Marshall, Jonathan. Drug Wars: Corruption, Counterinsurgency and Covert
Operations in the Third World. Forestville CA: Cohan & Cohen Publishers,
1991. 90 pages.
This is a short book on an important topic. The 264 end notes, in
addition to the fact that this is not Jonathan Marshall's first book on
this topic, mean that there is a lot packed into these 90 pages. His main
point is that the war against drugs can never succeed, due to the laws of
supply and demand. Yet it continues, because the massive infrastructure of
drug enforcement, anti-organized crime efforts, money laundering detection,
counterinsurgency, and military special forces have become addicted to the
battle nonetheless. Caught in the middle are the poor countries. On one side
they are destabilized with narcodollars and criminal syndicates, while on
the other side the U.S. bankrolls powerful security forces that shift the
balance from elected parliaments to military elites. Examples are noted
from Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Thailand and Burma.
Since the end of the Cold War, there is a dangerous new tendency for
U.S. counterinsurgency elites to substitute "drugs" as the new enemy, now
that "communists" are hard to sell at budget time. The CIA supposedly joined
the drug war in 1969, but their role is still unconvincing. The worst aspect
of this "drugs as the enemy" tendency might be yet to come in America:
counterinsurgency not merely as foreign policy, but also as domestic policy.
ISBN 1-56060-062-4
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