Braudel and Drug Trafficking
A seizure may last only a few hours. The routes that brought the cocaine there took decades to build. Some of the structures that made its journey possible took centuries. A journey into the depths of drug trafficking through the lens of Fernand Braudel.
Before feeling the warmth of the sun and ending up surrounded by people wearing lightweight blue jackets, yellow lettering across their backs, and sunglasses, the cocaine began a journey that, like the one undertaken by Mr. Fogg and Passepartout a century and a half earlier, crossed oceans, ports, and borders.
The ship carrying the container with the cocaine concealed among fruit, vegetables, furniture, car parts, or dissolved in oils travels the 9,000 kilometers separating the port of Buenaventura in Colombia from the port of Dakar in Senegal in approximately fifteen days. When it reaches Dakar, the container in which the cocaine is traveling remains on board the same ship for forty-eight hours, while customs authorities inspect some of the other containers and check the cargo documentation. The ship is refueled, part of the crew is replaced, and it then departs for Huelva, at the southwestern tip of Spain.
The floating skyscraper takes three days to reach the Iberian Peninsula if it follows the coasts of Mauritania and Morocco. If it moves away from the African coast and heads toward the Azores, it takes a little longer. The cocaine could be unloaded in Huelva, but in this case the Spanish port is merely part of the itinerary, a necessary stop for the other goods that make up the ship’s cargo and that were inspected in Senegal.
While the goods are being unloaded, the container identified by an extraordinarily long alphanumeric code remains on board the same ship on which it left the port of Buenaventura on the Pacific Ocean. Without attracting attention, yet unable to do anything to make itself less conspicuous, the cocaine remains inside the same dull red container, with large white letters along its sides.
If it is concealed among tons of fruit or vegetables, the container is refrigerated and the time available to inspect it is limited. Perishable goods—such as food—can spoil if they spend too long under inspection, and if that happens, someone loses their investment and others lose their jobs. That limited window for inspection is one of the reasons why drug traffickers choose fruit and vegetables as cover for their shipments. Another is that primary exports carry significant weight in the economies of the countries from which cocaine is exported.
With the European continent to starboard for another four days, the ship finally reaches its destination: the port of Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. The cocaine was destined for the noses of millions of consumers across the continent, but information obtained by the authorities of one country allowed the Dutch authorities, at some point during the maritime journey, to begin monitoring the movements of the container carrying the cocaine.
When they open the container and remove the legal merchandise concealing the drugs, the investigators pose for photographs as they stare at the shipment of cocaine as though they were standing before an overly abstract work of art. Those photographs will illustrate the print newspapers the following day and their digital counterparts three or four hours later and, ultimately, will become part of an immeasurable archive.
But the cocaine seized in Rotterdam—which left the port of Buenaventura, crossed the Panama Canal and the Atlantic Ocean, and passed through the port of Dakar in Senegal and Huelva in Spain—is merely an event within a much longer and more complex process, one that can be traced back to Christopher Columbus’s departure from the port of Palos in 1492—and even much further back—and forward to the emergence of Bitcoin in 2008 and the present day.
Drug Trafficking in the Annales
With his article History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée, published in 1958, Fernand Braudel sparked a revolution in modern historiography. The French historian proposed distinguishing between different historical temporalities and challenged the primacy of the event.
Short-term time is the time of events—those that may last hours, days, or perhaps weeks. They may take the form of a demonstration, a battle, or an election. Braudel compares the short term to the waves of the sea: they are striking, they make noise, and they break quickly, but on their own they cannot explain how the ocean works. Medium-term time spans years, decades, and even half a century. It focuses on social movements, demographic trends, and economic cycles. Braudel compares it to the tides, regular movements of the ocean that become visible along the shore.
The longue durée is the time of structures that change slowly: relationships with nature, geography, forms of economic organization, and mentalities. The time of the longue durée is measured in centuries, even millennia, and Braudel identifies it with the depths of the ocean: dark, undergoing slow and barely perceptible transformations despite the great movements taking place on the surface.
Nine years before that article, Braudel had published what is perhaps his best-known work, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Organized into three major parts corresponding to different speeds of history, the first examined the Mediterranean space: its mountains, coasts, islands, and routes, which for centuries shaped the lives of those who inhabited it. He then analyzed economies, commercial relations, societies, and movements that changed at a faster pace. Finally, he turned to political events, wars, and the decisions of rulers.
The sea, the ports, the captains, and the sailors ceased to be mere settings and became part of the explanation of an extensive and complex history that continually produced new events. Braudel’s three temporalities do not describe different histories, but rather different dimensions of the same process. They make it possible to analyze the same phenomenon at different scales and to observe what the event, on its own, cannot explain. These temporalities become a teasing caress against common sense and a tool for anyone willing to make use of them.
The seizure of cocaine in Rotterdam belongs to the short term. The investigation may have lasted months and the story may circulate for several days, but the opening of the container, the discovery of the cocaine, and the photographs documenting it belong to the time of the event. To understand how and why the cocaine traveled inside that dull red container, with large white letters along its sides, from the port of Buenaventura to Rotterdam, it is necessary to change the scale.
The ship that departed from Buenaventura avoided having to sail around the continent or transport its containers overland from one ocean to the other because, between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, first France and then the United States promoted the construction of the Panama Canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and reduce the distances, time, and costs of maritime trade.
Dakar is no random choice either. Its position along Atlantic routes and its role as a maritime gateway for West African economies without direct access to the sea have made it an important regional logistics hub. Since 2008, investments by the Dubai-based company DP World have modernized the terminal and greatly expanded its handling capacity. The growth of legal trade created precisely what drug trafficking particularly needs: enormous flows of goods within which to try to pass unnoticed.
The ports of Huelva and Rotterdam are integrated into the Trans-European Transport Network, a system of ports, highways, railways, and inland waterways designed to facilitate and accelerate the movement of goods and people across much of Europe. In this case, more than half of the cocaine concealed inside the dull red container, with large white letters along its sides, was destined for the London market.
Once in The Big Smoke, some of the cocaine was to be distributed among frequent users in the City and surrounding areas, while another portion was to be converted into crack cocaine and distributed through what are known as county lines, using public transport networks, mobile phones to arrange deliveries, and digital wallets to make payments.
Drug trafficking did not build the Panama Canal, dredge the approaches to the ports, pave the highways, or invent mobile phones. It did not need to: it learned how to use them. But all these infrastructures are too recent to fully explain the history of the cocaine found in Rotterdam. To descend even deeper, we must leave behind containers, modern ports, and mobile phones and travel back at least 3,000 years.
In the Depths of Drug Trafficking
In many Andean regions of South America, coca leaves are chewed to mitigate the effects of high altitude. Before the conquest of the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century, they were frequently used as offerings in spiritual rituals and also formed part of economic exchanges. With the European conquest of Peru, however, the coca leaf acquired a new dimension within the colonial economy.
Composed of different types of alkaloids, the coca leaf reduced symptoms of fatigue and acquired considerable importance within the silver extraction system at Cerro Rico in Potosí, in what is now the Plurinational State of Bolivia. European conquerors had imposed a coercive labor system—the mita—that forced thousands of Indigenous people to work under extremely harsh conditions in the mines. Within this system, coqueo—the practice of chewing coca—was fundamental to productivity in the mines, but it was regarded as an act of Satanism and, at the urging of the Second Council of Lima in 1567, King Philip II attempted to ban it, with little success, two years later.
Attempts to restrict coqueo, however, clashed with the economic importance that coca had acquired within the colonial system. According to the Thesaurus Indicus, a voluminous treatise written by the Spanish Jesuit jurist Diego de Avendaño in 1668, selling goods on credit to Indigenous workers could become a mechanism for prolonging their time in the mines. “Finally, to sell something on credit to the Indians who work in the mines or in other burdensome forms of labor, with the intention that, being unable to pay, they may be forced to continue working. They will surely leave their lives in such work, for they will never be able to repay the debt in full.”
The exhausting working days increased demand for coca, whose trade became closely intertwined with the mining economy. Receiving meager wages and being forced to purchase expensive goods—including coca leaves—Indigenous workers fell into perpetual debt to their employers. Lacking the money to pay for these goods, they were forced to work ever more in order to repay their debts, creating a rudimentary—yet sophisticated—cycle of exploitation, extraction, consumption, and indebtedness that can be understood as a form of debt bondage.
For centuries, however, coca faced a limitation in becoming a truly global commodity: it remained merely a leaf. But everything began to change when the German chemist Albert Niemann succeeded in obtaining one of the first measurable extractions of the coca leaf’s principal active alkaloid and named it cocaine. Cocaine began to be used for medical purposes and incorporated into various consumer products, including chewing gum, wines, cigarettes, and sweetened beverages.
The extraction of the alkaloid did more than change the possibilities for its use. Cocaine could be processed, stored, measured into doses, transported, and incorporated into other products in ways that differed from the coca leaf itself. The commodity was beginning to become materially independent from the plant.
Paradoxically, when cocaine became subject to increasing restrictions during the first decades of the twentieth century and its illegal production and trade progressively moved underground, much of the initial stages of its transformation remained close to the territories where coca was cultivated.
More than a century later, much of cocaine production continues to take place near the same Andean regions where the plant from which it was chemically separated is cultivated. Cocaine managed to become independent from the leaf, but it never fully managed to become independent from its geography.
Back to the Surface
Cocaine was not born an illegal commodity. During the first decades of the twentieth century, different national regulations and international agreements began progressively restricting its production, trade, and consumption. But the substance remained the same. What changed were the rules determining how it could be produced, transported, sold, and consumed.
Prohibition did not put an end to the cocaine market, but it profoundly transformed the way it operated. A growing share of production and circulation moved underground, and around the cocaine market there emerged an expanding network of intermediaries, transporters, dealers, workers of all kinds, and professionals responsible for channeling the profits into the legal economy.
For the cocaine to reach Rotterdam, drug traffickers did not need to build the Panama Canal, dredge the approaches to the ports, pave the highways, or invent mobile phones. They only needed to learn how to use each of them. Three thousand years of history ended up compressed inside a dull red container, with large white letters along its sides.
When they opened the container and removed the legal merchandise concealing the drugs, the investigators posed for photographs, staring at the shipment of cocaine as though they were standing before an overly abstract work of art. Those photographs, which today illustrate both print and digital newspapers, did more than become part of an immeasurable archive. They also recorded something else. The coca had changed hands once again.
Four centuries later and thousands of kilometers from Potosí, a young man boards a train leaving London. He carries crack cocaine in his backpack. It is the same drug he consumes after finishing his deliveries, and the one that first led him into debt with the trafficker. The same trafficker who filled his backpack with crack and sends him out to distribute it in order to collect a debt that never seems to be fully repaid.
The commodity, the landscape, and the means of transportation have changed. Even the coca has changed hands. But the deep currents have kept moving. Following them will be part of another journey.
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