Cocaine Production In The Andes

It is commonly known that the Andean nations of Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia are the international centers of cocaine production. But until now, there has been no comprehensive view of this billion dollar industry. Using never-before unearthed information culled from their extensive field research, Patrick Clawson and Rensselaer Lee reveal the configuration of the drug industry, from the original cultivation of coca in the fields of South America to the sale of cocaine on the streets of the United States. The authors analyze the economic and political impact of the drug business on the Andean nations, including such problems as violence and the undermining of legitimate business. Through the ground-breaking work of Clawson and Lee, The Andean Cocaine Industry illuminates one of the most pervasive problems facing the world today.

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject Geography / Earth Science - Economic Geography, grade: 1,2 (A+), RWTH Aachen University (Geography Institute), 15 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Andean farmers have good financial reasons for continuing to grow coca, and it is unlikely that theeconomic equation can be substantially altered. Cocaine is as cheap and plentiful as ever on U.S.streets, the biggest market for cocaine; the State Department estimates that 1999 coca productionincreased. The current U.S. retail cocaine market is somewhere between $30 billion and $150 billion. Efforts at interdiction and crop substitution have failed, the former because the amounts of cocaineimported are so large that seizures have little overall impact, the latter both because alternative cropsare intrinsically less lucrative and because there is no infrastructure to bring such crops to market. TheU.S. General Accounting Office report to Congress argued that crop substitution was unlikely tosucceed, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has calculated the cost of raw coca as makingup less than 1 percent of the retail cost of refined cocaine in the U.S. The latter statistic means thattraffickers could easily afford to increase what they pay for raw coca if a shortage occurred, therebystimulating production. In order to explain why the andean Countries prefer to grow coca, it is important to understand that thecoca plant is a part of the culture, as history shows and there is a difference between the existence ofcoca and cocaine. The usage and the production of the coca plant changed in the last hundred years,and the monocultural development carry tremendous illegal capacities. But on the other hand, it isoriginally a cultural heritage. To explain this issue one must know where it is cultivated, why and whatproblems it causes for the Andean Countries, and not only for these countries, but on a globalscale.

It is commonly known that the Andean nations of Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia are the international centers of cocaine production. But until now, there has been no comprehensive view of this billion dollar industry. Using never-before unearthed information culled from their extensive field research, Patrick Clawson and Rensselaer Lee reveal the configuration of the drug industry, from the original cultivation of coca in the fields of South America to the sale of cocaine on the streets of the United States. The authors analyze the economic and political impact of the drug business on the Andean nations, including such problems as violence and the undermining of legitimate business. Through the ground-breaking work of Clawson and Lee, The Andean Cocaine Industry illuminates one of the most pervasive problems facing the world today.

In the 1960s, the governments of Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia launched agricultural settlement programs in each country’s vast Amazonian frontier lowlands. Two decades later, these exact same zones had transformed into the centers of the illicit cocaine boom of the Americas. Drawing on concepts from both history and anthropology, The Origins of Cocaine explores how three countries with divergent different mid-century political trajectories ended up with parallel outcomes in illicit frontier economies and cocalero cultures. Bringing together transnational, national, and local analyses, the volume provides an in-depth examination of the deep origins of drug economics in the Americas. As the first substantial study on the shift from agrarian colonization to narcotization, The Origins of Cocaine will appeal to scholars and postgraduate students of Latin American history, anthropology, globalization, development and environmental studies.

Illuminating a hidden and fascinating chapter in the history of globalization, Paul Gootenberg chronicles the rise of one of the most spectacular and now illegal Latin American exports: cocaine. Gootenberg traces cocaine's history from its origins as a medical commodity in the nineteenth century to its repression during the early twentieth century and its dramatic reemergence as an illicit good after World War II. Connecting the story of the drug's transformations is a host of people, products, and processes: Sigmund Freud, Coca-Cola, and Pablo Escobar all make appearances, exemplifying the global influences that have shaped the history of cocaine. But Gootenberg decenters the familiar story to uncover the roles played by hitherto obscure but vital Andean actors as well--for example, the Peruvian pharmacist who developed the techniques for refining cocaine on an industrial scale and the creators of the original drug-smuggling networks that decades later would be taken over by Colombian traffickers. Andean Cocaine proves indispensable to understanding one of the most vexing social dilemmas of the late twentieth-century Americas: the American cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and, in its wake, the seemingly endless U.S. drug war in the Andes.

British journalist Hargreaves examines the cocaine industry in Bolivia, which has tripled since the US instigated drug-war against Colombians. She interviews dealers, growers, addicts, and officials of both the Bolivian and US government, and concludes that the trade must be stopped at the demand end, not the supply end. Paper edition (unseen), $16.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR