Drug Wars and Covert Netherworlds

Drug Wars and Covert Netherworlds PDF Author: James H. Creechan
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816544255
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
The popular history of narco-Mexico has long been narrowly framed by the U.S. “War on Drugs.” Stereotypes overemphasize the criminal agency of celebrity drug lords. Common understanding of the narco world is rooted in mythology and misunderstanding, and the public narrative has consistently downplayed links to respected individuals and legitimate society. In Drug Wars and Covert Netherworlds sociologist and criminologist James H. Creechan draws on decades of research to paint a much more nuanced picture of the transformation of Mexico’s narco cartels. Creechan details narco cartel history, focusing on the decades since Richard Nixon declared the War on Drugs. With sobering detail, Creechan unravels a web of government dependence, legitimate enterprises, covert connections, and violent infighting. He details how drug smuggling organizations have grown into powerful criminal mafias with the complicit involvement of powerful figures in civil society to create covert netherworlds. Mexico is at a moment of change—a country on the verge of transition or perdition. It can only move forward by examining its history of narco-connections spun and re-spun over the last fifty years.

Drug Wars and Covert Netherworlds

Drug Wars and Covert Netherworlds PDF Author: James H. Creechan
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816544255
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 393

Get Book

Book Description
The popular history of narco-Mexico has long been narrowly framed by the U.S. “War on Drugs.” Stereotypes overemphasize the criminal agency of celebrity drug lords. Common understanding of the narco world is rooted in mythology and misunderstanding, and the public narrative has consistently downplayed links to respected individuals and legitimate society. In Drug Wars and Covert Netherworlds sociologist and criminologist James H. Creechan draws on decades of research to paint a much more nuanced picture of the transformation of Mexico’s narco cartels. Creechan details narco cartel history, focusing on the decades since Richard Nixon declared the War on Drugs. With sobering detail, Creechan unravels a web of government dependence, legitimate enterprises, covert connections, and violent infighting. He details how drug smuggling organizations have grown into powerful criminal mafias with the complicit involvement of powerful figures in civil society to create covert netherworlds. Mexico is at a moment of change—a country on the verge of transition or perdition. It can only move forward by examining its history of narco-connections spun and re-spun over the last fifty years.

Cartel: The Coming Invasion of Mexico's Drug Wars

Cartel: The Coming Invasion of Mexico's Drug Wars PDF Author: Sylvia Longmire
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 0230340555
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Having followed Mexico's cartels for years, border security expert Sylvia Longmire takes us deep into the heart of their world to witness a dangerous underground that will do whatever it takes to deliver drugs to a willing audience of American consumers. The cartels have grown increasingly bold in recent years, building submarines to move up the coast of Central America and digging elaborate tunnels that both move drugs north and carry cash and U.S. high-powered assault weapons back to fuel the drug war. Channeling her long experience working on border issues, Longmire brings to life the very real threat of Mexican cartels operating not just along the southwest border, but deep inside every corner of the United States. She also offers real solutions to the critical problems facing Mexico and the United States, including programs to deter youth in Mexico from joining the cartels and changing drug laws on both sides of the border.

Drug Wars

Drug Wars PDF Author: Jonathan Marshall
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
The violence that surrounds drug dealing and drug trafficking has decimated whole communities, and, in some cases, reshaped daily life in entire countries. This volume takes a closer look at the people affected by the drug trade and the efforts being made to combat it. The book includes firsthand stories, critical thinking questions, and a summative activity, all with the aim of showing the human toll of the drug economy.

The Wolfpack

The Wolfpack PDF Author: Peter Edwards
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0735275416
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Joined by award-winning Mexican journalist Luis Nájera, leading organized-crime author Peter Edwards introduces a motley assortment of millennial bikers, gangsters and Mafia whose bloody trail of murders and schemes gone wrong led to the arrival in Canada of the world's most dangerous criminal organizations: the drug cartels of Mexico. A man watching the Euro Cup on a restaurant patio is shot dead on a busy Sunday afternoon in Toronto. Another dies in a sidewalk ambush just outside a bus-tling college campus. Two men in a Vancouver hotel lobby are gunned down in an attack that sends an American soccer star scrambling for cover. In Mexico, a Canadian is killed at a Nuevo Vallarta coffee shop, his death barely registering amidst the terrifying death tolls of President Calderón’s war on drugs and the cartels’ response; while a Montreal cop is beaten within an inch of his life in a Playa del Carmen nightclub. An infamous heckler from an NBA Toronto Raptors game turns up dead in a bullet-riddled car in a midtown lane-way. Throughout the 2010s, these and other disparate acts of violence entered the public awareness like iso-lated tragedies—but there was nothing isolated about them. In this masterly investigation, veteran journalists Peter Edwards and Luis Nájera introduce readers to the common cause of a near-decade of chaos. Meet the Wolfpack, millennial-aged gangsters from across the spectrum of Canada’s underworld. Vying to fast-track their way into the criminal void left by the death of Montreal godfather Vito Rizzuto, the Wolfpack sought advantage in a steady supply of cocaine from El Chapo Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel, among the deadliest and most far-reaching of criminal organizations. The juniors had just stepped into the big leagues. This is the roiling landscape of The Wolfpack, a brilliant examination of a time of criminal disruption and rapid adaptation, when one gang’s unchecked ambition unwittingly gave away the most hotly contested corner of the Canadian underworld without a fight. Brazen criminal disruptors or entitled upstarts looking to get rich without paying their dues--whatever you think of them, you will never forget the Wolfpack.

Grieving

Grieving PDF Author: Cristina Rivera Garza
Publisher: Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 1936932946
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
Finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Criticism By one of Mexico's greatest contemporary writers, this investigation into state violence and mourning gives voice to the political experience of collective pain. Grieving is a hybrid collection of short crónicas, journalism, and personal essays on systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the US-Mexico border. Drawing together literary theory and historical analysis, she outlines how neoliberalism, corruption, and drug trafficking—culminating in the misnamed “war on drugs”—has shaped her country. Working from and against this political context, Cristina Rivera Garza posits that collective grief is an act of resistance against state violence, and that writing is a powerful mode of seeking social justice and embodying resilience. She states: “As we write, as we work with language—the humblest and most powerful force available to us—we activate the potential of words, phrases, sentences. Writing as we grieve, grieving as we write: a practice able to create refuge from the open. Writing with others. Grieving like someone who takes refuge from the open. Grieving, which is always a radically different mode of writing.” “A lucid, poignant collection of essays and poetry. . . . deeply hopeful, ultimately love letters to writing itself, and to the power of language to overcome the silence that impunity imposes.” —New York Times Book Review "For all the losses tallied, the pieces are imbued with optimism and an activist’s passion for reshaping the world." —The New Yorker

Code of the Suburb

Code of the Suburb PDF Author: Scott Jacques
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022616425X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
This ethnography of teenage suburban drug dealers “provides a fascinating and powerful counterpoint to the devastation of the drug war” (Alice Goffman, author of On the Run). When we think about young people dealing drugs, we tend to picture it happening in disadvantaged, crime-ridden, urban neighborhoods. But drugs are used everywhere. And teenage users in the suburbs tend to buy drugs from their peers, dealers who have their own culture and code, distinct from their urban counterparts. In Code of the Suburb, Scott Jacques and Richard Wright offer a fascinating ethnography of the culture of suburban drug dealers. Drawing on fieldwork among teens in a wealthy suburb of Atlanta, they carefully parse the complicated code that governs relationships among buyers, sellers, police, and other suburbanites. That code differs from the one followed by urban drug dealers in one crucial respect: whereas urban drug dealers see violent vengeance as crucial to status and security, the opposite is true for their suburban counterparts. As Jacques and Wright show, suburban drug dealers accord status to deliberate avoidance of conflict, which helps keep their drug markets more peaceful—and, consequently, less likely to be noticed by law enforcement.

Drug Wars

Drug Wars PDF Author: Gary Fleming
Publisher: Booksurge Publishing
ISBN: 9781439204108
Category : Drug control
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The powerful truth behind the war on drugs and the consequences of allowing Mexico to be overtaken by the cartels.

Drug Wars

Drug Wars PDF Author: Al Cimino
Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
ISBN: 1784280445
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
With the suppression of the Colombian cartels, the Mexican crime syndicates took over the Latin American drug trade, controlling ninety per cent of the cocaine entering the US. This is their story.

Making Peace in Drug Wars

Making Peace in Drug Wars PDF Author: Benjamin Lessing
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107199638
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
State crackdowns on drug cartels often backfire, producing entrenched 'cartel-state conflict'; deterrence approaches have curbed violence but proven fragile. This book explains why.

The Taken

The Taken PDF Author: Javier Valdez Cárdenas
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806158875
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
A massive wave of violence has rippled across Mexico over the past decade. In the western state of Sinaloa, the birthplace of modern drug trafficking, ordinary citizens live in constant fear of being “taken”—kidnapped or held against their will by armed men, whether criminals, police, or both. This remarkable collection of firsthand accounts by prize-winning journalist Javier Valdez Cárdenas provides a uniquely human perspective on life in Sinaloa during the drug war. The reality of the Mexican drug war, a conflict fueled by uncertainty and fear, is far more complex than the images conjured in popular imagination. Often missing from news reports is the perspective of ordinary people—migrant workers, schoolteachers, single mothers, businessmen, teenagers, petty criminals, police officers, and local journalists—people whose worlds center not on drugs or illegal activity but on survival and resilience, truth and reconciliation. Building on a rich tradition of testimonial literature, Valdez Cárdenas recounts in gripping detail how people deal not only with the constant threat of physical violence but also with the fear, uncertainty, and guilt that afflict survivors and witnesses. Mexican journalists who dare expose the drug war’s inconvenient political and social realities are censored and smeared, murdered, and “disappeared.” This is precisely why we need to hear from seasoned local reporters like Valdez Cárdenas who write about the places where they live, rely on a network of trusted sources built over decades, and tell the stories behind the headline-grabbing massacres and scandals. In his informative introduction to the volume, translator Everard Meade orients the reader to the broader armed conflict in Mexico and explains the unique role of Sinaloa as its epicenter. Reports on border politics and infamous drug traffickers may obscure the victims’ suffering. The Taken helps ensure that their stories will not be forgotten or suppressed.