Rooted in thousands of pages of Access to Information documents and dozens of interviews carried out throughout Latin America, Blood of Extraction examines the increasing presence of Canadian mining companies in Latin America and the environmental and human rights abuses that have occurred as a result. By following the money, Gordon and Webber illustrate the myriad ways Canadian-based multinational corporations, backed by the Canadian state, have developed extensive economic interests in Latin America over the last two decades at the expense of Latin American people and the environment. Latin American communities affected by Canadian resource extraction are now organized into hundreds of opposition movements, from Mexico to Argentina, and the authors illustrate the strategies used by the Canadian state to silence this resistance and advance corporate interests.

This analysis explores law-and-order policing as a central point of capitalist state power, arguing that crime-fighting is not the principle aim of contemporary law and order policing--rather, the aim is the production of a new, neoliberal capitalist order based on the restructuring of social relations. Two case studies provide a close-up look at the impact of such policing as a means of social control.