FEAR IS JUST A WORD

A harrowing exposé, years in the making, of the tyranny of the drug cartels in Mexico.

In 2014, writes former New York Times Mexico bureau chief Ahmed, a young woman named Karen Rodríguez disappeared from the streets of a small town in Tamaulipas. The town had once been in the thrall of the Gulf cartel, then fell into the hands of the Zetas, the most violent drug gang in Mexico, whose leaders recruited locals, mostly young, as their couriers and assassins. In one horrific incident that Ahmed recounts, they murdered 72 migrants in one night, burying them in a mass grave on a nearby ranch. Karen wound up buried there, too, with local authorities looking the other way despite the furious intervention of her mother, Miriam, who, one by one, tracked down the killers and attempted to bring them to justice. In some instances, something like justice unfolded. For example, when Mexican marines detained two assassins who had kidnapped and killed local women, they shot one at point-blank range and shot the other in the back after they told her to run. In this powerful narrative, Ahmed shows how the marines are about the only element of the Mexican government that has been remotely effective; police and elected officials are often in the pockets of the cartels, and the bureaucracy is formidable. As Miriam discovered when seeking justice for Karen, “There was an art to the throat-clearing formalism of the government’s legal communications, a vernacular that relied on language so circular and difficult to understand that one got the feeling its entire purpose was to obfuscate.” In fact, it was, and the government’s inaction forced Miriam into vigilantism. Thanks to her mother’s persistence, Karen’s fate is known, but the cartels continue to work largely unimpeded, having amassed a count of victims in Tamaulipas of “more than ten thousand.”

A dispiriting yet necessary study of how a criminal enterprise can swallow a nation whole.