tizzerz_4's review against another edition
5.0
literally obsessed with this book, best sociology book I’ve read in a while. great sources (the source section is so thick it’s a major nut), wide geographic range, good discussion of social, geopolitical, historical, etc. contexts that create violence of latin america (and of COURSE the root is global capitalism eat the rich). good mix of ethnographic and statistical research. she is also such a captivating writer too. couldn’t put it down.
daveoswald's review against another edition
4.0
(Reviewed for Briarpatch Magazine.)
Do you know the story of Mexico’s 43 missing student-teachers? Scrutinize any in-depth account, and you’ll start to question everything you thought you knew about the so-called war on drugs.
In the fall of 2014, students from the teachers’ college of Ayotzinapa in Guerrero, Mexico, commandeered buses to transport them to a protest and were attacked by police in the town of Iguala while the military stood by. Four were killed, and 43 students were never seen again.
To a weary and terrorized body politic, news of the attack came like a shot of pure adrenaline. Citizen-led searches turned up many mass graves nearby, but none contained the remains of the students. Federal authorities, seeking to close the case in the face of widespread outrage, eventually blamed a gang-infiltrated police force, a corrupt mayor, and local gang members, but the official account was rife with inconsistencies. Some believe, with good reason, that the students met their deaths at a military base very close to the scene of the attack, their bodies incinerated in ovens there.
The official response throughout has been silence, obfuscation, and cover-up, fuelling the outrage that has filled the streets of Mexico’s major cities. The state congress building was torched, the mayor fled, the governor resigned, and week after week, hundreds of thousands marched, united by two things: a demand that the students be returned alive, and the three-word accusation, fue el estado, “it was the state” – a condemnation of the entire political edifice and its repressive apparatus.
Indeed, the unpopular government of President Enrique Peña Nieto now stands exposed as corrupt, criminally inept, and complicit in the paramilitary violence that has terrorized the country. This, at the very moment Peña Nieto was pushing through a series of neoliberal reforms sure to widen Mexico’s deep inequalities – reforms that the students of Ayotzinapa were actively protesting.
As the first gruesome reports of these attacks were surfacing, an important book by a Canadian investigative journalist was going to press that exposes the conventional narrative of the drug war as entirely inadequate for making sense of these events. Dawn Paley’s Drug War Capitalism, published last fall, argues that the real aim of the drug war in Latin America is not to stem the northward flow of drugs (which it has consistently failed to do), but to augment the northward flow of capital: opening markets, imposing pro-extraction legislation, displacing communities from resource-rich land, and decimating recalcitrant social movements through fear, forced disappearance, and extrajudicial killing.
“There are,” Paley writes, “three principal mechanisms through which the drug war advances the interests of neoliberal capitalism: through the imposition of rule of law and policy changes, through formal militarization, and through the paramilitarization that results from it.” Drawing on years of research and courageous frontline reporting, Paley details the evolution of this strategy, from its first coherent formulation in Plan Colombia in the early 2000s to the drug war that for nearly a decade has raged through Mexico, to the war’s more recent spread to Guatemala and post-2009-coup Honduras.
The picture that emerges is of an increasingly coherent neoliberal endgame, the U.S. government and local elites using the terror and impunity that result from militarized policing to advance a program of privatization, pro-corporate reform, suppression of dissent, and significantly expanded resource extraction. The manufactured “permanent shock” of drug war capitalism, Paley’s research shows, is great for business, and death for anyone who stands in its way.
Though much of Drug War Capitalism focuses on the voices of communities in resistance, Paley devotes little space to profiling groups that are consciously challenging drug war capitalism as such. According to Paley, this is because such movements do not exist: “This book may leave some readers filled with a sense of despair or hopelessness,” she observes, “but it would be dishonest to pretend that there is a unified resistance movement taking on the drug war in the hemisphere. Rather, it is from many autonomies and from many communities that the strongest challenges to capitalism are being mounted.”
Paley thus refuses to indulge North American readers’ desire for closure with false hopes of imminent change, but as her book itself makes clear, the seeds of a unified resistance movement are indeed sprouting in all four countries profiled: “As I neared completion of this book in the spring of 2014,” she writes, “I found that I was meeting more and more people who shared an analysis similar to that included within these pages.” It remains to be seen whether, or how, a systemic understanding of drug war capitalism might yet help unite these diverse “autonomies,” or what the impact might be of policy victories like Uruguay’s 2013 legalization of marijuana, or of more recent social eruptions like Ayotzinapa, but Paley’s frontline journalism-from-below is exactly what is needed to give such a nascent movement voice and form, by assisting participants in diverse struggles across the hemisphere to see themselves and one another as its protagonists.
What makes Drug War Capitalism uniquely valuable is its explicitly anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and social movement-centred formulation of the issue: identifying neoliberal capitalism as the engine of drug war policies, and strong social movements, Indigenous rights, and national self-determination as casualties. What is needed now, and where future work from Paley and others pursuing this line of analysis must surely go, is to begin to frame the resistance to drug war capitalism in the same anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and social movement-centred terms: a continental struggle against the impunity, corruption, privatization, militarization, northern domination, and accelerated resource extraction that characterize this policy aberration. Perhaps only such a unified movement is capable of forcing junkie capital off its drug war habit.
Do you know the story of Mexico’s 43 missing student-teachers? Scrutinize any in-depth account, and you’ll start to question everything you thought you knew about the so-called war on drugs.
In the fall of 2014, students from the teachers’ college of Ayotzinapa in Guerrero, Mexico, commandeered buses to transport them to a protest and were attacked by police in the town of Iguala while the military stood by. Four were killed, and 43 students were never seen again.
To a weary and terrorized body politic, news of the attack came like a shot of pure adrenaline. Citizen-led searches turned up many mass graves nearby, but none contained the remains of the students. Federal authorities, seeking to close the case in the face of widespread outrage, eventually blamed a gang-infiltrated police force, a corrupt mayor, and local gang members, but the official account was rife with inconsistencies. Some believe, with good reason, that the students met their deaths at a military base very close to the scene of the attack, their bodies incinerated in ovens there.
The official response throughout has been silence, obfuscation, and cover-up, fuelling the outrage that has filled the streets of Mexico’s major cities. The state congress building was torched, the mayor fled, the governor resigned, and week after week, hundreds of thousands marched, united by two things: a demand that the students be returned alive, and the three-word accusation, fue el estado, “it was the state” – a condemnation of the entire political edifice and its repressive apparatus.
Indeed, the unpopular government of President Enrique Peña Nieto now stands exposed as corrupt, criminally inept, and complicit in the paramilitary violence that has terrorized the country. This, at the very moment Peña Nieto was pushing through a series of neoliberal reforms sure to widen Mexico’s deep inequalities – reforms that the students of Ayotzinapa were actively protesting.
As the first gruesome reports of these attacks were surfacing, an important book by a Canadian investigative journalist was going to press that exposes the conventional narrative of the drug war as entirely inadequate for making sense of these events. Dawn Paley’s Drug War Capitalism, published last fall, argues that the real aim of the drug war in Latin America is not to stem the northward flow of drugs (which it has consistently failed to do), but to augment the northward flow of capital: opening markets, imposing pro-extraction legislation, displacing communities from resource-rich land, and decimating recalcitrant social movements through fear, forced disappearance, and extrajudicial killing.
“There are,” Paley writes, “three principal mechanisms through which the drug war advances the interests of neoliberal capitalism: through the imposition of rule of law and policy changes, through formal militarization, and through the paramilitarization that results from it.” Drawing on years of research and courageous frontline reporting, Paley details the evolution of this strategy, from its first coherent formulation in Plan Colombia in the early 2000s to the drug war that for nearly a decade has raged through Mexico, to the war’s more recent spread to Guatemala and post-2009-coup Honduras.
The picture that emerges is of an increasingly coherent neoliberal endgame, the U.S. government and local elites using the terror and impunity that result from militarized policing to advance a program of privatization, pro-corporate reform, suppression of dissent, and significantly expanded resource extraction. The manufactured “permanent shock” of drug war capitalism, Paley’s research shows, is great for business, and death for anyone who stands in its way.
Though much of Drug War Capitalism focuses on the voices of communities in resistance, Paley devotes little space to profiling groups that are consciously challenging drug war capitalism as such. According to Paley, this is because such movements do not exist: “This book may leave some readers filled with a sense of despair or hopelessness,” she observes, “but it would be dishonest to pretend that there is a unified resistance movement taking on the drug war in the hemisphere. Rather, it is from many autonomies and from many communities that the strongest challenges to capitalism are being mounted.”
Paley thus refuses to indulge North American readers’ desire for closure with false hopes of imminent change, but as her book itself makes clear, the seeds of a unified resistance movement are indeed sprouting in all four countries profiled: “As I neared completion of this book in the spring of 2014,” she writes, “I found that I was meeting more and more people who shared an analysis similar to that included within these pages.” It remains to be seen whether, or how, a systemic understanding of drug war capitalism might yet help unite these diverse “autonomies,” or what the impact might be of policy victories like Uruguay’s 2013 legalization of marijuana, or of more recent social eruptions like Ayotzinapa, but Paley’s frontline journalism-from-below is exactly what is needed to give such a nascent movement voice and form, by assisting participants in diverse struggles across the hemisphere to see themselves and one another as its protagonists.
What makes Drug War Capitalism uniquely valuable is its explicitly anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and social movement-centred formulation of the issue: identifying neoliberal capitalism as the engine of drug war policies, and strong social movements, Indigenous rights, and national self-determination as casualties. What is needed now, and where future work from Paley and others pursuing this line of analysis must surely go, is to begin to frame the resistance to drug war capitalism in the same anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and social movement-centred terms: a continental struggle against the impunity, corruption, privatization, militarization, northern domination, and accelerated resource extraction that characterize this policy aberration. Perhaps only such a unified movement is capable of forcing junkie capital off its drug war habit.
archytas's review against another edition
4.0
I picked this up on the recommendation of a friend to better understand the dynamics underpinning the horrific escalation in violence in Central America in the last two decades. Paley's analysis is a macro one: a depressing but believable tale of (state) violence begetting (paramilitary) violence and of private armies whose main mining company employers turn a blind eye to extortion and drug running on the side. Paley documents a blurring of state, corporation and gang, all underpinned by "War on Drugs" funding and arms designed and used more to protect the interests of multinationals than to limit drug running.
Paley takes both a historic and a geographic approach to this, tracking the investment of US Military funds into Mexico, Colombia and to a lesser extent Honduras and Guatemala, from the 1980s through to the early 2010s. She looks at the large scale changes in agriculture that occurred over this period - the heart of her argument for 'why' - including the shift from food-crops to cash-crops (of which illegal crops are the most lucrative) and the push away from crops altogether in resource-rich areas where mines, dams and other infrastructure is built and villages cleared out. In effect, she argues that this large scale transformation involves the destruction of the livelihoods and land ownership of millions of peasants, and is enforced through systemic, unfathomable violence.
Far from being enacted by strong state actors, she argues this violence is largely coming from a loose coalition of military, paramilitary and gangs - with individuals and arms moving between these organisations. What started as a contra movement, where training was exclusively provided by the USA Military, has grown and morphed into a much more self-sustaining system, which now includes forced land removals for the purposes of cartel military training camps, for example.
For evidence, Paley largely tracks the financial involvement of major capital in the drug trade - one of the more head-slapping examples is that of HSBC, which widened the teller windows of local banks to better accept the boxes of cash the bank laundered. She also points to detailed work by many academics showing that violence follows military deployment, rather than the other way around. Several cases are detailed in which mass killings, rapes and torture were ultimately revealed to be the work of the military directly, as well as examples of collusion between cartels and the military.
"Your blinders must be security fastened in order to miss the connection between the mass deployment of police and soldiers in order to fight against internal enemies and systematic murders among poor and marginalized populations ... Our estimates display a distinct, asymmetric pattern: when U.S. military aid increases, attacks by paramilitaries, who are known to work with the military, increase more in municipalities with bases."
The phenomenon described here, however, seems to have grown beyond the direct needs of capital. As the strength of the illegal groups grows - many towns have little law enforcement outside of the cartels - so does lucrative new income opportunities. Extortion and kidnapping are among these growth 'boom' industries, as is the domination now by cartels of the northward immigration routes.
One thing that caught my attention in all this is the increasing economic significance of undocumented migrants within the USA. The migrant kidnapping trade - in which migrants are held hostage until US-based relatives cough up a few thousand for a ransom - is entirely built on the relative economic privilege of US-based workers, and Paley mentions in passing that many Honduran villages - unable since NAFTA to sell food crops at a profit - are now entirely dependent on the income sent home from those based in the USA.
There is a lot to chew on here, most of which is still slightly fuzzy in my head. Reading in the midst of a resurgent Black Lives Matter movement, it is almost unescapable how much of this could be solved by defunding and de-escalating the conflict by cutting the arms supply. However, Paley's analysis is quite focused on Mexico and Colombia and also resides mainly at tracking money paths. I am keen to follow up with more journalistic accounts of how drug and state actors are entwined, to understand a slice of depth as well as the breadth that is presented here.
Paley takes both a historic and a geographic approach to this, tracking the investment of US Military funds into Mexico, Colombia and to a lesser extent Honduras and Guatemala, from the 1980s through to the early 2010s. She looks at the large scale changes in agriculture that occurred over this period - the heart of her argument for 'why' - including the shift from food-crops to cash-crops (of which illegal crops are the most lucrative) and the push away from crops altogether in resource-rich areas where mines, dams and other infrastructure is built and villages cleared out. In effect, she argues that this large scale transformation involves the destruction of the livelihoods and land ownership of millions of peasants, and is enforced through systemic, unfathomable violence.
Far from being enacted by strong state actors, she argues this violence is largely coming from a loose coalition of military, paramilitary and gangs - with individuals and arms moving between these organisations. What started as a contra movement, where training was exclusively provided by the USA Military, has grown and morphed into a much more self-sustaining system, which now includes forced land removals for the purposes of cartel military training camps, for example.
For evidence, Paley largely tracks the financial involvement of major capital in the drug trade - one of the more head-slapping examples is that of HSBC, which widened the teller windows of local banks to better accept the boxes of cash the bank laundered. She also points to detailed work by many academics showing that violence follows military deployment, rather than the other way around. Several cases are detailed in which mass killings, rapes and torture were ultimately revealed to be the work of the military directly, as well as examples of collusion between cartels and the military.
"Your blinders must be security fastened in order to miss the connection between the mass deployment of police and soldiers in order to fight against internal enemies and systematic murders among poor and marginalized populations ... Our estimates display a distinct, asymmetric pattern: when U.S. military aid increases, attacks by paramilitaries, who are known to work with the military, increase more in municipalities with bases."
The phenomenon described here, however, seems to have grown beyond the direct needs of capital. As the strength of the illegal groups grows - many towns have little law enforcement outside of the cartels - so does lucrative new income opportunities. Extortion and kidnapping are among these growth 'boom' industries, as is the domination now by cartels of the northward immigration routes.
One thing that caught my attention in all this is the increasing economic significance of undocumented migrants within the USA. The migrant kidnapping trade - in which migrants are held hostage until US-based relatives cough up a few thousand for a ransom - is entirely built on the relative economic privilege of US-based workers, and Paley mentions in passing that many Honduran villages - unable since NAFTA to sell food crops at a profit - are now entirely dependent on the income sent home from those based in the USA.
There is a lot to chew on here, most of which is still slightly fuzzy in my head. Reading in the midst of a resurgent Black Lives Matter movement, it is almost unescapable how much of this could be solved by defunding and de-escalating the conflict by cutting the arms supply. However, Paley's analysis is quite focused on Mexico and Colombia and also resides mainly at tracking money paths. I am keen to follow up with more journalistic accounts of how drug and state actors are entwined, to understand a slice of depth as well as the breadth that is presented here.
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