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101 Foreign Aff. 207 (2022)
Western Hemisphere

handle is hein.journals/fora101 and id is 425 raw text is: Recent Books Western Hemisphere Richard Feinberg Resisting Extortion: Victims, Criminals, and States in Latin America BY EDUARDO MONCADA. Cambridge University Press, 2022, 300 pp. oncada urges his readers to recognize that targets of armed criminal gangs, far from being helpless victims, often summon the courage and power to confront their aggressors. Moncada's well-chosen, carefully researched case studies compare the ways in which people have resisted the predations of organized crime in Latin America; he looks at the strategies adopted by small businesses in the city of Medellin, in Colombia; subsistence farmers in El Salvador; and industrial-scale producers of avocados and berries in the Mexican state of Michoacin. These resistance strategies include sporadic vigilante killings of gang members, collective paramilitary defense, the formation of opportunistic alliances with trustworthy security forces, and attempts to negoti- ate or end extortion payments to criminals. Some victims even managed to reclaim a sense of personal dignity through verbal jousting with gang members. The choice of the method of resistance was contingent on a number of factors, such as whether the criminal activity was a one-off or long term, whether victims could organize their own defense, and whether the criminals had co-opted the police. Moncada acknowledges that some of these actions blurred the line between the legal and extralegal realms and between victims and predators. The Last Emperor of Mexico: The Dramatic Story of the Habsburg Archduke Who Created a Kingdom in the New World BY EDWARD SHAWCROSS. Basic Books, 2021, 336 pp. Shawcross deftly reexamines the tragi- comic rule of the Austrian archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, the Habsburg prince whom France briefly imposed on Mexico in the 1860s. Maximilian is often portrayed as a vainglorious buffoon, a quixotic old-school European aristocrat egged on by an ambitious wife. In Shawcross's persuasive retell- ing, Maximilian was a well-intentioned, if flawed, Enlightenment ruler buffeted by the great forces of the mid-nineteenth century. Napoleon III, the French emperor, installed Maximilian in Mexico to challenge the growing power of the United States. Ultraconservative Mexican exiles championed him as an autocratic ruler to combat rising repub- lican liberalism. Maximilian tried but failed to reconcile these opposing forces. After the end of the American Civil War, the United States reas- serted the Monroe Doctrine, which sought to prevent further European colonization in the Western Hemi- sphere, and demanded that the French government withdraw from Mexico. Washington backed the uncompromis- ing secular reformer Benito Juirez, who swept aside Maximilian's forces and ordered the archduke's execution by firing squad. In The Execution of Maximilian, the French painter Rdouard March/April 2022 207

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