violence has been especially notorious in the last year, but the recent spate of deaths is not an anamoly. As Warrior Cops indicates, not only have police forces assumed a more militaristic attitude in recent decades, but they now come armed with the army’s weapons.

In setting up his argument, Balko gives a brief history of law enforcement in the United States which expands in the mid-20^th century, during a rising crime wave that put stress on the government to “do something”.  Law and order rose to become a mainstay, with liberals arguing for social programs that would combat poverty and reform criminals, and conservatives advocating  stern enforcement and prison expansion.  The latter approach met with more popular support, but few could predict what Nixon’s approach would result in. Balko details several problems that would arise in the decades to follow: first, the excessive formation and use of SWAT teams, initially devise to deal with extraordinary situations beyond the means of beat cops.   This initially meant high-powered rifles, but it wasn’t long before SWAT officers were lobbing grenades into private homes.  At the same time as they were using more brutal weapons, they were deployed for mundane ends, like serving arrest warrants. This stemmed from a use-it-or-lose-it mentality: if cities couldn’t point to any recent uses of  the team’s training and equipment, how could it justify further expenses to the public?  

Fortunately for them, that problem soon fell away when D.C. initiated programs that would funnel money to purchase arms, and equipment itself, to the cities.  This made it easier for local law enforcement agencies to purchase military  surplus, from the practical to the insane: one California city attempted to requisition a submarine.  Even as the wall keeping civil and military uses of force crumbled, the legal walls protecting citizens from illicit police force vanished together: warrantless raids and arrests skyrocketed after 9/11, leading to tragedy after tragedy.  Although advocates for “no-knock raids” maintained that they prevented intended arrests from destroying evidence and scampering away, the sudden and violent invasion of homes by  masked men screaming obscenities was time and again met with alarm, confusion, and legitimate attempts at defense that led to slaughter, especially tragic given how many times SWAT teams invaded the wrong house. Still worse, in the modern age new Federal programs helping military officers transition into the police force, or programs training police for anti-terrorist programs, mold the law enforcement mind in the pattern of  search-and-destroy soldiers.

Despite all of this, Balko sees some meager grounds for hope.  Legal objections to no-knock raids and police employed military equipment have for the most part fallen away, but in the light of widespread videography by citizens,   abuses are much more publicized -- and some parts of the war on drugs are finally losing support.  By way of offering grounds of hope, Balko looks at efforts at reintroducing community policing, in which police officers build relationships with the communities they patrol (preferably on foot) and create solutions that don't involve ramming down doors and rushing in with MP-5s at the ready. This is a profoundly disturbing book, but worth any American's attention, especially in light of the recent deaths at the hands of policemen in Balitmore and New York.

The New Jim Crow

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

© 2010 Michelle Alexander

290 pages

            In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues that the United States’ drug laws, coupled with its law enforcement and penal cultures, have ushered in a new era of discrimination, segregation, and 2^nd class citizenship for  African Americans.

            In building her case, Alexander first demonstrates how law enforcement practices have become increasingly abusive, both physically and of the law. She then scrutinizes the penal system as a whole, revealing how dramatically the ranks of the imprisoned have swelled since the declaration of the drug war. That war is waged not against the manufacturers of narcotics in South America, but against their users; the streets and homes are the battlefield, through which the police storm through in full riot gear.  Next, she elaborates on the traumatic consequences of being touched by the penal system; a mistaken arrest, not even a conviction, can haunt an individual for life, ruining their ability to find work and housing both on the market and through government assistance. So much as touching a joint can warrant an individual being thrown into a sinkhole of self-perpetuating despair and poverty.

            Although each point is condemning on its own, throughout the text Alexander emphasizes the disproportionate way they impact African-American families. The police kick down the doors of black apartments, not white suburbs, even though drug use is statistically the same across ethnic lines. Blacks, not whites, are most subject to arbitrary traffic stops and unconstitutional drug searches. The result of these policies and practices is that African-American families and communities have been destroyed: millions of black men are in prison, and millions more unable to build a life for themselves through honest toil after having been branded a criminal. The chief weakness of her approach is that drug use is voluntary, something Alexander counters only with pointing toward the double standard which exists wherein blacks are punished hard for the same crime that whites are ignored for violating. (This is a a valid point, to be sure, though it doesn’t seem quite the match for countering the criticism.)

            The old Jim Crow separated blacks from whites, relegating them to the sides or beneath the status of whites, through segregation and disenfranchisement. Although law enforcement and penal practices were not arranged deliberately against blacks like Jim Crow, the effects of the two sets of laws, Jim Crow and drug war, are strikingly the same:  the act of being discriminated against by agents of government strangles any notion of citizenship among black youth in the cradle, while destroying their ability to create a life and stable family for themselves and become constructive members of society.The New Jim Crow exposes the lie that discrimination is a thing of the past;  bigotry and abuse are plainly rampant. The work stands as a penetrating criticism of the United States’ prison system, which as much a stain on its human rights record as Jim Crow or slavery. This is one well worth reading.

Related:

• Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation,  Joseph T. Hallman
• Reefer Madness, Eric Schlosser