Chains of dispossession and communities in struggle: the illegal opiate market in Guerrero (Mexico). (original) (raw)
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The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, 2020
Why do peasants cultivate opium poppies? And how do they survive the dangers of participation in the drug trade? In this article I argue that opium producers in Mexico share important cultural, political and economic affinities with the so-called 'serrano' peasants whom Alan Knight has identified as key players in the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20. Building on this comparison, I identify three strategies - 'legalism,' 'weapons of the weak,' and the threat or use of violence - that poppy farmers use to defend themselves from the exploitation or aggression of the police, the army, and cartel gunmen alike. I then explore how poppy farmers have historically employed these strategies in practice, as well as the factors that determine when and where they are used.
2014
In May 2014 the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) hosted a workshop, cofunded by NOREF and Christian Aid, designed to facilitate dialogue between scholars working on the political economy of drugs, conflict and development in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The workshop explored how political economy perspectives, derived from long-term empirical research on drugs-affected regions, can enhance understanding of, and policy responses to, drug production and trafficking. This approach, rather than seeing drugs as “exceptional” and “criminal”, seeks to situate the role of illicit economies within broader processes of state formation and agrarian change.
Critique of everyday narco-capitalism
Third World Quarterly, 2022
Capitalism is not only an economic mode of production; it is also a form of life. This also applies to a historical type of capitalism, which is the capitalism founded on (illicit) drugs-in other words: narco-capitalism. The article discusses how capitalism alters life at the nexus of drug production, trade and consumption through a study of drug heartlands in Colombia, Afghanistan and Myanmar. What forms of life emerge under narco-capitalism? And how do people seek change and express agency in the exploitative conditions governed by narco-capital? To do so, the article proceeds through the following sections: first, it elucidates its definition of the 'everyday' as a conceptual and methodological scheme to understand capitalist forms of life. Then it uses material collected from people's everyday encounter with narco-capitalism in Afghanistan, Myanmar and Colombia to discuss mystification, predation and alienation. The article explores how capitalism produces forms of life that make use of drugs and narco-capital to dispossess and alienate collectivities. Finally, the article argues that to move beyond this alienating condition, drug wars and/or development are not a solution, because drugs are not the problem. Instead, it is people's organisation and world-building in dialectical mode to capitalist forms of life that can transform everyday life beyond predation and alienation.
The Cultural Effects of the Narcoeconomy in Rural Mexico
2009
This essay describes the cultural effects of drug trafficking on a town in rural Mexico. A variety of ethnographic scenes reveal the rapidly changing social imagination as new forms of consumption create new opportunities for identity formation. However, because these new consumer forms are expensive, and therefore inaccessible to the majority of community members, a type of cultural exclusion is at work. In this ordinary town, there are extraordinary forms of consumption: large, lavish houses; high-stakes gambling at local cockfights; a new urban-oriented consumer culture; and new farmer entrepreneurs. All were underwritten by narco-activities. These new forms of consumption challenge and subvert older, stable forms of hierarchy and status. Individuals with access to these forms of consumption have new types of economic, cultural and social capital privilege, and such access legitimizes their status and power. The article closes by considering the implications of the rising levels of violence in Mexico's interior and the potential that we are seeing the initial stages of a civil war.
The War on Drugs, launched by the United States in the 1970s and subsequently waged with the collaboration of governments throughout Latin America, has helped to consolidate the transnational drug trade, which according to official sources now earns more than US$400 billion in annual profits worldwide. By the 1980s, when the television series Miami Vice first brought a glossy and glamorized version of the drug war to the global public, Latin American drug traffickers had developed complex distribution routes and smuggling methods to satisfy the great demand for cocaine, marijuana, and heroin in the United States and Europe. Since the capitalist crisis of the 1980s and the implementation of neoliberal policies in the past two decades, drug trafficking has become the most important illegal global industry and a source of political corruption, judicial impunity, and violence throughout Latin America. Without denying the contested nature of the world of the narco and its impact, here we theorize narcoscapes as both real and fictional, true and "imagined." We attempt to go beyond the drug war to understand how real communities and individuals are rethinking the effect of drugs and the violence generated by the "war" in the context of globalization.
Development and Change, 2022
Bolivia is a centre for drug production and trafficking and yet it experiences far less drug-related violence than other countries in Latin America that form part of cocaine's commodity chain. Drawing upon more than three years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2005 and 2019, this article presents evidence from the Chapare, a coca-growing and drug processing region in central Bolivia, to consider why this is the case. Building from the literature on embedded economies and the subsistence ethic of peasant communities, the article demonstrates that the drug trade is part of a local moral order that prioritizes kinship, reciprocal relations and community well-being, facilitated by the cultural significance of the coca leaf. This has served to limit possibilities for the violence that is often associated with drug production and trafficking. In addition, coca grower agricultural unions act as a parallel form of governance, providing a framework for the peaceful resolution of disputes and working actively to exclude the state and criminal actors.
Capitalism and discontent in Mexico’s drug war
Pavón-Cuéllar, D. & Orozco-Guzmán, M. (2013). Capitalism and discontent in Mexico’s drug war. In A. Marvakis et al (Eds), Doing Psychology under New Conditions (pp. 157–165). Concord, Canada: Captus University Publications., 2013
Capitalism is conceived as a cultural formation that involves, essentially, a specific form of discontent. This conception finds inspiration in both Lacan’s reduction of capitalism to a symbolic system that constitutes culture, and Freud’s proposal that culture is not only based on discontent, but actually produces it. One way of generating discontent is to create needs whose satisfaction can never be truly fulfilling. One example of such a need is drug-dependency, which, at least today, can only be un-satisfied through a drug war that entails an additional discontent. This latter discontent is analysed here in the context of the subculture that has developed in Mexico to meet the demand for drugs in the United States. It is argued that this need, and the demand it generates, cannot be explained if we fail to consider the global context of capitalist culture and local drug-dealing and trafficking subcultures.
Journal of Illicit Economies and Development, 2022
Despite the well-documented human costs of the war on drugs, and the growing evidence of the environmental impacts of illicit economies, the militarized repression of the illicit drug trade remains a central hemispheric security and cooperation strategy in Northern and Central American countries. Through a multidisciplinary dialogue that combines history, sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science, this Special Issue critically interrogates why despite these failures the war on drug endures. Together, the contributors challenge explanations focused on state absence, weakening of the state, and ungoverned spaces and instead propose a research agenda that sheds light on the long-lasting, structural effects of the capitalistic integration of the region within the economy of illicit drugs. In particular, the Special Issue contributes to three existing and interconnected debates: First: the role of drug economies and illicitness on state formation, social inequalities, and development in Mexico and Central America. Second: the impact of illicit economies on local populations, and the connections between the licit and the illicit, margins and centers, and political orders and violence. Third: the variety of stakeholders that benefit from the war on drugs and that link the United States, Mexico, and Central America in licit and illicit fashions.
Crisis, corruption and state-led development in the making of the Mexican drug trade
Past & Present, 2024
The state of Durango has long been a centre of Mexican heroin production and an important node in transnational drug trafficking networks. As early as 1944, it was the site of one of the biggest drug busts in Mexican history, when an opium poppy plantation the size of 325 football pitches, irrigated by a purpose-built aqueduct, was discovered in the state’s northern mountains. By the mid 1970s, a combination of kinship ties and concrete connected these poppy fields directly with the US drug market hub of Chicago, Illinois, along a route known as the ‘heroin highway’, which helped Mexico become the supplier of 90 per cent of US heroin. But how did a poor, underpopulated and overwhelmingly rural state become a major player in the billion-dollar US–Mexican drug trade? This article shows that in Durango, the rise of heroin production and trafficking were integral aspects of local processes of social, political and economic modernization. Stimulated by the Mexican and US governments’ promotion of infrastructural improvements and mass migration, and protected by representatives of Mexico’s post-revolutionary political system, the drug trade in turn fuelled further ‘licit’ economic development, making it part of the very foundation of Mexico as we know it today.