Travel Reads

Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography

VAWN HIMMELSBACH, Chic Savvy Travels

Powder. Blow. Flake. Nose candy. Whatever you call it, cocaine is intimately tied to Latin America — from building empires to funding civil war. On recent trips to Colombia and Panama, I never encountered the stuff, but its influence was all around me.

After reading Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography, by journalist and documentary film producer Dominic Streatfeild, I have a much better understanding of how the innocuous coca leaf has shaped the politics, economy and social fabric of this part of the world — from the days of the Inca Empire to the infamous Medellin and Cali cartels of Colombia.

So whether you’re a budget backpacker hiking the Inca Trail in Peru or doing business in Bogota or Panama City, it’s well worth picking up a copy of this book, which is entertaining, disturbing and sobering — even laugh-out-loud funny in parts.

For centuries, coca has been used as a traditional remedy for stomach complaints and altitude sickness. In the 1800s, it was a popular cure-all in patent medicines and was considered to have properties similar to Viagra (even the Incas used it for impotence). And Coca-Cola started using trujillo leaves in its product, which was marketed as a “nerve and tonic stimulant” to pharmacists.

Colombia's infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar.

After a lengthy process that involves, among other things, mashing up dried coca leaves with powdered cement and soaking the mixture in gasoline, voila — you’ve got cocaine. And the effect this drug has had — and continues to have — on Latin America, and on social history, is nothing short of astounding.

While the price of cocaine is high for consumers, Streatfeild points out it’s considerably higher for producers.

“In the last 25 years alone, cocaine-generated cash has been responsible for coups d’etat in Bolivia and Honduras; has infiltrated the governments of the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, Haiti, Cuba, and every single Latin American country without exception; has helped to fund a guerrilla war in Nicaragua (creating one of the most embarrassing scandals in the CIA’s history); and has prompted the U.S. invasion of Panama. In the late 1980s, traffickers in Peru and Bolivia were so wealthy that they offered to pay off their countries’ national debts,” he writes. And then there’s Colombia, with its cartels and drug-funded civil war.

Colombia's Medellin cartel.

This book isn’t new — it was published in 2001 — but still provides incredible insights into Latin America through Streatfeild’s investigations, from crack houses in New York to paste factories deep in the jungles of Colombia. His interviews include some of the most notorious drug lords of our time, often written with self-deprecating humour.

When Streatfeild ventures into a Peruvian village, for example, he tries telling the locals he’s 31 years old and has been researching coca in England for two years. But his rudimentary Spanish causes him to make a fatal error: “The villagers of San Jorge were delighted to hear that I had 31 anuses and had been writing a book for two of them. A snigger ran through the crowd. It was probably the best thing I could have said. Clearly I was harmless: even the DEA wouldn’t employ someone this stupid.”

So if you’re heading to Latin America, you might want to throw Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography into your backpack along with that Gabriel Garcia Márquez novel.

Date Added: October 3, 2011 | Comments (0)