Transnational crime remains a particularly serious problem in Latin America, with most issues connected to the drug trade. There are several relevant roles that the U.S. Air Force can and should play in boosting Mexico's capacity to counter drug production and trafficking, as well as further honing and adjusting its wider counternarcotics effort in Latin America.

Transnational crime remains a particularly serious problem in Latin America, with most issues connected to the drug trade. There are several relevant roles that the U.S. Air Force can and should play in boosting Mexico?'s capacity to counter drug production and trafficking, as well as further honing and adjusting its wider counternarcotics effort in Latin America.

In some Latin American countries, traffickers equipped with vast resources have corrupted individuals in every aspect of public life, compromising the integrity of entire national institutions - the political system and the judiciary, the military, the police, and banking and financial systems. Moreover, Latin America, like Europe and the USA, has a drug consumption problem. Yet, drug control in Latin America is beset with contradictions. For some Latin Americans, illicit drug production in the form of coca cultivation is a traditional way of life, and has often been an economic bulwark against destitution. Attempts to control the drug trade, while absorbing vast resources, have been largely ineffectual and have had dramatic and unintended consequences. This book analyses the profound consequences that the illicit drug trade has for millions of Latin Americans, and what they imply for domestic policy and for international cooperation. Latin America and the Multinational Drug Trade is essential reading for students of Latin America, politics, international relations, security studies, foreign policy, economic development, criminology and law, and for anyone interested in the politics and economics of the global illicit drug trade.

While the U.S. has failed to reduce the supply of cocaine and heroin entering its borders, it has, however, succeeded in generating widespread, often profoundly damaging, consequences on democracy and human rights in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Contents: (1) An Overview of Illicit Drugs in Latin America and the Caribbean (LA&C): Drug Traffickers and Related Criminal-Terrorist Actors; (2) U.S. Antidrug Assistance Programs in LA&C: Plan Colombia: Mérida Initiative for Mexico and Central America: U.S. Assistance to Mexico Beyond Mérida; Central American Regional Security Initiative; Caribbean Basin Security Initiative; DoD Counternarcotics Assistance Programs; (3) Foreign Assistance Prohibitions and Conditions: Annual Drug Certification Process; Conditions on Counternarcotics Assistance: Human Rights Prohibitions on Assistance to Security Forces; Country-Specific Prohibitions on Certain Counterdrug Assistance; Drug Eradication-Related Conditions; (4) Issues for Congress. Illus.

Since the mid-1980s subsequent US governments have promoted a highly militarized and prohibitionist drug control approach in Latin America. Despite this strategy the region has seen increasing levels of homicide, displacement and violence. Why did the militarization of U.S. drug war policies in Latin America begin and why has it continued despite its inability to achieve the stated targets? Are such policies simply intended to impose U.S. power or have elites in Latin America internalized this agenda as their own? Why did resistance to this approach emerge in the late-2000s and does this represent a challenge to the prohibitionist agenda? In this book William Avilés argues that if we are to understand and explain the militarization of the drug war in Latin America a ‘transnational grand strategy’, developed and implemented by networks of elites and state managers operating in a neoliberal, globalized social structure of accumulation, must be considered and examined.

This book is an informative and well written piece of research on a contemporary issues of major interest to the United States. . . . Most highly recommended. La Red/The Net Provides in one place a well written survey of the problem of the drug trade in the Americas, especially on the socio-economic and political aspects of the phenomena. The book will serve as a useful resource to persons working in Latin American drug trade. Caribbean Review This short book is an excellent introduction to the complicated history and turbulent present-day status of illegal drugs in several Latin American neighborhoods. National Catholic News Service This provocative, informative book explores what is rapidly becoming a major obstacle in inter-American relations. Despite the common problems created by increasing drug addiction and drug-related violence, each side continues to blame the other for the deepening crisis. There is, MacDonald states emphatically, enough blame to go around for everyone. He puts the Latin American drug trade in much-needed perspective, providing both historical backgrund and insight on the contemporary political ramifications of drug trafficking. Because the drug trade is an inter-American phenomenon, the solution to it will have to be a joint one. Among the problems that will have to be faced, according to the author, are Cuba's role as an active middleman in the drug trade, the U.S. market for illegal drugs, the impact of the drug trade on U.S. policy in the region, and the interrelationship of the drug problem to the Latin Americn debt crisis. He warns that there will be no quick victories in the war on drugs in Latin America and the strategies used must attack both supply and demand. Whatever the approach used, its success or failure will depend on the ability of both the United Stataes and the Latin American nations to contain the drugs-insurgence nexus and to deal with the increasingly political nature of the drug trade.