The Taken: True Stories of the Sinaloa Drug War by Javier Valdez Cárdenas, and: Levantones: historias reales de desaparecidos y víctimas del narco (review)

Javier Valdez Cárdenas refused the title of a drug war journalist. He once told a fellow Mexican journalist that he was "an expert in people," focused not on the ever-shifting composition of drug cartel alliances and warfare, but on the myriad impacts of drug war violence on everyday people; on, to borrow the subtitle from one of his ten published books, "life under the narco."¹ In The Taken, the first of Valdez's books published in English, the late Sinaloan reporter (QEPD) chronicles life under the narco by focusing on a practice that has become ubiquitous in Mexico's latest iteration of the drug war: the levant ón, the literal "taking" of someone by heavily armed, usually masked men to an unknown location. Some of the taken survive and return to their families, indelibly scarred by an experience that usually included torture and sadistic violence. Many others are found dead, dumped somewhere on the fringes of Sinaloa's state capital Culiacán or nearby rural communities. However, some of the taken "disappear," joining the more than 30,000 disappearances nationwide since 2006.² In Valdez's Sinaloa, everyday life vacillates between a Foucauldian biopolitical arrangement in which organized crime seeks the control of entire populations and a type of "gore capitalism" described by feminist intellectual Sayak Valencia as based on the commodification and accumulation of death and dismembered bodies.³

In thirty-three firsthand accounts of levantones, organized into five chapters, Valdez provides the testimonies of "migrant workers, schoolteachers, single moms, small businessmen, bored teenagers, petty criminals, aspiring assassins, municipal officials and local journalists" (6). As historian Everard Meade correctly notes in an Introduction that stands out for its intellectual rigor and emotiveness, these are the sort of testimonies largely missing in US and Mexico City-based press coverage of drug war violence. The local, largely Sinaloa-based perspective offered by Valdez goes beneath the already horrific casualty numbers of the drug war—more than 200,000 dead and 30,000 disappeared since 2006⁴—to reveal the grassroots terror, fear, and familial/communal displacement that linger long after a levantón in the midst of a broader "multiparty civil war" (52). Indeed, the journalist presents the individual stories of those most impacted by the drug-related violence: people who have nothing to do with the drug business like the Maya migrant laborers or displaced highland Sinaloan communities included in Chapter 1. These stories testify to the sort of quotidian terror and uncertainty that tortures the conjugation of verbs when wives of the disappeared like "Rocío" waver between "he is, he was" to describe her missing husband, Daniel (92); to the sort of impunity that enables some state police officers to moonlight as cartel assassins (Chapter 2), that allows low-level cartel sicarios to victimize communities through acts of petty crime (Chapter 3), and that leads to the assassination of journalists who fear state authorities more than cartel-connected criminals (Chapter 4). Connecting these stories is the levant ón, striking suddenly and inexplicably, leaving survivors with an inability to chart the coordinates of power, the axes of inter-cartel violence, the line between state authorities and drug barons. "Welcome to the land of impunity and desolation," writes Valdez (96).

And yet, above all, these chronicles are survival stories of people living in war zones, of individual acts of solidarity and courage, of continuing to live after the disappearance of a loved one in "an agony that lasts practically forever, because when you don't have news, you don't know if they're alive or dead" (98). These survival stories are peppered throughout the chapters: strangers who helped a dazed, tortured, levantón survivor...