When it comes to repression and terror in Mexico, the tactics employed by the state coercive apparatus go far beyond the Colombia experience, and are nourished by generations of US and other imperial warfare around the world.[16] In this context, I believe the experiences of US-backed counterinsurgency wars in Central America, and in Guatemala in particular, are of great importance in understanding what is happening in Mexico and the region today. Though rarely considered linked, these conflicts must be considered part of a repressive memory that has been activated in order to carry out the ongoing war on drugs in Mexico, Central America, and elsewhere. Some of the same repressive forces and the techniques used against populations in Central America in the 1980s are again being activated in the context of the drug war. This is a phenomenon that exists on a global level. As Laleh Khalili argues in her work on Palestine and counterinsurgency, “Officials and foot soldiers, technologies of control, and resources travel not only between colonies and metropoles but also between different colonies of the same colonial power and between different colonial metropoles, whereby bureaucrats and military elites actively study and borrow each other’s techniques and advise one another on effective ruling practices.”[17]
There are certain lines of continuity between the wars (including genocide) in Central America in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s and Mexico today. For example, grenades used by the Zetas in attacks in Mexico have been traced back to the 1980s, when they were sold to El Salvador’s military by the United States.[18] Another thread connecting the thirty-six-year war in Guatemala to today is the Kaibiles, the country’s elite special forces, whose members were responsible for horrific massacres then, and who today are active both as an elite government force and as members of criminal groups. It was a former Kaibil who was accused of directing the single most violent drug trafficking-related act in Guatemala. Hugo Gómez Vásquez was accused of supervising the massacre in Finca Los Cocos, Petén, in May 2011, when twenty seven farm workers were killed, allegedly as part of a land dispute between Otto Salguero, a local landowner, and the Zetas.[19] In addition to these concrete examples, many of the practices of terror used by armies such as Guatemala’s have resurfaced in Mexico and Central America at the hands of criminal groups. In today’s war, the “war on drugs,” violence deployed against civilians—especially migrants and the poor—comes from official, uniformed troops, as well as from irregular forces, including drug cartels or paramilitary groups. And in Colombia, the model country for this type of warfare, it comes from the sky, as the air force continues to rain bombs on peasants from above.
Drug War Capitalism in Mexico
“This is what the beginning of neoliberalism felt like,” said Raquel Gutiérrez when I interviewed her in 2012, reflecting on what it is like to try and understand the ongoing war in Mexico. Now a professor at the Autonomous University of Puebla, Gutiérrez was an underground militant in Bolivia in the mid-’80s when the first neoliberal policies took effect there, pauperizing the working class. It’s been ten years since she’s returned to Mexico. We’re talking at the table in her downtown apartment. Raquel pauses and drags on a cigarette, as if trying to remember a language she’s forgotten. It doesn’t come. Then she asks me if I’ve read Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine. I nod. Silence. “The thing is, in Mexico, the shocks didn’t work,” she says. It’s not that there was a shortage of shocks, which Klein describes as ranging from natural disasters to economic crises that are exploited in order to deepen the neoliberal order. In The Shock Doctrine, Klein writes, “The most dramatic case to date came in 1994, the year after Yeltsin’s coup, when Mexico’s economy suffered a major meltdown known as the Tequila Crisis: the terms of the U.S. bailout demanded rapid-fire privatizations, and Forbes announced that the process had minted twenty-three new billionaires.… It also cracked Mexico open to unprecedented foreign ownership: in 1990, only one of Mexico’s banks was foreign owned, but ‘by 2000 twenty-four out of thirty were in foreign hands.’”[20] The impacts of these policies were felt especially harshly in rural areas. “These neoliberal policies ushered in a new era of nontraditional production of export fruits and vegetables, new forms of land control, realignment of labor relations under contract farming, and substantial out-migration by uncompetitive small-scale campesinos.”[21]
The first wave of neoliberal economic policies was introduced in the form of structural adjustment programs. These programs came at the end of “the Mexican Miracle,” a period of steady economic growth, import substitution industrialization, and high oil prices. “From 1980 to 1991, Mexico received thirteen structural adjustment loans from the World Bank, more than any other country,” wrote Tom Barry in his 1995 book Zapata’s Revenge. “It also signed six agreements with the IMF, all of which brought increased pressure to liberalize trade and investment.”[22] In the 1980s, sometimes called Mexico’s “lost decade,” oil prices collapsed along with the peso. “From over a thousand state enterprises in 1983, the Mexican state owned around two hundred by 1993.... In 1991, the Mexican program brought in more money to government coffers (US$9.4 billion) than all other sales of public companies in Latin America combined.”[23] By 1988, the Mexican economy was already considered one of the most open to foreign investment in the world.[24] Many of the most important privatizations happened during the presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who was elected, in 1988, in what is widely believed to have been a fraudulent election. Mexico did go through a series of what Klein calls shocks, and some sectors (like banking and telephony) were thoroughly privatized. Still, at the outset of the drug war in Mexico, large corporations like the Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE) and Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex)—the seventeenth-largest oil company in the world by oil reserves,[25] and by other counts the eighth-largest[26]—remained firmly in government hands; peasant and Indigenous communities continued to exercise communal title over lands rich in resources; a large middle class owned small businesses; and the richest Mexican families kept control over lucrative sectors of the economy. Mexican investors were favored in the privatizations that took place during Salinas’s term, coming as they did before the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed.[27] According to the US State Department, Mexico’s ten richest families “are not the only obstacle[s] to improving competition in the Mexican economy.”[28] Though weakened by constitutional amendments made by Salinas before NAFTA came into effect, communal landholder organizations, including ejidos and comunidades índigenas, have not been totally undone by neoliberal reforms. By the end of 1994, Mexico had signed on to the North America Free Trade Agreement, witnessed the Zapatista uprising, and undergone another major currency devaluation, but by the turn of the twenty-first century, Mexico’s territory and economy still weren’t fully open to foreign investors. In 2000, Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN) was elected president, interrupting the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI) seventy-one years of rule, and some say, returning democracy to Mexico.
But there is more than not-yet-privatized corporations that make Mexico interesting to transnational capital: take Mexico’s strategic geographical location, for example. The Mexico-US border spans nearly 2,000 miles, a line that runs from Pacific to Atlantic, from Tijuana–San Diego to Juarez–El Paso and Brownsville–Matamoros. Along some stretches, the border is fenced, in other places the unforgiving desert polices it.[29] The US border with Mexico can and should be considered a valuable economic resource; low-cost labor on the south side of the border, within spitting distance of the United States, is a winning combination as transportation costs are also reduced. As such, Mexico is becoming an increasingly significant player in US and global