Report Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words - 1

Report - Essay Example There are recent examples of this mass socio-cultural shift: the arrest of the renowned â€Å"Queen of the Pacific,† Mexican drug lord Sandra Avila Beltran, and the portrayal of a brutal female drug kingpin by Salma Hayek in the soon-to-be-released Oliver Stone film Savages. Despite the unquestionably heavy feminine presence in the drug trade, the historically macho world of drug smuggling can still be said to have victimized women. Women, particularly in Latin American countries, have come to identify equality with access to commercial opportunity in the most lucrative business venture available to them: the drug trade. In this way, in their struggle for gender parity, women have wittingly become part of the same destructive cycle with which men have typically been associated. This may, in part, be driven by persistently high rates of violence against women in Latin America, with women seeking a measure of control amid the carnage (see graph, page 6). By asserting their femin inity, some achieve power but compromise their moral existence in what can best be characterized as a devil’s bargain. ... While this may once have been true, the burgeoning drug trade has carried women to power and international infamy on a scale heretofore unknown and unanticipated by many for whom females have always been the prototypical victims of the drug trade and the collateral damage it creates. New lifestyle, new opportunity This is not to argue that countless women are not thus victimized. But their increasing presence at the highest levels of some of the most powerful drug organizations indicates that women are susceptible to the same economic and psychological motivations that have previously been ascribed to men only. In his widely cited anthropological study of the Mexican drug trade, Hugh Campbell has ascertained that female drug smugglers enjoy â€Å"a pleasurable lifestyle and relative autonomy from men,† aggrandizing their power in the same violent and ruthless ways as men. Campbell examines a female subject he identifies as Zulema, whose pursuit of the high-risk, high-return li festyle is typical of the new breed of women in the trade. â€Å"Contrary to standard interpretations of women’s motivation for entry into drug smuggling, Zulema was initially attracted to crime, including drug-selling, by the opportunity it presented for adventure and revolt against bourgeois lifestyles† (antropologi, 2008). Such women have done more than simply reject poverty and a non-descript lifestyle; they seek the â€Å"high† that comes from a powerful adrenaline rush. There is an element of glamour to the drug underworld, and in a sense women have long been a part of the image it projects in mass culture. There is a long association between beauty and illicit activity. During Prohibition, bootleggers were famous for showing off beautiful female