Drug War Capitalism

by Dawn Paley

  Foreign Occupation and Drugs

  Processes of modern colonization that reach back to the period when Nixon first declared a war on drugs have shaped the geography of drug production and trafficking. It was in that period that new marijuana plantations in Mexico were sown by US smugglers. Don Henry Ford, a blue-eyed smuggler-turned-organic-farmer in Texas, told me about pushing seeds on Mexican farmers in the Sierra Madre, the northern mountain range splitting Chihuahua from Sonora, Sinaloa, and Durango: “I was one of the guys that did it, see, I used to go down to Sinaloa you know, and show ’em the money. I’d say look, ya know, here’s some seeds, why don’t you plant these instead, this is what we want.”

  Ford and I met in a small ranching town in Texas not far from San Antonio. He picked me up from the Greyhound station in a pick-up truck littered with hay, and we drove over to a classic Texas BBQ joint, where we talked over meat, pickles, and coleslaw. “It was like look, if y’all grow this shit for me instead of this other kind, I can sell this better. We were the ones that created the demand.… It’s like, I’ll pay you a shitload of money, $100 a pound or whatever, you know.”

  Though there were lone wolves like Don Henry Ford, who eventually ended up serving prison time for smuggling, the Mexican Army was historically the primary organization dedicated to marijuana trafficking. “The case based data collected by the author over a 7-year period unequivocally point to the army as the primary transporter of marijuana shipments to the border,” writes scholar Patrick O’Day, who relied on data he gathered through his own observations when he encountered an unwillingness on the part of authorities and police on the US side of the border to speak openly with him about drug trafficking.[41] “The lack of reporting and misreporting of relevant facts, the disappearance of incident reports, and the extreme paranoia of law enforcement personnel interviewed for the purpose of shedding light on this politically sensitive topic became so noteworthy during the course of the author’s research that the obstruction itself has become part of the findings,” he wrote.[42]

  Eventually, also because of a push from the United States, mass marijuana production made its way south toward Colombia. Washington ran interdiction programs in Mexico in the 1970s, in Sinaloa, Guerrero, and elsewhere,[43] and in 1976 began aerial spraying of poppy crops in Chihuahua, Durango, and Sinaloa as part of Operation Trizo.[44] Twenty-two thousand hectares of land had been sprayed by the end of 1977. According to the DEA, “The large numbers of arrests that resulted from Operation Trizo caused an economic crisis in the poppy-growing regions of Mexico. In order to reduce the social upheaval, the Mexican 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 Gua
temala, 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 shores in 2013 compared to 2012.”[54] Rather than acknowledging that the drug war has designs other than stopping the flow of narcotics, we are meant to believe that the enemy is becoming increasingly sophisticated. “Mr. Chairman, gone are the days of the ‘cocaine cowboys.’ Instead, we and our partners are confronted with cocaine corporations that have franchises all over the world, including 1,200 American cities, as well as criminal enterprises like the violent transnational gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, that specialize in extortion and human trafficking,” said US general John F. Kelly, the commander of SouthCom, in the 2014 posture statement before the House Armed Services Committee.[55]

  If we cannot see how the drug war serves as a tool for expanding capitalism, we will be left imagining this imperial strategy as a futile whack-a-mole game, where feisty criminals consistently outrun a series of multibillion-dollar military operations. In this scenario, drug traffickers are run out of the Caribbean into Mexico, out of Colombia into Venezuela,[56] and from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic. But we have seen how marijuana, opium, and cocaine production not only responds to US markets, but has been historically shaped and created by US demand. Now it is time to delve into just how the drug war serves to reconfigure trafficking routes, and as it does so, brings further militarization and violence to said regions.

  Chapter 3:

  A Look South To Colombia

  Tall and clean cut with a serious look and a small scar on his cheek, thirty-seven-year-old Fabian Laverde has been an activist for more than half his life. We met in the bottom floor of a collective house in a hip neighborhood in central Bogotá, finding a quiet room to talk while younger organizers met to plan a protest in the living room. A tent was pitched near the table, indicating that here too had become an informal safe house for someone displaced because of Colombia’s conflict. Laverde, who is the director of the Social Corporation for Community Support and Learning (COSPACC), gave the immediate impression of a rigid professional, and someone who doesn’t talk much. By the time I visited Colombia I had nearly finished the first draft of the book, and I explained to him and one of his colleagues the gist of the project. I asked what he thought of the war on drugs, and I was pleased to find out that my impression of Laverde as a man of few words was wrong. “There’s a discourse about attacking production and that whole story related to coca, but really what they try to attack is the social movement,” he said, clearing his throat gently. “If you look at the map of conflicts in Colombia, you’ll find that the highest concentrations of uniformed public forces are in the zones where the social movements resist the most. So you’ll find that there is a large military concentration in Casanare, that there’s a large military concentration in Arauca, in Catatumbo, in Cauca, and if you look at it from the other side you’ll see that the social movements become stronger and try and resist in an organized manner in these regions.”

  Laverde turned the US supply-side discourse on its head, arguing that his experience of the war on drugs is nothing like what’s publicly stated. “Beyond the fact of the militarization under the discourse of the war on drugs, and saying that Colombia is a country that produces cocaine, and if Colombia didn’t produce cocaine the US wouldn’t experience the scourge of consumption, it also has to do with the fact that in most of these regions there are important concentrations of natural resources, especially for mining and energy.”

  As an example of an area where transnational oil companies—in this case British Petroleum (BP), Petrobras, and others—are at the center of the conflict, Laverde cites the Casanare region, where COSPACC works. “It was possible to see that, in Casanare specifically, as transnational investment—especially in the oil industry—grew, the military apparatus strengthened, represented by the 16th Brigade of the Colombian Army,” he told me. “As those two large sectors—multinational capital and the military apparatus—were strengthened, paramilitarism also strengthened in the region.… If you take a map of Casanare and divide it into its nineteen municipalities, and you start to put some kind of symbol for assassinations, in this case false positives [civilian victims dressed up by soldiers to appear as if they were guerrilla members] or forced disappearances that took place in each municipality, we will find that Agua Azul was the epicenter … Agua Azul and Yopal. Agua Azul is the second largest city in Casanare, and Yopal is the capital. But if we look it all over carefully, all of the cases occurred very close to where the oil installations are, which belonged to the British Petroleum Company, BP.”

  Casanare doesn’t have a history of coca cultivation, but it is considered an important transshipment point for the chemicals needed for cocaine production, as well as for cocaine itself. It has also been a focus of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) activity, and the National Liberation Army (ELN) and various local paramilitary organizations have also been active there. In Casanare, as elsewhere in Colombia, resources from Plan Colombia were used to go after the guerrillas, and it was civilians who paid the highest price. Laverde explained that he documented the case of a municipality called Recetor
, a town that had little state presence and ongoing guerrilla activity, until the Peasant Self-Defense of Casanare (ACC) paramilitary group entered the area. Between December 2002 and March 2003, after the ACC’s arrival, at least thirty-three people were disappeared. Survivors and family members who did not vacate the area were arrested en masse by soldiers, police, and members of the secret service, and accused of being guerrillas before they were eventually released without charge. In 2011, Recetor’s city council reported that 1,232 people—95 percent of the population—were displaced.[1] But as is so often the case in Colombia, the displacement of civilians in the conflict did not mean that their lands and villages sat abandoned. Rather, one year after terror was visited on the population, Brazilian oil giant Petrobras opened offices in tiny Recetor in order to coordinate oil exploration. “This company was in charge of the Homero 1 oil well, located in the community of El Vegón, where it is believed in the coming years there will be new seismic testing for oil reserves; all of this in exchange for victims, who are added to the list of the thousands of disappeared in Casanare and Colombia,”reads Laverde’s report.[2] The same phenomenon took place with startling regularity in various areas, as entire communities were driven out of their homes only to return years later to find that their land had been planted with palm oil trees or was being explored for minerals.

  In Colombia, the connections between Plan Colombia, state, paramilitary, and guerrilla violence, and natural resources vary greatly from one region to another, but organizers, activists, and those who are directly impacted regularly insist upon their connection. In addition to state security forces’ collusion with narcotrafficking groups, the country has powerful paramilitary structures that support not only the drug trade but also the repression of insurgent groups and social movements. Colombia also has multiple, long-running guerrilla insurgencies, a factor that differentiates it from any other country in the hemisphere. Thus, in addition to fighting narcotics, an important part of United States policy in Colombia is combating leftist insurgencies and (in terms of official discourse) terrorism.