Abstract
One crucial facet of the illicit drug trade is that it is entrenched in matters of power, violence, territory, and, ultimately, politics. The global import of these issues in the modern world is massive. There is no denying the harms caused by both the War on Drugs itself and many of the dark networks through which drugs flow. These harms range from a poisoned drug supply and increased drug-related deaths to state and organizational violence. However, among the U.S. public, our understanding of the impacts and catalysts of drug trafficking organizations operating under and within the global drug war remains deeply limited. It is often narratively driven and focuses on charismatic figures, often in the form of villains, heroes, or (commonly) antiheroes, rather than complex socio-historical and political factors.
James Creechan’s Drug Wars and Covert Netherworlds: The Transformations of Mexico’s Narco Cartels takes a holistic accounting of Mexico’s narco cartels that moves beyond a journalistic focus on individual figures and their actions and the limited and strategically framed information found in DEA reports. The book accomplishes this feat by focusing on inter-organizational conflicts, relationships with legitimate business, government, and civil society, and the broader context wrought by the global War on Drugs. It eschews government or American journalistic sources for Spanish-language academic papers, books, magazines, and newspapers published in the region.
Creechan points out the profound limitations of DEA and government narratives on these matters despite their ability to saturate the media landscape. For one, these framings and narratives told from the DEA’s perspective only serve to legitimate their authority through depictions of government agents as morally sacrosanct warriors defending innocent people from the scourge of drugs and violence. Of course, the actual reality behind these narratives is much more complex and morally gray, and I appreciated the innovative approach that the author used to get at the more nuanced story of Mexican drug cartels.
The book presents a more structural, political, and geographical accounting of the rise and dynamics of Mexico’s drug cartels. It importantly challenges the often glamorized and sensationalized narratives around narco cartels that focus on specific, powerful actors in the criminal underground like El Chapo. Instead, Creechan emphasizes, for instance, “The Mexican state has been directly and indirectly complicit in creating these powerful drug-trafficking organizations” (p. 98). The book very carefully documents the complexity and historical trajectory of the connections between the Mexican government and the narco-underworld. These connections even include contemporary cartels’ holding sway in elections through the threat of violence.
Aside from the role of domestic policies in Mexico, the book also notes the role of U.S. policies, such as the CIA’s operations interfacing with Mexico’s narco trade during the Iran-Contra affair. The creation of the DEA and increased pressures from the United States for Mexican military cooperation against cartels beginning in the late 1970s further shaped the space in which cartels operated. Creechan demonstrates how these moments generate new opportunity structures for cartel figures and organizations, granting a new terrain of power and resources, and how they shaped contestations and factionalism within and between cartels. For instance, writing about the 1977 military intervention under Mexican President Luis Echeverría Álvarez, the Mexican arm of Operation Condor, Creechan points out that it led to massive human rights violations and unintentionally bolstered and solidified Mexico’s first national drug trafficking organization, the Guadalajara Cartel. This example is one of many that demonstrates how the very conditions and politics of drug prohibition have merely exacerbated many of the problems ascribed to drugs themselves.
An overall trend throughout the text is that U.S. interventions in collaboration with the Mexican federal government tended to consolidate the power of cartels that could mobilize enough social and political capital to avoid being targeted. Creechan further demonstrates this dynamic in discussing the 1999 Kingpin Act and how it strengthened the Sinaloa cartel. Unfortunately, the text tends to frame these operations and interventions as holding purely unintended consequences or as policy failures rather than reflecting other more complex racialized and geopolitical motives (see Rosino 2021). I would have appreciated more discussion of the role of ethnoracial politics and moral panics in the United States in shaping these issues, relationships, and outcomes, given its outsized influence.
Overall, the book provides a compelling window into a criminalized world that is notoriously difficult to access outside of U.S. official government sources. It will be of deep interest to students of U.S. and Mexican policy and history and scholars of drug policy, organized crime, and violence. Its effort at presenting a more structural accounting of these issues is crucial as a counter to mainstream American depictions of them in shows like Narcos or films like Traffic.