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Citation link: https://doi.org/10.26092/elib/920
gamevironments14_Ward.pdf
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Ghosts, Spooks, and Martyrs. Historical Hauntings in Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands


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Authors: Ward, Megan  
Abstract: 
In 1985, a United States undercover Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent, Enrique Kiki Camarena, was abducted, tortured, and murdered in Guadalajara, Mexico by an alleged drug cartel. The ensuing international murder investigation saw breaches in extradition procedures, accusations that Mexican officials had destroyed key evidence, and allegations that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had targeted Camarena to cover evidence of CIA covert involvement in Nicaragua. Camarena’s death and subsequent martyrdom took form in national anti-drug campaigns, DEA awards, and the drug war foreign policy. More recently in 2017, French video game company Ubisoft released a massively popular video game, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands (2017), which fictionalizes Camarena’s death and draws its players into a history of the United States drug war, complete with CIA Spooks, agrarian militias, and Mexican drug lords. In conversation with historical epistemologies, game studies, and with close attention to the obscured record of covert operation, this article investigates how cultural artifacts, specifically interactive ones, not only create history, but place their audience within in a history only now freshly unearthed and resurrected. Camarena’s many resurrections in popular politics and media are salient examples of the participatory nature of history and the narratives we use to place ourselves within murky pasts.
Keywords: Hauntings; Drug War; Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands; Historical Epistemologies; Game Studies; United States History; Border Security; Kiki Camarena; Empire; gamevironments
Issue Date: 28-Jul-2021
Journal/Edited collection: gamevironments 
Start page: 85
End page: 118
Band: 14
Type: Artikel/Aufsatz
ISSN: 2364-382X
DOI: 10.26092/elib/920
URN: urn:nbn:de:gbv:46-elib51236
Institution: Universität Bremen 
Faculty: Fachbereich 09: Kulturwissenschaften (FB 09) 
Institute: Institut für Religionswissenschaft und Religionspädagogik 
Appears in Collections:Forschungsdokumente

  

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