them to control and occupy entire neighborhoods and regions in military fashion. Indeed, those weapons manufacturers who sell to both the military and local police recognize the intertwining of global militarism and militarized policing within the drug war assemblage. Thus, for example, the German defense manufacturing company Heckler and Koch advertises the MP5 semiautomatic weapon with: “From the Gulf War to the Drug War—Battle Proven.”41
This militarization of the police as one aspect of the larger militarization of the drug war has its origins in the 1980s, despite the overwhelming media claim that this is an offshoot of the war on terror. As Radley Balko has convincingly shown, to a great extent the war on terror—like the hostage and rioting scenarios before it—has largely been used as a convenient excuse for the militarization of the police.42 For the overwhelming majority of the actual use of militarized police since the 1970s and right up to the writing of this book have been in drug war situations, such that most of the over one hundred SWAT raids that occur daily in the United States are drug related. And, for example, of the fifty thousand to sixty thousand times in 2005 that SWAT teams “violently smash[ed] into private homes,”43 oftentimes in the middle of the night with machine guns blasting, they were not for the purpose of taking down cartels or breaking up a trafficking ring but rather “to enforce laws against consensual crimes,” such as the personal use of some drug.44 To the extent, however, that police militarization has increased in response to the war on terror, this is best understood as a tighter intertwining knot of the surveillance and control, carceral political-economic, and global militarism aspects of the drug war assemblage. How this intertwining became knotted can be seen in the development of the latter aspect of the drug war and particularly in the increasing link between counternarcotics and counterterrorism.
The global militarism aspect of the drug war has been significant from the war’s declaration by Nixon in 1971. For not only did this declaration result in the increased funding for domestic law enforcement training and cooperation between enforcement agencies and the creation of new state and federal legislation in support of this law enforcement, but Nixon also used military and economic aid to force countries “to reduce the manufacture and trafficking of narcotics within their borders.”45 Beginning from this decisive moment, the drug war assemblage increasingly became—and particularly so during the Reagan and Bush years—partially constituted by an intertwining of national and international legislation, economic aid and development, and military aid and eventually intervention, all of which rested on the international inequalities that characterized Cold War politics.46
As the 1980s came to an end, it became increasingly difficult to discern precisely the distinction between drug war and Cold War military operations. This was particularly so throughout Latin America and the Caribbean as the U.S. military became fully entangled with counternarcotics operations. Senator Bob Dole was just one of many at the time to call for a “total war” against drugs and asserted that it was “time to bring the full force [of] military and intelligence communities into this war.”47 It was only a matter of time before the George H. W. Bush administration fully committed the U.S. military to the drug war, which was clearly demonstrated in the 1989 invasion of Panama. Although many of the top military brass had resisted the military’s increased role in counternarcotics operations abroad, with the end of the Cold War, many of them came to see the military’s participation in such operations as a means to secure the inflated budgets they had enjoyed over the past decades. Economic analysts who feared the onset of a recession if military expenditures were cut echoed this concern. William Taylor, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, offered one solution to this concern that would prove prescient. Arguing that with the “Soviet threat” eliminated the U.S. military would need to “develop some social-utility arguments” in order to defend its standing reserve of personnel, equipment, and funding, Taylor recommended that the so-called Third World might offer a solution in the form of “insurgency, terrorism, and narcotics interdiction.”48
If one of the initial intertwinings of the drug war assemblage was that of counternarcotics operations, global militarism, and the Cold War, then by the late 1990s and the 2000s this would morph into counternarcotics operations, global militarism, and counterterrorism.49 Just as the U.S. government claimed that Communist insurgents in Latin America funded their operations with drug trafficking—a claim that at times was tenuous at best—so too it currently makes similar claims about terrorist organizations.50 And just as such claims in the 1980s and 1990s allowed for the increased intertwining of economic and military aid, military and law enforcement operations, and military interventions in drug war situations, so too today have these become tightly knotted and manifest in locations such as Afghanistan; Mexico; Central Asia; Southeast Europe; and increasingly, parts of Africa; as well as continuing what had already begun in the 1980s in the United States.51 At both the national and international levels, then, counternarcotics and counterterrorism often intertwine and emerge in the form of either military intervention as in Afghanistan, Special Ops in Latin America, or militarized police in the United States and elsewhere.
It is primarily this particular emergence of a drug war situation in Mexico that Javier talked about that evening in Vancouver and that the Movimiento focuses its political activity on. This is also the “drug war” that gets most of the media and other public discursive attention. Bud’s poem, however, disrupts this narrow public discursive focus and discloses the nonlocalized complexity that is the drug war. Beginning with his poem as a hermeneutic entrée, I have tried to trace the assemblic relations of the drug war to show that it goes well beyond these localized and situated emergences, which, it should be noted, typical anthropological ethnography tends to focus upon, and that any comprehensive analysis of the drug war must recognize this widely diffused and complex assemblic phenomenon. In other words, in this section I have tried to show that the drug war can only be understood as a complex assemblage of, among other things, state-based surveillance and control, biopolitical therapeutics, carceral-political economics, militarized police violence, and global militarism in its various forms over the past forty years, and, as a consequence, all of these can only be understood in terms of their relation to the drug war.
INTERLUDE—A SITUATION THEORETICALLY DESCRIBED
So far I have been trying to show that the way in which the global anti–drug war movement conceives of, experiences, and addresses the drug war is best analyzed as what I am calling a situation. By situation I mean a nontotalizable assemblage widely diffused across different global scales that allows us to conceptualize how persons and objects that are geographically, socioeconomically, and “culturally” distributed get caught up in shared conditions that significantly affect their possible ways of being-in-the-world. This might become clearer if we consider what we normally mean when we say something like, “We found ourselves in this situation” or ask, “What can I do in this situation I’m in?” These are ways we articulate the recognition that “to be in a situation” is at one and the same time something that falls upon us, or perhaps better put, we get caught up in, and to a great extent, but not entirely, provides the conditions for possible ways of being, doing, speaking, and thinking within that situation. Thus, this is recognition that a situation is both a singularity of which one has become a part and a multiplicity that both preexists one’s participation in it and as already having been, exceeds this localized instance of it. The multiplicity of a situation, however, denotes more than its durative and widely diffused existence. It also indicates its multiaspectual nature; for a situation is not a closed and totalized occurrence that appears as if from nowhere. Rather, and as I have been trying to show, a situation is constituted by diverse phenomena that become intertwined and emerge temporarily as localized manifestations. It is in these ways, then, that a situation can be described as a singular multiplicity that provides widely diffused but shared conditions.
Recently, some nonanthropological scholars have also recognized the significance of widely diffused phenomena with localized affect and have reconceived analytic and political concepts accordingly.52 Timothy Morton, for example, has done this to address global warming, which he conceives as a hyperobject.53
