The Drug War in Latin America

Hegemony and Global Capitalism

William Avilés

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781032178936
• eBook ISBN: 9781315456676
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since the mid-1980s subsequent US governments have promoted a highly militarized and prohibitionist drug control approach in Latin America. Despite this strategy the region has seen increasing levels of homicide, displacement and violence.

Why did the militarization of U.S. drug war policies in Latin America begin and why has it continued despite its inability to achieve the stated targets? Are such policies simply intended to impose U.S. power or have elites in Latin America internalized this agenda as their own? Why did resistance to this approach emerge in the late-2000s and does this represent a challenge to the prohibitionist agenda?

In this book William Avilés argues that if we are to understand and explain the militarization of the drug war in Latin America a 'transnational grand strategy', developed and implemented by networks of elites and state managers operating in a neoliberal, globalized social structure of accumulation, must be considered and examined.

1Global capitalism, transnational relations, and U.S. foreign policy

The behavior of states domestically and internationally is intricately tied to the revolutionary transformation of our political economy that is associated with globalization. Globalization represents a new stage in the evolution of world capitalism, one that has involved the growth in the economic power and size of transnational corporations, the expansion of free trade and foreign direct investment and the decentralized nature of capitalist production on a world wide scale. The debt crisis and the collapse of foreign credit for much of Latin America in the 1980s led to the region seeking assistance from the United States, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank in the hopes of re- linking their economies to international credit and foreign direct investment. Structural adjustment programs were usually the conditions of such loans, representing the heart of transnational capital’s agenda, one that saw in the debt crisis an opportunity to pry open the relatively statist and protectionist economies of Latin America. Within the region the spread and deepening of capitalist globalization has contributed to the region’s democratization and created a structural impediment to an authoritarian return. The “straight- jacket” of capitalist globalization has narrowed the range of policy options available to governments, with deviations from market oriented prescriptions being punished by the decline in international credit and overall capital flight as statist policies threaten to trigger the automatic punishment associated with declines in business confidence (Friedman 1999; Lindblom 1982; Gill and Law 1993).

William Robinson submits that transnational capital has obtained leading economic positions within different states around the world and it “… operates through dense networks, national and supranational institutions that in analytical abstraction can be conceived as transnational state apparatuses …” (2014, 150).¹ The transnational state represents an array of institutions, including national states captured by transnational elites, and global institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank that are pursuing policies guided by the needs of transnational corporations and the stability of global capitalism. In an era in which changes in the international economy have prioritized neoliberal economic solutions as the key to economic growth, these governments have increasingly been led by those actors who demonstrate their integration (intellectually and politically) with this changing social order.

Politically, the transnational capitalist class requires that states: “(1) adopt fiscal and monetary policies which assure macroeconomic stability (2) provide the basic infrastructure necessary for the global economic activity …, and (3) provide social order, that is, stability, which requires sustaining instruments of direct coercion and ideological apparatuses” (Robinson 1996, 36). Different drug policy initiatives from the U.S. state and/or Latin American states have largely stressed the contribution of these policies to achieving the third objective, but often with the explicit understanding that expanded foreign direct investment, trade liberalization as well as the suppression of anti- capitalist movements will be associated with coca eradication in Peru or the elimination of “kingpins” in Mexico. They have also cited the need to fight the drug war as intimately connected to protecting democracy in the region.

The region- wide dissemination of neoliberal economic policies important to economic globalization not only coincided with the intensification of U.S. drug war policies, but also a shift from authoritarian systems of control to formally democratic ones. The period of democratization and transition that Latin American societies experienced throughout the 1980s removed a variety of authoritarian/repressive regimes from power. These authoritarian regimes had worked to remove societal challenges to the progressive development and expansion of capitalist relations by eliminating trade unionists, Communists and/or peasant organizers. However, after increasingly radical challenges to military rule in the 1970 and 1980s, U.S. policymakers and elites within Latin America increasingly viewed authoritarian regimes as potentially engendering revolutionary movements seeking more fundamental change to the prevailing market- based system (Robinson 1996). Over the last three decades the United States has regularly linked various foreign policies with the establishment/defense of low- intensity or market democracies. This has included the struggle against the illegal drug trade, which has been presented as a threat to democracy in the region. For example, both the Reagan and Bush administrations stressed the need for greater military and police aid to Latin America in the 1980s as in part to protect “democracies in jeopardy” due to the threat of “narco- terrorism” and drug trafficking (Johns 1992, 131).

The type of democracy protected in the war on drugs is low- intensity democracy. Low- intensity democracies are largely procedural democracies that allow political opposition, greater individual freedoms, a reduced institutional role for the armed forces, and a more permeable environment for the investments of transnational capital. This type of “democracy” is viewed favorably by transnational corporations, the U.S. government, and international financial institutions for its ability to co- opt radical movements that challenge the dominant political and/or socioeconomic order, effectively obtaining the public’s consent for capitalist globalization (Robinson 2000). Gills and Rocamora argue that this democratic model should be viewed “… as an integral aspect of the economic and ideological restructuring accompanying a new stage of globalisation in the capitalist world economy,” a regime in which civilian- based regimes are prioritized over military ones (Gills and Rocamora 1992, 502). Military rule was viewed (and is viewed) as problematic in maintaining stability within specific nation- states, while liberal civilian rule is to be prioritized given its ability to more effectively co- opt radical opposition while more efficiently adapting to a more globalized environment.

However, the military, other state security forces and paramilitary organizations remain politically important in the maintenance of domestic order and the prevention of radical efforts to extend democracy beyond the formal political process and/or replace capitalist globalization with other models of economic development. This relationship with Latin American militaries fundamentally works to provide “stability,” which is helpful for “… oil companies seeking to pump Venezuela’s crude, for clothing chains seeking cheap Central American labor and for Pentagon officers trying to enforce American drug policy … the problem, though, is when stability becomes stasis and it merely preserves the old economic and political order” (Weiner 2001). So the promotion of “low- intensity democracy” or “polyarchy” is a conditional promotion that is “… compatible with, and in fact regularly includes, the promotion of repression” (Robinson 2000, 47).

Prohibitionist drug control policies create important justifications for the maintenance and strengthening of an internal role for coercive sectors in Latin America. The armed forces and police have periodically utilized their drug war budgets and personnel to attack groups seeking to challenge the continuation of capitalist globalization whether it has been the assassinations of trade unionists by military/paramilitary forces in Colombia and Peru or the attacks upon Zapatista communities in Mexico under the pretense of counternarcotics missions. Furthermore, drug war policies have allowed for the continuation and deepening of transnational military/law enforcement relations and cooperation across borders that existed during the Cold War period, with drug war policymaking remaining largely in the hands of those actors committed to capitalist globalization and seeking to ensure that any drug war policy remain consistent with facilitating the expansion of this process. This facilitation takes place through transnational networks between the U.S. and less powerful states such as Bolivia, Mexico or Colombia. Members of transnational capital, a transnational elite, and an emerging transnational state are all relevant to the development and implementation of U.S. drug war policies in Latin America, which represent important elements of a larger transnational grand strategy. This is in line with the expectations of global capitalism theory.

Globalization and U.S. foreign policy

U.S. state behavior has long been considered central to this process given its unsurpassed military and economic power in the decades following World War II and the early preeminence of transnational capital and elites in influencing its foreign policy. The relationship of the U.S. state to our understanding of global power has been the subject of extensive debates about the existence of a “New Imperialism” (Harvey 2003) and/or an “Empire of Capital” (Wood 2003) being led by an “American Empire” (Panitch and Gindin 2012). In these works, economic globalization and neoliberalism are processes being promoted by the U.S. state and/or U.S. capital for the economic/geopolitical interests of a U.S. state- capital alliance. This is in contrast with the work of William Robinson who views national states as being integrated into a larger transnational state with U.S. state behavior being guided by the interests of transnational capital. I find much of this debate to be overly polarizing as much overlap exists between the global capitalist thesis of Robinson and much of the “new imperialism” works. For example, Robinson explicitly views the U.S. state as a “… point of condensation for pressures from [globally] dominant groups to resolve the problems of global capitalism and for pressures to secure the legitimacy of the system overall” and that “the empire of [global]capital is headquartered in Washington” (2005, 11; emphasis Robinson). He has even stressed the degree that global elites have uneven access to the U.S. state, with the “U.S. contingent” of that elite with greater influence over its behavior (2014, 122). Critics of Robinson’s work typically ignore the centrality he places upon the U.S. state in creating the conditions necessary for transnational capital, even suggesting that he ignores the continuing importance of national states in this process. However, he argues that

To say that globalization involves the supersession of the nation- state as an organizing principle of capitalist development does not mean the end of the nation- state or that the state is now irrelevant. What it does mean is that we need to return to an understanding of the nation- state as a historical rather than an immanent category, an institution that came about as a result of the particular form in which capitalism as an historical system developed.

(2014, 10)

In a similar fashion Van Apeldoorn and de Graaf, who reject the thesis of a “transnational state,” have stressed the importance of U.S. grand strategy, specifically the long- term strategy of “Open Door” imperialism as being fundamental to foreign policymaking in Democratic and Republican administrations, especially since the end of the Cold War (Van Apeldoorn and de Graaf 2012). Coined by the historian William Appleman Williams, “open- door diplomacy” argues that a central component of U.S. grand strategy is dedicated to ensuring that foreign markets were equally open to the exports and investments from all countries in the world. This is in line with the notion of a “hegemonic power” within world- systems analysis, which stresses that this power “… has a built- in incentive to force other nations to abandon their national capitalism and economic controls and to accept a world of free trade, free capital flows, and free currency convertibility” given that the economic power of elites based within their state are in the best position to take advantage of such an open trading system (McCormick 1995, 5). The U.S. sought (and seeks) to create an international system that is economically open and subscribes to U.S. liberal values and institutions (Layne 2006, 30). Others have stressed the long continuity in U.S. foreign policy (Stokes 2003; Chomsky 1993) before, during and after the Cold War in which the U.S. sought to establish and maintain a distribution of economic and political resources that disproportionately benefitted the U.S. George Kennan, a central architect of U.S. Cold War policy wrote in the secret Policy Planning Study for the State Department in 1948 regarding U.S. foreign policy in East Asia that:

we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population.… In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.… We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction …

(Kennan 1948)

The history of U.S. intervention in Latin America during the Cold War reflects efforts to maintain this inequality as between 1948 and 1990 the U.S. facilitated the overthrow of at least twenty- four governments, while backing military and authoritarian regimes throughout the Western Hemisphere. In an era of capitalist globalization these interventions increasingly take on a transnational character as the use of U.S. power in no way guarantees exclusive influence by “U.S.” corporations.

In fact, Van Apeldoorn and de Graff emphasizes U.S. grand strategy’s importance to the “… most transnationally oriented sections of U.S. capital” (van Apeldoorn and de Graaff 2014, 29), yet the “open door” grand strategy simultaneously benefits transnational corporations based throughout the world— as territory is not reserved solely for the benefit of U.S. economic interests. One could reasonably argue that during earlier periods of this Grand Strategy (late nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth) that primary beneficiaries were U.S. based capital (multiple U.S. invasions in Latin America during this period were largely driven solely by the needs of U.S. capital), but by the 1980s this strategy clearly benefitted transnational capital as a whole. Similarly, Panitch and Gindin conclude that the U.S. state

in the very process of supporting the export of capital and the expansion of multinational corporations, increasingly took responsibility [especially after World War II] for creating the political and juridical conditions for the general extension and reproduction of capitalism internationally.

(2012, 6 emphasis mine)

Finally, Doug Stokes argues for a “dual- logic” explanation for U.S. foreign policy, insisting that U.S. policymakers have often pursued global policies driven by both the needs of U.S. based economic interests and capital from around the world (Stokes 2005).²

Ultimately, based on the empirical evidence it might make more sense to revise the original “open- door” thesis to take account of the extent that the “U.S.” foreign policy establishment is increasingly advancing the interests of global capitalism and transnational corporations.

Globalization and crime

Global capitalism and neoliberalism have not only been viewed as central to understanding the emergence and consolidation of low- intensity democracies and integral to U.S. foreign pol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 Global capitalism, transnational relations, and U.S. foreign policy
• 2 Capitalist globalization, prohibition, and the U.S. drug war
• 3 Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative—waging war to advance capitalist globalization
• 4 Social conflict, coca eradication, and the transnational elite in Bolivia and Peru
• 5 Transnational advocacy networks and the drug war
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index