by Dawn Paley
There are also Honduran special forces, organized into the 15th Battalion and the Joint Task Force Xatruch III, some of whom have been trained by the United States, though it is Colombians who play a prominent role as trainers of private security guards and police in Honduras. “We don’t know if they just dress up in the uniforms, or if they are police, or soldiers, or criminals,” said Yoni Rivas, a leader of the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán who ran unsuccessfully with LIBRE for a Congress seat. I interviewed Rivas in a one-room cement office, the air conditioning working on full against the humid, sunbaked heat. Rivas told me that around sixty men dressed in military uniforms kidnapped one of his comrades. Later, German Alfaro Escalante, who was then the commander of Joint Task Force Xatruch III, said the kidnappers were part of a criminal group. The crossover between soldiers, police, and private security is common in this area. According to the UN Working Group on Mercenaries, the day five people were massacred at the El Tumbador farm, “Members of the 15th Battalion were seen with Orion security guards at the site and some of them reportedly took off their military uniforms and changed into Orion uniforms before the shooting began.”[66]
Along with their attacks on members of the land occupations in the Aguán, security forces are accused of participating directly in drug trafficking. Locals say the army participates in drug smuggling up the coast. “In October we were organizing a press conference, and that same day a small airplane supposedly loaded with drugs crash-landed on a clandestine air strip on one of Miguel Facussé’s properties. Then twenty-five men, dressed in military fatigues, went in five vehicles, took the drugs, and burned the airplane,” said Rivas, who himself has survived five assassination attempts. Reports of military activity in drug trafficking go back to 1978, and investigations by the DEA found army officers participating in trafficking, including in one instance moving fifty tons of cocaine during a fifteen-month period.[67] The US and Honduras governments did little to punish the army’s actions, fearing a crackdown could impact the Honduran army’s role in supporting Nicaraguan Contras.[68] The United States began using the Soto Cano air force base in central Honduras in the early 1980s, and continued funding the Honduran army even as it was known to participate in trafficking in order to have continued access to the base. To this day, “military officers and their immediate and extended families have formed a powerful elite largely isolated from the rule of law. Accordingly, they have been in a unique position to work closely with traffickers, protecting shipments, carrying drugs in diplomatic pouches, and serving as vital cogs in transshipment schemes.”[69]
Amid the confusion and the proliferation of armed actors in Honduras are US soldiers and special forces. US Special Operations Command South operates in the Aguán and other parts of the country, and the US Air Force runs the region’s key Southern Command base at Soto Cano, near Tegucigalpa. There are a handful of US bases under construction in Honduras, and funding under the Central America Regional Security Initiative has boosted anti-drugs efforts in Honduras under US watch. In 2014, the State Department requested just over $54 million for Honduras, $5 million of which is specifically meant to finance the military and military training programs. All of these factors together—political violence, gangs, the war on drugs, US military presence, and curtailment of civil rights—have created a maze of militarization and impunities that ultimately results in further barriers for Hondurans living in urban centers and those organizing in rural areas to ensure their continued ability to access clean water, wood from the forests, and meet other needs. It also undermines any attempts at political freedom and it disproportionately impacts the poorest sectors of the population.
Conclusion:
Thinking Through Peace In Wartime
This book is a sprawling project, and the process of researching and writing has left me with even more questions than I had when I set out on this journey nearly four years ago. This text represents my best attempt to introduce readers to the systems at work when warfare is introduced throughout the hemisphere under the pretext of fighting drugs. Drug war capitalism differs from previous repressive drug war initiatives internationally because it takes place during overarching policy, legislative and foreign aid frameworks enshrined in Plan Colombia, the Mérida Initiative, the Central America Regional Security Initiative, and other state initiatives. Throughout this book, I argue that there are three principal mechanisms through which the drug war advances the interests of neoliberal capitalism: through the imposition of rule of law and policy changes, through formal militarization, and through the paramilitarization that results from it. The violence and forced displacement resulting from the drug war are experienced most acutely by poor and working people and migrants, often in resource rich or geographically strategic areas. Other central impacts of the drug war include restrictions on mobility and harsh limitations on free expression in the media or through public activities and protest. The insights that I have used to guide the process of understanding, theorizing, and writing about drug war capitalism have come through years of conversations and dozens of reporting trips to regions affected by the drug war. They are not mine alone, rather they belong to the many people who have shared their time and space with me over the past four years.
As I neared completion of this book in the spring of 2014, I found that I was meeting more and more people who shared an analysis similar to that included within these pages. The trip I made to Colombia in February of 2014 laid bare the impact of the drug war and Plan Colombia there. The people I interviewed clearly articulated the connections between Plan Colombia and preparing the terrain for foreign direct investment and the extractive industries. A few months later, during a visit to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, I met a young man who explained how he thought the violence there was related to the eventual exploitation of gas through fracking in the region. It was, he said, the only explanation that he and his friends could come up with for why things had gotten so bad in the border region just south of Laredo, Texas, where the Eagle Ford shale deposit is located. But it was the very last interview I did for the book, with Carlos Fazio, a professor at the Autonomous University of Mexico City (UACM), that helped me summarize some of my own thinking about the issue. Under the bold fluorescent lights of a university conference room, Fazio shared with me his vision of what the drug war represents in Mexico. “I think what is being hidden by this war is a phase of present day imperialism that has to do with displacement, and a form of neo-colonization, which has to do with the appropriation of land and territories, with considering the land as a form of merchandise, and opening that land to industrial agriculture, to the exploitation of African palm and rare wood products, but it also has to do with the land and the subsoil, with mining.” This war is about control over territory and society, much more so than it is about cocaine or marijuana.
But voices like Fazio’s remain marginal in Mexico and elsewhere, as media discourse and so called experts on the drug war focus almost exclusively on inter-cartel violence and state successes in reigning in criminals. The binary between state and criminals deployed by the media is perhaps the central methodological weakness in press reports and mainstream analysis about the drug war. This binary casts state security forces as legitimate actors for good (bringing security), and highly organized, nefarious drug cartels as completely separate from the state. The image of the benevolent state against the bad drug traffickers provides a frame through which governments can justify rising military spending and attacks on unarmed civilians as necessary for national security. Most journalism fails to make the connections or allow readers to see these events in context, and instead isolates the police officers, soldiers, or bankers and bureaucrats that are discovered facilitating or participating in the activities of criminal groups as bad apples. Social theorist Immanuel Wallerstein writes that if issues like globalization and terrorism are “defined in limited time and scope, we tend to arrive at conclusions that are as ephemeral as the newspapers.”[1] This prevents us, he says,
from understanding how these themes and events fit into a larger context. I would not hesitate to add the war on drugs to Wallerstein’s list, and this book is about attempting to understand this brand of war across time and from a wide analytical scope.
The lines between governments and organized criminal groups are blurred enough to force a complete reassessment of the very categories used to explain what is taking place in Mexico. An alternative framework through which to understand the drug war need not be revolutionary. Acknowledging how and when perpetrators of violence are linked to the state, as well as how structural impunity functions to permit terror and violence would help to clarify what is actually taking place in regions impacted by violence. In doing so, we could begin to escape from the logical and ethical quagmires presented by sticking to the official line on the drug war.
Official discourse in Colombia has shifted toward emphasis on the fact that the country is now in a peace process, that paramilitaries have demobilized, that President Santos is a drug policy reformer, and that the war is as good as over. My reporting in the chapter on Colombia pokes holes in this discourse, but it remains a difficult discourse to counter when the media, think tanks, governments, and elite sectors continue to promote it. When I traveled to Arauca to report on the ongoing violence there, I met with the leaders of an occupation of land belonging to the Colombian Ministry of Defense, who live in a war-like context. “The problem is that Arauca is considered a red zone in Colombia, and any leader who teaches people, who even just teaches them how to go to city hall [to manage their paperwork], that’s enough to say they’re a guerrilla and hunt them until they kill them,” said Jhon Carlos Ariza Aguilar, the vice president of the squatted community of Héctor Alirio Martínez. His words brought me back to a description of the functions of terror in Guatemala, as described by writers Gomis, Romillo, and Rodríguez in the early 1980s.
With domination through terror, in addition to the physical elimination of those who oppose the interests of the regime, there is also the pursuit of ‘the control of a social universe made possible through the intimidation induced by acts of destruction … (and with) acts of terror there is an overall impact on the social universe,—at a social and generalized level—, of a whole series of psychosociological pressures which impose an obstacle to possible political action.’[2]
Ariza Aguilar’s story reminded me of Francisco Chavira’s description of how acts of terror carried out at city halls in Tamaulipas carried a strong message for residents, which was to avoid demanding transparency from local governments.
State and paramilitary terror continues to be used against broad swaths of the population in Mexico, Colombia, Honduras, and Guatemala, as well as in regions outside the scope of this book. Official discourses have begun to shift toward peace and prosperity; the mainstream media and governments would have us believe that peace has been achieved in Colombia and that things have calmed down in Mexico. Anyone taking a longer view, as suggested by Wallerstein, realizes that a city like Juárez, where over 10,000 people were killed in a handful of years, does not simply get better overnight. To begin with, the murders have not stopped, rather they carry on through to today. Then there are tens of thousands of children orphaned by violence, as well as widows who lost their partners and mothers and fathers grieving their murdered children. The near total impunity with which these crimes were committed prevents closure for friends and families of victims. In addition, the underlying social conditions in Juárez, including harsh inequality in the service of multinational corporations, a lack of educational and career opportunities for residents, and safe, regular transportation for workers, have not changed. Though Juárez became the murder capital of the world, it is but one example of a place where peace remains a faraway promise. For Francisco Ramírez, the Colombian union lawyer who investigates links between displacement and corporate activity, the most active voices promoting peace are the ones responsible for disrupting it, and who use it to rebrand their image. “Those who talk about being post-conflict are the intellectual authors of the crimes: the governments of developed countries, the spokespeople for multinationals, the spokespeople for the establishment, etcetera. They talk about being post-conflict, because they want to say to the people, ‘Shut your eyes, that is over now, that already happened, we’re going to forgive, look at those dogs who did that, we’re good people.’”
Untangling hegemonic discourses of peace and prosperity is greatly complicated by self-censorship by members of the press, as well as attacks on journalists. It is hard to know what is taking place in remote and rural areas impacted by the drug war. But getting at the social, political, and economic transformations that accompany drug war policies remains a critical task as these wars drag on. In this respect, this book feels very much like a preliminary work, and hopefully one of many emerging efforts to extend our understanding and analysis of the economic and political factors that drive the drug war. It seems inevitable that over time more evidence of the collusion of corporate interests and drug war capitalism will emerge; in any case it is a constantly evolving story that requires ongoing attention. In June 2014, as I finished the final edits on this text, secondary legislation linked to the energy reforms, which facilitate the expropriation of lands on behalf of energy companies, was approved by Mexico’s Senate. The reform was debated for only fifty-five minutes, as World Cup soccer dominated television screens across the nation. According to Senator Alejandro Encinas, “It is a shame that the Senate supports ejido members and community members being obliged to hand over their lands to foreign companies, with the threat that if they don’t their lands will be appropriated with great celerity, and on top of that, that they can be paid [for their land] in-kind or via jobs.” That this legislation was passed following more than six years of extreme violence and terror is not a mere coincidence. This book is an attempt to explain how the violence of the drug war laid the foundation for the expansion of neoliberal capitalism in Mexico, Central America, and Colombia. I hope it will help to nourish future actions and thinking in defense of the land and of autonomous spaces outside of or in contradiction to capitalism.
The ongoing, daily resistances of communities throughout Mexico, Central America, and Colombia are under attack by the drug war, yet they carry on, day after day. This book may leave some readers filled with a sense of despair or hopelessness, but it would be dishonest to pretend that there is a unified resistance movement taking on the the drug war in the hemisphere. Rather, it is from many autonomies and from many communities that the strongest challenges to capitalism are being mounted. I hope this book incites more meaningful discussions about the drug war and reveals more spaces from which communities as well as allies can fight back.
Acknowledgments
I first had the idea that I wanted to write Drug War Capitalism in late 2010. Since then, I’ve traveled far and wide, gathering information on the meager income of a freelancer working primarily for alternative media. This book would not have been possible without the generous support of my family, friends, and independent journalists in Canada, the US, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, and elsewhere. Dozens of people helped in so many ways with this text, and have helped me out immensely over the years. Special thanks are due to Chelsea Elizabeth Manning, whose brave actions provided critical information for this and so many other projects.
Thanks to the crew at AK Press, especially Zach Blue, and my editor Charles Weigl, for believing in this project and helping to improve and shape the final work. Lorna Vetters shone through toward the end of the process with incredibly helpful suggestions. Thanks to Amélie Trudeau, Shannon Young, Isaac Oommen, Stefan Christoff, Sandra Cuffe, Zara Snapp, Luis Solano and especially Myles Estey for their feedback on previous versions of the manuscript. That being said, any mistakes in the book are my own.
Without my friends and colleagues at the Media Co-op and The Dominion I wouldn’t have made it through; thanks especially to Tim McSorley for being there through thick and thi
n. Cyril Mychalejko at Upside Down World is an encouraging editor and a good friend, and Ben Dangl at Toward Freedom shared with me many tips as I wrote and pitched the book. Delores Broten at Watershed Sentinel, Mark Karlin at Truth Out, and Dianne Feely at Against the Current have been incredibly supportive. Thanks to Harsha Walia for her important work, writing, and early support of this book, to Nemer Narchi for believing in my work, and to Anthony Fenton for his critical eye. Nicolas Olucha Sánchez in Berlin has artfully translated an unending stream of my articles over the years. Gracias.
This work was informed by hundreds of chats, discussions, arguments, and otherwise in Mexico City. Luis Arroyo, Gladys Tzul, Dave O. Mitchell, Daniel Hernández, Laura Carlsen, Andalusia Knoll, Beto Paredes, Clayton Conn, and Pablo Pérez were important sources of friendship, critical thought, advice, and ideas. Thanks to Koko Medina in Chihuahua, Leobardo Alvarado, Héctor Padilla, Connie Gutiérrez, and especially Julián Cardona in Juárez, as well as Molly Molloy in Las Cruces, New Mexico. It deeply saddens me that Charles Bowden passed away suddenly before this book went to print. His support for this project was whole, and made a world of difference. He is deeply missed. Without Francisco Chavira and the families that supported me in Reynosa and Tampico, my reporting in Tamaulipas would not have been possible. Dr. Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, who wrote the foreword, helped me think through many late night doubts about the nature of events in northern Mexico. Gustavo Castro, Miguel Mijangos, and Ruben Figueroa helped ground my understanding of events in Chiapas, Guerrero, and Tabasco. Bernardo Vásquez in Oaxaca was a key influence in forming my understanding around territory and conflict before he was tragically murdered in March 2012. In Puebla, Dr. Raquel Gutiérrez has been a rock and a role model. I am inordinately excited to be working with her on my next project. Eva Hershaw helped me out in many ways, and is dearly missed in Mexico. Amélie Trudeau and Fallon Poisson have been a source of deep inspiration, as they continue to struggle inside prison walls. Kath, Mau, Dai, Nacho, and Citlali were amazingly patient roomies as I shut myself in to write, day in, day out, for weeks and months. Abraham Muñoz and la banda at Surf in Cabo helped me get the fresh air I needed to make this project happen. I owe a very deep thanks to mis lobas in Mexico: Zara Snapp, Isis Goldberg, Adriana Paz, Moravia de la O, Mandeep Dhillon, and Juanita Sundberg. You were all there with me through the good times and the bad times too. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for your company and your friendship.