This title offers a history of Colombia's illegal drug trade and of the extreme violence that it generated. The book's focus is the criminality and violence that the drug trade brought to Colombia and how that social upset was ended in the early 2000s. At the work's centre are chapters detailing the Medellin and Cali cocaine cartels' war against the Colombian state, the revolutionary guerrillas' war against the state, and the war that paramilitary groups conducted against the guerrillas.