Description:
This work brings together a new generation of drug historians and new historical sources to uncover the history of the drug trade and its regulations. While the US and Mexican governments developed anti-drug discourses and policies, which criminalized both high-profile traffickers and small-time addicts, these authorities also employed the criminals and cash connected to the drug trade to pursue more pressing political concerns. The politics, socioeconomic relations, and criminal justice system of modern Mexico have been shaped by these public and covert policies as well as by subnational histories of drug production and trafficking. The essays in this study explore this complicated narrative and provide insight into Mexico's history and the wider contemporary global drug trade.
Brief description: Wil G. Pansters is a professor of social and political anthropology of Latin America at Utrecht University. He is the editor of Violence, Coercion and State-Making in Twentieth-Century Mexico: The Other Half of the Centaur and La Santa Muerte in Mexico: History, Devotion, and Society (UNM Press).
Review Quotes: "A cutting-edge, boots-on-the-ground approach to researching drug trafficking provides us with new insights gleaned from archival collections only recently opened to the public."--Andrae M. Marak, coeditor of Smugglers, Brothels, and Twine: Historical Perspectives on Contraband and Vice in North America's Borderlands