A View from the South: The Global Creation of the War on Drugs

Abstract The paper claims that it is necessary to seriously consider facts and phenomena beyond the ‘West’ in order to understand and theorise the complex social practices that shape the world. From a Latin American standpoint, it questions the traditional approach to a global matter: the War on Drugs. Researchers usually see this phenomenon in Latin America as reflecting US domination in the region. However, by identifying how and why the drug issue became a matter of security in Latin America and by specifying the collective countermeasures adopted, Latin American participation becomes more apparent in the construction of the international process that gave rise to the normative framework that holds up the War on Drugs: the 1988 Vienna Convention.