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Drug Trades in Latin America

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Feb 1st, 2017
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  1. Introduction
  2.  
  3. Illicit drug trades of the Americas in the early 21st century are worth, in rough estimates, about $150 billion. They have inspired sharp conflict and violence (70,000 deaths in Mexico alone), corruption, human rights violations, new forms of popular “narco” culture, and powerful criminal organizations known as “cartels.” A long US-led “drug war” also marks the region, from the Andes to Mexico, though some Latin American nations are leading new reform efforts against the harms of both the drug business and drug prohibition. Such costs aside, drug trades of cocaine, marijuana, opiates, and amphetamines are paradoxically among the most “successful” and home-grown export industries in all of Latin American history. Illicit drug trades are also quite recent in origins, having taking off during the 1970s. The topic, however, lacks major research by historians. Invisible trades are hard to trace in sources and sensationalism about drugs holds off archival work. Thus, the literature about drug trades usually taps other fields, including political science, anthropology, and criminology, or draws on journalistic or policy-oriented writings. Key definitional problems also complicate “drugs.” Drugs are medicinal (the America’s botanical history) or they can include legal regulated drugs such as alcohol and tobacco, also prominent in the region. Drugs can include “soft” intoxicants, such as coffee and cacao and the many indigenous hallucinogens such as peyote and ayahuasca. Atlantic historians now view colonial stimulants, goods such as tobacco and cacao, as “drug-foods” that fueled, in David Courtwright’s term, a 17th-century Atlantic “Psychoactive Revolution” (Courtwright 2001, cited under Global Drug Histories), as well as the later Brazilian domination of world coffee trades. Thus in the wider drug trades, Latin America has been a leader for centuries. Nonetheless, for this article, citations are limited to the major illicit drugs of the late 20th century, namely cocaine, cannabis, and opiates, drugs in conventional terms. After 1900, a small group of world power began the movement to proscribe specific drugs, and, by 1961, a global treaty regime reigned that included the countries of Latin America. By the 1970s, modern drug trafficking bonanzas had begun—from Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, and the Caribbean—that were influenced by local drug cultures and regional smuggling traditions. Since trafficking histories are rare, many sources below deal with drug cultures and restrictive laws, or they draw on the informed politics or journalistic research done amid Latin America’s drug boom decades of the 1970s to the 1990s.
  4.  
  5. General Overviews
  6.  
  7. Archival historical research on trafficking or drugs in Latin America has not, to date, reached the stage to merit a true synthesis. A new effort could help guide fresh research. No updated overviews exist of the history per se of Latin American trafficking: the closest work to a Latin American survey was first published in 1981 by a US diplomatic historian (Walker 1989). Good synthetic information, however, on drugs trafficking and its impact is often available from well-written and accessible official reports (Organization of American States 2013).
  8.  
  9. Organization of American States. The Drug Problem in the Americas: Studies: The Economics of Drug Trafficking. Washington, DC: Organization of American States, 2013.
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  11. An up-to-date official report on the size of the current drug trades in Latin America, prepared by expert panels, part of a larger OAS policy reform effort.
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  13. Walker, William, III. Drug Control in the Americas. Rev. ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989.
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  15. Focused on origins of controls and institutions, drawing on a wide use of US sources about Latin American, if mainly Mexican, drugs. A critical history that calls for new research. Originally published in 1981.
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  17. Surveys and Edited Collections
  18.  
  19. In place of historical surveys, numerous valuable social science or policy-oriented edited collections on drugs are available, some of which include historical background essays. There are two basic types. First, readers can draw on older collections or surveys that represent or sample the situation with drugs in particular decades: the 1990s (Joyce and Malumud 1998, Tokatlián and Bagley 1990); the 1980s (MacDonald 1988, Smith 1992); or 1970s rise of trafficking networks (Henman, et al. 1985). Others focus on particular up-to-date-themes: criminal networks and organizations (Garzón 2008), the political economy of drugs (Vellinga 2004), or the impact of drug wars on political regimes and human rights (Youngers and Rosen 2005).
  20.  
  21. Garzón, Juan Carlos. Mafia & Co.: The Criminal Networks in Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2008.
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  23. Strong empirical source on the contemporary shape of shifting organizations, with some reference to emergence patterns.
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  25. Henman, Anthony, Roger Lewis, Tim Maylon, eds. Big Deal: The Politics of the Illicit Drugs Business. London: Pluto, 1985.
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  27. Written at the start of global drug booms, with a critical eyewitness edge: two valuable chapters on Americas include chapter 3, “Ganja” by Tim Malyon, and chapter 5, “Cocaine Futures” by Anthony Henman.
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  29. Joyce, Elizabeth, and Carlos Malumud, eds. Latin America and the Multilateral Drug Trade. London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 1998.
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  31. One of many mixed country and discipline collections; provides critical views on drug wars; Melo on Colombia, Maignot on Panama, and finance; most material is historical.
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  33. MacDonald, Scott B. Dancing on a Volcano: The Latin American Drug Trade. New York: Praeger, 1988.
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  35. A “first” hemispheric look at the drug trade, at its sensationalistic height; the Andes, Mexico, Caribbean, Central America, and the “human” side and cost from a journalist’s view.
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  37. Smith, Peter H., ed. Drug Policy in the Americas. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992.
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  39. A diverse time capsule of perspectives, a few historical, on international drug regimes and especially cocaine.
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  41. Tokatlián, Juan G., and Bruce Bagley, eds. Economía y política del narcotráfico. Bogotá, Colombia: Ediciones Uniandes, 1990.
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  43. Early 1990s state-of-the-art collection, critical of drug wars; compare with issues and critical updates in latest Bagley collection (with Jonathan Rosen), Drug Trafficking, Organized Crime, and Violence in the Americas Today (Gainesville: University Press of Florida), 2015.
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  45. Vellinga, Menno, ed. The Political Economy of the Drug Industry: Latin America and the International System. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004.
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  47. Seventeen specialist essays, focusing on unintended perverse social costs and the political economy of the 1990s hemispheric drug policies.
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  49. Walker, William, III, ed. Drug Control Policy: Essays in Historical and Comparative Perspective. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.
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  51. Global scope (United States, Asia, Americas), written by a motley group of early historians of drugs, from varied perspectives.
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  53. Youngers, Coletta A., and Eileen Rosen, eds. Drugs and Democracy in Latin America: The Impact of US Policy. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2005.
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  55. Some historical references; reliably tallies costs of drug wars to human and social rights, country by country.
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  57. Primary Source Collections
  58.  
  59. Primary document collections are also scarce. Besides botanical anthropological writings about native hallucinogens, such as peyote or on drugs in general (such as Schultes and Hoffman 1992, cited under Global Drug Histories), most document collections about particular drugs deal with coca leaf/cocaine. They are native to South America and drugs of deep conflict and concern. Works were mainly published in the 1970s as the contemporary controversy arose about cocaine. Andrews and Solomon 1975, Byck 1974, and Mortimer 1974 are rich examples. Cannabis, though not indigenous, has extensive use, cultivation, and trade in the Americas, some like Brazilian maconha with African roots, and it is far less represented in the literature (Rubin 1975, Henman and Pessoa 1986); opiates are barely represented. A few strong collections, cited below, reproduce historical diplomatic history documents about the origins of the drug war (Astorga 1995, cited under Mexico: Mexican Cartels; Walker 1989, cited under General Overviews). A unique collection in Portuguese brings together literary documents relating to the cocaine scene in Rio de Janeiro at the turn of the 20th century (Resende 2006, Consuming Nations: Brazil).
  60.  
  61. Andrews, George, and David Solomon, eds. The Coca Leaf and Cocaine Papers. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1975.
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  63. State-of-the-art original document collection, mid-1970s, mainly German, US, French sources—match to “Marijuana” papers.
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  65. Byck, Robert, comp. Cocaine Papers/Sigmund Freud. New York: Stonehill, 1974.
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  67. Timely republication of Sigmund Freud’s seven essays about coca/cocaine written largely in the 1880s, with additional framing sources; restored Freud’s role as a psycho-pharmacologist, after long neglect.
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  69. Henman, Anthony, and Osvaldo Pessoa, eds. Diamba sarabamba: Coletânea de textos brasileiros sobre a maconha. São Paulo: Ground, 1986.
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  71. Classic and only anthropological-historical collection of texts on maconha—Afro-Brazilian marijuana culture.
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  73. Mortimer, W. Golden. History of Coca: “The Divine Plant” of the Incas. Reprint. San Francisco: And/or Press, 1974.
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  75. Classic reprint of early-20th-century account of coca (not cocaine) is a fount of information on the era’s US “cocamania,” Andean folklore, and coca-related medicine. Originally published in 1901.
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  77. Rubin, Vera, ed. Cannabis and Culture. Paris: Mouton, 1975.
  78. DOI: 10.1515/9783110812060Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  79. Rubin places more stress on social patterns and culture of the drug than trafficking; a few essays (Jamaica, Brazil, Colombia) have historical depth. Published in 1975 and never superseded by newer or fuller historical studies of marijuana in the Western Hemisphere.
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  81. Walker, William, III, ed. Drugs in the Western Hemisphere: An Odyssey of Cultures in Conflict. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1996.
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  83. Unique thematically organized documents collection, wide ranging from the 1890s to the 1990s. Introduction and conclusion on drug “cultures in conflict.”
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  85. Global Background
  86.  
  87. Until historians fully assess how local drug cultures and political elite and popular attitudes to drugs developed across Latin America, global contexts are a good starting point. Larger 20-century drug regimes—the global “prohibitions” system—and illicit drug flows, sparked in Latin America largely by drug demand from outside North America, provide a necessary starting point for study. The modern international anti-drug regime emerged in the early 20th century (approximately 1905–1920) in relation to overseas imperial concerns (opiates in China and the Philippines) and metropolitan drug scares, for example, involving recreational cocaine use in the United States at the turn of the 20th century (Bewley-Taylor 1999 and McAllister 2000, both cited under Global Drug Regimes). These new norms and legal restrictions, or active post–World War II campaigns against exports of specific illicit drugs, only slowly filtered to Latin American nations (Walker 1989, cited under General Overviews). The general literature on drugs in the 19th and 20th centuries, sampled below, is broad and excellent, but research is needed on how such legal regimes played out in the Americas.
  88.  
  89. Global Drug Regimes
  90.  
  91. A number of studies serve as excellent starting points to the study of the history of global drug regimes. Many classic and recent books examine the politics, conventions, and institutions of 20th-century drug control, from the original Opium Conventions through the efforts of the League of Nations to post–World War II and current United Nations drug regimes (McAllister 2000). The active US role is critical for Latin America (Taylor 1969) as well as the sources of US anti-drug attitudes and campaigns (Musto 1987) and the spread of US legal norms 2006 and policing institutions, such as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) (Nadelmann 1993). Also crucial are works that provides a broad review of the global and policy dynamics of the “war on drugs” waged by the United States later in the 20th century (Felab-Brown 2010, Stares 1996).
  92.  
  93. Bewley-Taylor, David R. The United States and International Drug Control. London: Pinter, 1999.
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  95. Well-researched critical academic history; looks at the current weakening of drug regimes. See also the follow-up book, International Drug Control: Consensus Fractured (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
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  97. Felab-Brown, Vanda. Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2010.
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  99. Global and policy-oriented, with detailed analytical chapters on the cases of Colombia and Peru.
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  101. McAllister, William B. Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century: An International History. London: Routledge, 2000.
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  103. Archive-rich rigorous international examination of politics in the rise of the prewar League of Nations and postwar United Nations drug regimes; treats the prohibitions of the regimes, which were less than perfect.
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  105. Musto, David F. The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control. 3d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
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  107. Canonical detailed account of the rise of drug prohibitions in the United States, related to racial fears, and America’s deep cultural ambivalence about drugs—love them, hate them.
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  109. Nadelmann, Ethan. Cops across Borders: The Internationalization of US Criminal Law Enforcement. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.
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  111. Unravels novel US attempts at international law and control dating from the early 20th century, including drug enforcement. Compare to Peter Andreas and Ethan Nadelmann, Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), which gives a fuller treatment of the rise of international control regimes, including drugs.
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  113. Stares, Paul B. Global Habit: The Drug Problem in a Borderless World. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, 1996.
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  115. Defines drugs as part of the larger problematic of “globalization” in the 1990s.
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  117. Taylor, Arnold H. American Diplomacy and the Narcotics Traffic, 1900–1939. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1969.
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  119. Early archival scholarship that aims to entangle early US drug foreign policies, demonstrates initial US pressures at drug “source” control.
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  121. Global Drug Histories
  122.  
  123. Another key set of contextual readings for the Americas is global drug history. Major new syntheses are available, notably, long-range histories that look at drugs as shifting sets of global and regional commodities (Courtwright 2001) or that present an encyclopedic range of the world’s drug cultures and trades (Davenport-Hines 2002, Escohotado 1989). A number of influential global scholarly collections combine cross-cultural insights from anthropology and history (Goodman, et al. 1995) or bring in strong ethno-botanical perspectives (Rudgley 1994, Schultes and Hoffman 1992). Trade in drugs can be well framed by a global commodity-chain analysis of the Latin American trade (Topik, et al. 2006) or in the history of colonial labor systems (Jankowiak and Bradburd 2003).
  124.  
  125. Courtwright, David T. Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
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  127. Vital global commodity study: accurate, readable, and analytical on distinctive drug histories and historical waves starting with the “psychoactive” revolution of the 17th century.
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  129. Davenport-Hines, Richard. The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002.
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  131. Exhaustive background on the global cornucopia of drugs; readable and long survey.
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  133. Escohotado, Antonio. Historia general de las drogas. 3 vols. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1989.
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  135. More exhaustive, if sometimes unoriginal global account of drug history; Spanish author has many other books, mostly on cannabis. A very abridged English translation is A Brief History of Drugs: From the Stone Age to the Stoned Age (Rochester, VT: Park Street, 1999).
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  137. Goodman, Jordan, Paul Lovejoy, and Andrew Sherratt, eds. Consuming Habits: Drugs in History and Anthropology. London: Routledge, 1995.
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  139. Lucid conceptual statement on the mix of anthropological and historical sensibilities in shifting roles, cultures, and values of drug foods, with case studies on specific drugs.
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  141. Jankowiak, William, and Daniel Bradburd, eds. Drugs, Labor and Colonial Expansion. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003.
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  143. Varied optics and global historical cases of the relation of varied drugs (alcohol, coca, tobacco) to strategies of colonial labor and commerce.
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  145. Rudgley, Richard. Essential Substances: A Cultural History of Intoxicants in Society. New York: Kodansha International, 1994.
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  147. Rudgley chronicles the long strange trip that it has been, from the angle of ethno-botanical anthropology.
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  149. Schultes, Richard Evans, and Albert Hoffman. Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing and Hallucinogenic Powers. Rochester, VT: Healing Arts, 1992.
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  151. Encyclopedia-like, much of the focus is on the cornucopia of American drug plants, from the world’s leading authorities at the time (one, the discoverer of LSD).
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  153. Topik, Steven, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank, eds. From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
  154. DOI: 10.1215/9780822388029Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  155. State-of-the-art collection on exports and consumption cultures from Latin America, with drug-related contributions of the three big “Cs”: coffee, cacao, and cocaine.
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  157. Global Smuggling and Illicit Flows
  158.  
  159. Drug trades are also related to controversies, whether academic- or policy-based, about illicit goods and flows or about smuggling activities in general. Critical academic literature is growing about the very ways we distinguish legitimate from illicit commerce—drugs, arms, migrants, counterfeit goods, etc.—across borders (Abraham and van Schendel 2005). Most topical works still take a sensationalized view of the threats posed by illicit globalization (Naím 2005), but this is countered by scholars who consider smuggling as an ancient central part of commerce, including as found in the long commercial history of the United States (Andreas 2013). Histories of smuggling range from the global (Karras 2010) to the strictly local (Zimmerman 2006), although Zimmerman 2006, about Florida, is illuminating with regard to the modern drug trades with Latin America.
  160.  
  161. Abraham, Itty, and Willem van Schendel, eds. Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders and the Other Side of Globalization. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.
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  163. Cutting-edge volume that disputes conventional views on illicit flows; includes two essays on Latin American drugs.
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  165. Andreas, Peter. Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
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  167. Accessible, boldly argued revisionist account; includes chapters on drug wars and the actions of smugglers that touch on Latin America and the Caribbean.
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  169. Karras, Alan L. Smuggling: Contraband and Corruption in World History. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010.
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  171. Part of a global history series, much material on the Caribbean, pirates, and colonial enterprises.
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  173. Naím, Moisés. Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy. New York: Doubleday, 2005.
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  175. Broad, sharp, and sensationalizing account of distinctive forms of illicit global economies and flows of the late 20th century.
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  177. Zimmerman, Stan. A History of Smuggling in Florida: Rumrunners and Cocaine Cowboys. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2006.
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  179. Brief amateur and long perspective on the other borderland—South Florida; last chapters on trades in modern drugs.
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  181. Coca/Cocaine
  182.  
  183. Because coca leaf and even the “invention” of modern cocaine trafficking are indigenous to Andean South America (see chapter 5 in Gootenberg 2009, cited under Peru: Peruvian Cocaine Traders), a significant set of works exist about them, in contrast to other drugs. The fact that between 1980 and 2010 the US hemispheric drug war focused primarily on cocaine supplies, and sharpened cultural and political conflicts about indigenous coca leaf, also contributes to this literature. These works are divided here into works on native Coca Leaf (mostly anthropological) and illicit Cocaine (mostly social sciences and modern trafficking literatures).
  184.  
  185. Coca Leaf
  186.  
  187. Some of these selections deal with coca’s historical material, especially late-19th-century connections or sites in Europe and the United States, when it became studied, marketed (as in Vin Mariani and Coca-Cola), and sometimes commercially grown in Asian colonies (Kennedy 1985, Karch 2003). They are valuable for understanding the context of the drug’s global impact (Musto 1998) (see also Andrews and Solomon 1975, cited under Primary Source Collections). Other works, mainly from the 1980s, are pioneering anthropological collections about Andean coca that began the modern wave of defending the leaf from the negative representations and consequences of the drug war (Boldó i Climent 1986, Instituto Indigenista InterAmericana 1989, Pacini and Franquemont 1985), and they often contain essays by key scholars of coca leaf. A Finnish geography thesis (Soininen 2008) offers a detailed global mapping of coca leaf history, while a collection originally written in Italian has historical essays on many aspects of the leaf (Calvani 2007).
  188.  
  189. Boldó i Climent, Jöan, ed. La coca andina: Visión indígena de una planta satanizada. Mexico City: Instituto Indigenista InterAmericano, 1986.
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  191. One of several valuable pro-coca rights collections, largely ethnographic, written in the midst of the expanding global war against Andean cocaine.
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  193. Calvani, Sandro, ed. La coca: Pasado y presente mitos y realidades. Bogotá, Colombia: Ediciones Aurora, 2007.
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  195. Idiosyncratic collection of essays on alleged 19th-century Bolivian origins of cocaine to UN evaluations of Colombian coca campaigns. Originally written in Italian.
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  197. Instituto Indigenista InterAmericana. La coca . . . tradición, rito, identidad. Mexico City: Instituto Indigenista InterAmericana, 1989.
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  199. Mostly anthropological, some history, and some reference to trafficking. Collection designed to “recuperate” or vindicate coca’s indigenous values; mostly about Bolivia.
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  201. Karch, Steven B. A History of Cocaine: The Mystery of Coca Java and the Kew Plant. London: Royal Society of Medicine Press, 2003.
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  203. Valuable reproduced documents, European and Asian, on coca’s worldly botanical and commercial travels at the turn of the 20th century; compare with his early survey, A Brief History of Cocaine (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1996). One of a series of global-oriented surveys and documents collections by Karch, with no research on Latin America.
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  205. Kennedy, Joseph. Coca Exotica: The Illustrated History of Cocaine. New York: Cornwall, 1985.
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  207. A suggestive and vigorous examination of the relationship of coca to cocaine through history, based on existing published literatures. Well-illustrated, coffee-book style.
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  209. Musto, David F. “International Traffic in Coca through the Early 20th Century.” Drug and Alcohol Dependence 19 (1998): 145–156.
  210. DOI: 10.1016/S0376-8716(97)00157-9Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  211. Unique collective effort at a measurement of the overall global trades of the era; lumps together coca/cocaine trades.
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  213. Pacini, Deborah, and Christine Franquemont, eds. Coca and Cocaine: Effects on People and Policy in Latin America. Cambridge, MA: Cultural Survival, 1985.
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  215. One of the top ethnographic and dissenting collections about the initial Andean drug war against coca.
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  217. Soininen, Jyri. “Industrial Geographies of Cocaine.” MA dess., Helinski School of Economics, 2008.
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  219. A major global historical survey of coca and cocaine sites and routes, from Asia and Europe to South America. Some primary work and rigorous critical analysis of all existing published sources.
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  221. Cocaine
  222.  
  223. The Andean cocaine boom was in full swing by the 1980s in Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia. The interventionist US response of the Reagan era, and beyond, stimulated much writing, specifically on cocaine trafficking. Many works have strong data and are valuable to read in retrospect as background documents (Clawson and Lee 1996); some offer comparative or pan-Andean perspectives (García-Sayán 1989, MacGregor 1993) or reflect the political climate of the times (MacDonald 1989). Global works on cocaine are also available. One excellent collection is contemporaneous with the rise of cocaine culture and consumption in the United States (Phillips and Wynne 1980) before the drug’s demonization; after 2000, one finds acceptable global biographies or commodity studies of cocaine, including overviews of the drug war against it (Feiling 2009, Streatfeild 2001). Strictly speaking, only two deeply researched academic studies exist on cocaine history, one about the United States from 1880 to 1920 (Spillane 2000), with some data on South American coca supplies, and the other a long-term 1850–1980 study of global cocaine, one centered on its birth in the Andes, especially in Peru (Gootenberg 2009, cited under Peru: Peruvian Cocaine Trades).
  224.  
  225. Clawson, Patrick L., and Rensselaer Lee III. The Andean Coca Industry. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996.
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  227. Hard-headed 1990s portrait, mainly dealing with economics and politics, not bullish on drug war prospects.
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  229. Feiling, Tom. The Candy Machine: How Cocaine Took Over the World. New York: Penguin, 2009.
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  231. Reedition of his Cocaine Nation (New York: Pegasus, 2009), a sharp nonacademic global survey from past to present, covers a wide range, including Colombia and Mexico, and includes liberalizing policy recommendations.
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  233. García-Sayán, Diego. Coca, cocaína y narcotráfico: Laberinto en los Andes. Lima: Comisión Andina de Jurídistas, 1989.
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  235. A then leading collection with multidiscipline essays (anthropology, economics, law, etc.) about Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia; follow-up policy-oriented volume appeared in 1990.
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  237. Gootenberg, Paul, ed. Cocaine: Global Histories. London: Routledge, 1999.
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  239. Organized by global commodity chains, brings together a new generation of historians of major coca and cocaine sites, writing about Europe, the United States, and Asia, including (in Latin America) Mexico, Colombia, and Peru.
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  241. MacDonald, Scott. Mountain High, White Avalanche: Cocaine and Power in the Andean States and Panama. New York: Praeger, 1989.
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  243. A typical alarmist 1980s survey; includes smaller countries.
  244. Find this resource:
  245. MacGregor, Felipe E., ed. Coca and Cocaine: An Andean Perspective. Translated by Jonathan Cavanagh and Rosemary Underhay. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993.
  246. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  247. Detailed essays on Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru in the 1980s, economic, social, and political impacts, UN-oriented.
  248. Find this resource:
  249. Phillips, Joel L., and Ronald W. Wynne, eds. Cocaine: The Mystique and the Reality. New York: Avon, 1980.
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  251. Unusual survey of the era, with substantive historical documentation about precursors and about consumption in the 1970s, at the moment of cocaine’s rebirth as a pleasure good in the United States.
  252. Find this resource:
  253. Spillane, Joseph F. Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States, 1884–1920. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
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  255. Quality academic history of cocaine, focused on the rise of the US industry, medicine, and restrictions, and notes linkages to Andean supply.
  256. Find this resource:
  257. Streatfeild, Dominic. Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography. London: Virgin, 2001.
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  259. Long narrative, including Latin American material and perspectives, drawing from travel, interviews, and secondary works.
  260. Find this resource:
  261. National Studies
  262.  
  263. Drug trafficking as smuggling across borders is intrinsically “transnational,” raising questions of how to study cross-border contraband flows (Abraham and van Schendel 2005, cited under Global Smuggling and Illicit Flows). Yet, national (or even regional, ethnic, or class-based) drug cultures were also significant in many areas of the Americas and likely contributed to the making of trafficking supply zones and routes during the latter half of the 20th century. A handful of national drug histories in Latin America exist, focused on drug laws and aspects of drug cultures in particular countries, such as Chile, Brazil, and Mexico (Fernández Labbé 2011, cited under Argentina, Chile, Paraguay; Gonçalves 2005, cited under Consuming Nations: Brazil; Pérez Montfort 1999, cited under Mexican Drug Cultures). Until now, most scholars have written about trafficking starting from basic national frameworks, which is why and how the topic is organized here, starting with Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and other Transit Zones (Cuba, the Caribbean, and Central America).
  264.  
  265. Bolivia
  266.  
  267. Bolivia, with is strong Aymara past, is South America’s most indigenous nation, and it is the Andean nation with the greatest attachment to the coca leaf (Carter and Mamami 1980, cited under History of Bolivian Coca Leaf). A traditional marker of highland Indian identity, coca use now extends to mestizo and lowland populations, making it by now a symbol of national identity. Historically, coca was raised on estates and some Indian ayllus (communities) in the tropical Yungas ravines, and its domestic exchange throughout the highland altiplano monetized Bolivia’s mainly export economy. After the Bolivian revolution of 1952, peasant cultivation of coca spread rapidly into tropical lowlands zones, such as Santa Cruz and the Chapare. By the 1960s, Bolivia also became a key site for illicit cocaine exports, climaxing during the 1980s with a series of military regimes notoriously tainted by their cocaine politics. Illicit drug production fell significantly in the 1990s with the help of US-supported eradication programs. Yet, in 2005, in another twist of history, the long presidency of Evo Morales, a former coca union leader, made Bolivia novel on the world stage for its national defense of the indigenous coca leaf, which set the nation at odds with hard-line US views of the drug war in the Western Hemisphere.
  268.  
  269. History of Bolivian Coca Leaf
  270.  
  271. The pre-Hispanic and colonial roots of coca extended into cultivation in the 19th century by Bolivian elites and indigenous communities in the rugged Yungas region near La Paz (Klein 1985). In fact, coca revenue was a key source of power and influence for Liberal Party elites (Soux 1993), one reason why Bolivia mounted a fascinating defense of its traditional leaf before officials of the League of Nations during the 1920s (Lema 1992). The subsequent 20th-century history of the leaf remains highly scattered, and work has been done mainly by ethnographers or botanists (Carter and Mamami 1980, Loza Balsa 1992) rather than systematically undertaken by archival historians. An aspect of the modernization of the growth and spread of the leaf, namely its use by the middle classes in nearby parts of Argentina, also needs further study (Rivera Cusicanqui 2005).
  272.  
  273. Carter, William E., ed. Ensayos científicos sobre la coca. La Paz, Bolivia: Librería Editorial Juventud, 1983.
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  275. Varied essays, some scientific, edited by ethnographic expert working against international coca trend.
  276. Find this resource:
  277. Carter, William E., and Mauricio Mamami. Coca in Bolivia. La Paz, Bolivia: UFLA/NIDA, 1980.
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  279. Exhaustive survey of issues such as nutritional values and the cultural and social roles of coca.
  280. Find this resource:
  281. Klein, Herbert S. “Coca Production in the Bolivian Yungas in the Colonial and Early National Periods.” In Coca and Cocaine: Effects on People and Policy in Latin America. Edited by Deborah Pacini and Christine Franquemont, 53–64. Cambridge, MA: Cultural Survival, 1985.
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  283. Succinct and best historical background survey in English.
  284. Find this resource:
  285. Lema, Ana María. “La coca de las Americas: Partido renido entre la Sociedad Propietarios de Yungas y la Sociedad de Naciones.” I Coloquio Cocayapu (1992): 1–12.
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  287. Bolivian angle on the encounter with League of Nation drug controllers in the 1920s; English version in “The Coca Debate and Yungas Landowners in the First Half of the 20th-Century,” in Coca, Cocaine, and the Bolivian Reality, edited by Madeline Barbara Léons and Harry Sanabria (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 99–117.
  288. Find this resource:
  289. Loza Balsa, Gregorio. Monografía de la coca. La Paz, Bolivia: Sociedad Geográfica de La Paz, 1992.
  290. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  291. A major source for historical and regional data.
  292. Find this resource:
  293. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. “‘Here Even Legislators Chew Them’: Coca Leaves and Identity Politics in Northern Argentina.” In Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders and the Other Side of Globalization. Edited by Itty Abraham and Willem van Schendel, 128–152. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.
  294. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  295. Demonstrates cross-class use and acceptance of “Bolivian” coca in nearby Argentina.
  296. Find this resource:
  297. Soux, María Luisa. La coca liberal: Producción y circulación a principios del s. xx. La Paz, Bolivia: CID, 1993.
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  299. The sole cohesively researched monograph on coca history in Bolivia: detailed account of coca producing at the turn of the 20th century by Yungas elites and ayllus (indigenous communities), based on strong coca census data; shows impacts on Liberal Party politics.
  300. Find this resource:
  301. Bolivian Cocaine
  302.  
  303. Bolivia does not have a long history with cocaine as does Peru; after the emergence of illicit cocaine production in Bolivia’s tropical frontiers beginning in the 1960s, some scholarship traced the relationship of traditional coca to cocaine trafficking. Some of this work provides decent historical data on a difficult topic for empirical research (Bascopé Aspiazu 1993, Canelas Orellana and Canelas Zanner 1983), but it is mainly focused on the cocaine boom and “narco-state” years of the 1980s (Léons and Sanabria 1997). Very little has been done on the Bolivian development of illicit cocaine labs from the 1950s to the 1970s (Gootenberg 2009, cited under Peru: Peruvian Cocaine Trades, see pp. 275–286). Bolivia’s lagging adaptation of anti-drug politics and campaigns after 1960 has not been well studied (Reiss 2005). However, a few strong ethnographic studies of the migratory economies that brought highland peasants and workers into coca cultivation in the Chapare and other lowland regions are available (Sanabria 1993, Rodas Morales 1996). US-sponsored anti-drug and coca eradication programs of the 1990s are also studied, often from critical perspectives (Malamud-Goti 1992, Painter 1994). An interesting area for future research is the revaloration of national coca leaf after the 1970s, linked to neo-indigenistas politics and peasant unions, today a lively factor in Bolivian politics.
  304.  
  305. Bascopé Aspiazu, René. La veta blanca: Coca y cocaína en Bolivia. 3d ed. La Paz, Bolivia: Ediciones Gráficas “E.G.”, 1993.
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  307. Brief but useful survey, originally published in 1982, first of coca, then cocaine, with episodic historical data about the 1950s to the 1970s.
  308. Find this resource:
  309. Canelas Orellana, Amado, and Juan Carlos Canelas Zanner. Bolivia: Coca cocaína: Subdesarrollo y poder político. La Paz, Bolivia: Los Amigos de Libro, 1983.
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  311. Long (470 pages plus charts) and wandering, treats region, coca, and cocaine, mostly deals with the 1980s. Some good historical data; includes chronology.
  312. Find this resource:
  313. Léons, Madeline Barbara, and Harry Sanabria, eds. Coca, Cocaine, and the Bolivian Reality. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.
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  315. Good selection of mostly ethnographic and critical essays on the impact of the drug war on Bolivia in the 1980s.
  316. Find this resource:
  317. Malamud-Goti, Jaime. Smoke and Mirrors: The Paradox of the Drug Wars. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992.
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  319. Critically engaged, revealing on the ground account and analysis of the drug war in the 1980s in Bolivia.
  320. Find this resource:
  321. Painter, James. Bolivia and Coca: A Study in Dependency. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994.
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  323. Lucid and data-filled journalist look at coca and cocaine as a typical “export” commodity with few benefits (and many costs) to the host country.
  324. Find this resource:
  325. Reiss, Suzanna J. “Policing for Profit: United States Imperialism and the International Drug Economy.” PhD diss., New York University, 2005.
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  327. Thesis with archival-based narrative on the US role in fostering anti-drug laws in postwar Bolivia, as a case of economic imperialism.
  328. Find this resource:
  329. Rodas Morales, Hugo. Huanchaca: Modelo político empresarial de la cocaína en Bolivia. La Paz, Bolivia: Centro de Información para el Desarrollo, 1996.
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  331. Much theorized, fragmented, yet analytical account placing the rise of Chapare cocaine in the aftermath of 1952 revolution; synthesizes narco-regimes of the 1980s.
  332. Find this resource:
  333. Sanabria, Harry. The Coca Boom and Rural Social Change in Bolivia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
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  335. Rare genuine ethnographic work linking coca to migrants from former highland and mining regions, including impact on cocalero politics.
  336. Find this resource:
  337. Colombia
  338.  
  339. During the 1980s and 1990s, Colombia became synonymous with the Latin American drug trade, mostly for cocaine, though Colombia had an earlier marijuana boom in the Santa Marta region in the 1970s and even a brief heroin boom in the mid-1990s. Colombia was the country closely associated with the term cartels—powerful regional criminal organizations based in Medellín, Cali, and other regional hubs. Colombia also endured, during the 1980s and 1990s, intense waves of drug violence as traffickers battled the state and each other for control of territory and legitimacy. Social scientists debate the political and social conditions that made Colombia ripe for illicit economies, but, prior to the 1970s, the country had little role in drug smuggling, despite its regional contraband traditions. The Colombian peasantry barely raised coca until it took off after the mid-1980s as an illicit crop grown in southeastern provinces and linked to traffickers in the global cocaine trade. By 2000, the Colombian state formed a strategic anti-drug alliance with the United States, “Plan Colombia,” which, after a long struggle and high costs, has helped the Colombian government regain control over traffickers, coca peasants, and armed actors such as paramilitaries and guerrillas in the drug trade. By 2013, Colombia’s cocaine bonanza is probably ebbing, with coca returning, “balloon” style, back to Peru. Many historical questions, however, remain: Why did cocaine root here and what made it so violent here? How did the drug industry relate to economic and other elites and to social maladies, such as inequality, urban slums, political exclusion, and landlessness? Cocaine trafficking features ins much contemporaneous writing, including in the fields of journalism, politics, and political economy, but its historical roots remain murky, like the illicit underground worlds that thrived during a now recognizable four-decade “Age of Colombian Cocaine” (1975–2005).
  340.  
  341. Colombian Origins
  342.  
  343. A more extensive literature is beginning to appear that looks at the longer historical origins and contexts of the 1980s boom. This includes works on Colombian smuggling zones and traditions (Betancourt and García 1994, González Plazas 2008), on coca in pre-cocaine Colombia (Henman 1978, García Hoyos 2002), and on Colombian drug use (Bula Agudelo and Pérez Gómez 1988). At least two histories (Henderson 2012, Hylton 2006) attempt to place the explosive outbreak of Colombian drug violence in longer historical and international perspective. The historian Sáenz Rovner is dedicated to amassing scattered documents and cases of precursory drug trades in Colombia. Together, his works (Sáenz Rovner 1996, Sáenz Rovner 2008, and Sáenz Rovner 2012 (along with a book about Cuba, Sáenz Rovner 2008, cited under Transit Zones (Cuba, the Caribbean, and Central America)) represent a heavily footnoted catalogue of evidence by a trained historian interested in the origins of the drug trade. Britto’s “The Marihuana Axis” (Britto 2013) is the first true scholarly work on that drug, a brief boom in marijuana exporting and smuggling in the Caribbean region in the 1970s prior to cocaine.
  344.  
  345. Betancourt, Darío, and Martha Luz García. Contrabandistas, marimberos y mafiosos: Historia social de la mafia colombiana, 1965–1992. Bogotá, Colombia: Tercer Mundo Editoriales, 1994.
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  347. Valuable social history of groups associated with early contraband and coastal marijuana trades.
  348. Find this resource:
  349. Britto, Lina. “The Marihuana Axis: Colombia’s First Narcotics Boom, 1935–1985.” PhD diss., New York University, 2013.
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  351. Recently researched thesis, including in-depth oral history, on the rise of marijuana smuggling elites in relation to the previous rise in export and development in the Guajira region. Some of this analysis is published in Lino Britto, “A Trafficker’s Paradise: The ‘War on Drugs’ and the New Cold War in Colombia,” Contemporánea 1.1 (2010): 159–177.
  352. Find this resource:
  353. Bula Agudelo, Mayra, and Augusto Pérez Gómez. Historia de la drogadicción en Colombia. Bogotá, Colombia: Uniandes, 1988.
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  355. Addiction perspective on growing domestic and medical problem in Colombia. See also Bula Agudelo and Augusto Pérez Gómez, Sustancias psicoactivas: Historia del consumo en Colombia (Bogotá, Colombia: Editorial Presencia, 1994), a national consumption drug history.
  356. Find this resource:
  357. García Hoyos, Juan Carlos. De la coca a la cocaína: Una historia para comprender. Mexico City: Ediciones del Milenio, 2002.
  358. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  359. Brief, fairly polemical historical survey by a Colombian anthropologist, with small gems detailing Colombia’s limited history of coca.
  360. Find this resource:
  361. González Plazas, Santiago. Pasado y presente del contrabando en la Guajira: Aproximaciones al fenómeno de ilegalidad en la región. Bogotá, Colombia: Centro de Estudios y Observatorio de Drogas y Delitos, Universidad del Rosario, 2008.
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  363. One of the studies of “illicit” proclivities and a history of the northern coast.
  364. Find this resource:
  365. Henderson, James D. Víctima de la globalización: La historia de cómo el narcotráfico destruyóla paz en Colombia. Bogotá, Colombia: Siglo de Hombres Editores, 2012.
  366. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  367. One of the first books by a professional historian on the drug and violence decades; detailed attempt at periodization, but based primarily on existing print sources.
  368. Find this resource:
  369. Henman, Anthony (Antonil). Mama coca. London: Hassle Free Press, 1978.
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  371. Often unruly anthropological account of coca in Colombia in the 1970s, offers an onsight lens into the explosion of then-novel trades in illicit cocaine.
  372. Find this resource:
  373. Hylton, Forrest. Evil Hour in Colombia. London: Verso, 2006.
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  375. A historian and writer, Hylton takes a long view (19th century, La Violencia of the 1950s) of Colombia’s descent into violence, drugs, and repression in the late 20th century.
  376. Find this resource:
  377. Sáenz Rovner, Eduardo. “‘La prehistoria del narcotráfico en Colombia.’ Innovar 8 (1996): 65–92.
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  379. See also “La prehistoria de la marihuana en Colombia: Consumo y cultivos entre los años 30 y 60,” Cuadernos de Economía 26.47 (2007): 205–222. Looks at early marijuana smugglers along the coast; with footnotes.
  380. Find this resource:
  381. Sáenz Rovner, Eduardo. “Los redes de Cubanos, norteamericanos, y colombianos en el narcotraffico en Miami durantes los años sesenta.” Innovar 18 (2008): 111–126.
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  383. Transnational study of Colombians and their networks moving into Miami in the 1970s.
  384. Find this resource:
  385. Sáenz Rovner, Eduardo. “Entre Carlos Lehder y los vaqueros de la cocaína: La consolidacíon de las redes de narcotraficantes Colombianos en Miami en los años 70.” Cuadernos de Economía 30.54 (2011): 105–126.
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  387. Similar to Sáenz Rovner 2008, a heavily footnoted work.
  388. Find this resource:
  389. Sáenz Rovner, Eduardo. “Estudio de caso de la diplomacia antinarcóticos entre Colombia y los Estados Unidos (gobierno de Alfonso López Michelsen, 1974–1978).” Documento Escuela de Administración y Contaduría 13 (2012).
  390. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  391. Looks at drug diplomacy and governmental corruption charges during the first major rise of Colombian trafficking.
  392. Find this resource:
  393. Colombian Trafficking
  394.  
  395. A number of books illustrate different aspects of the trafficking phenomena in Colombia. They include multifaceted interdisciplinary essays collections (Arrieta 1990), extended ethnographies (Cajas 2004), anthropological studies of the cocaleros (peasant coca growers) as political actors (Ramírez 2011), and many analyses of the economic conditions for, and impact of, illicit drugs (Rocha García 2000, Thoumi 1997, Thoumi 2003). Kenney 2007 is a revealing and rigorous new book drawing on criminology, which uncovers the actual structures and changing behavior of the so-called cartels in their proactive relation to the US drug warriers.
  396.  
  397. Arrieta, Carlos G., eds. Narcotráfico en Colombia: Dimensiones políticas, económicas, jurídicas e internacionales. Bogotá, Colombia: Tercer Mundo Editores, 1990.
  398. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  399. Weighty collection, mostly economics, criminology, and US policies about drugs, from 1978 to the 1980s.
  400. Find this resource:
  401. Cajas, Juan. El truquito y la maroma, cocaína, traquetos y pistolocos en Nueva York: Una antropología de la incertidumbre y lo prohibido. Mexico City: M. A. Porrúa, 2004.
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  403. Multisited ethnography of small-time coke dealers from Colombian origins, transit, and Queens, New York; with musings.
  404. Find this resource:
  405. Kenney, Michael. From Pablo to Osama: Trafficking and Terrorist Networks, Government Bureaucracies, and Competitive Adaptation. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007.
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  407. Part criminology, ethnography, and network theory, a striking analysis of the adaptability and changing structures of “cartels” in the face of the escalating drug war of the 1990s. Draws comparisons to terrorist networks after 9/11. Highly recommended, but historical sections in his doctoral thesis only: “Outsmating the State: A Comparison Case Study of the Learning Capacity of Colombian Drug Trafficking Organizations and Government Counter-Narcotics Agencies,” PhD dissertation, University of florida, Gainesville, 2002.
  408. Find this resource:
  409. Ramírez, María Clemencia. Between the Guerrillas and the State: The Cocalero Movement, Citizenship, and Identity in the Colombian Amazon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
  410. DOI: 10.1215/9780822394204Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  411. Well-researched and engaged scholarship about the rise of coca growers as political actors in the Putumayo region.
  412. Find this resource:
  413. Rocha García, Ricardo. La economía colombiana tras 25 años de narcotráfico. Bogotá, Colombia: Siglo del Hombre, 2000.
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  415. UN-sponsored report, tracing the economic impact of drugs over time.
  416. Find this resource:
  417. Thoumi, Francisco, ed. Drogas ilícitas en Colombia: Su impacto económico, político y social. Bogotá, Colombia: Editorial Ariel, 1997.
  418. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  419. Collection of social scientific analyses, the why and how of Colombian cocaine in the 1980s and 1990s.
  420. Find this resource:
  421. Thoumi, Francisco. Illegal Drugs, Economy and Society in the Andes. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2003.
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  423. Integrated collection of Thoumi’s essays, who is an economist by training, on the structure and behavior of drugs as an “industry”; some historical context and comparisons to southern Andes and Mexico.
  424. Find this resource:
  425. Colombian Cartels
  426.  
  427. Since the 1970s, Colombian drug trafficking organizations have been characterized, as they are today in Mexico, as “cartels.” The stress on territorial cartels can obscure the longer historical origins of drug trades, and the term itself is problematic for competitive entrepreneurial and criminal structures with complex sets of social and political networks (Krauthausen and Sarmiento 1991, and Kenney 2007, cited under Colombia: Colombian Trafficking). The dominant groups is centered around Medellín and Cali, though specialists and journalists identified four to five groups for the entire country (Jaramillo Arango and Veléz 1987, Castillo 1987, Gugliotta and Leen 1989), including the later lesser-known “North Valle” (López 2008). Cartels are closely identified with violence, though they were also involved in politics, and Cali traffickers, unlike those in Medellín, for example, carefully avoided confrontation with the state (Chepesiuk 2007, Chaparro 2005). After the government’s assault on Medellín traffickers and then on the Cali interests during the 1990s, these groups splintered into scores of so-called boutique cartelitos or traquetos (Camacho-Guizado and López-Restrepo 2007), some managed by groups, such as former paramilitaries, and others spreading branches abroad to Peru and Argentina.
  428.  
  429. Camacho-Guizado, Alvaro, and Andrés López-Restrepo. “From Smugglers to Drug-Lords to Traquetos: Changes in the Colombian Illicit Drug Organizations.” In Peace, Democracy, and Human Rights in Colombia. Edited by Christopher Welna and Gustavo Gallón, 60–89. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
  430. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  431. One of the few strong historical outlines of trafficking organizations.
  432. Find this resource:
  433. Castillo, Fabio. Los jinetes de la cocaína. Bogotá, Colombia: Editoriales Documentos Periodísticos, 1987.
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  435. Drawn from the archives of the Bogotá newspaper El Espectador; implicates scores of Colombians in early activities of the drug trade; a muckracking, fragmented account. See also Fabio Castillo, La coca nostro (Bogotá, Colombia: Editoriales Documentos Periodísticos, 1991), a continuation of this work; includes an effort to map cartels; better documented and written.
  436. Find this resource:
  437. Chaparro, Camilio. Historia del cartel de Calí: El Aledrez mueve sus fichas. Bogotá, Colombia: Intermedio, 2005.
  438. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  439. Chronologically fractured journalistic account, largely centered on the activities, including the extradition, of the dominant Rodríguez Orijuela brothers in the 1990s.
  440. Find this resource:
  441. Chepesiuk, Ron. Drug Lords: The Rise and Fall of the Cali Cartel. Lythan, UK: Milo, 2007.
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  443. Detailed and at times historical (1970s–1990s) account, drawing on journalistic and policing sources, connecting Colombia trafficking to the Caribbean, Miami, and New York.
  444. Find this resource:
  445. Gugliotta, Guy, and Jeff Leen. Kings of Cocaine: Inside the Medellín Cartel, an Astonishing True Story of Murder, Money, and Corruption. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.
  446. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  447. The title tells it all; almost 700 episodic pages, written at the height of the “cartels” prior to the manhunt for Escobar in 1993.
  448. Find this resource:
  449. Jaramillo Arango, Mario, and Jorge Child Veléz. Narcotráfico: Imperio de la cocaína. Mexico City: Editorial Diana, 1987.
  450. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  451. Early effort to categorize Colombia’s illicit drug organizations.
  452. Find this resource:
  453. Krauthausen, Ciro, and Luis Fernando Sarmiento. Cocaína & Co.: Un mercado ilegal por dentro. Bogotá, Colombia: Tercer Mundo Editores, 1991.
  454. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  455. Useful effort to map the major actors, groups, and “networks” of the 1980s, treated as sociological Colombian “entrepreneurs” (empresarios).
  456. Find this resource:
  457. López, Andrés. El cartel de los Sapos: La historia secreta de una de las mafias más ponderosas del mundo: El cartel del Norte del Valle. Bogotá, Colombia: Editorial Planeta Colombiana, 2008.
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  459. Story of the other cartel; carries a journalistic tone, a story with roots in Escobar and overseas connections.
  460. Find this resource:
  461. Pablo Escobar and Medellín
  462.  
  463. Many strongmen and defined family groups vied for dominance in Colombian drug trafficking in the 1980s (Carlos Lehder, the Rodríguez Orijuela brothers, the Ochoa clan), but Pablo Escobar was the wealthiest and most flamboyant, and he left an enduring mystique, reflected in the literature. Recommended overall biographies are Salazar 2001 (in Spanish and in English) and Mollison (2007), which is part original photographic essay. After his obscure rise in the turbulent politics in Medellín in the 1970s (Martin 2012, Roldán 1999), Escobar, a business innovator who used systematic violence as a tactic, dominated the “Medellin cartel,” which, by the early 1980s, had become the world’s largest drug exporting enterprise (Baquero 2012). His following included marginalized urban youth, such as sicarios (assassins), and he developed national political aspirations that brought him into a sharp, bloody conflict with the Colombian state in 1984 (Strong 1995). Escobar was jailed and, in in 1993, he was assassinated by US-assisted government forces (Bowden 2001). Following his death, his iconic status grew even greater, and Escobar is now the subject of much writing (Legara Martínez 2005) and filmmaking (i.e., Ferrero 2012, cited under Documentaries and Film).
  464.  
  465. Baquero, Petrit. El A.B.C. de la Mafia: Radiografía del cartel de Medellín. Bogotá, Colombia: Planeta, 2012.
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  467. Limited historical context and biographies of players and structure of organization; up-to-date but largely journalistic. Epilogue on rival Cali cartel of 1990s.
  468. Find this resource:
  469. Bowden, Mark. Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2001.
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  471. Part biography, part international police “thriller,” a best-seller-type account of the decade of violence and manhunt (assisted by US forces) preceding Escobar’s targeted 1993 assassination.
  472. Find this resource:
  473. Legara Martínez, Astrid. El verdadero Pablo: Sangre, traición, muerte. Bogotá, Colombia: Gato Azul, 2005.
  474. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  475. Journalistic, orally narrated, diffuse account of the infamous Medellín cartel patron.
  476. Find this resource:
  477. Martin, Gerard. Medellín: Tragedía y resurrección: Mafía, ciudad y estado, 1975–2012. Bogotá, Colombia: Planeta Colombiana, 2012.
  478. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  479. Recent, intensely researched, detailed, serious urban history of the impact of cocaine gangs and cartels and the rampant social violence of the drug era and it aftermath.
  480. Find this resource:
  481. Mollison, James. The Memory of Pablo Escobar. London: Chris Boot, 2007.
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  483. Ostensibly an extended essay on the photographic or forensic memory of Escobar, the analysis of Escobar’s activities and mentalities, based on hundreds of interviews (including access to Escobar’s late mother), which makes it one of the best sources for understanding the man and Colombia’s cocaine era. With Rainbow Nelso.
  484. Find this resource:
  485. Roldán, Mary. “Colombia: Cocaine and the ‘Miracle’ of Modernity in Medellín.” In Cocaine: Global Histories. Edited by Paul Gootenberg, 165–182. London: Routledge, 1999.
  486. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  487. A brief essay that lucidly reveals the climate and impact of cocaine in Medellín in the 1970s and 1980s.
  488. Find this resource:
  489. Salazar, J. Alonso. La parábola de Pablo: Auge y caída de un gran capo del narcotráfico. Bogotá, Colombia: Editorial Planeta Colombiana, 2001.
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  491. Engaged, deeply informed, and well-written social and political biography—inspiring a hit Colombian TV series—by an innovative Colombian thinker and politician who has also written about the sicarios (drug assassins) of Medellín.
  492. Find this resource:
  493. Strong, Simon. Whitewash: Pablo Escobar and the Cocaine Wars. London: Macmillan, 1995.
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  495. A rare volume that is a solid politically contextual biography of Escobar by a highly experienced Andean journalist.
  496. Find this resource:
  497. The United States and Colombian Drugs
  498.  
  499. The United States, a longtime close ally of the government of Colombia, became a major factor in Colombian anti-drug and trafficker policies after the 1980s—a relationship that has been characterized by conflict and dissension as well (Crandall 2002). Policy trends included the drug kingpin “extradition” politics of the late 1980s, which polarized Colombian society and brought a wave of trafficker violence, and the coca eradication of “Plan Colombia” after 1999, which targeted the lowland rural peasantry. Some critical studies of the drug relationship suggest US imperial motives for involvement, such as counterinsurgency strategies or economic interests (see Marcy 2010 for broad view as well as Villar and Cottle 2011) and the counterproductive results of anti-drug pressures (Tokatlián 1995). The United States surely helped Colombia build a “stronger” state amid the drug war, especially during Plan Colombia. The United States has been criticized for the consequences, intended or not, that befell the Colombian populace, including human rights abuses, refugees, environmental harm, and drug-related violence and repression (Kirk 2004).
  500.  
  501. Crandall, Russell. Driven by Drugs: U.S. Policy Towards Colombia. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002.
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  503. Includes historical backdrop on the relationship, tackling of drugs and violence problems; mostly focused on the Samper and Pastraña regimes of the 1990s up to the start of the Plan Colombia anti-drug campaign of 1999.
  504. Find this resource:
  505. Kirk, Robin. More Terrible than Death: Massacres, Drugs, and America’s War on Drugs. New York: Public Affairs, 2004.
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  507. Graphic insightful work on the multiple harms wrought by the US drug war in Colombia; a good companion to New Yorker writer Alma Guillermoprieta’s famous essays on the same topic.
  508. Find this resource:
  509. Marcy, William L. The Politics of Cocaine: How U.S. Foreign Policy Has Created a Thriving Drug Industry in Central and South America. Chicago: Chicago Review, 2010.
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  511. Well-researched in the US National Archives and other sites; gives a broad account of Andean and Central American cocaine trafficking of the 1980s and 1990s in relation to US policies. Notes that the drive to repress drug-related guerrilla groups dooms policies.
  512. Find this resource:
  513. Tokatlián, Juan. 1995. Drogas, dilemas y dogmas: Estados Unidos y la narcocriminalidad organizada en Colombia. Bogotá, Colombia: Tercer Mundo.
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  515. A critical perspective treating political science and international relations, written by amajor veteran specialist in the field.
  516. Find this resource:
  517. Villar, Oliver, and Drew Cottle. Cocaine Death Squads and the War on Terror: US Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia. New York: Monthly Review, 2011.
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  519. As the title suggests, cocaine trades as product of imperious international and social forces.
  520. Find this resource:
  521. Mexico
  522.  
  523. By the 21st century, Mexico became the main drug trafficking center and entry zone into US markets. This shift from Colombia sparked the notorious corruption and strife that has climaxed in the “Mexican drug war,” which, since 2006, has cost an estimated 70,000 lives in fierce fighting between various trafficking groups and the Mexican state. Beyond sensationalistic journalistic accounts, the origins of Mexico’s drug commerce remain insufficiently researched, but historical work is advancing on border regions and the Sierra Madre and Pacific coast regions, such as Sinaloa, that generated cartels by the 1980s. Mexico has grown marijuana for export (in the north and some southern states such as Oaxaca) as well as poppies, and it has recently made methamphetamine. Major questions have been raised as to whether the post-revolution Mexican state led by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) extended regulatory or peace pacts with regional traffickers in the 1940s, which dissolved amid the drug boom of the mid-1980s, whether Mexico devised its own anti-drug politics, or whether the country has largely followed US cues about its drug laws. Historians are examining ties among traditional border cultures, contraband, and corruption, and between Mexico’s impoverished post-1970s peasantry (and regional business groups) and the emergence of strong trafficking networks in northern Mexico.
  524.  
  525. Mexican Drug Cultures
  526.  
  527. Ancient Mexico was home to one of the world’s most diverse complexes of hallucinogenic and other plant intoxicants (fungi, cacti, seeds, etc.), which slipped underground among the indigenous people during the Spanish colonial era. In the 20th century, some native drug cultures, such as that of peyote in northern Mexico and mushroom cults in southern Mexico (Estrada 1996, Feinberg 2003) reemerged with shaman leaders, and they acquired international renown. In recent years, a number of works have addressed the history of modern Mexican drug scenes and cultures. Works such as Gutiérrez Ramos 1996, Pérez Montfort 1997, and Pérez Montfort 1999 are more serious and historically based than others, such as Martínez Rentería and Rivera Rivera 2010. A few new popular histories openly celebrate the Mexican drug culture, such as “mariguana” use, and they decry policies such as drug criminalization and the drug war, which are seen as foreign impositions (Martínez Rentería 2012, Velázquez Huerta 2010). However, the most seriously researched scholarly book on Mexican drug history (Campos 2012), shows that, contrary to myths, cannabis was an uncommon, denigrated botanic import in Mexico until the 20th century, and that Mexican prejudices and early government policies against low-class drugs ran very strong.
  528.  
  529. Campos, Isaac. Home-Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
  530. DOI: 10.5149/9780807882689_camposSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  531. First model archival-based study, with revisionist perspectives on the drug’s late-comer status, global origins, national discourses, and initial prohibition. See also Campos, “Degeneration and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 26.2 (2010): 379–408.
  532. Find this resource:
  533. Estrada, Álvaro. Huautla en tiempo de hippies. Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1996.
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  535. Author of several books about mushroom shaman María Sabina, a brief ethnography of the counterculture drug tourism impact on this small Oaxacan drug mecca in the 1960s.
  536. Find this resource:
  537. Feinberg, Benjamin. The Devil’s Book of Culture: History, Mushrooms, and Caves in Southern Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
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  539. Ethnographic more than historical, with lucid framing of Oaxacan hallucinogenic usage.
  540. Find this resource:
  541. Gutiérrez Ramos, Axayácatl. “Consumo y tráfico de opio en Mexico, 1920–1949.” Unpublished thesis, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1996.
  542. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  543. Rare archival research on early-20th-century opiates, as well as pioneering research on the first drug laws.
  544. Find this resource:
  545. Martínez Rentería, Carlos. La utopía posible: Periodismo por la despenalización de las drogas. Mexico City: Generación Publicaciones Periodísticas, 2012.
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  547. Brief mainly pro-drug interviews, some historical reflections.
  548. Find this resource:
  549. Martínez Rentería, Carlos, and Leopoldo Rivera Rivera, eds. Tradición, disfrute, y prohibición: Cultura de las drogas en México. Mexico City: Generación Publicaciones Periodísticas, 2010.
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  551. More than thirty brief entries on mushrooms, María Sabina, peyote, “mariguana,” cocaine, and the “farce” of prohibitions in Mexico.
  552. Find this resource:
  553. Pérez Montfort, Ricardo. “Fragmentos de historia de Las ‘drogas’ en México, 1870–1920.” In Hábitos, normas y escándalo: Prensa, criminalidad y drogas durante el porfiriato tardío. Edited by Ricardo Pérez Montfort, 143–210. Mexico: Plaza y Valdés, 1997.
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  555. Fragments of medical and drug history, largely Porfirian, in three-part text on criminality, alcoholism, and drugs (the rest by Alberto de Castillo and Pablo Piccato).
  556. Find this resource:
  557. Pérez Montfort, Ricardo. Yerba, goma y polvo: Drogas, ambientes y policías en México, 1900–1940. Mexico City: INAH-Ediciones ERA, 1999.
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  559. Well-produced photographic essay, mostly of addicts at the turn of the 20th century; impressionistic introductory text on early Mexican drug history.
  560. Find this resource:
  561. Velázquez Huerta, Armando. Mariguana: Historia de la mariguana en México. Mexico City: Biblos y Thacuilos, 2010.
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  563. Popular, predictable, but timely account from well-known sources.
  564. Find this resource:
  565. Trafficking History
  566.  
  567. Mexico has a long but largely unstudied pre-history of drug smuggling before the rise of large-scale “cartel” criminal organizations in the 1980s, which likely derived from strong regional cultures and political functions of illicit activities (Astorga 1996, Knight 2012). Border towns, such as Mexicali, Tijuana, Juárez, and Laredo, embraced a succession of smuggling and vice trades starting around 1910 that ranged from patent medicines and Mexican Revolution–era pleasure drugs at the turn of the 20th century (Sandos 1984, cited under Mexico–US Borderlands); booze during US prohibition (Recio 2002), opiates and heroin in the 1940s (Carey 2009, Cedillo 2011), and marijuana in the 1960s. Trafficking groups consolidated and multiplied into regional cartels in part in reaction to US-supported anti-drug operations in the 1970s (Enciso 2009), particularly harsh in the rural mountainous Sinaloa, Chihuahua, and Durango “triangle” (Smith 2013). The power of these cartels grew after 1985, shaped by political fallout from the killing of US DEA agent Enrique Camerena, the high-profit rerouting of Colombian cocaine via Mexico after 1990, increasing border commerce, and the weakening of the PRI political machine (Valdés Castellanos 2013). Sociologists and anthropologists have joined in studying regional drug producing and trafficking zones, such as Sinaloa, and of states such as Michoacán (Córdova 2011, Maldonado Aranda 2010).
  568.  
  569. Astorga, Luis. El siglo de las drogas: Usos, percepciones, y personajes. Mexico City: Espasa-Hoy, 1996.
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  571. Expanded focus from Astorga 1995 (cited under Mexican Cartels) on types of drugs and periods of consumption and trafficking in Mexico. Serious sociological-historical analysis that challenges previous journalistic speculations.
  572. Find this resource:
  573. Carey, Elaine. “Selling Is More of a Habit than Using: Narcotraficante Lola la Chata and Her Threat to Civilization, 1930–1960.” Journal of Women’s History 21.2 (Summer 2009): 62–89.
  574. DOI: 10.1353/jowh.0.0080Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  575. Well-written researched study of colorful mid-century dealer, part of a broader study of the roles of women in border trades.
  576. Find this resource:
  577. Cedillo, Juan Alberto. La Cosa Nostra en México, 1938–1950. Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2011.
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  579. Fascinating conspiratorial document about US mafia penetration of the Mexican state in the 1940s, with ideas to expand Pacific narcotics trades.
  580. Find this resource:
  581. Córdova, Nery. La narcocultura: Simbología de la transgression, el poder y la muerte: Sinaloa y la “leyenda negra.” Culiacán, Mexico: Universidad Autónima de Sinaloa, 2011.
  582. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  583. Strong anthropologically inspired study of popular and political icons of Sinaloan regional drug trades.
  584. Find this resource:
  585. Enciso, Froylán. “Drogas, narcotráfico, y política en México: Protocol de hipocresía, 1969–2000.” In Una historia contemporánea de México. Vol. 4, Las políticas. Edited by Lorenzo Meyer and Ilán Bizberg, 183–242. Mexico City: Oceano, 2009.
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  587. Critical political international history of evolving early Mexican drug war by one of Mexico’s newest historians of drugs. See also Froylán Enciso, “Los fracasos del chantaje: Régimen de prohibición de drogas y narcotráfico,” pp. 61–104 in Seguridad nacional y seguridad interior, edited by Arturo Alvarado and Mónica Serrano (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2010), a solid assessment of the Mexican prohibition regime.
  588. Find this resource:
  589. Knight, Alan. “NarcoViolence and the State in Modern Mexico.” In Violence, Coercion, and State-Making in Twentieth-Century Mexico: The Other Half of the Centaur. Edited by Wil G. Pranster, 115–134. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.
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  591. Major new synthesis by a top Mexican historian: reviews the long historical place of trafficking on the margins of the Mexican state and “social” banditry character of activity.
  592. Find this resource:
  593. Maldonado Aranda, Salvador. Los márgenes del estado mexicano: Territorios ilegales, desarrollo y violencia en Michoacán. Zamora, Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2010.
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  595. Serious socio-anthropological analysis of rural sources of drug trades; English sample in Salvador Maldonado Aranda, “Stories of Drug Trafficking in Rural Mexico: Territories, Drug and Cartels in Michoacán,” European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies/Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe 94 (April 2013): 43–66.
  596. Find this resource:
  597. Recio, Gabriela. “Drugs and Alcohol: US Prohibition and the Origins of the Drug Trade in Mexico, 1910–1930.” Journal of Latin American Studies 34.1 (2002): 21–41.
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  599. Uncovers links between alcohol smuggling of northern elite business families and incipient drug trades.
  600. Find this resource:
  601. Smith, Benjamin T. “The Rise and Fall of Narcopopulism: Drugs, Politics, and Society in Sinaloa, 1930–1980.” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 7.2 (2013): 125–165.
  602. DOI: 10.1353/jsr.2013.0015Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  603. Well-researched essay linking drugs to post-revolutionary regional politics and 1970s anti-peasant policies.
  604. Find this resource:
  605. Valdés Castellanos, Guillermo. Historia del Narcotráfico en México. Mexico City: Aguilar, 2013.
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  607. Massive competent recent overview of existing historical studies by non-historian.
  608. Find this resource:
  609. Mexican Cartels
  610.  
  611. Like their Colombian counterparts, Mexico’s drug trafficking organizations are usually termed “cartels,” though in Mexico they manage so-called plazas (territories or specific border routes) rather than any specific drug market. The original Mexican cartel was Sinaloa on the Pacific coast, concentrated in Culiacán, Mazatlán, and a number of rural districts such as Badiraguato, the birthplace of many renowned capos (Astorga 1995, Osorno 2011). Sinaloa splintered after 1985 into an array of related but increasingly rival nationwide groupings. A journalistic publishing industry now exists that purports to map these groups (Ravelo 2005, Rodríguez Cateñeda 2010), for example, of the Gulf, Juárez (Cruz 2008), Tijuana, Zetas, La Familia, etc., as well as shifting cartel alliances and rivalries and their apparent long complicity with politicians (Hernández 2010). Biographies accent the dominant figures, namely Félix Angel Gallardo and Pablo Acosta (Poppa 1990) in the 1980s, Amado Carrillo Fuentes or Osiel Cárdenas in the 1990s, and “El Chapo” Guzmán after 2000. After 2000, inter-cartel conflicts were exacerbated by weakening state authority and, after 2006, by the Mexican state’s militarized drug war against trafficker influence in the country, a crisis that has drawn much coverage (Grillo 2011), particularly its grusome violence. In response, Mexican cartels are now spreading out to Central and South America and even to Europe and Asia (Langon 2011).
  612.  
  613. Astorga, Luis. Mitología del “narcotraficante” en México. Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés, 1995.
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  615. Pioneering brief suggestive study of Sinaloan traffickers by a Culiacán native and historical sociologist; treats their relations to local and national politics and “construction” as social types.
  616. Find this resource:
  617. Cruz, Francisco. El cártel de Juárez. Mexico City: Planeta, 2008.
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  619. Episodic journalistic account; some chapters on the 1910s, 1930s, 1960s, and 1980s, when the cartel took off via transshipments of Colombian cocaine across the border.
  620. Find this resource:
  621. Grillo, Ioan. El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011.
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  623. Basically the story of the grusome 2006 Mexican “drug war,” with in-depth coverage of precedents in the rise of “cartels, warlords, tycoons” of the dangerous trades.
  624. Find this resource:
  625. Hernández, Anabel. Los señores del Narco. Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2010.
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  627. Supported by facimile documents, the author purports to prove deep complicities between the Mexican state, US officials, and drug cartels, with historical antecedents to the 1970s. English version appeared with Verso Press in 2013.
  628. Find this resource:
  629. Langon, Jerry. Gangland: The Rise of the Mexican Drug Cartels from El Paso to Vancouver. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2011.
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  631. Popular account, likely flawed, from the past to the present brutal violance.
  632. Find this resource:
  633. Osorno, Diego Enrique. El cártel de Sinaloa. Mexico City: Debolsillo, 2011.
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  635. Rigorous investigations, interviews, and background about the Sinaloan cartel; critical rather than sensational journalistic perspective.
  636. Find this resource:
  637. Poppa, Terrence E. Drug Lord: The Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin. New York: Pharos, 1990.
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  639. Another subtitled “True Story,” biography of the narcotics career of Pablo Acosta, the violent 1980s innovator of the Juárez cartel, which slipped Colombian cocaine across US borders.
  640. Find this resource:
  641. Ravelo, Ricardo. Los Capos: Las narco-rutas de México. Mexico City: Plaza y Janés, 2005.
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  643. Journalistic geography of drug cartels, kingpins, some going back to the 1980s. Also author of Osiel: Vida y tragedía de un capo (Mexico City: Grijalba, 2009), the story of Osiel Cárdenas, innovator of the “Gulf Cartel,” and recruiter of the violent “Los Zetas.”; and El Narco en México: Historia y historia de una guerra (Mexico City: Grijalba, 2011), journalistic histories of major recent protagonists of “cartels.”
  644. Find this resource:
  645. Rodríguez Cateñeda, Rafael, ed. El México narco: La geografía del narcotráfico, región por región, estado por estado, ciudad por ciudad. Mexico City: Planeta, 2010.
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  647. Some twenty-five entries, all on Mexico, narco by narco, from the reporter files of Proceso, Mexico’s muckraking magazine. Not historical.
  648. Find this resource:
  649. Mexico–US Borderlands
  650.  
  651. The Mexico–US borderlands enjoy long and deep traditions of smuggling, going back to border-lines drawn in the aftermath of the 1848 US conquest of northern Mexico. Since 1910, border towns, such as Mexicali, Tijuana, Juárez, and Laredo, saw prohibition-era alcohol, vice tourism, and motley drug gangs (Bender 2012; Mottier 2009, Sandos 1984, Schantz 2001) and after World War II, illicit drugs, mostly heroin, slipped over the border to US drug consumers and distributors, often by women smugglers active on both sides of the divide (Carey 2014). The 1960s dramatically opened up this trade, particularly of marijuana. By the 1980s, the borderlands had sprawling slum cities, countless illegal migrants, and expanding cross-border commerce, all of which multiplied following the 1994 NAFTA treaty. The 1990s diversion of Colombian cocaine through Mexico raised trafficking and drug violence to unprecedented levels, a trade that has since diversified into other drugs such as meth and to wider criminal activities. Border regions also became an incubating zone for narco-culture, such as the well-studied “narcocorrido” music (Wald 2001). Most of this large borderlands literature deals with the post-1980s boom and its militarized perils (Andreas 2009)—the border’s definition as a “drug war zone” in the words of anthropologist Howard Campbell (Bowden 2004, Campbell 2009).
  652.  
  653. Andreas, Peter. Border Games: Policing the US-Mexican Divide. 2d ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009.
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  655. Rigorous analyses of ties between smuggling and illicit activities generally in both states, evolving borders, and the rise of Mexican drug trafficking.
  656. Find this resource:
  657. Bender, Steven W. Run for the Border: Vice and Virtue in US–Mexico Border Crossings. New York: New York University Press, 2012.
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  659. Written by a legal scholar with a keen sociological eye, conceptualizing multiple crossings (many illicit and historical), including alcohol, drugs, and vice generally.
  660. Find this resource:
  661. Bowden, Charles. Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.
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  663. Account of rising nefarious border activities and violence during the 1990s Salinas era.
  664. Find this resource:
  665. Campbell, Howard. Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.
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  667. Excellent ethnographic analysis, with some historical points about the Juárez cartel, border smuggling, and political entanglements. Insightful conceptual introduction.
  668. Find this resource:
  669. Carey, Elaine. Women Drug Traffickers: Mules, Bosses, and Organized Crime. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014.
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  671. Original researched account of varied and colorful women actors in the construction of trans-borderland drug trades.
  672. Find this resource:
  673. Mottier, Nicole. “Drug Gangs and Politics in Ciudad Juárez, 1928–1936.” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 25.1 (Winter 2009): 19–46.
  674. DOI: 10.1525/msem.2009.25.1.19Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  675. Well-researched analysis of post-revolutionary drug gangs and political involvements along US border; accessible part of unpublished thesis, “Organised Crime, Political Corruption and Drug Gangs in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, 1928–1937” (M. Phil thesis, Oxford University, 2004).
  676. Find this resource:
  677. Sandos, James. “Northern Separatism during the Mexican Revolution: An Inquiry into the Role of Drug Trafficking, 1910–1920.” The Americas 4.2 (October 1984): 191–214.
  678. DOI: 10.2307/1007456Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  679. Pioneer inquiry into the role of revolutionary governor Cantú of Baja California in state drug monopolies and trafficking to Californians.
  680. Find this resource:
  681. Schantz, Eric Michael. “From the Mexicali Rose to the Tijuana Brass: Vice Tours of the United States–Mexico Border, 1910–1965.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2001.
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  683. Lots of data, including stories of very early trades in patent medicines and other illicit drugs.
  684. Find this resource:
  685. Wald, Elijah. Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas. New York: Rayo, 2001.
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  687. Well-written early ethnomusical English-language account by noted musicologist of what is now an academic-literary growth industry: studies of narco-culture.
  688. Find this resource:
  689. The United States and Mexican Drugs
  690.  
  691. That Mexico and the United States are close neighbors, with a long US influence in Mexico, means drugs are deeply affected by US-Mexican relations, including laws and consumer wants for illegal highs in Mexico. Both sides tend to blame each other for the problem, and historically the United States is seen as the prime mover of Mexico’s drug policy (see Campos 2012, cited under Mexican Drug Cultures, for new views). Astorga 2003 chronicles lengthy official documentation of US-Mexican drug cooperation. Some works view the relationship transnationally and in terms of wider kinds of illicit and licit trades (Carey and Marak 2011). Political scientists (Bailey and Godson 2000) view drugs in models of border governance and state-mafia relations or in the power games of the Mexican political system (Toro 1995). Specific transformative events, such as the ramping up of US drug operations along the Mexican border during the 1970s “Operation Intercept,” are analyzed in their impact on Mexican trafficking zones and organizations (Craig 1980; Doyle 2003–, Gooberman 1974). A new interpretation (Weimer 2011) sees this rising drug intervention as a form of US-style “counterinsurgency” operation, in which militarized repression had the unintended effects of creating future traffickers from afflicted peasants and fostering cartel organizations (see Toro 1995).
  692.  
  693. Astorga, Luis. Drogas sin fronteras: Los expedientes de una guerra permanente. Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2003.
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  695. Organized by Mexican regions, anti-drug campaigns, and other categories, mostly translations into Spanish of US Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) reports on Mexico, rich on the 1940s.
  696. Find this resource:
  697. Bailey, John, and Roy Godson, eds. Organized Crime & Democratic Governability: Mexico and the US Mexican Borderlands. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000.
  698. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  699. Analyses of border crime and politics linkages during Mexico’s critical 1990s breakdowns.
  700. Find this resource:
  701. Carey, Elaine, and Andrae Marak, eds. Smugglers, Brothels, and Twine: Historical Perspectives on Contraband and Vice in North America’s Borderlands. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011.
  702. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  703. Background volume on precursor smuggling trades, including Mexico and Canada.
  704. Find this resource:
  705. Craig, Richard. “Operation Intercept: The International Politics of Pressure.” Review of Politics 42.4 (October 1980): 556–580.
  706. DOI: 10.1017/S0034670500031995Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  707. Critical contemporaneous account of 1970s drug war in Mexico.
  708. Find this resource:
  709. Doyle, Kate. Operation Intercept: The Perils of Unilateralism. Washington, DC: National Security Archive, The George Washington University, 2003–.
  710. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  711. Valuable declassified documentation of Washington, DC-based National Security Archive.
  712. Find this resource:
  713. Gooberman, Lawrence A. Operation Intercept: The Multiple Consequences of Public Policy. New York: Pergamon, 1974.
  714. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  715. Virtually contemporary policy account of failed early 1970s US effort to disrupt border marijuana trades.
  716. Find this resource:
  717. Toro, María Celia. Mexico’s “War” on Drugs: Causes and Consequences. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995.
  718. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  719. Informed account of US-assisted drug suppression campaigns since the 1970s and the impact on “cartelization.”
  720. Find this resource:
  721. Weimer, Daniel. Seeing Drugs: Modernization, Counter-insurgency, and US Narcotics Control in the Third World, 1969–1976. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2011.
  722. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  723. Compelling global interpretation of the rising drug wars of the 1970s as an expression of US modernization anti-insurgency drives; chapter 6 on Mexico’s drug campaigns, including mid-1970s Operation Condor.
  724. Find this resource:
  725. Peru
  726.  
  727. Historically, greater Peru boasted many indigenous drug cultures, including ayahuasca vision vine, san pedro cactus, and a variety of shamanistic Amazonian drug plants. But only one—coca leaf (Erythroxylon coca)—has achieved global prominence, following a slow colonial start. Coca leaf, “the Sacred Leaf of the Incas,” grown on the subtropical Amazonian slopes of the Andes, has been “chewed” by highland and other indigenous groups for at least 5,000 years—the ethno-botanical literature on its use is vast—for its medicinal, nutritional spiritual, communal, and energizing properties. In 1859, German chemists isolated one of its alkaloids, cocaine, a turning point in the history of coca and cocaine, soon used as a legal medicinal drug in modern local anesthesia and as an export ingredient in popular beverages such as Coca-Cola. After the rise and decline of a legal cocaine industry in eastern Peru, during the late 1940s an illicit cocaine industry began, which exploded during the 1980s, particularly in the Upper Huallaga Valley. That first illicit boom peaked in the mid-1990s, when it was deflected to Colombia by joint US-Peruvian anti-drug operations. After 2010, Peru once again became the world’s largest producer of criminal cocaine, particularly in the VRAE (Apurímac valley system). Coca growers in Peru are less legitimate and politically visible than their national counterparts in Bolivia.
  728.  
  729. Peruvian Coca Leaf
  730.  
  731. Eastern tropical Peru is the botanical homeland to Erythroxylon coca. Coca has typically been studied from an anthropological perspective (Allen 1988, Meyer 1978), as integral to the lifestyles and cultures of highland Indian communities. Coca has attracted very little historical research, save for one long-term study of elite and policy discourses around the leaf (Gagliano 1994); a debate on the role of psychiatry in demonizing leaf users in the mid-20th century (Cáceres 2003), and a comparative essay on Andean countries (Fischer 2003). The transformation of coca into a migrant crop used for making illicit export cocaine, however, has attracted new ethnographic interest (Durand 2006; Gallo, et al. 1994), including reports about coca’s cocaine economy (Kawell 1989) and studies of the post-coca peasantry after 2000 in the Huallaga region (Kerrigan 2009). Some of the best sources on coca remain the primary document collections, such as Andrews and Solomon 1975 (cited under Primary Source Collections).
  732.  
  733. Allen, Catherine. The Hold Life Has: Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean Community. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1988.
  734. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  735. Now classic ethnographical, not historical, study of highland coca usage.
  736. Find this resource:
  737. Cáceres, Baldomero, “Psiquiatría y prohibición de las drogas,” June 2003.
  738. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  739. Written by Peru’s long active coca scholar, one of many passionate writings about the topic.
  740. Find this resource:
  741. Durand, Ursula. “El camino cocalero.” In PerúHoy: Nuevos rostros en la escena nacional. Edited by Alejandro Alayza and Eduardo Toche, 90–115. Lima: Desco, Centro de Estudios y Promoción de Desarrollo, 2006.
  742. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  743. One of the few on the ground ethnographies of coca growers and their political organizations.
  744. Find this resource:
  745. Fischer, Thomas. “¿Culturas de coca? El debate acerca de los grupos que produjeron y consumieron la coca en los países andinos, años veinte a cuarenta.” Revista de UNAM (December 2003): 16–26.
  746. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  747. Swiss study published in Mexico, one of few known comparative historical works on coca (1920s–1940s), based on secondary sources.
  748. Find this resource:
  749. Gagliano, Joseph. Coca Prohibition in Peru: The Historical Debates. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994.
  750. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  751. In-depth historical monograph, starting in the early colonial era, of discourses or debates about coca, sometimes mixed with the modern problem of cocaine.
  752. Find this resource:
  753. Gallo, Mario, Luis Tello, and Lelis Rivera. El impacto económic del cultivo de la coca. Monograph 11. Lima: Centro de Información y Educación para la Prevención del Abusado de Drogas, 1994.
  754. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  755. Valuable empirical “monograph” of high point of illicit coca cultivation in both the Alto Huallaga and La Convención-Cuzco valleys.
  756. Find this resource:
  757. Kawell, JoAnn. “Coca: The Real Green Revolution.” NACLA Report on the Americas 22.6 (March 1989): 13–21.
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  759. See also pp. 25–30 and 33–38. Strong firsthand account of the then dominant coca-cocaine economy of the Huallaga Valley region.
  760. Find this resource:
  761. Kerrigan, Richard. Coca’s Gone: Of Might and Right in the Huallaga Post-Boom. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.
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  763. Now mis-titled, given the post 2010 resurgence of coca-cocaine in eastern Peru. Subtle ethnography of the aftermath of the 1990s (Fujimori era) drug repression and varied local peasant incorporations and interactions with the Peruvian state and military.
  764. Find this resource:
  765. Meyer, Enrique. “El uso social de la coca en el mundo andino: Contribución a un debate y un tomo de posición.” América Indígena 38.4 (1978): 849–865.
  766. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  767. Classic anthropological reinterpretation of essential social roles of coca, reproduced in several of the coca volumes cited in this article (see Boldó i Climent 1986, cited under Coca/Cocaine: Coca Leaf).
  768. Find this resource:
  769. Peruvian Cocaine Trades
  770.  
  771. Work on the modern drug cocaine, first derived from coca leaf in 1860, has attracted only one archival historian (Gootenberg 2009), but that history of the drug in Peru covers a long period (1850–1980), is widely researched, and connects the drug to global forces. Rubio Correo 1994 is a valuable collection of the country’s drug legislation, mostly regarding coca-cocaine. The rise of the illicit Amazonian cocaine complex in the 1970s and 1980s has drawn the most scholarship. They include studies of peasant migrants to cocaine-making regions (Morales 1989; van Dun 2009, for the later wave), of cocaine’s adaptable jungle technology (Léon and de la Mata 1989), of the drug’s larger economic and political impacts (Lee 1989), of the era’s drug corruption scandals (Gorritti 2006), and of cocaine’s political entanglement with the US drug war (Cotler 1999).
  772.  
  773. Cotler, Julio. Drogas y política en el Perú: La conexión norteamericana. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1999.
  774. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  775. Peru’s leading sociologist analyzes in detail the embrace of US drug-eradication politics and models in Peru.
  776. Find this resource:
  777. Gootenberg, Paul. Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
  778. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  779. Archival and global study, covering more than a century (1850–1975), of the rise and fall of cocaine as a licit commodity. Uses expanded “commodity-chains” approach to explore historical relationships of Peruvian cocaine zones and actors to US, European, and Asian connections. See Paul Gootenberg, “The ‘Pre-Colombian’ Era of Drug Trafficking in the Americas: Cocaine, 1945–1965,” The Americas 64.2 (2007): 133–176, for trafficker prehistory.
  780. Find this resource:
  781. Gorritti, Gustavo. La Calavera en negro: El traficante que quiso gobernar el país. Lima: Planeta Perú, 2006.
  782. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  783. Serious investigative journalist of Sendero Lumino and Fujimori regime turns his attention to the “Caso Lansburg” trafficking and corruption scandal of the 1980s, which tainted, among others, the García regime.
  784. Find this resource:
  785. Lee, Rensselaer W., III. The White Labyrinth: Cocaine and Political Power. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1989.
  786. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  787. Realist view centered on economics of the cocaine boom near its first peak.
  788. Find this resource:
  789. Léon, Federico, and Ramiro Castro de la Mata, eds. Pasta básica de cocaína: Un estudio multidisciplinario. Lima: Centro de Información y Educación para la Prevención del Abusado de Drogas, 1989.
  790. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  791. Studies of PBC, the processing mix between coca and cocaine.
  792. Find this resource:
  793. Morales, Edmundo. Cocaine: White Gold Rush in Peru. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989.
  794. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  795. Descriptive ethnography of upland migrants into the early Huallaga cocaine boom.
  796. Find this resource:
  797. Rubio Correo, Marcial. Legislación peruano sobre drogas, 1920–1993. Monograph 10. Lima: Centro de Información y Educación para la Prevención del Abusado de Drogas, 1994.
  798. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  799. Valuable collection and periodization of virtually all official Peruvian laws and decrees on drugs; supersedes briefer monograph 2 of 1988.
  800. Find this resource:
  801. van Dun, Mirella. Cocaleros: Violence, Drugs and Social Mobilization in the Post-conflict Upper Huallaga Valley, Peru. Amsterdam: Rozenberg, 2009.
  802. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  803. Published thesis by a Dutch researcher on Huallaga coca peasants, political movements, and “post-conflict” violence.
  804. Find this resource:
  805. Transit Zones (Cuba, the Caribbean, and Central America)
  806.  
  807. In works of exposé, much is written about the transit of South American drugs (such as cocaine) through sites such as Cuba before the revolution (1920s–1950s) and across Central America during the dramatic wave of revolutions and counterrevolutions of the 1980s and 1990s. Cuba, a “neocolonial” outpost through the first half of the 20th century, witnessed many illicit scenes, including the rise of early mafias of cocaine and the introduction of the drug among tourists during the 1950s (Cirules 2004, Sáenz Rovner 2008). Panama, with the adjacent US-controlled Panama Canal Zone, was similarly well placed for illicit commerce (Scalena 2013). Such locales witnessed notorious episodes in contemporary history, for example, the role of General Manuel Noriega in Panama in laundering Colombian drug profits before being ousted by the US military invasion in 1988 (Dinges 1990, Murillo 1995). Researchers have proposed many “deep” trafficking conspiracies implicating political groups, such as the Nicaraguan “Contras,” Sandanistas, or even the CIA in cocaine trafficking on the isthmus (Scott and Marshall 1992, Webb 1999). These views require more scholarly support. Since the 1980s Central America has served as a transit zone for drug trades, dramatically so in the wake of Mexico’s post-2006 crackdown on its northern cartels. No book exists on the history of the Jamaican ganja trades (save aspects of Rubin 1975, cited under Primary Source Collections) and little has been written on Caribbean islands, such as Barbados and the Bahamas, that serve as key stopover and money-laundering sites.
  808.  
  809. Cirules, Enrique. The Mafia in Havana: A Caribbean Mob Story. Translated by Douglas E. LaPrade. New York: Ocean, 2004.
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  811. See chapter 3, “The Cocaine Era” (pre-1950s) for a likely exaggerated account of foreign mafia, drug use, and peddling. Originally published as El imperio de la Havana (Havana: Letras, 1993).
  812. Find this resource:
  813. Dinges, John. Our Man in Panama: How General Noriega Used the United States—And Made Millions in Drugs and Arms. New York: Random House, 1990.
  814. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  815. Strong informed journalistic account, though little done subsequently on Noriega, drugs, and US invasion as history.
  816. Find this resource:
  817. Murillo, Manuel. The Noriega Mess: The Drugs, the Canal, and Why America Invaded. Berkeley, CA: Video, 1995.
  818. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  819. Massively detailed tome on post-1968 Panamanian history, exposing corrupt involvements of military, banks, and state in Colombian-related traffic and finance.
  820. Find this resource:
  821. Sáenz Rovner, Eduardo. The Cuban Connection: Drug Trafficking, Smuggling, and Gambling in Cuba from the 1920s to the Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
  822. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  823. Rare monographic study of and from the region, originally published in Colombia in Spanish in 2005. Much information about smuggling, “vice,” and diasporic trafficking groups, largely drawn from the US National Archives; critical of previous interpretations, such as the myth of US mafia dominance.
  824. Find this resource:
  825. Scalena, Matthew. “Illicit Nation: Panamanian State Formation, US Imperialism, and Illegality on the Isthmus of Panama.” PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2013.
  826. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  827. Original research and conception, some about drugs, on early (1910–1930s) Panama role in modern illicit trades.
  828. Find this resource:
  829. Scott, Peter Dale, and Jonathan Marshall. Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
  830. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  831. Classic well-written account of how forces such as the CIA and the Contras were complicit or worse in the 1980s cocaine trades. Genre of uncertain credibility or explanatory power.
  832. Find this resource:
  833. Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. New York: Seven Story, 1999.
  834. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  835. Detailed exposé of nefarious actors ranging from Langley and Central America to the streets of Los Angeles—cost Webb his career, and some claim, his life.
  836. Find this resource:
  837. Consuming Nations
  838.  
  839. The consumption of illicit drugs has grown substantially in many Latin American countries in the past decades, sometimes as a side effect of export drug trades and the drug war, as traffickers seek new local markets. Some countries also had longer subcultures with certain drugs—cannabis, opiates, and cocaine—stretching to the early 20th century. Their legacies, in attitudes and legislation about drugs, may have affected how these nations were later, after 1960, inserted into a global drug regime. The few countries sampled here (Brazil and the Southern Cone nations Argentina, Chile, Paraguay) either have notable consumption cultures in terms of visibility and size or have good published histories of domestic drugs.
  840.  
  841. Brazil
  842.  
  843. Brazil has a vast and diverse set of historical drug cultures, including macohna (African-inflected popular cannibus) (Henman and Pessoa 1986), alcohol (Gonçalves 2005), and dozens of native Amazonian hullucinogens and stimulants that have now spilled into quasi-religious modern use (Labate, et al. 2008). In the early 20th century, urban classes in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro adopted new recreational drugs, such as cocaine and opiates (Resende 2006), and Brazil’s large middle classes today partake liberally of drugs such as marijuana and cocaine. Indeed, since the 1980s, Brazil has emerged as both a major world site of drug consumption, currently, for example, second in overall cocaine usage after the United States, and a hub for illict transhipments of cocaine from Colombia and Peru to Africa and Europe. Favelas (slums cities) have also become hotspots of drug-related gangs, violence, and citizen insecurity (Arias 2006). Brazilian responses to drug problems such as “crack” have been mixed, ranging from police repression to social and health policies to new approaches to drug diplomacy. Networks of drug and violence scholarship have sprung up in Brazil, along with much drug-reform and substance-abuse activism, researchable at such websites as Drug Law Reform in Latin America: Brazil and Núcleo de Estudos Interdisciplinares sobre Psicoativos. So far, the deeper history of these social problems remains largely unknown.
  844.  
  845. Arias, Desmond. Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro: Trafficking, Social Networks, and Public Security. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2006.
  846. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  847. Pioneering lengthy ethnography of violence-prone 1990s favela trafficking and its convoluted relation to policing authorities.
  848. Find this resource:
  849. Drug Law Reform in Latin America: Brazil.
  850. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  851. Website provides a portal into the current highly active Brazilian movements of drug-reform and related substance-abuse activism.
  852. Find this resource:
  853. Gonçalves, Lisley. Álcool e drogas na história do Brasil. São Paulo: Editora PUCMinas, 2005.
  854. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  855. A national overview, one of few combining drugs and alcohol.
  856. Find this resource:
  857. Henman, Anthony, and Osvaldo Pessoa, eds. Diamba sarabamba: Coletânea de textos brasileiros sobre a maconha. São Paulo: Ground, 1986.
  858. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  859. Classic and only anthropological-historical collection of texts on maconha—Afro-Brazilian marijuana culture; see also Harry W. Hutchinson, “Patterns of Marihuana Use in Brazil,” in Cannabis and Culture, edited by Vera D. Rubin (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), for the sociology of macohna.
  860. Find this resource:
  861. Labate, Caiuby, Sandra Goulart Beatriz, Mauricio Fiore, Eduard MacRae, and Henrique Carneiro, eds. Drogas e cultura: Novas perspectivas. Salvador, Brazil: EDUFA, 2008.
  862. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  863. Broad range of contributions, mainly anthropological, about the wide variety of Brazilian drug cultures.
  864. Find this resource:
  865. Núcleo de Estudos Interdisciplinares sobre Psicoativos.
  866. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  867. A website that brings together different disciplines studying drugs in Brazil, led by anthropologists and social sciences.
  868. Find this resource:
  869. Resende, Beatriz, ed. Cocaína: Literatura e outros companheiros de ilusão. Rio de Janeiro: Casa da Palavra, 2006.
  870. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  871. Fascinating collection of literary accounts of surprisingly active recreational cocaine scene of early-20th-century Brazil.
  872. Find this resource:
  873. Argentina, Chile, Paraguay
  874.  
  875. Argentina and Chile are two South American nations with substantial post-1960s middle-class drug use, some storied drug pasts, and some surprising trafficking history, such as Chile’s pioneer role in Andean cocaine trades in the 1950s. Both historical cases are insufficiently researched, for example, Chile’s postwar trafficking role (Gootenberg 2009, pp. 261–264, cited under Peru: Peruvian Cocaine Trades) and detailed allegations of officially abetted trafficking during the Pinochet era in the 1970s (De Castro and Garparini 2000), though Chile has a published history of its early drug legislation (Fernández Labbé 2011). Buenos Aires is a cosmopolitan port city, so not surprisingly, mafia groups have tried to establish drug distribution centers there in the past (Aguirre 2008, Mauro 2011, Pasquini and Miguel 1995). The country had drug scenes in the 1920s and 1930s (in places like tango clubs), and it sprouted a youth drug “counterculture” even during the dictatorial 1970s (Weissman 2002). Historical research may deepen as Argentina now serves as a hub for global cocaine transshipments to Europe. Paraguay, in contrast, has, since the 1990s, become one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of cannabis, principally to neighbors such as Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay (Miranda 2000). Uruguay became the first country in the world to openly legalize marijuana in 2013, in part, to dampen this Paraguayan influence. Yet Paraguay, infamous for all sorts of contraband in the unruly “tripartite” frontier, lacks a serious study of its drug trafficking past.
  876.  
  877. Aguirre, Osvaldo. La conexión latina: De la mafia corsa a la ruta Argentina de la heroína. Buenos Aires: Tusquets Editores, 2008.
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  879. The most historical work of this quasi-journalistic genre about early mafia attempts (post–World War II) to use Argentina as a base for pan-American heroin distribution.
  880. Find this resource:
  881. De Castro, Rodrigo, and Juan Garparini. La delgada línea blanca. Buenos Aires: Ediciones B. Argentina, 2000.
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  883. This rare (in Chile) book, divided into two parts by the authors, purports to show the involvement of the Pinochet regime in various underground flows (money, arms, drugs) relating to right-wing and terror networks. Chapters 3 and 6 contain detailed allegations of cocaine trafficking in the late 1970s and 1980s by the head of DINA secret police (General Contreras) and others in the regime, charges that invite further factual investigation.
  884. Find this resource:
  885. Fernández Labbé, Marcos. Drogas en Chile, 1900–1970: Mercado, consumo y representación. Santiago, Chile: Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2011.
  886. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  887. Survey of early-20th-century drugs, regulation, and some representations of users; contribution by historian of alcohol, little on illicit traffic of the 1950s to the 1970s.
  888. Find this resource:
  889. Mauro, Federico. País narco: Tráfico de drogas en Argentina: Del tránsito a la producción propio. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Sudaméricano, 2011.
  890. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  891. Journalistic style located in present; some attempt is made to link Argentina’s recent emergence as a global trafficking hub to precursor groups going back to the 1970s.
  892. Find this resource:
  893. Miranda, Anibal. Dossier Paraguay: Los dueños de grandes fortunas. Asunción, Paraguay: Miranda & Asociados, 2000.
  894. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  895. One of many journalistic peeks at Paraguay’s illicit fortunes, and corruption, derived from smuggling and cannabis.
  896. Find this resource:
  897. Pasquini, Gabriel, and Eduardo de Miguel. Blanca y radiente: Mafias, poder, y narcotráfico en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Planeta Espejo de la Argentina, 1995.
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  899. Authors of prior 1991 book on cocaine and politics in Argentina, detailed tracing of global routes of drugs through Argentina, including 1970s and 1980s pioneers, and much about “mafias” and politicos.
  900. Find this resource:
  901. Weissman, Patricia. Toxicomanías: Historia de las ideas toxicológicas en la Argentina. Mar del Plata, Argentina: Editorial Universitaria de Mar del Plata, 2002.
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  903. As title suggests, ideas about “addiction” in Argentina, which date to medical and social debates of the 1920s.
  904. Find this resource:
  905. Testimonial, Biography
  906.  
  907. Literally dozens of confessional, anecdotal books (apologetic or not) are available about personal involvements in the Latin American drug trade. They are uneven in quality and should be read with caution. Some, however, as in this small sampling below, contain unique evidence and viewpoints unobtainable through official or journalistic accounts and documents. A fair number are moralistic adventure tales about “gringos” who got involved in the early years of trafficking from South America (Bowdon 1987, Gross 1998, Mermelstein 1990), at least one (Porter 2001) served as the basis for a major Hollywood motion picture, Blow. Early examples, from the 1970s (Kamastra 1974, Sabbag 2010) have historical value. Other works (Escobar Gaviria 2008) offer evidence uniquely gleaned from the family about figures such as Pablo Escobar. Levine 2013 is a testimonial of anti-drug agents, or about the DEA, which expose grave complicities and failures in the drug war.
  908.  
  909. Bowdon, Mark. Doctor Dealer: The Rise and Fall of an All-American Boy and His Multimillion-Dollar Cocaine Empire. New York: Grove, 1987.
  910. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  911. The title says it all; an entrepreneurial bio of Larry Lavin, rich-boy Philadelphia distributor of Andean goods in South Florida in the 1980s.
  912. Find this resource:
  913. Escobar Gaviria, Roberto. Mi hermano Pablo. Bogotá, Colombia: Quintero Editores, 2008.
  914. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  915. Originally published in 2000. A proclaimed “best-seller,” his brother’s short account is lucid and reveals new facts about the Medellín kingpin. Expanded in English (with David Fisher) as The Accountant’s Story: Inside the Violent World of the Medellín Cartel (New York: Grand Central, 2008).
  916. Find this resource:
  917. Gross, K. Hawkeye. Reefer Warrior: How My Friends and I Found Adventure, Wealth, and Romance Smuggling Marijuana—Until We All Went to Jail. Boulder, CO: Paladin, 1998.
  918. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  919. Unabashed adventure story of ex-Vietnam pilot instrumental in Colombian trafficking; follow-up accounts as well.
  920. Find this resource:
  921. Kamastra, Jerry. Weed: Adventures of a Dope Smuggler. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.
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  923. Graphic detailed, readable firsthand account of Mexican adventures, smuggling techniques starting in 1962, including reactions to Mexican-US anti-drug campaigns in the 1970s.
  924. Find this resource:
  925. Levine, Michael. The Big White Lie: The Deep Cover Operation That Exposed the CIA Sabotage of the Drug War. Lexington, KY: Michael Levine, 2013.
  926. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  927. One of two books by macho ex-undercover drug agent that expose political betrayals in the US war on drugs; see also Kenneth C. Bucchi, CIA: Cocaine in America? A Veteran of the CIA Drug Wars Tells All (New York: S. P. I., 1994), which among other things, links CIA chief William Casey to Pablo Escobar.
  928. Find this resource:
  929. Mermelstein, Max. The Man Who Made It Snow. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990.
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  931. Outgoing American guy gets intimately involved with Colombian cartels and the DEA, and lives to tell the tale.
  932. Find this resource:
  933. Porter, Bruce. Blow: How a Small-Town Boy Made $100 Million with the Medellín Cocaine Cartel and Lost It All. New York: Griffin, 2001.
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  935. Originally published in 1993. The George Jung story, made into a major motion picture (Blow starring Depp and Cruz): marijuana seller gets deeply involved in Medellín activities via bad-guy Carlos Ledher.
  936. Find this resource:
  937. Sabbag, Robert. Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade. New York: Grove, 2010.
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  939. Originally published in 1976. One of the earliest sagas; tells the story of Zachary Swan, one of the gringo risk-takers in initial Colombian connection. Follow-up book about weed.
  940. Find this resource:
  941. Documentaries and Film
  942.  
  943. A growing number of quality and/or critical films about Latin American drug trades are available. This is a small Colombian-biased sample of genres, which is now rapidly expanding to include more Mexican topics and filmmakers. They include fictionalized films, such as Colombia’s nationally captivating Escobar “telenovela” (Ferrero 2012) and documentaries concerning Escobar (Beaufort 2002, Entel and Marroquín 2009). Other films expose the violence, culture of violence, and social despair of people in the drugs trade (Gaviria 1991, Schwarz 2014). Some fictional accounts capture the human side of trafficking (Marston 2004). Few so far are historical, with a few exceptions (Corben 2005). A number of good new documentaries critically expose the follies and damage of the global war on drugs (Seifert 2012).
  944.  
  945. Beaufort, Marc de, dir. Los archivos privados de Pablo Escobar. Buenos Aires: Divina Producciones, 2002.
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  947. Fascinating account of the man, taking the family’s apologetic perspective, based around home videos. One of many film “bios” now on the market.
  948. Find this resource:
  949. Corben, Billy, dir. Cocaine Cowboys: How Miami became the Cocaine Capital of the United States! Miami: Rakuntur Pictures, 2005.
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  951. Sensationalism aside, a primary source for learning about the wild entry era of Colombian cocaine in the late 1970s and associated violence. Now relatedbook as well as a Part 2 film.
  952. Find this resource:
  953. Entel, Nicholas, and Sebastián Marroquín, dirs. Sins of My Father. DVD. Los Angeles: Maya Home Entertainment, 2009.
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  955. Repentance and reconciliation film of Escobar’s exiled son, Juan Pablo, a peace-loving Buddhist living in Argentina under the name Sebastián Marroquín.
  956. Find this resource:
  957. Ferrero, Juan, dir. Escobar: Patron del mal. Colombia: Primera Temporada, 2012.
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  959. A historical narco-novela national morality tale; whole series on seven DVDs. Strong historical setting, informed by Alfonso Salazar’s writings (Salazar 2001, cited under Colombia: Pablo Escobar and Medellín).
  960. Find this resource:
  961. Gaviria, Víctor, dir. Rodrigo D: No Futuro. New York: Kino International Corporation, 1991.
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  963. Sociologically rich and depressing story of youthful sicarios, drug assassins of Colombia. Mexican counterparts now appearing.
  964. Find this resource:
  965. Marston, Joshua, dir. Maria: Full of Grace. New York: HBO Films and Journeyman Pictures, 2004.
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  967. Acclaimed fictional spare-budget Spanish-language film: affectingly realistic portrayal of young women recruited as “mules” in the drug trade between Colombia and New York.
  968. Find this resource:
  969. Schwarz, Shual, dir. Narco Cultura. Los Angeles: Cenedigm Entertainment Group, 2014.
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  971. Well-shot story of borderlands “narcocorridos” groups juxtaposed with grisly toll of drug violence in Juárez.
  972. Find this resource:
  973. Seifert, Rachel, dir. Cocaine Unwrapped. London: Dartmouth Films, 2012.
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  975. Critical well-done British documentary, following actors and damage along the entire cocaine and drug-war commodity chain.
  976. Find this resource:
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