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Frank 0. Mora1
Rhodes College, Memphis
If for much of the 1980s the Andean countries and Mexico viewed drug-trafficking as basically a U.S. problem, Brazil and the Southern Cone, plagued by a number of political, economic and social problems of their own, were surely not about to toe the U.S. line and declare a "war on drugs."2 Brazil and the Southern Cone countries saw this as a problem that involved the U.S. in its "war" against Colombian and Mexican narcotraficantes. The prevailing opinion at the time was that this region was nothing more than a minor staging area for drugs destined to the U.S. and Europe and a producer of small amounts of marijuana. These governments, in addition to the U.S., did not see any danger of their countries coming under the multifarious threat of drug-trafficking.
Before 1989, the U.S. paid only scant attention to drug-trafficking in Brazil and the Southern cone. In the early 1970s there were pressures from President Richard Nixon, whose administration was the first to officially declare a war on drugs, for these countries, particularly Brazil, Chile, and Paraguay, to pass anti-drug legislation to counter the growing "heroin threat," which all of them did by 1978. However, in each of these countries the legislation was little more than window dressing - an attempt to appease Washington at a time when the U.S. public grew increasingly alarmed at the high rate of drug (heroin) consumption. There was no political will on the part of these governments to follow through, mainly because they did not perceive a problem. By the mid-1980s, when the anti-drug campaign heated up again, the Reagan and Bush
administrations focused their attention and resources on the "war" in Mexico and the Andean region. By 1988 there was widespread consensus that drug-trafficking and the violence, corruption and socio-economic costs associated with it was a national security threat to the U.S. and Latin America. However, Brazilian and the Southern Cone governments, despite evidence of increasing levels of trafficking, consumption, and money laundering, continued to neglect this mounting problem.
The U.S. not only neglected to pay attention to the problem in this region, but, in fact, indirectly and unwittingly contributed to pushing the drug trade away from the Andean region and toward...