The Origins of Cocaine: Colonization and Failed Development in the Amazon Andes

Gootenberg’s edited volume (with Liliana M. Dávalos) tracing the origins of the illicit cocaine economy to a series of Cold War-era peasant colonization projects in the western Amazon of Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia during the 1950s–70s. Abandoned and disillusioned colonists, after the withdrawal of state support and development funding, took up coca livelihoods; the book’s central finding is that illegal drug trades do not appear in historical isolation from state-building and development projects but from their failures. Reads as the Andean companion to Britto on Colombia and Smith/Morris on Mexico.