Smuggler Nation

SMUGGLER
NATION

SMUGGLER
NATION

HOW ILLICIT
TRADE MADE
AMERICA

PETER ANDREAS

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© Peter Andreas 2013

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Andreas, Peter, 1965–
Smuggler nation : how illicit trade made America / Peter Andreas.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–974688–0 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. Smuggling—United States—History.
2. United States—Commerce—History. 3. United States—Foreign economic relations.
4. United States—Economic conditions. I. Title.
HJ6690.A74 2013
364.1´3360973—dc23
2012022990

ISBN 978–0–19–974688–0

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

For my teachers at Swarthmore and Cornell

Preface

Introduction: A Nation of Smugglers

PART I: THE COLONIAL ERA

1. The Golden Age of Illicit Trade

2. The Smuggling Road to Revolution

3. The Smuggling War of Independence

PART II: THE EARLY REPUBLIC

4. Contraband and Embargo Busting in the New Nation

5. Traitorous Traders and Patriotic Pirates

6. The Illicit Industrial Revolution

PART III: WESTWARD EXPANSION, SLAVERY, AND THE CIVIL WAR

7. Bootleggers and Fur Traders in Indian Country

8. Illicit Slavers and the Perpetuation of the Slave Trade

9. Blood Cotton and Blockade Runners

PART IV: THE GILDED AGE AND THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

10. Tariff Evaders and Enforcers

11. Sex, Smugglers, and Purity Crusaders

12. Coming to America Through the Back Door

13. Rumrunners and Prohibitionists

PART V: INTO THE MODERN AGE

14. America’s Century-Long Drug War

15. Border Wars and the Underside of Economic Integration

16. America and Illicit Globalization in the Twenty-First Century

Epilogue

Notes

Index

PREFACE

MY INITIAL INTEREST IN
illicit trade—and the early inspiration for this book—began as a smuggler’s accomplice. Shortly after graduating from college, I spent four months bumming around Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru. While crossing into Bolivia from Peru by bus, a nice elderly woman sitting next to me sheepishly handed me a large plastic bag filled with rolls of toilet paper and then pleaded with me to put it under my seat. I did what she asked; it seemed harmless enough, even if a bit peculiar. The Bolivian border guards then entered the bus, checking documents and belongings, and proceeded to confiscate large amounts of toilet paper. But they overlooked my hidden stash, perhaps because I did not fit the profile of the typical toilet paper smuggler. Later I learned that the inflated demand for toilet paper in Bolivia was partly due to the cocaine industry. Toilet paper was commonly used to dry and filter coca paste, which was then transported to remote jungle laboratories to be refined into powder cocaine—most of which would eventually end up in the noses of American consumers.

During the same trip, I caught a ride on a cargo boat—which turned out to be a smuggling boat—traveling down the Amazon River from Iquitos, Peru, to Leticia, Colombia. Leticia, a bustling town where the borders between Peru, Colombia, and Brazil meet deep in the jungle, owed much of its existence to smuggling. Some of my fellow
passengers were
pisadores
(coca stompers) with distinctive scars on their feet from exposure to the chemicals used to make coca paste. Late at night, before we departed Iquitos, I watched as several dozen drums of chemicals were quietly loaded onto our boat, and then off-loaded in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere before our arrival in Leticia.

I would later find out that many of the chemicals used by the Andean cocaine industry were actually imported from the United States. Leading American chemical companies were exporting vast quantities of precursor chemicals to the region far in excess of what legitimate industry could possibly absorb. Much of it was diverted to the black market and shipped to remote cocaine-processing laboratories—sometimes via Amazonian cargo boats like the one I was on. Even as America’s rapidly escalating war on drugs was trying to stop the northbound flow of cocaine, largely overlooked at the time was the equally important southbound flow of U.S. chemicals needed to cook the coke. I ended up writing a short piece about it for
The New Republic
. And this, in turn, led to an invitation to testify, alongside Gene Haislip from the Drug Enforcement Administration, before a Senate hearing on chemical diversion and trafficking (with industry lobbyists sitting nervously in the audience). I was hooked on drugs, or more precisely, hooked on trying to figure out the business of drugs and the politics of drug control. And this turned into a career-long interest in illicit economic flows and government campaigns to police them.

As we’ll see in the pages that follow, the drug story is just one particularly prominent and relatively late chapter in the much bigger story of America’s long and intimate relationship with smuggling—a clandestine economic practice that we can simply define as bringing in or taking out from one jurisdiction to another without authorization. It is also a far more complex and double-edged relationship than I first imagined, one characterized by intense confrontation but also by accommodation, toleration, and complicity.

In this book, I tell the story of how smuggling—and attempts to police it—have made and remade America, from the illicit molasses trade in colonial times to drug trafficking today. I highlight the profound but often overlooked role of clandestine commerce in the nation’s birth, economic development, geographic expansion, and foreign relations, as well as the role of anti-smuggling initiatives in vastly expanding the policing authority and reach of the federal government. Smuggling, it turns out, has been as much about building up the American state as about subverting it. Through its long interaction with the underworld of smuggling, the United States has emerged not only with a sprawling law enforcement bureaucracy—and jails overflowing with convicted drug law offenders—but also as a policing superpower, promoting its favored prohibitions and policing practices to its neighbors and the rest of the world.

Smuggler Nation
covers a lot of ground, from pot to porn. It is the first book that re-narrates the story of America and its engagement with the world as a series of highly contentious and consequential battles over illicit trade. But the coverage is also inevitably selective. I make no pretense of being comprehensive. I paint in broad strokes, identifying and making sense of the most important historical episodes, trends, themes, and underlying dynamics.

These are not merely colorful smuggling stories that are otherwise marginal to the overall American historical trajectory. Far from it. For better and for worse, smuggling was an essential ingredient in the very birth and development of America and its transformation into a global power. Only by including the lens of smuggling in looking back at the American experience can we fully answer some crucial questions. For instance, what provoked such intense colonial outrage against the British imperial authorities? How did George Washington manage to defeat the world’s greatest military power? How did America industrialize and catch up to England technologically? Why did the United States fail to annex Canada in the War of 1812? Why did the American Civil War last so long given the North’s lopsided military advantage? Why are the tomatoes we eat so cheap, and why is American agribusiness so globally competitive? Why do we now have such a massive criminal justice system, including the world’s largest prison population? In various ways and to varying degrees, smuggling—and the politics of policing it—provides an essential part of the answer to these wide-ranging questions. It is certainly not the only thing that matters. But
Smuggler Nation
shows how and why we should place it more front and center than in conventional accounts of the American epic.

I should say a word of caution about the subject of this book. As one would expect, there are built-in limits and obstacles to doing research on smugglers and smuggling. Information on illicit trade is necessarily imprecise, to say the least; there are no quarterly business reports and annual trade balance statistics. Indeed, the very success of smuggling operations typically depends on not being seen or counted. Documentation therefore tends to be fragmentary and uneven, and it represents rough estimates at best. Readers should keep these inherent limitations in mind in the chapters that follow. In the end, I hope they will agree with me that it is better to tell the story with admittedly imperfect and incomplete data than to simply throw up one’s hands and pretend that the world of smuggling doesn’t exist because it cannot be precisely measured. After all, that would be the equivalent of a drunkard looking for his keys under the lightpost because it is the only place he can see.