In recent years, the south-western border of the United States has come under increasing pressure from the activities of Mexican narco-insurgents. These insurgents have developed rapidly from beginnings as nebulous gangs into networked cartels that have exposed the porosity of the border. These cartels declare no allegiance to any nation and are engaging in asymmetrical warfare against sovereign states throughout Mexico and in Central America. Within such states, de facto political control is shifting to the cartels in the 'areas of impunity' that have emerged. This book addresses these concerns and focuses on the criminal insurgencies being waged by the gangs and cartels. It is divided into sections on theory, Mexico, and the Americas and contains a number of introductory essays pertaining to this premier security threat to the United States and her allies in the region. Topics covered include criminal and spiritual insurgency, cartel weapons, corruption, feral cities, Los Zetas, politicized gangs, and threat analysis in Central America. This book will be a valuable resource to scholars in the fields of regional security, criminal justice and American Studies. It will be of great benefit to military and civil policymakers and practitioners in the areas of law enforcement and counternarcotics. This book was published as a special issue of Small Wars and Insurgencies.

The Story-Takers charts new territory in public pedagogy through an exploration of the multiple forms of communal protests against the mafia in Sicily. Writing at the rich juncture of cultural, feminist, and psychoanalytic theories, Paula M. Salvio draws on visual and textual representations including shrines to those murdered by the mafia, photographs, and literary and cinematic narratives, to explore how trauma and mourning inspire solidarity and a quest for justice among educators, activists, artists, and journalists living and working in Italy. Salvio reveals how the anti-mafia movement is being brought out from behind the curtains, with educators leading the charge. She critically analyses six cases of communal acts of anti-mafia solidarity and argues that transitional justice requires radical approaches to pedagogy that are best informed by journalists, educators, and activists working to remember, not only victims of trauma, but those who resist trauma and violence.

"Julia" nervously emerges from her shabby tent in the suburban wastelands on the outskirts of Madrid to face another day of survival in one of Europe's most problematic ghettos: she is homeless, wanted by the police, and addicted to heroin and cocaine. She is also five months pregnant and rarely makes contact with support services. Welcome to the city shadows in Valdemingomez: a lawless landscape of drugs and violence where the third world meets the Wild West. Briggs and Monge entered this area with only their patience, some cigarettes and a mobile phone and collected vivid testimonies and images of Julia and others like her who live there. This important book documents what they found, locating these people's stories and situations in a political, economic and social context of spatial inequality and oppressive mechanisms of social control.

Methamphetamine: A Love Story presents an insider's view of the world of methamphetamine based on the life stories of thirty-three adults formerly immersed in using, dealing, and manufacturing meth in rural Oklahoma. Using a respectful tone towards her subjects, Shukla illuminates their often decades-long love affair with the drug, the attractions of the lifestyle, the eventual unsustainability of it, and the challenges of exiting the life. These personal stories reveal how and why people with limited economic means and inadequate resources become entrapped in the drug epidemic, while challenging longstanding societal views about addiction, drugs, drug policy, and public health.

Individuals who have committed a number of crimes over their lifetimes have had complex, multi-faceted life experiences often characterized by extreme disadvantage and victimization. Those who are formally designated as "high-risk" by the Canadian criminal justice system often have a record of violent or sexual crimes. As a result, they are usually subject to additional monitoring in the community after completing a prison sentence. Pathways to Ruin? disentangles the numerous elements and pathways that lead to high rates of reoffending by focusing on developmental periods of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. The book uses a case-study approach to consider individuals' entire crime pathway by examining the circumstances and factors that contribute to assumptions or official designations of "high-risk" behaviour. Erin Gibbs Van Brunschot and Tamara Humphrey overhaul society's popular crime narratives and instead draw on sociological and criminological perspectives to identify historical, social, and personal contexts that appear to increase the likelihood of reoffending. They also consider how negative life experiences may be addressed to circumvent trajectories of serious offending. Reducing the social distance that the "law-abiding" public may feel towards marginalized groups, Pathways to Ruin? details how legal systems could better serve these individuals, and acknowledges the many missed opportunities for compassion.

This book reveals the inside story of the formulation and implementation the United States' and United Kingdom's counter narcotics policies in Afghanistan. Western counter narcotics policies in Afghanistan failed dismally after opium poppy cultivation surged to unprecedented levels. The Anglo-American partnership at the centre of this battleground was divided by competing and opposing views of how to address the opium problem, which troubled the well-established Anglo-American relationship. Through interviews with key policy practitioners on both sides of the Atlantic, this study reveals the complex picture of counter narcotics strategy; highlighting key points of cooperation and contention and detailing the often contradictory and competitive objectives of the overall war effort in Afghanistan.

"When I Wear My Alligator Boots "examines how the lives of dispossessed men and women are affected by the rise of narcotrafficking along the U.S.-Mexico border. In particular, the book explores a crucial tension at the heart of the war on drugs: despite the violence and suffering brought on by drug cartels, for the rural poor in MexicoOCOs north, narcotrafficking offers one of the few paths to upward mobility and is a powerful source of cultural meanings and local prestige.
In the borderlands, traces of the drug trade are everywhere: from gang violence in cities to drug addiction in rural villages, from the vibrant folklore popularized in the narco-corridos of Nortea music to the icon of Jess Malverde, the patron saint of narcos, tucked beneath the shirts of local people. In" When I Wear My Alligator Boots, "the author explores the everyday reality of the drug trade by living alongside its low-level workers, who live at the edges of the violence generated by the militarization of the war on drugs. Rather than telling the story of the powerful cartel leaders, the book focuses on the women who occasionally make their sandwiches, the low-level businessmen who launder their money, the addicts who consume their products, the mules who carry their money and drugs across borders, and the men and women who serve out prison sentences when their bosses' operations go awry.
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Exploring the experiences of both male clients and female sex workers, China's Commercial Sexscapes expands upon the complex dynamics of sex worker and client relationships, and places them within the wider implications of expanding globalization and capitalism. The book is based in large part upon interviews with sex workers and their clients the author conducted while undercover as a bartender in Dongguan, an important industrial city in Guangdong province and an explicit, complicated, and multidimensional setting for study. In the wake of the financial crisis, the purchasing of sex by single, young-adult males has become an increasingly socially acceptable way for men to perform and experience heteronormative masculinity. Investigating human rights, social policy, and the criminal justice system in China, this book applies the concept of "edgework" to the commercial sex industry in Dongguan to study how men and women interact within the changing global economy.

Built around the experiences of older prisoners, Punished for Aging looks at the challenges individuals face in Canadian penitentiaries and their struggles for justice. Through firsthand accounts and quantitative data drawn from extensive interviews, this book brings forward the experiences of federally incarcerated people living their "golden years" behind bars. These experiences show the limited ability of the system to respond to heightened needs, while also raising questions about how international and national laws and policies are applied, and why they fail to ensure the safety and well-being of incarcerated individuals. In so doing, Adelina Iftene explores the shortcomings of institutional processes, prison-monitoring mechanisms, and legal remedies available in courts and tribunals, which leave prisoners vulnerable to rights abuses. Some of the problems addressed in this book are not new; however, the demographic shift and the increase in people dying in prisons after long, inadequately addressed illnesses, with few release options, adds a renewed sense of urgency to reform. Working from the interview data, contextualized by participants' lived experiences, and building on previous work, Iftene seeks solutions for such reform, which would constitute a significant step forward not only in protecting older prisoners, but in consolidating the status of incarcerated individuals as holders of substantive rights.

This Element introduces the concept of oligopoly of coercion to interpretate the interaction between drug trafficking and reconfiguration of the state in Colombia. Three elements are central to this interpretation: corruption in oligopolies of coercion must be understood as a payment by drug traffickers for acting like a parallel state; the state criminalizes more drug as merchandise than drug as capital - its equivalent in money; the politics and war around drug trafficking in Colombia should be understood as the way in which peripheral societies access global markets through the ruling institutions of private armies. With these elements, the author focuses on the dynamics of the reconfiguration of the state in Colombia after the cocaine boom in the mid-70s and the evolution of the private armies in Colombia.

Since the launch of the infamous Silk Road, the use of cryptomarkets - illicit markets for drugs on the dark web - has expanded rapidly around the world. Cryptomarkets: A Research Companion is an accessible, detailed guidebook which offers all the tools necessary to begin researching cryptomarket phenomena and the dark web trade in illicit drugs. Offering an in-depth historical account of the development of cryptomarkets up until the present day, the book goes on to examine key trends and findings regarding the contemporary operations of cryptomarkets. The principal methodologies used to conduct cryptomarket research, as well as questions regarding research ethics, are further explored. Finally, the authors outline underdeveloped areas of the field and pose key questions for future cryptomarket research. Whether an academic researcher, post-graduate student, law enforcement officer, or public health professional, this book is essential reading for those researching and working in the realm of cryptomarkets.

A unique and unbelievable first-hand account of how one man fought his way to the top of the criminal underworld... and what he needed to do to stay there. As you read this, someone somewhere is buying drugs. Across the globe, millions of people are involved in the brutal, cold-blooded world of drug dealing, but only a small number make life-changing money. Only a few get to the top, make the calls, know how it all works and truly become drugs lords. And even fewer survive. I know because I am one of those drug lords. After thirty years, I've decided to retire and tell the story of how I got to the top of this tainted profession, what's involved in being a serious criminal, the tricks of the trade, the art of the deal and what it really takes to stay alive for so long. This will be my last confession. And I hope you learn something.

Everything drug cartels do to survive and prosper they've learnt from big business - brand value and franchising from McDonald's, supply chain management from Walmart, diversification from Coca-Cola. Whether it's human resourcing, R&D, corporate social responsibility, off-shoring, problems with e-commerce or troublesome changes in legislation, the drug lords face the same strategic concerns companies like Ryanair or Apple. So when the drug cartels start to think like big business, the only way to understand them is using economics. In Narconomics, Tom Wainwright meets everyone from coca farmers in secret Andean locations, deluded heads of state in presidential palaces, journalists with a price on their head, gang leaders who run their empires from dangerous prisons and teenage hitmen on city streets - all in search of the economic truth.

When we think about young people dealing drugs, we tend to picture it happening on urban streets, in disadvantaged, crime-ridden neighborhoods. But drugs are used everywhere - even in upscale suburbs and top-tier high schools - and teenage users in the suburbs tend to buy drugs from their peers, dealers who have their own culture and code, distinct from their urban counterparts. In Code of the Suburb, Scott Jacques and Richard Wright offer a fascinating ethnography of the culture of suburban drug dealers. Drawing on fieldwork among teens in a wealthy suburb of Atlanta, they carefully parse the complicated code that governs relationships among buyers, sellers, police, and other suburbanites. That code differs from the one followed by urban drug dealers in one crucial respect: whereas urban drug dealers see violent vengeance as crucial to status and security, the opposite is true for their suburban counterparts. As Jacques and Wright show, suburban drug dealers accord status to deliberate avoidance of conflict, which helps keep their drug markets more peaceful - and, consequently, less likely to be noticed by law enforcement. Offering new insight into both the little-studied area of suburban drug dealing, and, by extension, the more familiar urban variety, Code of the Suburb will be of interest to scholars and policy makers alike.

'It's a rollicking tale that brings to life the antic atmosphere of America in the 'Me' Decade' Wall Street Journal 'A madcap chase... this is a well-written chronicle of 28 months when the world went slightly mad' Sunday Times 'A suitably head-spinning account of LSD High Priest Dr Timothy Leary' Mail on Sunday On the moonlit evening of September 12, 1970, an ex-Harvard professor with a genius IQ studies a twelve-foot high fence topped with barbed wire. A few months earlier, Dr. Timothy Leary, the High Priest of LSD, had been running a gleeful campaign for California governor against Ronald Reagan. Now, Leary is six months into a ten-year prison sentence for the crime of possessing two marijuana cigarettes. Aided by the radical Weather Underground, Leary's escape from prison is the counterculture's union of "dope and dynamite," aimed at sparking a revolution and overthrowing the government. Inside the Oval Office, President Richard Nixon drinks his way through sleepless nights as he expands the war in Vietnam and plots to unleash the United States government against his ever-expanding list of domestic enemies. Antiwar demonstrators are massing by the tens of thousands; homemade bombs are exploding everywhere; Black Panther leaders are threatening to burn down the White House; and all the while Nixon obsesses over tracking down Timothy Leary, whom he has branded "the most dangerous man in America." Based on freshly uncovered primary sources and new firsthand interviews, THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA is an American thriller that takes readers along for the gonzo ride of a lifetime. Spanning twenty-eight months, President Nixon's careening, global manhunt for Dr. Timothy Leary winds its way among homegrown radicals, European aristocrats, a Black Panther outpost in Algeria, an international arms dealer, hash-smuggling hippies from the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and secret agents on four continents, culminating in one of the trippiest journeys through the American counterculture.

An astonishing read -- full of corruption, greed, strong drink and stronger language -- that reveals the rotten heart of the global economy - Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland Crackles along ... they deserve credit for exposing the dark underbelly of the jewellery industry and giving us another glimpse into the real cost of the global obsession with gold - Spectator __________ All that glitters is not gold. Gold is the new cocaine - and it's just as lucrative, dangerous, and destructive. __________ Dirty Gold is a searing expose on the booming gold mining industry and destruction on the land and people of Latin America. It looks closely at a small US firm in Miami that helped transform the city into the nation's No.1 importer of gold into the United States. The book follows the meteoric rise and fall of a group of drug traders known as 'the three amigos' who laundered narco money through gold illegally brought into the US and raked in millions before they were caught. Whilst they were making their millions, the humanitarian situation in Colombia, Peru, and many other countries deteriorated dramatically.

This Element examines an increasingly important community crime prevention strategy - focused deterrence. This strategy seeks to change offender behavior by understanding underlying crime-producing dynamics and conditions that sustain recurring crime problems, and implementing a blended set of law enforcement, community mobilization, and social service actions. The approach builds on recent theorizing on optimizing deterrence, mobilizing informal social control, enhancing police legitimacy, and reducing crime opportunities through situational crime prevention. There are three main types of focused deterrence strategies: group violence intervention programs, drug market intervention programs, and individual offender programs. A growing number of rigorous program evaluations find focused deterrence to be an effective crime prevention strategy. However, a number of steps need to be taken to ensure focused deterrence strategies are implemented properly. These steps include creating a network of capacity through partnering agencies, conducting upfront and ongoing problem analysis, and developing accountability structures and sustainability plans.

An astonishing and revelatory memoir by two women who escaped the glamorous yet deadly international drug trade. Mia Flores and Olivia Flores live under assumed names. To their neighbours, they are typical single mothers, their days filled with school runs and PTA meetings. But Olivia and Mia are anything but ordinary. They live in fear, hiding from a past that included wealth beyond their wildest dreams but also more danger than they ever could have imagined. Mia and Olivia are married to the highest level American drug traffickers ever to become US informants, Chicago-born twin brothers Margarito and Pedro Flores. These men worked with - and then brought down - dozens of high-level members of the Mexican cartels, most significantly notorious kingpin Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman. The brothers and their wives had everything money could buy - luxury cars, huge houses and expensive jewellery - but came to understand that the vast wealth that accompanied cartel life came with the ever-present threat of kidnapping, death or imprisonment. Choosing their families over money, they decided to give it all up and cooperate with the US government. Now, from behind the cloak of witness protection, Olivia and Mia have come forward for the first time to tell the full story of their family's decision to risk everything and seek redemption. Cartel Wives is a love story, an insider's look into a terrifying but high-flying modern-day drug empire and, finally, the story of a major federal government operation to bring down one of the most feared men in the world.

One of the most surprising developments in Mexico's transition to democracy is the outbreak of criminal wars and large-scale criminal violence. Why did Mexican drug cartels go to war as the country transitioned away from one-party rule? And why have criminal wars proliferated as democracy has consolidated and elections have become more competitive subnationally? In Votes, Drugs, and Violence, Guillermo Trejo and Sandra Ley develop a political theory of criminal violence in weak democracies that elucidates how democratic politics and the fragmentation of power fundamentally shape cartels' incentives for war and peace. Drawing on in-depth case studies and statistical analysis spanning more than two decades and multiple levels of government, Trejo and Ley show that electoral competition and partisan conflict were key drivers of the outbreak of Mexico's crime wars, the intensification of violence, and the expansion of war and violence to the spheres of local politics and civil society.

This is the untold story of the American federal agent who captured the world's most-wanted drug-lord. Every generation has its larger-than-life criminal legend living beyond the reach of the law: Billy the Kid, Al Capone, Ronnie Biggs, Pablo Escobar. But for every one of these criminals, there's a Wyatt Earp, Pat Garrett or Slipper of the Yard. For Joaquin Archivaldo Guzman-Loera a.k.a. 'El Chapo' - the 21st century's most notorious criminal - that man is D.E.A. Special Agent Andrew Hogan. This is the incredible story of Hogan's seven-year-long chase to capture El Chapo, a multibillionaire drug-lord and escape-artist posing as a Mexican Robin Hood, who in reality was a brutal sociopath responsible for the murders of thousands. His greedy campaign to take over his rivals' territories resulted in an unprecedented war with a body count of over 100,000. We follow Hogan on his quest to achieve the seemingly impossible: to cross the border into Mexico and arrest El Chapo, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, a billionaire and Public Enemy No. 1, who had been evading capture for more than a decade and had earned a reputation for being utterly untouchable. This intimate thriller tells how Hogan single-mindedly and methodically climbed the ladder within the hierarchy of the Sinaloa Cartel - the world's wealthiest and most powerful drug-trafficking organization - by creating one of the most sophisticated undercover operations in the history of the D.E.A. From infiltrating Chapo's inner circle to leading a white-knuckle manhunt with an elite brigade of Mexican Marines, Hogan left no stone unturned in his hunt for the world's most powerful drug kingpin.

One of the most surprising developments in Mexico's transition to democracy is the outbreak of criminal wars and large-scale criminal violence. Why did Mexican drug cartels go to war as the country transitioned away from one-party rule? And why have criminal wars proliferated as democracy has consolidated and elections have become more competitive subnationally? In Votes, Drugs, and Violence, Guillermo Trejo and Sandra Ley develop a political theory of criminal violence in weak democracies that elucidates how democratic politics and the fragmentation of power fundamentally shape cartels' incentives for war and peace. Drawing on in-depth case studies and statistical analysis spanning more than two decades and multiple levels of government, Trejo and Ley show that electoral competition and partisan conflict were key drivers of the outbreak of Mexico's crime wars, the intensification of violence, and the expansion of war and violence to the spheres of local politics and civil society.

Postmodern global terrorist groups engage sovereign nations asymmetrically with prolonged, sustained campaigns driven by ideology. Increasingly, transnational criminal organizations operate with sophistication previously only found in multinational corporations. Unfortunately, both of these entities can now effectively hide and morph, keeping law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the dark and on the run. Perhaps more disturbing is the fact that al Qaeda, Hezbollah, FARC, drug cartels, and increasingly violent gangs-as well as domestic groups such as the Sovereign Citizens-are now joining forces. Despite differing ideologies, they are threatening us in new and provocative ways. The Terrorist-Criminal Nexus: An Alliance of International Drug Cartels, Organized Crime, and Terror Groups frames this complex issue using current research and real-world examples of how these entities are sharing knowledge, training, tactics, and-in increasing frequency-joining forces. Providing policy makers, security strategists, law enforcement and intelligence agents, and students with new evidence of this growing threat, this volume: Examines current and future threats from international and domestic criminal and terror groups Identifies specific instances in which these groups are working together or in parallel to achieve their goals Discusses the "lifeblood" of modern organizations-the money trail Describes how nefarious groups leverage both traditional funding methods and e-commerce to raise, store, move, and launder money Explores the social networking phenomenon and reveals how it is the perfect clandestine platform for spying, communicating, recruiting, and spreading propaganda Investigates emergent tactics such as the use of human shields, and the targeting of first responders, schools, hospitals, and churches This text reveals the often disregarded, misunderstood, or downplayed nexus threat to the United States. Proving definitively that such liaisons exist despite differing ideologies, the book provides a thought-provoking new look at the complexity and phenomena of the terrorist-criminal nexus. This book was excerpted in the February/March 2013 issue of The Counter Terrorist.

Richard Stratton was the unlikeliest of kingpins. A clean-cut college boy who entered outlaw culture on a university trip to Mexico, he saw his search for a joint morph into a thrill-filled dope run smuggling two kilos across the border in his car door. He never looked back. Stratton became a member of the hippie mafia, travelling the world to keep America high, living the underground life while embracing the hippie credo, rejecting hard drugs in favour of marijuana and hashish. With cameos by Whitey Bulger and Norman Mailer, Smuggler tells Stratton's adventure while centring on his last years in the business as he travels from New York to Lebanon's Bekaa Valley to source and smuggle high-grade hash in the midst of civil war, from the Caribbean to the backwoods of Maine and from the Chelsea Hotel to the Plaza. As Stratton's fortunes rise and fall, he's pursued all the while by his nemesis, a philosophical DEA agent who respects him for his good business practices.

In Trafficking Hector Amaya examines how the dramatic escalation of drug violence in Mexico in 2008 prompted new forms of participation in public culture in Mexico and the United States. He contends that, by becoming a site of national and transnational debate about the role of the state, this violence altered the modes publicness could take, transforming assumptions about freedom of expression and the rules of public participation. Amaya examines the practices of narcocorrido musicians who take advantage of digital production and distribution technologies to escape Mexican censors and to share music across the US-Mexico border, as well as anonymous bloggers whose coverage of trafficking and violence from a place of relative safety made them public heroes. These new forms of being in the public sphere, Amaya demonstrates, evolved to exceed the bounds of the state and traditional media sources, signaling the inadequacy of democratic theories of freedom and publicness to understand how violence shapes public discourse.

Wild Horses is a brutally powerful, unflinching account of the heroin epidemic that swept across Catalonia in the 1980s. The novel, told from a variety of points of view, tells the story of a group of friends as they buy, sell, and consume heroin and other drugs in their home town. Wild Horses is a kaleidoscope of voices, stories, song lyrics and heartbreakingly all-too-real characters. It is a true classic of modern story-telling that is both shocking and captivating at the same time.