High on Ideology, Low on Drugs: The Emergence of Uruguay's War on Drugs 1968-1974

• In Event: Security and Drugs

Abstract

In 1974, Uruguay's Council of State -an ersatz legislative body controlled by the military dictatorship- passed law 14.294, aligning the country's drug policies with a transnational “War on Drugs.” While studies on the genesis of Latin America's drug prohibitionism have correctly pointed to the diffusion of the Unites States' own War on Drugs, this article explores the significance of an assemblage process between transnational imperatives and local socio-political dynamics.
Drug consumption was still very marginal in Uruguay at beginning of the 1970s. However, drug control was rapidly becoming an important and visible regulating practice. Constructing the “problem of drugs” as one of young, male, communist students -a dangerous group par excellence in a “national security” doctrine context- was a key mechanism in the process of criminalizing drugs. Regulating drugs -through repression, jail, and mandatory internment- was, therefore, a way of managing dilemmas of governance in a Cold War context. It is by unpacking these local configurations of power that the contextual political significance of new regulative mechanisms becomes intelligible. Moreover, understanding how transnational processes were refracted through these local conditions explains cross-national variance in the implementation of War on Drug approaches and their divergent long-term and unintended consequences.
This article addresses two important questions for the discipline and the region: What do the shifting boundaries of legal/illegal, tolerated/repressed, and moral/immoral practices and commodities say about social control and disciplining and the construction of political order more broadly? And what can drug regulation -its transnational and local determinants- tell us about the emergence and consolidation of authoritarian regimes in Latin America during the 1970s?

Author

• Guzman Castro, University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences