Blood Gun Money

Starred review from December 7, 2020
Journalist Grillo (Gangster Warlords) delivers an alarming and deeply reported account of how the U.S. gun trade fuels bloodshed, terror, and refugee crises throughout the Western hemisphere. Noting that North and South America contain 47 of the 50 cities with the highest murder rates in the world, Grillo documents how weapons flow in an “iron river” from the legal gun industry to the black market through theft, straw purchases, and private sales (which don’t require background checks in the U.S.). He interviews ATF agents and Central American refugees fleeing gun violence, tracks assault rifles seized in a raid on a Mexican drug cartel to a weapons factory in Romania, interviews a black-market gun dealer who sells to neighborhood drug crews in Baltimore, sketches the history of the Kalashnikov rifle, and analyzes the cultural divide in the U.S. over gun control. Each piece of the puzzle comes together to illustrate the book’s key takeaway: “The United States churns out millions of guns” but has “relatively strong law enforcement that keeps organized crime in check”; meanwhile, “Latin America receives the flow of guns... and drowns in blood.” This expert account makes the high cost of America’s thirst for guns crystal clear. Agent: Katherine Fausset, Curtis Brown.

Starred review from December 15, 2020
An eye-opening investigation of the relationship among gun violence and the drug and arms trades, all closely connected. British journalist Grillo, who has worked the Latin America beat for more than two decades, begins with the trial of "El Chapo" Guzm�n, who was extradited to New York to stand trial for running narcotics into the U.S.--$14 billion worth, by prosecutorial claim. Yet, as the author shows, Guzm�n was more than a mere drug lord: "He would be seen as a war criminal if it were to be understood as a war." The weapons that he bought and sold formed a large branch of the "iron river" that flows between the legal and illegal arms trades, a river defended by the National Rifle Association and Second Amendment fundamentalists everywhere even while enriching people like Guzm�n. In this lively and incisive report, the author demonstrates that even as guns overrun the U.S., at least there are some checks on crime; most Latin American governments "cannot contain the gun-toting gangsters." The author, a diligent and courageous investigator, traces the vehemence of some of these gun supporters to a larger anti-government ethos--e.g., biker gangs such as the Mongols are at war with both law enforcement and the Mexican Mafia. Drug runners are not always killers, Grillo notes; looking closely at Baltimore street gangs, he observes that "a small hardcore group is behind most of the bloodshed." The real bad guys are political operatives and dealers, such as the Reagan administration officials who supplied the Salvadoran army with more than 260,000 hand grenades that now turn up in turf wars, 300 thrown in a single 2010 intergang battle in Mexico alone. Legalizing some drugs and tightening controls on gun sales, notes the author, will lessen the violence but won't contain it all: "Claiming we can abolish the entire drug trade through enforcement is an unhelpful fantasy." Vigorous on-the-ground reporting and a big-picture view combine to make this a jarring portrait of clear and present danger.

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