Narco X

Narco X
Author: Steven Valentino
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2017-05-02
Genre:
ISBN: 9781547200818
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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
Author: Steven Spaliviero
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2015-06-10
Genre:
ISBN: 9780646938080
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Narrating Narcos

Narrating Narcos
Author: Gabriela Polit Dueñas
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2013-10-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0822979098
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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.

Mexico

Mexico
Author: George W Grayson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 509
Release: 2017-07-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351505505
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* 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

Narcoland

Narcoland
Author: Anabel Hernández
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2013-09-10
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 1781682488
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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.

A Sense of Brutality

A Sense of Brutality
Author: Carlos Alberto Sánchez
Publisher: Amherst College Press
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2020-09-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 194320814X
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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
Author: Tony M. Kail
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2017-07-27
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1466595469
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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

El Narco

El Narco
Author: Ioan Grillo
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2012-01-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1408824337
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‘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.

Narco Estado

Narco Estado
Author: Howard Campbell
Publisher: Lannoo Publishers
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Ciudad Juárez (Mexico)
ISBN: 9789401404075
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Teun Voeten was originally born in the Netherlands. After a year as an exchange student in New Jersey, he travelled for a while all over Europe. Later, he studied at the School of Visual Arts, New York. Over the years to follow, Voeten covered the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Haiti and Rwanda for Dutch, Belgian, German and American publications. Voeten soon developed a taste for the so called 'forgotten wars' and went out to document the ongoing crises in Colombia, Afghanistan, Sudan and Sierra Leone. More recently, he focused his camera on the Gaza strip, the DR Congo and North Korea (design and architecture) as well as Chad (Darfur crisis), Iran, China (pollution) and more recently, in 2012, the Arab Spring in Egypt and Libya. Voeten has been published in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, NY Times Magazine, National Geographic Magazine, Newsweek, Time, Granta, Village Voice, Frankfurter Allgemeine, among others. His photos are used worldwide by relief organisations such as the International Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, UNICEF, UNHCR, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. AUTHOR: Howard Campbell is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso. He is the co-editor of the University of Texas Press Inter-America Series. Previously he published Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El Paso and Juárez, University of Texas Press. Javier Valdez Cadenas is a Mexican reporter and author who received several international awards for his writing on drug trafficking and organised crime in the Mexican drug war. In 2003, he and other reporters from the daily newspaper Noroeste founded Ríodoce, a weekly dedicated to crime and corruption in Sinaloa, considered one of Mexico's most violent states. He is also the author of several books on drug trafficking, including Miss Narco, which chronicles the lives of the girlfriends and wives of drug lords. In 2011, Valdez Cardenas was awarded the International Press Freedom Award of the Committee to Protect Journalists, "an annual recognition of courageous journalism". In his acceptance speech, he called the violence of Mexican drug trafficking "a tragedy that should shame us", blaming the citizenry of Mexico for giving the drug war its deaths. SELLING POINTS: *Intriguing photo book on drug violence in Mexico *War photographer Teun Voeten investigates the dark side of the Mexican society: murder, violence, criminality and mafia practices *Over the past 5 years, over 50,000 people have been killed in the Mexican drugs war. With over 3100 casualties each year, Ciudad Juarez is the most violent city in the world *Poignant, distressing, harsh images in a colourful, southern setting ILLUSTRATIONS: 120 colour

Drug Wars and Covert Netherworlds

Drug Wars and Covert Netherworlds
Author: James H. Creechan
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2021-12-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0816540918
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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.