Paul Gootenberg

The Social Origins of Protectionism and Free Trade in Nineteenth-Century Lima

Nineteenth-century Peru is customarily taken as a hyperbolic example of how the triumph of economic liberalism in Latin America hindered prospects for sustained economic development. While historians now agree that guano-age liberalism triggered adverse economic and social consequences, the roots of Peruvian free trade policy remain shrouded in mystery. Most recently, dependency writers elevated free trade into a major component of their posited transition to ‘neocolonialism’ after Independence. However, this new periodization is not convincing for it fails to explain how liberal policies actually took hold, symptomatic of the insufficient attention given to internal dynamics of change.

The 'Pre-Colombian' Era of Drug Trafficking in the Americas: Cocaine, 1945-1965

Before anyone heard of Colombian narcotraficantes, a new class of international cocaine traffickers was born between 1947 and 1964, led by little-known Peruvians, Bolivians, Chileans, Cubans, Mexicans, Brazilians, and Argentines. These men—and often daring young women—anxiously pursued by U.S. drug agents, pioneered the business of illicit cocaine, a drug whose small-scale production in the Andes remained legal and above board until the late 1940s. Before 1945, cocaine barely existed as an illicit drug; by 1950, a handful of couriers were smuggling it by the ounce from Peru; by the mid-1960s this hemispheric flow topped hundreds of kilos yearly, linking thousands of coca farmers across the eastern Andes to crude labs, organized trafficking rings, and a bustling retailer diaspora in consuming hot-spots like New York and Miami. The Colombians of the 1970s, the Pablo Escobars who leveraged this network into one of hundreds of tons, worth untold billions, are today notorious. Yet historians have yet to uncover their modest predecessors or the actual start of Colombias role: cocaines “pre-Colombian” origins.

Between Coca and Cocaine: A Century or More of U.S.-Peruvian Drug Paradoxes, 1860-1980

hospitality and largesse during writing; Julio Cotler (Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, Lima) for his commentary; Gil Joseph and two anonymous HAHR readers; and colleagues and helpers in the larger research project behind this essay. And our new son, Danyal Natan Sainz-Gootenberg (b. 1/2000), for allowing some needed sleep to put this all together. 1. And largely unknown: this essay is part of a larger archival project to unveil this hidden history. For the United States itself, we now have the superb study by Joseph F. Spillane, Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States, 1884–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1999); for global views, see Paul Gootenberg, ed., Cocaine: Global Histories (London: Routledge, 1999); as background, Steven B. Karch, M.D., A Brief History of Cocaine (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 1998). A strong source on transnational issues is William Walker III’s Drug Control in the Americas (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1981).

Toward a New Drug History of Latin America: A Research Frontier at the Center of Debates

This introduction brings the issue of Latin American drug trades and cultures into conversation with the region’s historiography. Illicit drugs are now notoriously associated with Latin America and represent untold billions in exports, generating over the last three decades tremendous violence, instability, and public controversy. Yet historians are just starting to seriously research the topic. Psychoactive drugs, broadly conceived, have been central in Latin American history from pre-Columbian times to the present; this piece offers a long-term periodization of drugs to uncover and analyze their complex and often-surprising roles. Rather than fetishize drugs, the essay maintains that they can be productively woven into the largest contexts and problems of Latin American history. After analyzing three methodological concerns of drug history—issues of transnationality and scale, the place of drugs in commodity studies, and the social constructivist approach to drug meanings and effects—the special issue editors introduce three exemplary new essays on the history of drugs in Latin America. ‘‘D rugs,’’ at least the criminalized, menacing kind, are everywhere in twentyfirst-century dispatches about Latin America. The Andean region, despite decades of US-sponsored drug war, still exports some 600 metric tons of illicit cocaine a year. The yearly consumption value alone of drugs in the Western Hemisphere is guesstimated at around 150 billion dollars. Trafficker violence that not long ago blighted Colombia’s cities has spread to Mexico, where tens of thousands have horrifically perished in the country’s worst social meltdown since the Cristero revolt of the 1920s. Mexico remains a bustling cross-border supplier of illegal cannabis, heroin, methamphetamine, and cocaine to desirous consumers in the United States, though much of that trade, and its ‘‘cartels,’’ is shifting perilously to smaller Central American nations, notably Honduras and Guatemala. Governments and police already notorious for old-style graft are caught in a torrent of drug-induced corruption, including billions in drug profits laundered through Caribbean banks. And Latin America is taking drugs too: Brazil, for example, is now the world’s second-biggest consumer of Andean cocaine after the United States, fueling fierce gang warfare in the favelas, while the Argentine and Chilean middle classes smoke marijuana at rates similar to those for disaffected European youth. Drug addiction, beyond problems with Hispanic American Historical Review 95:1 doi 10.1215/00182168-2836796 2015 by Duke University Press Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/hahr/article-pdf/95/1/1/420552/1.pdf by guest on 30 October 2019 alcohol, is now recognized as a public health hazard across the region. Meanwhile, the prefix ‘‘narco’’ is attached to myriad cultural and political actors and has gained its own commercial and popular currency. And, for the first time, a diverse group of Latin American political elites are voicing fresh opinions about solving hemispheric drug problems, sometimes against the strict international prohibitionist system long advocated by Washington. Who has not heard of Bolivian president Evo Morales’s passionate defense of the indigenous coca leaf, the mounting calls from Colombian officials to debate new strategies in the drug war, or Uruguay’s recent experiment as the hemisphere’s first pot-legal nation?1 These issues are certainly topical, but we argue that drugs, broadly conceived, have long pervaded the social, economic, and cultural history of the Americas. In this special issue ofHAHR, we, two archival historians who study that drug past, want to introduce a new drug history for the Americas, though admittedly, the old kind barely got a start.2 We argue here that the fetishization of drugs by prohibitionists and enthusiasts alike has been no accident. Whether due to the resemblance between drug-induced and spiritually inspired ecstasy, or the way that drugs can undermine the razón on which Western civilization has supposedly hinged, or their life-and-death medicinal implications, these are no ordinary goods. Thus drugs also possess, we believe, extraordinary potential for expanding historical study. At the same time, drugs have been closely tied to fundamental themes and developments throughout Latin American history. Here we will introduce these ideas in three parts. First, we offer a long-term periodization of drugs in Latin America that frames the big picture and problematizes present distinctions between licit and illicit drugs. Second, we propose a brief set of explicit suggestions on the methodological possibilities of drug history. Third, we present three new essays, focused specifically on the tumultuous long 1960s in Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico, that exemplify how drugs can open new frontiers at the center of our field.

Anti-Drug Policies in Colombia: Successes, Failures, and Wrong Turns eds. by Alejandro Gaviria and Daniel Mejía (review)

The authors find that genomic research fixes the concept of race but at the same time unfixes it. It fixes race through “[genetic] precision and triangulation,” absent in the early works of historians and anthropologists like Justo Sierra, Robert Redfield, or Stanley Stein (214–215). It unfixes race because, while genetic research may pinpoint ancestral paths and proportions, it also uncovers “different combinations” that “could be possible, and that the number of [these ethnic] combinations is practically unlimited” (223). At this point, Wade even leans on Michel Foucault, who believed that “classic 19th-century social formations . . . walked between a conception of finitude (the realm of humans) and infinity (the transcendent realm of God)” (222). Wade views these newly discovered permutations as the “re-figuration of race . . . through the unlimited finity generated by genomics [which] creates a sense of movement and modulation” (224).

The Political Economy of the Drug Industry: Latin America and the International System (review)

When Adriaan C. Van Oss died suddenly in 1984 at age 37, he left behind an impressive body of work. This volume, sponsored by the Center for Latin American Research and Documentation in Amsterdam (CEDLA), brings together what the editorial board considered to be the more “timeless” of his articles. Three of them appeared in journals; six others are published here for the first time. Topics include quantitative comparisons of bishoprics in colonial South America; the relationship between ecclesiastical building activity, demographic patterns, and economic diversification in New Spain; the demography and economy of colonial Venezuela; regional patterns of change in colonial Central America; and the effects of the Cristero war of the late 1920s in Hidalgo. Obviously this was a wide-ranging scholar with voracious curiosity and great energy.

Imagining Development: Economic Ideas in Peru's "Fictitious Prosperity" of Guano, 1840-1880.

Retelling the saga of Perus nineteenth-century age of guano, Paul Gootenberg provides the first book in English to explore the historical genealogy of Latin Americas postcolonial economic thought. He scrutinizes the mentalities, ideas, and visions that led the country down an ill-fated path of export liberalism. The surprising diversity, vitality, and subtlety of Peruvian economic thinking challenges images of Latin American liberalism as a borrowed, impoverished, and narrow conception of material progress. By closely weaving together intellectual and social history and a multitude of forgotten texts, as well as trends in elite and popular and European and national cultures, Gootenberg offers a newly integrated approach to the long-neglected field of Latin American economic ideas.