Pubdate: Sat, 30 Jan 2016 Source: Dominion Post, The (New Zealand) Copyright: 2016 The Dominion Post Contact: http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2550 THE WAR OF DRUGS Gangster Warlords, by Ioan Grillo, Allen & Unwin, $32.99 In May 2010 a state of emergency was declared in the Jamaican capital of Kingston. Schools and businesses were closed as armed vigilantes were seen patrolling the ghetto streets. In Tivoli Gardens, a west Kingston housing estate, gang members stockpiled weapons to prevent the arrest of their leader Dudus (Michael Christopher) Coke, revered locally as a Robin Hood figure but reviled in the US as a master of drug cartels. Ioan Grillo's exploration of the drug trade in the Caribbean, Central and South America, a follow-up to El Narco (2011), charts the rise of newlook drug barons such as Dudus, who see themselves partly as combatants in a war zone, partly as an alternative state-within-a-state. The power wielded by Dudus over the people of Kingston evolved in the face of their oppression by the police and military. With state provision inadequate, Dudus had settled local disputes, set up ghetto schools and employment schemes. In short, he provided public services that the Jamaican government did not. In a journalist's pedestrian prose, Grillo chronicles the depredations wrought in the 21st century by capitalist narco-laundering. Cartels are now so deeply ingrained in the political fabric of the US-Mexican border, he suggests, that not a single bar or shop remains "un-narcotised". To live in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico's second largest border city, calls for special qualities of endurance. Some 90 per cent of the cocaine currently consumed by Americans is thought to come across Mexico's frontier. Run by a computer-literate management, the frontier cartels kill reporters, women, magistrates and police anyone who dares to obstruct their business. The total of those murdered in Mexico in 2015 alone reached 7428. Grillo, a British-born resident of Mexico City, portrays a nation that has lost its moral bearings. Grillo's investigations into the brokers, dealers and professional killers who manage the supply and demand of cocaine involves him in a degree of danger. On at least one occasion he is mistaken for a US government narc; El Narco, his expose of Mexican drug trafficking, was no less harum-scarum. Though Gangster Warlords lacks the locker-room snooping and legwork that made El Narco such a visceral masterwork, it remains an absorbing work of reportage. Throughout, Grillo turns an appalled eye on the methods used to grow, stock, transport and protect shipments of narcotics. Corrupt Mexican policemen are now mixed up in the transborder drug killings which, says Grillo, have become increasingly lurid. Bodies are no longer quietly dumped in the desert; they are displayed for all to see, and in some cases flayed or decapitated. In place of the old Cold War certainties of "good against evil", Latin America today offers no such clarity and seems only to mix crime and war together. Disconcertingly, the drug lords and their foot soldiers are often deified by the poor. A sainted, black-hooded reaper figure known as Nazario is worshipped alongside the darkskinned Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's first indigenous saint. The quasi-religious Nazario is named after the real-life Mexican meth trafficker Nazario Moreno, who headed the bizarrely named Knights Templar Cartel until he died in a shoot-out with the police in 2014. Wretchedly, the rural dispossessed worship Nazario as if he were one of their own. Grillo argues that their baroque hybrid of Catholic and MesoAmerican Indian belief accords well with the narco-traffickers' cult of death. THE TELEGRAPH - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom