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"Members of the Guatemalan army abducted Maritza Urrutia after she took her son to school one morning in 1992. [book title] describes her ordeal. After days of interrogation and torture, Maritza was ultimately spared because her family was able to contact influential intermediaries, including [author], who was in Guatemala working for the Catholic Church's Human Rights Office. Here [author] brings to life the players who achieved Maritza's release: the church, the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Congress, numerous NGOs, guerrilla groups, politicians, students, and the media. The book is a study of the complex and often cruel politics of human rights, and its themes reverberate from Guatemala to Guantánamo to Iraq."--Back cover.
This book deals with the rising epidemic of illegal drug use and its relation to governmental policies. Drug trafficking in the United States has become a significant problem, both within the country and from foreign sources. The development of international drug policies can prove difficult, as other countries exhibit different national policies, goals and concerns. Terrorist funding is yet another threat resulting from drug trafficking activity.
The war on drugs has failed, but consensus in the international drug policy debate on the way forward is missing. Amidst this moment of uncertainty, militarized lenses on the global illicit drug problem continue to neglect the complexity of the causes and consequences that this war is intended to defend or defeat. Challenging conventional thinking in defense and security sectors, Transforming the War on Drugs constitutes the first comprehensive and systematic effort to theoretically, conceptually, and empirically investigate the impacts of the war on drugs. The contributors trace the consequences of the war on drugs across vulnerable regions, including South America and Central America, West...
This book presents evidence that drug policies impose high costs on poor transit and producer countries. It argues that, in the face of great uncertainty about the benefits of alternative drug policies, those with lower social costs should receive greater emphasis.
A central element of contemporary border regimes is their application to migrants before they reach a state's territory. The main forms of this extraterritorial immigration control are visa requirements, pre-embarkation immigration controls and the interception of irregular migrants at sea. This work analyses the complex relationship of the law to these practices, as legal guarantees are potentially avoided, while the legality of control is often uncertain. It examines the international law framework, including the law of the sea and the extraterritorial application of principles of non-refoulement contained in the Refugee Convention and in international human rights law. The work also includes detailed case-studies of the legal challenges posed by extraterritorial immigration controls in Europe, Australia and the United States.
Over 3,100 total pages ... CONTENTS: The Nexus of Extremism and Trafficking: Scourge of the World or So Much Hype? Crossing Our Red Lines About Partner Engagement in Mexico Two Faces of Attrition: Analysis of a Mismatched Strategy against Mexican and Central American Drug Traffickers Combating Drug Trafficking: Variation in the United States' Military Cooperation with Colombia and Mexico Ungoverned Spaces in Mexico: Autodefensas, Failed States, and the War on Drugs in Michoacan U.S. SOUTHWEST BORDER SECURITY: AN OPERATIONAL APPROACH TWO WARS: OVERSEAS CONTINGENCY OPERATIONS AND THE WAR ON DRUGS WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED FROM THE WAR ON DRUGS? AN ASSESSMENT OF MEXICO’S COUNTERNARCOTICS STRATEGY ...
The southern frontier is one of the most emotionally charged zones in the United States, second only to its historical predecessor and partner, the western frontier. Though they span many genres, border films share common themes, trace the mood swings of public policy, and shape our cultural agenda. In this examination, Camilla Fojas studies how major Hollywood films exploit the border between Mexico and the United States to tell a story about U.S. dominance in the American hemisphere. She charts the shift from the mythos of the open western frontier to that of the embattled southern frontier by offering in-depth analyses of particular border films, from post-World War II Westerns to drug-tr...
Mexico ranks highly on many of the measures that have proven significant for creating a positive human rights record, including democratization, good health and life expectancy, and engagement in the global economy. Yet the nation's most vulnerable populations suffer human rights abuses on a large scale, such as gruesome killings in the Mexican drug war, decades of violent feminicide, migrant deaths in the U.S. desert, and the ongoing effects of the failed detention and deportation system in the States. Some atrocities have received extensive and sensational coverage, while others have become routine or simply ignored by national and international media. Binational Human Rights examines both...
An accessible course book on U.S.-Latin American relations “Our Hemisphere”? uncovers the range, depth, and veracity of the United States’ relationship with the Americas. Using short historical vignettes, Britta and Russell Crandall chart the course of inter‑American relations from 1776 to the present, highlighting the roles that individuals and groups of soldiers, intellectuals, private citizens, and politicians have had in shaping U.S. policy toward Latin America in the postcolonial, Cold War, and post–Cold War eras. The United States is usually and correctly seen as pursuing a monolithic, hegemonic agenda in Latin America, wielding political, economic, and military muscle to force Latin American countries to do its bidding, but the Crandalls reveal unexpected yet salient regional interactions where Latin Americans have exercised their own power with their northern and very powerful neighbor. Moreover, they show that Washington’s relationship with the region has relied, in addition to the usual heavy‑handedness, on cooperation and mutual respect since the beginning of the relationship.
Since the late 1990s, the United States has funneled billions of dollars in aid to Colombia, ostensibly to combat the illicit drug trade and State Department-designated terrorist groups. The result has been a spiral of violence that continues to take lives and destabilize Colombian society. This book asks an obvious question: are the official reasons given for the wars on drugs and terror in Colombia plausible, or are there other, deeper factors at work? Scholars Villar and Cottle suggest that the answers lie in a close examination of the cocaine trade, particularly its class dimensions. Their analysis reveals that this trade has fueled extensive economic growth and led to the development of...