Amexica: War Along the Borderline [Hardcover]

Ed Vulliamy (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 26, 2010

Amexica is the harrowing story of the extraordinary terror unfolding along the U.S.-Mexico border—“a country in its own right, which belongs to both the United States and Mexico, yet neither”—as the narco-war escalates to a fever pitch there.

In 2009, after reporting from the border for many years, Ed Vulliamy traveled the frontier from the Pacific coast to the Gulf of Mexico, from Tijuana to Matamoros, a journey through a kaleidoscopic landscape of corruption and all-out civil war, but also of beauty and joy and resilience. He describes in revelatory detail how the narco gangs work; the smuggling of people, weapons, and drugs back and forth across the border; middle-class flight from Mexico and an American celebrity culture that is feeding the violence; the interrelated economies of drugs and the maquiladora factories; the ruthless, systematic murder of young women in Ciudad Juarez. Heroes, villains, and victims—the brave and rogue police, priests, women, and journalists fighting the violence; the gangs and their freelance killers; the dead and the devastated—all come to life in this singular book.

Amexica takes us far beyond today’s headlines. It is a street-level portrait, by turns horrific and sublime, of a place and people in a time of war as much as of the war itself.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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 Félix 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 Juárez, 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 Santíssima 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.
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From Booklist

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. --Vanessa Bush

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 26, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374104417
• ISBN-13: 978-0374104412
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #910,068 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating, and much needed, perspective January 31, 2011

By Sylvia Longmire

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I'm a professional consultant, freelance writer, and author on Mexico's drug war, so I've read a LOT of books about this subject. These range from more scholarly works by academics like Dr George Grayson, to journalistic tomes by Charles Bowden and Malcolm Beith. I have to say, this has been my favorite book so far, if only because it makes the drug war seem so real and personal.

To give you an idea of how the book is set up, Vulliamy starts at the western end of the border in the Tijuana/San Diego area, and works his way east. During his journey, he meets and interviews people on both sides of the border to get their perspectives on the impact the drug war has had on their lives, and what the region known as "Amexica" means to them. He talks to American law enforcement, Mexican drug addicts and priests, businessmen and the unemployed...you name it. His chapter on Ciudad Juárez does an amazing job of capturing the chaos and hopelessness of the city - how no one knows anymore who's doing the killing, the rise in local drug addiction, the shockingly severe shortage of schools, the daily abandonment of children by parents who work in the maquiladoras, and the few souls who still hold out some hope.

The author's journey doesn't have a formal structure, but that's one of the things I liked about it. He does arrange his stories as he travels from west to east, but the stories themselves are so incredibly engrossing that you just can't wait to see who he meets next, and what his or her story is going to be. It's at times eye-opening, funny, sad, shocking, and heart-wrenching. If you're looking for a source for an academic research piece, this isn't it.... However, if you want to learn more about the drug war from the personal perspectives of people on the ground on both sides of the border and from all walks of life, this book is for you. Read more ›

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars What it offers trumped by what it lacks March 8, 2011

By T Campbell

Format:Hardcover

Picking up Amexica: War Along the Borderline by journalist Ed Vulliamy, I was initially excited, thinking here might be an accessible book by a veteran journalist capable of explaining to the English-speaking public just what is going on in Mexico and why. Naďve, I know. My suspicions were raised as early as the second paragraph when the author mistranslated the extremely common Spanish-language sign-off Atte: as Look out. Atte: is actually an abbreviation of Atentamente, simply meaning Sincerely. Get something that basic that wrong that early in the book, and I knew I was in for a ride - downhill.

In short, Amexica is part travelogue, part sympathetic recounting of the devastation of the militarization of the war on drugs, and part "look at what daring stuff this white guy did." Vulliamy gets some things right - pointing out the fact that the drug trade is just another form of transnational capitalism; examining the U.S. role in arming the cartels and laundering their money; describing the toll neoliberalism has taken on Mexico in terms of migration and maquiladoras; and putting names and faces on some the 35,000+ dead in Felipe Calderón's disastrous so-called fight against organized crime. The main problem is that all of this is carried out superficially and with a lack of historical context and political analysis, along with omissions and errors. As such, if you want to know how things are right now in the borderlands, reading this book might be somewhat useful. If you want to know why things are they way they are right now, this book will not help you.

In glossing over the past to get to the juicy, bloody present, Vulliamy does his readers a disservice.... There is no discussion of how the war on drugs as a concept emerged in the Nixon-era and developed as a strategy of population containment and oppression, a politically expedient and enormously profitable endeavor that since 2001 has coalesced well with the rhetoric of the war on terror and Bush and Obama's war on migrants. The end of 70 years of PRI rule in Mexico on the federal level, dismantling the pre-existing arrangements with the drug cartels just as they were getting more powerful due to the collapse of the Colombian cartels, goes nearly unexamined. Similarly ignored is the role that Calderón's legitimacy played in the launching of a military offensive inside of Mexico. As he fraudulently arrived at the presidency, the drug war was a means of instilling his regime with legitimacy. Scant attention is paid to the Mérida Initiative, the U.S.'s billion dollar military aid package to Mexico, nor to how the same police and military forces receiving the aid and executing the "drug war" are also involved in large scale human rights violations, massive corruption, and the severe repression of Mexico's social movements - all with impunity. Linking these factors to the current events that this book covers is essential for any understanding of the situation.

Adding to the contextual shortcomings of the book are the various errors and poor translations. It's stunning his editors either in the U.K. or U.S. did not hire a translator to verify his Spanish - or at least open a Spanish-English dictionary. Some of the more humorous examples: He translates gabacho as someone from Europe and gringo as someone from the U.S. (Both mean someone from the U.S., Vulliamy would simply be a güero); and translating fresa - in reference to someone who dresses or acts bourgeois - literally as strawberry. Regarding the facts, some examples of errors: The claim that Carlos Salinas privatized communally-held land in the 1980s. (He only arrived at the presidency in December of 1988, privatization did not begin until after the 1992 reform of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution in preparation for NAFTA.) Vulliamy's statement that the Arrellano Félix Organization intentionally killed Cardinal Posadas Ocampo in 1993 in order to target the Catholic Church. (Initial investigations showed they confused Posadas' convoy with that of a rival cartel leader. More recent investigations indicate the assassination was likely state-sponsored.) Or also his writing that "the only investigation of its kind" into Los Zetas penetration into Monterrey was carried out by a Los Angeles Times reporter, ignoring those done by Mexican journalists or Kristin Bricker for Narco News.

In sum, Vulliamy's book leaves much to be desired and that which is present should be cautiously digested. Even if it took a bit longer to put out, a more thoroughly-considered and better edited version of this book would have made a much more useful contribution to this politically-manufactured crisis facing Mexico and increasingly the U.S. Read more ›

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Globalization February 27, 2011

By Professor Joseph L. McCauley

Format:Hardcover

I learned a lot from this discussion of recent violent events along the border from Calif. to Tx. The author presents drug running, the murders of women in Juarez, and illegal entry in the context of globalization, provokes thoughts. Massive immigration to the border was spurred by the Maquiladoras there. Globalization based on cheap labor.

My wife gave me the book for Christmas. I read it on our odyssey along and south of I-10 from Houston to Ajo, Az. during the school break. We talked with a border agent in El Paso at the rr tracks, with people in se Az. where a rancher was recently killed, with a park ranger at Apache Pass, and with a Tonho O'odham Indian in sw Az. on the Devil's Highway. All the while reading the book. Certainly, from the Indian standpoint the border makes no sense. We'd slept in van Horn before El Paso del Norte. The border agent (who removed his name badge for a photo) told us that Tommy Lee Jones ha a ranch near van Horn and doesn't like the border patrol. He recommended Jones' film 'The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada', and 'Bordertown', and said that the border is far worse than is depicted in (book, movie) 'No Country for Old Men'. I recommend all of those, plus a good, slow drive along and south of I-10 from Texas through Azizona. The wild, untamed landscape will grow on you, and you will begin to glimpse the vastly diverse viewpoints of the different people who populate that wild, sparse, mountainous and desert region.

Don't avoid the drive through the O'odham reservation from Ajo to Sells, where the signs in the modern, well-stocked supermarket in Sells are in the Indian language. At Apache Pass there was sympathy on the part of the park rangers for the Apache. They told us that Cochise used to come down and play cards with the U.S.... Cavalry before he was framed. In the O'odham nation, the Apache are not heroes. The region is complex and dangerous on the American side of 'the border'. Read more ›