Editor’s Note: We close out our back-to-school Teaching Points series this week with Myrna Santiago’s upper division undergraduate history seminar “Cocaine, the Drug Trade, The War on Drugs, and U.S.-Latin American Relations.” Professor and Chair of the History Department at St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles, Santiago comes to drug history through border, economic, and environmental issues, a nexus of ideas represented in her prize-winning book The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican Revolution, 1900-1938 (Cambridge, 2007). Here she looks at another commodity fetish–cocaine– across a span of a hundred years.
For the last thirty years, one of the dominant themes between Latin America and the United States has been the drug trade, specifically the trafficking in cocaine. The policy of successive US administrations has been to wage a “war on drugs” to the exclusion of alternatives. The question then becomes, what has such a war accomplished? How has it affected relations between the United States and Latin America? What effects has the war had on production, transportation, and consumption patterns? This course will examine these questions by looking at the history of cocaine production from the late 19th century until today, tracing the changes the humble coca leaf underwent to become a powerful addictive substance.
We will follow the trajectory of cocaine production and transportation through the countries most affected over the course of the late nineteenth and the whole of the twentieth century—Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, and now Mexico—paying attention to the impact such illicit trade has had on politics, economic development, and democracy.
Objectives. The primary goal of this course is to have students develop an informed and sophisticated analysis of the impact the drug trade has had on U.S.-Latin American relations and within Latin American countries themselves, in addition to gaining knowledge about the history of cocaine and a developing a more critical view of media representations of drug matters in general.
Required Readings
Paul Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug
Gabriel García Márquez, News of a Kidnapping
Roberto Escobar, The Accountant’s Story
Coletta A. Youngers and Eileen Rosin, Drugs & Democracy in Latin America
Jeffrey A. Miron, Drug War Crimes
Articles from e-reserve
Schedule of Classes
Mon Aug 31 Introduction
Wed Sept 2: Coca and the first wave of cocaine, to 1890
- Gootenberg, Introduction, ch 1
- Learning objective: understanding the historiography