I now live in Brownsville, Texas, right across the border from the Mexican city of Matamoros. The area south of Brownsville—as many other regions along the Mexican side of the US-Mexico border—has been particularly affected by new and more extreme forms of violence, organized crime, militarization, and paramilitarization.
Experiencing violence so closely—and being aware of a disturbing transformation of Mexican society—I have become particularly interested in this phenomenon that has expanded to other regions of the hemisphere and seems to have transnational roots and explanations. For the past few years, I have conducted a large number of lengthy interviews with experts, journalists, and other key actors regarding drug violence and the activities of transnational organized crime syndicates. I have talked with many people and have read almost every trade book that has come out on this subject matter. Before reading Drug War Capitalism, I had not found any comprehensive text that offered a coherent explanation of these very complex phenomena that have affected entire communities and led to the loss of thousands of lives, sparking a human tragedy of considerable dimensions in Colombia, Mexico, and Central America—the Northern Triangle countries in particular (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador).
The first time I talked to Paley was in April of 2011, when she was writing an article about violence in the northeastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas for The Nation magazine. We stayed in contact, and I started to follow her work and her trips to different parts of our hemisphere in her quest to understand violence, imperialism, and exploitation of poor communities in the context of what she calls a “war against people” (guerra contra los pueblos). I still remember a conversation we had in February 2012, in La Paz, Baja California, when we met briefly and talked about the situation in Mexico five years into a war that was allegedly declared to fight organized crime and to reestablish order and the rule of law in the country.
At that time, Paley expressed to me her intention to write this book and explained in detail what she meant by a “war against the people” that derives from the war on drugs in the United States. She stressed then (and stresses now) “the importance of critical research and writing on the conflicts in Colombia, Mexico, and elsewhere in the hemisphere that take into consideration resource extraction as a driving force behind whatever the current dominant explications of the conflicts are.” For Paley, it is important to rethink what is called the war on drugs, which “isn’t about prohibition or drug policy,” but instead, is a war “in which terror is used against the population at large in cities and rural areas,” while “parallel to this terror and the panic it generates, policy changes are implemented which facilitate foreign direct investment and economic growth.” For the author of the present book, this is drug war capitalism, advanced through a war on the people and their communities. In her words, “The war on drugs is a long-term fix to capitalism’s woes, combining terror with policymaking in a seasoned neoliberal mix, cracking open social worlds and territories once unavailable to globalized capitalism.”
Paley is, in my opinion, one of the very few persons I know who understands the dynamics of drug-related conflicts in the Americas. She has traveled to the most important regions in the hemisphere afflicted by drug war violence and has carefully documented what she has observed. Her material is precise, well-documented, and provocative, and this book is the culmination of an extraordinary effort to understand a complex phenomenon that has affected thousands of persons and entire communities in the Western hemisphere.
Notwithstanding the numerous human and material resources spent by government agencies, NGOs, and civil society in general to explain the drug war crisis, recent studies on the drug war have been very limited and explain very little—particularly, the most popular ones.
From readings and conversations over the past years, I have concluded that there are essentially three types of analyses on the so-called drug wars in the Americas. One popular view on the subject—the one that is present in most trade books displayed in airports, popular bookstores, and shopping centers—is the one that sees this conflict as an issue of “drug lords” (narcos) and wars among “drug cartels” and of cartels fighting against the state for the control of drug trafficking routes. Another viewpoint focuses on prohibition and drug policy. These two perspectives do not seem to be very helpful to explain violence and organized crime in the hemisphere. Stories about narcos do not portray accurately the complex reality of transnational businesses involving a variety of extremely powerful actors and interests, both public and private. On the other hand, as Paley recognizes, debates of prohibition of drugs and decriminalization of drugs tend to “obscure the militaristic nature of the war on drugs” and keep this phenomenon “firmly within the realm of ideas, and [avoids] a discussion of this war’s legitimacy.”
The third and last type of analysis on these so-called wars on drugs that I have identified is the one that guides the present text, one that explains the powerful forces and interests behind a conflict that mainly affects “the people” (la gente/el pueblo/los pueblos) and the most vulnerable groups in society. As Drug War Capitalism points out, it is important to put these conflicts “into a broader context of US and transnational interests in the hemisphere” and link “anti-drug policies to the territorial and social expansion of capitalism.”
A key element of Paley’s analysis is the one that identifies the US involvement in the militarization of anti–drug trafficking operations in the four countries she studies. The US-backed policy initiatives of Plan Colombia, the Mérida Initiative, and CARSI, according to her account, are the primary vehicles to advance drug war capitalism in the region. These initiatives, in her view, promote “the militarization of aid and the steering of anti-drug money toward fostering the creation of more welcoming investment policies and legal regulations. Though not often talked about in the context of the drug war, these policy changes often have little to nothing to do with illicit substances and everything to do with the transformation of the business environment.”
The US-backed militarization of security strategies in the four countries—with the alleged key purposes of strengthening institutional reforms and the rule of law as well as of preventing violence—has coincided with a visible increase in the murder rate as well as with the militarization of organized crime or the creation or strengthening of countrywide structures of paramilitary control. In Paley’s opinion, the militarization of crime groups can be very useful to the expansion of capitalism. And she correctly makes use of the word “paramilitarization” when referring to TCOs, since these criminal forces, at many times, seem to be “supported or tolerated by the state.” In fact, the complicity between state actors and criminal groups has been present in most of the cases analyzed by the author.
The most important contribution of this book is its extraordinary explanation—utilizing different cases in the four countries of study—of how the state violence displaces urban and rural populations, leading to changes in land ownership and resource exploitation. Paley documents very well how several Indigenous communities in these four countries have had their lands taken away by war, and how these properties have been acquired by transnational corporations whose aim is to extract natural resources.
In general, we find in this text that internal conflicts and militarization have concentrated in “areas deemed important for energy projects or resource extraction.” These phenomena have taken place in areas “where there are fierce social and land conflicts related to the imposition of mega‐projects” such as oil and natural gas exploration or exploitation, large-scale agriculture, hydroelectric projects, large-scale forestry, among others. And in this context, the real beneficiaries of drug wars in the Americas are, among others, large banks, local elites, and transnational oil and mining companies. These policies have also helped the United States to gain more leverage and achieve its strategic foreign policy objectives in