Benjamin T. Smith is professor of history at the University of Warwick. As a historian of nineteenth and twentieth-century grassroots politics, he has done most of his research in the archives, villages, churches, and markets of the predominantly indigenous state of Oaxaca. His first book, Pistoleros and Popular Movements: The Politics of State Formation in Postrevolutionary Oaxaca attempted to capture the diversity of post-revolutionary politics and looked at regional bosses, female-led social movements, violence, and agrarian reform from the 1920s through to the 1950s. He has also co-edited a collection of essays on the subject, entitled Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938-1968, which was published in early 2014. His book The Press and Civil Society in Mexico, 1940-1976 was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2018.

Carlos A. Pérez Ricart is an assistant professor in International Relations at the Centre for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE) and postdoctoral fellow in the Contemporary History and Public Policy of Mexico at the University of Oxford. He is member of both the History Faculty and the Latin American Centre (LAC). He holds a PhD in Political Science and in Latin American Studies from a Comparative and Transregional Perspective at the Freie Universität Berlin and has a degree in International Relations of El Colegio de México. His general research and teaching interests include the relationship between Mexico and the United States, security and organized crime, drug policies and state formation. He is currently conducting a research project which aims to examine the history of the Mexican police from a long-term historical and global perspective. His forthcoming book (Penguin Random House) explores the activities of US drug law enforcement agents in Mexico.

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