ThePre-ColombianEraofDrugTraffickingintheAmericasCocaine1945-1965..pdf

THE "PRE-COLOMBIAN" ERA OF DRUGTRAFFICKING IN THE AMERICAS: COCAINE,1945-1965* Gootenberg, Paul . The Americas ; Berkeley 64.2 (Oct 2007): 133-0_7.

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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

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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 a long legitimate industry; run out of Peru, it incubated after 1952 in the

revolutionary chaos of neighboring Bolivia. Loose smuggler corridors sprang up across Chile, Cuba, Brazil, and

Argentina, linking Latin American cities with urban drug scenes. Early cocaine resembled criminologists'

spontaneous "disorganized crime" or petty "ant trades," taking root in the gray area between legitimate and

criminal commerce, and dependent on older Andean coca circuits.5 In the second phase from 1959-64, cocaine

consolidated itself into more systematic growing, processing, and smuggling circuits. Its watershed was the 1959

Cuban revolution, which sent veteran Cuban drug mafiosos across the Americas, including into the United States.

After 1960, when Bolivia, then cocaine's incubator, fell under U.S.-style drug control, coca-growing peasants

flooded into lowland jungles, lending the export a now unstoppable social base. By 1965, at the height of U.S.-

backed modernizing regimes in the region, a commodity chain built by unsung chemists and smugglers linked

Amazonian peasants to distant pleasure users in the north.

Based on newly-declassified DEA archives, this article revolves around these shifting transnational geographies of

nascent cocaine. The first section deals with the politics of cocaine in Peru from 1947-50, during the drug's final

turn from a legal commodity to an illicit one after World War II. The second section turns to the emerging narco

corridors crossing the borders of 1950s Chile, Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico by 1960, a pan-American

smuggling class catering to novel tastes for cocaine. The essay ends on Bolivia's revolutionary merger of peasant

coca and cocaine, prelude to illicit cocaine's take-off of the mid-1960s.

PERU: BIRTH OF THE ILLICIT

The lush montana of east-central Peru below the town of Huanuco, botanic cradle of the coca plant, was for six

decades after 1890 the capital of Peru's legal cocaine industry. The same site became, after 1950, the seedbed of

illicit cocaine that would famously flourish in the Huallaga valley during the 1980s. By 1947, Peru's clutch of

surviving cocaine-makers, led by trader Andres A. Soberon, saw few prospects ahead through encroaching anti-

cocaine politics and law. In May of 1949, after drying a final 77-kilo load, Soberon ended a 30-year quest to revive

the industry, officially closing his "Huanuco" factory. At the same time, his son Walter, the mayor of Huanuco,

resigned from the hounded left-wing Peruvian APRA party. Soberon retired to Lima, ceding his equipment to the

new state lab at the Ministry of Public Health.6 As cocaine-making became off-limits, another option arose: petty

contraband up the Pacific coast.

These highly local changes were the outcome of global shifts in the history of cocaine stretching back to the turn

of the century, when Huanuco had placed on world markets 10 tons of "crude cocaine" sulfides using simple

Peruvian technologies. Advancing world legal restrictions on cocaine, a missionary movement spearheaded by the

United States since 1911, were finally taking effect here. Without going into all the motives or mysteries behind the

American turn against cocaine, a drug once embraced by American medical authorities and consumers, after 1906

cocaine came under a strict domestic control regimen for shrinking medicinal uses. By 1922, all imports of cocaine

halted. U.S. diplomats, who greatly wanted to, had a harder time, however, convincing the rest of the world of the

evil or urgency of cocaine, producers and refiners such as Peru, Germany, Japan, and Dutch Java. By the mid-

1920s, anti-cocaine strictures existed on paper in League of Nations narcotics conventions and in early U.S.

aspirations to stem it at the raw material "source." Little came of these crusades, save for a steady global de-

legitimation of the drug, long ignored in countries like Peru and Bolivia. Until 1945, a multipolar cocaine world

prevailed, with distinctive legal drug regimes actively coexisting in various corners of the globe. World War II ended

this tolerance of cocaine: warfare and U.S. occupations obliterated the relic circuits of Europe and Asia, and the

United Nations, closer to American drug ideals, immediately put coca and cocaine on its agenda.7 In 1947-49, the

UN organized, for pliable cold-war regimes in Peru and Bolivia, a visiting Commission of Enquiry on the Coca-Leaf,

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which brought home to these holdout nations the need to ban cocaine and rein in the cultivation and "chewing" of

native coca. By 1950, Peru, under highly political circumstances, outlawed cocaine and issued a range of punitive

drug controls. Bolivia, rocked by revolution, and more nationalist about its coca-leaf, took another decade to

comply with the U.S. campaign to close cocaine's last legal spaces.

What is striking about that fading multipolar world was the scant impulse it gave to illicit cocaine. To be sure, there

had long been some recreational use of cocaine, and illicit sales, but both fell into severe decline by the 1920s.

Cocaine had never spawned any organized form of illicit production or systematic traffic from producing zones.

The United States suffered a well-known cocaine "epidemic" at the turn of the century, during the drug's legal era,

yet for dimly-understood reasons cocaine use plummeted after 1917. The prohibitions of the 1914 Harrison Act

may have helped in a limited domestic sense, but other factors prevailed: strict self-regulation by pharmaceutical

firms and dentists, a tightly organized political-economy of cocaine control based on the regulated centralized

import of coca by two cooperative New Jersey firms, and even the timely lure to criminal gangs by 1919 alcohol

prohibition or more addictive heroin during the 1920s. Cocaine "fiends" died out or switched vices and contraband,

if at all, came from locally-diverted medicinal stock. In Europe, colorful urban cocaine scenes persisted longer into

the 1920s and 1930s, but invariably relied on sporadic heists of pharmacy vials. During the 1930s, accusations

sounded of a Japan-sponsored stealth Asian narcotics trade from colonial Formosa, but the evidence is scant for

cocaine. The notable fact was the absence of border-crossing cocaine trades after the initial bans on cocaine. For

example, the State Department's infamous "Name file" of inter-war drug traffickers lists hundreds of suspects for

heroin and other opiates and not one wanted for cocaine; similarly, a 1930s League of Nations' campaign to

suppress illicit labs never found any for cocaine.8 The sole Andean on the U.S. blacklist was Carlos Fernández

Bácula, a Peruvian diplomat who plied heroin in Europe. The FBN's annual reports of the 1930s celebrated

cocaine's disappearance-measured in ounces if found, and by 1938 "so small as to be without significance"-as if

this were due to the Bureau's vigilance.

The economy of cocaine also fell in steep decline. The legal Andean boom of the 1890s spurred efficient rival

colonialist coca-cocaine industries in Java and Formosa. Peruvian prospects dampened by the 1920s, when it sold

a mere 500-1,000 kilos per annum, at plummeted prices, mainly to Germany or France. Colonial competition

vanished in the 1940s, but advancing U.S., League, and UN restrictions and quotas pushed "legitimate" medicinal

demand under 400 kilos by the late 1940s, easily covered by war surplus.9 Most producers, the 8-10 part-time

workshops left in Huánuco, a few elsewhere in Peru, and none in Bolivia, diversified into other ventures. Yet despite

a rising outcry against a now "backward" coca habit, Peruvian coca crops grew from 6 to 10 million tons in the

1950s alone, oriented to a thriving peasant home market. Bolivia's 2 million-ton harvest soared in the late 1950s,

linked like Peru's, to colonizing Amazon frontiers.

The first documented case of South American cocaine smuggling dates from 1939. Undercover officers on

Brooklyn's 16th Street pier nabbed Ramon Urbina, a Chilean sailor, after he offered his Puerto Rican partner a

250gm sample of cocaine carried from Chile. The evidence went overboard during a scuffle with crewmen of the

Copiapó, but Urbina later pled guilty, receiving 2 ½years. The next incident, eight years later, marked more of a

trend: in October 1947, Peruvian informants warned that the Santa Cecilia, a Grace Line ship, had cocaine onboard.

Police seized steward Ralph Roland in Weehawken, N.J. "in possession of slightly over a pound of cocaine."

Betrayed, he confessed that "Peru was wide open for purchase of cocaine" from customs agents in Callao. Two

months later, Alfonso Ojen, a naturalized American ship-waiter was arrested in Callao harbor with "2 bottles

containing 14.4 gms cocaine" hidden in his bunk.10 Ojen's steamer the Santa Margarita sailed on to Brooklyn,

where he was questioned by FBN agents, who were unable to trace his source. FBN reports of 1945-47 collate

eight such ship seizures of probable "Peruvian origin." Something new was afoot.

In December 1948, Salvadore C. Pena, a New York customs agent, filed a Confidential Memo to the FBN based on a

special "two-month undercover operation." In this dirty work he had befriended "various Latin traffickers and

smugglers." They confirmed suspicions of "dangerously increasing smuggling of cocaine into the United States"

(emphasis in original). Pena claimed to eye-witnessed "the open trafficking in cocaine especially among the

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extensive Puerto Rican, Cuban and Spanish population in New York City. . . ." The report, a masterpiece of the

genre, warts and all, merits excerpting for its sketch of the sailor-driven drug circuit:

SOURCE: The principal and easiest source of supply for cocaine is located at El Callao, Peru, and at Valparaiso,

Chile. . . . principle [sic] ports of call for boats making the South American run … it is believed the coca leaves

produced in Peru are processed on a large scale, possibly with the under-cover protection of corrupted officials.

INTERMEDIARY DISTRIBUTING POINTS: The loads of contraband cocaine secured by the traffickers at Peru, Chile

and Bolivia are sometimes brought directly to the United States when the boats make a direct run, or if the

contraband is transferred to other boats at Bilbao [Panama] and Havana, Cuba. … Information secured from

seamen … supplied names and addresses of some of the traffickers handling loads of cocaine at Havana, Cuba

and at Callao.

SMUGGLING: When the boats arrive . . . loads of cocaine are brought ashore, especially in the port of New York, by

longshoremen . . . because longshoremen are not searched going through customs. . . . Cocaine is also smuggled

on passenger planes, some traffickers make special trips by car to Miami, where they received their loads, 2 or 3

kilos at a time.

CONSPIRACY: Generally a group of Puerto Ricans or Cubans get together and pool several thousand dollars which

are given to a seaman going to South America. . . . The price usually paid at the source is from $200 to $250 per

gram of pure cocaine. The retail price in New York is from $250 to $300 per ounce, cut cocaine. . . . The peddling of

this cocaine … is usually uptown among the Puerto Rican, Negro and Cuban section of New York and around the

bars and the Latin night clubs around the Times Square area."

Thus by 1948 cocaine was moving beyond individual or opportunistic smuggling, as Pena details in credible terms,

by a loose diaspora of "Latin" cocaine smugglers from Callao to Havana into New York. What is absent from his

account is the refining of Peruvian crude cocaine into marketable powder, or the origins of this new Latin taste for

the drug, which was also starting to seep into New York's "be-hop" jazz scene. Pena notes the difficulty, lacking

informers, of cracking such mobile groups. He drew up an actual plan, which involved sending Spanish-speaking

undercover agents to Peru "acquainted with the idiosyncrasies of the Latins," by which he meant the corruptibility

of local officials. A four-month mission to Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Panama, and Cuba would gather the data necessary

to bring in diplomatic sanctions against the trade. The problem could be blocked at its mysterious source, akin to

operations against prohibition-runners in 1920s Cuba and opiates in 1940s Mexico. Whether or not Agent Pena got

the assignment, within months dramatic cocaine busts-from the Huallaga to Harlem-became front-page news.

The sensational August 1949 arrests of the so-called "Balarezo Gang" were the first modern international cocaine

scare. On August 20, New York's Daily Mirror headlined "SMASH BIGGEST DOPE RING HERE-Seize Leader in City,

Peru Jails 80 … Tied to Peru Revolt." Amid the affair, Time dubbed cocaine "Peru's White Goddess." Balarezo, 49, a

naturalized U.S. citizen, was a ship-steward for the Grace Lines with a slew of contacts in New York and Lima. Born

in Lambayeque in 1900, Balarezo was described in Peru as a bowlegged zambo (black cholo). He had resided

several years in New York, reputedly crossing paths even with crime boss "Lucky" Luciano. After raids on nine

houses, he was picked up while boarding a boat to Italy. According to the federal prosecutor who arrested Balarezo

and six accomplices, he began smuggling cocaine in 1946. Business expanded in 1947 and by 1949 moved some

"50 kilos of pure cocaine" a month, worth a reported $5 million, focusing on the "Harlem district" using two couriers

named Edelstein and Gonzalez. This was surely the Grace Line circuit sketched by Pena in 1948. Only 13 kilos were

captured in New York, said to possess an adulterated street value of $154,000 per kilo. Balarezo owned a mansion

on Long Island, cavorted with Peruvian dignitaries, took on a young mistress, and easily posted a $100,000 bond.

In Peru, the sweeping arrests, including Balarezo's wife Carmen, were engineered by Capt. Alfonso Mier y Terán,

head of the PIP (Peru's FBI), who had spent two months in New York pursuing leads. Among those detained were

"prominent Peruvian businessmen, one of them a known Customs official."

The FBN depicted the trade as an "International Cocaine Smuggling Ring" with some 50 links in greater New York

and Puerto Rico. It took less than a month to convict Balarezo, who received five years and a $10,000 fine, and

other sailors, with the testimony of turncoat Geraldo Tapias Chocano. In a high profile crossover from cold-war

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politics, Balarezo's prosecutor was Joseph Martin, who at the same time was leading the prosecution of Alger

Hiss. FBN Director Harry J. Anslinger waxed triumphant for years: "The suppression of this traffic has averted a

serious crime wave" he claimed, and wrote glowingly of his action in his various drug-fighting books. The scope of

the operation, from New York to Callao and Huanuco, led by New York narcotics agent Garland H. Williams, one of

Anslinger's top field office managers, revealed new forms of U.S.-Peruvian cooperation, involving on its end Peru's

first active drug squad. FBN threat magnification aside, this business had clearly moved beyond the work of

solitary sailors.

In Peru, however, the scandal over illegal drugs was eclipsed by its politics: the claim that Balarezo was an Aprista

militant, ally of legendary APRA chief Victor Raul Haya de la Torre and his brother Edmundo. Balarezo had

allegedly funneled $50,000 of drug money into APRA's failed 1947 naval uprising, which had led to the right-wing

coup of Gen. Manuel Odria. Fed by FBN leaks from New York, the anti-APRA Peruvian military regime and

conservative press reveled in this timely link of narcotics, "Communism"(i.e., the moderating APRA party), and

Haya de la Torre, then holed up in Lima's Colombian embassy. Drugs, arms, and luxury contraband, all traded by a

sinister APRA "cell" in customs, became the focus of Odria's outcry against the "Regimen de los Apristas," the

former Bustamante government. Peru demanded extradition, as Balarezo reputedly bragged of killing seven

loyalists singlehandedly during the 1947 mutiny. For its part El Partido del Pueblo vehemently denied any

connection to drugs, and soon APRA, outlawed in Peru, began a hemispheric press campaign to clear its name.

Alarmed State Department officials, like Harold Tittelman, ambassador to Peru, distanced themselves from the

FBN. Not only was the evidence suspect about Haya de la Torre's ties to Balarezo in New York, but starting in the

mid-1940s U.S. officials were quietly cultivating Haya and APRA as possible anti-communist allies.

Diplomatic historian Glenn Dorn has recently untangled the byzantine politics of the affair.12 The contradictory

and fabricated anti-APRA drug charges, in his assessment, were invented by anti-communist PIP chief Mier y

Terán, and broadcast in New York by the seasoned ex-OSS officer Williams. Anslinger jumped into the fray not only

to invigorate his new anticocaine campaign with cold-war passions, but also to forge a working antidrug

relationship with Odria. Peru was still not a strong ally on drugs. The State Department, on the other hand, enjoyed

sensitive ties to APRA and fragile Latin American democracies generally. Embarrassed by publication of the case's

internal documents and spreading anti-U.S. protests, they demanded retractions from Anslinger and Odria's

ambassador. Outgunned, in April 1950, Anslinger quietly withdrew, but never formally rescinded, the APRA drug

charges.

A key question, apart from the actual scale of the trade, is where Balarezo's group got its cocaine. Where did illicit

cocaine first spring up in the Andes? In a zeal to criminalize the industry, American reports cast suspicion upon a

reported "eighteen" legal or unregistered cocaine factories. Williams talked of two large plants in Huanuco

producing $2 million a year, as well as a chemist who "may" work in "basements." They converted the area's

sulfate-cake staple, crude cocaine-an intermediate product akin to today's pasta basica de cocaina-into saleable

cocaine hydrochloride. William's claims about the capacity of Peruvian cocaine were wildly inflated, as was most

of the evidence filtered through local informers. Sources named for Balarezo included Orestes Rodriquez of

Ferenafe, husband of Alicia Martinez, young go-between her uncles the Torres and Balarezo, and possible FBN

plant. Julio Vázquez reportedly sold 3 kilos to the group in early 1949.13 In mid-1949, Hoover's FBI looked into

Gustavo Padros, a worker in northern cocaine plants and repeated visitor to New York, who began supplying quite

detailed accounts of the industry. Another lead, Hector Pizarro, had brothers said to run a cocaine lab in

Amazonian Pucallpa. Sales moved via "El Chino" Morales, a notorious figure in later drug rap-sheets. Peru's leading

daily, El Comercio, printed similar sorts of allegations.

Odría used such news to tighten both the screws against APRA, with some 4,000 political detainees by 1949, and

cocaine. In April 1949, the last nine licensed cocaine factories closed for good under "special" anti-narcotics

decrees. Mass roundups followed under Peru's new anti-subversive "Law of Internal security." From late April

through May 1949, well before break-up of the Balarezo gang, the military mounted drug sweeps from

Lambayeque, Huanuco, and Huancayo to Lima. Mug shots of the narcos ran in Lima dailies, which hailed the

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offensive and the "timely degrees of the Junta Militar." Authorities uncovered five "clandestine factories" in varied

parts of the country. Peru's 1950 narcotics report to UN details those arrested and convicted for cocaine running,

though it is hard to tell, given the politics hysteria and legal ambiguity of the drug, who was a true trafficker. That

said, among the 70-plus cocaine-related arrests listed for 1949-50 are a number of likely sources: the northern

Ayllon clan; Soberon's associate in Lima Guillermo Carter Suva ("a chemist with a clandestine laboratory"); the

eight-man gang of El Chino Morales and Panamanian businessman José Steel. The UN also names Julio Vázquez

and six others linked to Balarezo, notably supplier Orestes Rodriguez, whose getaway imperiled the criminal case

in Peru. A driver, Pedro Garcia Céspedes was picked up in Huanuco in June 1949 with cocaine refined in Chorrillos.

Leandro Ferreyra, caught on the New York route, pointed to Rodriguez's "clandestine factory" in Ferrenafe for

"drugs sold to the crews of Grace Line Vessels … of Cuban, U.S., Panamanian and Porto-Rican [sic] nationality."

Even without any captured goods, Ferreyra got five years and a $16,000 fine.14 Other cases include Cuban José

Flaifel Mubarack, a very active courier of the 1950s, a local French prostitute Angela Pasqiiero, and a Peruvian

laundress, probably small-time users.

Some ties emerged between the former legal cocaine industry and newly illicit cocaine. By definition, legal

businesses of the 1940s became illegal ones, though still a gray area of commerce until Odria's mid-1949 and

1950-51 dragnets, which netted another 110 drug arrests. Some families, like the venerable Durand clan, had long

diversified from cocaine, becoming prominent in national public life. Several recognizable chemists and minor

figures were among the scores arrested, fairly or not. Some may have viewed stocks of cocaine as hard-won

severance pay when the industry ended, and tried to pawn them on the black market. Others unwitting sold legally-

registered cocaine to traffickers. Garcia Céspedes' crude cocaine came from Huanuco. Soberon, after retiring in

mid-1949, was charged in 1950 with supplying chemist Carter Suva, and sentenced to six months and a 20,000

soles fine. Known figures in illicit sales, Prados (tracked by the FBI in New York), or Rodriquez, had worked in the

legal sector.15 By the mid-1950s, veterans of Peru's legal cocaine surface in new Bolivian exploits. The tropics

beyond Huanuco made for easy escape, so Peru's cold-war campaign against cocaine, inflamed by hatred of APRA,

simply scattered its seeds.

Local archives fill a few gaps. For example, the Huanuco Prefecture shows that in July 1948, after state plans to

monopolize cocaine, José Roncaglioclo of the Bolivar Crude Cocaine Factory, registered to dispatch cocaine to the

Health Ministry in Lima, consigning 21 kilos to one César Balarezo, a possible relation or illicit cover. In northern

Peru, an anonymous tip denounced the "Fabricacion de cocaina clandestina" on the Sacamanca Hacienda in

August 1948, whose license may have lapsed. The owner's sons Ricardo and Santiago Martin Ayllon engaged in

suspicious acts: there was cocaine stashed under farm goods in transit to Trujillo, buyers and couriers in Lima and

Bolivia, and visits to the hotel Bolivar, Lima's favored watering place for foreigners. The informer duly listed

addresses for all the principles. Authorities seized 44 kilos, despite rumors of official protection. In April 1948, this

cocaine lair became front-page news in Peru. Sixty year-old Santiago Ayllon, long invested in legal cocaine,

received 18 months from the National Executive Council in 1950, his sons and accomplices lesser terms.16

The most remarkable allegation, from the FBN itself, concerns Huanuco cocaine patriarch Andres Avelino Soberón,

dedicated to this trade since 1917. If at all true, these could make Soberón, then 68, the "Johnny CocaSeed" of

South American cocaine. In mid-1949, Odría's men closed Huánuco's factories, yet a number of those implicated

later that year as refiners of cocaine paste acquired their stock there. Soberon, now retired, was soon picked up

with other merchants and despite his pleas of innocence, sentenced.

Not much is heard of Soberon until 1953, when a U.S. agent posted a series of secret reports via Ecuador about the

advent of cocaine-manufacturing in Bolivia. He charged that the cocaine sold freely at nightclubs and restaurants

in downtown Lima, especially Silvio Canata Podestá's at Manco Capac 590, originated with Andres and Walter

Soberón. The operation seemed sizable: "paste" (presumably crude cocaine) was manufactured in 25-50 kilogram

lots "which they store in an isolated area some 40 miles northeast of Huanuco." The Soberons, with a prior arrest,

work discreetly. Most dramatic was his claim that "they are responsible for the operation of a clandestine cocaine

laboratory in Bolivia since they sent two cocaine manufacturing experts to the country in 1951." Nelson Alfred

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López, a FBN agent in Lima assigned to Carlos Ávalos, head of Peru's narcotics squad, soon launched an inquiry.

He reported that after the 1949-50 crackdown, cocaine-"known in Peru as PICHICATA"-became a staple at such

Lima hot-spots as the Embassy Club, Penguino, and Negro-Negro. The agents then traveled 600 miles overland to

Huanuco to interview its ex-mayor Walter Soberon. Posing as members of "a large Chicago syndicate," they

overcame Walter's reluctance, leading to a night ride to a jungle gathering of the Soberon clan. There, the hosts

unveiled "a sort of hot-house where on a platform about two feet high and covered with leaves and jute … he was

shown 28 bricks of a dark yellow paste purported to be cocaine paste." Soberon demanded an all-or-nothing deal

for the drug cache.17 Later, for a delivery plan, agent Lopez contacted one Raul Wissmar, as usual in the Hotel

Bolívar, "a Peruvian about 32 years old, who will act as future liaison man with Soberón." Agents also mingled in

Huanuco, where locals blamed Soberón for the town's troubles. A storekeeper recounted local rumors of "two

expert workers," Alvaro Salvatierra and Uvalde Recavarren, sent to Cochabamba or La Paz, Bolivia, in an operation

shielded there by a Czech diplomat or Patino tin operatives. This amazing exposé ended by recounting Soberón's

earlier offer to the Ministry of Health to unload "one ton" of cocaine, and warnings of protection high in Peru's

regime.

I am still unsure what to make of these documents, given the unreliability of much FBN analysis. Little came of it.

Soberón was not rearrested, and the family pursued an exemplary life in Lima. Perhaps political protection was at

play, as several Peruvian officials were later implicated in aiding traffickers. Perhaps Soberón, bitter over his 1950

persecution, sold off aging cocaine stock, since an actual Huallaga factory sounds far too risky. As for the link to

Bolivia, it is during this period that illicit cocaine labs pop up in that country's clandestine industrialization of coca,

though this does not require much technical prowess. Peruvians and Bolivians meshed there during the 1950s as

did numerous Cuban and Chilean smugglers. Such links are circumstantial, yet if true, show the wide

repercussions of Odría's war on cocaine.

For the rest of the 1950s, repressive Peru was no longer the center of illicit cocaine-making. Peru had played its

decisive role transforming a historical regional culture of crude cocaine into a new class of product, the "cocaine

paste" of international traffickers. Interested Cuban mafia men continued to scout Peru and repeated arrests and

allegations registered, suggesting the forming of a few criminal careers in cocaine. At least a dozen colorful

reports of smugglers issued from Peru in the decade 1951-61.18 But it is not until the early 1960s, after the impact

of the Bolivian and Cuban revolutions, that cocaine began to return in force to eastern Peru, in Uchiza, Pucallpa,

Tingo María, this time dispersed and socially entrenched, as roads and peasant agriculture advanced into the

Huallaga valley. In Peru, late-1940s smuggling from decrepit factories was crushed with military efficiency by

1950, fanned by the cold-war passions of the first pan-American trafficking scandals. Suppression of legal cocaine

swiftly dispersed the nascent trade across borders, with revolutionary Bolivia the next site of cocaine's evolution

as an illicit drug.

Before examining that key 1950s development, I want to turn to the protagonists and spaces of the new pathways

north of illicit cocaine-through Chile, Cuba, Mexico, and beyond.

CHILE: COCAINE CLANS

Chile, with Cuba, was the major and now forgotten transit route for illicit cocaine throughout the 1950s. In fact the

Chilean corridor, linked to Bolivia, grew sporadically until the early 1970s, when the 1973 coup finally propelled the

cocaine trade to Colombia. Chile's northern desert outposts, Tarapacá, Antofagasta and Arica, far from the capital,

bordered Peru and served as Bolivia's outlet to the sea. Valparaíso sailor clubs had long offered delicacies like

cocaine and it was a port of call for the Grace Line freighters that plied the Pacific coast to the United States.

As early as 1945-47, the FBN speculated from seizures that Chile was the "source" for the cocaine being smuggled

to New York. It was not until the early 1950s, with Peru fading and Bolivia in turmoil, that Chilean narcos moved

beyond courier roles to emerge on their own as risk-taking empresarios. Newly-founded Bolivian labs sent cocaine-

sulfates or pressed coca down the mountains to Arica for refining and smuggling. Authorities complained that

traditional Bolivian coca sales to workers in northern mining camps, banned in 1957, facilitated illicit trade.

By the mid-1950s, Chilean and American authorities clearly identified the multitudinous Huasaff-Harb clan as the

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dominant force of the Bolivian trade, a position they held until a major international bust in 1966. (There were many

spellings: Huasoff, Huassaf, Harv yet one "race: Arabian" in U.S. consular classification.) César Harb, his wife, and

four sons formed the nucleus of this so-called "syndicate," starting out with the sailor circuit of the late 1940s. In

1952 they reputedly built their first two cocaine labs in northern Chile. Rubén Sacre Huasaff, the eldest son,

became the chief refiner, based in Antofagasto and Valparaíso. Luisa Huasaff Harb, his aunt, frequently visited

ostensible relatives in Connecticut; Amanda, another sister, was the "owner-manager of the most renowned house

of prostitution in Valparaíso," according to a detailed 1959 exposé in Vistazo "and has interests in her right in the

traffic of cocaine. The Huasafs are the Borgias of cocaine." The article noted her son René Harb Huasaff as

another large "dope distributor." Their family enjoyed direct ties to Bolivia where Amanda's brother Ramis had

settled. The ring operated with complicity of pharmacists and compromised Chilean police. Indeed, they eluded

arrests for many years with tip-offs from federal police, where they found an ally in Carlos Jiménez, the Sub-Prefect

of Investigations.19 Exports through Arica complemented a bustling domestic pleasure market, with cocaine

"available in most night spots in Santiago," from such local celebrities as the Cuban bongo-drummer known as

"Jimmy." In Chile, it was said "no hay fiesta sin cocaína." The Huasaffs typically used women, overlooked in border

searches, as couriers from Bolivia, although two exceptions were nabbed in 1959. Their Bolivian connection was

no small fish: Luis Gayan, Chileanborn friend of Amanda's brother Ramis in Bolivia, who had incredibly risen after

the 1952 revolution to chief of the "National Identification Service," or political police, under Paz Estenssoro. His

business, involving cross-border protection rackets, scandalized Bolivia in the early 1960s. According to leftist

Vistazo:

All cocaine is sent to Arica, from there it goes to the north, diverting only what is necessary for Santiago . . . the

raw material arrived in [. . .] Santiago's airport, in police envelopes, marked confidential. Other detectives [. . .] were

involved in the handling of these raw materials. The cocaine also arrived by other methods, including automobiles

and passenger aircraft. Bolivian cocaine is yellow and of a disagreeable odor [sulfides.] After treatment it acquires

a white, almost metallic color. It is then mixed with boric acid and bi-carbonate so that a kilo of pure cocaine is

converted into three of 'Pichicata' [i.e., Peruvian term]. One package of cocaine contains a gram.

That same year, 1959, Chile accounted for half the cocaine seizures at U.S. borders, some 985 gms alone on the

hapless Humberto Figueroa and Jesse Colson. In Chile, INTERPOL reported 1.2 kilos captured from a seven-man

Santiago gang, aptly composed of five Chileans, a Cuban, and a Bolivian. Authorities rounded up more Bolivian-

Chilean traders in 1960 and 1961, and in 1962 recovered 288 kilos of coca from a "public highway, on a donkey's

back," plus 800 kilos of leaf netted during a police raid in Arica. In 1962, a courier named Williams was convicted

for a kilo of Chilean coke found in a New York safety-deposit box. A 1962 UN report quoted authorities in Chile

about a growing trend with 6 HCl seizures totaling 3 kilos between June and July 1960: "illicit traffic in Chile is

much greater than previously thought . . . our efforts must be continued and steadily intensified."20

Ramis Harb, self-described "hijo de árabes," later testified about the routes of this family enterprise. The clan

initially piggy-backed on the well-trodden Panama-Cuba route. By 1952, Ramis was ferrying cocaine from Bolivia

directly to Mexico "on his own account," where he carefully placed 1-2 kilo packets in safety-deposit boxes of the

National Financiera and Banco Mercantil of Monterrey. He enjoyed more than three Mexican passports. Under the

assumed names, he would personally deliver or send by courier to his New York contact Enrique Sierra.21

Members of the Huasaff-Harb clan were arrested at least twice during the 1960s, after the 1959 downfall of their

police protector Jiménez. Their prosecution, however, mainly served to disperse cocaine into a more competitive

enterprise employing hundreds of Chileans. After 1960, ever more cocaine moved via Mexico. In early 1963, a

woman ensnared in Mexico with 4 kilos from Arica led police, in the words of Antofagasta's consul, to "the house

of Huasaff, a complete laboratory for processing of cocaine. The center of distribution activities was a restaurant

known as 'El Polio Cojo" [The Lame Chicken] . . . Huasaff declared that the drug laboratory was a legacy of his

father and that he had not been involved in the drug traffic for years." Those last words suggest a true family

business. Captured records showed many forays to Bolivia. "A peculiar fact of the case" was the defense of the

group by Arica's Departmental attorney.22 The Huasaffs' last hurrah came in June 1966, when the core of the clan

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was caught with a "large clandestine laboratory" after a botched late 1964 bid to run 10 kilos through Kennedy

Airport using the mule Juanita Bradbie. The conviction of six local New York co-defendants, including Sybil

Horowitz, reveals a burgeoning U.S. network. A massive sting in Chile soon brought down Luisa "Huassaff," her

husband René Hard-Huasaff, brother Ramis, and his live-in companion.

Chileans had evolved from part-time smugglers into organized international drug rings, with many emulators

across the Andes by the mid-1960s. In 1966, the UN, reviewing local police reports, counted more than 460 Chilean

cocaine runners, with more arrests to come in 1967. Cracking the Huasaff clan had opened a floodgate. They

tagged the Chilean corridor as one of three thriving cocaine routes to the United States (along with Peru-Panama-

Mexico and Bolivia-Brazil-Caribbean). Bustling border barter trades laundered drug profits, helping sellers adapt to

the turbulent early 1970s. UN experts dubbed Chile "an important producer of cocaine" with a dozen significant

"organizations." A proverbial "cartel de Santiago" lured foreign mobsters like Uruguayan Adolfo Sobosky.23 Rising

political tensions with the United States put drugs into the optic of anti-communism. Yet, a congressional report of

1973 lauded the drug policy cooperation of the Allende regime, even after the politically-tainted 1970 "Squella-

Avendaño" smuggling affair. Chile's path in democracy and drugs was interrupted by the events of September

1973, which became the final push to the opportunities grabbed by Colombians in coming years.

CUBA: COCAINE CULTURE

Cuba was the hub for burgeoning international cocaine traffic and tastes during the 1950s, a role that is better

known than Chile's. Havana was among the first post-war global sin capitals, with roots in Prohibition, where

offshore gangsters rubbed shoulders with their "Latin" counterparts from Chile, Panama, Argentina, and Mexico,

amid the haven of corrupted regimes of Prío, Grau and Batista (1952-58). Havana's notorious gambling and

pleasure clubs, and freewheeling prostitution industry, became the era's pioneer test-markets of cocaine. The

spreading modern taste for cocaine, including among curious American tourists, was a Cuban invention, worthy of

its own cultural history. A vibrant new pan-American "mambo" culture superceded the relic blues inflection of prior

recreational cocaine.24 By 1950, Cuban couriers were venturing out in search of cocaine's ingredients, and by the

mid-1950s Cuban labs prepared Andean cocaine for distribution in the United States. The 1959 revolution, by

driving out drug dealers, marked a sea-change for cocaine, as this Cuban capitalist diaspora sought havens from

Mexico to Miami.

Cuban traffickers, such as Abelardo Martínez del Rey had been scouting Peru by 1948-52, and as opportunities

arose in revolutionary Bolivian paste, they quickly shifted operations there. By the mid-1950s, Havana had emerged

as the capital of this inter-American cocaine culture and commerce. In 1954, Cuba saw two major seizures over 3

kilos. Mi Conlico estate near Havana housed a lab; police seized "prepared cocaine," raw cocaine, coca, a false-

bottom suitcase, and "ether, camphor, acetone and laboratory apparatus such as test-tubes and fake labels

marked 'Merck." Chemist Aulet Curbelo, 50, got away, but police later apprehended accomplices including Oscar

Méndez Pérez in Brooklyn, who received five years. A 1956 seizure of 2.7 kilos in New York originated in Cuba. By

now, INTERPOL regarded Cuba as the main "staging-point" for Bolivian cocaine entering the United States. In 1957,

alarms sounded with the seizure of more than 12 kilos of coke in Cuba, an enormous haul for the time. In 1958,

police came upon a "clandestine laboratory" with 700 gms of finished HCl at the Residencia Fontanar in Havana.

The "possessor and chemist" was José Ríos Benze, alias "El Gallego Ríos." However, Cuba's most talked about

traffickers were two Lebanese merchants, with a long record and jail-time in opiate trades-José Flaifel Moubarak

and his father Nicolás Flaifel Yapur (alias "Flyfel") and José Gabriel Pérez Fernández. Flaifel was implicated in

several Peruvian cocaine rings of the early 1950s and later Bolivia schemes.25 The extended González clan

(Esther, Armando, Ramón among them) also threw themselves into cocaine and by 1960 had dispersed to

Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States. Bolivia's colorful trafficker, Bianca Ibáñez de Sánchez, worked her

Bolivia-New York route with pit-stops in Cuba until her arrests after 1959. In 1958, a mysterious Bolivian, probably

Ibáñez, bribed their way out of Cuba after caught with 26 kilos. Andean police archives of the 1950s trace the

comings-and-goings of Cuban buyers, the trade's core intermediaries: Miguel González, Gustavo Portelo, Martínez

del Rey, José Ara, Régulo Escalona, Méndez Marfa, all with trademark Cuban aliases, to name a few.

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It is hard to say how much "organization" there was to this new transnational crime. Few signs point to

intervention by North American mafia figures in Havana. It seemed like a strictly Cuban or Hispano-American affair,

of tough homegrown smuggling outfits, perhaps following the example of foreign heroin dealers. The first visible

year of Andean contraband, 1947, was also the year of Lucky Luciano's post-war effort to settle offshore in Cuba,

before FBN pressures forced him out because of his alleged ties to heroin trades. During the Balarezo case,

Anslinger desperately sought to link the two flows. Meyer Lansky and company swelled 1950s Havana, mixing with

the locals until both the revolution and the development of a new capitalist paradise in Las Vegas drew them away.

Cocaine was a new natural sideline to the other entertainments of Batista's Cuba, gambling, cigars, women, and

great music. Oral and popular mafia histories spin a similar tale: the proactive role of Cuban nationals, including

those in the United States, promoting cocaine, in part as a result of the FBI assault on American mobsters after the

1950 Kefauver Hearings. In the 1960s, the American mafia then peacefully ceded domestic markets to Cubans

cocaine retailers. Officials portrayed this as a "highly-organized" trade:

Cocaine traffic in the United States is almost exclusively by Cuban nationals residing and operating in New York

City. These violators cause large quantities of cocaine to be delivered through professional couriers, mostly

passengers on commercial airliners, directly from Havana to New York. . . . Cuban Traffickers in New York City then

distribute the cocaine to other ethnical groups [African-Americans?] and interstate to criminal associates in

Chicago, Detroit and other large metropolitan cities.26

Castro's 1959 Revolution marked a spike of cocaine found the United States, which rose to 6 kilos and 3 in Cuba,

more than the previous half-decade combined. Smuggling routes noticeably scattered across the Caribbean basin.

Cubans fled to Argentina for secure bases near Bolivia, and left for Mexico to set up distributor labs. The core of

this new professional international cocaine trafficking class was formed by Cuban exiles. In 1959, police netted no

less than 11 Cuban cocaine traffickers, with their signature "false-bottom suitcases." The revolution revived the

once-rival Chile-Mexico corridor. By 1962, Miami had become a second port for cocaine, not surprisingly with its

large exile population, which included gangsters taking what they could. The FBN reported two dramatic seizures

that year, from Gabriella Giralt and eight others, with over 5.5 kilos concealed in Miami and Key West safe-houses.

Pioneer dealers throughout the United States, such as New York's Felix Martínez ("Cubuche") and his brother-in-law

Miguel Uzquiano, were Cuban nationals. Tied in with Mexican mafioso Botano Zeijo, Martínez used a clothing firm

as cover for heroin and cocaine sales from Chile, rising into "a major distributor of narcotics in the New York

area"27

The FBN was fully aware of this dispersing stimulus of Cuba's revolution, detailed in a special "Cocaine Traffic"

memo of November 1961. Its collation of 24 prime cocaine suspects highlighted the Cuban role: "In most of our

cases, where we are able to trace the cocaine back to the source of supply in South America, there is usually a

Cuban involved somewhere along the line. It appears that the Cubans are taking over as middlemen . . . smuggling

the cocaine into this country."28 Cubans reputedly managed all cocaine entering New York, the principal growth

market, as "the only people able to bring cocaine into this country in any quantity or regularity." In "Central

America," which in FBN geography included Mexico, "laboratories are being set up by Cubans who left Cuba

because of the Revolution." The memo noted the widening sources of cocaine, from Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, and

Ecuador, connected by this Cuban diaspora. The list of the two dozen leading cocaine traders in the Americas

started with Bolivians at the source followed by a parade of prominent Cubans: Antonio Martínez Rodríguez, El

Teniente, "a well-known trafficker of drugs in big scale," sighted in Lima in the 1950s, his brother Jorge; Mack and

Modina Piedras, "Cuban functionaries of the regime of Batista"; Cristóbal Pérez; José H. Rodríguez; a woman

Angélica García; Carlos Curbelo, the freed early chemist; Dr. José Regalado, alias "Pepin"; Markos Cárdenas Xiquez

and Humberto Bermúdez Pérez, the last two "known traffickers of drugs." As late as 1962, the FBN felt there were

"important fugitives . . . reported to be living in Cuba at this time and evidently continuing in the cocaine traffic,"

including Louis Binker, a key target of investigations, William Irizarry, Eduardo Berry, and Ramiro Infanzon. The

latter group tapped seamen and women to sneak cocaine north. Another 1962 FBN report "Trafficking of Cocaine

Hydrochloride" affirmed the drug's "dormancy" then "gradual rise until 1959, when it spurts upwards at an alarming

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rate" due to the Cuban-Bolivian connection. The FBN had no less than 43 ongoing Cuba-related investigations

ranging from "California to New York and Michigan to California." Nothing here suggests support or planning by

U.S. mobsters-i.e., this was a national diasporic project.

As it had done with the 1949 scandal with APRA, the FBN tried to paint "Communist" Cuba as a cocaine-lovers'

paradise, in contradiction of their own evidence. In one theory, Batista's flight allowed relatives of ex-president Prío

to reopen his drug emporium. Just months after his triumph in March 1959, Castro felt compelled to answer

Anslinger's inflammatory charges that Havana was "full of cocaine coming up from Bolivia" and Lebanese heroin.

To the U.S. demands to deport American and other "hoodlums," Castro shot back in La Prensa Libre:

We are not only disposed to deport the gangsters but to shoot them. Send us that list and they will see. . . .

Evidently the Commissioner has not heard that there has been a Revolution here and gangsterism, racketeering,

interventionism and similar things have stopped. . . . We shall handle these affairs here with our own means and all

can rest assured that Cuba will not again become a center for narcotics traffic as in the past.29

By the 1961 Rio "Inter-American Coca Consultative Congress," U.S. officials like FBN administrator Charles

Siragusa spent much of their time tracking or complaining about "Communist" propaganda and influence, such as

the warm reception given to Cuban delegate Dr. Miguel Uriquen Bravo. Within a year, diplomacy collapsed with U.S.

rejection of a "Cuban Note on Narcotics": Cuban objections, after the Bay of Pigs, that ongoing FBN drug charges

were part of a "dirty" U.S. plot to prepare the invasion and "discredit the socialist Revolution in Cuba." Among the

final acts of his 30-year reign, Anslinger launched an aggressive disinformation campaign about Cuban cocaine.

"Dope Pours into Cuba," read one of his press leaks about a 14-kilo find, which actually occurred in Mexico.

Anslinger argued Cuba was using cocaine to raise "vast sums" and to drug dissidents, a practice he termed

"Narcotics for psychotics." He boldly claimed "Communist agents" funneled $2 million monthly into New York

alone.30 More likely, Cuban émigrés in this business were fueling the other side, the rightist anti-Castro exile

movement, just as they were to do with the Nicaraguan "contras" decades later. Anslinger, his usefulness outlived,

shortly retired. The Cuban revolution marked a turning-point in cocaine's history to widely dispersed markets, led

by this new class of pan-American career traffickers.

ARGENTINA: COCAINE MAFIAS

Argentina of the venal post-Peronist years resembled Chile as an outlet for Bolivian cocaine of the 1950s-60s, but

with notable differences from its neighbor. Buenos Aires had long hosted overseas smuggling networks of Italian

and Jewish mobsters, whose wares included narcotics. A national tradition of cocaine use had taken root in

popular tango clubs, a site of urban cocaine culture since the 1920s. Rosario's mafia made it the "Chicago" of

Argentina. Northern provinces like Salta and Tucuman, geographically and culturally tied to Bolivia, had sizeable

regional coca-using communities. By the mid-1950s, cocaine dragnets and scandals implicated Argentines, who to

some extent shared in airborne smuggling of cocaine until the early 1970s.

In Argentina, the trade was not dominated by a clan, and its most striking characteristic was the sheer number of

participants. A UN report of 1964, "Illicit Traffic in Cocaine," from the third meeting of the panicky InterAmerican

Consultative Group on Coca-Leaf Problems, targeted Argentina. Organized heists from pharmacies historically

sufficed for domestic use, since Argentina had its own cocaine-processing pharmaceutical facilities. After 1952,

the UN group noted, supplies flowed out from Bolivia: "Federal Police have come to the conclusion that illicit traffic

always uses the same route, i.e. via Santa Cruz, Yacuiba, Salta, Tucman [sic], Córdoba and Buenos Aires, by train

and lorry and also by using port and airport facilities. It appears that Argentina is a victim country and not a transit

country. . . ." The report records 38 cocaine arrests in 1962. A year later, 56 people were "implicated in cocaine

traffic cases," with 3.29 kilos seized on its way to heavily adulterated retail sales; in Salta, a freshly-refined cache

of 848 gms surfaced along the Bolivian border.31 The Bolivia connection sparked scandals among northern

governors and police. Officials also worried about coca-leaf chewing in Indian Salta and Jujay, where even the

middle-class indulged in coca, and with quickened post-war migration, coca markets spread into Buenos Aires. The

UN cited a "greatly exaggerated" early 1960s Geneva expert who put the number of "cocaine addicts" (i.e., coca

users) in Buenos Aires at 20,000, though it was agreed that "Buenos Aires has become the largest centre in South

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America for this narcotic drug."

INTERPOL eyed Argentina as a smuggling entrepôt rather than self-described drug victim. In 1959, they cited two

seizures amounting to half kilo in a mushrooming trade involving Bolivians, Cubans, and "one female trafficker,"

probably Bianca Ibáñez. The most dramatic discovery was a "clandestine laboratory" for refining Bolivian sulfates

was in Ituzaingo, Buenos Aires province, replete with flasks, acids, and "ten liters of a macerated substance." The

lab was clearly export-oriented: according to INTERPOL, "a person had arrived from Havana in order to set up a

drug trafficking organization in Buenos Aires." Those arrested included Lucho Aguillera, an "industrial chemist"

from Santa Cruz, the Cuban Lara Duboe who led them to the factory, the ubiquitous Bolivian trafficker Ibáñez

"supplier of the product dealt with in the laboratory," and her accomplice in Oruro Junto Alba Medina as well as

three overseas traffickers "for whom the cocaine was intended."32 In 1960, someone tipped off police to the

methods of smuggling drugs north aboard Braniff flights, along with "watch parts" "concealed behind the decalage

doors or plates on the plane." In 1961, authorities found 2.5 kilos on six traffickers, including "2 Poles," in a Buenos

Aires flat converted into a "clandestine laboratory" by the Bolivian Vicente Lopez. Arrests continued in 1962, mainly

on highways, such as a lorry ferrying 890 kilos of coca-leaf, though not necessarily intended for cocaine. In 1963,

INTERPOL detailed six more seizures of cocaine stashed "under a motor-car chassis" and "in a chimney." In 1964,

Milton Trigo Paz, a Bolivian, was intercepted in Miami in transit to New York via Buenos Aires with 26 plastic bags

of cocaine containing 840 gms of 77-percent pure cocaine inside a "plastic girdle." By the late 1960s, airport

arrests show opportunistic Argentines tapping drug flights to Miami and Europe. Argentina's post-1966 military

regimes dampened this trade, and, like other South American mules, their role was taken up by Colombians after

1970.

BRAZIL: COCAINE ACROSS THE AMAZON

Brazil shared a long, porous and still uncharted western border with lowland Bolivia and Peru. In the 1950s, fluvial

and land routes for smuggling cocaine arose from Bolivia's new paste zones of Chapare and Santa Cruz. With lively

cocaine scenes in Rio and Sao Paulo, and the Brazilian police's vociferous anti-drug postures, Brazil was seen by

the early 1960s as a key cocaine transit space. Cocaine surged during late-1950s developmentalist moves into the

interior and Goulart's era of weakening central authority from 1961-64.

In 1958, Brazilian authorities issued a special UN report on "traffic in cocaine supplied by illicit manufacturers in

Peru and Bolivia." Cocaine flew to interior Matto Grosso for overland passage to Rio; most of it was siphoned off

internally, but some was smuggled for re-export via Dutch Guyana. Seizures rose from 3.7 kilos in 1958 to 8.4 kilos

in 1959. By the early 1960s, smuggling routes had split and dispersed "as a result of the action taken by Brazilian

authorities." "Cocaine produced in some 20 clandestine factories in Bolivia and Peru came for the most part from

Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Cochabamba, La Paz, Roboré (Bolivia) and from Iquitos, Lima, Fazenda Upini, Sao Camiri

(Peru), and traffickers tend to pass through Corumba" [and 10 other named border-posts]. Apart from a Bolivian

land and Peruvian water route, traffickers had opened a bypass across the Paraguay via Buenos Aires.33

Police spun rich stories about these illicit trails. For example, in Río in May 1961, "the trafficker Alfredo Bello,

Brazilian, owner of several gaming houses and gambling dens, was arrested and 200 gm of cocaine were seized at

his residence." He carried checks from other sellers, Japanese and SyroBrazilians, to buy Bolivian cocaine at

Londrina for $3.90 a gram. A Bolivian smuggler "known as Jorgihno." brought coke into Brazil via Matto Grosso.

Five of his cohorts included "Paulo Santiago Fernández de Lima, alias 'Chicken Stew,' owner of night clubs in

Brasilia" and a TV performer, Luiz Wanderley. "Jorgihno and the Japanese . . . are the main links for the sale and

distribution of cocaine in south Brazil and also work with Josefina Galvano, 'the spook', a Bolivian who is

undoubtedly the brains of the gang and has been living at Santa Cruz de la Sierra since she left Brazil." In May

1961, police profiled an international gang in Caias, composed of "Magnaldi, Peruvian, a gambler owner of a

nightclub at Copacabana; a certain Jesuisino, partner of a woman known as Dora, who keeps a gambling den at

Copacabana, the singer[s] Nelson Goncalves and Roberto Luna." On the Amazon route, they nabbed Genaro

Masulo, an accountant for Amazonas state, and businessman Fabio Garcia de Freites with 1.5 kilos in Manáus.

Hoping to find the source, police reported "Genaro states that he was in contact with a Syrian in Manáus who

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introduced him to a presumed seller of fish in the Manáus market who trafficked in Narcotic drug." Cocaine

originated in Iquitos, Peru, and was sent down-river towards Sao Paulo by José Loureiro of the Manáus Municipal

Aquarium. A mysterious Abraim had put up the Iquitos lab "and hired one of the most expert chemists of Pará [for]

conversion of large quantities of cocaine."34 This collage of hedonistic demi-monde, ethnic traders, and Amazon

smugglers filled police blotters, always on alert against Brazil's sin-loving countrymen.

International police soon joined in the watch. In 1960, the first U.N.-U.S.-sponsored Inter-American Conference on

the Illicit Traffic in Coca-Leaf and Cocaine purposely chose Rio for its meeting place. Brazil produced negligible

coca, but its hardline anti-drug discourse won the privilege. The conference, the first in a series of shrill police

meetings to combat cocaine, tried to find ways to link coca-leaf problems to illicit cocaine. Indeed by the late

1950s, U.S. drug agents had jumped into action in Brazil. In a semi-fictional 1959 account, Undercover Agent-

Narcotics: The Dramatic Story of the World's Secret War against Drug Racketeers, FBN agent Derek Agnew has a

racy chapter on the "Amazon Drama," complete with Amazon speedboat chases. The real-life six-month case in

1956-58 focused on the Corumba rail crossing from Bolivia and a hidden Rio lab, helping Brazilian police to crack

an "extensive traffic in cocaine involving Peru, Bolivia and Brazil" involving 23 arrests. The story was enlivened with

Cuban gangsters, riotous Frenchmen, fast launches, and a lumbering Amazon contraband boat La Belle France.35

In Agnew's self-titled "secret war" against cocaine, he ironically predicted "rich harvests to come."

Despite this crackdown, by 1963 Brazilians typically voiced the hyperbole of "genuine alarm" about "cocaine

addiction" with which it "cannot cope." Seizures shot to 3.4 kilos in 1962, mainly in Sao Paulo, but also in Bahia,

Parana and Guanabara states. By now, Brazilian police mapped out two meandering cross-border flows. "The most

important of these routes starts in Peru, follows the Amazon from Sao Paulo de Olivenca to Manáus in Brazil and

continues to Paramaribo, which is a free port." From here, traffickers shipped cocaine to Italy and the United States

via the West Indies. The second route they sketched began in La Paz, Cochabamba, and Santa Cruz, and wove

through Paraguay or Argentina for sites across Brazil. Federal police soon seized four Amazonian craft used in

"illicit trading of every description." With Bolivia rumors of "500kg of cocaine smuggled into the Brazilian town of

Corumba for onward dispatch to Rio, Sao Paulo and European countries," a problem of "serious proportions" was

"daily growing worse"36

Brazil continued to serve as one of three main flows of cocaine through the 1960s, but was never to become the

massive channel sources predicted, as cocaine drove north through Colombia and Mexico instead. The anti-left

authoritarian 1964 regime, like the later Chilean coup, blunted the potential of Brazil's free-wheeling traffickers.

Only in the 1990s did cocaine return in force to Brazil, with new trans-Atlantic shipment routes, and within the

country's vast slums and pleasure spots, making Brazil today the world's second leading user of the drug.

PANAMA, ECUADOR, COLOMBIA, MEXICO: MODEST STARTS

The FBN flagged all these countries as minor transit points for early cocaine. Mexico's role proved more

portentous, with efforts to test new smuggling routes into the United States and by the late 1950s cocaine projects

with Cuban mafia. Panama, with its prime location as a meeting ground of foreigners, was always a suspect zone

of smuggling activity. U.S. officials distrusted the country's "Arab gold" i.e., Middle Eastern commercial clans, and

worried openly about the vulnerable nation's grasping presidential families, shady nightclubs, and the stop-overs of

Pan-American Airlines. In one intricate 1961 episode, corrupt Peruvian officers exchanged arms and drugs via

Panama to a group of disaffected Cubans. In the mid-sixties, the BNDD assessed a Panamanian undercover agent

working on their behalf, one Rubén Blades-the salsa singer's father-as one of the country's only honest cops.

Ecuador, with no coca culture of its own, was a known stop-over or trading site for cocaine smugglers and

Ecuadorians served as regional couriers. Colombia, on the other hand, barely merits mention as a transit space

during this period. The country's over-zealous mid-1960s coca reports overshadowed the only two known

smuggler incidents, one a Caliense nabbed in Brooklyn in 1961, the other in 1966.37 During the late 1950s, the

scions of one respected Medellín family, the Herrán twins, were implicated in narcotics, albeit most likely heroin, in

a complex affair reminiscent of Peru's rogue diplomatic Bácula clan. A few historians hint at longer Colombian

interest in cocaine, but the evidence shows only episodic offshoots of Cuban projects, rather than revealing any

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emerging trafficker network. Prior to 1970-75, Colombian entrepreneurs overlooked their locational potential in the

new Andean cocaine trades, in favor of traditional pursuits in Caribbean contraband and by the 1960s Santa Marta

marihuana, i.e., "Colombian Gold." Thus, before cocaine's dramatic early 1970s shift to Colombia, global police and

study missions of the 1960s left the country entirely off their cocaine maps.

Nascent Mexican developments were more significant. Mexico enjoyed venerable smuggling traditions, a border

drug traffic with the United States in liquor and heroin, and had a legendary official tolerance to graft. A local taste

for cocaine had taken hold by the 1940s, mainly in upscale brothels, using medicinal-grade drugs diverted by the

same Middle Eastern national mafia behind Mexico's heroin trade.38 By 1952, long-range traffickers, like the

Chilean Huasaff-Harbs, free of Cuban ties, quietly exploited Mexico as their safe-house en route to the United

States. Of the scores of drugs dispatched by air through Mexico, authorities nabbed only a few armed with an

insufficient mordida. Heroin and cocaine traveled together. El Chino Morales and Régulo Escalona, early Cubans in

Peru, carried this mix via Mexican safety deposit boxes in 1955. By the late 1950s, more trade was washing up

from Cuba, including Mexican attempts to process cocaine in CHl labs, by locals tapping Cuban expertise to

diversify from heroin, then under stiff U.S. pressure. The 1955 arrest of Cubans Méndez Marfa and González in

New York with Bolivian cocaine spotlighted Mexico's role. In 1956, 2.7 kilos of Bolivian-Cuban coke traversed

Mexico before being intercepted in New York. Agents arrested Roberta Rodríguez in Chicago in 1958 trying to

unload 190 gms bought in Villa Acuña, Mexico.

In fall 1959, a new type of discovery shook Mexico: "two clandestine laboratories installed in dwelling houses" in

the D.F., along with 6.2 kilos of cocaine, following the arrests of 4 Cubans and 11 Mexican nationals, including five

women. Raw material had been flown directly up from Bolivia. That year cocaine seizures peaked across the

region, with the moves to Mexico reflecting the new Cuban inhospitality for gangster-capitalists. In 1960, in a

spectacular case, a cocaine lab in Cuernavaca blew up, an occupational hazard among novice refiners, obliterating

all but 74 gms of evidence. The FBN fingered the five Cuban González brothers, arrested with 1.5 kilos, though one

had perished in the inferno. The next year, authorities detained four Mexican smugglers. By 1963, sourcing had

branched out to Peru: two Mexican women, María Garrido Cruz and her friend, were hauled in near the airport with

over 4 kilos. Police also stopped Panamanian and Ecuadorian runners crossing Mexico. That year, an ambitious

U.S. sting operation busted "El Lobo," Francisco Samayoa, and two Cubans, who had conspired to ferry Mexican

cocaine to New York. In June 1960, clues from Mérida, a city but minutes by air from Cuba, led police to a large

Mexico City factory, with 7 kilos in processing, run by a team of Mexicans and four Cubans, including again

Méndez Marfa. The FBN 1961 memo detailing the hemisphere's top traffickers clarified this Havana to Mexico

shift. Agents analyzed cases like Raymond González and Nilda Gómez, Cubans who fled to Guatemala and then

Mexico. Not only were Cubans "taking over as middlemen and smuggling the cocaine into this country" [the U.S.]

but "laboratories were being set up by Cubans who left Cuba because of the revolution."39 Castro's moralization at

home gave a boost to Mexican vice.

By 1965, Mexico reached a new plateau of national entrepreneurship, which emerged after the collapse of the

Chilean Huasaff clan, who had long used Mexico routes. In a turbulent early 1960s escapade, police set up Jorge

Asaf-Bala y Escabí, Mexico's most notorious home-grown turco mobster (but no known relation to Chilean

Huasaffs). Asaf, long suspected of Havana-Mexico cocaine deals, confided to undercover agents of his desires to

break into cocaine, hoping to use his ties with underworld figures like José Mayawak Mayer, Manual Sharfin Pérez,

and Salvador Escasi. After Asaf narrowly eluded arrest with 14 kilos of coke in 1964, U.S. agents applied pressure

on his family for cooperation. A year later, authorities caught Asaf with two false-bottomed suitcases from Lima.40

Asaf had hired Ecuadorian chemist Julio Rubeiro Moreno to run a lab "located near the U.S. Embassy" in the Zona

Rosa. At 4 kilos, it was largest Mexican find yet, but Asaf and associates, no doubt protected, slipped away.

Mexicans were confidently taking business into their own hands, having mastered this business from exiled

Cubans. The trend persisted through the 1960s, along with burgeoning exports of national marijuana. By the mid-

1960s, the Andes-Mexico route was one of three drawn in BNDD maps of cocaine aimed at the underbelly of the

United States, and was a prelude to the Sinaloan druglords of the 1980s.

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BOLIVIA: REVOLUTIONIZING COCAINE

Like Peru, Bolivia has a venerable tradition of coca, cultivated in the steep hot yungas ravines east of La Paz and

Cochabamba. Coca was more socially integrated among the Indian majority, proletarian miners, and even urban

elites. The vociferous Sociedad de Proprietaries de Yungas (SPY), led by the Gamarra family, was among the

country's oldest and most central lobbies. Unlike Peru, however, coca-leaf had never "industrialized" at the turn of

the century, due to geographic adversities or the pull of the Indian market itself. No local precedent existed for

cocaine-making or illicit sales, though yungas leaf had a fine alkaloid content. Around 1950, following

displacement of Peru's legal and illicit trade in 1947-50, Bolivia rapidly transformed into a decade-long incubation

site for illicit cocaine. The Bolivian national revolution of 1952 and the sinuous U.S. cold-war politics to reverse it

helped set the stage for the spread of cocaine. The revolution, which abolished the national army, ushered in an era

of statelessness. The country lacked elementary narcotics laws or drug police until the 1960s, facilitating the

growth of a new drug culture.41 Already dirt-poor, Bolivia fell into profound economic turmoil during the 1950s.

Revolution broke the traditional rural order: groups like the SPY lost power in the 1953 agrarian reform, and

invading peasants displaced yungas elites. Other landless peasants were encouraged to migrate to new lowland

colonization zones in the Chapare, east of Cochabamba, or remote Santa Cruz and Beni provinces. By 1960, a re-

constituted Bolivian state, propped up by cold-war U.S. foreign aid, began promoting development of these tropical

regions as a social safety valve. The ironic result of these processes was to provide Andean cocaine a dynamic

social base and illicit space in emerging lowland peasant coca districts. These developments passed through

several discernible stages, which I will trace out: the 1949-55 arrival from the outside of cocaine; the rise of a mid-

1950s national cocaine circuit, exemplified by trafficker Bianca Ibáñez and the paste labs of La Paz and

Cochabamba; the 1961 turning-point of drug-related political scandals and drug repression; and the early 1960s

birth of coca capitalism.

In Bolivia, the birth of cocaine culture was sparked by external actors and influences. In the early 1950s, the FBN

raised the specter that Peruvian Andrés Soberón, ex-boss of Huánuco's cocaine industry, was sending operatives

and chemists into safe-haven in Bolivia. Initial drug arrests and speculations invoked the Peruvian crackdown on

cocaine, which sent Cuban and other smugglers scrambling for new sources of supply. There were many suspect

foreigners at work: Peruvians and Peruvian-Croatian chemists, exiled Germans and Jews, and above all Chilean

Arabs of the Huasaff-Harb clan, strategically positioned in Bolivia.

In March 1950, the FBN's Williams wrote Anslinger from the New York office about "Rumors of Illegal Narcotic

Activity in Bolivia." Williams asserted that "Cocaine traffic is now originating in Bolivia under the direction of

Peruvian traffickers who receive payment for the drugs in Lima, Peru, and Callao, and there afterwards arrange for

the drugs to be distributed from Bolivia to Chilean ports." Odría's Peru had proven too risky, so remnants of the

Pacific coast merchant marine gangs now recruited sailors in Callao for pick-ups of Bolivian goods in

Antofagasta.42 Peruvian police seemed delighted to spotlight Bolivia's new role. FBN intelligence followed the

heels of the first reported Bolivian cocaine deal, an incident at the Hotel Nacional in Obrajes, a suburb of La Paz,

involving Peruvian Jaime Florentine and Argentine Alberto Robinson. The pair was freed when the powder turned

out to be processing soda. The Bolivian press also alluded to cocaine-laden letters to Buenos Aires, a postal trade

originating from an aging government cache of 116 kilos seized from Germans in 1941. New Jersey gangster

Michael Tremontona, it was said, had purchased a Cochabamba alcohol plant as a cover for cocaine. The Czech

consulate also fell under suspicion. A mid-1950 report, which even the FBN admitted "may contain considerable

fabrication," had "communist" agents plying cocaine to Argentina and Brazil, men soon reclassified as "bohemians"

instead. By mid-1950, U.S. authorities officially labeled Bolivia the principal source of cocaine entering the United

States.

A year later, the trademarks of Chilean traffickers appear. Published reports of Chilean police officer Luis Brun

confirmed the rerouting of the Peruvian corridor of 1947-48. "Chile is the base of the traffic with Bolivia," Brun

announced, an opinion echoed in another exposé in La Razón. Bolivian police, who denied any cocaine refining on

their turf, begin working with the Chilean authorities. In October 1951, the first Chileans were arrested in La Paz:

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"Siro-Libanés" including chemist Said Harb, linked to "Mrs. Huasaaf, owner of the Hotel SAVOY at Valparaíso," who

supplied sailors of the Santos line. According to these sources, their de-commissioned lab produced

"approximately 100 kilos of cocaine per month," a major scale if true, including cocaine hydrochloride. The

Chileans "Rames, Ruben and Harbe," however, quickly escaped under Bolivia's flimsy narcotics law, a recurring

event over the next decade. Two years later, authorities discovered a related cocaine lab in Cochabamba when, as

common among novices, it burst into flames. The chemist died and two injured workers, including Judith Polini,

were hospitalized "under police control." Yet, police soon retracted the name "Antonio N. Harb" as part of the gang,

depicting them instead as "Ecuadorians." In a similar move, the implicating cocaine, apart from a hundred kilos of

pressed coca, was reclassified as legal sulfates of soda.43

As the revolution unfolded after 1952, opportunities opened in drugs too. The Huasaff-Harb clan worked Bolivia

continuously during the decade despite their intermittent arrests in both countries. A key to their success was the

protection offered by Luis Gayan Contador, a well-placed Chilean who had fought for Bolivia during the 1930s

Chaco War. After the revolution, Gayan naturalized himself and rose under Paz Estenssoro to Chief of Bolivia's

political National Identification Police, later heading both the Border and La Paz police forces. The 1951 police

source denying the presence of cocaine in Bolivia was Gayan. Amanda Huasaff's brother Ramis Harb in La Paz

knew Gayan well, and his activities would later spark an international cocaine scandal among revolutionary

políticos.

In August 1953 not even Gayan could stem the arrests of a gang involving Ruben Sacre Huassaf ("Chilean of Arab

origin"), José Luis Harb (nominal Bolivian), and six Bolivians of mainly German extraction. Authorities believed it to

be the revamped 1951 gang, working in Bolivia since 1949. The press pictured their labs as "well-equipped,"

inaugurating a 1950s genre based on forensic photos of confiscated drug-refining apparatus. The Huasaff

connection was now clear. Authorities seized a Peruvian journalist, Carlos Camacho, instrumental in exposing the

gang, for "political activities" and for being a narco himself, all the handiwork of Gayan. La Paz newspapers

protested with a call for stricter narcotics laws. Police stumbled upon another lab on Calle Chaco, belonging to

Davíd Fernández, with 60 bags of sulfates and two abandoned suitcases of crude cocaine.44 Again, a Bolivian

judge let the presumed traffickers go. In May 1954, Capt. Manuel Suárez sought FBI aid to jail an international

group, from Cuba, Chile, Argentina, Peru, and Panama, now "out on bail and operating as before from the factory

that was previously raided." Police raided them again. Interrogations produced links with the Huasaff Ramis Harv

and military officer Carlos Zembrano.

By 1955, Sam Levine, a U.S. narcotics agent of later renown, was working to arouse South American editors about

the continental threat posed by Bolivian cocaine. In New York, Cuban cocaine was traced to Bolivian coca and

graft, a conclusion certified by INTERPOL. The 1955 FBN report featured Bolivian cocaine: the largest jump in

seizures since Peru's in 1949 came with the detention at La Guardia of Cuban Régulo Escalona (over a kilo) and

known Cuban traffickers Méndez Marfa and González (over 3 kilos), en route from Bolivia. The typical drug ring of

the fifties had a mix of Bolivians with varied cosmopolitan figures. In 1957-58, the FBN identified a Greek national

Karambelas as "an important cocaine smuggling trafficker," ferrying drugs between his restaurant in Esquintla,

Guatemala and contacts at the Greek consulate in La Paz. Argentine Jews frequently served as couriers, like León

Fruscher, Itzchak Hercovici, Salomo Funtowitcz and Leib Witz, caught in Brazil with Bolivian coke in June 1959, or

the Polish emigrés Zelda and Hersh Freifeld, later nabbed in New York. So did Bolivian-based Germans such as

Puttkammer, Wallschllaeger, Netzeier, Bornemann, and Bosch. Jewish traders and refugees were often pioneers in

the development of global drug smuggling since the 1920s, in Shanghai, Turkey, and the United States. They were

well-placed to pass illicit goods across trans-border communities and networks. One wonders if these contrasting

diasporas in Bolivia, Nazi war criminals and "Hotel Bolivia" Holocaust survivors, ever crossed paths around drugs.

Most accounts still featured stray Peruvians and organized Chileans at the center of the trade. For example, in July

1957, a Dutchman took "five kilograms of cocaine" from Bolivia to a "warehouse on the square of Iquique." In early

1956, authorities named five suspects after a dramatic raid on a La Paz lab, including José Salgado, a "Chilean

national, the chemist who operated the factory." The U.S. attaché noted his ties to "the Chilean group which has

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operated here on and off for some time."45

In 1958, Bolivia's trade was steadily growing, at "30 kilos a month" in the guess of a senior official in the Ministry of

Government. Authorities found another "rude factory" in Las Obrajes suburb with 5 kilos, run by Cuban Rosa Peña

and two Bolivians, notably the chemist Raul Booch. The FBN even knew that "the traffic in cocaine between Bolivia

and Cuba is handled primarily by women who enter the country as tourists and who smuggle the drugs in small

handbags with false bottoms."46 In May, police raided the "largest" cocaine operation yet in La Paz, hidden in Isías

Díaz's shampoo factory, operated by a Peruvian with four locals. The Peruvian chemist was Renado Marinovich, a

refugee from the Croat clan of Huánuco cocaine.

By the late-1950s, however, a native Bolivian trafficking group had formed, exemplified by the legendary female

trafficker Bianca Ibáñez de Sánchez (also known as "Delicia Herrera," like "Bianca" surely a tantalizing alias). Born

in Riberalta around 1930 from a "well-placed" family, her La Paz home faced La Prensa on Loayza Street. Her State

Department visa photos reveal an elegant, well-attired white woman. Ibáñez became an energetic entrepreneur,

swiftly rising from the ranks of Cuban apprenticeship as a female "mule," a typical practice when customs agents

were still less prone to check the luggage or orifices of well-heeled Latin women. Ibáñez set up a home base at the

modest "The Star Hotel," owned with her husband in La Paz, from which she allegedly ran her own "cocaine

laboratory" in secret locations in Cochabamba, Santa Cruz, and "elsewhere." She bragged of a purification lab in

Havana. By her own account, she began by buying up coca-leaf from "Peruvian Indians" as a guest in Lima's Hotel

Azúcar. Ibáñez became the courier's courier, frequently passing through Argentina, Brazil, and Havana en route to

New York. In 1958, Ibáñez began to bypass her Cuban sponsors, traveling directly into the United States, an

upward mobility the FBN attributed to her ruthless "greed." She ultimately failed in this bid when novice Cuban

street contacts bilked her. In 1961 her "lover" and middleman, the Cuban gangster Juan Suárez, turned after his

arrest. Ibáñez herself was often trailed and arrested between 1956 and 1961, leaving information for historians.

One 1958 undercover investigation sketched Ibáñez's personal network in New York. Among those detained were

four local Hispanics, for dealing to "Negroes" at such dives as the "El Prado Bar" on 8th Avenue and 51st Street on

the west side. Her partner was the nervous and talkative Louis Schemel, who, to elude jail and keep a U.S.

passport, promised authorities to "locate cocaine laboratories in South America." Schemel betrayed Ibáñez despite

her offer to cover all legal expenses and her ability to "fix anything."47 The FBN now assigned Special Agent Frank

Martin specifically to trap Ibáñez. In 1959, she was arrested in Argentina with seven accomplices as a supplier of

Bolivian sulfates to a lab in Buenos Aires province with links to Cuba. She quickly fixed her way out. In Cuba,

Francisco Prío, the ex-president's brother, reputedly protected Ibáñez, who regularly exchanged her coke at

Havana's airport for identical suitcases of cash.

In April 1960, Ibáñez was haggling with a U.S. undercover agent in La Paz over a deal to unload 5 kilos for $20,000.

Negotiations played out over the year, as the offer, involving a Bolivian partner Ebar Franco and the Chilean

Victoria Torres, doubled in size. Agents planned to nab her in Mexico, as Ibáñez was now wary of U.S. travel. In a

novel joint U.S.-Peruvian-Bolivian operation following the Rio police summit, officials anxiously plotted to put

Ibáñez away, since she "has in the past delivered large quantities of cocaine to other narcotics traffickers in New

York City. [T]his woman has access to a cocaine laboratory" and is "head of a group of international traffickers."

Bolivian Carabineros joined in the action. But as told in a "Bolivia-Bianca Ibáñez" section of the 1960 FBN Report,

Ibáñez and most of her gang got away in May 1960, after a dramatic armed street scuffle with dozens of aroused

local bystanders in a poorly-lit slum. Officials later snared accomplices, and seized the Star hotel where the deal

was hatched, as well as Ibáñez's "automobile service, wash-center" and other properties kept under various

names.48 It is unclear if this La Paz empire was used to finance cocaine smuggling or vice versa.

A month later, as if to taunt her pursuers, Ibáñez dropped a note at the Embassy protesting her innocence and

expressing curiosity about the "two American gangsters" talked about in the case. Agents despaired of ever

capturing Ibáñez after this narrow escape. In 1961, she topped the secret U.S. most-wanted list of 24 major

cocaine dealers; Bolivians nationalistically claimed hers "the most important gang" in South America, and signed

Rio's new drug laws in part to trap her. Yet a "reliable source" found Ibáñez "has too many connections in the

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government to be held or tried for cocaine trafficking." Then partnered with Miami-based Bolivians Alfredo Alipaz

and Carlos Bosch (possibly the 1958 chemist), she reportedly ran U.S. borders via Panama under new false

names.49 Blanca Ibáñez was an intriguing autonomous figure in early cocaine trades, who then completely faded

from sight, yet not her legacy of national cocaine.

The fall of Bolivia's ailing oligarchic state after 1952 and mounting U.S. intervention in the wavering revolution

gave a political cast to the rise of cocaine. In contrast to other cold-war conflicts, the United States proved

unusually willing to work with the MNR regime, if mainly to undermine its left wing. Exiled Bolivian conservatives,

for U.S. consumption, equated the revolution with "Communistic" cocaine, for illicit funds to spread revolutionary

arms, a potent version of the communist-drug contagion particularly after the Cuban revolution inflamed inter-

American relations. As a new industry, cocaine likely did attract some political protection. By the early 1960s, these

charges provoked drug scandals in the regime, the most flagrant against fiery COB left labor leader and MNR vice-

president Juan Lechin in mid-1961. If never proven, the accusations prompted the Lechin's exit from politics and

Bolivia's first anti-narcotics drive, both prime American objectives in Bolivia.

By the mid-1950s rumor already tied national political figures to cocaine-Gayan, Lechín and Col. Carlos de

Zembrano, a Cochabamba revolutionary tracked as military attaché in Mexico, the latter suspected, among others,

of misusing the diplomatic pouch. Whether true or not, such charges became common after 1952 as regime foes

worked to tarnish the MNR with drugs, just as Peru's Odria had tried to discredit "communist" APRA in 1949. In

1955, FBN sources, after the arrest of Cuban traffickers Méndez Marfa and González in New York, revealed that

their 6-pound stash was "produced in laboratory on farm near La Paz. . . . Farm is allegedly owned by brother of

man who was president of Bolivia in 1954-55" (Paz Estenssoro). Beechcraft freely took off for Sao Paulo, using a

private runway. One "conspirator" was the "well-known violator" Ramis Harv. It's not hard to imagine cornered

Cubans feeding such clues to FBN interrogators.50

The 1961 scandal broke out with a round-up of suspected Argentine smugglers. From Buenos Aires, La Razón

charged "high Bolivian officials complicity in the drug trade," and news filtered through Argentine provincial

politics. The central figure was none other than Col. Luis Gayan, Chilean-born accomplice of the Huasaff-Harbs and

despite repeated exposés, chief of police in La Paz. State petroleum firm (YPFB) officials and Vice-President

Lechín were also implicated, an idea U.S. embassy officials labored to prove. MNR loyalists in congress rejected

Lechín's resignation, though Gayan was suspended from duty and a parliamentary commission convened.

Gayan, from preventative detention, gave dramatic commission testimony on September 21, 1961. For over four

hours he named "50 persons" engaged in cocaine manufacture and trade. Seventy other witnesses were called,

just as the Bolivian congress began study of unprecedented anti-drug legislation. Fanning the crisis was exiled pre-

revolutionary president Enrique Herzog, who denounced Lechin and his dealings in Brazil and Argentina, which he

would return to prove, if given "guarantees" of safety. Walter Guevara, ex-minister of government, joined this

chorus. Meanwhile, the rightist press trotted out anti-MNR tracts on "Anti-comunismo y cocaina." Behind the

scenes, the U.S. embassy, aided by the FBI, FBN, and an ardent informant, Ovidio Pozo, traced Lechín's travels to

New York, where he lodged at the exclusive University Club in early 1961, revealing an unseemly relationship with

wealthy widow Corina Gruenbaum of the despised Bolivian rosca tin interests. Lechín, though a "professed

communist of the Marxist-Leninist school," put his two children in a New York State boarding-school (he "is said to

be very fond of these boys," hardly a punishable offense).51 His personal secretary, Mario Abdallah, was said to

have a hand in cocaine from the mid-1950s. Lechín Oquendo, from a turco family himself, was likely tainted by

such ethnic associations.

Across the border in Córdova and Salta roundups intensified, with detention of Argentine dealer Isaac Goldberg

and Ciro Mercado Terrazas in Santa Cruz. On November 14th, the Bolivian commission, after interviewing

Argentine officials and prisoners, released its first report, anticipating "sensation" ahead. U.S. diplomats thought

the report, if mainly old news, "shows a picture of a large narcotics net operating between Bolivia and Argentina,"

though it named only two acting officials, Gayan and José Requeña of YPFB. The commission highlighted,

however, Bolivia's newest industry. Coca processing occurred in "Santa Cruz, Yacuiba, Villamonte, Chaparé, and the

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Yungas," before passing through small border posts towards Salta and Buenos Aires, where it was refined into

pure cocaine in the factory of Luís González. The commission backed Bolivia's swift adhesion to antidrug

measures: joining INTERPOL, signing the new UN Single Convention treaty, which committed Bolivia, a largely pro-

coca nation, to its limitation, and to drug laws, a narcotics bureau, and foreign training and assistance. By

November 1961, President Paz approved Bolivia's first public anti-coca decree, to launch a UN coca substitution

program. Markets for coca reportedly plummeted after the report and "many cocaine factories in Bolivia and

Argentina closed." Even the partisan U.S. vice-consul Samuel Karp admitted that if this last news were true,

thousands of Bolivians would be out of work in the yungas, bringing pressures to relax the drug repression. "Once

the Commission has finished its work and the publicity has died down, narcotics operations in Bolivia would return

to 'normal'."52 By 1961, in short, job creation in the coca-cocaine sector was affecting Bolivia's national political

dynamic.

Scholars of the Bolivian revolution, such as James Dunkerley, believe that accusations against Lechín, who left

political life in September 1961 amid the scandal, were false, though Lechín was "careless" in his personal

associations. Not only right-wing foes, but likely the CIA station chief drove the affair, to isolate Lechín's left-wing

MNR faction from President Paz, who was quickly sliding into the U.S. orbit. Aid to Bolivia, including that for

policing and lowland development, shot up some 600 percent between 1960 and 1964, turning the tiny nation into

the hemisphere's highest per-capita recipient, a showcase for the new anti-communist Alliance for Progress. An

overlooked part of this story, making this episode Bolivia's version of Odría's offensive in Peru the decade before,

was the de facto criminalization of tolerated cocaine trades and a quieting of the nation's prococa rhetoric. In

1962, reluctant Bolivia finally joined the global prohibitions regime, a U.S. goal since the 1940s. Pressures on

Bolivia came to a head after the 1961 Blanca Ibáñez fiasco, Bolivian cocaine seizures at U.S. borders, and the 1961

FBN survey of cocaine routing, which dramatized the new range of inter-American cocaine merchants. These

helped prompt the first UN Inter-American "Coca Leaf Consultative Seminars" a March 1960 anti-cocaine summit in

Rio where Bolivia first requested aid. The second meeting, specifically re-labeled for "Inter-American Narcotics

Control" occurred within days of Bolivia's first drug laws in late 1961. The U.S. delegates who ran these affairs

praised these moves, as Bolivia previously had few penalties besides regulatory health fines. The third Lima

conference of 1963 saw Bolivia assume an active role.53

The embrace of prohibitions hardly meant the end of Bolivia's cocaine industry. In the November 1961 climax of

the MNR affair, a raid occurred in Santa Cruz city against "a large net of cocaine manufacturers and consumers."

Among seven detainees was Emilio Harb, that pioneer apellido in disseminating cocaine. In March 1962,

authorities smashed a major German-Bolivian smuggling ring, now bereft of protection, through Argentina, to New

York and Miami, with cocaine tucked in money belts. But the seasoned ringleader, Raúl Bosch, got away along with

his American accomplice Donald Burt. The BNDD set more traps from New York, for ever-suspect officials, for

example "Guichi," identified in 1964 as a close aide to President Paz. The Bolivian police, meanwhile, claimed they

had learned to literally "smell out" labs using only their noses, at least in La Paz.54 Signs pointed elsewhere:

cocaine was swiftly spreading to distant Amazon sites, becoming more purposefully elusive than urban labs or

mules on scheduled ships and planes.

By the time of the 1961 scandal, cocaine was already rooting in Santa Cruz, the lowland frontier zone near Brazil

opened by a rising regional bourgeoisie in cotton and cattle enterprises. The first road, to promote rice cultivation,

reached Santa Cruz in 1954. In an ironic link to cold-war struggles, the hilly jungles between Santa Cruz and the

Chapare were precisely where Ernesto "Che" Guevara, another Argentine-Cuban connection, mounted his fated

1966-67 guerrilla foco at Nancahuazú. Coca was also infiltrating the area, a poor choice for a liberation war given

its sparse and conservative colono peasantry. One local hacendado kept mum about Guevara's activities to get in

on the mysterious visitors' cocaine enterprise. The first army unit to encounter Che's band was surveying coca

fields.

U.S. archives contain voluminous material about the 1960s explosion of cocaine in Santa Cruz and the Chapare. By

the early 1960s, illicit cocaine, born in crude labs and lone smugglers in the 1950s, reliant on Indian market coca,

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was flexing enough muscle to bring a new social force to bear in its future: displaced highland peasants, a

movement also starting to stir in Peru. The 1964 anti-communist coup and U.S.-backed Barrientos regime (1964-

69), with its "Pacto-militar-campesino" marks not only the official end of Bolivia's revolution, but an accelerated

transition to a socially-rooted economy of coca and cocaine. This shift was markedly spatial: the by-passing of the

old yungas near highland cities by new coca fields in lowland Santa Cruz and the Chapare.

By the 1960s, the Amazon had become the country's prime coca-leaf zone, and this coca was enmeshed with illicit

drugs. These developments forced Bolivian and U.S. officials into panicky guess-work about the size of the

problem: cocaine production at 30 kilos a month, 48 small sulfate labs, 23,500 hectares of coca bush, or maybe

12,000 tons of leaf. Another tally put 10,000 tons of leaf in illicit circuits, though Bolivia's official crop came to only

1,500 tons. Coca yields had dipped after the 1953 agrarian reform, but Bolivia soon overtook Peru, this time by the

labor of anonymous frontier campesinos, with weak ties to the state, rather than yungas oligarchs. By 1962,

believable estimates had half of Bolivia's leaf re-routed to "non-traditional" use, i.e., illicit cocaine. To the

satisfaction of the Inter-American Coca Leaf Congress, Bolivian police seized "approximately 140 kg" of

contraband coke in 1960-61. Yet that year Brazil's UN Illicit Traffic report for the Rio summit found a Bolivian-Brazil

flow out of Santa Cruz plus a trickle down the Amazon from Peru. UN narcotics missions toured the region in 1964

and 1966 with site visits to the hot Santa Cruz border. By 1965, INTERPOL, which tallied 60-70 cocaine arrests and

20 seizures worldwide in the mid-1960s, began operating in Santa Cruz, alongside the BNDD in stings and the

training of Bolivian counterparts. The epicenter was Santa Cruz province, though smugglers, including remnants of

the Harb clan, fanned out from all across Bolivia.55 Pursuing this trend, the U.S. consular office at Cochabamba,

closest to the action, began regular briefs in mid-1964 on Santa Cruz drug operations. In 1966 alone, consul

McVickers monitored 25 major cocaine busts, mostly in the wilds between Santa Cruz and Brazil.

By the mid-1960s cocaine-related arrests in Santa Cruz accelerate to one every few days, a sign the rapid seeding

of coca bush. Moreover, the U.S.-Bolivian crackdown on Santa Cruz was hiking incentives, far across borders, for

Peruvian peasant farmers in the Huallaga valley, who began streaming into similar pursuits at an unprecedented

pace by the mid-1960s. In June 1967, as a fatigued Che slogged from clash to clash with CIA-led patrols, the BNDD

lent INTERPOL a "list of persons, believed to be Bolivians, who have been engaged in the illicit growing,

manufacturing or marketing of coca and cocaine."56 This single national list went into the hundreds. Cocaine was

the new Andean revolution.

EPILOGUE: SHIFTS AND FLOWS, 1964-1973

This article presented new details on the birth of a new class of export businessmen, cocaine traffickers, in the two

decades from 1945 to 1965. These men and women invented today's massive transnational trades in illicit

cocaine. U.S. drug agents and agencies were all along in hot pursuit-which only helped sharpen the narcos'

incentives and skill levels-and cold-war conflicts across the Americas helped to structure the shifting geographies

of cocaine processing and trade. Illicit cocaine for overseas use was born in Peru in 1947-50 with the suppression

of a declining legal cocaine sector, and then pushed on to Bolivia, where the revolution progressively fostered

cocaine's development until 1964. Key trading diasporas and sites arose in 1950s Cuba and Chile, as well as

across Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, attracting dozens and then hundreds of new narcos into a many-layered

enterprise, which including consumption centers in cities like Havana, Buenos Aires, and Sao Paulo. The 1959

Cuban revolution marked a milestone in cocaine's evolution, as it sent seasoned Cuban drug smugglers into

faraway new hideouts and markets, creating in effect the first specialized class of pan-American traffickers. It also

lit pressures for U.S. hemispheric drug-control and anti-communist development, such as the Alliance for Progress,

which unknowingly helped lure land-hungry peasants into the new lowland cocaine economies of Bolivia's Chapare

and Peru's Huallaga.

At first irregular and retail, by 1965 this lengthy and socially-rooted global "commodity chain" was systematized,

though still hidden from public sight. As with many young enterprises, small-scale cooperation, competition, and a

variety of pan-American networking marked newly illicit cocaine. Only later did violence and coercion prevail with

the drug's cartelization and the hostile takeovers of the 1970s. For cocaine in the Americas, this new trafficking

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economy paralleled the mafia-structured Eurasian network of heroin built up during the 1920s and 1930s.57

Ironically, in a long history of trade, cocaine is often considered as one of Latin America's most successful

homegrown exports. If true, these forms of post-war grassroots agency may help explain why it has so resisted

outside control, by both external syndicates and foreign drug-control regimes.

The birth of illicit cocaine alarmed world drug authorities, who still wanted to believe this drug had vanished for

good in the 1920s. In late 1966, the UN mobilized an emergency study mission on "Points of Convergence of the

Illicit Traffic in Coca Leaf and Cocaine in Latin America," assembling drug agents from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil,

Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, the United States, and INTERPOL.58 The UN was worried about the now "heavy"

processing of cocaine across Peru, three bustling supply lines from Bolivia, and the multitudes of Chileans plying it

north. Chile's role would be read as sign of a communist cocaine conspiracy, especially after Allende's election in

1970. The BNDD launched its own "Cocaine Project" in 1968, zeroing in on peasant poverty as the social cause of

an aptly-named new "drug economy." As the cocaine seized at U.S. borders rose exponentially-26 pounds in 1967,

52 in 1969, 436 in 1971-officials knew a serious change was afoot. New counter-cultural rags such as Rolling

Stone already touted cocaine as the gourmet drug of the 70s, and far-away "cocaine busts" in South America made

the New York Times. As Nixon's drug war heated up in 1971, congressional hearings on "International Aspects of

the Narcotics Problem" openly discussed cocaine. In 1973, congress ordered another study mission on "The World

Narcotics Problem: The Latin American Perspective," a global view of the pan-American cocaine economy just prior

to entry of the Colombians. By 1979, as cocaine's illicit capacity reached the 100-ton mark, House hearings on the

problem were simply billed "Cocaine: A Major Drug of the Seventies."

I have no idea what happened to the pioneering traffickers of the 1950s and 60s, not even a flamboyant figure like

Bianca Ibáñez. They were probably ill-fit for the coming more coercive political economy of cocaine, though their

legacy clearly lives on. For historians, the challenge is establishing direct links between the groups uncovered here

and the Colombian narcotraficantes of the 1970s, who would personify and steer the cocaine enterprise over the

next decades.59

As an epilogue to this analysis, it can be argued that waning pan-American cold-war politics remained a driving

force in cocaine's development, along with increasingly hardline U.S. drug policies. After 1964, cocaine's

acceleration was fueled by the polarized Andean politics of the 1960s-the regimes of Barrientos in Bolivia,

Beláunde and Velasco in Peru, Frei and Allende in Chile-unstable statist governments born of cold-war tensions. In

the Andes, these modernizing projects of left and right practically invited peasants to flood into the country's

choice coca zones as a politically cheap U.S.-inspired alternative to conflictive agrarian reforms. For Peru of the

1960s, the Huallaga's 10-percent yearly growth made it the country's fastest-growing region; in Bolivia, the landed

class of Santa Cruz became on the side kingpins of the drug trade. The early 1970s collapse of the leftist Velasco

military experiment in Peru left thousands of colonized peasant families stranded in the jungle with no effective

state services or loyalties. By 1973, both nations were profoundly disorganized, politically and economically

bankrupt, an Andean crisis that would deepen and drive cocaine capitalism over the next decades. Throughout the

region, new-style anti-left military regimes in Brazil (1964) and Argentina (1966) hobbled the freestyle dispersed

drug-running of the early 1960s. This bolstered the Chilean smuggler corridor, by 1970 at the height of Chilean

democracy, cocaine's byway to the United States. Now was when Colombia's anuoqueños began toying with this

trade, in a country with an émigré diaspora trading in coastal marihuana to the United States and a central state

disorganized from decades of regional violence. The early 1970s was also a turning-point in domestic U.S. cold-

war culture, too: the "drug culture" of the 1960s was waning, linked with a protest culture against the Vietnam war

and the values of cold-war corporate society. Drug use was still expanding in many directions up and down the

social ladder, when cocaine came on line as a foil to marihuana, heroin, and speed, all under pressure by the Nixon

regime. It was the old cold-warrior Richard Nixon who oversaw the transition to the age of cocaine: 1970 marks the

year that quantities of cocaine seized at home first exceed heroin, the stated foe of his openly-declared war on

drugs. Nixon's political attack on marihuana from Mexico, starting with 1970 Operation Intercept, showed

smugglers and dealers-especially astute Colombians-that a more concentrated, pricey, elite substance like

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cocaine, by now trendy in "disco" and other cultural escapisms, was the wave of the future. Cocaine overflowed its

post-war Latin-inflected ghetto markets. As southern-cone militarism channeled the flow of cocaine towards

Colombia and squeezed drug scenes in places like Buenos Aires or Sao Paulo, signs pointing north to its potential

growth market among moneyed American consumers. The expansive Drug Enforcement Administration, set up in

1973 to supercede past drug agencies, has been tied to Nixon's cold-war project of a larger repressive state, and

has dealt with the legacy of Nixon-era cocaine ever since.

The practically unknown climax here was the September 11, 1973 anticommunist Pinochet coup in Chile, again

abetted by Nixon and Kissinger. We know that a "DEA official" quickly convinced General Pinochet to arrest the

country's top 19 traffickers, on the grounds that illicit drug activities might be used by the left to threaten state

security. The general summarily shut down cocaine trades then reaching 200 kilos a month, abruptly disrupting

routing to the other more logical direction: north via Leticia, Colombia, by air close across protective Amazonian

borders to the new coca lowlands of Peru and Bolivia. Colombian smugglers like Pablo Escobar and Carlos Lehder

became forces in this wholesale trade, swiftly branching into the streets of Queens, Miami, and Los Angeles,

pushing to dizzying heights the anonymous networks built by hundreds of pre-Colombian narcos since the 1950s.

Still, little is known about that 1970-75 shift, when Colombians began flying to pick up coca paste from Bolivian

and Peruvian peasants in the field. Escobar used a beat-up Renault to ferry his first load over the Andes before

going big with his own fleet of trucks and planes.60 This much is known though: fed by spiraling crises, cocaine

was to be the Andean boom industry of the late twentieth century.

Footnote

* The research for this article was done as a fellow of the Wilson Center, Washington, in 1999-2000; Fred

Romansky at the U.S. National Archives helped declassify Record Group 170 (DEA historical records). Joseph

Spillane, Isaac Campos, Pablo Piccato, and William Walker III all gave critical readings. I presented early versions

of this paper in 2004-06 at the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales (UNAM); Simon Fraser University; the New

York City Latin American History Workshop; Boston Area Latin American History Workshop (Harvard); Workshop

on Latin America: History, Economy &Culture (New School University); and the European Social Science History

Conference (Amsterdam).

1 For a longer perspective, Paul Gootenberg, ed., Cocaine: Global Hislories (London: Routledge UK, 1999).

2 Paul Gootenberg, "Between Coca and Cocaine: A Century of More of U.S.-Peruvian Drug Paradoxes," Hispanic

American Historical Review 83:1 (Feb. 2003), pp. 137-50; for use of Group 170, DEA historical documents, Luis

Astorga, Drogas sin fronteras: Los expediertes de una guerra permanente, México y Los Estados Unidos, 1916-

1970 (Mexico: Grijalbo Ed., 2003); a survey of historical interAmerican drug issues (written prior to access to DEA-

FBN papers) is William Walker III, Drug Control in the Americas (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press:

1981/89); FBN's secret war also in Douglas Valentine, Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on

Drugs (London: Verso Press, 2004).

3 Richard Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 1789-1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1970); Carlo Ginzburg, "The Inquisitor as Anthropologist" in Clues, Myths and Historical Methods (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1992). On drugs discourse, see Marek Kohn, Narcomania: On Heroin (London: Faber

&Faber, 1987); Luis Astorga, Mitología del "Narcotraficante" en México (Mexico: Plaza y Valdés, 1995); Paul

Gootenberg, "Talking Like a State: Drugs, Borders and the Language of Control," in Itty, Abraham and Willem van

Schendel, eds., Illicit Flows and Criminal Things (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), pp. 101-27.

Drug traffickers are rare subjects of historical research (besides Astorga on Mexico): Kathryn Meyer and Terry

Parssinen (Asian) Webs of Smoke: Smuggling, Warlords, Spies and the History of the International Drug Trade

(London: Rowman &Littlefield, 1998); Alan A. Block, "European Drug Traffic and Traffickers Between the Wars: The

Policy of Suppression and its Consequences," Journal of Social History 23/2 (1989), pp. 315-38; or (in part),

Eduardo Sáenz Rovner, La conexión cubana: narcotráfico, contrabando y juego en Cuba entre los años 20 y

comienzos de la Revolución (Bogota: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2005).

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4 For transnational optics, Gilbert Joseph, Catherine LeGrand. Ricardo Salvatorre, eds. Close Encounters of Empire:

Rewriting the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); for U.S.-

Andean cold-war, Frederick B. Pike, The United States and the Andean Republics (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press,1977), chs. 10-11.

5 Peter Reuter, Disorganized Crime: The Economics of the Visible Hand (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983); Mark H.

Haller, "Illegal Enterprise: A Theoretical and Historical Interpretation," Criminology 28:2 (1990), pp. 207-36; Michael

Kenney, From Pablo to Osama: Trafficking and Terrorist Networks, Government Bureaucracies, and Competitive

Adaptation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), chs. 1-2.

6 Archive Provincial de Huánuco (Peru) (APH), Prefecture, Expediente 463, 1949, Oficio 82, Soberón's bankruptcy

statement; Legado 80/Exp.l212, 1948 (last shipment).

7 In-depth analysis is Paul Gootenberg, "Reluctance or Resistance: Constructing Cocaine (Prohibitions) in Peru,

1910-50," ch. 3 in Gootenberg, Cocaine; for the politics of control, Paul Gootenberg, "Secret Ingredients: The

Politics of Coca in US-Peruvian Relations, 1915-65," Journal of Latin American Studies 36:2 (2004), pp. 233-61.

8 Joseph F. Spillane, Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 2000), chs. 6-7 or Karch (Japan) or Kohn (London) in Cocaine; David F. Musto, "America's

First Cocaine Epidemic," Wilson Quarterly (Summer 1989), pp. 59-64. Bertil Renborg, International Drug Control: A

Study of International Administration by and through the League of Nations (Washington D.C.: Carnegie

Endowment for International Peace, 1947), pp. 147-48. U.S. National Archives, Record Group 59 (Dept. of State,

hence RG59) LOT Files (Office Files), 55D607 Far East, Subject Files, "Name File of Suspected Narcotics

Traffickers, 1927-42"; also Meyer and Parssinen, Webs of Smoke, pp. 260-61; U.S. Treasury, Federal Bureau of

Narcotics (FBN), Traffic in Narcotics and Other Dangerous Drugs (Washington D.C.), all 1930s, quote, 1938.

9 Paul Gootenberg, "Cocaine in Chains: The Rise and Demise of a Global Commodity, 1860-1950," in Z. Frank, C.

Marichal, and S. Topik, eds., From Silver to Cocaine: Latin America Commodity Chains and the Building of the

World Economy, 1500-2000 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), ch. 12; or economic laments in C.E. Paz Soldait,

La Coca Peruana: Memorandum sobre su situacion actual (Lima: SNA, 1936).

10 RG59 LOT 55D607 Far East 311.2125, "Urbina, R.," July 1940; RG59 State Dept. Decimal Files (Consular reports,

hence RG59 DecFile), 823.114, Narcotics-Peru, 7 Oct. 1943; 823.114, 1-1347; 823.114 1-1347, 23 Jan. 1947, 2 Jan.

1948. FBN, Traffic in Drugs, 1946-47 reports. For "bebop" and cocaine, see Miles Davis (with Quincy Troupe), Miles:

An Autobiography (New York: Simon &Schuster, 1989), pp. 86, 95.

11 RG59, Subject files. Bureau of Narcotics, 0660 South America, Box 30, "Confidential" 6-1998, Pena, 14 Dec.

1948; "Cocaine Renaissance," RG170 Box 63, Drugs-Cocaine, 27 Feb. 1950.

12 Glenn J. Dorn, 'The American Reputation for Fair Play': Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre and the Federal Bureau of

Narcotics," The Historian 48 (2003), pp. 59-81. RG59 DecFile 823.114, Peru-Narcotics, esp. Memo of 24 Aug. 1949.

On APRA, RG59 LOT 825.53, Chile, 1950-59, "Apristas Protest Bureau of Narcotics Correspondence." Also in

polemical Luis Enríquez, Haya de la Torre: La estafa politico mas grande de America (Lima: Ed. Pacífico, 1951), pp.

121-33.

13 RG59 DecFile 825.23, Chile, enclosure #3, pp. 3, 15, March 1950; DecFile 823.114, Peru-Narcotics, 1948-49, esp.

Williams, "Illicit Cocaine Traffic," 17 May 1949; 1 Nov. 1948, 7 June 1949, 14 Dec. 1949. Williams evoked a 27-kilo

daily capacity, or 7 illicit tons a year worth $35 million in New York, though Peru's output of the 1940s was less

than half a ton.

14 El Comercio (Lima), all April-May 1949; UN CND E/NR 1950/07, "Peru, Annual Report for 1950," pp. 35-40, add.

"Cocaine and Crude Cocaine," 17 Jan. 1952.

15 RG59 DecFile 823.114, 7 June 1949 (Prados) and DecFile 823.114 8-2548, "Fabricación de cocaína clandestina"

(Ayllon); DecFile 823.114 Narcotics, No. 302, 7 Dec. 1948.

16 APH (Huánuco), Prefectura, Leg. 80, #905, 3 July 1948. DecFile 823.114, Peru-Narcotics, 25 Aug. 1948,

"Clandestine Traffic. . ."; UN CND "Peru, Report for 1950," pp. 35-36.

17 Documents stumbled on in RG170 Subject files 0660, Ecuador, Box 8, "Illicit Narcotic Traffic in Peru," 7 May

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1953; Lopez to Anslinger, 30 April 1953; and "A Report on Observation in Peru regarding Illicit Drug Traffic," 24 April

1953. Mario Vargas Llosa, A Fish in the Water: A Memoir, transi. Helen Lane (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994),

p. 147, for an account of same local cocaine scene.

18 Cases from RG59 DecFile, Peru/Narcotics, all 1949-55 (various, press clippings); plus RG170 Box 30, Trafficking,

Mexico, March 1961.

19 RG59 DecFile 825.53 Narcotics-Chile (1955) 000254, "Control of Narcotic Drugs" (Jan. 1959); RG170 Box 19,

Drugs-Cocaine, 4-29-52 (excerpt); Vistazo 331, 20 Jan. 1959; also "Soy un Traficante de Drogas Heroícas" Vea, 29

Jan. 1959. INTERPOL "Illicit Traffic," 1959. UN CND E/CN.7.388, p. 79 (also 1962); FBN, Traffic in Drugs, 1959.

20 UN EC.SOC, E/CN.7/420 add. 1, "The Question of the Coca Leaf: Report by the National Health Services of Chile,"

2 March 1962, p. 3.

21 RG170, Subject files, Box 30, Trafficking, Mexico, 13 March 1961.

22 RG59 Dec File 825.530, Chile 1960-63, 29 Jan. 1963; UN GEN/NAR/64Conf.2.6, Inter-American Consultative

Group on the Coca Leaf, Chile report "Illicit Traffic in Cocaine," 1 Sept. 1964, pp. 6, 14. FBN, Traffic in Drugs, 1964,

pp. 18, 31.

23 UN TAO/LAT/72, "Report of the UN Study Tour of Points of Convergence of the Illicit Traffic in Coca Leaf and

Cocaine in Latin America, " 28 Feb. 1967, pp. 14, 44; Committee on Foreign Affairs, Study Mission to Latin America.,

The World Narcotics Problem: The Latin American Perspective: cf. Senate Judiciary Committee, 14 Sept. 1972,

"World Drug Traffic and its Impact on U.S. security," for $10 million Miami cocaine find on Squella-Avendano,

former air-force officer "slated to receive an important post in Allende government." E-Com., Daniel Palma A.

(Santiago), Feb. 2006.

24 Rosalie Schwartz, Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1997) p.

24; Enrique Cirules, The Mafia in Havana: A Caribbean Mob Story (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2004); Sáenz Rovner,

Conexiín cubana, chs. 2, 6, 8; Mary K. Crabb, "Critical Care: An Ethnographic Journey into Health, Health Politics

and Revolution in 20th-century Cuba," ms., ch. 12.

25 FBN, Traffic in Drugs, 1957, "Cuba" (also 1960, 1962 reports); INTERPOL, UN CND E/CN.7 "Illicit Traffic,"

"Clandestine laboratories" reports, 1953-61.

26 Hank Messick and Burt Goldlatt, The Mobs and the Mafia: The Illustrated History of Organized Crime (New York:

T. Crowell Co., 1972), pp. 5, 202-4. RG170 Box 54, Inter-American Conferences," 1960-64, "Statement of the USA

Delegation," Rio, Feb. 1960.

27 FBN, Traffic in Drugs, 1961-64 reports.

28 RG170 Box 30, Subject file, Traffickers, "Cocaine Traffic between South America, Central America and the

United States," New York, 1961, enclosures, and 19 July 1960; RG170 0660, Country file, Cuba; RG170 Box 19

"Drugs-Cocaine Thru Dec. 1962." RG170 Box 54 Inter-American Conferences, file 0345, "Correlation between

Production of Coca Leaf and the Illicit Trafficking in Cocaine Hydrochloride," Nov. 1962.

29 RG170 0660 Box 8, Cuba, 1958-59; RG59 DecFile 837.53, Cuba, 1955-59, #1037, 19 March 1959. DecFile 837.53,

23 March 1962, "Rejection of Cuban Note on Narcotics," William Walker III, Drugs in the Western Hemisphere

(Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1996), pp. 170-72.

30 Harry J. Anslinger Papers (Pennsylvania State University Library), Box 6, Scrapbooks, press clippings, June

1962; RG170 0660, Country file, Bolivia, Box 6, 1955-62, Confidential, "Report of U.S. Delegation," Rio Conference,

1961.

31 UN Gen/NAR/64Conf.2.6, "Illicit Traffic in Cocaine," 1 Sept. 1964, Memo for Inter-American Consultative Group

on Coca-Leaf Problems, La Paz, Nov. 1964, pp. 3-4; RG170 0660 Bolivia documents; also1962 UN E/CN.7 R.12/add.

31, p. 3.

32 INTERPOL, E/CN.7/388, 447 1959, 1962, and PCOB "Traffic in Narcotic Drugs"; INTERPOL, "Clandestine

Laboratories," 1945-60 (Paris, 1961-no UN class), pp. 72-73. RG170 Box 30, Subject: Trafficking, 12 Oct. 1960.

33 UN CND 14th Session, Gen. E/CN.7/R.12, Restricted, add 24, "Illicit Traffic, Brazil," 1959, add. 31 (1962), pp. 2-5

(Source: DEA Library).

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34 UN CND 15th Session. Gen. E/CN.7/R.12/add.31, "Illicit Traffic, Brazil," 1962, pp. 4-5; D. Parreiras, "Data on the

illicit traffic in cocaine and coca leaves in South America, with an annex on narcotics control in Brazil," UN Bulletin

on Narcotics, vol. XIII/4 (Oct.-Dec. 1961), pp. 33-36.

35 Derek Agnew, Undercover Agent-Narcotics: The Dramatic Story of the World's Secret War against Drug

Racketeers (London: Souvenir Press, 1959), ch. 10. 1960: UN CND E/CN.7/393, April 1960, Illicit Traffic, "Inter-

American Conference on the Illicit Traffic in Cocaine and Coca-Leaf," Rio de Janeiro (various designations,

delegation reports).

36 UN GEN/NAB/64/Conf.2/6, p. 5-6 Nov. 1964, "Illicit Traffic in Cocaine," Inter-American Consultative Group on

Coca-Leaf Problems.

37 RG170 0660 Box 8, Colombia (1960s) is sparse (12 Jan. 1959, Cuba file on Herrán-Ologaza); UN TAO/LAT/72,

"UN Study Tour of Points of Convergence of the Illicit Traffic. . . ," 1967; PCNB, 89th Session, E/OB/W/A.1, "Mission

to Honduras, Colombia, Ecuador. . . ," 5 Sept. 1966, p. 8; FBN, Traffic in Drugs, 1961; RG59 DecFile 819.53, 1956-

60s. Mary Roldán, "Colombia: cocaine and the 'miracle' of modernity in Medellin," ch. 8 in Gootenberg, Cocaine',

Colombia trailed in Alvaro Camacho-Guizado and Andres López-Restrepo, "From Smugglers to Drug-Lords to

Traquetos: Changes in the Colombian Illicit Drug Organizations," in C. Welna and G. Gallón, eds., Peace, Democracy,

and Human Rights in Colombia (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), pp. 65-69, reliant on Eduardo

Sáenz-Rovner, "La prehistoria del narcotráfico en Colombia," Innovar (8 July-Dec. 1996), pp. 65-90, translated U.S.

documents that show little "pre-history." RG170 0660 Box 10, Ecuador, 1961; on Blades, RG170 Box 161, Panama

etc., "Subject: South America," 31 July 1964.

38 Luis Astorga, "Cocaine in Mexico: a prelude to 'los narcos'" in Gootenberg, Cocaine, p. 185; Astorga, Drogas

sinfronteras, pp. 296-98, 300-4, similar incidents based on RG170 FBN-FBND.

39 UN CND E/CN.7/388, INTERPOL, 26 March 1956. RG170 Box 30, Trafficking, "Cocaine Trafficking b/n S.

America, Central America and the U.S." 15 Nov 1959; RG170 0660, Mexico, Box 1961, July 1960, Aug. 1960 memo;

FBN-FBND, Traffic in Drugs reports, all 1958-65.

40 RG170 Box 30, "Cocaine Trafficking"; RG170 0660 Box 10 Foreign Countries, Mexico, 1964-65; RG170 0660

Foreign Countries-Mexico, Box 161 "Case: George Asaf de Bala," Nov. 1959; Astorga, Drogas sin fronteras, pp. 300-

3; Astorga (oral communication, Aug. 2004) links these pioneers and 1980s Sonorans, who learned cocaine trade

from Cubans incarcerated in Mexico.

41 James Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins: Political Struggles in Bolivia, 1952-1982 (London: Verso Press, 1984),

and pp. 308-26 on post-1970 cocaine politics; for coca, see detailed consular "Coca Reports," for FBN, e.g., RG170

Box 8, "Drugs-Coca Chewing," 1937-1963.

42 RG170 0660, Foreign Countries, Bolivia, Box 19, Williams, 8 March 1950; 15 Feb. 1950; 11 April 1950, Peru

origins, "Information from Confidential Source," 19 June 1950; "Alleged Smuggling of Cocaine to Brazil," 16 May

1950.

43 RG170 0660 Box 19, 23 July 1951; "Bolivian Police Uncover Narcotics Organization" 16 Oct. 1951; "Further

Developments in . . . Narcotics Trade," 28 Nov 1951; 5 March 1953. RG59 DecFile 824.53/4-450, Narcotics-Bolivia,

23 July 1951; RG 170 Box 1, Ecuador, April 30, 1953.

44 RG59 DecFile 824.53/8-1253, 12 Aug.-2 Sept. 1953, clippings; DecFile 824.53/5-554, 5 May 1954. DecFile

825.53/254 Embassy, Santiago, "Control of Narcotic Drugs," 22 Jan. 1959.

45 RG170 0660, Foreign Countries, Bolivia, 1957-64; also RG59 DecFile 824.53/2.2956, 27 Feb. 1956, 29 Feb. 1956;

DecFile 411.24342 Jan.-Feb. 1961, July 1962. RG170 Box 6, 13 April 1962; UN E/CN. 7,INTERPOL, 1953-60; FBN,

Traffic in Drugs, 1955, "Cocaine"; Leo Spitzer, Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge From Nazism (New

York: Hill and Wang, 1998); Jews as drug traders in Block, "European Traffic," pp. 324-25.

46 RG59 DecFile 824.53/22956, Narcotics-Bolivia, 23 March 1956; DecFile 824.53/5-2958, "Fábrica de Jabones y

Champú se elaborada Cocaína en Gran Escala," La Nación, 29 May 1958.

47 RG170 0660, Bolivia, "Investigation of cocaine smuggler BLANCA IBANEZ DE SANCHEZ of La Paz, Bolivia," 12

Nov. 1958 (and 4-16-58); RG170 Box 54, Conferences, "The Bianca Ibáñez de Sánchez Gang of International Illicit

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Cocaine Traffickers," 26 Nov. 1962; RG 170 O660 Bolivia; RG170 0660 Cuba, 28 April 1961, "Cocaine Traffic," 15

Nov. 1961.

48 FBN, Traffic in Drugs, 1960, "Bolivia," pp. 41-42; RG59 DecFile 824.53/5-260, Narcotics-Bolivia, 2 May 1960;

INTERPOL E/CN.7/388, "Illicit Traffic"1960, Argentina; INTERPOL "Clandestine Laboratories," 1960, p. 73.

49 RG59 DecFile 411.24342/2-761, "Narcotics Trafficker: Bianca Ibáñez de Sánchez," photos; DecFile 824.53/5-

2460, 24 May 1960.

50 RG170 0660, Foreign Countries, Box 6, Bolivia, Enforcement, 10 July, 18 Aug. 1957; Vice-President Lechín, 15

Sept. 1961; Karambalas file (nd, 1962).

51 RG59 DecFile 824.53/9-1561, Narcotics-Bolivia, 15 Sept. 1961, enclosures. RG170 0660 Box 6, Bolivia 1955-62,

"Controversy over Illegal Narcotics Activity in Argentina."

52 RG59 DecFile 824.53/11-1161, #246, 15 Nov. 1961, Karp to Embassy, press enclosures.

53 Dunkerley, Rebellion in Veins, p. 108. RG59 DecFile 824.53/11-1161, clippings Ultima Hora, El Diario, RG170

0660 Box 6, "Press Round-up on Luis Gayan," Dec. 1961. RG170 Box 6, Bolivia, Jan.-Feb. 1962. UN CND

E/CN.7/L257, 24 April 1963, "Question of the Coca-Leaf," Consultative Group on Coca-Leaf Problems, Lima 1962;

"Report of Delegation to 2nd Meeting of Inter-American Consultative Group," Jan. 1962; Rio report, Nov. 27-Dec. 7

1961, p. 15.

54 RG59 DecFile 824.53/1246, Bolivia-Narcotics, "Arrest of Members of Narcotic Ring," 4 Dec. 1961; RG170 0660

Bolivia, 30 March 1962. RG170 0660 Box 6, Various 1962-65, "Bolivian Cops Sniff Way to Coke Cookers," Sunday

News, 11 July 1965. On Che, René Bascopé Aspiazu, La veto blanca: coca y cocaina en Bolivia (La Paz: Eds. Aqui,

1982), p. 60.

55 UN C/CN.7/L.257, "Question of the Coca Leaf," Minister of Health, 24 April 1963, pp. 5, 30, "Classified Report of

U.S. Delegation" (Rio), 2 Dec. 1961, in RG170 0660 Bolivia, Box 6; "Illicit Traffic in Cocaine," 1 Sept 1964, Inter-

American Consultative Group," pp. 4-5; UN CND, E/CN.7/R. 11, add. 40 "Illicit Traffic-Brazil," 7 April 1961. RG170

0660 Box 6, 1957-64. McVicker, Cochabamba, 18 Nov. 1965, Box 6, "Control of Narcotics," 20 July, 22 Aug. 1966.

On lowland migration, see Harry Sanabriu, The Coca Boom and Rural Social Change in Bolivia (Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 1993).

56 RG170 0660 Bolivia, Box 6, Durkin to INTERPOL, 2 June 1967; "Bi-Annual Summary . . . of Manufacture, Traffic,

and Consumption of Narcotics in Bolivia," July-Dec. 1966.

57 Block, "European Traffic"; Meyer and Parsinnen, Webs of Smoke; Kenney, Pablo to Osama.

58 UN TAO/LAT/72, "UN Study Tour of Points of Convergence of Illicit Traffic. . . ," 28 Feb. 1967; RG170 Box 10,

Conferences and Commissions, UN Latin American Study Tour, 1969; RG170 Box 54, Conferences, "Cocaine

Project," Dec. 1968; "International Aspects of the Narcotics Problem" (92nd Congress, Foreign Affairs Committee),

1972; "The World Narcotics Problem: The Latin American Perspective" (93rd Congress), 1973; "Cocaine: A Major

Drug Issue of the Seventies" (96th Congress, Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control), 1979.

59 I do trace out some of the connections to Colombia's later role in my forthcoming book, Andean Cocaine: The

Making of a Global Drug, 1850-1975 (ms., 2007), ch. 8.

60 Facts are scarce: Fabio Castillo, Losjinetes de la cocaína (Bogotá: Ed Documentes Periodisticas, 1987), ch. 2;

Darío Bentacourt, M.L. García, Contmbandistas, marimberos y mafiosos: Historia social de la mafia colombiana

(Bogotá: Tercer Mundo Eds., 1994); Roberto Escobar, Mi hermano Pablo (Bogotá: Quintero Eds., 2000); Los

archivas privados de Pablo Escobar (documentary, Marc de Beaufort, Director, 2002); Lester Grinspoon and James

Bakalar, Cocaine: A Drug and its Social Evolution (New York: Basic Books, 1976/85), pp. 53-54.

AuthorAffiliation

Stony Brook University PAUL GOOTENBERG

Stony Brook, New York

AuthorAffiliation

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Paul Gootenberg is Professor of History at Stony Brook University. Besides his writings in Peruvian economic and

social history, he has edited Cocaine: Global Histories (Routledge, 1999) and recently completed a book

manuscript on the long-term transformations of Andean cocaine between 1850 and 1975. DETAILS

LINKS

Subject: Politics; Peasants; Drug trafficking; Drug use

Publication title: The Americas; Berkeley

Volume: 64

Issue: 2

Pages: 133-0_7

Number of pages: 45

Publication year: 2007

Publication date: Oct 2007

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Place of publication: Berkeley

Country of publication: United Kingdom

Publication subject: History–History of North And South America

ISSN: 00031615

Source type: Scholarly Journals

Language of publication: English

Document type: Feature

ProQuest document ID: 209595867

Document URL: https://search.proquest.com/docview/209595867?accountid=8289

Copyright: Copyright Academy of American Franciscan History Oct 2007

Last updated: 2015-04-04

Database: ProQuest Central

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