Dawn Paley, a Canadian investigative journalist based in Puebla, Mexico, will discuss her book Drug War Capitalism from 6-8 p.m. Wednesday at Fletcher Free Library in Burlington. The following is a short review and an interview with the author.
Dawn Paley, a Canadian investigative journalist based in Puebla, argues in her book “Drug War Capitalism” that the war on drugs is not a war against the illegal trade of illicit substances, but rather an action in which a largely poor and rural underclass is killed, displaced or oppressed in order to seize resources and open them up for privatization by transnational mining and petroleum companies, as well as foreign direct investment and military control.
Paley subverts the traditional government versus cartel narrative and presents exhaustive research that suggests collusion between the U.S. and local governments, transnational corporations, militant groups and establishment media.
Beginning with Plan Colombia, a U.S. military and aid initiative started in 1999, and continuing on through the modern war on drugs in Mexico and Central America, Paley’s research brings a forceful and fresh perspective to this violent chapter in U.S. relations in Latin America.
Her dense and complex survey of the business of the drug war leaves the reader with more questions than answers, and that seems to be exactly what Paley wants. With the backdrop of widespread protests over the recent revelations implicating police in the killing of 43 Mexican students in Ayotzinapa, she calls on readers to question the ruling establishment in Mexico more deeply.
Q and A with Dawn Paley
How did this book come about and how did you arrive at the term “drug war capitalism”?
The book came about from a couple years of freelance reporting. I was writing a lot about mining in Latin America and also doing some research about the oil industry in various places like Colombia, Central America and Mexico, and it sort of started to feel like I was reporting the same story over and over again. I kept finding the same types of struggles, the same kinds of violence, the same stories. So I decided that I wanted to make an effort to bring some of the reporting together into a book and to look at some of the more structural things that there isn’t really space for in newspapers. The title “Drug War Capitalism” emerged as a way of linking the expansion of capitalism to the drug war in Latin America, which is something that we don’t do very often, unfortunately.
Why do you think that is? You’ve spoken before about how the public had an awareness that the war on terror had motives that went beyond fighting terrorism, yet people haven’t shown this willingness to subvert the state narrative when it comes to the war on drugs.
I really don’t know and it’s something that I’m trying to change. This book is my effort to have people start thinking more broadly about the war on drugs. Part of it is that I just think it’s really complicated. The state narratives are very persistent and it’s a difficult narrative to start to undo. There’s so much information out there telling us one thing, but it really changes when you’re down there working on the ground and talking to the people who are living it.
So why aren’t more journalists showing that side of the conflict? You write in Drug War Capitalism that the media’s compliance with the government narrative keeps the public from learning the truth. Why do you think this happens?
Sadly, I think that it’s kind of a constant feature when you look at wars that the U.S. is involved in, whether it’s Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria or other places. You see a sort of careful avoidance of the real role of the United States. The establishment media tends to use sources from within the state department or unnamed sources that they’re protecting in the U.S. government. In this way, reading the New York Times can sometimes be like reading something directly from the state department. I think there are a lot of reasons for this. Access is one of them. Journalists don’t want to lose their access so they publish friendly stories.
One thing that I propose in the book is that journalists of conscience who want to write about Mexico in a different way stop buying the state line, stop accepting the cartel war discourse, and start looking at how various elements of the state oppressive apparatus are involved in crimes against people in Mexico.
You frame this apparatus in terms of largely rural and poor communities being displaced from their land by transnational corporations and government forces. These displacers seize the resources and open the area up to significant investment from abroad. Do you think that this is how countries, both in Latin America and all over the world, become what is considered “developed” today?
I think that, yes, the phase of capitalism that we’re living in right now is very violent and it continues to rely on accumulation through dispossession as a primary mechanism of expansion. If the U.S. went into Mexico and said “OK, we’re going to fight a war for territory because we want to take all of these resources away from the people,” you’d have widespread resistance throughout the country. With a discourse that says “we’re fighting these drug cartels that are violent and out of control,” they’re invited in and welcomed. Terror plays a huge role in the kind of social control that is exercised in Colombia and Mexico. I think it’s discursively a very effective way of allowing for accumulation through dispossession. Drugs have often been used as a way to get an exception or a trump card. It’s a very effective way to legitimize accumulation through dispossession.
You emphasize in Drug War Capitalism that these systems never stop the flow of drugs from Latin America to the United States, but instead move the channels to neighboring countries. Do you see this as a self-renewing system that will continue to make its way up and down Latin America?
I think it can be. In terms of the discourse, those in charge of drug policy in the U.S. have admitted that the U.S. policy has moved the drug war from Colombia into Mexico and now into Central America. They’re openly admitting that they’re the ones moving this war around and moving this violence around, and as long as that’s going unquestioned they’ll be able to keep doing it over and over and over again. I’m hoping that, with events like the revelation of federal involvement in the mass kidnapping and massacre of students in Ayotzinapa and with all of the mobilization taking place in Mexico, there will be a change and a challenge to these kinds of U.S. policies and their deployment in one place after another.
Who do you see as the controlling parties with a long view of this system? Are there controlling architects cognizant of the entire process, or are there a lot of different chains of command who are all separately working in their own self-interest?
There are documents coming from USAID and the state department that say that Plan Colombia worked because it created all of these new regulations and it created a better business climate. There are people that have recognized and vocalized that these are successful plans for the achievement of U.S. goals, all the way from Hillary Clinton to bureaucrats with USAID.
With that being said, I think it’s really important not to think of it like some monolithic thing where the president knows exactly what’s going to happen and all of the police are on board. It’s much more complicated than that. What I try to get at in the book are the trends that we’ve started to notice. We can start to identify how things that have taken place in Colombia are starting to manifest in Mexico. I say at the end of the book that it really is a preliminary effort to bring this analysis out and share it with as many people as we can in order to get more people writing and thinking about all of these things.
What do you hope some people in Vermont, who might feel far removed from the war on drugs, take away from reading your book?
I think my role as an author in this case is to be someone who can give a new perspective and maybe some new information on how we can think about the war on drugs and how we can understand what’s going on in Mexico. I think there is a lot going on in Vermont. I’d like to encourage folks to read the book and start thinking about the drug war as something that is really important, something that has claimed a lot of victims, and something that has a lot more to do with capitalism and corporations than it does with cocaine.
