Narco X

Narco X PDF Author: Steven Valentino
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781547200818
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
With over 20 years in the narcotics business, Australian-born Steven Valentino knows a thing or two about drug trafficking and the risks involved. Dropping out of school as a teenager, Valentino would later further his education in a California state prison, but the subjects they offer in one of America's hardest prisons won't look good on your job resume - unless you're applying for a job with the Sinaloa cartel. Four years after arriving in Los Angeles with just a few dollars in his pocket, Valentino had carved his name deep into the US Ecstasy market. He owned the fastest cars, lived in a beachfront mansion, rubbed shoulders with Hollywood's elite, and had Charlotte, a stunning Swedish model, by his side. However, in the underworld, things can go wrong quickly, and he is now a fugitive of the United States, hiding in the depths of the Colombian jungle. Inspired by a number of extraordinary and life-changing events, Valentino gives a detailed account of his life in his gripping autobiography, Narco X. This sensational true story places the reader in the shoes of a major narcotics producer and reveals his motives to become the largest Ecstasy manufacturer in American history. Valentino shares intimate details of his life - from a bully kid to becoming a major drug producer for the Sinaloa cartel and his close relationship with a CIA official who helped him traffic $21 billion of narcotics around the world. Fueled by love, greed, betrayal, and revenge, Valentino's astonishing story is captivating. It will transport you away from the world you know and expose the mindset of a drug trafficker who, in the end, had nothing to lose...

Narco X

Narco X PDF Author: Steven Valentino
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781547200818
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
With over 20 years in the narcotics business, Australian-born Steven Valentino knows a thing or two about drug trafficking and the risks involved. Dropping out of school as a teenager, Valentino would later further his education in a California state prison, but the subjects they offer in one of America's hardest prisons won't look good on your job resume - unless you're applying for a job with the Sinaloa cartel. Four years after arriving in Los Angeles with just a few dollars in his pocket, Valentino had carved his name deep into the US Ecstasy market. He owned the fastest cars, lived in a beachfront mansion, rubbed shoulders with Hollywood's elite, and had Charlotte, a stunning Swedish model, by his side. However, in the underworld, things can go wrong quickly, and he is now a fugitive of the United States, hiding in the depths of the Colombian jungle. Inspired by a number of extraordinary and life-changing events, Valentino gives a detailed account of his life in his gripping autobiography, Narco X. This sensational true story places the reader in the shoes of a major narcotics producer and reveals his motives to become the largest Ecstasy manufacturer in American history. Valentino shares intimate details of his life - from a bully kid to becoming a major drug producer for the Sinaloa cartel and his close relationship with a CIA official who helped him traffic $21 billion of narcotics around the world. Fueled by love, greed, betrayal, and revenge, Valentino's astonishing story is captivating. It will transport you away from the world you know and expose the mindset of a drug trafficker who, in the end, had nothing to lose...

Pills of God

Pills of God PDF Author: Steven Spaliviero
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780646938080
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


Narrating Narcos

Narrating Narcos PDF Author: Gabriela Polit Dueñas
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822979098
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Narcoland

Narcoland PDF Author: Anabel Hernández
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1781682488
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 408

Get Book Here

Book Description
This “investigative magnum opus” offers a jaw-dropping history of Mexican drug cartels as it transports readers to the frontlines of the ‘war on drugs’ in Latin America (Los Angeles Times). “A riveting story . . . [from] an incredibly brave journalist.” —NPR The “war on drugs” has so far cost more than 60,000 lives. Hernández explains in riveting detail how Mexico became a base for the mega-cartels of Latin America and one of the most violent places on the planet. At every turn, Hernández names not just the narcos, but also the politicians, functionaries, judges, and entrepreneurs who have collaborated with them. In doing so, she reveals the mind-boggling depth of corruption in Mexico’s government and business elite. Hernández became a journalist after her father was kidnapped and killed and the police refused to investigate without a bribe. She gained national prominence in 2001 with her exposure of excess and misconduct at the presidential palace, and previous books have focused on criminality at the summit of power, under presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón. The product of 5 years’ investigative reporting—and the subject of intense national controversy—Narcoland is a publishing and political sensation in Mexico.

Mexico

Mexico PDF Author: George W Grayson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351505505
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 509

Get Book Here

Book Description
* Mexico was named an Outstanding Academic Title of 2010 by Choice Magazine.Bloodshed connected with Mexican drug cartels, how they emerged, and their impact on the United States is the subject of this frightening book. Savage narcotics-related decapitations, castrations, and other murders have destroyed tourism in many Mexican communities and such savagery is now cascading across the border into the United States. Grayson explores how this spiral of violence emerged in Mexico, its impact on the country and its northern neighbor, and the prospects for managing it.Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ruled in Tammany Hall fashion for seventy-nine years before losing the presidency in 2000 to the center-right National Action Party (PAN). Grayson focuses on drug wars, prohibition, corruption, and other antecedents that occurred during the PRI's hegemony. He illuminates the diaspora of drug cartels and their fragmentation, analyzes the emergence of new gangs, sets forth President Felipe Calderi?1/2n's strategy against vicious criminal organizations, and assesses its relative success. Grayson reviews the effect of narcotics-focused issues in U.S.-Mexican relations. He considers the possibility that Mexico may become a failed state, as feared by opinion-leaders, even as it pursues an aggressive but thus far unsuccessful crusade against the importation, processing, and sale of illegal substances.Becoming a failed state involves two dimensions of state power: its scope, or the different functions and goals taken on by governments, and its strength, or the government's ability to plan and execute policies. The Mexican state boasts an extensive scope evidenced by its monopoly over the petroleum industry, its role as the major supplier of electricity, its financing of public education, its numerous retirement and health-care programs, its control of public universities, and its dominance

A Sense of Brutality

A Sense of Brutality PDF Author: Carlos Alberto Sánchez
Publisher: Amherst College Press
ISBN: 194320814X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 171

Get Book Here

Book Description
Contemporary popular culture is riddled with references to Mexican drug cartels, narcos, and drug trafficking. In the United States, documentary filmmakers, journalists, academics, and politicians have taken note of the increasing threats to our security coming from a subculture that appears to feed on murder and brutality while being fed by a romanticism about power and capital. Carlos Alberto Sánchez uses Mexican narco-culture as a point of departure for thinking about the nature and limits of violence, culture, and personhood. A Sense of Brutality argues that violent cultural modalities, of which narco-culture is but one, call into question our understanding of “violence” as a concept. The reality of narco-violence suggests that “violence” itself is insufficient to capture it, that we need to redeploy and reconceptualize “brutality” as a concept that better captures this reality. Brutality is more than violence, other to cruelty, and distinct from horror and terror—all concepts that are normally used interchangeably with brutality, but which, as the analysis suggests, ought not to be. In narco-culture, the normalization of brutality into everyday life is a condition upon which the absolute erasure or derealization of people is made possible. "The study is original, bringing a wide range of voices into dialogue to present a problem that is pressing and deserving of careful analysis. The study will contribute to the field of Latin American philosophy in important ways... This is the only book by a philosopher on the topic of narco-culture, and I think it’s an important contribution to a topic that should be addressed by philosophers." —Elizabeth Millán, DePaul University

Narco-Cults

Narco-Cults PDF Author: Tony M. Kail
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1466595469
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Get Book Here

Book Description
Those who know about how spirituality plays into the world of drug smuggling have likely heard of Santa Muerte, Jesus Malverde, and Santer but the details of the more obscure African religions and Latin American folk saints and cults often remain a mystery. While the vast majority of these religions are practiced by law-abiding citizens with no co

Narcos Over the Border

Narcos Over the Border PDF Author: Robert J Bunker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317987802
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description
The book takes a hard hitting look at the drug wars taking place in Mexico between competing gangs, cartels, and mercenary factions; their insurgency against the Mexican state; the narco-violence and terrorism that is increasingly coming over the border into the United States, and its interrelationship with domestic prison and street gangs. Analysis and response strategies are provided by leading writers on 3GEN gang theory, counterterrorism, transnational organized crime, and homeland security. Narcos Over the Border is divided into three sections: narco-opposing force (NARCO OPFOR) organization and technology use; patterns of violence and corruption and the illicit economy; and United States response strategies. The work also includes short introductory essays, a strategic threat overview, an afterword and selected references. Specific topics covered include: advanced weaponry, internet use, kidnappings and assassinations, torture, beheadings, and occultism, cartel and gang evolutionary patterns, drug trafficking, street taxation, corruption, and border firefights. This book was published as a special issue of Small Wars and Insurgencies.

Drug Wars and Covert Netherworlds

Drug Wars and Covert Netherworlds PDF Author: James H. Creechan
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816540918
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

Get Book Here

Book Description
Drug Wars and Covert Netherworlds describes the history of Mexican narco cartels and their regional and organizational trajectories and differences. Covering more than five decades, sociologist James H. Creechan unravels a web of government dependence, legitimate enterprises, and covert connections.

El Narco

El Narco PDF Author: Ioan Grillo
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408824337
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 333

Get Book Here

Book Description
‘War’ is no exaggeration in discussing the bloodshed that has terrorized Mexico in the past decades. As rival cartels battle for control of a billion-dollar drug trade, the body count - 23,000 dead in five years - and sheer horror beggar the imagination of journalistic witnesses. Cartel gunmen have attacked schools and rehabilitation centers, and murdered the entire families of those who defy them. Reformers and law enforcement officials have been gunned down within hours of taking office. Headless corpses are dumped on streets to intimidate rivals, and severed heads are rolled onto dancefloors as messages to would-be opponents. And the war is creeping northward, towards the United States. El Narco is the story of the ultraviolent criminal organizations that have turned huge areas of Mexico into a combat zone. It is a piercing portrait of a drug trade that turns ordinary men into mass murderers, as well as a diagnosis of what drives the cartels and what gives them such power. Veteran Mexico correspondent Ioan Grillo traces the gangs from their origins as smugglers to their present status as criminal empires. The narco cartels are a threat to the Mexican government - and their violence has now reached as far as North Carolina. El Narco is required reading for anyone concerned about one of the most important news stories of the decade.