Carmen Boullosa & Mike Wallace 
A Narco History 
How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the ‘Mexican Drug War’

The term “Mexican Drug War” misleads. It implies that the ongoing bloodbath, which has now killed well over 100, 000 people, is an internal Mexican affair.



But this diverts attention from the U.S. role in creating and sustaining the carnage. It’s not just that Americans buy drugs from, and sell weapons to, Mexico’s murderous cartels. It’s that ever since the U.S. prohibited the use and sale of drugs in the early 1900s, it has pressured Mexico into acting as its border enforcer—with increasingly deadly consequences.

Mexico was not a helpless victim. Powerful forces within the country profited hugely from supplying Americans with what their government forbade them. But the policies that spawned the drug war have proved disastrous for both countries.



Written by two award-winning authors, one American and the other Mexican,
A Narco History reviews the interlocking twentieth-century histories that produced this twenty-first century calamity, and proposes how to end it.

About the author

Carmen Boullosa has published fifteen novels, most recently
Tejas, La virgen y el violín,
El complot de los románticos and
Las paredes hablan. Her novels in English translation are
Texas: The Great Theft;
They’re Cows, We’re Pigs;
Leaving Tabasco and
Cleopatra Dismounts. She has received the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize in Mexico, the Anna Seghers and Liberaturpreis in Germany, and the Café Gijón Prize in Madrid. She is a member of Mexico’s Sistema Nacional de Creadores.


Mike Wallace, Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center, and founder of the Gotham Center for New York City History, won the Pulitzer Prize for History for his book
Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford University Press), co-written with Edwin Burrows. He is a co-founder of the Radical History Review and author of the essay collection
Mickey Mouse History (1996).