Drugs And Democracy 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.

A comprehensive review of U.S. drug-control policies toward Latin America and the Caribbean, assessing their impact on democracy and human rights in the region.

Taking an ethnographic approach to understanding urban violence, Enrique Desmond Arias examines the ongoing problems of crime and police corruption that have led to widespread misery and human rights violations in many of Latin America's new democracies. Employing participant observation and interview research in three favelas (shantytowns) in Rio de Janeiro over a nine-year period, Arias closely considers the social interactions and criminal networks that are at the heart of the challenges to democratic governance in urban Brazil. Much of the violence is the result of highly organized, politically connected drug dealers feeding off of the global cocaine market. Rising crime prompts repressive police tactics, and corruption runs deep in state structures. The rich move to walled communities, and the poor are caught between the criminals and often corrupt officials. Arias argues that public policy change is not enough to stop the vicious cycle of crime and corruption. The challenge, he suggests, is to build new social networks committed to controlling violence locally. Arias also offers comparative insights that apply this analysis to other cities in Brazil and throughout Latin America.

What becomes clear throughout is that there is a paradox at the heart of Latin America's democracies. Despite decades of struggle to replace authoritarian dictatorships with electoral democracies, solid economic growth (leading up to the global credit crisis), and increased efforts by the state to extend the benefits of peace and prosperity to the poor, democracy - as a political system - is experiencing declining support, and support for authoritarianism is on the rise.

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.

When widespread state-criminal collusion persists in transitions from autocracy to democracy, electoral competition becomes a catalyst of large-scale criminal violence.

This work is an introduction to who's who and what is really happening in Columbia. In one volume, it brings together the best material published on the war, the economy, social impact and prospects of peace in Columbia.

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.