The Global Drug Trade and the War on Drugs in the Americas

A number of new academic studies, ranging from historiography to political economy, analyze the impact on Latin America of the sale, transport, and consumption of drugs. Most of them focus on Mexico or Colombia, but Paul Gootemberg’s Andean Cocaine introduces us to the Peruvian Eduardo Barelezo, a pioneer cocaine trafficker arrested in the United States in 1949, and Blanca Sánchez Ibáñez, a Bolivian trafficker who was arrested in 1960 in a police operation carried out by Peruvian, Bolivian, and U.S. agents. He documents the history of the connection between the production of coca leaf and multinational corporations such as Coca Cola and Merck. As he explains, cocaine was developed by the French immigrant to Peru Alfredo Bignon in 1885 and was immediately absorbed into the competition among German, English, French, and U.S. pharmaceutical companies. The first cocaine boom took place in the 1890s, when it began to be exported to the United States and Europe. By 1933 cocaine exports had declined exponentially because of U.S. protectionism and global drug controls and because of national debates on the issue (led by Dr. Carlos Enrique Paz Soldán) that produced federal regulation of cocaine. Eventually, in the 1950s, cocaine was banned altogether. The traffickers of the period between 1947 and 1964, many of whom belonged to the elite and entrepreneurial classes or had direct access to local capital, operated in small groups not only in Peru but also in Bolivia (Vicente López), Cuba (Abelardo Martínez del Rey), Chile (the Huasaff-Harb family), Colombia (the Herrán Olazaga twins), Brazil (Alfredo Bello), Mexico, and Argentina. Groups of Colombian traffickers became prominent in the 1970s, but the book fails to explain how the Colombians came to dominate the other Latin American groups that had pioneered cocaine distribution. Gootemberg uses the concept of “global commodity chains” to understand cocaine as Latin America’s main and most profitable export.

Julie Marie Bunck and Michael Fowler, in Bribes, Bullets, and Intimidation, examine drug trafficking in what they call the “bridge countries”: Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach involving political science, law, history, geography, economics, and criminology, they describe the development of groups of local traffickers in these areas that interacted with the Mexican and Colombian cartels. They point to the difficulties of research of this kind because of the varying reliability of the data; official statistics are sometimes below or above the actual numbers depending on their political usefulness. Some of the countries included in their study are drug producers (Guatemala produces opium and Belize and Panama marijuana), but above all they are bridges to the North American market.

Bunck and Fowler critique the hypothesis that “weak states” are fertile ground for the development of crime, pointing out that Costa Rica has strong and stable government institutions and has nevertheless developed strong drug-trafficking networks. They argue that Central America’s geography is ideal for moving drugs. They explain that Colombian traffickers took control of the industry precisely because of their geographical location and their connections with commercial and business groups that had prior experience in the smuggling of cigarettes, coffee, emeralds, and textiles. The Colombians began working as intermediaries for the Andean countries and then developed their own production and distribution networks; by 2001 Colombia was the world’s center of coca cultivation. At the same time, a quarter of the narcotics traded passes through the bridge countries, and 60–65 percent of the cocaine that enters the United States comes from Central America. This book offers a clear and concise history of the links between Central American groups and the prominent cartels (e.g., Medellín, Cali, Sinaloa, Michoacán, and Juárez). It analyzes the factors that drive prominent drug traffickers to choose one bridge country or another—risk, cost, methods, routes, protection, etc. Its conclusions highlight the lack of cooperation between Central American nations and the competition to eliminate drug trafficking that has increased violence and crime in the area. It is disappointing that it ends in a call for more of the cat-and-mouse game of the U.S.-directed drug war, failing to take into account the complex connections involving politics and distribution centers in the United States.

The Political Economy of the Drug Industry, edited by Menno Vellinga, touches on this issue but adopts the point of view that trying to eliminate the drug supply has not worked and scholars should therefore explore other possibilities. It points to the illegal industry’s use of the same marketing techniques that appear with globalization and the fact that the cultivation and trafficking of cocaine, heroin, and marijuana are perfectly suited to rural economic conditions of low development and therefore become an important economic alternative. Plan Dignidad in Bolivia has created resistance among farmers, and through this campaign they have become a significant political movement. The studies in this collection follow the work of Francisco Thoumi, who argues that drug trafficking in Colombia is part of the process of the delegitimization of the state. They address the complexity of the interactions between national elites and rural marginal societies in the context of the war on drugs and eradication programs. They also explore the problems of governance and militarization that the drug war creates. Some of them assess other economic and political models for dealing with crime and drug use, including the Dutch model of decriminalization. They propose a new interdisciplinary model for handling the drug problem in which arguments against a military solution are strong, solid, and well-articulated.

Enrique Desmond Arias, in Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro, describes the impact of illegality on democratic processes of the city and examines the violence generated by the industry in the shantytowns of this Brazilian city. His study deals with the trafficker as a new political actor who participates in the development and security of local communities. He suggests that there are relationships of power between local leaders and drug dealers that are unstable and complex. His main research questions are why there is so much violence in the shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro and what can be done to eliminate it. To answer these questions, he studies three shantytowns, and in two of them he finds an emerging model for controlling violence. In Vigário and Tubarão, the people mobilized against violence when the police and criminals killed innocent members of the community. Their mobilizations called into question the power of the criminals and inspired state action to eliminate the violence. Civic associations arose in response to violations of human rights and spread without any visible leadership, with activists keeping the cause alive. There was little evidence of cooperation between communities. Arias points out that the poor in Rio have to make alliances with the traffickers because the state does not provide them access to basic necessities such as housing and work and that low wages for the police foster corruption. The chapter comparing Mexico, Colombia, and Jamaica leaves much to be desired in that it extrapolates ideas developed in the context of small communities to very different contexts. While the book succeeds in depicting the criminal as one more political actor interacting with the forces of the state, it does not help us to rethink the structural problems faced by Latin American cities.

William L. Marcy’s The Politics of Cocaine addresses the role of the United States in encouraging cocaine cultivation and trafficking. Marcy points out that the war on drugs has given control to the subversive groups targeted during the cold war and led groups such as the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) to pursue drug profits in order to maintain their war against the state. In some ways, his book records the failure of the Andean strategy and Plan Colombia, which have driven coca producers into the arms of the guerrillas. One of his most important points is that the United States has focused so much attention on the militarization of drug control and the elimination of production that it has overlooked the main cause of the development of this illegal industry, the lack of economic development in these mostly rural areas. According to Marcy, drug trafficking is a symptom of a deeper problem.

Marcy’s book stresses the interaction between the war on drugs and the cold war in terms of ideology and rhetoric and the use of drugs as a source of financing for low-intensity warfare. It points out that the U.S. government has used the ideological connection between guerrillas and narcos to attack subversive groups under the umbrella of the war on drugs. It reports on the research conducted by Senator John Kerry on the Nicaraguan Contra scandal, which showed that the CIA covertly used money and direct support from drug traffickers (aircraft, logistics, paramilitary forces, etc.) to finance the fight against the Sandinista revolutionary government without the support of the U.S. Congress or the American people. Afterward, Washington continued to argue that Nicaragua had economic ties with drug traffickers. According to Marcy, the Andean strategy generated a series of problems in three key countries: Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. It destabilized the governments of these countries, and the militarization of the countryside alienated the peasants. In Bolivia it promoted the emergence of insurgent groups with ties to drug trafficking, and in Colombia and Peru it produced a triangular war among guerrillas, armies, and paramilitaries over control of the coca-growing areas. Although the Peruvian revolutionary group Sendero Luminoso was ultimately vanquished, coca production continued and military corruption increased over time. The war on drugs only exacerbated the trafficking problem.

Anabel Hernández, the author of Narcoland, is a Mexican journalist who has written about the political connections between drug traffickers, the state, and the CIA in Mexico. Her book was published in Spanish in 2010 and sold more than 75,000 copies, and it has now been translated into English. It tells the story of the most important drug traffickers and their protectors, whose membership in the commercial elites and the political class (from local politicians to the national government and the presidency) makes the war against drugs impossible to win. In some ways, it is a critique of the war on the cartels declared by former president Felipe Calderón, which has resulted in thousands of dead. Most of the book focuses on Joaquín “Chapo” Guzmán and his ascent to power. One of its strongest charges is that Calderón’s drug war was a cover to provide Guzmán with a monopoly on smuggling in Mexico. The book demonstrates this point in part by describing Guzmán’s escape from prison with the help of various officials at the prison and across different levels of government. Hernández rejects the official versions and proposes her own, based on solid research. Her account implicates the Echeverría, Salinas de Gortari, Fox, and Calderón administrations in the protection of the narcos. Hernández’s offers further proof in the trafficker Edgar “La Barbie” Valdez Villarreal’s testimony of connections between the Calderón adminstration and his own organization. Many of these allegations were never investigated, and the scandal was silenced by getting people who could point directly to the criminal networks out of the way. The book also accuses the CIA of collaborating with the narcos and promoting and protecting the business at the same time that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency was trying to curb the cartels’ power.

Oliver Villar and Drew Cottle’s Cocaine Death Squads and the War on Terror focuses on the intersections between the drug war and counterrevolutionary incursions in Colombia, mainly through Plan Colombia and the cooperation between the Colombian and U.S. governments. The premise of the book is that the war on drugs and terrorism in Colombia is in fact a war for the control of the cocaine trade in a system of imperial domination and by means of state-sponsored terrorism. It does what Hernández does for Mexico in the Colombian context, exploring the connection between politics and narcotrafficking. These connections, however, are supported not by case studies but by a theoretical analysis of the connection between the interests of the narcobourgeoisie and U.S. capital. The explanations are bold, but the evidence is not always convincing.

The main argument is that the narcobourgeoisie (a network of businessmen, politicians, and local elites) came into conflict with the FARC in developing its multimillion-dollar business. At the same time, the U.S. and Colombian governments capitalized on the idea that coca production could end up corrupting the guerrillas, and this led to a paramilitary struggle to regain control and destroy the guerrilla groups and their support in the countryside. According to Villar and Cottle, the drug trade has helped finance the guerrilla war against U.S. colonialism and the narcos. The U.S. capital market takes 90 percent of the profits of the drug trade (Colombia receives about 10 percent redistributed through the economy). Therefore, Plan Colombia supports the narcobourgeoisie and U.S. capital at the expense of the Colombian working classes. This hypothesis is not demonstrated. While the book convincingly shows the control of the media in Colombia, especially regarding anti-FARC propaganda, its assertions of direct connections between drug traffickers, the military, and Washington remain unproven.

These studies address the war on drugs in the Americas and its implications for social policy and offer possible approaches to the topic from interdisciplinary angles. They also provide the historical perspective we need to reflect on the effects of the drug trade on our twenty-first-century societies.