To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War (City Lights Open Media)

I've really been looking forward to reading this relatively short and new contribution to the growing body of published work on the drug war. Many of my colleagues have read it and said it was great, so my expectations going into it were pretty high...just so you know. Gibler starts the book off a la Saving Private Ryan, with lots of back-to-back stories of gruesome narco deaths and explanations about the silences that follow them. I particularly like how he details the story of a photographer who snapped shots of a man in police, then Navy, custody one day, only to be taking photos of his body on the side of the road the next day.But then the first chapter started to meander, and I picked up on a couple of things that bugged me. First, Gibler touches upon how the illegality of drugs fuels the violence - true enough. He says, "Legalization would put the traffickers as they exist today out of business." However, he then spends several pages describing how cartels have branched out into kidnapping, extortion, oil theft, etc., which somewhat contradicts his stance on legalization. He even acknowledges that statistics regarding the estimated values of cartel drug profits are only guesses, and sometimes wild ones, so it's tough to see how he reconciles these things.I was happy that he touched upon the extent of cartel money laundering and how much money gets injected into the Mexican economy by the drug trade. However, Gibler drops a bomb here; he quoted a reporter from London's The Observer who said, "Drug money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis." The reporter got this info from a man at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, and Gibler ticks off some theoretical statistics about how this is possible. But he stops the discussion after only a couple of paragraphs. I mean, if true, this is huge news! Why would he not lend more space towards expanding on something that explosive?In his discussion about cartels' expansion into other trades, I was disturbed that Gibler used the term "human trafficking" instead of "human smuggling." I'm used to amateurs getting the two confused and using the terms interchangeably, but I would never expect someone with Gibler's experience to make this error. As a reminder, human trafficking is when people are involuntarily taken from one country to another to work as sex slaves or essentially indentured servants. Human smuggling is when people voluntarily pay someone to get them to, then safely across, a border into another country. Mexican cartels, contrary to the verbiage Gibler uses, are involved in human smuggling, and to varying extents of involvement depending on the cartel.All that being said, Gibler does a fabulous job of explaining how the cartels operate with such impunity. He also beautifully illustrates the myth the Mexican government keeps trying to feed its people like castor oil: that almost everyone killed in the drug war must have been involved or deserved it somehow. I love this passage:"And this is what they tell us: if you are found dead, shot through the face, wrapped in a soiled blanket, and left on some desolate roadside, then you are somehow to blame. You must have been into something bad to end up like that. Surely you were a drug dealer, a drug trafficker, or an official on the take. The very fact of your execution is the judgment against you, the determination of your guilt."Still, To Die in Mexico is an uneven read for me. Gibler provides some good background information on the drug war that's invaluable for context. But these sections are interspersed with politically charged statements and opinions that could be a turn-off for many readers. For example, he supports Michelle Alexander's statement, "Reagan's drug war consolidated the racist underpinnings of prohibition into a new racial caste system." Later, he writes, "Thirty years later mass incarceration through drug laws has become the new Jim Crow caste system of racial discrimination in the United States." I understand what he means, but I totally disagree with his approach; the last time I checked, illegal drug use in the US was still voluntary, and heroin will kill a black man as easily as a white man. He provides no compelling evidence that the US government is willfully using prohibition as a means of "social control" (he brings up that term) to propagate racism, although that's what he implies. Hey, I just wanted to learn more about Mexico's drug war from a different perspective, not get hammered with a social agenda!The unevenness continues with a solid mention of La Santa Muerte and a conversation with renowned anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz. But then Gibler casually throws in that Los Zetas studied counterinsurgency strategies in the US and adopted al-Qa'ida's tactics of recording beheadings and posting them on YouTube. First, the US Army has run all the names of known Zetas through their student databases, and there have been no matches; the "fact" that Zetas trained at Ft Bragg or Ft Benning is only a (false) rumor. Also, there has never been any confirmation that Los Zetas are intentionally imitating al-Qa'ida's techniques; this has always been pure speculation, but Gibler presents both as facts. This bugs me.Fortunately, the second chapter flows into a familiar rhythm of solid journalistic narrative. I enjoyed reading about his visits with Mexican journalists and ride-alongs with photographers to various crime scenes. Gibler is able to give the reader an "I was there" feeling without actually having to personally live through the horror like he did. But even in the midst of this great flow, the reader can find errors of fact that lead Gibler to make some bad conclusions. For example, he mentions the expansive arrests of dozens mayors, police and other officials that President Felipe Calderon initiated in May 2009. Gibler writes every single person arrested belonged to the PRD, one of the opposition parties to Calderon's own PAN. He then says the arrests took place six weeks before the Mexican mid-term elections, implying the arrests were a political ploy by Calderon. The problem is that the people arrested came from all different political parties: the PRI, the PRD, and Calderon's PAN (as reported by Reuters, the Associated Press, etc.)The narratives in the third chapter are pretty thrilling, especially one of a confrontation between journalists and cartel members in Reynosa. Much of the rest of the book focuses repeatedly on two main themes: the lives of and threats to journalists working in Mexico, and the general agreement by Mexican citizens that the cartels run the show across the country. Over and over, the reporters Gibler talks to say the same thing: they can't report the war accurately, and there are unspoken rules to follow and lines not to cross if they want to stay alive. Gibler delves into Ciudad Juarez and the hundreds of maquiladoras on the city's outskirts in the fourth chapter, and how it all interconnects in the drug war.Unfortunately, as Gibler wraps up the book in the final chapter, he goes political again. It's one thing to propose solutions to decreasing the violence and making the situation more manageable. But Gibler aggressivly stands on his soapbox to say "the drug war is a proxy for racism, militarization, social control, and access to the truckloads of cash that illegality makes possible." These are strong statements, and he has every right to say them. I disagree with him on several counts, which makes these sections so difficult to read, but there are many people out there who'd tell Gibler he was preaching to the choir.All in all, for me, To Die in Mexico was a mixed bag. I loved the narratives and all the stories of people he interviewed. He's a good writer, and has a knack for bringing to life these conversations and situations for the reader. However, I was really bothered by the factual inaccuracies in several places, and those were just the ones I caught, having written my own book on this subject. This, of course, leads me to wonder what else in the book I'm accepting as face value that might not be accurate because I'm not personally familiar with the incident or topic. I also didn't like that he injected so much political vitriol in the first chapter; I was honestly tempted to just stop reading right there. The only thing that kept me going was knowing there was some great writing on the other side of that. Gibler might have been better served by saving all of it for the end so that readers have a chance to fully ingest all the information he provides before getting an earful of his opinion, and potentially getting turned off by it. I'd say, 3 1/2 out of 5 stars for being solidly written, but diverging too many times into too many directions, several factual inaccuracies, and breaking up good narrative with political invective at the wrong moments.

It’s actually been years since I read this book in college, but I’ve never forgotten it and how the author’s chronicles made me feel as I read them. It was truly eye-opening at the time as Gibler uses first-hand accounts and other interviews with grieving and confused family members and friends of those involved. He covers various cartels, how the media sought out truths, and how the corrupted Mexican and US governments have spent so much on perpetuating the so called war on drugs. Like I said, this book has stuck with me for years, and I often still refer to it while speaking on the subject. I’ve been hankering to read it lately and can’t find my copy, so I’ve decided to order it again. I highly recommend this book to those interested in the drug war, true crime, and recent international political history.

Human beings have been using drugs and alcohol since the beginning of time it seems. It's human nature. We use in order to feel good, have a good time, to relieve stress, to reduce inhibitions, and many more reasons. People have been consuming cannabis and coca for at least two thousand years and opium for more than eight thousand years. Yet our country has decided to fight a war on drugs for the last forty years. Well, guess who's winning? The drugs are. In 2009, more people got high in the U.S. than any year prior, and that coincided with the bloodiest year on record for Mexico's war on drugs. According to John Gibler in "To Die in Mexico", the drug war in Mexico is really two wars. One is President Felipe Calderon's war on drugs, and the other is the feuding between cartels over territory. Mexico's most wanted cartel leader - "El Chapo" Guzman - is frequently listed among Forbes billionaires. The source of his income is listed as "shipping." The U.N. estimates the global drug industry generates between $300 billion to $500 billion annually. And in 2008, during the economic crisis, drug money - cold, hard cash - saved the major global banks from collapse. Criminalizing drugs has done nothing but create chaos, death and destruction. In the U.S., decades of narcotics prohibition has produced the highest number of drug users in history and the largest prison population in the world. In Mexico, the cartels are more powerful than the government. They murder and kidnap with impunity. Things are so bad in Reynosa, just across the border from Texas, that the city government opened up a Twitter account to inform residents of the locations of gun battles. In "To Die in Mexico", Gibler takes us to the front lines of the drug war to discover why 38,000 Mexicans have been murdered since 2006, why only 5 in 100 of those murders are investigated, and why drug money is Mexico's single largest source of income. And it leaves me asking why we continue this quixotic "war on drugs?"David Allan ReevesAuthor of "Running Away From Me"

A wonderful read!

Nothing special about this book it gets a bit boring and is the type of book that you are glad it's finished.Martin Mc Larnon