A Crooked Gauntlet
More than a hundred Central Americans —including 21 minors and three infants—had been trapped in a forced labor camp in the city of Tuxtla Gutiérrez until discovered by Mexican…
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Country: Mexico
Criminal Organizations and Enterprise
There is nothing new about organized crime. Nor is there anything new about criminal violence. What is new—at least for Mexico—is the scale. In Mexico, homicide had been falling …
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Maya Roads, One Woman’s Journey Among the People of the Rainforest
The tropical forest within the southern Mexican state of Chiapas and the Guatemalan northern state of Petén, what Mary Jo McConahay calls the “jungle cradle” of ancient civilization in her remarkable page-turning book, Maya Roads, One Woman’s Journey Among the People of the Rainforest, is today threatened with destruction by what can be called the modern barbarism of drug trafficking and deforestation. …
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Mexico’s Indigenous Communities: Their Lands and Histories, 1500-2010
Mexico’s Indigenous Communities: Their Lands and Histories, 1500-2010 lives up to its ambitious title. In only 291 pages of dense near-encyclopedic history, Ruiz Medrano orders an enormous corpus of facts and arguments to provide a Post-Conquest review of indigenous…
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Juárez in the Shadows
It is ten minutes before midnight; I’ve already reported on ten crimes in fewer than six hours. Today, fifteen people have died. To remember the exact number of muertitos—little dead people, in the very particular journalistic jargon of Ciudad Juárez—I have to look at my notes…
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