Drug War Capitalism

by Dawn Paley

  The implementation of US-backed initiatives that further the militarization of security strategies in Colombia, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean have not achieved their alleged main aims. In fact, the amount of drug trafficking in these regions has not fallen. At the same time, as Paley explains, non-state armed actors have been empowered, thus “increasing extra-legal violence with no apparent effect on its stated goal of curbing drug production.” Plan Colombia, for example, hasn’t significantly reduced the amount of cocaine for sale in the United States, and homicide rates in the Andean country remain among the highest in the region. Regardless, Plan Colombia has been touted by authorities as a successful initiative. These sources would agree with Milton Friedman when he states that “one of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”[3] It seems that for them, positive results fall along the lines of what Paley suggests: an emerging series of metrics linked to security, an improved business environment, the transition to a US-style justice system, and the extension of police forces throughout the national territory.

  Another important argument in Drug War Capitalism is the one suggesting that transnational oil and gas companies are among the biggest winners in this new context. For example, “immediately following Plan Colombia, the state oil company, Ecopetrol, was privatized, and new laws introduced to encourage foreign direct investment.” At the same time, as Paley observes, “[s]pecial battalions of the army were trained to protect oil pipelines belonging to US companies. In the wake of Plan Colombia, foreign investment in the extractive industries soared and new trade agreements were signed.” Something similar has been taking place in Mexico.

  Energy reforms were recently passed in Mexico. In December 2013, the Congress approved constitutional changes to open up even more of Mexico’s hydrocarbons industry to the participation of private transnational businesses. At the same time, Mexican states rich in hydrocarbons—such as Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, San Luis Potosí, and Veracruz—have been militarized as part of the war on drugs. Some of these regions have shown high levels of forced displacement because of the severe drug-related violence. In this context, the government of Mexico intends to attract massive foreign investments to tap into the country’s energy resources. Similarly, in Guatemala and Honduras national security seems to have been driven by the extractive industries in recent years.

  Drug wars greatly transformed the economies of Colombia, Mexico, and Central America in the present era. However, this transformation has taken place at a large cost in terms of human lives. This cost can be considered a human tragedy, the tragedy of drug war capitalism. In this tragic context, as Paley recognizes, “rural populations continue to be displaced from their lands and to fall victim to state and non-state violence.” Overall, drug wars in the Americas have disproportionately impacted the poorest sectors of the population. This phenomenon contributes to the creation of increasingly stratified and unequal societies.

  Paley does an incredible job explaining the complexities of the hemispheric dilemmas that have brought death and destruction, while benefiting corporate interests. She has done exhaustive field research in key places that exemplify the basic dynamics of drug wars in the Americas. Drug War Capitalism is a provocative, comprehensive, and very well documented analysis of the big picture of the war on drugs in this hemisphere. By evaluating specific violent events in four crucial countries—Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras—and supporting her assertions with interesting testimonies of numerous actors/victims/politicians and a variety of US government reports and other official documents, Paley tells a tale of modern post–Cold War capitalism, that is, a story of drug war capitalism.

  This book is an antidote to the official discourse and confusing spot news reports on the drug war. As Bertrand Russell states in Freedom in Society: “Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.”[4] Drug War Capitalism is an important attempt at revealing that tyranny at work.

  Chapter 1:

  Drug War Capitalism

  Not long ago, I sat in the only restaurant in Santo Domingo—a nearly empty ranch house with three plastic tables, two fridges full of cold soft drinks and beer, and a rack of homemade chorizo hanging in the sun. Dogs slept in scraps of shade, and across the street an old man with his shirt slung over his shoulder sat silently and watched as every now and then a motorcycle went by, occasionally a large tractor-trailer. For these drivers, Santo Domingo is one more nondescript village on their route across Colombia’s northern prairies. Beside the restaurant stands a curving stone monument in memory of the people killed by the Colombian Air Force in December 1998.

  On December 12, 1998, an airborne chase led a number of army helicopters to this village of about 200 people, part of the municipality of Tame, in Arauca, Colombia. Local festivities were under way, but few ended up sleeping peacefully that night as flyovers, explosions, and gunfire kept people awake and fearful. Eventually the activity overhead stopped, but resumed around 5 a.m. As the noise picked up, locals began to assemble at the drugstore, right across the street from the restaurant where I would sit fifteen years later.

  Maria Antonia Reyes Beltran lived in a palm-roofed house near the drugstore, and she remembers hearing the flyovers and trying to convince her elderly neighbors to evacuate, but they had previously been displaced and refused to budge. Reyes Beltran left her house and walked toward the meeting place. At 10:02 a.m., a WWII–era cluster bomb, made up of six fragmentation grenades, was dropped from a helicopter onto the road where community members were gathered. Seventeen people were killed as they huddled for protection in the drugstore. Twenty-seven others, including fifteen children, were injured. “It was almost ten, we were listening to the radio when the helicopter went over. The people who were on the edge of the highway were trying to signal us that something had been thrown from the helicopter, but we didn’t know what it was. It was bright. It turns out that was the bomb that killed the people,” she said in an interview conducted in the community’s schoolhouse, less than 200 meters from the site of the bombing. “I was leaning against some boards; one of the pieces of shrapnel passed very close—it almost killed me. The people there were yelling, ‘Help! Help!’”

  As community members tried to evacuate the injured, above, the pilots of the Skymaster plane insisted that there were guerrillas among them, and so the helicopters continued to fire on the wounded.[1] “The helicopter kept shooting, way up the highway, it kept shooting. Many, many people were killed,” Reyes Beltran told me. All of the survivors were displaced from Santo Domingo, taking shelter in a nearby school until the fifth of January, when they ventured back to the town and tried to start again.

  Earlier on the morning of the bombing, two US citizens had met with members of the Colombian military inside the facilities of Occidental Petroleum’s Caño Limón project, where they planned the attack. Barbaro José Orta and Charlie Denny were working for a private US security company called AirScan Inc, which Occidental had contracted to provide security from guerrilla attacks along the pipeline. Regardless of their mandate, the two men ended up leading a fleet of five Colombian military helicopters to Santo Domingo, over a hundred kilometers from Occidental’s facilities. At 6:53 a.m., one of the two Americans got on the military radio from the Skymaster plane they were piloting, and suggested that guerrillas had infiltrated the population who were now gathering to take shelter from the bombing. He said, “I have a group of persons here, but they are all civilians, I cannot see any [...] all these people appear to be civilians here. They changed, they all changed clothes, that is the problem we have here, these guys have gone into the house and changed clothes.”[2]

  According to the court testimony of one of the Colombian crew members, the Skymaster belonged to Occidental Petroleum (Oxy). At that time, Oxy was funding the C
olombian military to the tune of $750,000 in cash and in-kind, and “it supplied, directly or through contractors, troop transportation, planning facilities and fuel to Colombian military aircraft, including the helicopter crew accused of dropping the bomb.”[3] Though supposedly restricted to doing pipeline surveillance, AirScan pilots and equipment were regularly used to help the Colombian Air Force hunt suspected guerrillas. “They frequently strayed from their missions to help us in operations against the guerrillas. The plane would go and check and verify [guerrilla] patrols and say, ‘Hey, there are people here,’” one of the Colombians accused of participating in the massacre told the LA Times in 2002.[4] Following the bombings, ownership of the Skymaster aircrafts was transferred to the Colombian Air Force.[5]

  After the bombings, the Colombian military claimed the dead were members of guerrilla forces—a story that didn’t stick. Later, the military changed their story and said that it was in fact the guerrillas who had bombed Santo Domingo. Neither American on the Skymaster that day has faced charges or jail time in the United States. Some families of victims received reparations for their dead relatives, but people like Reyes Beltran, whose palm house later burned to the ground when an army helicopter dropped a flare, received nothing.

  The Colombian government has never officially apologized to the community for the attack. Quite the opposite, in fact: over the past year, the Colombian Air Force began a new bombing campaign in the area. I interviewed nearly a dozen people from different areas of Santo Domingo, who came to the school cafeteria—an open room without walls or much other than cement tables and chairs—to tell their stories.

  Daniel Zavala, a freckle-faced farmer with piercing green eyes and a traditional black-and-white straw hat, explained what happened to his neighbor in March 2013: “At my neighbor’s house.… I’m not exaggerating, unfortunately he’s not here.… But without word of a lie, a helicopter opened fire approximately fifty meters from his house; it literally rained lead. There were kids there—a family, he has a son who is around twelve years old and a daughter who is eight. It’s incredible.” As Zavala explained how flyovers traumatize children in the community, more and more community members arrived. Some suggested that I should visit one of the bombing sites, and community members discussed among themselves which one would be the most suitable. Finally, they decided to take me to an area that was bombed on December 7, 2013—a place called Lusitania.

  I climbed on the back of a motorcycle, and three men and I went ten minutes down the highway, then turned onto a thin grassy trail, with rustic wood bridges and cows grazing on either side. After thirty minutes, we stopped so that they could show me the schoolhouse, a large palm hut without electricity or running water. We carried on for another twenty minutes until we arrived at Joel Armando Estrada’s small house, which shelters seven children and five adults. When we pulled up, the boys were coloring and the younger kids were playing in the yard. Not a two-minute walk from the house into the jungle were two craters, each easily twenty meters wide and ten meters deep, evidence of the recent bombing. A large snake emerged from the bottom of one crater, which had since filled with water, and two boys took turns trying to kill it with a rock.

  “It was four in the morning. We were sleeping when the planes came and bombed. All of my kids got nauseous because the explosions nearly made them burst, and the youngest one vomited,” Armando Estrada told me, his hand on the shoulder of his youngest son. An hour and a half after the explosion, soldiers landed the helicopter, came into the house and went through everything. They asked Estrada where he had hidden guerrilla fighters—something the farmer, who cultivates bananas, yucca, and corn, said his family has never done. Miguel Otero, who lives with Estrada, told me that he was already awake when the bombing started, and that he looked out after the first one fell to see a sixty- to seventy-meter fireball less than 200 meters from the house. Moments later, a shower of shrapnel fell onto the roof and ricocheted off the house. Later, the children picked up hundreds of small round iron shells, and they showed me the fragments of the bombs they found in their yard. At least one of the shells penetrated the thin wall of the palm house, and many others lodged in trees near the family’s home.

  “You can imagine how we felt afterwards: totally psychologically ill. We’ve never lived through a situation like that, something so terrible,” Otero said. “When the soldiers arrived, they were aggressive as usual, insulting us and asking us where the man was who was hiding inside the house. They arrived so angry, as if we were their targets. That’s what it seemed like.”

  “Maybe they were chasing the guerrillas or other groups, but when we went to [the bombing site] we didn’t see any traces of a dead human being, nothing, not even footprints of guerrillas or anything. We didn’t see anything like that,” said Otero, who sat across from me and fiddled with a piece of paper as he spoke. “We can’t understand why they would bomb in this area where there’s no one.… I don’t know.”

  The possibility that oil exploration is going on in the lands surrounding Santo Domingo seems to others like the motivation behind the violence. “This is a policy of the government: to clear us off the territory that is ours, as campesinos and Indigenous peoples, because there are many Indigenous communities who have their lands taken away by war, by the terror that they instill in the communities to remove us from our territory so that they can come and extract natural resources,” said Fernando Roa, a farmer who was elected vice president of Santo Domingo’s communal action council. Roa and others who remain in the territory realize that staying is an act of resistance. “Our idea is to continue to live in our territory, and to struggle to defend our rights. We have the right to education, to health.… They only give us crumbs.”

  Conflicts and violence in Colombia, Mexico, and elsewhere often hold so much confusion, fear, and pain that it is difficult to step back and put events into an economic and political context. Hearing Roa utter these sentences while a breeze rustled through the school cafeteria reinforced, for me, the importance of critical research and writing on these conflicts. One motivation for this book is to bring these strains of analysis together in order to understand the violence in the context of struggles over territory, land, and resources. To learn of the ongoing humanitarian tragedy in Santo Domingo and hear Roa say that he and others believe the bombings are connected to oil was a crucial confirmation of how important it is to make these connections.

  Through the devastating bombing in Santo Domingo in 1998 and the ongoing bombing campaigns, Colombia remains Washington’s closest ally in the region. In the name of arming the state in its fight against drug cultivation and trafficking—as well as fighting leftist guerrillas—US aid to Colombia skyrocketed throughout the 2000s. But, as I shall explore in this book, rather than stopping the flow of drugs, funding the drug war has bolstered a war strategy that ensures transnational corporations access to resources through dispossession and terror. Through the Mérida Initiative and the Central America Regional Security Initiative, the United States sponsored the spread of Colombian-style war to Mexico and Central America. This book is not about infiltrating crime groups or trying to bring out the stories from inside the cartels; it isn’t about reproducing the dominant narratives of the drug war or explaining which cartel does what where, since those tales change as quickly as the wind. Rather, it is about exposing the impacts of the drug war, a monumental task.

  Drug War Capitalism emerges from a desire to consider other factors and motivations for the war on drugs, specifically the expansion of the capitalist system into new or previously inaccessible territories and social spaces. In addition to boosting US banks, propping up political campaigns, and feeding a profitable trade in arms, the imposition of drug war policies can benefit transnational oil and gas and mining companies, as well as other large corporations. There are other sectors that also enjoy benefits from the violence: the manufacturing and transportation industries, as well as a segment of the retail and commercial sector, specifically tho
se represented by corporate players like Walmart, and real estate interests in parts of Mexico and the United States. 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. This project is about re-thinking what is called the war on drugs: it isn’t about prohibition or drug policy. Instead, it looks at how, in this war, terror is used against the populations in cities and rural areas, and how, parallel to this terror and resulting panic, policies that facilitate foreign direct investment and economic growth are implemented. This is drug war capitalism. Pillage, profit, and plunder have been mainstays of war since pre-colonial times, but there is little focus on the role of finance and economics in war. Mats Berdal and David M. Malone write that, in research and literature on the generation and maintenance of conflicts, there is little systematic attention paid to economic interests.[6] In the case of the war on drugs, a reading of the conflict that includes economic analysis has generally been reserved for speculation as to the profits of drug traffickers and reportage on cash laundering in major banks. But as Malone and Berdal state, in order to properly understand wars today, “The role of the international private sector, particularly that of extractive industries (petroleum, mining), is key.”[7]

  The driving impulse of this project is to create a more useful framework through which we can make sense of the drug war south of the US-Mexico border, where violence stems from state militarization and drug cartels, which I also refer to as paramilitary groups. One key element in understanding how drug wars strengthen irregular armed groups is that these groups may begin providing drug traffickers with protection, but later will work for whoever can pay them. At one moment in time they could be on the payroll of drug traffickers, at another, paid by elites looking for executors of extrajudicial repression. These elites could include politicians fighting among themselves for political power, or landowners wishing to move poor people off their lands. But as is documented in this book, structural factors are at play, by which irregular armed groups are allowed near total impunity to carry out extortion and acts of terror among populations when those acts tend toward benefiting transnational capitalism or US foreign policy.