The Mexican Drug Cartel: A Spotlight On The Man They Call El Chapo
Choose a world event that occurred sometime between September 1, 2015 and February 7, 2016, and create a 1,000-word wiki that explains, from a critical and global perspective, how the trajectory of this event was shaped by various information systems. Your goal is to evaluate the authenticity and credibility of information reported about this world event, so the essay should demonstrate your understanding of the diverse and complex nature of information, bringing order to, and maximizing the value of, the information for the audience it reaches. True to the title of this course, your essay will help you come full circle, in that you must explain how we know what we know about this world event. Thus, your essay should state a thesis, and your paper should analyze, how the event was covered or how information about the event was manipulated or suppressed. Finally, your essay should address what all that means on a global level.
Your writing should CRITICALLY examine HOW WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW about your event. You need to challenge assumptions and expand the bounds of debate. Don’t just give a recap of the event. As voracious readers, we already KNOW what happened. Think instead of how the public got the information and how it might have been influenced – manipulated, suppressed, etc. Look at all the different players and facets involved in the event. Media, business, government, and the public from countries around the world may have been affected. Be careful of sweeping generalizations such as, “the media only want sensational stories”, or, “the government always lies.” Back up your claims with facts and expert opinions that are cited.
The concepts covered in the course should be the building blocks of your essay. Descriptions of events do not constitute analysis, which is the application of learned concepts to create new ways of looking at the world. How does the rhetorical triangle apply in your analysis? Who’s keeping secrets? Who’s penetrating secrets? Who’s manipulating information? How is information created, harvested, conveyed, and used?
For the first purpose, you should select an international event and do a thorough-going read of articles related to that event. Imagine that you are tearing apart an engine, piece by piece, examining every part for wear, tear and defective workmanship. Remember, information usually is a collection of a lot of moving parts. Challenge assumptions, expand the bounds of debate and make sure your analysis is beneficial to global society.
For the second purpose, how do the readings/web explorations this semester frame your examination of the event? What role, if any, did secrecy, revelation, intellectual property, freedom of information or suppression play in this event? Review readings and lecture notes to focus your thinking. Was there an example of how lies protect secrets or how secrets protect lies? Or, perhaps, how was rhetoric used to shape and convey the event? Use every lens you’ve been provided this semester to examine the event and select those that bring it into focus.
If you do that, you’ll be in great shape to tackle the third purpose, which is to determine how a person, movement or technology influenced this event. How did one or more of those alter the global culture? How do any (or all) of those bring desirable or undesirable change?
You should have a minimum of 5 sources, one of which is scholarly. Use MLA for your citation format, but don’t worry about indentations or margins (they’re a problem on WikiSpaces). Remember to examine everything that is covered in class: readings, assignments, discussions, tutorials, as potential tools useful to crafting your final assignment. The essay and thesis will be created on Wikispaces.
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The Mexican Drug Cartel: A Spotlight On The Man They Call El Chapo
If one reads about the Mexican drug cartel, then it is inevitable to come across Joaquin Guzman Loera, also known as El Chapo, the king of the tunnels. He is somewhat a legend in Mexico because of his daring escape from prison, not once, but twice. Needless to say, El Chapo is a complicated character to deal with. While the rest of the world imagines him as a ruthless drug lord who gets his way through threats and bribes, his wife describes him as a “loving family man…not violent, not rude” (Hernandez). And based on Sean Penn’s narration of his meeting with the man, he seems to be respectful too: “We follow him to where the family who had cooked our dinner stands dutifully behind a serving table. He takes each of them by the hand graciously; giving them thanks, and with a look, he invites us to do the same” (Penn). insert image: /img-5692bf22/turbine/la-fg-el-chapo-guzman-escapes-pictures-2015071-007/1000/1000x563
How many “decent” and law abiding Americans have dispensed this kind of gratitude and respect recently? For sure, El Chapo is involved with drug trafficking, but recent news about him seems to have a lot of inconsistencies. This article looks at a number of those inconsistencies in order to prove this central claim: the problem that is El Chapo is caused by the need for the media to create “news worthy” articles. Journalists compete for who gets to do the story first, not on who can tell the story best, in the most factual way. Unfortunately for regular citizens, the veracity of information is no longer a priority for some journalists, what matters now is that the article will sell. Hence, some writers will deliberately add false information, omit information, misrepresent the information they have gathered or use no information at all.
To better understand this, this article will study four articles. The first two are both published by The Los Angeles Times. The first article published on January 10 this year said this about El Chapo’s recapture: “Although questions have been raised about whether electronic contacts between Guzman and actors Sean Penn and Kate del Castillo could have led police to his hide-out, it was that simple tip-off [from a neighbor] that led to Friday’s arrest” (Wilkinson, Kraul, and Sanchez), this according to Mike Vigil, a high level administration official at the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). This claim is corroborated by Sean Penn who said, “We had met with him many weeks earlier…on October 2nd, in a place nowhere near where he was captured” (CBS Staff). And yet, in January 20, an opinion piece written by no less than the Times’ editorial team said, “…finally, the recapture of the world’s most infamous drug lord, in part due to a visit by a pair of celebrities – and a big order of tacos delivered to his hide-out” (The Times Editorial Board). For sure, it is this same editorial board that read and approved the article published earlier in January. They would have known the truth behind El Chapo’s arrest, and yet, they chose to use the incorrect information because it was novel and amusing, and it would prompt people to keep reading an otherwise boring opinion piece.
The next two articles to be studied talks about how El Chapo was arrested. The New York Daily News said: “The drug lord…was found asleep next to his beauty-queen wife inside their makeshift home in the city of Los Mochis in the Mexican state of Sinaloa while their children slept nearby” (Bult), which gave the impression that El Chapo was caught unawares. This story complemented the earlier claim that the drug lord’s demise is due to his desire to create a movie of his life. It completed the story that El Chapo was a classic drug lord, narcissistic and stupid – a move that undermines the fact that he has operated the world’s most successful drug cartel for decades. This story provides an impression that El Chapo’s immunity has gone to his head, which led him to put his guards down and enabled the government to find his whereabouts due to his own carelessness. The storyline would have been great, but it is downright inaccurate. Five days after the article from New York Daily came out, The New York Times released its own version of the story. This time, it portrayed El Chapo as a worthy adversary of the DEA, who fought for his freedom up to the last minute, but was forced to accept that he has been outsmarted; “El Chapo was apprehended heading south on Highway 15 toward Guasave and taken to the Hotel Doux” (Ahmed). This is a classic hero story, where the evil forces are always defeated by the good.
The inconsistencies shown by the four articles as described above drives home the fact that news articles are no longer as objective as they used to be. Of course, the editorial process is also in question given the inaccuracies that are being presented in separate articles printed by the same newspaper company. There is also a question as to how facts are verified before any article is approved for publication. The New York Daily article is quite alarming because it invented facts in the hope of being the first to release the release, a privilege that would make them a preferred choice for information. And with hundreds of individuals who subscribe to their print version, the repercussion of such misinformation is large.
Having shown the inconsistencies surrounding the capture of El Chapo, it is now useful to look at the prevailing “truth”. In just a...