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Not long ago, I sat in the only restaurant in Santo Domingo—a nearly empty ranch house with three plastic tables, two fridges full of cold soft drinks and beer, and a rack of homemade chorizo hanging in the sun. Dogs slept in scraps of shade, and across the street an old man with his shirt slung over his shoulder sat silently and watched as every now and then a motorcycle went by, occasionally a large tractor-trailer. For these drivers, Santo Domingo is one more nondescript village on their route across Colombia’s northern prairies. Beside the restaurant stands a curving stone monument in memory of the people killed by the Colombian Air Force in December 1998.

On December 12, 1998, an airborne chase led a number of army helicopters to this village of about 200 people, part of the municipality of Tame, in Arauca, Colombia. Local festivities were under way, but few ended up sleeping peacefully that night as flyovers, explosions, and gunfire kept people awake and fearful. Eventually the activity overhead stopped, but resumed around 5 a.m. As the noise picked up, locals began to assemble at the drugstore, right across the street from the restaurant where I would sit fifteen years later.

Maria Antonia Reyes Beltran lived in a palm-roofed house near the drugstore, and she remembers hearing the flyovers and trying to convince her elderly neighbors to evacuate, but they had previously been displaced and refused to budge. Reyes Beltran left her house and walked toward the meeting place. At 10:02 a.m., a WWII–era cluster bomb, made up of six fragmentation grenades, was dropped from a helicopter onto the road where community members were gathered. Seventeen people were killed as they huddled for protection in the drugstore. Twenty-seven others, including fifteen children, were injured. “It was almost ten, we were listening to the radio when the heli­copter went over. The people who were on the edge of the highway were trying to signal us that something had been thrown from the helicopter, but we didn’t know what it was. It was bright. It turns out that was the bomb that killed the people,” she said in an interview conducted in the community’s schoolhouse, less than 200 meters from the site of the bombing. “I was leaning against some boards; one of the pieces of shrapnel passed very close—it almost killed me. The people there were yelling, ‘Help! Help!’”

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.

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.

But there is more than not-yet-privatized corporations that make Mexico interesting to transnational capital: take Mexico’s strategic geographical location, for example. The Mexico-US border spans nearly 2,000 miles, a line that runs from Pacific to Atlantic, from Tijuana–San Diego to Juarez–El Paso and Brownsville–Matamoros. Along some stretches, the border is fenced, in other places the unforgiving desert polices it.[29] The US border with Mexico can and should be considered a valuable economic resource; low-cost labor on the south side of the border, within spitting distance of the United States, is a winning combination as transportation costs are also reduced. As such, Mexico is becoming an increasingly significant player in US and global manufacturing. For example, in the automobile sector, located along the border as well as in the country’s interior, “Mexico is becoming the export hub for the Americas—not only North America but also South America,” according to Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn.[30]

One afternoon while driving through the border city of Nuevo Laredo, a local activist pointed out an overpass and mentioned that bodies had been hung over it more than once. I remembered the site from photos that appeared online, but there was one big difference seeing it in person: behind where the photograph was taken, a Sony factory dominates the block, with Japanese, US, and Mexican flags hoisted at the entrance. It seemed to me a crucial bit of context that Sony operates a factory literally a stone’s throw from where human bodies have been publicly displayed. Knowing that the overpass isn’t in some abandoned part of town, but rather is meters away from a bustling assembly plant, means knowing that the workers coming in and out of the factory at dawn, when bodies tend to be hung, would all have witnessed these gruesome scenes. As we shall see later on, while the violence in Mexico has generally not deeply impacted the owners of multinational corporations, it does impact the workers. These workers’ decisions of whether or not to carry on working in hostile environments, where terror is used against residents, can impact the labor supply available to the assembly industry. According to a 2010 report by the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, in Juárez alone “estimates place the number of people who have fled their homes at around 230,000. Roughly half of those are thought to have crossed into the United States, which would leave about 115,000 people living as internally displaced people (IDPs).”[31] The fact that violence can impact the size of the labor pool in these areas means that it can also prevent labor organizing, which keeps wages depressed along the border—both important factors in determining the future of a vital sector of the US economy.

Then there are the natural resources. Mexico has only recently been opened up to modern mining. According to data from the Mexican government, Mexico produced about twenty-two tons of gold in 2001, and ten years later, it produced eighty-four tons, most of which was extracted by Canadian mining companies. Silver production doubled over the same period. According to Mexico’s National Chamber of Mines, Mexico is the fourth destination worldwide for mining investment, after Canada, Australia, and the United States. Looked at in terms of the US government’s more general foreign-policy goals, the condition of Mexico’s large economy, driven by a handful of profitable, state-owned corporations, and the country’s mineral-rich territory (much of which remains communally owned by peasant farmers) means there are attractive money-making opportunities to be had. William I. Robinson, author of A Theory of Global Capitalism among other books, explained the overarching goal of US foreign policy during an interview in 2010: “All the evidence shows us that what the US is doing is playing the lead role in organizing a new globalist capitalist system, a new epoch of global capitalism.” According to Robinson, world capitalism was a system in which circuits of production existed first within and later between nations. Global capitalism, which is the current system, consists of transnational circuits of production and trade, in which manufacturing takes place across nations rather than within them. As an example, under world capitalism, clothes were sewn in Mexico from fabric made of Mexican-grown cotton, and under global capitalism, fabric is imported, clothing is partially assembled in Mexico and exported for completion in the US.

In his 1996 book Promoting Polyarchy, Robinson explains that “political and economic power tends to gravitate towards new groups linked to the global economy, either directly or indirectly through reorganized local state apparatuses which function as ‘transmission belts’ for transnational interests. In every region of the world, in both North and South, from Eastern Europe to Latin America, states, economies and political processes are becoming transnationalized and integrated under the guidance of this new elite.”[32] Elsewhere, he notes that “‘going global’ allowed capital to shake off the constraints that nation-state capitalism had placed on accumulation and break free of the class compromises and concessions that had been imposed by working and popular classes and by national governments in the preceding epoch.”[33] In Mexico, as we have seen, many of these compromises and concessions survived the imposition of NAFTA and the onset of neoliberalism into the twenty-first century.

In Mexico, something more than an economic shock was in order: a comprehensive strategy proven to increase foreign direct investment was needed. Among other things, this strategy had to ensure that local police and the army, and eventually the entire legal system, would operate according to US standards. A similar strategy had already been developed via Plan Colombia—a carefully planned, US-backed war on drugs. For example, over the past years in Mexico, the privatization of large state companies has taken place alongside attacks on the working population along the US-Mexico border and the displacement and murders of communal and small landholders. The drug war can be understood as forming the basis of a permanent shock in Mexico.

In December 2006, immediately after he was inaugurated, President Felipe Calderón launched a new phase of the war on drug cartels and organized crime in Mexico. It was a high point in social mobilization in Mexico City and throughout the country, as Calderón’s inauguration took place amidst massive protests against election fraud, which brought over two million people, including left-wing candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, into the streets of the capital. Also that year, the Zapatistas carried out their Otra Campaña, consulting with Mexicans around the country from below and to the left. “There was also the Popular Revolutionary Army [EPR], there were movements like that in Atenco, which was repressed and which provoked important solidarity actions, and also between June and November 2006 in Oaxaca an important social movement against then governor Ulises Ruíz rose up,” said Carlos Fazio, a professor at the Autonomous University of Mexico City (UACM). “In 2006 we could say that there were large mass protests by systemic and anti-systemic social forces, by people who wanted change.”

Since 2006, social movements have not mobilized with such a vengeance, and the violence and terror in Mexico have instead taken center stage. The social costs of the drug war have been enormous: one of the few independent counts, carried out by Molly Molloy, a librarian at New Mexico State University, affirms that since December 2006, over 153,000 people have been murdered in Mexico.[34] At a March 2012 press conference, US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta stated that the violence was tremendous, and that Mexican officials had told him there were 150,000 people dead because of drug violence.[35] The body count reported in the mainstream media is much lower, often referring to 60,000 dead as a result of drug war violence.[36] This is a misleading figure since it is known that less than 5 percent of all crimes in Mexico are investigated. As well, some bodies have been secretly disposed of in mass graves, while others are dissolved in chemicals; these bodies have not made it to the morgues to be counted. The number of murders increased sharply when US military aid came online—rising from 10,452 to over 25,000 in 2010 and over 27,000 in 2011.[37] Though the media fanfare about the war on drugs diminished when President Enrique Peña Nieto began his term in December 2012, reports show that in 2013, over 21,000 people were murdered in Mexico.[38]

In addition to the dead, one official count pegs the number of disappeared in Mexico at 42,300.[39] According to a survey carried out by the National Statistics Institute (INEGI), 105,682 kidnappings took place in 2012, and less than 2 percent of kidnappings were reported to officials that year.[40] Not included in these numbers are the kidnappings of migrants transiting through Mexico; from September 2008 to February 2009, Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) recorded 9,758 such kidnappings.[41] Activists estimate the number of disappeared non-citizen migrants in Mexico since 2006 could be over 70,000.[42] In Mexico the majority of the dead are civilians, and their assassins are often members of state forces, but we are told over and over again that the dead in this war are criminals. We are told that the war on drugs is about in-fighting between the cartels that transport narcotics from Colombia through Central America and Mexico to the United States. Few analyses take a more in-depth look at how this violence interacts with capitalism, state power, and resource extraction. That is exactly what Drug War Capitalism proposes to do.

In Mexico, states along the US border, like Baja California Norte, Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas, have been hard hit by the war on drugs. Some non-border states like Veracruz, Guerrero, and Michoacán have also been affected by the violence, which has touched every state in the country to some extent. In nationwide polling in 2011 and 2010, over 60 percent of respondents polled by Mexico’s national statistics agency felt that public security was worse or much worse than twelve months before, and a minority felt it was the same or better.[43]

The ratcheting up of conflict linked to what we are led to believe is inter-cartel violence and a state-led assault on drug trafficking goes beyond Mexico; violence is also on the rise in Central America, where insecurity reigns. Massacres linked to drug trafficking have shaken Guatemala in recent years, and in 2011, Honduras had the highest murder rate in the world.[44] The players responsible for the violence in parts of Mexico and Central America are not necessarily consistent, nor are their methods, which vary depending on the region and the environment. In Central America, unlike Mexico, the United States openly uses its own forces in the field, as evidenced by DEA activities in Honduras in the spring of 2012 and the deployment of US marines to Guatemala later that year. Seven military bases were designated throughout Colombia for use by US troops following Plan Colombia. Some say this could be part a plan to destabilize left-led countries in the region, like Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador.

The overall picture is this: drugs, and particularly cocaine, are produced in Colombia (as well as Bolivia and Peru) and shipped north, often using small planes and go-fast boats. Trafficking organizations must cooperate with at least a segment of local authorities in each country they transit, paying bribes so that their product can cross borders and avoid impoundment. The state and state security forces are not a monolithic enterprise—while some politicians and judges are attempting to curb corruption, others are deeply involved in facilitating narcotrafficking, money laundering, and other sectors of the illicit economy. Similarly, in some cases units of the army or marines have faced off against police, who themselves are involved in drug trafficking. Major drug trafficking routes can only exist in places where sufficient cooperation with authorities has been achieved. When official cooperation ends or is interrupted, violence results. A 2012 paper found that in municipalities where Felipe Calderón’s National Action Party defeated the PRI in 2007 and 2008 elections by a close margin, the probability of drug-related homicides increased by 8.4 percent. According to the study, “Analysis using information on the industrial organization of trafficking suggests that the violence reflects rival traffickers’ attempts to wrest control of territories after crackdowns initiated by PAN mayors have weakened the incumbent traffickers.”[45] Empirical evidence indicates that the election of the PAN Party in municipalities caused violence to increase, though the idea of a crackdown by PAN mayors reveals only one facet of the impacts of the anti-drugs policy in place since 2006. That said, we lack sufficient information to clearly understand the configuration of alternative trafficking networks operating with the support and complicity of the PAN, including on a local level. The interruption of drug trafficking does not signify cutting off the flow, rather, it leads to the diversion of routes elsewhere.

A similar logic applies to cultivation: in the 1990s crop eradication programs pushed coca growing for cocaine production from Bolivia and Peru into Colombia. The next generation of eradication programs in Colombia pushed coca growing back into Peru and Bolivia.[46] Through it all, the overall amount of cocaine produced was virtually unchanged. What this means is that both crop eradication and the interruption of drug trafficking effectively divert those practices into other regions. In addition to ensuring the continued supply of narcotics to the United States and other markets, the diversion of trafficking and production allows the militarization of the newly used regions, under the pretext of fighting the drug war.

Throughout the 1980s and until the mid-1990s, the dominant media and government narratives held that Colombian drug cartels, the top-down organizations with high-level government connections and high-profile leaders like Pablo Escobar, were responsible for much of the drug running. But even then, for those involved in the trade, it was apparent that the boogeyman figure of the cartel was being exaggerated for public consumption. Gustavo Salazar, who worked as an attorney to Medellín drug runners in Colombia, told journalist Ioan Grillo, “Cartels don’t exist. What you have is a collection of drug traffickers. Sometimes, they work together, and sometimes they don’t. American prosecutors just call them cartels to make it easier to make their cases. It is all part of the game.”[47] Following the murder of Escobar in the mid-’90s, the organizations once portrayed as cartels were presented as having splintered into smaller groups that kept the cocaine flowing to the United States.

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]

The US-Mexico border has become one of the key elements in the drug war. Some of Mexico’s most violent cities are located directly on the border, while on the US side, border cities remain among the safest (though some are also among the poorest) in the country. In one of the more critical English texts on the drug war, University of ­Texas at El Paso professor Howard Campbell used the term “Drug War Zone” to describe what he calls the cultural world of drug traffickers and anti-drug police. “This zone is especially prominent and physically observable on the US-Mexico border but the term also applies to any place or situation in which drug traffickers, drug users, and anti-drug narcs confront, avoid or attempt to subvert one another,” he writes.[64] Campbell notes that he avoids the term “war on drugs” because it is used in a hypocritical and misleading way by the US government. While Campbell’s concept of a Drug War Zone may be considered an improvement over the notion of a drug war, it leaves much to be desired for two reasons. First, because it ignores the role of armies and navies and other special non–“law enforcement” state organizations in the drug war, but second, and more importantly, because it leaves out the segment of the population that desperately needs to be made visible in the context of the drug war: civilians. These are the workers, families, campesinos, migrants, and youth who have been targeted by police, army, or paramilitary groups in the context of the drug war. In Guatemala and Honduras, entire villages have been labeled “narco-communities” as if to justify mass displacement.

Having traveled from Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, and the US-Mexico border filing stories on the impacts of the drug war, I have found three primary hallmarks of this kind of war. First, in all of the regions touched by drug war violence, the pain, fear, and suffering resulting from militarization and paramilitarization are experienced in large part by poor and working people and migrants. It is clear that though they may have little to no involvement or contact with controlled substances, the violence and terror of the drug war are primarily against them. Second, one of the earliest, longest lasting, and most tangible impacts of the violence is a restriction on people’s mobility, whether in moving around one’s own neighborhood, traveling between cities, crossing the US border (in either direction), or migrating. Third, in each place where the violence stemming from the drug war has increased, free expression—individual and collective, through public activities, community and mainstream media, and otherwise—has been targeted. Even though these three factors together make up the most widely accessible and consistent narratives of the war on drugs for any reporter familiar with the situation on the ground, they are not the narratives that dominate accounts of the drug trade and the US-backed war. Instead of telling the stories of those affected by the drug war, newspapers, think tanks, and governments produce reports dominated by stories of drug cartels (criminals or criminal groups) at war with each other for control of trafficking routes and territory. I call this narrative the cartel wars discourse, which includes a few salient features, among them: an almost exclusive reliance on state and government sources for information, a guilty-until-proven-innocent and victims-were-involved-in-drug-trade-bias, and a foundational belief that cops involved in criminal activity are the exception not the rule, and that more policing improves security.[65] Cartel wars discourse is the dominant and hegemonic narrative of the drug war, positing that state forces are out to break the cartels, and most if not all victims of violence are involved in the drug trade.

TV news reports in the United States bring the most horrendous acts of the war to the screens of millions of North Americans: fifty two people burned alive in a casino, hundreds of bodies discovered in unmarked graves, and so on. The victims are regularly portrayed as having been involved in criminal activity, or at least involved with somebody who was involved, a formulation that effectively criminalizes entire populations. In the mainstream media, common people are rarely given voice. Instead, the population-at-large is relegated to tweeting or blogging anonymously if they wish to have a say, though even that can be risky.[66] If you expose cartel members, according to the editor of one Reynosa paper, “They will abduct you; they will torture you for hours; they will kill you, and then dismember you. And your family will always be waiting for you to come home.”[67] These acts against the media by members of crime groups are carried out with impunity, the perpetrators protected by a state that is unwilling or unable to investigate. Telling stories that fall outside of official lines can be deadly. To begin with, many sources fear talking, afraid that if they go on the record they will be tortured, disappeared, or killed. There are also major disincentives for journalists themselves. The press freedom organization Article 19 counts fifty journalists killed in Mexico between January 2007 and December 2013.[68] That’s nearly double the number of journalists killed in the previous six years, during Vicente Fox’s term.[69] Over the same time span, 726 acts of aggression and 213 threats against journalists and media organizations were reported. According to a report by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), in Mexico “Journalists across the country have told CPJ that they avoid coverage of crime and corruption in order to stay alive.”[70]

In areas affected by the drug war, not only does the dominant media discourse win out, but it is incredibly dangerous for media workers to stray too far from it. An examination of media reports reveals that information on the drug cartels blamed for the violence and terror generally comes from a handful of official sources, namely from elements of the Mexican and US state coercive apparatus (police, army, prosecutors, anti-narcotics forces) as well as civilian arms of the government, the United Nations, and think tanks like the discredited Austin-based intelligence firm Stratfor.[71] That most reporting reflects the dominant discourse about the drug trade and the war on drugs is not a new phenomenon. In fact, the frequency with which the dominant narratives of the drug war are reproduced by the press could be considered one of the fundamental reasons for the longevity of the drug war discourse.[72] “Most information about narcotraffic is furnished by the Miami Herald and other U.S. newspapers that use the U.S. DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency [sic]) as their information source,” wrote Colombian historian Germán Alfonso Palacio Castañeda in 1991. “Such media tend to follow the DEA’s strategic orientation, which is empirically unacceptable.”[73] It’s been more than twenty years since Palacio wrote those words, and unfortunately, they still hold true today. For example, in early 2011, I met a photographer based in Monterrey, another city that plunged into drug war-related violence beginning around 2010. He didn’t want to speak on the record, but having established anonymity, he didn’t hold back. He told me that photographers regularly embed themselves with the army, waiting until soldiers visit the scene, as there is no other way to access certain areas safely. He explained how he once took photos of cadavers on a ranch not far out of the city, and how the victims looked like they had been holding automatic weapons, which he knew had been planted by soldiers. He and other photographers didn’t question the set up or refuse to run the images they shot, out of fears for their safety.

Regardless of the risks, critiques of the drug wars in Mexico, Central America, Colombia, and South America are becoming more sophisticated as time reveals their lasting impacts. The links between drug war policies and an improving investment climate for transnational corporations are increasingly intelligible, especially as the outcomes from US engagement in Colombia, specifically between 2000 and 2006, are lauded, refined, and applied elsewhere. The first phase of Plan Colombia officially ended in 2006; the next year, the Mérida Initiative, or Plan Mexico, started. The Mérida Initiative would have been in the works early in former President Felipe Calderón’s term (2006–2012), if not before. The Mérida Initiative was announced in fall 2007, and originally included Central America within it, but in 2010, the United States split off the Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI), which covers Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. The US funded CARSI to the tune of $496 million between 2008 and 2013.[74] In April 2009, the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative (CBSI) was announced, and the Caribbean is increasingly the centerpiece of the drug war.[75] There is continuity in these US-backed aid packages. Though this book only deals with a handful of the countries affected by planned drug wars and drug war capitalism, the outcomes of these policies are similar wherever they are applied.

According to Gian Carlo Delgado Ramos and Silvina María Romano, Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative can be understood as two more examples of US interference in Latin America. In the name of protecting US national security, the United States pushes self-­interested policies in target countries. This not only contributes to historical processes of despoliation, plundering, exploitation, and the transfer of wealth in Latin America, but also leads to the reorganization of internal power relations between civilian and military groups in the nations in which such programs are implemented.[76] Though the focus of this work is Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and Colombia, the drug war is under way around the globe. This is evidenced by the fact that in 2012, the US Drug Enforcement Administration worked in partnership with sixty-five countries.[77] In some areas, the drug war is latent, and in others (like the United States) its principle characteristic is criminalization and mass incarceration, particularly of young men of color. In December 2012, the government of Peru announced that it would be spending $300 million on fighting “terrorism and narcotrafficking” there.[78] Places like Afghanistan and Burma have also been testing grounds for drug war capitalism, and as this is being written, the State Department, together with the Woodrow Wilson Institute and others, are pushing to extend the drug war to Africa.[79] Mexico and Central America are today the regions that are experiencing the brunt of the explosive physical violence linked to the policies applied in the name of disrupting the flow of narcotics to the United States. These are the places where the war against controlled substances is serving as the basis for a deepening of previously existing militarization, as well as the sweetening of the terms of international trade and investment. Colombia is generally looked upon by pro–drug war hawks as a success story, even though little has changed in terms of the amount of coca produced there. But as we shall see, Colombia has become the sandbox for how non-state armed actors can serve to control dissent and conquer territory. Seen in this light, it becomes easier to understand how the drug war facilitates the continuation of a capitalist economic model predicated on security, in part by creating a public discourse that allows increased state militarization on the pretext of implementing security measures to protect civilians in the face of heinous acts carried out by criminal groups.