Download or read book The Dope The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade written by Benjamin T. Smith and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A myth-busting, 100-year history of the Mexican drug trade that reveals how an industry founded by farmers and village healers became dominated by cartels and kingpins. The Mexican drug trade has inspired prejudiced narratives of a war between north and south, white and brown; between noble cops and vicious kingpins, corrupt politicians and powerful cartels. In this first comprehensive history of the trade, historian Benjamin T. Smith tells the real story of how and why this one-peaceful industry turned violent. He uncovers its origins and explains how this illicit business essentially built modern Mexico, affecting everything from agriculture to medicine to economics—and the country’s all-important relationship with the United States. Drawing on unprecedented archival research; leaked DEA, Mexican law enforcement, and cartel documents; and dozens of harrowing interviews, Smith tells a thrilling story brimming with vivid characters—from Ignacia “La Nacha” Jasso, “queen pin” of Ciudad Juárez, to Dr. Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, the crusading physician who argued that marijuana was harmless and tried to decriminalize morphine, to Harry Anslinger, the Machiavellian founder of the American Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who drummed up racist drug panics to increase his budget. Smith also profiles everyday agricultural workers, whose stories reveal both the economic benefits and the human cost of the trade. The Dope contains many surprising conclusions about drug use and the failure of drug enforcement, all backed by new research and data. Smith explains the complicated dynamics that drive the current drug war violence, probes the U.S.-backed policies that have inflamed the carnage, and explores corruption on both sides of the border. A dark morality tale about the American hunger for intoxication and the necessities of human survival, The Dope is essential for understanding the violence in the drug war and how decades-old myths shape Mexico in the American imagination today.

Download or read book Histories of Drug Trafficking in Twentieth century Mexico written by Wil G. Pansters and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work brings together a new generation of drug historians and new historical sources to uncover the history of the drug trade and its regulations. While the US and Mexican governments developed anti-drug discourses and policies, which criminalized both high-profile traffickers and small-time addicts, these authorities also employed the criminals and cash connected to the drug trade to pursue more pressing political concerns. The politics, socioeconomic relations, and criminal justice system of modern Mexico has been shaped by standing public and covert state policies as well as by the interaction of subnational trajectories of drug production and trafficking. The essays in this study explore this complicated narrative and provide insight into Mexico's history and the wider contemporary global drug trade.

Download or read book Narrating Narcos written by Gabriela Polit Dueñas and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narrating Narcos presents a probing examination of the prominent role of narcotics trafficking in contemporary Latin American cultural production. In her study, Gabriela Polit Due–as juxtaposes two infamous narco regions, Culiacan, Mexico, and Medellin, Colombia, to demonstrate the powerful forces of violence, corruption, and avarice and their influence over locally based cultural texts. Polit Due–as provides a theoretical basis for her methods, citing the work of Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, and other cultural analysts. She supplements this with extensive ethnographic fieldwork, interviewing artists and writers, their confidants, relatives, and others, and documents their responses to the portrayal of narco culture. Polit Due–as offers close readings of the characters, language, and milieu of popular works of literature and the visual arts and relates their ethical and thematic undercurrents to real life experiences. In both regions, there are few individuals who have not been personally affected by the narcotics trade. Each region has witnessed corrupt state, police, and paramilitary actors in league with drug capos. Both have a legacy of murder. Polit Due–as documents how narco culture developed at different times historically in the two regions. In Mexico, drugs have been cultivated and trafficked for over a century, while in Colombia the cocaine trade is a relatively recent development. In Culiacan, characters in narco narratives are often modeled after the serrano (highlander), a romanticized historic figure and sometime thief who nobly defied a corrupt state and its laws. In Medellin, the oft-portrayed sicario (assassin) is a recent creation, an individual recruited by drug lords from poverty stricken shantytowns who would have little economic opportunity otherwise. As Polit Due–as shows, each character occupies a different place in the psyche of the local populace. Narrating Narcos offers a unique melding of archival and ground-level research combined with textual analysis. Here, the relationship of writer, subject, and audience becomes clearly evident, and our understanding of the cultural bonds of Latin American drug trafficking is greatly enhanced. As such, this book will be an important resource for students and scholars of Latin American literature, history, culture, and contemporary issues.

Download or read book Mexican Cartels written by David F. Marley and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-10-11 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This captivating resource covers the bloody history of Mexican drug cartels from their rise in the 1980s to the latest round of brutal violence, which has seen more than 125,000 Mexican citizens killed over the past decade. This comprehensive reference work offers a detailed exploration of the vicious drug organizations that have enveloped Mexico in extreme violence since the 1980s. Organized alphabetically, the book features more than 200 entries on the major individuals and organizations that have dominated Mexico's booming illegal drug trade, as well as the Mexican armed forces and police units that have faced off against them in the escalating War on Drugs. The book opens with illuminating essays that provide context for Mexico's cartels and the long-running War on Drugs and explore the impact of the cartels on the United States. The A-Z entries that follow include such topics as Vincente Fox, "El Chapo" Guzman, the Golden Triangle, Operation Border Star, and the Sinaloa and Zetas cartels. Other entries focus on various anti-drug campaigns, crucial events, and weaponry favored by the cartels. The entries are augmented by an expansive chronology, a colorful glossary, and an extensive bibliography.

Download or read book Andean Cocaine written by Paul Gootenberg and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illuminating a hidden and fascinating chapter in the history of globalization, Paul Gootenberg chronicles the rise of one of the most spectacular and now illegal Latin American exports: cocaine. Gootenberg traces cocaine's history from its origins as a medical commodity in the nineteenth century to its repression during the early twentieth century and its dramatic reemergence as an illicit good after World War II. Connecting the story of the drug's transformations is a host of people, products, and processes: Sigmund Freud, Coca-Cola, and Pablo Escobar all make appearances, exemplifying the global influences that have shaped the history of cocaine. But Gootenberg decenters the familiar story to uncover the roles played by hitherto obscure but vital Andean actors as well--for example, the Peruvian pharmacist who developed the techniques for refining cocaine on an industrial scale and the creators of the original drug-smuggling networks that decades later would be taken over by Colombian traffickers. Andean Cocaine proves indispensable to understanding one of the most vexing social dilemmas of the late twentieth-century Americas: the American cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and, in its wake, the seemingly endless U.S. drug war in the Andes.

Download or read book Routledge Handbook of International Criminology written by Cindy J. Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-05-03 with total page 717 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of International Criminology brings together the latest thinking and findings from a diverse group of both senior and promising young scholars from around the globe. This collaborative project articulates a new way of thinking about criminology that extends existing perspectives in understanding crime and social control across borders, jurisdictions, and cultures, and facilitates the development of an overarching framework that is truly international. The book is divided into three parts, in which three distinct yet overlapping types of crime are analyzed: international crime, transnational crime, and national crime. Each of these perspectives is then articulated through a number of chapters which cover theory and methods, international and transnational crime analyses, and case studies of criminology and criminal justice in relevant nations. In addition, questions placed at the end of each chapter encourage greater reflection on the issues raised, and will encourage young scholars to move the field of inquiry forward. This handbook is an excellent reference tool for undergraduate and graduate students with particular interests in research methods, international criminology, and making comparisons across countries.

Download or read book Brass Bands of the World Militarism Colonial Legacies and Local Music Making written by Suzel Ana Reily and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bands structured around western wind instruments are among the most widespread instrumental ensembles in the world. Although these ensembles draw upon European military traditions that spread globally through colonialism, militarism and missionary work, local musicians have adapted the brass band prototype to their home settings, and today these ensembles are found in religious processions and funerals, military manoeuvres and parades, and popular music genres throughout the world. Based on their expertise in ethnographic and archival research, the contributors to this volume present a series of essays that examine wind band cultures from a range of disciplinary perspectives, allowing for a comparison of band cultures across geographic and historical fields. The themes addressed encompass the military heritage of band cultures; local appropriations of the military prototype; links between bands and their local communities; the spheres of local band activities and the modes of sociability within them; and the role of bands in trajectories toward professional musicianship. This book will appeal to readers with an interest in ethnomusicology, colonial and post-colonial studies, community music practices, as well as anyone who has played with or listened to their local band.

Download or read book Musica Nortena written by Cathy Ragland and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-16 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first history of the music that binds together Mexican immigrant communities.

Download or read book The Politics of Drug Violence written by Angelica Duran-Martinez and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-13 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last few decades, drug trafficking organizations in Latin America became infamous for their shocking public crimes, from narcoterrorist assaults on the Colombian political system in the 1980s to the more recent wave of beheadings in Mexico. However, while these highly visible forms of public violence dominate headlines, they are neither the most common form of drug violence nor simply the result of brutality. Rather, they stem from structural conditions that vary from country to country and from era to era. In The Politics of Drug Violence, Angelica Durán-Martínez shows how variation in drug violence results from the complex relationship between state power and criminal competition. Drawing on remarkably extensive fieldwork, this book compares five cities that have been home to major trafficking organizations for the past four decades: Cali and Medellín in Colombia, and Ciudad Juárez, Culiacán, and Tijuana in Mexico. She shows that violence escalates when trafficking organizations compete and the state security apparatus is fragmented. However, when the criminal market is monopolized and the state security apparatus cohesive, violence tends to be more hidden and less frequent. The size of drug profits does not determine violence levels, and neither does the degree of state weakness. Rather, the forms and scale of violent crime derive primarily from the interplay between marketplace competition and state cohesiveness. An unprecedentedly rich empirical account of one of the worst problems of our era, the book will reshape our understanding of the forces driving organized criminal violence in Latin America and elsewhere.

Download or read book The Politics of Drug Violence written by Angélica Durán-Martínez and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last few decades, drug trafficking organizations in Latin America became infamous for their shocking public crimes, from narcoterrorist assaults on the Colombian political system in the 1980s to the more recent wave of beheadings in Mexico. However, while these highly visible forms of public violence dominate headlines, they are neither the most common form of drug violence nor simply the result of brutality. Rather, they stem from structural conditions that vary from country to country and from era to era. In The Politics of Drug Violence, Angelica Dur n-Mart nez shows how variation in drug violence results from the complex relationship between state power and criminal competition. Drawing on remarkably extensive fieldwork, this book compares five cities that have been home to major trafficking organizations for the past four decades: Cali and Medell n in Colombia, and Ciudad Ju rez, Culiac n, and Tijuana in Mexico. She shows that violence escalates when trafficking organizations compete and the state security apparatus is fragmented. However, when the criminal market is monopolized and the state security apparatus cohesive, violence tends to be more hidden and less frequent. The size of drug profits does not determine violence levels, and neither does the degree of state weakness. Rather, the forms and scale of violent crime derive primarily from the interplay between marketplace competition and state cohesiveness. An unprecedentedly rich empirical account of one of the worst problems of our era, the book will reshape our understanding of the forces driving organized criminal violence in Latin America and elsewhere.

Download or read book Decentering the Nation written by Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-12-12 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: winner of the 2021 Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume Prize Decentering the Nation: Music, Mexicanidad, and Globalization considers how neoliberal capitalism has upset the symbolic economy of “Mexican” cultural discourse, and how this phenomenon touches on a broader crisis of representation affecting the nation-state in globalization. This book argues that, while mexicanidad emerged in the early twentieth century as a cultural trope about national origins, culture, and history, it was, nonetheless a trope steeped in ‘otherization’ and used by nation-states (Mexico and the United States) to legitimize narratives of cultural and socioeconomic development stemming out of nationalist political projects that are now under strain. Using music as a phenomenological platform of inquiry, contributors to this book focus on a critique of mexicanidad in terms of the cultural processes through which people contest ideas about race, gender, and sexuality; reframe ideas of memory, history, and belonging; and negotiate the experiences of dislocation that affect them. The volume urges readers to find points of resonance in its chapters, and thus, interrogate the asymmetrical ways in which power traverses their own historical experience. In light of the crisis in representation that currently affects the nation-state as a political unit in globalization, such resonance is critical to make culture an arena of social collusion, where alliances can restore the fiber of civil society and contest the pressures that have made disenfranchisement one of the most alarming features characterizing the complex relationships between the state and the neoliberal corporate system that seeks to regulate it. Scholars of history, international relations, cultural anthropology, Latin American studies, queer and gender studies, music, and cultural studies will find this book particularly useful.

Download or read book Meanings of Violence in Contemporary Latin America written by Maria Helena Rueda and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume includes contributions of scholars from various fields - the social sciences, journalism, the humanities and the arts - whose work offers insightful and innovative ways to understand the devastating and unprecedented forms of violence currently experienced in Latin America. As an interdisciplinary endeavor, it offers an array of perspectives that contribute to ongoing debates in the study of violence in the region.

Download or read book Pablo Escobar and Colombian Narcoculture written by Aldona Bialowas Pobutsky and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2020-03-18 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years since his death in 1993, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar has become a globally recognized symbol of crime, wealth, power, and masculinity. In this long-overdue exploration of Escobar’s impact on popular culture, Aldona Bialowas Pobutsky shows how his legacy inspired the development of narcoculture—television, music, literature, and fashion representing the drug-trafficking lifestyle—in Colombia and around the world. Pobutsky looks at the ways the “Escobar brand” surfaces in bars, restaurants, and clothing lines; in Colombia’s tourist industry; and in telenovelas, documentaries, and narco memoirs about his life, which in turn have generated popular interest in other drug traffickers such as Griselda Blanco and Miami’s “cocaine cowboys.” Pobutsky illustrates how the Colombian state strives to erase his memory while Escobar’s notoriety only continues to increase in popular culture through the transnational media. She argues that the image of Escobar is inextricably linked to Colombia’s internal tensions in the areas of cocaine politics, gender relations, class divisions, and political corruption and that his “brand” perpetuates the country’s reputation as a center of organized crime, to the dismay of the Colombian people. This book is a fascinating study of how the world perceives Colombia and how Colombia’s citizens understand their nation’s past and present. A volume in the series Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America, edited by Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste and Juan Carlos Rodríguez

Download or read book Traditional Organized Crime in the Modern World written by Dina Siegel and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-03-23 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite strenuous efforts from local, national, and international law enforcement, organized crime continues to thrive and prosper—even centuries-old crime outfits are surviving the global forces of mass migration and multinational business and finance. From traditional gangland enterprises such as narcotics, gambling, and prostitution, the world’s mafias have moved into new sources of illegal income, including high-tech arms smuggling, money laundering, and identity fraud. Traditional Crime in the Modern World tracks these organizations—the Italian and Mexican mafias, Columbian drug cartels, Chinese triads, and others—across five continents as they adapt to change, and assesses their prospects in the short and long term. World events such as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 9/11 terror attacks are discussed in the context of contributing to emerging markets for illicit goods and services, and to evolving partnerships among criminal entities. This timely volume: • Provides a comprehensive overview of how mafia-like structures function today. • Analyzes in depth national crime situations with global implications. • Examines the migration of organized crime groups and their operations in their new countries. • Gauges the influence of digital and other technologies on organized crime. • Where applicable, notes the links between organized crime and national political institutions. • Describes the impact of the global financial crisis on crime organizations. Concise, compelling, and deeply documented, Traditional Crime in the Modern World is an eye-opening resource for researchers in Criminology and Criminal Justice, particularly with an interest in organized crime and trafficking, as well as related topics of Demography, Political Science, and International Relations.

Download or read book Cocaine written by Paul Gootenberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-01-04 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cocaine examines the rise and fall of this notorious substance from its legitimate use by scientists and medics in the nineteenth century to the international prohibitionist regimes and drug gangs of today. Themes explored include: * Amsterdam's complex cocaine culture * the manufacture, sale and control of cocaine in the United States * Japan and the Southeast Asian cocaine industry * export of cocaine prohibitions to Peru * sex, drugs and race in early modern London Cocaine unveils new primary sources and covert social, cultural and political transformations to shed light on cocaine's hidden history.

Download or read book Illicit Flows and Criminal Things written by Willem van Schendel and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2005-11-04 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illicit Flows and Criminal Things offers a new perspective on illegal transnational linkages, international relations, and the transnational. The contributors argue for a nuanced approach that recognizes the difference between "organized" crime and the thousands of illicit acts that take place across national borders every day. They distinguish between the illegal (prohibited by law) and the illicit (socially perceived as unacceptable), which are historically changeable and contested. Detailed case studies of arms smuggling, illegal transnational migration, the global diamond trade, borderland practices, and the transnational consumption of drugs take us to Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and North America. They allow us to understand how states, borders, and the language of law enforcement produce criminality, and how people and goods which are labeled "illegal" move across regulatory spaces.

Download or read book Histories of Perplexity written by A. Ricardo López-Pedreros and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-03-19 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By combining chronological coverage, analytical breadth, and interdisciplinary approaches, these two volumes—Histories of Solitude and Histories of Perplexity—study the histories of Colombia over the past two centuries as illustrations of the histories of democracy across the Americas. The volumes bring together over 40 scholars based in Colombia, the United States, England, and Canada working in various disciplines to discuss how a country that has been consistently presented as a rarity in Latin America provides critical examples to re-examine major historical problems: republicanism and liberalism; export economies and agrarian modernization; populism and cultural politics of state formation; revolutionary and counterinsurgent Cold War violence; neoliberal reforms and urban development; popular mobilization and counterhegemonic public spheres; political ecologies and environmental struggles; and labors of memory and the challenge of reconciliation. Contributors are sensitive to questions of subjectivity and discourse, observant of ethnographic details and micro-politics, and attuned to macro-perspectives such as transnational and global histories. These volumes offer fresh perspectives on Colombia and will be of great value to those interested in Latin American and Caribbean history.