An eye-opening work of journalism that largely avoids glamorizing its subjects’ criminal activity.
An evenhanded look at notorious women drug runners in Latin American cartels.
As a feminist journalist, Bonello, Mexico City–based senior editor for Latin America at VICE World News, is acutely aware of gender stereotypes held by both the drug cartels as well as the mostly male journalists who cover the narcos and don’t question those stereotypes. “The patriarchy of the cartels seems very real,” she writes, “but to assume women don’t have a capacity for violence or a thirst for power and status is just another narrow gender stereotype that grossly misunderstands and underestimates women and their role in the social order.” Bonello finds that the women she profiles (mostly now in prison) largely come from poor backgrounds with few job opportunities. Most got involved in drug cartels because of male family members, and they found that they enjoyed the thrill of the work. In brief chapters, the author describes the lives of a variety of fascinating characters, including Honduran Digna Valle, the matriarch in the Valle family cocaine cartel, which moves drugs from Guatemala to the U.S. Arrested in 2018, she evidently informed on her family members and got a relatively light sentence. “Women have been movers and shakers in the narco business since the drug war began,” writes the author, and she looks into new research into María Dolores Estévez Zuleta, aka Lola “La Chata,” an early Mexican cartel leader; women involved in the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gangs; and Emma Coronel, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s wife. “She must have known from the day in 2007,” writes Bonello, “when she first met El Chapo on a dusty ranch dance floor in the tiny town of Canelas, when she was a seventeen-year-old aspiring beauty queen, that she might one day be the most famous woman in Sinaloa.” Throughout this intriguing text, the author busts the myth that these narcas are mere victims.
An eye-opening work of journalism that largely avoids glamorizing its subjects’ criminal activity.Pub Date: July 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780807007044
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
Not for the faint of heart, but true-crime aficionados will appreciate this fast-paced, illuminating report.
An intimate investigative account of a notorious serial killer focused on the making of his teenage apprentices.
Acclaimed forensic psychologist Ramsland, author of Confession of a Serial Killer, Beating the Devil’s Game, and dozens of other true-crime books, teams up with investigative journalist and documentarian Ullman to add materially to the 50-year-old story of the “Candy Man” killer, Dean Corll, who was shot and killed in 1973. The authors examine the involvement of David Brooks and Elmer Wayne Henley Jr. as apprentices, performing Corll’s “grunt work,” which consisted of the abduction, torture, murder, and burial of other teenage boys. The authors explore the devious strategies predators employ when choosing their “apprentices” and grooming them. Brooks and Henley were both ready targets for Corll, but Henley, the book’s primary character, is especially noteworthy, both in terms of his vulnerability and willing participation as a primary accomplice to a serial killer. Ramsland and Ullman expand the background to Corll’s reprehensible acts to reveal the work of a larger criminal organization, a widespread network of sex offenders dealing in the trafficking and murder of boys operated by John David Norman, who “had been charged more than two dozen times previously for child sex crimes and had a long rap sheet charted by the FBI.” Norman, Corll, John Wayne Gacy, and thousands of other pedophiles coordinated their heinous acts for years. At the end, the authors provide sobering images from the case, including those taken on the day of Corll’s murder, as well as statements by the teen accomplices upon their arrests. Frighteningly, the authors write, “many of the same grooming techniques that Corll employed are still in use because they’re successful.” Ramsland and Ullman paint a disturbingly vivid portrait of true evil.
Not for the faint of heart, but true-crime aficionados will appreciate this fast-paced, illuminating report.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781613164952
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crime Ink/Penzler
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
An intellectually probing analysis.
A wide-ranging investigation of gender, power, and abuse.
British literary scholar and cultural critic Rose examines the impetus for and experience of violence, especially against women. Casting a wide net, she considers sexual predation and harassment; violence against transgender women, including by feminists who engage in “the coercive violence of gendering”; violence depicted in literary fiction; South Africa, where a woman is murdered every three hours and Cape Town is known as the rape capital of the world; and violence against migrant women and children. Although Rose focuses mainly on male violence, she argues that violence is not inherent in masculinity, and she takes issue with feminists who see women “solely or predominantly as the victims of their histories.” Nevertheless, she calls sexual harassment “the great male performative, the act through which a man aims to convince his target not only that he is the one with the power, which is true, but also that his power and his sexuality are one and the same thing.” Though she does not believe “that all women are at risk from all men,” she concedes “that a woman does not say she is scared of a man without cause and that when she does so, we must listen.” Drawing on Freudian psychoanalytic theory, Rose sees violence as “part of the psyche,” characterizing violent behavior as “a crime of the deepest thoughtlessness. It is a sign that the mind has brutally blocked itself.” Feminists, she asserts, must reckon with “the extraordinary, often painful and mostly overlooked range of what the human mind is capable of.” Like Hannah Arendt, Rose sees violence as “a form of entitlement” inflamed by “illegitimate and/or waning power.” The abuse of refugees and asylum seekers, for example, reflects “the violence of colonial expansion” as well as a “fight to preserve the privilege of the few against the many.”
An intellectually probing analysis.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-28421-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
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