Review by Choice Review
This book joins a spate of other new books by journalists and academics to tell more stories about the 2,000-mile frontier that stretches from Tijuana/San Diego on the Pacific Coast to Matamoros/Brownsville on the Gulf of Mexico, passing through Juarez/El Paso and Nuevo Laredo/Laredo along the meandering and changeable Rio Grande River. Journalist Vulliamy takes readers on an unforgettable journey across this rugged and haunting terrain of mountains and deserts to meet all sorts of ordinary Mexicans, and an occasional North American, who are impacted in some way by the escalating drug trade with its shifting cast of colorful drug lords, the rampant violence it has engendered and feeds on, and the profound corruption of Mexican officials (politicians, police, and military) whose venality and fear sustain it. He intercuts this main narrative with other stories along the borderline: illegal Mexican migrants dying in the desert, women factory workers who are mysteriously murdered, and hard-living truck drivers who ferry the $367 billion annual worth of NAFTA commerce as well as drugs, arms, and other contraband. He suggests that, along with the drug trade, they are all interrelated parts of the same war unleashed on the borderlands--"Amexica"--by late capitalist globalization. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. E. Hu-DeHart Brown University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
THE veteran British journalist Ed Vulliamy is visiting Ciudad Juárez, epicenter of Mexican border violence, when a massacre occurs at a drug rehabilitation clinic in an impoverished neighborhood on the outskirts of town. The year before, more than 1,700 people had been killed in Ciudad Juárez; in the previous week, 75 were slain, including one who was beheaded. Ciudad Juárez has the world's highest homicide rate. And drug gangs armed with military-grade weapons usually reserved for professional soldiers all but control the city. The day after the massacre, Vulliamy rushes to the clinic and produces a gruesome report. He gets into the building by climbing onto the roof and down into a courtyard. The corpses have been removed but nothing else disturbed, and pools of blood are drying in every room, connected by the killers' boot prints. Vulliamy follows the tracks and reconstructs the crime, something he assures us the local police will never do. This victim, one of 10, escaped through that door before being shot down over there in a hail of AK-47 bullets. Another poor soul's handbag (filled with Christian magazines), together with her CD collection (Guns N' Roses and Radiohead), memorializes her and captures the essence of the modest facility. At one point, an S.U. V. with tinted windows appears outside the center on an otherwise deserted street. Vulliamy, locked in the building, can't run, but after a few heart-pounding minutes, the surveillants drive away. It could be a scene from a police thriller, and Vulliamy, with a mix of irony and pathos, writes like a latter-day Graham Greene - the detached foreign observer who has seen it all yet really cares. It's a great moment. The only problem: In the end, we don't actually learn what was being played out in the clinic, or why. Why would international criminal syndicates that control entire cities and rake in billions of dollars a year in narcotics profits want to kill a few hapless addicts in a shabby neighborhood shelter? Why does this sort of senseless violence seem to be a hallmark of the Mexican drug war? Vulliamy has lots of theories about the killings at the clinic and the wider war. But they fail to come across as much more than that - theories, and often wildly conspiratorial, politically driven theories at that. The drug war, Vulliamy believes, is a result of global capitalism. Its perpetrators are just like multinational C.E.O.'s, except when they're like pop-star wannabes, killing to "wear the right clothes, . . . chatter on the latest mobile phone . . . and drive the right S.U. V." Or maybe, as in other chapters, they're the product of traditional Latino machismo gone wrong in the wake of women's empowerment. As for the clinics, one theory cited at length by Vulliamy is that it's really the authorities, not the narcos, who are targeting neighborhood shelters - part of a campaign "cleansing" society of "undesirables," including impoverished addicts. "Amexica; War Along the Borderline" is structured as a "journey." Having covered the border off and on for many years, Vulliamy makes one more trip for this book, traveling west to east, from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, visiting some unforgettable places along the 2,100-mile frontier. He travels to a Mexican village where migrant workers wait to hook" up with coyotes, the smugglers who will help them navigate the deadly trek to Arizona. He visits the grimy slums, or colonias, that ring the industrial assembly plants, known as maquiladoras, that run along the south side of the border between Texas and Mexico. And in addition to the usual mayors, priests, ex-priests and human rights lawyers well known to every journalist who covers the borderland, he seeks and finds an array of less familiar informants. The most moving are the parents of the narco-victims (who are often also narcoperpetrators). Memorable, too, are the truck drivers, Mexican and American, he meets outside the great binational trucking hub, Laredo. Along the way, more than one suspicious S.U.V. threatens. Vulliamy deflects the advances of several prostitutes. He tries buying drugs from some loitering youths in order to have a conversation about the syndicate they work for. And then there's the exassassin, big Oliver (that's not his real name), who reveals more than he means to about what it felt like to do his former job. Again, that problem: Vulliamy never gets to the bottom of anything - in part because he doesn't have to. After all, a man on a journey can always move on; indeed, he must. There's no time for any but a superficial analysis or, maybe more important, for an extended narrative, which might prove or disprove the author's hypotheses. Perhaps most damaging, as a travel writer Vulliamy is free to pick and choose his sources from among the people he meets on the road. And though the people he cites are often fascinating, most if not all of them share his worldview. Whether in the United States or Mexico, whether former border officials or ex-assassins, they are consistently anti-authority, anti-capitalist and suspicious of the very concept of nationality, not to mention law enforcement. And because, apart from the anecdotes he tells, Vulliamy cites little evidence, we have to take their word for whatever explanations they give him. To be fair, the narco cartels taking over large parts of Mexico and warring with the army are poorly understood at best. (The former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castañeda provoked fierce debate by questioning both nations' most basic assumptions - including the belief that violence was escalating before the Mexican government began using the army three years ago to attack the cartels.) And Vulliamy's sources aren't wrong. That old social mores are fraying, that gender relations have been upended by Mexican economic development, that young people (including yeung drug runners) see status in owning the latest cellphone and S.U.V. - all this is indisputable and surely plays into the culture of the cartels. It's also true that the two halves of the territory Vulliamy calls Amexica, north and south of the frontier, resemble each other in many ways. BUT all this raises a critical question. If capitalism is the villain, as Vulliamy claims, why has it and the changing mores that come with it produced the deadly cancer of narcoviolence and corruption on the Mexican side but not in the United States. (After all, El Paso, Ciudad Juarez's "twin city," is the third-safest American city of its size.) Vulliamy doesn't ask, let alone answer, this question - because he puts so little store by the nation state or the borders that define nations. He doesn't seem to grasp that in addition to regulating who lives and who travels where, frontiers create political communities, and that the liberty he cherishes is a product of the very distinctions he mistrusts. Just how much Mexican cartel violence is spilling over into the United States? That too ts a critical question - for the borderland and for American immigration politics - yet it's one more issue Vulliamy doesn't nail down. Like all good travel writing, "Amexica" is vivid, colorful and exotic, filled with striking vignettes and larger-than-life characters. But when it comes to policy, Vulliamy is an unreliable guide because he has so little interest in it. After all, if the root problem is capitalism, and all the underlying values and attitudes that come with it, there is only so much any government can or can be expected to do. Why would international criminal syndicates want to kill a few hapless drug addicts in a shabby shelter? Tamar Jacoby is president of ImmigrationWorks USA, a national federation of small-business owners in favor of immigration reform.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 21, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Journalist Vulliamy has long reported on life along the border between the U.S. and Mexico, writing about international trucking, sweatshop factories, and illegal immigration. In this compelling book, he brings together the economic and cultural factors that have led to escalating violence along the border in territory that seems not to be under the control of either government. Traveling the frontier from the Pacific coast to the Gulf of Mexico, he interviewed drug dealers, law enforcers, and ordinary citizens caught in the gory violence and material excess surrounding narco-trafficking. Glorified in narcocorrido music and American film, drug traffickers are now involved in smuggling illegal immigrants, charging taxes to coyotes and ransom to families of immigrants kidnapped once they cross the border. He chronicles startling violence from a soupmaker who dissolves dead bodies in lye and acid to young traffickers who worship a culture of death that combines Catholicism and pre-Columbian faiths. Vulliamy examines the tough Arizona anti-immigration law and other immigration policies that are only now beginning to recognize that narco-trafficking can no longer be seen as the problem and responsibility of Mexico alone.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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 Felix 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 Juarez, 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 Santissima 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. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Vulliamy (former correspondent, The Observer, UK) spent decades reporting from the volatile U.S.-Mexico border. In 2009, he set out on a journey from San Diego, CA/Tijuana, Mexico, to Brownsville, TX/Matamoros, Mexico, in order to understand better this vast borderland. Through his travels, we meet some of the people who inhabit both sides of the boundary: innocents who struggle to survive everyday against a backdrop of poor prospects and raging violence; politicians, police and military who either struggle against the drug violence or are complicit in it; reporters who must balance risking their lives against fair and honest journalism; and the victims of all the violence, living and dead, and those who struggle to preserve their memories. Vulliamy writes as a war correspondent, covering a "post-political" war, with each casualty appearing more senseless than the one previous. VERDICT This is a compelling look at the growing problems along the southwestern borderland. Its problems grab headlines daily and will likely continue for the foreseeable future. Recommended for all interested readers and all libraries where there is a strong interest in border and immigration issues.-Mike Miller, Austin P.L., TX (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A gutsy international journalist narrates life and death along the U.S.-Mexican border.Former Guardian reporter Vulliamy (Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia's War, 1994) divides his time between Arizona andLondon. While writing about America for British readers, the author became fascinated with the mingling of national cultures along the 2,100 milelong and 50 milewide swath he terms "Amexica." He insists that it is not merely a clever word creation but a historically valid term whose meaning reaches back to Aztec cultures. Because of illegal narcotics moving from Mexico into the United States and more-or-less legal guns for the narcotraficantesmoving the other direction, Amexica is a constant battlefield marked by thousands of murders, rapes and business-related shakedowns. However, as Vulliamy documents through hundreds of individuals featured in the book, the battlefield is also teeming with everyday life. The mixture meansa minorityof residents in Amexica suffer fear and joy simultaneously, with the joy deriving from high income. The majority of residents, however, subsist amid grinding poverty. Those who can find regular employment tend to labor in sweatshops along the border run by exploitative multinational corporations that have transferred many of the jobs from the continental United States, devastating cities north of the border. The author writes lyrically, with the enticing rhythm of his sentences contrasting jarringly with the degradation of humanity found on nearly every page, and Vulliamy generously credits authors who have documented the border in previous books in both English and Spanish. Some sections of the book may be familiarespecially the hundreds of murders of poverty-stricken single women around CiudadJurez, their bodies left to rot in the desert while law-enforcement agencies express bafflementbut most of the narrative feels fresh because it is based so heavily on Vulliamy's own wanderings.An impressively rendered, nightmare-inducing account.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
