Drug War Capitalism

by Dawn Paley

  South of the Mexico-US border in Guerrero state, a similar pattern with regards to the arrival of federal troops and an increased use of violence emerged. In 2012 and 2013, the resort town (and port) of Acapulco played host to a federal police and army surge on the pretext of fighting organized crime. In 2012, Acapulco replaced Juárez as Mexico’s most dangerous city, with 1,170 homicides, or a rate of 142.88 killings per 100,000 people.[51] An October 2013 case saw eighteen arrests of members of a kidnapping ring, thirteen of them federal police.[52] A government spokesperson told the media that the group of criminals and police had carried out seven murders and four kidnappings.

  Prisons

  The US rule of law program in Mexico falls in lockstep with counterinsurgency efforts, and it is clear that changes to the Mexican legal system are tied to the Mérida Initiative’s funded expansion of the Mexican prison system. Remember, the United States has already “expanded secure incarceration at the federal level from five facilities with a capacity of 3,500 to fourteen facilities with a capacity of 20,000.”[53] The statistics show that a move toward a US system is a transition to a model that incarcerates more and more people. According to the International Center for Prison Studies, incarceration rates in Mexico have been climbing—from 186 per 100,000 in 2004; to 197 in 2010; to 209 per 100,000 in January 2013.[54] Compare this to the United States, which incarcerated an estimated 716 people per 100,000 in 2011—by far the highest rate in the world.[55]

  The war on drugs has been part of the impetus for the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs program to provide prison training for foreign prison guards. Mexicans, Afghans, and others traveled to a women’s prison, which was converted into the International Correctional Management Training Center, in Cañon City, Colorado.[56] “The threats are different; the cultures are different,” training coordinator Bill Claspell told the Denver Post, which reported that “the strategies for neutralizing a cartel kingpin, a white-supremacist recruiter or a Taliban jihadist are the same: isolation.”[57] According to a 2010 report on Colorado’s training of Mexican prison guards, the exercises took place in a secret location, and the focus of the visit was on transporting high-risk prisoners from one jail to another: “Much of what they learn is about strategy. Ambushes most often happen because of breaches in intelligence. Drug lords pay underpaid federal agents to get information about when transports happen. In response, the Colorado authorities taught Mexican agents to limit how many prison officials know when transports happen, showed them how to use decoys and explained how to change when the transports happen. It makes sense sometimes to do them in the middle of the night.”[58]

  The Wall Street Journal reported that, by 2012, 5,000 Mexican prison officials had been trained in Colorado.[59] There are also training facilities for Mexican prison guards in New Mexico (canine trainings), California (emergency response), and Maryland (anti-gang trainings), as well as a Mérida Initiative–funded prison guard training program in Xalapa, Veracruz.[60] In addition to training for Mexican prison guards, the United States has provided “biometric equipment consisting of fingerprint card readers, voice recognition and DNA test kits.… This equipment will be placed in Federal and State facilities for positive inmate identification and registration in the National Database.” The expansion of Mexico’s prison system is a crucial if authorities are to maintain control south of the US border.

  The Border

  The US-Mexico border has become a linchpin in the drug war in Mexico. In the process of researching this book I visited and crossed the border dozens of times, between Juarez and El Paso, Nuevo Laredo and Laredo, and Reynosa and Pharr. On the way up to the United States, the experience is always rigorous and generally pretty high-tech, line-ups to cross can sometimes last for hours. On the way south, the situation is reversed. At most of these crossings, there is literally no control as you pass from the United States into Mexico; you could do it without a passport. The huge discrepancy between the levels of violence on each side lead me to believe the porosity of crossing into Mexico is a factor in why the level of violence in the United States is so much lower. It’s not that there aren’t enough resources for Mexican authorities to examine everyone that comes in, it just isn’t a priority for the United States that they do so—since it is Washington that determines how these borders work. The militarization of the border on the US side, and the harsh and unjust restrictions on who (and what) can get in contribute to the concentration of criminal groups (including police, army, and authorities involved in trafficking) on the south side of the border.

  Of course, there’s a feeling that you are safer after crossing the border from Mexico into the States. Many Mexicans are fleeing violence, kidnapping, threats, and so on by going to Texas. In my case, I walked around Laredo alone in the evening and didn’t feel afraid. When I visited Nuevo Laredo in early 2014, my contacts refused to take me for a walk through the city center in the evening, insisting that we drive. The same goes for when I was in McAllen and El Paso, compared to being in Reynosa and Juárez. On an individual level, stripped of context, it is much safer on the US side, but that doesn’t change the fact that the worst of the violence taking place to the south is happening in places where the border area is militarized on both the US side and the Mexican side, as in Tamaulipas and Chihuahua.[61]

  It is important to understand this militarization within the framework of counterinsurgency. Laleh Khalili notes that “Elbit Systems Ltd., the Israeli firm involved in the construction of the separation wall in Palestine, has also been contributing to the ‘security’ of the U.S.–Mexico border wall. In response to the moral panic about terror, many domestic police programs adopt military counterinsurgency tactics—and especially those of Israel—in their control of suspect urban populations.”[62] In the case of the US-Mexico border, the suspect populations are obviously those south of the wall, and, in particular, groups of Mexican, Central American, and other migrants making their way north. In his book Border Patrol Nation, journalist Todd Miller reports that since September 11, 2001, the US government has spent $791 billion on Homeland Security, the agency responsible for border control. Miller reports that “in 2012, the $18 billion spent on border and immigration enforcement [outdid] all other federal law enforcement bodies combined including the FBI, Secret Service, Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Marshal Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.” Border Patrol Nation details that, prior to 1986, there were rarely more than 2,000 people deported each year. “By the late 1990s, the U.S. government was deporting more than 40,000 people annually, still only a fraction of what we see today. By the early 2010s, Homeland Security was expelling well over 400,000 people per year from the United States.” This drastic increase in deportations has taken place just as a variety of US states—most famously Arizona but also Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, and Utah—have passed laws obliging local and state police to enforce immigration law. Communities of color, and especially those living close to the line experience the impacts of border militarization in the United States particularly harshly. However, the violence south of the border should not be considered an entirely separate phenomenon, as it can be considered, in some ways, a lurid reflection of the US policy of border militarization.

  The Rio Grande area has been transformed into a testing ground for the rest of the US border with Mexico, from due west of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez to the Atlantic. “The intent is to use Texas as a model for a nationwide campaign that will stem the cross-border intrusion of these dangerous and insidious criminal groups,” reads a 2011 report endorsed by the Texas Department of Agriculture. Senior Texas police officials told the retired military men who wrote the report that “much of their effort was derived from experience in recent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.”[63] In 2006, Texas, under the governorship of Rick Perry, launched the Unified Command (UC) structure in six urban centers along the Texas-Mexico border, bringing together feder
al, state, and tribal organizations, including the Joint Terrorism Task Force, Border Patrol, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), local police departments, Parks and Wildlife, state military forces, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and the FBI. At the UCs, these armed groups work hand in hand with other government agencies, including the US Postal Service and the Department of Transportation; corporations, including UPS and FedEx; as well as nongovernmental outfits like the reactionary Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. To facilitate information sharing between the UCs, which are located in El Paso, Big Bend, Del Rio, Laredo, McAllen, and the Coastal Bend, six “unified tactical commands,” known as Joint Operations and Intelligence Centers (JOIC) were created, one at the site of each UC. “UC/JOICs in effect replicate the military system of joint command and control that has proven so successful in Iraq and Afghanistan,” reads the report.[64]

  Borders play an incredibly important role in how societies are organized today. In Undoing Border Imperialism, writer and activist Harsha Walia describes the overarching nature of border controls as border imperialism. She summarizes border imperialism as emerging from a confluence of four central practices spearheaded by nation states and accompanied by ongoing processes of capitalist accumulation: The first is capitalism and empire, which underpin the entire system; followed by the criminalization of migrants; the production of racialized, sexist, and imperialist national identities; and the denial of legal permanent residency and citizenship to migrants.[65] “Border controls are used to deter those for whom migration is the only option to the plundering of their communities and economies due to the free license granted to capital and militaries,” she writes.[66] But in addition to their role as locations for social control and the creation of a labor apartheid system, borders are increasingly used in the drug war context as launching pads for militarism and violence. For example, in order for the drug war to take root in southern Mexico, a program of border militarization along the Guatemala and Belize borders will be necessary in order to give the state a foothold and a venue from which to begin to interrupt flows of people and narcotics. The more open the borders are, and the less the state controls the movement of people through those borders, the less violence surrounding communities will experience.

  Profits

  It’s long been clear that the boost in police in Mexico has been aimed at securing business interests. In August 2011, Mexico’s former finance minister Bruno Ferrari told Bloomberg in an English interview that “Nowadays what we are seeing is that we are having a big fight against crime so that, as I said, [it] guarantees the future investments and the investments we are having right now because what we are seeing is that Mexico is fighting to prevail against crime.”[67] Ferrari’s statement is backed up by the experiences of the transnational business elite.

  “Multinationals in Mexico practically haven’t been affected, with exception of the mining sector,” said Alejandro Hope, the Mexico City–based analyst. “Yes there have been some cases, but the extortion is more a phenomenon that is directed toward small and medium-sized businesses rather than large companies. There has been some kidnappings, but not much,” he told me in the common room of the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness. According to Rafael McCadden, who works with Colliers International real estate group, “We don’t see any companies leaving Mexico because of the security issues. We are experiencing expansions, which means they are here to stay.”[68] Militarization that helps the corporate sector is often framed as benefiting society at large, like in this statement from a US military journal: “President Calderón promised to improve security, thereby enhancing prosperity for the Mexican people.”[69] Though examined in the military and business press, the links between anti-narcotics programs and the economy are crucial, but are generally siloed off into separate categories or they are ignored.

  According to a 2009 Business Week cover story, attacks on foreign staff and factories have been rare in Juárez and other border towns along drug trafficking routes, including Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo, and Tijuana.[70] Police are already deployed there with special instructions to care for transnational corporations. Following the kidnapping of a corporate executive, police suggested managers alter their work routines, leave Juárez by sundown, and stick to two key roads. Patrols were beefed up along these roads, “creating relatively safe corridors between the border and the industrial parks.”[71] In other border areas, the level of repression and violence has been as intense as in Juárez, but there is less documentation of the situation. In Nuevo Laredo and elsewhere, local radio DJs would use codes like “it’s hot outside” or “it’s not a very nice day” to warn people to stay inside and avoid violence. Bazookas, grenades, and car bombs all made early appearances in the strategic border city, the busiest commercial crossing along the US-Mexico line. In 2010, the US consulate there was the target of a grenade attack. “Everything that the country is living through, all of the violence, started here in Nuevo Laredo,” said a young lawyer from the city, just across the Rio Grande from Laredo. In 2003, during Vicente Fox’s presidency, Nuevo Laredo was flooded with over 10,000 police (Federal Preventive Police [PFP], which preceded the creation of the Policia Federal) and soldiers. “On every corner there were four or five PFPs, from the edges of the city to the bridge,” the lawyer told me. “As that happened, violence rose. The local police were infiltrated and they clashed with the federal police. Over time, we learned that another group had also infiltrated the federal police. In Nuevo Laredo there were clashes between municipal police and the army, and with federal police.” On one visit, I walked across the bridge from Laredo and went over to a small Nuevo Laredo marketplace, which was once filled with restaurants and souvenir stands catering to day-tripping gringos. As I passed from stall to stall, I attempted small talk with various vendors. One man warmed to it, his voice dropping to a whisper when I told him I was a journalist. He was explicit that I couldn’t record, but he wanted to tell me something important, he said. “The army is hunting young men on the edges of town. Hunting them like animals, and killing them, just like that.”

  I’ll always remember an afternoon I spent in Nuevo Laredo in late 2011, a time when that city was considered one of the most dangerous in Mexico. The presence of organized criminal groups, working right under the army’s nose, was apparent immediately, which is to say as soon as I hit the halfway point on the border bridge separating Laredo, Texas, from Nuevo Laredo, which is in the state of Tamaulipas. People I spoke to in Reynosa said going to their local, state-funded Human Rights Commission was like talking directly to narcos—there was no perceived separation between organized crime groups and the state government. Tamaulipas is famous, on one hand, for its horror stories, including the massacre of seventy-two migrants and the discovery of a series of mass graves in 2011, but it is also considered a state where “nothing happens”—where journalists are totally under state and cartel control, and local governments don’t keep statistics.

  I asked the young lawyer, who himself was kidnapped a few years before, what he thought would happen in Nuevo Laredo in coming years. “Our theory is that things won’t change, this is the kind of government the PRI has always dreamed of running, with the army in the streets, with a form of control so that the people can’t rise up against them. A totalitarian state, and the PAN did it for them, the PAN put the army in the streets and they won’t, not even by accident, send the soldiers back to their bases,” he said. His friends are organizers with Morena, the offshoot of the PRD that is organized under the leadership of Andres Manuel López Obrador. Since the violence took hold, they spend long evenings inside discussing the future of the city. “The country is militarized. In Nuevo Laredo there are no civilian police; it’s been seven or eight years since we’ve seen a cop. There are no transit police. The soldiers do everything, and obviously that doesn’t guarantee security. Rather, violence has exploded.… Today there is daily violence, violence that we didn’t know before, soc
ial violence.”

  The drug war strengthens the power of the police and army, and fortifies the ability of the hegemonic political elite to rule. The Atlacomulco group, a neoliberalizing faction of the PRI, which was led by Carlos Salinas through the ’90s, is also behind Enrique Peña Nieto, who was born in the municipality of Atlacomulco in Mexico state. At the same time as it creates internal enemies out of the population by linking them with drug trafficking, dealing, or using, the drug war is militarizing and modernizing the police and the army, and Mexico’s network of jails. These elements together are useful in the exercise and preservation of repressive state power. In an interview with English journalist Ed Vulliamy, then-presidential spokesperson Alejandra Sota Mirafuentes said: “The president is clear: the fight is not against drugs, it is against the violence and the ability of criminal organizations to subvert the state. The president knows that drugs will not disappear.”[72] Indeed they haven’t and won’t, and everyone knows this, but I can’t help but wonder how things would be different if this was the tagline on the drug war that was repeated over and again on television and in newspapers.

  Anti-Drugs Cops Help Canadian Mining Companies

  Chihuahua, like other parts of Mexico and Central America, is experiencing an important expansion in transnational mining and state-led militarization under the pretext of the war on drugs. While disappearances and murders of environmental activists by state forces or paramilitary/cartel members are obvious examples through which we can understand environmental violence in Mexico, the overall rise in killings, kidnapping, and threats to civilians in Mexico is of utmost importance. I believe many of these events may eventually prove to be linked to environmental violence, which is to say violence related to the economic potential of the specific geographic location where it occurs. What now appear as indiscriminate murders may eventually begin to appear as patterns, which could be linked either, in rural areas, to the clearing of territory through terror for future resource extraction or, in urban settings, to capital flow facilitating infrastructure projects (like highways, airports, or border bridges). When government officials talk about reducing violence or improving security, what they are usually referring to is sending additional police and/or soldiers and/or marines.