On 14 December 2011, around the time when Javier Valdez Cárdenas was reporting on the stories for this book from the streets of Culiacán, state capital of Sinaloa, Mexican President Felipe Calderón met with navy marines to decorate and praise them for ‘cleaning and disinfecting’ the country of criminals, whom he referred to as ‘a plague of cockroaches’. That was the language, the logic of the so-called ‘war on drugs’, which, after more than a decade, Mexican society is still struggling to replace with a better explanation.

The merit of The Taken is how Valdez actively tries to resist (as far as possible) this logic with tools of his own: journalism, narrative skill and an empirical sensibility (we should not forget that he originally trained as a sociologist). The 33 journalistic accounts compiled in this book offer fragmentary, but nonetheless insightful, glimpses of the complex ways in which extreme violence has become a constitutive element of the new local order, a process which, for lack of a better term, has been characterised as the Mexican security and justice crisis. In this sense, The Taken is not merely about el narco (drug trafficking), nor about a war, and this is precisely its main virtue.

What Valdez and his informants describe is much more intriguing. They talk about all sorts of extreme acts of violence, performed by commandos of heavily armed men in peculiar, but not random, parts of Sinaloa's territory. These range from the hijack of a refrigerated lorry full of shrimp on the highway between the port of Topolobampo and Culiacán, to a migrant smuggler who covered the expenses involved in transporting 25 Lacandón seasonal labourers from Chiapas to the Choix mountains, only for them to be forcibly carried to a safe house where a crude firefight ensued. One cannot help but wonder: what place does stealing tonnes of shrimp, then tracking and killing the drivers after they file a police report, have within the logistical chain of producing and trafficking drugs? Why, all of a sudden, do the old practices of smuggling, migration, drugs and contraband require the use of lethal violence?

Valdez's coverage echoes what anthropologist Natalia Mendoza Rockwell has recently described as the process of expansion and monopolistic privatisation of the illegal economies of extraction and extortion, which require a permanent workforce of professionals in violence (with or without a badge) to ensure territorial control and the vigilance of key private gateways throughout the country. I will give some examples.

In Chapter 3, ‘In the Assassin's Shoes’, Valdez's sources recall periods of underemployment for sicarios (hitmen), or the narco payroll being cut from 20 to five pistoleros (gunmen), who in turn sought self-employment through extortion or as violent freelancers. The latter is used as a parallel way of solving all sorts of social conflicts, from the grudge held by a notable businessman's favoured son against three cousins he quarrelled with at a party, to a mother who hired seven sicarios to take revenge on her son's murderers, whose families were extorted into paying a large ransom on the initiative of the sicarios, who were then assassinated by a narco cell.

Each of these stories involves un levantón (someone taken), and in each case the key to violence lies in being granted (or not) private permission to extort or illegally extract resources, whether from migrants, mines, land, ports or oil pipelines. Thus, in ‘A Good Day to Die’, a seasoned hitman's cousin explains that their commando attacked a group ‘who were allegedly robbing cars along the coast highway (without permission from them)’ (p. 153). Likewise, in ‘The Apprentice’, a source admits that ‘if they learn that other guys are knocking over the store, the pharmacy, or the tortilla shop, or affecting the people in the neighbourhood where they live, and which they supposedly control, they come for them’, and in that sense ‘they are the neighbourhood police’ (pp. 161–2). In other words, these militias use violence not randomly, but within a logic: to exclude everyone else from regulating and policing the various economies of illegality.

To complicate things further, these new dynamics of violence are intertwined with another crisis: the malfunctioning of the justice system. In ‘Assassins in Uniforms’, Valdez tells the stories of parents, siblings and spouses agonising over prosecutors who do not investigate; forensic medical services that misidentify bodies and bill them for highly overpriced DNA tests; and disappearances carried out by uniformed men in municipal and state patrol cars.

All of this matters because the consequences of the security and justice crisis are atrocious: mass graves, enforced disappearances, the internally displaced, and psychological trauma. For this reason, Valdez focuses most of the book (Chapters 1, 4 and 5) towards ‘giving a voice to the victims’ and the families who have resolutely taken the search for their loved ones into their own hands. Thus, one of the public roles of journalism is fulfilled: the therapeutic experience of being heard, of acknowledging the voices of the unheard.

Nevertheless, there is a caveat in dealing with such an emotive charge: in a handful of passages Valdez rushes his interpretation and wavers between what German sociologist Norbert Elias calls ‘involvement’ and ‘detachment’. On the one hand, criminals are depicted as ‘addicted to killing’ (p. 161) or having an innate propensity to evil (pp. 169–70). On the other hand, el narco is characterised as ‘omnipresent’ (p. 189) or omnipotent: ‘El narco everywhere. El narco in charge’ (p. 65). The main problem of using such monstrous or godly features is that they foreclose all possibility of rendering these actions intelligible. After all, only God works in mysterious ways.

At times Valdez mirrors, understandably, the urgency of a large part of Mexican society. It is no coincidence that throughout the book, Valdez's interviewees feel the need to clarify that their disappeared relative ‘wasn't a bad person’, to dispel any aspersions cast on them by a decade's worth of the ‘war on drugs’ mentality. Nonetheless, Valdez resists and keeps asking questions, especially to those considered mala yerba (weeds), like the mother who declares that her murdered son ‘was young, and if he'd done something wrong, they should have arrested him and brought him before a judge’ (p. 119).

Overall though, The Taken is an example of how local journalism can contribute to understanding Mexico's most dire and complex problems by combining local knowledge, territorial specificity and the rich detail of in situ reporting with a flair for storytelling and the relentless effort of reporters like Valdez, who, until his assassination in May 2017, continued reporting, questioning and searching. This vocation is a collective effort. Throughout the book, Valdez draws on the work of fellow reporters from the media outlets of Sinaloa (Ríodoce, Noroeste, El Debate) and other states (Vanguardia, El Imparcial, El Diario de Juárez), as well as correspondents from national outlets such as La Jornada, Proceso, Pie de Página, among others. Hence the importance of supporting and defending local journalism.