Governing Through Cocaine: The García Meza Regime and the inter-American Cold War (1980-1)

On 17 July 1980, General Luis García Meza’s coup inaugurated Bolivia’s last National Security regime. Though conventionally situated within the broader cycle of Southern Cone authoritarianism, the Bolivian case diverged in several respects: the participation of drug traffickers in the coup and the post-coup order; its installation with Argentine operational support; and prompt US opposition, which moved to isolate it diplomatically. Drawing on US, Argentine, and Bolivian sources—including federal court records, diplomatic cables, and intelligence reporting—this article argues that the regime emerged from a reconfiguration of the inter-American Cold War, in which the fragmentation of the hemispheric anti-communist order created conditions for new political alliances, external intervention, and regime financing. In Bolivia, this took the form of a structural fusion between the state apparatus and the cocaine economy, sustained by Argentine support that extended beyond counterinsurgency expertise to active financial and operational participation. The regime’s entanglement with narcotrafficking, however, proved a diplomatic liability that made it difficult to accommodate even for an incoming Reagan administration otherwise critical of Carter’s human rights agenda. Bolivia thus reveals how this fragmentation altered counterrevolutionary politics, as regional security projects increasingly operated through channels that bypassed established patterns of hemispheric alignment.