I won El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency by Ioan Grillo from LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer program a couple of months ago, and I have been eagerly awaiting it’s arrival.  Today, it finally showed up in the mailbox, and I look forward to reading it.

This book contends:

Despite what some politicians and pundits say — that these gangsters have become a criminal insurgency that poses the biggest armed threat to Mexico since it’s 1910 revolution.  It looks at how failures of the American war on drugs and Mexico’s political and economic turmoil have triggered the insurgency.  And it argues for a drastic rethinking of strategies to stop the conflict from spreading into a wider civil war on the United States’ doorstep.

I’m anxious to read what Ioan Grillo has to say.  For many years, I’ve suspected something isn’t right in the “War on Drugs.”  In fact, in any long-term problem the government has sworn to wipe out that remains long after people remember why they effort began in the first place, I’ve come to believe it becomes counterproductive for the government for that problem to go away, and, perhaps unwittingly, they don’t really do what needs to be done to solve the problem.  Clearly, the “War on Drugs” is not being won via conventional means.  What other approach might work more effectively?  Will this book propose a viable solution?  Or has it been written for some other purpose.  We’ll see.