Out of Mexico—A British Journalist Survives The Lawless Mountains Of Mexico

By Bellamy London

The British have always been an adventuring people. Since they are a literary people also, it is not surprising that they should excel at the art of travel writing. In modern times, George Borrow, Richard Francis Burton, Charles Doughty, T.E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene spring to mind as exemplars of that art. And now there is Richard Grant, a British citizen residing in Tucson, Arizona, who came to the United States as the British correspondent for an American magazine and stayed on to write books about the kind of nomadic misfits in which America has always abounded.

Fifteen years ago, Mr. Grant developed a fascination also for misfits south of the border who, by the success they have achieved in the northwestern states of the People’s Republic of Mexico, are misfits no longer but rather the dominant majority.

These are the denizens of the Sierra Madre Occidental who grow the fabulously lucrative drug crops raised in the sierra, smuggle them within Mexico and into El Norte, defend these growers and smugglers against their rival narcotraficantes, and battle that portion of the police and the federal army that remains unbought by them. Together, they have created the drug culture that has become the mainstream culture of Chihuahua, Sonora, Sinaloa, and Durango states.

Rashly—almost insanely—Richard Grant decided that he must and would travel the length of the Sierra de la Madre to experience the reality of this surreal region for himself.[Watch a clip in Youtube.]