As drug wars have raged across Latin America,
the region has suffered almost unimaginable levels of violence.
Over 27,000 have disappeared.
Previously exhumed mass graves pepper the hills.
It stinks of death up here.
Over the past 20 years,
over 2 million people have been killed
as cartels have made billions.
What was once produced in the back of campervans
is now produced in huge quantities
and makes huge profits for the cartels.
I’m JS Rafaeli.
I’ve spent years writing about drugs—
why people take them,
and why our governments chose to declare war on them.
At VICE, we make a lot of films about drugs,
but in this show, I get to dig a bit deeper.
I get to talk to fellow expert drug nerds
about their research
into the crazy world of mind-altering substances.
[NEWS ON DRUGS]
We’re here on the western wing of the prison.
You can start seeing the numbers of people and the overcrowding here,
which is quite considerable.
Ioan Grillo is a journalist who’s spent the last 20 years
reporting on the drug war in Latin America.
He’s spent time with
to the ghettos of Jamaica and El Salvador.
He’s joining us today to explore how drugs and drug policy
have fundamentally reshaped the region in shocking ways.
Hi, Ioan. Thanks so much for joining us.
So how does a writer from Brighton, England,
end up spending two decades
chasing around the drug wars of Latin America?
In 2004 to 2005, I was working for the
a Texas newspaper,
and I was covering the border between the city of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico,
and Laredo, Texas.
Now this, at that time,
was really the beginning of the current Mexican drug war,
which really exploded across the country.
Then you started seeing some crazy stuff,
houses with 30 people tied up and kidnapped.
You started to see the mass graves.
At the beginning, they were like,
a house with 15 bodies was a big deal.
Though later on, it’d be filled with 298 bodies.
So that was the first stage, 2004, 2005.
In 2006, December 2006, you saw Felipe Calderón become president,
and he launched his military crackdown on drug cartels,
and I was covering that.
You suddenly saw the real explosion, the body count really taking off,
the level of weaponry really taking off.
And one scene there, which I remember very clearly,
which was kind of a wake-up call to me,
I went to this town called El Pozo
right up outside of Culiacán, Sinaloa,
and there’d been two massacres there.
We went just after the second massacre there,
and there was still all the bullets laid out.
They hadn’t even cleaned up the scene.
And all the residents of this village, this place,
were all leaving in a convoy of pickup trucks,
just taking their stuff, leaving stuff like refugees,
leaving this place.
And that was like-- This vision of that was like,
“Wow, this is going to destabilize the country.”
I found myself by 2012 in a morgue in Monterrey
with 49 bodies who had all been decapitated,
all had their hands and feet cut off.
You know, the stench of death
and like, “What the hell am I covering?”
You know, “What am I following here?”
Actually, about you as a journalist,
reporting on the narco wars in Latin America
is actually extremely dangerous for journalists.
Have you ever felt in real danger yourself,
and what do you do to stay safe in that?
Yeah, I mean, obviously, I feel in danger many times,
I mean, I think any journalist covering this has and does.
There’s many situations...
so there’s more obvious violent situations,
like being in shootouts,
being with security forces during raids,
or being where there’s armed gunmen,
armed criminal gunmen moving around in these areas.
But there’s also always this kind of paranoia.
But sure, there’s been a whole bunch of episodes
that have happened over the years,
including one time where I was accused of being a DEA agent,
and this guy said if he saw me again he’d put a bullet in my head.
The level of violence against so many local journalists has been so bad,
and we’ve seen perhaps 150 Mexican journalists
who have been murdered since 2000.
I knew personally two of them.
And you’ve also gone beyond Mexico, right?
You’ve been to places like Honduras, Brazil, Jamaica.
I’m curious about the common threads
and I suppose also the sort of different nuances
of how the drug trade plays out in each of these places
and how it shapes the societies there.
They call them favelas in Brazil,
they call them the garrisons in Jamaica,
they call them comunas in Colombia.
But these kind of poor marginalized areas,
which often they’ve been kind of set aside,
they haven’t had all the benefits of society
and this kind of modernization or a lot of the industrialization,
they’ve kind of been on the margins.
But at the same time, they’ve built up their own structures.
And I see organized crime and the drug cartels in some way
being a kind of organization,
organized power groups
coming out of a lot of the deprived and poor communities.
You see control of territory,
and they have spies who watch people coming in and out.
In Mexico, they call them
In Central America, they often call them
In Brazil, they call them vapors,
these guys who are there who will disappear.
So you have these people having that same kind of role.
You have more of the violent arm, the triggermen,
the paramilitary groups, again, who have different names,
but they often have that common--
You know, some places, they just call them soldiers.
Others, you know, in Mexico, they call them
But they have that same role, the kind of muscle.
You have these financial elements in the business, which can--
You know, not just about drugs.
Drugs are a huge thing, but also in Mexico particularly,
you see a diversification of organized crime.
So you see them involved in stealing crude oil, running human smuggling,
running prostitution, extortion, kidnapping, piracy,
wildcat mining, and a whole bunch of economic activities.
One of the things I actually most wanted to touch on
is this idea of political corruption,
which is obviously super key to the whole discussion
around the drug wars in Latin America and the Caribbean,
and how this sort of plays out
in different ways in different places.
Jamaica is one of the places where you really see the political story
in a very, very big way because in Jamaica,
the gangs in Jamaica or the posses in Jamaica
were in many ways founded by this link to political parties
and this idea of delivering votes to political parties.
But you see that same practice in many places in Central America.
You see in Honduras, in El Salvador,
you see the gangs which control neighborhoods
and then deliver the votes en masse to political parties
in exchange for certain things.
Now, Mexico is a kind of a basket case of corruption.
You had this cop whose nickname was El Tyson in Michoacan,
and he was a state police commander.
And when he was eventually arrested and gave a confession,
which they aired on TV,
he was saying, “Well, yeah, I was actually a ranking cartel member,”
actually not just a regular on the payroll
but a ranking cartel operative
who was not only carrying out horrific murders for the cartel
but training youngsters
and getting youngsters, young recruits in the cartel
to lose their fear of blood.
So he would describe how he would get the young recruits
and get them to cut up bodies
and get them to lose their kind of fear of blood and stuff.
That’s what he was doing,
and that’s a police commander.
But some of the kids doing this,
they’re doing this from very, very young age.
This is, like, 13, 14-year-olds committing murder
or acts of extreme violence, right?
Pretty much across the region.
How are these children being recruited?
And what’s their career progression up the cartel hierarchy?
There was one guy from the Barrio Azteca Ciudad Juarez I interviewed,
and he was talking about how they look for
the young people who are going to be good murderers.
And it’s, you know, often people who have got hurt inside them,
who haven’t got really stable families
people who have got a lot of violent impulses.
There’s one guy I knew in Honduras,
whose nickname was Fresa,
who was one of these guys—
on one side, a nice guy,
on the other side, a very, very violent
And he was abandoned as a kid, and he had this real--
He’d tell this to me about the real kind of hate inside,
like, “I’ve had a shit life, how come?”
You know, “I’ve got to take this out.
I don’t care if I’m going to mess you up.”
He ended up himself being murdered and leaving his own kids fatherless,
and he was looking for his kids not to be fatherless,
so you see this repeating in that way.
Once you’ve committed multiple murders,
and sometimes I talk to kids who are 13
and they’ve already committed double murders and that kind of thing,
and it’s like, well, it’s very hard to bring them back from that.
I think we need to get a real sense of the scale of this, right?
In Latin America, we’re talking about
hundreds of thousands of casualties every year,
mass graves, refugees.
This is beginning to look like warfare.
And where does one draw the line between criminality and war here?
So this is a weird place between crime and war,
and it's kind of somewhere between.
That’s why I use the word “crime wars” sometimes.
And then what you also get is the gangster warlords...
in very poor areas
sort of taking over the role which the state fails to do,
sometimes providing almost social services
in a very haphazard, basic way
but attaining this kind of Robin Hood folk hero status
within these communities.
You see the kind of gangster warlords themselves,
the real top figures
become these weird kind of between rock stars
and criminal CEOs
and paramilitary leaders, you see that as well.
I mean, Dudus Coke’s celebrated in songs,
including by some very big dancehall and reggae artists.
The same as in Mexico,
the drug lords celebrated in soap operas and telenovelas.
You know, these stars of music, stars of culture
and the way they have these anti-hero role in societies,
you see as well right across the continent.
So where are all the weapons that these various gangs
and cartels are using?
Where are they coming from?
So the cartels get their guns from various sources.
But in Mexico, the biggest source by all evidence is the United States.
So the US,
as well as having the biggest drug consumption market in the world,
also has the biggest retail gun market in the world by far.
You know, you see more guns in civilian hands in the United States
than in the next 25 countries combined.
And as well as a legal retail market,
you see a parallel black market in guns in the US.
So you see guns moving from that legal market
to the black market by various ways.
And the cartels, you know, you’re right here in Mexico,
right next to the US,
are using that massively.
So we see-- We know there’s been about 160,000 firearms
taken from criminals in Mexico over the last 12 years
and definitively traced to gun sellers
and gun factories in the United States.
But that’s only the ones that have been captured.
The real number, there are estimates of
more than 2 million guns being trafficked over the last decade.
So really on a substantial scale,
a real big issue.
This is a historic case of firearms trafficking
from the United States to a very, very violent war zone
or a very, very violent hybrid armed conflict.
I don’t know what to call this.
And... right now we’ve got a situation where
the Mexican government is suing the US gun companies over this.
It’s a long shot, but they are, you know...
have now forced the gun companies to hire lawyers
and to go to court to try and respond to this challenge.
I mean, people associate Latin America with
being the route from South America to the United States,
which is the world's biggest drug market, we know that.
I think a lot of people don’t mention or don’t talk about actually how--
the domestic drug consumption along those routes, right?
People don’t know that
Brazil is the second largest consumer of cocaine in the world.
Have you seen that change and shift over your time there?
There’s been certainly a rise in drug consumption in Latin America.
This happened before I arrived here.
I think you first saw a big rise going up from the 90s.
But it’s very natural.
One thing that happens,
and this is the logic of drug economics or narco-economics,
is that people will often pay somebody,
and instead of paying them in cash, they’ll pay them in drugs.
So they’re like, it’ll be cheaper for them,
and it’s better for the person who receives it.
So if you sell-- What do you want? I can either give you, you know,
20 grand or a key of cocaine.
And that key of cocaine, you can bounce that
and then make 50 grand out of it.
Now, some of the cartels in some areas
actually don’t allow in Mexico the selling of crystal meth
because they see crystal meth is a bad--
Basically, the type of crystal meth they’re producing these days
is a bad drug,
and they don’t want their own base of people,
they don’t want their own
taking cocaine, sorry, crystal meth.
They’re OK with them taking cocaine.
Cocaine use, you see,
I mean, one of the funny things is in rural Mexico, in the north west,
you see a lot of old guys taking cocaine.
I was up there recently with an 80-year-old guy
who was still taking cocaine off a key in the local shop,
which was kind of like the local corner shop.
You can just go in there and say, “Can I have some cocaine, please?”
And they’d bring out a little drawer,
and they bring out these different types of cocaine.
Your time in Latin America
has coincided with the opioid crisis in the United States.
Did that change the shape of the market?
The issue when you have... when you have synthetic drugs,
whereas the traditional bases of plant-based drugs
were in certain areas,
so the Andean region for cocaine,
heroin, particularly the Sierra Madre, Mexico,
marijuana in certain mountainous areas,
these labs could be anywhere.
So you could find labs in the cities,
in outskirts, right by the border,
all over the place,
these labs with the synthetic drugs.
Two questions.
Is there a solution for this that you can see?
And what do you see
the short-to-medium-term future of this trade being?
In all of my books, I try to put these solutions.
And it is interesting when I talk to people who grew up in this,
they’re a lot more cynical about it.
So I’m like, you know, you come,
and this is often the question people ask,
and people in the UK, the US, and Europe are more like,
“These are problems we can solve.”
Then you talk to somebody who grows up in a favela,
or grows up in these really hardcore areas
and been involved in this, and they’re like,
“This is the way things are.
You’ve got to make the best of it for yourself in this situation.”
However, I do always emphasize three areas for solutions.
First, there's no magic bullet.
It’s not like, you know, there’s a silver bullet,
and bang, this all goes away.
But the three areas I look at, one is drug policy reform.
It’s like saying, I think, you know...
really moving global drug policy
and American drug policy and Latin American drug policy
to say, “We haven’t been able to stop the drug trade.
We have to look for harm reduction.
What drugs can you legalize
and take this away from being a very, very bloodthirsty
gangster market?
How can we reduce addiction?” This kind of thing.
The second is, how do you actually build justice systems in these areas?
How do you build police forces that work?
And I grew up in the UK, you know, being anti-police,
or seeing, you know, when I was a teenager,
I thought all police were scum or whatever.
And then you realize,
OK, go to a place where really there’s no police force functioning,
and go to a place where people kidnap someone’s kid
and sends them videos of them saying, “I’ve got your kid here, kidnapped,
and I’m going to beat the crap out of them
until you pay me some money,”
and see what that’s like.
And you and you start to realize how bad things are
and actually what’s--
You know, it’s not that there’s no police in this area.
Sometimes the police have pulled out of this area,
so the gangsters become the police,
and they offer a pretty brutal justice system like we talked about,
or you have really corrupt, violent police.
So how do you build some justice system which functions
and which really serves people and helps community?
A third area is...
how do you change these people who are recruited into this...
who have very few options?
How you change that?
So there’s been some interesting people around,
from a guy who was mayor of Medellin,
and he said, “Our city is like a mathematical problem.
The people in the poorest areas need to have the best services.”
How you change and transform these areas?
How do you give people a better stake in society
and the idea that people aren’t going to become...
mass murdering, serial killing
and putting them on a different path in life?