Gangster Warlords

Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America by Ioan Grillo
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Informative in the best kind of 'journalism for the good folks at home' way. The book is full of fascinating dramatic stories and eyewitness accounts of a horror in progress. The details are at a personal level which makes for a good story but a poor history. The perspective is about what one would expect from a battlefield journalist - an accounting that is light on the strategic perspectives of government leaders but heavy in the tales of the streets. Because of this one gains no insight from other thought leaders and expert analysts on the geopolitical situation in the Northern Triangle or the Caribbean. I can't recall that the Organization of American States was mentioned once. Not that OAS might have a solution, but the author suggests that the War on Drugs was all Nixon's idea. Nor was Manuel Noriega or Hugo Chavez mentioned. One might think, given this account, that almost nobody thinks about drug trafficking but 8 or 9 countries. Granted, it's a huge issue that could never be covered in one volume, and this book will no doubt be cited in the future - for good reason. Nevertheless, the concluding chapters fall rather flat.

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