Cocaine has a long and mostly forgotten history, which more often than not over the past century has revolved around relationships between the United States and the Andean republic of Peru.1 This essay examines that U.S.-Peruvian axis, through three long historical arcs or processes that preceded— and in some sense inform—the hemispheric “drug wars” of the past twenty years. For each stage, I will focus on the changing U.S. influences, signals, or designs around Andean coca and cocaine, the global contexts and competing cocaine circuits that mediated those transnational forces and flows, and the notably dynamic Peruvian responses to North American drug challenges. Each period left its legacies, and paradoxes, for cocaine’s progressive definition as a global, illicit, and menacing drug.
This is mainly a synthetic essay, trying to make sense of a vast body of new research in international archives—but the history of drugs also makes fertile ground...
