Includes bibliographical references.

The Great Divide is an in-depth examination of the longest boundary dividing the industrialized from the developing world: the almost two-thousand-mile border between Mexico and the United States. Relations between these countries have always been volatile, characterized by prejudice, imperialism, and violence, and only recently by cooperation and mutual dependence. This precarious harmony is further threatened by the North American Free Trade Agreement, which promises to change permanently the nature of the line. Bound as the two countries are by trade, debt, immigration, and the drug war, the economic and social changes they face play out most visibly along the border. Every day, some eight thousand people risk their lives to cross illegally into the United States through the borderlands; two thousand maquiladora factories littered across the borderlands employ more than half a million Mexicans and yet regularly flout the U.S.'s labor and environmental laws; half the cocaine and three-quarters of the marijuana smuggled into the U.S. come through the borderlands; and the pollution in the area is so bad that a section of the Nogales Wash, a borderlands river, recently exploded. The Great Divide is essential reading for anyone interested in NAFTA, in the future of the U.S. and Mexico, and in their potential for cooperation.

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