Grounding traffic: how the cocaine commodity chain embeds in rural Central America
Across Latin America, the going usurpaton of land and natural resources by political/economic elites and multinational corporations has received considerable academic attention. A parallel body of work is emphasizing the role of illicit capital (mainly associated with the trade in illicit drugs) in corrupting governments and drastically compromising citizen security (dramatically manifest in the surge of unaccompanied minors from Central America to the US border). To date, however, little work has linked the two processes, particularly in terms of the ways in which illicit activities articulate on the ground with land grabs and rural dispossession. In this presentation, I unpack the functioning of a single rural transshipment node in the global cocaine trade, tracing the ways in which cocaine transit embeds in the social and ecological worlds of eastern Honduras' Moskitia region. Drawing from long-term ethnographic research and satellite image analyses, I show how the region's rise as a trafficking hub post 2006 has changed land use and land cover in stark and unprecedented ways. Exploring the ways in which narco-rents are captured and laundered, and by whom, I review the long-term implications for agrarian change and rural livelihoods in place.
Dr. McSweeney is Professor of Geography at Ohio State University. Her research interests are Human-environment Interactions; Cultural and Political Ecology.
