Drug War Capitalism (29 page)

Chéran, an Indigenous Purépecha village, made headlines in April 2011 when a group of women chased out illegal loggers that were associated with La Familia Michoacána. Margarita Ambrosio Magaña, whose husband was killed by illegal loggers when he tried to protect some forested lands in 2009, participated in the blockades from the early days. “Before, the forest cutters would come in and we were all afraid. Now with the barricades bad people don’t come in anymore and the kids can go out and play,” she told Desinformemonos.[63] Chéran was the first example in Michoacán of a self-defense group formed (in this case by assembly) to prevent organized crime groups from operating in the area. Since the uprising, Chéran has been an autonomously run community, without state police or political parties, and the violence and illegal logging have dropped off considerably. Rural communities have responded to the presence of paramilitary and state forces in their territories by creating their own armed groups, sometimes in the form of self-defense groups and other times community police. Lime growers in Michoacán have met much the same fate as avocado growers, forced to choose between their lands and livelihoods and extortion under threat of death or kidnapping by the Caballeros Templarios. In April of 2013, eight lime farmers were killed and at least sixteen wounded when they joined a protest against extortion. After the massacre, marchers were evacuated by the Mexican military.[64] Buenavista Tomatlán, a tiny town in western Michoacan that depends economically on lime crops, made international news when a federal prosecutor claimed the self-defense group there was in fact working in tandem with one drug cartel against another. Lime growers from the town of Apatzingán claim to have been threatened against receiving limes from farms in Buenavista for packing at their local plant.[65] In a story that reinforces why banners hung by supposed narcos should not be trusted, the lime growers from Apatzingán later allegedly hung a banner with the same accusations against their neighbors.[66] Instead of defending the lime growers against the Caballeros Templarios, the state accused them of being with the other cartel. The violence continued after the army raided the town and police and soldiers took over self-defense patrols in the community of just over 42,000. Six people were murdered there in July 2013, another four bodies were hung from a welcome sign crossing a rural road the same month, and nine more were killed in August 2013.

Self-defense groups operating without a clear mandate from their communities must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Though their name harkens back to the United Self-Defense of Colombia (AUC), a right-wing paramilitary group allied with the Colombian state, and their white T-shirts may appear in the same vein as Miami’s reactionary Cubans, many of the self-defense groups that have formed in Mexico appear to be protecting the will of the people against the collusion of state and cartel/right-wing paramilitary groups. Often sparked by the kidnappings, murders, or extortions of community members, these self-defense groups organize to guard the roads in and out of their community, checking each vehicle, armed with basic weapons and machetes. But the formation of these armed groups can also be understood as a strategy to defend community and small holder territories from ongoing theft and pillage.

“In reality we’re prisoners in our own village, but at least we’re safe there,” said a community member from a town in Michoacán, which has been protected by a self-defense group for eight months.[67] Within the boundaries of each village, these groups can ensure locals are not being kidnapped or otherwise impacted by paramilitary/criminal groups, but once they travel on highways connecting their villages, locals risk their lives. After a march of self-defense groups from their communities to Apatzingán was met with grenades and gunfire, soldiers told a reporter with
El Pais
that the army is merely a referee in the conflict, and that things would get worse when night fell.[68] As a solution, it was agreed that members of the self-defense groups would patrol with the army to ensure that they didn’t let criminal groups through the main roads back to their villages.

In reading information from the US government and the status quo media, one finds a careful reiteration that the war in Mexico is non-political. “The Mexican gangs are motivated by profit, and have no visible ideological agenda. Their only political goal is weaker law enforcement,” reads a 2011 report by the Soros-funded research group InSight Crime.[69] The effort to present criminal groups in Mexico as apolitical has echoes in the effort to rebrand Colombian paramilitaries as criminal bands (Bacrim).
But it is deceiving to ascribe “political” status to a war only when there is a national liberation movement or a guerrilla struggle. The war in Mexico is political: it is a counter-revolution, a hundred years late. It is decimating communities and destroying some of the few gains from the Mexican Revolution that remained after NAFTA was signed in 1994.
Conceiving of
drug cartels as paramilitaries politicizes their actions and creates space through which to have a more informed discussion of the ramifications of drug war violence in Mexico and elsewhere.

Chapter 7:
Drug War Capitalism In Guatemala

Though Guatemala and Mexico were both subject to Spanish colonization (the first genocide), the countries’ histories have diverged dramatically since. Access to land, and land reform (or lack thereof), has put the two countries on markedly different paths in the twentieth century. Unlike Mexico, Guatemala didn’t undergo a revolution or a period of nationalizations early in the last century, instead it was in the 1940s and the early 1950s that the country experienced what some call the “Guatemalan Spring.” Democratically elected presidents Juan José Árevalo and Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán began making reforms, but both remained committed to the capitalist economic model and to a Western liberal conception of democracy.

US leaders characterized Árbenz’s main misstep as daring to expropriate land owned by American banana companies. According to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization, “The election of Árbenz in 1951 resulted in a period of intense but brief reform beginning with the enactment of the Agrarian Reform Law (Decree 900) on 17 June 1952. The declared objectives of Decree 900 were to 1) eliminate feudal estates 2) obliterate all forms of indentured servitude 3) provide land to the landless and land poor 4) distribute credit and technical assistance to smallholders. The developmental goals of the reforms was to develop a capitalist economy among the peasants and in agriculture generally and to facilitate the investment of new capital in agriculture by means of the capitalist rental of nationalized land. The reform involved the expropriation of
idle
land and its redistribution to the landless and land-poor.”[1]

Regardless of the capitalist nature of his land-reform program, Árbenz was labeled a communist, and, shortly after, his government was overthrown in a coup d’état planned in Washington and backed up by the CIA in a mission called PBSuccess.
^[2]
The CIA-backed Guatemalan coup in 1954 and the US government’s refusal to allow elections in 1963 in order to prevent the participation of Árevalo marked the beginning of a series of events that would push the country toward a thirty-six-year war that culminated in genocide. More than 200,000 people were murdered over this time in Guatemala, primarily Indigenous Mayans, as well as leftist activists, union organizers, and otherwise. An additional 50,000 people remain disappeared.

Though the conflict in Guatemala was often dressed up as being a war against communists or insurgents, in many regions it is clear that what was really motivating the assassinations of Indigenous people was access to their lands. One example of this is the municipality of Rabinal, where approximately one-fifth of the population was assassinated between 1981 and 1983. Efraín Osorio Chen is from Rio Negro, a community in Rabinal, where Maya Achi people make up the majority of the population. Osorio was ten years old when he survived the massacres that killed his family. I met him as I traveled with Jesús Tecú Osorio through the village of Pacux, where many of the survivors who were displaced from Rio Negro were resettled in the 1980s. I mentioned to Tecú Osorio that I wanted to talk to someone who had directly survived the violence, and the first person we saw was Osorio Chen, riding his bicycle down the road. Tecú Osorio called out to him, and he rode up and met us at a monument to the dead—a plain rock reminder pointing toward the sky.

“I am a survivor, I lost my whole family. They killed my father, my mother, an older brother, two sisters, and a younger brother. When they killed my mother, she was pregnant,” Osorio Chen told us. “The army destroyed our community. They wanted to eliminate the whole community, but still, thank God, we survived. I don’t know how, how we could survive all of that, but thanks be to God that here we are, alive.” Survivors like Osorio were eventually required to settle in the model village of Pacux, which he likened to a cage, a place where community members no longer have access to firewood or land to plant and harvest their crops. Entire communities were fragmented and decimated through mass murder, survivors forced into military-controlled model villages like this one. After the massacre, Osorio Chen spent two years hidden in the mountains, sleeping under trees and eating plants to stay alive.

In a pattern repeated throughout the country, members of the community were labeled guerrilla supporters and communists to justify the massacres in the Rio Negro area, of which there were five. Beside the memorial where I first met Osorio Chen sits Pacux’s one-room community hall, the walls of which are painted with even more names of people killed. “We’re talking about approximately 700 people, because what you see on the list are about 450, but there are people who were disappeared, children; we still don’t know if maybe there are some people who live nearby but who won’t come back to Rabinal out of fear,” said Tecú Osorio, who was a boy when he witnessed the killings of his relatives by the army and the Civilian Patrol in 1982. He says the genocide against his people, the Maya Achi, was carried out to make way for the construction of the Chixoy Dam, a project funded by the World Bank. “What was called communism, in Rio Negro, was the community’s opposition to the project and defense of their territories. The fight was because the peasants were defending their territories, and the government was responding to the demands of transnational corporations with interests in building the dams.” Tecú Osorio’s words would continue to echo for me as I navigated a present deeply marked by the wounds of the past.

Massacres weren’t the only terror technique deployed in Guatemala. In 2012, I spoke with José Samuel Suasnávar, the executive sub-director of the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala. When we met, forensic anthropologists had just turned up over 400 skeletons at a military base known since 2006 as the Regional Training Command for Peacekeeping Operations, or CREOMPAZ, in Cobán, Guatemala, in what fast became one of the largest discoveries of a clandestine mass grave in the country. During the country’s thirty-six-year internal armed conflict, which led to acts of genocide, the base at Cobán was a center of military coordination and intelligence. “We have a few more than 400 trenches, where we’ve found I think sixty graves, and we’ve found 426 skeletons, mostly men, like everywhere else, but there’s also women, and what’s particular to CREOMPAZ is that there are also many children,” Suasnávar told me. “What is radically different about this military base … is that here there are up to sixty-two people buried in one single grave, representing a single event.” Suasnávar explained how incidents of massacres and those of forced disappearances during the internal conflict responded to economic logic. Most of the massacres during the war took place in the Guatemalan highlands, in areas inhabited by a Mayan majority, but many of the disappearances took place in the fertile lowlands, where Guatemala’s land-owning elite ran cotton, coffee, and sugar plantations. Laborers would come from all over the country to work during harvest season. Suasnávar said the economic costs of carrying out open and massive counterinsurgency in the lowlands in the Pacific Coast region were far higher than the political costs. “If they carried out massacres there, as they did in other places, who would work in export agriculture?” he asked. “The disappearance of people, the disappearances of leaders, this was what took place there in a more selective way than how it transpired in other areas.”

Many of the disappeared may have eventually been taken to places like CREOMPAZ, in the interior of the country, and murdered there. There are few bullet wounds among the dead; most of the skeletons still show evidence of being bound, and many reveal bones that had been broken, healed, and re-broken, indicating that the dead had been tortured and interrogated, some for lengthy periods of time, before they were killed and thrown in the pits. The dig in Cobán is revealing the gruesome reality of the country’s internal armed conflict, where people labeled subversives—political and student activists, Indigenous leaders and community members, and others—were kidnapped and tortured
en masse
. Children were also murdered before being dumped in graves at the base.

The work of identifying the country’s disappeared is monumental. Of the 50,000 disappeared, the names of 42,000 are known. Eighteen thousand bodies have been found in clandestine graves, but so far only 500 have been identified.

But what set the dig at CREOMPAZ apart is that it took place at an active military base: foreign military and police arrive regularly at the base to train troops from Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic. The killings took place within the protective confines of a military-controlled area where today blue-helmeted peacekeepers from the United Nations are trained.