by Ioan Grillo
As always my agent Katherine Fausset for believing in my work from blastoff and editor Anton Mueller for leaping into this project, supporting my vision and giving me the time to make it happen, along with the rest of the team at Curtis Brown and Bloomsbury, including Kerry D’Agostino, Sara Kitchen, and Rachel Mannheimer. My dad, for all the brainstorming, and my mum, who helped with days of translation work. Y como siempre mi esposa Myri, aguantando los viajes y presion de este trabajo. Te amo.
Bibliography
General
Bowden, Mark. Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw. New York: Penguin, 2001.
Felbab-Brown, Vanda. Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs. Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2010.
Glenny, Misha. McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers. London: Bodley Head, 2008.
Hari, Johann. Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015.
Reding, Nick. Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009.
Reno, William. Warlord Politics and African States. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998.
Streatfeild, Dominic. Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography. New York: Picador, 2001.
Van Creveld, Martin. The Transformation of War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.
Williamson, Edwin. The Penguin History of Latin America. London: Allen Lane, 1992. New Edition, London: Penguin, 2009.
Brazil
Amorim, Carlos. CV _ PCC: A Irmandade Do Crime. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Record, 2003.
Barcellos, Caco. Abusado: O Dono do Morro Dona Marta. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Record, 2003.
Bellos, Alex. Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life. London: Bloomsbury, 2002.
Dowdney, Luke. Children of the Drug Trade: A Case Study of Children in Organized Armed Violence in Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: 7 Letras, 2003.
Fernandes, Andre. Perseguindo um sonho: A história de fundaçǎo da primeira agência de notícias de favelas do mundo. Rio de Janeiro, ANF Produçǒes, 2014.
Da Silva Lima, William. Quatrocentos Contra Um: Uma História Do Comando Vermelho. Rio de Janeiro, Vozes, 2001. New edition 400 Contre 1: La Véridique Histoire du Comando Vermelho. Montreal: L’Insomniaque, 2014.
Rohter, Larry. Brazil on the Rise: The Story of a Country Transformed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Jamaica
Gunst, Laurie. Born Fi’ Dead: A Journey Through the Jamaican Posse Underworld. New York: Holt, 1995.
Levy, Horace. Killing Streets & Community Revival: Community Stories (70’s–80’s). Kingston: Arawak, 2009.
Samuels, K.C. Jamaica’s First President: Dudus 1992–2013, His Rise, His Reign, His Demise. Kingston: Page Turner Publishing House, 2011.
Sives, Amanda. Elections, Violence and the Democratic Process in Jamaica. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2010.
Thomson, Ian. The Dead Yard: A Story of Modern Jamaica. London: Faber and Faber, 2009.
Central America (and its L.A. gang connections)
Henry, O. Cabbages and Kings. New York: McClure, Phillips & Co, 1904.
Logan, Samuel. This is for the Mara Salvatrucha: Inside the MS-13, America’s Most Violent Gang. New York: HarperCollins, 2009.
Martinez, Oscar. The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail. New York: Verso, 2013.
Rafael, Tony. The Mexican Mafia. New York: Encounter Books, 2007.
Schlesinger, Stephen and Kinzer, Stephen. Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. New York: Anchor, 1983.
Ward, T. W. Gangsters Without Borders: An Ethnography of a Salvadoran Street Gang. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Mexico
Blancornelas, Jesús. El Cártel: Los Arellano Félix: la mafia más poderosa en la historia de América Latina. Mexico City: Plaza & Janes, 2002.
Bowden, Charles. Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
Corchado, Alfredo. Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter’s Journey Through a Country’s Descent Into Darkness. New York: Penguin, 2013.
Campbell, Howard. Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El Paso and Juarez. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.
Grant, Richard. Bandit Roads: Into the Lawless Heart of Mexico. London: Little, Brown, 2008.
Grayson, George and Logan, Samuel. The Executioner’s Men: Los Zetas, Rogue Soldiers, Criminal Entrepreneurs, and the Shadow State They Created. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2012.
Hernández, Anabel. Los Señores Del Narco. Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2010.
Illades, Esteban. La Noche mas Triste: La Desaparicion de los 43 estudiantes de Ayotzinapa. Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2015.
Krauze, Enrique. Biografía del Poder: Caudillos de la Revólucion Mexicana (1910–1940). Madrid: Andanzas, 1997.
McLynn, Frank. Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution. New York: Caroll & Graf, 2000.
Osorno, Diego Enrique. El Cártel de Sinaloa: Una Historia del Uso Político del Narco. Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2009.
Poppa, Terrence. Drug Lord: The Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin. New York: Pharos, 1990.
Ravelo, Ricardo. Osiel: Vida y Tragedia de un Capo. Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2009.
Shannon, Elaine. Desperados: Latin Drug Lords, U.S. Lawmen, and the War America Can’t Win. New York: Viking, 1988.
Tuckman, Jo. Mexico: Democracy Interrupted. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.
Turati, Marcela. Fuego Cruzado: Las Víctimas Atrapadas en la Guerra del Narco. Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2010.
Vulliamy, Ed. Amexica: War Along the Borderline. London: Bodley Head, 2010.
Womack, John. Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1970.
Notes
Part I: War?
Chapter 1
1. Both former Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca and his wife were prosecuted on organized crime charges. As of mid 2015, the cases had not been resolved. The case garnered widespread coverage including Eyder Peralta, “Mexico Charges Former Iguala Mayor in Missing Students Case,” NPR, Jan. 14, 2015.
2. Federal Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam first publicly announced his conclusion that the cartel had murdered the students at the Cocula dump at a news conference on November 14, 2014, seven weeks after the attack.
3. The following are Mexican federal government figures on cartel murders and total intentional homicides.
Cartel Murders Intentional Homicides
2007 2,819 10,253
2008 6,824 13,155
2009 9,612 16,118
2010 15,259 20,680
2011 16,990 22,852
2012 14,857 21,736
2013 10,076 18,331
2014 6,797 15,649
(Total cartel murders 83,234)
The total homicide numbers are compiled by the Sistema Nacional de Seguridad Publica, taken from state police departments, and published on its website. The estimates of cartel murders are made by a unit in the intelligence agency CISEN and provided to federal officials. These same figures are also published in Benito Jimenez, “Bajan con Peña narcoejecuciones,” Reforma, Jan. 3, 2015. Some analysts and media outlets have accused the Mexican government of underreporting the number of cartel murders. For example, the newspaper Zeta of Tijuana claimed there were eighty-three thousand such killings during the 2006 to 2012 presidency of Felipe Calderón alone, about a quarter more than the government reported. One clear inconsistency is that Mexico’s autonomous national statistics institute, known by the acronym INEGI, has counted death certificates and found higher total homicide figures than the police departments reported during several years. For example, in 2011, the INEGI recorded 27,199 total intentional homicides—or 19 percent more than the police departments reported.
4. Some earlier estimates had put the Tlatelolco death toll much higher, but the most thoroughly documented count is from a collaboration of the National Security Archive and Proceso magazine, publ
ished in Kate Doyle, “The Dead of Tlatelolco,” Proceso, Oct. 1, 2006.
5. Nobel Prize-winning Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa coined the phrase “Perfect Dictatorship” in 1990 in a debate organized by Vuelta magazine.
6. Federal prosecutors say in their reports and statements that soldiers and federal police were active in the Iguala area during the night of September 26 to September 27 when the students were abducted. This is widely reported as in Juan Pablo Becerra, “El Ejercito en la noche de Iguala,” Milenio, Jan. 26, 2015. Family members protested outside military bases calling for a further investigation into the soldiers’ activities, while some journalists accused the federal forces of taking part in the violence. Federal prosecutors responded that they had found no evidence that soldiers or federal police were involved in the attack on students. See “Ejercito y PF no participan en aggresion a normalistas de Ayotzinapa: PGR,” CNN, Dec. 16, 2014. As of mid 2015, the issue continued to be hotly debated.
7. This is described in interview with Rio CORE commander Rodrigo Olveira in chapter 12. Also see “Naval Special Warfare Personnel Train with Elite Brazilian Unit,” Naval Special Warfare Group 4 Public Affairs, May 20, 2010.
8. “Citizen Security with a Human Face, Evidence and Proposals for Latin America,” Executive Summary, 3, United Nations Development Program, November 2013.
9. Report, “The 50 most violent cities in the world 2014,” by the Mexican non-governmental organization Citizens Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice (Spanish acronym CCSP-JP).
10. “Citizen Security …” Executive summary, 3.
11. This alleged massacre is covered in detail in chapter 14. Also detailed in Movimiento Mães de Maio, A Periferia Grita: Mães de Maio Mães do Cárcere, (São Paulo: Fondo Brasil De Direitos Humanos, 2012).
Chapter 2
1. Juan Alberto Cedillo covered these death ranches in a series of stories including “Suman 500 los restos humanos hallados en narcofosas en Coahuila,” Proceso, Feb. 8, 2014. Diego Enrique Osorno also wrote a detailed report on the killings in “How a Mexican Cartel Demolished a Town, Incinerated Hundreds of Victims, and Got Away With It,” Vice, Dec. 31, 2014.
2. I am referring to mother Irma Hidalgo, whose son Roy Rivera Hidalgo was abducted in 2011.
3. The allegations of gladiatorial fights were uncovered by Dane Schiller in “Mexican Crook: Gangsters arrange fights to death for entertainment,” Houston Chronicle, June 11, 2011.
4. Villa is said to have ordered the killing of eighty-four victims in San Pedro de la Cueva, Sonora, in December 1915. The comparison of the San Fernando massacre being the biggest since San Pedro de la Cueva is also made in Gary Moore, “Unraveling Mysteries of Mexico’s San Fernando Massacre,” InSight Crime, Sept. 19, 2011.
5. This mark of more than one thousand battlefield deaths is used by various analysts including Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambinis, “International Peacebuilding: A Theoretical and Quantitative Analysis,” American Political Science Review (December) 94: 4, 2000.
6. Ben Lessing, “Logics of Violence in Criminal War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming.
7. Bunker is also former Minerva Chair at the U.S. Army War College, a research associate of the Terrorism Research Center, and author of over two hundred publications on the issue.
Chapter 3
1. Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 2.
2. While it is extremely difficult to calculate the size of the illegal drug industry, the most thorough estimates are made by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, as in its 2012 report, “Transnational organized crime: Let’s put them out of business,” in which it says that the illegal drug industry is worth $320 billion a year.
Part II: The Red
Chapter 4
1. The Comando Vermelho has almost always been translated as Red Command. However, I prefer to use commando as I think it is a better reflection of the spirit of the term as used by gang members. The Comando Vermelho invokes the image of an elite force inside the favela. Gangs also use names that sound good to them and they identify with. In English, the noun “command” is awkward to refer to a gang or group.
2. This splinter is known in Brazil as the Terceiro Comando. Brazilian prosecutors say in their description of the gang on the website http://www.procurados.org.br that it was formed in 1994. Other sources say the traffickers who formed it were already drifting away in the 1980s. Later, the Third itself splintered, creating the Pure Third Commando.
3. More than 2.5 million people live in favelas in Rio State. In Rio city, where the presence of illegal armed groups has been most closely counted, a 2013 study at Rio State University by Alba Zaluar found armed groups in 82 percent of favelas, with 37 percent being controlled by drug traffickers and 45 percent by the militias.
4. William Mangin, “Squatter Settlements,” Scientific American, Oct. 1967.
5. Alex Bellos, Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2002) 33–36.
6. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database is online at www.slavevoyages.org. The number of slaves arriving on U.S. plantations includes those shipped directly from Africa and those who arrived via the Caribbean.
7. Brazil’s census information is published by the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia y Estatística. Information on favelas is summarized in press release “2010 Census: 11.4 million Brazilians (6.0 percent) live in subnormal agglomerates,” Dec. 21, 2011.
8. Interview with author, May 16, 2014.
Chapter 5
1. Carlos Amorim, CV_PCC, A Irmandade Do Crime (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2003), refers to William as “the brain” of Red Commando.
Chapter 6
1. William da Silva Lima, Quatrocentos Contra Um: Uma História Do Comando Vemelho, (Rio de Janeiro: Vozes, 2001). Republished in 2014.
2. Film directed by Caco Souza, 400 Contra 1: Uma História do Crime Organizado, 2010 (Brazil).
Chapter 7
1. Da Silva, 21.
2. I am using jail and prison interchangeably as in common British usage, rather than the technical U.S. distinction of jail as temporary holding institution.
3. Da Silva, 25.
Chapter 8
1. CIA dispatch, “Castro’s Subversive Capabilities in Latin America,” Nov. 9, 1962, declassified Mar. 18, 2004.
2. Maria Rost Rublee in Slaying the Nuclear Dragon: Disarmament Dynamics in the Twenty-first Century, 152, edited by Tanya Ogilvie-White and David Santoro (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).
3. “Brazil Marks 40th Anniversary of Military Coup: Declassified Documents Shed Light on U.S. Role,” The National Security Archive, Mar. 31, 2004.
4. “White House Audio Tape, President Lyndon B. Johnson discussing the impending coup in Brazil with Undersecretary of State George Ball, Mar. 31, 1964,” The National Security Archive.
5. Da Silva, 37.
6. Interview with Elvira Elbrick as part of The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, Spouse Oral History Series, interviewed by Jewell Fenzi, Oct. 24, 1986.
7. Department of State Intelligence Cable, “Widespread Arrests and Psychophysical Interrogation of Suspected Subversives,” Apr. 18, 1973, sent by U.S. Consul General in Rio de Janeiro, declassified June 5, 2014. In National Security Archive. Secretary of State John Kerry gave a copy to Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff on a trip to Brazil.
8. “Rousseff reveals how she was tortured as student by the Brazilian military regime,” MercoPress, June 20, 2012. Also cited in Brazilian media.
Chapter 9
1. This quote is taken from documentary film Senhora Liberadade (Freedom), Caco Souza, 2005.
2. Da Silva, 45.
3. Ibid., 67.
4. Ibid., 74.
Chapter 10
1. Amorim, 166.
2. Ibid., 166–167.
3. Da Silva, 17.
4. Ibid., 87.
Chapter 11
1.
Theresa Bradley, “Brazil now consumes 18 percent of the world’s cocaine,” Quartz, Sept. 24, 2012, uses estimates provided by the UNODC. There are several other estimates of Brazilian cocaine use, including the II Brazilian national alcohol and drugs survey. These other estimates also put Brazil as the world’s second biggest cocaine consumer in total quantities.
2. The crack survey, entitled Estimativa do número de usuários de crack e/ou similares nas capitais do país, was carried out by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), which is part of the Brazilian health ministry. It was released September 2013, following groundwork in 2012.