The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the NYU Department of History hosts a book presentation titled, Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia's First Drug Paradise, by Lina Britto (Northwestern University), as a part of the New Work in Latin American History Lecture Series.
This event is free and open to the public.
About the Book:
Before Colombia became one of the world’s largest producers of cocaine in the 1980s, traffickers from the Caribbean coast partnered with American buyers in the 1970s to make the South American country the main supplier of marijuana for a booming US drug market, fueled by the US hippie counterculture. How did Colombia become central to the creation of an international drug trafficking circuit? Marijuana Boom is the story of this forgotten history. Combining deep archival research with unprecedented oral history, Lina Britto deciphers a puzzle: Why did the Colombian coffee republic, a model of Latin American representative democracy and economic modernization, transform into a drug paradise, and at what cost?
About the Author:
Lina Britto (Ph.D., New York University, 2013) is an historian of modern Latin America and the Caribbean. Her work situates the emergence and consolidation of illegal drug smuggling networks in the Caribbean and Andean regions of Colombia, particularly marijuana, in the context of a growing articulation between the country and the United States during the Cold War. She was awarded grants from the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies and Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation and Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. She received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Harvard University, and her dissertation won a Martin Diskin Dissertation Award honorable mention from the Latin American Studies Association in 2014. She has published in Revista Contemporánea—from the Grupo de Estudios Interdisciplinario del Pasado Reciente (GEIPAR)—, the Hispanic American Historical Review, North American Congress on Latin America-NACLA, and El Espectador (Colombia). She is preparing a book manuscript on Colombia’s marijuana boom in the 1970s based on extensive fieldwork and oral history in the Colombian Caribbean, as well as archival research in Colombia and the United States. Her courses at Northwestern focus on the hemispheric history of the drug trade and the war on drugs, popular music and nation-state formation, oral history and Cold War terror, and contemporary Latin America in historical perspective.