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research-article2015
LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X15585117LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVESPaley / DRUG WAR AS NEOLIBERAL TROJAN HORSE
Drug War as Neoliberal Trojan Horse
by
Dawn Paley
Examination of the U.S.-backed wars on drugs in Colombia and Mexico reveals that,
apart from the hegemonic discourse about narcotics control, these wars reinforce the power
of transnational corporations over resource-rich areas owned and used by indigenous
people, peasants, and the urban poor. Case studies in Mexico demonstrate that recent
assassinations of activists and intimidation of communities that are organizing against
large-scale mining must be understood within the framework of militarization justified in
terms of an antinarcotics discourse. Drug war politics may thus be understood as a mechanism for promoting business-friendly policies and militarizing resource-rich areas. This
politics is enshrined in the Mérida Initiative, which includes a national U.S.- style legal
reform, modernization of the prison system, and the militarization and training of the
federal police and other security forces, equipment transfers, and development funding
designed to encourage foreign investment and further transnationalize the national economy.
El examen de la guerra contra las drogas financiada por los Estados Unidos en Colombia
y México revela que, aparte del discurso hegemónico sobre el control de narcóticos, estas
guerras refuerzan el poder de las corporaciones transnacionales sobre las áreas ricas en
recursos que pertenecen y son utilizadas por las comunidades indígenas, los campesinos y
los pobres de las zonas urbanas. Los estudios de casos en México demuestran que los recientes asesinatos de activistas y la intimidación de las comunidades que se están organizando en contra de la minería a gran escala deben ser entendidas dentro del marco de la
militarización justificada en términos de un discurso antinarcótico. La política de la
guerra contra las drogas puede, por lo tanto, entenderse como un mecanismo para promover políticas favorables a los negocios y la militarización de las áreas ricas en recursos.
Esta política está consagrada en la Iniciativa de Mérida, la cual incluye una reforma
jurídica nacional al estilo de los Estados Unidos, la modernización del sistema de prisiones, la militarización y entrenamiento de la policía federal y otras fuerzas de seguridad, la
transferencia de equipos y fondos para desarrollar políticas que promuevan la inversión
extranjera y así transnacionalizar más la economía nacional.
Keywords: Drug war, Natural resources, Displacement, Neoliberalism, Mexico
On October 22, 2012, Ismael Solorio Urrutia and his wife, Manuela Solís
Contreras, were shot point-blank outside of the city of Cuauhtémoc, in the
northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. Solorio was one of the highest-profile
opponents of a mining exploration project under way in his ejido, and he had
Dawn Paley is the author of Drug War Capitalism (2014) and a doctoral student at the Benemérita
Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. Some sections of this essay draw on previous reporting she
has done for The Dominion, Against the Current, the Nation, and Upside Down World.
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue XXX, Vol. XX No. XXX, Month 201X, 1–24
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X15585117
© 2015 Latin American Perspectives
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formally denounced an attack on him by men from his community who supported the mining project (Amnesty International, 2012). Some of these men
were believed to be low-ranking members of the Juárez cartel, an organized
crime group thought to be active in the region. According to Martín Solís
Bustamante, the decision to kill Ismael “wasn’t a decision made by the bosses
of the drug cartels; rather, it was a local decision by low-level operatives of
organized crime. They were the ones who made the decision together with
[employees of] the mining company” (quoted Paley, 2013a). Solorio and Solís
Bustamante were members of El Barzón, a farmer’s rights group active in
Chihuahua and other northern states that had carried out early debtors’ protests and actions against devaluation and the lack of agricultural subsidies in
Mexico’s countryside. The double murder of mine opponents in Chihuahua
represented the first killings of locals resisting transnational mining in the state.
(Activists resisting mining had previously been murdered in Oaxaca in March
2012 and in Chiapas in November 2010.)
According to the Servicio Mexicano de Geología (Mexican Geological
Service—SMG), in 2010 Chihuahua was the second-most-important state in the
country in the production of gold, silver, lead, and zinc (SMG, 2011). More than
half of the land in Chihuahua, the largest state in Mexico and almost the size of
Texas, has been distributed in mining concessions (SMG, 2011). The volume of
precious metals mined has increased since 2006, with silver extraction almost
doubling between 2006 and 2010 (SMG, 2011).
Since 2008, Chihuahua has also become one of the most violent states in
Mexico. There were 2,601 homicides in 2008, 3,671 in 2009, 6,407 in 2010, and
4,500 in 2011 (INEGI, 2011). The spike in homicides coincided with the militarization of the state, particularly the border area around Ciudad Juárez, in 2008,
beginning with Operativo Conjunto Chihuahua, a joint police and army
deployment meant to deter organized crime and drug trafficking. In the 10
years preceding the militarization of the region, the murder rate in the state had
averaged 586 a year and never gone over 648 (INEGI, 2011).
The murders of Solorio and Solís took place in a context of extreme violence
against civilians and in a state with a strong prior history of attacks against
activists. Instead of calling for a proper investigation and denouncing the murder of the highest-profile community opponent of its Cinco de Mayo exploration project in Chihuahua, Dan MacInnis, president and CEO of MAG Silver,
chalked the killings up to the government’s fight against organized crime. “It
was kind of an odd situation considering that 60,000 to 100,000 people have
been killed in Mexico in the last six years by organized crime in the so-called
drug war,” MacInnis told a Canadian journalist (Munson, 2013). “And rather
than the obvious being reported, it was everything but that was being reported.”
Asked for a clarification of this statement, MacInnis (personal communication)
responded that what was puzzling was the “assumptions about the involvement of mining companies, utility companies, or farmers.”
The company position that it has become normal for civilians to be killed in
Mexico reflects a generalized pattern in which the drug war launched by
President Felipe Calderón “created a climate of such overwhelming violence and
impunity that assassinations of political opponents—indigenous rights leaders,
human rights advocates, anti-mining activists, guerrilla insurgents—are quickly
Paley / DRUG WAR AS NEOLIBERAL TROJAN HORSE
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swept into the ever rising body count without much attention or outcry” (Gibler,
2011: 29). MacInnis may be able to chalk up the double murder of opponents of
his mining project to the widespread violence happening around the country, but
Solorio’s and Solís’s three orphaned sons and their extended family will live with
the loss for the rest of their lives. Their community, Benito Juárez, is deeply
divided over the prospect of mining in the territory. Following the murders, the
ejido passed an ordinance against mining for the next 100 years that the company
says is illegal (Paley, 2013b). The company has announced that it has stopped
work for permitting reasons but plans to pick it up again as soon as possible
(Paley, 2013b). More violence seems like a potential outcome should the company
attempt to have workers resume exploration.
The killings of Solorio and Solís did not happen in isolation. Activists in
Chihuahua and elsewhere in Mexico find themselves at a crossroads of environmental activism and organized crime in a region where all armed actors
(police, army, organized crime groups) operate with near-total impunity. “In
this state today, you can’t go into the mountains, you can’t go into communities
more than 50 kilometers from the capital,” said Oscar Castrejón Rivas, a lawyer
who serves as head of the state lawyer’s college. “And in the state capital you
have the absurdity that in the entrance of the [main government building], they
killed Marisela Escobedo, and in another important city they killed the two
leaders of El Barzón.” Escobedo was a mother fighting for justice in the case of
her murdered teenage daughter and was gunned down on the corner of the
city’s central park in December 2010. Some of her closest supporters, including
Castrejón, believe that her assassin is still on the loose.
Saúl Reyes Salazar, an activist from the Juárez Valley, estimates that in the
state of Chihuahua alone, 40 activists have been killed since December 2006,
something he likens to an ideological cleansing in the state. Two of his sisters,
his sister-in-law, and two of his brothers were murdered between January 2010
and February 2011. The Reyes Salazar family was known for its environmental
activism, having successfully fought a proposed nuclear waste facility in Texas
and carried out campaigns against contamination and toxins being illegally
disposed of in Juárez. Reyes Salazar links the killings of his siblings to their
outspoken conviction that the army was responsible for murdering and disappearing family members (beginning with Josefina Reyes’s son). Today, he lives
in El Paso, Texas, having been granted asylum along with his immediate family
in January of 2012, and his activism is now focused on denouncing the killings
and the war that destroyed his family and forced him to flee Mexico. In an
interview with me in March 2013 he said,
Today there’s pretty much no one who talks about this, but the Juárez Valley is
still contaminated by a 100-kilometer canal that carries Juárez waste water, the
farming lands are contaminated by chemicals by various maquilas that dump
their chemicals in the waste, there’s oil from the mechanics’ shops, and of
course all of the human waste from all of the houses in Ciudad Juárez ends up
in the valley, which is basically the septic tank of Juárez.
Indeed, news of environmental actions in the border region has fallen off in
the face of the violence.
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Chihuahua, like other parts of Mexico and Central America, is at once experiencing an important expansion in transnational mining and a state-led militarization under the pretext of the war on drugs. While disappearances and
murders of environmental activists by state or irregular forces are obvious
examples of environmental violence in Mexico, the rise in killings, kidnappings, and threats to civilians in Mexico is also of the utmost importance. I
believe that what now appear as indiscriminate murders may eventually begin
to appear as patterns linked either to the clearing of territory through terror
for future resource extraction in rural areas or to capital-flow-facilitating infrastructure projects such as highways, airports, and border bridges in urban
settings.
For example, at Vasco Gil, a tiny ranching hamlet in the mountains of
Durango, in the summer of 2009, approximately 30 soldiers showed up and
began carrying out surveillance and harassing residents. A few days later 10 to
15 more soldiers arrived and kidnapped 12 men from the area. Residents said
that the soldiers asked them “where the armed groups were, and especially if
[locals] had any knowledge about suspected narcotraffickers Ismael El Mayo
Zambada and Joaquín el Chapo Guzmán” (Riodoce, 2009). The criminalization
and terrorization of residents of Vasco Gil and nearby hamlets was carried out
in the name of the fight against drug cartels, but closer inspection reveals that
there is an even larger interest in the region. The Vancouver-based Chesapeake
Gold Corporation has plans to build an open-pit mine in the area, removing 821
million metric tons of ore over 19 years of operations. These plans would necessitate the displacement of all residents of Vasco Gil (M3 Engineering and
Technology, 2011). M3 Engineering and Technology, the consulting company
that prepared the technical report for Chesapeake, described living conditions
in Vasco Gil and surrounding communities as primitive and the community as
isolated. It mischaracterized the local economy as based on ranching when
forestry is actually the predominant economic activity.
The stakes in the area surrounding Vasco Gil are high: the Canadian company will need to invest Can$486,926,000, to operate the mine, and there are
claims that the areas contain “one of the largest undeveloped disseminated
gold and silver deposits in the world” (Chesapeake, n.d.; M3 Engineering and
Technology, 2011: 21). For Chesapeake the residents of Vasco Gil and nearby
hamlets represent potential barriers to profit maximization. It owns 5,776 hectares of concessions in the area and acquired core samples in March and April
of 2009 (M3 Engineering and Technology, 2011). Perhaps it is a coincidence that
almost four dozen soldiers arrived in town months after the latest round of
drilling took place in the area, but it seems useful to consider factors other than
drugs (in this case, transnational mining interests) as potentially influencing
violence aimed at local populations in resource-rich areas.
The fact that there is a resource rush taking place in tandem with the militarization (and paramilitarization) linked to the drug war is an open secret, one
that provides a more adequate explanation of why governments (host and foreign) are promoting drug control strategies that do little to control drug trafficking or lessen consumption. To understand how this is taking place, it is
helpful to consider the lessons emerging from antidrug efforts in Colombia
through the 2000s.
Paley / DRUG WAR AS NEOLIBERAL TROJAN HORSE
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HOW PLAN COLOMBIA INFORMED PLAN MÉXICO
As soon as Felipe Calderón became president in December of 2006, he
announced that he would crack down on the drug trade. Less than a year later,
Mexico announced the Mérida Initiative, a bilateral antinarcotics initiative
funded by the United States and Mexico. Critics immediately began calling the
agreement Plan México after its predecessor, Plan Colombia. Plan Colombia
ended in 2006; in 2007 the United States shifted its weight behind the war on
drugs from Colombia to Mexico; it introduced the Central America Regional
Security Initiative (Plan Central America) in 2008 and the Caribbean Basin
Security Initiative (Plan Caribbean) in 2010.
Plan Colombia was launched in 2000 as a six-year plan to reduce cocaine
production in Colombia and trafficking to the United States. Between 2000 and
2012, the U.S. government spent over US$8 billion on Plan Colombia and
related initiatives (Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, 2012). For all its
spending, drug trafficking was not stemmed. A U.S. Government Accountability
Office report found that drug-related targets were not met and “estimated flow
of cocaine towards the United States from South America rose over the period”
from 2000 to 2006 (U.S. GAO, 2008: 23). The Colombian military received
US$4.9 billion in of U.S. State Department and Defense Department assistance
between 2000 and 2008 (U.S. GAO, 2008: 11). By 2005 there were an estimated
800 U.S. military personnel and 600 private military contractors working for
the United States in Colombia (Forero, 2004). During former President Álvaro
Uribe’s two terms (2002–2010) the army was commanded by now-president
Juan Manuel Santos. The army was known to carry out joint patrols with rightwing paramilitary groups and was found to have perpetrated the “false-positives” scandal, which saw soldiers capturing and murdering civilians and then
dressing them up as guerrilla combatants in order to claim progress in the war
(Evans, 2009). According to a 2011 report on U.S. cooperation with Colombia
prepared by the RAND Corporation and sponsored by the U.S. Air Force, U.S.
support for Colombia through the 2000s included the supply of radar systems,
helicopter carriers, heavy artillery, surveillance and interdiction training, training for port authorities, advice and equipment for aerial crop spraying programs, and U.S. Special Forces advisers to train the Colombian police and army
(Chalk, 2011).
For much of Colombia’s poor and rural population, Plan Colombia meant
increased militarization and violence. The aerial spraying of coca crops
amounted to chemical warfare, as peasants and their lands were poisoned from
above (O’Shaunessy, 2001). A historic process of paramilitarization was compounded by the war on drugs, which effectively forced indigenous and peasant
communities off of their territories in order to open up land for foreign-owned
corporations (Maher and Thompson, 2011: 96). In rural areas the presence of
armed actors from state, guerrilla, narco, or other interests has severely
impacted people’s daily lives. “Peasants and rural inhabitants have been deliberately terrorized by these uniformed, armed groups of men,” wrote María
Victoria Uribe (2004: 91). By 2014 the total number of people displaced in
Colombia was estimated at 5,368,138, and the total number of victims (including those killed and disappeared) over the past 50 years reached 6,073,437
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LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
(Sierra, 2014). Violence increased markedly with the implementation of Plan
Colombia, and in 2002 there were 673,919 victims of violence in the war in
Colombia, the largest number recorded for any year in recent decades (Sierra,
2014).
As Ibáñez and Vélez (2008: 661) point out,
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 civilian population.
The displacements in Colombia did not drop off when Plan Colombia ended.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (2012),
“While there has been a drop in the rate of new displacements, an estimated
100,000 people were displaced internally in 2010, representing a net increase of
35 per cent compared to 2009, according to the Government.” The number of
displaced recorded by the Colombian nongovernmental organization
Consultoría para los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento (Consultancy on
Human Rights and Displacement—CODHES) in 2011 was more than double
the 2010 number, at 259,146 persons (Consultoría, 2012). Between 2005 and
2010, 265 trade unionists were murdered, many by the same paramilitary
groups spawned to fight guerrillas and protect narcotics traffickers (U.S. Leap,
n.d.). The situation of indigenous people became so dire that human rights
groups warned of genocide. According to the Organización Nacional Indígena
de Colombia (National Indigenous Organization of Colombia—ONIC), 64 of
Colombia’s 102 indigenous groups are at risk of extinction, and indigenous
peoples have been and continue to be disproportionately impacted by the
armed conflict in Colombia (ONIC, 2010: 8–11).
For all the damage wrought and the money spent in Colombia, Plan Colombia
failed to reduce in a meaningful way the amount of cocaine flowing from South
America to the United States. Homicide rates in the Andean nation remain
among the highest in South America (United Nations Office on Drugs and
Crime, 2011: 93). Mass displacements of the rural population continue. In retrospect, it appears that the economic impacts of Plan Colombia outshone any
progress on controlled substances and the ongoing violence in the countryside.
Halfway through Plan Colombia, in January of 2003, the International Monetary
Fund approved a US$2.1 billion loan to Colombia. “Subsequently, the president
privatized one of the country’s largest banks (BANCAFE), restructured the
pension program, and reduced the number of public-sector workers in order to
cut budget deficits, as required by the international lending institution”
(Hristov, 2009: 17). According to the Committee for the Abolition of Third
World Debt (2002), “Although not directly related to Plan Colombia, the IMF’s
Colombia loan fits in to Plan Colombia as part of the larger strategy to revive
the Colombian economy.”
If opening up the economy (rather than narcotics control) was the desired
outcome of Plan Colombia, it was a success. Foreign direct investment increased
Paley / DRUG WAR AS NEOLIBERAL TROJAN HORSE
7
steadily following the launch of Plan Colombia. At the outset it was calculated
at US$2.4 billion, and by 2011 it was more than US$13.4 billion, registering the
fastest growth in Latin America; in 2012 it reached US$15.65 billion (Banco de
la República, 2013). Foreign direct investment in the mining sector (including
coal) has grown from US$47 million in 1994 to more than US$2 billion in 2012,
when it accounted for nearly half of nonpetroleum investment. Oil and gas also
make up an increasingly important portion of Colombia’s inward foreign direct
investment, increasing from less than one-tenth in the mid-1990s to over onethird by 2012, when it reached US$5.389 billion (Banco de la República, 2013).
U.S. bureaucrats were happy to take credit for the country’s economic turnaround. “Colombia’s economic takeoff after 2003 did not happen by chance,”
noted a representative of USAID in a 2008 report to the GAO. Fifty-two areas
of Colombia’s economic system were targeted for reform during Plan Colombia,
and “USAID provided technical assistance to the [Government of Colombia] to
help it design and implement policies ranging from fiscal reform to financial
sector strengthening to improving the environment for small businesses, and
many others” (U.S. GAO, 2008: 101).
One of the companies opened up to private investment under Plan Colombia
was the formerly fully state-owned oil firm Ecopetrol. Ecopetrol was founded
in 1951 as a state company but, following a partial privatization scheme introduced by President Uribe, is now a mixed corporation that is 89.9 percent
owned by the state and 10.1 percent by shareholders. In addition to backing the
partial privatization of the state oil company in 2002, the U.S. government
began funding the Colombian army to protect sections of the Caño Limón–
Coveñas oil pipeline (Dunning and Wirpsa, 2005: 84):
Violent attacks on Colombian energy installations, prior to and within the context of the post–11 September global anti-terrorism campaigns, have provided
U.S. lawmakers and members of the executive branch with legitimating arguments for increasing military aid to Colombia and expanding significantly and
without precedent, the U.S. mission there beyond counter-narcotics to include
counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism.
By 2005 U.S. Special Forces had “provided training and equipment to about
1,600 Colombian Army soldiers” (U.S. GAO, 2005: 2). There are proven links
between this infrastructure protection plan and the drug war: the aviation component of the U.S.-led militarization of the pipeline was administered by the
U.S. Narcotics Affairs Section of the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá (U.S. GAO, 2005:
8). The Caño Limón–Coveñas pipeline serves oil fields exploited jointly by
Occidental Petroleum (U.S.), Repsol (Spain), and Ecopetrol.
The unfolding of Plan Colombia in Putumayo, a vast region encompassing
Colombia’s southern jungles and shared border area with Ecuador, provides
further insight into the way antidrug initiatives have benefited transnational
oil companies. According to the journalist Gary Leech (2004),
In December 2000, U.S.-trained counternarcotics battalions, U.S.-supplied
Blackhawk helicopters and U.S.-piloted spray planes descended on Putumayo
department to conduct Plan Colombia’s initial aerial fumigation campaign.
But while Plan Colombia has failed to affect the price, purity and availability
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LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
of cocaine in U.S. cities, its militarization of Putumayo has contributed significantly to increased oil exploration by multinational companies in this resourcerich region.
In 2006 there were 4,500 soldiers guarding oil facilities in Putumayo, as well
as two extra brigades and one special brigade trained by the U.S. army. 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 the
land they occupy 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.” However, there have been challenges to the government’s assertion
that the displacement of the Cofán from their oil-rich land was a result of military battles between armed actors. “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” (Tenthoff, 2007: 2).
As Plan Colombia wound down, government authorities began to make it
clear that the militarization of drug trafficking was also considered a precursor
to the signing of a free-trade agreement between Colombia and the United
States. A report prepared by the Colombian government noted “promoting
conditions for employment generation and social stability” and expanding
“tariff preferences in compensation for the negative effects of the drug trade
and to favor a free-trade agreement that will broaden employment opportunities” were desired outcomes of Plan Colombia (National Planning Department
of Colombia, 2006: 9). When Condoleezza Rice attended her confirmation hearing to become U.S. Secretary of State in 2005, she was asked about Colombia.
Here is part of what she said (Rice, 2005: 22):
It is a country that has potential but has really been—a lot of the potential has
been held back by the terrible security situation produced by narcotrafficking.
And as the narcotrafficking situation is brought under control, we obviously
will want to be a partner with Colombia in how they build a vibrant democracy. Part of that is that they have asked us to discuss with them what we might
be doing in the area of free trade.
The U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement went into effect seven years later, on
May 15, 2012.
In a response to the GAO report on the failure of Plan Colombia to meet drug
reduction targets, the State Department argued that other impacts of the plan
should be emphasized, including Colombia’s transition to a U.S.-style justice
system and the extension of Colombian police forces throughout the national
territory. “In many ways, Colombian programs and U.S. support have evolved
from our original, more narrow focus into a comprehensive strategy that can
now serve as a model to inform efforts in other challenged or failing states,”
wrote Bradford Higgins, assistant secretary for resource management and chief
financial officer of the U.S. State Department (U.S. GAO, 2008: 90).
Paley / DRUG WAR AS NEOLIBERAL TROJAN HORSE
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Colombia’s economic boost following Plan Colombia has to do with financial and legal reforms instituted as part of the “antinarcotics” program, but it
also goes hand in hand with the repressive social order and militarization
imposed during (and after) the initiative. Territories around the country were
cleared of communities and later occupied and exploited by transnational corporations, unions weakened, and indigenous and popular movement left reeling from the violence exerted against their members.
What are the primary insights from Plan Colombia from the perspective of
the U.S. government? First, that the war on drugs can be used as a mechanism
to promote business-friendly policies and, second, that the paramilitarism that
results from militarizing drug trafficking and drug production can assist in the
maintenance of control over territories and populations. A refined version of
the comprehensive U.S.-backed “drug war” strategy is what has been applied
in Mexico, beginning in 2007. Seen through this lens, the war on drugs appears
to be a bloody fix to the United States’ economic woes. The drug war, as embodied in Plan Colombia, Plan Mérida, and CARSI, combines terror with policy
making in a neoliberal mix, cracking open social worlds and territories previously unavailable to globalized capitalism. The social worlds targeted for
destruction include “occupational contact networks, invisible colleges, behaviour systems, activity systems, and subcultures” (Unruh, 1980: 271); the intrusion into the territories on which these social worlds often overlap is a necessary
next step for the continued advance of neoliberal capitalist development.
PLAN MÉXICO: NEOLIBERAL REFORMS AND MILITARIZATION
Looking at the way conflicts and wars intersect with resource extraction is
becoming an increasingly important analytical frame for understanding socalled civil wars and other conflicts around the world. It is also the lens through
which we can begin to grasp the overlapping of the violence of the war on
drugs with environmental violence, understood here as violence against civilians acting to protect the natural environment as well as against residents of
resource-rich areas with the purpose of clearing social and physical territories
for the expansion of extractive capitalism.
Though pillage, profit, and plunder have been a mainstay of war since precolonial times, there is a hegemonic shift away from the focus on the role of
finance and economics in war. “In the recent literature on conflict and, even
more so, in the practice of international and nongovernmental organizations,
comparatively little systematic attention has been given to the precise role of
economically-motivated actions and processes in generating and sustaining
contemporary civil conflicts” (Berdal and Malone, 2000: 1). In the case of the
war on drugs, a reading of the conflict that includes economic analysis has
generally been reserved for speculation as to the profits of drug traffickers and
reportage on cash laundering in major banks. But, as Berdal and Malone state,
in civil wars today “the role of the international private sector, particularly that
of extractive industries (petroleum, mining), is key” (12). The majority of a
recent body of empirical studies examining the links between resources and
conflict “find a strong positive association between fiscal dependence on oil
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LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
exports, in particular, and the incidence and duration of civil war” (Dunning
and Wirpsa, 2005: 81). The emergence of new orders through periods of conflict
is something that is increasingly understood as necessary to study.
The resource conflict analysis of Colombia often focuses on the largely
ignored role of oil in that country’s protracted conflict. In Mexico, the makeup
of the oil sector makes such an analysis more difficult, since there are (to date)
no private oil companies independently extracting and exporting oil from
Mexico. While there is no doubt that the privatization of Petróleos Mexicanos
(PEMEX) was and continues to be an aim of the transnational elite, the assault
on Mexico’s oil sector is taking a primarily legislative form at the moment, as
local elites team up with foreign oil interests to promote an increasingly open oil
sector. According to the Financial Times, “an opening of Mexico’s highly protected oil sector, which is dominated by state behemoth PEMEX, could provide
untold opportunities for U.S. oil companies as well as the sort of technologytransfer Mexico desperately needs” (G. Thompson, 2011). President Enrique
Peña Nieto claimed during his campaign that he was the only candidate who
could open Mexico’s oil sector to increased private investment, including possibly selling shares in the company (Krause-Jackson and Cattan, 2012). An indication of the importance of Mexico’s oil sector is that between 2004 and 2007
Mexico was the second-largest oil supplier to the United States and in 2008 it
ranked third after Canada and Saudi Arabia (Fletcher, 2009). Physical attacks
related to oil that could be linked to the war on drugs have tended to be on
PEMEX union members and workers, who have been kidnapped, killed, and
threatened by criminal groups for carrying out their regular labor. Mexico’s as
yet undeveloped shale gas sector is worthy of analysis in that many of the gasrich regions in northeastern Mexico have also been among the most violent
areas in the drug war. For the purposes of this article, the modern metals mining
industry provides a similar sectoral analysis through which to examine the
application of drug war policies in Mexico in relation to resource extraction.
Other sectors that would be worth exploring in the same vein are the biofuels
industry, the wind power sector, new hydroelectric projects, small and mediumsized business, the manufacturing sector, and the real estate sector.
Naomi Klein (2007: 248–249) reminds us that
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.”
Mexico went through a series of what Klein calls “shocks,” and some sectors
(such as banking and telephony) were thoroughly privatized, but large corporations like the Comisión Federal de Electricidad (Federal Electricity
Commission—CFE) and PEMEX remained in government hands. Also, and
important for our purposes, though weakened by constitutional amendments
made by President Carlos Salinas before the North American Free Trade
Agreement went into effect, communal landholder organizations including
Paley / DRUG WAR AS NEOLIBERAL TROJAN HORSE
11
ejidos and comunidades índigenas have not been entirely undone by neoliberal
reforms. According to the most recent agrarian census, carried out in 2007, over
half of Mexico’s national territory is still owned communally by ejidos and
indigenous communities (INEGI, 2007). The undoing of these large state companies and the displacement and murder of communal landholders like Ismael
Solorio and Manuela Solís in Chihuahua is now being attempted through violence and terror linked to the drug war, itself a kind of permanent shock.
To understand the drug war in Mexico, a general overview of the Mérida
Initiative is in order. What became the Mérida Initiative was first discussed
between President George W. Bush and his counterpart, Felipe Calderón, in
Mérida, Yucatan, in the spring of 2007. The initiative was crafted in secret negotiations that took place the following summer. “These negotiations were not
public, and members of both the U.S. and Mexican Congresses reportedly have
expressed frustration that they were not involved in the discussions” (Cook,
Rush, and Seelke, 2008: 1). The U.S. State Department openly touts the success
of Plan Colombia as an important factor in the creation of the Mérida Initiative
and CARSI. “We know from the work that the United States has supported in
Colombia and now in Mexico that good leadership, proactive investments, and
committed partnerships can turn the tide,” Hillary Clinton told delegates to the
Central America Security Conference in Guatemala City in 2011 (Clinton, 2011).
The Mérida Initiative was officially announced by the U.S. and Mexican governments in the fall of 2007. Total U.S. funding appropriations for the initiative
between 2008 and January 2012 were US$1.9 billion for Mexico; an additional
US$466.5 million went to Central America over the same period and US$42
million to the Dominican Republic and Haiti (Meyer and Seelke, 2012; Seelke,
2010: 2), and US$234 million was requested by Congress for 2013 (Seelke, 2013:
13). The U.S. government did not provide any cash to the Mexican government
as part of the Mérida Initiative, instead spending the earmarked dollars on
U.S.-made equipment and various private contracting firms. Additionally, nonMérida antidrug assistance was provided by the U.S. Department of Defense,
totaling US$208.6 million between 2009 and 2012 (Seelke, 2013: 14). The initiative served as catalyst for a sharp increase in domestic police and military
spending in Mexico. “Prior to 2008, Mexico was not a significant recipient of
U.S. security assistance, with typical allocations averaging between $60 million
and $70 million per year” (Chalk, 2011: 60). It is calculated that the Mexican
government matched Mérida Initiative funds between 10 to 1 and 13 to 1
(Brownfield, 2013c, 1; Voice of America, 2012). Chalk (2011: 61) points out that
Mexico has devoted considerable monies of its own to combat drug-related
crime in the country, increasing the defense budget from just $2 billion in 2006
to $9.3 billion in 2009. This investment has been used to mobilize thousands of
troops and federal police, underwrite interdiction of drug shipments, implement institutional reform, and enhance inter- and intra-agency cooperation
and intelligence sharing.
Calderón officially launched the drug war in December 2006. His offensive
“was backed by the United States under the Mérida Initiative and included
deployment of 96,000 army troops, together with thousands of marines and the
12
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
appointment of dozens of military officers as police chiefs in towns and cities”
(International Crisis Group, 2013: ii).
As U.S. and Mexican security cooperation (and spending) increased, the
body count in Mexico began to rise. Violence spiked, and violent incidents
spread throughout Mexico. According to Shannon O’Neil (2013: 3) of 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 Torreón.
The link between U.S.-backed militarization of the drug trade and the shifting geography of criminal activity (and therefore violence) is one the U.S. 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 (2013a), assistant secretary of the Bureau of International
Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. When it was conceived, the original
focus of the Mérida Initiative was 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,
strengthen air, maritime and border controls, reform the justice system, and
diminish gang activity while reducing the demand for drugs (Feeley, 2013: 2;
Seelke, 2010: 3). In 2010 the initiative was retooled to consist of four pillars:
disrupt organized criminal groups, institutionalize reforms to sustain rule of
law and respect for human rights, create a twenty-first-century border, and
build strong and resilient communities.
From a critical perspective, it is possible to understand the Mérida Initiative
and the activity it has inspired within the Mexican state as being made up of
two primary elements: legal/policy reforms and militarization. The paramilitarization of crime groups in response to state militarization of trafficking
routes is a third effect of the initiative that can also prove beneficial to the
expansion of capitalism. The initiative is today the primary vehicle through
which drug war capitalism, as developed in Colombia and applied to Mexico,
is enshrined bilaterally between the United States and Mexico.
Recent testimony by Brownfield (2013b: 1) highlights the fact that the motives
of the U.S. government in funding the Mérida Initiative go beyond security:
In every society, citizen security underpins economic stability and allows
trade, investment, energy development, and education exchanges to flourish.
The partnership forged between the United States and the Government of
Mexico over the past six years under the Mérida Initiative exemplifies how
strengthening citizen security supports these broader objectives.
In Mexico, the backdoor reasoning for the drug war is the strengthening of
the neoliberal state, which is committed to macroeconomic stability and the
Paley / DRUG WAR AS NEOLIBERAL TROJAN HORSE
13
protection of corporate interests. In an interview with the English journalist Ed
Vulliamy, then presidential spokesperson Alejandra Sota Mirafuentes said,
“The president is clear: the fight is not against drugs, it is against the violence
and the ability of criminal organizations to subvert the state. The president
knows that drugs will not disappear” (quoted in Vulliamy, 2010: 39).
Gian Carlo Delgado-Ramos and Silvina María Romano (2011: 94) argue that
Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative are forms of U.S. interference connected to the expansion of global capitalism. “The Colombia Plan and the
Mérida Initiative are paradigmatic but not isolated cases of U.S. interference in
Latin America. With the purpose of guaranteeing its ‘national security’ (that is,
its socioeconomic and geopolitical interests), the United States promotes ad hoc
mechanisms of internal order throughout the region.” They point out that “the
aim of the interference, pressure, and stabilization-destabilization policies
employed by the United States in strategic regions is strongly linked to political-economic factors and the associated cronyism” (93). It follows that many of
the regions of Mexico (as well as Central America and Colombia) that have
been destabilized through violence related to the drug war are resource-rich.
There is a lack of reporting or critical analysis on anything related to the drug
war in Mexico other than the bloody violence. This violence is rarely presented
in context, and the focus on blood and guts provides a media climate in which
other aspects of the Mérida Initiative and other U.S.-backed economic plans are
operationalized almost undetected.
The policy component of the drug war in Mexico is perhaps one of the greatest innovations inherited from Plan Colombia: fostering the creation of a more
welcoming investment climate while carrying out the war on drugs. This part
of the Mérida Initiative is overseen mainly by USAID, which “coordinates
implementation of Mérida economic and social development and rule of law
programs with USAID Missions in Central America as well as Mexico” (U.S.
GAO, 2010: 29). One of USAID’s program goals is that the “Government of
Mexico becomes more effective in curbing monopolies and eliminating anticompetitive practices” (USAID, 2010: 29). According to a USAID call for proposals issued in January 2012, “USAID is working with Mexican partners to
improve economic governance and increase private sector competitiveness by
improving the business enabling environment and by building sustainable
support for continued policy reforms and systemic changes” (USAID, 2012a:
11). Not all of this work is taking place using Mérida Initiative funds, but there
is coordination between Mérida programs and competitiveness programs. One
document posted by USAID for the Mexico Competitiveness Program noted
that though the program is 80 percent national, “subnational interventions
shall prioritize geographic areas identified by Pillar IV (build strong and resilient communities) of the Mérida Initiative, as appropriate” (USAID, 2012b: 12).
USAID funds the Red Mexicana de Competencia y Regulación (Mexican
Network on Competition and Regulation—RMCR) and the Centro de
Investigación para el Desarrollo, A.C. (Center for Research for Development—
CIDAC), whose policy proposals for Mexico’s economy look as if they had
been drawn directly from a U.S. State Department wish list. The CIDAC
promotes a new regulatory regime and additional privatization, deregulation, and foreign direct investment in the transportation, financial, energy,
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LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
and telecommunications sectors. In addition, USAID subcontracts work to
private firms, which it tasks with carrying out various programs designed to
improve the investment climate in Mexico. In 2009 it awarded Abt &
Associates US$17.8 million to carry out the Mexico Competitiveness Program,
which consists of four elements: building sustainable environmental governance, increasing private sector competitiveness, making precursor markets
more competitive, and increasing investment in and use of clean energy (Abt
& Associates, 2012). Abt subcontracted out the private-sector-competitiveness section of the program to Casals & Associates. This segment of the program aims to increase government transparency and accountability, promote
competition within government through policy reforms and regulatory
changes, improve government communication, and promote nongovernmental organization networks and public-private partnerships to strengthen
the role of civil society. Casals and Associates and Abt & Associates both
have direct ties to the U.S. military. Casals & Associates is owned by DynCorp,
a defense contractor that, according to its web site, has “recruited, trained,
and deployed more than 6,000 highly-qualified civilian peacekeepers and
police trainers to 11 countries, including Haiti, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and
Iraq, for the Department of State,” while Abt got its start “transferring
defense-related technology and systems to civilian application” (Abt &
Associates, n.d.; DynCorp, n.d.). Both of these military-linked corporations
are today at work in Mexico promoting policy reforms aimed at further
opening the country to transnational corporations and investors seeking to
do business in Mexico.
There is also a juridical aspect to the Mérida Initiative, the importance of
which is often overlooked. “Mexico is doing things that go much beyond fighting drugs, yes, we’re fighting organized crime and organized delinquency,
which is one aspect of drug trafficking, but the truth is that the struggle in
Mexico is a struggle for the transformation of its security and justice institutions,” stated Alejandro Poiré Romero, who served as secretary of the interior
during part of Calderón’s administration (Economist, 2012). In February 2012
the U.S. government announced a new training program for 8,500 prosecutors
and investigators in Mexico (U.S. Embassy, 2012). By 2016 all of Mexico is
expected to be using a U.S.-style legal system, a complicated transition funded
under the Mérida Initiative. As Castrejón Rivas, the lawyer from Chihuahua,
put it (quoted in Paley, 2011a),
Just as within globalized commerce [the United States] wants a world where
everywhere there is a McDonalds, an Applebee’s, a Home Depot, a Walmart, a
Sam’s [Club], they also want a world where tribunals are the same everywhere
as they are in the United States, so that whatever legal issues they have can be
dealt with perfectly well by a legal firm from the United States, which can
operate in the U.S., in Puerto Rico, in Argentina, in Chile, and so on.
According to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill law professor
Deborah M. Weissman (2014: 18), “The impetus behind rule of law projects has
often been the belief that markets require predictable legal structures to protect
property rights, facilitate foreign direct investments, and contract enforcement—
that is, to establish U.S. law as the ‘lingua franca for business and politics.’”
Paley / DRUG WAR AS NEOLIBERAL TROJAN HORSE
15
In addition to USAID, the Quebec Bar Association, the U.S. Federal Judicial
Affairs Council, the National Judicial Institute, the National Democratic
Institute, and the Federal Judicial Affairs Council have all been involved in
promoting such legal reforms in Mexico. The economic basis for the reforms
has been established by the USAID-funded Mexico Competitiveness Institute.
According to the USAID chief Rodger Garner (2009),
The Mexican Competitiveness Institute identifies the creation of an objective
and reliable justice system as Mexico’s top priority to improve competitiveness
and to attract both foreign and domestic investment. Our Mérida programs in
Mexico are designed to support those Mexican institutions as they fundamentally change their entire justice system and train an estimated 1 million people
in new, more transparent and accountable ways of administering justice.
The push to change Mexico’s legal system could negatively impact popular
resistance to mega-projects with foreign beneficiaries. Weissman (2014: 28)
points out that although there are many serious problems with the Mexican
legal system, it does include “ongoing attention to indigenous rights, constitutionally designed cooperative land use, corporative models of labor relations,
and legal pluralism.”
The U.S. rule-of-law program in Mexico also falls in lockstep with counterinsurgency efforts, according to Weissman (quoted in Paley, 2013c):
If you look at the allocation of Rule of Law money, it’s for surveillance, it’s for
activating, whatever the heck that means, new prisons in Mexico, it’s for training Mexicans with regard to the adversarial and oral trial systems, yet they do
not introduce the jury system. You have a Rule of Law program in what is
essentially a plan to militarize the drug war. You see that everywhere.
According to the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement
Affairs (2013), with regard to the prison system, the United States has provided
Mexico with “expertise in facility design, security procedures, objective inmate
classification, entry-level and advanced training for corrections officers, and
the provision of specialized equipment.”
Police training is another crucial part of the Mérida Initiative. The New York
Times reported in August of 2011 that “the United States has trained nearly
4,500 new [Mexican] federal police agents and assisted in conducting wiretaps,
running informants, and interrogating suspects” (G. Thompson, 2011).
According to Senate testimony provided in June 2013 by William Brownfield
(2013b: 2),
With [U.S.] assistance, the Government of Mexico has: Augmented the professionalization of police units by providing training to more than 19,000 federal
and state police officers, 4,000 of which are federal investigators; built a stronger legal framework through the training of over 8,500 federal justice sector
personnel; improved the detection of narcotics, arms, and money, reaching
almost $3 billion in illicit goods seized; expanded secure incarceration at the
federal level from five facilities with a capacity of 3,500 to 14 facilities with a
capacity of 20,000; and provided civic education and ethics training to more
than 700,000 Mexican students.
16
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
In addition to the United States, police from Canada, Israel, Colombia,
France, Spain, El Salvador, Holland, and the Czech Republic are all actively
training different branches of Mexican police (Hawley, 2009). Increasingly since
2006, Mexico has openly collaborated with Colombian police and military officials, sometimes with encouragement by the U.S. government. “Colombia and
Mexico are more united than ever in the fight against transnational organized
crime and are also ready to collaborate with third countries in the region to
combat this scourge, particularly with our brother nations in Central America,”
said President Calderón in 2011 (Corcoran, 2011). In 2012 Colombian police
trained 12,000 Mexican police in specialized subjects ranging from antikidnapping to antidrugs and civilian security (Animal Político, 2012). Mexico’s new
president, Enrique Peña Nieto, appointed the Colombian police officer Oscár
Naranjo as an adviser during his presidential campaign and stated that
Colombia provided him and the world with a successful model for achieving
peace and security (Zapata, 2012).
The intense paramilitarization that has taken place in Mexico since Calderón
declared war on drug cartels in December 2006 can be understood as stemming
from two elements of U.S.-promoted militarization policy in Mexico. The first
is that historically in Latin America the professionalization of the police has
resulted in paramilitarization. According to Huggins (1998: 21),
Devolution from bureaucratized militarization is often manifested in the emergence of social-control groups with less direct, more tenuous links to the state.
These take the form of death squads related only in varying degree to police,
or police-linked justiciero lone-wolf killers, or parts of the internal security system that have turned against other parts—as when one internal security organization spies on, or takes action against, another.
The second is an outcome of confronting well-financed drug trafficking
groups that have a large supply of cash and almost unfettered access to arms
using military force. As a consequence of state attempts to militarize their trafficking routes, drug trafficking organizations recruit and arm foot-soldiers to
protect their trade. Instead of being called “paramilitaries” these armed groups
are referred to in the mainstream press and by government officials as drug
cartels or in some cases the “armed wing” of a given drug cartel. Many of these
groups are initially formed by deserters from state security forces in the pay of
crime groups, sometimes receive protection from police, soldiers, and officials,
and enjoy high rates of impunity for the crimes they carry out. The notion that
they are loyal to a particular organization (or, more absurd, to the trade of a
particular commodity) is vastly overstated in hegemonic discourses about
drug cartels. A more accurate way of understanding these groups is that their
members work for anyone who can pay them. At one moment in time they
could be in the pay of drug traffickers, at another by elite groups looking for
executors of extrajudicial repression. This phenomenon is particularly worrying with a view to the longer term. When drug trafficking patterns eventually
shift away from Mexico as history indicates that they are bound to do, it is
likely that those who will be able to afford to pay members of paramilitary
groups will be people connected to the state and the so-called legal economy.
Paley / DRUG WAR AS NEOLIBERAL TROJAN HORSE
17
MINING THE DRUG WAR
In August 2011, Mexico’s former finance minister, Bruno Ferrari, told
Bloomberg that “nowadays what we are seeing is that we are having a big fight
against crime so that, as I said, [it] guarantees the future investments and the
investments we are having right now because what we are seeing is that
Mexico is fighting to prevail against crime” (quoted in Bloomberg, 2011, 19:45).
In one example from Ciudad Juárez, Mexican police secured corridors between
foreign-owned maquilas and the U.S. border to ensure the security of U.S.
citizens returning home from work in Juárez (Smith, 2009). Mexico’s police
reform combined with an increasingly business-friendly policy environment
has not gone unnoticed. In 2008, before the financial crisis spread to Mexico,
foreign direct investment reached US$23.2 billion, but it fell the following year
to US$11.4 billion (Lange, 2012). It has since rebounded, by 2013 surpassing
US$35 billion, primarily in manufacturing (73.8 percent), mining (7.9 percent),
and commercial services (4.9 percent) (Comisión Nacional de Inversiones
Extranjeras, 2011; 2013).
Historically, the drug war has been used in Mexico as a way to attack and
undermine left-wing organizations. According to a declassified document from
the Central Intelligence Agency that dates to the 1970s, “The Army will also
take advantage of the eradication campaign to uncover any arms trafficking
and guerrilla activities. . . . Army eradication forces may devote as much effort
to internal security as eradication. They do not however have their own airline
support capabilities and they may seek helicopters and other equipment from
the Attorney General’s limited eradication sources” (quoted in Grillo, 2011: 51).
The repressive impacts of the U.S.-backed drug eradication programs of the
1970s, however, pale in comparison with the number of dead and disappeared
in today’s war on drugs. Where once drug war assets were used to criminalize
weak and fragmented guerrilla movements and populations in Mexico’s high
mountain regions, today the tools of the drug war have been deployed in major
urban centers and extensive regions, in particular areas rich in natural resources.
Events in the mountain town of Madera, Chihuahua, give some insight into
this process. Police and soldiers sent into the Sierra Madre on the pretext of
fighting organized crime were used to escort workers of a Canadian mining
company past a blockade of the project erected by ejido members in 2008 (Paley,
2011b). According to Dante Valdez Jimenez, a local teacher and activist, “At the
blockade, there were always, permanently, soldiers travelling in the company
trucks, dressed like civilians, [and] as many as eight company trucks watching
the demonstrations, the blockade” (quoted in Paley, 2011b). Not only were
blockaders intimidated by the presence of soldiers but the company continued
to have access to the mine, passing through the blockade because they had
soldiers in their trucks. As in the blockades, the militarization of the region
factored into Pan American Silver’s ability to win support for its open-pit mine.
Luis Peña Amaya, a member of Ejido Huizopa who helped organize the blockade (Paley, 2011b), said:
The Federal Police had a presence and intimidated people on many occasions.
In the decisive assembly, they took control and surrounded the inside of the
18
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
salon where we held our assembly. When things turned against the other
group, which was the group preferred by the mining company, [Federal Police]
intervened to ensure that we didn’t exercise our rights.
The ejido eventually signed an agreement with the company. Environmentalists
and human rights organizations in the area confirmed that they feared traveling to the mine site because the road was under the control of organized crime
groups.
In Guerrero, community members have prevented the army from entering
their territories in the belief that where the army goes transnational mining
companies will follow. “If we allow the army to enter communal territory, they
will never leave. The government has its sights on exploiting the mines, they
want us to fight amongst ourselves, so that they can come in and militarize the
territory. That’s the bottom line here,” said Claudio Carrasco, former coordinator of the Coordinadora Regional de Autoridades Comunitarias–Policía
Comunitaria (Regional Committee of Community Authorities–Community
Police—CRAC-PC) (quoted in Quintana, 2013). Guerrero has three producing
mines, a host of exploration projects, and vast expanses of mountainous land
that have not yet been granted in mining concessions. In July of 2013, 300 people, most of them children, were displaced from seven villages of San Miguel
Totolapan and Coyuca de Catalán after having received threats from organized
crime groups (Ocampo and Briseño, 2013). There are approximately 2,000 people who have been displaced from the region (Araujo, 2013). Manuel Olivares
of the Red Guerrerense de Organismos Civiles de Derechos Humanos told
Desinformémonos (quoted in Araujo, 2013), “It is said that there are mining concessions, but most of the territory consists of ejidos. The state leaves the dirty
work of de-populating the area to organized crime, and when the mining companies arrive, there will be no one to oppose them.”
Violence has also been wrought on members of the ejidal commission in
Carrizalillo, Guerrero, where the president of the ejido was murdered in May
of 2013 (Agustín, 2013). This murder came after years of protests by the ejido,
including blockades against a local subsidiary of Vancouver’s Goldcorp. Two
months later, two workers at the same mine in Guerrero were murdered when
their vehicle was sprayed with more than 100 rounds of AK-47 fire (Notinfomex,
2013). These murders have not been linked directly to organized crime, but the
fact that they took place in a climate of violence allowed nearby mining companies to avoid coming under the spotlight.
Just as in Colombia after Plan Colombia, it appears the Mérida Initiative and
U.S.-led policy change and militarization may help Mexico become an increasingly hospitable destination for foreign investment. Paramilitarization stemming from the drug traffickers’ response to military attempts to disrupt their
supply routes can also create a less hostile business environment, as we understand from Colombia and also from the fate of Solorio and Solís and the many
others who have suffered displacement or repression because of the violence
created by the drug war. The drug war thus fits with Wallerstein’s (2004: 24)
suggestion that the capitalist system requires structural elements that ensure
the basis for endless accumulation: “If we say that a system ‘gives priority’ to
such endless accumulation, it means that there exist structural mechanisms by
Paley / DRUG WAR AS NEOLIBERAL TROJAN HORSE
19
which those who act with other motivations are penalized in some way, and are
eventually eliminated from the social scene, whereas those who act with the
appropriate motivations are rewarded and, if successful, enriched.” Drug war
policies whose end result is communal landowners’ being forced off their land,
destruction of the social fabric, the interweaving of terror and social control,
and extreme policing of the movement of migrants and the poor can all be
understood as forms of penalization (and in some cases elimination) of individuals and social worlds that exist at least partially outside of the capitalist
system.
A rebranding of the conflict in Mexico is currently under way in the U.S.
media, shifting the focus away from violence and toward the country’s economic potential. There has been a slate of reforms since Peña Nieto was elected
in July of 2012, including energy reform, financial reform, tax reform, labor
reform, political reform, education reform, and telecommunications reform. “If
all of this unfolds successfully, Peña Nieto will have moved Mexico forward
more than anyone since NAFTA was passed, putting Mexico on the path to
economic and democratic modernity,” said James R. Jones, co-chair of Manatt
Jones Global Strategies (quoted in Hershaw, 2013). Even as these reforms are
implemented and international rebranding takes place, the body count continues to rise, more than 100,000 murders remain in near-total impunity, and little
effort is being made to locate the more than 27,000 disappeared.
It is clear that Mexico is far from consolidating peace after seven years of
drug war policies. In fact, with the passage of new reforms particularly in the
energy sector, it is likely that violence against peasants, communal landowners, indigenous people, and land defenders will intensify in order to guarantee security for transnational investors. Deepening our understanding of how
the violence connected to the war on drugs is linked to privatization, the
economy, and the extractive industries is critical to understanding what is
taking place in Mexico and elsewhere today. Only once we begin to move
toward such an understanding will we be able to position ourselves as effective allies for peace.
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