Abstract
The Executioner’s Men: Los Zetas, Rogue Soldiers, Criminal Entrepreneurs, and the Shadow State They Created is a very useful but flawed investigation into Los Zetas, perhaps Mexico’s most notorious drug trafficking organization (DTO). The book traces the dramatic rise of Los Zetas from its founding in the late 1990s by former Mexican army commandos as an enforcement arm of the Gulf Cartel to its current status as a formidable transnational DTO in its own right. Grayson and Logan have amassed an impressive amount of information on the organization gleaned from a wide range of English and Spanish-language sources, especially government reports, newspapers, magazines, and electronic media (including blogs). Much of this information is organized into handy tables and charts that appear throughout the book and in two long appendices. This treasure trove of data should prove invaluable to future researchers and for this reason the book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the history, principal protagonists, organization, modus operandi, internal politics, and transnational scope of Los Zetas and its principal competitors. Pieces of this story have appeared elsewhere but The Executioner’s Men is the first serious attempt to pull those pieces into a coherent book-length study and the authors are to be commended for their effort.
Despite a wealth of information, The Executioner’s Men is a deeply flawed book. It offers up a seemingly endless supply of gruesome anecdotes intended perhaps to grab the attention of “true crime” aficionados, muckraking journalists, and impressionable politicians. But serious scholars and policy makers are likely to be disappointed by the lack of sustained analysis. While individual chapters are organized around sensible themes like “Leadership, Organization, and Training,” “Psychological Operations,” and “Zetas in Central America,” all of them suffer from hyperbolic writing, numerous tangents, and a mix of reliable reporting and unsubstantiated rumors that the authors make no effort to disentangle or critique. If their intention was to write the book for a popular audience this is not a big deal (although the craftsmanship could be better), but if their purpose was to inform scholarly research on DTOs and/or to shape public policy then these flaws are a serious problem.
The serious problems with The Executioner’s Men come as a surprise. George Grayson is an eminent professor of government at the College of William and Mary who has written extensively (and well) on Mexican politics and Samuel Logan is a well-regarded investigative journalist who specializes on security, politics, and energy issues in Latin America. Grayson is a senior associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, and Logan provides regular briefings for U.S. Intelligence Agencies. On the surface, the combination of academic and journalistic expertise seems like a great idea. But the book proves a disappointment on both scores. The chapters are so densely packed with information that the narrative arch is hard to discern and the flood of colorful names—El Cachetes, El Mamito, La Chispa, El Z-6, El 40, and so on—are impossible for even the most attentive reader to track. The tables help with chronology and names but the story itself is plodding, repetitious, and confusing. Even the stream of horrific atrocities and sociopathic personalities quickly becomes a blur of gruesome tortures and severed body parts tossed into public spaces.
The scholarly analysis disappoints as well. In a recent review of two books on Mexican drug traffickers (The New York Review of Books, September 27, 2012), historian Enrique Krause notes that the 2000 electoral defeat of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, after several decades of political domination, weakened the national government, which meant that “governors and mayors, the illegal forces of narcos and other criminal groups became stronger” (p. 66). For Krause, this was an “unexpected consequence” of democratization, but other scholars have argued that the neoliberal model of governance which seeks to constrain the power of national governments, “devolve” those powers to local authorities, and dismantle social welfare programs often produces the conditions under which DTOs flourish. As Krause implies, local governments are especially susceptible to corruption and coercion. As he neglects to mention, the retraction of government welfare services opens up spaces that drug traffickers, seeking community support (or at least tolerance) for their illicit activities, have been more than happy to fill with clinics, soccer teams, investment capital, and employment opportunities. The Executioner’s Men mostly ignores these structural causes for the rise of DTOs like Los Zetas even as it documents the noxious effects those causes have produced. And while the book reports on the controversies over president Felipe Calderón’s 2006 escalation of the Mexican drug “war”—which, according to most estimates, has resulted in the deaths of over 50,000 people—it refrains from critical analysis of its impact on drug trafficking other than to make the obvious point that capturing cartel leaders has encouraged infighting within and among the drug cartels, and the “war” has yet to make serious inroads into the trafficking problem. Nor do the authors have much to say about U.S. involvement in Mexican drug policy, other than to note the points of contention between the two countries. This neutral approach might be appropriate to journalistic notions of “objectivity” but it fails to live up to academic standards of critical analysis. In sum, Grayson and Logan have done some important research on Los Zetas and other Mexican DTOs but have failed to follow through with a rigorous scholarly analysis of the challenges they present to policy makers, government officials, law enforcement, and society on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border.