Oscar Martinez. (2016). A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America. Verso Books.

Oscar Martinez. 2016. A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America. Verso Books.

Oscar Martinez, A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America. Verso Books, 2016.

Oscar Martinez. A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America. Verso Books, 2016.

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1. • value: politics
2. • value: Mexico
3. • value: Central America
4. • value: drug trafficking
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12. • value: Honduras
13. • value: Geopolitics
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17. • value: illegal immigration
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24. • value: Sociology
25. • value: political science
26. • value: Gang violence
27. • value: drug cartels
28. • value: immigration reform
29. • value: immigration books
30. • value: history books
31. • value: political books
32. • value: immigration policy
33. • value: Mexican border
34. • value: narcos
35. • value: Immigration crisis
36. • value: history gifts
37. • value: hurricane maria

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Martinez, Oscar
   • bioText: Óscar Martínez is the author of The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail. He writes for El Faro, the first online newspaper in Latin America.
   • name: Oscar Martinez
2. • role: Author of introduction, etc.
   • fileAs: Anderson, Jon Lee
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3. • role: Translator
   • fileAs: Washington, John B.
   • name: John B. Washington
4. • role: Translator
   • fileAs: Ugaz, Daniela Maria
   • name: Daniela Maria Ugaz

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title

A History of Violence

fullDescription

“A necessary read.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“A chilling portrait of corruption, unimaginable brutality and impunity.” —Financial Times
This revelatory and heartbreaking immersion into the lives of people enduring extreme violence in Central America is a powerful call for immigration policy reform in the United States.
El Salvador and Honduras have had the highest homicide rates in the world over the past ten years, with Guatemala close behind. Every day more than 1,000 people—men, women, and children—flee these three countries for North America. Óscar Martínez, author of The Beast, named one of the best books of the year by the Economist, Mother Jones, and the Financial Times, fleshes out these stark figures with true stories, producing a jarringly beautiful and immersive account of life in deadly locations.
Martínez travels to Nicaraguan fishing towns, southern Mexican brothels where Central American women are trafficked, isolated Guatemalan jungle villages, and crime-ridden Salvadoran slums. With his precise and empathetic reporting, he explores the underbelly of these troubled places. He goes undercover to drink with narcos, accompanies police patrols, rides in trafficking boats and hides out with a gang informer. The result is an unforgettable portrait of a region of fear and a subtle analysis of the North American roots and reach of the crisis, helping to explain why this history of violence should matter to all of us.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Library Journal
   • content: "Ripped from the headlines, these are powerful stories of Central America's chaotic and bloody present, sure to raise awareness among a broad audience of North Americans, whom Martínez refuses to let off the hook. 'The solution?' he asks. 'It's up to you.'"
2. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus
   • content: "Martínez draws readers into this complex narrative by alternating between a panoramic social sweep and the beleaguered lives of civilians, victims, gang members, and cops, capturing the multilayered nature of a place whose indigenous traditions are being brutalized by modern criminals who commit murder casually ... Smart, angry immersive journalism from an author who warrants wider readership on this side of the border."
3. • premium: False
   • source: New York Times
   • content: "The graceful, incisive writing lifts The Beast from being merely an impressive feat of reportage into the realm of literature. Mr. Martínez has produced something that is an honorable successor to enduring works like George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier or Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Junot Diaz
   • content: "The most extraordinary (and harrowing) book I read this year. Beautiful and searing and impossible to put down."
5. • premium: False
   • source: New Yorker
   • content: "Óscar Martínez deserves praise not only for his efforts, and for what he writes about, but because he writes so very well."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Financial Times
   • content: "If Martínez feels anger, he does not show it. Instead, his precise, empathetic and often poetic language summons rage and pity but also admiration in the reader."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Observer
   • content: "Clearly a wonderful listener--journalism's rarest and most important attribute--and this makes his prose resound with raw authenticity."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Columbia Journalism Review
   • content: "A powerful storyteller and his approach to investigative journalism is closer to anthropological immersion."
9. • premium: False
   • source: New York Journal of Books
   • content: "Martínez's writing is eloquent, gritty, and incisive, embedded in vividly observed detail."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Dazed and Confused
    • content: "One of the bravest writers in Latin America, if not the world. He's also one of the best."
11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from February 15, 2016
      Journalist Martínez (The Beast) tenaciously reports piece by piece on the accretion of gang-related violence besetting El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. This book is based on a series of articles he wrote for the website elfaro.net, and each entry details its own escapade." A well-connected mafioso twice escapes the clutches of the state and finally ends up serving time for murder. The bleak story of the paranoid informant's untimely end constitutes its own chapter. Another details how Los Zetas, a Mexican gang, consolidated power in Guatemala, which is crucial background for understanding a police massacre and the subsequent "chess game of criminal politics" analyzed later. Martínez pulls the tarp back from the snake-pit tangle of gang affiliations, offenses, and revenge in overcrowded prisons that lead to periodic massacres. He tells of the perseverance of El Salvador's only forensic investigator in excavating a well, a tale that approaches dark farce. The book enters "strange and impenetrable worlds filled with code words and carnage, in which players function as it were just another day at work." Martínez's reporting reveals shocking failures of the state—particularly of police and courts—but he avoids tidy lessons, preferring to let the intractable issues stand in all their cold brutality.

12. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      January 1, 2016
      Hard-hitting exploration of the violence visited by globalization and the narco-economy upon Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Human Rights Prize-winning journalist Martinez (The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail, 2013) follows up his grisly, underdiscussed debut investigation of human trafficking with a similarly unflinching account of the circumstances and communities involved in the ongoing migrant crisis. "I want you to understand what thousands of Central Americans are going through," he writes. The author argues that the American expulsion of first-generation Mara Salvatrucha and other Central American refugee gangs led to the violent groups' expansion back home: "What the United States has tried to flush away has rather multiplied." Simultaneously, Mexican cartels (notably the brutal Los Zetas) firmed up their transshipment routes through these countries' rural, impoverished regions; this conjunction has resulted in the highest murder rates in the hemisphere, in areas where law enforcement is undersupported and easily corrupted. Martinez draws readers into this complex narrative by alternating between a panoramic social sweep and the beleaguered lives of civilians, victims, gang members, and cops, capturing the multilayered nature of a place whose indigenous traditions are being brutalized by modern criminals who commit murder casually. The punchy short chapters capture shocking tableaux of violence in distanced, nearly wry prose, with some characters and crimes recurring. The author follows one hardened gangster who's obsessed with his own inevitable murder: "It's clear that El Nino was recognized in the town as someone destined to die." Absurdity is captured in the account of investigators facing the Sisyphean task of excavating a rural well known to be packed with corpses. Martinez returns to his earlier topic, portraying the cruelty of the migrant experience: "What you think is stupid sitting at home can be the most logical thing in the world on the trails." Smart, angry immersive journalism from an author who warrants wider readership on this side of the border.

      COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

13. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      January 1, 2016
      

      Journalist Martinez (The Beast) narrates 14 troublingly contemporary stories of Central American crime and corruption, drawing from investigations he documented at ElFaro.net, a Salvadoran online news agency. Beset by astronomical murder rates and impotent or corrupt governments, Central America is ground zero for drug and human trafficking to the United States. Martinez interviews criminals, cops, and politicians as he builds a narrative around the themes of power vacuum ("Emptiness"), consequent narcotrafficking and horrendous gang violence ("Madness"), and migration or human trafficking of the dispossessed ("Fleeing"). One particularly telling example comes from Guatemala, where the government evicts peasants living on environmentally protected land--peasants initially displaced by land-grabbing U.S. corporations--but ignores the drug cartels that operate openly on that same land. Martinez calls out the United States as drug market and arms dealer, enabler of Central America's troubles. He tempers his outrage and frustration with empathy and deep sociological understanding. VERDICT Ripped from the headlines, these are powerful stories of Central America's chaotic and bloody present, sure to raise awareness among a broad audience of North Americans, whom Martinez refuses to let off the hook. "The solution?" he asks. "It's up to you."--Michael Rodriguez, Hodges Univ. Lib., Naples, FL

      Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

24

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“A necessary read.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“A chilling portrait of corruption, unimaginable brutality and impunity.” —Financial Times
This revelatory and heartbreaking immersion into the lives of people enduring extreme violence in Central America is a powerful call for immigration policy reform in the United States.
El Salvador and Honduras have had the highest homicide rates in the world over the past ten years, with Guatemala close behind. Every day more than 1,000 people—men, women, and children—flee these three countries for North America. Óscar Martínez, author of The Beast, named one of the best books of the year by the Economist, Mother Jones, and the Financial Times, fleshes out these stark figures with true stories, producing a jarringly beautiful and immersive account of life in deadly locations.
Martínez travels to...

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Living and Dying in Central America

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   • description: History / Latin America / General
2. • code: POL057000
   • description: Political Science / World / Caribbean & Latin American
3. • code: SOC051000
   • description: Social Science / Violence in Society