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
