In some Latin American countries, traffickers equipped with vast resources have corrupted individuals in every aspect of public life, compromising the integrity of entire national institutions - the political system and the judiciary, the military, the police, and banking and financial systems. Moreover, Latin America, like Europe and the USA, has a drug consumption problem. Yet, drug control in Latin America is beset with contradictions. For some Latin Americans, illicit drug production in the form of coca cultivation is a traditional way of life, and has often been an economic bulwark against destitution. Attempts to control the drug trade, while absorbing vast resources, have been largely ineffectual and have had dramatic and unintended consequences. This book analyses the profound consequences that the illicit drug trade has for millions of Latin Americans, and what they imply for domestic policy and for international cooperation. Latin America and the Multinational Drug Trade is essential reading for students of Latin America, politics, international relations, security studies, foreign policy, economic development, criminology and law, and for anyone interested in the politics and economics of the global illicit drug trade.

Transnational crime remains a particularly serious problem in Latin America, with most issues connected to the drug trade. There are several relevant roles that the U.S. Air Force can and should play in boosting Mexico's capacity to counter drug production and trafficking, as well as further honing and adjusting its wider counternarcotics effort in Latin America.

Transnational crime remains a particularly serious problem in Latin America, with most issues connected to the drug trade. There are several relevant roles that the U.S. Air Force can and should play in boosting Mexico?'s capacity to counter drug production and trafficking, as well as further honing and adjusting its wider counternarcotics effort in Latin America.

While the U.S. has failed to reduce the supply of cocaine and heroin entering its borders, it has, however, succeeded in generating widespread, often profoundly damaging, consequences on democracy and human rights in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Since the mid-1980s subsequent US governments have promoted a highly militarized and prohibitionist drug control approach in Latin America. Despite this strategy the region has seen increasing levels of homicide, displacement and violence. Why did the militarization of U.S. drug war policies in Latin America begin and why has it continued despite its inability to achieve the stated targets? Are such policies simply intended to impose U.S. power or have elites in Latin America internalized this agenda as their own? Why did resistance to this approach emerge in the late-2000s and does this represent a challenge to the prohibitionist agenda? In this book William Avilés argues that if we are to understand and explain the militarization of the drug war in Latin America a ‘transnational grand strategy’, developed and implemented by networks of elites and state managers operating in a neoliberal, globalized social structure of accumulation, must be considered and examined.

This book describes the main patterns and trends of drug trafficking in Latin America and analyzes its political, economic and social effects on several countries over the last twenty years. Its aim is to provide readers an introductory yet elaborate text on the illegal drug problem in the region. It first seeks to define and measure the problem, and then discusses some of the implications that the growth of production, trafficking, and consumption of illegal drugs had in the economies, in the social fabrics, and in the domestic and international policies of Latin American countries. This book analyzes the illegal drugs problem from a Latin American perspective. Although there is a large literature and research on drug use and trade in the USA, Canada, Europe and the Far East, little is understood on the impact of narcotics in countries that have supplied a large share of the drugs used worldwide. This work explores how routes into Europe and the USA are developed, why the so-called drug cartels exist in the region, what level of profits illegal drugs generate, how such gains are distributed among producers, traffickers, and dealers and how much they make, why violence spread in certain places but not in others, and which alternative policies were taken to address the growing challenges posed by illegal drugs. With a strong empirical foundation based on the best available data, Illegal Drugs, Drug Trafficking and Violence in Latin America explains how rackets in the region built highly profitable enterprises transshipping and smuggling drugs northbound and why the large circulation of drugs also produced the emergence of vibrant domestic markets, which doubled the number of drug users in the region the last 10 years. It presents the best available information for 18 countries, and the final two chapters analyze in depth two rather different case studies: Mexico and Argentina.

"This comprehensive volume makes a substantive and unique contribution to understanding the drug trade at the national, regional, and global levels. Bringing together respected scholars and analysts from diverse disciplines and from Latin America, Europe, and the United States, it is the most important single volume in the field this decade."--Michael Gold-Biss, American University Stemming from an international conference held in Utrecht, this collection encompasses the political, economic, social, and legal aspects of the illegal drug industry. The introduction provides an overview of the political economy of the drug industry followed by discussions of the impact of the drug industry on the Latin American source countries; drug trafficking and money laundering; the war on drugs, transnational crime, and international security; and current options for intervention and control. Contents Part I. Introduction 1. The Political Economy of the Drug Industry: Its Structure and Functioning, by Menno Vellinga Part II. The Drug Industry: Its Impact on Economy, Politics, and Society and the Drug Control Effort in Source Countries 2. Has Bolivia Won the War? Lessons from Plan Dignidad, by Eduardo A. Gamarra 3. Questionable Alliances in the War on Drugs: Peru and the United States, by Mariano Valderrama and Hugo Cabieses 4. Illegal Drugs in Colombia: From Illegal Economic Boom to Social Crisis, by Francisco E. Thoumi 5. Mexico: Drugs and Politics, by Luis Astorga 6. The Political Economy of Drugs in the Caribbean: Problems without Passports, by Ivelaw L. Griffith Part III. Trafficking and Money Laundering 7. The Political Economy of Drug Smuggling, by Peter Reuter 8. Post-Fordist Cocaine: Labor and Business Relations among Colombian Dealers, by Damián Zaitch 9. Follow the Money: Anti-Money-Laundering Policies and Financial Investigations, by Ernesto Savona Part IV. The Drug Industry and the War on Drugs 10. Perversely Harmful Effects of Counter-Narcotics Policy in the Andes, by Rensselaer Lee 11. Diverging Trends in Global Drug Policy, by Martin Jelsma 12. Multilateral Drug Control, by Sandeep Chawla 13. The European Union and Drug Control: Issues and Trends, by Tim Boekhout van Solinge Part V. Drugs, Transnational Crime, and International Security 14. Globalization and Transnational Organized Crime: The Russian Mafia in Latin America and the Caribbean, by Bruce Michael Bagley 15. The War against Drugs and the Interests of Governments, by Alain Labrousse 16. Drugs and Transnational Organized Crime: Conceptualization and Solutions, by Ybo Buruma Part VI. Conclusion 17. The Drug Industry, Its Economic, Social, and Political Effects, and the Options of Intervention and Control, by Menno Vellinga Menno Vellinga has served as professor of development geography and director of the Institute of Development Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He presently occupies the Bacardi Chair for Eminent Visiting Scholars at the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida.