Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera - Böcker

The northern and southern borders and borderlands of the United States should have much in common; instead they offer mirror articulations of the complex relationships and engagements between the United States, Mexico, and Canada. In North American Borders in Comparative Perspective leading experts provide a contemporary analysis of how globalization and security imperatives have redefined the shared border regions of these three nations.This volume offers a comparative perspective on North American borders and reveals the distinctive nature first of the overportrayed Mexico-U.S. border and then of the largely overlooked Canada-U.S. border. The perspectives on either border are rarely compared. Essays in this volume bring North American borders into comparative focus; the contributors advance the understanding of borders in a variety of theoretical and empirical contexts pertaining to North America with an intense sharing of knowledge, ideas, and perspectives.Adding to the regional analysis of North American borders and borderlands, this book cuts across disciplinary and topical areas to provide a balanced, comparative view of borders. Scholars, policy makers, and practitioners convey perspectives on current research and understanding of the United States' borders with its immediate neighbors. Developing current border theories, the authors address timely and practical border issues that are significant to our understanding and management of North American borderlands.The future of borders demands a deep understanding of borderlands and borders. This volume is a major step in that direction.

The northern and southern borders and borderlands of the United States should have much in common; instead they offer mirror articulations of the complex relationships and engagements between the United States, Mexico, and Canada. In North American Borders in Comparative Perspective leading experts provide a contemporary analysis of how globalization and security imperatives have redefined the shared border regions of these three nations.This volume offers a comparative perspective on North American borders and reveals the distinctive nature first of the overportrayed Mexico-U.S. border and then of the largely overlooked Canada-U.S. border. The perspectives on either border are rarely compared. Essays in this volume bring North American borders into comparative focus; the contributors advance the understanding of borders in a variety of theoretical and empirical contexts pertaining to North America with an intense sharing of knowledge, ideas, and perspectives.Adding to the regional analysis of North American borders and borderlands, this book cuts across disciplinary and topical areas to provide a balanced, comparative view of borders. Scholars, policy makers, and practitioners convey perspectives on current research and understanding of the United States' borders with its immediate neighbors. Developing current border theories, the authors address timely and practical border issues that are significant to our understanding and management of North American borderlands.The future of borders demands a deep understanding of borderlands and borders. This volume is a major step in that direction.

Following the border formed by the Rio Grande and moving cross-country to the Pacific Ocean, Frontera is a lavishly illustrated book that offers a comprehensive examination of the nearly two thousand-mile border shared by the United States and Mexico. The region has a reputation for being a dangerous place, with US Border Patrol and Mexican authorities playing cat and mouse with smugglers and undocumented migrants, and with drug cartels inflicting unspeakable violence on the region. Frontera takes an unblinking look at those dangers, but it goes beyond stereotypes and offers the reader vivid portraits of the beauty and complexity of the area—its history, its contemporary attractions, its rich cultural life. Moving through thirty-eight municipalities on the Mexican side and twenty-four counties in the US, Frontera includes maps, key cities, points of interest, border crossings, festivals, local cuisines, and more, along with analyses of local politics and security issues. Despite its troubles, the US-Mexico border is a beautiful place, the home of welcoming and warm people. It is a land of contrasts—austere landscapes and lush oases, thunderstorms and rainbows in the desert, robust industry and ghost towns, great wealth and aching poverty. Frontera is both a feast for the eyes and an encyclopedic reference that offers readers a clear-eyed perspective on a subject of critical importance to the United States and its southern neighbor.

The rapid growth of organized crime in Mexico and the government’s response to it have driven an unprecedented rise in violence and impelled major structural economic changes, including the recent passage of energy reform. Los Zetas Inc. asserts that these phenomena are a direct and intended result of the emergence of the brutal Zetas criminal organization in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas. Going beyond previous studies of the group as a drug trafficking organization, Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera builds a convincing case that the Zetas and similar organizations effectively constitute transnational corporations with business practices that include the trafficking of crude oil, natural gas, and gasoline; migrant and weapons smuggling; kidnapping for ransom; and video and music piracy.Combining vivid interview commentary with in-depth analysis of organized crime as a transnational and corporate phenomenon, Los Zetas Inc. proposes a new theoretical framework for understanding the emerging face, new structure, and economic implications of organized crime in Mexico. Correa-Cabrera delineates the Zetas establishment, structure, and forms of operation, along with the reactions to this new model of criminality by the state and other lawbreaking, foreign, and corporate actors. Since the Zetas share some characteristics with legal transnational businesses that operate in the energy and private security industries, she also compares this criminal corporation with ExxonMobil, Halliburton, and Blackwater (renamed “Academi” and now a Constellis company). Asserting that the elevated level of violence between the Zetas and the Mexican state resembles a civil war, Correa-Cabrera identifies the beneficiaries of this war, including arms-producing companies, the international banking system, the US border economy, the US border security/military-industrial complex, and corporate capital, especially international oil and gas companies.