ABSTRACT
Mexico, Jamaica, Brazil, and Central America have become battlegrounds for drug traffickers and their respective governments, making the 2000s and 2010s the era with the most drug-related murders per capita in Latin American history. The colonial system, which awarded enormous land holdings to Spaniards connected to the Crown between the 1500s and the 1800s had a lasting impact on Colombia, as it did across Latin America. Colombia has been one of the least equal Latin American countries in the past century, making it ripe for exploitation by wealthy, armed individuals like those running the cartels in Medellin and Cali. The Shining Path was arguably the most terroristic of all the guerrilla forces operating in Latin America during the Cold War. The Andean Initiative was the first major international counter-narcotics plan led by the US, with the cooperation of Latin American countries.
