“Paradise Lost?” Miami and Militarization in the War on Drugs

On 23 November 1981, a foreboding image of South Florida graced the cover of Time magazine under a pointed question: “Paradise Lost?” Miami’s unique geographic position put it on the front line of transnational narcotics smuggling and a complex Caribbean refugee crisis, while 80% of all cocaine and marijuana imported into the US flowed through the city. Narcotic capital fueled a booming regional economy, but it also intensified deadly economic competition as narco-entrepreneurs jockeyed for advantage at the bottom of a racially stratified illicit economy. The Miami Chamber of Commerce responded with an unprecedented grassroots effort to secure from the White House a significant activation and redeployment of military assets to solve Florida’s problems of migration, drugs, and crime. The campaign blamed Miami’s woes on weak national borders and directed the federal drug control apparatus outward, to avoid interference with South Florida’s drug-fueled metropolitan growth machine. Grounded in the world-city of Miami during the peak of its 1980s crisis of drugs and crime, this article analyzes urban political economy and elite agenda-setting to tell a history of the military’s entry into the United States’ global prohibitionist crusade.