Milenio Semanal has an interview with the the American author Paul Gootenberg, who explains that half a century ago, the nation that really fired up the international cocaine trade wasn't Bolivia, Peru, or even Colombia, but Chile, of all places. A group of families of Turkish descent controlled the cultivation and transport of the powder from Chile's border region with Bolivia, which I'd thought was mostly desert, but evidently not.
Gootenberg, whose book Andean Cocaine was the subject of the interview, also noted that the cocaine trade has always been in the hands of Latin Americans. This has always stumped me. Not being a botanist or cultivator of drugs, I speak with no expertise, but I can't imagine the Andes is the only mountain range conducive to growing coca in the world. Why, then, has an enterprising criminal in Bhutan or Afghanistan or Nepal never thought to open another center of production for cocaine? I'm not hoping they do, mind you, it's just that it seems to confound logic.
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Even closer to home: why isn't there significant cultivation in Ecuador?
I think it has quite a lot to do with areas of traditional-use cultivation. After all, there's a reason why Bolivia and Peru were the big dogs at first: this is where they've grown coca for hundreds of years. Of course, all the money's in distribution, and the Colombians were the ones who managed to control the networks, which meant that when the cultivation crackdown started and the "balloon effect" first appeared, it made sense for Colombia to be the main new entrant into cultivation (the country's ungovernability helped immensely). The enormous - and ongoing - success of cultivation in Colombia, along with continued cultivation in Peru and Bolivia, has been more or less sufficient to meet demand, which is the main reason why it hasn't spread even to Ecuador, which is a geographically logical candidate but did not have a history of indigenous cultivation.
As for the rest of the world, the west has really dominated cocaine use, with the Euros well behind. That seems to be changing a bit, though, with usage rising quickly in Europe and even more quickly in LatAm - ahem, Mexico Brazil Argentina, cough. This is why we've seen much more attention paid to distribution through the Southern Cone and West Africa in recent years. And there are now rumors that coca is being grown in new areas, including Venezuela's Orinoco Delta (very sketchy rumors) and in Guinea-Bissau, the most frequently mentioned emerging African narco-state.
The other way to look at this is, why have new drug crops - specifically opium poppies - been introduced into the Americas (in Colombia and Mexico) but not coca into other places? When you think of the industry as a whole, it's fairly clear: the Latino drug gangs, who have already mastered commodifying drugs, have a massive incentive to use their geographic comparative advantage to undercut Asian heroin suppliers in the North American market (remember: US heroin use blew up following Vietnam...right as the cocaine industry started developing). On the other hand, the incentives for development of a coca-plant-to-nasal-passage production chain in other continents has been comparatively small. But as I said, this may be changing now.
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