Drug War as Neoliberal Trojan Horse

Published date01 September 2015
Date01 September 2015
DOI10.1177/0094582X15585117
Subject MatterArticles
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 204, Vol. 42 No. 5, September 2015, 109–132
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X15585117
© 2015 Latin American Perspectives
109
Drug War as Neoliberal Trojan Horse
by
Dawn Paley
Examination of the U.S.-backed wars on drugs in Colombia and Mexico reveals that,
apart from the hegemonic discourse about narcotics control, these wars reinforce the power
of transnational corporations over resource-rich areas owned and used by indigenous
people, peasants, and the urban poor. Case studies in Mexico demonstrate that recent
assassinations of activists and intimidation of communities that are organizing against
large-scale mining must be understood within the framework of militarization justified in
terms of an antinarcotics discourse. Drug war politics may thus be understood as a mech-
anism for promoting business-friendly policies and militarizing resource-rich areas. This
politics is enshrined in the Mérida Initiative, which includes a national U.S.- style legal
reform, modernization of the prison system, and the militarization and training of the
federal police and other security forces, equipment transfers, and development funding
designed to encourage foreign investment and further transnationalize the national econ-
omy.
El examen de la guerra contra las drogas financiada por los Estados Unidos en Colombia
y México revela que, aparte del discurso hegemónico sobre el control de narcóticos, estas
guerras refuerzan el poder de las corporaciones transnacionales sobre las áreas ricas en
recursos que pertenecen y son utilizadas por las comunidades indígenas, los campesinos y
los pobres de las zonas urbanas. Los estudios de casos en México demuestran que los re-
cientes asesinatos de activistas y la intimidación de las comunidades que se están organi-
zando en contra de la minería a gran escala deben ser entendidas dentro del marco de la
militarización justificada en términos de un discurso antinarcótico. La política de la
guerra contra las drogas puede, por lo tanto, entenderse como un mecanismo para pro-
mover políticas favorables a los negocios y la militarización de las áreas ricas en recursos.
Esta política está consagrada en la Iniciativa de Mérida, la cual incluye una reforma
jurídica nacional al estilo de los Estados Unidos, la modernización del sistema de prisio-
nes, la militarización y entrenamiento de la policía federal y otras fuerzas de seguridad, la
transferencia de equipos y fondos para desarrollar políticas que promuevan la inversión
extranjera y así transnacionalizar más la economía nacional.
Keywords: Drug war, Natural resources, Displacement, Neoliberalism, Mexico
On October 22, 2012, Ismael Solorio Urrutia and his wife, Manuela Solís
Contreras, were shot point-blank outside of the city of Cuauhtémoc, in the
northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. Solorio was one of the highest-profile
opponents of a mining exploration project under way in his ejido, and he had
Dawn Paley is the author of Drug War Capitalism (2014) and a doctoral student at the Benemérita
Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. Some sections of this essay draw on previous reporting she
has done for The Dominion, Against the Current, the Nation, and Upside Down World.
585117LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X15585117LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVESPaley / DRUG WAR AS NEOLIBERAL TROJAN HORSE
research-article2015
110 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
formally denounced an attack on him by men from his community who sup-
ported the mining project (Amnesty International, 2012). Some of these men
were believed to be low-ranking members of the Juárez cartel, an organized
crime group thought to be active in the region. According to Martín Solís
Bustamante, the decision to kill Ismael “wasn’t a decision made by the bosses
of the drug cartels; rather, it was a local decision by low-level operatives of
organized crime. They were the ones who made the decision together with
[employees of] the mining company” (quoted Paley, 2013a). Solorio and Solís
Bustamante were members of El Barzón, a farmer’s rights group active in
Chihuahua and other northern states that had carried out early debtors’ pro-
tests and actions against devaluation and the lack of agricultural subsidies in
Mexico’s countryside. The double murder of mine opponents in Chihuahua
represented the first killings of locals resisting transnational mining in the state.
(Activists resisting mining had previously been murdered in Oaxaca in March
2012 and in Chiapas in November 2010.)
According to the Servicio Mexicano de Geología (Mexican Geological
Service—SMG), in 2010 Chihuahua was the second-most-important state in the
country in the production of gold, silver, lead, and zinc (SMG, 2011). More than
half of the land in Chihuahua, the largest state in Mexico and almost the size of
Texas, has been distributed in mining concessions (SMG, 2011). The volume of
precious metals mined has increased since 2006, with silver extraction almost
doubling between 2006 and 2010 (SMG, 2011).
Since 2008, Chihuahua has also become one of the most violent states in
Mexico. There were 2,601 homicides in 2008, 3,671 in 2009, 6,407 in 2010, and
4,500 in 2011 (INEGI, 2011). The spike in homicides coincided with the milita-
rization of the state, particularly the border area around Ciudad Juárez, in 2008,
beginning with Operativo Conjunto Chihuahua, a joint police and army
deployment meant to deter organized crime and drug trafficking. In the 10
years preceding the militarization of the region, the murder rate in the state had
averaged 586 a year and never gone over 648 (INEGI, 2011).
The murders of Solorio and Solís took place in a context of extreme violence
against civilians and in a state with a strong prior history of attacks against
activists. Instead of calling for a proper investigation and denouncing the mur-
der of the highest-profile community opponent of its Cinco de Mayo explora-
tion project in Chihuahua, Dan MacInnis, president and CEO of MAG Silver,
chalked the killings up to the government’s fight against organized crime. “It
was kind of an odd situation considering that 60,000 to 100,000 people have
been killed in Mexico in the last six years by organized crime in the so-called
drug war,” MacInnis told a Canadian journalist (Munson, 2013). “And rather
than the obvious being reported, it was everything but that was being reported.”
Asked for a clarification of this statement, MacInnis (personal communication)
responded that what was puzzling was the “assumptions about the involve-
ment of mining companies, utility companies, or farmers.”
The company position that it has become normal for civilians to be killed in
Mexico reflects a generalized pattern in which the drug war launched by
President Felipe Calderón “created a climate of such overwhelming violence and
impunity that assassinations of political opponents—indigenous rights leaders,
human rights advocates, anti-mining activists, guerrilla insurgents—are quickly

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