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For more on crime, watch our doc 'How Pablo Escobar's Legacy of Violence Drives Today's Cartel Wars':
VICE: You have reported extensively from Mexico on that country's drug cartels and violence, but when did you start researching what's going on in other nearby countries?
Ioan Grillo: I've found from the 15 years I've been in Mexico reporting on cartel violence that you get connections to other places. When you realize that there are similar and even worse situations in many places around Latin America and the Caribbean, you can follow the trail of dominos between the Mexican cartels to Honduran gangsters to Colombian gangsters. You can follow guns that travel from the United States and Mexico all the way to the Caribbean. You have these physical connections that you find, but also you see the similarities of the situations. It's not a coincidence that suddenly you have cartel-related violence in Mexico killing 17,000 people a year, and organized crime violence is killing tens of thousands in Brazil and Honduras, too.
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Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel built a model. He was a man ahead of his time in that sense. He tapped into the cocaine dollars and made more money than you or I could possibly imagine. Pablo dominated the cocaine market, but now it's spread right across the continent and is growing. Brazil is the number two market in the world for consumption of cocaine after the United States. Right now they are number one for consuming crack cocaine. In Brazil, you go to these favelas and they have a table and they sit there selling drugs. When you have these poor countries with young men that have very little job opportunities living in these slums and the cartels offer them drugs, money, women—all of these things—these [cartel leaders] very quickly recruit their own private armies.
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Watch our doc on Matthew Heineman, the filmmaker behind 'Cartel Land':
Who are some of the more notorious gangster warlords you cover in the book?
Dudus Coke, aka the President, a Jamaican drug trafficker who is now incarcerated, is one. Bunny Wailer, the big reggae artist, had a song called "Don't Touch the President" about him. Coke was a rock star, CEO-type who did a lot of charity work that he took to incredible levels. In the song, Bunny Wailer sings, "Sometimes out of evil, come the poor good/Can't you see the progress in the neighborhood." It's like he's saying from the evil of drug money comes good. At the same time, he was also moving a lot of cocaine to the UK and United States. He had women moving the cocaine in condoms in their vaginas. There would be like 30 of them on a plane. The [police] might bust one or two, but there would still be 28 or 29 who got through.Another figure that I look at is Nazario "El Mas Loco" Moreno, who led both La Familia Michoacana and the Knights Templar cartel in Mexico. He wrote his own religious text called Pensamientos, meaning "My Thoughts," and he became venerated as a saint—even beyond rock star status. When people misguidedly thought he'd been killed, they actually prayed to the guy. How can people be praying to a man who is trafficking crystal meth? I went to the area where he's from. He believed that people who drank Coca Cola were rich because he grew up poor and drank water from the river, but this guy took over his entire area.
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I went into a prison in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico where a gang leader had a pool table in his cell and a disco sound system for parties. On his wall he had a life size poster of Al Pacino as Scarface. I interviewed this young Mara Salvatrucha gang member and his nickname was Montana. This is a guy, 23 years old, who's killed 30 people and started killing when he was 13. He described to me all of his murders and all the craziness behind his incredibly violent life.In Jamaica, the criminals and kingpins are called Dons. I was interviewing this older guy from the Shower Posse gang in hopes of finding out why. He told me that they started calling themselves Don's after Don Corleone when The Godfather came out.In Honduras, I asked when these guys got so violent and someone told me it was after they saw the movie Blood In, Blood Out dubbed into Spanish. The young gangsters all know that movie by heart.
We can't prohibit singers from talking about drug traffickers or Hollywood from making movies. Watching movies or listening to records isn't the problem. Law enforcement is part of the problem. The police and the soldiers are part of that violence. I don't want to blame everything on them, but they are clearly part of the problem rather than part of the solution. In America, it's a big deal right now about police officers killing African Americans, but right across Latin America and the Caribbean police officers are killing at a level way, way higher than the United States.What do you mean?
I just came back from Venezuela and you should see the police there. Some estimate that the police killed over 1,000 people in 2014 . That's in a country with 30 million. In the United States, that would be like killing over 10,000 people. In Jamaica, the police are very aggressive and heavily armed—they come into the ghettoes real gung ho. The police commit one in every four murders there. In Mexico, we have seen extraordinary things like the police working with the cartels, kidnapping, killing students, murdering innocents. The police are part of the problem. Often they are corrupt and make money off the criminals, and can get away with murder. But on the other side, the police are also facing extraordinarily violent and heavily armed criminals and gangs.So the fight between the two is super complex.
It's a mess on both sides. These criminal kingpins have this crazy role in society where they head these big business empires and organizations. They're attacking policemen, throwing grenades at people in squares, all these crazy violent acts. But they are also a part of popular culture. We have soap operas and songs being made about them. We are looking at who these figures are, what do they mean to society, how do they challenge the government? It's weird how this relates to and plays out in popular culture, especially right now with all these TV series like Narcos. We are reliving Pablo Escobar [on TV] while this stuff is still happening out in the world.'Gangster Warlords' is out January 19 on Bloomsbury Press. Pre-order it here and visit Grillo's website for more on his work.Follow Seth on Twitter.