Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El Paso and Juárez (review)

In 2010, predominantly drug-related violence in the Juárez, Mexico, area claimed the lives of over three thousand people. The statistic represents a 1000 percent increase in homicides in Juárez from the annual figures of 2007. Several major American news publications have covered the escalation of Juárez’s drug violence in headline features over the past few years. With Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from El Paso and Juárez, University of Texas anthropologist/sociologist Howard Campbell offers one of the first dedicated studies into the escalating cartel conflicts, rampant violence, and epic scope of the Juárez/El Paso region’s growing drug problem. Further, he provides a look at the devastating effects an increasing American market for Mexican marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamine has had on the cartel-based struggles for control of that market.

Campbell successfully unites El Paso and Juárez conceptually into the “Drug War Zone” of the book’s title, presenting a compelling case for the notion that the U.S./Mexico border has become an arbitrary designation with regard to the bilingual region’s self-contained problem. The book calls for a new transnational approach to understanding the fundamental nature of the Juárez violence and the market that fuels it. Comprised of interviews with a wide array of figures from El Paso and Juárez from both sides of the law, Drug War Zone presents insights into the effects of Juárez/El Paso drug violence on the personal lives of people in this region.

Employing Studs Terkel’s seminal oral history model, Campbell seeks to add a degree of human detail and understanding to the Juárez/El Paso region’s recent turmoil. Campbell cites Terkel’s study Working (New York: Pantheon, 1974) as a model for interviews, by selecting individual “workers” who have embraced widely varying roles in the Juárez/El Paso area drug trade. The book eschews a traditional question-and-answer format to allow for a tight, linear focus on the narratives Campbell’s interviewees present.

The interviews presented in Drug War Zone inspire readers to look at the El Paso/Juárez region as a self-contained entity that requires a special transnational understanding. Collectively, Campbell’s drug war workers present a symbiotic relationship between the vast amount of drugs in Mexico and the insatiable appetite for illicit substances in the U.S. Isolated Mexican and American efforts to curb the trend in the El Paso/Juárez area have been continually plagued with a lack of communication between officials in the two nations. While the escalating drug-related violence in this region remains virtually isolated to Mexico, the expanding market that fuels Juárez’s problem transcends borders.

Supporting his call for a transnational approach to understanding the Juárez/El Paso problem, the author allows his interview subjects to present complementary (and often conflicting) levels of insight representing varying angles of the issue. According to Campbell, the escalation of Juárez violence stems primarily from disputes between the feuding Juárez and Sinaloa drug cartels, struggling for dominance in the El Paso underground market. Likewise, interviews from both sides of the drug conflict comprise a jarring panorama of the accompanying violence in Juárez. For example, candid interviews with various Mexican and American street dealers shed light on various aspects of the Mexico-to-El Paso trafficking system, as do interviews with Mexican and American journalists who have witnessed the Juárez/El Paso connection firsthand. With regard to Juárez violence, Campbell also interviews several individuals whose lives have been affected by the cartel-based violence, including some of the cartel workers who directly perpetrated it. Finally, Drug War Zone explores the lack of law enforcement communication (and related frustration) through interviews with El Paso and Juárez authorities. Exacerbating the problem, rampant corruption among Mexican officials in...