© 2024 KRWG
News that Matters.
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Drug Reporter Ioan Grillo On The Drug War

One of the world’s best-known reporters covering drug cartel violence recently visited our region to discuss the state of the war on drugs.

Ioan Grillo is a freelance reporter with bylines in the New York Times, Reuters, and CNN as well as two books on the drug trade in Latin America. In covering the issue throughout El Salvador, Honduras, Jamaica and Mexico Grillo has documented distinct similarities that allow organized crime to flourish:  A lack of civil society and marginal infrastructure and opportunity.

“The conditions of society. neighborhoods where there are no paved streets, where there is often no running water, no electricity and there is not much presence of the government or of companies coming there. But the cartels will come and will offer young people something. ” Grillo said

That is not to discount the first world demand for illegal drugs, the major factor. But Grillo said there have been measured reductions in violence and cartel activity in Juarez and other regions when resources have been put into improving marginal and impoverished conditions. He said it can make individuals less vulnerable to cartel recruitment.

“The idea of offering something to young people to try and save marginalized neighborhood is crucial to any solution to this. We live in a very un equal world, an increasingly unequal world and within that you have large swaths of the world population living in very bad conditions. That is where major organized crime groups can grow.”

Grillo recently documented the forces and causes of violence and the changing dynamics of the drug trade in his book, “Gangster Warlords.”

 

Simon Thompson was a reporter/producer for KRWG-TV's Newsmakers from 2014 to 2017. Encores of his work appear from time to time on KRWG-TV's Newsmakers and KRWG-FM's Fronteras-A Changing America.