The Road That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in the Anexos of Mexico City

How controversial clinics south of the border are tackling addiction.

For many Americans of a certain age, their first memory of Mexico’s descent into drug-related violence came in 1985 with the news of the kidnapping and murder of U.S. DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena. Newspapers and magazines, both at the height of their power, ran lurid stories about the rise of Mexico’s drug cartels and the tentacles these brutal criminal organizations had extended to 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 in a downward spiral. And yet Mexico was mentioned only sporadically in American news coverage during the 10 months I spent there.

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 were collapsing one after another in the climactic end of the Cold War. But Mexico quickly reemerged as a major news story, and now, nearly 40 years after Kiki Camarena’s murder, the devil’s pact between Mexico’s cartels and their North American clients 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 torment came flooding back as I read The road that leads among the lostthe powerful new book from Stanford University anthropologist Angela Garcia. Combining memoir, investigative journalism, and anthropological research, Garcia has written a compelling work of narrative nonfiction.

She deftly sketches the modern history of the illegal drug trade in Mexico and the U.S.’s outsized role as both customer and policeman. And she describes the kidnappings and summary executions that have marked modern Mexico and the “profound humanitarian crisis that the United States perpetuates with military aid and illegally trafficked weapons.”

But the unique contribution of Garcia’s book is her illumination of the devastating impact of the drug trade on poor and powerless Mexicans. She does this by shining a spotlight on the dark world of the country’s anexos, the “informal and coercive drug rehabilitation clinics run and used by the working poor.”

Thousands of families in Mexico (and the United States, the author reveals) have turned to these underground clinics in desperate attempts to save loved ones struggling with drug and alcohol addiction. The ordinary people whose stories she shares see the clinics as refuges from cartel violence. But the facilities are known for their own aggressive methods. The “merger of care and violence reflects the burdens that families and communities bear in the context of poverty and institutional neglect,” Garcia writes.

Survivors watch in horror as loved ones are abducted by anexo staff and dragged to their new homes. In many cases, the decision to assign a family member to an anexo is made by the mother. “The fathers were long gone—either having abandoned the family, emigrated to the United States, or died,” Garcia notes. “This placed a huge financial burden on women, who scrambled to pay the weekly or monthly fees of anexos.” Many of the clinics Garcia visits have optimistic names that belie reality, such as Grupo Esperanza (Hope), Serenity and Nueva Vida (New Life) in Mexico, and Grupo Amor y Servicio (Love and Service) in Oakland, California.

Amid the brutality, Garcia captures scenes of tenderness. At the Mexico City anexo Hope, she is drawn to a bond forged between two residents, Rita and Sheila. “One afternoon I arrived and saw Rita lying with her head on Sheila’s lap, her eyes closed,” Garcia says. “Sheila looked at her friend’s calm face and murmured a lullaby as she rubbed her temples. ‘Heal, heal, little frogtail. If you don’t heal today, you’ll heal tomorrow.’”

Garcia’s empathy for the anexados, as the sufferers are called, is rooted in her own past, as she reveals in a raw thread of memoir that weaves through her story. Her father was an adjunct professor from a Greek military family, but according to the author, he was a bad-tempered patriarch who couldn’t hold down 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 like I was living alone that summer, reading by day and being afraid by night.”

Garcia’s family is further dispersed when they join her father in Idaho, where he is 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. Garcia was left to fend for herself. “I was dressed head to toe in black,” she writes, “sleeves pulled up over my razor-pierced arms.”

After moving to New Mexico to be closer to her pregnant mother, Garcia drops out of 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 to a hostel, and finds herself in a world of runaways and addicts. Over time, she finds a path to higher education and a more stable life, but her encounters in the anexos of Mexico trigger haunting memories that color and shape the book.

Garcia grapples with, among other things, the controversial reputation of the anexos and the ultimate question that surrounds them: do they work? In a closing passage, she portrays the clinics not as a solution, but as a window into the harsh reality of Mexico. “They represent not only violence and despair, but also care and hope,” she writes. “In this way, anexos do not obscure 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 American and British newspapers, an award-winning author, and a journalism professor at the Greenhill School in Addison, Texas. His fourth nonfiction book, The Most Honourable Son: A Forgotten Hero’s Struggle Against Fascism and Hatred During World War IIwas released on July 23, 2024. It tells the story of Ben Kuroki, a Nebraska farm boy who overcomes bigotry and prejudice in the U.S. Air Force to become the first Japanese-American combat hero of World War II.