“Coca Notebooks”: Working for the Drug Business in Tito Gutierrez’s Novel Mariposa blanca (1990)

Abstract

Latin American narco-narratives have represented the complex world of drug trafficking through different narrative strategies and literary techniques. Gutierrez’s text Mariposa blanca uses a hybrid form, an in-between of bildungsroman and testimonial narrative, to get us closer to the changing realities of drug trafficking in Bolivia. With the moral crisis of a medical student who arrives to El Chapare to work in the drug industry, Gutierrez’s text illustrates the tension between a traditional crop—la coca—and the illegal market of cocaine in the Andean region perfectly.