Over nearly a decade, Mexico has fought a multi-layered and bloody war against organised crime. A growing body of literature explores the slow descent into violence that the country experienced in many of its cities and states. Two of the books that add to this literature on Mexico's struggle with organised crime are Grayson's Mexico: Narco-Violence and a Failed State? and Grayson and Logan's The Executioner's Men. In the following paragraphs I outline what and how these two books contribute to the debate and examine how they muddy the waters rather than clarify them.

Reading these two books, together over 600 pages, it is undeniable that the author(s) spent countless hours accumulating thousands of facts surrounding Mexico's battle with organised crime and the multiple connections between it and Mexico's society, economics, politics and even religion. The sheer number of names, dates, places and other facts that the authors handle is veritably encyclopaedic. Similarly, the many tables that accompany the texts are clearly the result of many hours of accumulating and organising the pieces of what is a truly knotty puzzle: the complex state of affairs regarding organised crime in Mexico. The empirical contribution of these two books is a truly impressive body of facts and data. Anyone wanting to research Mexico's battle with organised crime in the last decade will have to read and cite these two books.

Unfortunately, their contribution ends there. There are several distinct problems they share. First, to truly contribute to an understanding of a complex social phenomenon, particularly one as puzzling as Mexico's struggle with organised crime – which extends to much of Latin America and other parts of the developing world – any serious exploration of the issues must at least attempt to theorise. As it is, there is not much plausible theorising in the literature around the rise and resilience of organised crime in middle-class countries such as Mexico or Brazil, but that is no reason for these books not to at least attempt some. Neither book, for instance, says much about the phenomenon of the sicariato, or black market phenomena, or failed or semi-failed states, or any other truly theoretic concept. The Executioner's Men cannot be faulted for that. It does not pretend to theorise at all, presenting a rather journalistic narrative of events – but one could get that from reading the newspapers every day. Mexico: Narco-Violence or a Failed State? does promise in the title to bring to bear existing theories on failed states to examine drug violence in Mexico. Yet it ultimately fails to do so, ending instead with a simple set of potential scenarios in which the war against organised crime may end.

This is not to say that Grayson did not make an attempt to go beyond a journalistic account in Mexico: Narco-Violence and a Failed State? He clearly tried to make sense of what he wrote, but the framework he uses falls short of solid theoretical work. Very intriguing, for example, is the use of certain concepts that end up not being carefully handled or fully exploited. For instance, Mexico: Narco-Violence and a Failed State? takes a set of concepts related to the Catholic religion and applies it to organised crime in Mexico. But they are awkwardly applied and fail to contribute to clarifying the problem, and then the analogy is dropped without any further explanation as to how it could have helped our understanding of the problem. Moreover, the author leaves out important details, such as omitting the last three presidents from the ‘popes’ list on p. 12. Exactly why Zedillo, Fox or Calderón do not fit into this old pattern is never explained by the author. Similarly, Grayson speculates on Mexico's prospects of becoming a failed state, without really explaining what constitutes a failed state or specifying that state failure is never a binary variable or why such an idea would apply to Mexico.

In general, theoretically, the texts rely on a historical narrative to make their arguments, but fail to offer variables, dependent or independent, to present possible causal explanations. This is in a sense odd given that there is today a wealth of theoretical developments from political science, economics, sociology, anthropology or any other discipline with the potential to craft plausible explanations. Sadly, however, anyone looking for important theories or at least provocative conceptualisation of the problems of organised crime in Mexico or for theorising on the relationship between weaker states and organised crime will not find it here.

Methodologically, these two books are also quite problematic. A careful check on the sources of information or data on each chapter in both books reveals that the authors relied mostly on newspaper and other journalistic accounts as their primary source. There is very little actual field research evident, although there seems to have been some email correspondence with some experts and some court document research. The authors fail to consider important work from the United States, let alone from the Mexican literature. The problem with the kind of journalistic evidence presented in the books is that newspapers and magazines and the internet are notoriously error-prone, and there are enormous factual gaps as well. Worse, coverage in Mexico is notoriously unreliable given a phenomenon that the authors themselves acknowledge as a problem, the campaign of intimidation (which Grayson and Logan refer to as ‘psychological operations’) against the media – besides the fact that Mexico is a country where truth and myth blend together and it is often hard to disentangle one from the other.

This journalistic approach has an added drawback, evident in both books. The timeline is garbled – this is particularly true in The Executioner's Men. Page after page, the book jumps back and forth from one year to another, from one place to another, from one character to another, and from one event to another, often without a detectable pattern with regard to why the authors arranged or failed to arrange the data they collected. The enormous amount of research that went into collecting all these data is, in a way, sabotaged by the disorganised presentation of the many facts and factoids that the authors handle. Perhaps they never had it in mind to arrange the data in any particular order, but this non-choice takes value away from their work because they place on the reader the burden of having to piece together what should have been a much more carefully assembled narrative. This leads the reader to thank the authors for no more than gathering and typing out a string of paper clippings.

Additionally, Grayson's Mexico text explores what he calls the ‘U.S.–Mexican Narcotics Policy’ (chapter 9), yet he hardly deals with organised crime as a truly transnational phenomenon, where all actors along the chain (legal and illegal, legitimate and illegitimate) play a role and where enormous entrenched interests in perpetuating policies and narratives around organised crime are key as much in Mexico as in the rest of Latin America and the United States. To tenuously connect some US gangs to some cartels in Mexico is one instance of this. To dismiss that most guns in the streets of Mexico come from the United States, calling this assertion ‘The 90 Percent Gun Myth’, is another example. There is already much more interesting research on both of these points elsewhere, and these examples signal that Grayson fails to recognise the role that the United States has played in pressuring Mexico (or Colombia or any other country, let alone the entire international prohibitionist regime that scaffolds the way we deal with psychotropic substances today) into a drug war or the American material and ideological contributions to it. Similar issues are evident throughout the two books. The reader leaves these books with the idea that drug trafficking is Mexico's problem and that it has nothing to do with the enormous drug markets or the globalised trading lanes or the American debate on gun ownership rights or any other social problem.

In sum, these two books, while they contain a wealth of facts on the relationship between organised crime and Mexican society, politics, economics and even religion, do not advance the theoretical debate on what happened in Mexico. As such, they cannot contribute to explaining what happened in Colombia in the 1990s, or what appears to be developing in Central America in the 2010s, or the criminal chaos in cities in Venezuela, Brazil or the Caribbean. In the social sciences, this is referred to as wasted data. The approach these books take is in fact a disservice to the social sciences because we have an enormous task ahead of us: making sense of what happened to, and in, Mexico in order to stop it and prevent it from happening in other Latin American countries in the future. These two books contribute very little to advancing this agenda, in spite of what seems to have been many hours of research.