The New Bogeymen

Every few years a new criminal horror emerges that should cause us to hide in our homes, pray to our idols and hope the Evil Ones do not invade our neighbourhood. Remember all those stories about voodoo-chanting Jamaicans? The garishly tattooed Russians? How about when Hells Angels were blowing up small-town Quebec and slaughtering the innocent?

These days Mexican drug cartels with a decapitation fetish have captured the dark imagination of tabloid editors, Hollywood screenwriters and true crime aficionados. It isn’t that the old bogeymen are not still out there on the corner dealing drugs, death and general mayhem, but they are yesterday’s news compared to the carnage in cheap-flight tourist land.

Be afraid, be very afraid, Toronto-based journalist Jerry Langton warns. This latest menace is even more fearsome and homicidal: an endless army of Latin American psychopaths with a penchant for torturing and mutilating their victims.

In his new...