For many Americans of a certain age, their first memory of Mexico’s descent into drug-related violence was formed in 1985 with news of the kidnapping and murder of U.S. DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena. Newspapers and news magazines, both at the peak of their powers, published chilling articles on the rise of Mexico’s drug cartels and the tentacles these brutal criminal organizations had extended into the country’s most powerful institutions.

By the time I arrived in Mexico City as a freelance correspondent for the Washington Post four years after Camarena’s murder, America’s southern neighbor was on a downward spiral. And yet Mexico warranted only sporadic mention in U.S. news coverage during the 10 months I spent in-country.

The big stories in 1989 were China — where the communist government crushed pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square — and Eastern Europe, where the Soviet Union’s satellite regimes crumbled one after another in the Cold War’s climactic denouement. But Mexico soon reemerged as a marquee news story, and now, nearly 40 years after Kiki Camarena’s killing, the devil’s pact between Mexico’s cartels and their norteamericano customers has been immortalized in pop-culture fare like the 2018 Netflix crime series “Narcos: Mexico.”

My memories of the early days of Mexico’s modern agony flooded back as I read The Way That Leads Among the Lost, the powerful new book by Stanford University anthropologist Angela Garcia. Meshing memoir, investigative journalism, and anthropological inquiry, Garcia has written a compelling work of narrative nonfiction.

She briskly sketches the modern history of Mexico’s illicit drug trade and the outsized U.S. role in it as both customer and cop. And she describes the kidnappings and summary executions that have scarred modern Mexico and the “profound humanitarian crisis perpetuated by the United States with military aid and illegally trafficked guns.”

But the singular contribution of Garcia’s book is her illumination of the drug trade’s devastating impact on poor and powerless Mexicans. She does this by turning a spotlight on the shadowy world of the country’s anexos, the “informal and coercive rehabilitation clinics for the treatment of drug addiction that are run and utilized by the working poor.”

Thousands of families in Mexico (and in the United States, the author reveals) have turned to these underground clinics in desperate efforts to save loved ones struggling with drug or alcohol addiction. The everyday people whose stories she shares view the clinics as havens from cartel violence. But the facilities are notorious for their own aggressive methods. The “fusion of care and violence reflects the burden families and communities shoulder in the contexts of poverty and institutional neglect,” Garcia writes.

Relatives watch in horror as loved ones are abducted by anexo staff and dragged off to their new homes. In many cases, the decision to commit a family member to an anexo is made by the mother. “The fathers were long gone — either because they had left the family, migrated to the United States, or died,” Garcia observes. “This placed a tremendous financial burden on women, who scrambled to meet anexos’ weekly or monthly fees.” Many of the clinics Garcia visits bear optimistic names that belie the reality, like Grupo Esperanza (hope), Serenity, and Nueva Vida (new life) in Mexico and Grupo Amor y Servicio (love and service) in Oakland, California.

Amid the cruelty, Garcia captures scenes of tenderness. At the Mexico City anexo called Hope, she’s drawn to a bond forged between two residents, Rita and Sheila. “One afternoon, I arrived there to see Rita lying with her head in Sheila’s lap, her eyes closed,” Garcia recounts. “Sheila looked down toward her friend’s calm face and murmured a lullaby as she rubbed her temples. ‘Heal, heal, little frog’s tail. If you don’t heal today, you’ll heal tomorrow.’”

Garcia’s empathy for the anexados, as the patients are known, is rooted in her own past, as she reveals in a raw thread of memoir winding through her narrative. Her father was an adjunct professor from a Greek military family, but in the author’s telling, he was an ill-tempered patriarch who couldn’t hold a job. Garcia was 14 when he left the family in Maine for a university position in Idaho. “The money my father promised to send from his new teaching position was always late and less than promised,” she writes, adding that her mother “fell into a deep depression and rarely left her room. I felt as if I lived alone that summer, reading during the day, frightened at night.”

Garcia’s family unravels further when they join her father in Idaho, where he’s having an affair with a student. Garcia’s mother returns to her roots in New Mexico, while her younger sister and brother move in with their father and his new girlfriend. That left Garcia to fend for herself. “I was dressed head to toe in black,” she writes, “sleeves pulled over my razor blade-scarred arms.”

After moving to New Mexico to be closer to her pregnant mother, Garcia drops out of high school just weeks into her junior year. She earns her GED and becomes a teenage drifter in Albuquerque. She finds work as a motel maid, moves into a hostel, and drifts into a world of runaways and addicts. In time, she finds a path to higher education and a more stable life, but her encounters in Mexico’s anexos stir haunting memories that color and inform the book.

Among other things, Garcia wrestles with the controversial reputation of the anexos and the ultimate question that shrouds them: Do they work? In a concluding passage, she portrays the clinics not as a solution but as a window into Mexico’s harsh reality. “They represent not just violence and despair but also care and hope,” she writes. “In so doing, anexos do not deflect the ambiguities of life. Instead, anexos draw our attention to them, if only we open our eyes.”

Gregg Jones is a Pulitzer Prize-finalist journalist who has written for U.S. and British newspapers, an award-winning author, and a journalism educator at Greenhill School in Addison, Texas. His fourth nonfiction book, Most Honorable Son: A Forgotten Hero’s Fight Against Fascism and Hate During World War II, was released on July 23, 2024. It tells the story of Ben Kuroki, the Nebraska farm boy who overcame bigotry and prejudice in the U.S. Army Air Forces to became the first Japanese American combat hero of World War II.

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