US PRESIDENT Richard Nixon formally declared a war on drugs in 1971, but the current global architecture of prohibition dates back to 1961 with the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs.
Since that attempt to ban the drug trade it has ballooned, spreading violence and corruption across large parts of the globe. In Latin America the war on drugs is specifically focused on combating the global cocaine trade. Coca, the drug’s main ingredient, is a traditional plant grown in the Andes and Colombia, Peru and Bolivia account for nearly all coca – and cocaine – production.
Despite billions spent on combating them the region’s drug traffickers have for decades outwitted the authorities, keeping consumers in North America and Europe supplied at a price and purity that remains remarkably consistent despite law enforcement officials around the world frequently heralding the dismantling of trafficking networks.
In a long established pattern, as soon as authorities close down one drug route traffickers open another. After US authorities largely shut down smuggling routes over the Caribbean in the 1980s traffickers switched to Mexico. Now the main entry point for cocaine into the US, the country is locked into a spiral of violence as powerful drug cartels battle each other for control of a multibillion dollar trade.
The Mexican government’s efforts to combat its cocaine problem are behind the spread of the trade into neighbouring Central America, bringing fresh violence to a region still recovering from the brutal civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s. The traffickers’ ingenuity in meeting European demand has seen Venezuela and West African states emerge as major transhipment points in recent years.
The lure of huge profits has also fuelled regional corruption. An Argentine air force commodore was recently dismissed after a medical plane that left his base landed in Spain with almost a tonne of cocaine on board.
