Évolutions récentes de la géopolitique de la cocaïne

• Main Authors: Alain Labrousse, Daurius Figueira, Romain Cruse
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université de Reims Champagne-Ardennes 2007-03-01
• Series: L'Espace Politique
• Subjects: geopolitics; cocaine; South America; Colombia; Caribbean; Africa
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/espacepolitique/691

This paper looks at the recent illicit cocaine trafficking geographical and geopolitical trends, from the South american producer regions to the western markets, through the various spaces filling this commercial gap into the Caribbean and Africa. New patterns have been emerging since two decades: production activities have been increasingly taking place in Colombia without being completely eradicated from Bolivia and Peru, consummation has been steadily increasing in Europe as well as in South America and Africa, while trafficking operations were blooming around the Caribbean and in Africa. The main reason for those developments is the balloon effect, the shift of trafficking networks according to day-to-day repression targets. Those movements have been eased off by the actual prohibition politics lack of will, although much energy has been put into the discourses surrounding them. This gap between talks and actions allows us to be very sceptical when it comes to a repression often used as a smoke screen to mask major geopolitical interventions.