Gangland: The Rise of the Mexican Drug Cartels from El Paso to Vancouver

by Jerry Langton

A frightening look at Mexico's new power elite—the Mexican drug cartels The members of Mexico's drug cartels are among the criminal underworld's most ambitious and ruthless entrepreneurs. Supplanting the once dominant Colombian cartels, the Mexican drug cartels are now the major distributor of heroin and cocaine to the U.S. and Canada. Not only have their drugs crossed north of the border, so have the cartels (in 2009, 230 active Mexican drug cartels have been reported in U.S. cities). In Gangland, bestselling author Jerry Langton details their frightening stranglehold on the economy and daily life of Mexico today—and what it portends for the future of Mexico and its neighbours. Offering a firsthand look from members of law enforcement, politicians, journalists, and people involved in the drug trade in Mexico and Canada, Gangland sheds a harsh light on the multibillion dollar industry that is the drug trade, the territorial wars, and the on-the-street reality for the United States, with the importation of narco-terrorists. With the unstinting realism and keen analysis that have made him an internationally respected journalist, Langton offers the bleak prospects of what a collapsed government in Mexico might lead to—a new Mexican warlord state not unlike Somalia.

Genres: Crime, True Crime, Nonfiction, History

288 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 8, 2011

Reviews

[Jaidee · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 "eye opening, thought provoking, terrifying" stars !!

The 2018 Most Average of Average Award

This is not a horror novel where you look forward to being frightened. This is our real world. Mexico the land to the south of Canada and USA. A civil war where there are not only fatalities but brutal tortures, decapitations, rapes and mutilations. Not a few but many thousand per year ...throughout Mexico. Nobody is safe....the poor, the rich, the famous and infamous can all easily become victims. Your age or gender or skin tone do not protect you. You often do not have choice. You either take the silver of money or the silver of a bullet to do dirty deeds like making meth, extorting money, bribing politicians and police, perhaps torture and murder.

This book does a decent job of describing sequentially the rise of the various drug cartels and the leaders and followers. He starts with a political and cultural history of Mexico that created the perfect conditions for these organizations to flourish and why the government and army face a losing battle. Is Mexico a failing state ? or a failed one ?

What role do the US and Canada have in both enabling as well as fighting these crimes ?

Mr. Langton's narrative is direct but often hard to follow due to the huge number of specific persons involved. As well, he does not provide any psychological, sociological or political analysis of what is happening in Mexico up until about 2012.

I saw a couple of documentaries a couple of years ago about these cartels and this book helped fill in some of the gaps.

Billions of dollars exchanging hands, hundreds of thousands if not more people becoming addicted to various substances and causing havoc for themselves and their loved ones and of course the many casualties of these events that pay with their lives....often innocent bystanders.

This is as equally frightening as jihad fundamentalism. This is a war that will have no end, at least not in our lifetimes.

[James Creechan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Save yourself some money and avoid this book. It is misnamed, full of errors, and has no documentation to support some of the claims made by the author. One star is a generous assessment in my mind.

I am not finished and may find something positive to say before I reach the end, but the greatest predictor of the future is the past and the present and the first 100 pages are simply awful.

I suspected that there would be trouble when the author misspelled (and continued to misspell) the term for the mexican popular music style name the corrido. He refers to narcocorridA and uses this term throughout the book. That's not the only spelling or misidentification of terms found in this book. Mestizo becomes Mezito, knicknames of people become mangled and switched around to unrecognizable forms. The review of Mexican history is simplistic and looks like it might have been cribbed directly from Wikipedia. Doesn't Wiley have editors who do fact checking?

And the title is very strange. There is NO mention of Cartels until page 56 — a quarter of the way into the book, and then there are another 5 pages before he begins to lay out some of his understanding of the history of the cartels. And he immediately makes two errors of fact — the most egregious being completely incorrect information about one of the first generation narcotraffickers Pedro Aviles Perez. He goes from bad to worse by page 65 when he attempts to describe the emergence of the Guadalajara Cartel and its leaders.

It seems to me that this author is simply trying to cash in on a hot topic even though he is highly unqualified and misinformed about what is happening in Mexico. There is a disclaimer at the end indicating that he has not identified sources to protect them from retaliation, but I can assure any of his respondents that they have nothing to worry about from what he has said.

[WIlliam Gerrard · Rating 4 out of 5]

This fascinating subject is explored by the author, Jerry Langton, in a fresh and vibrant manner. He makes the often bloody stories flow nicely into each other. What is for sure is that the Mexican drug war is a nasty business and page after page of horrifying bloodthirstiness attends to this. We read of the different cartels from Sinaloa across Mexico. Ciudad Juarez, the murder capital of the world is a common area for discussion. The author always has his mind on the export role of the cartels and how their actions are affecting populations further North in the USA and Canada. If anything, it is difficult to weave together a fabric of the tale due to the sheer mass of brutalities that have occurred. More people are killed each year in Mexico due to the cartel warfare than in foreign war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. The book is not the first I have studied on this topic in Mexico and I found it very well-researched and full of details, some of which were unknown to me previously. It is certainly worth a read if the topic of Mexican cartels interests you.

[Estela Anders · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very sad recopilation of news regarding Mexico's drug problems. The fights between carteles and vs the government. Little analysis.

[Malcolm Stewart · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Gangland” is a solid account of cartel violence up to 2012. Langton does a good job of bringing the facts to the table and sorting through some of the causes and symptoms of the Mexican drug war. Yet it brings little in terms of analysis — often times this work is bogged down by the sheer weight of statistics, names, dates, etc. without taking any further steps by way of explaining, say, how it all fits into modern North American society or, perhaps, a prediction of where the drug war will go considering present trends towards the liberalization of drug policy.
I had difficulty with this book about half way through when I started to get bored with the way it’s presented. I didn’t touch it for months, and only picked it up again because I’m a bit of a completionist. History books, usually, are more engaging (at least for me, a history nerd) than this. “Gangland” reads like what, in retrospect, I should have expected: like a journalist who, however talented Langton may be, is putting years of reporting between two covers and billing it as something it’s not. It is not a historical analysis of “the Rise of the Mexican Drug Cartels from El Paso to Vancouver.” It simply relays events in chronological order and lets the reader guess at the underlying importance of it all.
I give “Gangland” three stars because you may find this work reasonably enjoyable and illuminating if you go into it understanding its limitations. For what it is, it is good.

[Scott Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5 stars) This is another in a series of books I’ve been reading for background on the rise of the Mexican drug cartels. This work is different from others in that it looks to explore the history of Mexico and set the stage for how the cartels evolved over time into the criminal powers they are now. This was published circa 2016, so before the more recent capture of El Chapo. However, it does go into more graphic detail of the crimes and actions of the Cartels, as well as the failed efforts of the government of Mexico, Canada and the United States to stop the cartels from plying their trade, in Mexico and across the continent.

At times, it can be hard to follow some of the facts and writing in the book. At point, the author seemed to imply that Hoover was president during Pancho Villa’s raids, which is clearly not the case. The list of names and people can get a little overwhelming, and there are times when charts/maps would help the author’s case. Perhaps being an e-book, this is hard to convey in the work, but it would be so much more helpful in the overview style of writing the author goes with in this book.

There’s much to learn and gather from this book, but I would not look at this as a one-stop shop for reading/expertise. Other books/sources will provide much more insight and knowledge, and probably in a less chaotic way.

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

It took me almost a month to get through this book and I dislike that I am one of those people who feel they need to complete a book before I move on to the next one.
I'm not sure why I struggled so much with it but tend to think that part of it was due to being let down after the first chapter which seemed to start off strong with the stories of the different Cartel's and the violence they perpetrate in their quest to traffic their drugs. The next couple of chapters were boring to me with all the history on Mexico and the politics which I didn't really sign up for. There was a flavor to this book that I couldn't quite put my finger on and it didn't appeal to me though I am interested in the subject matter.
The stories were interesting in the psychological sense and it was hard for my brain to fathom the darkness and evil of the Cartel people who are doing the horrific things they do to others and how they leave their victims on such public display, thus traumatizing others and reminding them of what they will get if they don't cooperate if the the Cartel's come knocking. This, and the corruption all up the ladder from the smallest of employees in Government organizations to the top of the echelon, whether they were given no choice by the Cartels to participate, or the people wanted to for the 'quick and easy' money.

[Anne Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting book on the history of the rise of Mexican drug cartels. At times, the time line of events seemed a little confusing, and I was a little disappointed with the lac of very much information on Operation Fast and Furious and how it dovetailed with the cartel activity, but by and large this is an informative book.

[Christopher Schulz · Rating 2 out of 5]

It essentially amounts to a long list of discrete incidents of violence, drug busts, close calls, with no real analysis or legitimate attempt at creating a narrative. Not what I was hoping for - the book fails to do justice to the topic.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

For people that know nothing about Mexico cartels and their influence on North America

[Joel Melgren · Rating 4 out of 5]

could not finish it

[Darla Cabanas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing - but kept me turning pages.

[MaryAnn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting stats but not that easy to read.

[Sonny Levine · Rating 1 out of 5]

HISTORY OF EARLY BATTLES WITH EUROPEAN COUNTRIES FOR CONTROL OF MEXICO