Drug War Capitalism (6 page)

Mexico’s oldest drug trafficking groups, formerly known as the “big four” (Juárez, Gulf, Sinaloa, and Tijuana) have splintered to varying degrees as a result of the drug war, resulting in what are estimated to be between sixty and eighty drug trafficking groups.[48] In addition, the Zetas, which splintered from the Gulf Cartel in 2010, are said to have established a presence through Mexico and Guatemala, often working in tandem with local and regional state security forces and government officials.[49] While the armed actors vary from place to place, it has long been established that the lines between the state and criminal groups are murky, and that each empowers the other. There are defecting soldiers and police, like those who formed the Zetas, and there’s the phenomenon of double dipping—police receiving paychecks from criminal organizations and the state simultaneously. In some places, entire police corps has been known to double dip.[50] Sometimes those dressed up as police are actually soldiers or criminals, and military men are increasingly at the head of city police outfits, as was Colonel Julián Leyzaola Pérez previously in Tijuana and today in Juárez. There are also security corporations and private mercenaries, whose members are sometimes identifiable by their jackets, boots, and vehicles. And there are also community police, armed in defense of their (often Indigenous) communities through the blessing of local authorities, and self-defense groups, which are often more spontaneously formed groups in rural areas. Telling one from the other (from the other, from the other) in this war, and knowing who exactly is fighting whom, is difficult and dangerous.

The state role in drug trafficking and illegal activity runs deep and is complex. “It is known that it is not possible to move tons of cocaine, launder thousands of millions of dollars, maintain an organization with hundreds of armed individuals operating clandestinely, without a system of political and police protection, without growing alliances with the productive and financial apparatus,” wrote Yolanda Figueroa, a journalist who wrote the seminal history of the Gulf Cartel in 1996.[51] Indeed, there is no reason to assume a clear division between state forces and cartels. Throughout this text I refer to what official discourse calls drug cartels using various terms, including paramilitary groups, organized crime groups, and cartels. The actions of so-called cartels can strengthen state control, and often consist of ex-special forces or state troops, and can thus be considered paramilitary groups. Another reason I don’t always use the term “drug cartels” is that these groups in Mexico are responsible for carrying out actions that have little or nothing to do with drug trafficking, including attacks and extortion against civilians, migrants, journalists, and activists.

The term “war on drugs” is definitely problematic, and I debated using other terms for describing what’s called the drug war, since as I argue throughout this book it is very clearly a war against people, waged with far wider interests than controlling substances. But in the end, I decided to stick with the familiar “drug war,” so as to ensure the text is accessible and understandable for people who may only read a section at a time. The term “drug war” is the most visceral shorthand for what is taking place vis à vis US policies carried out in the name of stopping the flow of narcotics. In 2009, the
Wall Street Journal
ran a story headlined “White House Czar Calls for End to ‘War on Drugs.’” The story goes on to explain that the Obama administration has attempted to distance itself from the concept of the drug war. “Regardless of how you try to explain to people it’s a ‘war on drugs’ or a ‘war on a product,’ people see a war as a war on them,” said Gil Kerlikowske, who was then the US drug czar. “We’re not at war with people in this country.”[52] Indeed, people living through the impacts of the war on drugs in the US and elsewhere understand that it is a war on them and their communities. As for Kerlikowske’s clarification that the US government is not at war with its own people, a maxim from reporter Claud Cockburn comes to mind: “Never believe anything until it’s officially denied.” For these reasons, and for accessibility and readability, I use the term war on drugs to describe these US-led policies, and drug war capitalism to underscore the connections between these policies and the economic interests of the powerful.

The Mérida Initiative, from Talk to Action

One Friday in September 2006, just after his election as president, Felipe Calderón and his wife invited Antonio Garza, then US ambassador to Mexico, and his wife over for dinner. At some point in the evening, Calderón told the ambassador that improving security would be a key part of his administration. When Garza recapped his evening to State Department bosses, he included Calderón’s comment, to which, according to his own notes, the ambassador replied: “Gains on competitiveness, education, and employment could be quickly overshadowed by narcotics-related organized crime.” To jump-start Mexico’s economy, “foreigners and Mexicans alike had to be reassured that the rule of law would prevail.”[53] What became the Mérida Initiative was first discussed between President George W. Bush and his homologue Felipe Calderón in Mérida, Yucatan, in the spring of 2007. The Mérida Initiative was crafted in secret negotiations, which took place the following summer. “These negotiations were not public, and Members of both the U.S. and Mexican Congresses reportedly have expressed frustration that they were not involved in the discussions.”[54] The US State Department openly touts the success of Plan Colombia as an important factor in the creation of the Mérida Initiative, the Central America Regional Security Initiative and other similar plans. “We know from the work that the United States has supported in Colombia and now in Mexico that good leadership, proactive investments, and committed partnerships can turn the tide,” Hillary Clinton told delegates to the Central America Security Conference in Guatemala City in 2011.

As soon as Felipe Calderón was sworn in as Mexico’s president in December 2006, he announced that he would crack down on the drug trade. Less than a year later, Mexico announced the Mérida Initiative, a bilateral anti-narcotics initiative funded by the United States and Mexico. Critics immediately began calling the agreement Plan Mexico, after its predecessor, Plan Colombia, which ended in 2006. In 2007, the United States shifted its weight behind the war on drugs from Colombia to Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. The drug war in Mexico has some features that set it apart from Colombia, the most important of which is a shared physical border with the United States. A related dynamic of the drug war in Mexico, not present in Colombia, is the targeting of non-status migrants (mostly from Central America) as part of the conflict. The spike in attacks against and murders of migrants in Mexico has accompanied the creation of countrywide structures of paramilitary control, particularly by Los Zetas. The paramilitarization in Mexico differs from that in Colombia because of distinct historical, territorial, political, and economic roots of paramilitary and resistance forces. Paramilitaries have long existed throughout parts of Mexico with militant social movements, but the phenomenon has never been as widespread as it is today. Mexico’s guerrilla movements have historically been much smaller and more dispersed than those in Colombia, in part because of land tenure, which has generally been more equitable in Mexico than in Colombia. On the economic front, Mexico’s gross domestic product in 2010 was more than 3.5 times larger than Colombia’s, and Mexico’s economy is far more complex.[55] Despite the differences, there are important drug war precedents, first set in Colombia, now being applied in Mexico.

From a critical perspective, it is possible to understand the Mérida Initiative and the activity it has inspired within Mexico as consisting of three primary elements: legal and policy reforms, militarization, and paramilitarization. The formation and strengthening of armed groups by criminal organizations as a response to state militarization of trafficking routes is the third effect of the Mérida Initiative that can also prove beneficial to the expansion of capitalism.

The Mérida Initiative is the primary means through which drug war capitalism, as developed in Colombia and applied in Mexico, is enshrined bilaterally between the US and Mexico. As US and Mexican security cooperation (and spending) increased, violence spiked and violent incidents spread throughout Mexico, and the body count began to rise. According to Shannon O’Neill from the Council on Foreign Relations, “When the Mérida Initiative was signed in 2007, there were just over two thousand drug-related homicides annually; by 2012, the number escalated to more than twelve thousand. Violence also spread from roughly 50 municipalities in 2007 (mostly along the border and in Sinaloa) to some 240 municipalities throughout Mexico in 2011, including the once-safe industrial center of Monterrey and cities such as Acapulco, Nuevo Laredo, and Torreon.”[56] Reports in local and US media generally fail to connect US investment in the drug war to the increased violence, even though it is a trend that is observed in Colombia, Mexico, and elsewhere. The link between US-backed militarization of the drug trade and the shifting geography of criminal activity (and therefore violence) is one that the US government itself has acknowledged. “Just as Plan Colombia helped push the focus of criminal activity and presence north to Mexico, so has the impact of the Mérida Initiative pushed the same activities into Central America itself,” said William Brownfield, assistant secretary of the US Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), in March of 2013.[57] A lanky, blue-eyed Texan, Brownfield is a career diplomat who served as the US ambassador to Colombia immediately following the end of Plan Colombia (2007–2010).

The initial justification of the Mérida Initiative was the need to “confront the violent transnational gangs and organized crime syndicates that plague the entire region and directly undermine U.S. security interests” by dismantling criminal organizations; strengthening air, maritime, and border controls; reforming the justice system; and diminishing gang activity while decreasing demand for drugs.[58] In 2010, the Mérida Initiative was retooled to consist of four pillars, which remain as follows: Disrupt Organized Criminal Groups, Institutionalize Reforms to Sustain Rule of Law and Respect for Human Rights, Create a 21st Century Border, and Build Strong and Resilient Communities. But as will be argued throughout this book, the US-funded war on drugs, and all of its justifications, is not far afield from the US-led war on terror, with which the US government claims to be liberating women and increasing democracy. Canadian sociologist Jasmin Hristov puts this particularly well, explaining, “The efforts of the elite to eliminate any challenges to the status quo have found expression in various politicoeconomic models throughout history. The features common to all of them have been the highly unequal socioeconomic structure consisting of armed force, repressive laws, and anti-subversive ideology, packaged under different names—the War on Communism, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror.”[59] The war on drugs maintains a specific location within the “war-on” triumvirate described by Hristov, since its backers can utilize discourses related to health in justifying its existence, something that each of us can relate to on a personal level. The language of the War on Terror is not useful in regards to Mexico, which shares a 2,000-mile border with the United States, and with over thirty million people in the US being of Mexican origin.[60] Raising the specter of cartel and gang members is the Western Hemisphere strategy of the United States for painting entire societies as bringers of harm to US citizens. In the words of the Stop the Injunctions Coalition in California, “Culturally and politically the lines between ‘terrorist,’ ‘insurgent,’ ‘immigrant,’ and ‘gang member’ have been aggressively blurred.”[61]

Debates around the war on drugs tend to consist of two contrasting positions: one that posits the prohibition of drugs (the US federal government’s position) and the other, a more liberal position, which advocates for their decriminalization. While this is an important debate, it tends to obscure the militaristic nature of the war on drugs, keeping the drug war firmly within the realm of ideas, and avoiding a discussion of the war’s legitimacy. But there is an urgent need to deepen our understandings of this kind of war; we must put it into the broader context of US and transnational interests in the hemisphere, and connect anti-drug policies to the territorial and social expansion of capitalism. In the same way anti-war movements successfully linked the US occupation of Iraq to oil, we ought to be able to make connections between the US-backed war on drugs in Mexico, and that country’s natural resources, workforce, and population, as well as its strategic geographical location. “With Mexico and then more generally, there’s an international criminal economy, which overlaps with the international above-ground or so-called legal economy.… The US has been able to, through the drug trafficking, and the excuse of trying to control
narcotrafico
, [pour] hundreds of millions, now billions of dollars into Mexican security, and Mexican armed forces, and it is changing the whole nature of Mexican society. Mexican society is being militarized,” Dr. Robinson told me during an interview in 2010.[62] “And again it’s being done in the name of combating drug trafficking, but … part of the face of this global capitalism is increasingly militarized societies in function of social control when inequalities and misery become just so intense that there’s no other way but through military and coercive means to maintain social control.”

Part of the system of social control imposed by the drug war includes extortions in certain parts of the country, which force the closure of mom-n-pop businesses and funnel consumers into big box stores. The violence deployed by the state and justified with claims of combating trafficking can lead to urban and rural populations being displaced, clearing territory for corporations to extract natural resources, and impacting land ownership and property values. The drug war creates a context where members of resistance movements and journalists can be assassinated or disappeared under the pretext that they were involved in the drug trade. It also acts as a mechanism through which the number of (primarily Central American) migrants traveling through Mexico to the United States can be controlled through harsh policing of their movements carried out by crime groups. Finally it creates institutional (legal and social) conditions that guarantee protection for foreign direct investment, creating the necessary conditions for capitalist expansion and flexible accumulation. In addition to the violence that disproportionately impacts poor and working people and migrants, drug war militarization favors some segments of the elite more than others, provoking in some places an elite struggle for the ability to maintain the control and territoriality necessary to continue to participate in capital accumulation. “What is taking place in Mexican territories is part of a global process that transcends territoriality.… It is an expression, without a doubt, of an inter-capitalist struggle … and it will continue to be, for a very long time,” according to a report published by a Mexican research collective in late 2011.[63]