Shifting South: Cocaine’s Diverging Histories and Drug Politics in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru

• In Event: Cocaine's Products Part I: From growing to transit

Abstract

This paper traces the highly divergent political impacts of cocaine’s global commodity chain’s recent shift in southern and global directions away from the Colombia-United States connection that dominated the previous three decades of cocaine’s history. The larger shift is sparking, I contend, highly distinctive drug political responses in all three of the Andean nations involved in illicit production and trafficking. Bolivia, breaking from the U.S. drug war model, has famously embraced “coca nationalism” and embarked on unorthodox pacted policies of “social control” of drug control. Colombia is asserting its growing state sovereignty both domestically and vis-a-vis the United States in a series of “post-drug war” debates and initiatives around sustainable forms of drug and drug-violence control. Peru, now again the world’s largest single exporter of cocaine, has paradoxically fallen into what I term “cocaine denial” and a related form of policy passivity vis-à-vis external drug war pressures. The paper analyzes these national responses in terms of longer and distinctive historical and socio-geographic patterns of coca leaf and illicit cocaine traffic in the three Andean cases.

Author

• Paul Gootenberg, SUNY/Stony Brook University