Publishers Weekly
05/10/2021
Rolling Stone journalist Hurowitz debuts with a granular yet familiar account of the rise and fall of Sinaloa cartel boss El Chapo. Born Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera in La Tuna, Mexico, in 1957, El Chapo (“Shorty”) was first arrested in 1993, after a botched assassination attempt by a rival cartel instead killed a popular Roman Catholic cardinal. Extensive bribery of prison officials enabled El Chapo to continue his trafficking from behind bars. He escaped in 2001, and, after being rearrested on new charges in 2014, escaped again, before being apprehended and extradited to the U.S. in 2016. (He’s now serving a life sentence at a Colorado prison.) Hurowitz fleshes out the harrowing details of Mexico’s drug violence and high-level corruption, and draws on interviews with former cartel insiders to document El Chapo’s staggering ambitions and deep-seated paranoia—at one point, he explored installing spyware on every public computer in a city of 800,000 people. Unfortunately, the catalog of slaughter, which includes pages listing the names of El Chapo’s victims, is more numbing than illuminating. Though Hurowitz’s access to players on both sides of the drug war impresses, readers hoping for a deep dive into the political and social circumstances that enabled El Chapo to evade justice for so long will be disappointed. Agent: Richard Abate, 3 Arts. (July)
From the Publisher
El Chapo tears through the myth of Mexico's most infamous mobster and reveals the flesh and blood of the living man, the vibrant if cutthroat mountain culture he hailed from and the failed war on drugs that made him.” —Ioan Grillo, author of El Narco and Blood Gun Money
“Hurowitz fleshes out the harrowing details of Mexico’s drug violence and high-level corruption, and draws on interviews with former cartel insiders to document El Chapo’s staggering ambitions and deep-seated paranoia.... [The author’s] access to players on both sides of the drug war impresses.” —Publishers Weekly
“A fast-paced study of the infamous, now imprisoned Mexican drug lord and the social structures that supported and enabled his rise...Readers won’t look at the war on drugs the same way after reading Hurowitz’s damning account.” —Kirkus
“[A] much-needed revisit of the Chapo story...fast-paced, at times edgy...Hurowitz manages to capture the history of the drug war in Mexico well.” —Small Wars Journal
“This remarkably engaging...Truly the definitive account of the life of Joaquín Guzmán, El Chapo. Yet it is about so much more than just the world’s most infamous drug trafficker. Through the story of El Chapo, Hurowitz reveals in compelling fashion the calculated and violent absurdity that is the so-called War on Drugs—a war that has proven more effective in killing, terrorizing, and repressing poor people across the globe than stopping the flow of illicit drugs. This impressively researched book is essential reading.” —Alexander Aviña, author of Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside
"El Chapo buries the sensationalism and strips the myths from Mexico's most famous drug lord. Instead Hurowitz gives us a complex, but no less rollicking, portrait of a man caught between America's never-ending demand for narcotics, its persistent need for a scapegoat and a Mexican state always happy to dish one up. El Chapo is true crime biography done right." —Benjamin T. Smith, author of The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade
"Hurowitz did what a few American journalists or writers do: he went to Mexico to capture the background of the events that describe and explain the failure of the American war on drugs and the rise of criminals like Chapo Guzmán. El Chapo is a great book, easy to digest for readers and a fabulous explanation with a healthy narrative of the cruel reality on both sides of the Río Bravo about narcotrafficking, corruption and political blindness." —J. Jesús Esquivel, Washington DC correspondent for Proceso magazine and author of El Juicio: Crónica de la caída del Chapo
“A rare achievement: a page-turning, true crime narrative with a deep and well-researched analysis. Hurowitz details the rise to power of Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, but never takes his eye off the structures of power that facilitated it, within both the Mexican government and the global economy.” —Christy Thornton, assistant professor of sociology and Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins University and author of Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy
Library Journal
07/09/2021
After covering the trial of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán for Rolling Stone magazine, Hurowitz traveled to Mexico to learn more about the notorious leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel. Using court transcripts and interviews with law enforcement, journalists, hit men, drug smugglers, and civilians, Hurowitz offers a detailed history of drug trafficking between the United States and Mexico, the cartels, and El Chapo's rise. The author describes how in the 1990s, the drug trade faced growing pressure from Mexican authorities, which he says led to an increase in conflict and violence between the cartels. El Chapo was known for his creative methods for smuggling drugs between borders, evading capture, and escaping from prison multiple times, which Hurowitz says made him a legend in his Sinaloa community. VERDICT Hurowitz presents a comprehensive picture of the drug trade, but the more gripping aspects of the narrative often get bogged down with the minute details and names of numerous cartel members. Still, readers looking for a deep dive into the drug trade will appreciate this detailed work.—Melissa Stoeger, Deerfield P.L., IL
Kirkus Reviews
2021-05-18
A fast-paced study of the infamous, now imprisoned Mexican drug lord and the social structures that supported and enabled his rise.
Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán (1957), who headed the Sinaloa drug cartel for decades, may have flattered himself with comparisons to Jesús Malverde, a Mexican counterpart of Robin Hood. Freelance journalist Hurowitz writes that Guzmán, like other drug lords, “certainly distributed portions of their illegal largesse after hitting it big,” funding infrastructural improvements that weren’t entirely selfless—e.g., a new road leading to poppy and marijuana fields in the Sierra Madre. The author makes an important point early on: Guzmán was able to accumulate such wealth and power thanks to the market north of the border, “the world’s largest consumer of illicit drugs.” Indeed, it is American involvement that conditions the entirety of the drug trade, which has relied on a kind of symbiosis with the Mexican government: The drug kingpins support the politicians, the politicians support the drug trade if only by ignoring it. With the collapse of one-party rule in Mexico and the emergence of several competing cartels, the drug trade became a government unto itself, and few were more vigorous in amassing power than Guzmán. Hurowitz’s portrait of Guzmán is a touch overlong and sometimes repetitious—e.g., when he writes, multiple times, of Guzmán’s “beady” or “beady little eyes.” Still, his tale of Guzmán’s rise and vicious rule is comprehensive, as is his account of how Guzmán, rightly paranoid thanks to the willingness of his lieutenants to sell him out, was finally captured and brought to the U.S. “His final act is playing out now, in a tiny cell in a supermax prison on the windswept high desert plains of Colorado,” writes Hurowitz, adding that the drug trade is essentially unaffected by his removal. “In Mexico,” he writes, “the story goes on without him.”
Readers won’t look at the war on drugs the same way after reading Hurowitz’s damning account.
