About Ioan Grillo
Ioan Grillo is an author and journalist. He has reported on Latin America since 2001 for international media including TIME magazine, Reuters, CNN, the Associated Press, PBS NewsHour, the Houston Chronicle, CBC, and the Sunday Telegraph.
His first book, El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency, was translated into five languages and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
His second book is Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America
Ioan Grillo is a native of England, but he lives in Mexico City.
Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and Cartels
From the author of El Narco, a searing investigation into the enormous black market for firearms, essential to cartels and gangs in the drug trade and contributing to the epidemic of mass shootings.
The gun control debate is revived with every mass shooting. But far more people die from gun deaths on the street corners of inner-city America and across the border as Mexico’s powerful cartels battle to control the drug trade.
Guns and drugs aren’t often connected in our heated discussions of gun control-but they should be. In Ioan Grillo’s groundbreaking new work of investigative journalism, he shows us this connection by following the market for guns in the Americas and how it has made the continent the most murderous on earth.
Ioan Grillo travels to gun manufacturers, strolls the aisles of gun shows and gun shops, talks to FBI agents who have infiltrated biker gangs, hangs out on Baltimore street corners, and visits the ATF gun tracing center in West Virginia.
Along the way, he details the many ways that legal guns can cross over into the black market and into the hands of criminals, fueling violence here and south of the border. Simple legislative measures would help close these loopholes, but America’s powerful gun lobby is uncompromising in its defense of the hallowed Second Amendment. Perhaps, however, if guns were seen not as symbols of freedom, but as key accessories in our epidemics of addiction, the conversation would shift. Blood Gun Money is that conversation shifter.
Ioan Grillo tells the story, as he investigates the “iron river” of firearms that begin life as legal weapons but end up on the black market. With conversational prose and audacious reporting, he etches brisk vignettes of A.T.F. agents, gunrunners, hit men and straw purchasers, switching among more characters and exotic locales than an international thriller — from a peace activist near a gun factory in Germany’s Black Forest to “Fresa,” an executioner of 45 who eventually dies by the gun himself.
“Chain,” a street-level firearms dealer in Baltimore, increases his prices for desperate customers — “distressed buyers” — caught in gang feuds, only to experience a scintilla of remorse when his best friend is shot dead by a gun he supplied (its value now severely eroded because it was used in a homicide). In a Mexican state prison, “Jorge” tells of outfitting cartels with AR-15s bought at gun shows in Dallas before moving on to .50-caliber rifles, used to shoot at police convoys. According to Grillo, Baltimore suffers rates of homicide similar to those of cities in Mexico, Honduras and Brazil.
Meanwhile, America’s gun sellers outnumber McDonald’s 10 to 1, proliferating in border states. And yet there is no federal firearm-trafficking statute to tackle guns flowing to Mexican cartels. Nor is there a national gun registry, which makes tracking down the owners of guns used in crimes a Sisyphean task. In America, children in neighborhoods scarred by income inequality and beset by warring gun dealers have the same wretched outcomes as the 12-year-old in the slum in San Pedro, Honduras, controlled by the Barrio 18 gang, who was hit by a stray bullet and lives out her life in a wheelchair.
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