Drug War Capitalism

by Dawn Paley

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to the memory of independent photographer and journalist Ali Mustafa, 1984–2014. His bravery, fighting spirit, and commitment live on in our hearts, in our work, and in our words.

  Días antes de terminar este libro recibimos las primeras noticias de los 43 normalistas de Ayotzinapa desaparecidos en Iguala, Guerrero, el 27 de septiembre de 2014. Sus nombres aquí aparecen, con la firme esperanza de que sean encontrados con vida y con la profunda rabia e indignación por lo que les haya sucedido, ¡los tenemos presentes!: Abel García Hernández, Abelardo Vázquez Peniten, Adán Abrajan de la Cruz, Alexander Mora Venancio, Antonio Santana Maestro, Benjamín Ascencio Bautista, Bernardo Flores Alcaraz, Carlos Iván Ramírez Villarreal, Carlos Lorenzo Hernández Muñoz, César Manuel González Hernández, Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre, Christian Tomas Colon Garnica, Cutberto Ortiz Ramos, Dorian González Parral, Emiliano Alen Gaspar de la Cruz, Everardo Rodríguez Bello, Felipe Arnulfo Rosas, Giovanni Galindes Guerrero, Israel Caballero Sánchez, Israel Jacinto Lugardo, Jesús Jovany Rodríguez Tlatempa, Jonas Trujillo González, Jorge Álvarez Nava, Jorge Aníbal Cruz Mendoza, Jorge Antonio Tizapa Legideño, Jorge Luis González Parral, José Ángel Campos Cantor, José Ángel Navarrete González, José Eduardo Bartolo Tlatempa, José Luis Luna Torres, Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz, Julio César López Patolzin, Leonel Castro Abarca, Luis Ángel Abarca Carrillo, Luis Ángel Francisco Arzola, Magdaleno Rubén Lauro Villegas, Marcial Pablo Baranda, Marco Antonio Gómez Molina, Martín Getsemany Sánchez García, Mauricio Ortega Valerio, Miguel Ángel Hernández Martínez, Miguel Ángel Mendoza Zacarías, Saúl Bruno García.

  Foreword

  Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera

  “To get rich, one must have but a single idea, one fixed, hard, immutable thought: the desire to make a heap of gold. And in order to increase this heap of gold, one must be inflexible, a usurer, thief, extortionist, and murderer! And one must especially mistreat the small and the weak! And when this mountain of gold has been amassed, one can climb up on it, and from up on the summit, a smile on one’s lips, one can contemplate the valley of poor wretches that one has created.”

  —Petrus Borel, Champavert, Immoral Tales

  Capitalism is defined as a socioeconomic system based on private ownership of the means of production and the exploitation of the labor force. According to Karl Marx, the capitalist mode of production “rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of non-workers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, of labor power.”[1] This is the system that rules most parts of our world today; and it is a system based on the accumulation of wealth/capital and exploitation of labor and natural resources by small elites—mainly transnational businesses. With these ideas in mind and with an aim of explaining the violent socioeconomic and political reality of Colombia, Mexico, and Central America today, Dawn Paley wrote Drug War Capitalism. Paley is one of the best and most serious journalists I have encountered in my own journey to understand the massive crisis these societies have undergone in recent times, and Drug War Capitalism is the best book I have recently read on this subject, by far.

  I was born in Mexico in 1975, and witnessed the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, which allegedly meant the triumph of capitalism over what was called at that time communism. I studied economics in the 1990s, during the Third Wave of democratization in the post–Cold War world, when scholars Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama suggested that ideologies had come to an end, and that capitalism had won the ideological battle forever. For Fukuyama we were living the “end of history.” As an undergraduate student of economics at a private university in Mexico City, I was trained in the tradition of neoclassical economics. I became familiar with the ideas of Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, and Adam Smith, who are associated—by themselves or by others—with the ideology of capitalism. I was a student when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed; at school I was taught about the supposed benefits of economic liberalization, the comparative advantage, free markets, deregulation, and privatization; in other words, the benefits of capitalism. I began to understand the limitations of this socioeconomic system and structural economic reforms during Mexico’s economic and devaluation crisis in 1994–1995, and the Zapatista uprising.

  I worked for the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Agriculture in Mexico and was present during the 2000 elections, when Vicente Fox became president of the country, after more than seventy years of one-party rule. I witnessed months of great expectations and enthusiasm by Mexican society, in the streets, in the universities, and elsewhere. Democracy amounted to a big promise in a still very unequal nation. But poverty and inequality, at that particular moment, did not seem to matter for many, who thought that the problems of our country would be solved through free and fair elections and the consolidation of democratic institutions. For many optimistic citizens, the new Mexican democracy and President Fox—a former employee of a transnational company (Coca Cola-México), a tall and unintelligent man who wore cowboy boots and ran a very successful presidential campaign—would save Mexico and bring prosperity and stability to our nation after serious economic and political crises in the 1980s and 1990s.

  In August of 2000, I left my country to study for a PhD in political science at the New School for Social Research in New York City. It was there, at a progressive school in the United States, that I learned the basics of Marxism and understood the key limitations of capitalism in extremely unequal nations. During the years I spent in New York, I studied the contemporary political history of most Latin American countries and became very interested in the Central American region as well as in the massive violence and war on drugs in Colombia. The first years of the twenty-first century were determinant for the relative stabilization of the Colombian conflict, after many years, even decades, of intense violence and massive social and political crisis.

  I returned to Mexico City in early 2006, some months before the most contested presidential election in the country’s history. Mexican society was extremely divided and polarized over the issues and the selection of presidential candidates. I realized that Fukuyama was mistaken about the end of history and the end of ideologies. After a very tight election, allegations of fraud, and a period of intense social mobilization, Felipe Calderón became president of Mexico. Immediately after he assumed power on December 1, 2006, he declared a war on drugs and launched military operations against drug trafficking organizations—now known as transnational criminal organizations (TCOs). To some extent, certain elements of this episode of Mexico’s history reminded me of recent violence and anti-narcotics efforts in Colombia.

  Since that time, violence in Mexico has reached unprecedented levels. To date, Mexico’s so-called “war on drugs” has claimed over 100,000 lives—probably many more, but we do not have access to the exact figure. During this period, more than 27,000 people have vanished, with many of these disappearances linked to organized crime. Thousands of citizens have become internal refugees, displaced within Mexico, or forced to move abroad. This momentous increase in violence has been accompanied by the widespread use of barbaric, terror-inflicting methods such as decapitation, dismemberment, car bombs, mass kidnappings, grenade attacks, blockades, and the widespread execution of public officials. These practices remind me of the late Cold War period in Central America.

  At the same time, drug trafficking organizations diversified their operations and became involved in lucrative new businesses, such as kidnapping, extortion, migrant smuggling, human trafficking, weapons smuggling, video and music piracy, and trafficking of crude oil, natural
gas, and gasoline stolen from Mexico’s state petroleum company, among others. These activities have been made possible by a new relationship of organized crime with a new set of actors. New corruption networks have been built between criminal organizations, local police and law enforcement agencies, politicians at all levels, and federal authorities. Formal businesses, including transnational companies (e.g., financial firms, US oil companies, private security firms, arms-producing companies, and gambling companies) have also established new connections with TCOs.

  A new model of organized crime has evolved in the last few years, and it seems to have been exported to other parts of the Americas, particularly to Central America. This new paramilitarized model of organized crime has coincided with the militarization of anti-narcotic operations in the region, which was furthered by the successor of Plan Colombia, that is, by Plan Mérida—a program that started officially about one year after Plan Colombia ended—and the Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI). These initiatives were advanced and supported by the government of the United States. The combination of these phenomena led to levels and types of violence that had not been experienced in a long time.

  I now live in Brownsville, Texas, right across the border from the Mexican city of Matamoros. The area south of Brownsville—as many other regions along the Mexican side of the US-Mexico border—has been particularly affected by new and more extreme forms of violence, organized crime, militarization, and paramilitarization.

  Experiencing violence so closely—and being aware of a disturbing transformation of Mexican society—I have become particularly interested in this phenomenon that has expanded to other regions of the hemisphere and seems to have transnational roots and explanations. For the past few years, I have conducted a large number of lengthy interviews with experts, journalists, and other key actors regarding drug violence and the activities of transnational organized crime syndicates. I have talked with many people and have read almost every trade book that has come out on this subject matter. Before reading Drug War Capitalism, I had not found any comprehensive text that offered a coherent explanation of these very complex phenomena that have affected entire communities and led to the loss of thousands of lives, sparking a human tragedy of considerable dimensions in Colombia, Mexico, and Central America—the Northern Triangle countries in particular (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador).

  The first time I talked to Paley was in April of 2011, when she was writing an article about violence in the northeastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas for The Nation magazine. We stayed in contact, and I started to follow her work and her trips to different parts of our hemisphere in her quest to understand violence, imperialism, and exploitation of poor communities in the context of what she calls a “war against people” (guerra contra los pueblos). I still remember a conversation we had in February 2012, in La Paz, Baja California, when we met briefly and talked about the situation in Mexico five years into a war that was allegedly declared to fight organized crime and to reestablish order and the rule of law in the country.

  At that time, Paley expressed to me her intention to write this book and explained in detail what she meant by a “war against the people” that derives from the war on drugs in the United States. She stressed then (and stresses now) “the importance of critical research and writing on the conflicts in Colombia, Mexico, and elsewhere in the hemisphere that take into consideration resource extraction as a driving force behind whatever the current dominant explications of the conflicts are.” For Paley, it is important to rethink what is called the war on drugs, which “isn’t about prohibition or drug policy,” but instead, is a war “in which terror is used against the population at large in cities and rural areas,” while “parallel to this terror and the panic it generates, policy changes are implemented which facilitate foreign direct investment and economic growth.” For the author of the present book, this is drug war capitalism, advanced through a war on the people and their communities. In her words, “The war on drugs is a long-term fix to capitalism’s woes, combining terror with policymaking in a seasoned neoliberal mix, cracking open social worlds and territories once unavailable to globalized capitalism.”

  Paley is, in my opinion, one of the very few persons I know who understands the dynamics of drug-related conflicts in the Americas. She has traveled to the most important regions in the hemisphere afflicted by drug war violence and has carefully documented what she has observed. Her material is precise, well-documented, and provocative, and this book is the culmination of an extraordinary effort to understand a complex phenomenon that has affected thousands of persons and entire communities in the Western hemisphere.

  Notwithstanding the numerous human and material resources spent by government agencies, NGOs, and civil society in general to explain the drug war crisis, recent studies on the drug war have been very limited and explain very little—particularly, the most popular ones.

  From readings and conversations over the past years, I have concluded that there are essentially three types of analyses on the so-called drug wars in the Americas. One popular view on the subject—the one that is present in most trade books displayed in airports, popular bookstores, and shopping centers—is the one that sees this conflict as an issue of “drug lords” (narcos) and wars among “drug cartels” and of cartels fighting against the state for the control of drug trafficking routes. Another viewpoint focuses on prohibition and drug policy. These two perspectives do not seem to be very helpful to explain violence and organized crime in the hemisphere. Stories about narcos do not portray accurately the complex reality of transnational businesses involving a variety of extremely powerful actors and interests, both public and private. On the other hand, as Paley recognizes, debates of prohibition of drugs and decriminalization of drugs tend to “obscure the militaristic nature of the war on drugs” and keep this phenomenon “firmly within the realm of ideas, and [avoids] a discussion of this war’s legitimacy.”

  The third and last type of analysis on these so-called wars on drugs that I have identified is the one that guides the present text, one that explains the powerful forces and interests behind a conflict that mainly affects “the people” (la gente/el pueblo/los pueblos) and the most vulnerable groups in society. As Drug War Capitalism points out, it is important to put these conflicts “into a broader context of US and transnational interests in the hemisphere” and link “anti-drug policies to the territorial and social expansion of capitalism.”

  A key element of Paley’s analysis is the one that identifies the US involvement in the militarization of anti–drug trafficking operations in the four countries she studies. The US-backed policy initiatives of Plan Colombia, the Mérida Initiative, and CARSI, according to her account, are the primary vehicles to advance drug war capitalism in the region. These initiatives, in her view, promote “the militarization of aid and the steering of anti-drug money toward fostering the creation of more welcoming investment policies and legal regulations. Though not often talked about in the context of the drug war, these policy changes often have little to nothing to do with illicit substances and everything to do with the transformation of the business environment.”

  The US-backed militarization of security strategies in the four countries—with the alleged key purposes of strengthening institutional reforms and the rule of law as well as of preventing violence—has coincided with a visible increase in the murder rate as well as with the militarization of organized crime or the creation or strengthening of countrywide structures of paramilitary control. In Paley’s opinion, the militarization of crime groups can be very useful to the expansion of capitalism. And she correctly makes use of the word “paramilitarization” when referring to TCOs, since these criminal forces, at many times, seem to be “supported or tolerated by the state.” In fact, the complicity between state actors and criminal groups has been present in most of the cases analyzed by the author.

  The most important contribution of this book is its extraordinar
y explanation—utilizing different cases in the four countries of study—of how the state violence displaces urban and rural populations, leading to changes in land ownership and resource exploitation. Paley documents very well how several Indigenous communities in these four countries have had their lands taken away by war, and how these properties have been acquired by transnational corporations whose aim is to extract natural resources.

  In general, we find in this text that internal conflicts and militarization have concentrated in “areas deemed important for energy projects or resource extraction.” These phenomena have taken place in areas “where there are fierce social and land conflicts related to the imposition of mega‐projects” such as oil and natural gas exploration or exploitation, large-scale agriculture, hydroelectric projects, large-scale forestry, among others. And in this context, the real beneficiaries of drug wars in the Americas are, among others, large banks, local elites, and transnational oil and mining companies. These policies have also helped the United States to gain more leverage and achieve its strategic foreign policy objectives in the Americas and particularly in Colombia, Mexico, and Central America.

  In Paley’s view, connections between drug wars, the state, paramilitary violence, and natural resources are increasingly evident. In her account, paramilitaries or non-state armed actors “can serve to control dissent and conquer territory.” And this also coincides with a cycle of accumulation and drug war capitalism, where “forced displacement … is not a casual by product of the internal conflict.” As part of this cycle, according to a report cited by Paley, “armed groups attack the civil population to strengthen territorial strongholds, expand territorial control, weaken the support of the opponent, and accumulate valuable assets (e.g., land or extraction of natural resources).” In such a context, as Marx notes, “the instruments of labor are the monopoly of the landowners (the monopoly of property in land is even the basis of the monopoly of capital) and the capitalists.”[2]