Amexica
War Along the Borderline
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
Between the interiors of the USA and Mexico lies a borderland: Amexica.
A terrain astride the world’s busiest frontier, teeming with migrants, factory workers, narcos, tourists, heroines and heroes, ranchers and rogues.
A border both porous and harsh, criss-crossed by a million people every day.
A warzone, where a grotesque pastiche of the globalised economy plays out in a tragedy of unfathomable violence as drug cartels and state forces face off.
Amexica is a journey through the cartels’ reach into the borderland’s daily life: through migrant camps, drug-smuggling ‘plazas’, rehab centres, sweatshop factories and the mass-murder of women. Updated with new material ten years on it paints an essential portrait of a country under siege - and testament to people who carry on regardless.
‘Previously, to understand the ruthlessness, ambition and impact of today's global criminals, you needed to read Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah and Misha Glenny's McMafia. Now, you also need to read Vulliamy's Amexica’ The Sunday Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This engrossing travelogue traces the fraught Mexican-American border, where the collision of affluence and poverty is mediated by an ultraviolent narco-traficante culture. Vulliamy (Seasons in Hell) journeys from Tijuana, where the ruthless Arellano F lix Organization cartel battles rivals, to the Atlantic coast, where the even more ruthless Zetas cartel, armed with grenades and rocket launchers, battles the Mexican army and besieges whole cities. In the middle is Ju rez, the world s most violent town, an anarchy of contending cartels, street gangs, and their police and military allies, where massacres, beheadings, and grisly sex murders are routine. Vulliamy s border isn t all drugs and killings; it s also narco-corrida songs that celebrate drugs and killings, the American gun industry that feeds off drug money and enables the killings, and a presiding quasi-Catholic cult of Sant ssima Muerte (holiest death). The author s take isn t entirely coherent. Sometimes the border is the problem, an artificial rupture that provokes turf battles over prime smuggling sites; sometimes, presented less persuasively, the lawless border is just a symptom of global capitalism, like the desperate illegal immigrants and exploited maquiladora workers (in foreign-owned low-wage factories along the border) he profiles. Although not especially deep, Vulliamy s is a vivid, disturbing dispatch from a very wild frontier.
