Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror

Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror PDF Author: Oliver Villar
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1583673075
Category : Cocaine industry
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Since the late 1990s, the United States has funneled billions of dollars in aid to Colombia, ostensibly to combat the illicit drug trade and State Department-designated terrorist groups. The result has been a spiral of violence that continues to take lives and destabilize Colombian society. This book asks an obvious question: are the official reasons given for the wars on drugs and terror in Colombia plausible, or are there other, deeper factors at work? Scholars Villar and Cottle suggest that the answers lie in a close examination of the cocaine trade, particularly its class dimensions. Their analysis reveals that this trade has fueled extensive economic growth and led to the development of a "narco-state" under the control of a "narco-bourgeoisie" which is not interested in eradicating cocaine but in gaining a monopoly over its production. The principal target of this effort is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who challenge that monopoly as well as the very existence of the Colombian state. Meanwhile, U.S. business interests likewise gain from the cocaine trade and seek to maintain a dominant, imperialist relationship with their most important client state in Latin America. Suffering the brutal consequences, as always, are the peasants and workers of Colombia. This revelatory book punctures the official propaganda and shows the class war underpinning the politics of the Colombian cocaine trade.

Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror

Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror PDF Author: Oliver Villar
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1583673075
Category : Cocaine industry
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Since the late 1990s, the United States has funneled billions of dollars in aid to Colombia, ostensibly to combat the illicit drug trade and State Department-designated terrorist groups. The result has been a spiral of violence that continues to take lives and destabilize Colombian society. This book asks an obvious question: are the official reasons given for the wars on drugs and terror in Colombia plausible, or are there other, deeper factors at work? Scholars Villar and Cottle suggest that the answers lie in a close examination of the cocaine trade, particularly its class dimensions. Their analysis reveals that this trade has fueled extensive economic growth and led to the development of a "narco-state" under the control of a "narco-bourgeoisie" which is not interested in eradicating cocaine but in gaining a monopoly over its production. The principal target of this effort is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who challenge that monopoly as well as the very existence of the Colombian state. Meanwhile, U.S. business interests likewise gain from the cocaine trade and seek to maintain a dominant, imperialist relationship with their most important client state in Latin America. Suffering the brutal consequences, as always, are the peasants and workers of Colombia. This revelatory book punctures the official propaganda and shows the class war underpinning the politics of the Colombian cocaine trade.

Counter-Terrorism and State Political Violence

Counter-Terrorism and State Political Violence PDF Author: Scott Poynting
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415607205
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
This edited volume aims to deepen our understanding of state power through a series of case studies of political violence arising from state ‘counter-terrorism’ strategies. The book examines how state counter-terrorism strategies are invariably underpinned by terror, in the form of state political violence. It seeks to answer three key questions: To what extent can counter-terror strategies be read as a form of state terror? How fundamental is state terror to the maintenance of a neo-liberal social order? What are the features of counter-terrorism that render it so easily reducible to state terror? In order to explore these issues, and to reach an understanding of what it means to say that the ‘war on terror’ is terror , the contributing authors draw upon case studies from a range of geographical contexts including the UK and Northern Ireland, the US and Colombia, and Sri Lanka and Tamil Eelam. Analysing these case studies from a psychological-warfare and hegemonic perspective, the book also includes two chapters from Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, which provide a global and historical context. This book will be of great interest to students of critical terrorism studies, political violence, war and conflict studies, sociology, international security and IR.

War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence

War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence PDF Author: Ronan Farrow
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393652114
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
A New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and IndieBound bestseller Finalist for the Colby Award A new, revised and updated edition of a modern classic of foreign policy, a harrowing exploration of the collapse of American diplomacy and the abdication of global leadership, by the winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service. US foreign policy is undergoing a dire transformation, forever changing America’s place in the world. Institutions of diplomacy and development are bleeding out after deep budget cuts; the diplomats who make America’s deals and protect its citizens around the world are walking out in droves. Offices across the State Department sit empty, while abroad the military-industrial complex has assumed the work once undertaken by peacemakers. We’re becoming a nation that shoots first and asks questions later. In an astonishing journey from the corridors of power in Washington, DC, to some of the most remote and dangerous places on earth—Afghanistan, Somalia, and North Korea among them—acclaimed investigative journalist Ronan Farrow illuminates one of the most consequential and poorly understood changes in American history. His firsthand experience as a former State Department official affords a personal look at some of the last standard bearers of traditional statecraft, including Richard Holbrooke, who made peace in Bosnia and died while trying to do so in Afghanistan. Drawing on recently unearthed documents, and richly informed by rare interviews with whistle-blowers, a warlord, and policymakers—including every living former secretary of state from Henry Kissinger to Hillary Clinton to Rex Tillerson—and now updated with revealing firsthand accounts from inside Donald Trump’s confrontations with diplomats during his impeachment and candid testimonials from officials in Joe Biden’s inner circle, War on Peace makes a powerful case for an endangered profession. Diplomacy, Farrow argues, has declined after decades of political cowardice, shortsightedness, and outright malice—but it may just offer America a way out of a world at war.

America's Backyard

America's Backyard PDF Author: Grace Livingstone
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1848136110
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
The United States has shaped Latin American history, condemning it to poverty and inequality by intervening to protect the rich and powerful. America’s Backyard tells the story of that intervention. Using newly declassified documents, Grace Livingstone reveals the US role in the darkest periods of Latin American history, including Pinochet’s coup in Chile, the Contra War in Nicaragua and the death squads in El Salvador. She shows how George W Bush’s administration used the War on Terror as a new pretext for intervention; how it tried to destabilise leftwing governments and push back the ‘pink tide’ washing across the Americas. America’s Backyard also includes chapters on drugs, economy and culture. It explains why US drug policy has caused widespread environmental damage yet failed to reduce the supply of cocaine, and it looks at the US economic stake in Latin America and the strategies of the big corporations. Today Latin Americans are demanding respect and an end to the Washington Consensus. Will the White House listen?

Colombia

Colombia PDF Author: Geoffrey Leslie Simons
Publisher: Saqi Books
ISBN:
Category : COLOMBIA--HISTORY--20TH CENTURY.
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Colombia has not known a single day of peace since its inception: this book is an urgent political narrative setting out to tell the tragic story of a people who, despite everything, remain unbroken.

Drug War Capitalism

Drug War Capitalism PDF Author: Dawn Paley
Publisher: AK Press
ISBN: 1849351880
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Though pillage, profit, and plunder have been a mainstay of war since pre-colonial times, there is little contemporary focus on the role of finance and economics in today's "Drug Wars"—despite the fact that they boost US banks and fill our prisons with poor people. They feed political campaigns, increase the arms trade, and function as long-term fixes to capitalism's woes, cracking open new territories to privatization and foreign direct investment. Combining on-the-ground reporting with extensive research, Dawn Paley moves beyond the usual horror stories, beyond journalistic rubbernecking and hand-wringing, to follow the thread of the Drug War story throughout the entire region of Latin America and all the way back to US boardrooms and political offices. This unprecedented book chronicles how terror is used against the population at large in cities and rural areas, generating panic and facilitating policy changes that benefit the international private sector, particularly extractive industries like petroleum and mining. This is what is really going on. This is drug war capitalism. Dawn Paley is a freelance journalist who has been reporting from South America, Central America, and Mexico for over ten years. Her writing has been published in the Nation, the Guardian, Vancouver Sun, Globe and Mail, Ms. magazine, the Tyee, Georgia Straight, and NACLA, among others.

Marijuana Boom

Marijuana Boom PDF Author: Lina Britto
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520325478
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Before Colombia became one of the world’s largest producers of cocaine in the 1980s, traffickers from the Caribbean coast partnered with American buyers in the 1970s to make the South American country the main supplier of marijuana for a booming US drug market, fueled by the US hippie counterculture. How did Colombia become central to the creation of an international drug trafficking circuit? Marijuana Boom is the story of this forgotten history. Combining deep archival research with unprecedented oral history, Lina Britto deciphers a puzzle: Why did the Colombian coffee republic, a model of Latin American representative democracy and economic modernization, transform into a drug paradise, and at what cost?

Learning Blender

Learning Blender PDF Author: Oliver Villar
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
ISBN: 013659042X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 630

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Book Description
Master the Newest Blender Techniques for Creating Amazing 3D Characters: From Design and Modeling to Video Compositing Now fully updated for Blender 2.83 LTS (Long-Term Support) and beyond, Learning Blender, Third Edition, walks you through every step of creating an outstanding 3D animated character with Blender, and then compositing it in a real video using a professional workflow. This edition covers the extensive interface changes of the software, as well as many improvements and some almost fully rewritten chapters to showcase more modern workflows. Still the only Blender tutorial to take you from preproduction to final result, this guide is perfect for both novices and those moving from other software to Blender (open source and free software). Author Oliver Villar provides full-color, hands-on chapters that cover every aspect of character creation: design, modeling, unwrapping, texturing, shading, rigging, animation, and rendering. He also walks you through integrating your animated character into a real-world video, using professional camera tracking, lighting, and compositing techniques. The rich companion website ( blendtuts.com/learning-blender-files) will help you quickly master even the most complex techniques with bonus contents like video tutorials. By the time you're done, you'll be ready to create outstanding characters for all media -- and you'll have up-to-date skills for any 3D project, whether it involves characters or not. Learn Blender's updated user interface and navigation Create your first scene with Blender and the Blender Render and Cycles render engines Organize an efficient, step-by-step pipeline to streamline workflow in any project Master modeling, unwrapping, and texturing Bring your character to life with materials and shading in both Cycles and EEVEE (the new real-time render engine included in Blender) Create your character's skeleton and make it walk Use Camera Tracking to mix 3D objects into a real-world video Transform a raw rendered scene into the final result using Blender's compositing nodes Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

Kilo

Kilo PDF Author: Toby Muse
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062905317
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
For fans of the Netflix show Narcos and readers of true crime, Kilo is a deeply reported account of life inside Colombia’s drug cartels, using unprecedented access in the cartels to trace a kilo of cocaine—from the fields where it is farmed, to the hit men who protect it, to the smuggling ships that bring it to American shores. "Toby Muse’s tautly written account of his intimate prowl through Colombia’s narco world is both compelling and unforgettable. With Kilo, cocaine now has its own Dispatches. Simply kickass.” — Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker and author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life Cocaine is glamour, sex and murder. From the badlands of Colombia, it stretches across the globe, seducing, corrupting and destroying. A product that must be produced, distributed, and protected, it is both a harbinger of violence and a source of immense wealth. Beginning in the jungles and mountains of Colombia, it filters down to countryside villages and the nightclubs of the cities, attracting money, sex, and death. Each step in the life of a kilo reveals a different criminal underworld with its own players, rules, and dangers, ranging from the bizarre to the diabolical. The killers, the drug-lords, all find themselves seduced by cocaine and trapped in her world. Seasoned war correspondent Toby Muse has witnessed each level of this underworld, fueled by the appetite for cocaine in America and Europe. In this riveting chronicle, he takes the reader inside Colombia’s notorious drug cartels to offer a never before look at the drug trade. Following a kilo of cocaine from its production in a clandestine laboratory to the smugglers who ship it abroad, he reveals the human lives behind the drug’s complicated legacy. Reporting on Colombia for the world’s most prestigious networks and publications, Muse gained unprecedented access to the extraordinary people who survive on the drug trade—farmers, smugglers, assassins—and the drug lords and their lovers controlling these multi-billion dollar enterprises. Uncovering stories of violence, sex, and money, he shows the allure and the madness of cocaine. And how the War on Drugs has been no match for cocaine. Piercing this veiled world, Kilo is a gripping portrait of a country struggling to end this deadly trade even as the riches flow. A human portrait of criminals and the shocking details of their lives, Kilo is a chilling, unforgettable story that takes you deep into the belly of the beast. Kilo includes 16 pages of photographs.

War on Terror, Inc

War on Terror, Inc PDF Author: Solomon Hughes
Publisher: Verso Trade
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Surveying the activities of private contractors in the provision of frontline mercenaries, security services guarding key installations and VIPs, prisons and law enforcement, media management, and intelligence-gathering at home and abroad, Hughes demonstrated that the private sector and its army of lobbyists and salesmen are continuously lowering the practical and moral barriers to interventions of every kind, from torture and imprisonment without trial, to blanket surveillance of the civilian population, and to outright war. Meanwhile the state is evermore evasive when it comes to taking responsibility for the practices it authorizes via agreements drawn up under a veil of 'commercial privacy, ' and remains as inept as it has ever been at procuring efficiency and value for money from its contracts.