Damián Zaitch (Utrecht University) - For the past 15 years, several transformations have taken place at the levels of cocaine production in Latin America and subsequent export to Europe. These changes refer to the nature of drug trafficking organizations, their relation with legal structures and actors, territorial displacement, but also to the modus operandi of cocaine entrepreneurs in terms of routes and business modalities. Critical research on these developments remains fragmentary, often based on ‘official’ or journalistic sources, and in general difficult to do. In this contribution, I will first share my views and personal experience of conducting long-term ethnographic research on the cocaine trade in Colombia and Europe (Zaitch 2002; Zaitch 2015), stressing the value of ethnographic methods to study illegal markets in Latin America. A second part of this contribution will present the main recent trends and developments of the cocaine business in Latin America (particularly Colombia), and the shifts regarding cocaine export to European markets.
Dr. Damián Zaitch (1966) is since 2009 Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the Willem Pompe Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology, Utrecht University. From 2000 to 2009 he was Lecturer at the Department of Criminology, Erasmus University Rotterdam. He has researched and published on social control and terrorism, police cooperation in Europe, critical criminology, and for the past 20 years on organised crime, drug trafficking and drug policies in the Netherlands and Latin America. He obtained his PhD (2001, cum laude) at the University of Amsterdam, with an ethnographic research on Colombians involved in the cocaine business in the Netherlands (Trafficking Cocaine (2002), Kluwer Law International) for which he obtained the Willem Nagel Prize in 2003.
