• By Jorge Valencia
• June 22, 2026

Summary

Few journalists have devoted as much time to reporting on organized crime as Ioan Grillo. In an interview with LJR, he reflects on the challenges, lessons and stories that stay with him.

He’s not the only journalist covering drug trafficking across the Americas, but he may be the best known.

And for good reason. For more than two decades, Ioan Grillo has reported on one of the defining stories of modern Mexico: the rise of drug cartels and their insidious ties to politics and power. Few reporters have cultivated deeper sources or produced a larger body of work on the subject.

Grillo, 53, who grew up near Brighton, England, is mostly known for his three books examining criminal organizations, drug trafficking and the global firearms trade. His readership has included Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, who made Grillo’s 2016 book, “Gangster Warlords,” required reading for police and military commanders during his bloody anti-drug trafficking campaign. (More on that later.)

But books are only part of Grillo’s output. He publishes newsletters in English and Spanish through his Substack, produces documentaries, hosts a podcast and is regularly sought out by outlets in Mexico and abroad — including The New Yorker and The New York Times — to make sense of the confusing and messy tangles of crime and public security.

In this interview with LatAm Journalism Review (LJR), edited for length and clarity, Grillo discusses the perils of reporting from the criminal underworld, the ways crime has driven the global rise of populism and his lingering sense that he still has something to prove.

LJR: Shortly before the World Cup started, you got a scoop that I imagine many reporters in Mexico wanted. You figured out that the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which carried out more than 250 attacks across Mexico earlier in the year, had ordered its operatives to steer clear of tourists, football teams or anyone visiting the country for the World Cup. What can you tell us about how you reported that? 

Grillo: Cartels operate in a very aggressive, predatory way, but they can also be quite smart and selective about not wanting to mess with their interests. And there are many different ways of reaching people within cartels or what we know as networks of paramilitary organized crime. I've tried every single way imaginable from going into prisons and asking to speak to people, or approaching people I’ve had contact with or finding contacts through local journalists.

With this story about the World Cup in particular, I first got the confirmation from someone in the cartel, but then took that to sources in the state of Jalisco police to confirm they were hearing the same thing. They said the cartels had orders not to attack tourists because their priority is keeping things calm right now and not catching the wrath of the government over this.

 

LJR: Why is it in their interest to not mess with the World Cup?

Grillo: Although cartels are generally very violent organizations, they’re also rational players and look for ways they can make money, dominate and sometimes create terror. But they don’t use violence randomly, like hitting foreign tourists. It’s just not in their interest to do that. Now, against the Mexican government, sometimes they can use public violence to create pressure, like when you see burned down Oxxo convenience stores, or burned down banks or burned down trucks. They’re creating public episodes of violence and hurting civilians in order to pressure the government. But the rationale right now for the Jalisco New Generation Cartel is that they’ve got new leadership and they’re very strong. They want to “calmar las aguas,” they want to defuse the situation.

LJR: This might be a naive outsider question, but I wonder if the heads of these organizations are in any way like everyone else in the country, swept up in the excitement of the World Cup, and want their country to project a positive image. Is it naive to think that? 

Grillo: Not at all. I'm getting quite a lot of messaging from the cartel on some of these points, and I don’t want to be a propagandist for them. But the messaging I'm getting very clearly from the new leadership is that they really want to portray themselves as being kind of law abiding. That sounds bizarre, but they want to portray themselves as being in control and looking after the community. They have strange mentalities. There’s an idea of “Welcome to Mexico, foreigners are welcome.”

LJR: When you first started reporting in Mexico in 2001, you worked for the English-language newspaper The News, for the Houston Chronicle and also freelanced for other news organizations. It seems like it was only gradually that you started covering crime and the war against drug traffickers. When did you realize you were in the middle of this big story? 

Grillo: I found myself in this one moment in 2008 in a town called El Pozo, which is in the state of Sinaloa, where there had been two massacres quite close together. There were bullet shells scattered everywhere. And I saw this convoy of villagers riding out of the village in their pickup trucks with mattresses, leaving as refugees. That was a significant moment. I thought, “This could really shake the country.” And it did. It became bigger and bigger, and it's still going on now.

LJR: Your first book, “El Narco,” which got published in 2011, how did it come about? 

Grillo: When I was covering the war in Sinaloa in 2008, I was looking at these scenes, and I thought “This is bigger than I can tell in my reporting,” even though at the time I was helping produce news documentaries and magazine pieces. And I was always interested in writing. I was a big reader as a kid. So I wondered, how does this work? I looked online and realized you have to get an agent first. I sent a few cold emails to agents and didn’t get a response. Finally, I spoke with Daniel Hernandez, whom I had worked with at The News, and who wrote the book “Down and Delirious in Mexico City,” and he gave me the name of his agent and I sent her a pitch and she said yes. I got the deal by 2009 and wrote the book and I kind of wrote it fairly fast. I was experiencing a lot of this very intense stuff and it came out of me quite easily. It got a lot of media play. I got on a lot of big shows like Fresh Air on NPR. I kind of felt for a moment, “Wow this is a life-changing moment.” The book sold well for a while, but then you realize you’re still on the grind. And now, 15 years later, I’m working on my fourth book and I’m still on the grind. It wasn’t as life changing as I thought at the time. (Laughs.)

 

LJR: Your next book, “Gangster Warlords,” came out in 2016. Where did the idea come from? 

Grillo: The idea actually came from when I used to work at the Houston Chronicle and my boss and mentor was Dudley Althaus. He had this idea that we discussed as a series of newspaper articles. So he gets a big thanks in the acknowledgements. The core of it was that Latin America and the Caribbean is seeing this big issue with organized crime and violence. And it's seeing it massively in Brazil, in Colombia, in Mexico, in El Salvador, in Honduras, in Jamaica. And why is this happening and what does this mean right now? And you see that these groups have similarities. They recruit in marginalized areas. They recruit a lot of poor young men, particularly as their rank and file and as killers. They also have this way of making a bunch of money, particularly through drugs, but also through extortion and stealing oil and illegal gold mining. And they're political players. You see them actually moving votes, which in various places they're pushing for certain candidates and intimidating people. So it's kind of telling that story through characters, particularly through the leaders.

The figure in Jamaica was Dudus Coke, who was this drug trafficker who became known as the president of Jamaica, which has a prime minister but no president. The head of state is the King of England, and he, Dudus Coke, was bigger than that.

In Mexico, it was El Más Loco, or The Maddest One, who was kind of a religious cult leader at the same time as being a crystal meth trafficker. In Brazil, I got a good interview with El Profesor, this guy who was a bank robber who'd become one of the founders of the Red Commando. In Central America, it was the Mara Salvatrucha, and I talked to some of the leadership there.

LJR: Along the way, you're interviewing people who might not like what you report, and who are willing to use violence to silence you. How are you able to do your reporting long term while staying safe? 

Grillo: Doing this work, tragically, you can't have your safety guaranteed. And I think you have to make a certain peace with yourself. There's a risk. At the same time, other people do that in various jobs. Firemen do that. Miners do that. Soldiers do that. You can’t be a fireman and say, “I’m always going to be safe.” You can’t be a narcojournalist and say, “I’m always going to be safe.”

LJR: So how do you reduce your risks? 

Grillo: There's a whole bunch of ways. In terms of how you're moving in the field, it's better to be with somebody. It's generally bad to be by yourself. I think it's psychologically easier for an armed group to take out one person than two or three. Then there’s working with sources who can get you protection in the field. Sometimes, you might go to the local police and say, “Can you accompany us to this place?” And sometimes they will send people with you. Then sometimes, there are things you might think, “I don’t want to publish that because if I do, I can’t stay in Mexico.”

LJR: There’s a phrase that is regrettably common in our reporting at LJR, and it’s self-censorship. Do you feel you have to exercise a certain level of self-censorship to stay safe?

Grillo: Yes, absolutely. There's no doubt about it. You have to think that Mexican journalists have been the vast majority of victims of violence against journalists. It’s a fact that as a foreign journalist, you’re in a better position. There’s also a difference between a famous journalist from Mexico City and a guy who works for a local newspaper in a small town in Veracruz. Veracruz has been a graveyard of journalists. It’s part of their [organized crime’s] calculation. They could kill a local journalist in Veracruz and there can be almost no risk for them. Whereas if they kill a well-known journalist from Mexico City or a foreign journalist with some credentials, there can be a comeback from them. It can create big heat. But even as I say that, I really don’t want to feel in any way immune because first, you could be killed in the crossfire of a shootout. Second, you can find yourself in front of a 16-year-old kid with an AK-47. So it’s not like I feel like I can walk around with an invincibility shield around me, but the fact is that Mexican journalists have been the vast majority of victims.

LJR: So what role do local journalists play in your work? 

Grillo: I've worked with local journalists in almost every state of Mexico. I've worked with local journalists heavily in Sinaloa, in Ciudad Juarez, in Michoacán, in Guerrero. I always pay local journalists I work with and get them as best deal as I can. I would not be able to move and have found so many of these things without working with local journalists. I could still go build up my own contacts, but for example, I once met a local radio journalist who immediately was able to get 100 sources in his town. Or I went to Cuautla, in the state of Morelos, and I worked with this local journalist who rides around on a four wheeler. He knew literally everybody. In that particular case, I got to someone who was describing being extorted, being shaken down by a cartel. How will you get someone to tell you that unless you know someone who knows them? So, yeah, I massively work with local journalists.

LJR: These stories that you’re reporting and telling to the world, you do it in a variety of mediums, sometimes under your own brand Crashout Media, and sometimes for bigger news organizations. How do you introduce yourself when you meet someone who knows nothing about your work? 

Grillo: I just say I'm a journalist. The next question usually is, “Who do you work for?” So then I say, I'm independent. If they get more into it, I’ll say I’ve got my own newsletter, or also I work for media including The New York Times. Now, sometimes I’ve faced an issue where staff journalists will look down their nose at freelancers or independent journalists.

LJR: Only sometimes? (Laughs.) That might be putting it generously.

Grillo: There are some great staff journalists, and there are some independent, freelance journalists who have done all kinds of great stuff. But there’s always that need to prove yourself.

 

LJR: Wait, after all your books, and the recognition you’ve received, like the Maria Moors Cabot Award in 2022, you still feel like you need to prove yourself? 

Grillo: Sometimes, because if you meet someone who’s not familiar with your work, there’s always that question that I hate of, “Who are you with?” And if you say, “I’m a freelancer,” you see their blank face, and you feel a vibe of someone putting you down. And you feel a need to say, “I’ve won such and such award.” The best thing about being a journalist is being out in the field reporting. But I also love the process of writing, and communication coming back from a reader saying, “I read that.” I still remember a nurse who wrote to me during COVID-19 who told me that watching the Tiger King documentary series and reading “El Narco” was what got her through COVID-19. So when you’re creating a work of journalism, you're creating something that another human being is receiving, and when you get feedback, it’s a great thing. Sometimes, in Mexico people will come up to me and say, “Hey, I know your work!” That’s cool. But you don’t want to base too much of your personality or your confidence on that.

LJR: You did have at least one very well-known person who gave very visible recognition to your work. That was Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines who’s now facing crimes against humanity charges at the International Criminal Court. You wrote in your Substack last year about how he praised your second book, “Gangster Warlords,” handed it out to his commanding officers and through his ambassador in Mexico asked to meet you. You eventually bought a plane ticket and flew to Manila to interview him. How did you handle that? 

Grillo: When the day finally came, I went to go do the interview at his presidential palace, and everyone was taking photos. He had bought all these copies of my book, so I felt very compromised. Then I did this interview with him and it was a crazy interview and it ended with this line of him saying, “It feels good to kill somebody, especially if you can do it legally.” And then I had this crazy experience reporting in the Philippines, but I felt very conflicted about it. I should have buried my fears about it, and just published the story back then.

LJR: What were your fears in publishing it? 

Grillo: At the time, I was very worried I was going to come across as an apologist for Duterte, who we now know wound up in the Criminal Court in the Hague.

LJR: That’s interesting because earlier in this conversation you said you don’t want to inadvertently reproduce propaganda from drug cartels. How much of a challenge is that in the type of stories you cover?

Grillo: Duterte was promoting my book, so it wasn’t just a matter of being too close to him, but being seen as close to someone who was accused of mass murder. So a friend of mine said, “You should write a piece denouncing him.” And I thought it was more complicated than that as well. Duterte had massive support among the Filipino people. He massively reduced the consumption of crystal meth, which they call shabu. This stuff is complicated. It’s like if you look at Nayib Bukele in El Salvador now. He’s highly, highly popular. These populists get into power because they're delivering stuff to people and particularly to people who are outside of the cultural elite. A lot of populism is appealing to people outside of a cultural elite or a cultural class.

LJR: How do you make sense of a president on the other face of the planet connecting with your work? 

Grillo: The story of Mexico is an important story with global implications. And it wasn’t just the work that he was seeing. It was the events. The book allowed him to physically have an item to show and say, “I don't want this to happen in the Philippines. This is the warning of how we can end up.” But even before Duterte, I could see there was going to be a reaction to this issue. In Brazil, you had Jair Bolsonaro, and in El Salvador you have Bukele, and in Ecuador you have Daniel Noboa. There’s going to be a populist reaction because crime is hurting so many regular people. My argument to liberals with this is to say, “We've got to confront the issue of crime. It's an important issue. We can't ignore this and only say, ‘It's only important because politicians stir it up.’” Regular working-class people and regular middle-class people care about this stuff. It affects them. By saying that doesn't mean I'm saying I'm pro-Duterte or pro-Bukele. What I’m saying is this stuff has to be taken seriously because we’re going to see a reaction to it.

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Part of Special Assignment, a series of interviews with seasoned correspondents on the craft of reporting in Latin America.