Drug War Capitalism (7 page)

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] Campbell 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 despoliation, 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.

Chapter 2:
Defining The Drug War

If there really was a war on drugs, it wouldn’t make for very good media fodder: bullet-riddled packets of cocaine (or cigarettes, for that matter) don’t bleed, and following the newspaper industry rhyme, they probably wouldn’t lead. “War on drugs” is a misnomer, as war is defined as an armed conflict between at least two groups, and not between one group and a substance. As we shall see, in Mexico, Colombia, and elsewhere, the primary victims of the so-called war on drugs are poor people, migrants, and Indigenous and peasant farmers.

Since the Nixon administration declared that the United States was embarking on a “war on drugs” in 1969, the phrase has been part of the popular imagination.[1] Nixon’s declaration of war was followed by the passage of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, which serves as the legal basis for US drug policy today.[2] Nixon’s war was based on policies passed at the outset of the twentieth century, including the Harrison Act in 1914 and the Hague Convention for the control of opium sales in 1912. The Boggs Act, passed in 1951, put marijuana on the same rank as heroin and cocaine, and introduced the mandatory death penalty as punishment for selling it to a minor.[3] At the end of the nineteenth century, San Francisco banned opium smoking, and New York banned opium dens—laws that targeted primarily Chinese migrants.[4] Similarly, early attempts to control marijuana use and distribution in the United States were guided by an anti-Mexican sentiment. Legislation passed in 1969 was followed, on July 6, 1973, by the creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), a new national anti-drugs force that would wage “an all-out global war on the drug menace,” according to Nixon.[5] Beriah Empie and Lydia Anne M Bartholow use a Trojan horse analogy to describe the purpose of the war on drugs. “Despite the lack of evidence of a national narcotics issue, the war on drugs was the White House’s Trojan horse for intensified federal involvement in policing. It allowed Nixon to deliver on his campaign rhetoric of being tough on crime while stifling organized political rebellion.”[6]

The war on drugs kicked off on the heels of 1968, when worldwide protest and student movements shook the world, from Mexico City to Paris to San Francisco. It came at a critical moment of the United States war in Vietnam (by the fall of 1971, half of all US soldiers in Vietnam had tried heroin, and two were dying of heroin overdoses each month),[7] and at a time when youth were experimenting with legal and illegal drugs “to a degree unprecedented in American history.”[8] The 1960s and ’70s marked high points in anti-war and anti-imperialist activism, and existing anti-narcotics efforts were adapted to quash protest. “Strict anti-drug laws, punitive sentencing procedures and harsh enforcement made it possible to suppress and curb dissent,” writes Julia Buxton in her book
The Political Economy of Narcotics
.[9]