Cold War, Neoliberal War, and Disappearance: Observations from Mexico

• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20975001
• Author: Dawn Marie Paley
• Date: 01 January 2021
• Published date: 01 January 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X20975001

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 236, Vol. 48 No. 1, January 2021, 145–162

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20975001

© 2020 Latin American Perspectives

145

Cold War, Neoliberal War, and Disappearance

Observations from Mexico

by

Dawn Marie Paley

A comparison of Cold War disappearance drawing examples from conflicts in the last

half of the twentieth century in the Southern Cone, Colombia, and Central America with

the instances of violence during the subsequent period of consolidation of neoliberalism

distinguishes the latter as neoliberal war, operating discursively through a state-promoted

linkage of victims and perpetrators to delinquency and organized crime. Examination of

neoliberal disappearance in the Mexican state of Coahuila leads to a proposal to consider

it as connected not only to the establishment but also to the ongoing maintenance of neo-

liberal capitalism.

Una comparación de la desaparición de la Guerra Fría (con ejemplos de conflictos en la

última mitad del siglo XX en el Cono Sur, Colombia y Centroamérica) y los casos de vio-

lencia durante el período posterior de consolidación del neoliberalismo distingue a esta

última etapa como una guerra neoliberal que opera discursivamente a través de una vin-

culación, promovida por el Estado, de víctimas y perpetradores a la delincuencia y crimen

organizado. Un análisis de la desaparición neoliberal en el estado mexicano de Coahuila

nos lleva a la propuesta de considerarla como relacionada no sólo al establecimiento sino

también al mantenimiento continuo del capitalismo neoliberal.

Keywords: Disappearance, Neoliberalism, Drug war, Violence, Mexico

Although enforced disappearance in Latin America has been widely stud-

ied, the problematic notion predominates in the literature that “most of those

who have been subject to the practice of enforced disappearance have been

politically active individuals, dissidents, journalists, writers, and community

leaders—in short, those who are deemed ‘subversives’ and thus singled out for

the terrorizing violence of the state” (Bargu, 2014: 47). Reading enforced disap-

pearance through this lens traps us in Cold War logics. Not only does it fail to

account for contemporary disappearance in Mexico and elsewhere but it hin-

ders our ability to understand disappearance as a key element of the violence

deployed against urban and rural communities under the rubric of the war on

drugs in an effort to maintain the neoliberal economic order.

In the case of the selective disappearance of the Cold War, the identities of

the direct victims (those deemed subversives and activists and their networks)

Dawn Marie Paley is a journalist and the recent recipient of a Ph.D. in sociology from the

Benemérita Univeridad Autónoma de Puebla. In addition to her dissertation, published as Guerra

neoliberal: Desaparición y búsqueda en el norte de México (2020), she is the author of Drug War

Capitalism (2014).

975001LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X20975001Latin American PerspectivesPaley / Cold War, Neoliberal War, and Disappearance

research-article2020

146 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

and perpetrators (state forces and death squads) were fairly clear. Today, how-

ever, disappearance is being deployed against broad segments of the popula-

tion. The majority of direct victims of this neoliberal disappearance are young

men who are targeted on the basis of their physical locations, which are struc-

turally linked with race and class. Disappearances today are carried out by an

opaque network of state and formally nonstate actors (including drug cartels

and criminal gangs) that often operate in collusion with the state repressive

apparatus. In most cases, neoliberal disappearance does not appear to be polit-

ically motivated (as during the Cold War); it is depoliticized, and its victims are

further marginalized in the national imaginary.

In this paper, I lay out the hallmarks of Cold War disappearance, with exam-

ples from conflicts in the last half of the twentieth century in the Southern

Cone, Colombia, and Central America, and discuss the connections between

the Cold War in Latin America and the imposition of neoliberalism. I then

propose that we think through the post–Cold War conflicts, including what I

have called drug war capitalism (Paley, 2014), as part of a neoliberal war. In

doing so I suggest expanding our frame for understanding neoliberalization

beyond the focus on “political economic practices . . . liberating individual

entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework charac-

terized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” and

“neoliberalism as a discourse through which a political economic form of

power-knowledge is formed” (Harvey, 2007: 2; Springer, 2018: 621) to consider

the material and symbolic resources that have become available to states

through the war on drugs. An expanded understanding of neoliberalism

demands an analysis of military and police budgets and roles within this eco-

nomic system, and requires of how neoliberal states use the language of the

drug war to create confusion with regards to coercive violence, ascribing

blame to victims and distancing state security forces and government officials

from perpetrators.

I then move to a situated examination of neoliberal disappearance in the

Laguna region of the northern Mexican state of Coahuila, centering the experi-

ences of family members of the disappeared who have organized autono-

mously against neoliberal disappearance. In this way I counter the dominant

narrative around neoliberal war as a war about drugs and greed, arguing that

it is about social control and the maintenance of extreme inequality. I end with

a call to consider disappearance as connected to neoliberalism and thus to the

expansion of capitalism in both historical periods.

Methods

The first part of this article is based on the literature about disappearance in

English and Spanish and media coverage and reports by civil society and activ-

ist organizations dating back to the 1980s. To develop the contours of Cold War

disappearance it relies on the publicly available findings of truth commissions

in Latin America, an important source of exhaustive information on these con-

flicts. These truth commissions were sometimes state-run and sometimes coor-

dinated by nonstate organizations such as the Catholic Church in Guatemala.