Drug War Capitalism (2 page)

At that time, Paley expressed to me her intention to write this book and explained in detail what she meant by a “war against the people” that derives from the war on drugs in the United States. She stressed then (and stresses now) “the importance of critical research and writing on the conflicts in Colombia, Mexico, and elsewhere in the hemisphere that take into consideration resource extraction as a driving force behind whatever the current dominant explications of the conflicts are.” For Paley, it is important to rethink what is called the war on drugs, which “isn’t about prohibition or drug policy,” but instead, is a war “in which terror is used against the population at large in cities and rural areas,” while “parallel to this terror and the panic it generates, policy changes are implemented which facilitate foreign direct investment and economic growth.” For the author of the present book, this is drug war capitalism, advanced through a war on the people and their communities. In her words, “The war on drugs is a long-term fix to capitalism’s woes, combining terror with policymaking in a seasoned neoliberal mix, cracking open social worlds and territories once unavailable to globalized capitalism.”

Paley is, in my opinion, one of the very few persons I know who understands the dynamics of drug-related conflicts in the Americas. She has traveled to the most important regions in the hemisphere afflicted by drug war violence and has carefully documented what she has observed. Her material is precise, well-documented, and provocative, and this book is the culmination of an extraordinary effort to understand a complex phenomenon that has affected thousands of persons and entire communities in the Western hemisphere.

Notwithstanding the numerous human and material resources spent by government agencies, NGOs, and civil society in general to explain the drug war crisis, recent studies on the drug war have been very limited and explain very little—particularly, the most popular ones.

From readings and conversations over the past years,
I have concluded that there are essentially three types of analyses on the so-called drug wars in the Americas. One popular view on the subject—the one that is present in most trade books displayed in airports, popular bookstores, and shopping centers—is the one that sees this conflict as an issue of “drug lords” (
narcos
) and wars among “drug cartels” and of cartels fighting against the state for the control of drug trafficking routes. Another viewpoint focuses on prohibition and drug policy. These two perspectives do not seem to be very helpful to explain violence and organized crime in the hemisphere. Stories about
narcos
do not portray accurately the complex reality of transnational businesses involving a variety of extremely powerful actors and interests, both public and private. On the other hand, as Paley recognizes,
debates of prohibition of drugs and decriminalization of drugs tend to “obscure the militaristic nature of the war on drugs” and keep this phenomenon “firmly within the realm of ideas, and [avoids] a discussion of this war’s legitimacy.”

The third and last type of analysis on these so-called wars on drugs that I have identified is the one that guides the present text, one that explains the powerful forces and interests behind a conflict that mainly affects “the people” (
la gente/el pueblo/los pueblos
) and the most vulnerable groups in society. As
Drug War Capitalism
points out, it is important to put these conflicts “into a broader context of US and transnational interests in the hemisphere” and link “anti-drug policies to the territorial and social expansion of capitalism.”

A key element of Paley’s analysis is the one that identifies the US involvement in the militarization of anti–drug trafficking operations in the four countries she studies. The US-backed policy initiatives of Plan Colombia, the Mérida Initiative, and CARSI, according to her account, are the primary vehicles to advance drug war capitalism in the region. These initiatives, in her view, promote “the militarization of aid and the steering of anti-drug money toward fostering the creation of more welcoming investment policies and legal regulations. Though not often talked about in the context of the drug war, these policy changes often have little to nothing to do with illicit substances and everything to do with the transformation of the business environment.”

The US-backed militarization of security strategies in the four countries—with the alleged key purposes of strengthening institutional reforms and the rule of law as well as of preventing violence—has coincided with a visible increase in the murder rate as well as with the militarization of organized crime or the creation or strengthening of countrywide structures of paramilitary control. In Paley’s opinion, the militarization of crime groups can be very useful to the expansion of capitalism. And she correctly makes use of the word “paramilitarization” when referring to TCOs, since these criminal forces, at many times, seem to be “supported or tolerated by the state.” In fact, the complicity between state actors and criminal groups has been present in most of the cases analyzed by the author.

The most important contribution of this book is its extraordinary explanation—utilizing different cases in the four countries of study—of how the state violence displaces urban and rural populations, leading to changes in land ownership and resource exploitation.
Paley documents very well how several Indigenous communities in these four countries have had
their lands taken away by war, and how these properties have been acquired by transnational corporations whose aim is to extract natural resources.

In general, we find in this text that internal conflicts and militarization have concentrated in “areas deemed important for energy projects or resource extraction.” These phenomena have taken place in areas “where there are fierce social and land conflicts related to the imposition of mega‐projects” such as oil and natural gas exploration or exploitation, large-scale agriculture, hydroelectric projects, large-scale forestry, among others. And in this context, the real beneficiaries of drug wars in the Americas are, among others, large banks, local elites, and transnational oil and mining companies. These policies have also helped the United States to gain more leverage and achieve its strategic foreign policy objectives in the Americas and particularly in Colombia, Mexico, and Central America.

In Paley’s view, connections between drug wars, the state, paramilitary violence, and natural resources are increasingly evident. In her account, paramilitaries or non-state armed actors “can serve to control dissent and conquer territory.”
And this also coincides with a cycle of accumulation and drug war capitalism, where “f
orced displacement … is not a casual by product of the internal conflict.” As part of this cycle, according to a report cited by Paley, “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).” In such a context
, as Marx notes, “the instruments of labor are the monopoly of the landowners (the monopoly of property in land is even the basis of the monopoly of capital) and the capitalists.”
^[2]

The implementation of US-backed initiatives that further the militarization of security strategies in Colombia, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean have not achieved their alleged main aims. In fact, the amount of drug trafficking in these regions has not fallen. At the same time, as Paley explains, non-state armed actors have been empowered, thus “increasing extra-legal violence with no apparent effect on its stated goal of curbing drug production.” Plan Colombia, for example, hasn’t significantly reduced the amount of cocaine for sale in the United States, and homicide rates in the Andean country remain among the highest in the region. Regardless, Plan Colombia has been touted by authorities as a successful initiative. These sources would agree with Milton Friedman when he states that “one of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”
^[3]
It seems that for them, positive results fall along the lines of what Paley suggests: an emerging series of metrics linked to security, an improved business environment, the transition to a US-style justice system, and the extension of police forces throughout the national territory.

Another important argument in
Drug War Capitalism
is the one suggesting
that transnational oil and gas companies are among the biggest winners in this new context.
For example, “immediately following Plan Colombia, the state oil company, Ecopetrol, was privatized, and new laws introduced to encourage foreign direct investment.” At the same time, as Paley observes, “[s]pecial battalions of the army were trained to protect oil pipelines belonging to US companies. In the wake of Plan Colombia, foreign investment in the extractive industries soared and new trade agreements were signed.” Something similar has been taking place in Mexico.

Energy reforms were recently passed in Mexico. In December 2013, the Congress approved constitutional changes to open up even more of Mexico’s hydrocarbons industry to the participation of private transnational businesses. At the same time, Mexican states rich in hydrocarbons—such as Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, San Luis Potosí, and Veracruz—have been militarized as part of the war on drugs. Some of these regions have shown high levels of forced displacement because of the severe drug-related violence. In this context, the government of Mexico intends to attract massive foreign investments
to tap into the country’s energy resources.
Similarly, in Guatemala and Honduras national security seems to have been driven by the extractive industries in recent years.

Drug wars greatly transformed the economies of Colombia, Mexico, and Central America in the present era. However, this transformation has taken place at a large cost in terms of human lives. This cost can be considered a human tragedy, the tragedy of drug war capitalism. In this tragic context, as Paley recognizes, “rural populations continue to be displaced from their lands and to fall victim to state and non-state violence.” Overall, drug wars in the Americas have disproportionately impacted the poorest sectors of the population. This phenomenon contributes to the creation of increasingly stratified and unequal societies.

Paley does an incredible job explaining the complexities of the hemispheric dilemmas that have brought death and destruction, while benefiting corporate interests. She has done exhaustive field research in key places that exemplify the basic dynamics of drug wars in the Americas.
Drug War Capitalism
is a provocative, comprehensive, and very well documented analysis of the big picture of the war on drugs in this hemisphere. By evaluating specific violent events in four crucial countries—Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras—and supporting her assertions with interesting testimonies of numerous actors/victims/politicians and a variety of US government reports and other official documents, Paley tells a tale of modern post–Cold War capitalism, that is, a story of drug war capitalism.

This book is an antidote to the official discourse and confusing spot news reports on the drug war. As Bertrand Russell states in
Freedom in Society
: “Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.”
^[4]
Drug War Capitalism
is an important attempt at revealing that tyranny at work.

Chapter 1:
Drug War Capitalism

Not long ago, I sat in the only restaurant in Santo Domingo—a nearly empty ranch house with three plastic tables, two fridges full of cold soft drinks and beer, and a rack of homemade chorizo hanging in the sun. Dogs slept in scraps of shade, and across the street an old man with his shirt slung over his shoulder sat silently and watched as every now and then a motorcycle went by, occasionally a large tractor-trailer. For these drivers, Santo Domingo is one more nondescript village on their route across Colombia’s northern prairies. Beside the restaurant stands a curving stone monument in memory of the people killed by the Colombian Air Force in December 1998.

On December 12, 1998, an airborne chase led a number of army helicopters to this village of about 200 people, part of the municipality of Tame, in Arauca, Colombia. Local festivities were under way, but few ended up sleeping peacefully that night as flyovers, explosions, and gunfire kept people awake and fearful. Eventually the activity overhead stopped, but resumed around 5 a.m. As the noise picked up, locals began to assemble at the drugstore, right across the street from the restaurant where I would sit fifteen years later.

Maria Antonia Reyes Beltran lived in a palm-roofed house near the drugstore, and she remembers hearing the flyovers and trying to convince her elderly neighbors to evacuate, but they had previously been displaced and refused to budge. Reyes Beltran left her house and walked toward the meeting place. At 10:02 a.m., a WWII–era cluster bomb, made up of six fragmentation grenades, was dropped from a helicopter onto the road where community members were gathered. Seventeen people were killed as they huddled for protection in the drugstore. Twenty-seven others, including fifteen children, were injured. “It was almost ten, we were listening to the radio when the helicopter went over. The people who were on the edge of the highway were trying to signal us that something had been thrown from the helicopter, but we didn’t know what it was. It was bright. It turns out that was the bomb that killed the people,” she said in an interview conducted in the community’s schoolhouse, less than 200 meters from the site of the bombing. “I was leaning against some boards; one of the pieces of shrapnel passed very close—it almost killed me. The people there were yelling, ‘Help! Help!’”