The 'Pre-Colombian' Era of Drug Trafficking in the Americas: Cocaine, 1945-1965

Before anyone heard of Colombian narcotraficantes, a new class of international cocaine traffickers was born between 1947 and 1964, led by little-known Peruvians, Bolivians, Chileans, Cubans, Mexicans, Brazilians, and Argentines. These men—and often daring young women—anxiously pursued by U.S. drug agents, pioneered the business of illicit cocaine, a drug whose small-scale production in the Andes remained legal and above board until the late 1940s.¹ Before 1945, cocaine barely existed as an illicit drug; by 1950, a handful of couriers were smuggling it by the ounce from Peru; by the mid-1960s this hemispheric flow topped hundreds of kilos yearly, linking thousands of coca farmers across the eastern Andes to crude labs, organized trafficking rings, and a bustling retailer diaspora in consuming hot-spots like New York and Miami. The Colombians of the 1970s, the Pablo Escobars who leveraged this network into one of hundreds of tons, worth untold billions, are today notorious. Yet historians have yet to uncover their modest predecessors or the actual start of Colombia's role: cocaine's "pre-Colombian" origins.

My aim here of identifying these narco intermediaries means that this article cannot treat, in limited space, a number of other worthy topics. This is not, for example, a social history of coca-growing peasants, the colonizing migrants who by the mid-1960s became a force in the emerging economy of cocaine. This is also not a systematic study of U.S. anti-cocaine policies or activities during the era, nor of changing North American drug tastes and demand, though all impinged on cocaine's rise. As seen elsewhere, escalating American efforts against Andean cocaine, a kind of "secret war" actually launched around 1947, was an unwitting spur for the profit incentives and geographic dispersal that led into the drug boom of the 1970s.² Even as I focus my lens on narco middlemen, it is hard to convey a rounded sense of their underworld, on their own cultural or personal terms. By necessity, this new narrative about early traffickers derives from scores of fragmented international policing reports, primarily of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) and BNDD, forerunners of the 1970s DEA. In exploiting these new sources, I try to move beyond as much as possible their official categories and language of drug control, as well as the inherently speculative or exaggerated nature of such documents, based on a trail of suspects and informers filtered through police eyes. As historians as distinct as Richard Cobb and Carlo Ginzburg suggest, even flawed policing or inquisition testimony can lend critical clues to the real past men and women who inspired them.³

What this article does try to decipher are the new middlemen—"traffickers"—and cocaine-makers—"chemists"—who emerged in the transnational space between coca-growing peasants and cocaine-hunting drug agents during the post-war era. They constituted a new class, articulating in newly-clandestine markets, highly local conditions for drug trades with the new obstacles and incentives planted by overseas and state interests. I will try to convey here two larger "transnational" perspectives on these early traffickers. First, this smuggling class, which came together across a vast expanse of shifting geographies, and as they learned, shared, and invented new tools of the trade, represented a new form of pan-American "networking." This was a surge of local agency that would eventually transform the global drug trades. Second, in larger political terms, cocaine's new transnational geographies pertain to the "cold-war" history of the Americas, since these political tensions structured the major spaces for and movements of illicit activities. Illicit cocaine was a specific pan-American product of the high cold war.⁴

To observe these deeper political trends, I divide the postwar decades of cocaine's resurgence into two stages, 1947-59 and 1959-64. Illicit cocaine began on one end with the advent of the cold war and stepped-up international campaigns to extend coca-cocaine prohibitions to the Andes. Illicit cocaine surfaced in eastern Peru in 1948-49 when anti-communist regimes suppressed...