The Dope
The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
Discover the secret history behind the headlines.
The Mexican drug wars have inspired countless articles, TV shows and movies. From Breaking Bad to Sicario, El Chapo’s escapes to Trump’s tirades, this is a story we think we know. But there’s a hidden history to the biggest story of the twenty-first century.
The Dope exposes how an illicit industry that started with farmers, families and healers came to be dominated by cartels, kingpins and corruption. Benjamin T Smith traces an unforgettable cast of characters from the early twentieth century to the modern day, whose actions came to influence Mexico as we now know it. There’s Enrique Fernández, the borderlands trafficker who became Mexico’s first major narco and one of the first victims of the war on drugs; Eduardo ‘Lalo’ Fernández, Mexico’s most prominent heroin chemist and first major cocaine importer; Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, the brilliant doctor and Marxist who tried (and failed) to decriminalize Mexico’s drugs; and Harry Anslinger, the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics whose sensationalist strategies paved the way for U.S. interference and the extraordinary levels of violence in Mexico today.
The Dope is the epic saga of how violence and corruption came to plague modern Mexico, and the first book to make sense of the political and economic big picture of the Mexican drug wars.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The evolution of the Mexican drug trade over the past century is a sordid tale of murder, torture, corruption, and political opportunism fed by America's thirst for narcotics and the poverty of Mexico's drug-producing provinces, according to this doggedly researched history. Smith (The Mexican Press and Civil Society, 1940–1976), a professor of Latin American history at the University of Warwick, documents shifting market trends and the many ways drugs are smuggled into the U.S. (including via drones, GPS-guided submersibles, and "massive catapults"), and details corruption on both sides of the border. Staggering statistics (one estimate suggests that as many as 65,000 Mexicans were killed in "drug-related murders" from 2006 to 2012) are reinforced by harrowing descriptions of assassinations and kidnappings. Smith also depicts atrocities committed by Mexico's drug enforcement agencies, and the complicity of U.S. agents who failed to intervene. Forcefully arguing that the "war on drugs" has been a failure, Smith believes that little in Mexico will change as long as narcotics remain illegal. Though the relentless back-and-forth of cartel violence grows numbing, Smith's depth of knowledge astonishes, and his pointed critiques of U.S. drug policy hit home. This searing history leaves a mark.
