Paco: Drug War Blowback in Argentina

“Paco”, a cheap and addictive form of cocaine, became widely known after Argentina’s financial collapse. This article ties the appearance of paco in Argentina to the U.S. War on Drugs and Plan Colombia.

Key to understanding paco may be Argentina’s changing role within the international cocaine business as a result of the U.S.-funded, multibillion-dollar counter-drug program, Plan Colombia, implemented in 2000, on the cusp of Argentina’s meltdown.

“Before, cocaine hydrochloride would pass from the producer countries into Argentina. Now what enters is the paste base, which is much cheaper. In the past, Argentina was a transit country. Now it’s a country of transit, consumption, and production.”

Another result of Plan Colombia and the War on Drugs is the appearance of narco-states in West Africa, thanks to a surge in European demand and price for cocaine.

Traffickers now follow a transshipment route from Brazil, Colombia, or Venezuela to Europe via West African nations, especially Guinea-Bissau, which the United Nations has called “Africa’s first narco-state”—and where, like Argentina, a cheap, smokable cocaine product (known by its Brazilian name, pedra) has taken hold among locals.

Beginning in mid-2006, news reports in English began appearing about paco, a cheap, highly addictive form of cocaine ravaging the impoverished neighborhoods of Buenos Aires.

Most of the reporting from Buenos Aires barrios emphasized paco’s link to impoverishment in Argentina following the country’s 2001–02 economic meltdown. Official poverty among residents of Buenos Aires suburbs reached 61% in 2003, according to the Argentine National Institute of Statistics and Census. And in neighboring Montevideo, Uruguay, where cheap cocaine has also taken root, unemployment surged to more than 20%.

The media identified paco as pasta base (“base paste”), or cocaine sulfate, the form of the drug that both precedes its conversion into powder (cocaine hydrochloride) and is left over, in small quantities, when that process is completed. Selling for less than 50 cents per dose, the drug is said to have saturated the street-corner drug market. Between 2004 and 2006, paco consumption increased 200% in Buenos Aires, according to the Argentine government. About 70,000 Argentines between the ages of 16 and 26 have tried the drug in greater Buenos Aires, according to the Argentine Secretariat for Prevention of Drug Addiction and Control of Narco-trafficking (Sedronar).

Posted by charlesmostoller
--Más vale morir de pie, que mendigar de rodillas--