Loyal Soldiers in the Cocaine Kingdom
Subtitle: Tales of Drugs, Mules, and Gunmen
Contributors: James Graham (Translator)
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: March 2004
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9780231129145
Subjects: True crime; Social Science; True Crime / Espionage; Sociology; Criminology; Latin America - South America; Organized Crime; Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs; General; Cocaine industry; Colombia; Drug dealers; Drug traffic
First sentence: Colombia is a small country somewhere on the periphery of Latin America, far away from the United States.
Description: Loyal Soldiers in the Cocaine Kingdom opens a window on a rarely glimpsed world: the couriers who transport drugs from Colombia into the United States and Europe. Written by one of Colombia's leading writers, the book lets English-speaking readers get a good look--for the first time--at the people behind the drug trade. Colombians from many different backgrounds and parts of the country tell the story of how they got involved in smuggling and how some of them managed to get out alive, This book is about the predicament in which ordinary Colombians find themselves, forced to find a way out of poverty in the middle of an unending civil war. Based on Alfred Molano's visits to Spanish and Latin American jails, Loyal Soldiers in the Cocaine Kingdom combines the gut-wrenching honesty of testimonial literature with the passionate storytelling we have come to expect from Latin America. In his native Colombia Molano has been compared to Gabriel García Marquez, and indeed the many layered narrative in this book resemble harrowing fictions.