Drugs and Money
Lazare, Daniel
When Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, the alleged boss of Colombia's Cali cocaine cartel, granted a rare interview to the press back in 1991, he protested that he was an honest businessman whose...
...7 The relationship between market liberalization and drugs is even starker in Bolivia and Peru...
...3 0 In the meantime, drug money spread through the military and governmental ranks...
...Inebriants of one type or another are common to virtually every human culture, be it wine in France, opium in the Burmese highlands or coca in the Andean region...
...10.UN Development Program, Human Development Report 1996 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 189...
...While real annual growth in Colombia has averaged 1.5% since 1980, higher than that of any of its neighboring Andean countries," the drug trade has in fact weakened the country's economy by fostering violence and corruption, undermining legal activity, frightening off foreign investment, and all but destroying the social fabric...
...21, No...
...20.Washington Estellano, "From Populism to a Coca Economy in Bolivia," Latin American Perspectives, Vol...
...The February 6 arrest on drug charges of Jesds Guti6rrez Rebollo, the general in charge of Mexico's anti-drug program, was a shock to the Clinton administration-rather as if Gen...
...3 2 Yet U.S...
...Where Colombia's other major drug-export sector-caffeine, otherwise known as coffee-is characterized by thin profit margins and concentrated ownership, the cocaine business is fragmented, both horizontally and vertically, with huge mark-ups at every step of the way...
...In late 1994, with Shining Path's back broken by a combined militarypolice offensive, Fujimori re-invented himself as a militant anti-drug warrior...
...Rather than crushing the drug trade, the "war on drugs" has driven it to ever-more feverish levels...
...8 Between 1980 and 1987, the rate of productive investment was more than halved.1 9 By its own standards, neoliberalism worked...
...By mid-1992, 90% of Lima was un- or underemployed...
...Under growing U.S...
...Yet the measures did nothing to reduce coca cultivation nor to deprive Shining Path of its financial base...
...Between 1993 and 1994, the year NAFTA went into effect, the number of trucks entering the United States from Mexico rose from 1.9 million a year to 2.8 million, a 50% increase...
...Torn between the paramilitary forces and the armies of the left, campesinos had little choice but to join one side or another-or leave...
...Yet coca cultivation in all three countries has expanded to record levels, and since 1990, Colombia and Peru have branched off into poppy production for heroin as well...
...government pours into interdiction, trade liberalization has rendered international borders the most porous they have been in decades...
...Where drug legalization remained unpopular in Colombia in the 1980s, at least among established opinion leaders, Bolivian peasant leaders sprang to coca's defense...
...30.As cited in Corinne Schmidt-Lynch, "On Peru's Hillsides, Coca Farmers Defy U.S...
...While the rise of capitalism was historically associated with a "rationalized" legal system in which justice was detached from the arbitrary whims of feudal lords, the drug business has given rise to mass violence that is arbitrary and chaotic in the extreme...
...With drug revenues estimated (very roughly) at around $3 billion a year, experts are divided as to whether all that hot money has benefited the national economy or not...
...28.David Scott Palmer, "Peru's Persistent Problems," Current History Vol...
...By 1988, any semblance of an independent peasant movement in areas where guerrillas operated had been crushed...
...But a desperately poor, land-locked country still produced next to nothing of what the rest of the world needed...
...Maybe," he added with a chuckle, "people confused coca with my dealings with Iacocca...
...By 1996, according to the World Bank, the richest quintile of Colombian society was earning 16% more relative to the bottom quintile than in 1990.16 And income flows from illicit drugs, which do not show up on the World Bank radar screen, undoubtedly ealers are put on display with their captured wares in Mexico City...
...By the mid-1990s, Suspected drug d the cocaine barons had bought up some 12 million acres-more than 3,500 square miles-of prime grazing land, a process Francisco Thoumi describes as "land reform in reverse...
...As Hector Mendoza, a 31-year-old Chapareno, told a U.S...
...Cattle ranchers who did not derive their wealth from drug trafficking and had long been in the habit of paying protection money to guerrillas sold out in increasing numbers as well...
...and Patrick L. Clawson and Rensselaer W. Lee, The Andean Cocaine Industry (New York: St...
...26.As cited in Thomas Kamm, "Bolivians Fear a U.S.-Led War on Drugs," The Wall Street Journal, June 24, 1991, p. A8...
...The income disSt 'I a tribution is incredibly skewed...
...But, in absolute terms, people have tended to fare far better than they would in the regular economy, whether they're pilots, traffickers or farmers...
...The world's anti-drug strategy is a failure," he told reporters in September, 1993...
...policies at cross-purposes in Latin America," Third World Quarterly Vol...
...8. Bruce M. Bagley, "Colombia and the War on Drugs," Foreign Policy No...
...2 3 Elegant neighborhoods sprang up in La Paz, Santa Cruz and Cochabamba, and purchases of late-model cars, computers and appliances took offthis in a country which, officially at least, saw a 30% drop in per-capita earnings between 1978 and 1989.24 Unlike in Colombia, however, workers and peasants were better positioned to fight back...
...Public-sector wages plummeted nearly 60% and private-sector wages nearly 40% in the span of a single month...
...Rather than depressing demand, repression often seems to stimulate it for stronger substances...
...I was chairman of the board of directors of a bank in Colombia and president of the board of directors of a bank in Panama," he said, when he first incurred official displeasure...
...Making matters even worse, the price of tin, the country's most important legal export, plummeted by more than half during the same period...
...17.Author's interview, Rensselaer Lee, February 22, 1997...
...3 By creating an alternative source of income for people to fall back on, it makes it easier for the government of a country like Bolivia or Peru to tell its citizens to tighten their belts...
...2 & 3 (Summer/Fall 1988), p. 129...
...VOL XXX, No 6 MAY/JUNE 1997 & IVREPORT ON WEALTH organizations willing to face the gamut of customs agents, border patrol officers and drug-sniffing dogs to bring them in...
...6.Author's interview, Francisco Thoumi, February 19, 1997...
...89, No...
...Although the city of Medellin had emerged as a cocaine and heroin center as far back as the 1940s, Colombia's modem drug history dates from the late 1970s when the Carter administration, alarmed at the volume of pot flowing across America's southern border, began pressing Mexico to spray its marijuana fields with an herbicide known as paraquat...
...It is a Hobson's choice: waging war on coca means kicking out the last economic prop from under their own people...
...4. Peter Andreas, "Free-market reform...
...1 (1991), p. 102...
...Alan Garcia, president from 1985 to 1990, pursued a policy of defiance toward both the international banks and the international drug lords, with ruinous consequences...
...Team's Praise," The New York Times, January 23, 1995, p. A2...
...The death rate climbed higher and higher until, by the late 1980s, it exceeded that of La Violencia, Colombia's anarchic civil war of 1949-58.9 Murder has become the leading cause of death for males aged 15 to 44, and the UN has described Colombia as one of the five most homicidal countries on earth.10 Corruption is also rampant-from local police officials to the presidential palace, whose current occupant, Ernesto Samper, is barred from entering the United States on charges of accepting nearly $6 40 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASREPORT ON WEALTH million in campaign contributions from drug traffickers...
...Needless to say, the biggest profits do not go to the hundreds of thousands of cocaleros in the Andes who actually grow the coca-and whose income accounts for less than 1% of the price of a gram of cocaine-but to those higher 41REPORT ON WEALTH up the scale who organize the marketing of coke in the United States...
...2 8 Austerity began during the final two years of the Garcia administration...
...Death squads and right-wing paramilitary groups, sponsored jointly by the drug lords and the military brass, proliferated...
...Francisco Thoumi, Political Economy, p. 162...
...25.As cited in Kevin Healy, "Political Ascent...
...By the late 1980s, between 50,000 and 100,000 day-laborers were streaming into the Chapare coca-growing region to help harvest coca and make it into paste, the first step in the production of powdered coke...
...Repressive strategies won't work," he added...
...The reason has to do with the structure of the international drug trade...
...No matter how much money the U.S...
...While early capitalism was synonymous with savings and investment, the drug trade discourages both in favor of conspicuous consumption -cars, stereos and TVs in Peru's Huallaga Valley, goldplated bathroom fixtures in narcotraffickers' residences in Colombia...
...Official statistics fail to capture the dimensions of this breakdown...
...Following his arrest in 1994, Peruvian cocaine kingpin Demetrio ("El Vaticano") Chavez charged that top military officers were participating in the drug trade, while the Peruvian press reported that army officers were protecting landing strips used by Colombian coca smugglers deep in the interior...
...Official exports shrank 24% between 1984 and 1986, and when the government attempted to cover its deficit by printing money, the annual inflation rate shot up to 24,000...
...Better than 80% of Bolivia's 28,000 tin miners were laid off...
...When Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, the alleged boss of Colombia's Cali cocaine cartel, granted a rare interview to the press back in 1991, he protested that he was an honest businessman whose only crime was his all-too-obvious success...
...This drives prices up, which leads to immense profits for 37 0o 5 Daniel Lazare is a freelance writer based in New York City He is the author of The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace, 1996...
...More ominously, El Vaticano also testified that he personally paid Vladimiro Montesinos, Fujimori's Rasputin-like personal adviser and de facto head of the National Intelligence Service (SIN), $50,000 a month for tips about DEA operations...
...Within 24 hours after his program went into effect, staple food prices had shot up 700...
...4 Locating the odd vehicle with a few hundred kilos of coke stashed away among the agricultural commodities or maquiladora products becomes more and more akin to finding a needle in a haystack with each passing year...
...government viewed drugs as a supply-side problem to be solved by wiping out cultivation "at the source...
...75-87...
...Neoliberal economic poli- Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela cocaine cartel, is surrounde cies, pushed by the Inter- co .e e isurounde cies, pushed by the Inter- leaves the federal prosecut( national Monetary Fund past February...
...I also had the concession for Chrysler Motors in Colombia...
...Bolivian President Victor Paz Estensorro responded with what is by now the standard neoclassical medicine: he deregulated finance, devalued the currency, removed trade restrictions, froze salaries, privatized state-owned industries and slashed subsidies...
...Income ue winds up even more maldistributed within l i the kingdom of cono ic cocaine than without...
...With illegal drug revenues currently estimated at up to 5% of GDP, money laundering, asset hiding and tax evasion became wellnigh universal among the moneyed classes, which hurt the poor all the more...
...Today, I think we are in the abyss," former President Misael Pastrana Borrero declared following his abduction by drug gangsters in 1988.15 In the years since, Colombia, especially its poor, have plunged in deeper and deeper...
...As in Bolivia, austerity stimulated coca production, which became far and away Peru's most dynamic economic sector...
...44 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 44REPORT ON WEALTH 22.Jaime Malamud-Goti, Smoke and Mirrors: The Paradox of the Drug War (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), p. 3. 23.Washington Estellano, "From Populism to a Coca Economy...
...sector of the national peasant union...
...Even statistics-gathering, the great accomplishment of nineteenth- and twentieth-century governments, is subverted as more and more of the economy goes underground and hence out of sight-as the worst-case scenario of Colombia illustrates...
...The drug barons effectively joined forces with Shining Path, the Maoist guerrilla movement, when Garcia, eager to curry favor with the Reagan administration in the sole remaining area where collaboration was possible, declared war NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASREPORT ON WEALTH against cocaine...
...And by "freeing" up the financial markets, it makes it easier to repatriate drug profits and invest them in the legal sector...
...alleged boss of the Cali Attempts at suppressing by prison guards as he drugs often have perverse con- "s office in Bogota this uenha pve n sequences...
...8 As long as the drug in question was marijuana, it was hard to take seriouslyColombians were inclined to see pot smoking on U.S...
...The banks cut off credit when Garcia unilaterally declared he was limiting payment of the debt to 10% of Peru's export earnings...
...The flawed logic of U.S...
...In 1989, a left-wing coalition, the United Left, denounced coca eradication as an attempt to "extinguish the Andean culture, since, to the extent this culture exists, there will always be coca...
...543 (January 1990), p. 5. 29.Peter Andreas, "Free-market reform...
...In Bolivia's case, the crunch came in the mid-1980s...
...By putting the squeeze on "legitimate" economic activities and driving up unemployment, neoliberalism generates thousands of recruits for the drug trade-coca growers, day laborers, smugglers, enforcers, etc...
...24.Jaime Malamud-Goti, Smoke and Mirrors...
...In the name of "zero tolerance," the U.S...
...2 6 Like so much in Peru, the history of the coca trade divides rather neatly into pre-Fujimori and Fujimori periods...
...IMF), the World Bank and other agencies with relentless efficiency since the 1970s, have also fueled the drug trade...
...While the rise of capitalism was bound up with the Protestant work ethic described by the German sociologist Max Weber, the drug trade fosters the very opposite: a short-term, get-rich-quick gambler's ethic...
...Water prices subsequently went up eightfold, electricity fivefold, and gasoline 30-fold...
...A few weeks later, The New York Times reported breathlessly that a governor in league with the narcotraffickers, Manlio Fabio Beltrones Rivera, controlled the Mexican state of Sonora, just south of Arizona, and that Mexican drug oldiers dismantle a cocaine factory in Peru's Huallaga Valley dealers were taking in $10 billion a year, 60% of which was kicked back to government officials...
...And some served as simply a place for members of the extended Cali network to park their immense narcomoney, the drug war and neoliberal economic austerity programs have all intersected in a way that is little short of explosive...
...But with 80 to 90% of coca earnings flowing to some 200 families, the coca economy contributed to and exacerbated the neoliberal polarization of wealth just as it had in Colombia...
...Maybe indeed...
...1 2 The drug barons' war against the government soon intersected with another kind of violence-the lowgrade civil war between the military and the guerrillas that had been going on since the 1960s...
...Barry McCaffrey, the U.S...
...18.Peter Andreas, "Free-market reform...
...government's goal of zero tolerance is thoroughly unrealistic...
...4 (Fall 1994), p. 39...
...reporter in 1991: "There's no development, no jobs, nothing...
...Indeed, as one dissident drug analyst, Peter Andreas, has pointed out, by inflating the drug sector, the drug war helps generate a revenue stream that serves to mitigate the harshness of neoliberal austerity programs...
...In both cases, living standards were gutted and unemployment was sent rocketing to stratospheric heights...
...When the M-19 guerrillas kidnapped coke baron Jorge Luis Ochoa's sister in 1981, the Medellin drug lords formed a hit squad dubbed "Death to Kidnappers" (known by its Spanish acronym MAS) that promptly assassinated several M-19 members and sympathizers in revenge...
...14.Mary Anastasia O'Grady, "Colombia's Struggle for Law and Order," The Wall Street Journal, February 18, 1997, p. A22...
...and Penny Lernoux, "Corrupting Colombia," Inquiry September 30, 1979, pp...
...33 Drugs & Money 1.John Moody, "A Day with the Chess Player," Time, July 1, 1991, p. 34...
...19.Kevin Healy, "Political Ascent of Bolivia's Peasant Coca Leaf Producers," Latin American Perspectives, Vol...
...Quite the contrary, by levying a $2,000-to-$4,000 departure tax on every plane entering and leaving the Upper Huallaga Valley, Shining Path was earning an estimated $30 million a year by 1988, making it the richest political movement in the country...
...VOL XXX, No 6 MAY/JUNE 1997 The legal system was swamped-by 1994, the court backlog had reached a million cases-which meant that criminals were free to operate with virtual impunity.14 Not surprisingly, the victims of Colombia's nightmare of violence have been overwhelmingly drawn from the ranks of the urban and rural poor...
...Peru allowed U.S...
...11.UN Development Program, Human Development Report 1996, p. 189...
...Protest marches and "chew-ins" were organized to celebrate traditional uses of the coca leaf, with coca growers emerging as the most radical, militant and anti-U.S...
...not waging war on coca means allowing drug money to permeate the economy, fueling the growth of the narco-bourgeoisie, encouraging corruption and angering the United States...
...Soldiers and civilians should unite in one single fist to crush drug trafficking, the destroyer of world youth and the source of corruption everywhere," he told air force academy graduates in December...
...drug policy is apparent to all but a small 3, d or number of journalists, politicians and professional drug warriors who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo...
...21.Kevin Healy, "Political Ascent...
...In both those countries, economic shock treatment was imposed of the severest sort...
...It is, moreover, a convenient investment in a country in which it is difficult to launder large sums without drawing attention...
...make the picture worse...
...Land is a traditional investment for wealthy Colombians, and it allows drug barons a lavish, lordly lifestyle...
...Prohibition encouraged a kind of hard drinking that is now indelibly associated with the Roaring Twenties, while the war on drugs has led to, among other things, the crack epidemic of the 1980s and the heroin resurgence of the 1990s...
...2 7 Meanwhile, the economy was in shambles, with inflation running at 7,649% in 1989, two-thirds of the working population unemployed or underemployed, and real wages at less than half the 1970 level...
...Already one of the poorest nations in the Western Hemisphere, between 1980 and 1985 Bolivia saw its GNP decline by 17%, percapita consumption fall by a third, and unemployment double...
...2 According to various police officials and drug-scene observers, some of those businesses served as covers for the import of chemicals used in converting raw coca paste to cocaine...
...Inevitably, Bolivia found itself turning to its one area of comparative advantage-the production of coca...
...But the U.S...
...The currency was stabilized, and capital flight ceased...
...Cynthia McClintock, "The War on Drugs: The Peruvian Case," Journal of Interamerican Studies, Vol...
...31.James Brooke, "Peru Combats Drug Traffic, Winning U.S...
...Fields were sprayed, boats and airplanes were confiscated, yet not only did pot survive, but cocaine soon emerged as a highly profitable growth industry...
...Although Chavez later retracted his testimony, it had made more credible what had already been widely reported...
...drug policy is so incoherent at this point that there is little governments of drug-producing countries can do in response...
...With some 2,000 sicarios, or assassins-for-hire, in Medellin alone, the quality of urban life plummeted...
...3 1 Nonetheless, some 200,000 Peruvian peasants were cultivating an estimated 500,000 acres of coca by early 1995 and were even branching off into opium as well...
...In response, President Belisario Betancur declared war against the narco-traffickers, who declared war right back...
...While driving the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) up the wall, it allows Latin American governments to seem more virtuous in the eyes of the World Bank and the IMF...
...Martin's Press, 1996), p. 17...
...While the task force proved highly effective against rustbucket freighters loaded to the gunwales with pot, narco-entrepreneurs viewed it as further proof that it was time to get out of a high-risk, low-profit venture like marijuana and into the far more remunerative business of cocaine...
...2 9 While stepping up the war against Shining Path, Fujimori proved initially less aggressive than Garcia when it came to the war on drugs...
...16.World Bank, World Development Report 1996...
...By throwing millions of people out of work, financial shock treatment in Bolivia, Peru and elsewhere has swollen the ranks of those willing to work as coca growers and traffickers...
...Class relations were, to say the least, transformed...
...1 3 The drug lords put their money into real estate for a variety of reasons...
...16, No...
...Although public referenda in favor of medical marijuana passed handily in California and Arizona last year, the Clinton administration remains staunchly opposed...
...Rather than encouraging Latin American nations to get out of the drug business and into more "legitimate" economic activities, neoliberalism has done the opposite by forcing them to fall back on the one sector in which they continue to enjoy a comparative international advantage...
...2 2 For the foundering Bolivian economy, coca was a lifesaver...
...32.Sam Dillon and Craig Pyles, "Drug Ties Taint Two Mexican Governors," The New York Times, February 23, 1997, p. 1. 33.As cited in Maria Jimena Duz~n, Death Beat: A Colombian Journalist's Life Inside the Cocaine Wars (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), p. 280...
...3. Peter Andreas, "Free-market reform and drug market prohibition: U.S...
...7 With illegal drug sales already netting Colombians more than $1 billion a year by the late 1970s, the Colombian government was reluctant to step in and cut off the flow of cash...
...2 The Sunday Telegraph, June 30, 1991, p. 16...
...Put it in the headlines...
...The cocaine mafia's clout has spread, not only within Colombia, Bolivia and Peru, but to Mexico (which has emerged since the 1980s as a major transshipment point), Venezuela and Brazil...
...13-19...
...If there's no coca, what will the campesinos do...
...Last year I said we were on the verge of the abyss...
...2 0 Coca production doubled between 1985 and 1990.21 By the early 1990s, Bolivian coca exports were worth an estimated $1.6 billion a year, $600 million of which remained in the economy as foreign earnings...
...9. Bruce Bagley, "Colombia and the War on Drugs...
...And it fuels the business empire of people like Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, who, if various narco-intelligence sources are believed, had by the early 1990s put together the most sophisticated corporate-style operation the world has ever seen for the export of illegal substances to North America and Western Europe (See "The Rise and Fall of the 'Gentlemen of Cali,' " p. 39...
...drug czar, had been found to be in the pay of the Cali Cartel...
...As cocaine barons, anxious for a place to park their money, began buying up grazing land, they came into increasing conflict with land-hungry campesinos and the guerrillas who championed their cause...
...But instead of body counts, you have cocaine and heroin seizures...
...In 1981, then-Vice President George Bush inaugurated the South Florida Task Force, a comprehensive air and sea campaign against marijuana smuggling...
...The U.S...
...6 While often described as a throwback to the primitive capitalism of the nineteenth century, the drug trade is actually something very different-a form of speculative activity that behaves in ways directly contrary to the way industrial capitalism has behaved over the course of its two- or three-century history...
...But rather than knocking out the marijuana trade, the measure merely shifted the source southward...
...Repression," The San Francisco Examiner September 12, 1993, p. A8...
...press was announcing that 240,000 acres were under cultivation, enough to generate some 60,000 tons of pot...
...5.Author's interview, Francisco Thoumi, February 19, 1997...
...Some-the taxi fleet, for instance-served as a mobile intelligence system for keeping tabs on the cops...
...pressure, President Julio C6sar Turbay agreed in 1978 to a major eradication and interdiction campaign led by the military and aimed at nipping the young marijuana industry in the bud...
...government has imposed trade sanctions, terminated aid programs and used its enormous economic muscle to force the major Latin American coca producersColombia, Bolivia and Peru-to eradicate thousands of acres of coca fields and force peasants to forsake coca for "legitimate" crops...
...There was little, if any, room for it in the global economy...
...7. Everett G. Martin, "Guajira Peninsula Becomes Chief Source of Marijuana for U.S.," The Wall Street Journal, November 20, 1978, p. Al...
...Colombia's Guajira Peninsula, source of the high-potency pot known as "Colombian Gold," emerged as the new center of the international marijuana trade...
...If you're comparing a i individuals like Cali kingpins Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela to the individual coca farmer, *eolbl i you're talking about someone making $5,000 a year versus thu n o * i someone making hundreds of millions," Says Rensselaer Lee, a d r tra *- l*m drug-policy consultant...
...Mexico agreed...
...15.As cited in Bruce Bagley, "Colombia and the War on Drugs...
...Rodrfguez was also the head at various points of a 30-station radio network, at least two pharmaceutical laboratories, a chain of some 400 discount drugstores, a soccer team, a fleet of 1,000 taxis, plus extensive other holdings in communications, construction, light industry and agribusiness...
...And while the rise of capitalism was intimately linked to the rise of the nation-state, the drug trade corrodes the state from within through corruption and mass intimidation...
...As Gabriel Garcia Mdrquez put it: "We will rot alive in a war that cannot be won...
...campuses as a gringo problem for gringos alone to solve...
...Cocaine production has increased 12 to 15 times since the Reagan administration declared the "war on drugs" in early 1982.5 Legalization, the most obvious answer to the drug-war mess, remains politically impossible for the foreseeable future, despite growing public unease with current policies...
...relations with Colombia and Mexico to the breaking point, for instance, making a neoliberal hero out of President Alberto Fujimori in Peru, and sparking widespread peasant protests in cocagrowing regions throughout the Andes...
...Soon, the U.S...
...Thus, a drug war-any drug war-is virtually by definition a war against one drug culture on behalf of another, and, therefore, an exercise in hypocrisy...
...This is the strange new chemistry that is now roiling the political and economic waters between North and South America--driving U.S...
...12.Francisco E. Thoumi, Political Economy and Illegal Drugs in Colombia (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1995), p. 3. 13.Author's interview, Francisco Thoumi, February 19, 1997...
...30, Nos...
...The Clinton Administration considers the narcotics fight less important than fostering commerce with this country's third largest trading partner," the Times report complained...
...2 5 It declared war, in effect, on the war on drugs...
...77 (Fall 1988), p. 76...
...1 (1995), pp...
...Finally, there is Mexico, where the drug "problem" began in the 1960s and 1970s with marijuana and which, by the mid-1980s, had emerged as a major conduit for Colombian cocaine...
...Rather than inhibiting the drug trade, neoliberal austerity has wound up fueling it...
...This was more than what the country earned from legal exports and more than it received in the form of foreign loans...
...Colombia's spiral of drug-related violence began in 1984, when drug lords assassinated Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla in revenge for a raid on a major drug-processing center...
...Republican and Democratic politicians vie with one another to see who can be tougher on drugs just the way they used to vie to see who could be tougher on Communism...
...advisers to set up a military base and acceded to American pressure to spray coca fields with the environmentally harmful defoliant, "Spike...
...Before long the region was displaying the classic symptoms of an over-heated drug economy-flashy cars, impoverished Guajiro Indians suddenly flush with cash, and Wild West shootouts in the streets of coastal cities like Riohacha and Santa Marta...
...We'd have to jail 200,000 farmers...
...Instead of dampening demand for illegal substances like marijuana, cocaine or opiates, drug prohibition has stimulated it by glamorizing and eroticizing them...
...It reminds me of Vietnam," says drug-trade expert Francisco Thoumi...
...By fueling Shining Path's terror offensive, coca meanwhile set the stage for Fujimori's autogolpe, or "self-coup," in 1992...
...33, No...
...Nonetheless, it was left to Fujimori to really slam on the brakes beginning in August, 1990...
Vol. 30 • May 1997 • No. 6
