Introduction

This introduction previews the basic issues of the book: that a series of official Cold-War era peasant colonization projects in the western Amazon of the 1950s-70s were the source of the illicit cocaine trade that emerged from these same sites by the 1980s, in Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia alike. Abandoned and disillusioned peasants, after the withdrawal of the state, dedicated themselves instead to coca livelihoods. The chapter reviews the mixed methodologies of the book (from scientific spatial analysis to ethnographic and historical case studies) and the focus of the five chapters that follow. It reviews some of the key literatures, where it exists, on drugs and development, and signals three key implications of these studies. The main finding is that illegal drug trades do not appear in historical isolation from state building and development projects, but from their failures. Reformed efforts to contain drugs in the Andes (after the failures of the U.S. inspired “war on drugs”) should take these historical lessons into account.