Mexico’s Mass Disappearances and the Drug War (Ayotzinapa: The Missing 43 Students) : What is the Drug War?
What is the Drug War?
The “War on Drugs” grew from roots that spread throughout the 20th century in the U.S., where a growing spirit of prohibition targeted certain substances as foreign contaminants to a pure social body, often linking these substances with minority or immigrant populations and a loss of individual and social control. The term itself was coined by Richard Nixon in 1971, but from much earlier, the U.S. sought to control the use of certain drugs domestically as well as pressuring other governments to take interdiction measures to curb supply to the U.S.
In 2006, Mexican president Felipe Calderón declared a “guerra contra el narcotráfico en México,” known as the Mexican Drug War, which has led to a far-reaching intensification of interdiction efforts involving increasing militarization of Mexican society, a staggering and ongoing death toll (well over 150,000 people and counting), and a pervasive climate of fear and insecurity, all the while appearing neither to stem supply to the U.S. or elsewhere nor to definitively address the cartels’ apparent connections at all levels of government.
Under Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto administration, the rhetoric has softened, but the death toll has only increased, and the capture of a number of high-profile drug capos has not seemed to slow the flow of money and illicit substances. Meanwhile, continued demand from the U.S., Europe and elsewhere and a lack of economic opportunities and sense of disenfranchisement within Mexico guarantees a workforce of people desperate enough to risk death and worse to support their families or make a name for themselves, feeding an ongoing state of crisis in Mexico.
Key Words
Some key words or terms that are common for this search:
- Prohibition
- Drug War / War on Drugs
- Mexican Drug War
- Mass Incarceration
- Narcotics
- Narcos
Recommended Books
LuchadorasCall Number: PN6790 F84 L8818 2007ISBN: 9781906653125
El Narco by
The world has watched stunned at the bloodshed in Mexico. Thirty thousand murdered since 2006; police chiefs shot within hours of taking office; mass graves comparable to those of civil wars; car bombs shattering storefronts; headless corpses heaped in town squares. And it is all because a few Americans are getting high. Or is it? The United States throws Black Hawk helicopters and drug agents at the problem. But in secret, Washington is confused and divided about what to do. Who are these mysterious figures tearing Mexico apart? they wonder. What is El Narco? El Narco draws the first definitive portrait of Mexico's drug cartels and how they have radically transformed in the last decade. El Narco is not a gang; it is a movement and an industry drawing in hundreds of thousands from bullet-ridden barrios to marijuana-growing mountains. And it has created paramilitary death squads with tens of thousands of men-at-arms from Guatemala to the Texas border. Journalist Ioan Grillo has spent a decade in Mexico reporting on the drug wars from the front lines. This piercing book joins testimonies from inside the cartels with firsthand dispatches and unsparing analysis. The devastation may be south of the Rio Grande, El Narco shows, but America is knee-deep in this conflict.
ISBN: 9781608192113Publication Date: 2011-10-25
Chasing the Scream by
New York Times Bestseller It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned in the United States. On the eve of this centenary, journalist Johann Hari set off on an epic three-year, thirty-thousand-mile journey into the war on drugs. What he found is that more and more people all over the world have begun to recognize three startling truths: Drugs are not what we think they are. Addiction is not what we think it is. And the drug war has very different motives to the ones we have seen on our TV screens for so long. InChasing the Scream, Hari reveals his discoveries entirely through the stories of people across the world whose lives have been transformed by this war. They range from a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn searching for her mother, to a teenage hit-man in Mexico searching for a way out. It begins with Hari's discovery that at the birth of the drug war, Billie Holiday was stalked and killed by the man who launched this crusade--and it ends with the story of a brave doctor who has led his country to decriminalize every drug, from cannabis to crack, with remarkable results. Chasing the Scream lays bare what we really have been chasing in our century of drug war--in our hunger for drugs, and in our attempt to destroy them. This book will challenge and change how you think about one of the most controversial--and consequential--questions of our time.
Call Number: HV4997 .C68 2001HV5825 .H234 2015.ISBN: 9781620408902Publication Date: 2015-01-20
Drug War Mexico by
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 Mexico's biggest source of revenue, as well as its most violent, with an astonishing 9,000 drug-related executions in 2009 alone.In response, Mexican president Felipe Calderón, armed with millions of dollars in military aid supplied by the US government, has attempted to launch a 'crackdown', ostensibly to combat the power of 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 increase. And yet, both the Mexican and US governments pour money into a drug war fought by an army with a track record of violating human rights and having close links to the drug cartels. In this insightful and controversial book, Watt and Zepeda throw new light on the situation, contending that the 'drug war' in Mexico is in fact the pretext for a bi-national strategy to bolster unpopular neoliberal policies, a weak yet authoritarian government and a radically unfair status quo.
Call Number: HV5840 M4 W37 2012ISBN: 9781848138889Publication Date: 2012-06-14
Narcoleaks by
A partir de una exhaustiva clasificación de los cables mexicanos de Wikileaks, el análisis de archivos nacionales y documentos clasificados del departamento de Estado norteamericano, esta investigación aborda con gran rigor y detalle uno de los temas más controvertidos de los tiempos recientes: el papel de Estados Unidos en la guerra mexicana contra el narcotráfico.
Call Number: HV6453.M6 T67 2013ISBN: 9786073113625Publication Date: 2013-03-26
Download PDF for a List of More Books on the Topic (With Call Numbers)
- Download PDF for a List of More Books on the Topic (With Call Numbers) A list of resources for the topic of Drug War. With Call Numbers. (Revised September 2016)