by Dawn Paley
In Mexico, the Zetas have led the path away from the dictionary definition of “cartel,” from the old Italian cartels, or card, first used to refer to a coalition between Conservative and National parties in Germany in 1887. Later, cartel came to mean “an association of manufacturers or suppliers with the purpose of maintaining prices at a high level and restricting competition: the Colombian drug cartels.”[8] Cartels do not exist solely to maintain high prices, though that doesn’t stop the constant use of the word. In the case of Mexico, groups including the Zetas are known as cartels, though their purpose goes far beyond trafficking in drugs; they are also active in extortion (of businesses and migrants), kidnapping, massacres, controlling distributors of pirated goods, and so on. The Zetas are a paramilitary group, an armed organization officially outside of state command, financed at least in part by direct proceeds from narcotics trafficking, but with deep roots in state military structures.
The notion that there is a clear division between state forces and crime groups—that corruption and collaboration are the work of a few bad apples—is a hegemonic idea promoted by nation-states and the mainstream media. Undoing this binary means learning from the people whose lives have been directly affected by armed groups whose activity is carried out with impunity. Impunity is not the result of a weak or deficient state, but rather it is actively provided to the gamut of armed groups who commit crimes and acts of terror against citizens, migrants, and the poor. The provision of impunity to armed actors who are politically aligned with capitalism is part of a modern nation state’s raison d’etre.
Mexican peace activist Javier Sicilia, whose son was murdered in 2011, warns against framing events in Mexico as cops versus cartels. “There is a war between the state and parallel states,” he said in a 2014 interview in Mexico City. “Until we understand that organized crime is not made up of criminals, but rather that it is cells of a parallel state, with firepower, with the capacity to subjugate, and some with social bases, and if we don’t see that this is a struggle for territory and for control of citizen life, we will not understand the problem.” I asked Francisco Chavira, an activist and educator based in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, to explain how the narco-war interacts with the state in Mexico. “In my point of view, the true criminal, the true capo in Mexico is the president of the republic; the governors are the same in each of their state, and the jefes de plaza are the mayors,” he said. “They all got where they are with financing from illicit sources. They protect each other; they are the same thing.”
A key means through which globalized capitalism can penetrate new territories and social worlds is through the use of terror against the population. The New Oxford American Dictionary’s primary definition of terror is “extreme fear: the use of such fear to intimidate people, esp. for political reasons; terrorism.” Mass killings and the public display of bodies is one example of a terror technique, practiced over centuries, by government and irregular forces, often in tandem with the imposition of political and economic regimes. Terror plays a specific role in ensuring control over the population. “In all its forms, terror was designed to shatter the human spirit. Whether in London at the birth of capitalism or in Haiti today, terror infects the collective imagination, generating an assortment of demons and monsters.”[9] Whether it is bodies hung over busy thoroughfares or cut into pieces and dumped one on top of another on a highway, or explosions and massacres leaving dozens of civilians dead or injured, Mexico has seen an unprecedented array of bone-chilling episodes since former President Felipe Calderón launched the drug war in December 2006.[10]
Terror creates fertile ground for new forms of social control. It also impacts mobility—understood as peoples’ ability to move freely on their own will—which is restricted by increasing border surveillance and police and military checkpoints, as well as by the fear generated through mass murders of bus passengers, shootouts on major roadways, and disappearances that occur while the victim is traveling. Reduced mobility is one of the first impacts that terror has on the affected population. Meanwhile, forced migration and involuntary displacement increase as the transition to a more repressive society claims victims and threatens survivors.
These drastic elements of repression and terror provide the basis for the continuation and intensification of capitalist expansion into Mexico and Central and Latin America. States and transnational capital take recourse in repression through terror in attempt to dispossess people from their communal lands and territories throughout the Americas and the world. As Uruguayan social theorist Raúl Zibechi notes, “It will be difficult for capitalism to survive if it fails to consolidate new forms of control and subjugation.”[11] According to geographer David Harvey, the expansion of capitalism depends on accumulation through dispossession,[12] which can include forcible displacement, the privatization of public or communally held lands, the suppression of Indigenous forms of production and consumption, and the use of credit and debt in order to facilitate accumulation by dispossession, among others.[13] All of these things are occurring in Mexico today, as in other countries, and, as we shall see throughout this book, the war on drugs is contributing to the acceleration of many of these processes.
Deploying the army to fight an internal enemy, in this case drug traffickers, represents a crucial shift to allow a formally democratic state to justify soldiers attacking civilians on home soil by claiming those civilians are criminals.
History teaches us that so-called anti-drugs training and spending can be used for a variety of purposes. For his book on Colombia, Doug Stokes interviewed former US Special Forces trainer Stan Goff, who was unusually candid about what counter-narcotics training meant to him. “You were told, and the American public was being told, if they were told anything at all, that this was counter-narcotics training. The training I conducted was anything but that. It was pretty much updated Vietnam-style counter-insurgency doctrines. We were advised that this is what we would do, and we were further advised to refer to it as counter-narcotics training, should anyone ask. It was extremely clear to us that the counter-narcotics thing was an official cover story.”[14] Republican senator John McCain came out and said as much himself in a 2002 speech: “To the President’s credit, American policy has dispensed with the illusion that the Colombian government is fighting two separate wars, one against drug trafficking and another against domestic terrorists. The democratic government of Colombia has long insisted that it is the nexus of terrorists involved in the drug trade that threatens Colombian society. American policy now recognizes that reality, and abandons any fictional distinctions between counter-narcotic and counter-insurgency operations,” he said.[15]
The creation of anti-drug police forces and army units and spending on the drug war must be understood within the context of global capitalism and global warfare. In this context, the acquisition of territory and resources, including increased control over social worlds and labor power, is a crucial motivating factor. Drug war discourses promoted by states and reported by mainstream media provide an efficient smokescreen, provoking moral panic in the population, which can also calcify and exaggerate divisions among communities (like between those who are and who are not involved in illicit activities), and impact relationships down to the level of neighborhoods, community groups, and campesino (peasant farmer) organizations. We know the quantity of drugs trafficked to the United States did not decrease significantly because of Plan Colombia. I argue though that this doesn’t indicate a failure of the war, because the Plan Colombia model has more to do with improving the conditions for foreign direct investment and encouraging the expansion of capitalism than it does with stemming the flow of drugs.
When it comes to repression and terror in Mexico, the tactics employed by the state coercive apparatus go far beyond the Colombia experience, and are nourished by generations of US and other imperial warfare around the world.[16] In this context, I believe the experiences of US-backed counterinsurgency wars in Central America, and in Guatemala in parti
cular, are of great importance in understanding what is happening in Mexico and the region today. Though rarely considered linked, these conflicts must be considered part of a repressive memory that has been activated in order to carry out the ongoing war on drugs in Mexico, Central America, and elsewhere. Some of the same repressive forces and the techniques used against populations in Central America in the 1980s are again being activated in the context of the drug war. This is a phenomenon that exists on a global level. As Laleh Khalili argues in her work on Palestine and counterinsurgency, “Officials and foot soldiers, technologies of control, and resources travel not only between colonies and metropoles but also between different colonies of the same colonial power and between different colonial metropoles, whereby bureaucrats and military elites actively study and borrow each other’s techniques and advise one another on effective ruling practices.”[17]
There are certain lines of continuity between the wars (including genocide) in Central America in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s and Mexico today. For example, grenades used by the Zetas in attacks in Mexico have been traced back to the 1980s, when they were sold to El Salvador’s military by the United States.[18] Another thread connecting the thirty-six-year war in Guatemala to today is the Kaibiles, the country’s elite special forces, whose members were responsible for horrific massacres then, and who today are active both as an elite government force and as members of criminal groups. It was a former Kaibil who was accused of directing the single most violent drug trafficking-related act in Guatemala. Hugo Gómez Vásquez was accused of supervising the massacre in Finca Los Cocos, Petén, in May 2011, when twenty seven farm workers were killed, allegedly as part of a land dispute between Otto Salguero, a local landowner, and the Zetas.[19] In addition to these concrete examples, many of the practices of terror used by armies such as Guatemala’s have resurfaced in Mexico and Central America at the hands of criminal groups. In today’s war, the “war on drugs,” violence deployed against civilians—especially migrants and the poor—comes from official, uniformed troops, as well as from irregular forces, including drug cartels or paramilitary groups. And in Colombia, the model country for this type of warfare, it comes from the sky, as the air force continues to rain bombs on peasants from above.
Drug War Capitalism in Mexico
“This is what the beginning of neoliberalism felt like,” said Raquel Gutiérrez when I interviewed her in 2012, reflecting on what it is like to try and understand the ongoing war in Mexico. Now a professor at the Autonomous University of Puebla, Gutiérrez was an underground militant in Bolivia in the mid-’80s when the first neoliberal policies took effect there, pauperizing the working class. It’s been ten years since she’s returned to Mexico. We’re talking at the table in her downtown apartment. Raquel pauses and drags on a cigarette, as if trying to remember a language she’s forgotten. It doesn’t come. Then she asks me if I’ve read Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine. I nod. Silence. “The thing is, in Mexico, the shocks didn’t work,” she says. It’s not that there was a shortage of shocks, which Klein describes as ranging from natural disasters to economic crises that are exploited in order to deepen the neoliberal order. In The Shock Doctrine, Klein writes, “The most dramatic case to date came in 1994, the year after Yeltsin’s coup, when Mexico’s economy suffered a major meltdown known as the Tequila Crisis: the terms of the U.S. bailout demanded rapid-fire privatizations, and Forbes announced that the process had minted twenty-three new billionaires.… It also cracked Mexico open to unprecedented foreign ownership: in 1990, only one of Mexico’s banks was foreign owned, but ‘by 2000 twenty-four out of thirty were in foreign hands.’”[20] The impacts of these policies were felt especially harshly in rural areas. “These neoliberal policies ushered in a new era of nontraditional production of export fruits and vegetables, new forms of land control, realignment of labor relations under contract farming, and substantial out-migration by uncompetitive small-scale campesinos.”[21]
The first wave of neoliberal economic policies was introduced in the form of structural adjustment programs. These programs came at the end of “the Mexican Miracle,” a period of steady economic growth, import substitution industrialization, and high oil prices. “From 1980 to 1991, Mexico received thirteen structural adjustment loans from the World Bank, more than any other country,” wrote Tom Barry in his 1995 book Zapata’s Revenge. “It also signed six agreements with the IMF, all of which brought increased pressure to liberalize trade and investment.”[22] In the 1980s, sometimes called Mexico’s “lost decade,” oil prices collapsed along with the peso. “From over a thousand state enterprises in 1983, the Mexican state owned around two hundred by 1993.... In 1991, the Mexican program brought in more money to government coffers (US$9.4 billion) than all other sales of public companies in Latin America combined.”[23] By 1988, the Mexican economy was already considered one of the most open to foreign investment in the world.[24] Many of the most important privatizations happened during the presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who was elected, in 1988, in what is widely believed to have been a fraudulent election. Mexico did go through a series of what Klein calls shocks, and some sectors (like banking and telephony) were thoroughly privatized. Still, at the outset of the drug war in Mexico, large corporations like the Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE) and Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex)—the seventeenth-largest oil company in the world by oil reserves,[25] and by other counts the eighth-largest[26]—remained firmly in government hands; peasant and Indigenous communities continued to exercise communal title over lands rich in resources; a large middle class owned small businesses; and the richest Mexican families kept control over lucrative sectors of the economy. Mexican investors were favored in the privatizations that took place during Salinas’s term, coming as they did before the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed.[27] According to the US State Department, Mexico’s ten richest families “are not the only obstacle[s] to improving competition in the Mexican economy.”[28] Though weakened by constitutional amendments made by Salinas before NAFTA came into effect, communal landholder organizations, including ejidos and comunidades índigenas, have not been totally undone by neoliberal reforms. By the end of 1994, Mexico had signed on to the North America Free Trade Agreement, witnessed the Zapatista uprising, and undergone another major currency devaluation, but by the turn of the twenty-first century, Mexico’s territory and economy still weren’t fully open to foreign investors. In 2000, Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN) was elected president, interrupting the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI) seventy-one years of rule, and some say, returning democracy to Mexico.
But there is more than not-yet-privatized corporations that make Mexico interesting to transnational capital: take Mexico’s strategic geographical location, for example. The Mexico-US border spans nearly 2,000 miles, a line that runs from Pacific to Atlantic, from Tijuana–San Diego to Juarez–El Paso and Brownsville–Matamoros. Along some stretches, the border is fenced, in other places the unforgiving desert polices it.[29] The US border with Mexico can and should be considered a valuable economic resource; low-cost labor on the south side of the border, within spitting distance of the United States, is a winning combination as transportation costs are also reduced. As such, Mexico is becoming an increasingly significant player in US and global manufacturing. For example, in the automobile sector, located along the border as well as in the country’s interior, “Mexico is becoming the export hub for the Americas—not only North America but also South America,” according to Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn.[30]
One afternoon while driving through the border city of Nuevo Laredo, a local activist pointed out an overpass and mentioned that bodies had been hung over it more than once. I remembered the site from photos that appeared online, but there was one big difference seeing it in person: behind where the photograph was taken, a Sony factory dominates the block, with Japanese, US, and Mexican flags hoisted at the entrance. It seemed to me a crucial bit of context th
at Sony operates a factory literally a stone’s throw from where human bodies have been publicly displayed. Knowing that the overpass isn’t in some abandoned part of town, but rather is meters away from a bustling assembly plant, means knowing that the workers coming in and out of the factory at dawn, when bodies tend to be hung, would all have witnessed these gruesome scenes. As we shall see later on, while the violence in Mexico has generally not deeply impacted the owners of multinational corporations, it does impact the workers. These workers’ decisions of whether or not to carry on working in hostile environments, where terror is used against residents, can impact the labor supply available to the assembly industry. According to a 2010 report by the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, in Juárez alone “estimates place the number of people who have fled their homes at around 230,000. Roughly half of those are thought to have crossed into the United States, which would leave about 115,000 people living as internally displaced people (IDPs).”[31] The fact that violence can impact the size of the labor pool in these areas means that it can also prevent labor organizing, which keeps wages depressed along the border—both important factors in determining the future of a vital sector of the US economy.
Then there are the natural resources. Mexico has only recently been opened up to modern mining. According to data from the Mexican government, Mexico produced about twenty-two tons of gold in 2001, and ten years later, it produced eighty-four tons, most of which was extracted by Canadian mining companies. Silver production doubled over the same period. According to Mexico’s National Chamber of Mines, Mexico is the fourth destination worldwide for mining investment, after Canada, Australia, and the United States. Looked at in terms of the US government’s more general foreign-policy goals, the condition of Mexico’s large economy, driven by a handful of profitable, state-owned corporations, and the country’s mineral-rich territory (much of which remains communally owned by peasant farmers) means there are attractive money-making opportunities to be had. William I. Robinson, author of A Theory of Global Capitalism among other books, explained the overarching goal of US foreign policy during an interview in 2010: “All the evidence shows us that what the US is doing is playing the lead role in organizing a new globalist capitalist system, a new epoch of global capitalism.” According to Robinson, world capitalism was a system in which circuits of production existed first within and later between nations. Global capitalism, which is the current system, consists of transnational circuits of production and trade, in which manufacturing takes place across nations rather than within them. As an example, under world capitalism, clothes were sewn in Mexico from fabric made of Mexican-grown cotton, and under global capitalism, fabric is imported, clothing is partially assembled in Mexico and exported for completion in the US.