A gripping, sobering account of how Mexican drug gangs have transformed into a criminal insurgency that threatens the nation’s democracy and spirals into the United States.

The world has watched stunned at the bloodshed in Mexico. Forty thousand are murdered since 2006; police chiefs are shot within hours of taking office; villagers dig up mass graves comparable to civil wars; car bombs rattle streets; piles of headless corpses haunt town squares. And it is all because a few Americans are getting high. Or is it? The United States throws black hawk helicopters and drug agents at the problem. But in secret, Washington is confused and divided about what to do. Who really are these mysterious figures, they wonder, tearing Mexico apart. What is El Narco?

El Narco draws the first definite portrait of Mexico’s drug cartels and how they have radically transformed in the last decade. El Narco is not a gang; it is a movement and an industry drawing in hundreds of thousands from bullet-ridden barrios to marijuana-growing mountains. And it has created paramilitary death squads with tens of thousands of men at arms from Guatemala to the Texas border. This piercing book brings in testimonies from inside this movement collected over a decade, dispatches from the frontline and far sighting analysis. The devastation maybe south of the Rio Grande, El Narco shows, but America is knee-deep in this conflict.