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Official stories say that violence in Latin America is a product of criminal activity and the drug trade. Organized Violence exposes how that narrative serves corporate and state interests and de-politicizes events that have more to do with logistics infrastructure, social control, and the extractive industries than with cocaine. Global capital and violence reinforce conditions that fortify the current economic order, and whether it be the military, police, or death squads that pull the trigger, economic expansion benefits from repressive activities carried out under the guise of fighting crime. "This book situates organized criminal violence in Latin America within the region's broader poli...
Dealing with Peace presents the struggles of the Guatemalan campesino (peasant) social movement during the country’s post-conflict transition from 1996 to the present, focusing on efforts to obtain land and improve livelihoods within a shifting, yet consistently hostile, political-economic environment. With special focus on the relationship between the movement and the neoliberal state, Simon Granovsky-Larsen asks whether the acceptance of neoliberal resources – in this case, support for land access in Guatemala provided by the World Bank-funded Fondo de Tierras – reduces the potential for social movements to continue to work for transformative change. Positioned in contrast to studies...
Dealing with Peace presents the struggles of the Guatemalan campesino (peasant) social movement during the country's post-conflict transition from 1996 to the present, focusing on efforts to obtain land and improve livelihoods within a shifting, yet consistently hostile, political-economic environment. With special focus on the relationship between the movement and the neoliberal state, Simon Granovsky-Larsen asks whether the acceptance of neoliberal resources - in this case, support for land access in Guatemala provided by the World Bank-funded Fondo de Tierras - reduces the potential for social movements to continue to work for transformative change. Positioned in contrast to studies warni...
Iconic images of machismo in Mexico's classic cinema affirm the national film industry's historical alignment with the patriarchal ideology intrinsic to the post-revolutionary state's political culture. Filmmakers gradually turned away from the cultural nationalism of mexicanidad, but has the underlying gender paradigm been similarly abandoned? Films made in the past two decades clearly reflect transformations instituted by a neoliberal regime of cultural politics, yet significant elements of macho mythology continue to be rearticulated. Mexico Unmanned examines these structural continuities in recent commercial and auteur films directed by Alfonso Cuarón, Carlos Cuarón, Carlos Reygadas, Amat Escalante, and Julio Hernández Cordón, among others. Informed by cinema's role in Mexico's modern/colonial gender system, Samanta Ordóñez draws out recurrent patterns of signification that reproduce racialized categories of masculinity and bolster a larger network of social hierarchies. In so doing, Ordóñez dialogues with current intersectional gender theory, fresh scholarship on violence in the neoliberal state, and the latest research on Mexican cinema.
A gripping portrait of the relentless women taking missing persons, kidnapping, and extortion cases into their own hands—and building a movement for one another. In this riveting exploration of the lives of mothers whose children are among the 100,000 disappeared in Mexico’s war on drugs, Shaylih Muehlmann shows how families have mobilized on the ground to get answers and justice. It is often mothers who confront government corruption, indifference, and incompetence by taking on the responsibilities of searching for missing persons and dealing with kidnapping and extortion cases. In bringing the voices of these women to the fore, Muehlmann demonstrates how the war on drugs affects everyday life in Mexico and how these activists have become detectives, forensic specialists, and even negotiators with drug traffickers. Call the Mothers provides a unique look at a grassroots movement that draws from the symbolic power of motherhood to build a network of collectives that redefine traditional gender roles and challenge injustice and impunity.
This volume examines the ways in which the socio-economic elites of the region have transformed and expanded the material bases of their power from the inception of neo-liberal policies in the 1970s through to the so-called progressive ‘pink tide’ governments of the past two decades. The six case study chapters—on Chile, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, El Salvador, and Guatemala—variously explore how state policies and even United Nations peace-keeping missions have enhanced elite control of land and agricultural exports, banks and insurance companies, wholesale and import commerce, industrial activities, and alliances with foreign capital. Chapters also pay attention to the ways in which violence has been deployed to maintain elite power, and how international forces feed into sustaining historic and contemporary configurations of power.
This book examines the nature, causes, and consequences of grand corruption, showing how it can be assessed, measured, and attacked from within and without. The volume brings together in a single, definitive text some of the best analyses on how to measure the costs of grand corruption and dissects the legal approaches and institutions to counter grand corruption and kleptocracy. Through a series of compelling country case studies, the book explores how corrupt political elites and public officials have stolen from the public purse for personal gain at the expense of their own people and their country’s social and economic development. It also highlights the role of financial and legal int...
This edited collection brings together a broad range of case studies to highlight the role of Canadian corporations in producing, deepening and exacerbating conditions of dispossession both at home and abroad. Rather than presented as instances of exceptional greed or malice, the cases are described as expected and inherent consequences of contemporary capitalism and/or settler colonialism. A core purpose of the book is to combine and synthesize analyses of dispossession within and outside of Canada. While the literature tends to treat the two as distinct and unrelated phenomena, these processes are often connected, as the normalization of settler colonialism at home can lead to indifference...
When A Beauty That Hurts first appeared in 1995, Guatemala was one of the world’s most flagrant violators of human rights. An accord brokered by the United Nations brought a measure of peace after three decades of armed conflict, but the country’s troubles are far from over. George Lovell revisits Guatemala to grapple once again with the terror inflicted on its Maya peoples by a military-dominated state.
Border Killers delves into how recent Mexican creators have reported, analyzed, distended, and refracted the increasingly violent world of neoliberal Mexico, especially its versions of masculinity. By looking to the insights of artists, writers, and filmmakers, Elizabeth Villalobos offers a path for making sense and critiquing very real border violence in contemporary Mexico. Villalobos focuses on representations of “border killers” in literature, film, and theater. The author develops a metaphor of “maquilization” to describe the mass-production of masculine violence as a result of neoliberalism. The author demonstrates that the killer is an interchangeable cog in a societal factory...