phenomena have taken place in areas “where there are fierce social and land conflicts related to the imposition of mega‐projects” such as oil and natural gas exploration or exploitation, large-scale agriculture, hydroelectric projects, large-scale forestry, among others. And in this context, the real beneficiaries of drug wars in the Americas are, among others, large banks, local elites, and transnational oil and mining companies. These policies have also helped the United States to gain more leverage and achieve its strategic foreign policy objectives in the Americas and particularly in Colombia, Mexico, and Central America.
In Paley’s view, connections between drug wars, the state, paramilitary violence, and natural resources are increasingly evident. In her account, paramilitaries or non-state armed actors “can serve to control dissent and conquer territory.” And this also coincides with a cycle of accumulation and drug war capitalism, where “forced displacement … is not a casual by product of the internal conflict.” As part of this cycle, according to a report cited by Paley, “armed groups attack the civil population to strengthen territorial strongholds, expand territorial control, weaken the support of the opponent, and accumulate valuable assets (e.g., land or extraction of natural resources).” In such a context, as Marx notes, “the instruments of labor are the monopoly of the landowners (the monopoly of property in land is even the basis of the monopoly of capital) and the capitalists.”[2]
The implementation of US-backed initiatives that further the militarization of security strategies in Colombia, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean have not achieved their alleged main aims. In fact, the amount of drug trafficking in these regions has not fallen. At the same time, as Paley explains, non-state armed actors have been empowered, thus “increasing extra-legal violence with no apparent effect on its stated goal of curbing drug production.” Plan Colombia, for example, hasn’t significantly reduced the amount of cocaine for sale in the United States, and homicide rates in the Andean country remain among the highest in the region. Regardless, Plan Colombia has been touted by authorities as a successful initiative. These sources would agree with Milton Friedman when he states that “one of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”[3] It seems that for them, positive results fall along the lines of what Paley suggests: an emerging series of metrics linked to security, an improved business environment, the transition to a US-style justice system, and the extension of police forces throughout the national territory.
Another important argument in Drug War Capitalism is the one suggesting that transnational oil and gas companies are among the biggest winners in this new context. For example, “immediately following Plan Colombia, the state oil company, Ecopetrol, was privatized, and new laws introduced to encourage foreign direct investment.” At the same time, as Paley observes, “[s]pecial battalions of the army were trained to protect oil pipelines belonging to US companies. In the wake of Plan Colombia, foreign investment in the extractive industries soared and new trade agreements were signed.” Something similar has been taking place in Mexico.
Energy reforms were recently passed in Mexico. In December 2013, the Congress approved constitutional changes to open up even more of Mexico’s hydrocarbons industry to the participation of private transnational businesses. At the same time, Mexican states rich in hydrocarbons—such as Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, San Luis Potosí, and Veracruz—have been militarized as part of the war on drugs. Some of these regions have shown high levels of forced displacement because of the severe drug-related violence. In this context, the government of Mexico intends to attract massive foreign investments to tap into the country’s energy resources. Similarly, in Guatemala and Honduras national security seems to have been driven by the extractive industries in recent years.
Drug wars greatly transformed the economies of Colombia, Mexico, and Central America in the present era. However, this transformation has taken place at a large cost in terms of human lives. This cost can be considered a human tragedy, the tragedy of drug war capitalism. In this tragic context, as Paley recognizes, “rural populations continue to be displaced from their lands and to fall victim to state and non-state violence.” Overall, drug wars in the Americas have disproportionately impacted the poorest sectors of the population. This phenomenon contributes to the creation of increasingly stratified and unequal societies.
Paley does an incredible job explaining the complexities of the hemispheric dilemmas that have brought death and destruction, while benefiting corporate interests. She has done exhaustive field research in key places that exemplify the basic dynamics of drug wars in the Americas. Drug War Capitalism is a provocative, comprehensive, and very well documented analysis of the big picture of the war on drugs in this hemisphere. By evaluating specific violent events in four crucial countries—Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras—and supporting her assertions with interesting testimonies of numerous actors/victims/politicians and a variety of US government reports and other official documents, Paley tells a tale of modern post–Cold War capitalism, that is, a story of drug war capitalism.
This book is an antidote to the official discourse and confusing spot news reports on the drug war. As Bertrand Russell states in Freedom in Society: “Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.”[4] Drug War Capitalism is an important attempt at revealing that tyranny at work.
Chapter 1:
Drug War Capitalism
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
