Rotella, the Los Angeles Times bureau chief for South America, tells his alarming story of drug lords' domination of the US/Mexico border region by focusing on the frustrations and martyrdom of Mexican reformers. Mexico's marijuana and cocaine smuggling rings are flourishing and expanding into other kinds of criminal activity. A US crackdown on illegal immigrant entries along the border has allowed crime syndicates to triple the price of a guided border crossing, while would-be migrants are more exposed to theft and death during their journey. Money buys power, and with all this new cash, the influence of Mexico's organized crime families is expanding at a frightening rate. When drug lords do get arrested, Rotella suggests, it's only because police are acting at the request of a rival mob. Meanwhile, a string of assassinations goes unsolved. Rotella takes a look at the conspiracy theories surrounding the 1994 murders of Cardinal Juan JÇsus Posadas Ocampo and presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, and suggests that the whole truth may never be known. Perhaps more disturbing is the mounting list of other assassinations—of those judicial reformers who were clearly killed because they couldn't be bought off. The reformist with a pragmatic approach is likely to survive the longest in this staggeringly corrupt political and judicial system, it would seem, and Rotella finds such a pragmatist in Duarte, a prison warden who cautiously negotiates with gangsters to replace their lavish prison condominiums with a rehabilitation training center. Yet like the brash police chief, the crusading prosecutor, and other agents of positive change whom Rotella profiles, Duarte too is eventually shot in a gangland-style assassination. Rotella admits that he and the many experts on the drug crisis quoted here are at a loss for solutions. But he makes it clear that Mexico's transition to greater electoral democracy will be threatened if more heroes don't step forward.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-393-04113-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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