Sean Penn has admitted that his article about Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman for Rolling Stone fell short of his expectations. “Let me be clear: my article has failed,” he allowed. The piece, a strange sort of longwinded gonzo journalism, has been widely condemned for the concessions the author and magazine allowed the subject prior to publication. My preoccupations are less pedantic. I think Penn’s article is terribly written, but that’s not my main criticism. I think the piece fails because it lacks substance. I imagine that Sean Penn did most of the research for the article at the airport on his iPhone before showing up in Mexico to do his fieldwork. Sean Penn claims he wanted to change the national conversation on the War on Drugs with his article, but somehow between October of 2015 and January of 2016 he didn’t find the time to do any research to bring his piece to life. He secured an exclusive interview with El Chapo and literally farted it away. In the end, Penn’s piece has become a major conversation starter, but not for the reasons he would have liked.
So, here are five articles about Mexico and the War on Drugs that are actually worth reading and discussing:
ONE: In his article “The Disappeared” for California Sunday Magazine John Gibler provides an illuminating and well-researched investigation into the disappearance of 43 students from the city of Iguala in the state of Guerrero in southwestern Mexico. While El Chapo’s capture, escape, and re-capture have captured public attention around the globe in places such as Guerrero, outside of the spotlight, the brutal grind of organized crime has continued to plague residents’ lives. The disappearance of the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa school has attracted attention but it is not an isolated event. In January 2016, in the nearby city of Arcelia, gunmen kidnapped 17 people at a wedding and five teachers from a nearby school. Whether El Chapo is free or behind bars has become increasingly irrelevant. Mexico’s criminal justice system has proven itself to be almost entirely uncapable of dealing with violent gangs in places like rural Guerrero.
In the article Gibler, a longtime Mexico researcher who wrote a book on organized crime south of the U.S. border, explains:
Although it was neither an isolated event nor the largest massacre in recent years, what occurred in Iguala has struck at the core of Mexican society. Perhaps it was the scale of the violence, or the sheer brutality, or that the victims were college students, or that the perpetrators were mostly municipal police, or that the mayor of Iguala, his wife, and the police chief were probably behind the attack, or that the state and federal governments were deceptive in their investigation and callous in their treatment of the mothers and fathers of the murdered, wounded, and disappeared. Whatever the cause — and it was likely a combination of all these reasons — it is impossible to overstate the effect of the attacks on the country. Mexicans speak of Iguala as shorthand for collective trauma. Mexico is now a nation in mourning, and at the heart of that grief are those 43 families on the Ayotzinapa basketball court and their agonizing demand: Bring them back alive.
TWO: Monte Reel’s article “Underworld: How the Sinaloa Cartel digs its tunnels” for The New Yorker is an excellent and illuminating explanation of the meticulous planning behind El Chapo’s cross-border tunnel operations. Reel explains, “[El Chapo] did not invent smuggling tunnels—bank robbers, rumrunners, and guerrillas had used them for decades—but his criminal enterprise, the Sinaloa drug cartel, built the first cross-border narcotúnel, in 1989. Since then, Sinaloa has refined the art of underground construction and has used tunnels more effectively than any criminal group in history.” Reel is not a Mexico expert or an organized crime specialist. He is, however, a thorough researcher and an excellent writer.
Reel, the author of the book The Last of the Tribe, details the investigation that uncovered the network behind the tunnel-building in Tijuana and also explains how migrant workers are tricked into becoming enslaved (and usually killed) while laboring on tunnel projects:
They stopped in front of a structure with no identifying marks except the street address, stencilled in black. Inside, behind a rolling gate, was a loading bay big enough to accommodate a dump truck. Inside was a storage room with cinder-block walls. Fernando didn’t see anyone else in the storage room—just a deep hole and sacks of dirt. The man told Fernando that things had changed: he would be digging a tunnel, not cleaning a store. If he tried to leave, he and his family would be killed.
THREE: In 2011 Venessa Grigoriadis and Mary Cuddhe wrote “An American Druglord in Acapulco” for Rolling Stone. The piece follows the rise an fall of a one-time El Chapo associate named Edgar “La Barbie” Valdez Villareal. Although the authors never secured an interview with the subject of their profile they provide a vivid and illuminating portrait of his life on both sides of the U.S. border. While Cuddhe has written extensively about the U.S.-Mexico border and issues related to the War on Drugs, Grigoriadis is less of a specialist. She has, however, won acclaim for her profiles of celebrities such as Arianna Huffington and Nicki Minaj. The pair's Rolling Stone article is effective because of the long hours of research that went into it.
The article explains:
Barbie believed in vengeance, and in taking care of his enemies. Over his 15 years in the drug trade, he had managed to alienate the leaders of almost every major cartel in Mexico: the Zetas, the Gulf cartel, even the Sinaloa and Beltrán-Leyva cartels he worked for. ‘Barbie had enemies galore,’ says George Grayson, a Mexico scholar at the College of William & Mary and the author of Mexico: Narco-Violence and a Failed State. ‘He could have set the Guinness World Record for people who wanted to kill him.’ Yet Barbie remained chillingly detached, unable to see the connection between his personal savagery and the way his own family and friends came to fear him. ‘Even with all the bad things he's done, Barbie always thought the world looked on him kindly,’ says a law-enforcement source familiar with Barbie. ‘He's just one of those blithe-living guys who thinks his life is charmed.’
FOUR: In 2012 Cecilia Balli wrote an article called “Calderon’s War: The gruesome legacy of Mexico’s antidrug campaign” for Harper’s Magazine. Balli is a veteran newspaper journalist who is based in Texas. She has written extensively about Mexico and the U.S. border region. Balli opens her piece with a gut-wrenching story about a teenager named Jaime’s detention by men in military uniforms in the troubled border city of Ciudad Juarez. In the article Balli explains:
The story might have seemed outrageous had it not fit a pattern that emerged in Juárez the previous year, when every day four or five bodies had turned up in a city of 1.3 million people. So far there was only one official explanation for the increase in violence: the country was ensnared in an escalating war among its six or seven largest drug cartels, and Juárez had become their most intense battlefield. By the end of 2008, Juárez’s annual homicide rate had quintupled, to 1,623 murders from 316 in 2007. But no tale of warring cartels seemed sufficient to explain those numbers, since it was also the year that President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa dispatched 2,500 soldiers and federal police to patrol the city’s streets and combat the cartels. Nor was it useful to conceive of Juárez as a place where anarchy and evil had simply been unleashed. Surely there was some system driving the unprecedented slaughter, which, even for a city with a history of violence, now surpassed anything it had known. I thought Jaime’s case might offer some clues.
Balli’s article is effective because it zooms in on one family’s devastating story and also zooms out to tell the bigger picture narrative of a city and entire country’s struggle. Penn was limited by the fact that he doesn’t speak Spanish. As a result of his inability to effectively communicate one-on-one with El Chapo, Penn's article mostly just follows through a sequence of offhand observations.
FIVE: Finally—I think it’s important that any discussion of the War on Drugs not focus only on Mexico. We also need to turn our attention north of the border. For that we can turn to “The Black Family In The Age of Mass Incarceration,” Ta-Nehisi Coates October 2015 article for The Atlantic. Sean Penn might have found this magazine in an airport bookshop on his way to Mexico and used it to pull some statistics and analysis into his article. Coates has dedicated his life to researching and writing about prisons and race in the U.S. His article is one of the the best pieces I've seen on this topic.
In his Atlantic article Coates explains:
From the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s, America’s incarceration rate doubled, from about 150 people per 100,000 to about 300 per 100,000. From the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, it doubled again. By 2007, it had reached a historic high of 767 people per 100,000, before registering a modest decline to 707 people per 100,000 in 2012. In absolute terms, America’s prison and jail population from 1970 until today has increased sevenfold, from some 300,000 people to 2.2 million. The United States now accounts for less than 5 percent of the world’s inhabitants—and about 25 percent of its incarcerated inhabitants. In 2000, one in 10 black males between the ages of 20 and 40 was incarcerated—10 times the rate of their white peers. In 2010, a third of all black male high-school dropouts between the ages of 20 and 39 were imprisoned, compared with only 13 percent of their white peers. Our carceral state banishes American citizens to a gray wasteland far beyond the promises and protections the government grants its other citizens. Banishment continues long after one’s actual time behind bars has ended, making housing and employment hard to secure.
By his own account, Sean Penn wanted to use his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of interviewing El Chapo to write a game-changing article about the U.S.’ policies on drugs. His article fell short of those aims. These five articles, however, serve as a strong starting point for discussion. Anybody who stumbled upon Penn’s piece should also read these.
