This collection is the first exploration into green crime in Mexico, offering a unique critique of the environmental problems facing Mexico today. Written by a diverse range of Mexican academics and practitioners from different career stages and various different disciplines, this edited volume exposes the corruption, power, and disregard for the environment through highly detailed and engaging case studies. The chapters are grouped into four categories: Environmental Degradation, Social and Environmental Justice, Wildlife Trafficking, and Non-compliance with Environmental Obligations, and are illuminated by rigorous original research. This book fills a substantial gap in knowledge about concerns that are important not only to the Mexican people and the wider region, but to anyone with an interest in the environmental issues facing the world today. To this end, the contributors hope to inspire other Mexicans to study and research green crimes as well as to influence scholars and practitioners across Central and South America who are facing similar environmental crises and challenges.

This book is the first green criminology text to focus specifically on Latin America. Green criminology has always adopted a broad horizon and explicitly emphasised that environmental crimes and harms affect countries and cultures around the world. The chapters collected here illuminate and describe the “theft of nature” and the “poisoning of the land” in Latin America through and from processes of agro-industry expansion, biopiracy, legal and illegal trafficking of free-born non-human animals, and mining. An interdisciplinary study, this collection draws on research from a wide range of international experts on not only green criminology, but also social justice, political ecology and sociology. An engaging and thought-provoking work, this book will be an essential text for anyone interested in current issues in environmental crime.

The Gulf oil spill was the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, and will be the most significant criminal case ever prosecuted under U.S. environmental laws. The Justice Department is likely to prosecute BP, Transocean, and Halliburton for criminal violations of the Clean Water Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which will result in the largest fines ever imposed in the United States for any form of corporate crime. The Justice Department also may decide to pursue charges for manslaughter, false statements, and obstruction of justice. The prosecution will shape public perceptions about environmental crime, for reasons that are understandable given the notoriety of the spill and the penalties at stake. In some respects, the Gulf oil spill is similar to other environmental crimes, most notably because it involves large corporations that committed serious violations because they put profits before environmental compliance and worker safety. Yet the spill's most distinctive qualities make it an anomalous environmental crime: the conduct was not as egregious, the harm was far worse, and the penalties bear no relation to norms for environmental crime. The Justice Department should bring criminal charges based on the Gulf oil spill, because a criminal prosecution will deter future spills better than civil penalties alone and will express societal condemnation of the negligence that caused the spill in ways that civil enforcement cannot. But criminal prosecution of the Gulf oil spill may raise questions about the role of criminal enforcement under the environmental laws, including whether ordinary negligence should result in criminal liability as well as what the proper normative relationship should be between culpable conduct and environmental harm. Nor can criminal prosecution, without more, prevent future spills; for that to occur, we must demand greater attention to safety and more rigorously enforce our drilling laws.

First published in 1996. One of the primary goals of this series has been to explore new areas of criminology and criminal justice, topics that constitute the frontiers of the field. This work, edited by Sally Edwards, Terry Edwards and Charles Fields exemplifies that purpose in its coverage of environmental crime. While corporate and political crime developed slowly into mainstream criminology over the last half century, environmental crime, as an area of emphasis is still in its infancy. It is unusual to have many varied and informative perspectives early in a subject's development. This volume, however, demonstrates that many people are already examining environmental crime perhaps as an extension of both the greater environmental movement and the broadening of the popular parameters of crime.

This book presents a socio-criminological study of environmental crime in the global South. It gathers contributors from all the regions of the geographical global South (Africa, Asia, Oceania, and Latin America) to discuss instances of environmental crime and conflict. Overall, it seeks to further decolonise the knowledge production of green criminology. It considers the legacy of colonisation, North-South and the core-periphery divides in the production of environmental crime, the epistemological contributions of the marginalised, impoverished, and oppressed, and the unique contexts of the global South. This book has three sections: drivers of green crime in the global South; responses to environmental harm in the global South; and global dialogues about crime and destruction in the global South. The first two sections represent the breadth of the topics that green criminologists have historically studied but from unique perspectives. The third section explores ethical and decolonial ways for Southern green criminology to collaborate with Western academia. This book speaks to scholars in criminology, political ecology, decolonial theory, along with the many readers interested in the interactions between humans and nature.

Appendices include: Glossary, Important environmental activities, Criminal sanctions outlined in federal environmental legislation, environmental legal cases, environmental crimes investigations for law enforcement officers.

Since 2000, more than 150 journalists have been killed in Mexico. Today the country is one of the most dangerous in the world in which to be a reporter. In Surviving Mexico, Celeste González de Bustamante and Jeannine E. Relly examine the networks of political power, business interests, and organized crime that threaten and attack Mexican journalists, who forge ahead despite the risks. Amid the crackdown on drug cartels, overall violence in Mexico has increased, and journalists covering the conflict have grown more vulnerable. But it is not just criminal groups that want reporters out of the way. Government forces also attack journalists in order to shield corrupt authorities and the very criminals they are supposed to be fighting. Meanwhile some news organizations, enriched by their ties to corrupt government officials and criminal groups, fail to support their employees. In some cases, journalists must wait for a “green light” to publish not from their editors but from organized crime groups. Despite seemingly insurmountable constraints, journalists have turned to one another and to their communities to resist pressures and create their own networks of resilience. Drawing on a decade of rigorous research in Mexico, González de Bustamante and Relly explain how journalists have become their own activists and how they hold those in power accountable.

Criminal and Citizen in Modern Mexico explores elite notions of crime and criminality from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. In Mexico these notions represented contested areas of the social terrain, places where generalized ideas about criminality transcended the individual criminal act to intersect with larger issues of class, race, gender, and sexuality. It was at this intersection that modern Mexican society bared its soul. Attitudes toward race amalgamation and indios, lower-class lifestyles and läperos, women and sexual deviance, all influenced perceptions of criminality and ultimately determined the fundamental issue of citizenship: who belonged and who did not. The liberal discourse of toleration and human rights, the positivist discourse of order and progress, the revolutionary discourse of social justice and integration sought in turn to disguise the exclusions of modern Mexican society behind a veil of criminality?to proscribe as criminal those activities that criminologists, penologists, and anthropologists clearly linked to marginalized social groups. This book attempts to lift that veil and to gaze, like Josä Guadalupe Posada, at the grinning calavera that it shields.

* Mexico was named an Outstanding Academic Title of 2010 by Choice Magazine.Bloodshed connected with Mexican drug cartels, how they emerged, and their impact on the United States is the subject of this frightening book. Savage narcotics-related decapitations, castrations, and other murders have destroyed tourism in many Mexican communities and such savagery is now cascading across the border into the United States. Grayson explores how this spiral of violence emerged in Mexico, its impact on the country and its northern neighbor, and the prospects for managing it.Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ruled in Tammany Hall fashion for seventy-nine years before losing the presidency in 2000 to the center-right National Action Party (PAN). Grayson focuses on drug wars, prohibition, corruption, and other antecedents that occurred during the PRI's hegemony. He illuminates the diaspora of drug cartels and their fragmentation, analyzes the emergence of new gangs, sets forth President Felipe Calderi?1/2n's strategy against vicious criminal organizations, and assesses its relative success. Grayson reviews the effect of narcotics-focused issues in U.S.-Mexican relations. He considers the possibility that Mexico may become a failed state, as feared by opinion-leaders, even as it pursues an aggressive but thus far unsuccessful crusade against the importation, processing, and sale of illegal substances.Becoming a failed state involves two dimensions of state power: its scope, or the different functions and goals taken on by governments, and its strength, or the government's ability to plan and execute policies. The Mexican state boasts an extensive scope evidenced by its monopoly over the petroleum industry, its role as the major supplier of electricity, its financing of public education, its numerous retirement and health-care programs, its control of public universities, and its dominance