WILLIAM MARCY "The Politics of Cocaine" March 26th at 6pm
Drawing on declassified documents and extensive first-hand research, The Politics of Cocaine takes a hard look at the role the United States played in creating the drug industry that thrives in Central and
South America. Author William L. Marcy contends that by conflating
anti-Communist and counternarcotics policies, the United States helped
establish and strengthen the drug trade as the area's economic base.
Increased militarization, destabilization of governments,
uncontrollable drug trafficking, more violence, and higher death tolls
resulted. Marcy explores how the counternarcotics policies of the 1970s
collapsed during the 1980s when economic calamity, the Andean guerrilla
insurgencies, and Reagan's anti-Communist struggle with Nicaragua and
Cuba became conflated as part of the War on Drugs. The book then
explores how the U.S. invasion of Panama and narcotics related violence
throughout Andean region during the 1990s led to the militarization of
the War on Drugs as a way to confront narcotics production,
narco-traffickers, and narco-guerrillas alike. Marcy brings to the
reader up to the end of the George W. Bush administration and explains
why to this date the United States remains unable to control the flow
of cocaine into the United States and why the War on Drugs appears to
be spiraling out of control. The Politics of Cocaine fills in
historical gaps and provides a new and controversial analysis of a
complex and seemingly unsolvable problem.
- Street:
- 509 E. 4th Ave
- City:
- Olympia ,
- Province:
- Washington
- Postal Code:
- 98501
- Country:
- United States
