Middle managers looking for a career change with excellent earning potential, great perks and travel look no further. Holidays, glamour and adventure: working for a drug cartel has it all. If you thought the people who ran them were thuggish cokeheads, think again. These businesses are as sophisticated as any multinational corporation.
So says Narconomics, a lively dissection of how to run a drugs cartel by Tom Wainwright, former Mexico correspondent at The Economist, who spent years meeting (and sometimes irritating) the lawmakers and lawbreakers of Latin America.
Viewed one way, Wainwright says, Narconomics is a business manual for drug lords. Viewed from another, it’s a blueprint for how to defeat them. It’s also pretty great PR for the industry.
This is an economics book for the Breaking Bad generation. According to Wainwright, drug cartels have essentially copied the same principles taught at business school to streamline their businesses (and earn rather a lot more in the process). Drug lords need to know about mark-ups, PR, offshoring, franchising, “innovating ahead of the law”, how to diversify into new markets . . . perhaps in a couple of years the drug dealers’ experience will be a unit in a master’s syllabus.
Having trouble with a nervy drug mule? The savviest operators, Wainwright tells us, don’t shoot their head off, they use the same techniques HR departments do across the western world to smooth over issues with staff.
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The people who run the industry may have names like El Comeniños, which translates as The Childeater, but the most successful cartel operators are using the same principles as Walmart and McDonald’s to expand.
Wainwright reveals how the cost of cocaine rises from $385 per kilo at its point of origin to $122,000 at the retail end. The initiation ceremonies for people to enter gangs range from the violent to the bizarre: one involves being forced to repeatedly read the works of John Eldredge, a US author of Christian self-help books.
Good business-to-business relationships are vital. When a bad batch of cocaine is delivered to a trafficker he does not send a henchman on the first plane to Rio to settle the score, he calls the supplier, who sends an “engineer” to resolve the problem.
Narconomics is a fascinating account of a $300 billion trade, but not always in the way I expected. I was most interested in the culture clashes between Wainwright (first class, Oxford PPE), and the Mexican authorities. The best is when he asks Juarez’s mayor whether the city’s police are up to the job of monitoring the border, and the mayor spends the rest of their meeting passive-aggressively tapping away on his Blackberry.
Wainwright has a thought-provoking thesis on the nature of cartels, but perhaps there’s another book to be written, a much more entertaining one, about his quasi-Louis Theroux weird weekend experience.
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