NCJ Number
137729
Date Published
1992
Length
138 pages
Annotation
This book examines efforts of the Bolivian and United States governments to prosecute the "war on drugs" in Bolivia and explains why the war is being lost.
Abstract
The analysis of this book is based upon the author's several trips to Bolivia and interviews with Bolivian officials, U.S. diplomats, researchers, and drug experts. The analysis concludes that the Bolivian war on drugs is fraught with paradoxes. Perhaps the greatest of all these paradoxes is the new social environment that U.S. policy has helped create; and in this environment, coca cultivation and drug manufacturing are expanding. The Bolivian economic structure is based on cocaine. Peasants manufacture coca paste, wealthy merchants exploit their labor and export the goods, and the so-called drug enforcers profit from the drug trade. The Bolivian government risks alienating itself even further from the people if it seriously undermines the cocaine economy, and there is little support for serious government efforts to destroy the cocaine economy. Enforcement efforts rarely reach to the top of the drug trafficking network; enforcement statistics are mainly designed to convince U.S. officials that sufficient progress is being made to justify continued U.S. economic support. Although this book does not offer a clear solution to the flow of cocaine from Bolivia into the United States, it critique of the current limited focus on drug trafficking may lead to a broader approach to the problems that confront Bolivia. Chapter notes and 51-item bibliography