Maria Full Of Grace Sparknotes

The 2012 movie, Maria Full of Grace, produced by Joshua Marston, is about drug trafficking in Colombia where marijuana crops are grown and are extremely valuable to cartels and businessmen. It is related to the Reaction and Neoliberalism chapters of Chasteen’s Born In Blood and Fire where great power comes from increased wealth. Maria is the main character who flies to New York with illegal drugs, serving as an example of the danger and risk that people are willing to take to make money to make a living through the drug trafficking ring.

The movie begins horticulturists working tirelessly in a warehouse in Colombia. The main protagonist, Maria, played by Carolina Sandino Morena, quit her job in the warehouse because she felt her boss, who

When the protagonist, Maria, understands first-hand the struggle that she must endure when her family forces her to pay for her sister’s baby’s care without being able to enjoy any of the money she worked hard for. Maria starts to work for Javier, a representative of the cartel that attempts to smuggle drugs into the United States for money. She needed to swallow pellets of heroin that were to be well wrapped. It was a struggle for Maria to consume sixty-two pellets at first and it was difficult for her to endure her trip with the pellets inside of her belly, knowing that there was a risk that the pellets could open up and kill her quickly and painfully. Lucy, one of the women on board the flight that Maria was on, had a pellet rupture inside of her upon her arrival to New York. She died shortly after meeting with the drug

Both show the undergoing of the struggle to survive in poverty and promote the desire to make lives better financially as well as socially. The drug trafficking theme is used in both the movie and Chasteen’s book. During the 1970’s, Pablo Escobar pioneered the Colombian drug trade. He became wealthy off of the business with US consumers, selling marijuana and cocaine to them (Chasteen 314). Since those times, many people have looked to drug trafficking as a profitable business, hiring people to smuggle their merchandise into other countries, especially the United States. They worked behind the scenes like mafia hit men, selling their drugs and transporting them through messengers who were local