Moderated by Kalika Sen. Panelists: Dr. Adaeze Okonkwo-Reyes (critical theorist, gender and cartel violence), Dr. Karl Anholt (political economist), and Marcus Teale (security analyst and journalist, fifteen years covering Mexican and Central American organized crime).
KALIKA SEN: Before I turn these three loose on the book, I want to provide some context for anyone who hasn’t read the it. Narco Beach follows Tucker Jonathan Wayne — TJ, a tenured math professor from Madison who cashes out his Bitcoin, abandons a perfectly comfortable life, and drifts into Playa del Carmen chasing nothing more specific than the feeling that the impossible might be more interesting than his job. What he finds is a jungle where elf-like creatures move your belongings at night, a deer might be half human, and a Mayan woman named Doña Marisol (with “the eyes of a professional executioner”) is taking over his town, Playa del Carmen. The novel runs on a real premise underneath the fantastical texture: that cartel power can be built two different ways once you stop assuming it has to be inherited at gunpoint. Doña Marisol, a former criminal defense lawyer, gets fed up with the old-boy, brotherhood-and-honor mythology of the men running traditional cartels, and builds a rival syndicate from nothing by cold-calling every underpaid cop and shortchanged sicario in Eastern Mexico with a pitch that has nothing to do with family or loyalty — just the promise of “making bank.” They call her Doña Banco behind her back. Doña Khloé, a Sonora influencer a few years later, discovers that the same transactional logic works even better once you swap cash up front for followers and reputation. TJ, meanwhile, keeps trying to stay a bystander to both economies, fails at that, and is absorbed into the system.
Structurally, the book opens and closes on the same image — a deer and an alux (the elf-like creature) standing at the tree line, watching the humans self-destruct, with the bored contempt of creatures that were there before the playa had a resort on it and will be there long after. Everything in between is satire wearing the clothes of narco-noir: real cartels and real historical violence — Los Ántrax, the Sinaloa–Gulf war, a Guatemalan Kaibil carrying documents about an actual massacre — sit in the same sentences as talking deer and love potions, delivered in exactly the same flat, unbothered register regardless of whether the thing happening is a joke or a tragedy. It is, depending on who you ask, either a deeply cynical book about how little any individual life is worth once it’s been absorbed into a myth, or a deeply moral book about the same thing.
Three different people are about to tell me this book is actually about three different things, and I suspect all three of you are right, which is the most annoying possible outcome for a moderator. Marcus, you first, since you’ve spent more time studying the actual cartel plazas than anyone else on this stage. Does the book get the mechanics right?
MARCUS TEALE: Mostly, yes, and better than most fiction manages. The Los Ántrax material is drawn straight from the record — El Chino Ántrax genuinely was one of the first narcos to build a public persona on social media, and he genuinely did get burned by his own image, the diamond ring giving him up at Schiphol is real, the online pile-on afterward calling him a nacoinstead of a real narco, that’s close to how it actually played out. Where the book does something smarter than the history is Doña Khloé. The real innovation the novel identifies — that you can manufacture the appearance of cartel authority through pure reputation management, with no product ever moving through your hands — is exactly the direction actual narco-influencer culture has been heading. I’ve seen real accounts that function almost exactly like her origin story: broker one favor, publicize it, let the myth do the recruiting.
DR. KARL ANHOLT: I’d push back on calling that the book’s insight, because it’s not new; it’s just capital doing what capital always does once production stops being the fastest way to accumulate power. Khloé’s entire arc is a case study in finance capital replacing industrial capital — she never touches a kilo, correct, but that’s not because she invented something clever; it’s because the actual violent labor of moving product has already been done by generations of sicarios who took all the physical risk for a fraction of the return. She’s a rentier. She extracts value from a reputation economy built on other people’s bodies, and the book treats this as a triumph of personal branding when it’s really just an extremely legible example of how capital detaches from production and starts feeding on itself.
TEALE: Sure, but “capital detaches from production” doesn’t explain why she specifically was the one who succeeded at it and a hundred other Sonora rich kids with Instagram accounts weren’t. There’s an actual skill being depicted — knowing which four or five officials in a state judicial system are real levers and which forty are decoration. That’s not rent extraction; that’s applied intelligence about a corruption network, and the book gets that specific mechanism right in a way most journalism doesn’t bother to.
ANHOLT: It’s applied intelligence about a corruption network that only pays off because the state has already been hollowed out by exactly the economic order I’m describing. You can’t credit her cleverness without crediting the conditions that made cleverness of that particular kind profitable. TJ is actually themore useful case for my argument, but not for the reason people assume. He isn’t displaced. He’s a tenured math professor who cashed out his Bitcoin, sold a perfectly good life in Madison, and chose the jungle out of boredom — his own words are something like why be deadwood in Wisconsin when you can be deadwood on a beach. That’s not a man fleeing scarcity. That’s a man with enough accumulated capital to treat immiseration as a lifestyle experiment. Meanwhile, Espartano, Platón, every actual sicario around him, is in that same violent economy because it was the only labor market that would take them. The book’s real economic joke, whether it means to make it or not, is that TJ gets to opt into the very system that Platón and the others were forced into and were never permitted to opt out of.
TEALE: That distinction matters more than people give it credit for, honestly, because it’s exactly the dynamic you see with a lot of the foreigners who end up adjacent to these networks. TJ isn’t recruited the way a nineteen-year-old from Sinaloa is recruited — economic desperation, family debt, a plaza boss who already knows your cousin. TJ wanders in, uninvited. He is an invasive species with no natural predators. But Las Sobras recognize that they can use him for the inherent violence he will bring to the ecosystem. The children in the Ejido understood this better than anyone else in the book: TJ is the new god of death.
KALIKA SEN: Marcus, is Doña Marisol’s origin story plausible — a lawyer who watches the old-boy network humiliate itself at a rooftop party and builds a rival syndicate from scratch, purely by offering people money instead of brotherhood? Or is that the novel being generous about how easy it is to just opt out of a mafia’s existing loyalty structures?
TEALE: The recruitment mechanism is more plausible than the founder. Organizations in this world bleed personnel to whoever pays better constantly — that part is just how labor markets work even when the product is violence. A cop or a foot soldier defecting because someone finally offers to just pay him, instead of making him perform loyalty to a boss who’s already skimming his cut, that’s not novelistic at all, that’s Tuesday. The bigger leap is a criminal defense lawyer deciding to found the rival organization herself rather than simply working for the highest bidder. But the book earns that leap, because it’s explicit that she’s reacting to something specific — watching cartel lieutenants and government men at that party, all performing brotherhood while robbing each other blind, and deciding the brotherhood talk is the actual lie, not the money.
DR. KARL ANHOLT: That’s the most interesting economic move in the entire book, and I don’t think it’s gotten its due yet in this conversation. What Doña Marisol does at that party is what capital has always done to every romanticized relation it touches — she strips away the mystification. Traditional cartel culture, like traditional capitalism before it professionalized, likes to dress the wage relation up in the language of family, honor, loyalty, brotherhood. Marisol looks at that costume and simply refuses to wear it. She calls people up and says, in essence: I will not pretend this is about honor, I will pay you more than the man currently exploiting your loyalty is paying you. And it works instantly, because everyone she calls already knew the brotherhood talk was a costume. Nobody had ever bothered to just say the quiet part out loud before. She’s not a romantic alternative to the old cartels. She’s the old cartels with the ideology finally switched off.
TEALE: And it’s worth saying — the book itself makes this contrast explicit, a few pages later, when Doña Marisol is thinking about Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the real Juárez Cartel boss everyone says “inherited” his position, when what actually happened is he had his own boss machine-gunned in Cancún and then took over. The novel is drawing a straight line: the old model calls violent succession “inheritance” to make it sound orderly. Marisol’s model doesn’t need that euphemism, because she never had to kill anyone to get the job — she just had to be honest about the money in a business built on pretending it wasn’t about the money.
DR. OKONKWO-REYES: Which is also, not incidentally, a very specific critique of a very specific kind of male institution. She’s a lawyer, an outsider to the brotherhood mythology by definition, since that mythology was never built to include her anyway. It’s precisely her exclusion from the old-boy network that lets her see it clearly enough to undercut it. A man raised inside that mythology has too much invested in believing the family metaphor is real. She never had the option to believe it, so she never has to unbelieve it either.
ANHOLT: And then Khloé arrives a few years later and does the same demystification in reverse. Marisol strips the ideology off the cash nexus and shows everyone the money underneath. Khloé takes a pure cash nexus — favors, bribes, protection — and re-wraps it in a new ideology that isn’t family or honor, it’s attention. Followers. Aesthetic. In Marxist terms she re-mystifies exactly what Marisol had just de-mystified, except the new mystification runs on Instagram instead of blood oaths. Between the two of them you get a complete cycle: ideology stripped away, then reassembled in a form suited to a different decade’s technology.
DR. OKONKWO-REYES: I want to take both of those and add the piece that keeps getting left out when we talk about labor markets and reputation economies in the abstract: whose bodies are the raw material. Khloé’s entire commodity line — the perfume, the cosmetics, the tactical yoga wear — is her literally packaging herself as a product, but the actual violence her empire runs on lands somewhere else entirely, on women like Yuriana Castillo Torres, who is kidnapped, beaten, and hanged, and whose death becomes raw material for Khloé’s brand loyalty rather than a cost Khloé herself ever pays. That’s not incidental to the political economy Karl’s describing. That’s the actual supply chain. The finished good is Khloé’s mythology. The unpaid input is other women’s bodies.
ANHOLT: I don’t disagree with that, and I’d go further — it’s the same relationship industrial capital has always had to the bodies it doesn’t count as labor. Reproductive labor, care labor, the women who are never on the ledger. Yuriana isn’t outside the economy Khloé runs. She’s the externality the economy never has to price in.
TEALE: I’ll grant the framework, but I want to correct something about the mechanism, because it matters for how dangerous this actually is in reality: the buchona wars the book depicts — women attacking each other online over which one belongs to which man — aren’t a side effect of the cartel economy, they’re an actively cultivated one. Cartels have historically encouraged exactly this kind of internal conflict among the women in their orbit, because it keeps loyalty personal and competitive rather than collective. A woman who’s busy going to war with another buchona over a boyfriend is not organizing with her. That’s not an oversight in how the plaza system works. It’s closer to policy.
DR. OKONKWO-REYES: Which is precisely the point at which gender analysis and political economy should be doing the same work instead of competing for which one gets to be the “real” explanation. The competition among women is materially useful to the men running the actual violence, and it’s also, separately, a genuine expression of a culture that gives women exactly one legible route to status — attachment to a powerful man — and then blames them individually when that route turns lethal. Both things are true. Khloé’s own logic when Yuriana dies — “what did people expect, stealing another woman’s man” — is victim-blaming, full stop, but it’s also the correct description of the only ladder she’s ever been offered to climb. Doña Marisol built herself a different ladder entirely. That’s precisely why she’s the exception, and why it costs her so much to stay one.
ANHOLT: Which brings me back to my structural worry, though — the novel still needs her to be exceptional. One woman, one dramatic rupture with the old model. It’s a satisfying character, but it’s a bad unit of analysis if you actually want to explain the system. The book shows us the one lawyer who got fed up and rewired the incentive structure. It doesn’t ask why there’s only one of her.
DR. OKONKWO-REYES: That’s fair, and it’s the same critique I’d make of Khloé — the book is a character study where I sometimes want a sociology. But I’d defend the choice on craft grounds even where I’d critique it on analytical ones. A novel that gave you the full structural account Karl wants would be a monograph, not Narco Beach.
KALIKA SEN: Before we close, I want to go somewhere none of us has touched yet — Flor and her sister Gloria. Adaeze, you keep circling back to whose bodies fund whose mythologies. Where do they fit?
DR. OKONKWO-REYES: They’re the clearest version of the pattern, and the book is more careful with them than I initially gave it credit for. Flor and Gloria are Venezuelan sisters, twenty and twenty-three, who left home to support their family after the economy collapsed under them — the Bolívar hyperinflating, the shelves empty, their mother in tears. The brothel agent’s pitch was “good money, clean clients, safe work.” The book’s own verdict, one sentence later, is that Lima was “a shithole.” That gap between the euphemism and the sentence right after it is the whole critique in miniature. Nobody kidnapped them. Nobody forced them at gunpoint. They made a rational economic decision inside a set of options that had already been narrowed to almost nothing, and the narrowing itself is the violence, even when no individual man in the scene is doing anything a court would call a crime.
ANHOLT: Which is the exact mirror of the TJ material, and I don’t think the book fully clocks how damning the comparison is. TJ liquidates real capital and chooses immiseration as an experiment. Flor and Gloria have no capital to liquidate and choose a foreign brothel because the alternative is watching their mother starve. Same continent, same decade, same word — “opportunity” — doing structurally opposite work in each sentence. And then the book does something I have to admire against my own instincts: it has Flor spend TJ’s money, later, to solve a supernatural problem, which means the entire economic loop closes. The capital that let TJ opt into immiseration is the same capital that eventually buys Flor a moment of real agency. It doesn’t redistribute anything. It just moves the asymmetry one step sideways.
KALIKA SEN: Say more about that — the money and the ritual. Flor ends up appealing to Los Santos Malandros, a whole pantheon this panel hasn’t mentioned yet. Marcus, is that invented, or is there something real underneath it?
TEALE: Structurally real, yes, although I’m not an expert on Venezuelan syncretic religion, so I can’t say how accurate the book is here. I can say that Mexico has a genuine folk-canonization tradition around dead criminals — Jesús Malverdeis the famous one, a bandit who becomes a saint specifically for people the official church has no interest in protecting. “Los Santos Malandros” is the novel’s pantheon built on exactly that template, and the book is precise about the mechanism: Flor doesn’t go to her main household altar for this, the one with María Lionza and the Venezuelan pantheon. She tears open a hidden cavity behind the wallpaper in her own bedroom to reveal a second, secret altar: three statues, one of them a Nike-cap-wearing folk saint named Don Ismael — a Robin Hood figure who robbed trucks of meat and flower and gave it to the poor. That’s not incidental set dressing. She needs saints who specialize in exactly her actual problem, which her prayer states outright: “protector of criminals and protector from criminals.”
DR. OKONKWO-REYES: And the ritual itself is worth sitting with for a second — she lights a cigarette by wiring it into the statue’s mouth, crosses herself, and prays in the same breath for protection and permission. That’s not a woman treating faith as decoration. That’s a fully worked theology with its own division of labor, and Flor navigates it as fluently as she navigates the men in her life. Whatever agency this book grants its women, it grants Flor the most technical version of it — she doesn’t just feel something and act; she consults the correct department.
ANHOLT: And she gets an answer within a minute, notably — faster and cleaner than any human institution in this book ever resolves anything. Then she immediately calls in a favor from an ex-lover who happens to command a faction of the Colombian ELN, which the book is very funny and very accurate about in its own aside: a leftist guerrilla group whose kidnappings get called “retentions” and whose extortion gets called “war taxes.” That’s ideology performing exactly the function Doña Marisol refused to let it perform. The ELN dresses a mercenary cash relationship in revolutionary language the same way the old cartels dressed exploitation in brotherhood language. Flor’s entire rescue plan runs on TJ’s Bitcoin buying actual military violence from an organization that insists, on paper, it isn’t for sale.
TEALE: Which, again, isn’t novelistic exaggeration. The ELN really does operate as a quasi-governmental force along parts of the Colombia–Venezuela border, really does fund itself partly through kidnapping and extortion regardless of its founding doctrine, and really does maintain the kind of cross-border relationships that would make a call like Flor’s plausible rather than fantastical. The single most unrealistic detail in the whole sequence is a comandante taking a cartel-adjacent client’s word about undisclosed Bitcoin wealth on a handshake. Everything else tracks.
KALIKA SEN: Last thing on this before we move on — Marcus mentioned Don Ismael. Does he come back?
DR. OKONKWO-REYES: He does, and it’s the detail that made me revise my own earlier position on this book. Much later, after TJ is simply gone, Flor doesn’t return to the altar to pray. She hires a polero — a grave robber — to physically dig up Malandro Ismael’s actual remains for a revenge ritual, and receives, in so many words, the blessing of “the gods of death and revenge.” The same saint she once lit a cigarette for and asked nicely for help, she eventually has exhumed. That’s not a contradiction in the book’s theology. That’s the whole arc of what happens to a person’s relationship with the sacred once asking nicely has stopped working. Flor doesn’t lose her faith. She escalates it.
KALIKA SEN: Last question, one each. What does the book get most right, and what would you change?
TEALE: Most right: the corruption mechanism in Khloé’s origin story, the reputation-as-leverage model. It’s not decoration, it’s how it actually works in places where institutions are thin. What I’d change: the Kaibiles material with Modesto and the classified massacre documents deserves a harder edge than the book gives it. That history is not narco-noir texture. It’s a specific, documented atrocity, and the novel sometimes lets it sit at the same emotional temperature as everything else around it.
ANHOLT: Most right: the asymmetry between TJ and everyone around him — a man wealthy enough to choose immiseration as a lifestyle, dropped into an economy where everyone else is there because they had no other labor market that would take them. Least examined: the book never asks who’s buying. The entire structure it depicts exists because of demand sitting comfortably north of every border it describes, and that demand is never made to answer for anything. The consumption side of this economy gets a complete pass — including, frankly, from TJ himself, who consumes the whole experience the way he once consumed a math conference.
DR. OKONKWO-REYES: Most right: that reputation and violence are shown as genuinely interchangeable currencies, not metaphorically but mechanically — that’s the sharpest idea in the book. What I’d change: give the women whose deaths fund other people’s mythologies one paragraph each of interior life before the myth-making starts. Not more plot. Just enough that they were people first and raw material second, rather than the reverse.
KALIKA SEN: A political economist, a security analyst, and a critical theorist walked into a panel discussion… I was expecting to hear depictions of three different jungles, and instead your critiques seem to be converging on one. Thank you all. Narco Beach is at the table by the door. We have some time for questions…
[End of transcript.]
