How drug trafficking has kept its grip on Latin America

For decades, Latin America has remained a hub of the illicit drug market and a target of international efforts to stamp out the production of cocaine and marijuana. Many researchers attribute the rise of drug trafficking in Latin America to the region's instability and its complex political and social landscape. However, many places around the world have experienced a similar degree of fragmentation, without grappling with the emergence of powerful groups that have managed to infiltrate the government and military while becoming epicenters of drug production.

Although several attempts have been made to eliminate it, the illicit drug market has strengthened and drug production continues to increase. For example, coca leaf production has reached countries like Guatemala and Honduras, whereas previously only Colombia, Peru and Ecuador produced them. Understanding how this black market has remained a constant in Latin America in an ever-changing world could be the key to understanding how to dismantle it.

Knowledge and soil: the origins of the illicit drug market

Marijuana is the most widely used illicit drug in the world, closely followed by cocaine. Although both are currently produced in the region, cocaine is endemic to South America. Unlike marijuana, whose production spread to most continents from Asia centuries ago, coca (the plant source processed to produce cocaine) has been cultivated by indigenous Andean communities for over 5,000 years, thus protecting it from its eradication on their ancestral lands. These leaves are important to indigenous communities because of their medicinal properties and ritual use.

In the 19th century, when European and American pharmacists began researching new medicines, they traveled to the forests of South America where they discovered that indigenous communities used coca leaf to treat pain and stimulate the 'energy. Nicolás Fajardo, a researcher at the University of Potsdam, has studied how crossing borders between Europe and the Americas transformed an almost natural product into one of the most popular medicines in the world. He explains that initially European scientists began extracting cocaine from the leaf for medicinal purposes. However, “cocaine ceased to be a medicine in the 1940s and became a recreational drug like alcohol or tobacco, with much more deadly consequences.”

Although scientists knew how to extract the cocaine alkaloid from the leaf, indigenous communities in the Andean countries were the main group growing the plant. As the 20th century progressed, farmers in the region learned to cultivate the coca leaf and sell it to illegal groups who would later synthesize the extract and produce the famous white powder. Since then, cocaine production has continued to increase. For example, Peru produces 10 times more cocaine than indigenous communities need for their medicines and rituals; the rest is headed to the illegal market to be transformed into cocaine. Colombia reached its highest number of coca plantations with 230,000 hectares at the end of 2022. Despite the government's eradication efforts, the price paid by drug traffickers for this premium product and the lower demand for fertilizer in make a more attractive and very profitable crop. Farmers.

Additionally, the geographic advantages of the Andean and Amazonian regions have provided fertile soil and sanctuary for these illegal crops and the laboratories where cocaine is extracted and the drug produced.

When did drug trafficking explode in Latin America?

When cocaine was first introduced to the international market, it was greeted with great praise by the highest figures of the day. Sigmund Freud and John Pemberton, creators of the Coca-Cola recipe, helped cocaine become a widely recognized drug, apparently offering rapid energy and improved concentration. It wasn't until the 1920s that cocaine began to be considered dangerous and was banned by the U.S. government. Although cocaine has been a black market commodity since its ban, the drug's distribution only reached its peak in the 1970s, when young Colombians from poor neighborhoods began transporting it across the Caribbean, exploiting Colombia's fertile soil and its proximity to the United States. States.

At first, the fight for control of the American market was particularly bloody. It was dubbed “Miami's Drug War” because 50% of the city's homicides were drug-related; these homicides brought down the morgue system in the late 1970s. The kidnapping of Jorge Luis Ochoa's sister in 1981 marked a turning point in the way Colombia's most important narcos interacted. At a meeting, Ochoa and other drug traffickers decided to create the paramilitary group MAS (Death to Kidnappers) to protect themselves and create a united front. Thanks to the alliance, the war between drug traffickers diminished to some extent and the fighting in Miami diminished. However, the creation of MAS also helped to skyrocket cocaine production. From this meeting also emerged the first drug cartel, the Medellin Cartel, paving the way for the complex drug trafficking structures we see today. The consolidation of the “business” helped traffickers gain more ground, as they were not afraid to fight among themselves but rather against other groups that controlled important drug transport routes.

The cartels were able to put more pressure on the Colombian government to meet their demands through coordinated violent attacks such as bombings and assassinations. The death of Pablo Escobar in 1993 and the crackdown on cartels by the Colombian and US governments in the late 1990s and early 2000s erased the powerful monopoly that Colombian cartels held on trade over three decades previous ones. This opened the drug market to new players. In the early 2000s, most distribution networks shifted north and moved from the Caribbean to the U.S.-Mexico border, accelerating the formation of the cartels that now traffic in Mexico. At least 170,000 people died between 2006 and 2016 because of the war between the Mexican government and the cartels. While drug traffickers in Colombia primarily represented a force against the government, recently drug traffickers in Mexico have infiltrated most hierarchies within the police and federal government, gaining more power with less opposition.

Politics and poverty: the stabilizers of the world of drug trafficking

Latin America has long been a deeply unequal region; in 1985, 45.6 percent of Colombians and about 25 percent of Mexicans lived below the poverty line. Income disparities have pushed people into the lucrative illegal drug market to make “easy money” and escape a life of want. For example, “El Chapo”, former head of Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel, said in an interview that he got into drug trafficking because there were no job opportunities in his area. region. According to the Spanish newspaper El PaísDrug traffickers are Mexico's fifth-largest employer, with around 165,000 people involved.

These high poverty levels reflect the instability of Latin American states facing recurring civil wars and military coups. Rural areas where most cocaine is produced feel abandoned by the central government due to geographic isolation and the concentration of political elites in urban areas. The lack of law enforcement in these rural areas gives illegal groups more room to maneuver. In recent years, Central America has become a key link in the drug distribution chain due to its high levels of corruption and impunity. The instability of these failed Latin American states creates an ideal environment for the development of drug trafficking groups.

After 50 years of drug trafficking, why is the fight against violence still far from over?

Several efforts have been made to eradicate drug trafficking in Latin America, primarily sponsored by the U.S. government. Plan Colombia is one of the offensive plans that the US government has repeatedly called a success. Through the Colombian military, the United States spent $10 billion on training, arming, and coca eradication strategies to stabilize the country and eliminate the power of narco traffickers. Although Plan Colombia reduced the power of illegal groups and brought stability during the 2000s and 2010s, plantations are again spreading rapidly and the elimination of the pharmaceutical industry through national and international efforts seems far away. In Peru, since 1991, the government has also received support from the US government to combat drug trafficking based on coca plantations and established routes to Colombia to distribute cocaine.

The efforts of Latin American armies, however, have not produced long-term results. Drug trafficking operates as a parallel economy to countries' legal exports, making it well-entrenched in local economies and therefore more difficult to eliminate. Although political instability and poverty are not unique to Latin America, the combination of these factors, along with soil fertility and indigenous knowledge for cultivating the coca leaf, have created the ideal conditions for a market of flourishing drug trafficking which does not seem to be disappearing any time soon.