![]() He interviewed the players, got down their life histories and made the indelible point that the people written off by their own country as ill-educated bumkins were creative and were turning power on its head in the nation. By that act, he wrote the history of the key moment when flights of cocaine from Columbia entered the Mexican economy. In the eighties, he captured the rise and fall of Pablo Acosta in Ojinaga, the border town across from Presidio, Texas. Terrence Poppa was a reporter for the El Paso Herald-Post. I remember in the mid-nineties paying fifty dollars for a copy of Drug Lord in a used bookstore in El Paso and being damned happy to get my hands on it. And also the history of the shift of power from Colombia to Mexico, when American efforts hampered the pathways in Florida and made Mexico the trampoline for cocaine shipments into the U.S. And how to maintain discipline by killing everyone connected to a lost load lest a traitor survive. Here we find the first good description of the plaza - that arrangement where the Mexican government seeks a partner to supervise all criminal activity in a city. This book could function as an owner’s manual for the Mexican drug cartels. Such a revolution was unfolding only ten blocks south of the newspaper, just on the other side of the Rio Grande. Juarez, the largest city in the state of Chihuahua, was the scene of what today would be called a “color” revolution - a democratic movement that used tactics of non-violent resistance to achieve its goals. My journalistic work, which had begun for the El Paso Herald-Post in 1984, focused primarily on reporting on a political movement in northern Mexico that was challenging the entrenched one-party system that had ruled Mexico since 1929. It was low keyed even in its violence it did not draw too much attention to itself. Drug trafficking was part of the background noise of the El Paso-Juarez region where I worked as a reporter. ![]() Until the kidnapping, I didn’t have much interest in the subject of drugs. This book came about because of the kidnapping of an American newspaper photographer by a Juarez drug trafficker, a brutal and unprecedented event that caused an international scandal and brought about the downfall of one of the major drug traffickers of the time. y todo en ella es la verdad.” -Elaine Shannon, autora de Desperados, Los narcotraficantes latinoamericanos, los legisladores estadounidneses y la guerra que Estados Unidos no puede ganar. Esta es la verdadera frontera: cruda, sangrienta, siempre cambiante y siempre intrigante. “Terrence Poppa ha realizado un increíble reportaje de investigación. y nos cuenta lo que encontró.” - Albuquerque Journal Indagó en la realidad del tráfico de drogas. “Poppa es un talentoso narrador con clara visión para el detalle. Ha penetrado sus secretos.” - Dallas Morning News “Poppa ha causado conmoción con su descripción de las convenciones utilizadas en la industria del narcotráfico. Poppa es un periodista de primera línea que ha examinado a conciencia los testimonios de traficantes agentes de narcóticos y policías, para documentar el ascenso y la caída de uno de los mas célebres narcotraficantes, Pablo Acosta.” - Wall Street Journal
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