Drug War Capitalism (23 page)

The drug war strengthens the power of the police and army, and fortifies the ability of the hegemonic political elite to rule. The Atlacomulco group, a neoliberalizing faction of the PRI, which was led by Carlos Salinas through the ’90s, is also behind Enrique Peña Nieto, who was born in the municipality of Atlacomulco in Mexico state. At the same time as it creates internal enemies out of the population by linking them with drug trafficking, dealing, or using, the drug war is militarizing and modernizing the police and the army, and Mexico’s network of jails. These elements together are useful in the exercise and preservation of repressive state power. In an interview with 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.”[72] Indeed they haven’t and won’t, and everyone knows this, but I can’t help but wonder how things would be different if this was the tagline on the drug war that was repeated over and again on television and in newspapers.

Anti-Drugs Cops Help Canadian Mining Companies

Chihuahua, like other parts of Mexico and Central America, is experiencing an important expansion in transnational mining and state-led militarization under the pretext of the war on drugs. While disappearances and murders of environmental activists by state forces or paramilitary/cartel members are obvious examples through which we can understand environmental violence in Mexico, the overall rise in killings, kidnapping, and threats to civilians in Mexico is of utmost importance. I believe many of these events may eventually prove to be linked to environmental violence, which is to say violence related to the economic potential of the specific geographic location where it occurs. What now appear as indiscriminate murders may eventually begin to appear as patterns, which could be linked either, in rural areas, to the clearing of territory through terror for future resource extraction or, in urban settings, to capital flow facilitating infrastructure projects (like highways, airports, or border bridges). When government officials talk about reducing violence or improving security, what they are usually referring to is sending additional police and/or soldiers and/or marines.

Problems related to police deployments are not limited to urban areas. The mountain town of Madera, Chihuahua, lies a couple hours’ bus ride west of the state capital. What happened after 10,000 federal police and soldiers arrived in Chihuahua state, in 2008, shows that an increase in police and soldiers in an area can prove beneficial to transnational corporate interests. Increased policing can precipitate the breakdown of community structures, in this case, of an ejido or community landholders group, who exercise legal title over their lands through assemblies and communal decision making. On an August afternoon in 2008, Dante Váldez Jimenez was giving a teacher training class in an elementary school in Madera, but before he finished his lecture, he was interrupted by a group of thirty men, some of them armed. In the minutes that followed, Váldez was savagely beaten in front of his students. While they beat him, his attackers yelled that he should keep his nose out of other people’s business. Váldez was lucky to escape with his life. Five days later, Amnesty International put out an alert expressing concern for Váldez’s safety, as well as that of members of a nearby community. The attack was political: Váldez is known for his work against Pan American Silver Corporation, a Vancouver-based company that operates an open-pit gold mine near Madera. Amnesty indicated that among the attackers were employees of the mining company. “There isn’t a single authority in any of the three levels of government that is looking out for the people who are displaced, for people who have been mistreated or beaten,” Váldez told me, his voice quiet and low. He pointed out that there was a classroom full of witnesses to the incident, but there was never an investigation. His attack wasn’t an isolated incident, but a brazen reminder of the repression meted out to those who organized against the company, which began operating in Mexico in 1994 after NAFTA was signed. In 2007, Pan American Silver started construction on a low-grade, cyanide-leaching gold and silver mine near the town. Madera, which means “wood” in Spanish, is situated high in the Sierra Madre mountain range and has the air of a logging town, but the area is anything but tranquil: at that time, the dominant story was that in the Sierra Madre, the Sinaloa Cartel—Mexico’s most powerful drug cartel—was battling it out with La Linea, the armed wing of the Juárez Cartel.

According to the official story, at stake were trafficking routes, as well as vast fields where peasant and Indigenous farmers cultivate marijuana and opium poppies. Certainly the region is home to illicit crop production and trafficking but there are other interests at play. Before construction of the Pan American Silver mine could begin, the historic town of Dolores had to be relocated to make way for the project, affecting more than sixty families. Locals were not ardently anti-mining, but many felt that Ejido Huizopa, the body that represents communal landholders in the area, was not getting a fair shake. By 2008, as construction gave way to gold production, tensions between the company and members of the ejido reached a breaking point. That May, after reaching a majority decision in an assembly, members of the ejido erected a blockade at the mine access route, demanding meaningful negotiations and a better agreement with the company. People working for the mining company were prevented from passing, but soldiers were allowed through the barricades.

The mining company soon found a way around the protesters, one that didn’t involve sitting at a negotiating table. “At the blockade, there was always, permanently, soldiers traveling in the company trucks, dressed like civilians, [and] as many as eight company trucks watching the demonstrations, the blockade,” said Váldez. Blockaders were intimidated by the soldiers’ presence, and the company continued to access the mine, with workers passing through the blockade because they had soldiers in their trucks. After armed commandos linked to narcotraffickers attacked civilians in a neighboring village, police maintained a continuous presence at the blockade. The blockade lasted one year and five months, during which time residents say the company co-opted members of Ejido Huizopa through financial incentives and intimidation. “When the mining company saw that we had a majority of [communal land owners] supporting us, they began to manipulate in a certain way, using the same people from the ejido to manipulate other compañeros, to ensure that we didn’t have a majority in decision making,” said Luis Peña Amaya, a member of the ejido, who helped organize the blockade.

As on the blockades, the militarization of the region factored into the company’s ability to win support for its open-pit mine. “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 hall where we held our assembly,” said Peña Amaya. The intrusion of police into communal decision making is unconstitutional in Mexico. “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.”

Then there’s the case of Vasco Gil, a tiny ranching hamlet in the mountains of Durango. In the summer of 2009, approximately thirty soldiers showed up and began surveilling and harassing residents. A few days later, another ten or fifteen soldiers arrived, and twelve men from the area were kidnapped. “In a direct statement to
Riodoce,
[residents] commented that the soldiers showed up to the mountainous region approximately one month ago and began carrying out surveillance, then they began asking where the armed groups were, and especially if [locals] had any knowledge about suspected narcotraffickers Ismael El Mayo Zambada and Joaquín el Chapo Guzmán,” reads an article printed in
Riodoce
, an independent weekly based in Culiacán, Sonora.
^[73]
The criminalization and terrorizing of residents of Vasco Gil and nearby hamlets by soldiers was carried out in the name of the fight against drug cartels. Closer inspection reveals that there is a much larger interest in the region.

Vancouver-based mining company Chesapeake Gold Corporation has plans to build an open-pit mine in the area, removing 821 million tons of ore over nineteen years of mining operations. These plans would necessitate the displacement of all residents of Vasco Gil.[74] “The living conditions are primitive in this isolated, mountainous area, where the roads are sometimes impassable during the rainy season,” according to the company’s economic feasibility report on the mine, which proceeds to wrongfully characterize the local economy as based on ranching, rather than forestry, which is actually the predominant economic activity. The stakes in the area surrounding Vasco Gil are high: the company will need to invest about $487 million to operate the mine, and believes that the proposed Metates mine “project is one of the largest, undeveloped disseminated gold and silver deposits in the world.”[75] For Chesapeake Gold Corporation, residents of Vasco Gil and the surrounding area are potential barriers to profit maximization. Chesapeake owns 5,776 hectares of concessions in the area, and actively drilled core samples for exploration in March and April of 2009.[76] Maybe it is a coincidence that almost four dozen soldiers arrived in the town months after a round of exploration drilling around Vasco Gil. Maybe not. 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.

Territory, Community Police, and Self-defense Groups

In Mexico’s Guerrero state, community members have prevented the army from entering their territories because they believe that where the army goes, transnational companies will follow. Guerrero’s distinct history has meant that the drug war has differently impacted the state, which has long experienced violence and militarization at levels unknown in the rest of the country before the drug war began in 2006. “The war on drugs is no less than continuing to use military force to contain nonconformist, disruptive movements, groups in resistance, and collectives who raise their voices,” said Abel Barrera, director of Tlachinollan, a human rights group based in Tlapa de Comonfort, Guerrero. Poppy growing in the region gives soldiers and state authorities a pretext to enter into community lands, but according to Barrera, it does even more than that. “What we’ve seen up until now is that the militarization is not only a way to enter into the territories, but that it serves to impose megaprojects. [The police and army] are the offensive front that goes and enters into territories in order to guarantee that transnational capital can be established there, and install itself via mines, megaprojects, dams, and ecotourism projects. Regardless of the fact that they are in their own lands, a village cannot go against a mine or a multinational company. Companies need a guarantee that capital is worth more than the lives of the peasants that are blocking it,” said Barrera, emphasizing that the role of state forces in Guerrero is to provide that guarantee. Barrera, who is from Tlapa, dresses casually and his language is easy and informal, punctuated by local vernacular and street slang. A photo to his right shows him receiving the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for Human Rights, which he was awarded in 2010 for his work at Tlachinollan, and to his left is a heavy bust of RFK, sitting on a shelf beside dozens of reports produced by the human rights group.

According to Barrera, the re-militarization taking place as part of the drug war is a pretext to destroy community control over land and resources. “The other [role of militarization] is to not allow the community police and self-defense groups, which are controlling territory—this is another issue, the issue is that the people have understood that with the reforms and with all the privatizations, and with the mining companies, what do the people say? ‘Well then we’re going to protect ourselves, we are in our own territory, so how are we going to protect it?’ And that’s where the self-defense groups and the community police begin to take on a more proactive role, in saying, ‘We’re not going to allow the mining companies to come in.’” The places where community police and self-defense groups are active have been increasingly militarized since the war on drugs was declared and the Mérida Initiative launched. Barrera insists, though, that the suite of armed actors in the region be understood within a context where local armed groups are defending their territories while being faced down by state militarization at the service of transnational capital. “What we see is that there is a process of remilitarization, but it is with the intention of re-conquering territories and reinforcing a strategy of counterinsurgency, but also as an armed front of the state to re-conquer and impose projects, to help mega-projects set up in these regions.”

Barrera is interrupted by a call on his old Nokia, and he takes it, signaling the end to the interview. He is a man known for having his finger on the pulse of social movements in Guerrero state, and for going out to a community gathering on a moment’s notice if invited.

Unlike the self-defense groups in Michoacán, the community police in Guerrero didn’t surge up from movements against drug cartels. According to Francisco López Barcenas, an Indigenous lawyer and human rights activist, community policing groups have a history that traces back to pre-colonial times in states throughout Mexico. “What we can see today is communities reorganizing,” he said in an interview with
Vice
. “On the one hand, they are doing it to stop the violence, and on the other hand, to defend their natural resources.”[77] Community policing experienced a revival in Guerrero in 1995 when the Regional Coordinator of Community Authorities (CRAC) was created to form a regional structure that incorporated numerous towns and included training and processes for trying and rehabilitating those deemed criminals through community service. “Officers of the CRAC community police are appointed by the Assembly. We don’t cover our faces. The weapons used by the CRAC’s officers are bought by the community,” according to Pablo Guzmán Hernández, who previously coordinated the CRAC.[78]