Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-jbqgn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-26T07:17:39.640Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Cocaine’s Long March North, 1900–2010

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Paul Gootenberg
Paul Gootenberg*
Affiliation:
Stony Brook University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay charts the entanglements and “blowback” effects of U.S. policy toward Latin American drug exports over the last century as the backdrop to today’s cascading drug violence in northern Mexico. The history of cocaine reveals a series of major geopolitical shifts (closely related to U.S. interdictionist drug war policies) that bring drug commodity chains, illicit trafficking centers, and conflicts, over the long run, closer to the United States. It analyzes shifts from initial legal cocaine and small-time postwar smuggling of the central Andes to the concentrating 1970s–1990s “cartel” epicenter in northern Andean Colombia, to the 1990s political shift north to Mexican transhipment and organizational leadership. Violence around cocaine has intensified at every step, and the present conflict portends another shift in the chain.

Type
Policy Issues
Information
Latin American Politics and Society , Volume 54 , Issue 1 , Spring 2012 , pp. 159 - 180
Copyright
Copyright © University of Miami 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aguilar, Rubén and Castañeda, Jorge. 2009: El narco: la guerra fallada. Mexico City : Punto de Lectura.Google Scholar
Andreas, Peter. 2009. Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexican Divide. 2nd ed. Ithaca : Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Astorga, Luis. 1995. Mitología del “narcotraficante” en México. Mexico City : Plaza y Valdés.Google Scholar
Campbell, Howard. 2009. Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El Paso and Juárez. Austin : University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Chepesiuk, Ron. 2003. Drug Lords: The Rise and Fall of the Cali Cartel, The World's Most Powerful Criminal Organisation. London : Milo Books.Google Scholar
Cirules, Enrique. 2004. The Mafia in Havana: A Caribbean Mob Story. Melbourne : Ocean Press.Google Scholar
Esquivil, J. Jesus. 2009. Dea Intelligence Chief Likens Mexico to 1980s Colombia. Mexidata.Info March 2 (orig. Proceso [Mexico City], February 22.).Google Scholar
Fountain, Ben. 2010. Addicted to Haiti. New York times, February 7.Google Scholar
Gootenberg, Paul. 2007. The “Pre-Colombian” Era of Drug Trafficking in the Americas: Cocaine, 1947–1965. The Americas 64, 2 (October): 133–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gootenberg, Paul. 2008. Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Gootenberg, Paul. 2009. Talking about the Flow: Drugs, Borders, and the Discourse of Drug Control. Cultural Critique 71 (Winter): 13–49.Google Scholar
Grayson, George W. 2010. Mexico: Narco-Violence and a Failed State? New Brunswick : Transaction.Google Scholar
Grillo, Iion. 2011. El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency. New York : Bloomsbury Press.Google Scholar
Guillermoprieto, Alma. 1995. The Heart that Bleeds: Latin America Now. New York : Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Johnson, Chalmers. 2004. Blowback: The Cost and Consequences of American Empire. New York : Holt.Google Scholar
Kenney, Michael. 2007. From Pablo to Osama: Trafficking and Terrorist Networks, Government Bureaucracies, and Competitive Adaptations. University Park : Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Kirk, Robin. 2004. More Terrible than Death: Violence, Drugs, and America's War in Colombia. New York : Public Affairs Books.Google Scholar
Knight, Alan. 2001. The Modern Mexican State: Theory and Practice. In The Other Mirror: Grand Theory Through the Lens of Latin America, ed. Centeno, Miguel and López-Alves, Francisco. Princeton : Princeton University Press. Chap. 6, 177–218.Google Scholar
Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy. 2008. Drugs and Democracy: Toward a Paradigm Shift. Statement by the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy. New York : Open Society Institute.Google Scholar
Los Angeles Times . 2011. Researcher Projects 5,000 Will Die in Ciudad Juárez in 2011. January 24.Google Scholar
Malamud-Goti, Jaime. 1992. Smoke and Mirrors: The Paradox of the Drug Wars. Boulder : Westview Press.Google Scholar
Massing, Michael. 1998. The Fix. New York : Simon and Schuster, 1998.Google Scholar
Ravelo, Ricardo. 2006. Los capos: las narco-rutas de México. Mexico City : Plaza y Janés.Google Scholar
Reuter, Peter. 2004. The Political Economy of Drug Smuggling. In The Political Economy of the Drug Industry: Latin America and the Internatonal System, ed. Vellinga, Mario. Gainesville : University of Florida Press. Chap. 4, 127–47.Google Scholar
Reuter, Peter. 2009. Do No Harm. The American Interest 4, 4 (Spring): 46–52.Google Scholar
Rodríguez Castañeda, Rafael, ed. 2009. El México narco. Mexico City : Planeta.Google Scholar
Roldán, Mary. 1999. Colombia: Cocaine and the “Miracle” of Modernity in Medellín. In Cocaine: Global Histories, ed. Gootenberg, Paul. London : Routledge. Chap. 8, 165–82.Google Scholar
Romero, Simon. 2010, Coca Growing Surges in Peru as Drug Fight Shifts Trade. New York times, June 14.Google Scholar
Sáenz Rovner, Eduardo. 2008. The Cuban Connection: Drug Trafficking, Smuggling, and Gambling in Cuba from the 1920s to the Revolution. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Thoumi, Francisco E. 1992. Why the Illegal Psychoactive Drugs Industry Grew in Colombia. Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 34, 3 (Fall): 37–63.Google Scholar
Transborder Institute. 2010. Drug Violence in Mexico: Data and Analysis from 2001 to 2009. San Diego : Transborder Institute, University of San Diego.Google Scholar
United Nations International Drug Control Programme (UNDCP). 2008. World Drug Report 2008. Oxford : Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
United Nations International Drug Control Programme (UNDCP). 2011. World Drug Report 2010. Web Publication no. E.10.XI.13. Vienna : United Nations.Google Scholar
Zimmerman, Stan. 2006. A History of Smuggling in Florida: Rumrunners and Cocaine Cowboys. Charleston, SC : History Press.Google Scholar