Litopia After Dark

Seventy thousand dead.  Twenty thousand disappeared.  Severed heads with threatening messages dumped by the side of the highway. A terrorist insurgency on the verge of toppling governments. Iraq?  Syria?  The Congo?  Ukraine? No. This is Northern Mexico— one of the most violent places on earth.  Why?  Because Western culture likes to take drugs.  Tons of them.  Drugs we brand illegal and on which we’re waging war. To walk us through the kill zone— from the peasants picking coca in the hills behind Bogota to the contract killers of Ciudad Juarez— tonight we’re joined by the amazingly-still-alive Ioan Grillo, acclaimed journalist and author of El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency. Intimately familiar with the deadly cartels, Ioan breaks down Mexico’s bloody “trampolines”, the reality of Breaking Bad— in the form of Mexican crystal meth “super-labs”— the splashy death of Pablo Escobar, and the largest cash seizure in