Drug War Capitalism (4 page)

Mexican peace activist Javier Sicilia, whose son was murdered in 2011, warns against framing events in Mexico as cops versus cartels. “There is a war between the state and parallel states,” he said in a 2014 interview in Mexico City. “Until we understand that organized crime is not made up of criminals, but rather that it is cells of a parallel state, with firepower, with the capacity to subjugate, and some with social bases, and if we don’t see that this is a struggle for territory and for control of citizen life, we will not understand the problem.” I asked Francisco Chavira, an activist and educator based in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, to explain how the narco-war interacts with the state in Mexico. “In my point of view, the true criminal, the true capo in Mexico is the president of the republic; the governors are the same in each of their state, and the
jefes de plaza
are the mayors,” he said. “They all got where they are with financing from illicit sources. They protect each other; they are the same thing.”

A key means through which globalized capitalism can penetrate new territories and social worlds is through the use of terror against the population. The
New Oxford American Dictionary
’s primary definition of terror is “extreme fear: the use of such fear to intimidate people, esp. for political reasons; terrorism.” Mass killings and the public display of bodies is one example of a terror technique, practiced over centuries, by government and irregular forces, often in tandem with the imposition of political and economic regimes. Terror plays a specific role in ensuring control over the population. “In all its forms, terror was designed to shatter the human spirit. Whether in London at the birth of capitalism or in Haiti today, terror infects the collective imagination, generating an assortment of demons and monsters.”[9] Whether it is bodies hung over busy thoroughfares or cut into pieces and dumped one on top of another on a highway, or explosions and massacres leaving dozens of civilians dead or injured, Mexico has seen an unprecedented array of bone-chilling episodes since former President Felipe Calderón launched the drug war in December 2006.[10]

Terror creates fertile ground for new forms of social control. It also impacts mobility—understood as peoples’ ability to move freely on their own will—which is restricted by increasing border surveillance and police and military checkpoints, as well as by the fear generated through mass murders of bus passengers, shootouts on major roadways, and disappearances that occur while the victim is traveling. Reduced mobility is one of the first impacts that terror has on the affected population. Meanwhile, forced migration and involuntary displacement increase as the transition to a more repressive society claims victims and threatens survivors.

These drastic elements of repression and terror provide the basis for the continuation and intensification of capitalist expansion into Mexico and Central and Latin America.
States and transnational capital take recourse in repression through terror in attempt to dispossess people from their communal lands and territories throughout the Americas and the world. As Uruguayan social theorist Raúl Zibechi notes, “It will be difficult for capitalism to survive if it fails to consolidate new forms of control and subjugation.”[11] According to geographer David Harvey, the expansion of capitalism depends on accumulation through dispossession,[12] which can include forcible displacement, the privatization of public or communally held lands, the suppression of Indigenous forms of production and consumption, and the use of credit and debt in order to facilitate accumulation by dispossession, among others.[13] All of these things are occurring in Mexico today, as in other countries, and, as we shall see throughout this book, the war on drugs is contributing to the acceleration of many of these processes.

Deploying the army to fight an internal enemy, in this case drug traffickers, represents a crucial shift to allow a formally democratic state to justify soldiers attacking civilians on home soil by claiming those civilians are criminals.

History teaches us that so-called anti-drugs training and spending can be used for a variety of purposes. For his book on Colombia, Doug Stokes interviewed former US Special Forces trainer Stan Goff, who was unusually candid about what counter-narcotics training meant to him. “You were told, and the American public was being told, if they were told anything at all, that this was counter-narcotics training. The training I conducted was anything but that. It was pretty much updated Vietnam-style counter-insurgency doctrines. We were advised that this is what we would do, and we were further advised to
refer
to it as counter-narcotics training, should anyone ask. It was extremely clear to us that the counter-narcotics thing was an official cover story.”[14] Republican senator John McCain came out and said as much himself in a 2002 speech: “To the President’s credit, American policy has dispensed with the illusion that the Colombian government is fighting two separate wars, one against drug trafficking and another against domestic terrorists. The democratic government of Colombia has long insisted that it is the nexus of terrorists involved in the drug trade that threatens Colombian society. American policy now recognizes that reality, and abandons any fictional distinctions between counter-narcotic and counter-insurgency operations,” he said.[15]

The creation of anti-drug police forces and army units and spending on the drug war must be understood within the context of global capitalism and global warfare. In this context, the acquisition of territory and resources, including increased control over social worlds and labor power, is a crucial motivating factor. Drug war discourses promoted by states and reported by mainstream media provide an efficient smokescreen, provoking moral panic in the population, which can also calcify and exaggerate divisions among communities (like between those who are and who are not involved in illicit activities), and impact relationships down to the level of neighborhoods, community groups, and
campesino
(peasant farmer) organizations. We know the quantity of drugs trafficked to the United States did not decrease significantly because of Plan Colombia. I argue though that this doesn’t indicate a failure of the war, because the Plan Colombia model has more to do with improving the conditions for foreign direct investment and encouraging the expansion of capitalism than it does with stemming the flow of drugs.

When it comes to repression and terror in Mexico, the tactics employed by the state coercive apparatus go far beyond the Colombia experience, and are nourished by generations of US and other imperial warfare around the world.[16] In this context, I believe the experiences of US-backed counterinsurgency wars in Central America, and in Guatemala in particular, are of great importance in understanding what is happening in Mexico and the region today. Though rarely considered linked, these conflicts must be considered part of a repressive memory that has been activated in order to carry out the ongoing war on drugs in Mexico, Central America, and elsewhere. Some of the same repressive forces and the techniques used against populations in Central America in the 1980s are again being activated in the context of the drug war. This is a phenomenon that exists on a global level. As Laleh Khalili argues in her work on Palestine and counterinsurgency, “Officials and foot soldiers, technologies of control, and resources travel not only between colonies and metropoles but also between different colonies of the same colonial power and between different colonial metropoles, whereby bureaucrats and military elites actively study and borrow each other’s techniques and advise one another on effective ruling practices.”[17]

There are certain lines of continuity between the wars (including genocide) in Central America in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s and Mexico today. For example, grenades used by the Zetas in attacks in Mexico have been traced back to the 1980s, when they were sold to El Salvador’s military by the United States.[18] Another thread connecting the thirty-six-year war in Guatemala to today is the Kaibiles, the country’s elite special forces, whose members were responsible for horrific massacres then, and who today are active both as an elite government force and as members of criminal groups. It was a former Kaibil who was accused of directing the single most violent drug trafficking-related act in Guatemala. Hugo Gómez Vásquez was accused of supervising the massacre in Finca Los Cocos, Petén, in May 2011, when twenty seven farm workers were killed, allegedly as part of a land dispute between Otto Salguero, a local landowner, and the Zetas.[19] In addition to these concrete examples, many of the practices of terror used by armies such as Guatemala’s have resurfaced in Mexico and Central America at the hands of criminal groups. In today’s war, the “war on drugs,” violence deployed against civilians—especially migrants and the poor—comes from official, uniformed troops, as well as from irregular forces, including drug cartels or paramilitary groups. And in Colombia, the model country for this type of warfare, it comes from the sky, as the air force continues to rain bombs on peasants from above.

Drug War Capitalism in Mexico

“This is what the beginning of neoliberalism felt like,” said Raquel Gutiérrez when I interviewed her in 2012, reflecting on what it is like to try and understand the ongoing war in Mexico. Now a professor at the Autonomous University of Puebla, Gutiérrez was an underground militant in Bolivia in the mid-’80s when the first neoliberal policies took effect there, pauperizing the working class. It’s been ten years since she’s returned to Mexico. We’re talking at the table in her downtown apartment. Raquel pauses and drags on a cigarette, as if trying to remember a language she’s forgotten. It doesn’t come. Then she asks me if I’ve read Naomi Klein’s book
The Shock Doctrine.
I nod. Silence. “The thing is, in Mexico, the shocks didn’t work,” she says. It’s not that there was a shortage of shocks, which Klein describes as ranging from natural disasters to economic crises that are exploited in order to deepen the neoliberal order. In
The Shock Doctrine,
Klein writes, “The most dramatic case to date came in 1994, the year after Yeltsin’s coup, when 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.’”[20] The impacts of these policies were felt especially harshly in rural areas. “These neoliberal policies ushered in a new era of nontraditional production of export fruits and vegetables, new forms of land control, realignment of labor relations under contract farming, and substantial out-migration by uncompetitive small-scale campesinos.”[21]

The first wave of neoliberal economic policies was introduced in the form of structural adjustment programs. These programs came at the end of “the Mexican Miracle,” a period of steady economic growth, import substitution industrialization, and high oil prices. “From 1980 to 1991, Mexico received thirteen structural adjustment loans from the World Bank, more than any other country,” wrote Tom Barry in his 1995 book
Zapata’s Revenge.
“It also signed six agreements with the IMF, all of which brought increased pressure to liberalize trade and investment.”[22] In the 1980s, sometimes called Mexico’s “lost decade,” oil prices collapsed along with the peso. “From over a thousand state enterprises in 1983, the Mexican state owned around two hundred by 1993.... In 1991, the Mexican program brought in more money to government coffers (US$9.4 billion) than all other sales of public companies in Latin America combined.”[23] By 1988, the Mexican economy was already considered one of the most open to foreign investment in the world.[24] Many of the most important privatizations happened during the presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who was elected, in 1988, in what is widely believed to have been a fraudulent election. Mexico did go through a series of what Klein calls shocks, and some sectors (like banking and telephony) were thoroughly privatized. Still, at the outset of the drug war in Mexico, large corporations like the Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE) and Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex)—the seventeenth-largest oil company in the world by oil reserves,[25] and by other counts the eighth-largest[26]—remained firmly in government hands; peasant and Indigenous communities continued to exercise communal title over lands rich in resources; a large middle class owned small businesses; and the richest Mexican families kept control over lucrative sectors of the economy. Mexican investors were favored in the privatizations that took place during Salinas’s term, coming as they did before the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed.[27] According to the US State Department, Mexico’s ten richest families “are not the only obstacle[s] to improving competition in the Mexican economy.”[28] Though weakened by constitutional amendments made by Salinas before NAFTA came into effect, communal landholder organizations, including
ejidos
and
comunidades índigenas
, have not been totally undone by neoliberal reforms. By the end of 1994, Mexico had signed on to the North America Free Trade Agreement, witnessed the Zapatista uprising, and undergone another major currency devaluation, but by the turn of the twenty-first century, Mexico’s territory and economy still weren’t fully open to foreign investors. In 2000, Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN) was elected president, interrupting the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI) seventy-one years of rule, and some say, returning democracy to Mexico.