Drug War Capitalism

by Dawn Paley

  From a critical perspective, it is possible to understand the Mérida Initiative and the activity it has inspired within Mexico as consisting of three primary elements: legal and policy reforms, militarization, and paramilitarization. The formation and strengthening of armed groups by criminal organizations as a response to state militarization of trafficking routes is the third effect of the Mérida Initiative that can also prove beneficial to the expansion of capitalism.

  The Mérida Initiative is the primary means through which drug war capitalism, as developed in Colombia and applied in Mexico, is enshrined bilaterally between the US and Mexico. As US and Mexican security cooperation (and spending) increased, violence spiked and violent incidents spread throughout Mexico, and the body count began to rise. According to Shannon O’Neill from the Council on Foreign Relations, “When the Mérida Initiative was signed in 2007, there were just over two thousand drug-related homicides annually; by 2012, the number escalated to more than twelve thousand. Violence also spread from roughly 50 municipalities in 2007 (mostly along the border and in Sinaloa) to some 240 municipalities throughout Mexico in 2011, including the once-safe industrial center of Monterrey and cities such as Acapulco, Nuevo Laredo, and Torreon.”[56] Reports in local and US media generally fail to connect US investment in the drug war to the increased violence, even though it is a trend that is observed in Colombia, Mexico, and elsewhere. The link between US-backed militarization of the drug trade and the shifting geography of criminal activity (and therefore violence) is one that the US government itself has acknowledged. “Just as Plan Colombia helped push the focus of criminal activity and presence north to Mexico, so has the impact of the Mérida Initiative pushed the same activities into Central America itself,” said William Brownfield, assistant secretary of the US Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), in March of 2013.[57] A lanky, blue-eyed Texan, Brownfield is a career diplomat who served as the US ambassador to Colombia immediately following the end of Plan Colombia (2007–2010).

  The initial justification of the Mérida Initiative was the need to “confront the violent transnational gangs and organized crime syndicates that plague the entire region and directly undermine U.S. security interests” by dismantling criminal organizations; strengthening air, maritime, and border controls; reforming the justice system; and diminishing gang activity while decreasing demand for drugs.[58] In 2010, the Mérida Initiative was retooled to consist of four pillars, which remain as follows: Disrupt Organized Criminal Groups, Institutionalize Reforms to Sustain Rule of Law and Respect for Human Rights, Create a 21st Century Border, and Build Strong and Resilient Communities. But as will be argued throughout this book, the US-funded war on drugs, and all of its justifications, is not far afield from the US-led war on terror, with which the US government claims to be liberating women and increasing democracy. Canadian sociologist Jasmin Hristov puts this particularly well, explaining, “The efforts of the elite to eliminate any challenges to the status quo have found expression in various politicoeconomic models throughout history. The features common to all of them have been the highly unequal socioeconomic structure consisting of armed force, repressive laws, and anti-subversive ideology, packaged under different names—the War on Communism, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror.”[59] The war on drugs maintains a specific location within the “war-on” triumvirate described by Hristov, since its backers can utilize discourses related to health in justifying its existence, something that each of us can relate to on a personal level. The language of the War on Terror is not useful in regards to Mexico, which shares a 2,000-mile border with the United States, and with over thirty million people in the US being of Mexican origin.[60] Raising the specter of cartel and gang members is the Western Hemisphere strategy of the United States for painting entire societies as bringers of harm to US citizens. In the words of the Stop the Injunctions Coalition in California, “Culturally and politically the lines between ‘terrorist,’ ‘insurgent,’ ‘immigrant,’ and ‘gang member’ have been aggressively blurred.”[61]

  Debates around the war on drugs tend to consist of two contrasting positions: one that posits the prohibition of drugs (the US federal government’s position) and the other, a more liberal position, which advocates for their decriminalization. While this is an important debate, it tends to obscure the militaristic nature of the war on drugs, keeping the drug war firmly within the realm of ideas, and avoiding a discussion of the war’s legitimacy. But there is an urgent need to deepen our understandings of this kind of war; we must put it into the broader context of US and transnational interests in the hemisphere, and connect anti-drug policies to the territorial and social expansion of capitalism. In the same way anti-war movements successfully linked the US occupation of Iraq to oil, we ought to be able to make connections between the US-backed war on drugs in Mexico, and that country’s natural resources, workforce, and population, as well as its strategic geographical location. “With Mexico and then more generally, there’s an international criminal economy, which overlaps with the international above-ground or so-called legal economy.… The US has been able to, through the drug trafficking, and the excuse of trying to control narcotrafico, [pour] hundreds of millions, now billions of dollars into Mexican security, and Mexican armed forces, and it is changing the whole nature of Mexican society. Mexican society is being militarized,” Dr. Robinson told me during an interview in 2010.[62] “And again it’s being done in the name of combating drug trafficking, but … part of the face of this global capitalism is increasingly militarized societies in function of social control when inequalities and misery become just so intense that there’s no other way but through military and coercive means to maintain social control.”

  Part of the system of social control imposed by the drug war includes extortions in certain parts of the country, which force the closure of mom-n-pop businesses and funnel consumers into big box stores. The violence deployed by the state and justified with claims of combating trafficking can lead to urban and rural populations being displaced, clearing territory for corporations to extract natural resources, and impacting land ownership and property values. The drug war creates a context where members of resistance movements and journalists can be assassinated or disappeared under the pretext that they were involved in the drug trade. It also acts as a mechanism through which the number of (primarily Central American) migrants traveling through Mexico to the United States can be controlled through harsh policing of their movements carried out by crime groups. Finally it creates institutional (legal and social) conditions that guarantee protection for foreign direct investment, creating the necessary conditions for capitalist expansion and flexible accumulation. In addition to the violence that disproportionately impacts poor and working people and migrants, drug war militarization favors some segments of the elite more than others, provoking in some places an elite struggle for the ability to maintain the control and territoriality necessary to continue to participate in capital accumulation. “What is taking place in Mexican territories is part of a global process that transcends territoriality.… It is an expression, without a doubt, of an inter-capitalist struggle … and it will continue to be, for a very long time,” according to a report published by a Mexican research collective in late 2011.[63]

  The US-Mexico border has become one of the key elements in the drug war. Some of Mexico’s most violent cities are located directly on the border, while on the US side, border cities remain among the safest (though some are also among the poorest) in the country. In one of the more critical English texts on the drug war, University of Texas at El Paso professor Howard Campbell used the term “Drug War Zone” to describe what he calls the cultural world of drug traffickers and anti-drug police. “This zone is especially prominent and physically observable on the US-Mexico border but the term also applies to any place or situation in which drug traffickers, drug users, and anti-drug narcs confront, avoid or attempt to subvert one another,” he writes.[64] Campb
ell notes that he avoids the term “war on drugs” because it is used in a hypocritical and misleading way by the US government. While Campbell’s concept of a Drug War Zone may be considered an improvement over the notion of a drug war, it leaves much to be desired for two reasons. First, because it ignores the role of armies and navies and other special non–“law enforcement” state organizations in the drug war, but second, and more importantly, because it leaves out the segment of the population that desperately needs to be made visible in the context of the drug war: civilians. These are the workers, families, campesinos, migrants, and youth who have been targeted by police, army, or paramilitary groups in the context of the drug war. In Guatemala and Honduras, entire villages have been labeled “narco-communities” as if to justify mass displacement.

  Having traveled from Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, and the US-Mexico border filing stories on the impacts of the drug war, I have found three primary hallmarks of this kind of war. First, in all of the regions touched by drug war violence, the pain, fear, and suffering resulting from militarization and paramilitarization are experienced in large part by poor and working people and migrants. It is clear that though they may have little to no involvement or contact with controlled substances, the violence and terror of the drug war are primarily against them. Second, one of the earliest, longest lasting, and most tangible impacts of the violence is a restriction on people’s mobility, whether in moving around one’s own neighborhood, traveling between cities, crossing the US border (in either direction), or migrating. Third, in each place where the violence stemming from the drug war has increased, free expression—individual and collective, through public activities, community and mainstream media, and otherwise—has been targeted. Even though these three factors together make up the most widely accessible and consistent narratives of the war on drugs for any reporter familiar with the situation on the ground, they are not the narratives that dominate accounts of the drug trade and the US-backed war. Instead of telling the stories of those affected by the drug war, newspapers, think tanks, and governments produce reports dominated by stories of drug cartels (criminals or criminal groups) at war with each other for control of trafficking routes and territory. I call this narrative the cartel wars discourse, which includes a few salient features, among them: an almost exclusive reliance on state and government sources for information, a guilty-until-proven-innocent and victims-were-involved-in-drug-trade-bias, and a foundational belief that cops involved in criminal activity are the exception not the rule, and that more policing improves security.[65] Cartel wars discourse is the dominant and hegemonic narrative of the drug war, positing that state forces are out to break the cartels, and most if not all victims of violence are involved in the drug trade.

  TV news reports in the United States bring the most horrendous acts of the war to the screens of millions of North Americans: fifty two people burned alive in a casino, hundreds of bodies discovered in unmarked graves, and so on. The victims are regularly portrayed as having been involved in criminal activity, or at least involved with somebody who was involved, a formulation that effectively criminalizes entire populations. In the mainstream media, common people are rarely given voice. Instead, the population-at-large is relegated to tweeting or blogging anonymously if they wish to have a say, though even that can be risky.[66] If you expose cartel members, according to the editor of one Reynosa paper, “They will abduct you; they will torture you for hours; they will kill you, and then dismember you. And your family will always be waiting for you to come home.”[67] These acts against the media by members of crime groups are carried out with impunity, the perpetrators protected by a state that is unwilling or unable to investigate. Telling stories that fall outside of official lines can be deadly. To begin with, many sources fear talking, afraid that if they go on the record they will be tortured, disappeared, or killed. There are also major disincentives for journalists themselves. The press freedom organization Article 19 counts fifty journalists killed in Mexico between January 2007 and December 2013.[68] That’s nearly double the number of journalists killed in the previous six years, during Vicente Fox’s term.[69] Over the same time span, 726 acts of aggression and 213 threats against journalists and media organizations were reported. According to a report by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), in Mexico “Journalists across the country have told CPJ that they avoid coverage of crime and corruption in order to stay alive.”[70]

  In areas affected by the drug war, not only does the dominant media discourse win out, but it is incredibly dangerous for media workers to stray too far from it. An examination of media reports reveals that information on the drug cartels blamed for the violence and terror generally comes from a handful of official sources, namely from elements of the Mexican and US state coercive apparatus (police, army, prosecutors, anti-narcotics forces) as well as civilian arms of the government, the United Nations, and think tanks like the discredited Austin-based intelligence firm Stratfor.[71] That most reporting reflects the dominant discourse about the drug trade and the war on drugs is not a new phenomenon. In fact, the frequency with which the dominant narratives of the drug war are reproduced by the press could be considered one of the fundamental reasons for the longevity of the drug war discourse.[72] “Most information about narcotraffic is furnished by the Miami Herald and other U.S. newspapers that use the U.S. DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency [sic]) as their information source,” wrote Colombian historian Germán Alfonso Palacio Castañeda in 1991. “Such media tend to follow the DEA’s strategic orientation, which is empirically unacceptable.”[73] It’s been more than twenty years since Palacio wrote those words, and unfortunately, they still hold true today. For example, in early 2011, I met a photographer based in Monterrey, another city that plunged into drug war-related violence beginning around 2010. He didn’t want to speak on the record, but having established anonymity, he didn’t hold back. He told me that photographers regularly embed themselves with the army, waiting until soldiers visit the scene, as there is no other way to access certain areas safely. He explained how he once took photos of cadavers on a ranch not far out of the city, and how the victims looked like they had been holding automatic weapons, which he knew had been planted by soldiers. He and other photographers didn’t question the set up or refuse to run the images they shot, out of fears for their safety.

  Regardless of the risks, critiques of the drug wars in Mexico, Central America, Colombia, and South America are becoming more sophisticated as time reveals their lasting impacts. The links between drug war policies and an improving investment climate for transnational corporations are increasingly intelligible, especially as the outcomes from US engagement in Colombia, specifically between 2000 and 2006, are lauded, refined, and applied elsewhere. The first phase of Plan Colombia officially ended in 2006; the next year, the Mérida Initiative, or Plan Mexico, started. The Mérida Initiative would have been in the works early in former President Felipe Calderón’s term (2006–2012), if not before. The Mérida Initiative was announced in fall 2007, and originally included Central America within it, but in 2010, the United States split off the Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI), which covers Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. The US funded CARSI to the tune of $496 million between 2008 and 2013.[74] In April 2009, the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative (CBSI) was announced, and the Caribbean is increasingly the centerpiece of the drug war.[75] There is continuity in these US-backed aid packages. Though this book only deals with a handful of the countries affected by planned drug wars and drug war capitalism, the outcomes of these policies are similar wherever they are applied.

  According to Gian Carlo Delgado Ramos and Silvina María Romano, Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative can be understood as two more examples of US interference in Latin America. In the name of protecting US national security, the United States pushes self-interested policies in target countries. This not only contributes to historical processes of des
poliation, plundering, exploitation, and the transfer of wealth in Latin America, but also leads to the reorganization of internal power relations between civilian and military groups in the nations in which such programs are implemented.[76] Though the focus of this work is Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and Colombia, the drug war is under way around the globe. This is evidenced by the fact that in 2012, the US Drug Enforcement Administration worked in partnership with sixty-five countries.[77] In some areas, the drug war is latent, and in others (like the United States) its principle characteristic is criminalization and mass incarceration, particularly of young men of color. In December 2012, the government of Peru announced that it would be spending $300 million on fighting “terrorism and narcotrafficking” there.[78] Places like Afghanistan and Burma have also been testing grounds for drug war capitalism, and as this is being written, the State Department, together with the Woodrow Wilson Institute and others, are pushing to extend the drug war to Africa.[79] Mexico and Central America are today the regions that are experiencing the brunt of the explosive physical violence linked to the policies applied in the name of disrupting the flow of narcotics to the United States. These are the places where the war against controlled substances is serving as the basis for a deepening of previously existing militarization, as well as the sweetening of the terms of international trade and investment. Colombia is generally looked upon by pro–drug war hawks as a success story, even though little has changed in terms of the amount of coca produced there. But as we shall see, Colombia has become the sandbox for how non-state armed actors can serve to control dissent and conquer territory. Seen in this light, it becomes easier to understand how the drug war facilitates the continuation of a capitalist economic model predicated on security, in part by creating a public discourse that allows increased state militarization on the pretext of implementing security measures to protect civilians in the face of heinous acts carried out by criminal groups.