Drug War Capitalism

by Dawn Paley

  Acapulco is another city that has suffered through the worst of what the drug war has to offer. “The resort town has also become a major theater of the drug war: On a single weekend this year, more than 30 bodies were found, including night-club workers abducted after hours and later found hanging from a bridge.”[50] Fourteen tourists were tied up and threatened in a single incident in 2012, and later, six of the women (who were Spanish citizens, hence the fact that it became a national scandal) were raped. Following the rapes, the mayor of Acapulco said that what took place was bad for Acapulco’s image but that “this could have happened anywhere, in Mexico or in Acapulco.”[51] Tourism to Acapulco, a resort city nestled between cliffs, white sand beaches, and the crashing waves of the Pacific, dropped off 50 percent between 2006 and 2011.[52] The spike in violence has, just like Juárez, taken place in tandem with the deployment of state forces as part of Operacion Guerrero Seguro. In Acapulco, “Components [of Guerrero Seguro] include new lighting along Costera Miguel Alemán, the placement of more than 600 surveillance cameras in the tourist areas and the deployment of federal security forces to oversee nighttime law enforcement.”[53]

  Far from scaring away investors, the height of the violence in Acapulco inspired magnate Carlos Slim, who has repeatedly been named the world’s richest man, to bring together some of Mexico’s richest and most powerful in a consortium for the economic revival of the city. While thousands of families suffered through devastating losses of friends and loved ones and were forced to live in an increasingly cruel context of kidnappings, tortures, and massacres, Slim stayed focused on investing. “Those who do not invest and go slow because they have doubts will be left behind. I am not afraid of investing here in Acapulco,” he said in 2012.[54] Slim has invested heavily in Acapulco real estate, and now owns a hotel and other properties in the resort city. Violence against the poor in Acapulco, one of the most unequal cities in Mexico, has provided investors like Slim a clean slate for kick-starting a new development plan.

  Farmers and ranchers have also been displaced from rural areas in northern Mexico because of threats and violence. By the end of 2010, 5,000 farmers had been displaced in Tamaulipas state, according to a report prepared by Mexico’s intelligence agency (CISEN).[55] “Ranchers and farmers have been victims of kidnapping and extortion and all of that, and now many of them are asking me to sell their lands, and their ranches, but who can I sell them to?” said a real estate agent I interviewed in Tamaulipas state in 2011. “They’re kidnapping ranchers and farmers, so they don’t go to their ranges anymore; their ranches are abandoned.”

  “They forced me out of my truck near Loma Prieta, a ranch I have near Jiménez [a city close to the capital of Tamaulipas],” a farmer told Mexican newspaper Milenio.[56] “There were a handful of kids, no more than twenty years old, armed with machine guns and with Central American accents.”[57] After the threat against him, the farmer stopped going to his land. “I don’t know if I still have cattle, but the way things are, I’d rather lose them.” According to press reports, narco groups, especially Los Zetas, used the abandoned lands for training camps and bases.

  Avocados and Limes at Gunpoint

  In 2011, Mexico’s agri-food exports were valued at $22 billion, just slightly more than the country’s mining exports of $21.6 billion. The overlapping presence of armed actors in some of the country’s most productive agricultural regions has had severe consequences for the lives of farmers and has impacted the price of fruits and vegetables in Mexico, the United States, and elsewhere.

  Attacks against and extortions of small and medium-sized farmers are taking place in areas that had previously undergone rapid changes to their agricultural sector as a result of neoliberal policies and changing market structures. Dr. Donna Chollett documented the transformation of the local economy in the Los Reyes region of Michoacán from one where sugar cane workers could earn a subsistence living because of state subsidies, to one where contract workers picked blackberries for luxury consumption in the United States. “The retraction of government assistance for campesinos, withdrawal of price supports, and reduction of import tariffs create markets in which small farmers are unable to compete, thus opening the door for transnational agribusiness.… Transnational blackberry agroindustries form a commodity chain that establishes hierarchies of power linked to broader initiatives of the WTO and NAFTA. As men are displaced from cane production, a segmented labor force that relies on unequal compensation divides workers by gender and separates capitalized growers from small-scale campesinos who lack the resources to compete in the new transnational order.”[58]

  Avocados and limes are grown in the area Chollett describes, part of which is known as the Tierra Caliente region of Michoacán. The state is Mexico’s number one producer of avocados and one of the most important producers of limes in the country. In fact, the very first drug trafficking group in Michoacán, Los Hermanos Valencia, had its roots in avocado farming.[59] Michoacán is also an area that, over the last decade, has been occupied by various armed groups, from the Mexican Army[60] to La Familia Michoacana, which has morphed into what is known as the Caballeros Templarios (Knights Templar).

  Michoacán has been a hotbed of political activity, including disputes between parties, Indigenous movements, student uprisings, and otherwise. Like Tamaulipas and other embattled Mexican states, it has also been an area where deep links between state governments and organized crime have contributed to the consolidation and dominance of criminal economies. Some of the most gruesome public acts of terror in Mexico since 2006 have taken place in the state: five human heads were tossed onto a dance floor at a bar in Uruapan in fall 2006; and grenades exploded at Independence Day celebrations in the capital of Morelia in September 2008, killing eight. Mexico City–based analyst Alejandro Hope notes that the family of Governor Leonel Godoy had “all kinds of links with people from La Familia, which later became Los Templarios. There is a taped phone call between [the governor’s] half-brother and La Tuta, the leader of the Templarios.… Where Julio Cesar Godoy, half-brother of the governor, calls La Tuta ‘Godfather’ and La Tuta tells him, ‘Don’t you worry, my son, you have already won, we already spoke with the boys, we told them.’” Godoy’s term ended in 2011, and new elections brought Fausto Vallejo to power in Michoacán. “He won, but he was very sick and he left his post temporarily right at the beginning of his mandate. He left the position to his secretary of government, equivalent of a secretary of the interior, and that individual has all kinds of links with the Templarios.” Hope says that historically, “What drug trafficking [in Michoacán] there was, and what organized crime there was, was strongly connected with the traditional PRI structure of control.” As an example, take the case of Tepalcatepec, where locals accused Mayor Guillermo Valencia of being the “big Templario.” Valencia, who denies the accusations, was elected to Congress as a member of the PRI in the embattled state ten years ago at the tender age of twenty-three, and then served as youth leader of the PRI, before being elected mayor.[61] Where they exist, these high-level links ensure impunity for criminal groups, whose actions do not threaten the state government so much as contribute to the rearrangement of land ownership and the economy, at a high price for small farmers and common folk.

  A report on the alternative Mexican news website Sin Embargo reveals that, as of November 2013, the Caballeros were charging small avocado growers 3,000 pesos per hectare if they were exporting the fruit and 1,500 pesos if it was for the internal market. Humberto Padgett and Dalia Martínez, the journalists who reported the story, asked a group of small farmers how the crime group could know how much land each of them had planted. In an answer the journalists attribute to the whole group, the farmers respond: “Ahh, that’s easy! They know how much we have because they have direct access to the guides (permits) that the Local Council for Vegetable Sanitation gives, which depend on the Secretary of Agriculture, Ranching, Rural Development, Fishing and Alimentation (SAGARPA) and the State Committees of Vegeta
ble Sanitation. The Council controls and physically inspects every meter of every hectare, every bush, every tree, and the quality of each fruit.”[62] Agricultural authorities are in the pocket of organized crime groups, who charge additional extortion fees from the growers. According to the reporters, “The incursion of organized crime in the avocado production chain has hit the small farmers who have less than 10 hectares especially hard, as well as those new to the business and who, faced with the excessive payments, have opted to abandon their lands and sell or rent them.” Indigenous and farming communities throughout Michoacán are up against organized crime groups that are increasingly taking control of the land. “First we found marijuana plantations, but the real use of the land was for planting avocados. They wanted to take over the territory. In a handful of nearby villages, in Zacapu, the same thing happened, the same thing happened there and where they’re cultivating used to be forest, and now it’s only avocados,” said Trinidad Ramírez, a member of the Council of Chéran.

  Chéran, an Indigenous Purépecha village, made headlines in April 2011 when a group of women chased out illegal loggers that were associated with La Familia Michoacána. Margarita Ambrosio Magaña, whose husband was killed by illegal loggers when he tried to protect some forested lands in 2009, participated in the blockades from the early days. “Before, the forest cutters would come in and we were all afraid. Now with the barricades bad people don’t come in anymore and the kids can go out and play,” she told Desinformemonos.[63] Chéran was the first example in Michoacán of a self-defense group formed (in this case by assembly) to prevent organized crime groups from operating in the area. Since the uprising, Chéran has been an autonomously run community, without state police or political parties, and the violence and illegal logging have dropped off considerably. Rural communities have responded to the presence of paramilitary and state forces in their territories by creating their own armed groups, sometimes in the form of self-defense groups and other times community police. Lime growers in Michoacán have met much the same fate as avocado growers, forced to choose between their lands and livelihoods and extortion under threat of death or kidnapping by the Caballeros Templarios. In April of 2013, eight lime farmers were killed and at least sixteen wounded when they joined a protest against extortion. After the massacre, marchers were evacuated by the Mexican military.[64] Buenavista Tomatlán, a tiny town in western Michoacan that depends economically on lime crops, made international news when a federal prosecutor claimed the self-defense group there was in fact working in tandem with one drug cartel against another. Lime growers from the town of Apatzingán claim to have been threatened against receiving limes from farms in Buenavista for packing at their local plant.[65] In a story that reinforces why banners hung by supposed narcos should not be trusted, the lime growers from Apatzingán later allegedly hung a banner with the same accusations against their neighbors.[66] Instead of defending the lime growers against the Caballeros Templarios, the state accused them of being with the other cartel. The violence continued after the army raided the town and police and soldiers took over self-defense patrols in the community of just over 42,000. Six people were murdered there in July 2013, another four bodies were hung from a welcome sign crossing a rural road the same month, and nine more were killed in August 2013.

  Self-defense groups operating without a clear mandate from their communities must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Though their name harkens back to the United Self-Defense of Colombia (AUC), a right-wing paramilitary group allied with the Colombian state, and their white T-shirts may appear in the same vein as Miami’s reactionary Cubans, many of the self-defense groups that have formed in Mexico appear to be protecting the will of the people against the collusion of state and cartel/right-wing paramilitary groups. Often sparked by the kidnappings, murders, or extortions of community members, these self-defense groups organize to guard the roads in and out of their community, checking each vehicle, armed with basic weapons and machetes. But the formation of these armed groups can also be understood as a strategy to defend community and small holder territories from ongoing theft and pillage.

  “In reality we’re prisoners in our own village, but at least we’re safe there,” said a community member from a town in Michoacán, which has been protected by a self-defense group for eight months.[67] Within the boundaries of each village, these groups can ensure locals are not being kidnapped or otherwise impacted by paramilitary/criminal groups, but once they travel on highways connecting their villages, locals risk their lives. After a march of self-defense groups from their communities to Apatzingán was met with grenades and gunfire, soldiers told a reporter with El Pais that the army is merely a referee in the conflict, and that things would get worse when night fell.[68] As a solution, it was agreed that members of the self-defense groups would patrol with the army to ensure that they didn’t let criminal groups through the main roads back to their villages.

  In reading information from the US government and the status quo media, one finds a careful reiteration that the war in Mexico is non-political. “The Mexican gangs are motivated by profit, and have no visible ideological agenda. Their only political goal is weaker law enforcement,” reads a 2011 report by the Soros-funded research group InSight Crime.[69] The effort to present criminal groups in Mexico as apolitical has echoes in the effort to rebrand Colombian paramilitaries as criminal bands (Bacrim). But it is deceiving to ascribe “political” status to a war only when there is a national liberation movement or a guerrilla struggle. The war in Mexico is political: it is a counter-revolution, a hundred years late. It is decimating communities and destroying some of the few gains from the Mexican Revolution that remained after NAFTA was signed in 1994. Conceiving of drug cartels as paramilitaries politicizes their actions and creates space through which to have a more informed discussion of the ramifications of drug war violence in Mexico and elsewhere.

  Chapter 7:

  Drug War Capitalism In Guatemala

  Though Guatemala and Mexico were both subject to Spanish colonization (the first genocide), the countries’ histories have diverged dramatically since. Access to land, and land reform (or lack thereof), has put the two countries on markedly different paths in the twentieth century. Unlike Mexico, Guatemala didn’t undergo a revolution or a period of nationalizations early in the last century, instead it was in the 1940s and the early 1950s that the country experienced what some call the “Guatemalan Spring.” Democratically elected presidents Juan José Árevalo and Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán began making reforms, but both remained committed to the capitalist economic model and to a Western liberal conception of democracy.

  US leaders characterized Árbenz’s main misstep as daring to expropriate land owned by American banana companies. According to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization, “The election of Árbenz in 1951 resulted in a period of intense but brief reform beginning with the enactment of the Agrarian Reform Law (Decree 900) on 17 June 1952. The declared objectives of Decree 900 were to 1) eliminate feudal estates 2) obliterate all forms of indentured servitude 3) provide land to the landless and land poor 4) distribute credit and technical assistance to smallholders. The developmental goals of the reforms was to develop a capitalist economy among the peasants and in agriculture generally and to facilitate the investment of new capital in agriculture by means of the capitalist rental of nationalized land. The reform involved the expropriation of idle land and its redistribution to the landless and land-poor.”[1]

  Regardless of the capitalist nature of his land-reform program, Árbenz was labeled a communist, and, shortly after, his government was overthrown in a coup d’état planned in Washington and backed up by the CIA in a mission called PBSuccess.[2] The CIA-backed Guatemalan coup in 1954 and the US government’s refusal to allow elections in 1963 in order to prevent the participation of Árevalo marked the beginning of a series of events that would push the country toward a thirty-six-year war that culminated in genocide. More than 200,000 p
eople were murdered over this time in Guatemala, primarily Indigenous Mayans, as well as leftist activists, union organizers, and otherwise. An additional 50,000 people remain disappeared.

  Though the conflict in Guatemala was often dressed up as being a war against communists or insurgents, in many regions it is clear that what was really motivating the assassinations of Indigenous people was access to their lands. One example of this is the municipality of Rabinal, where approximately one-fifth of the population was assassinated between 1981 and 1983. Efraín Osorio Chen is from Rio Negro, a community in Rabinal, where Maya Achi people make up the majority of the population. Osorio was ten years old when he survived the massacres that killed his family. I met him as I traveled with Jesús Tecú Osorio through the village of Pacux, where many of the survivors who were displaced from Rio Negro were resettled in the 1980s. I mentioned to Tecú Osorio that I wanted to talk to someone who had directly survived the violence, and the first person we saw was Osorio Chen, riding his bicycle down the road. Tecú Osorio called out to him, and he rode up and met us at a monument to the dead—a plain rock reminder pointing toward the sky.