dawn 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.

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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.

The crisis over these disappearances in the past 12 years is perhaps the deepest wound in this battered country inherited by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly known as AMLO. In his inaugural speech on December 1, López Obrador mentioned the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college in the state of Guerrero who have been missing since September 2014. On his first working day as president, he issued a decree authorizing resources for a new investigation into their disappearance.

But beyond the 43 young men, López Obrador has said little about the tens of thousands of other desaparecidos. He campaigned on a promise of “hugs, not bullets,” and his security plan states that his administration will implement a “paradigm of public security that is radically different from that which has been applied in previous sexenios,” or six-year presidential terms.

Published Januaey 10, 2019: https://www.thenation.com/article/mexico-drug-war-killings-lopez-obrador/

Co-written with Laura Weiss.

Sisterhood, friendship, and love motivate us to come together and to gather strength so that we can live and rebel against the rot of capital, patriarchy, and nationalism. Women, understood as those who self- identify as such, stand for life in the broadest sense, for human and more-than-human life, for rivers and forests, for clean water and air. We stand shoulder to shoulder in defense of our ability to make choices about our own lives: from our right to choose to become partners or mothers, to our right to exist-in-movement.

The resolve of the searchers, most of them mothers whose children were disappeared in the context of the war on drugs, brings them out every Saturday in scorching temperatures to walk long distances, dropping to their hands and knees to comb the dry, dusty soil. After hours of searching and filtering earth through homemade screens, Grupo VIDA sometimes ends up with thousands of bone fragments to hand off to authorities for DNA testing.

“We don’t have a global, real number, because as you’ve seen, week to week there’s more and more bones,” said Silvia Ortiz, the leader of Grupo VIDA, in an interview in her living room in central Torreón last year. Behind her hung a faded school portrait of her daughter Silvia Stephanie Sánchez Viesca Ortiz, who was disappeared on November 5, 2004 a few blocks from the family’s home.

The War of Drugs was always far more about advancing capitalism than battling narcotics. Unsurprisingly, civilians have borne the brunt of the conflict, but its reach extends into all facets of life and politics in the region, as NACLA has long documented.

This chapter takes a long view of the overlapping crises of economic and coercive violence in Central America, which have been activated through colonization, nation-state formation, and the wars of the twentieth century. A historical panorama helps establish a baseline of understanding that allows us to better interpret present- day events in the region. Such an approach avoids falling into a shallow and self- serving reading of the current crisis that would suggest that the reasons for mass out-migration are based on local mismanagement of politics and the economy or on rumors and misinformation. Within this historical overview of events, I integrate a series of journalistic interviews carried out in Guatemala in the spring of 2016. The combination of up-to-date information from activists, lawyers, and journalists on the ground with a historical overview of Central America aims to provide readers with a nuanced examination of issues often brushed over in mainstream media and buried in difficult to access academic literature on the region.

Theoretically, this chapter shares Ana Patricia Rodríguez’s view that “the same devastating effects produced in the South by the North come to represent Central America as a natural(ized) site of decomposition and underdevelopment, which requires regeneration by outside forces. Regeneration from the North comes to Central America in the form of imperialism, (neo)colonialism and now neoliberalism” (2009: 200). Put another way, a careful, if concise, read of history in the region teaches us that often it is foreign invasion and intervention imposed under the guises of development, security, and prosperity that create the very crises they claim to be solving.

Rodríguez, A. P. (2009). Dividing the isthmus: Central American transnational histories, literatures and cultures. Austin: University of Texas Press.

This article positions the prohibition of psychoactive substances as a material means of strengthening States and State power. We argue that the militarized enforcement of prohibition has known outcomes beyond the control of substances, including the creation of cash economies that, firstly, support the smooth flowing of modern global capitalism, and secondly, finance US allied (reactionary) armed groups internationally. Various national contexts are considered , with a special focus on how these trends are developing in the ongoing " war on drugs " in Mexico.

Resumen: En este artículo se postula la prohibición de las sustancias psico-activas como un medio material para fortalecer a los Estados y al poder estatal. Sugerimos entonces que la aplicación militarizada de la prohibición ha tenido resultados más allá del control de las sustancias, incluyendo la creación de economías en efectivo que, en primer lugar, apoyan la fluidez del capitalismo global moderno y, en segundo lugar, financian a los grupos armados aliados (re-accionarios) de los Estados Unidos a nivel internacional. Se consideran diversos contextos nacionales, con especial énfasis en cómo se desarrollan estas tendencias en la guerra contra el narcotráfico en curso en México.

Este texto representa un intento por dar otro significado a la violencia y el terror vividos en México bajo el discurso del combate al narcotrafico. En este sentido, argumenta que no estamos viviendo una guerra contra las drogas sino una guerra contra el pueblo. Una guerra de contrainsurgencia ampliada que ataca, masacra y desaparece a los pueblos que viven de acuerdo a pautas comunitario-populares, intentando despojarlos así de su capacidad de reproducir la vida, de producir lo comun, y reduciendo sus posibilidades de resistir y de existir mas alládel capitalismo. Sostengo que la contrainsurgencia ampliada ejercida en México durante los ultimos 10 años constituye una evolucion de la guerra contrainsurgente, por la forma descentralizada de la violencia y por la expansion de la categoría insurgente hacia grupos sociales que constituyen lo popular en las zonas militarizadas.

 The plight of the 43 missing students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School has captured the world’s attention, with high-level investigations and ongoing public demonstrations demanding their return alive. The Mexican government continues to say the students were killed and their bodies burned in a garbage dump near Iguala, a claim thoroughly discredited by international experts. To this day, there is no convincing explanation of where the 43 students might have been taken after they were disappeared. This has translated into a serious crisis of legitimacy for all levels of government in Mexico. During this national institutional crisis, the work of self-trained searchers has quietly proliferated throughout the country. Their work is a response to the spectacular violence that has accompanied the US-backed war on drugs in Mexico.

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 mechanism 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 economy.

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 organizando 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 promover 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 prisiones, 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.

Wolfe situates his work at the crossroads of postrevolutionary state formation and environmental history in Mexico, both areas which he notes are “largely overlooked.” In 1936, La Laguna was home to the largest and most important process of agrarian reform in Mexico, which was the result of “two decades’ worth of mass-mobilization and unionization of campesinos and workers,” though it is often misattributed to the generosity of President Lázaro Cárdenas. “The reparto de tierras (distribution of the land) was fast and relatively easy. The reparto de aguas (distribution of the water) for this new land regime proved to be a far greater technical challenge that was never fully overcome,” writes Wolfe.

Como recién dijo la Dra. Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar en una conferencia en la FLACSO, “es hora de atrevernos a pensar, a investigar y elaborar una explicación de lo que se nos presenta como opaco y confuso”. Cada vez queda más clara la necesidad de enfrentar la confusión sembrada por el Estado con investigación seria. Sí, con datos, pero también con las voces de la propia gente afectada por la violencia y el terror. Mientras pueden ser de interés teórico conceptos como los que propone Las Nuevas Formas de la Guerra y el Cuerpo de la Mujer, cualquier consideración de la violencia como algo simbólica, sin relacionarla con los flujos del capital, nos aleja de una lectura más comprensiva e iluminadora de los problemas del presente.

The 2015 release of the Netflix series Narcos and the feature crime thriller Sicario brought the war on drugs onto screens across the US. Both of these productions tell the story of the drug war from the perspective of US police. Narcos is narrated from the perspective of a DEA Agent in Colombia who doesn't speak Spanish. Sicario is narrated primarily through the experience of FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), the only woman agent in the film. Sicario, which was released in October 2015, opens with an FBI raid on a house in Chandler, a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona.

A lo largo de los capítulos que componen este segundo volumen del tenaz trabajo de Dawn Marie Paley encontraremos un relato tenso y un argumento claro: ¿por qué algunas ideas que heredamos del período de la Guerra Fría en torno a lo que significa un conflicto bélico ya no son pertinentes y, más bien, obstaculizan la comprensión del curso de la Guerra Neoliberal en curso? ¿Por qué requerimos ampliar la idea de insurgencia desatándola de anacrónicos cánones políticos, si nos proponemos comprender lo que hoy ocurre? ¿Cómo opera en estos tiempos el infame dispositivo de la desaparación que se  extiende mucho más allá de vidas humanas destrozadas, agigantándose hacia regiones enteras? ¿Cómo se hilvana todo esto con la historia anterior de las regiones de México y de la República toda?
Fragmentos de sentido tejidos y ordenados a modo de un cuerpo hallado que poco a poco recupera su forma. La autora nos confronta con lo que en ocasiones preferimos ni siquiera mirar para alejarnos del dolor y la zozobra; lo hace, sin embargo, desde una lúcida e inmensa sensibilidad que nos permite reflejarnos en sus propias inquietudes.

Por eso este trabajo es tan valioso y tan valiente. Porque persevera en reunir pedazos de la sinrazon que habitamos para entenderla y, así quizá, detenerla y subvertirla.

Raquel Gutiérrez

Co-authored with Simon Granovsky-Larsen.

Official stories from media centers in New York and Mexico City say that most violence in Latin America is a product of the drug trade. Organized Violence exposes how that narrative serves corporate and state interests and de-politicizes situations that have more to do with coal, oil, or rare wood extraction than with cocaine. Global capital and violence reinforce conditions that fortify the current economic order, and whether it be the military, police, or death squads that pull the trigger, economic expansion benefits from the violent elimination of the opposition, who are most often dispossessed and precarious communities.

Capitalismo antidrogas surge de un deseo de considerar motivaciones y factores alternativos para la guerra antidrogas, específicamente la expansión capitalista hacia territorios y espacios sociales nuevos o previamente inaccesibles. Además de enriquecer a los bancos estadounidenses, financiar campañas políticas, y alimentar un redituable comercio de armas, la imposición de políticas antidrogas puede beneficiar a empresas petroleras, gaseras y mineras trasnacionales, así como a otras grandes corporaciones. Hay también otros sectores beneficiados por la violencia: las industrias maquiladoras y las redes de transporte, así como un segmento del sector comercial y de venta al menudeo representado por empresas como Walmart, e intereses en bienes raíces en México y Estados Unidos. La guerra antidrogas es un remedio a largo plazo para los achaques del capitalismo, que combina legislación y terror en una experimentada mezcla neoliberal para infiltrarse en sociedades y territorios antes no disponibles para el capitalismo globalizado.

Drug wars are good business.

Though pillage, profit, and plunder have been a mainstay of war since precolonial times, there is little contemporary focus on the role of finance and economics in today’s “Drug Wars”—despite the fact that they boost US banks and fill prisons with poor people. They feed political campaigns, increase the arms trade, and function as long-term fixes to capitalism’s woes, cracking open new territories to privatization and foreign direct investment.

Combining on-the-ground reporting with extensive research, Dawn Paley moves beyond the usual horror stories, beyond journalistic rubbernecking and hand-wringing, to follow the thread of the Drug War story throughout the entire region of Latin America and all the way back to US boardrooms and political offices. This unprecedented book chronicles how terror is used against the population at large in cities and rural areas, generating panic and facilitating policy changes that benefit the international private sector, particularly extractive industries like petroleum and mining. This is what is really going on. This is drug war capitalism.