Official Colombian figures estimate that the total hectares of eradication exceed U. The new commodity was highly desired, not by German pharmaceutical firms, but by Chilean and Cuban gangsters. Reviews Editorial reviews Publisher Synopsis This excellent book adds a definitive archive-based history of cocaine.
Gootenberg has written a history that will make history. As Paul Gootenberg shows in his rich, rewarding history of the Peruvian, and broader Andean, cocaine industry, the roots of this conflict go back much further.
Highly recommended. Meanwhile, the creation of alternative anesthetics, like eucaine and procaine, allowed medical professionals to prescribe safer substitutes for their patients.
Cuba emerged as an important transshipment point and processing center during this period.
As Gootenberg points out, the rise of repressive military regimes in Argentina and Brazil during the s had the ancillary effect of curtailing cocaine trafficking in both countries, providing opportunities for illicit entrepreneurs elsewhere, including Chile, which emerged as a major cocaine smuggling corridor during the s and early s.
With a keen eye for documenting the socio-economic, political, and cultural structures triggering the reformulation of cocaine into an illicit commodity.
If the past is prologue, this past, strikingly revealed by Gootenberg, is essential to comprehending the limitations, even futility, of the never-ending war on drugs.
Such propaganda was music to the ears of Washington officials, eager as they were to prevent likeminded revolutions in neighboring countries, and willing to back anti-Communist military regimes that deposed democratic governments and violently suppressed civilian discontent.
Indispensable reading for graduate seminars on economic, cultural, and social history, and shall appeal not only to experts on Latin America but also to world historians and those interested in comparative history. Over the last 30 years, the central front in the U.