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Joyce, Elizabeth, and Carlos Malamud, eds. Latin America and the Multinational Drug Trade. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. Tables, figures, notes, bibliography, index, 242 pp.; hardcover $49.95.
Coca and cocaine have become integrally associated with Latin America, contributing to notoriety, violence, and the breakdown of states. Yet despite feverish publicity, a plethora of policy formulations, and extensive academic examination, a clearer understanding of coca's role in the cultures and economies of the region and its complex economic and political impact on the hemisphere is still elusive. In the popular mind especially, the drug problem may assume legendary proportions. I still recall the amazed gasps and titillated student faces during a recent university lecture as I mentioned drinking mate de coca on a research trip to Bolivia. The class generally assumed that I was confessing an illicit and illegal secret, unaware that Britain's Princess Anne, the king and queen of Spain, and the Pope himself, not to mention many a casual tourist to highland Bolivia or Peru, had done the same.
Once, but no longer, the U.S. State Department recommended coca tea for altitude sickness. Although other embassies in La Paz may continue to serve the indigenous beverage to guests, U.S. drug control policy and attitudes have directly and indirectly influenced hemispheric and world drug strategy. U.S. policy and its consequences in Latin America, both intended and unintended, are the central theme and core strength of this work edited by Elizabeth Joyce and Carlos Malamud. Joyce, formerly of the Institute for European-Latin American Relations (IRELA) in Madrid, is a scholar and researcher at Georgetown and Maryland universities. Malamud, director of the Contemporary Latin America Program at the Instituto Universitario Ortega y Gasset in Madrid, was an original coordinator of a conference on European and Latin American drug trafficking held in Toledo, Spain, in January 1995, jointly sponsored by his institute and the University of London's Institute of Latin American Studies, from which these papers come.
The editors, as well as most of the contributors, are European or Latin American specialists who provide a refreshing and provocative non-U.S. perspective on the global drug dilemma. Even the two North American contributions, Anthony Maingot's assessment of offshore banking and money laundering in the Caribbean and Panama and Peter...