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There were always two hotel rooms. One for his counterparts doing the surveillance and one he used as the stage to play a ruthless Mexican drug trafficker making the deal for enormous amounts of cocaine, marijuana or heroin. One small slip of the tongue, or a slight bead of sweat on the brow could result in his violent, painful death. He was willing to do anything to convince the dangerous criminals he was one of them. Whether showing them a million dollars cash packed in a suitcase, flashing a bag of diamonds, buying rounds of drinks for everyone in a nightclub, whatever it took to make them believe he was as greed-filled and callous as they were. It was a spectacular cat and mouse game with the ultimate reward of sitting next to a hand cuffed cartel head on a flight headed to prison. It was listening to him beg for his freedom, offer millions in bribes, threaten his life and both knowing he had won.
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 fo...
Mexico is a country in crisis. Capitalizing on weakened public institutions, widespread unemployment, a state of lawlessness and the strengthening of links between Mexican and Colombian drug cartels, narcotrafficking in the country has flourished during the post-1982 neoliberal era. In fact, it has become one of Mexico's biggest source of revenue, as well as its most violent, with over 12,000 drug-related executions in 2011 alone. In response, Mexican president Felipe Calderón, armed with millions of dollars in US military aid, has launched a crackdown, ostensibly to combat organised crime. Despite this, human rights violations have increased, as has the murder rate, making Ciudad Juárez on the northern border the most dangerous city on the planet. Meanwhile, the supply of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine has continued to grow. In this insightful and controversial book, Watt and Zepeda throw new light on the situation, contending that the 'war on drugs' in Mexico is in fact the pretext for a US-backed strategy to bolster unpopular neoliberal policies, a weak yet authoritarian government and a radically unfair status quo.
Inspired by the pre-Hispanic codices that escaped immolation during colonial invasions, this artists' book opens out in accordion folds expanding to a length of over 21 feet. Rice has created a series of beautiful and jarring montages in which the mixture of languages, slang, poetry, and prose of Gomez-Pena's performance texts are woven through and around Chagoya's collages filled with pre-Hispanic drawings, colonial-era representations of New World natives, and comic book superheroes. Irreverent to the last, Gomez-Pena and Chagoya employ iconic figures and persistent stereotypes to overturn the fantasies of nationalism, ethnocentrism, and historical amnesia that cloud international relation...
La Pocha Nostra: A Handbook for the Rebel Artist in a Post-Democratic Society marks a transformation from its sister book, Exercises for Rebel Artists, into a pedagogical matrix suited for use as a performance handbook and conceptual tool for artists, activists, theorists, pedagogues, and trans-disciplinary border crossers of all stripes. Featuring a newly reworked outline of La Pocha Nostra's overall pedagogy, and how it has evolved in the time of Trump, cartel violence, and the politics of social media, this new handbook presents deeper explanations of the interdisciplinary pedagogical practices developed by the group that has been labeled "the most influential Latino/a performance troupe ...
On March 16, 1998, the CIA's Inspector General, Fred Hitz, finally let?the cat out of the bag in an aside at a Congressional Hearing. Hitz told?the US Reps that the CIA had maintained relationships with companies and?individuals the Agency knew to be involved in the drug business. Even more?astonishingly, Hitz revealed that back in 1982 the CIA had requested and?received from Reagan's Justice Department clearance not to report any knowledge?it might have of drug-dealing by CIA assets. With these two admisstions, Hitz definitively sank decades of CIA denials,?many of them under oath to Congress. Hitz's admissions also made fools of?some of the most prominent names in US journalism, and vindic...
Clippings of Latin American political, social and economic news from various English language newspapers.
Money laundering has been around as long as there have been illicit businesses, since criminals have always had to convert their ill-gotten gains into clean financial instruments in order to utilize them in legitimate business. Grosse explores how drug traffickers turn profits from street sales of cocaine and crack into bank accounts, airplanes, securities investments, and other uses. These schemes are both creative and extensive, from shipping suitcases of dollars to Mexico, to buying gold with drug cash in California, to faking the export of clothing from Colombia to Panama. The amounts of money involved are often staggering--hundreds of millions of dollars in most cases. Grosse also consi...