Miriam Pensack

How did nations in the Western Hemisphere come to wage a War on Drugs? In this course, we will study the political and social history of drug production, trade, prohibition, and deterrence in the Americas. We will examine the origins of the international narcotics trade, focusing of the cultivation, commodification, and consumption of marijuana, cocaine, and opiates—three drugs that have seen the greatest consumer use in the Americas. We will consider how Latin American countries, including Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, became sites of cultivation and export for these substances. Through a sustained examination of primary sources and secondary literature, we will trace the rise of narcotrafficking networks and their relationship to state policies of prohibition and deterrence, studying how criminalization and militarization have impacted communities in countries where these substances are cultivated, transported, and consumed. We will consider the many consequences of the War on Drugs, which include state violence, prison expansion, community displacement, and the erosion of democratic institutions, among others. We will analyze how Latin American governments and civil societies have both collaborated with and resisted US counternarcotics efforts and how the War on Drugs has intersected with issues of race, class, and national sovereignty. In the concluding sessions, students will explore concepts and policies such as decriminalization, harm reduction, and regional self-determination, prompting them to consider possible contemporary alternatives to the War on Drugs.

This course will examine the history of revolution and counterrevolution in Latin America from the late 18th century to the end of the Cold War. Beginning with the Haitian Revolution, the only successful slave revolt in modern history, students will examine how challenges to colonial domination, chattel slavery, racial hierarchies, economic deprivation, and political repression upended powerful governing regimes and provoked blowback from those regimes’ defenders. Over the semester, we will examine some of the most significant revolutionary movements in the Western Hemisphere, including the early 19th-century wars for independence in what was then Spanish America, the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Chile’s democratic-socialist project under Salvador Allende (1970–1973), and the 1979 Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. In each case, we will analyze the social and economic conditions that gave rise to these movements, the ideologies that inspired them, and the often-violent responses that they provoked from local and foreign powers. The course will also investigate the broader counterrevolutionary forces that have shaped modern Latin America’s political landscape, from military coups and dictatorships to US interventions and Cold War anticommunism. Through a combination of secondary literature and primary sources, students will become familiar with key historical concepts, including class conflict, nationalism, imperialism, political violence, and the possibilities and limits of revolutionary change.