Rural cocaine elites and resilient clandestine connections in Peru's high Amazonia

In the ‘global age’, drug trades have become ever more seen as dynamic, flexible and fluid, since transnational crime nodes allegedly use a plethora of routes or pathways through which to move these ‘illegalized’ commodities. Most research on the subject centers around such global metaphors and lesser on the rural source contexts. Countless debates therefore have turned a blind eye to the development of the cocaine trade in Peru's ceja de selva (High Amazonia). Based on research in the Tocache Province, where smaller but also pivotal and more observable actors, groups and networks operated, this study follows the cocaine trade's ‘movements’ in a rural context to understand how these activities became an expression of dynamic formations of order, control and governance. By connecting the changes in these local power structures to the area's shifting associations with cocaine's global commodity chains, it will be shown that rural drug trades, in fact, are both incessantly in motion while simultaneously deep-rooted in specific locations.