Chapter 11 focuses on the new violence that has erupted in many Latin American countries in the early twenty-first century. It shows that Latin America is the most violent region in the world and that violence is perpetrated by drug cartels, gangs, common criminals, militias, and state agents. The chapter explores the causes of violence through case studies of Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) and draws several conclusions. International factors, such as the global drug trade and US policy toward Latin America, have played a largely negative role. The state has failed to guarantee citizen security, in part because it is absent, and in part because it colludes with criminal groups. Additionally, needed reforms of the state’s security forces are not enacted because the democratically elected politicians who have to propose such reforms are threatened or bought off by actors who benefit from violence. This chapter shows that problems of democracy – the poor quality of democracy – and problems for democracy – the failure of democracies to guarantee civil rights such as the right to life – are tightly interconnected.

In Latin America, goods substitution dynamics are evident in states that have recently opposed US hegemony, such as Venezuela and Ecuador. However, the case of Colombia – one of the USA’s closest allies in the region – shows how asset substitution dynamics come to operate under conditions of hierarchy. Colombia does not seek to challenge the USA directly. Rather, Colombia is consistently seeking to diversify its ties with the USA, thereby increasing its leverage and autonomy and hedging its bets from within a hierarchical arrangement. Colombia is a “least likely” case for the theory of goods substitution, and there is limited evidence of actual Chinese goods substitution in Colombia. Yet, China’s increasingly central role in a global goods ecology is a new context in which Colombian hedging strategies are used to threaten with goods substitution. This chapter shows that the mere threat of exiting or hedging strategies has the potential to effect policy change, particularly when combined with domestic political context – a diversification of ties interacts with domestic and international politics, with one area having possible unintended effects on the other.

Chapter 4 studies illegal drugs, a significant driver of crime and a central issue in Latin American politics and society. One in five inmates is incarcerated for drug-related crimes, and at least one in three uses drugs regularly inside prisons. This chapter examines the patterns of drug crimes, the revenue made from selling or transporting drugs, and the income offenders made prior to being arrested, as well as the use of drugs inside prisons (who supplies the drugs, how much is spent on drugs, who controls drug trafficking inside the correction facilities, and how big the illegal prison market is). We show that law enforcement overwhelmingly targets “easy to catch” drug-traffickers, while barely making inroads on dismantling illegal drug industries, and facilitates the replacement social mechanism. Prison has become an extreme punishment that has had only limited success in reducing the supply of illegal drugs.

Chapter 2 studies the movement of various material forms of medical knowledge about cinchona – bottled compound wines, or powdered bark – by setting out the structure, volume and reach of world commerce in cinchona. Based on trade statistics, pharmaceutical inventories and medical treatises as well as the extensive Spanish administrative record on the subject, the chapter charts the bark’s availability across the Atlantic World by means of commerce and contraband as well as concomitant, non-commercial forms of distribution – charitable giving, medical relief programmes and diplomatic gift exchange. Preparing the ground for subsequent chapters concerned with the movement of consumption practices and expertise in indications, it exposes and examines both the bark’s geographic reach, along the veins of Atlantic trade, proselytizing, and imperialism, and its more elusive social reach within consumer societies.