Category: Reviews

Via Brietbart– The insults were published in The New Yorker writer’s piece “The Missing Story of The Drug War” where he rightfully praises Mathew Heinemann’s documentary “Cartel Land” but then dismisses the work of those four authors claiming their reporting is inconsequential.

“They tend to treat the rising and falling cartels as historically important entities whose backgrounds, victories, defeats, escapes, murders and betrayals must be catalogued in order to understand where the war is leading,” Slater said. “This guy killed that guy, and then that guy’s brother took revenge, and there’s no end in sight.

Slater manages to display his ignorance of cartel violence by talking at large about various Hollywood movies that deal with cartels. These movies are, in fact, works of fiction.

In a country where the might of drug cartels rivals that of the Mexican government, and news outlets have gone silent for the most part, the books published by Hernandez, Deibert, Beith and Grillo help give historical context to the daily chapters of shootouts, murders, executions, torture and kidnappings that continue to plague Mexico.

Deibert spoke with Breitbart Texas about what he perceived as the obvious ignorance displayed by Slater. Deibert provided this outlet with a rebuttal letter that he sent to The New Yorker and also published in his personal website.

In Deibert’s letter, the author speaks about his work in Mexico along with the work of his colleagues including the many threats that Anabel Hernandez has been subjected to because of her work. In a masterful comeback, Deibert further invites Slater to leave the Connecticut suburbs and to go to Mexico as real investigative journalists have done.

Deibert also provides a letter where Slater is actually asking for a copy of his book “In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America’s Drug War in Mexico.” Slater stated that he is interested in a section of the book regarding an interview with a former Zeta hitman.

That section in Deibert’s book is actually an interview that this reporter did years ago, which you can read here, however based on Slater’s assessment that interview would likely be considered flyover and with little firsthand reporting.
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