The Andean region has been, and continues to be, at the center of a struggle over embracing economic globalization and market democracies or eschewing such models for various nationalist/socialist strategies of development and politics. The regions militaries have not been outside of this struggle, with factions in Venezuela or Ecuador working to frustrate the establishment and/or maintenance of neoliberal regimes, while militaries in Colombia, Peru, and to an extent in Bolivia, playing crucial roles in weakening or eliminating substantive challenges to capitalist globalization. William Aviles explores this variation in military power, identifying how neoliberal economic and political elites and international actors such as the United States have sought to marginalize "radical populists" while seeking the subordination of militaries to the decision-making of neoliberal elites within Andean states.

Since the mid-1980s subsequent US governments have promoted a highly militarized and prohibitionist drug control approach in Latin America. Despite this strategy the region has seen increasing levels of homicide, displacement and violence. Why did the militarization of U.S. drug war policies in Latin America begin and why has it continued despite its inability to achieve the stated targets? Are such policies simply intended to impose U.S. power or have elites in Latin America internalized this agenda as their own? Why did resistance to this approach emerge in the late-2000s and does this represent a challenge to the prohibitionist agenda? In this book William Aviles argues that if we are to understand and explain the militarization of the drug war in Latin America a 'transnational grand strategy', developed and implemented by networks of elites and state managers operating in a neoliberal, globalized social structure of accumulation, must be considered and examined.

Since the mid-1980s subsequent US governments have promoted a highly militarized and prohibitionist drug control approach in Latin America. Despite this strategy the region has seen increasing levels of homicide, displacement and violence. Why did the militarization of U.S. drug war policies in Latin America begin and why has it continued despite its inability to achieve the stated targets? Are such policies simply intended to impose U.S. power or have elites in Latin America internalized this agenda as their own? Why did resistance to this approach emerge in the late-2000s and does this represent a challenge to the prohibitionist agenda? In this book William Aviles argues that if we are to understand and explain the militarization of the drug war in Latin America a 'transnational grand strategy', developed and implemented by networks of elites and state managers operating in a neoliberal, globalized social structure of accumulation, must be considered and examined.

Through a series of comparative case studies, the author demonstrates that the conflicts and struggles over capitalist globalization in the Andes are intricately connected to the political power of the military in the region.