Drug Economies of the Americas

In the Americas, the production and sale of illicit drugs generates tens of billions of dollars a year—perhaps far more. NACLA editor Mark Fried wrote in 1989, in the introduction to our first issue on the subject, "The moral blinders most of us wear tend to hide the essentials of the drug trade. [Drugs] are not devils, any more than they are gods. They are commodities and the drug trade is a multinational industry like any other."

That is still true, and it is still helpful to examine the industry in that light, even though the drug trade has changed in some significant ways since then. There now seems to be no nation in the Americas that has no role at all in the drug trade; most of the nations of South and Central America and the Caribbean that do not produce significant amounts of illegal drugs for export have some role as drug transit routes or money laundering centers. In this Report, we detail the history and current state of some of the most important national industries.

September/October
2002
Volume: 
36
Number: 
2

Taking Note

Fred Rosen
Over the past two decades, the chief survival strategy for many rural Mexican communities—particularly in the south—has been to send young people away, wait for them to find jobs, and hope they send large chunks of their earnings home.

Intro

JoAnn Kawell
In the Americas, the production and sale of illicit drugs generates tens of billions of dollars a year—perhaps far more. Though exact figures are impossible to come by, for reasons we discuss below, it’s clear that many Latin American nations now earn as much, or more, from the drug trade than they do from any other single legal commodity or industry.
JoAnn Kawell
Economist Pierre Salama has listed the problems that the study of the production, distribution and use of drugs presents for him and his colleagues: “The object of the study is poorly defined, measurement is difficult and often ‘folkloric,’ and the behavior of the traffickers is little known and changes difficult to evaluate.”[1]
JoAnn Kawell
Central America and the island nations of the Caribbean primarily play a support role in the international drug industry, serving as transit points and money laundering sites.
JoAnn Kawell
Colombia’s drug industry is the most complete and diversified in the world: Colombia is the world’s only important producer of all three of the top non-synthetic illicit drugs; it provides an estimated 75% of the world’s cocaine supply, 2% of the world’s heroin supply, and a large amount of marijuana, including perhaps 40% of the pot imported into the United States.[1]
JoAnn Kawell
Peru and Bolivia both produce some refined cocaine for sale in international markets, but their main role in the international drug industry is as producers of coca leaf, the raw material used to make cocaine, and of coca paste, which is further processed, usually in Colombian labs, into finished cocaine hydrochloride.
JoAnn Kawell
The United States is best known as the world’s largest market for drugs and, of course, as the main promoter, at home and abroad, of prohibition-based drug control policy. But the United States is also a major producer of illicit drugs, especially marijuana and amphetamines, and a major money launderer.

Open Forum

Carlos Marichal
Diverse and complex factors underlie Latin America’s economic backwardness, but one of the most important is the persistence of corruption, especially that undertaken or permitted by individuals at the highest levels of government: the presidency, treasury, army, police, judiciary.

Report

Bill Weinberg
Reports of massacres in the Mexican countryside have become alarmingly common in recent years, but a recent incident was among the bloodiest—and murkiest. On the night of May 31, 26 peasants were shot to death in an ambush on a remote dirt road high in Oaxaca’s rugged Sierra Madre del Sur.
Jordi Pius Llopart
It was two in the morning when I was awakened to begin a journey that would take me high into Mexico’s Sierra Madre del Sur and deep into one of the most troubled and remote parts of the state of Guerrero, the region that includes the Petatlán and Coyuquilla river valleys.
Irene Ortiz
Cuernavaca, Saturday, June 13, 1998: At 1:55 in the afternoon I park my pickup truck on Avenida Central, across the street from La Harinera, about a block from the big traffic circle, La Luna. Thinking I’ll be right back, I don’t attach the security club to the steering wheel or check to see if there’s any danger nearby.
David Borden
Often, divergent intellectual pathways can lead to similar conclusions, and drug policy reform is an excellent example of this. There may be no other issue that draws together such diverse advocates, representing such wide ranging, sometimes starkly opposing viewpoints.
Juan G.Tokatlian
During his campaign for the presidency of Colombia in March 2002, then-candidate Alvaro Uribe announced that he supported the U.S.-backed, multi-billion dollar anti-drug campaign known as Plan Colombia, “because if we do not defeat drugs, they will destroy our ecology, our rule of law, our productive culture, and the future of our youth.”
Phillip S. Smith
In many parts of the Americas, the U.S.-led consensus about the “war on drugs” is beginning to fray. This is happening not only in obvious places, such as Bolivia, where the June 30 presidential election catapulted coca grower leader Evo Morales from parliamentary outcast to presidential powerbroker, but across the Americas.
Robert Neuwirth
When armed robbers assaulted her store in Rio de Janeiro’s Flamengo neighborhood and cleaned out her entire inventory of eyeglasses and jewelry, Valéria Cristina knew just what to do. She closed up shop and opened a new store with the same name, Lince Optical and Jewelers, in one of Rio’s more than 600 favelas, or squatter communities.

Reviews

Daniel Lazare
When the movie Traffic burst onto U.S. movie screens in December 2000, the pundits were unanimous: By confronting a difficult subject in a compelling, head-on manner, the film would force Americans to grapple with an anti-drug crusade that was costing billions of dollars a year and sending millions of people to jail, yet doing little to stop the flow of illegal substances.

In Brief

Raúl Zibechi
Montevideo—July 2002 will be remembered as the month the Uruguayan crisis exploded. It is a triple crisis—economic, political, and social—that has been brewing for years in a society that didn’t want to pay attention to facts that pointed to an imminent financial disaster.

Article

Phillip S. Smith
If a sort of de facto decriminalization exists in Canada's British Columbia province, where the marijuana business generates at least $2 billion annually and provides an estimated 100,000 jobs, the Liberal government of Prime Minister Jean Chretien is hinting that it wishes to formalize a sim- ilar policy nationwide. In July, Justice Minister Mau- rice Cauchon floated a decriminalization trial bal- loon that would entail removing marijuana possession from the criminal code, making it instead a ticketable offense with a fine, similar to a traffic citation.
Phillip S. Smith
Within the last year, Jamaica's parliament- appointed National Commission on Ganja (marijuana) has called for the decriminalization of marijuana on the island, and the ruling Peoples' National Party has endorsed Prime Minister PJ. Pat- terson's call for a national debate on the topic.
Phillip S. Smith
Although Mexican President Vicente Fox last year made brief comments suggesting drug legalization may be the ultimate solution, and his Foreign Secretary, Jorge Castafieda, made widely- read calls for ending drug prohibition prior to tak- ing office, Fox's National Action Party (PAN) gov- ernmient has remained firmly in the camp of the U.S.
JoAnn Kawell
Mexico is, according to the U.S. State Department, “a major supplier of heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana” for the U.S. market and “the transit point for more than one half of the cocaine sold in the U.S.” It is also a major money laundering site: The State Department reports that “In recent years international money launderers have turned increasingly to Mexico for initial placement of drug proceeds into the global financial system.”
ONLINE RESOURCES FOR RESEARCHING THE DRUG INDUSTRY The International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR) http://www.state.