government formally asked the DEA to stop participating in the surveillance flights.”[45]
In Mexico, in the 1980s, the US launched Operation Condor, a new program of aerial pot plantation spraying. Operation Condor and Operation Trizo, together with the intercept programs, pioneered the supply side, cat-and-mouse-style drug control tactics used up until today. In their book Drug War Mexico, Peter Watt and Roberto Zepeda argue that these US programs made heroin and marijuana prices spike and encouraged the “cartelization” of the drug trade. “For the producers and traffickers with the best political contacts, the largest networks, and sufficient resources, and for those who had adapted to survive the initial years of this new phase of anti-drug policy, this sharp and sudden rise in the price of their exports was both rewarding and tantalizing,” they write.
There was international fallout from early US crop spraying programs as well. “Some Mexican traffickers apparently made a fatal mistake—they harvested poisoned marijuana and sent it to El Norte. Lab tests by the US government found Mexican ganja with signs of paraquat,” writes Ioan Grillo in his book El Narco.[46] Paraquat, a toxic chemical used as a herbicide, also poisons and kills humans and animals if ingested. Grillo continues: “The bad publicity pushed dealers to look for a new source of weed for millions of hungry hippies. It didn’t take long to find a country with the land, laborers, and lawlessness to fill the gap—Colombia. Farmers had been growing weed in Colombia’s Sierra Nevada since the early 1970s. As Mexico cracked down, the Colombians stepped up, creating a boom in their own marijuana industry known by local historians as the Bonanza Marimbera.”[47] In a clear link between colonization and the introduction of narcotics production, coca plantations arrived in Putumayo, a southern province bordering Ecuador, which is inhabited by the Cofán people, as well as the oil industry. “The main coca crops began to appear in the 1970s, with the colonization of territory linked to petroleum interests. Many work contracts in the petroleum sector were temporary, and workers sought alternative sources of income, including coca cultivation.”[48]
The Magdalena Medio region, a geographically strategic area replete with oil deposits and pipelines, gold, lead, marble, quartz, forests containing rare and valuable wood, important water sources, and rich agricultural areas, was previously home to Shell, Texaco, and Frontino Goldmines (now Medoro Resources), and now to drug traffickers. Resource-rich areas of Colombia, like the Magdalena Medio, where multinational corporations distorted local economies and the populations had little access to state services were prime territory for drug traffickers. “The presence of the state in the area has not provided for equitable development, which benefits local populations who have lived there since the distant past, or those who have arrived there searching subsistence, rather it has favored the interests of large companies with foreign capital, which introduce an exclusive development model of social, political, and economic domination. Many of these characteristics led to these lands being coveted by the big powers in drug trafficking, who made important investments in land there, aggravating all of the conflicts.”[49]
These examples provide some insight into how the geography of narcotics in the Western Hemisphere has taken shape over the last 150 years. Though it’s difficult to say exactly how much land is used for drug cultivation, the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs—part of the US State Department—claims that in 2011, 12,000 hectares were sown with opium and roughly the same amount of cannabis. As economist Peter Reuter notes, “No detail has ever been published on the methodology of these estimates, beyond the fact that they are generated from estimates of growing area, crop per acre, and refining yield per ton of raw product; the information sources, even the technology used to produce them (for area estimates) are classified.”[50]
What is clear, however, is that free trade agreements and neoliberal restructuring have defined the shape of the drug market today. A study of over 2,200 rural municipalities in Mexico from 1990 to 2010 found that lower prices for maize, which fell following the implementation of NAFTA, increased the cultivation of opium and cannabis. “This increase was accompanied by differentially lower rural wages, suggesting that households planted more drug crops in response to the decreased income generating potential of maize farming,” write the study authors.[51] Mexico scholars Watt and Zepeda argue that the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) “provided both the infrastructure and the labor pool to facilitate smuggling,” further developing the idea of a narcotics industry intertwined with neoliberal transformation. For example, highways built to bring agricultural exports to US markets also serve drug traffickers, and increasing inequality makes more people willing to risk working in the illicit economy.
This book takes the long view on the drug war, positing that the United States and its allies control the demand and create the conditions for the production, flow, and demand of illegal narcotics.
It is in large part US policy that creates the criminal networks that traffic drugs, and US policy that generates extreme violence. Take, for example, the murder of Mexican drug runner Miguel Treviño Morales, alias Z-40. As a member of the Zetas, Treviño Morales was said to have killed thousands, and was himself murdered in 2013. To get a handle on his death, which the media flaunted as a blow against the Zetas and a victory for the Mexican government, I interviewed Sean Dunagan, a former DEA intelligence analyst in Mexico and Guatemala, and a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. “The one thing that really stands out, that really isn’t reported, is that we created Miguel Treviño,” Dunagan told me. “I mean he is entirely a product of American drug policy. Without our current drug policy he wouldn’t exist. He might have been a carjacker who probably would be sitting in a Mexican jail right now. Our policy of prohibition is what creates people like that. It incentivizes violence to a tremendous degree, so we shouldn’t be surprised when someone rises to the top and commits 2,000 murders to get there, because in the scheme that we’ve created and forced on the Mexican government, that’s necessarily going to happen.… If we want people like him to stop terrorizing Mexico we need to stop our policies. He’s just a logical product of what we’ve done.”
But the impacts of US policy obviously go beyond individual players and their connections to drug-smuggling empires. The violence connected to the war on drugs is moved depending on where the United States pumps anti-drug money, which is to say the explosive violence in narcotics-producing or transshipment countries is often directly linked with external pressures and the provision of resources to local security forces. American officials have admitted as much, noting that anti-drugs programs in Colombia pushed the problem into Mexico, and from there into Central America and the Caribbean, and so on. As we will see in Mexico, Central America, and Colombia, the shifting geography of the drug war fosters state and non-state militarization, and can deepen the ability of transnational corporations to exploit labor and natural resources.
In countries where US-backed anti-drug programs go—Colombia, Mexico, and the Caribbean, for example—drug flows often increase, as does violence. In the words of Peter Dale Scott, writing about Colombia in 2003, “Drug trafficking thrives in times of conflict; and by now it is obvious that US military interventions in drug areas have been, and will be, accompanied by significantly increased drug flows into [the United States]. The new [increases in trafficking] are more because of US efforts than despite them.”[52] Scott connects the police and army roles in facilitating the transport of narcotics, something that intensifies, as does violence, as their numbers and resources are boosted in the name of controlling illicit substances. To make the connection domestically, the periods with the most recorded homicides in the US between 1900 and 1990 were during Prohibition (1915–1930) and the period after Nixon declared the war on drugs.[53]
Today, the United States Northern Command has jurisdiction over the United States, Mexico, Canada, and part of the Caribbean, while the Southern Command is the US military’s primary organization in Central and South America. For the Southern Command, transnational organized crime is the number one regional security issue, and particularly cocaine trafficking. But despite the billions of dollars the US has poured into combating drug trafficking, the threat continues to rise; “according to US Customs and Border Protection, there was a 483% increase in cocaine washing up on Florida’s
