Description
From Pablo Escobar’s violent campaign against the Colombian government to the Sinaloa Cartel’s armed takeover of the Mexican city of Culiacán in 2019, extremes of the ‘war on drugs’ in Latin America dominate popular and policy discourses. The historic development of the drug trade in Bolivia sits in stark contrast to such cases. Despite the exponential growth of its cocaine economy in the 1980s, Bolivia largely avoided high-levels of drug-related violence. State-narco networks – relations of patronage between state actors and Bolivia’s drug trafficking clans – played an important role in suppressing violent competition in the cocaine trade. The intensification of US drug war policies in the Andes, though, threatened to upset this balance and spark drug-related violence. Drawing on archival sources and 30 oral history interviews of high-level Bolivian and US political actors, this paper shows how Bolivian state actors instead prioritised stability and resisted drug war policies, creating friction with their US counterparts. It problematises the state-building premises of the US ‘war on drugs’, arguing that such policies fundamentally misunderstand the nature and function of statehood in post-colonial contexts, such as Bolivia. This misunderstanding underpins the destabilising effects of drug war policies, the disruption of criminal markets and the extremes of drug-violence seen across Latin America.
