El Narco: The Bloody Rise of Mexican Drug Cartels by Ioan Grillo

Author:Ioan Grillo
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Political Economy, Social Science, Political Science, Criminology
ISBN: 9781408824337
Publisher: A&C Black
Published: 2012-01-16T05:00:00+00:00

In the mid-twentieth century, assassination was a lucrative and niche trade in Mexico. The killers were known as gatilleros, or “triggermen.” They were skilled professionals who carried on their trade into middle age, using pistols and dispatching their victims at close range, often in the dark of the night.

One of the earliest gatilleros was Rodolfo Valdés, a Sinaloan known as the Gitano, or Gypsy. Valdes headed a gang of gunmen called the Dorados, the Golden Ones, who were paid by landowners to kill uppity peasants in the 1940s. This was the origin of many Sinaloan murder squads—to protect the crops and property of the wealthy against agrarian reform. El Gitano is reported to have taken the lives of more than fifty people. He is even alleged to have killed the governor of Sinaloa, who was gunned down in a carnival in Mazatlán in 1944. Governor Rodolfo Loaiza angered landowners by making too many expropriations. He is also reported to have annoyed opium growers by seizures of their crops.1

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