RaveFinancial Times (UK)\"... a magisterial and immensely readable new history of the Mexican drug trade ... riveting detail ... His pacy narrative is true crime at its historical best, replete with all the larger-than-life characters and thrills and spills of a Netflix narco drama ... gripping and revealing—but ultimately depressing. Smith skates over what the future holds but it is hard not to agree with his conclusion: \'A century and counting; the Mexican drug trade shows no sign of slowing.\'
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Fernando Cervantes
RaveThe Financial Times (UK)... enlightening ... [Cervantes\'] conclusion that the roots of Latin America’s enduring social ills lie with 19th-century liberal reforms rather than with the conquest is an intriguing argument slipped into the penultimate page, and one that he could have developed further. But, for a vivid portrayal of a clash of very different cultures, each equally astonishing to the other, and a group of men who \'whatever their myriad faults and crimes . . . succeeded more or less through their own agency, in fundamentally transforming Spanish and European conceptions of the world in barely half a century\', Conquistadores makes for fascinating reading.
Anabel Hernandez, Trans. by John Washington
PositiveThe Financial TimesNewly published in English, the book...comprehensively demolishes what the government has dubbed the \'historic truth.\' Instead, it makes a convincing case for the existence of a cover-up to hide what Ms Hernández alleges was federal police involvement in atrocities and the army’s role in protecting a $2m consignment of heroin. This book does not reveal what finally happened to the students [who vanished in Iguala in 2014]. Four years on, that remains a mystery. But Ms Hernández vividly reconstructs the dramatic hours in which they were attacked and rounded up by security forces ... The book reconstructs the night’s events minutely; it is easy for readers to end up bogged down in detail. But one thing appears crystal clear: the official \'truth\' does not add up.
