Drug War Capitalism (3 page)

As community members tried to evacuate the injured, above, the pilots of the Skymaster plane insisted that there were guerrillas among them, and so the helicopters continued to fire on the wounded.[1] “The helicopter kept shooting, way up the highway, it kept shooting. Many, many people were killed,” Reyes Beltran told me. All of the survivors were displaced from Santo Domingo, taking shelter in a nearby school until the fifth of January, when they ventured back to the town and tried to start again.

Earlier on the morning of the bombing, two US citizens had met with members of the Colombian military inside the facilities of Occidental Petroleum’s Caño Limón project, where they planned the attack. Barbaro José Orta and Charlie Denny were working for a private US security company called AirScan Inc, which Occidental had contracted to provide security from guerrilla attacks along the pipeline. Regardless of their mandate, the two men ended up leading a fleet of five Colombian military helicopters to Santo Domingo, over a hundred kilometers from Occidental’s facilities. At 6:53 a.m., one of the two Americans got on the military radio from the Skymaster plane they were piloting, and suggested that guerrillas had infiltrated the population who were now gathering to take shelter from the bombing. He said, “I have a group of persons here, but they are all civilians, I cannot see any [...] all these people appear to be civilians here. They changed, they all changed clothes, that is the problem we have here, these guys have gone into the house and changed clothes.”[2]

According to the court testimony of one of the Colombian crew members, the Skymaster belonged to Occidental Petroleum (Oxy). At that time, Oxy was funding the Colombian military to the tune of $750,000 in cash and in-kind, and “it supplied, directly or through contractors, troop transportation, planning facilities and fuel to Colombian military aircraft, including the helicopter crew accused of dropping the bomb.”[3] Though supposedly restricted to doing pipeline surveillance, AirScan pilots and equipment were regularly used to help the Colombian Air Force hunt suspected guerrillas. “They frequently strayed from their missions to help us in operations against the guerrillas. The plane would go and check and verify [guerrilla] patrols and say, ‘Hey, there are people here,’” one of the Colombians accused of participating in the massacre told the
LA Times
in 2002.[4] Following the bombings, ownership of the Skymaster aircrafts was transferred to the Colombian Air Force.[5]

After the bombings, the Colombian military claimed the dead were members of guerrilla forces—a story that didn’t stick. Later, the military changed their story and said that it was in fact the guerrillas who had bombed Santo Domingo. Neither American on the Skymaster that day has faced charges or jail time in the United States. Some families of victims received reparations for their dead relatives, but people like Reyes Beltran, whose palm house later burned to the ground when an army helicopter dropped a flare, received nothing.

The Colombian government has never officially apologized to the community for the attack. Quite the opposite, in fact: over the past year, the Colombian Air Force began a new bombing campaign in the area. I interviewed nearly a dozen people from different areas of Santo Domingo, who came to the school cafeteria—an open room without walls or much other than cement tables and chairs—to tell their stories.

Daniel Zavala, a freckle-faced farmer with piercing green eyes and a traditional black-and-white straw hat, explained what happened to his neighbor in March 2013: “At my neighbor’s house.… I’m not exaggerating, unfortunately he’s not here.… But without word of a lie, a helicopter opened fire approximately fifty meters from his house; it literally rained lead. There were kids there—a family, he has a son who is around twelve years old and a daughter who is eight. It’s incredible.” As Zavala explained how flyovers traumatize children in the community, more and more community members arrived. Some suggested that I should visit one of the bombing sites, and community members discussed among themselves which one would be the most suitable. Finally, they decided to take me to an area that was bombed on December 7, 2013—a place called Lusitania.

I climbed on the back of a motorcycle, and three men and I went ten minutes down the highway, then turned onto a thin grassy trail, with rustic wood bridges and cows grazing on either side. After thirty minutes, we stopped so that they could show me the schoolhouse, a large palm hut without electricity or running water. We carried on for another twenty minutes until we arrived at Joel Armando Estrada’s small house, which shelters seven children and five adults. When we pulled up, the boys were coloring and the younger kids were playing in the yard. Not a two-minute walk from the house into the jungle were two craters, each easily twenty meters wide and ten meters deep, evidence of the recent bombing. A large snake emerged from the bottom of one crater, which had since filled with water, and two boys took turns trying to kill it with a rock.

“It was four in the morning. We were sleeping when the planes came and bombed. All of my kids got nauseous because the explosions nearly made them burst, and the youngest one vomited,” Armando Estrada told me, his hand on the shoulder of his youngest son. An hour and a half after the explosion, soldiers landed the helicopter, came into the house and went through everything. They asked Estrada where he had hidden guerrilla fighters—something the farmer, who cultivates bananas, yucca, and corn, said his family has never done. Miguel Otero, who lives with Estrada, told me that he was already awake when the bombing started, and that he looked out after the first one fell to see a sixty- to seventy-meter fireball less than 200 meters from the house. Moments later, a shower of shrapnel fell onto the roof and ricocheted off the house. Later, the children picked up hundreds of small round iron shells, and they showed me the fragments of the bombs they found in their yard. At least one of the shells penetrated the thin wall of the palm house, and many others lodged in trees near the family’s home.

“You can imagine how we felt afterwards: totally psychologically ill. We’ve never lived through a situation like that, something so terrible,” Otero said. “When the soldiers arrived, they were aggressive as usual, insulting us and asking us where the man was who was hiding inside the house. They arrived so angry, as if we were their targets. That’s what it seemed like.”

“Maybe they were chasing the guerrillas or other groups, but when we went to [the bombing site] we didn’t see any traces of a dead human being, nothing, not even footprints of guerrillas or anything. We didn’t see anything like that,” said Otero, who sat across from me and fiddled with a piece of paper as he spoke. “We can’t understand why they would bomb in this area where there’s no one.… I don’t know.”

The possibility that oil exploration is going on in the lands surrounding Santo Domingo seems to others like the motivation behind the violence. “This is a policy of the government: to clear us off the territory that is ours, as
campesinos
and Indigenous peoples, because there are many Indigenous communities who have their lands taken away by war, by the terror that they instill in the communities to remove us from our territory so that they can come and extract natural resources,” said Fernando Roa, a farmer who was elected vice president of Santo Domingo’s communal action council. Roa and others who remain in the territory realize that staying is an act of resistance. “Our idea is to continue to live in our territory, and to struggle to defend our rights. We have the right to education, to health.… They only give us crumbs.”

Conflicts and violence in Colombia, Mexico, and elsewhere often hold so much confusion, fear, and pain that it is difficult to step back and put events into an economic and political context
. Hearing Roa utter these sentences while a breeze rustled through the school cafeteria reinforced, for me, the importance of critical research and writing on these conflicts. One motivation for this book is to bring these strains of analysis together in order to understand the violence in the context of struggles over territory, land, and resources.
To learn of the ongoing humanitarian tragedy in Santo Domingo and hear Roa say that he and others believe the bombings are connected to oil was a crucial confirmation of how important it is to make these connections.

Through the devastating bombing in Santo Domingo in 1998 and the ongoing bombing campaigns, Colombia remains Washington’s closest ally in the region. In the name of arming the state in its fight against drug cultivation and trafficking—as well as fighting leftist guerrillas—US aid to Colombia skyrocketed throughout the 2000s. But, as I shall explore in this book, rather than stopping the flow of drugs, funding the drug war has bolstered a war strategy that ensures transnational corporations access to resources through dispossession and terror. Through the Mérida Initiative and the Central America Regional Security Initiative, the United States sponsored the spread of Colombian-style war to Mexico and Central America. This book is not about infiltrating crime groups or trying to bring out the stories from inside the cartels; it isn’t about reproducing the dominant narratives of the drug war or explaining which cartel does what where, since those tales change as quickly as the wind. Rather, it is about exposing the impacts of the drug war, a monumental task.

Drug War Capitalism
emerges from a desire to consider other factors and motivations for the war on drugs, specifically the expansion of the capitalist system into new or previously inaccessible territories and social spaces. In addition to boosting US banks, propping up political campaigns, and feeding a profitable trade in arms, the imposition of drug war policies can benefit transnational oil and gas and mining companies, as well as other large corporations. There are other sectors that also enjoy benefits from the violence: the manufacturing and transportation industries, as well as a segment of the retail and commercial sector, specifically those represented by corporate players like Walmart, and real estate interests in parts of Mexico and the United States. 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. This project is about re-thinking what is called the war on drugs: it isn’t about prohibition or drug policy. Instead, it looks at how, in this war, terror is used against the populations in cities and rural areas, and how, parallel to this terror and resulting panic, policies that facilitate foreign direct investment and economic growth are implemented. This is drug war capitalism. Pillage, profit, and plunder have been mainstays of war since pre-colonial times, but there is little focus on the role of finance and economics in war. Mats Berdal and David M. Malone write that, in research and literature on the generation and maintenance of conflicts, there is little systematic attention paid to economic interests.[6] 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 Malone and Berdal state, in order to properly understand wars today, “The
role of the international private sector
, particularly that of extractive industries (petroleum, mining), is key.”[7]

The driving impulse of this project is to create a more useful framework through which we can make sense of the drug war south of the US-Mexico border, where violence stems from state militarization and drug cartels, which I also refer to as paramilitary groups. One key element in understanding how drug wars strengthen irregular armed groups is that these groups may begin providing drug traffickers with protection, but later will work for whoever can pay them. At one moment in time they could be on the payroll of drug traffickers, at another, paid by elites looking for executors of extrajudicial repression. These elites could include politicians fighting among themselves for political power, or landowners wishing to move poor people off their lands. But as is documented in this book, structural factors are at play, by which irregular armed groups are allowed near total impunity to carry out extortion and acts of terror among populations when those acts tend toward benefiting transnational capitalism or US foreign policy.

In Mexico, the Zetas have led the path away from the dictionary definition of “cartel,” from the old Italian
cartels
, or card, first used to refer to a coalition between Conservative and National parties in Germany in 1887. Later, cartel came to mean “an association of manufacturers or suppliers with the purpose of maintaining prices at a high level and restricting competition:
the Colombian drug cartels
.”[8] Cartels do not exist solely to maintain high prices, though that doesn’t stop the constant use of the word. In the case of Mexico, groups including the Zetas are known as cartels, though their purpose goes far beyond trafficking in drugs; they are also active in extortion (of businesses and migrants), kidnapping, massacres, controlling distributors of pirated goods, and so on. The Zetas are a paramilitary group, an armed organization officially outside of state command, financed at least in part by direct proceeds from narcotics trafficking, but with deep roots in state military structures.

The notion that there is a clear division between state forces and crime groups—that corruption and collaboration are the work of a few bad apples—is a hegemonic idea promoted by nation-states and the mainstream media. Undoing this binary means learning from the people whose lives have been directly affected by armed groups whose activity is carried out with impunity. Impunity is not the result of a weak or deficient state, but rather it is actively provided to the gamut of armed groups who commit crimes and acts of terror against citizens, migrants, and the poor. The provision of impunity to armed actors who are politically aligned with capitalism is part of a modern nation state’s
raison d’etre.