MEDIA: BOOK REVIEW –

August 24, 2021 – Just two weeks earlier, I had moved to Mexico to work as a foreign correspondent for this newspaper; my principal assignment: covering the upcoming North American Free Trade Agreement and reporting on Mexico’s acceptance into the club of developed nations. The brazen attack lasted only minutes, but it abruptly ended the glowing bonhomie that Mexico had enjoyed until then. Besides introducing “El Chapo” Guzmán to the world, the killing made all of us aware of the terrifying power of the cartels.

The initial investigation into the cardinal’s murder was deeply flawed, and the notion of an unlucky crossfire or mistaken identity gave way to sinister theories involving Mexican officials. It’s unlikely the truth will ever be known, but the nexus between drug traffickers and the government has been laid out convincingly in many journalistic and academic works. Few have been as chilling as Benjamin T. Smith’s prodigious overview “The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade,” a century-long chronicle crammed with as much violence and mayhem as a Don Winslow border novel. It ditches drama as such and presents the war on drugs in all its grubby, often grisly, detail.

Written with a journalist’s eye and a historian’s perspective, “The Dope” begins with the 1908 arrest in Mexico City of José de Moral, a toothless marijuana wholesaler known as “the King of the Stoners.” It concludes in 2019 with the galling decision by Mexico’s current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to call off soldiers who were about to arrest El Chapo’s son in order to avert an all-out war with the cartels.

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