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Truth, Deceptions and Fallacies about Mexico's Drug Wars
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By Patrick Corcoran

In Seguridad, Traficantes y Militares, Luis Astorga spreads his disdain around like bullets from an AK-47. The list of people whose opinions are exposed as contradictory, illogical, and substantially deceptive – cabinet officers, mayors, police officials, PGR spokesmen, DEA bigwigs, Eduardo Medina Mora, Genaro García Luna, Clemente Vega, Asa Hutchinson, et cetera – goes on and on.

It’s hard to narrow his book of 300-plus pages to one unifying theme, but a general contempt for the simplistic narratives that dominate the conversation on Mexico’s drug trade drips from every word. Perhaps you’ve heard a Mexican or American official declare that the Zetas are the most dangerous drug gang in the world. Astorga demonstrates that they usually do so without providing much (if any) evidence for such sweeping statements. More damningly, on numerous occasions and with great certainty, Mexican officials have declared the Zetas extinct, only to revive the group when a bit of fear-mongering suited their purposes.

With equal deftness, Astorga shoots down the suggestions that the federal government has made a pact with the Sinaloa traffickers (or any other gang), a theory often posited by barstool pundits, mainstream media outlets, and even politicians. Astorga reasonably asks why, if Chapo Guzmán has all the force of the state at his disposal, can he not dispose of his enemies? How is it possible that his competitors not only survive but also thrive with both the federal government and all of the Sinaloa gunmen lined up against them? Astorga’s answer is that the stories we tell ourselves about the drug wars are fantastical crutches masquerading as honest analysis.

Astorga also attacks what he perceives as the semantic flaws of our drug-war discourse, starting with the word “cartel.” As he points out, the common usage of drug cartel is divorced from its economic origins, and the effect is to bestow upon drug-trafficking organizations a greater sense of power and hierarchy than the chaotic gangs generally enjoy.

Another of Astorga’s targets is the word “narco,” as ubiquitous in Mexico as any word besides “the.” The word, which first achieved wide use in Mexico in the 1950s as a prefix to the word “narcotraficante,” has turned into an etymologically ambiguous catchall for anything related to the smuggling, production, sale, and consumption of illegal drugs. Using “narco” doesn’t inhibit understanding or the distortion of reality as much as “cartel,” but it does equate a hit man with a farm hand, as long as they both have a loose connection to the drug trade.

Unfortunately, Astorga’s book shares a limitation with virtually all of the Mexican books I’ve ever read about the drug trade: it’s a better wrecking ball than a cornerstone. As effective as he is exposing others’ fallacies, the author doesn’t do enough to articulate an alternative version of reality. The reader walks away from Seguridad unlikely to ever trust an unsubstantiated claim from a government official again, but the truth of the drug war is no clearer to me for having read it.

Nor is the solution.

Astorga rarely comes within miles of advocating specific policy changes. He complains a lot about the US influence on Mexican drug policy, but he doesn’t offer a vision of Mexican policy independent from Washington’s wishes. He ridicules dozens of ill-conceived statements from officials, but he doesn’t offer readers an alternative program that he’d like to see implemented. While it’s full of probing questions, the book is nowhere near specific enough to use as a building block for policy.

Seguridad also suffers from the same organizational defects as many drug books; sometimes it reads like a series of Proceso magazine articles (though less than the books that are written by Proceso reporters). There is little to connect the scattered anecdotes, and readers can be forgiven for losing focus as Astorga bounces from the evaluation of Mexico’s drug policies at the OAS to the recent increases in helicopter crashes conducting anti-narcotics operations without so much as a word of segue.

Essentially (and somewhat indirectly) Seguridad is a 300-page argument for sanity and modesty in confronting el narco. Just before the end of his work, Astorga pens a passage that should be an epigraph for any book about Latin American drug traffickers: “Government strategies influence the reorganization of illegal enterprises, their manner of operating, and, eventually, the … levels and methods of the violence associated with the drug business, but not in the short term.”

That may not sound like a penetrating insight, but it’s an awareness that is sorely lacking.