Drug War Capitalism (40 page)

61 Stop the Injunctions Coalition, “Our Oakland, Our Solutions,” in
Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency
, eds. Kristian Williams, Lara Messersmith-Glavin, and William Munger (Oakland: AK Press, 2013), 150.

62 Dawn
Paley, “Interview: Dr. William I. Robinson on Power, Domination and Conflicts in Mexico,”
Upside Down World
, December 7, 2010, http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/2811-interview-dr
-william-i-robinson-on-power-domination-and-conflicts-in-mexico.

63
Equipo Bourbaki, “El Costo Humano de la Guerra por la Construction del Monopolio del Narcotrafico en Mexico, 2008–2009,” February 2011, http://redporlapazyjusticia.org/directorioinfo/InformeBourbaki.pdf.

64 Howard
Campbell,
Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches From the Streets of El Paso and Juárez
(Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2009), 6.

65 Dawn Paley, “Insight Crime & the Mexicanization of Cartel War Discourse,” March 11, 2013, http://dawnpaley.tumblr.com/post/45119662682/insight-crime-the-mexicanization-of-cartel-war.

66 In 2011, two people in Veracruz were charged with terrorism for their Twitter and Facebook status updates, in which they mistakenly reported a hostage-taking at a school. Charges against them were later dropped. BBC News, “Mexico ‘Twitter terrorism’ Charges Dropped,” September 22, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-15010202.

67 Carlos Lauría and Mike O’Conner, “Silence or Death in Mexico’s Press: Cartel City,” Committee to Protect Journalists, September 8, 2010, http://cpj.org/reports/2010/09/silence-death-mexico-press-cartel-city.php.

68 Articulo 19,
Informe 2013,
March 2014, http://www.articulo19.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Art19_Informe2013web.pdf, 30.

69 Redacción, “Panismo: 102 periodistas asesinados o desaparecidos,”
Contralínea
, September 13, 2011, http://contralinea.info/archivo-revista/index.php/2011/09/13/panismo-102-periodistas-asesinados-o-desaparecidos/.

70 Committee to Protect Journalists, “Getting Away With Murder: CPJ’s 2013 Impunity Index,” May 2, 2013, https://www.cpj.org/reports/impunity_index
2013.pdf.

71 Hristov,
Blood and Capital
, 27.
Stratfor was hacked, and five million internal emails were released to Wikileaks in early 2012. “The most striking revelation from the latest disclosure is not simply the military-industrial complex that conspires to spy on citizens, activists and trouble-causers, but the extremely low quality of the information available to the highest bidder,” wrote Pratap Chatterjee (“WikiLeaks’ Stratfor Dump Lifts Lid on Intelligence-industrial Complex,”
Guardian
,
February 28, 2012,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/feb/28/wikileaks
-intelligence-industrial-complex.

72
As students at the Masters in Journalism program at the University of British Columbia, we were taught once and again that statements from police and officials are key primary sources—enough to anchor a story on. During a brief stint at the
Globe and Mail,
Canada’s paper of record, I was made aware that police press releases were akin to gospel—not to be questioned or fact-checked before being reformatted and printed in the newspaper. The status quo media’s reliance on police and official sources, combined with threats, harassment, or elimination of journalists and photographers who dare operate outside this discourse ensure a near-picture-perfect reproduction of the official line on the drug war.

73
German Alfonso Palacio Castañeda, “Institutional Crisis, Parainstitutionality, and Regime Flexibility in Colombia: The Place of Narcotraffic and Counterinsurgency,” in
Vigilantism and the State in Modern Latin America: Essays on Extralegal Violence
,
ed. Martha Huggins (Portsmouth, NH: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1991), 108.

74 Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, “The Central America Regional Security Initiative: A Shared Partnership,” April 25, 2013, http://www.state.gov/p/wha/rls/fs/2013/208592.htm.

75 The Caribbean Basin Security Initiative (CBSI) covers Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago.

76 Gian Carlo Delgado-Ramos and Silvina Maria Romano, “Political-Economic Factors in U.S. Foreign Policy: The Colombia Plan, the Mérida Initiative, and the Obama Administration,”
Latin American Perspectives
38, no. 4 (July 2011): 93
,
94.

77
Executive Office of the President of the United States, “National Drug Control Strategy, 2012,” http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/ondcp
/2012_ndcs.pdf 32.

78
Correo, “Destinarán US$ 300 millones a lucha contra terrorismo y narcotráfico,”
Diario Correo
,
December 19, 2012, http://diariocorreo.pe/movil/ultimas/noticias/2732815/edicion+lima/destinaran-us-300-millones-a-lucha-contra-t.

79 Charlie
Savage and Thom Shankar, “U.S. Drug War Expands to Africa, a Newer Hub for Cartels,”
New York Times
,
July 21, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/world/africa/us-expands-drug-fight-in-africa.html?_r=0.

CHAPTER 2: DEFINING THE DRUG WAR

1 Julia Buxton,
The Political Economy of Narcotics: Production, Consumption & Global Markets
(Black Point, NS: Fernwood Publishing, 2006), 62.

2 David Courtwright,
Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 163.

3 Matthew Robinson and Renee Scherlen,
Lies, Damned Lies, and Drug War Statistics
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 25.

4 “Historians agree that efforts to limit opium smoking grew out of an effort to control Chinese immigrants and their influence on (white) Americans.” Ibid., 20.

5 Drug Enforcement Administration, “DEA History,” http://www.justice.gov/dea/about/history.shtml.

6 Beriah Empie and Lydia Anne Bartholow, “Raze the Walls,” in
Life During Wartime
, 189.

7 Courtwright,
Dark Paradise
, 168.

8 Ibid., 165.

9 Buxton,
The Political Economy of Narcotics
, 61.

10 Ibid.

11 Kate Doyle, “Operation Intercept: The Perils of Unilateralism,” National Security Archive, April 13, 2003, http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB86/.

12 Ibid.

13 Ted Carpenter, “Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington’s Futile War on Drugs in Latin America,” (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2003), 29.

14 Ibid., 37.

15 Robinson and Scherlen,
Lies, Damned Lies, and Drug War Statistics
, 31 (emphasis in original).

16 John Gibler,
To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War
(San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2011), 43.

17 Michelle Alexander,
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
(New York: New Press, 2010), 15.

18 Federal Bureau of Prisons, “Offenses,” February 22, 2014, http://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp.

19 Drug Enforcement Administration, “A Tradition of Excellence: 1970–1975,” http://www.justice.gov/dea/about/history/1970-1975.pdf.

20 Drug Enforcement Administration, “DEA History.”

21 Amy Goodman, “‘Drugs Aren’t the Problem’: Neuroscientist Carl Hart on Brain Science & Myths About Addiction,”
Democracy Now!
, http://www.democracynow.org/2014/1/6/drugs_arent_the_problem_neuroscientist_carl.

22 John Strang, Thomas Babor, Jonathan Caulkins, et al. “Drug Policy and the Public Good: Evidence for Effective Interventions,”
The Lancet
379, no. 9810 (January 7, 2012): 71–83, www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140673611616747.pdf.

23 Paul Gootenberg, “Talking About the Flow: Drugs, Borders, and the Discourse of Drug Control,”
Cultural Critique
71 (Winter 2009): 36–37.

24 Holder, Eric. “Retroactive Application of Department Policy on Changing Mandatory Minimum Sentences and Recidivist Enhancements in Certain Drug Cases.” Office of the Attorney General. August 29, 2013. http://www.fd.org/docs/select-topics/sentencing-resources/august-29-2013-holder-memo
-on-retroactivity-of-mandatory-minimum-charging-policy.pdf?sfvrsn=4.

25 Evan Munsing and Christopher Lamb, “Joint Interagency Task Force–South: The Best Known, Least Understood Interagency Success,”
Institute for National Strategic Studies, Strategic Perspectives
5 (July 2011), http://www.ndu.edu/press/lib/pdf/strategic-perspectives/Strategic-Perspectives-5.pdf, 7–8.

26 Paley, Dawn. “Repressive Memories: Terror, Insurgency and the Drug War.”
Occupied London
. Fall, 2013. dawnpaley.ca/2013/10/27/repressive
-memories-terror-insurgency-and-the-drug-war/.

27 David Courtwright,
Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World
, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 3.

28 Ibid., 4–5.

29 Paul Gootenberg, “Talking About the Flow,” 16.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid., 21.

32 Paul Gootenberg, “Cocaine in Chains,” in
From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000
, eds. Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 323.

33 Courtwright,
Forces of Habit
, 34.

34 Peter Andreas, “Illicit Globalization: Myths, Misconceptions, and Historical Lessons,”
Political Science Quarterly
126, no. 3 (2011): 7.

35 Ibid., 8.

36 Gootenberg, “Cocaine in Chains,” 330.

37 Ibid., 325.

38 Ibid., 329.

39 Courtwright,
Forces of Habit
, 78.

40 Joseph Spillane, “Making a Modern Drug: The Manufacture, Sale, and Control of Cocaine in the United States, 1880–1920,” in
Cocaine: Global Histories
, ed. Paul Gootenberg (London: Routledge, 1999), 21.

41 Patrick O’Day, “Mexican Army as Cartel,”
Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice
17, no. 3 (2001): 284.

42 Ibid., 286.

43 Drug Enforcement Administration, “A Tradition of Excellence.”

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid.

46 Ioan Grillo,
El Narco
, 49.

47 Ibid.

48 Moritz Tenthoff, “Coca, Petroleum and Conflict in Cofán Territory,”
Transnational Institute,
Drug Policy Briefing #23, September 2007, http://www.tni.org/sites/www.tni.org/files/download/brief23.pdf, 2.

49 Asociación de familiares de detenidos, desaparecidos,
Colombia, nunca más: Crímenes de lesa humanidad
Zona 14a 1966, Tomo 1 (Bogata: Asfaddes, 2000), 117.

50 Peter Andreas, “Illicit Globalization,” 5.

51 Oeindrila Dube, Omar García-Ponce, and Kevin Thom, “From Maize to Haze: Agricultural Shocks and the Growth of the Mexican Drug Sector,” February 2014, http://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/maize-haize-agricultural
-shocks-growth-mexican-drug-sector_0.pdf.

52 Peter Dale Scott,
Drugs, Oil and War: The US In Afghanistan, Colombia and Indochina
(Oxford: Bowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 75.

53 Arthur Benavie, “Drugs: America’s Holy War,” (London: Routledge, 2009), 37.

54 John Kelly, “Posture Statement of General John F. Kelly, United States Marine Corps Commander, United States Southern Command: Before the 113th Congress House Armed Services Committee,” February 26, 2014, http://www.southcom.mil/newsroom/Documents/2014_SOUTHCOM_
Posture_Statement_HASC_FINAL_PDF.pdf, 6.

55 Ibid., 7.

56 Natalie Southwick, “Venezuela Destroys 17 Cocaine Labs Near Colombia Border,”
InSight Crime
, October 23, 2013, http://www.insightcrime.org/news-briefs/venezuela-destroys-17-cocaine-labs-near-colombia-border.