Amexica: War Along the Borderline - Couverture souple

Vulliamy, Ed

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1847921299 ISBN 13 : 9781847921291

Editeur : Bodley Head, 2010

Synopsis

'As dawn broke over the vast desert, the body was still hanging beneath the overpass, having been suspended from it - decapitated and dangling by a rope tied around the armpits - at 4.30am. The sun rose about two hours after it had been suspended from the concrete 'Bridge of Dreams', throwing rays like firelight across rush-hour traffic and discarded American school buses carrying workers to sweatshop factories. And it was still there another hour later - swaying, headless, hands cuffed behind its back, in the cold early morning wind of Ciudad Juárez, the most dangerous city in the Americas, probably the world.'

Amexica tells the harrowing story of the extraordinary terror unfolding along the US-Mexico border - 'a country in its own right, which belongs to both the US and Mexico, yet neither' - as the narco-war escalates to a fever pitch there.

In over twenty years as a journalist at the Guardian and the Observer, Ed has covered organized crime in Italy, the war in Bosnia, and the aftermath of 9/11 in America, and Iraq. He has been a war reporter all over the world, and yet nowhere more has the violence commanded such revulsion and compulsion as it does along the borderline. 'The borderline has always drawn me in, and never lets me go - not least because it is a land of such dichotomy and contrast - of love and violence, tribulation and opportunity.'

The book documents a kind of road trip that Vulliamy undertakes in mid-2009 along the border itself - from the Pacific coast to the Gulf of Mexico - Tijuana to Brownsville. Along the way, facets of the crisis - police corruption and the system of 'plazas'; the smuggling of people, weapons and drugs back and forth across the border; middle-class flight from Mexico as violence escalates; the interrelated economies of drugs and the 'Maquiladora' factories; the harrowing, systematic murders of young women in Juarez; the insatiable market for drugs inside and outside of Mexico - are illuminated through everyday people and places.

This is the story of a place and people in time of war as much as the war itself. Vulliamy paints a street-level portrait of a place, shows us the institutional roots of the chaos and violence that plagues it, and makes us care about its very survival.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Ed Vulliamy is a journalist and author who has worked more than thirty years as an international reporter with the Guardian and Observer. He won all the major awards in British journalism for his coverage of the Balkan wars between 1991-5, and discovered the gulag of concentration camps operated by the Bosnian Serbs in the Northwest Krajina region of Bosnia. As a result, he became the first reporter to testify at a war crimes tribunal since those at Nuremberg, giving evidence in nine trials at the ICTY in The Hague.

Vulliamy currently specialises in organised crime, narco-traffic and laundering of drug money, winning the 2013 Ryszard Kapusinski Prize for Literary Reportage for his book Amexica: War Along The Borderline. He was shortlisted for the same prize in 2016 for The War Is Dead Long Live the War, Bosnia: The Reckoning. He also writes about football, painting and music. His most recent publication is a memoir through music, When Words Fail: A Life With Music, War and Peace.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Bodley Head
• Date d'édition: 2010
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1847921299
• ISBN 13: 9781847921291
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 368
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible