LOW DOWN Someone has a score to settle with the Gunsmith, and after a few attempts are made on his life, Clint Adams decides to lay low in Mexico until it blows over. But he's not the only gringo taking refuge in the sleepy seaside town of Laguna Niguel. With an old friend staying close by, and a man who is going by the name Father Flynn hanging around, everyone is keeping their secrets close and their heads down. But when it gets too quiet in Laguna Niguel, the sheriff knows it can only mean one thing: trouble. OVER 15 MILLION GUNSMITH BOOKS IN PRINT!

A myth-busting, 100-year history of the Mexican drug trade that reveals how an industry founded by farmers and village healers became dominated by cartels and kingpins. The Mexican drug trade has inspired prejudiced narratives of a war between north and south, white and brown; between noble cops and vicious kingpins, corrupt politicians and powerful cartels. In this first comprehensive history of the trade, historian Benjamin T. Smith tells the real story of how and why this one-peaceful industry turned violent. He uncovers its origins and explains how this illicit business essentially built modern Mexico, affecting everything from agriculture to medicine to economics—and the country’s all-important relationship with the United States. Drawing on unprecedented archival research; leaked DEA, Mexican law enforcement, and cartel documents; and dozens of harrowing interviews, Smith tells a thrilling story brimming with vivid characters—from Ignacia “La Nacha” Jasso, “queen pin” of Ciudad Juárez, to Dr. Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, the crusading physician who argued that marijuana was harmless and tried to decriminalize morphine, to Harry Anslinger, the Machiavellian founder of the American Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who drummed up racist drug panics to increase his budget. Smith also profiles everyday agricultural workers, whose stories reveal both the economic benefits and the human cost of the trade. The Dope contains many surprising conclusions about drug use and the failure of drug enforcement, all backed by new research and data. Smith explains the complicated dynamics that drive the current drug war violence, probes the U.S.-backed policies that have inflamed the carnage, and explores corruption on both sides of the border. A dark morality tale about the American hunger for intoxication and the necessities of human survival, The Dope is essential for understanding the violence in the drug war and how decades-old myths shape Mexico in the American imagination today.

Despite the scope of the threat they pose to Mexico’s security, violent drug-trafficking organizations are not well understood, and optimal strategies to combat them have not been identified. While there is no perfectly analogous case to Mexico’s current security situation, historical case studies may offer lessons for policymakers as they cope with challenges related to violence and corruption in that country.

The brutal journey of two American kids from normal teenagers to Cartel killers. At first glance, Gabriel Cardona was the poster boy American teenager: athletic, bright, handsome and charismatic. But the streets of his border town of Laredo, Texas, were poor and dangerous, and it wasn't long before Gabriel, along with some childhood friends, abandoned his promising future for the allure of the Zetas, a drug cartel with roots in the Mexican military, boosting cars and smuggling drugs. Within a few months they were to become some of the cartel's most-feared killers: Los Lobos, The Wolf Boys. Mexican-born detective Robert Garcia had worked hard all his life, struggling to raise his family in America. As violence spilled over the border into his adopted country, Detective Garcia's pursuit of the boys and their cartel leaders would place him face to face with the terrible consequences of a war he came to see as unwinnable. Through the eyes of these young boys, whose actions and lives blended teenage normalcy with monstrous barbarity, Dan Slater takes us from the Sierra Madre mountaintops to the dusty, dark alleys of small-town Texas on a harrowing, often brutal journey into the heart of the Mexican drug trade. An astonishing, immersive, non-fiction thriller informed by extraordinary research and vivid detail, Wolf Boys uncovers the dark truth about Mexico's cartels and the tragic failure of the 'war on drugs'.

The opening of free trade agreements in the 1980s caused major economic changes in Mexico and the United States. These economic activities spawned dramatic social changes in Mexican society. One young Mexican woman, Anay Palomeque de Carrillo, rode the tumultuous wave of these economic activities from her rural home in tropical southern Mexico to the factories in the harsh desert lands of Ciudad Juárez during the early years of the city’s notorious violence. During her years as an education professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, author Elaine Hampton researched Mexican education in border factory (maquiladora) communities. On one trip across the border into Ciudad Juárez, she met Anay, who became her guide in uncovering the complexities of a factory laborer’s experiences in these turbulent times. Hampton here provides an exploration of education in an era of dramatic social and economic upheaval in rural and urban Mexico. This critical ethnographic case study presents Anay’s experiences in a series of narrative essays addressing the economic, social, and political context of her world. This young Mexican woman leads us through Ciudad Juárez in its most violent years, into women’s experiences in the factories, around family and religious commitments as well as personal illness, and on to her achievement of an education through perseverance and creativity.

“Brutally honest... a deeply extraordinary and original work.” - SEBASTIAN JUNGER. With an estimated 250,000 people killed in 15 years, the Mexican drug war is the most violent conflict in the Western world. It shows no sign of abating. In this book, Dr Teun A. Voeten analyzes the dynamics of the violence. He argues it is a new type of war called hybrid warfare: multidimensional, elusive and unpredictable, fought at different levels, with different intensities with multiple goals. The war ISIS has declared against the West is another example of hybrid warfare. Voeten interprets drug cartels as ultra-capitalist predatory corporations thriving in a neoliberal, globalized economy. They use similar branding and marketing strategies as legitimate business. He also looks at the anthropological, individual level and explains how people can become killers. Voeten compares Mexican sicarios, West African child soldiers and Western jihadis and sees the same logic of cruelty that facilitates perpetrating ‘inhumane’ acts that are in fact very human.

During the Obama years, an asymmetrical media war was waged to control the critical first draft of American history. There is no fair way to record that history without first acknowledging the war. The field of battle shaped up as follows: on the right, the alternative conservative media and the “responsible” right, occasionally working together, often working at odds; on the left, the mainstream media, the social media giants, Hollywood, Broadway, the federal bureaucracies, the national security apparatus, and what Ray Bradbury would call “firemen”—the virtual book burners, amateur and professional. Rarely at odds, these forces routinely worked together to amplify what Obama adviser Ben Rhodes famously called the White House’s “messaging campaign.” Money, resources, and power overwhelmingly favored the left, but the right had the equalizer on its side—the truth.