Histories of Drug Trafficking in Twentieth-Century Mexico

Wil G. Pansters · Benjamin T. Smith

May 2022 · University of New Mexico Press

About this ebook

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.

About the author

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).

Benjamin T. Smith is a professor of Latin American history at the University of Warwick. His works include The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade; The Mexican Press and Civil Society, 1940–1976: Stories from the Newsroom, Stories from the Street; and The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico: Catholicism, Society, and Politics in the Mixteca Baja, 1750–1962 (UNM Press).