Author: Jerry Langton
ISBN No: 978-1-1180-080
Review date: 13/12/2025
No of pages: 288
Publisher: Wiley
Publisher URL:
http://www.wiley.com
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
Might Mexico become a warlord state - not unlike Somalia? That is the suggested prospect in a new book about the drugs trade and organised crime in North America.
Extortion and kidnap, missing people, any resisters (police, the media) murdered: Mexico is in trouble. Given that, as author Jerry Langton points out early on, US President Richard Nixon declared a ‘war on drugs’ in 1972, the next 40 years look bleak – and ‘victory’ in that war, at this rate, seems unlikely. While you may feel that Mexican drug cartels are not your business, Langton shows how the corruption, and general wrong-doing that organised crime can get away with, reaches far and deep. Banks do money laundering, police and lawyers are bought (or killed). Businesses have to ramp up security, as a cost of doing business in the region.
The members of Mexico’s drug cartels are among the criminal underworld’s most ambitious and ruthless entrepreneurs. Supplanting the once dominant Colombian cartels, the Mexican drug cartels are now the major distributor of heroin and cocaine to the US and Canada. Not only have their drugs crossed north of the border, so have the cartels (in 2009, 230 active Mexican drug cartels have been reported in US cities). In Gangland, author Jerry Langton details their stranglehold on the economy and daily life of Mexico —and what it portends for the future of Mexico and its neighbours.
Offering a firsthand look from members of law enforcement, politicians, journalists, and people involved in the drug trade in Mexico and Canada, Gangland sheds a light on the multi-billion dollar industry that is the drug trade, the territorial wars, and the on-the-street reality for the United States, with the importation of narco-terrorists.
Details the emergence of the Mexican drug cartels—the transformation of middlemen who ferried drugs from Bolivia and Colombia to the US and Canada into self-styled entrepreneurs
Describes how the growth of the cartels led to violent territorial wars—with Felipe Calderon declaring war on the cartels in 2006
Offers a frightening look at how much the incursion of the drug cartels has affected American life and business—Wachovia and Bank of America have been found guilty of laundering cartel profits.
