Abstract
This paper aims at presenting an overview of the historic and current features concerning the relationship among original peoples, psychoactive drugs, and various forms of anti-drug practices in Latin America. The current expansion of extractivist capitalism in Latin America overlaps with Indigenous peoples' traditional lands, provoking new forms of violence and confrontation. The War on Drugs is being used as a justification to militarize these lands and to criminalize Indigenous populations. Thus, neo-extractivist initiatives in Latin America provoke renewed clashes between Indigenous peoples' interests and local and global elites' purposes. We seek to raise awareness about the relationship between the drug war and Indigenous people's human rights violations as an alert and an invitation for social scientists to engage in theoretical and empirical research on this issue.
Introduction
The impact of the War on Drugs in Latin America has been vastly documented and analyzed by specialized research since its inception in the 1970 and 1980s. Critical accounts on the international Drug Prohibition regime have highlighted the social and individual costs of the global preference for repressive and militarized responses toward illegal psychoactive substances' social practices and economic markets. The selectivity of enforcement has become quite evident, with repression aiming particularly at the poorest, the youngest, the most vulnerable, and the darkest-skinned men and women.
However, the consequences of the illegal drug economy and the repression against it for Indigenous peoples have been consistently overlooked. It is precisely one of Dawn Paley's (2015) main arguments in the book Drug War Capitalism. According to the Canadian researcher based in Mexico, the War on Drugs has been the most important instrument for repressive state intervention over traditional peoples and their lands in Latin America.
For Paley, the combat against drug trafficking is the justification for the state's security forces incursions into traditional lands that result in mass displacement and physical annihilation of whole Indigenous communities in areas fancied by multinational agribusiness corporations, timber enterprises, and global mining giants. Thus, it is not coincidental that the most targeted Latin American rural and forest areas match the still barely exploited frontiers for capitalist ambition on the continent.
These areas correspond to traditional Indigenous lands located in remote zones; mostly mountain and rainforest regions rich in biodiversity, in mineral deposits, noble wood, and hydric potential. They are also areas targeted by illegal armed groups—such as guerrillas and paramilitary and drug organizations—for their strategic location, possibilities for occultation, and opportunities for sowing illegal crops to produce illegal psychoactive drugs.
In such regions, Indigenous peoples are caught in the crossfire among drug cartels, military forces, corporations' private security personnel, militias, and guerrillas. The contemporary dispute over their sacred land is a process started by the first European conquerors in the 1500s, and continued over centuries by local elites and international corporate interests. The destruction and predation of Indigenous peoples and their land and cultural practices has been the historic mode of contact among Europeans and criollo elites with original peoples. Its combination with the War on Drugs is the current chapter of a bloody history of conquest and subjugation, but also of resistance, resilience, and perseverance. We will grasp here some sparks of this struggle.
Cultural warfare and drug's demonization in colonial Latin America
In the Spanish-speaking Latin American countries, history textbooks on the European dominion of the continent usually describe it as “la Conquista” (the Conquest). It is not a simple selection of a term over others. By using “conquest” instead of “colonization,” the authors emphasize the violence of the European enterprise. The expression “colonization” suggests a relatively positive approach toward the land's original peoples, implying improvement and amelioration of general conditions. “Conquista,” on the other hand, highlights the enterprise's inherent subjugation, enslavement, genocide, and cultural doom. It also implies that the vast region later called “the Americas” was populated by an array of different societies with immense diversity and richness of traditions, history, and cultural features. The land was not empty or occupied by less civilized creatures (De Courcelles, 2015; Fuentes, 1992; García Jordan, 1992; Morales Padrón, 1981).
Dispute over land was also a struggle for the Indigenous subjectivity. The conquest of souls by the Catholic missionaries was as violent as the physical submission imposed by the weapons, and as important for European control over territory and population as the presence of royal and private armies. In effect, the disciplining and domination of bodies and souls walked hand in hand.
Practices and beliefs related to shamanism stand out as some of the main features of many Indigenous populations. The European disconnection between body and soul conceived, for instance, the possibility of the mutilation of the flesh as penitence for the salvation of the soul. Such a partition was, in general, foreign to the peoples the Europeans subdued in the Americas. Shamanic knowledges were, and still are, pillars for Amerindian societies, playing a central role in the production and transmission of knowledge, cultural identity, socialization, interethnic relationships, hunting, war, divination, healing (understood as a holistic affair, including both physical and spiritual dimensions), and what one could call the “cosmological ordering of the world.” Within the set of millenary knowledges held by original peoples is the intimate relationship with psychoactive substances that allows communication with humans and non-humans alike.
Plants, cacti, fungi, and some animal fluids with psychoactive properties were (and continue to be) crucial for original peoples' social cohesion, and are a central part of their cultural foundations. Precisely because of that, they were directly attacked by European religious missionaries, political authorities, and botanists. According to Antonio Escohotado, a reference on the global history of psychoactive drugs, the European mindset on psychoactive substances that arrived with the conquistadores was marked by European Christian values that already declared demoniac all sorts of conscious-altering effects from the use of psychoactive drugs (Escohotado, 1997).
European codes and Inquisition manuals on “witch-hunts,” like On the Demon-Mania of Witches by Jean Bodin (1580), included sections on the correlation between demon-idolatry and the use of drugs, reflecting a long history of Catholic fight against pre-Christian pagan practices. When the Europeans in the Americas approached a multitude of social, curative, and religious habits related to psychoactive drug use, the same inquisitorial framework was applied. Consistent with the European judgements of Native Americans as “barbarian” and “savage,” all kinds of medical, therapeutic, spiritual, and social uses of psychoactive substances were promptly designated as deadly sins and blasphemies to be destroyed.
Mentions of the supposedly “demoniac” use of drugs infested European chronists' narratives from the first centuries of the conquest. The correlation between drugs and Indigenous peoples was always considered an indication of native Americans' supposedly backwardness, immorality, and paganism. Contemporary works on pre-Iberic America enregister how psychoactive substances were crucial for structuring systems of beliefs, political institutions, and economic relations within various peoples such as the Mexica, the Incas, and the Maya. Works like Serge Gruzinski's (1992, 1993) and Don's (2010) on Mexico's peoples and the Spanish occupation have added colorful analyses of the relationship between psychoactive drugs, economy, power, and society, both before and during Spanish conquest.
The Spanish conquerors who subjugated the vice-kingdom of New Spain (present-day Western US, Mexico, and Central America) noted and combated the consumption of cacti such as peyote and numerous fungi that had been used for thousands of years before the arrival of Hernán Cortés. Tombs and ceremonial altars by the Olmecs (tenth century BCE) depicted fungi symbolizing spiritual experiences, as well as written codes and inscriptions by the Maya (250–900 CE) and the Toltecs (900–1580 CE) describing the close and everyday relationship of those civilizations with psychoactive drugs (Carod-Artal, 2015).
When Spain began its invasion, the Spaniards found a number of different peoples subjected to the Aztec Empire. Throughout decades of war and resistance, Spaniard chronists and priests recorded first-hand stories of psychoactive substances used among the Aztec and other peoples, such as the seed of the Ololiuhqui bindweed, the peyote cactus, and a set of psilocybin mushrooms known as teonanacatl, “the flesh of God.” Prudish priests invariably described the rituals and modes of drug use as “intercourse with the Devil” or other such derogatory expressions, always combining horror and moral repulsion toward Native American values and ways of living (Gruzinski, 1993).
The same pattern occurred elsewhere in the Americas. In South America, Spanish and Portuguese—and later, French and Dutch—reproduced the demoniac interpretation to name and to fight Indigenous practices related to psychoactive substances (Osorio, 2005). In the Andean region, archeological artifacts from the Chavín (900–200 BCE) and Moche (100–700 CE) cultures depict the San Pedro cactus (Trichocereus) in shamanic context. Later, in present-day Dominican Republic, Haiti, Venezuela, and Colombia, narratives from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries describe the use of cohibo, a powder from the seed of Cojobana tree; the same kind of powder as had been made from other similar plants rich in DMT or nicotine (Carneiro, 2008; Vargas, 2008).
Far more than the consumption of [other] drugs, that of pulque already tended to escape the norms of tradition and the community. But the Spanish domination intensified its disintegrative effects by the state of anomy that it instigated and, more immediately, by the new forms of alcohol, such as Castilian wine, that it introduced.
In colonial Brazil, habits related to alcohol, particularly cauim, an Indigenous drink, were rashly combated by Jesuits and other Catholic orders who were overwhelmed by the widespread practices of inebriation by peoples such as the Tupinamba. Reputed as “savage” and “demoniac,” the Indigenous alcohol traditions were condemned and coerced while European alcoholic beverages—especially wine and beer—were disseminated both among settlers and natives (Fernandes, 2013; Sztutman, 2008).
From the late sixteenth century onwards, the Portuguese possessions in South America turned into the world's major producer of sugar cane, which was transformed into both sugar and alcoholic cachaça. Until the abolition of African slave trafficking in Brazil, in the nineteenth century, cachaça was one of the main products used to trade in human lives. The South Atlantic trade lines worked in a frantic fashion, connecting ports such as Rio de Janeiro and Salvador de Bahia to trading ports in West and Southern African shores. The ships left Brazil stocked with cachaça, weapons, metal tools, silver, and gold coins, and returned from Africa with enslaved women, men, and children (Alencastro, 2000; Carneiro, 2011).
South America's Indigenous peoples were also well-versed in the use of psychoactive drugs for healing, spiritual, and social purposes. From the Guiana's Caribbean shores to the Andean Altiplano, including the Pampas and the Amazon rainforest, different peoples mastered the use of psychoactive beverages (ayahuasca, cauim), tobacco, mushrooms, reptile glandular secretions, and the multiple uses of coca leaf (Allen, 2002; Henman, 2008; Metaal, 2014; Sztutman, 2008) Native American peoples developed deep knowledge about the uses of those substances, in parallel with other societies in time and space. According to the Greek notion pharmakon, depending on the dosage, the same substance could be used to heal or to kill; in both ancient Greece and during the colonization of the Americas, to name only a few examples, psychoactive substances have been subject to complex and nuanced understandings that are not easily translated into Eurocentric categories (Labate & Cavnar, 2014; Metaal, 2014).
Some of the psychoactive drugs used in the Americas at the time of the European conquest became popular in the Old World, such as tobacco and xocoatl (chocolate). Nonetheless, the general connotation associated with psychoactive drug use among Native American peoples remained associated with deviation, savagery, lust, madness, and sin. After the processes of national independence from the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century, the social and cultural codes adopted by the new local elites preserved the colonial eras' judgements toward Indigenous peoples, maintaining the rejection towards psychoactive drug uses (Courtwright, 2012; Dawson, 2016).
In the newly-independent American countries, the disavowal of Indigenous peoples' cultures and legacies remained predominant, combining moral-religious judgements and pseudo-scientific medical, sociological, and anthropological stances on their alleged “racial backwardness” (Rodrigues & Labate, 2019; Smith, 2016). The use of psychoactive drugs that remained was deemed a trace of congenital inferiority and moral deviation.
In the three first decades of the twentieth century, the first national and international drug-related regulations represented “institutionalized prejudice” against Indigenous uses of psychoactive substances. During that period, the European and North American theories of racial supremacy were very popular among Latin American criollo elites. They were eager to “modernize” their societies, which, at that time, comprised repressing traditional practices related to Indigenous communities and those of African descent. Among the features to be suppressed was the issue of cultivating and using psychoactive drugs.
In Mexico, for example, one of the most important outcomes of the Revolution (1910–1917)—the 1917 Constitution—included a paragraph (Art. 73, XVI, 4a) on the combat of “alcohol and substances that poison the individuals and that degenerate the race” (Diario Oficial, 1917, p. 154). The task of combating the use of psychoactive drugs became one of the Central Government's main responsibilities, and one that could also be understood as an effort to eliminate the traces of “barbarism” related to Indigenous peoples and minorities such as African Mexicans and Chinese migrants. Taking into account that Mexicans were mostly of Indigenous descent, the combat against “archaism” and “savagery” was precisely a war against the Mexican people.
The alleged connection between psychoactive drugs and “racial backwardness” can be identified throughout Latin America. In Brazil, for instance, the first laws on psychoactive drugs, promulgated in the 1920 and 1930s, were directly informed by medical, psychiatric, and anthropologic reports connecting the use of Cannabis and social practices reputed as “primitive” and “underdeveloped”; particularly, those related to African Brazilians and Indigenous peoples (Rodrigues & Pereira, 2022; Saad, 2019).
Renowned medical doctors such as Costa Doria and Pernambuco Filho were vocal during the 1910 and 1920s on the supposed malefices of the use of Cannabis, which comprised moral, physical, and intellectual “degeneration.” As examples of Cannabis' “evil effects,” their work used Black persons' and mestizos' images and cultural features as illustration for their “research findings.” Their work influenced both Brazilian legislation and the first League of Nations' treaties on drugs. In 1925, Pernambuco Filho was sent to Geneva as chief delegate of the Brazilian representation at the Conference on Opium and Other Drugs. His motto, “marijuana is the poor man's opium,” gained momentum, and Pernambuco was invited to join the group of experts who drafted the 1928 Treaty on Drugs (França, 2015; Rodrigues & Pereira, 2022; Saad, 2019).
Similar processes took place in countries like Colombia, Peru, Argentina, and Paraguay, where local Indigenous and African American practices connected to the use of psychoactive drugs were denounced by social, economic, and political elites in the narratives on the modernization of Latin American societies. The model aimed by such hegemonic social groups were mirrored in the European—and the US’—patterns of social organization, institutional framework, economic development, and moral and racial standards (López-Alves, 2011; Quijano, 1989). The elites' prospects on “modernization” included features as incentives for the migration of white Europeans and the moral and “scientific” condemnation of “savage habits,” such as those related to traditional psychoactive drugs (Camacho Quizado, 1988; Restrepo, 2016).
Brazil was not the only—or the most—influential country in the era of the first international treaties on drug control. The US global protagonism in establishing norms in the subject of drug control is widely known and well documented. William McAllister (2000), among others (Paley, 2015; Rodrigues & Labate, 2016; Rodrigues, Carvalho, Policarpo, 2021), acknowledged the active US “drug diplomacy” as a double-edged strategy, both aimed at the domestic US society and at the US foreign interests.
Domestically, the anti-drug diplomacy was used by the US federal government during the 1910 and 1920s to reinforce internal reforms aimed at regulating the legal market for psychoactive drugs and their medical applications. In addition, these reforms were instrumentalized by use of racist, moralist, and xenophobic accounts to produce legal and political means to repress and criminally prosecute ethnic and social minorities associated with psychoactive drugs. Internationally, US anti-drug activism was a powerful tool to weaken one of the pillars for the European colonial system that was the market of psychoactive drugs. That market connected producing and consuming markets in Asia, such as China and India, with the European market for industrialized drugs from vegetal extraction, such as heroin, synthetized from opium poppy.
Nevertheless, the US anti-drug diplomacy was not preaching in the desert. Latin American countries such as Brazil and Mexico—but also others such as Colombia and Argentina—were facing similar internal processes of “conservative modernization” that comprised in its ideology the impetus to extirpate social practices reputed to be “underdeveloped,” such as the use of “traditional drugs” (cacti, marijuana, fungi, coca leaf, opium) and the problematic use of medically or socially accepted drugs (morphine, alcohol, tobacco). Thus, despite the US anti-drug activism since the 1910s, the construction of a global prohibitionist regime was a collective deed, with important contribution from Latin American countries (Rodrigues et al., 2021; Rodrigues & Pereira, 2022).
In the Americas, the moral background upon which the international norms and national legislation on drugs were built was shared by developed capitalist economies, such as the US and Canada, and Latin American and Caribbean societies (Beckmann, 2021; Molano Cruz, 2017, 2019; Rodrigues & Labate, 2016). Such a common ground was completed by one of medical and scientific arguments that promoted a shift in the public display of justifications to combat drug-related practices. Instead of openly showing racist repulsion toward non-Western peoples, both international and national drug regulation assumed a “neutral” tone based on the formula of “medical use” and “medical uselessness.” The notion of being “medically useful,” however, was from Western provenance, which once again casts Indigenous medical systems of knowledge and healthcare into the realm of darkness, ignorance, and superstition.
International drug regulation and indigenous rights
The international system for the control of psychoactive drugs preceded the emergence of the major international organizations, such as the League of Nations (1919) and its successor, the United Nations (1945). The first formal international commitment on drug regulation was signed at The Hague, Netherlands, in 1912. Originally, there were 12 signatories, but after 1919, when the League of Nations absorbed the issue of drug control, membership jumped to 60 affiliated countries: nearly all the independent states in the world (McAllister, 2000; Rodrigues & Labate, 2016).
According to McAllister (2000), the formula adopted in the 1912 Convention set the rationale for drug treaties ever since, which is the concept of “medical/therapeutic use.” The concept states that a psychoactive drug will have legal authorization for production, trade, and use if it has proved a medical or therapeutic indication. The authority who defined if a psychoactive substance had a medical application rested in the hands of a special board within the League of Nations and, later, was placed under the responsibility of the World Health Organization (WHO).
The patterns for classification, however, have never been coherent, since similar drugs in chemical composition and physiological effects, such as morphine and heroin—both opiates—are categorized under different labels; thus, morphine was included in the global legal pharmacopeia, while the heroin legal market was totally banned. For McAllister and other experts, there is no objective criteria for such medical definition (McAllister, 2000; Reiss, 2014). Historically, the legal authorization for a psychoactive drug has been an effect of complex clashes of political and economic interests involving geopolitical and geoeconomic struggles that have little scientificity.
Nevertheless, the scientific, medical, and therapeutic knowledge in question is always the one within the realm of Western medicine. It means that therapeutic systems foreign to Western medicine have been ostracized and called “un-scientific” and, therefore, “false.” It includes, of course, Native American knowledge and healing practices related to sacred plants.
The consolidation of the global regime for drug control was set by the celebration of the 1961 United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. This document gathered and updated the previous treaties on the matter under the League of Nations, introducing four lists or schedules concerning the level of authorization for psychoactive drugs use. The lists were organized in a crescent degree of legal relaxation, while Schedule I comprised the drugs totally prohibited, Schedule IV encompassed substances under regulation, but legally endorsed for medical purposes. Officially, the applied criterion was of “medical use.” However, since this classification was oriented by scientifically questionable parameters, in practice, the inclusion of a psychoactive drug in one of the schedules was driven less by scientific accounts on the substance and more by economic, political, and moral interests and justifications.
In such a context, psychoactive drugs related to Native Americans were especially targeted. Opium, for example, was completely prohibited, while morphine—a drug synthetized from opium—was indexed in Schedule III, meaning it has legal indication under specific production, trade, and use controls. The millenary opium, however, was proscribed, as well as the cultivation of poppies that occurred outside the paradigm for legal opiate production. Opium, a natural substance from Asia used since old Mesopotamia (3400 BCE) to alleviate physical pain and to induce extreme relaxation, was subjugated by the nineteenth century-invented morphine, produced by major pharmaceutical companies mainly located in the Global North (Booth, 2013; Hanes & Sanello, 2002).
In Latin America, the biased “medical-use formula” has also targeted specific drugs and their vegetal/fungi sources, particularly those related to Indigenous practices. One striking example is the coca leaf. The consumption of coca leaves in the Andes dates back 3000 years when the first peoples arriving from the North occupied its mountain ranges and its highlands. During the Inca rule (from thirteenth to fifteenth centuries CE), coca leaves acquired a dimension of special importance: they were used as “money” (for salary and taxes), as a fundamental source of minerals, and contained helpful alkaloids to overcome the adverse symptoms imposed by the rarefaction of oxygen in high altitudes. In colonial Peru and Bolivia, foreign rulers adapted the coca-based economic relations to secure Spanish exploitation over the Altiplano peoples (Allen, 2002; Escohotado, 1997; Mortimer, 2017; Worthon, 1980).
Coca is also an example of how the modern international regime on drug control has treated psychoactive substances related to traditional Indigenous peoples' cultural legacies. In the 1961 UN Single Convention, coca leaves were classified on Schedule I, which meant the total ban from legal use in the world. Officially, the international authority on health issues—the WHO—decided that millenary knowledge of the use of coca for healing and for mitigating physiologic needs were to be dismissed as invalid data (Grisaffi, 2019; Weil, 1978).
Ten years later, the 1971 UN Protocol on Psychotropic Substances expanded this rationale by including substances such as mescaline (present in peyote), DMT (present in ayahuasca), and psilocybin (present in fungi) in Schedule I. Those substances are components of plants, fungi, or cacti traditionally used by Native American peoples. For Julian Burger and Mary Kapron (2017), the UN drug control system was more than an outcome of disputes among Big Pharma interests, geopolitical accounts by Western states, and police control strategies for criminalizing social and political minorities. Besides that, the treaties were a system designed to enforce Western medicine and knowledge over different healing traditions. More than a social and political global strategy for control and intervention, the UN drug regime was, according to them, a means to forbid and to obliterate traditional use of psychoactive substances worldwide.
Indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities are disproportionately affected by the production of illicit drugs, trafficking, and the “war on drugs.” The major production areas of the raw materials—coca and the opium poppy—for the most commodified drugs [cocaine and heroin, respectively] are often on the traditional lands of Indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities.
The combat against illicit production and trafficking of those raw materials was focused on traditional peoples and lands often considered ancestral territories. It is also a direct outcome of the War on Drugs model adopted in the Americas since the early 1970s, when the US government initiated it.
Inaugurated during the Nixon administration (1969–1974), the War on Drugs consisted of a national security policy based on the militarization of the fight against the illegal drug economy, i.e., the production, trafficking, selling, and consumption of illegal psychoactive substances. In geopolitical terms, it was structured by the identification of “drug-producing countries” (located in the Global South) and “drug-consuming countries” (developed capitalist countries such as the US). The former were considered “dangerous” and sometimes “threatening” countries, while the latter were depicted as “victims” that had the right to take all the necessary measures to defend themselves.
In the 1980s, the War on Drugs attained a central place in the US foreign and defense policies toward Latin America and the Caribbean (Bagley & Walker, 1996; Rodrigues et al., 2022). In many countries like Mexico, Peru, and Colombia, US economic, military, and diplomatic pressure for more engagement with the War on Drugs was adapted to parochial political and economic goals. These were related to local dynamics, such as the fight against leftist guerrillas (in Colombia and Peru) and opening new economic frontiers for the expansion of capitalist exploitation, both for local elites and for multinational corporations.
The anti-drug policies had impacts on the urban population—especially on the poor and the non-white—and on Indigenous peoples in rural and yet-to-be-explored natural national parks and regions. The Colombian case is the epitome of how the War on Drugs has been particularly harmful toward Indigenous peoples.
Colombia has been a central piece in the international economy of illegal drugs since the late 1970s. The country had textbook features for the development of massive transnational illegal practices, such as its geographic location—midway between the coca leaf-producing countries of Peru and Bolivia—the presence of organized criminal groups with working international connections, a high-level connectivity between political figures and organized crime, long and scarcely-protected border zones, and entire regions of difficult-to-access tropical forest and mountain peaks where drug labs and supplementary illegal cultivation zones were implemented.
Among the manifold repressive measures taken by successive US-backed Colombian administrations against drug-trafficking, policies of “forced eradication” are paradigmatic. They have been sustained in Colombia both in their manual and chemical versions. The manual eradication comprises the actual localization of illegal crops, coca and poppy, and the mobilization of soldiers, police officers, and local campesinos, to manually destroy the plants. The chemical eradication is carried out by the massive aerial aspersion of defoliants such as glyphosate in the pursuit of destroying entire illegal crops. Fumigation operations were started during the Turbay Ayala administration (1978–1982) in the early days of the War on Drugs in Colombia and lasted until the Santos administration (2010–2018), when they were terminated after years of national and international denouncing of the many disastrous effects on nature and human lives.
The fumigation campaigns were carried out by Colombian administrations, both from Liberal Party and Conservative Party, in accordance with the US anti-narcotics support sustained since the 1970s, and they were kept in force likewise by Democratic and Republican administrations (Hidrovo, 2004; Meneses Cabrera, 2022). Since the 1990s, critics have been denouncing fumigation as a major cause of deforestation and massive contamination of people, livestock, wildlife, soil, and water reserves (Hidrovo, 2004; Osorio, 2003; Meneses Cabrera, 2022). Critics also highlight the impact on Indigenous peoples and on campesino populations, since anti-drug harassment, as well as the dispute among drug-trafficking organizations over the control of lands, has been provoking massive human rights violations and population displacement (Carrión Sánchez, 2014; Ruano-Ibarra & Arciniegas Carreño, 2020).
The Nasa people in the Cauca region of Colombia have been especially impacted by decades of fumigation and manual eradication. The department of Cauca, as well as the neighboring departments of Valle del Cauca, Putumayo, and Caquetá, have been disputed by drug-trafficking organizations, paramilitary organizations, and the guerrillas since the 1980s as a strategic area for the control of the transnational flow of cocaine. However, following the crop eradication campaigns in Peru and Bolivia in the 1990s, coca fields have been relocated to those Colombian departments following the so-called “balloon effect.”
The “balloon effect” is a process of displacement of routes and crops related to drug-trafficking that follows anti-narcotics operations. When an area or a drug-trafficking route is particularly targeted by security forces, highly flexible narco-organizations change their territories and routes, seeking under-surveilled zones. Attacks on Peruvian and Bolivian coca cultivation opened a window of opportunity for the Colombian drug organizations that then started investing in their own coca fields. Thus, since the 1990s, Colombian narcos have assumed the position of both the world's largest coca and cocaine producers. Data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC) indicates that, in 2020, Colombian groups were responsible for 245,000 ha of coca bush cultivation for 1,099 metric tons of cocaine, while Peruvian narcos controlled a production potential of 88,200 ha of coca for 810 metric tons of cocaine, and Bolivian organized crime held a potential for 39,400 ha for 312 metric tons of cocaine (UNODC, 2021).
Cauca, Valle del Cauca, Putumayo, and Caquetá are areas of traditional occupation of such Indigenous peoples as the Nasa and the Pastos, who have been massively affected by the drug economy and the anti-drug policies. Similar impacts are notorious in other countries and on other Indigenous peoples. Nicaragua's Misquitos, Peru's Ashaninkas, Guatemala's peoples of Maya descent, Brazil's Kanamaris and Korubos, the Nahuatl and Chihuahuas in Mexico, and an enormous number of other Indigenous peoples are impacted by the dynamics both of drug-trafficking and the War on Drugs (Ardenghi, 2020; Balieiro & Nascimento, 2015; De la Cuadra, 2015; Laura & Huancles Unoss, 2021; Navarrete-Frías & Thoumi, 2005; Pimenta, 2018).
The 2018 Defensoría del Pueblo's report on illegal economies and armed groups in Colombia's post-2016 Peace Agreement highlights a phenomenon that can be generalized to other regions in Latin America: the overlap of illegal crop zones, narco's territorial control, paramilitary activity, military repression, campesino communities, and Indigenous people's traditional lands (Defensoría del Pueblo, 2018). From Northern Argentina and Paraguay to Mexico, the intensification of drug-related activities—associated or not with other illegal activities such as illegal mining and timber exploration—have yielded continuous degradation of the Indigenous quality of life.
Julian Burger and Mary Kapron (2017) remember that international agreements on Indigenous peoples, such as the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), are not binding to the member-states, while the treaties of the international regime of drug control are mandatory to the signatories. It means that compromises on the rights of Indigenous peoples' self-determination (UNDRIP's Art. 3), the defense of ancestral lands (Art. 26), the prevention of forcible dislocations (Art. 10), the preservation of ancestral knowledge (Art. 31), culture (Art. 8), and health (Art. 24) are not under the scrutiny of international law, nor under any kind of obligation by the states that signed the 2007 declaration. The 1961 UN Single Convention on Drugs, its 1971 and 1972 protocols, and its 1988 aggiornamento with the Conference of Vienna, were, in turn, fostered to be converted into domestic legislations by their signatories. This means that the international agreements on psychoactive drugs share a heavier legal and political weight than the pacts on Indigenous peoples' rights (Boiteux, Chernicharo, & Alves, 2014).
The authors, however, emphasize that the 2007 declaration must be understood as a specification for Indigenous peoples' rights that were already protected under the 1948 Human Rights Declaration for the obvious reason that every Indigenous individual is human. If the international legal status of the 2007 declaration is not as equally binding as the 1948 declaration, it ought to be a reason for scandal, and a demonstration that the international community does not intend to protect the world's Indigenous peoples as much as they would like to control their practices and beliefs.
Remembering Dawn Paley's (2015) accounts on the drug war and capitalism, it is possible to speculate how the overture and further exploitation of new frontiers for global capitalism are more valuable to States and corporations than the respect for the human rights of Indigenous peoples. It also makes it clear that the colonial perspective is still in full motion. Therefore, the colonial mindset proceeds to reinforce economic interests in ancestral land resources. In such a context, Indigenous peoples are seen as “obstacles” to “modernization” and “progress”; old terms for the longstanding purpose of recreating forms of economic exploitation and ethnic and cultural obliteration.
Final remarks
The history of the relationship among Western cultural, political, and economic hegemony in the Americas, psychoactive drugs, and original peoples can be divided into two parts. First, it is a millenary tradition concerning multiple uses, from religious to therapeutic applications, including political, celebratory, social, and economic ends. Second, it has been a way for colonizers, the State and, later, biomedical dispositive to repress, to discipline, and to control populations of Indigenous descent throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
Since the emergence of the contemporary national and international drug control regimes, the Indigenous peoples' situation in relation to psychoactive drugs has considerably deteriorated. In the Americas, the setting of condemnatory stances toward Indigenous peoples' traditions and cultural practices has been associated with legal bias against psychoactive drugs. Drugs banned in the international and national norms were especially those related to traditional use. By doing so, the national-international legal framework on drugs favored psychoactive substances produced by major drug corporations based in Global North countries, while criminalizing substances of traditional use from non-industrial economic environments.
As a strategy for social control, the prohibition of traditional drugs was a powerful tool to criminalize segments of the American continent's societies that were sought out to be controlled and explored. Such a strategy works for the poor and non-white urban population as well as for the rural campesinos and Indigenous peoples. When the international agreements on drug control were standardized under the questionable concept of “medical use,” it represented the consolidation of global patterns concerning the prohibition of drugs and the criminalization of social and cultural practices related to minorities and marginalized majorities worldwide.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, the elite's national political and economic interests have promoted the elaboration of anti-drug norms that made the bridge between them and the Global North's economic and geopolitical goals concerning drug control possible. Hence, the construction of an international regime of drug control has been a process of combined articulation between global economic and local mainstream political and economic interests. Latin American and Caribbean Indigenous peoples have literally been caught in the crossfire produced by drug prohibition.
The renewed interest in exploring the natural resources of ancestral lands has catapulted an articulation between national and public security strategies toward Indigenous peoples. The consequence is a new phase of massive violence against already-targeted Native American communities, whose existence and presence in their territories is seen by economic and political actors as annoying and outdated obstacles. The current stage of capitalist search for natural resources has reached new frontiers with previously marginal exploitation. It includes the Poles, deep oceanic waters, and tropical forests. In the Americas, many of these areas coincide with original peoples' traditional lands.
In times of massive violations of the human rights of Indigenous peoples, associated with dramatic depredation of previously untouched ecosystems, it is mandatory to raise awareness over the impact of the War on Drugs on Indigenous peoples. Such awareness is crucial to offer visibility to the otherwise-silenced violence that concurs to the extermination of many original peoples in Latin America.
Such silence has been reflected in the lack of studies in this area. This overview is an invitation for a new generation of researchers to address many possible directions of investigation of the relationships between drug regulation and Indigenous people. The issues related to this problem are multiple, such as: the profaning and criminalization of sacred plants and their rituals; the displacement of Indigenous population by illegal drug, mining, and lumberjacking organizations; uncontrolled eco-tourism and psychedelic tourism in Indigenous lands; the use of Indigenous people as pawns, mules, and prostitutes by illegal actors; the trafficking of Indigenous children and adults for illegal purposes, and the increasing illness of Indigenous people due to contact with outsiders and their drugs, such alcohol, methamphetamines, and cocaine.
This plural research agenda is an effort that demands the engagement of different knowledges and fields of expertise. Anthropologists and sociologists would benefit from engaging with political scientists, economists, historians, ecologists, social workers, and experts in the sciences of health, among others. Such research agendas must depart from considering the War on Drugs as a powerful, lethal, and highly adaptable strategy that makes it possible to enact new forms of repression and control, and authorizes the occupation of the lands of Indigenous peoples throughout the continent.
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