Over the last couple of years, Mexico’s war on drugs has spawned a deluge of non-fiction books brimming with all the components of action-packed thrillers. With “narco-” among the most commonly used prefixes in contemporary Mexican culture, this new literary genre shall hereby be known as “narco-lit.” Featuring an unsavory cast of corrupt police officers, crooked politicians, young street-level criminals and fugitive billionaire drug lords, these page-turners revolve around plot devices such as kidnappings, mammoth drug hauls, gunfights and gruesome executions.
One of the most unique works to emerge from the drug war is “El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin.” In this unprecedented and chilling monologue, a repentant and anonymous Mexican hitman tells the unvarnished truth about the war on drugs, laying bare the corruption and criminality at the heart of Mexican law enforcement.
During his post with the Chihuahua state police, the subject also worked as a contract killer. He was trained in the United States by the FBI, but for 20 years he kidnapped, tortured and murdered people at the behest of Mexican drug cartels. Even when he headed the state police anti-abduction squad in Ciudad Juarez, he was simultaneously running a kidnapping ring in the same city.
Having left the business and found God, he now lives as a free man in the United States, although one cartel has put a 250,000-dollar price on his head, while another is trying to recruit him. No one with his background has ever come forward and talked.
American author Charles Bowden first met his subject while researching a previous book, “Murder City.” As trust between the pair developed, the assassin agreed to tell his story. The well-spoken man who emerges from the pages of “El Sicario” explains at length how terror and slaughter are simply means of implementing policy for both the police and the cartels in Mexico.
In “The Last Narco: Inside the Hunt for El Chapo, the World’s Most Wanted Drug Lord,” British-American journalist Malcolm Beith tells the story of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the most powerful drug lord since Colombia’s Pablo Escobar.
The book documents El Chapo’s legendary rise from a poor farming family to becoming the “capo” of the world’s largest drug empire. After eight years of imprisonment, Guzman famously escaped from Jalisco’s maximum security Puente Grande prison in 2001 by hiding in a laundry basket and is now believed to be hiding with a legion of bodyguards in the remote regions of the Sierra Madre mountain range in northwest Mexico.
A folk hero to some, “Shorty,” as the diminutive narco is known, was ranked by Forbes last year as the 55th most powerful man on earth. He regularly appears on the magazine’s annual rich list and since the death of Osama Bin Laden last year, he has assumed the mantle of the world’s most wanted man.
*Restricted Article* - To view rest of this content, please login or register..
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
