In his new history, Amitav Ghosh shows how the world’s first international drug cartels were run by the Dutch and British governments through their monopoly East India companies.
Washington looked the other way as coup leaders and drugs cartels conspired to turn Honduras into a center of the cocaine trade.
Men who were detained under the state of emergency are transported in a cargo truck in Soyapango, El Salvador in October 2022 after President Nayib Bukele began a crackdown on gangs that suspended constitutional rights and threw one in every 100 people in jail.
(AP Photo/Moises Castillo)
Haiti is facing a wave of chaos as gang violence grips the country.
Special Forces soldiers in action: Ecuador is hostage to organised crime, amid a culture of violence rooted in the foundations of a society with a fragile economy and political and legal systems compromised by corruption.
AP Photo/Dolores Ochoa
Just five years ago, Ecuador was still considered one of the safest countries in Latin America. Now, there is a brutal war playing out between criminal gangs and the state.
Child criminal exploitation affects children caught up in both county lines drugs trafficking and paramilitary groups. Modern slavery policy – when applied – can better ensure their safety.
Xylazine, or tranq, is increasingly being mixed with drugs like fentanyl or heroin and can be difficult to detect. Most people who use drugs are unable to tell if they have been exposed to it.
South Africa’s governing ANC has continued the anti-cannabis repression inherited from apartheid.
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Tor Market is now the longest-running English-language market for illegal drugs on the dark web. But its success and profile may contain the seeds of its own downfall.
Ghana’s maritime space is key to its economy.
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International and Australian laws need to be updated to cope with the newest drug-trafficking technique threatening maritime security: remote-controlled narco-drones.
An Afghan boy collects raw opium east of Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2018.
(AP Photo/Mohammad Anwar Danishyar)
The federal government’s fight against cocaine distribution wrongly assumes that it’s all destined for the US.
More than 35,000 people were killed in Mexico in 2019, the deadliest year on record. Violence has spiked as a result of the government’s ongoing assault on drug cartels.
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A researcher who fled crime-beset Mexico returns to interview the drug cartels behind so much of the violence, asking 33 ‘narcos’ everything about their lives, from birth to their latest murder.
With its tales of bloody violence, corruption, international trade and entrepreneurial innovation, Guzmán’s trial offers a telenovela-style explainer on Mexican cartels and their American clients.