Drug War Capitalism (14 page)

One of the key points about the conflict in Colombia is that civilians are not murdered and displaced as a consequence of the war, nor are they “collateral damage”—instead, the displacement of civilians, the threats to activists and community organizers, the forced disappearances, and the terror are integral to the conflict.[102] “Forced displacement in Colombia is not a casual by-product of the internal conflict. 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). Forcing out population as a war strategy aims at impeding collective action, damaging social networks, and intimidating and controlling the civilian population.”[103] By moving people off the lands, new territories are opened up for these so-called frontier investments. When people are forced off their land and are living in camps and slums, it becomes much more difficult for them to effectively organize to control their territories.

Part of the oil drilling in Putumayo is taking place on the land of the Cofán people, some of whom have been displaced as part of a concerted strategy to make their lands available for mega projects. According to the Colombian government’s Sistema de Información Indígena de Colombia (Indigenous Information System of Colombia, SIIC), “The fumigation of their territory as part of a military plan to weaken the stability of the guerrillas and battles between the FARC and paramilitaries caused a migration of the Cofán to Ecuador.”[104] However, there have been challenges to the government’s assertion that the displacement of the Cofán from their oil-rich lands was a result of military battles. “This displacement is not only the result of armed actions by the various factions fighting in the area; it must also be seen as the outcome of a strategy for expropriating lands that are part of the Cofán’s ancestral territory.”[105]

Among the prime beneficiaries of the conflict in Putumayo are Canadian oil companies: Grand Tierra Energy Incorporated, a Calgary-based firm, produces approximately 14,000 net barrels per day in Putumayo, and controls over 750,000 net acres of territory there. Calgary’s Petrobank has fourteen exploration blocks, covering a total of 1.6 million acres. Calgary’s Parex Resources Incorporated, formerly Petro Andina, is also active in Putumayo and in the plains region. But the most important oil company in Colombia today is Toronto-based Pacific Rubiales.
^[106]

In December of 2009, Pacific Rubiales became the first foreign company listed on the Colombian Stock Exchange. Today, Pacific Rubiales is the second most important oil company in Colombia, after Ecopetrol. It is an early mover in the latest phase of oil and gas exploration and production in the country. In a newspaper interview, CEO Ronald Pantin explained why his company was in Colombia: “The stars aligned. It was a combination of Uribe’s politics, the new hydrocarbon laws, the national security policies and very promising geology.”[107] But it wasn’t stars aligning. Colombia’s oil boom is the result of a deliberate set of policies and practices applied over the previous years, some of which, like the training of Colombian military brigades by US troops specifically to guard pipelines, were part of Plan Colombia. The 600 Colombian troops that were stationed at a military base inside the Rubiales oilfields illustrate a national security policy that Pantin probably appreciates.

When Pantin mentioned the “new hydrocarbon laws” in Colombia, he was referring to laws rewritten with Canadian assistance. In a project funded by the Canadian International Development Agency, the Calgary-based Canadian Energy Research Institute worked with Colombia in 2001 and 2002 to “streamline the country’s mining and petroleum regulations.”[108] This initiative can be understood as part of a multinational effort to improve investment conditions in Colombia. As mentioned, the passage of legislation to encourage investment was part of Plan Colombia. This legislation increased legal security for corporations seeking long-term guarantees from the Colombian state.[109] At the end of Plan Colombia, corporations enjoyed a new legal regime as well as increased security provided by the Colombian state.

From Drug War to Open Occupation

The drug war policies backed by the United States in Colombia did little more, in terms of the flow of narcotics, than create the perception that the drug trade was suffering as a result of a military strategy against trafficking. The same policies failed to create a safer environment for rural populations, who continue to be displaced from their lands and to be targets of state and non-state violence. In 2008, Uribe signaled to the United States that Colombia would be interested in hosting what is euphemistically called a Cooperative Security Location, which the United States said it would be interested in pursuing if Ecuador didn’t renew their agreement to use the Manta base (it didn’t).[110] In 2009, the United States and Colombia signed an agreement to allow US troops to access seven military bases in the South American country for ten years, with the possibility of renewal.[111] The agreement, which Colombian officials tacked on to Plan Colombia so that it did not go before Congress, was declared unconstitutional and struck down months after it was signed. That didn’t stop US troops from moving in or the Pentagon from beginning construction on the new bases.[112] People I interviewed in Arauca and Meta attested to the fact that US military personnel are present in bases in their regions, though there is no official confirmation of how many US soldiers are present in Colombia.

What has changed is official and media discourse regarding the war in Colombia: today, the general message is that paramilitary groups and drug cartels have demobilized and been disbanded. These irregular forces have today been rebranded as criminal bands (the Bacrim), which are presented as apolitical criminal groups without links to the state apparatus, and as such can be persecuted by police under the rule of law. According to international organizations active in Colombia, since the end of negotiations with the AUC in 2005, much of the Colombian government has acted as though paramilitaries no longer exist. They quote the attorney general’s office as stating that “criminal organizations that emerged after the demobilization of the AUC, developed as a new form of paramilitarism, considered to be the third generation of paramilitary groups in Colombia and whose initial purpose was maintaining control of the lands that had been abandoned by the AUC. Paramilitaries have not been dismantled and their crimes go unpunished.”[113] Attempting to rebrand paramilitaries as narcotraffickers without links to the government or state security forces is particularly interesting because it represents a shift in Colombia to a Mexican-style discourse around organized crime, which depoliticizes the reactionary actions of these groups and creates discursive distance between them and state actors.

I asked Fabian Laverde, with whom I opened this chapter, about the difference between paramilitary groups and Bacrim. “It is exactly the same thing,” he said. “If you look at who are the commanders of the Bacrim, as they call them, they are effectively the same commanders who were in the paramilitary blocs.” Today, the lay of the land looks similar to how it did throughout Plan Colombia, but instead of big-name regional paramilitary blocs, there are smaller, localized groups able to work with perhaps even less media scrutiny. “The lands that they take or that they’re after, or the leaders that they murder, don’t even benefit the commander of the Bacrim, rather it benefits a third party, who was the same person who robbed the peasants of their lands twenty years ago using the armed power of the paramilitaries with the complicity of the state, and now those who are impeding the recuperation of those lands are the famous Bacrim,” said Laverde. His analysis was one that I heard repeated over again by people I met in Colombia: the emergence of the Bacrim was a public relations tactic to conceal the state’s ongoing connection with armed groups.

There can be no doubt that Plan Colombia was a failure when it came to stopping the flow of drugs, and increasing how safe many Colombians—especially but not exclusively rural Colombians—felt in their homes. What it did achieve, however, was increased security for investors, both on the ground in regions where the state previously did not exercise control, and legally, through entrenching protection of investments and the ratification of free trade agreements between Colombia and the US and Canada. Colombia’s economic boost following Plan Colombia has to do with financial and legal reforms instituted as part of the “anti-narcotics” program, but it also goes hand in hand with the repressive social order and militarization imposed during (and after) the initiative. Armed groups cleared territories around the country of the people who lived there, and then corporations arrived to occupy and exploit them. Unions were weakened, and Indigenous and popular movements were left reeling from the violence leveled against their members.

What did the US government learn from Plan Colombia? First, that the war on drugs can be used as a mechanism to promote business-friendly policies, and second, that paramilitarism strengthened by prohibition can assist in the maintenance of control over territories and populations.

A refined version of the comprehensive, US-backed drug war strategy is what has been applied in Mexico, Central America, and elsewhere, beginning in 2007. Seen through this lens, the war on drugs appears to be a bloody fix to the US economic woes. Today, the United States and Colombia fund and promote security-related trainings by Colombians throughout the hemisphere. For the US State Department, “Colombia is also a significant contributor to Central America’s security sector and is becoming a partner in addressing citizen security in the region.”[114]

General Kelly, commander of US SouthCom, notes that “with Colombia increasingly taking on the role of security exporter, we are facilitating the deployment of Colombian-led training teams and subject matter experts and attendance of Central American personnel to law enforcement and military academies in Colombia as part of the U.S.-Colombia Action Plan on Regional Security Cooperation. This is a clear example of a sizeable return on our relatively modest investment and sustained engagement.”[115]

It is with this in mind that we can begin to explore the impacts of the Mérida Initiative and CARSI in Mexico and Central America. The economic results achieved with Plan Colombia, combined with its proximity to the United States, made Mexico a natural next place to roll out the drug war. Making the links between US anti-drug policy and the expansion of capitalism in Mexico is difficult because the impacts of these policies are continuously being implemented and felt, and we don’t (yet) have the benefit of hindsight. We do know, however, that Colombia is considered a model for Mexico’s anti-drug war, and we can see what the results have been there in terms of the anti-drug strategy serving to increase Colombia’s integration into global capitalism. Today in Mexico we’re presented with a confusing, jumbled picture, but that is all the more reason to attempt to analyze events taking place there with a view to the broader context.

Chapter 4:
Mexico’s Drug War Reforms

In 2010 and 2011, grenades exploded at city hall buildings in Reynosa, Matamoros, Nuevo Laredo, and Ciudad Victoria, all located in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas. Organized crime was blamed for the explosions—in particular, members of the Zetas or the Gulf Cartel. I visited the region in early 2011, at a loss for what could be driving criminal groups to fight against local governments that are, for all intents and purposes, under cartel control. I went to the region against the counsel of various journalists, who said it was too dangerous. Most of my sources refused to go on the record, and the stories they told in hushed tones were enough to give any reporter the chills. It wasn’t until I met Francisco Chavira Martínez that things began to become clear. The first time we met, he suggested we eat together at the back of a Reynosa restaurant that caters to well-heeled locals. Waiters dressed like penguins bowed in and out; the rest of the tables were occupied mostly by older men. Chavira, who runs a private university with campuses throughout Tamaulipas, spoke loudly between bites, not seeming to mind the fact that others could hear him.

After a bit of small talk and a couple of sips of coffee, I asked about the bombs. Local governments “use car thieves to steal the cars of anyone who opposes them; house thieves who will rob your house to frighten you; narcotraffickers, who they use as a way to create fear in the people, so that you don’t participate, so that you don’t raise your voice or go against the government; they even send their own to throw grenades at city halls,” Chavira explained.[1] Silence. Maybe Chavira noticed the quizzical look on my face. He quickly explained what it was he meant. “Why?” he asked himself, pausing for a moment. “So that the people are scared and don’t go to City Hall to make demands; they won’t go and demand that public accounts be transparent, or [ask] what the money is being spent on.” Some months after our interview, Chavira, a candidate for the left-leaning Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), was arrested on trumped-up charges and held in jail until after the elections, in what he referred to as a “legalized kidnapping” by the state.

Members of the Mexican government have used many means to defend their position in society, from explosions to extortion and threats. The methods Chavira describes above can help us understand the extent of this, and go a little ways toward illustrating the complicity between state actors and criminal groups. But the politics of the drug war isn’t just about bombs and bad guys. Alongside the violence, there are legal and policy reforms embedded in Plan Mexico that have everything to do with creating a more hospitable business environment as well as entrenching the US-backed rule of law framework.