Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rnac20 Download by: [187.177.255.153] Date: 21 July 2016, At: 13:01 NACLA Report on the Americas ISSN: 1071-4839 (Print) 2471-2620 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rnac20 Violence, Displacement, and Death Christy Thornton, William I. Robinson, John Gibler, Gladys Tzul Tzul & Dawn Paley To cite this article: Christy Thornton, William I. Robinson, John Gibler, Gladys Tzul Tzul & Dawn Paley (2016) Violence, Displacement, and Death, NACLA Report on the Americas, 48:2, 130-143, DOI: 10.1080/10714839.2016.1201270 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2016.1201270 Published online: 11 Jul 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 10 View related articles View Crossmark data
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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rnac20
Download by: [187.177.255.153] Date: 21 July 2016, At: 13:01
Christy Thornton, William I. Robinson, John Gibler, Gladys Tzul Tzul & DawnPaley
To cite this article: Christy Thornton, William I. Robinson, John Gibler, Gladys Tzul Tzul & DawnPaley (2016) Violence, Displacement, and Death, NACLA Report on the Americas, 48:2, 130-143,DOI: 10.1080/10714839.2016.1201270
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2016.1201270
Violence, Displacement, and DeathA forum on Dawn Paley’s Drug War Capitalism
131 Unraveling Drug War Capitalism CHRISTY THORNTON
132 The Pivot of Capitalist Globalization WILLIAM I. ROBINSON
135 Without Terror, There is No Business JOHN GIBLER
138 The Continuity of Exploitation in Central America GLADYS TZUL TZUL
140 Response: Fear and Terror as Tools of Capital DAWN PALEY
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A s a recent NACLA Report (“Reimagining Drug Policy in the Americas,” Summer 2014), made clear, the international tide on drug control
policy is beginning to turn. While the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on the World Drug Problem (UNGASS) this past April fell short of reform-ers’ expectations, it was accompanied by a high-profi le call for rethinking the so-called “war on drugs” by cur-rent and former Latin American heads of state. But even as a general consensus has emerged that the U.S.–led war on drugs has failed by its own standards—many illegal drugs are cheaper, stronger, and more plentiful now than ever before—much of the debate continues to avoid the underlying economic factors that keep not only the drug trade itself, but also the militarized war against it, going strong. Dawn Paley’s remarkable book Drug War Capitalism (AK Press, 2014) tackles this question head on, carefully examining the rela-tionship between the war on drugs and the expansion of global capitalism throughout the hemisphere.
Paley’s argument is that the U.S.–funded war on drugs has, as she puts it, “bol-stered a war strategy that ensures transnational cor-porations access to resources through dispossession and terror.” Drawing on the work of geographers like Melissa Wright and David Harvey, Paley sees the drug war as a strategy of “accumulation by dispossession,” a process of enclosure through violence that redistrib-utes resources to transnational investors, particularly in extractive industries like mining and petroleum. In her conception, the war between state militaries and paramilitarized drug-traffi cking organizations works to terrorize poor and working people, dispossessing
them of land and access to resources, restricting their mobility, and foreclosing their ability to organize re-sistance. In so doing, the war on drugs emerges as a “long-term fi x to capitalism’s woes,” in Paley’s words, allowing transnational capitalist fi rms to penetrate previously inaccessible or unavailable territory and establish new enterprises in fi nance, real estate devel-opment, manufacturing, agribusiness, and extraction.
This argument raises many new questions for scholars of the capitalist state. Are the drug traffi ckers themselves, the billionaire kingpins and their complex and diversi-fi ed organizations, part of this transnational capitalist class? How do we understand not only the illicit accu-mulation of drug capital but also its lubricating effects
on the larger economy? And how do we characterize the role that this capital and its masters play in shaping state policy? The intricate web of connections—be-tween a hegemonic U.S. state, its more or less depen-dent Latin American counterparts, the supposedly licit transnational capitalist class, and the underground and illicit capitalists who oversee drug traffi cking and relat-ed activities outside the bounds of the law—have made more complex the relationship of state to capital in the context of the war on drugs. But in much the same way that powerful fractions of the capitalist class have long used fi nancial and fi scal mechanisms to shape the state
CHRISTY THORNTON
Unraveling Drug War Capitalism
As Paley and the participants in this forum demonstrate, one thing is very clear: the overarching logic of the drug war has almost universally served the interests of transnational capital.
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in their favor, illicit capitalists can also use the threat or deployment of bodily violence (kidnapping, extor-tion, assassination of government officials) to foreclose what theorists have called the “relative autonomy” of Latin American states—that is, their ability to operate independently of illicit capitalist interests. This takes on the form we understand as corruption: if drug traf-fickers can’t openly bend the legal, financial, or fiscal mechanisms of the state in their favor (as financial, telecommunications, or mining interests might), they can certainly bend the practices of state power to their will, as we have seen, for example, in Mexico. This fo-rum challenges us to try to understand how the various competing and overlapping interests of licit and illicit capital are shaping the neoliberal state in Mexico, as well as how the extra-legal use of force is changing the practices of transnational capital vis-à-vis both the state and the working people of Latin America.
As Paley and the participants in this forum demon-strate, however, one thing is very clear: the overarch-ing logic of the drug war has almost universally served the interests of transnational capital, which, as William Robinson details, is rooted in and backed by the U.S. but organized into cross-border processes of produc-tion. To the wide swaths of working people who are
pressed into labor—legal and illegal, regulated and un-regulated, formal and informal—in the service of capi-tal accumulation, it has mattered little whether the boss spent his days in a boardroom or a hideout. As Gladys Tzul Tzul reminds us here, the violence and disposses-sion of the drug war are in many ways a continuation of earlier Cold-War processes in which the resistance of indigenous poor people in Guatemala to capitalist social relations was met with almost inconceivable violence. And, as John Gibler’s contribution demonstrates, in this context, violence can actually become an industry, where death itself is the mass-produced, and gruesome-ly profitable, product. For the poor, indigenous, Afro-descendant, and working people of the Latin American countries that have become the object of the U.S.–led war on drugs over the last decades, the particular con-figuration of forces that has marked their incorporation into capitalist globalization has brought untold violence, displacement, and death. This is, as these contributions demonstrate, the currency of drug war capitalism.
Christy Thornton is an assistant professor of history at Rowan University. A former executive director of NACLA, she currently serves on NACLA’s editorial committee and its Board of Directors.
WILLIAM I. ROBINSON
The Pivot of Capitalist Globalization
F ew developments in recent decades have been so functional to the global capitalist assault on the working and oppressed peoples of the Americas
than the so-called “war on drugs.” And few books have managed to put forth such a brilliant critique of the multiple dimensions of this strategy of capitalist glo-balization and transnational social control than Dawn Paley’s Drug War Capitalism.
Dominant accounts portray the drug wars as a heroic struggle by the U.S., Mexican, and other governments in the Americas against depraved mafia cartels and criminal gangs, typically mystifying and sensationaliz-ing the havoc as “senseless violence.” While few among the progressive community have trouble dismissing such a self-serving fantasy, the matter continues to be framed by some among these progressives as a scourge
of corruption or the ineluctable consequence of auster-ity and unemployment imposed on communities by neoliberalism.
Capitalism has always had two faces—its above board “legal” and “legitimate” activities and its flip side in the black or underground economy that is “illicit” and “illegitimate.” These two sides can be seen through-out the twentieth century, from the functionality of the mafia to U.S. capitalism to the role of international drug trafficking in Indochina, which helped to finance U.S. counterinsurgency and build a base for that region’s in-tegration into emergent globalized capitalism.
There is a vast literature from a left perspective on the illicit drug industry and the drug wars. An ear-lier generation of journalists and academics exposed how the CIA shuttled arms to the Nicaraguan Contras
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OAKLAND: AK PRESS, 2014
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and other right-wing paramilitary groups in Central America and the Andes and brought back drugs to dis-tribute in inner city, largely African-American neigh-borhoods in the United States. But we have not seen something so large-scale, systematic, and violent as the drug wars that came into being with capitalist glo-balization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Journalists, activists, and academics have grappled with its many dimensions and a number of important studies have helped us gain a greater ana-lytical and political understanding of the role of these bogus wars in global capitalism.
Among these, John Gibler’s 2011 book, To Die in Mexico, revealed how this war is not about ending the drug trade but rather about slicing up the war’s spoils among the Mexican military and the country’s political and economic elite. As Gibler shows, the illicit trade is also central to the rise of an increasingly predatory global banking system. In short, the drug wars have provided a smokescreen for the repression of popu-lar struggles and for social cleansing. In her masterful 2014 piece of investigative reporting, Los Señores del Narco (Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers), Anabel Hernández exposed how the drug cartels are nearly one and the same with the Mexican government and business elite in a mind-boggling cauldron of corruption and deceit.
Focusing on Colombia, Jasmin Hristov in Paramilitarism and Neoliberalism (2014) laid bare the state-paramilitary-capital nexus that violently imposed capitalist globalization under the canopy of Plan Colombia’s drug eradication program. And in the United States few books have had such an impact on political discourse in recent years as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2012), which unmasked how the war on drugs has allowed U.S. rulers to rede-sign the racial caste system in the United States from legal segregation and discrimination to the era of mass incarceration.
Paley draws on many of these (and other) contribu-tions and then takes the story several critical steps fur-ther. She shows how capitalist globalization is the thread that weaves together so many different strands associat-ed with the drug wars. The resulting tapestry is nothing less than drug war capitalism. The phrase itself gives us the appropriate vocabulary to talk of the particular con-stitution of this neoliberal capitalism in the Americas. It suggests—quite correctly, in my view—that the drug
wars are not some extraneous blemish or a dispensable aspect of the capitalist system but are an essential at-tribute of global capitalism as it has been constituted in the region in the past few decades.
These wars constitute the axis around which the vast program of militarized accumulation and capitalist globalization revolves in Mexico, Colombia, and else-where, a multi-pronged instrument of the transnational elite for primitive accumulation. “The war on drugs is a long-term fix to capitalism’s woes,” observes Paley, “combining terror with policymaking in a seasoned neoliberal mix, cracking open social worlds and territo-ries once unavailable to globalized capitalism.”
L et us look at the “big picture” of world capital-ism and crisis into which we can place Paley’s account. World capitalism experiences major epi-
sodes of crisis about every 40 to 50 years as obstacles emerge to ongoing accumulation and profit-making. These are “structural” or “restructuring” crises. As op-portunities for capitalists to profitably invest dry up, the system seeks to open up new outlets for surplus capital, typically through violence, whether structural or di-
rect, which restructure the entire system. The crisis of world capitalsim in the 1870s and 1880s was resolved momentarily by a new wave of imperialist expansion, which resulted in the colonization of Africa and por-tions of Asia. The crisis of the 1930s was “resolved” by a “class comprimise” and the introduction of New Deal or social democratic capitalism—the Third World variant of which was the kind of import-substition industrial-ization and state-led developoment that Mexico and the rest of Latin Ameirca pursued from the 1930s into the 1970s.
The last major structural crisis of world capitalism, prior to the global financial collapse of 2008, hit in the early 1970s. Capitalism “resolved” that crisis by going global, undertaking a vast new restructuring and inte-gration of the world economy through globalization. An emergent transnational capitalist class—which in-cludes local contingents in every single country in Latin America—launched the “neoliberal counterrevolution”
The war on drugs is a long-term fix to capitalism’s woes.
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as an attack on working and popular classes around the world. Free trade and neoliberalism are fundamentally programs of transnational capital liberated from the nation-state through globalization.
But the project of capitalist globalization faced a myriad of obstacles in the Americas. Not the least were the legacies of militant, working-class struggles and the Chicano and black liberation movements in the United States and the mass social movements and revolution-ary struggles throughout Latin America from the 1960s through the 1980s. Another was the relative autonomy of many local campesino, indigenous, Afro-descendant, and other communities in the Americas. How could these communities be alienated, their resistance sup-pressed, and their resources appropriated? A third chal-lenge was how to place downward pressure on wages and generate a supply of labor for large-scale agro-in-dustrial and mining operations, the maquiladoras, mega-infrastructural projects, and transnational tourist complexes brought into existence by this new round of transnational corporate expansion?
Enter drug war capitalism. As Paley demonstrates, the drug wars became the pivot around which all these dimensions of capitalist globalization came to hinge. These wars became the key instrument of primitive accumulation in Mexico and Colombia, and later in Central America and elsewhere, of social cleansing and profit-making through militarization and con-flict. Among other things, the drug wars have allowed for the social control of the North American working and popular classes; the criminalization and repres-sion of Mexican, Colombia, and Central American so-cial movements; vast profit-making through military
forms of transnational corporate accumulation, such as the production and deployment of military equip-ment and forces, border walls, surveillance systems, prison-industrial and immigrant detention complexes; the expulsion of communities from rural and urban conflict areas, the appropriation of lands, and establish-ment of agribusiness and mining operations in place of small-scale agriculture; the creation of a transnational migrant population among the dispossessed that could be super-exploited across borders; and the creation of a system of mass incarceration in the United States dis-proportionately targeting the African-American popula-tion as surplus, and rebellious, labor.
There are undoubtedly missing pieces to the story. But Paley’s Drug War Capitalism calls to mind the 2012 release of Michelle Alexander’s book on mass incarcera-tion, which coincided with (and contributed to) a re-invigorated black liberation movement in the United States that was dedicated to overturning the system of mass incarceration. As we continue to flesh out all the varied dimensions of exactly how the transnational capitalist class is extending the breadth and depth of its domination, Drug War Capitalism is a work that holds out similar potential for the mass social and political movements in the Americas, now in open rebellion against the depredations of global capitalism and the new violence it has produced. I eagerly await the Latin American reception of the book’s Spanish edition.
William I. Robinson is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His latest book is Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (Cambridge, 2014).
JOHN GIBLER
Without Terror, There is No Business
D awn Paley’s book, Drug War Capitalism, offers a clear, strong, and useful argument for thinking about the patterns of violence and policies re-
ferred to as “drug wars,” as well as the many patterns of violence and policies that are often obscured by or excluded in such drug war talk. Her analysis moves away from dead-end discussions of “failed” policies and “warring cartels,” focusing instead on the economic and
political functions and impacts of drug policies, from their relation to economic and political reforms to how they seek to disguise militarization and paramilitariza-tion practices. Her argument is, for this reader, a wel-come and enriching relief from so much journalism that uncritically takes on state categories and discourses.
While I agree with Paley’s observations and analysis, I have come to think of some recent developments in
The war on drugs is a long-term fix to capitalism’s woes.
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Mexico’s drug war in slightly different ways, perhaps placing emphasis in different locations but within a sim-ilar political economy framework. I will briefly sketch here two of these differences, which, I think, comple-ment rather than contradict Paley’s argument. (In ad-dition to Mexico, Paley also reports from Colombia, Guatemala, and Honduras; I limit my reflections to Mexico where I have done my research and reporting.)
F irst, while terror undoubtedly plays an instru-mental role in dispossession for present and fu-ture resource extraction, its more devastating and
immediate use, I think, is as an essential element of a new extractive industry of death. In the past ten years of revamped and jet-fueled drug war in Mexico, kidnap-ping, human trafficking, human smuggling, and extor-tion have all skyrocketed. What were previously small business enterprises of region-specific armed groups, whether state or non-state, have become semi-industri-alized. Where previously the risk of death was the key element of kidnapping and extortion economies, for example, now the mass production of death has taken its place. Consider the tens of thousands of Mexicans and Central American migrants forcibly disappeared over the past ten years. Consider the thousands of clan-destine mass graves found across the country over the past six years. Consider all the buses that would arrive to Reynosa stations emptied of passengers after passing through military and paramilitary roadblocks on the highways. Consider the testimonies of the hundreds of men and women with disappeared loved ones who comb the hillsides outside of Iguala, Guerrero, every Sunday searching for, and finding, hidden gravesites.
In the context of the revamped Mexican drug war (December 2006 to the present) it has apparently be-come more lucrative to kill kidnapping victims after collecting a ransom from their families, more lucrative to kill migrants who pay for guides to lead them across
the Mexico-U.S. border (after taking their money and then holding them for ransom); more profitable to kill enslaved and trafficked men and women once they are no longer able to carry out the labor they were enslaved to do; and sim-ply part of the overhead to kill a certain number of small land or business own-ers (and by small I mean anything from a corner store to a stall in the market to a taxi shift) so that all others will pay their
quotas on time and without complaint.Such an extractive industry of death is the most dev-
astating and horrifying example, I think, of Paley’s ex-cellent point about drug war capitalism enabling “the expansion of the capitalist system into previously inac-cessible territories and social spaces.” Kidnapping and extortion were previously small parts of the capitalist economy, but through the drug war in Mexico they have been updated, integrated, and expanded upon for neo-liberal times. Hence, terror is instrumental in prepar-ing future mineral extraction, but it is also essential for turning the capacity to mass-produce death into a cash machine.
Take, for example, something Gloria Arenas told me. Arenas is a former guerrilla and political prisoner who I spoke with not long ago about the explosion of violence in her home state of Veracruz since 2010. We talked about scenes of masked armed men driving through cities and highways and the new impossibility of read-ing the codes of violence: are they “narcos” or police or soldiers? Is there any difference between those catego-ries anymore? We talked about the murders of journal-ists and activists, the mass disappearances, and the state government’s alchemy of criminalizing only the dead. At one point in the conversation, she said: “Es que sin terror, no hay negocio,” or, literally, “without terror, there’s no business.” Terror is essential to the new death markets. The expanded and sometimes vertically-integrated death markets—kidnapping, human trafficking, human smug-gling, and extortion—all depend upon the overarching climate of terror, itself a structural feature of drug war capitalism. (Achille Mbembe’s analysis of necropower and state sovereignty in his 2003 essay, “Necropolitics,” has profoundly influenced my thinking here.)
S econd, an essential feature of what Paley calls drug war capitalism is the structural interdepen-dence between the illegal drugs markets and the
Drug war capitalism prepares new territories for mining and drilling, but it also opens new territories for capitalist intervention by turning human life and death into a commodity for extraction.
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drug war markets. The illegal drug markets depend upon the very illegality of the physical products: co-caine, heroin, methamphetamines, and—though this particular market is rapidly changing as U.S. states en-act various decriminalization and legalization laws—marijuana. Illegal drug merchants need the drug war to justify raising prices by hundreds or even thousands of percentages between the raw commodity and the internationally traffi cked and marketed drug. In other words, drug traffi cking as we know it today is entirely a product of the drug wars.
The drug war markets depend upon the produc-tion of horrifying symbolic commodities: dead and docile bodies. The drug war merchants need the pro-duction, and media representations, of killed and ar-rested “criminals” in order to justify maintaining and extending policies that routinely and colossally fail at their stated objectives. Since the offi cial drug wars are so extravagantly useless at curbing drug availability or consumption rates—the wars consistently and over the
long term increase both availability and consumption rates—the drug warriors must constantly promote the image of the enemy—the drug dealer, the drug traffi ck-er, the junkie—and then produce images of the enemy vanquished. In this sense, the photograph of Arturo Beltrán Leyva’s dead, naked body covered in bloodied paper money after being killed by Mexican marines, who were guarding his body when the image was tak-en, represents for me the symbolic core of the Felipe Calderón Administration (2006-2012). Enrique Peña Nieto’s corresponding image could be two: photographs of Joaquin Loera Guzmán’s tamed body under arrest, twice. Or it could also be the photograph of Daniel Solís Gallardo (18) and Julio César Ramírez Nava (23) lying dead on the predawn streets of Iguala with Mexican sol-diers standing, masked, in the background.
A corollary to the structural interdependence of il-legal drug and drug war markets is the fact that the po-lice and armed forces in Mexico have essentially merged with organized crime. It is now impossible to conceive
Mexican offi cials investigate the discovery of a supposed drug laboratory near the city of Temascaltepec, Mexico, in May 2011.
MARIO VAZQUEZ DE LA TORRE / LATINPHOTO.ORG
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of a “cartel” as an entity separate and distinct from the police and armed forces (or from the judicial, legisla-tive, and executive branches of government, in gen-eral). And this officially unacknowledged fact is one of the central components of drug war terrorism: those le-gally charged with protecting and guaranteeing security are most often the ones kidnapping, torturing, killing, and disappearing bodies. In her book, Nadie les pidió perdón (roughly, “No one asked for their forgiveness”), Mexican journalist Daniela Rea describes how Mexican soldiers abducted, beat, raped, tortured, held incom-municado for months, and then forced Miriam López Vargas to confess to crimes she did not commit. During her first torture sessions, after being ripped from her car in broad daylight by un-uniformed armed men, Miriam could see a huge Mexican flag through a window, and that was how she knew where she was: the Morelos Military Base in Tijuana. Terror. The soldiers, like the nurses that administered first aid in-between torture sessions, wore military uniforms: terror. The soldiers that tortured and raped her have never been punished: terror.
As Paley argues, drug war capitalism prepares new territories for mining and drilling, but it also opens new
territories for capitalist intervention by turning human life and death into a commodity for extraction. In this sense, drug war capitalism, like all forms of capitalism, is now and has always been predicated on racism, for it is largely through racial categories that the elite drug warriors identify who may be stopped, detained, im-prisoned, shot dead in the street, or disappeared.
The drug war is a creation and project of the United States government, though it has been embraced and innovated by governments in Colombia, Mexico, and elsewhere. As a U.S. project, however, the drug war should be seen, I think, within the logic of continu-ally extending and reconfiguring war economies both for domestic and international plunder. Drug wars have nothing to do with public health and substance abuse and everything to do with reinvigorating and extending the brutal reach of capitalism.
John Gibler is a writer based in Mexico and author of To Die in Mexico (City Lights, 2011), Tzompaxtle: La fuga de un guer-rillero (Tusquets, 2014), and Una historia oral de la infamia (Grijalbo and Sur+, 2016).
GLADYS TZUL TZUL
The Continuity of Exploitation in Central America
T wenty years after the signing of the 1996 Peace Accords in Guatemala, an event that put an end to a decades-long civil war in the country, more
than twenty “states of exception” have been declared by the Guatemalan government. The logic of each has followed a consistent pattern. First, organized commu-nities have resisted their own dispossession of ancestral lands by fighting back against policies of extraction, and against the grabbing of lands by big agribusiness. Such struggles have prevented companies from carry-ing out their extractive operations in various regions of the country. In turn, such companies have turned to the Guatemalan police and private security compa-nies to protect their economic interests; they have also
petitioned the Guatemalan government. Through the executive and legislative branches, the government has come to their aid by suspending constitutional guaran-tees and denying freedom of movement and associa-tion for citizens residing in the concerned areas. During these crackdowns, the army has resumed its practice of commiting violence against indigenous peoples, includ-ing acts of sexual violence against indigenous women. In fact, just as happened during Guatemala’s civil war, violence against women has today become a tactic used to take—and strip—communal lands.
In her book Drug War Capitalism, Dawn Paley analyz-es the deep logics behind the violence that has engulfed much of Latin America. She meticuoulsy connects the
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dots between corporate power, violence, the dispossession of in-digenous peoples from their an-cestral lands, and the general but pervasive militarization of society under the pretext of the so-called “war on drugs.” The linkages be-tween those events is something that is today present not just in Guatemala, but as Paley clearly demonstrates, it’s a dynamic that has become embedded into the political and economic fabric of Colombia, Mexico, and Honduras, among several other countries.
In the case of Guatemala, in particular, Paley’s work provides a new way of analyzing an issue that commu-nities in Central Ameica have been organizing around for years: the defense of their lands. One incident that Paley’s work is particularly useful for thinking about is the state of siege that was issued in the Petén region of Guatemala from early May 2011 through January 2012. The purpose of suspending constitutional guarantees, according to the government at the time, was to re-store order after the “Los Cocos” massacre in which 27 workers were killed at a large ranch in the department. When the authorities came to the scene a day later, they found more than two dozen bodies and 23 severed heads; on a wall near the bodies authorities discovered messages written in blood. As Paley writes in her book, the slaughter was attributed to the Mexican drug gang, the Zetas. And the government used the event to justify the suspension of constitutional rights for all communi-ties in the area.
More than anything else, the event put on full dis-play the fact that what is often at stake in the drug war is the protection of important economic interests and the control of resource-rich territories. Indeed, located not far from the massacre, in the middle of the Laguna del Tigre National Park of Petén, are more than 47 sites for oil development. Therein lies the novelty of Paley’s argument: through the use of new legal measures and through the use of terror, the drug war, at least as it has played out in Guatemala, is laying the foundation for the expansion of capital into parts of the country that have long sought to promote alternatives to extraction.
The drug war, then, appears less as a novelty but rather as the continuation of a much longer history of exploitation in Guatemala—one in which territories that were not previously accessible or available to globalized
capital have been opened up and then shielded from protest. In her analysis of the Mexican case, Paley notes that the drug war works as a counterrevolution against the organized communities of that country. A very simi-lar argument could be made about Guatemala, where the violence of today can be interpreted as a continua-tion of the genocidal war the country experienced dur-ing the 1980s.
P aley’s discussion of the spatial reach of Latin American states—and of drug gangs—also offers important new ways for thinking about disposse-
sion and violence in the region, particularly in Central America. As Paley contends, the drug wars are not the result of a weak or deficient state; rather violence has been actively produced by a wide range of armed groups who commit crimes and acts of terror against citizens and against those trying to flee such terror. One expres-sion of this violence has come through the displace-ment, extortion, and killing of small business owners and community shopkeepers in Central America.
Guatemala City is in this regard illustrative, as it shares similar elements with cities in Honduras, which have experienced particularly heightened levels of violence in recent years. Paley shows how the high homicide rates in many of Central America’s largest cities; the riots in the region’s prisons; the everyday extortion experienced by small shopowners, bus drivers, and taxistas; the violent deaths of women; the territorial control of large amounts of urban space by drug gangs; and the curfew that still persists today in parts of Tegucigalpa and Guatemala City are the latest means of imposing order on urban space. This is something that is reflected in the grave concerns expressed by taxi drivers, small shop owners, and restaurant cooks, among others employed in small urban enterprises, after a string of bombings was car-ried out in Guatemala City in March 2015 against small
Through the use of new legal measures and through the use of terror, the drug war...is laying the foundation for the expansion of capital into parts of the country that have long sought to promote alternatives to extraction.
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shops, tortillerías, buses, and small bodegas.Such fears are palpable when talking to a taxi-driver,
like Juan, a good friend of mine in Guatemala City. As Juan has noted, for nearly fifteen years now, gangs have begun to demand “taxes” from small shopkeepers. So draconian have such policies become that his own fami-ly was forced to close its small bodega in the city. As Juan puts it: “In the end, those [business owners] who remain are those of us who have the support of large compa-nies and can thus pay for private security—or those who have created some sort of alliance with the maras (urban gangs). The common, indigenous people of the city, who are most affected, have had to organize ourselves to face off with the maras and survive. The problem, however,
is that those close to the gangs are also in the market and when they find out we are not aligned with the maras, the threats and violence continue.” This is how Juan ex-plains the rising number of deaths that have occurred in public markets, as well as the number of murders in-volving bus drivers in the city. And it’s this sort of analy-sis that suggests an unlikely alliance between gangs and commercial corporations is only growing.
Translation by Joshua Frens-String.
Gladys Tzul Tzul is a Maya-K’iche’ sociologist from Guatemala.
DAWN PALEY
Response: Fear and Terror as Tools of Capital
O n March 24, 2016, thousands of Argentines gathered in the Plaza de Mayo to remember the 40th anniversary of the 1976 military coup that
ushered in a dictatorship of terror and torture. At the gathering, a statement written by organizations of fam-ily members of some of the 30,000 people who were disappeared in that period was read. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the Founding Group of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the Family Members of People Detained and Disappeared for Political Reasons, and HIJOS-Buenos Aires wrote with unflinching politi-cal clarity about the true aims of the war in Argentina. “With systematic terror as its method, [the military] tried to impose an economic, political, social, and cul-tural plan of hunger and exclusion, using a recipe writ-ten by economic groups, the government of the United States, the upper echelon of the church, and the partici-pation of the judiciary,” the statement reads.
The groups recalled their disappeared loved ones as parents, children, sisters, brothers, but also as ac-tivists working towards a country that was “great, just, and free.” Experiences of terror and disappearance in Argentina are understood to have been political, con-nected to the spread of authoritarian neoliberalism.
Less than two months later, on Mother’s Day, thou-sands of family members of the disappeared in Mexico marched for the fifth year in a row in the capital of Mexico City, displaying the names of some of the 27,000 people who have been officially recorded as disappeared since 2006. In Mexico, especially since the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School in Guerrero, slogans at marches impli-cate the state in disappearances and call for loved ones to be returned alive: ¡Fue el estado! ¡Vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos! (It was the state! They were taken alive, we want them back alive!).
But unlike in Argentina, relatively few of the disap-peared in Mexico were politically active or belonged to political organizations. Unlike in Argentina, there was no coup d’état, nor is there a military junta. Rather, in Mexico, there is a war on drugs. In the cities and rural ar-eas that have been affected by this war, the impacts have been intense. But the political and economic interests behind the violence have largely been ignored, masked by drug war discourses, and because of the scale of the social emergency generated through state-directed ter-ror. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in 2014 Mexico had the third highest number
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of fatalities in armed confl ict in the world, after Syria and Iraq, and a recent study found life expectancy in Mexico has fallen due to rising homicide rates.
P art of the struggle for a better world is to make sense of the structures of violence and domination that are active all around us. My book, Drug War
Capitalism, is meant as a contribution to that struggle. The argument of the book is, in a nutshell, that the war on drugs in Mexico, Central America, and South America is in fact a war on the people; that it is a U.S.-backed, U.S.-funded war that supports Washington’s broader foreign policy objectives; and that this kind of war leads to the deployment of terror in ways that allow for the expansion of capital.
If there is one thing that is clear about the war on drugs in Mexico and elsewhere in Central and South America, it’s that confusion plays a key role. Confusion is a known outcome of terror; together with fear, it is a key part of what keeps people submissive. Pilar Calveiro, herself a survivor of an Argentine torture camp, writes
in her book Violencias de Estado (State Violences) that an essential characteristic of terror is “that it is a dif-fuse and generalized threat, which doesn’t correspond to a comprehensible logic from the parameters in force at the moment of its application.” The discourse of the war on drugs is a spectacularly confusing facade that disguises what is in fact a war on the people. William I. Robinson, John Gibler, and Gladys Tzul Tzul, whose re-fl ections on the book are included in this section, have all had a profound infl uence on my own ability to make sense of the world around me. It is a huge honor for me to have such committed colleagues read and refl ect upon my work.
I n building my own understanding of capitalism to-day, I lean on William I. Robinson’s books A Theory of Global Capitalism and Transnational Confl icts,
which, though published in 2003, sets the scene for the 2009 coup d’état in Honduras. His work helped me to distinguish the transnational elite from national capitalists, the former being those positioned to benefi t
Ayotzinapa family members and human rights activists march together with the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires in May 2015 to mark eight months since the disappearance of 43 students in Ayotzinapa. PATRICIO MURPHY / LATINPHOTO.ORG
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spectacularly from drug war violence. Robinson makes a persistent point of signaling how the “legal” economy requires the “illegal” underground economy in order to function, but he doesn’t stop there. He also insists that we consider just what it is that makes a “legal” economy legal—it may be state-sanctioned, but it certainly isn’t separate from processes of terror, dispossession, and vi-olence that, although state-directed, are most certainly criminal. When it comes to the war on drugs, mainstream me-dia and state discourse give weight to greedy drug barons and their stashes of dollars, leaving the legal economy out of the picture. The under-ground economy created by the enforcement of prohibi-tion is not insignificant. But the UN Office on Drugs and Crime calculates that an estimated 85 percent of the proceeds of the cocaine market are made in the United States. Also, the underground economy is much smaller than the “legal” economy. According to a 2012 report by British think tank Chatham House, estimates for the proceeds from the sale of illegal narcotics from Mexico to the United States range from $6.2 billion USD to $29.5 billion USD per year, equivalent to less than one percent to just over three percent of Mexico’s gross do-mestic product.
U.S. journalist John Gibler’s work has been incred-ibly important, and his journalism continues to gain relevance, because he is not walking away from the dif-ficult and dangerous work of documenting the devas-tation caused by the war on drugs in Mexico, and in Guerrero state in particular. His coverage (in Spanish and English) of the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students and the massacre in Iguala in September of 2014 has been among the best of any writer, and his book To Die in Mexico (2011) is a key resource on the war in Mexico. Gibler is a journalist through and through, but he doesn’t shy from theory: he asks that we consider that an immediate and devastating use of terror through “kidnapping, human trafficking, human smuggling and extortion” is in itself “a ‘new’ extractive industry of death,” which turns “human life and death into a commodity for extraction.”
The idea of the creation of an “extractive industry of death” complements the overall argument in Drug War Capitalism. It does, however, raise the question of
how we can understand the many cases of disappear-ance where there is no extortion call and no ransom payout, and when nothing further is known about the disappeared person’s whereabouts.
Take the case of Ricardo Martínez, a 40-year-old fa-ther of three who was disappeared in Torreón, Coahuila, on May 10, 2010. “He said that in the afternoon he was going to buy a cake,” Martínez’s father, Ricardo Daniel
Martínez, told me in an interview in January. “I don’t know if he did or not, because he also had to go to the bank and take out some money… I don’t know if it was when he left the bank or when he went to the super-market to buy the cake,” the man’s father said. There was no ransom call, no eyewitness reports. “Nothing, nothing, nothing. That’s what really discourages me.” Like the case of Ricardo Martínez, there are thousands.
The second part of my reflection on Gibler’s notion of the “extractive industry of death” is the level of dif-ficulty and danger involved in concretely researching and understanding this sphere of activity, which makes it near impossible to come to any solid understanding of its size and functioning. However, as with the drug trade, what we can investigate is how various parts of the Mexican state (and for that matter the U.S. state) or-ganize themselves into and around these death markets. So for example, we can distinguish patterns of impu-nity: certain crimes, including disappearances, killings, and extortions against certain segments of the popula-tion in certain regions are permitted by state structures and often carried out with involvement by state secu-rity forces. For example, when Ricardo Daniel Martínez went to the local and state authorities to denounce the disappearance of his son, he was told that he was not allowed to make a complaint, and that he ought to be at home caring for his family. “There were many threats, everyone who was looking for their family members was threatened,” he said. “Anonymously, by phone, we were told not to go out looking for anyone.”
We cannot lose sight of the fact that it is those who live in the countries with closest relations to the United States who are most likely to become the targets of drug war terror.
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The “extractive industry of death” proposed by Gibler would not be possible without structural impunity, a guarantee provided by the Mexican government and reinforced by Washington. In some regions, the emer-gence of robust cash economies linked to extortion, dis-appearing, and killing may explain the intense growth of these phenomena, but I cannot help but see these economies as a smaller part of a much larger schema. Coming back to the arguments in Drug War Capitalism, in order to occur in a structural, massive manner, ex-tortion, disappearance, and killing must be functional to the broader foreign policy interests of the United States. In this way, the policing of northward migration (of Mexicans, Central Americans, and others) has been partially outsourced to paramilitary groups like Los Zetas with deadly consequences. The conversion of lo-cal economies through extortion of small businesses has favored transnational retailers, while terror in maquila towns can serve as form of discipline aimed at workers and their families, favoring transnational corporations. And the forced displacement of people via extortion, disappearance, and killing can lead to increased control of land by outside capitalists, who put it to a wide array of uses, ranging from shipping and airports to mining and fracking.
It is also important to note that youth are dispropor-tionately impacted by the violence of the war on drugs. What is taking place is an expanded counterinsurgency in which young men and women are being targeted for elimination—at the same time that austerity policies, associated with the government’s ongoing privatization programs, are deepened. The vital energies of entire families (and in some areas, whole neighborhoods) are invested in the search for disappeared family members, which generally involves elaborate interfacing with and dependence upon certain agencies of the state. The ex-panded counterinsurgency at work in Mexico today is a model for social control that serves the interests of transnational elites in Mexico and the U.S., at a huge cost to society.
Finally, the contribution of Maya-K’iche’ scholar Gladys Tzul Tzul provides an update on an increasing-ly violent reality in the capital city of Guatemala, and the ongoing use of states of emergency by the federal government to justify militarization in the resource-rich areas of Central America. Tzul Tzul points out that the war on drugs may appear as a new form of war, but it represents a continuation of the same vio-lence wrought upon the people of Guatemala since the
internal conflict. Her work has been essential to grow-ing my understanding of how resistance takes shape, what communal structures look like, and how they are produced through collective work, enjoyment, and systems of governance. In parts of Guatemala, these structures and systems have been so powerful that they have elicited genocide as the only state response capable of gaining full control over members of these communal structures. This is where we can see the continuation of violence mentioned by Tzul Tzul, as the communities that today organize and refuse to give their territories over for dams, for mining, for indus-trial agriculture, and for cement plants are the same ones targeted for militarization, often under the pretext of stopping the flow of narcotics.
C onfusion reigns in the war on drugs in Mexico, Central America, and Colombia, and that is just how the powerful would like it. As the media
tracks Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, Mexico is being structurally transformed, politically and socially. People throughout Mexico and Central America are terrorized by state and paramilitary forces, whose activities are strengthened by the war on drugs. There is little space amid the ongoing crises of fear, grief, and terror to connect the violence to economic and political factors. These wars are promoted from above, and militarization and violence stem from state forces and flow outward. We cannot lose sight of the fact that it is those who live in the countries with closest relations to the United States who are most likely to become the targets of drug war terror.
In this way, the war on drugs in Mexico, Central America, and South America is a twenty-first century reboot of the wars that pitted national militaries and police against communists and so-called “internal enemies” in the second half of the twentieth century—from Argentina all the way to Central America. Today, the drug war provides an updated formula to usher in systemic economic and political change and ensure social control through terror, all to the benefit of transnational capital.
Dawn Paley is the author of Drug War Capitalism (AK Press, 2014). For over a decade, she has reported from around the hemi-sphere as a freelance journalist, mostly for alternative media. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the Autonomous University of Puebla, Mexico.
