drug war capitalism drug war capitalism

288 Pages·2015·0.79 MB·Spanish

drug war capitalism
drug war capitalism

drug war capitalism
by
dawn paley
Drug War Capitalism
© 2014 Dawn Paley
Foreword © 2014 Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera
This edition © 2014 AK Press (Oakland, Edinburgh, Baltimore).
ISBN: 978-1-84935-193-5 | eBook ISBN: 978-1-84935-188-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014940826
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Cover design by John Yates | stealworks.com
Index by Chris Dodge
Printed in the USA on acid-free paper
This book is dedicated to the memory of independent photog-
rapher and journalist Ali Mustafa, 1984–2014. His bravery,
fighting spirit, and commitment live on in our hearts, in our
work, and in our words.
Días antes de terminar este libro recibimos las primeras noticias
de los 43 normalistas de Ayotzinapa desaparecidos en Iguala,
Guerrero, el 27 de septiembre de 2014. Sus nombres aquí apare-
cen, con la firme esperanza de que sean encontrados con vida y
con la profunda rabia e indignación por lo que les haya sucedi-
do, ¡los tenemos presentes!: Abel García Hernández, Abelardo
Vázquez Peniten, Adán Abrajan de la Cruz, Alexander Mora
Venancio, Antonio Santana Maestro, Benjamín Ascencio Bau-
tista, Bernardo Flores Alcaraz, Carlos Iván Ramírez Villarreal,
Carlos Lorenzo Hernández Muñoz, César Manuel González
Hernández, Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre, Christian
Tomas Colon Garnica, Cutberto Ortiz Ramos, Dorian González
Parral, Emiliano Alen Gaspar de la Cruz, Everardo Rodríguez
Bello, Felipe Arnulfo Rosas, Giovanni Galindes Guerrero, Israel
Caballero Sánchez, Israel Jacinto Lugardo, Jesús Jovany Rodrí-
guez Tlatempa, Jonas Trujillo González, Jorge Álvarez Nava,
Jorge Aníbal Cruz Mendoza, Jorge Antonio Tizapa Legideño,
Jorge Luis González Parral, José Ángel Campos Cantor, José
Ángel Navarrete González, José Eduardo Bartolo Tlatempa,
José Luis Luna Torres, Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz, Julio
César López Patolzin, Leonel Castro Abarca, Luis Ángel Abarca
Carrillo, Luis Ángel Francisco Arzola, Magdaleno Rubén Lauro
Villegas, Marcial Pablo Baranda, Marco Antonio Gómez Moli-
na, Martín Getsemany Sánchez García, Mauricio Ortega Vale-
rio, Miguel Ángel Hernández Martínez, Miguel Ángel Mendoza
Zacarías, Saúl Bruno García.

Contents
Foreword, by Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera .......................1
chapter 1:
Drug War Capitalism .......................................................11
chapter 2:
Defining the Drug War .....................................................39
chapter 3:
A Look South to Colombia ..............................................53
chapter 4:
Mexico’s Drug War Reforms ...........................................83
chapter 5:
Plan Mexico and Militarization .......................................109
chapter 6:
Mexico, Paramilitarization & the Drug War ....................139
chapter 7:
Drug War Capitalism in Guatemala .................................169
chapter 8:
Drug War Capitalism in Honduras ..................................193
conclusion
Thinking Through Peace in Wartime ...............................219
Acknowledgments ...........................................................225
Notes ...............................................................................229
Index ...............................................................................265

Foreword
Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera
“To get rich, one must have but a single idea, one fixed, hard,
immutable thought: the desire to make a heap of gold. And in
order to increase this heap of gold, one must be inflexible, a
usurer, thief, extortionist, and murderer! And one must espe-
cially mistreat the small and the weak! And when this moun-
tain of gold has been amassed, one can climb up on it, and
from up on the summit, a smile on one’s lips, one can con-
template the valley of poor wretches that one has created.”
—Petrus Borel, Champavert, Immoral Tales
Capitalism is defined as a socioeconomic system based on private
ownership of the means of production and the exploitation of the la-
bor force. According to Karl Marx, the capitalist mode of production
“rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the
hands of non-workers in the form of property in capital and land, while
the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production,
of labor power.”1 This is the system that rules most parts of our world
today; and it is a system based on the accumulation of wealth/capital
and exploitation of labor and natural resources by small elites—mainly
transnational businesses. With these ideas in mind and with an aim of
explaining the violent socioeconomic and political reality of Colom-
bia, Mexico, and Central America today, Dawn Paley wrote Drug War
Capitalism. Paley is one of the best and most serious journalists I have
encountered in my own journey to understand the massive crisis these
societies have undergone in recent times, and Drug War Capitalism is
the best book I have recently read on this subject, by far.
I was born in Mexico in 1975, and witnessed the end of the Cold
War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, which allegedly meant the triumph
drug war capitalism
of capitalism over what was called at that time communism. I studied
economics in the 1990s, during the Third Wave of democratization
in the post–Cold War world, when scholars Samuel Huntington and
Francis Fukuyama suggested that ideologies had come to an end, and
that capitalism had won the ideological battle forever. For Fukuyama
we were living the “end of history.” As an undergraduate student of
economics at a private university in Mexico City, I was trained in the
tradition of neoclassical economics. I became familiar with the ideas of
Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, and
Adam Smith, who are associated—by themselves or by others—with
the ideology of capitalism. I was a student when the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed; at school I was taught
about the supposed benefits of economic liberalization, the compara-
tive advantage, free markets, deregulation, and privatization; in other
words, the benefits of capitalism. I began to understand the limita-
tions of this socioeconomic system and structural economic reforms
during Mexico’s economic and devaluation crisis in 1994–1995, and
the Zapatista uprising.
I worked for the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Agri-
culture in Mexico and was present during the 2000 elections, when
Vicente Fox became president of the country, after more than seven-
ty years of one-party rule. I witnessed months of great expectations
and enthusiasm by Mexican society, in the streets, in the universities,
and elsewhere. Democracy amounted to a big promise in a still very
unequal nation. But poverty and inequality, at that particular mo-
ment, did not seem to matter for many, who thought that the prob-
lems of our country would be solved through free and fair elections
and the consolidation of democratic institutions. For many optimistic
citizens, the new Mexican democracy and President Fox—a former
employee of a transnational company (Coca Cola-México), a tall and
unintelligent man who wore cowboy boots and ran a very successful
presidential campaign—would save Mexico and bring prosperity and
stability to our nation after serious economic and political crises in
the 1980s and 1990s.
In August of 2000, I left my country to study for a PhD in political
science at the New School for Social Research in New York City. It was
there, at a progressive school in the United States, that I learned the
basics of Marxism and understood the key limitations of capitalism
in extremely unequal nations. During the years I spent in New York,
I studied the contemporary political history of most Latin American
2