The Drug War: Going After Supply—A commentary

1988 ◽  
Vol 30 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 77-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth E. Sharpe

The US Policymakers Working on the 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Act have clearly understood that going after the suppliers of narcotics is only part of the war on drugs; until US domestic demand is diminished, it will be difficult to bring this lucrative and illicit multinational business under control. There is, however, general agreement that something must be done about supply and that interdiction of drug shipments to the United States is only one means. The drug supply war's major focus is the growing, production, and shipment of narcotics within the Third World countries who are the suppliers, particularly in Latin America (Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia head the list).Although there have been occasional attempts to “Americanize” anti-drug operations in Latin America (with the US government assuming drug enforcement functions as it did in Bolivia with Operation Blast Furnace in 1986), the major US option is to support the build-up of the Latin American governments' own drug-fighting capabilities by supplying funds, training, and equipment.

Author(s):  
T. Kulinich

The present article reviews the current set of interests of the United States of America in respect of Latin American countries. The author believes that the key groups of interests pursued by the US in Latin America are as follows: political and security interests, economic interests, and combined interests, the most important of the latter being the interests relating to combating drug trafficking. The author believes that the economic interest, albeit being a secondary one in terms of formal hierarchy of interests, is in fact one of the core US interests in the region at present. The US is interested to preserve its influence upon the Latin American market, and further engage the Latin American workforce and industrial capacities to the benefit of the US economy. The US pursues its interests in Latin America, inter alia, through various integration projects, including NAFTA, CAFTA-DR, FTAA, and a range of free trade areas. The article also addresses the interest of the US in the field of prevention of drug trafficking, which constitutes an important area of cooperation between the US and the Latin American countries concerned. The author argues that, despite the fact that the current outcomes of the ongoing war on drugs may be perceived as controversial, the issue in question serves as a strong factor contributing to the growth of the US influence over, and its presence within, the region. The article also reviews key methods used by the US to further its interests in Latin America, including the classical methods and those relating to soft power.


Author(s):  
Amy C. Offner

In the years after 1945, a flood of U.S. advisors swept into Latin America with dreams of building a new economic order and lifting the Third World out of poverty. These businessmen, economists, community workers, and architects went south with the gospel of the New Deal on their lips, but Latin American realities soon revealed unexpected possibilities within the New Deal itself. In Colombia, Latin Americans and U.S. advisors ended up decentralizing the state, privatizing public functions, and launching austere social welfare programs. By the 1960s, they had remade the country's housing projects, river valleys, and universities. They had also generated new lessons for the United States itself. When the Johnson administration launched the War on Poverty, U.S. social movements, business associations, and government agencies all promised to repatriate the lessons of development, and they did so by multiplying the uses of austerity and for-profit contracting within their own welfare state. A decade later, ascendant right-wing movements seeking to dismantle the midcentury state did not need to reach for entirely new ideas: they redeployed policies already at hand. This book brings readers to Colombia and back, showing the entanglement of American societies and the contradictory promises of midcentury statebuilding. The untold story of how the road from the New Deal to the Great Society ran through Latin America, the book also offers a surprising new account of the origins of neoliberalism.


2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-325
Author(s):  
Guy Laron

In the last decade, influenced by current economic trends, Cold War historians have made an effort to de-center the story of the Cold War. They have shifted their gaze from the center of the conflict—the face-offs in Europe between the Soviet Union and the United States—and cast an observing eye on the Third World. Unlike many Middle East historians who seek to understand the Middle East in terms of its unique cultures, languages, and religions, Cold War historians treat that area as part of a revolutionary arc that stretched from the jungles of Latin America to the jungles of Vietnam. Rather than emphasizing the region's singularity, they focus on the themes that united guerilla fighters in the West Bank and the Makong Delta as well as leaders from Havana to Damascus: anticolonial and anti-imperial struggles, the yearning for self-definition, and the fight against what Third World revolutionaries perceived as economic exploitation. The sudden interest in what was considered, until recently, the periphery of the Cold War has undoubtedly been fueled by the zeitgeist of a new century in which the so-called peripheral regions are set to become more dominant economically. Southeast and Southwest Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East have a surplus of young skilled workers who are increasingly in demand by the global economy as the growth of world population slows and more prosperous countries in West Europe and North America are graying fast. The Third World consists today of the very regions where most of the economic growth in coming decades will take place. Dependency theory has gone topsy-turvy: leading economists now look with hope at countries such as China, India, Turkey, and Egypt and expect them to become the new engines of global growth. It is not surprising, then, that historians are now taking a stronger interest in the tangled history of the Cold War in the Third World and discovering the agency that these countries always had.


Author(s):  
Selfa A. Chew

The lives of Latin American Japanese were disrupted during World War II, when their civil and human rights were suspended. National security and continental defense were the main reasons given by the American countries consenting to their uprooting. More than 2,000 ethnic Japanese from Peru, Panama, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, and Nicaragua were transferred as “illegal aliens” to internment camps in the United States. Initially, US and Latin American agencies arrested and deported male ethnic Japanese, regardless of their citizenship status. During the second stage, women and children joined their relatives in the United States. Most forced migration originated in Peru. Brazil and Mexico established similar displacement programs, ordering the population of Japanese descent to leave the coastal zones, and in the case of Mexico the border areas. In both countries, ethnic Japanese were under strict monitoring and lost property, employment, and family and friend relationships, losses that affected their health and the opportunity to support themselves in many cases. Latin American Japanese in the United States remained in camps operated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the army for the duration of the war and were among the last internees leaving the detention facilities, in 1946. At the conclusion of World War II, the Latin American countries that had agreed to the expulsion of ethnic Japanese limited greatly their return. Some 800 internees were deported to Japan from the United States by the closure of the camps. Those who remained in North America were allowed to leave the camps to work in a fresh produce farm in Seabrook, New Jersey, without residency or citizenship rights. In 1952, immigration restrictions for former Latin American internees were lifted. Latin American governments have not apologized for the uprooting of the ethnic Japanese, while the US government has recognized it as a mistake. In 1988, the United States offered a symbolic compensation to all surviving victims of the internment camps in the amount of $20,000. In contrast, in 1991, Latin American Japanese survivors were granted only $5,000.


1995 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth McVey

Forty-odd years ago, when I became involved in the study of Southeast Asia, it appeared to be a new region, struggling to assert itself in the political world from the lingering ties of colonialism and in the academic world from those who would absorb it in the empires of Further India or the Far East. The centre of this new field of study was indisputably the United States, where in the 1950s and early 1960s Southeast Asia programmes were set up as part of the great expansion of regional studies funded by the US government and foundations. Their guiding assumption was that the interests of America and what would become known as the Third World were compatible and that sympathetic knowledge would aid in bringing about progress towards modernity as envisioned in the American dream.


1997 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-83
Author(s):  
Shirley Christian

There has always been a certain attitude in Washington having to do with Latin America. It is that Latin America is not quite a grown-up place and, therefore, is worthy of intense US interest only when the region, or part of it, falls into a crisis that crosses paths with one of the US hot-button issues of the moment: drugs, immigration, human rights, communism (until recently) and, farther back, fascism. In other words, Latin America has been worthy of attention only when the United States decided to “do good” (e.g., human rights crusades), incorporate the region into efforts at solving US domestic problems (e.g., drugs), or needed firm support from the region in some international effort (e.g., the Cold War and World War II).


1989 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
WILLIAM H. MEYER

This article seeks to test certain hypotheses drawn from structural communications theory, hypotheses that tend to support the call for a New World Information Order (NWIO). Structural theorists such as Johan Galtung and NWIO advocates from the Third World have charged that developing nations are dependent upon the West for international news. News dependency, in turn, is said to lead to the adoption of Western news values and subsequent cultural imperialism in the South. Finally, news dependency is said to be neocolonial in the sense that information flows through “vertical” channels (from North to South) and within distinct spheres of communication hegemony. These claims are tested with a news flow study drawn from African and Latin American dailies. Results of the empirical tests show that the Third World is dependent on Western agencies for the bulk of its international news, and that Third World newspapers reflect the news values of Western prestige dailies. Nonaligned newswires, however, are shown to be more resistant to journalistic westernization, as their coverage is markedly different from that of the Western wire services. Finally, news flow patterns do exhibit a pronounced neoimperial character. Agencies from the United States, Great Britain, and France each hold sway over their own regional domains within the Third World.


2016 ◽  
Vol I (I) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Amina Ghazanfar Butt ◽  
Bahramand Shah

The United States of America serves as a unique site for the literary world of contesting cultures due to the immigrant writers whose spirit of quest pulled them to this terra firma, away from their homelands. These exiled writers reside in the US but their native lands remain the thematic concern of their works. This study critically explores and investigates fictional accounts of two contemporary diaspora authors, i.e. Isabel Allende and Bapsi Sidwa. These female authors from the third world countries present subversive female characters both in the diasporic setting of the United States and in their native locations. Sidwa and Allende create characters who resist the native patriarchal structures of the third world homelands and establish their individual identities in the first world metropolitan.


2020 ◽  
pp. 307-314
Author(s):  
Russell Crandall

This chapter talks about how U.S. anti-drug enforcement achieved a fully global reach in the post-9/11 “Age of Terror.” It refers to opaque anti-drug missions that first piloted in Latin America and then exported to Thailand, Canada, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, at times without the knowledge or cooperation of the governments concerned. It also provides an overview of a landmark piece of legislation passed by the Congress in 2006 that expanded the scope of American officials' presumptive license abroad, giving U.S. counter-narcotics agents legal standing to pursue narcotics and terrorism crimes committed anywhere in the world. The chapter cites the explosion of cocaine consumption in Europe over the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century as the key motivation for the new legislation in the global war on drugs. It mentions three Malian nationals who had been arrested in their home country by U.S. federal agents and extradited to the United States under the 2006 rule.


1987 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 280-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane S. Jaquette ◽  
Abraham F. Lowenthal

NO country in Latin America, and few anywhere in the third world, was the subject of more social science writing during the late 1970s and early 1980s than Peru. Books, monographs, articles, and dissertations poured forth from Peru itself, from elsewhere in Latin America, and from the United States, Western Europe, and even the Soviet Union and Japan.


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