Lina Britto

Historian whose Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia’s First Drug Paradise (University of California Press, 2020) does for Colombia’s Caribbean coast what Benjamin Smith and Nathaniel Morris have done for the Mexican Golden Triangle. Britto argues that the marijuana bonanza of the 1970s was the product of unfulfilled promises of agrarian modernization, the socio-economic exclusion of popular sectors, older smuggling traditions, and shifts in international demand — and that its violent fall was driven by the “narcotization” of US–Colombia relations that turned Colombia into a laboratory of the War on Drugs.

Her work is increasingly read in tandem with the Mexican narco-historians because it confirms the same structural logic across cases: illicit crop booms arise not where states are absent but where state interventions are uneven, providing modern infrastructure while abandoning rural communities to compete at radical economic disadvantage.