Wolf Boys
Two American Teenagers and Mexico's Most Dangerous Drug Cartel
-
- S/ 52.90
-
- S/ 52.90
Descripción editorial
The tale of two American teenagers recruited as killers for a Mexican cartel, and the Mexican American detective who realizes the War on Drugs is unstoppable. “A hell of a story…undeniably gripping.” (The New York Times)
In this astonishing story, journalist Dan Slater recounts the unforgettable odyssey of Gabriel Cardona. At first glance, Gabriel is the poster-boy American teenager: athletic, bright, handsome, and charismatic. But the ghettos of Laredo, Texas—his border town—are full of smugglers and gangsters and patrolled by one of the largest law-enforcement complexes in the world. It isn’t long before Gabriel abandons his promising future for the allure of juvenile crime, which leads him across the river to Mexico’s most dangerous drug cartel: Los Zetas. Friends from his childhood join him and eventually they catch the eye of the cartel’s leadership.
As the cartel wars spill over the border, Gabriel and his crew are sent to the States to work. But in Texas, the teen hit men encounter a Mexican-born homicide detective determined to keep cartel violence out of his adopted country. Detective Robert Garcia’s pursuit of the boys puts him face-to-face with the urgent consequences and new security threats of a drug war he sees as unwinnable.
In Wolf Boys, Slater takes readers on a harrowing, often brutal journey into the heart of the Mexican drug trade. Ultimately though, Wolf Boys is the intimate story of the lobos: teens turned into pawns for the cartels. A nonfiction thriller, it reads with the emotional clarity of a great novel, yet offers its revelations through extraordinary reporting.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Slater (Love in a Time of Algorithms) offers a grim, gripping account of the lives of two boys caught up in the drug wars. In a dramatic prologue set in 2006, the reader is introduced to 19-year-old Gabriel Cardona, a soldier for the drug cartel known as the Company, who is in the midst of pep talk with a neophyte hit man. But before Gabriel and his comrade can go into action, he's arrested. Slater then backtracks to the mid-1990s in Laredo, Tex., "the poorest city in America" and Gabriel's hometown, to delineate how Gabriel went from an ordinary child to a murderous would-be manager for narcotics traffickers. Young Gabriel is depicted as a model student with perfect attendance and advanced reading skills. The details of his childhood are made all the more poignant by knowing where he will end up. The book also provides the story of one of Gabriel's cohorts, known as Bart because of his resemblance to the Simpsons character. Bart, who "carried the rage of a poor boy whose family couldn't feed him," turned to gang life at the age of 12, and ended up killing more than 30 people. Slater effectively alternates between Gabriel's perspective (based off extensive correspondence with his subject) and that of dedicated cop Robert Garcia, who worked tirelessly to capture and convict the two young men. Slater ends on a depressing note as he is led to troubling conclusions "about evil as a natural product of human consciousness." Slater's effective use of historical context, including tracing the roots of the Mexican drug trade back to the 16th century following the conquest of the Aztec Empire, elevates this above similar accounts..
