Chapter . . . . .8 ........................................ The Andean Connection
T
he 1940s and 1950s saw the furtherance of trade in illegal drugs within a triangle connecting the Andean countries, Cuba, and the United States. Both Cuban drug traffickers and their Andean counterparts, a large majority of them foreign-born immigrants, were very opportunistic, time and again demonstrating the ability to adapt to changing circumstances and to contest and deflect U.S. pressure against drug trafficking.
The emergence of the Andean countries — in particular, Peru — on the hemispheric drug trafficking scene was related in a circuitous way to economic and political developments in the Far East. The first link in the chain appeared in 1878, when the Dutch introduced coca plants to their Javanese colony. From that point on, shored up by support from the Koloniale Bank of Amsterdam, coca leaf production on the island steadily expanded, and in 1920 Java exported seventeen hundred tons of coca.1 When the Japanese occupation of British and Dutch colonies cut off the Asian coca supply during the Second World War, the demand for Peruvian coca increased significantly. With the end of the war and the reopening of the Asian supply lines to the West, the need for legal importation of Peruvian coca shrank to prewar levels, but the market dynamics had fundamentally changed, and Peru remained the principal source of cocaine in the Western Hemisphere.2 One barometer marking this change involved the number of confiscations made in the United States of the illegal drug. In 1945, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) seized 702 grams of cocaine originating in Peru and shipped from either Peruvian or Chilean ports; four years later, that number had jumped to more than 13.5 kilos.3 The activities of sailors served as another indicator of the change. During the war, sailors traveling between the United States and South America focused on smuggling U.S.-produced items that had become
