Human rights along the U.S.-Mexico border : gendered violence and insecurity /

The US-Mexico borderlands are, according to writers, an open wound that never heals. The region, with its old contradictory legacies of poverty and inequality to the south and wealth and dreams to the north, is currently engulfed in an unfathomable outbreak of violence. This collection analyzes the violence and violation of human rights on the border from a multidisciplinary perspective. Militarization of the northern states by the Mexican government, increased security on the US side, criminalization of undocumented immigrants by US law enforcement, and militias' stints of terror have coalesced in the escalation of violence to unprecedented proportions. The murder of young female maquiladora workers in Ciudad Juarez, which began in the early 1990s, continues unabated and unpunished. The daily occurring drug wars, and kidnappings and assassinations of journalists, social activists, policemen, and politicians, that followed have created confusion and fear in the transborder population. The work does not stop at simply reporting murder, corruption, and impunity cases. Quite to the contrary, the final chapter is a proactive discussion of possible democratic solutions with a transborder approach that involves all fronterizos. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division graduates and above. M. S. Arbelaez University of Nebraska at Omaha