Drug War Capitalism (37 page)

Indigenous and campesino peasant movements are the most steadfast sectors of the resistance in Honduras, refusing to bow down even when faced with assassinations, threats, and incarceration. The Chicago Religious Leadership Network on Latin America released a report documenting 229 politically related murders in Honduras during Porfirio Lobo’s presidency.[64] In addition, local campesino organizations calculate that more than 3,000 peasant farmers in Honduras are facing criminal charges linked to land struggles. “After the coup d’état, the Congress and de facto government implemented a series of laws and mechanisms to persecute and criminalize the organizations and spaces that are active in territory struggles … [those] who have used blockades as an alternative in facing down large transnationals and large megaprojects,” Aurelio Molina from COPINH told a delegation of US election observers. In addition to the truckloads of soldiers traveling on rural roads and secondary highways, a striking feature of the Honduran countryside is the number of rivers and amount of freshwater in the country: according to Molina, the government of Honduras has handed out a total of 800 mining concessions and 70 dam concessions in rural areas.

One of the most watched rural battles in Honduras is taking place in the lush, forested valleys of the country’s midwest, where an Indigenous community’s fight against a dam promises to continue. “The Lenca people have taken the decision to defend the Gualcarque River against the construction of a hydroelectric project called Agua Zarca,” said Molina, who along with Cáceres and one other faced criminal charges for their efforts to support the community’s fight against the dam. Tomás García was killed and another wounded when the army opened fire on the community’s blockade in July 2013. In March 2014, García’s sister was attacked and wounded by men with machetes, as were her husband and son, who rushed to defend her. When he spoke in November 2013, Molina said he feared the worst was yet to come, saying, “There have been high-level meetings where it has been determined that after the elections they are going to remove us, dead or alive, from Río Blanco so that the hydroelectric project can be built.”

Meanwhile, in the fertile Aguán region along the country’s north coast, peasant organizations have occupied twenty-six farms on 3,000 hectares of land. The Aguán is a verdant river valley that butts up against the Caribbean Sea. In 2010, more than 2,000 peasant families began to occupy lands granted to them through a government program. By the time I visited in November 2013, 113 participants in the land occupations had been murdered. We entered La Confianza, one of the largest occupations, after a short check by community guards on a hot, humid weekday afternoon. There was a sense of tranquility in the settlement, where residents were beginning to erect concrete houses beside their original houses with roofs and walls of palm. Community members were working to organize into a cooperative to harvest the fruits of the palm plants, but all of this self-organization by marginalized peasant farmers has ruffled palm oil magnate Miguel Facussé’s feathers. The region is militarized, in part, under the pretext that the government needs to fight against drug trafficking. It is not uncommon to see civilians bearing arms in Honduras, nor is it illegal, but in the department of Colón, where the Aguán is located, a new law introduced in August of 2012 prevents the carrying of weapons—but it does not apply to police, soldiers, or private security guards. The role of private security cannot be underestimated: the United Nations Working Group on Mercenaries notes that private security guards outnumber police in Honduras five to one.

“Security forces apply the law unequally, criminalizing campesinos while providing protection to local businessmen, some reported to engage in drug trafficking,” according to a report by Rights Action, a social justice group with a long history of supporting grassroots struggles in Central America.[65] In this region, there is a blurred line between just who are the police; who are military; and who are private security guards, paramilitaries, or death squad members. One warm afternoon in La Ceiba, part of the same Atlantic region used by drug traffickers, I sat on a large couch facing the wooden desk of the second in command of the National Office of Criminal Investigation (DNIC). As Inspector Miguel Enrique Suazo complained about how his men don’t have enough vehicles or equipment to do their jobs, he shuffled the same stack of papers over and over again. Even though we both knew violence related to the drug trade had rocked the region, he casually told me that drug trafficking and violence wasn’t much of an issue. As we neared the end of our interview, he leaned forward and said, “If someone goes out drinking every day in the streets, and has a bohemian life, it’s not that nothing bad will happen to them.” His statement came across as a suggestion that it would be fine by the police if so-called bohemians were killed off on the streets. Maybe he sensed that, and he stopped for a moment before adding: “Not that I am justifying murders.”

There are also Honduran special forces, organized into the 15th Battalion and the Joint Task Force Xatruch III, some of whom have been trained by the United States, though it is Colombians who play a prominent role as trainers of private security guards and police in Honduras. “We don’t know if they just dress up in the uniforms, or if they are police, or soldiers, or criminals,” said Yoni Rivas, a leader of the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán who ran unsuccessfully with LIBRE for a Congress seat. I interviewed Rivas in a one-room cement office, the air conditioning working on full against the humid, sunbaked heat. Rivas told me that around sixty men dressed in military uniforms kidnapped one of his comrades. Later, German Alfaro Escalante, who was then the commander of Joint Task Force Xatruch III, said the kidnappers were part of a criminal group. The crossover between soldiers, police, and private security is common in this area. According to the UN Working Group on Mercenaries, the day five people were massacred at the El Tumbador farm, “Members of the 15th Battalion were seen with Orion security guards at the site and some of them reportedly took off their military uniforms and changed into Orion uniforms before the shooting began.”[66]

Along with their attacks on members of the land occupations in the Aguán, security forces are accused of participating directly in drug trafficking. Locals say the army participates in drug smuggling up the coast. “In October we were organizing a press conference, and that same day a small airplane supposedly loaded with drugs crash-landed on a clandestine air strip on one of Miguel Facussé’s properties. Then twenty-five men, dressed in military fatigues, went in five vehicles, took the drugs, and burned the airplane,” said Rivas, who himself has survived five assassination attempts. Reports of military activity in drug trafficking go back to 1978, and investigations by the DEA found army officers participating in trafficking, including in one instance moving fifty tons of cocaine during a fifteen-month period.[67] The US and Honduras governments did little to punish the army’s actions, fearing a crackdown could impact the Honduran army’s role in supporting Nicaraguan Contras.[68] The United States began using the Soto Cano air force base in central Honduras in the early 1980s, and continued funding the Honduran army even as it was known to participate in trafficking in order to have continued access to the base. To this day, “military officers and their immediate and extended families have formed a powerful elite largely isolated from the rule of law. Accordingly, they have been in a unique position to work closely with traffickers, protecting shipments, carrying drugs in diplomatic pouches, and serving as vital cogs in transshipment schemes.”[69]

Amid the confusion and the proliferation of armed actors in Honduras are US soldiers and special forces. US Special Operations Command South operates in the Aguán and other parts of the country, and the US Air Force runs the region’s key Southern Command base at Soto Cano, near Tegucigalpa. There are a handful of US bases under construction in Honduras, and funding under the Central America Regional Security Initiative has boosted anti-drugs efforts in Honduras under US watch. In 2014, the State Department
requested
just over $54 million for Honduras, $5 million of which is specifically meant to finance the military and military training programs. All of these factors together—political violence, gangs, the war on drugs, US military presence, and curtailment of civil rights—have created a maze of militarization and impunities that ultimately results in further barriers for Hondurans living in urban centers and those organizing in rural areas to ensure their continued ability to access clean water, wood from the forests, and meet other needs. It also undermines any attempts at political freedom and it disproportionately impacts the poorest sectors of the population.

Conclusion:
Thinking Through Peace In Wartime

This book is a sprawling project, and the process of researching and writing has left me with even more questions than I had when I set out on this journey nearly four years ago. This text represents my best attempt to introduce readers to the systems at work when warfare is introduced throughout the hemisphere under the pretext of fighting drugs. Drug war capitalism differs from previous repressive drug war initiatives internationally because it takes place during overarching policy, legislative and foreign aid frameworks enshrined in Plan Colombia, the Mérida Initiative, the Central America Regional Security Initiative, and other state initiatives. Throughout this book, I argue that there are 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. The violence and forced displacement resulting from the drug war are experienced most acutely by poor and working people and migrants, often in resource rich or geographically strategic areas. Other central impacts of the drug war include restrictions on mobility and harsh limitations on free expression in the media or through public activities and protest. The insights that I have used to guide the process of understanding, theorizing, and writing about drug war capitalism have come through years of conversations and dozens of reporting trips to regions affected by the drug war. They are not mine alone, rather they belong to the many people who have shared their time and space with me over the past four years.

As I neared completion of this book in the spring of 2014, I found that I was meeting more and more people who shared an analysis similar to that included within these pages. The trip I made to Colombia in February of 2014 laid bare the impact of the drug war and Plan Colombia there. The people I interviewed clearly articulated the connections between Plan Colombia and preparing the terrain for foreign direct investment and the extractive industries. A few months later, during a visit to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, I met a young man who explained how he thought the violence there was related to the eventual exploitation of gas through fracking in the region. It was, he said, the only explanation that he and his friends could come up with for why things had gotten so bad in the border region just south of Laredo, Texas, where the Eagle Ford shale deposit is located. But it was the very last interview I did for the book, with Carlos Fazio, a professor at the Autonomous University of Mexico City (UACM), that helped me summarize some of my own thinking about the issue. Under the bold fluorescent lights of a university conference room, Fazio shared with me his vision of what the drug war represents in Mexico. “I think what is being hidden by this war is a phase of present day imperialism that has to do with displacement, and a form of neo-colonization, which has to do with the appropriation of land and territories, with considering the land as a form of merchandise, and opening that land to industrial agriculture, to the exploitation of African palm and rare wood products, but it also has to do with the land and the subsoil, with mining.” This war is about control over territory and society, much more so than it is about cocaine or marijuana.

But voices like Fazio’s remain marginal in Mexico and elsewhere, as media discourse and so called experts on the drug war focus almost exclusively on inter-cartel violence and state successes in reigning in criminals. The binary between state and criminals deployed by the media is perhaps the central methodological weakness in press reports and mainstream analysis about the drug war. This binary casts state security forces as legitimate actors for good (bringing security), and highly organized, nefarious drug cartels as completely separate from the state. The image of the benevolent state against the bad drug traffickers provides a frame through which governments can justify rising military spending and attacks on unarmed civilians as necessary for national security. Most journalism fails to make the connections or allow readers to see these events in context, and instead isolates the police officers, soldiers, or bankers and bureaucrats that are discovered facilitating or participating in the activities of criminal groups as bad apples. Social theorist Immanuel Wallerstein writes that if issues like globalization and terrorism are “defined in limited time and scope, we tend to arrive at conclusions that are as ephemeral as the newspapers.”
^[1]
This prevents us, he says, from understanding how these themes and events fit into a larger context. I would not hesitate to add the war on drugs to Wallerstein’s list, and this book is about attempting to understand this brand of war across time and from a wide analytical scope.

The lines between governments and organized criminal groups are blurred enough to force a complete reassessment of the very categories used to explain what is taking place in Mexico. An alternative framework through which to understand the drug war need not be revolutionary. Acknowledging how and when perpetrators of violence are linked to the state, as well as how structural impunity functions to permit terror and violence would help to clarify what is actually taking place in regions impacted by violence. In doing so, we could begin to escape from the logical and ethical quagmires presented by sticking to the official line on the drug war.