“Cocaine Cowboys: Reloaded” (2014): Reversing Empire and the 1980s’ Drug War

Miami, and what became a Miami aesthetic, was probably one of the most distinctive and memorable features of the 1980s in North America. Hit shows like Miami Vice and the music of Jan Hammer; movies like Scarface; and, new fashions like white cotton or linen jackets and pastel-coloured t-shirts, plus a revival of art deco and neon, all gave the 1980s their distinctive feel. In recent years there has been a mini-revival of the products of the times. Miami Vice was turned into a movie, while the series seemed to have a successor with CSI: Miami, just as Scarface has been succeeded by two Sicario movies that are just as brutal and remain focused on the Drug War of today. Video games like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City offered an almost nostalgic revival of the music, fashions, and crime themes of the 1980s. Hollywood movies about Pablo Escobar have come out only recently (such as Escobar: Paradise Lost and Loving Pablo), and Barry Seal was most recently played by Tom Cruise in American Made. The fashion, music, the styles and themes were all outgrowths of the drug boom, and the Drug War that surrounded it. (The field of studies which I entered in the mid-1980s, Latin American & Caribbean Studies, probably made me even more sensitive to the Miami–Cuban–Colombian–Central American–Caribbean connections that become prominent in the media at the time.) The 1980s and the “War on Drugs” have become so intertwined that one cannot remember one without remembering the other. Some of the key political and media actors of the time are still around making noise today, as the US’ Drug Wars continue (people such as then Senator Joe Biden, chairman of the task force on crime; Rudy Giuliani; Katie Couric, shown reporting on crime in Miami, Dan Rather, and others). More important than everything else, however, are the precedents set in this period that have continued to shape and inform the present, and what we can learn from this history.
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https://zeroanthropology.net/2018/10/28/cocaine-cowboys-reloaded-2014-reversing-empire-and-the-1980s-drug-war/