Paul Gootenberg

Historian of Latin America and of commodities whose Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug (2008) and edited volume The Origins of Cocaine reconstruct the origin of the Andean illicit cocaine economy in a series of Cold War-era peasant colonization projects in Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia during the 1950s–70s. His central finding is that illegal drug trades do not emerge in historical isolation from state-building and development projects, but from their failures: abandoned, disillusioned colonists took up coca livelihoods after the withdrawal of state support.

Gootenberg’s comparative frame is central to reading Mexican narco-history against the Andean case and Colombia’s marijuana boom, all of which display the same structural logic: uneven state intervention in peripheral regions producing the conditions for illicit crop booms.