Kilo
Life and Death Inside the Secret World of the Cocaine Cartels
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- USD 10.99
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- USD 10.99
Descripción editorial
Join the deadly journey of cocaine, from farmer to kingpin.
Meet Maria. Maria doesn’t see herself as a criminal. She’s just a farmhand picking the crops that never lose money: coca.
This is Cachote. He prays to the Virgin of the Assassins that his bullets find their target. If he misses, he’ll have to answer to the cartel who pay him to take out their enemies.
Pedro works the coca labs. But this laboratory is hidden deep in the jungle, and he turns coca leaves in to coca paste, a step just short of cocaine.
And finally, here is Alex. Alex is a drug-lord and decides where the drug goes next: into Europe or the US. And he wields the power of life and death over everyone around him.
In Kilo, Toby Muse takes us deeper into the drug trade than ever before, following a kilo of cocaine as it travels from its origins to the street. On the ground in the drug war for over a decade, earning the trust of those involved on all sides, Toby Muse takes us with him through the endless blood-soaked horror and economic logic at every level of the journey of the world’s most alluring and dangerous drug. We come to meet and ultimately understand the tainted personal psychology and motivations of each player in this dark El Dorado.
But there are no winners here. Anyone who tries to hold the power of the ‘white goddess’ cocaine is ultimately undone, violently stripped of their humanity, their souls and their lives in this endless, pointless dance of death.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Muse's beautifully written debut takes a deep dive into the Colombian drug trade. In fascinating detail, Muse describes how leaves harvested from the coca fields in the nation's mountains and jungles go to rustic labs, where workers produce coca paste. Then it's on to the narco-militias, who turn the paste into bricks of cocaine and sell them to drug traffickers in Medell n. Distribution efforts involve shipping massive amounts of cocaine via drug mules via airplanes, as well as speed boats and semi-subs that play nautical cat-and-mouse with the U.S. Coast Guard. At great personal risk, the author interviewed Colombians involved in the trade dealers, prostitutes, and sicarios (the paid assassins who keep the law of the drug trade); their intimate stories form the heart of the book. A young Medell n coke trafficker, Alex, is surprisingly open about his life of crime, and while he's far from sympathetic, readers will feel sad when he's gunned down at a birthday party in front of his fianc . In the bleak epilogue, Muse offers hope, but sees no end to the "forever war on drugs." This gripping account will linger in the mind of readers.
