We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire

by Suzanna Reiss

  By the time the UN commissioners arrived for their expedition in September 1949, the new president of the military junta in Peru, General Manuel A. Odría, had already invoked the work of the commission and the international demand for drug control to justify and explain a number of Supreme Decrees issued earlier that year. These decrees defined the illicit market specifically as the unregistered traffic in “cocaine” and introduced a paradigmatic shift in state-run drug control policy away from a question of public health and toward a new punitive approach centered on aggressive policing and market regulation. Defining and policing the “illicit” was facilitated by the establishment of a national coca monopoly to control “the sowing, cultivation, and drying of coca, its distribution, consumption and exportation,” and to limit coca’s industrialization, its processing for medicinal purposes, to the government.38

  The United States publicly and enthusiastically welcomed these initiatives. FBN Commissioner Anslinger publicly praised Odría’s efforts in Time magazine. Collaboration between the FBN and the Peruvian police had in fact led to a much-publicized cocaine trafficking bust, which along with the pending UN “enquiry,” was used as public justification for the new harsher legislation introduced by the Peruvian government.39 Not mentioning the FBN’s involvement (perhaps so as not to inflame political currents opposed to US imperialism), the military government nevertheless situated these initiatives within an international context.40 El Comercio, a popular Lima newspaper and media outlet for General Odría’s government and the Lima social elite, reported that these decrees were passed because of the government’s “desire to extirpate drug addiction from the country and avoid the trafficking of cocaine by unscrupulous individuals, Peruvians and foreigners, that have assaulted the national prestige.”41

  While previously Peruvian officials had invoked national sovereignty to challenge international efforts to control the domestic coca leaf economy, now Odría invoked the nation’s modernization and international prestige to justify consolidation of control over the domestic economy and the deeper integration of this economy into the international drug control apparatus. By instituting these decrees and taking aggressive action against “unscrupulous individuals,” Odría was capitalizing on international calls for drug control to garner domestic and foreign support for the new military regime. It also reflected one direct consequence of the UN- and US-inspired heightened policing of cocaine: the “birth of the narcos” whereby a “wholly new class of cocaine trafficker” appeared on the international scene after 1947, connected to a Peruvian cocaine industry that until that point in time had been legal.42 As the Peruvian economy and social control apparatus were further integrated into a US-dominated hemispheric order, the line delineating licit and illicit markets became a powerful economic and political tool, which relied on the demonization of cocaine and “cocaine traffickers,” even while securing supplies of coca leaves for export to US pharmaceutical manufacturers of cocaine.43

  Political power accrued to those who embraced the drug regulatory regime. The military coup that brought Odría to power in October 1948 ousted José Luis Bustamente Rivera, who had come to the support of the nationalist (anti-imperialist), populist, though explicitly not communist, party Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA). When divisions between Bustamente’s government and Aprista dissidents resulted in a naval mutiny in the Lima port of Callao, the military intervened and installed Odría as Peru’s new president, foreclosing the possibility of an official political turn leftward. When the founder and leader of APRA, Victór Raúl Haya de la Torre, sought political asylum in the Colombian Embassy, General Odría argued the request should be denied on the grounds that he was a common criminal rather than political refugee, prompting a case that dragged on for years before the International Court of Justice. He based this charge on information gathered from his collaborations with the FBN in relation to the recent bust of a cocaine trafficker with Peruvian connections in New York.44 “Cocaine” then, as now, was a fungible commodity. For Odría, the battle against a “cocaine trafficker” (and founder of the socialist APRA party) consolidated his domestic power while augmenting his international political capital with the United States.45 Odría perhaps learned this not uncommon McCarthy-era tactic from FBN Commissioner Anslinger himself, who regularly invoked the spectacle of the “communist dope-pusher” to advance his agenda.46 More than simply currency in a play for US support, Odría traded in drug scandal domestically. The frequent spectacle of cocaine trafficking busts reported in the Peruvian media helped to criminalize domestic political dissent while giving legitimacy to the coercive measures the military junta was using to consolidate its control.47 The political manipulation of criminal enforcement was becoming an increasingly common tactic in the Andes (and throughout the world) as the drug control regime gained traction. It is worth noting that in the early 1960s Bolivian labor leader and Vice President Juan Lechín would be forced into quasi-exile, based on, as historian Kenneth Lehman has argued, “trumped-up charges of cocaine trafficking.”48

  The spectacle of the drug bust was deployed as a political and economic weapon by the Peruvian government as it selectively licensed cocaine manufacturers and pursued criminal investigations to prevent seepage into the newly “illicit” realm. Government legislation and a series of spectacular media reports on criminal cases in the spring of 1949 helped delineate the line between licit and illicit cocaine, throwing former legitimate manufacturers onto the wrong side of the law. In one such incident, El Comercio published the mugshots of fourteen men, finely attired in business suits, accused of the crime of cocaine trafficking. The cocaine had been manufactured at the factory of Andrés Avelino Soberón in Huánuco. Soberón, a licensed manufacturer, was accused of producing cocaine in excess of his government contracts.49 The chief of police publicly attacked the “traffickers” for their luxurious lifestyles and their “ill-gotten wealth,” airing a populist appeal to the masses as the new regime sought to legitimate its rule.50 As the government consolidated its control, enforcing the new legislation, it literally created the illicit economy and numerous pharmacists, formerly legitimate manufacturers of cocaine, became embroiled in the “illicit” trade. This gave the government the power both to determine who could participate in the legitimate coca-commodities trade and to wield a powerful symbolic weapon attacking “criminality” in the struggle to consolidate political and economic control.

  While the Peruvian military junta joined US efforts to designate and then crack down on the illicit traffic in cocaine, it sought to reserve a realm of legitimate production by invoking national heritage in defense of the coca leaf. The government declared it was the state’s duty to “defend the national heritage, represented by investments in the cultivation of this valuable plant whose application by scientific means produces great benefits for humanity.”51 In the decree that created the national coca monopoly, the government conceded the dangers that the chewing habit might have for the Indian population, while insisting that the taxation and industrialization of the raw material was of value to the national economy. Both Peru and Bolivia sought to hold on to their sovereign ability to utilize coca leaves as raw material for national economic, industrial, and scientific development, even if they were more ambivalent about protecting Aymara and Quechua consuming practices. In this regard, both governments acceded to the policing of the illicit cocaine economy, but limiting the raw material—the coca leaf—posed more obstacles for national elites. Despite these reservations, it became increasingly difficult for Peru and Bolivia to influence the terms of national participation within the international “legitimate” drug trade once the entire commodity chain was incorporated into the international drug control apparatus and economy.52 This was accomplished on the one hand through hemispheric police collaboration and on the other hand through UN mediation. With the intervention of the UN commission, efforts to restrict coca leaf cultivation to that destined for export into the “legitimate” cocaine (and Coca-Col
a) trade relied almost exclusively on attempts to control Indian land, labor, and consumption while marginalizing the aspirations of Andean country elites to develop their own industrially produced coca-derived commodities for the world market.

  UN INVESTIGATORS AND PERUVIAN SCIENTIFIC DEBATES

  From September through November 1949 UN representatives of the Commission of Enquiry on the Coca Leaf traveled through Peru and Bolivia, visiting regions tied to the cultivation, distribution, and consumption of coca. It became clear only moments after the commissioners descended from their New York flight onto the tarmac at Lima’s airport that the commission’s primary objective, couched in a social scientific language of “development assistance,” was to convince the Peruvian and Bolivian governments to structure the Andean coca market according to their emergent principles of international drug control. Howard Fonda, the US pharmaceutical executive and head of the UN commission, announced to the assembled reporters that his goal was to study the negative impact of coca leaf chewing on the indigenous population and determine what needed to be done to eliminate it.53 The chairman’s explicit comments ignited a fire in the Peruvian press; reporters publicly questioned why the UN investigators were there if they already knew the answers to the questions they were purportedly arriving to study. The commission quickly distanced itself from these statements by issuing a press release claiming the UN emissaries held no preconceived opinions; they were there to pursue an objective scientific study of coca’s place in society.

  The UN delegates’ subsequent three months of travel through Peru and Bolivia proceeded relatively smoothly, with the active assistance and cooperation of national government officials and their specially delegated liaisons—the Chief of Narcotics of the Peruvian government and a representative from the Bolivian Ministry of Public Health.54 The Peruvian and Bolivian governments both established special commissions to study the issue in conjunction with the UN commission’s work, and regional newspapers reported regularly on the progress of all parties. The commission’s final report, the Report of the Commission of Enquiry on the Coca Leaf, outlined its work methods and described how the delegates sought out contact with local civil authorities, military personnel, and with “the medical profession, pharmacists and academic circles . . . in all the localities visited.” In addition, “whenever possible the Commission endeavored to make contact with existing agricultural, industrial and other employers’ or workers organizations,” although it is not clear in trip documentation or the final report how successful these efforts were or what impact they had on the ultimate recommendations of the United Nations.55 It seems the UN commissioners did not solicit opinions from Indian coca leaf cultivators or consumers themselves—except, as described below, in the form of scientific research into the physiological effect of coca leaves on their bodies.

  Due to the paucity of documentation, it is difficult to gauge popular reaction to the UN mission outside official circles. It is clear many communities were very concerned. When Bolivia’s Minister of Public Health and Hygiene welcomed the UN commissioners to the country, he was forced to address the widespread alarm that talk of coca eradication had already generated. He assured the public the commission’s investigation should proceed, “Without apprehension or nervousness among any social classes, [since] the object [of the commission‘s work] is to try to determine as final proof, if coca is a great tonic as it is considered to be among our indigenous masses, or a toxin that must be eliminated.”56 Debates among Peruvian scientists about the effects of coca on the Indian body and social development became a critical frame of reference for the UN commission, which drew upon a scientific discourse to pressure for an economically based system of limitations and controls.57 This focus was not merely an external imposition, but very much a product of local scientists’ incorporation into a US-dominated drug research network. These scientists depended on private and public capital to finance their research and to sustain political support for their work. Both Dr. Carlos Monge and Dr. Carlos Gutiérrez-Noriega, the two primary adversaries in the Peruvian debate, had studied and taught at US universities and maintained ties with various North American institutions.

  Monge drew upon his work as the director of the Institute of Andean Biology to defend Indian coca consumption as a natural, harmless component of a high-altitude environment inhabited by the racially specific “Andean man.” This line of reasoning, grounded in the racial stratification of Andean society, relied on the idea that “the Andean man is a climactic-physiological variation of the human race”58 in order to challenge the notion that coca leaf chewing reflected pathological behavior. He leveled this argument as an Indigenista, paternalistically protecting the Indians from those who would disdain them as uncivilized or backwards. Nominated by the government to preside over the National Committee on Coca, an investigative body created in response to the UN initiative, Monge’s views carried considerable weight. Monge’s prominence in scientific and political circles in Peru both bolstered and was facilitated by his international connections. Interest and support for Monge’s Institute of Andean Biology came primarily from US-owned mining companies, the US Air Force, and livestock breeders of the central highlands, all of whom were interested in maximizing (worker/ soldier/animal) productivity at high altitudes.59 Thus, a nexus of national and international medical, military, and business interests facilitated the scientific research that became so central to debates about coca.

  These institutional ties were facilitated by personal contacts. When the UN commission arrived in Lima, Monge was on tour in the United States, where he attended the Congress of Americanists organized by the American Anthropological Association and gave a presentation before the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization on “Physiological Anthropology of the Inhabitants of the Altiplanos of America.” He returned to Peru in the midst of the UN visit to preside over the International Symposium on High Altitude Biology sponsored by Monge’s own institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Institution. The symposium was convened “to understand the new Andean biology and anthropology and the social and racial conduct of high-altitude man.”60 It attracted not only the UN commissioners themselves who participated in a number of the sessions, but also an array of prominent US officials, including the chief of US Air Force Medicine and the directors of the US Naval Medical Research Center and Army Chemical Center.61

  Gutiérrez-Noriega, based at the Institute of Pharmacology and Therapeutics of the University of San Marcos, Lima, did his own tour of US scientific circles in 1949, lecturing at the Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics and at the University of Wisconsin.62 His work turned to coca as an explanation for what he viewed as the uncivilized state of Andean Indian society, arguing, for example, that the “influence of the drug through many generations may have some importance as a creative factor in psychological disturbances and racial degeneration.”63 Gutiérrez-Noriega’s work fundamentally influenced the UN commission’s report and was well received in the United States, even being translated for publication in the popular magazine Scientific Monthly. Introduced by the editors as the “first sustained study of [Indian coca use] in English,” Gutierrez-Noriega’s work asserted that coca leaf chewing was detrimental “drug” consumption: “In general, coca chewers present emotional dullness or apathy, indifference, lack of will power and low capacity for attention. They are mistrustful, shy, unsociable, and indecisive. In advanced stages many of them are vagabonds.” This narration began by representing coca leaf chewing as a social dysfunction and flowed easily into its presentation as a veritable reflection of criminal proclivity, making people not just “unsociable,” but “vagabonds.” Such arguments blurred the line between cultural practice and racially based notions of cultural, or even genetic, supremacy that increasingly were being articulated—in both the United States and the Andes—through the extension of a coercive penal apparatus.64

  Although circulating in the same institutional networks and
sharing a debate centered on Indian coca consumption, Monge and Gutiérrez-Noriega viewed each other as rivals, and indeed, their work approached the question of Indian coca leaf chewing from fundamentally different perspectives. Gutiérrez-Noriega attacked coca as generating Indian pathology whereas Monge saw it as a legitimate cultural practice of a unique—even super—human species. There was, however, considerable room for convergence between these two poles; both scientists relied on either debasing or idealizing the scientifically objectified “Indian.” Members of the Peruvian National Coca Commission headed by Monge praised Gutiérrez-Noriega’s work while emphasizing the need for more study. Dr. Fortunato Carranza suggested that research thus far had only produced “a state of confusion.” He also emphasized a point central to the national and international debate: the role of nutrition. While Monge defended coca chewing as a necessary and beneficial practice of Andean man, Gutierrez-Noriega saw it as fueling a vicious cycle of malnutrition. Carranza took a line somewhere in between, reflecting the spectrum of the debate—and the currency of racialized thought—in Peru. He acknowledged coca’s usefulness in dealing with the physiological effects of high altitude, yet claimed it numbed Indians to the hardships of life, robbing them of their initiative to improve themselves: “after chewing coca, one feels compensated for all the frustrations one’s had in life.”65

  THE REPORT OF THE UN COMMISSION

  In the wake of its consultations with local scientists, government officials, and business leaders the UN commission recommended that national governments implement policies for policing coca circuits not tied to the “legitimate” North American market, creating through legislative action what came to be called the “illicit drug trade”: a legal framework for controlling the circulation of both cocaine and coca leaves. The United Nations also recommended that Andean governments set about eradicating the widespread indigenous practice of chewing the coca leaf. Despite some resistance, the general tenets of drug control were accepted in the Andes (even though the effort to eliminate coca leaf chewing was never successful and remains practiced and defended by indigenous people to the present day). At mid-century the Bolivian government agreed with international drug control officials that scientific investigations into chewing coca leaves constituted the appropriate mechanism for resolving the issue. And in Peru, after establishing a national coca monopoly, the government hoped to “to limit, for now, and eradicate in the future, this general custom, in defense of the indigenous population.”66 The “defense” of indigenous peoples through the eradication of age-old cultural practices drew upon an Andean elite paternalism shared by UN regulators who explicitly defined coca’s hazards in terms of the racial and economic status of its consumers: “Not all Indians are coca-leaf chewers, though the great majority are. Moreover, chewing is practised among the mestizos, although to a much smaller extent. The very few whites who chew coca leaf must be regarded as isolated cases, and not as a social problem.”67