The Drug War in Latin America: Hegemony and Global Capitalism [1 ed.] 1138209821, 9781138209824

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Book Title
Copyright
Table of Contents
List of illustrations
Introduction
The limitations of traditional approaches to U.S. foreign drug policy
Notes
1 Global capitalism, transnational relations, and U.S. foreign policy
Globalization and U.S. foreign policy
Globalization and crime
Transnational elites, hegemony, and policy networks
Notes
2 Capitalist globalization, prohibition, and the U.S. drug war
Internationalizing prohibition—the early decades
World War II to the 1980s
The 1980s and drug war escalation
The Andean Initiative and the administration of George H.W. Bush (1989–1993)
Notes
3 Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative—waging war to advance capitalist globalization
Plan Colombia
Mérida Initiative
Conclusion
Notes
4 Social conflict, coca eradication, and the transnational elite in Bolivia and Peru
History of coca production/eradication pre-1980s
The 1990s–2000s-globalist agenda, multi-lateralism, and resistance
Consolidation vs successful resistance to the prohibitionist paradigm: 2006–2016
Peru and Bolivia in the eyes of U.S. international narcotics drug strategy reports
Conclusion
Notes
5 Transnational advocacy networks and the drug war
Transnational advocacy networks and drug policy reform
UNGASS 2016 and elite drug policy reform groups
The Open Society and George Soros
UNGASS 2016
Caravans and an “outsider” strategy
Conclusion
Notes
Conclusion
Global capitalism and policy networks
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Drug War in Latin America

Since the mid-­1980s different U.S. administrations have promoted a highly militarized and prohibitionist drug control approach in Latin America. This represented an escalation of a decades-­long prohibitionist strategy that has been fundamental to increasing levels of homicide, displacement, and violence throughout the hemisphere. Previous analyses of the “US drug war” have been unable to adequately address a number of puzzles related to this policy history, including why did this militarization of U.S. drug war policies in Latin America take place in the mid-­ 1980s and why has this approach continued despite its inability to achieve the government’s stated targets? Are these policies simply the imposition of U.S. power in the region or have elites in Latin America internalized this agenda as their own? Why did resistance to these policies emerge among some Latin American governments in the late-­2000s and does this resistance represent a challenge to the prohibitionist agenda of the U.S.? Avilés argues that answering these questions requires an examination of a “transnational grand strategy,” a strategy developed and implemented by networks of transnational elites and state managers throughout the region operating within a context of a neoliberal, globalized social structure of accumulation. William Avilés is Professor of Political Science at The University of Nebraska at Kearney, USA. He teaches courses on the Politics of the Developing World; Latin American Politics; The Politics of the Drug War; and Democracy Around the World.

Routledge Studies in US Foreign Policy Edited by Inderjeet Parmar

City University, and John Dumbrell, University of Durham

This new series sets out to publish high-­quality works by leading and emerging scholars critically engaging with United States Foreign Policy. The series welcomes a variety of approaches to the subject and draws on scholarship from international relations, security studies, international political economy, foreign policy analysis and contemporary international history. Subjects covered include the role of administrations and institutions, the media, think tanks, ideologues, and intellectuals, elites, transnational corporations, public opinion, and pressure groups in shaping foreign policy, U.S. relations with individual nations, with global regions and global institutions and America’s evolving strategic and military policies. The series aims to provide a range of books—from individual research monographs and edited collections to textbooks and supplemental reading for scholars, researchers, policy analysts and students. For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/series/RSUSFP Clinton, New Terrorism and the Origins of the War on Terror Chin-­Kuei Tsui The Obama Doctrine A Legacy of Continuity in US Foreign Policy? Edited by Michelle Bentley and Jack Holland US Power in Latin America Renewing Hegemony Rubrick Biegon The Drug War in Latin America Hegemony and Global Capitalism William Avilés

Forthcoming titles US Foreign Policy during the Cold War The Horn of Africa from Colonialism to Terrorism Donna Jackson The Foreign Policies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush A Comparative Perspective Martin Smith Eleanor Roosevelt Palestine, Israel and Human Rights Geraldine Kidd

The Drug War in Latin America

Hegemony and Global Capitalism

William Avilés

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 William Avilés The right of William Avilés to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Avilés, William, 1971- author. Title: The drug war in Latin America : hegemony and global capitalism / William Avilés. Description: New York : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Routledge studies in US foreign policy | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017021894 | ISBN 9781138209824 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315456690 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Drug traffic–Economic aspects–Latin America. | Drug traffic–Economic aspects–United States. | Drug control–Latin America. | Drug control–United States. | United States–Foreign relations–Latin America. | Latin America–Foreign relations–United States. Classification: LCC HV8079.N3 A95 2018 | DDC 364.1/3365098–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017021894 ISBN: 978-1-138-20982-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-45669-0 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents



List of illustrations

vi



Introduction

1

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

10

2 Capitalist globalization, prohibition, and the U.S. drug war

28

3 Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative—waging war to advance capitalist globalization

61

4 Social conflict, coca eradication, and the transnational elite in Bolivia and Peru

92

5 Transnational advocacy networks and the drug war

125



Conclusion

151



Bibliography Index

156 176

Illustrations

Figure 3.1 US aid and extrajudicial executions in Colombia

75

Tables 1.1 Informal employment in Latin America, 2013  1.2 Prison population, rate per 100,000 and increase  2.1 Key advisors/staff, U.S.–Latin American policy or U.S. drug policy, 1981–1989 3.1 Clinton administration 3.2 Bush administration 3.3 Transnational elite and Obama foreign policymakers 4.1 Counter-­cocaine progress in the Andes, 2015 5.1 Members of the IDPC network 5.2 Transnational elite members of the Open Society Global Board

17 17 51 65 66 87 122 137 139

Introduction

Death, displacement, and corruption have all been the result of attempts to prohibit—or facilitate—the production, distribution, and consumption of illegal psychoactive substances. Despite the region wide havoc of the illegal drug trade in Latin America and the different efforts to wage “war” against these substances, the international flow of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, and marijuana continues to reach consumers in the United States. This has not led to a shift away from the prohibitionist paradigm in U.S. foreign policy, a paradigm that stresses the destruction of supply and the interdiction of these substances before they reach U.S. territory. In fact, beginning in the 1980s and continuing to the present day the U.S. ratcheted up its international drug control policies, either through direct U.S. military intervention, and/or in the training of Latin American militaries/police forces to aggressively fight the war within their respective countries. This era has been unprecedented in the expanded use of the armed forces and in governmental expenditures dedicated to drug supply reduction and drug interdiction. In explaining this escalation, and the drug war as a whole, foreign policy analysts and international relations scholars have generally focused upon the perceived national security or imperial interests of the U.S. state, the intermestic nature of domestic politics, and/or the ideological constructions of norm entrepreneurs. However, these approaches are unable to adequately address a number of puzzles related to this policy history, including: why did this militarization of U.S. drug war policies in Latin America take place in the mid-­1980s and why has this approach continued despite its inability to achieve the government’s stated targets? Are these policies simply a reflection of U.S. power being imposed on weaker governments or have elites in Latin America internalized this agenda as their own? Why did resistance emerge among some Latin American governments and transnational civil society groups in the mid-­2000s and does this resistance represent a genuine challenge to the militaristic, prohibitionist agenda of the U.S.? I submit that this militarized drug war offensive has reflected the views of a transnational policy community and the related establishment of a neoliberal, globalized social structure of accumulation, factors that have been central to the development and continuation of an intensified model of prohibition.

2   Introduction Drawing from the work of thinkers such as Robert Cox, William Robinson, Leslie Sklair, and Bastian van Apeldoorn this work applies a historical materialist approach to understanding U.S. drug war foreign policy. In particular, Cox’s concept of world orders and the necessity of dominant states/classes to seek the consent of other classes/states (hegemony), Robinson’s focus on the variety of institutions and nation-­states that have come together to further the interests of transnational capital and Van Apeldoorn’s interest in the policy networks between economic elites and state actors are especially noteworthy. Structure and elite-­state manager networks must be integrated in order to understand U.S. and Latin American drug policies. U.S. international drug policies cannot be separated from the larger agenda of elites within the U.S. and Latin America to facilitate the conditions necessary for the investments of transnational corporations and the expansion of capitalist globalization. This underlying purpose of U.S. policy is not simply reflected in the consequences of drug war strategies, but can be seen in the way social classes and groups have acted through and with different state managers and institutions on a transnational basis. In other words, there is a direct relation between the development and implementation of a militarized drug control policy to the concomitant process of integrating Latin American economies into capitalist globalization. Drug policy has not only been shaped by a structural imperative to advance capitalist globalization, but networks between economic elites and foreign policy elites responsible for drug policy have ensured that such policies remain consistent with the larger objective of creating/maintaining the conditions for capital accumulation on a global scale. The cooperation among transnational elites over drug policy illustrates elements of a transnational grand strategy,1 a strategy focused upon global economic expansion by transnational corporations, the promotion of free markets, a liberal world order and capitalist democracies. However, the drug prohibitionist elements of this transnational grand strategy has met resistance from civil society in Latin America and the U.S. as well as within the transnational policy community itself, leading to a reconsideration of the type of drug policies most amenable for the smooth expansion of capitalist globalization in the region.

The limitations of traditional approaches to U.S. foreign drug policy In contrast to the structural context and policy networks in the U.S. and Latin America that I view as central to understanding U.S. drug policies in Latin America, U.S.–Latin American relations have largely been understood through various state-­centric prisms. Scholars and policymakers have often stressed the role of perceived national security threats, the influence of U.S. domestic politics and bureaucratic interests, and/or the interests of U.S. based corporations in explaining U.S. economic, military and/or political interventions in Latin America (Schmidt 2012). The sub-­field focused on U.S. drug policy in the region has largely mirrored these approaches, stressing the “threats” of narco-­cartels and/or the damage that addiction and drug crime are having within the U.S. or

Introduction   3 even asserting that U.S. drug policy is only a pretext to advance the interest of U.S. based corporate investors. Much of this literature would be viewed by Robert Cox as “problem-­solving” theory, which “takes the world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organized, as the given framework for action. The general aim of problem-­solving is to make these relationships and institutions work smoothly by dealing effectively with particular sources of trouble” (Cox 1981, 128–129). Fundamentally, the interests of the U.S. state and/or domestic political competition (often through the ideological construction of specific symbols) are viewed as central to understanding the initiation, development and implementation of drug war legislation to help “solve” the problem of illegal drug trafficking/ production. The description of this “problem” is nicely illustrated by the former commander of the former head of the U.S. Southern Command, Paul C. Gormand who stated that “the American people must understand much better than they ever have in the past how (our) safety and that of our children is threatened by Latin drug conspiracies (which are) dramatically more successful at subversion in the United States than any that are centered in Moscow” (U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations 1988).2 Or DEA spokesman Rusty Payne in 2014 stating that “We see this [drug cartels] as a very serious national security issue, as terrorist organizations get less support and funding from state sponsors of terror — they are looking more to drug trafficking to raise funds for training, recruitment and operations” (Carter 2014). Bagley and Tokatlian argue that U.S. supply side strategies and unilateral actions designed in the 1980s war on drugs “flowed directly from the core assumptions and internal logic of ‘realist’ analyses of the international system” (1992, 216). For them the emphasis on force and coercion so prominent in Reagan era strategies also was central in the development of certain ideas and conceptions related to drugs as drug war repression was a “natural outgrowth of the realist-­punitive military thrust and led spontaneously to the conceptualization of the drug issue as a national security threat” (ibid., 225, emphasis mine). Valderrama and Cabieses assert that the U.S. counter­narcotics policy has been defined in a “unilateral way” and is guided by the idea that the U.S. must “impose bans in production areas by force” (2004, 53). While Waltraud Morales stresses that the need for a new national security doctrine with the ending of the Cold War was instrumental to the “war on drugs”  playing a central role in U.S. foreign policy in Latin America in the 1980s (1989 148).3 In partial contrast, Russell Crandall has stressed intermestic issues, with Crandall submitting that U.S. relations with Colombia is “… inextricably linked with a politically volatile issue that has its roots in the domestic political arena— the war on drugs” (2008, 1) and that the Clinton administration’s “anti-­drug” strategy was guided in part to win over a Congress uninterested in backing a counterinsurgency policy (2002, 163). Vaicus and Isacson suggest that the militarist biases that existed within Clinton’s counternarcotics plan for Colombia reflected the political pressures of a Republican-­controlled Congress upon a

4   Introduction Democratic president intent on undermining their criticisms that he was “weak” on the “drug war” (2000, 9). Relatedly, constructivist accounts focus on domestic sources of ideas (such as media coverage) and/or focus upon the speeches and documents of key decision makers and organized groups seeking to influence their decisions. For instance, Vorobyeva’s analysis focuses upon how drugs are securitized, writing that “since the state shapes its foreign policy in response to threats posed by the international security environment, looking at how it perceives a threat helps us understand many foreign policy decisions that have profound implications for other countries” (2015, 44; Bagley et al. 2015, xii-­xiv; see also Campbell 1998 for uses of constructivism on drug policy). While each of these perspectives contributes to our understanding of elements of U.S. drug policy, they remain limited in their explanatory power. The cases of U.S. drug war aid plans to Colombia (Plan Colombia) and Mexico (the Merida Initiative) illustrate these limitations. The realist/national security perspective fails to adequately explain how the billions in “drug war” aid committed to Colombia (over $9 billion between 2000 and 2014) went largely to the Colombian army, an institution that enjoyed close ties to violent, narcotrafficking paramilitary groups that murdered thousands while displacing whole rural communities in order to concentrate ownership in the hands of agro-­exporters (Ballvé 2009; see also Stokes 2001). The connections between drug trafficking paramilitary groups and the Colombian armed forces had been documented by human rights organizations for decades prior to Plan Colombia (see Human Rights Watch 1996 for one example). While coca production saw some slight declines from their height in the early 2000s it simply returned Colombia to levels it saw before Plan Colombia was implemented while coca production was displaced to other Andean countries. For example, twenty years into the U.S. escalation of the war on drugs in Latin America (1980–2000) coca leaf production in South America reached a record-­ breaking high in 2000 while cocaine, heroin, and other illegal psychoactive substances were more available to U.S. consumers rather than less available in 2000 (Lee 2004, 188). In 2014, Colombia and Peru retained their top positions as sources of cocaine for the U.S. market despite being the focus of decades of bilateral coca eradication strategies promoted by the U.S., while Mexico was the largest foreign producer of marijuana, methamphetamine, and heroin consumed in the United States (in addition to being the central trans-­shipment point for the cocaine being exported from the Andes) (Rosen 2015, 2; 8). In the case of the Mérida Initiative, for decades the Mexican state has been viewed as closely tied to different drug trafficking organizations on the local, state, and national levels. Yet, this historical relationship did not prevent U.S. approval of billions in U.S. aid to this very same state. The years that followed the U.S.–Mexican agreement that committed over $2 billion in U.S. aid between 2008 and 2015 to strengthen the Mexican state and disrupt organized crime groups witnessed the greatest increase in the rate of Mexico’s homicide rate and the accelerated expansion of organized groups. The fact that illegal drugs are widely available throughout the United States and that hundreds of tons of illegal

Introduction   5 drugs cross the U.S.–Mexican border every year, despite the expenditure of over $1 trillion in forty years to stop this “threat” (and at times to actually finance narcotraffickers) illustrates that the continuation of these policies have served other interests/objectives beyond the interdiction of illegal drugs or their eradication (Mendoza 2010). In regards to the domestic/intermestic politics argument there is mixed support for this perspective. It is clear that the 2000 presidential election and Republican criticisms of the Clinton administration played important roles in the timing of Plan Colombia. However, it is not clear how the specific biases of the strategy or its size could be sufficiently explained by public opinion concerns, electoral outcomes or elite constructions of the threat. Public concern reached its peak in 1989, with 27 percent viewing drug abuse as their central policy concern, with only 5 percent typically viewing it as such in 1999 and 2000 (Bureau of Justice 2003). In regards to Mexico, the U.S.–Mexican negotiations over the Mérida Initiative took place throughout 2007, but a November 2007 Gallup poll found that not even 1 percent of Americans viewed “drugs” or “drug abuse” as an important election issue for the 2008 presidential election (Gallup and Newport 2007, 479–480). More recently, the Obama administration has increasingly minimized “drug war” rhetoric in an effort to “desecuritize” the issue. However, his 2014 $25 billion drug control budget committed, like previous administrations, approximately 60 percent to domestic and international law enforcement/supply reduction and approximately 40 percent dedicated to demand reduction (The White House 2014, 12; Tickner and Cepeda 2015, 176). The escalation and continuation of U.S. sponsored militarization in the “war on drugs” is also clearly present in Latin America. Long time drug policy scholar Coletta Youngers states that on a typical day 4,000 US troops are deployed across Latin America on counter-­drug missions … U.S. Navy ships are on patrol, U.S. pilots are clocking tens of thousands of hours per year flying drug-­control missions and agents from at least 10 U.S. agencies are involved in training and other drug control activities. (2013, 15) Also, the number of Special Operations forces training missions to Latin America tripled between 2007 and 2014 with Honduras, El Salvador, and Colombia leading the region in terms of the number of missions during this period (Kinosian and Isacson 2016). This prohibitionist approach is maintained despite a majority of Americans supporting the legalization of marijuana in 2011 and twenty-­nine states legalizing the medical use of marijuana since 1996. ­Ultimately, domestic politics and public opinion can only help us so much when it comes to the timing, nature, construction, and application of U.S. drug control policies in Latin America.

6   Introduction Marxist and radical analyses of foreign policy Various radical scholars have rejected mainstream interpretations of U.S. foreign drug policies. They have attempted to explain the various contradictions and “failures” associated with this agenda by focusing upon the imperial interests of the U.S. state seeking pretexts to protect Latin American markets, resources, and labor for the exclusive benefit of U.S. based transnational corporations. While researchers focused upon “problem-­solving” aspects of this issue suggest that failures can be attributed to specific tactics or the lack of political will, radical scholars tend to emphasize the extent that these policies have furthered other long-­standing goals of U.S. foreign policy. For example, Christina Jacqueline Johns submits that the international war on drugs in Latin America contributes to legitimating “… a vast expansion of U.S. control over and intervention in Latin America” (1992, 131) while James Petras argued that Plan Colombia represented one part of a regional strategy to defeat leftist challenges to its power in Latin America and to control the oil resources of Colombia under the cloak of fighting the war on drugs (a similar argument is made in Stokes 2001). Relatedly, Delgado-­Ramos and Maria Romano argue that U.S. drug policy in Colombia and Mexico serves the “economic interests” of the United States ensuring “U.S.” access to Latin America’s strategic resources and maintaining the region’s economic dependence upon the United States (2011, 93). For them the Colombian elite is simply the “pawn of the Northern power.” In their examination of the Merida Initiative they stress the importance of the “defense of the United States from Mexican territory” in contributing to increasing the influence of “power groups close to the military and security” within the Mexican state (Delgado-­Ramos and Romano 2011, 98, 100). Finally, Mercille stresses U.S hegemonic projects, such as NAFTA and expanding neoliberalism, as driving U.S. drug policies with the “war on drugs” representing simply a pretext to intervene in Mexican affairs (Mercille 2011, 1637; 1640). Much of Mercille’s analysis is shared with Dawn Paley in her book Drug War Capitalism (2014). Paley presents a detailed analysis of how drug war violence interacts with capitalism, state power, and resource extraction (ibid., 26). She argues that U.S. drug war policies “can benefit transnational oil and gas and mining companies, as well as other large companies” (15–16), as the “drug war” is “… a long-­term fix to capitalism’s woes, combining terror with policymaking in a seasoned neoliberal mix, cracking open social worlds and territories once unavailable to globalized capitalism … in this war, terror is used against the populations in cities and rural areas, and how, parallel to this terror and resulting panic, policies that facilitate foreign direct investment and economic growth are implemented” (ibid., 16). An important part of that “fix” is to eliminate popular opposition to the neoliberalism that is central to deepening Mexico’s integration into the global economy. Though the radical perspective correctly brings attention to how these drug war policies have achieved important goals in weakening popular forces and strengthening repressive security forces, they remain problematic.

Introduction   7 First, much of the radical interpretation presents Latin American governments as simply tools of U.S. imperialism, bending to the will of the U.S. agenda. They overly stress what Leo Panitch (Gowan et al. 2001, 16–17) refers to as an “outside-­in” process in which the United States is constructed as simply dictating policy to subordinate states, whereas the reality is one in which leading political elites in Latin America welcome, concede, and help to construct policies that they have internalized as being in their country’s interests. In traditional radical interpretations there is little suggestion that Latin American elites (political and economic) within these governments have their own interests or that they might be taking the initiative in policymaking. Bryant Garth refers to a similar process when writing about U.S. democracy promotion in Latin America, stressing the degree to which the ideas and values historically promoted in Latin America have not simply been imposed upon the region, but have historically received a sympathetic reception from “importers” within Latin America’s dominant classes (Garth 2007, 30). Juan Gabriel Tokatlian nicely captures this idea when he writes about the “drug war” that: Latin America adapted this crusade a long time ago. Although the United Sates played a decisive role in the process of imposing the war on drugs in the region, the intensity and depth this war has achieved there is a matter of shared responsibility: pressure (and even blackmail) from Washington has been a necessary but not sufficient condition; Latin America has embraced the prohibitionist paradigm and has not yet abandoned it. (Tokatlian 2015, 68, emphasis mine) Second, there is a tendency to ascribe all types of economic agendas as the explicit intention of drug war policies whether a direct connection can be made or not. In other words, U.S. drug control policies in Latin America are often presented as uncritically reflecting the general interest of capitalism or the capitalist class. This is not to argue for the other extreme that state policies within capitalist systems can be reduced solely to interpersonal relations,4 but this structuralist account of drug policy must be complemented by an analysis of the direct facilitation of these policies by social groups and individuals operating through state institutions and policy networks. Of course, as Ralph Miliband noted in The State in Capitalist Society, the existence of such networks has to be empirically established: … the obvious and fundamental fact that [economically dominant class] is involved in a relationship with the state, which cannot be assumed, in the political conditions which are typical of advanced capitalism, to be that of principal to agent. It may well be found that the relationship is very close indeed and that the holders of state power are, for many different reasons, the agents of private economic power—that those who wield that power are also, therefore, and without unduly stretching the meaning of words, an authentic “ruling class.” But this is precisely what has to be determined. (Miliband 1969, 54–55 italics in the original)

8   Introduction A central aim of this project is to demonstrate that the elites that came to power in Latin America during a U.S. militarized push in the drug war increasingly represented a globalist or transnational elite backing low-­intensity democracy and neoliberal economic policies. In order to demonstrate the veracity of this argument, U.S. drug policy in Latin America will be addressed historically and more specifically since the 1980s to the present-­day. Chapter 1 provides a more detailed and theoretical exposition of my argument that centers upon the relationship between U.S. foreign drug policies and the imperatives associated with the new stage of global capitalism and elite policy networks from the late twentieth century to today. Chapter 2 provides a historical context of U.S. drug war policies in Latin America in the twentieth century. While prohibitionist drug policies had been promoted since the early years of the twentieth century, it is only during the last decades of the century that we witness a marked escalation in these policies. This escalation included U.S. certification policies, which targeted Latin American governments for economic punishment if they failed to cooperate with the U.S. drug war agenda and prohibitionist international drug control treaties. In addition, increasing demands were made to Latin American governments to employ their armed forces in drug eradication. This escalation in the U.S. drug war has largely been maintained to the present-­day. Chapter 3 presents a comparative analysis of the two largest U.S. foreign drug war policies in terms of committed budgetary resources, Plan Colombia (initiated in 2000) and the Mérida Initiative in Mexico (initiated in 2008). Both policies involved billions in U.S. aid primarily to military and police forces in Colombia and Mexico over multiple years, prioritizing law enforcement and the strengthening of security forces over alternative strategies. In addition, they both represented unprecedented levels of U.S.–Latin American cooperation over counternarcotics strategies. The initiation and development of these plans were led by transnationally oriented elites within and outside the U.S., Colombian and Mexican states that developed and promoted these policies. The continuation of questionable prohibitionist policies that Plan Colombia and the Merida Initiative centrally represent is in part explained by how these policies helped to facilitate more central goals of U.S., Mexican and Colombian foreign/ domestic policies. Chapter 4 examines U.S. policy in two of the largest producers of coca (the central ingredient in cocaine) in the world—Peru and Bolivia. Since the 1980s the two countries have pursued a diverse array of strategies in cooperating or resisting the U.S. supply eradication strategies. In this chapter I detail the extent that maintaining, or not, a transnational community of elite policymakers between the United States and these two Andean republics was crucial to the successful implementation of the coca eradication strategy pursued by the U.S. This chapter will not only detail the economic and globalist objectives of the U.S. agenda, but also illustrate how this agenda led to such differing consequences—national resistance to U.S. drug policies in Bolivia and their institutionalization in Peru.

Introduction   9 The final empirical chapter addresses the possibilities of resistance to the militarized/prohibitionist model and the relationship between this resistance and larger struggles against neoliberal capitalist globalization. Specifically, the chapter will address the human rights movement in Mexico led by Juan Francisco Sicilia Ortega and Latin American efforts (by civil society and certain governments) to influence the outcome of the 2016 United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) to review international drug control efforts. The 2016 UNGASS represented the biggest global effort by reformers internationally to directly question and challenge prohibitionist drug control policies on a transnational level. Governments in Colombia, Mexico, and Guatemala called for this special session and different groups within Latin American civil society mobilized to challenge this prohibitionist paradigm. The chapter will assess to what degree these calls for reform emanating from Latin America represented a genuine shift in actual policy consequences or symbolic discourse shielding the continuation of the status quo. It will also address the extent that reform efforts reflect counter-­hegemonic movements or simply conflicts within the broader transnational policymaking elite over how to apply drug policies more legitimately while remaining committed to the primary goal of creating a stable and welcoming business environment for transnational capital. The final chapter of the book summarizes the central argument and highlights the key findings. Foremost among these is that the ratcheting up of militarization and coercion as a core part of the U.S. war on drugs in Latin America emerged and has been maintained in large part because of larger structural changes in the global economy and the interests of transnational elites operating through different states and intergovernmental organizations. The contrast from previous “wars” against drugs highlights the role that different world orders, different national political regimes and most importantly the power of different social forces has had upon the strategies and tactics of the global drug war.

Notes 1 Grand strategy in foreign policy studies refers to the plans and policies that make-­up a state’s effort to apply political, economic, and military tools to advance a “national interest.” Peter Feaver refers to it as “the art of reconciling ends and means” (2009). 2 Donald Mabry (with Raphael Perl) even suggests that substance abuse potentially threatens the ability of nations to raise armies in times of crisis (Mabry and Perl 1989, 151). 3 Of course, the arguments relating the increasing salience of the drug war to the decline of the Cold War are partially undermined by the fact that the ratcheting up of these policies began in 1982, the declaration of a “war on drugs” was first uttered during the Nixon administration and different U.S. governments have been involved in promoting prohibitionist/regulatory controls over certain psychoactive substances since the beginning of the twentieth century. 4 There are always important structural requirements that states must respond to, most importantly the automatic punishment of disinvestment if capital views investment opportunities as unprofitable.

1 Global 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.

U.S. drug policy   11 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

12   U.S. drug policy 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

U.S. drug policy   13 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

14   U.S. drug policy 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. drug policy   15 “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 policies, but have also been directly related to the politics of crime. An understanding of these connections is relevant given the intersection between a “war on crime” and a “war on drugs,” with the alleged need for “law and order” being central to both. While scholars such as Moises Naim or David Mares have pointed to the relationship between increasing trade relations or to the relationship between financial liberalization and drug money laundering, the idea that the deepening of capitalist globalization should be reversed or slowed in order to combat illegal drug traffic isn’t considered to be a viable option and/or even on the table as a tactic to undermine the international drug trade (Naim 2009; Mares 2006). The reality is that the illegal drug economy is a central global capitalist industry, cautiously estimated with an annual value of $320 billion, accounting for 1 percent of global commerce (Mendoza 2010). For example, 10 percent of Mexico’s economy is built on drug proceeds and billions of dollars from Mexican cartels have entered the global financial system through the work of transnational corporations such as Wachovia (currently controlled by Wells Fargo). At the same time hundreds of millions dollars were laundered for the Sinaloa cartel by HSBC3 as the U.S. government was annually providing hundreds of millions of dollars in military and police aid to the Mexican government to help it fight these very same traffickers (Vulliamy 2011; Vulliamy 2015; Mendoza 2010). For theorists employing a “problem-­solving” approach this relationship has often been noted, but it is assumed that capitalist globalization will expand and states must seek ways of weakening transnational drug trafficking organizations despite the importance of capitalist globalization to their profits. The relationship between the crime/punishment policies and neoliberalism/ globalization has been illustrated in the history of political economy in the United States. Surplus populations, joblessness and informal labor that are typically the result of neoliberal economic policies have coincided with the lengthening of sentences and the criminalization of social problems (Carlson et al. 2010). Thus, one cannot disconnect the various harsh penalties instituted against those dealing and possessing drugs in the 1980s with the increasing levels of poverty that a liberalized market model is ill-­equipped to address. Carlson et al. assert that with increases in the surplus population and attendant crimes, criminal justice systems strategies will seek to restore system legitimacy by increasing the severity of penalties in ways that will keep significant portions of the now, no longer needed, surplus population behind bars. (2010, 242)

16   U.S. drug policy The expansion of state coercion and repression represents important parts of a larger global capitalist social structure of accumulation or neoliberal social structure of accumulation. A social structure of accumulation refers to sets of economic, ideological, political and social institutions that during different periods in capitalist history have come together to …  mitigate and channel class conflict and stabilize capitalists’ long-­run expectations … [the] institutions of any social structure of accumulation are mutually compatible and generally supportive of each other as well as supportive of the accumulation process. Thus, each SSA constitutes a relatively unified structure. (McDonough, Reich, and Kotz 2010, 2) The neoliberal economic policies begun under Reagan, and continued by the administrations that followed, consistently subordinated anti-­poverty and jobs programs to the expansion of the defense budget, large tax cuts for the wealthy and/or deficit reduction. For example, between 1981 and 1990 the percentage of U.S. children living in poverty increased to 20 percent and the Bush administration cut discretionary programs for low-­income families by half while Bush vetoed medical/parental leave all while claiming a need to fight the war on drugs to safeguard America’s future generation (Johns 1992, 68–72). Robinson is even more explicit in linking this process, positing that  the turn to a “law and order” police state coincided with capitalist globalization, neoliberalism, and the incipient dismantling of the welfare state. Far from coincidental, these two processes were mutually reinforcing and part of a singular project of reconstituting the mechanisms of social control and shifting the hegemonic discourse. (2014, 185) De Giorgi concurs, suggesting that capitalist profitability has long been tied to the politics of punishment in the United States and that the current epoch of capitalist globalization and its accompanying Post-­Fordist “fragmentation” of labor relations have produced new forms of state control and punishment. De Giorgi suggests that in our current stage of capitalism that “… there seems to be neither a social order to be re-­established nor any individual deficit to be disciplined: what is emerging is a social surplus to be controlled” and leading to the “… adoption of strategies of mass confinement, incapacitation and surveillance” (2007, 247; 250–251). Thus, we have moved from a system of rehabilitation to facilitate ex-­felons back into the capitalist economy (extreme punishment to repress potential threats) during more nationally oriented stages of the global economy to a system dedicated to “social exclusion” of entire populations. This neoliberal/ post-­Fordist punishment and control system coincided not only with the domestic and global neoliberal offensive begun at the end of the Carter

U.S. drug policy   17 years  and fully during the Reagan administration, but also the traumatic period of debt crisis and structural adjustment in Latin America. The neo­liberal offensive beginning in the late 1970s in the U.S., and Latin America’s debt crisis of the 1980s, were central contributors to expanding surplus populations of precarious formal/informal labor in the region during the 1980s and 1990s. With the debt crisis of the 1980s, and the steady implementation of structural adjustment policies and neoliberal reform in response to that crisis, Latin America’s popular and working classes have experienced stagnant and declining real wages, increasing levels of informality and precariousness as well as unemployment. By the end of the 1980s unemployment increased by almost 50 percent, inflation rapidly increased and informal work grew by more than 30 percent representing 40 percent of the economically active population in 1990 (Biles 2009, 214). By the end of the 2000s this situation had not substantially improved from the end of the 1980s, with informal work representing 80 percent of new job creation and almost 50 percent of overall employment (Biles 2009, 215). Decades of neoliberal restructuring has led to the formal economies of Latin America failing to absorb over 100 million workers, many of whom exist in legal or illegal informal economies within the region or in the U.S. or have been incarcerated/killed by coercive agents of the state (Gonzalez 2015). Table 1.1 shows the percentage of the population in the informal labor force in those Latin American countries important to drug production or in the transshipment of these substances to the U.S. market. Prison populations have increased dramatically in many of these countries as well (see Table 1.2) Latin America’s increased prison population overlaps with the intensification of its “war on drugs” consistent with the historical experience within the United Table 1.1  Informal employment in Latin America, 2013 Mexico Colombia Peru Guatemala Bolivia (2014 figure)

53.8% 54.5% 64% 73.6% 75%

Sources: Gonzalez (2015); Danish Trade Union (2014).

Table 1.2  Prison population, rate per 100,000 and increase

Colombia Peru Mexico Bolivia

Prison population

Rate per 100,000

Increase (%)

118,245 (2014)   71,596 (2014) 257,017 (2015)   14,415 (2013)

245 212 212 134

300 (1991–2014) 195 (1997–2014)   25 (2005–2015) 158 (2001–2013)

Source: Corda (2015, 3).

18   U.S. drug policy States (Corda 2015, 3; Metaal and Youngers 2010). As in the U.S., and with intensive U.S. pressure, Latin America responded to this increasing surplus population by increasingly adopting “get tough” on crime policies (and specifically drug related crimes), emphasizing incarceration and imprisonment. In short, Latin American elites have adopted a model of state control in line with neoliberalism and capitalist globalization, a model that reflects the utilization of the rule of law to attempt to address a legitimation crisis inherent to these economic strategies, significantly replicating the U.S. approach. According to Andreas and Nadelmann: What makes the U.S. case unique is the extent to which the U.S. government has successfully internationalized its own criminal laws, procedures, and enforcement efforts … No other has devoted comparable diplomatic and financial resources to pursuing its international law enforcement agenda. And no other has proved so willing to intrude on the prerogatives of foreign sovereigns, challenge foreign political sensibilities, and circumvent and override foreign legal norms. (2006, 106) The domestic drug policies in different Latin American countries reflect the substantial success the U.S. has had in promoting its prohibitionist vision, and marginalizing alternatives, on an international level—what Rodrigo Uprimny Yepes and Diana Esther Guzmán refer to as a model of “globalized-­localism” (2011, 39). In Colombia, Mexico, and Bolivia (as well as in much of Central America) there has been a decades-­long effort by the U.S. state to reform their judicial/ punishment systems in the direction of a U.S. model. In essence drug policy assistance has promoted the integration of justice/punishment systems to coincide with the ongoing economic integration in the region. Ultimately, global capitalism is unable to fully employ populations in the first, nor in the third, world. The structural dislocations associated with embracing market liberalization, privatization, and free trade have worked to create substantial surplus populations in the U.S. and throughout Latin America. Mass incarceration and expanding criminalization must step in to ensure that political stability can be maintained. However, this does not simply reflect a structural impediment that capitalist states must respond to, but has also been promoted, and internalized, by elites throughout Latin America.

Transnational elites, hegemony, and policy networks While radical analysts of U.S. drug policies in Latin America have asserted that these have served a structural imperative serving the needs of U.S. based corporations there has been little to establish a causative relationship in the initiation or development of these policies rather than the many correlations that have been uncovered. Such an analysis requires attention to policy networks as well as the social backgrounds of key policymakers not simply in the U.S., but within the

U.S. drug policy   19 region as a whole. There exists a global community of like-­minded “modernizers” or “globalists” committed to creating the economic and political conditions for transnational capital within their (as well as others’) respective nation-­states. Thus, the global capitalist thesis emphasizes the role that globalization of economic and social society works to integrate elites across borders into a dominant transnational social group (Robinson 1996, 34). As will be shown below, these corporate links and membership in corporate policymaking groups were shared by policymakers dealing with “drug war” policies throughout the Western Hemisphere, facilitating cooperation behind repressive, neoliberal advancing drug control policies. Van Apeldoorn and de Graaff assert that the state’s structural dependence on successful capital accumulation far from guarantees that it will pursue policies that secure the long-­term interests of the capitalist class. Ultimately agency is crucial in articulating these long-­ term interests and ensuring that they come to inform the thinking and policy-­making of state officials. (Van Apeldoorn and de Graaff 2013) McCormick concurs, stressing that “a sufficient base of power is the prerequisite for global supremacy, but it is insufficient unless the will to use that power is present in those determining public policy for the potential superpower” (1995, 7, emphasis mine). In fact, in a quantitative study of factors that potentially influence U.S. foreign policy making Lawrence Jacobs and Benjamin Page compared the influence of public opinion, foreign policy experts, and organized groups (such as internationally oriented corporations) over foreign policy issues between 1974 and 2002. They found little support for the role of public opinion, but statistically significant support for the role of internationally oriented businesses. They point to the existence of a “foreign policy establishment” in which “…  business preferences were the strongest predictor of officials’ preferences within each of the three separate institutional arenas [the administration, the Senate and the House]” (Jacobs and Page 2005, 115). Their work is reinforced by Busby and Morten who find that “establishment internationalism” remains an influential force within U.S. foreign policymaking despite widespread arguments that George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a sharp turn toward unilateral imperialism (2008). Busby and Morten argue that this establishment was “anchored by”: A group of cultural and economic elites centered in the Northern and Eastern coastal regions of the United States. This foreign policy “establishment” was made up of individuals that formed a “network connecting Wall Street, Washington, worthy foundations, and proper clubs,” and often moved interchangeably between public and private service. (2008, 454)

20   U.S. drug policy In Christopher Layne’s analysis of U.S. grand strategy since 1940 he concludes that this strategy has served the interests of “dominant elites” made up of “…  large capital-­intensive corporations that look to overseas markets and outward looking investment banks” (2006, 201). As Perry Anderson has asserted regarding U.S. foreign policy, “…  what happens overseas is of much greater consequence to bankers and diplomats, officers and industrialists, than to voters …” (2015, 1). The centrality of economic elites in the making of foreign policy has been empirically supported by a long history of policymaking analysis in the United States by scholars such as C. Wright Mills (1956), Gabriel Kolko (1969), William Appelman Williams (1972), Ralph Miliband (1969), and G. William Domhoff (2009). They have concluded that national policymaking is largely the product of the interests of dominant economic, political and military elites utilizing foreign policy to advance their goals.4 These power elite or ruling class theorists stress the importance of personal networks and social backgrounds as instrumental in understanding policy behavior in line with the idea that “…  if government leaders are recruited from an extremely narrow portion of the population, it is unlikely their policy views would coincide with those of the majority” as “background appears to be a factor in determining scopes of interest” (Mintz 1990 [1975], 156). In his analysis of U.S. foreign policy Gabriel Kolko concluded that …  foreign policy decision-­makers are in reality a highly mobile sector of the American corporate structure, a group of men who frequently assume and define high level policy tasks in government, rather than routinely administer it, and then return to business. (1969, 17) In our current epoch of capitalist globalization the role of the transnational elite is central. The transnational elite consists of the owners and managers of transnational corporations and those politicians and bureaucrats linked with these economic actors who promote the policy agenda associated with the interests of TNCs (such as free trade, privatization, deregulation of labor markets, and the elimination of capital controls) (Robinson 2004, 77–84). Leslie Sklair suggests that this transnational elite or class “consists of those people who see their interests and/or the interests of their social and/or ethnic group, often transformed into an imagined national interest, as best served by an identification with the global system” (2002, 9). These actors, according to Sklair, pursue policies in line with the needs of transnational corporations because they see their interests bound up not only with particular corporations or states but also with the capitalist global system as a whole and see their mission as organizing the conditions under which capitalist globalization can be furthered locally. (Sklair 2002, 160)

U.S. drug policy   21 Major drug policies and counternarcotics plans in the late twentieth and early  twenty-­first century repeatedly illustrate both traditional understandings of nation-­state behavior as well as the role of transnational elites and an emerging transnational state in the development and initiation of these policies. These networks also “… serve a useful integrative purpose in world politics, in that they informally draw together primarily regional clusters of business and political activity for the purposes of greater communication and understanding” (Richardson et al. 2011, 36). Some within the school of global capitalism school, such as William Carroll and Kees van der Pijl, have emphasized the existence of such networks in the North Atlantic seeing little indication that such networks exist outside of the ones linking the U.S. elites with Western European elites (Carroll and Sapinski 2010; Carroll 2010; Van der Pijl 1984). However, what is clear in the chapters that follow is that such policy networks also integrate policymakers from Latin America to ones in the United States creating a transnational policy network over drug policy. This emerging transnational policy network integrates intellectuals and politicians across borders into the same policy community or foreign policy establishment. These intellectuals and politicians represent a global community of like-­minded “modernizers” committed to a similar set of ideas believed necessary to create the economic and political conditions for transnational capital within their (as well as others) respective nation-­states. When it comes to U.S. foreign policymaking in Latin America, policy is typically centered in the executive branch, with the President, the National Security Council, the Office of National Drug Control Policy as well as the secretaries of defense and state playing central roles (Marcella 1995, 276).5 In particular, sub-­cabinet officials within the National Security Council and State Department (at the assistant secretary levels) is where, according to Howard Wiarda, “… the policy decisions are made and where most of the work is done in any administration” (Wiarda 1995, 30). This elite has remained socially similar since World War II, with Busby and Monten finding that this elite continues to share a “specific set of formative experiences and a particular social back ground” that contributes to the maintenance of “establishment internationalism” within U.S. grand strategy (2008, 459). McCormick refers to this foreign policy elite as the “very heart of the imperial presidency” as “each accepted the reality and propriety of American hegemony”6 as well as the “coherent vision of internationalism toward which that hegemonic power was pushing and pulling the world-­system” (1995, 15). In order to develop the tactics and specific policies associated with this “coherent vision,” policy-­planning organizations, universities or think tanks have often played a role in the development of these ideas and policy agendas. These institutions introduce reports and proposals on major issues, and often members from these groups are appointed to central decision sites within the state (Robinson 1996, 26–28, 41–44; Domhoff 1978, 63; Miliband 1969).7 Bodenheimer and Gould nicely summarize this process, writing:

22   U.S. drug policy the ruling elite supplies money to foundations, think tanks and universities who fund and undertake foreign policy studies; in addition, the ruling elite provides money and members to consensus-­seeking groups (for example, the Council on Foreign Relations) in which the corporate elites and the experts they have funded discuss foreign policy problems. The solutions reached are proposed to the government, where members of the consensus-­seeking groups are often key policymakers. Once policy is agreed upon at the top levels of government, it must be implemented by the foreign policy bureaucracies. (1989, 179) In an era in which changes in the international economy have prioritized neoliberal economic solutions as the key to economic growth, governments have increasingly been led by those actors who demonstrate their integration (intellectually and politically) with this changing social order. Changing conditions within the international economy have created a policy environment in which those economists, technocrats, and other intellectuals who have long promoted (or recently embraced) the ideals of the free market and capitalist competition have an opportunity to enact their policies. Nardone and McDonough suggest that the transnational elite is deeply ideological in that it has found the means of consensually controlling decisions made within national states through advisors, experts, or by straightforwardly financing various administrations on both the left and right of the political spectrum. (2010, 182–183) Within different U.S. administrations and Latin American governments key state managers involved in advancing the steady integration of their economies into global capitalism and advancing militaristic/repressive drug control policies enjoyed important links to transnational corporations and/or corporate dominated policymaking groups such as the Council of Foreign Relations, the American Enterprise Institute, the Business Roundtable, The Trilateral Commission, the InterAmerican Dialogue, Council of the Americas, or the Woodrow Wilson Center (Barrow 1993, 33; Abelson 2009, 100–101). In other words, these are individuals closely interconnected with the leading social forces in this period of accelerating capitalist globalization. For example, one senior IMF official speaking of the connections between the IMF, the World Bank, and the individuals who run the finance and economic ministries in Latin America stated We are all the same—people who come and go through the Bank, the Fund, and Finance Ministries and Central Banks of Latin American countries. We all study at the same universities; we all attend the same seminars, conferences … we all know each other very well. We keep in touch with each other on a daily basis. (As quoted in Faux 2006, 170)

U.S. drug policy   23 The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has long been viewed as the central policy planning organization bringing together a diverse array of governmental, corporate, and academic officials dedicated to influencing the direction of U.S. foreign policy. As former Treasury Secretary in the Obama administration Timothy Geithner remarked about the Council on Foreign Relations, “You don’t go to speak to the Council; you go to get advice” (as cited in Shoup 2015, 55). The CFR has historically promoted the idea that political and capitalist globalization is central to economic development in the developing world while endorsing a leading and multilateral role for the U.S. state.8 The CFR is considered one of the most important foreign policy planning groups in the United States. Between 1945 and 1972 more than half of the 502 high level officials involved with foreign policymaking were members of the CFR and 80 percent of top federal government policymakers for foreign policy between 1976–2014 were members at some point in their careers (Grose 2006, 48; Shoup 2015, 95; see also Domhoff 2009; Abelson 2006). The CFR obtains most of its resources from contributions from wealthy individuals and TNCs, while its board of directors has historically been dominated by members of the capitalist class (Domhoff 2009, 105; Council on Foreign Relations, 2004; 2015; Shoup 2015, 15, 49). Between 1976 and 2013 approximately two-­thirds of CFR directors were capitalists, typically with close connections to New York, regional commercial or investment banks (such as Goldman Sachs, Chase Manhattan, Morgan Stanley, or First Chicago) (Shoup 2015, 49). The CFR maintains a special “corporate program” that facilitates interactions between executives from TNCs and policymakers within the U.S. as well as with inter-­governmental organizations (such as the IMF ) (Council on Foreign Relations 2015). These planning groups and think tanks can be viewed as a “third force” in U.S. society that “…  funds, plans, formulates, and directs the policy-­making process” as well as acting as “central coordinating points in the policy-­ making  process (Dye and Zeigler 2009, 87; 91). Corporate dominated policymaking groups have been viewed as important levers of corporate influence over the U.S. state (Carroll 2010; Domhoff 2009, 85–118; Gill 1990; van Apeldoorn and de Graaff 2014). Thomas Dye refers to them as “… the central coordinating points in the entire elite policy-­making process” that “… endeavor to build consensus among corporate, financial, media, civic, intellectual, and government leaders around major policy directions” (1986, 246). In addition, in different U.S. presidential administrations leading foreign policymakers enjoyed a number of different corporate affiliations prior to and after joining their respective administrations. Corporate affiliations included being board members, an owner/partner, or as a member of an advisory board for a specific corporation. In his analysis of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, Thomas McCormick submits that two-­ thirds of the foreign policy elite were ins-­and-outers. Such individuals move back and forth between the public and private sectors, as though on a perpetual shuttle. Unlike their careerist colleagues, who tend to remain inside only one departmental bureaucracy,

24   U.S. drug policy ins-­and-outers often move from one department to  another on their return trips to government service. (1995, 13) This elite is concentrated in the secretaries, assistant/under secretaries of state, defense, and treasury as well as within the top positions of the CIA, the NSC, and the Agency for International Development (AID). In the case of drug policy, the role of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the State Department (in particular USAID) as well as the DEA are instrumental parts of the elite making or implementing foreign drug policy in Latin America. Since the late 1980s the Department of Defense (especially U.S. SOUTHCOMM) has been given the central responsibility in detecting and monitoring the export of illegal drugs toward the U.S. market. It is clear that given their often-­central role as secretaries and leaders of these institutions that the “ins-­and-outers” typically dominated policymaking. McCormick’s review of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War repeatedly found that “…  these cosmopolitan leaders always carried the day when their views diverged from the expert advice of career bureaucrats” (1995, 14). McCormick submits that their success was based on two factors: First, their multiple roles, both in the private sector and in varied governmental positions, had given them a broader and stronger base of power in a particular department. Second, they were always able to fall back on an argument that has proven to be decisive, even in the face of the superior expertise held by the careerist: namely that their varied portfolios made it easier for them to see the big picture while more narrow experts could not see the forest for the trees. (1995, 14) As will be shown below analogous elite networks exist within Latin America that complement the already existing ties that some members of Latin America’s policymaking elite enjoy with U.S.-based entities. The importance of building consensus not only between state managers and representatives of a transnational elite within a given nation-­state, but across borders has been seen in the work of different formal and informal transnational policy networks such as the World Economic Forum, the Bilderberg Group, or the Trilateral Commission. In the book Bilderberg People: Elite Power and World Affairs, Richardson et al. argue “… elite networks, and the consensuses that are formed and disseminated by them, are a critical mechanism for resisting or facilitating change in world politics” (2011, 7). Establishing and maintaining a consensus is most important in terms of legitimizing a particular policy response. This is even more important when it involves illegal drug policy in that the costs of controlling or prohibiting the production, distribution, and consumption of these substances have been so unevenly experienced in the Western Hemisphere. Skyrocketing rates of homicides, corruption, and kidnappings have long been concentrated in Latin America in large part as a consequence of the

U.S. drug policy   25 drug trafficking industry and state efforts to repress this industry. Furthermore, the decades long failure of different U.S. governments to reduce the level of demand for these substances, that are central to the incredible profits associated with the drug trafficking industry, has often contributed to conflicts between different Latin American administrations and U.S. administrations. Transnational elite networks associated with drug policy have often worked to create this consensus facilitating the successful approval and implementation of policies that while often failing to level the “final blow” against narco trafficking have worked to either further integrate Latin America economies into global capitalism and/or have strengthened security/judicial institutions in order to create a more stable business environment. The creation of this ideological consensus is consistent with what Antonio Gramsci refers to as hegemony. Antonio Gramsci (1971) argued that “hegemony” is a relation between social classes, in which one class fraction or class sector takes a leading role through gaining the willing consent of other classes and groups. This hegemony is obtained and maintained through both coercive and consensual mechanisms, though coercive power is not regularly required given that subordinate groups have come to accept the nature of things. In an era of capitalist globalization the growing internationalization of production and exchange represents the potential material basis for a transnational historic bloc, hegemonic relations between social groups and political elites that transverse the borders of nation-­states (Cox 1981, 1987; Gill 1994; Robinson 1996). A related idea is presented by Robert Cox who refers to specific “historical structures” that have dominated different periods of world history. Each is made up of “material capabilities” based in production relations, institutions that work to resolve internal conflicts with minimal force, and dominant ideas. Cox divides dominant ideas between intersubjective meanings or those shared notions of the nature of social relations which tend to perpetuate habit and expectations of behavior [such as the meaning and purpose of nation-­states] … [and the] collective images of social order held by different groups of people. These are differing views as to both nature and the legitimacy of prevailing power relations, the meanings of justice and public good. (1981, 136) For instance, for over a century state managers and economic elites in the U.S. have maintained and promoted a “collective image” of the war on drugs that has stressed prohibitionist and repressive strategies against the production and distribution of certain psychoactive substances, an image that elites in other countries have found compatible with their interests. These policies have typically been justified by references to public order and/or controlling the marginalized minorities within the U.S. and/or defending our national security as justified by the “grand moral principles” (Augelli and Murphy 1993, 128) of fighting drugs. In the 1980s this rhetoric, and the policies that followed, stressed the need for

26   U.S. drug policy greater military commitment and a genuine war-­like posture in Latin American drug policies. Foreign policy establishments within the U.S. and certain Latin American states have, since the 1980s, increasingly shared the commitment to a repressive drug war policy agenda. However, this agenda has not been consistently applied nor has it been pursued without resistance, sometimes even within the transnational elite policymaking community itself. The integration of Latin America into capitalist globalization has not represented a linear and smooth process, but has been associated with conflict. Often conflict emerges between those actors wedded to a nationalist orientation and/or a rejection of capitalist forms of globalization versus those coalitions very much committed to a globalist perspective. Transnational or neoliberal policy coalitions consist of those politicians, economic elites, bureaucrats, social movements, intellectuals, and factions within the military that enjoy important ideological, material and/or political links/sympathies with the processes and political actors promoting capitalist globalization and market democracies. Statist/nationalist policy coalitions consist of those politicians, social movements, factions of the armed forces, intellectuals, sectors of the business community, and bureaucrats that resist the integration of their respective economies into a global system and accept various import substitution, nationalist economic strategies while seeking alternative forms of democratic politics. The transnational/neoliberal policy coalitions have often shared the economic and political goals promoted by the United States, such as the U.S. “drug war” and “war on terrorism.” When examining the spread of these economic and political ideas they clearly have been facilitated by the diffusion and internalization of  these norms by elites within Latin America convinced that this economic model and related policies associated with the “war on drugs” is consistent with democracy. U.S. foreign drug war policies in Latin America can be best understood by an analytical model that refuses to reduce policymaking simply to state managers pursuing perceived national security interests, electoral competition, or constructed norms within U.S. society. Class interests, policy networks, and structural changes within the global economy are a fundamental context to the shifts and continuity of these policies. Furthermore, the development and implementation of drug war policies since the last quarter of the twentieth century has increasingly reflected transnational networks across the region constructing a transnational grand strategy integrating prohibitionist campaigns, neoliberalism, and low-­intensity democracies across Latin America. The next chapter will illustrate the interaction of these different factors in U.S. foreign drug policies historically throughout the world and more specifically within Latin America.

Notes 1 An important indication of this transnational capitalist class is the increasing number of interlocking relationships between board members of different transnational corporations. In examining links between directors of companies sitting on different boards we find that between 1996 and 2004 almost half of Global 500 corporations had at least

U.S. drug policy   27 one transnational interlocker—a trend that dramatically increased from the 1970s (Richardson et al. 2011, 24–25). 2 This perspective is similar to liberalism within international relations, which submits that “… the core objectives of American foreign policy is to promote the expansion of individual liberty across the globe,” which will enhance U.S. security as the world becomes economically and politically similar to the U.S. (Schmidt 2012, 11). Of course for Liberalism this is presented in the context of national security and not through the needs or interests of economic elites and/or the functioning of global capitalism. 3 Despite the fact that the HSBC scandal involved assisting what the DEA views as the largest drug cartel in the world, there has not been a single criminal conviction of a bank official in connection with its widespread money laundering (Bewley-­Taylor and Jelsma 2016, 3). In fact, HSBC was the major colonial bank in China during the nineteenth century helping to facilitate the opium trade to China that Britain maintained through two different “opium wars” to support its opium exporting interests in colonial India (Taibbi 2013). 4 These elite theorists, who largely rely upon case study analyses, were supported in multivariate analysis of Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page who find that economic elites and corporate interest groups wield extensive independent influence on U.S. governmental policy on over 1700 policy issues between 1981 and 2002 (2014). 5 Marcella asserts that the “…  apex of the formal advisory system is the National Security Council” (1995, 279). 6 McCormick’s reference to “hegemony” is in line with realist and world-­systems conceptions of this term, which utilizes hegemony to refer to the dominance of powerful states in the international system and not Gramsci’s economic/ideological version of this concept. 7 For example, the rise and attainment of positions within the Council on Foreign Relations or a professorship within an elite university or major policy planning group act as informal signals to governmental policymakers in the United States that these individuals can be trusted with the power that they would wield in public office. This is apparent through a simple examination of the U.S. cabinet, as every single secretary of defense, treasury, and state in the United States between 1961–1988 was either a member of the board of directors from a multinational corporation, an elite law firm and/or corporate dominated think tank (Who’s Who in America, 44th edn. 1986). 8 One November 2013 Pew-­CFR survey of CFR members found that 93 percent of members viewed free trade agreements as “good things” and 73 percent found that it was “mostly helpful” when U.S. companies established operations overseas (Shoup 2015, 65).

2 Capitalist globalization, prohibition, and the U.S. drug war

At least since the Shanghai Conference of 1909 U.S. governmental leaders have been engaged in an effort to internationalize their views on drug regulation, prohibition, and control. While these policies have often been tied to domestic interests or temperance politics, they have often sought to simultaneously achieve other foreign policy objectives, including economic ones. The Shanghai conference was dedicated to regulating the production/export of opium in Asia, a goal in line with the increasingly influential temperance movement within the U.S., but which also reduced tensions between China and the United States, a country to which U.S. exporters sought greater access (Musto 1999, 28–32; Buxton 2006, 30–36). Ultimately, the Shanghai Conference would be followed by the Hague Conference leading to the 1912 Hague Opium Convention that required the twelve original signatories to exercise control over the cultivation, manufacture, and distribution of cocaine, opium, and its derivatives (Gray 2000, 50).1 The Harrison Act of 1914 represented the U.S. commitment to the Hague Convention and was largely justified in the U.S. Congress as being necessary to meet the international obligations of the U.S. Racism played a prominent role in mobilizing political support behind the legislation. Whether it was fear and prejudice against Asian opium users on the West Coast or paranoia about the effects of cocaine on African-­Americans in the south the white establishment and the public’s views of minorities would provide racist justifications for tightening regulations over certain psychoactive substances. The Harrison Act required that firms maintain a strict accounting of the amount of opium and coca that was imported into the U.S., with a small tax having to be paid at each transfer with permits needed from the Treasury Department in order to sell these substances. In addition, it permitted the sale of cocaine only through prescriptions and banned its use in patent medicines (Musto 1991). This act illustrated the early importance of market controls over the production and use of psychoactive substances, as the U.S. would increasingly outline the spheres for legal and illegal production, ensuring that U.S. based economic interests would benefit (such as pharmaceutical companies) while simultaneously strengthening the global presence of U.S. corporations seeking international markets (Reiss 2014, 3). Later, these drug war policies and tactics would shed such direct benefits to U.S. based capital and increasingly forward the interests of TNCs.

Capitalist prohibition   29 The Harrison Act demonstrated U.S. seriousness in its international commitment to restrict these substances, specifically illustrating to the Chinese that the U.S. was supportive of greater controls over opium. The State Department’s Opium Commissioner at the time and a leading advocate of greater prohibition of certain drugs, Hamilton Wright, argued that the anti-­narcotics campaign in the U.S. could be “…  used as oil to smooth the troubled water of our aggressive commercial policy there” (as cited in Musto 1991; see also McAllister 2000, 30–31), while William Howard Taft viewed China at the time as “… one of the greatest commercial prizes in the world” (as cited in Gray 2000, 42). The Hague Opium Convention of 1912 and the Harrison Act of 1914 are viewed as the starting points for a century long struggle to restrict and/or prohibit global access to certain psychoactive substances, specifically access outside of the medically necessary boundaries erected by the U.S. and its allies. In the decades that followed the U.S. sought in different international treaties and conferences to move beyond simply regulating and calculating supplies, but to the active elimination of these substances and the criminalization of the consumption, production, and distribution of these substances on an international scale. Central coca producers such as Peru and Bolivia and important marijuana and opium producers such as Mexico would regularly be targeted with pressure to do more in terms of regulating or eradicating their respective production. This effort, one that continues to this day, to shape and change the behavior and laws of countries around the world to meet “American” conceptions of morality, politics, and economics was often in line with an important U.S. grand strategy of an “open-­door policy” or “open-­door diplomacy” that emerged during this period. William Appelman Williams has argued that since the late nineteenth century different U.S. policymakers have been guided by the belief that U.S. national interests/security are directly tied to establishing free markets and trade in order to benefit U.S. based corporations. The notion of an “open door” is related to an 1899 “open door note” to the major European powers written by then U.S. Secretary of State John Hay, which proposed that China be kept open to trade with all countries on an equal basis and asking these powers not to seek special favors on behalf of economic interests based in their respective countries. Williams argued that the requirement of U.S. economic interests for access to international markets not only benefitted these actors, but was also key to maintaining economic growth for the U.S. economy, thus contributing to national stability while extending U.S. power globally to advance/protect those international markets. The closing of the frontier in the 1890s led U.S. businesses to turn their attention outward, with the ideology of open markets and individual opportunity being promoted abroad (see also McCormick 1995, 18).2 Finally, U.S. policymakers stressed that an open door policy was beneficial for all as formal colonialism was viewed as inefficient and the competition associated with a more open market would ensure that industries throughout the world would become more productive and efficient (McCormick 1995, 19). A central ideal underlying this strategy was an American belief that “… that other people cannot really solve their problems and improve their lives unless

30   Capitalist prohibition they go about it in the same way as the United States” (Williams 1972 13 emphasis in the original). Greater controls over psychoactive substances and greater criminalization, advocated by the different U.S. officials on a global level, were consistent with solving the world’s problems in the “same way as the United States.” In Christopher Layne’s description of the Open Door policy he highlights an important proposition in the policy in which “… the United States can be secure only in a world constituted of states whose domestic political systems mirror that of the United States and that ‘defects’ in other state can be readied by using US power  …” (2006, 35 emphasis mine). A “war on drugs” that effectively began in the first half of the twentieth century reflected an “imperialism of idealism” that Williams viewed as fundamental, along with an imperialism of free trade in the interests of U.S. based capital. Open markets and drug prohibition were wedded at the very start of U.S. foreign drug policies. By the end of the century this linkage would increasingly serve the interests of transnational capital as opposed to solely U.S. economic/geopolitical interests. The linkage between drug policy and free trade was in line with an early period of globalization (latter decades of the nineteenth century and early twen­ tieth century) in which global trade substantially increased throughout the world (for example, Hirsch and Thompson 2009)—though this period lacked the decentralization of the global production process through transnational commodity chains that marked capitalist globalization in the late twentieth century. The economic crises in the 1890s were widely attributed to a lack of foreign markets for U.S. goods. Expanding into foreign markets was considered a solution to re-­ accelerating economic growth (McDonough 1994, 110–111). This focus upon export markets was strongly promoted by an oligopolistic industrial structure in which large dominant corporations displaced smaller, competitive enterprises while simultaneously enjoying a collaborative relationship with the U.S. state (McDonough 1994, 104–105). This is a period that Robinson refers to as a “third epoch” in the history of world capitalism, which witnessed the “… rise of corporate (‘monopoly’) capitalism, the consolidation of a single world market and the nation-­state system into which world capitalism became organized” (2004, 4). In the case of Latin America, the 1920s witnessed the total value of U.S. foreign direct investment increase by 95 percent and U.S. based corporations were the number one investors in Latin America (Panitch and Gindin 2012, 49–50). Finally, the foreign policymaking community within the United States was largely dominated by members of the social and business elite in the first half of the twentieth century. In Beth Mintz’s study of Presidential cabinets she found that 90 percent of all cabinet officers that served between 1897 and 1973 were members of the social and business elite. Mintz’s definition of a social elite included individual members of the Social Register and/or graduates of Ivy League universities while the “business elite” were individuals who at anytime in their career before or after serving in a cabinet had sat on a board of directors of a corporation or had been a lawyer in a corporation (Mintz 1990 [1975], 157–158). The number of cabinet officials with corporate affiliations steadily increased in the latter decades of Mintz’s study. In key foreign policymaking

Capitalist prohibition   31 bodies (the State Department, the Department of War/Defense) the percentage of cabinet members who had served in a corporation averaged over 80 percent during the same time period (Freitag 1990 [1975]). This is also consistent with Kolko’s finding on the disproportionate representation of the corporate community within the U.S. foreign policy establishment in the first half of the twentieth century (1969, 17–18).

Internationalizing prohibition—the early decades The first few decades of the twentieth century would witness the United States seeking to integrate more prohibitionist elements in international drug control treaties. Increasing domestic controls over narcotics, cocaine, and marijuana on the federal and/or state level during this period contributed to the emergence of an increasing black market for these substances in the U.S. In fact, by 1926 poppy fields were growing throughout Sonora, Mexico to feed the illegal opium/ heroin market in the United States, which had grown in response to the increasing difficulties in legally acquiring these substances (Courtwright 2001, 38). Other prohibited or heavily regulated substances such as alcohol and cocaine were also smuggled across the U.S.–Mexican border during this period (Gootenberg 2010, 9). Of course, drug prohibition in the early decades of the twentieth century was also heavily influenced by larger domestic campaigns and fears associated with addiction, especially as it related to alcohol prohibition. Alcohol was viewed by temperance movements, progressives, and religious leaders as a scapegoat for poverty, domestic violence and unemployment with prohibition viewed as a solution for all of these problems. Like its efforts related to narcotics, the U.S. sought to expand its Alcohol Prohibition regime internationally, but was largely unsuccessful especially given the negative consequences associated with the U.S. experience of prohibition that ultimately ended this experiment in 1933. European governments were typically more willing to accept the prohibitions on other drugs, especially in order to placate the growing power and influence of the U.S. state. In fact, the Covenant of the League of Nations refers to the control of “dangerous drugs” as one of the organization’s concerns that Julia Buxton argues was explicitly done to integrate the U.S. into this intergovernmental organization (Buxton 2006, 40, 45; see also Levine 2002). The United Nations would later include drug prohibition as one of its priorities and the UN Single Convention of 1961 (along with other drug control treaties) instituted a system of global drug prohibition that has been maintained to the present-­day (Levine 2002). For different scholars, the global spread of international drug prohibition was centrally tied to the economic, political, and military power of the United States (Levine 2002; Buxton 2006; Gray 2000; Reiss 2014). Obviously, many nations adopted prohibitionist policies for other reasons as well, such as rationalizing an increase of domestic police power, or utilizing drugs as a scapegoat for larger social problems, but the persistent prohibitionist international agenda of the most economically and politically powerful state was central to international consolidation of this perspective (see Levine 2003).

32   Capitalist prohibition The influence of the U.S. was already felt in the first few decades of the twentieth century. According to McAllister, between 1919 and 1925, the “… United States played a key role in determining the trajectory of events … American pressure propelled other governments farther than they would have travelled on their own” (ibid., 78). In particular, U.S. based pharmaceutical firms, allied with drug prohibitionists in these early decades, sought an international system of controls that would allow them access to necessary raw materials (such as coca or opium poppies) and also ensure that their European competitors were operating under the same rules. McAllister concludes that the manufacturers’ [of pharmaceutical drugs] concern dovetailed with the existing elements of American drug control policy. The United States could continue to pursue the elimination of excess agricultural production as its ultimate goal. In the meantime, federal officials could urge other nation-­ states to imitate American domestic arrangements: retain free market in raw materials and finished products, supervise distribution closely, and criminalize illicit use. (2000, 91) During the 1930s and 1940s the U.S. based pharmaceutical industry represented one of the core export industries that benefitted from the close relations between the United States and Latin America, allowing it to dominate the region (Grandin 2006, 36). This was in keeping with increasing U.S. influence and control in the region during the first half of the century. Whether it was the more than thirty military interventions between 1898 and 1930 to establish governments more to the liking of the U.S. or the centrality of U.S. investments and trade to the well-­being of Latin American economies U.S. power in the region was preeminent (Grandin 2006, 20). U.S. interventions in the Western Hemisphere consolidated its hegemony before World War II, with Layne suggesting that U.S. regional hegemony in Latin America was a rehearsal for its larger objective of global hegemony (2006, 34, 37). Grandin concludes that by the late 1920s … the United States had apprenticed itself as the fledgling empire in Latin America, investing capital, establishing control over crucial raw materials and transit routes, gaining military expertise, and rehearsing many of the ideas that to this day justify American power in the world. (2006, 23) Latin American economies were largely agrarian during this period with many economies dependent upon relatively few cash crops (Vanden and Prevost 2015, 159). These economies were especially vulnerable to international changes in demand and prices for their specific commodities and dependent upon economies such as the U.S. for their industrial/manufactured goods. In the case of Mexico U.S. based capitalists had $1 billion in investments in that country by

Capitalist prohibition   33 1910, which was more than all foreign investment combined (McCormick 1995, 21). Illicit drug producers, such as Peru and Bolivia for coca or Mexico for opium poppies, were in no position to influence the outcome of different drug conventions in the 1920s or 1930s. In fact, their efforts to be manufacturers of legal cocaine for medicinal purposes were regularly undermined by the United States. The U.S effectively ensured that this manufacturing would remain in the hands of pharmaceutical corporations based in the United States with Peru and Bolivia restricted to exporting the raw materials and importing the finished product—exacerbating their dependency upon the core (Reiss 2014, 9).3 At the end of the war the U.S. would be the world’s largest importer of coca leaves and the largest producer of cocaine (licit) (Reiss 2014, 26). However, U.S. international drug diplomacy was unable to force Latin America’s complete compliance as the centrality of coca to Peruvian and Bolivian cultures and economies were often too great of an incentive to risk greater cooperation with international drug control organizations (McAllister 2000, 119). As William Walker concludes, officials in the two countries suspected, with some justification, that adherence to a broad treaty would ultimately serve to undermine their licit coca markets. This interpretation of global antidrug conventions did not change substantially in Lima or La Paz for more than seventy years. (1996, 5) Despite the difficulties and contradictions involved in pressuring certain Latin American governments for greater prohibition the pressure would continue in the 1930s with the leadership of Harry Anslinger over the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Anslinger had been active in the alcohol prohibition movement and aggressively shifted his attention to other psychoactive substances. He was committed to a supply reduction strategy abroad, the criminalization of distribution and use in the United States and the belief that harsh punishments and a genuine war footing was the only way to succeed in the U.S. “drug war.” Anslinger would direct the Bureau for over thirty years, regularly using misleading statistics, anecdotes, and racist myths in order to maintain a prohibitionist policy approach and justify the continued funding/existence of his very agency. He regularly referred to U.S. national security interests in his international dealings with other governments as well as in his domestic propaganda. Anslinger utilized his control over U.S. drug enforcement to pressure Latin American governments (and other governments) to toe closer to the prohibitionist/control agenda promoted by the U.S. in exchange for access to U.S. drugs and/or to the U.S. market for their raw materials (McAllister 2000, 145). However, even this pressure led to only minor, often cosmetic progress in the region in part out of concern that too much pressure for a coercive response might actually contribute to political instability and the rise of leftist governments—potentially restricting markets/trade with certain economies (McAllister 2000, 166). Furthermore, the 1930s coincided with Hoover and Roosevelt’s

34   Capitalist prohibition “good neighbor policy,” an effort to improve relations with Latin American countries through economic aid and cooperation as opposed to military intervention and coercion. It was hoped that this new strategy would contribute to greater political stability and reduce the possibility of revolutionary change or greater economic ties with the Axis powers.4 Throughout the twentieth and twenty-­first century U.S. state managers would often shift from coercive, repressive tactics to more cooperative consensual based strategies in their effort to maintain not only a state-­centric form of hegemony, but a hegemony in the Gramscian sense of the concept (see Grandin 2006 for history illustrating these political swings in U.S. foreign policy in Latin America).

World War II to the 1980s While the U.S. had made progress in different international agreements during the interwar period in terms of gradually increasing the monitoring, reporting, and controls over the production and distribution opium and to some extent with coca/cocaine, it was the years after World War II where the U.S. increasingly institutionalized its control over international drug control bodies. The U.S. state, at the peak of its military/economic power relative to other major powers, utilized that power to extend its prohibitionist agenda. Europe and Japan were devastated and in the process of rebuilding, and were less able to resist U.S. initiatives in international organizations. Furthermore, the U.S. used its influence to ensure that their remaining colonial possessions would end their various state monopolies over opium production. Suzanna Reiss argues that between the 1940s and 1960s the international drug control regime “…  was structured according to the geopolitical and strategic interests of the US state and private capital” (2014, 3; see also Jelsma 2011, 3). The U.S. was even finally able to influence Peru and Bolivia to criminalize cocaine (in 1948 and 1961 respectively) after faltering efforts in decades past (Gootenberg 2012, 163). Ironically and predictably, this success contributed to the emergence of illegal producing and smuggling networks in Peru, Bolivia, and Chile given the profitable opportunities associated with a prohibited substance combined with a strong demand (Gootenberg 2012, 163). In the case of Mexico the government had passed different pieces of national legislation in the 1930s and 1940s to reduce the illegal trafficking of drugs into the United States and a national campaign to eradicate illegal drugs. Finally, the Federal Security Directorate was established in 1947 to be centrally responsible for drug issues (Paula Hernández 2011, 60). During the post-­war period Anslinger worked to consistently tie the Communist “threat” with the threat of illegal drugs claiming that “Communist” opium was deadlier than Communist troops and that a global Communist conspiracy was in the works through the use of heroin drug use (Gray 2000 84–85). The effectiveness of Anslinger’s campaign bore fruit with harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession being passed in 1951 and 1956 with the “threat” of Communist China cited as a central justification for the intensification of

Capitalist prohibition   35 punishment (Bertram et al. 1996, 84–85). In fact, Anslinger would play a role in the creation of the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor of the CIA) providing some of its first agents—agents who shifted from secretive, international careers in the FBN to work for the new intelligence agency (Buxton 2006, 53; McAllister 2000).5 The false links between illegal drugs and national security threats were regularly employed by Anslinger and other U.S. officials as well as his supporters in society. During the post-­World War II period the U.S. increasingly downplayed its interest in democratic politics or individual political liberty in Latin America, preferring the stability of authoritarianism over the risks associated with democratic societies and the popularity of nationalist and/or socialist movements. The success of the 1959 Cuban revolution and the spread of armed insurgencies throughout the region only reinforced the view that capitalist dictatorships were the best guarantee to maintaining the openness of Latin America to foreign direct investment and trade. In fact, within the first year of the Cuban Revolution Anslinger as well as other U.S. state managers were accusing the Cuban government of trafficking cocaine into the United States (Reiss 2014, 210–211). In one 1960 Congressional hearing Anslinger argued that “there is probably more cocaine traffic in Cuba than all the rest of the countries of the world put together” (as cited in Reiss 2014, 211). This false claim is striking given the centrality that Cuban traffickers wielded over the illegal drug trade before the revolution and the mass expulsion of this mafia from the island after the revolution (see Gootenberg 2012, 161). During Inter-­American meetings on drug policy between 1960 and 1962 the United States not only sought that harsher drug control laws would be instituted in different countries of Latin America, but also used the forums to undermine the Cuban government by falsely accusing it of using Andean coca leaf production to make cocaine and distribute it to the U.S. (Reiss 2014, 211–212). By the early 1960s key police officials from Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela had received training from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics training school (established in 1956) facilitating the promotion of U.S. drug war priorities (Reiss 2014, 212). At the same time anti-­communist forces, such as conservative Cuban exiles and reactionary Bolivian elites, were producing and trafficking cocaine into the United States (Gootenberg 2012, 164) —illustrating the extent to which U.S. policymakers were willing to tolerate the alleged “drug threat” when this threat came from allies in its effort to crush popular movements. This would occur throughout the twentieth century and continues to the present-­day. The backing of authoritarian regimes was largely maintained throughout the 1960s and 1970s. By 1976 with the military coup in Argentina a majority of Latin American republics were governed by one-­man/one-­party systems or military regimes, all (with the exception of Cuba) maintaining their economies open to capitalist investment while crushing political dissent. While this political authoritarianism was preferred over democratic regimes “susceptible” to Communist influence, U.S. state managers were typically more tolerant of variations in economic development strategies within the context of capitalist systems. Grandin argues that

36   Capitalist prohibition presidents from Truman to Carter answered Communism’s charge that capitalism produced third-­world poverty by endorsing a vision of development similar to the one executed in Mexico after its revolution, in which the state would play an active role in the economy in order to lessen the volatility of commodity and capital markets. (2006, 161) This was roughly in line with various Keynesian, state assisted models of capitalism prominent in the developed world in which large social welfare states and relatively high taxation rates were relatively common. Price and wage controls, the nationalization of certain industries, labor protections, and high tariff walls associated with import substitution industrialization programs were all part of the political economy mix throughout Latin America (whether within authoritarian or semi-­democratic regimes) (Grandin 2006, 162). Though the U.S. was more willing to allow space for different nationalist/developmentalist strategies that continued to allow for the foreign investment of U.S. based multinational capital it continued to promote a prohibitionist position to psychoactive substances. The United Nations’ Single Convention on Narcotics Drugs in 1961 and the amendment in 1972 illustrated this continued prohibitionist drive as well as the extent of the U.S. and the pharmaceutical industry’s influence over international drug policy. The central author of the treaty, Adolph Lande, was a close friend of Anslinger and lobbied on behalf of the U.S. (and other manufacturing nations) in his career working for different UN drug control bodies. Lande would go on to represent the American Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (APMA) in the early 1970s after leaving the UN (Reiss 2014, 190–191). They would also honor his ally, Anslinger in 1962, with the APMA’s Remington Medal, which is given to those individuals who have done the most for American pharmacy (Reiss 2014, 217). Relatedly, the leading representative of six Latin American countries during the 1971 Vienna drug conference worked for the pharmaceutical firm Hoffmann-­LaRoche (McAllister 2000, 232). The 1961 Single Convention consolidated nine previous drug conventions that had been introduced since 1911 and expanded a “…  system of licensing, reporting and certifying drugs transactions to include raw plant materials such as cannabis and coca leaves” and required that the “… consumption of opium, cocaine and cannabis be immediately prohibited” (Buxton 2006, 56). A schedule system was maintained (first introduced in a 1931 treaty) rating the “dangers” of specific substances, more punitive laws against the illicit drug trade were demanded and an International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) was created to evaluate statistical information and authorize plant cultivations for medical and scientific needs (Buxton 2006, 57). Illegal psychoactive substances were presented as an “existential threat” and a great “evil” that the world had to combat (Crick 2012, 408).6 The war against “illegal” psychoactive substances was a benefit for the pharmaceutical industry as the convention also contributed to the creation of a more universally applied regulatory environment allowing them to “proceed with the

Capitalist prohibition   37 business of developing, securing approval for, and marketing new substances in a worldwide market” (McAllister 2000, 229). This was also illustrated by the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances, which incorporated over a hundred synthetic psychoactive substances (including amphetamines, barbiturates, and psychedelics), but the controls were much weaker relative to the ones associated with the plant-­based drugs—demonstrating the power of pharmaceutical companies concerned about excessive controls over their products (International Drug Policy Consortium 2016a, 14). Though the pursuit of a prohibitionist paradigm remained paramount, U.S. state managers continued to recognize the risks of going too far in pushing Latin American governments to abide by its drug war agenda. For example, Bolivia did not ratify the 1961 Single Convention until 1975 and relatively little pressure was placed upon either Peru or Bolivia to make much progress on eradicating coca in the first two decades after 1961. However, the Nixon administration (1968–1974) did represent an important escalation of U.S. pressure upon Latin America as it related to drug policy, being one of the first to recognize the direct relationship between controlling the traffic in drugs and maintaining U.S. hegemony in Latin America (Walker 1996, 9). A classic example was Operation Intercept in 1969 in which the U.S. Customs and federal drug agents effectively closed the U.S.–Mexican border in order to allow for a search of every vehicle crossing from Mexico into the United States for illegal drugs. The disruption to the Mexican economy and miles of automobiles waiting to cross into the U.S. placed severe pressure upon the Mexican government to cooperate more fully with the U.S. on its demands for greater crop eradication of poppy and marijuana fields (Baum 1996, 23–24). At the time Operation Intercept was referred to as “the country’s largest peacetime search and seizure operation by civil authorities” (as cited in Bertram et al. 1996, 107). Bertram et al. assert that the Nixon administration represented an important advance in U.S. international drug policy, stating that The concern over foreign supply had its origins in the international drug control efforts of American missionaries in the last century and had remained a point of focus for nativist and other antivice crusaders. But before Nixon the government’s approach was largely rhetorical, diplomatic, and low in profile. Nixon turned foreign supply into a prominent issue: drug trafficking from abroad became national enemies, and the war against foreign supply became of a critical plank of U.S. antidrug policy. (1996, 106) Even this effort to coerce a policy response was not maintained for very long as Nixon administration officials shifted more of their drug policy attention domestically and to other regions in the world (such as Eastern and Central Asia). Furthermore, during the 1970s, specific unity of the Mexican armed forces engaged in counternarcotics operations while other units would regularly be involved in trafficking drugs into the United States (Aviña 2016, 144). Counternarcotics and

38   Capitalist prohibition counterinsurgency operations often overlapped as the Mexican state conveniently utilized its own war on drugs as a pretext for domestic repression (Aviña 2016, 144). A year after Operation Intercept the Controlled Substance Act was passed in the U.S. in 1970. This act integrated all previous federal drug legislation into one central piece of legislation, establishing the scheduling system that classifies drugs by their ostensible harm and medical use (Buxton 2006, 62). A year later Nixon would declare in June of 1971 that “America’s public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse … in order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-­out offensive” (The American Presidency Project 1971). While Nixon stressed the welfare of America’s young people in justifying the war, his domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichman emphasized a more important rationale for his declaration of a new offensive. Ehrlichman stated to the journalist Dan Baum in 1994 that The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people … by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. (Baum 2016)7 Ehrlichman’s statement is reinforced by the words of another top Nixon advisor, H.R. Haldeman, who asserted that “He [President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to” (as cited in Alexander 2012, 43–44). This war against “hippies” and the increasingly radicalized communities of African-­Americans clearly illustrates the degree that the U.S. state viewed the “drug war” as a pretext to maintain the social and political order against dissent, something that has continued to the present day. It also demonstrates the importance of the argument detailed in Chapter 1 of the relationship between increased criminalization and incarceration to address the negative consequences of capitalist accumulation in terms of poverty and unemployment. This “war” expanded in 1973 when the Drug Enforcement Agency was created, which unified multiple drug enforcement agencies (including hundreds from U.S. Customs and the CIA) into one agency and by the end of the 1970s the DEA would have agents stationed throughout the nation and world seeking to interdict and eradicate illegal drugs (Gray 2000, 96). A central 1970s era precedent to the escalation of the prohibitionist paradigm that would eventually envelop national policy in the 1980s was the “Rockefeller Laws” of New York State. In fact, Eric Schlosser views the then governor Nelson Rockefeller and his drug laws as the beginning of the modern-­day explosion of the U.S. prison population as thousands of poor low-­level offenders  filled New York’s prisons (1998). Schlosser concluded that “Nelson Rockefeller had set in motion a profound shift in American sentencing policy …” (1998). In 1973, Rockefeller proposed a series of punitive drug laws

Capitalist prohibition   39 in response to increasing levels of drug crime and drug addiction. These laws included mandatory prison sentences of fifteen years to life for drug dealers and addicts, including those in possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, or heroin (Mann 2013). These laws became the model for other states and ultimately for the federal government that would institute similarly draconian mandatory sentences for drug possession and dealing in the 1980s. Rockefeller was a member of the CFR and his brother, David Rockefeller, represented the central force behind the organization for decades. The Rockefeller Drug Laws were at least in part related to Nelson Rockefeller’s travels to Latin America. Rockefeller held multiple positions in public service and the private sector centered on U.S.–Latin American relations between the 1930s and 1960s. This included heading the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-­ American Affairs for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and founding the American International Association and the International Basic Economy Corporation, which were economic ventures to promote philanthropic work and in the running of some of Standard Oil’s subsidiaries (Seigel 2015, 164). His work also involved directing mass advertising to Latin American audiences for U.S. based corporations. According to Edward Epstein, “By 1945 more than 75% of the news of the world that reached Latin America originated from Washington, where it was tightly controlled and shaped by Rockefeller’s office” (1977, 36–37). Rockefeller maintained a special place in the U.S. state’s relations with Latin America, even leading a “fact-­finding mission” to the region in 1969 for Richard Nixon. The mission was met with violent protests in multiple countries, including bombings and rioting as thousands of Latin Americans viewed the U.S. visit, and Rockefeller himself, as representing authoritarianism and imperialism in the region (Seigel 2015, 166–167). Latin American governments reported to Rockefeller the extent that criminality and communism overlapped, a view that reinforced Rockefeller’s view that the capitalist social order was being challenged in the U.S. and Latin America by revolutionary elements and that greater state control and repression was necessary to beat back this challenge (Seigel 2015, 167–169). In addition, his work in mass media in Latin America also influenced the manner that Rockefeller sought to use the drug issue as a symbol to mobilize and manipulate voters, explicitly making links between violent crime (sometimes rebellion) with drugs-­strengthening his law and order image for his gubernatorial elections (Epstein 1977, 38).8 The Carter administration would reduce the aggressive posture of Rockefeller’s approach or the “drug war” rhetoric of the Nixon administration, openly supporting the decriminalization of cannabis use while promoting a “human rights policy” in Latin America. Members of law enforcement and the DEA viewed his administration, according to the New York Times, “as being uncommitted to fighting drugs” (as cited in Carpenter 2003, 16). However, both his government and the Ford administration did maintain pressure for crop eradication and interdiction campaigns in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. For example, Carter’s State Department promoted greater military involvement in

40   Capitalist prohibition crop eradication in Latin America with 10,000 Colombian soldiers launching Operación Fulminante in Guajira and the Atlantic coast in order to stop marijuana production and trafficking (Tokatlian 2015, 77). In addition, both Ford and Carter shifted federal drug policy dollars away from treatment/prevention priorities, which the Nixon administration had dedicated a majority of its funds to, to greater law enforcement on a domestic and international level while increasing funding for the war on drugs (Mares 2006; Bertram et al. 1996, 104). In fact, federal funds dedicated to the “drug war” increased to $382 million in fiscal 1977 under Ford to $855 million in fiscal year 1981 at the end of the Carter administration (Bertram et al. 1996, 110). The global expansion in U.S. influence on drug policy continued in other ways, but would still pale to the escalation of the 1980s. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 was a central step in this escalation.

The 1980s and drug war escalation In reviewing the record of the Reagan administration Ted Galen Carpenter concludes that Reagan and his political allies ratcheted up the supply-­side campaign up several notches beyond any previous efforts. Between fiscal years 1980 and 1987, U.S. spending on international narcotics efforts more than tripled … the overall goal was to encourage, persuade, bribe, or coerce foreign governments into joining the U.S.-led drug war. (2003, 21) In addition, the federal drug budget increased from $1.8 billion to 12.5 billion from 1981 to 1993, while the Justice Department received over one billion dollars in illegal assets through asset forfeiture provisions between 1985 and 1991, while the DEA’s budget more than tripled, maintaining over 6,000 employees in 170 offices within the U.S. and in 48 foreign countries (Buxton 2006, 63–64; Bertram et al. 1996, 127). Both the Reagan and Bush administrations “built on the ideological and institutional groundwork laid by previous presidents—particularly Richard Nixon—to create a harsher, more expansive antidrug strategy” with the war on supply reaching “new heights” (Bertram et al. 1996, 116). The Reagan administration’s massive expansion in the U.S. state’s counternarcotics efforts was in keeping with the wider ideological perspective of his wing within the Republican party, one that demanded a foreign policy “morality plank” in the 1976 Republican platform, which criticized détente as appeasement and called for a U.S. foreign policy motivated by a “belief in the rights of man, the rule of law and guidance by the hand of God” (as cited in Grandin 2006, 65). The more aggressive, militaristic position was in line with the calls by various corporate funded, conservative think tanks that increasingly competed with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission for influence in

Capitalist prohibition   41 elite policymaking circles during the 1970s (Peschek 1987, 162). Both the CFR and TC had played prominent roles in the Nixon and Carter administrations respectively. Key advisors such as Henry Kissinger and Richard Helms were CFR members in the Nixon administration and Carter’s foreign policy team was dominated by representatives of the Trilateral Commission. This prominence in foreign policy circles would be partially diluted by the influence of these new think tanks. Organizations such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute effectively cultivated ties with the Reagan administration, with many of their members directly taking positions within his government. In fact, the Heritage Foundation produced the policy book Mandate for Leadership specifically to guide the Reagan administration on the policy changes needed for genuine conservative shift. According to the Heritage Foundation nearly two-­thirds of their over 2000 recommendations were adopted or initiated by his government (Peschek 1987, 158; Blasko 2004). Heritage was established in 1973 with central contributions from Joseph Coors (the Colorado brewer) and Richard Mellon Scaife of the Pittsburgh Mellon fortune as well as large multinational corporations such as Chase Manhattan Bank, Mobil Oil and capital based in South Korea and Taiwan (Peschek 1987, 32; Bodenheimer and Gould 1989, 183). Heritage was part of a larger policy offensive launched by big business throughout the 1970s in an effort to promote domestic and international neoliberalism as a cure for the stagnating economy of the 1970s. Corporate financed lobbying groups and think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Business Roundtable, and the Committee for Economic Development were all part of this ideological and political offensive. David Kotz and Terrence McDonough argue when discussing the current neoliberal social structure of accumulation (SSA), “all of the key domestic institutions of global neoliberalism … had been established in the United States by the early 1980s” (2010, 97). Corporate elites and policy-­planning organizations (representing both financial and nonfinancial corporations) in the 1970s and early 1980s increasingly turned to the politics of neoliberalism as the solution to the stagnating economy and weakening business profits of the era. They actively lobbied and financed candidates, think tanks (such as the Heritage Foundation), lobbying groups (such as the Business Roundtable) and political action committees dedicated to a vision of weakening labor unions and greater market flexibility, massive tax cuts, raising the retirement age and cutting social security and welfare benefits as well as substantial reductions in federal regulations over the economy—much of this would make up the Reagan agenda (Grandin 2006, 177–180).9 This agenda was increasingly transnationalizing capital interested in not only removing restraints upon its operations within the United States, but globally as well. By the start of the Reagan administration a consensus had emerged amongst the U.S. foreign policy establishment that the U.S. should play a leading role on behalf of the transnational elite and had to “…  develop policies to reconstruct the international order, and to move from the defensive to the offensive as a first

42   Capitalist prohibition step” (Robinson 1996, 75). Reagan’s first administration was particularly interventionist, representing a shift away from the idea of “détente” with the Soviets or emphasizing human rights concerns in U.S. relations with Latin America. A substantial part of its foreign policy objectives focused on Latin America and called for a “roll-­back” of Socialist/Communist regimes and the promotion of “low-­intensity conflict” in the developing world (Peschek 1987, 159–160). This was most clearly presented in “A New Inter-­American Policy for the Eighties” a policy guide authored by the conservative Committee of Santa Fe, a group of conservative activists and academics that produced the report for the Council for Inter-­American Security. Their policy guide called for subordinating human rights to the defense of national interest and reversing America’s “retreat” to Soviet “aggression,” arguing that “never before has the Republic been in such jeopardy from its exposed southern flank” (Committee of Santa Fe 1980, 2). This offensive included expanding the role of the U.S. armed forces and U.S. law enforcement, such as the DEA, to placing revolutionary/nationalist forces on the defensive, and reducing the power of drug trafficking organizations. Finally, this military/law enforcement offensive was coupled with advancing market fundamentalism domestically and globally to facilitate the needs of transnational capital (ibid., 75). Members of the Santa Fe committee, who were also associated with the Council for InterAmerican Security another ultraconservative organization, would go on to take policy positions within the Reagan administration. This included Lewis Tambs as ambassador to Costa Rica and to Colombia, Roger Fontaine as director of Latin American affairs in the National Security Council and retired Lt. General Gordon Sumner as special assistant to the assistant secretary of state for inter-­American affairs (Grandin 2006, 70). Tambs, as ambassador to Colombia, would famously refer to Colombia’s decades-­long insurgents as “narco-­guerrillas” given the various ways in which, in the mid-­1980s, guerrillas taxed and regulated the production of illegal drugs in the country. This was not to be the first, or last, time that U.S. state managers would find ways to tie insurgents seeking to move a country in a socialist direction, or coca growers defending their livelihood or “radical populists” challenging U.S. power in the region with drug trafficking. On June 24, 1982 Ronald Reagan officially declared his “war on drugs” stating that we can put drug abuse on the run through stronger law enforcement, through cooperation with other nations to stop the trafficking, and by calling on the tremendous volunteer resources of parents, teachers, civic and religious leaders … we’re taking down the surrender flag that has flown over so many drug efforts. We’re running up a battle flag. (as cited in Baum 1996, 165–166) Interestingly Reagan’s declaration of war preceded by years the “crack epidemic” and drug scare that would grip the nation (especially elites within the

Capitalist prohibition   43 Democratic and Republican parties) in the mid-­1980s and to which many point as the impetus for escalation in the U.S. government’s war on drugs. However, at the time of Reagan’s “battle flag” speech less than 2 percent of the public viewed drugs as a central issue facing the country (Alexander 2012, 49). This “war” would serve the purpose of dealing with a growing surplus population, disproportionately black, that had suffered greatly in the years prior due to a deep recession as well as the longer process of deindustrialization, and would continue to suffer with the imposition of Reagan’s neoliberal agenda.10 Deep cuts in welfare spending, stagnating minimum wages, steep cuts of taxes for the wealthiest Americans and an aggressive de-­unionization drive all characterized the neoliberal assault on society by the Reagan administration, an assault that was largely continued in the administrations that followed his government (Kotz 2015, 23–27). The consequences of such policies to the poor and their relationship with the informal economies of the drug trade was largely irrelevant to the Reagan, Bush, or Clinton administrations that all built upon Reagan’s prohibitionist drug war while deepening the neoliberal structural adjustments that his government advanced. The 1980s was ultimately the politics of “economic freedom and social control” (Garland 2001, 100), a politics that would be exported to, and internalized by, state managers and economic elites throughout Latin America. Racial and ethnic minorities have disproportionately borne the brunt of this “social control.” Alexander concludes that the drug war from the outset had little to do with public concern about drugs and much to do with public concern about race. By waging a war on drug users and dealers, Reagan made good on his promise to crack down on the racially defined ‘others’—the undeserving. (2012, 49) The increasing harshness of state punishment for the use and distribution of drugs represented a part of the Republican party’s “Southern Strategy” in which issues like drug use and drug crimes were coded efforts to disproportionately punish African-­Americans in the hopes of mobilizing Southern white support in the years following the height of the civil rights movement (Alexander 2012, 43–44). In addition, the linkage between minorities and drug use had historically been used by the different governments and politicians as a strategy to create “drug panics” regarding the dangers of drugs and their ability to increase the threats that marginalized minorities allegedly represented to the white majority. Reagan, like Nixon, also viewed the importance of racial codes in his campaign, referring to “welfare queens” and criminal “predators,” with one of his political advisors concluding that Reagan appealed to those “…  who fear or resent the Negro, and who expect Reagan somehow to keep him ‘in his place’ or at least echo their own anger and frustration” (as cited in Alexander 2012, 47). However, though the Republican party were the leaders in this type of politics all of Reagan’s central domestic and international drug war policies were backed by strong bi-­partisan majorities as Democrats also committed to this “get tough”

44   Capitalist prohibition policy. In other words, the politics of race and crime were core parts of this drug war offensive, but this was an offensive that represented a consensus across the political establishment suggesting the structural purposes that increased punishment and incarceration held for the system as a whole. The intensifying attention to the issue by the mass media by the end of the 1980s, simultaneously driving and being driven by the priorities of political elites, further institutionalized this direction. Ronald Reagan and Democratic leaders in Congress would not only promote the escalation of the drug war domestically, but would expand its global reach as part of a larger transnational project of promoting neoliberalism, and later low-­intensity democracies, while weakening nationalist/socialist influence within Latin America. A global war on drugs would facilitate these goals. Prior to and in the years that followed Reagan’s 1982 speech, his administration increasingly sought ways of getting the armed forces more directly involved in the “war on drugs” providing the U.S. Southern Command with “… the only war we’ve got” according to then commander General Maxwell Thurman (as cited in Baum 1996, 167–168). In December of 1981 the Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Statute was enacted that would allow military assistance to civilian law enforcement outside of the United States, with a special focus upon drug smuggling (Thevanaut 1997; Baum 1996, 168). The entire array of foreign intelligence agencies was ordered to provide guidance to civilian drug law enforcement agencies (Bertram et al. 1996, 112). The U.S. military was first deployed in 1983 to the Andes to provide counternarcotics training, with a specific focus upon what then U.S. ambassador to Colombia Lewis Tambs called narco-­guerrillas (Jelsma 2011, 6). The linkage between the U.S. state’s ideological/political enemies with drug trafficking was also applied to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the Cuban government (again) as drug policy was turned to again as a tactic to delegitimize the opposition during the administration foreign policy offensive. The appointments of Ed Meese as chairman of the National Drug Policy Board and Carlton Turner as Director of Drug Abuse Policy Office only strengthened this direction to a more aggressive posture on drug policy, with Pentagon funding for drug war missions increasing a hundred-­fold (Baum 1996, 167–168). Meese, a former corporate executive, was an ideological representative of the Reagan wing of the party. He would follow his career in office with membership in a number of conservative largely corporate funded or led think tanks, such as a distinguished fellow with the Heritage Foundation, the Council of National Policy, and a trustee on the board of the Trinity Foundation (Trinity Foundation n.d.). Both the Heritage Foundation and the Council on National Policy (CNP) promoted ultra-­conservative viewpoints on the economy, foreign policy, and social issues while receiving extensive financing from capitalists such as Richard DeVos, Joseph Coors and James Whalen (Grandin 2006, 176). The CNP was led by a number of capitalist evangelists committed not only to challenging the Soviet Union globally, but promoting a conservative Christian worldview that maintained a moralist position on illegal psychoactive substances.11 Turner, an academic before joining the administration, would follow

Capitalist prohibition   45 his leadership role on drug policy in the administration to become President and Chief Executive Officer of Princeton Diagnostic Laboratories of America, a biomedical and pharmaceutical testing laboratory, later he would become Chief Operating Officer of Carrington Laboratories—continuing a long history of U.S. state managers of drug policy joining the pharmaceutical industry after they leave office (Reagan Library Collections n.d.). Around the same time that Turner was making a career in the pharmaceutical industry this sector would be prominent in promoting the escalating war on illegal drugs in civil society. For example, the Partnership for Drug Free Kids (formerly the Partnership for Drug Free America) is a non-­profit organization that has since the mid-­1980s collaborated with the U.S. state in various ad campaigns against the use of illegal psychoactive substances. Pharmaceutical corporations and their trade association represented eight of the fifteen donors that contributed $100,000 or more to the organization in 2014 (Partnership for Drug Free Kids 2014). The organization has dedicated a large majority of its advertising attacking illegal pharmaceuticals since 1985. The expansion of a military and financial commitment to the drug war in the 1980s, as well as the effort by organization such as the Partnership for Drug Free America to influence the mass public of the necessity for this war, coincided with a regional push for the economic liberalization of Latin American economies. The 1980s and 1990s would also witness a Latin American shift toward neoliberalism and a political shift to low-­intensity democracies, as the United States, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank utilized a crushing debt crisis to extract concessions from Latin American governments, specifically policies that would facilitate the investments and interests of transnational capital. This economic offensive was coupled with a militaristic expansion, which included the drug war, as the militarists allied with neoliberals within the Reagan administration to promote a more coercive and market fundamentalist foreign policy. Of course, these economic and political shifts were not simply the product of ideological purity or short-­term reactions to the stagflation of the 1970s (in the case of the U.S. or the U.K.), or the debt crisis of the 1980s (Latin America). Transnational capital had been emerging and increasingly becoming a central economic actor in the decade prior to the “Reagan revolution” as it sought to escape the various regulations and controls that various models of Keynesian states had imposed during the post-­World War II period. This is a period in which a “new, transnational phase in the development of the world capitalist system” had begun, “globalization” (Robinson 2004, 9). Robinson writes: The latter decades of the twentieth century saw new scientific and technological revolutions, particularly the communications and information revolution, but also revolutions in transportation, marketing, management, automation, robotization, and so on. These new technologies were “globalizing” in the sense that they allowed capital to “go global.” New patterns of accumulation opened up by globalizing technologies both require and

46   Capitalist prohibition make possible economies of scale that are truly global and require a more generalized commodification of the world economy. Moreover, capitalists have come to achieve a newfound global mobility in a double sense, in that the material and the political obstacles to freely moving their capital around the world have decreased dramatically. In this process capital has become increasingly transnational. (2004, 9) A massive debt crisis that struck Latin America in the 1980s due in large part to: the conservative monetary policies of the Carter and Reagan administrations, huge debt accumulated in the 1970s to pay for increasing energy prices (though oil exporters would suffer when these prices collapsed in the early 1980s), and the various dysfunctions of ISI policies led to a “lost decade.” Latin America’s economy shrank in real terms in 1982 for the first time since World War II. This debt crisis was utilized by international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as a lever to promote neoliberal economic policies throughout the region, which simply exacerbated the economic crisis. Through a series of structural adjustment programs Latin American governments were offered loans that would allow them to pay their creditors on the condition that they institute widespread market reforms (i.e., labor and capital market reform, privatizations, reducing tariffs, and incentivizing foreign direct investment). The necessity of access to global financial markets placed important structural constraints on the pursuit of nationalist/protectionist policies, giving governments of different ideological stripes fewer policy options (Remmer 1992). This period of social and economic upheaval also set the stage for population reactions and protests with U.S. policymakers increasingly concluding that “low-­intensity” democracy as opposed to overt authoritarianism was necessary to avert co-­opt/control protests against neoliberal structural adjustments (Robinson 2000, 48). This crisis not only led to massive unemployment and economic displacement, but also contributed to the expansion of illegal drug production and distribution. With millions of Latin Americans joining the unemployed, and increasing trade access to the U.S. market, Latin Americans not only shifted increasingly to legal commodity markets (moving out of the no longer protected domestic industries), but into illegal commodity markets as well. Cocaine in particular surged between the 1980s and into the 2000s, with annual wholesale cocaine trade estimated at $20 billion in 2005 (Green 2013, 33). In fact, though cocaine exports to the United States had increased from approximately one ton in 1970 to approximately 100 tons in 1980, Reagan’s call for battle was followed by a thousand-­fold increase in cocaine exports by the end of the 1980s (Gootenberg 2012, 160). Money laundering was also made easier as financial liberalization loosened capital controls throughout Latin America, allowing traffickers greater ability to legalize their assets and/or conceal them in accounts around the world. As Peter Andreas concludes “…  the possibility that the drug trade and neoliberal

Capitalist prohibition   47 economic policies actually fuel each other rarely enters the official policy debate in Washington” (Andreas 1995, 85). It doesn’t, and has not, entered this debate due to the hegemonic nature of neoliberalism and its relationship to not only the long-­standing goal of Washington policymakers to maintain an open economic system in order to benefit U.S. based transnational corporations, but to the emergence of different transnational state apparatuses. Capitalist globalization has required a network of supranational institutions (such as the IMF or the World Bank) along with nation-­states “captured” by transnational elites in order to establish the basis of a global historic bloc seeking hegemony through a combination of consensual and coercive measures. This combination of consensus and coercion increasingly became part of U.S. policy as the Reagan administration began to emphasize the strategy of democracy promotion as a tactic to maintain stability in a democratizing region. However, the continued necessity for coercive/repressive power was maintained through the drug war and the need to protect the low-­intensity democracies that had emerged. In 1986 Ronald Reagan issued National Security Directive 221 describing drugs and drug trafficking as threats to U.S. national security requiring the involvement of the U.S. military, thus categorizing the trafficking itself, whether or not it was connected to Communist/nationalist forces, as a threat. NSD 221 stated that the primary concerns for the United States are: those nations with a flourishing narcotics industry, where a combination of international criminal trafficking organizations, rural insurgents, and urban terrorists can undermine the stability of the local government;.. and distort public perception of the narcotics issue in such a way that it becomes part of an anti-­U.S. or anti-­Western debate (emphasis mine). (White House 1986) Thus as early as 1986, the U.S. state recognized the relationship between the “war on drugs” upon not only the security interests of the United States, but also the security interests of the “West.” The directive would go on to require that: The Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General, in conjunction with the Secretary of State, should develop and implement any necessary modifications to applicable statutes, regulations, procedures, and guidelines to enable U.S. military forces to support counter-­narcotics efforts more actively, consistent with the maintenance of force readiness and training. (Ibid.) U.S. led military and law enforcement missions in the Andes followed this directive with Operation Blast Furnace (1986) and Operation Snowcap (1987) involving Blackhawk helicopters with military support and military training. Operation Blast Furnace was focused upon Bolivia, with over 100 troops accompanying Bolivian counternarcotics force in an effort to eradicate coca crops, while Operation Snowcap included multiple nations, in one of the biggest antidrug programs

48   Capitalist prohibition ever launched in Latin America. The operation included over 140 DEA agents accompanying police forces in Latin America in various counternarcotics operations (Chepesiuk 1999, 177). The U.S. ambassador to Bolivia during this period, Edward Rowell (ambassador from 1985 to 1988), was an important contributor to this escalation stating that “I decided to develop a strategy that involved an early shock and a longer term, follow-­on program to try to get the peasants to give up coca growing and to go into some kind of legitimate crops” (Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training 2012, 75).12 These operations generally disrupted these illicit economies for a short period of time, providing evidence of “progress,” however, they were largely unsuccessful in the long term. After playing a prominent role in the coca eradication campaigns in the 1980s Rowell would fill various diplomatic missions for the U.S. state. He would shift to the corporate world at the end of his diplomatic career, working as a Senior Associate of Global Business Access, Ltd., a private trade development firm in Washington, D.C. as well as the director of Source HOV a global Transaction Processing Services (TPS) and Enterprise Information Management (EIM) with a workforce across the Americas (Bloomberg.com n.d.; Source HOV n.d.). Both Democrats and Republicans also got behind the enactment of a “certification policy” in the 1986 Anti-­Drug Abuse Act, which required that the president certify whether major drug producing and drug trafficking nations were fully cooperating with U.S. counter-­drug measures. If a country was found to not be “cooperating” they faced the possibility of cuts in economic assistance, an inability to obtain loans from international financial institutions as well as discretionary trade sanctions. These punishments could be waived if the president deemed that they would harm U.S. “national security” (Freeman and Sierra 2005, 285). With the certification policy U.S. drug war policy was nicely and directly tied to the almost century long grand strategy of creating an open and stable economic environment. The foreign nature of the “threat” was highlighted in order to justify U.S. engagement and to pressure nations to adopt U.S. conceptions of “law and order.” Of course the need to ensure that Latin American economies remained open to transnational capital led to one of the biggest contradictions of U.S. drug policy in Latin America—the Iran-­Contra scandal. Throughout the 1980s different intelligence and security agencies (including the CIA and the National Security Agency) tolerated the trafficking of drugs into the United States by supporters of anti-­Communist forces (the Contras) fighting against the nationalist/socialist government in Nicaragua led by the Sandinistas. The proceeds from much of this trafficking were utilized by a repressive counter-­ revolutionary insurgency that waged a brutal campaign with the aim of overthrowing the Sandinistas. A related example was the authoritarian rule of Manuel Noriega in Panama, whose drug trafficking connections were regularly overlooked by the Reagan administration as long as he provided support for the Contras in Nicaragua.13 In these instances the ostensible objectives associated with the U.S. drug war were subordinated to the more immediate objective of

Capitalist prohibition   49 removing the Sandinistas from power—a bigger threat to the expansion and consolidation of capitalist globalization than the exports of drug trafficking organizations (Gray 2000, 111–112; U.S. Senate 1988). In fact, the Reagan administration (similar to Harry Anslinger’s false allegations against China in the 1950s) regularly alleged that the Sandinistas were directly involved in the trafficking of drugs into the United States in an effort to legitimize his illegal war against Nicaragua. Concomitant with this drug and market offensive institutionalized by NSD 221, as well as the administration’s democracy promotion agenda, was the strengthening position of the transnational fraction of capital within the administration in Reagan’s second term (1984–1988). Stephen Gill argues that Reagan’s second term witnessed a shift from the more militarized and unilateralist factions of the conservative movement to a more internationalist stance in which members of the Trilateral commission gained important roles (especially between 1985 and 1987). Reaganomics (i.e., neoliberalism) strengthened transnational forces by “… promoting the further interpenetration of capital, the liberalization of markets, and deepening the interdependence between American and other states’ macroeconomic policy-­making conditions” (Gill 1994, 107). Key members of his 1984–1988 cabinet were Trilateral members, including Secretary of State George Schultz, Frank Carlucci in the Department of Defense, and James Baker in the Department of Treasury (Gill 1994, 172). In addition, fourteen of nineteen top foreign policy officials were CFR members during his two terms including George H.W. Bush (Vice-­President) who was a council director from 1977–1979. His first Secretary of State and five of his six national security advisors were members (Shoup 2015, 96). Thomas Dye concluded that “the Reagan administration, like those that preceded it, is relying heavily on CFR advice” with “…  top U.S. government officials regularly” appearing at CFR meetings (1986, 251). Though they had long maintained an “internationalist” and “multilateral” reputation, the CFR had joined the Heritage Foundation and the Council for National Policy in support of a more assertive and aggressive foreign policy posture by the U.S. state (ibid.).14 In other words, by the mid-­ 1980s a consensus had emerged between ultra-­conservative and transnational factions of the foreign policy establishment behind a model of expanding the military presence of the United States as well as promoting the neoliberal economic policies at home and abroad to facilitate global capitalism. Grandin refers to this alliance when he writes: As economic internationalists joined with militarists and Christian capitalists to defeat world Bolshevism, avenge Vietnam, and push for open markets, the restoration of America’s global military power and the restoration of laissez-­faire capitalism were increasingly understood to be indistinguishable goals. This fusion of the goals of corporate America with the passion and ideas of a nationalist backlash created a perfect storm of resurgent American expansionism … (2006, 181)

50   Capitalist prohibition Table 2.1 illustrates the nature of Reagan’s foreign policy team, with emphasis upon individuals relevant to U.S.–Latin American Policy or U.S. drug policy during the Reagan years. George H.W. Bush, a long-­standing member of the CFR and the internationalist wing of the party represented this integration of consensus and coercion so prominent in the second half of the Reagan administration. He would apply this principle in drug policy. As Vice-­President Bush was appointed to lead the South Florida Drug Task Force in 1982 to address increasing levels of cocaine imports and drug related violence in the South Florida region. The task force was considered at the time as “the most ambitious and expensive drug enforcement operation in the nation’s history” (Brinkley 1986). Bush’s role and commitment to this “war” would continue into his administration (1989–1993), with the steady pursuit of bilateral and multi-­lateral efforts to not only integrate the domestic armed forces of Latin America into the war on drugs, but to more directly tie drug policy to neoliberal economic goals.

The Andean Initiative and the administration of George H.W. Bush (1989–1993) As the 1980s progressed the war on drugs was also increasingly tied to the defense of “democracy” or “low-­intensity democracy” in the region-­elite political regimes that were overseeing the steady neoliberal restructuring of the region’s economies while embracing continued integration into the global economy. The “war on drugs” complemented nicely this stated goal of protecting these elite democracies as it simultaneously promoted the “rule of law” viewed as important for the functioning of democracy while strengthening some of the more repressive sectors of Latin American states. Thus, formal democracy could be protected while internal challenges beyond narcotrafficking organizations could effectively be neutralized. For example, a 1988 U.S. Senate Report on the foreign policy implications of the international drug trade emphasized the power of drug trafficking cartels to “undermine regional stability” and their “capacity to destabilize democratic governments,” which according to the report were “deeply inimical to the national security interests of the United States” (U.S. Senate 1988, 8). This report later concluded that “other than the international debt issue, the operations of the drug cartels pose the most serious threat to the consolidation of democracy throughout the hemisphere” (U.S. Senate 1988, 11). Executive officials in the George H.W. Bush administration argued that their anti-­drug war plans “… could be critical in maintaining the stability of Andean democracies against the pressure of narcotics traffickers and insurgents” (Call 1991, 9 and 119). In effect, the “war on drugs” was being used to complement “democracy promotion,” justifying a set of policies amenable to the interests of transnational capital while mitigating/co-­opting political opposition to this agenda. After his 1988 election to the presidency, President Bush would substantially build upon Reagan’s international campaign against drugs. President Bush

Table 2.1 Key advisors/staff, U.S.–Latin American policy or U.S. drug policy, 1981–1989 Name

Position within the state

Different corporate/policy planning group/academic/other positions before or after appointment

George H.W. Bush

Vice-President

Council on Foreign Relations

Edwin Meese

Attorney General (1985–1988); chairman of the National Drug Policy Board (1987–1988)

Heritage Foundation, the Council of National Policy, and a trustee on the board of the Trinity Foundation

Carlton Turner

Senior Advisor and then Director of Drug Abuse Policy Office (1981–1987)

President and Chief Executive Officer of Princeton Diagnostic Laboratories of America; later Carrington Laboratories

Ann Wrobleski

Architect of Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign; United States Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics Matters from 1986 to 1989

Wrobelski joined Jefferson Waterman International, a corporate lobbying firm. After nine years at Jefferson Waterman International, she joined the American Forest & Paper Association as Vice-President (International); member of the corporate policy planning groups Partners Global and the Economic Club of Washington D.C.

George Schultz

Secretary of State (1982–1989)

Trilateral Commission, former Executive Vice-President of the Bechtel Group, chairman of JPMorgan Chase’s International Advisory Council

Caspar Weinberger

Secretary of Defense (1981–1987)

Council on Foreign Relations, general counsel of Bechtel Corporation

Frank Carlucci

Secretary of Defense (1987–1989)

Trilateral Commission, CFR, chairman of the Carlyle Group from 1992–2003; former Director of Wackenhut (private security and private prisons); Honorary Board of the Drug Policy Alliance

Colin Powell, Frank Carlucci, Richard Allen, William Clark and Robert McFarlane

Five different National Security Advisors during the Reagan administration

Members of the Council on Foreign Relations either before or following their work for the administration

continued

Table 2.1 Continued Name

Position within the state

Different corporate/policy planning group/academic/other positions before or after appointment

James Baker

Chief of Staff (1981–1985); Secretary of Treasury (1985–1988)

Trilateral Commission, Consultant to Enron, Senior Counselor for the Carlyle Group, Council on Foreign Relations

Dominick L. DiCarlo

United States Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics Matters from 1981–1984

DiCarlo was appointed to the United States Court of International Trade by President Reagan, and made Chief Judge from 1991–1996 by President Bush

Jon R. Thomas

United States Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics Matters from 1984–1986

Thomas was an adjunct professor in international business at the Jack C. Massey Graduate School of Business from 1989–1999. He later served as CEO of CIC Systems from 1999–2004

Francis M. Mullen

DEA administrator, 1981–1985

Mullen became the director of the Mohegan Tribal Gaming Commission at the Mohegan Sun Casino in Uncasville, Connecticut; board member of the DEA Educational Foundation (group involved in promoting the DEA museum and propagating DEA views in civil society)

John C. Lawn

DEA administrator, 1985–1990

Lawn became Vice-President of Operations for the Yankees from 1990–1994; served as the Chairman and CEO of The Century Council in 1998; board member of the DEA Educational Foundation (group involved in promoting the DEA museum and propagating DEA views in civil society)

Lewis Arthur Tambs

U.S. ambassador to Colombia, 1981–1985

Member of the Committee of Santa Fe

Alexander Fletcher Watson

U.S. ambassador to Peru, 1986–1989

Fletcher served on the boards of several non-profit organizations. In 2004, he joined Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change; member of the CFR, the InterAmerican Dialogue, Latin America Program of the Wilson Center for International Scholars, Pan American Development Foundation, InterAmerican Foundation

Charles A. Gillespie, Jr. U.S. ambassador to Colombia, 1985–1988

Member of the corporate advisory firm Scowcroft Group

Thomas Edmund McNamara

U.S. ambassador to Colombia, 1988–1991

McNamara became the President and CEO of the Americas Society and the Council of the Americas

John Gavin

U.S. ambassador to Mexico, 1981–1986

Gavin became Vice-President of Atlantic Richfield. After that he became the President of Univisa Satellite Communications and Gamma Holdings. He served on many boards such as Causeway Capital, Hotchkis & Wiley Funds, TWC Strategic Income Fund, Securitas Security Services USA, etc. He also served on various pro bono boards

Charles J. Pilliod, Jr.

U.S. ambassador to Mexico, 1986–1989

Pilliod currently serves on the Board of Marvin and Palmer Associates Inc. Pilliod was the President of Goodyear and Goodyear International Corporation. He also served in World War II. He was a Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Co-Chairman of the Brazil–U.S. council, and a founding of the Business Roundtable. He served on the Study Committee on National Health from 1977–1979, on the Grace Commission on Cost Reduction in Government in 1981, and on the Blue Ribbon Committee on Defense Management from 1985–1986

Edwin G. Corr

U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, 1981–1985

Corr became a Professor of Political Science at the University of Oklahoma from 1990–1996; he was the Director of the Energy Institute of the Americas, and served as the Associate Director of the International Programs Center of the University of Oklahoma

Edward Morgan Rowell U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, 1985–1988

He served as U.S. Ambassador to Portugal, as chief of mission in Lisbon, Portugal; Senior Associate of Global Business Access, Ltd after leaving government

Robert S. Gelbard

He was the founder and Chairman of Washington Global Partner LLC. In 2012, he joined the public policy and regulation practice at SNR Denton

U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, 88–91

54   Capitalist prohibition promoted the Andean Initiative (AI) in 1989, which pledged $2.2 billion in a five-­year program in largely military and police support to Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia region (Call 1991, 8–9).15 AI was formulated by the NSC and the ONDCP, with National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft of the NSC, William Bennet of ONDCP and the Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger developing the plan (Menzel, 47). Their work was in large based on data collected by John Walters of the ONDCP and Dennis Miller of the NSC during visits to Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru in March 1989. Both Eagleburger and Scowcroft were long-­time members of the Council on Foreign Relations, with Scowcroft acting as a CFR director prior to taking office (Shoup 2015, 96). Eagleburger would also join the staff of Kissinger Associates (KA) (founded by Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft) after his time in office, assisting corporate clients on investment opportunities, potential strategic partners, and government relations in nations worldwide (Shoup 2015, 119–120). Central clients included an array of transnational corporations, including American Express, JP Morgan, Coca-­Cola, American International Group, and Volvo (Shoup 2015, 119). John Walters would ultimately be director of the ONDCP during the George W. Bush administration. He followed his time in government to become the Chief Operating Officer of the ultraconservative think tank, the Hudson Institute. The vast majority of the Institute’s funding derives from corporate foundations such as the Scaife and Bradley Foundations (Domhoff 2010 102, 138). The political and economic goals that these individuals served outside of the state were advanced by the AI legislation they developed for the Andean region in 1989. The Andean Initiative, in part a reaction to increasing violence and instability in Colombia, continued the U.S. focus upon interdiction and law enforcement, but in contrast to previous plans, it called for greater involvement of local military forces in the counter-­narcotics effort. U.S. General Charles White exemplified the militarist focus of the U.S. counter-­narcotic policy, “the local armed forces are prepared and should assume a more important role in these efforts. They are the only forces sufficiently powerful enough to do the job” (El Tiempo, May 3, 1989, 12A). The State Department argued that “economic assistance is to be withheld as an incentive to elicit Andean nations’ cooperation, and that Andean ‘cooperation’ is defined by the involvement of their armed forces and acceptance of U.S. military aid” (Call 1991, 14). This was also in keeping with the largely U.S. initiated 1988 UN Convention, which called for the increased militarization of law enforcement and eradication strategies (Crick 2012, 410). The consequences of this policy would soon be seen in Colombia. Between 1988 and 1991 U.S. military aid to Colombia increased sevenfold (Gomez Lizarazo 1992, A21), while funding for military drug interdiction missions nearly quadrupled between 1989 and 1993 (Jelsma 2011, 7). This increase was coupled with U.S. State Department Human Rights reports on Colombia that blamed human rights atrocities largely on the actions of narcotraffickers and guerrilla groups, ignoring the substantial evidence of military and paramilitary atrocities (WOLA 1989, 113).

Capitalist prohibition   55 The Bush administration’s drug control policy in Latin America was wedded with the goal of defending and strengthening low-­intensity democracies in the region. Secretary of State James Baker stated in May 1991 that a central objective of U.S. foreign aid in Latin America was “promoting and consolidating democratic values” and in 1991 the U.S. Southern Command listed the “strengthening of democratic institutions” as its number 1 objective (shifting it up from its second priority) in its list of SouthCom’s overall strategic objectives (as cited in Call 1991, 119). The administration asserted that “… the support of the military could be critical in maintaining the stability of Andean democracies against the pressure of narcotics traffickers and insurgents” (as cited in Call 1991, 119). In its 1991 “Andean Anti-­Drug Efforts: A Report to Congress” the U.S. Department of Defense and State reported that “…  we cannot lose sight of the fact that in Colombia and Peru the insurgents are involved in narcotics and, along with traffickers, have created a militarized situation” (as cited in Call 1991, 49). With the decline of the Cold War and the emergence of low-­intensity democracies overseeing Latin America’s transition to a global capitalist order the war on drugs (and later the war on terrorism) worked to facilitate the continuation of transnational military ties and continuing relations between repressive security forces in Latin America and the U.S. state. Drug trafficking, terrorism, and later “radical populists” would all be cited at different times by U.S. Southern Commanders, Latin American elites, or U.S. presidents as justifying the continued necessity of internal security roles for Latin America’s armed forces. Robinson asserts that as global capitalism has penetrated the most remote spaces in Latin America the social control and institutional administration of these spaces that is required for the stability of global capitalism becomes essential to their integration. Behind the new doctrine is the need for much greater control over space that is required for the stability of global capitalism and the region and an institutional presence. (2008, 283) The drive to extend market relations globally is ostensibly threatened by narco­trafficking and corrupt states, which often disrupt legal market relations. However, the stated need to confront these actors is an important justification for strengthening security forces and repressing popular movements. Criminal networks have historically played a role in expanding capitalist relations as well as in the strengthening of states. Jonathan Goodhand writes that bandits … acted as brokers between center and periphery, facilitating capitalist penetration of the countryside by increasing monetization, encouraging marketization and by providing a venue for upward economic mobility. Through a process of either co-­opting or crushing rural outlaws in frontier regions, states experienced a “border effect” that strengthened their capacities. (2008, 406)

56   Capitalist prohibition One can see examples of this with the extension of the state in relatively isolated coca regions of Colombia, and efforts to co-­opt “bandits” throughout Mexico. Historically, U.S. drug policy has typically not involved direct U.S. military engagement with drug traffickers or coca growers,16 but has involved funding and training of Latin American militaries, law enforcement, and judicial institutions with the aim of strengthening these coercive/law and order sectors of the state. Repeatedly such U.S. training and armaments have been directed not only at illegal drug trafficking organizations, but also against armed and unarmed popular sectors resisting capitalist globalization. This is consistent with over a century of U.S. police training in Latin America that has done little to further the strengthening of democracy, but has furthered state terror and assisted Latin American elites in their efforts to control their respective populations (Huggins 1987, 149–150). U.S. trained and assisted police and military anti-­drug units in Latin America have been directly, or indirectly, involved in human rights abuses and corruption in each of the countries that has received such assistance—yet, different U.S. governments continue to stress this assistance as central to the drug fight and upholding “democracy.” The Bush administration granted the Department of Defense greater responsibility in the interdiction of illegal drugs, quadrupling funding for military drug interdiction missions, assets, and counterdrug personnel (Walther 2012, 9). The U.S. SOUTHCOM would play a central role in counterdrug operations in Latin America, consistently finding ways to take on greater responsibilities in this “war” with the decline and end of the Cold War in the 1990s. Greater and greater proportions of its budget have been dedicated to the drug policy as well as more bases and radars. Thus, by the early 1990s U.S. Navy ship days dedicated to antidrug activity in the Caribbean increased by 80 percent from 1989 to 1990, airplanes of the U.S. Atlantic Command flew more than 37,000 hours in antidrug missions in 1991 from 5,400 hours in 1989 and the U.S. Southern Command had been reorganized for counternarcotics missions, specifically in the training of local military forces (Bertram et al. 1996, 127–128). By 1991 U.S. military teams were planning and coordinating drug raids in Bolivia and Peru while the armed forces in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia had openly committed to working with the U.S. in its drug war (Call 1991, 67). In the case of Bolivia this cooperation was obtained through the conditioning of economic and military aid, with the U.S. demanding the involvement of Bolivia’s army in counternarcotics operations (Call 1991, 69). The inability of these elite democracies to maintain their legitimacy given the increasing inequality and marginalization associated with the economic policies that they implemented required a continued role for the U.S. and Latin American militaries in internal order as well as the militarization of their police forces. Thus, fire-­bases operated by the DEA in Peru’s Alto Huallaga Valley, an increase of drug-­related military aid of 300 percent between 1988 and 1991 and the drug czar’s proposal that U.S. Special Forces might be utilized in Bolivia and Peru not only reflected the administration’s militarization of the drug war, but also a recognition that the ending of the Cold War would not bring to an end the repressive internal role of Latin American states (Bagley 1996, 64). The

Capitalist prohibition   57 notion that Latin American governments should expand the role of their respective militaries in the drug war or that the U.S. should supply billions of dollars in military aid to governments throughout the region ostensibly to fight drugs had become a fundamental part of the prohibitionist paradigm that the U.S. has promoted internationally for over a century. Economically, the Andean Initiative and the expanding role for the armed forces was complemented with the Andean Trade Preference Act and the Enterprise for the Americas Initiative (EAI). The Andean Trade Preference Act reduced tariffs on approximately $325 million amount of Andean exports with the aim of creating economic alternatives as the administration promoted trade liberalization as an economic development strategy (Perl 1996, 25). The EAI was dedicated to “… promote debt relief, trade and investment opportunities in the region” (Perl 1996, 25). The stated rationale was that expanded trade between the United States and Andean countries would increase incentives for legal trade, while decreasing the incentives for illicit trade. U.S. exports to the Andean region increased by 65 percent between 1991 and 1998, as exports from the Andes to the U.S. increased by 98 percent during the same time period (Williams 2005, 164). The author of the Andean Trade Preferences Act was Ralph Ives, the director for Andean Affairs at the U. S. Trade Representative. Ives would continue to facilitate this agenda after his time in public service. Ives served in various positions in the USTR, including Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Pharmaceutical Policy in the Executive Office of the President and also worked for over a decade in the U.S. Department of Commerce. Upon retirement from government Ives would transition into the private sector as Executive Vice-­President for Global Strategy and Analysis at AdvaMed, a trade association for the medical technology companies with members from around the world (Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training 2012; Journal of Commerce, June 17, 1992). In other words, Ives would go on to serve international trade interests after he left office, working with some of the formal exporters within the Andes who benefitted from the act. However, this piece of legislation did little to assist coca farmers whose production continued at the same levels during the first ten years of the act. What the EAI did represent was another important example, like certification, of drug policy being linked/integrated into the larger and more central agenda of greater economic integration and trade liberalization. Importantly, coordination between U.S. agencies and Latin American governments was given greater emphasis under these Bush plans (Perl 1996, 23–24) initiating a trend in which different U.S. administration would seek consensus and cooperation over unilateral imposition of drug war objectives.17 The desire to seek consensus was also reflected in the tendency to shift away from the hard power/unilateral measures prominent in U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War and one increasingly focused on seeking consensual forms of social control (Robinson 1996, 16). William Robinson stresses the role of “democracy promotion” during this period as the United States moved away from backing coercive military regimes with the aim of reducing radical challenges to capitalist globalization and easing the institutionalization of

58   Capitalist prohibition neoliberalism within the region. This desire for consensual measures can also be seen in U.S. drug policy, where U.S. state managers were seeking the active consent of Latin American elites to the social, cultural, and military order they viewed as central. This notion of greater consensus and cooperation was even echoed by the ultraconservative Council for Inter-­American Security (formerly the Council on Hemispheric Security) and the Committee of Santa Fe who published another policy document for the start of the Bush administration. The document stressed the importance of assisting the reform of judicial systems throughout the region in order to advance the drug war (1989, 26) while declaring that “… the good neighbor is back, and he is going to stay” (1989, 7). Elizabeth Cohn and Michael J. Nojeim assert that Santa Fe II represented Bush’s “policy blueprint for Latin America” (1995, 463). Ultimately, the “war on drugs,” like the “war on terrorism” or the “war on communism” have been ideological constructs (as well as a specific set of policies) that in part serves to establish Gramscian hegemony on behalf of leading economic actors, such as transnational corporations in the current stage of world capitalism. The war on drugs, as it has been promoted since the Reagan administration, represents one part of a larger set of economic and global policies seeking “…  the active consent of other classes and groups…. gained through ‘intellectual and moral leadership’ ” (Gill 1990, 42). While the “war on drugs” clearly has its coercive elements given the expansion of U.S. military intervention (actual combat and training) as well as in U.S. demands that Latin American governments utilize their own militaries to destroy drug production and interdict distributors, it also dishonestly frames the issue in moral terms as a war to save addicts, states, and societies from the “evil” of drug cartels, drug gangs, narco-­ guerrillas, and narco-­terrorists. In more recent times, the mantra of “effective governance” or the dangers of “failed states” that is consistently linked with drug trafficking provides additional ideological justification for the maintenance of U.S. interventionist policies as well as facilitating the cooperation necessary for such intervention to proceed with limited opposition. The end of the cold war only furthered the usefulness of this “war” as it has allowed the strengthening of coercive sectors of Latin American states not on behalf of U.S. hegemony and dominance, but to create a business environment necessary for the investment of transnational capital wherever it may be headquartered. In fact, the “war on drugs” through policies like “certification” has directly tied the interests of transnational elites within Latin America who require access to U.S. markets and to the loans of IFIs with a commitment to U.S. drug control policies. In effect, it has represented one lever among many to embed the region within a global capitalist dynamic. The combined political strategies of militarizing the drug war and opening up economies to the investments of transnational corporations through cooperation with Latin American elites have continued to mark U.S.–Latin American relations into the 1990s and beyond. The following chapters will illustrate this dynamic by first examining counternarcotics plans in Colombia and Mexico. This is followed by an exploration of U.S. coca eradication policies in Peru and Bolivia.

Capitalist prohibition   59

Notes   1 Not all major nation-­states were in support of increasing drug control and regulation. For example, Turkey and Germany, leading producers of opium and cocaine respectively, were forced to sign the Opium Convention when it was integrated into the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I (International Drug Policy Consortium 2016a, 5).   2 William Culbertson, an economic and trade advisor to Woodrow Wilson, argued that “our economic frontiers are no longer coextensive with our territorial frontiers” (as cited in Williams 1972, 195).   3 This was more of an issue for Peru than Bolivia, as Bolivia’s coca production was mainly for domestic purposes (Gootenberg 2012, 162).   4 The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) and the resistance U.S. Marines faced from a nationalist, peasant insurgency in Nicaragua throughout the 1920s and 1930s were important to pushing the U.S. in a more moderate direction (Grandin 2006, 33).   5 As early as 1931 Anslinger had promoted meetings to strengthen international police cooperation toward increasing drug arrests, the sharing of information and tracking suspects (McAllister 2000, 107).   6 Crick points out that the use of the word “evil” to characterize the problem the convention was designed to address was exceptional as no other international convention describes a challenge in such terms (2012, 408).   7 Ehrlichman had earlier referred to Nixon’s 1968 campaign as one that would go “after the racists” and “that subliminal appeal to the anti-­black voter was always present in Nixon’s statements and speeches” (as cited in Alexander 2012, 44).   8 Epstein asserts that Nixon would borrow many of the rhetorical images and exaggerated claims from Rockefeller in his own hardening rhetoric regarding drugs (1977, 45).   9 Lobbying organizations for big business such as the Business Roundtable and the Committee for Economic Development fully backed Reagan’s neoliberal offensive with the Business Roundtable calling for “far reaching changes in economic policy” in 1981 while the CED demanded the “freeing of markets from ill-­designed government constraints” (in Kotz as cited 2015, 72–73). 10 According to Alexander, “… as late as 1970, more than 70% of all blacks working in metropolitan areas held blue-­collar jobs. Yet by 1987 when the drug war hit high gear, the industrial employment of black men had plummeted to 28 percent” (2012, 50). 11 For example, the Reverend Pat Robertson has served on its board, with the group playing a central role in the organizing of a “Gospel Crusade” with Oliver North to help raise funds for the contras in Nicaragua during the 1980s (Bodenheimer and Gould 1989, 63). Of course this “Gospel Crusade” would unknowingly subsidize the drug trafficking exploits of these very same Contras!  12 The Bolivian and U.S. governments also conflicted with the Bolivian plan to provide cash payments to coca farmers who had destroyed their crops. Ambassador Rowell asserted that “The Bolivian Government had said that they would pay the farmers for cutting down the coca. Payment was intended partly to provide capital to tide them over until an alternative legitimate crop could start producing returns. Our government said that paying the campesinos amounted to paying for sin and wouldn’t have anything to do with it” (Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training 2012, 79). 13 This may in part explain that despite Reagan’s escalation of the “war on drugs” that cocaine was largely much cheaper and more plentiful than it was in 1981 (Walther 2012, 8). 14 Susan Purcell, the director of CFR’s Latin American Program, asserted in 1987 that the Sandinistas were untrustworthy and that the contras should be supported while the InterAmerican Dialogue also supported the financing of the contras (Bodenheimer and Gould 1989, 209, 200).

60   Capitalist prohibition 15 Jack Blum, a former special counsel on narcotics for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, stated in response to Bush’s 1989 “drug war” strategy that “I have a feeling of time warp,” said Jack A. Blum, a former special counsel on narcotics for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Nelson Rockefeller started all of this in 1968. It was replayed by Richard Nixon in the 1972 campaign. The Bush policy is modestly reworked Richard Nixon” (New York Times September 6, 1989). 16 Important exceptions would include the DEA missions associated with Operation Blast Furnace and Operation Snowcap in the Andes during the 1980s and the U.S. Panamanian invasion in 1989. 17 The International Narcotics Control and Strategy Report addressing 1990 stressed that “after careful negotiations between the United States and each of the individual cooperating governments, implementation plans have been prepared to ensure effective use of the assistance” (Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs 1991).

3 Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative—waging war to advance capitalist globalization

As illustrated above for much of the twentieth century different U.S. governments have promoted prohibitionist drug control policies focused upon the destruction of illegal drug production, drug interdiction, and the arrest/killing of cartel leaders. This prohibitionist campaign was escalated and militarized beginning in the 1980s coinciding with a social structure of accumulation in which market liberalization and increasing “surplus populations” were marginalized through greater criminalization, incarceration, and drug war repression. For much of the administration of Bill Clinton (1993–2001) drug policy continued this prohibitionist mission, repeatedly enacting politically advantageous “get tough” on crime bills that were fully supported by a “narco-­enforcement complex” that mushroomed during the Reagan and Bush administrations (Bertram et al. 1996, 116–127). Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative were striking examples of the ratcheting up of U.S. foreign drug control policy. The two largest U.S. foreign drug war policies in terms of committed budgetary resources, Plan Colombia (initiated in 2000) and the Mérida Initiative in Mexico (initiated in 2008), involved billions in U.S. aid primarily to military and police forces in Colombia and Mexico over multiple years, prioritizing law enforcement and the strengthening of security forces over alternative strategies. In addition, they both represented unprecedented levels of U.S.–Latin American cooperation over counternarcotics strategies despite the ostensibly different ideological orientations of the Clinton and Bush administrations (Lozano Vázquez and Rebolledo Flores 2015, 241; Velazquez Flores and Schiavon 2009, 95; Mares 2006, 116). The trend begun in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the George H.W. Bush Administration to stress cooperation/consensus in order to legitimize drug war policies was continued with these governments and into the Obama administration. This process has been aided by the existence of transnational factions in Colombia and Mexico prepared to institute this key part of a transnational grand strategy. In the specific cases of Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative the initiation and development of these plans were led by globalist factions or transnationally oriented elites within and outside the U.S., Colombian, and Mexican states that developed and promoted these policies. The continuation of ineffectual prohibitionist policies in Latin America is in part explained by how these policies helped to facilitate more central goals of U.S.,

62   Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative Mexican, and Colombian foreign/domestic policies. In fact, these programs did little to actually change the role of Colombia and Mexico in the illegal drug industry. While the Medellín and Cali cartels of the 1980s and 1990s were dismantled long before Plan Colombia they were simply replaced by smaller organizations that effectively consolidated production and distribution within Colombia, with Mexican traffickers playing a growing role in the country as well (Insight Crime 2017). Criminal groups such as the Urabenos, the Rastrojos, as well as specific guerrilla units of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarios de Colombia (FARC) and Ejercito de Liberación Nacional (ELN) presently play central roles in this trade, though the FARC’s peace negotiations with the government between 2014 and 2016 has substantially reduced their role (ibid.). Seven years after the announcement of the Merida Initiative Mexico was still considered a major transit and source country for illicit drugs for the U.S. and a center for money laundering (U.S. State Department Narcotics Report 2015, 235). In 2006, the year that Felipe Calderón was elected president, there were three to four major DTOs: the Tijuana/Arellano Felix Organization (AFO), the Sinaloa Cartel, the Juárez/Vicente Carillo Fuentes Organization (CFO), and the Gulf Cartel. By the end of his administration these major groups had fractured, with the DEA estimating that there were seven dominant organizations while others suggested a number as high as sixty to eighty different groups, though not all with the regional or global reach of cartels such as Sinaloa, the Gulf Cartel, or Los Zetas (Beittel 2013, 9–10). Despite the failure to make progress on the stated rationales for these policies other objectives were achieved. In Colombia, U.S. technology and intelligence obtained through Plan Colombia was instrumental in helping the Colombian government severely weaken radical, anti-­neoliberal guerrilla armies (Hylton 2011, 2). The expanded security from guerrilla attacks contributed to a tripling of foreign direct investment in Colombia’s extractive sector during the first ten years of Plan Colombia (Hylton 2011, 10). Formal market changes to the economy were also an important part of Plan Colombia, as fifty-­two areas of Colombia’s economy were targeted for neoliberal reforms by the USAID during the implementation of the plan (Paley 2015, 115). Finally, in the first decade of the Plan trade unionists throughout Colombia continued to be targeted for assassinations and hundreds of thousands of Colombians were displaced from their lands, with much of this territory being obtained by Colombia’s landowning elite or extractivist sectors. By 2009 it was clear that these drug trafficking paramilitary groups enjoyed an array of connections with local, regional, and national governmental leaders—many of whom were allies with President Uribe (2002–2010). In fact, Uribe himself was implicated by a 1991 report from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency as working with Medellín cartel when he was a senator and as being a “close personal friend” of Pablo Escobar (as cited in Kozloff and Weinberg n.d.). During Uribe’s administration the armed forces were implicated in a “false positives” scandal that involved Colombian soldiers killing unarmed civilians

Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative   63 and dressing them up as FARC guerrillas with the aim of improving their combat statistics. Approximately 3,000 Colombians would be killed in this way by the U.S. backed military, the vast majority after 2002 (Isacson 2010; Semana 2014). Finally, the U.S. backed Administrative Department for Security (DAS), the Colombian President’s intelligence service, was involved in coordinating military operations with paramilitary groups and providing lists of labor leaders, human rights defenders, and opposition leaders to be killed (Isacson 2010). These crimes against humanity, crimes that were similar to pre-­Plan Colombia ones, did nothing to stop U.S. “drug war” assistance to Colombia’s security forces. The Mérida Initiative, which prioritized assisting the Mexican military and police, coincided with a 1,000 percent increase of alleged abuses by its armed forces during the first three years of the Calderón administration, with 4,772 reports of human rights related complaints reported to Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission (Haugaard et al. 2011, 4). One study by the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), a Mexican research center, found that homicide rates increased by 8 percent in those communities where the army was deployed (9 percent where they were active) (Ahmed 2017). In fact, between 2006 and September 2014, at least 3,600 civilians were killed in confrontations with Mexico’s armed forces—including the 2014 massacre of twenty-­two individuals in Tlatlaya (Washington Office on Latin America 2015). These violations often occurred against human rights, environmental, and social justice activists (Amnesty International 2010, 9–14). The International Civil Commission on Human Rights reported in 2008 that “there have been widespread arbitrary arrests of members of social movements … To justify the arrests false evidence is used … even false accusations of possession of drugs or arms … The logic behind all of this is to criminalize the members of social movements” (as cited in Mercille 2011, 1648). Like in the case of Colombia, the idea of maintaining Mexican stability in the face of domestic threats was promoted in the Bush Administration and the Obama administration. Mexico was ranked first by the director of National Intelligence in February of 2009 in the “arc of instability” while the undersecretary of the Army Joseph W. Westphal stated in February of 2011 that “… drug trafficking cartels of Mexico are a form of insurgency and potentially could take control of the Mexican government” (as cited in Tokatlian 2015, 72–73). The reported fears of the Mexican government being under siege was in part belied by the anecdotal and arrest data evidence that the most powerful Mexican cartel (the Sinaloa cartel) received protection from the Felipe Calderón administration (2006–2012) while human rights violations by the Mexican army and police (central recipients of U.S. aid) significantly increased (National Public Radio 2010). The Obama administration’s rhetoric about the “threat” to the Mexican government coincided with a decade-­long trend of U.S. foreign policy in the region in which fears about the “ungoverned spaces” of the region were pointed to as justification for U.S. security assistance and the various programs promoted by U.S. SOUTHCOM.

64   Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative For example, in 2003 SOUTHCOM commander General James Hill argued that “…  today’s foe is the terrorist, the narcotrafficker, the arms trafficker, the document forger…. This threat is a weed that is planted, grown and nurtured in the fertile ground of ungoverned spaces such as coastlines, rivers and unpopulated border areas” (as cited in Emerson 2010, 42). When the “drug war” is not the explicit pretext, the strengthened Mexican police and army have been utilized to repress anti-­neoliberal social movements. A recent example of such an outcome took place in Qaxaca, Mexico in June of 2016. Teachers on a month-­ long strike against the implementation of a national neoliberal educational reform were attacked by Mexican federal police seeking to remove them from roadblocks in different parts of Qaxaca. Eight teachers were killed by these police who had received millions in U.S. drug war funding in the previous eight years under the Merida Initiative (Gallón and Berlinger 2016). Grassroots activists and anti-­privatization campaigners have been assassinated in states such as Chihuahua as part of anti-­drug/anti-­terror operations while Zapatista communities in Chiapas have been attacked as part of Calderón’s anti-­cartel offensive (Carlsen 2008, 21). The widespread repression of oppositional forces that has been facilitated by U.S. drug war monies and training in Mexico and Colombia is in part a reflection of the policy elites that were key to planning these strategies in the United States. Elites that had no qualms with expanding U.S. cooperation with compromised forces in Mexico and Colombia given the alleged gains for “stability,” the “rule of law” and progress against drug trafficking organizations. Within both the Clinton and Bush administration key state managers involved in advancing U.S. foreign drug policies enjoyed important links to transnational corporations and/or corporate dominated policymaking groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations or the Woodrow Wilson Center. They were individuals closely interconnected with the leading social forces in this period of accelerating capitalist globalization and included key foreign policymakers (such as secretary of state, secretary of defense, National Security Advisor, and Secretary of Treasury). The research of Van Apeldoorn and de Graaf (2014) found fifteen individuals with forty-­one corporate affiliations in the Clinton administration and twenty-­two individuals with eighty-­nine corporate affiliations in the case of the Bush administration (44). In addition, in both cases, the corporate policy making group the Council on Foreign Relations was represented in their Secretaries of State, National Security Advisors, and Defense Secretaries. Table 3.1 and Table 3.2 illustrate these key individuals as well as their corporate affiliations (and the number of affiliations) as well as their membership in corporate dominated think tanks. As will be shown below, these corporate links and membership corporate policymaking groups were shared by policymakers dealing with “drug war” policies in all three countries, facilitating cooperation behind repressive, neoliberal advancing drug control policies. Thus, the “foreign policy establishment,” described by Page and Jacobs (2005) as consisting of state managers in foreign policy institutions within the U.S. and internationally oriented U.S. based

Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative   65 Table 3.1  Clinton administration Name and position

Corporate affiliations

Corporate dominated policymaking organization

Bill Clinton, President

Received over 130 million CFR, Trilateral dollars for speeches to Commission corporate interests between 2001 and 2015

Madeline Albright (Ambassador 4 to the UN/Secretary of State)

Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)

Samuel Berger, Deputy National Security Advisor

6

CFR

Warren Christopher, Secretary of State

5

CFR

Arturo Valenzuela, Deputy Assistant Secretary for InterAmerican Affairs in the U.S. State Department

1

CFR

Thomas Pickering, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs

2

CFR, Trilateral Commission

Gen. Barry McCafferty, Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy

1

CFR

William Perry, Secretary of Defense

17

CFR

William Cohen, Secretary of Defense

2

CFR, Trilateral Commission, Partnership for a Secure America (PSA)

U.S. Ambassador to Colombia, Myles Frechette (1994–1997)

1

Senior Associate, CSIS; former President and Chief Executive Officer of the Americas Society and Council of the Americas; Executive Director of the North American-Peruvian Business Council

U.S. Ambassador to Colombia, Curtis Kamman (1998–2000)

Career foreign service

U.S. Ambassador to Colombia, Anne Patterson (2000–2003)

Career foreign service, InterAmerican Dialogue Associate

Source: Van Apeldoon and de Graff (2014, 43–44); author’s searches of online biographical material, policymaking groups’ membership rolls and corporate websites.

66   Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative Table 3.2  Bush administration Name and position

Corporate Corporate dominated affiliates policymaking organization

John Bolton, Under Secretary of State/ Ambassador to the UN

5

CFR, American Enterprise Institute (AEI)

John Negroponte, Ambassador to the UN/ 6 Deputy Secretary of State

CFR, Trilateral Commission

Colin Powell, Secretary of State

6

CFR

Condoleeza Rice, National Security Advisor/Secretary of State

8

CFR

Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense

16

CFR, Hoover Institution, Project for a New American Century

Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense

6

CFR

Kimberly Breier, National Security Council’s Office of Western Hemisphere Affairs

1

National Policy Association, CSIS

Tony Garza, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico John Walters, Office of National Drug Control Policy

1

CFR Hudson Institute

Source: Van Apeldoon and de Graff (2014, 43–44); author’s searches of online biographical material, policymaking groups’ membership rolls and corporate websites.

businesses, transcended U.S. territory and also involved transnational elites and transnational corporations operating from other national territories. This transnational community was central to the unprecedented cooperation over drug war policy that occurred with Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative. U.S., Mexican, and Colombian members of the transnational elite worked through their respective state institutions to implement drug policies that would not only address specific “drug war” objectives (the arrest/killing drug “kingpins” or the eradication of coca crops) but serve the larger interests of transnational capital often at the expense of progress against the illegal drug economy. These included: • • • •

Greater military-­military relations and operational cooperation on a transnational basis; Exporting the mass incarceration/criminal justice model to address socioeconomic problems; Utilizing strengthened security forces to facilitate foreign direct investment; Provide profitable opportunities for private military and security contractors.

Many of these goals are highlighted by Bush’s Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Thomas Shannon, in an April 2008 speech where

Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative   67 he highlighted how North American security cooperation and the Mérida Initiative views: …  North America as a shared economic space and that as a shared economic space we need to protect it, and that we need to understand that we don’t protect this economic space only at our frontiers, that it has to be protected more broadly throughout North America.… we’re armoring NAFTA. (Shannon 2008, emphasis mine) The need for greater security and strengthened states was also highlighted in the 2004 report of the U.S. National Intelligence Council,1 Mapping the Global Future, which stresses the irreversibility of globalization and the emergence of internal conflicts: At their most extreme, internal conflicts can result in failing or failed states, with expanses of territory and populations devoid of effective governmental control. Such territories can become sanctuaries for transnational terrorists (such as al-­Qa’ida in Afghanistan) or for criminals and drug cartels (such as in Colombia). (National Intelligence Council 2004, 14) Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative represented policies that internalized this global capitalist agenda within the policy itself, an outcome that is not surprising given the role that a transnational foreign policy establishment played in crafting these policies. The following will illustrate the specific role of this elite in the making and promoting of these two counternarcotic programs.

Plan Colombia The late 1980s and early 1990s was a period of economic transition in Colombia, as a transnational elite came to national power and initiated a series of neoliberal economic measures. These policies were more or less maintained and expanded throughout the 1990s and have been national economic strategies for the presidential administrations that have governed to the present-­day. Colombia has become a more attractive destination for FDI, a free trade agreement with the United States has been instituted and labor protections have been weakened since the early 1990s. Throughout the 1990s Colombia experienced increasing rates of unemployment due to the opening of its economy with the agrarian sector being hit the hardest with the steady elimination of unemployment opportunities. This deteriorating economic context forced “… more and more agrarian workers to abandon their traditional crops and engage in drug production or join either the irregular guerrilla armies or the paramilitaries” (Ahumada and Andrews 1998, 462). Landownership in Colombia is one of the most concentrated in the world, with 0.4 percent of landowners owning 61.2 percent of registered agricultural

68   Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative land, while 97 percent of landowners control only 24.2 percent of registered agricultural land (Calligaro and Isacson 2004). In 2004, Colombia’s Comptroller General concluded that Colombia was the third most unequal country in Latin America (Calligaro and Isacson 2004). The country’s informal labor market steadily increased during this period, standing at over 50 percent in 2013 while its domestic drug war legislation contributed to a 300 percent increase in its prison population between 1991 and 2014 (Metaal and Youngers 2011). Prohibitionist drug policies had little effect upon major drug trafficking, but disproportionately punished the most marginal links of its illegal drug industry. In their study of the Colombia’s drug policies and prison population Rodrigo Uprimny Yepes and Diana Esther Guzmán conclude that: …  the vast majority of persons incarcerated for drug offenses has played only a minor part in the drug cycle, and so are easily replaced in the networks of manufacturing and trafficking; they generally have limited schooling and have lived amidst precarious socioeconomic conditions. (2011, 49) In essence, they are part of the surplus population that global capitalism and neoliberalism simply has little use for, a population that is marginalized and imprisoned on the basis of Colombia’s domestic war on drugs. The economic policies that have been aggressively promoted by the USA globally, and within Colombia by a transnational elite since the early 1990s, have contributed to a socio-­ economic environment conducive to the illegal production of coca and the trafficking of cocaine. By the end of the 1990s Colombia had become the central producer of coca in the world while facing a powerful anti-­globalization armed insurgency in different parts of the country. This was in large part due to what is referred to as the “balloon effect,” as successful coca eradication progress in Peru and Bolivia in the 1990s led to a shifting of coca production to Colombia, as traffickers consolidated much of their operations within the country.2 The resulting increase in coca production, coupled with the defeat of the Medellín and Cali cartels opened up increasingly profitable opportunities for right-­wing paramilitary organizations and the FARC, allowing both groups to expand their operations and presence throughout the country. The priority for elites in Colombia and the United States, as it had been for decades, was not the rising power of paramilitary groups whose violence often went hand in hand with protecting foreign direct investments and/or creating opportunities for export markets, but the power of the FARC. The FARC was founded in 1964 and represents the longest existing guerrilla force in Latin America. The organization reached its military heights in the late 1990s and early 2000s, maintaining military units throughout Colombia with a fighting force of approximately 20,000 under arms and tens of thousands more providing financing, shelter, and political support in other capacities. Over the  decades it has been committed to a struggle against, at least rhetorically,

Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative   69 “imperialism and neo-­liberalism” and toward a “world where capitalist exploitation is finally brought to an end” (FARC-­EP 2016). In response to the increasing strength of the FARC and Colombia’s seeming inability to arrest its progress in June 1999, an inter-­agency group was established within the Clinton Administration to develop an integral proposal to ostensibly assist the Colombian government with what were presented as drug-­related challenges. The armed insurgency, the FARC, enjoyed an important stream of revenue through the taxation of different segments of the production process related to the cocaine trade. This allowed both the U.S. and Colombian governments to present them as part of the larger challenge associated with illegal drug trafficking. However, as retired U.S. army officer Stan Goff notes, the justification of counternarcotics was historically utilized to promote counterinsurgency tactics, writing that “When I was training Colombian Special Forces in Tolemeida in 1992, my team was there allegedly to aid the counter-­narcotics effort. Narcotics were the cover story for a similar trip to Peru in 1991. In both cases we were giving military forces training in infantry counter-­insurgency doctrine” (1999). The inter-­agency group was led by Arturo Valenzuela, Thomas Pickering, and Sandy Berger, and involved experts from the Department of State, the Pentagon’s Southern Command, the Department of Justice, the Treasury, the Central Intelligence Agency, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) (García 2001, 227–228). This group consulted closely with U.S. officials in the U.S. embassy in Colombia and members of Andres Pastrana’s administration (1998–2002), including the Colombian military and national police (García 2001, 228). The partnership between Thomas Pickering, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, and General Barry McCaffrey (retired), head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy “… would form the basis of the Clinton administration’s new policies towards Colombia” (Crandall 2002, 162) and Colombianist Arlene Tickner claimed that visits by Thomas Pickering to Colombia in August of 1999 “planted the seed for Plan Colombia” (Tickner 2001, 223). McCaffrey had also been the former commander of the U.S. SOUTHCOM. Ostensibly, these meetings in the U.S. were focused upon supporting plans being developed in Colombia, but the centrality of U.S. financing to the Plan would give U.S. planners greater weight in the policy results. The number one strategic objective of the original plan that was proposed by Colombia in September of 1999 was to strengthen the fight against drug trafficking and destroy drug trafficking organizations (Salgado Tamayo 2000, 2). It emphasized the importance of “strengthening” Colombia’s armed forces and the “rule of law” as key to successful development and resolving Colombia’s political crisis. The economic strategy that would be employed was one focused upon balancing the national fiscal budget, expanding exports and creating incentives for greater private investment (Bergquist et al. 2001, 234). This Colombian development plan was aided by the legislation signed into law by Bill Clinton in July 2000, legislation that would be popularly referred to as Plan Colombia.

70   Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative The legislation committed approximately $1.6 billion dollars over two years, with over 70 percent of U.S. assistance devoted primarily to Colombian military and law enforcement for an invasion of southern Colombia, the central region for coca growth in the country and a stronghold of the FARC. Plan Colombia would continue to receive U.S. support at similar levels in the years that would follow with Colombia receiving approximately $10 billion drug war assistance as of 2016. Eighty percent of this aid went to Colombia’s security forces prior to 2008, and 70 percent since 2008, and allowed for the training of over 90,000 Colombian military and law enforcement personnel, the supplying of twenty Black Hawk helicopters and over eighty Huey helicopters, over twenty different aircraft (including multiple spray planes to poison coca fields), over one hundred boats and other related military material (Washington Office on Latin America 2016). Plan Colombia would be a central part of an expansion of U.S. spending on drug interdiction/supply reduction with a total of $45 billion spent between 1981 and 2004, but one-­third of that amount being spent between 2000 and 2004 (Freisendorf 2007, 13). The two leaders of Clinton’s Colombian policy team, Arturo Valenzuela and Pickering, were both members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). After his tenure in the Clinton administration, Pickering, would go on to take a Senior Vice-­President position in the transnational corporation, Boeing. In 2006, Pickering would represent Boeing at the annual World Economic Forum, an international organization dedicated to creating partnerships between TNCs and political elites to help shape and manage “global, regional and industry agendas” (World Economic Forum, n.d.). Clinton’s ONDCP’s director, General Barry McCaffrey, would later go on to become a member of the international advisory board for Fleishman-­Hillard, a communications consulting firm that advises corporations on their investment strategies in the USA and throughout the world. The career paths of Pickering and McCaffrey suggest their ideological sympathies to a globalist orientation. Their view is not surprising given the globalist orientation of the Clinton administration whose 1998 National Security Strategy for a New Century called for the enlargement of “free-­market democracies” as well as the maintenance of a global U.S. role in order to “ensure that the world remains stable so the international economic system can flourish” (The White House 1998, 9). Furthermore the document asserts that “the ultimate objective of our (economic) reform efforts is a stable, resilient global financial system that promotes strong global economic growth providing benefits broadly to workers and investors in all countries” (The White House 1998, 31, emphasis mine). This 1998 strategy followed the Clinton administration’s 1994 National Drug Strategy Report, which concluded that “market-­oriented governments are much easier to work with and more willing to cooperate with the international community in a common effort against the illicit drug industry” (as cited in Andreas 1995, 76) while the 1996 National Drug Strategy Report emphasized that: Drug-­related corruption, intimidation, and dirty money undermine democratic governments and free-­market economies around the world … [and]

Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative   71 Foreign-­based trafficking organizations are a direct and increasing threat to democracy and free-­market economies abroad. (The White House 1996, 13; 41) In fact, the 1999 Western Hemisphere Drug Elimination Act refers to the U.S. military’s “Global Military Policy” and demands that the U.S. Defense Department place its counter-­drug mission as a higher priority, just below engaging in actual wars (U.S. House of Representatives/U.S. Senate 2006, 362–363). The 1990s was also a period in which the DEA, the FBI, and the CIA expanded their counter-­drug operations around the globe, training European officers in Hungary, supporting Thai troops in various jungle operations, working against traffickers in Nigeria as well as linking various bilateral treaties with the extradition of drug trafficking suspects (Friesendorf 2008, 11). Members of the U.S. Congress, such as Senators Bob Graham and Mike DeWine, were also actively involved in the development of Plan Colombia. DeWine was one of the co-­sponsors of legislation in October 1998 to increase resources for the “drug war” and for Colombia in particular (García 2001, 247). Both Graham and DeWine worked with the CFR and the policy-­making group, the InterAmerican Dialogue (ID), in special task forces focusing on the Colombian situation. The ID is a Washington DC-­based policy planning organization with members from all over Latin America comprising corporate executives, scholars, and politicians. Key Clinton appointees for Latin American policy were selected from the Dialogue (Oppenheimer 1993). The ID was founded in 1982 with the stated goals of promoting democracy, economic reform and economic integration, that is, neoliberalism, throughout Latin America. The primary funders of the ID include TNCs, international financial institutions, foundations (including the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation) and governmental institutions (including the United States Agency for International Development, United Kingdom Department for International Development) (InterAmerican Dialogue 2002, 32–35). An independent review of the Dialogue activities concluded that the ID had become “the most important hemispheric policy forum, and that no other independent institution could match [its] access to policy makers and private opinion leaders in the Americas” (InterAmerican Dialogue 2002). The ID, like the CFR, maintains a special “corporate circle” for membership by domestic corporations and TNCs. The special task force organized by the ID and the CFR released an interim report before the final congressional vote on Plan Colombia in March of 2000 that was consistent with the broad goals of the Clinton administration’s plan and the means required to achieve those goals, that is, the strengthening of Colombia’s army and internationalization of its economy. Fifty percent of the signatories of the task force’s interim report worked for TNCs, law/financial firms that represented TNCs, or think tanks that disproportionately received funding from TNCs (Council on Foreign Relations 2000). In the end, a U.S. faction of the transnational elite/transnational capitalist class was central in the development and promotion of Plan Colombia.

72   Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative The Bush administration would continue the agenda that the Clinton administration began, shifting more overtly to direct U.S. support of Colombia’s counter-­insurgency war. Specifically, funding was made available to the Department of Defense to support a unified campaign by the Government of Colombia against narcotics trafficking and against activities by organizations designated as terrorist organizations, such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of  Colombia (FARC), the National Liberation Army (ELN), and the United Self-­Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). (U.S. House of Representatives/U.S. Senate 2006, 222) This was in line with a more aggressive posture in the region  after 9/11. For example, after 9/11 SOUTHCOM effectively utilized the label of “narcoterrorists” to demonstrate the centrality of its role in the “war on terrorism” wedding it directly to the “illegal drug threat” (Tokatlian 2015, 79). In fact, in the Defense Authorization Law of 2002 the central enemies of their various missions in the region were changed from “narcotraffickers” to  “narcoterrorists” in sections 1004 and 1035 of the law (Emerson 2010, 43). In the 2000s SOUTHCOM would also seek a role in “fostering prosperity” through  developing training programs in the “internal security” field; increasing the number of so-­called cooperative security locations; supporting a joint military unit initiative in Central America “to carry out stabilization operations” in this subregion; collaborating with Latin American countries in the development of “national security strategies”; and improving the definition of the Department of Defense’s role in “the political and socio-­economic development processes” in the region.  (Tokatlian 2015, 80) The Bush administration also went further in directly assisting the U.S. based transnational Occidental Petroleum, by designating $100 million to finance a special Colombian brigade to protect its central oil pipeline. Between 1990 and 1999, the production of oil in Colombia increased by 78 percent, making it the largest source of export revenues for the Colombian economy. This oil is extracted almost entirely by TNCs such as British Petroleum and Occidental Petroleum (Dudley and Murillo 1998, 42–46). In justifying the Bush administration’s financing of oil pipeline defense, U.S. ambassador to Colombia, Anne Patterson, argued that the pipeline plan was “something we have to do … It is important for the future of the country, for our petroleum supplies and for the confidence of our investors” (Washington Office on Latin America 2003b, 4). The relationship between energy interests and Plan Colombia is clearly outlined by Secretary of Energy during the Clinton administration (1998–2000), Bill Richardson, speaking in Cartagena, Colombia in 1999: “The United States and its allies will invest millions of dollars in two areas of the Colombian economy,

Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative   73 in the areas of mining and energy, and to secure these investments we are tripling military aid to Colombia” (Ramirez Cuellar 2005, 32).3 According to a 2005 report of the Colombian mining worker’s union SINTRAMINERCOL, Plan Colombia provided for the construction of three counternarcotics bases in “energy and mineral-­rich zones where foreign companies are trying to gain a foothold” (Ramirez Cuellar 2005, 36). US-­based companies such as Occidental Petroleum had invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the Colombian oil economy and had been suffering repeated attacks by leftist guerrillas upon its oil pipelines in the country for over a decade. Occidental not only directly lobbied in favor of the U.S. contribution to Plan Colombia, but also financially contributed monies to various congressional campaigns, spending over $8.6 million lobbying the U.S. government between 1996 and 2000 and specifically promoting an increase in U.S. military aid to Colombia (PBS Frontline 2002). Along with the oil industry private military contractors such as DynCorps and MPRI, with operations in scores of countries, have benefitted greatly from Plan Colombia. They earned over $1 billion a year in the first five years of Plan Colombia facilitating the eradication of coca and/or in the monitoring of drug traffickers (McCallion 2005, 320). Finally, the Bush administration, like the Clinton administration, consistently waived human rights concerns despite extensive evidence of brutal massacres by paramilitary groups working with the armed forces. According to Scott Wilson, a Latin American correspondent for the Washington Post, U.S. officials at the time viewed these drug trafficking paramilitary groups as providing “… the force that the army did not yet have. The group served as a placeholder for the more professional U.S.-trained force that would come along years later” (Wilson 2009). This transnational policymaking elite in the Clinton administration was supported in creating the conditions in Colombia for FDI by a similar faction operating within the Colombian state. Transnational elites, Colombia, and Plan Colombia In October of 1999, before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Pickering stated, “The USG consulted closely on the ‘building blocks,’ which make up the plan, with Colombian leaders and senior officials. However, the plan was formulated, drafted and approved by President Pastrana and his team” (Pickering 1999). Colombia’s “team” consisted of a core group of globalizing technocrats linked with transnational policy-­making groups and/or transnational institutions. The ultimate version of Plan Colombia was originally published in English when it was introduced to the international public in September 1999 and was unknown to the Colombian Congress at the time of its presentation (Salgado Tamayo 2000, 2). Some of the policy-­makers within the Colombian government that were central to the development and promotion of the Colombian plan were Jaime Ruiz, Mauricio Cardenas, Luis Moreno, and Andres Pastrana himself. One of the principal architects of the September 1999 plan was Jaime Ruiz, who was the head of the Department of National Planning in Colombia at the time and in

74   Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative 2001 became an Executive Director of the World Bank. According to Colombianist Garbriel Marcella (whose source was the U.S. ambassador to Colombia), Ruiz wrote “the plan in a week in English” (Marcella 2001, 7). Mauricio Cardenas followed Ruiz in the Department of National Planning and also played an important role in the administration of Plan Colombia (Center for Latin American Studies 2001). Cardenas went on to head a securities and mortgage-­lending firm in Colombia. He has also taught at the University of Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia since 1992, the source of some of Colombia’s leading globalizing economic thinkers and technocrats (Avilés 2006). Colombia’s ambassador to the USA, Luis Alberto Moreno, an economic adviser to President Cesar Gaviria (1990–1994) during a substantial period of neoliberal reform, was designated ambassador to the USA by Andres Pastrana in 1998, and was re-­nominated to the post by Pastrana’s successor, Alvaro Uribe. Moreno worked tirelessly to lobby and convince U.S. congressional representatives to support Plan Colombia (Sweig 2002). Prior to coming to this office, Moreno worked as a telecommunications consultant and private adviser to one of the largest transnational financial conglomerates in Colombia, the Luis Carlos Sarmiento Organization. Moreno, Ruiz, and Cardenas reflected the general orientation held by Andres Pastrana, the man that appointed them to their positions within his government.4 Pastrana, the son of a former president of Colombia and a member of the Conservative party, had been a part of Colombia’s political establishment and economic elite for years prior to being elected to the presidency in 1998. He was a committed neoliberal whose economic strategies focused on increasing the number of privatizations, including the privatization of state-­owned power, telephone, and mining companies. According to the Wall Street Journal, Pastrana sought the advice of foreign executives on developing different strategies to increase foreign investment and exports as well as other economic policies (Vogel 1999, A15). The chairman of the Drummond Ltd, a transnational coal company with over 1 billion dollars in investments in Colombia referred to Pastrana as a “breath of fresh air” (Vogel 1999). Key representatives of a transnational elite based in Colombia and the USA actively promoted a militarized drug-­war policy that would deepen Colombia’s integration into capitalist globalization. The Uribe administration (2002–2010) would actively expand Pastrana’s counternarcotics operations during his two terms as well as directly link a more aggressive counterinsurgency approach to the FARC. Thousands would be killed during his government’s escalation, including through the “false positives” scandal in which civilians would be kidnapped by the Colombian military, dressed as guerrillas and murdered as a way to improve a particular unit’s combat statistics. Relatively few officers were prosecuted for these years-­long crimes and U.S. counternarcotics assistance was never threatened during or after the outbreak of these military killings. Indeed, those Colombia’s military units receiving the highest level of U.S. financing or training between 2002 and 2009 committed more extrajudicial executions during and after receiving this assistance (Fellowship of Reconciliation 2010, iii). The human rights organization, Fellowship of Reconciliation found that 

Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative   75 for the 16 largest increases of aid from one year to the next to army units operating in a specific jurisdiction, the number of reported executions in the jurisdiction increased an average of 56 percent from the two-­year period prior to the increase to the two-­year period during and after the increased assistance. (Fellowship of Reconciliation 2010, see Figure 3.1) Furthermore, the group found a positive correlation between “false positives” and U.S. assistance as a statistical analysis of 1,821 of these executions where responsible units were directly identified showed that Army brigades that received a moderate as compared to low level of US assistance correlated to ten more executions per brigade in the two years following assistance. (Fellowship of Reconciliation 2010, 4) For members of the U.S. and Colombian transnational elite in the administrations that governed during this period the regular violations of human rights facilitated by “drug war” assistance did little to shift either Colombia or the U.S. from a prohibitionist agenda. In fact, Colombia brigade commanders whose respective brigades were widely involved in the “false positives” scandal went

Figure 3.1  US aid and extrajudicial executions in Colombia.

76   Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative on to receive promotions including three who became commanders of the army (Fellowship of Reconciliation 2014, 5). How could the well-­known history of Colombian security forces actively working with drug trafficking paramilitary groups before Plan Colombia not prevent the largest drug war aid package in the history of U.S. drug policy in Latin America? The benefits to transnational capital of a weakened and defeated FARC, the greater security for future investments in Colombia’s extractivist industry, and overall contribution to “stability” for FDI were all fully in line with the long held ideological objectives of a transnational grand strategy shared by state managers in both Colombia and the United States. Almost a decade later a similar cooperative dynamic would play itself out in the case of the U.S.–Mexico Mérida Initiative.

Mérida Initiative The decades prior to the development and enactment of the Mérida Initiative were years that witnessed Mexico’s steady integration into global capitalism through a radical shift from the state-­protected/state-­subsidized economy of its ISI years of the 1960s and 1970s. As others have correctly pointed out Mexico’s embrace of neoliberalism for over three decades has greatly facilitated the trafficking of illegal drugs. The various trade links between Mexico and the United States that have accelerated with neoliberalism and trade agreements like NAFTA have greatly expanded the potential entry points that traffickers utilize to export their merchandise to the United States as well as allowing Mexican DTOs to import U.S. armaments and precursors to facilitate their security and drug production respectively. In fact, the Salinas administration that governed Mexico during the negotiations and signing of NAFTA was enmeshed in a series of networks with Mexican drug trafficking organizations—including the President’s own brother (Gootenberg 2012, 175). John Gibler nicely highlights the trafficking advantages of NAFTA: More than 2,000 trucks and 34,000 cars cross from Juárez and El Paso every day. In 2009, more than $42 billion in legal trade crossed into Juárez and El Paso. An estimated $1.5 million to $10 million worth of illegal drugs moves over the border from Juárez to El Paso every single day. How do you think the drugs—bulky, heavy packages of cocaine, marijuana, heroin and crystal meth—get across? Where does the infrastructure and organizational capacity exist to transport so much merchandise? On the backs of mules led out through the desert? In the backpacks of pedestrians? In the trunks or spare tires of SUVs and sedans going through customs? Sure there are the occasional sensational discoveries of underground tunnels. But what about the thousands of daily cargo trucks with their NAFTA fast passes? What about the maquiladora warehouses? Recall, when Forbes first listed El Chapo Guzman on its list of billionaires, the magazine, with no moral qualms or qualifiers, credited the source of his fortune as “shipping.” (2011, 188)5

Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative   77 The reality is that the vast majority of drugs trafficked into the United States are smuggled through legal ports of entry—concealed in passenger vehicles and legitimate merchandise (Washington Office on Latin America 2017). How disruptive to global trade and investment would a more systematic and rigorous search of shipping containers from China or trucks from Mexico be? At minimum it is implicitly understood that these economic relations will be prioritized over any substantive inspection/interdiction effort. Not only has trade and capital liberalization facilitated the trafficking of drugs from Mexico, but agreements such as NAFTA have been important in expanding Mexico’s informal sector and surplus populations. Since the beginning of NAFTA, in 1994, the country’s annual per capita growth has averaged a stagnant 1.2 percent, real wages have declined and unemployment has increased. Twenty-­five percent of the population does not have access to basic food and 20 percent of the population suffers from malnutrition with the vast majority of workers existing in the low-­paying informal sector (Carlsen 2013; Roman and Velasco 2014). Thus, Mexico’s embrace of capitalist globalization has also contributed to the creation of a potential pool of recruits for the multiple drug-­ trafficking and other criminal organizations that have proliferated in the country during these last two decades. Furthermore, financial liberalization has also been a central part of Mexico’s neoliberal shift helping to ease money laundering in the country as well as creating opportunities for transnational banking institutions to gain access to the funds generated by the lucrative illegal drug industry. Ironically, 1994 was also the year in which the Mexican government increased penalties for drug production, transport, trafficking, and commerce (Paula Hernández 2011, 61). These increased penalties did little to slow the dramatic shift of trafficking away from routes on the Atlantic coast to the U.S.–Mexican border with Mexican traffickers expanding in their size and power in the decade that would follow. The profitable drug trade and the centrality of Mexican traffickers in shipping illegal drugs produced in Mexico and Colombia across the U.S.–Mexican border contributed to increasing levels of violence in the years leading to the election of Felipe Calderón in 2006. Furthermore, the decades prior to Calderon’s election also illustrated “blowback,” the unintended consequences of previous drug control policies in other regions of Latin America. For example, relatively successful efforts by the U.S. state in restricting the trafficking of drugs through Florida contributed to traffickers increasingly relying upon the U.S.–Mexican border to ship their merchandise (90 percent of the U.S. cocaine supply by 2010) (Gootenberg 2010, 8; Gootenberg 2012). In addition, successful U.S. and Colombian efforts to weaken the Medellin cartel during the 1980s and 1990s shifted power/influence to the Cali cartel, which enjoyed important links through Central America and Mexico via different Pacific routes (ibid., 9). Finally, Mexico’s democratization during this same period gradually weakened the power of the country’s one party system, which had for decades co-­opted criminal networks, creating more possibility for conflict and violence in a less politically predictable environment.

78   Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative In the years leading up to the Merida Initiative Mexico had witnessed a doubling of murders attributed to organized crime between 2001 and 2006 and opinion polls indicated that security outranked the economy and corruption in terms of the Mexican public’s priorities (Haugaard et al. 2011, 1). Previous governments had turned to the military as a tool for drug control efforts, typically as a result of pressures from the United States, and these forces often served objectives outside of the drug war. For example, the Mexican military used helicopters obtained with U.S. drug control assistance to move troops to the southern state of Chiapas to fight the anti-­neoliberal guerrilla forces of the Zapatistas in 1994 (Council on Foreign Relations 1997, 43). The controversial election of Felipe Calderón in 2006 under extremely questionable circumstances witnessed a radical expansion of the military’s use. Only eleven days after he was sworn in the national security budget was increased by 24 percent and 27,000 military and federal police were deployed to eight Mexican states (Lozano-­Vásquez and Rebolledo Flores 2015, 243). This deployment was celebrated by the United States, which continued to demand an internal security role for the region’s armed forces with the police being viewed as too weak and/or corrupt relative to the military (Roberts 2007). In fact, for many scholars Calderón’s declaration of war against the cartels is viewed as an early attempt by his government to create a degree of legitimacy and support for his administration, something to rally the Mexican public behind him—“legitimacy through the use of force” (Alvarez-­ Bejar 2007). From the very start of Calderón’s administration his government believed that the United States had to play a more prominent role in Mexico’s war against DTOs given the centrality of the U.S. market and the U.S. guns arming these cartels. In March of 2007 Felipe Calderón met with George W. Bush in Mérida, Mexico to discuss U.S.–Mexican relations. During this meeting the two governments committed to expanding bilateral and regional counternarcotics and security cooperation in line with expectations of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP). The SPP was a 2005 initiative agreed to between Mexico, the United States and Canada to “… increase security and to enhance prosperity” in North America, specifically an understanding of the importance of the three countries working together to protect themselves from alleged security threats (Watt and Zepeda 2012, 193–194). Some have argued that the Mérida plan was imposed by the United States in the form of a “new mandate” (Carlsen 2008, 18) or simply reflected a U.S. objective to defend NAFTA (Watt and Zepeda 2012, 194). However, these authors ignore the fact that it was equally a project promoted/advanced from the very beginning by the Calderón administration. Following their March meeting, representatives from both governments met secretly for several months to hammer out the details of the aid package, which was publicly introduced in October of 2007. The Mérida Initiative was a multi-­year plan that involved approximately $1.4 billion in U.S. assistance in the first three years (2009–2012) predominantly for Mexico and Central America (though approximately 85 percent of the aid was dedicated to Mexico) and a total of approximately $2.5 billion for Mexico

Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative   79 alone between FY2008 and FY2015 (Ribando Seelke and Finklea 2015, 1). Relatedly, Mexico’s legal system was to be transformed as “by 2016, all of Mexico is expected to be using a US-­styled legal system, a complicated transition funded by the Mérida Initiative” (2014, 102). The UN’s special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers concludes that the impetus behind the rule of law projects has often been the belief that markets require predictable legal structures to protect property rights, facilitate foreign direct investments, and contract enforcement—that is to establish U.S. law as the “lingua franca” for business and politics. (As cited in Paley 2014, 104) Similar to Plan Colombia, three-­fourths of U.S. assistance was for Mexico’s military and police forces (Haugaard et al. 2011, 3). Also, in FY 2008 the Central American Security Initiative was established in which the Congress appropriated $1.2 billion in assistance to “… to strengthen the long-­term capacities of Central American governments to address security challenges and the underlying social and political factors that contribute to them” (Meyer and Seelke 2015, Summary). Both these programs were modified and supported by the Obama administration, with increasing efforts to promote judicial and social reforms in the region ostensibly to modernize state institutions as a strategy to disrupt drug trafficking and the power of these criminal actors. Michael Huston, Chief Principal Director in the Department of Homeland Security in the Office of Policy in the Trump administration viewed the Merida Initiative as the “… real beginning of a join approach … to address a common set of issues” (C-­Span 2017). The plan provided support for Mexico in an array of policies, including counternarcotics, counterterrorism, law enforcement, and “institution building.” The majority of the first year’s funding would go towards the purchase of eight Bell 412 helicopters, surveillance planes and to improve “database interconnectivity” between Mexico’s different intelligence agencies. The program during the Calderón administration would also involve extensive intelligence and law enforcement cooperation between the two countries (in line with “armoring NAFTA”) as special “fusion centers” were established where U.S. and Mexican personnel worked side-­by-side against drug trafficking organizations (Evans 2014). Personnel from the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and U.S. NORTHCOM all worked at these centers in Mexico, deepening transnational security connections while largely failing to stem the flow of illegal psychoactive substances from entering the U.S. or the significant increase in homicides in different regions of Mexico. An examination of the central actors behind the development of the Mérida Initiative in the United States and Mexico demonstrates the role of transnational policy networks in shaping this “drug war” policy.

80   Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative Transnational elites, the United States, and the Mérida Initiative Though the Calderón administration importantly sought greater U.S. support, the ideas underlying the MI had long been promoted in the elite policy community within the U.S. For example, as early as 1997 a special CFR task force on international drug control policy called for taking the fight directly to the cartels (a central mission of the Merida Initiative), concluding that “… America’s international drug control priorities should shift from a primary focus on foreign drug supplies to the growing power and profits of transnational drug cartels that challenge the integrity of political, financial, and judicial institutions  …” and that the United States should “…  combat money-­laundering, drug-­related corruption and violence through bilateral and multilateral initiatives” (Council on Foreign Relations 1997, 57). Almost ten years later (November 2006) the Council on Foreign Relations released a “Council Special Report” by Pamela Starr examining U.S. Mexican policy after the controversial election of Felipe Calderón. The report detailed a number of concerns for U.S. policy, including security and narcotrafficking. The report highlighted the importance of Mexico’s energy supplies to the U.S. economy as well as its role as an ally in support of a hemispheric free trade agreement (the Free Trade Area of the Americas) (Starr 2006, 4). In her recommendations to U.S. policymakers Starr presented the core justifications and proposals that would eventually be part of the Merida Initiative: The United States should redouble current efforts to help Mexico build its law enforcement capabilities. The lack of security for foreign investors, especially in the border region, and Mexico’s limited ability to deal with the drug cartels are a direct threat to U.S. interests … bilateral cooperation between the two countries’ militaries should be continued and deepened. The United States should enhance technical and financial assistance to support Mexican efforts to improve the training, pay, and effectiveness of its federal and state police forces … (2006, 26) The concern for the security of foreign investors and its relationship to the power of drug cartels was complemented with a demand that the Mexican state go further integrating its security institutions with U.S. ones, Starr writes that: If Mexico is serious about improving the security environment within its borders, it also needs to overcome its historic sensitivity to joint operations with U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. These agencies possess a wealth of experience in dealing with organized crime, in screening and training police recruits, and in criminal investigations that could jump-­ start Mexican security reforms. Accepting such assistance, including close collaboration at the command level with U.S. personnel in Mexican territory, will be politically difficult in a country that has long harbored

Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative   81 suspicions of its northern neighbor. But it is an important element to building a solution to Mexico’s growing security problem. (2006, 26–27) In the months following this report members of the U.S. Congress would propose legislation reflecting many of the priorities laid out by the CFR. On January 17, 2007 Congressmen Henry Cuellar and Silvestre Reyes, two Democratic representatives of Texas introduced the “Prosperous and Secure Neighbor Alliance Act of 2007,” that Cuellar believes “… laid the ground work for aid to Mexico” (Cruz Cruz 2009, 352; Cuellar 2010). The act, which was never passed, called for U.S. assistance to improve security and economic development in Mexico, with a focus on professionalizing Mexican law enforcement, providing technological support and supporting anti-­corruption programs in Mexico, which would all be central to the final Mérida Initiative legislation (Library of Congress 2007). Cuellar and Reyes were frequent players in lobbying members of Congress on the importance of such aid as well as in consulting with political allies within Mexico through periodic congressional meetings with their counterparts from Mexico’s legislative branch (Chanona Burguete 2009, 59). Democrats in the House would overwhelmingly support the legislation over Republican opposition with 244 Democrats and only 32 Republicans while Democrats were unanimous in support for the funding package (Bricker 2008). Reyes, a representative from 1997–2012, was close to the defense industry with his top five contributors during 2011–2012 represented by defense contractors including General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Honeywell (Open Secrets 2012).6 These corporations, while closely tied to U.S. military spending, are very much transnational corporations with operations in different regions of the world. General Dynamics serves commercial customers and governments in forty different countries, Raytheon maintains operations in nineteen countries, while 55 percent of Honeywell’s revenues are generated from outside of the United States—including from Mexico (Raytheon n.d.; General Dynamics n.d.; Honeywell n.d.). The top career contributors to Cuellar included the “leading free enterprise group” Club for Growth, the International Bank of Commerce and AT&T that all promote greater economic integration and neoliberal economic policies within the United States and globally (Open Secrets 2015). The links with TNCs held by promoters of the Mérida Initiative within the U.S. House as well as the ideological commitment to capitalist globalization can also be seen within the Bush administration. For example, the Bush administration’s 2006 National Security Strategy (The White House 2006) declared that the U.S. must “ignite a new era of global economic growth through free markets and free trade” (1) while “pressing for open markets, financial stability, and deeper integration of the world economy” (26). During his administration the number of U.S. free trade agreements expanded from three to sixteen with his government seeking to establish a Free Trade Area  of the Americas that would extend NAFTA to the entire Western Hemisphere. In fact, greater trade relations was acknowledged to be central to the

82   Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative administration’s counternarcotics strategies, as then Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Richard Fisher told a Senate hearing on narcotics control and international trade in February 2000. A strong trade and investment relationship with the Andean region is a vital component of our counter-­narcotics efforts … Our trade policy … has been designed to give countries in the region greater opportunities to move away from narcotics cultivation into legitimate trade. (As cited in International Consortium of Investigative Journalists 2001) This same commitment to economic integration was shared by Bush’s director for Mexico and Canada within the National Security Council’s Office of Western Hemisphere Affairs, Kimberly Breier. Breier, who was also the lead NSC staffer for the 2006 North American leaders meeting for the SPP, had a career before and after her public service assisting/advising transnational capital. Prior to her work in government she worked as a senior fellow and director of the National Policy Association’s North American Committee, a trilateral business and labor committee involving senior officials from the United States, Mexico, and Canada. The National Policy Association was a think tank dedicated to the idea that the private sector should play a central role in the formulation of public policy. After her time in the Bush White House she became the vice president of the boutique consulting firm Peschard Sverdrup International, leading country risk assessment teams for private clients in Mexico, Argentina, and Chile as well as the deputy director of the Americas Program and director of the U.S.–Mexico Futures Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) (Center for Strategic and International Studies n.d.).7 CSIS is a conservative think tank whose central contributors included a who’s who of transnational capital and military industries including Lockheed Martin, the Boeing Company, Exxon Mobil, and Bank of America.8 Other central players within Bush’s foreign policy team shared a similar outlook as reflected by their involvement with transnational corporations and/or their links to corporate policy­making groups. Bush’s first two Secretaries of State, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, were both interlinked with transnational corporations and/or corporate policymaking organizations. Powell had been a director of Gulfstream Aerospace and America Online prior to his appointment as well as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (he became a CFR trustee after his time in office). Rice served on the boards of directors of Chevron and Transamerica as well as a member of the CFR prior to joining the Bush administration (Domhoff 2010, 185). She played an important role in publically advocating for the Mérida Initiative and criticizing human rights conditions being placed on the legislation during the legislative process. She was also instrumental in working with her Mexican counterpart, Patricia Espinosa, in establishing a process of collaboration in the implementation of the plan in the months following Bush’s signing it into law (Cortes et al. 2009, 402–403). In relation to the Mérida Initiative itself, one of the Bush administration’s leaders in the negotiations with the Mexican government over the specifics of

Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative   83 the plan was the then U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Tony Garza (Torre 2013, 176). Garza was Bush’s ambassador between 2002 and 2009 and worked closely with Mexico’s ambassador to the United States Arturo Sarukhán in not only developing the plan, but in ensuring its passage by the U.S. Congress (ibid.;  Corchado 2015). In fact, in the months before Calderón’s inauguration Calderón consulted with Garza about his plan to increase military pressure on narcotraffickers. Garza agreed with this strategy, arguing that if Mexico wanted to improve its economy that “foreigners and Mexicans alike had to be reassured that the rule of law would prevail” (as cited in Boullosa and Wallace 2016, 91). Garza, along with representatives from the Inter­American Dialogue, promoted the plan with the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations during their November 2007 hearings on the initiative (U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations 2007, 13–14). After his service as ambassador, Garza would take an attorney position at the international corporate law firm, White & Case LLP, which maintains offices in Mexico, the United States as well as in over thirty other countries (White and Case n.d.). According to his personal website, “Ambassador Garza’s professional expertise … affords his clients the breadth of experience so vital to effective cross-­border and global business ventures” (Garza n.d.). Garza’s “expertise” is also reflected in his membership to the globalist Council on Foreign Relations (Council on Foreign Relations 2014). Membership to the Council on Foreign Relations was also shared by Bush’s Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte. Negroponte oversaw the development and presentation of the Mérida plan to the U.S. Congress, playing an early role in “…  launching the Mérida Initiative” in the U.S. and in Mexico (U.S. House of Representatives 2010, 78–79). He personally visited Mexico in the lead up to passage of the Mérida Initiative to assure his Mexican counterparts and the globalist business community in Mexico that this plan served their interests. In one 2008 visit, Negroponte spoke to the “Northamerican Forum” organized by the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations, a largely corporate funded think tank whose corporate members include ExxonMobil, Shell, and Toyota (Wikileaks 2008; COMEXI n.d.). At this event Negroponte stressed the link between the Mérida Initiative to the Alianza para la Seguridad y Prosperidad de America del Norte (ASPAN, SPP in English), warning his audience of the challenges they must overcome to establish deeper regional integration (ibid.). After his time in government he would go back into the private sector working for the transnational lobbying and consulting firm McLarty Associates that is focused upon assisting Fortune 200 companies seeking to strengthen their presence in foreign markets (McLarty Associates n.d.). Negroponte also became the vice-­chairman of Covington and Burling Law Firm, a firm that regularly defends transnational corporations with investments in Latin America. This included defending Chiquita Bananas that was charged with financing Colombian paramilitary groups involved in killing banana workers seeking to improve their labor conditions (Kozloff 2009). Bush’s globalist network even reached into the members of the military command responsible for overseeing the implementation plan. For example, Victor Renuart was the commander of the U.S. Northern Command between

84   Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative 2007 and 2010 and prior to that appointment was the Director of Strategic Plans and Policy, within the Joint Chiefs of Staff.9 The USNORTHCOM was established in 2002 and is responsible for “homeland defense” and is engaged in missions with its “partners” in Canada and Mexico. During his tour as commander, USNORTHCOM worked with Mexican military and civil leaders in fighting drug cartels under the “… auspices of the Merida Initiative” (Garamone 2010). Renuart viewed the Merida Initiative “…  as an opportunity with our critical neighbor to jointly confront the threat of narcotics trafficking and organized crime” (Renaurt 2008, 23). After his retirement from the armed forces Renuart would go on to start his own “homeland security” and “leadership” consulting firm, while offering consulting work to transnational military industrial firms such as BAE Systems, Inc. and sitting on the board of the transnational company Griffon Corporation (Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors n.d.).10 Ultimately, central players within the United States in the development, promotion, and passage of the Mérida Initiative (as well as in administering it years later) were ideologically committed to the globalist agenda associated with transnational capital. They were accompanied in this effort by the Mexican faction of this elite. Transnational elites, Mexico, and the Mérida Initiative Before his campaign and throughout his administration Calderón represented a solid member of Mexico’s transnational elite, an individual who had fully embraced the National Action Party’s (PAN, Spanish acronyms) commitment to market reform and trade liberalization. One of Calderón’s first acts was to appoint a number of neoliberal technocrats to central economic/finance ministries, “… a team of U.S.educated economists to his Cabinet, laying the groundwork for a business-­friendly government” (Watson 2006). Calderón’s economic agenda included much of the neoliberal economic framework, including balanced budgets, the privatization of the pensions of millions of state education and health workers, the allowing of private investments in the energy sector as well as promoting tourism through “integrated development zones” (Washington Post n.d.). According to the Mexican Solidarity Network, “for the past six years, Calderón has been … defending free trade agreements, maintaining a neoliberal economic agenda by cutting social spending and sustaining a relatively balanced budget …” (Mexico Solidarity Network 2012). This agenda was aided by other members of Mexico’s transnational elite who worked with their U.S. counterparts in the crafting and promotion of the Mérida Initiative. Central individuals included Wanda Sigrid Arzt Colunga, the Technical Secretary of the National Security Council within the Calderón administration and former advisor to the World Bank. She was considered by many to be the architect of the initiative (El Universal 2008). Arzt’s role was not limited to influencing policymaking in Mexico, but she also consulted with the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations when they held hearings about the initiative in November of 2007 (U.S. Senate 2007, 13). After her time in Mexico’s government she joined the U.S. based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars as their

Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative   85 “Mexico Public Policy Scholar.” The center is a U.S. based “public-­private” think tank that was chartered by the U.S. Congress in 1968 to provide ideas on global issues for policymakers, seeking to build a “bridge between the worlds of academic and public policy.” The center is governed by a presidentially appointed board of trustees whose chairman in 2014 was Thomas Nides, who was also the vice-­chairman of Morgan Stanley (Woodrow Wilson Center 2014a). The U.S. state annually funds the center with millions of dollars, but two-­thirds of its annual budget derives from non-­appropriated sources (Woodrow Wilson Center 2014b). These non-­appropriated sources of funds derive from foundations, individuals, and corporate contributions. Its top four corporate donors in 2014 were the Boeing Company, Northrop Grumman,11 Citigroup and Goldman Sachs & Company (Woodrow Wilson Center 2014c). Arzt was not alone in playing a role in the development of the policy within Mexico and promoting it in the U.S., as she was joined in this effort by Mexico’s ambassador to the U.S. Arturo Sarukhán. Sarukhán was a central figure in Calderón’s foreign policy team. He was Calderón’s foreign policy coordinator in his campaign and within his transition team, ultimately serving as Mexico’s ambassador to the United States from January 2007 to January 2013. As part of Calderón’s campaign and transition team he was responsible for “developing the lines of action [for foreign policy] and being the voice of the campaign’s international platform” (Gomez Quintero and Javier Jimenez 2006). During his six years as Calderón’s ambassador to the United States he aggressively promoted a U.S.–Mexican alliance against illegal drugs and support for the Mérida Initiative (McLaughlin 2010). The Mexican journalist Wilbert Torre views his role in the development and implementation of the Mérida Initiative as central (Torre 2013) and he was “… described by officials as a key actor in the talks” between the United States and Mexico (Bachelet 2007). Sarukhán was also involved in discussions with the United States after the 2007 April–May interagency discussions within Mexico took place to organize their country’s proposal. This proposal was an important part of the basis of U.S.– Mexican negotiations where Sarukhán played his key role (U.S. Senate 2007). Like Arzt, Sarukhán membership in the transnational elite is clear. In fact, upon leaving his post as Mexico’s ambassador he became chairman of the U.S. based Podesta Group’s Global Solutions, Podesta Group, Inc, a “… global strategies and risk management company” (Podesta Group 2013). The company, a consulting group for transnational corporations, stresses its position at the intersection of commerce, economics, politics and diplomacy. Our multinational clients, both domestic and international, seek to work with other businesses, organizations and governments around the globe. We help our clients to forge and cement long-­standing relationships as they seek to explore, grow, expand and invest in new territories. (Podesta Group n.d.) Like Antonio Garza, Sarukhán served on important corporate policymaking organizations. He is listed as one of the “experts” for the InterAmerican

86   Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative Dialogue, and with Garza he sits on the board for the Americas Society, an organization that seeks to unite opinion leaders, exchange ideas, and create solutions in association with the Council of the Americas (InterAmerican Dialogue n.d.). The Council of the Americas refers to itself as the “premier international business organization” committed to “…  economic and social development, open markets, the rule of law, and democracy throughout the Western Hemisphere” (Americas Society/Council of the Americas n.d.). Its corporate membership includes over 200 different companies, including TNCs such as American Express, Boeing, Apple Inc, Archer Daniels Midland, Raytheon, Nike, McDonalds, and Johnson and Johnson. Sarukhán also sits on the advisory board on Woodrow Wilson’s Center’s Mexico Institute, which is dedicated to improving relations between the United States and Mexico. More than half of the members of this board represent transnational corporations, corporate law firms, and/or consulting companies for transnational business (Woodrow Wilson Center n.d.). Finally, like in the case of Plan Colombia, transnational corporations based in the United States have benefitted from drug war aid to Mexico while supporting or lobbying Congress for programs like the Mérida Initiative. In the two years prior to passage of the Mérida Initiative the defense industry spent over $100 million lobbying the U.S. congress while increasing their campaign contributions by approximately 40 percent between 2006 and 2008 (Open Secrets 2008, 2015). The majority of the funds of the first $1.4 billion in Mérida funds were spent on a variety of U.S. military contractors specializing in armored vehicles, military helicopters, and special inspection equipment (CNN Expansion 2009). Between 2005 and 2009 the majority of $3.1 billion counternarcotics contracts in Latin America went to five contractors: DYNCorp, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, ITT, and ARINC (U.S. Senate 2011, 1). Mexico was second to Colombia in terms of U.S. spending on counternarcotics contracts between 2005 and 2009 (ibid., 7). In the end, through the development and promotion of the assistance package and/ or through direct lobbying/contributions to state managers a transnational foreign policy establishment within and outside of the U.S. and Mexican states was fundamental to the Mérida Initiative. The Obama administration The trend of central state managers and members of the national security apparatus involved with U.S.–Mexican and U.S.–Colombian relations enjoying corporate links continued into the Obama administration (see Table 3.3). Van Apeldoorn and de Graaff ’s find that twenty-­two of Obama’s central “grand-­ strategy makers” enjoyed 113 different corporate affiliations, with individuals such as Secretary of Defense Gates and Special Envoy to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke with ten different affiliations (2014, 44). Obama’s first Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had over five different corporate affiliations prior to joining Obama’s cabinet and earned hundreds of thousands of dollars speaking to the most powerful financial entities in the U.S. after her time as Obama’s Secretary of State. While she was Secretary of State she remarked approvingly on the

Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative   87 Table 3.3  Transnational elite and Obama foreign policymakers Name

Position within the state

Corporate association/corporate policymaking association

Carlos Pascual

U.S. Ambassador to Mexico

CFR, HIS a global consulting firm

James Steinberg

Deputy Secretary of State

Trilateral Commission, CFR, Bilderberg Group, The Aspen Institute

Earl Anthony Wayne

U.S. Ambassador to Mexico

CFR, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Atlantic Council, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, HSBC banking corporation (required to $1.9 billion fine related to its money laundering for Latin American drug cartels)

Roberta S. Jacobson

U.S. Ambassador to Mexico

CFR

Arturo Valenzuela Assistant Secretary of Corporate law firm, Covington & Burling, State for Western CFR Hemisphere Affairs General James Jones

National Security Advisor

Trilateral Commission, Chevron, Boeing, Honeywell International, Bilderberg Group, U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Susan Rice

U.S. Ambassador to the UN, National Security Advisor

Trilateral Commission, The Aspen Institute, CFR, McKinsey and Company (selective list)

Robert M. Gates

Secretary of Defense

CFR, Director of Fidelity Funds, NACCO, Parker Drilling, TRW, The Mitchell Group

Hillary Clinton

Secretary of State

Recipient of millions from Wall Street banks in exchanges for speeches, Rose Law Firm, Wright, Lindey and Jennings, Walmart, TCBY

Leon Panetta

Director of the CIA, Secretary of Defense

Fleishman-Hillard International Communications; BP America, IDT Telecom, Blue Shield of California, Trilateral Commission, Center for National Policy (selective list)

John Kerrey

Secretary of State

Married to Teresa Heinz, of the Heinz Ketchup fortune

Chuck Hagel

Secretary of Defense

CFR, telephone company executive

Thomas Donilon

National Security Advisor

Bilderberg Group, CFR, corporate law firm O’Melveny & Myers

Admiral Mike Mullen

Chairman of the Joint CFR, Trilateral Commission Chiefs of Staff

P. Michael McKinley

U.S. Ambassador to Colombia

Career foreign service continued

88   Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative Table 3.3  Continued Name

Position within the state

Corporate association/corporate policymaking association

Kevin Whitaker

U.S. Ambassador to Colombia

Career foreign service

Dan Restrepo

Director of Western Center for American Progress (a central Hemisphere Affairs in source of funds is George Soros), the Walton the National Security Family Foundation and the Ford Foundation Council

Mark Feierstein

Director of Western Hemisphere Affairs in the National Security Council

CSIS, consultant with Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, an international political consulting firm, where he conducted research for political candidates and multinational companies; advised the 2002 Sanchez de Lozada campaign in Bolivia

Source: Van Apeldoon and de Graff (2015, Appendix); author’s searches of online biographical material, policymaking groups’ membership rolls and corporate websites.

success of Plan Colombia as a model for Mexico, stating that Mexico was facing a similar situation with its drug cartels that Colombia faced in the 1990s with the insurgent threat of the FARC. Obama’s first ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual, was a member of the CFR and upon leaving governmental service in 2011 he joined the board of HIS, a global consulting firm that owns companies such as Global Insight that provides market oriented economic advice to over 3,000 clients worldwide (Center on Global Energy Policy n.d.; Cave 2011). Arturo Valenzuela, Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs from 2009 to 2011, is a member of the Council on Foreign relations and upon leaving office joined the international law firm, Covington & Burling. Within the firm he is the Senior Advisor for Latin America, providing strategic advice, risk assessment and consulting services to US and international clients with investments and operations in Latin America and Latin American clients interested in expanding their operations overseas. His clients have included Fortune 500 firms and leading Latin American multinationals. (Covington n.d.) While the overall military and security assistance to most governments in the region declined during Obama’s two terms, his administration did expand the role of military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies in counternarcotics operations while assistance to Central America substantially increased (Isacson et al. 2013, 1).12 Like earlier administrations issues of human rights and democracy were consistently subordinated to maintaining a prohibitionist approach and/or defending globalist allies. This was illustrated in the administration’s

Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative   89 acquiescence to the 2009 Honduran coup, which allowed corrupt/drug trafficking linked allies to retain their power within the Honduran state, the continued support of the Colombian police and military personnel as trainers for the region despite their history of human rights violations or the 2012 killing of civilians in Honduras by a joint U.S.–Honduran counter-­narcotics operation. While the Obama administration continued the various programs related to Plan Colombia and the Merida Initiative, it expanded U.S. assistance to Central America through the Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI), which was part of the original Merida Aid package (Isacson et al. 2013, 12). Between 2008 and 2014, U.S. aid associated with CARSI amounted to over $600 million, mostly to the region’s militaries and police forces. The U.S. continued to finance Mexican and Honduran security forces during his two terms despite widespread evidence of their ongoing disrespect for human rights while finding ways to assist the Guatemalan military that had for decades been explicitly banned due to its genocidal behavior in the 1980s (Isacson et al. 2013, 17). This was despite the fact that prohibitionist strategies continued to illustrate their ongoing failure. For example, years after the implementation of both plans Colombia and Mexico remained central producers and trans shipment points for illegal drugs. The State Department’s International Narcotics Report of 2011 (over ten years after Plan Colombia) stated that Colombia remained the “… world‘s largest producer and exporter of cocaine, as well as a source country for heroin and marijuana” (U.S. Department of State 2011, 194). Obama’s own “drug czar,” Gil Kerlikowske, concluded that the “war on drugs” has failed, stating that “in the grand scheme, it has not been successful … Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified” (Mendoza 2010). Yet, the Obama administration continued to make requests for billions of dollars each year to engage in this failed enterprise, spending over $15 billion in 2010—thirty-­one times what was spent in 1970 (Mendoza 2010). The administration’s militarized commitment to drug prohibition complemented, as it did from the 1980s on, a thorough commitment to capitalist globalization. For fiscal year 2016 the Obama administration committed $750 million to a regional economic development plan that would facilitate greater economic integration of Central America as well as narcotics control and law enforcement. The administration stressed the importance of “good governance” and the “rule of law” to capital accumulation, asserting that “only through measurable progress towards those objectives will the private sector, small business owners, and international investors have the necessary confidence in the security of their investment and assurances that business dealings are fair and legal” (The White House 2016). Throughout his administration Obama was a strong advocate of economic globalization and worked hard to further integrate the U.S. economy into global capitalism as well as facilitate such integration in the Americas. The administration’s 2010 National Security Strategy explicitly committed the U.S. to maintaining “global security” and an “open international economic system” (as cited in Van Apeldoorn and de Graaff 2014, 41). Obama very much was in line with the largest contributors of his 2012 campaign, which included

90   Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative transnationals such as Microsoft, Google, and Deloitte while in 2008 his top five contributors included J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs (Open Secrets n.d.). Obama’s globalist orientation was consistently demonstrated through his support of the U.S. free trade agreement with Colombia, or promoting free trade and investor agreements with the European Union or the eleven Pacific nations in the Trans-­Pacific Partnership agreement. Obama aggressively sought to extend and deepen this process in Latin America and globally.

Conclusion The argument set forth in this chapter illustrates how a commitment by actors in the US, Colombia, and Mexico to a transnational order of neoliberal economics and “market democracies” (a transnational policy network) eased the policy-­ making process and worked to ensure that Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative would contribute to their integration into the global economy. Leading policy-­makers in Colombia, Mexico, and the U.S. were members of the same intellectual network that facilitated the development of these plans and the ultimate U.S. contribution to these programs. The social position and context of these policymakers helps shed light on the various biases that exist in the strategy, biases that strengthened actors in Colombia and Mexico that have promoted the neoliberal economic direction of the economy, and that have repressed civic and armed anti-­capitalist globalization movements. Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative simply build upon the progress already achieved in integrating these economies into global capitalism, as the drug war was adapted and linked to creating the conditions necessary for the furtherance of this project.

Notes   1 This council is an advisory group to the CIA, the NSC, and the Pentagon.   2 Between 1995 and 2000 coca production decreased from over 260,000 hectares to approximately 70,000 hectares in Bolivia and Peru while Colombia’s production increased from 229,300 hectares to almost 600,000 hectares of coca (Lee 2004, 191).   3 After his time in office Richardson would go on to other political offices, including the governor of New Mexico. He would also become a member of the InterAmerican Dialogue.   4 Pastrana’s Minister of Defense, the Minister of the Interior, Minister of Finance and Minister of Development had all formerly enjoyed positions with the IMF, the Colombian Chamber of Commerce, the World Bank, and an investor in Colombia’s tourism industry respectively (Avilés 2006, 126).   5 The Chief Customs officer for the port of Los Angeles in the late 1990s, Wayne Kornmann, stated that “We’re able to check about ten to twelve containers per shift … we look at less than two percent [of the shipping containers that arrive at this port every day]” (as cited in Gray 2000, 151).   6 Lockheed Martin has historically been one of the biggest recipients of counternarcotics’ aid for Latin America while Honeywell employs over 15,000 employees in Mexico in fourteen different facilities.   7 Bodenheimer and Gould asserted that CSIS appeared to be “… the leading contender for the super-­think tank of the post-­Reagan period” (1989, 184).

Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative   91   8 The global capitalist goals promoted by Breier, CSIS, or the National Policy Association are also reflected in Bush’s top campaign contributors. Nine of Bush’s top ten central contributors to his 2004 re-­election campaign were made up of transnational banks, investment firms, or transnational accounting corporations—in other words global finance, which has long been a central promoter of capitalist globalization (Open Secrets 2013).   9 The trend of military elites working closely with business elites has a long history. Samuel Huntington in The Solider and the State argues that in the decade after WWII there a close association developed between the military and the business elite, writing “retired generals and admirals in unprecedented numbers went into the executive staffs of American corporations; new organizations arose bridging the gap between corporate management and military leadership. For the military officers, business represented the epitome of the American way of life” (1957, 361–362). 10 Various military contractors and industrialists through their campaign contributions and lobbying as well as through the revolving door with the armed forces have allowed the military industrial complex a significant place within policymaking. For example, between 2004–2008 “… 80% of retiring three-­and four- star officers went to work as consultants or defense executives and services” (as cited in Gibbs 2012, 97). 11 Northrop Grumman was one of the military contractors that would receive most of the first MI appropriation of $1.8 billion allocated in 2008 (Ramsey 2011). 12 Between 2000 and 2012 the United States spent approximately $12.5 billion in supply reduction/interdiction policies in Latin America (Isacson et al. 2013, 2).

4 Social conflict, coca eradication, and the transnational elite in Bolivia and Peru

Since the Reagan administration different U.S. governments have worked with political elites in Peru and Bolivia to eradicate coca plants as part of a supply reduction strategy—a strategy viewed as central to increasing the price of cocaine in U.S. markets. This chapter demonstrates that progress on coca eradication is intimately tied to the existence of a transnational community of elite policymakers between the United States, Bolivia, and Peru. Furthermore, the chapter also illustrates the extent to which multilateral cooperation within the transnational elite can be conditioned by the power of resistance movements within specific nation-­states.

History of coca production/eradication pre-­1980s For thousands of years the coca leaf has been a part of Andean culture, with archaeological evidence indicating that coca was chewed as early as 3,000 bce (Courtwright 2001, 46). During that time, and to this day, it was valued as a mild stimulant and appetite suppressant, even used during colonial times by indigenous miners forced to work in Spanish owned silver mines (Farthing and Kohl 2010, 198). In the first century of their independence the idea of banning the production and consumption of coca in Bolivia and Peru was far from the priorities of their respective states or the power structures that predominated during this period. This would gradually change in the first half of the twentieth century as major international powers, most importantly the United States, would construct coca as a potential “threat” to their respective societies. Of course, the threat was not in terms of the plant itself, but in its centrality to the production of cocaine, which was first synthesized in 1860 by the German chemist Albert Niemann (Courtwright 2001, 47). During the late nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century cocaine was widely and legally sold in pharmacies in the United States and Europe as an effective pain reliever, appetite suppressant as well as an effective energy elixir. Merck Pharmaceutical established manufacturing centers in the Andes by the end of the nineteenth century, with Peru’s export of crude cocaine reaching 22,000 pounds annually between 1900–1905 (Courtwright 2001, 48). As the market grew other competitors entered the market, with companies successfully establishing coca production in Ceylon,

Coca eradication and the transnational elite   93 Nigeria, and Iwo Jima. Cocaine production expanded and its price lowered from $280 an ounce in 1885 to $3 an ounce in 1914 (Courtwright 2001). As discussed in Chapter 2 both Bolivia and Peru were lobbied by the United States and some European powers to enact greater controls over coca production, but these calls were typically not associated with any coercive measures or pressures upon their respective governments. This would slowly begin to change with the Single Convention of 1961, which unified a number of previous drug treaties into one convention. The Single Convention not only codified the prohibition of cocaine outside of narrow medical uses, but it called for the end of coca leaf chewing and distribution in the Andes.1 However, in the first two decades after 1961 there was little to non-­existent progress on the eradication of coca and/or in the prohibition of coca chewing in either country. The military regimes that dominated Bolivian and Peruvian governments between 1961 and 1980 were either wary of alienating indigenous communities and/or objected to international/U.S. demands that they make more progress on this agenda. Like during earlier periods these governments needed to balance other concerns against whatever benefits they might receive from pleasing their international allies. These military regimes were largely focused upon internal subversion with reactionary politics and counterinsurgency making up most of Bolivia’s response while Peru’s regime pursued a more nationalist and progressive direction seeking to eliminate land inequality and expand the role of the state sector in the economy. In neither case was the goal of eliminating a central basis for the survival of at least some peasant communities—coca production—deemed a priority. Furthermore, fears of Communist revolution often tempered the level of international criticism or pressure experienced by the two countries that annually produced the greatest amount of coca. This production had long served the domestic market for coca chewing, but increasingly in the 1970s and 1980s this production was overtaken by the illegal cocaine market in the United States. The democratic transitions of the late 1970s and early 1980s, economic crisis and the rise of neoliberalism in the North coincided with the ratcheting up of the drug war during the Reagan administration. Like many Latin American countries, Bolivia and Peru suffered substantial declines in their economies during this period, with rising foreign debt and inflation as well as substantial declines in their GDP undermining the legitimacy of their respective military regimes and strengthening calls for democratic change.2 Though Peru’s military regime helped to facilitate this transition, factions among their Bolivian counterparts openly rebelled against giving up power to civilian leaders. From 1980 to 1982 they would establish what many observers viewed as a narcostate where military leaders of the government directly profited, in alliance with drug traffickers and sectors of Bolivia’s legal economic establishment, from the trade of coca leaves and paste for illegal cocaine production. This criminal enterprise was condemned internationally. The U.S. immediately sanctioned the country and broke off diplomatic relations with the country, sending the country further into crisis (Ledebur 2005, 143). Though the political challenges of transitioning from authoritarian to electorally democratic regimes would ultimately be resolved by

94   Coca eradication and the transnational elite 1982 in Bolivia and 1980 in Peru, this transition would be buffeted by the debt crisis throughout the 1980s and 1990s. This period was simply devastating for Bolivia’s traditional peasants and tin miners who saw their markets and jobs vanish with the collapse of their country’s economy. Unable to survive on their landholdings and unable to find legal employment in other sectors of the economy thousands moved to the Chapare and Yungas regions of the country—the heart of coca production. They would all be part of a coca boom as coca growers, laborers in the production of coca paste, distributors of the product and/or in servicing the employees involved in this industry. In fact, coca production increased by 300 percent in the Andes between 1982 and 1992 (Courtwright 2001, 51). In contrast to legal agricultural commodities, coca production involved a commodity increasing in price with a steady demand that required little in the way of infrastructure as traffickers would often go directly to the source to purchase the product.3 A similar scenario developed in Peru during the 1980s with informal employment ballooning in the cities and illegal coca production booming in different parts of the countryside. In particular, the Upper Huallaga region of Peru greatly expanded its coca production as peasants migrated to the region seeking economic alternatives in a context of economic crisis and structural adjustment, while the Apurímac and Ene valleys saw illegal coca expand in the 1990s (Durand Ochoa 2014, 56). While the debt crisis and the neoliberal structural adjustment instituted to ostensibly address its causes were central to expanding the labor markets for a booming cocaine industry it also influenced the continuity of formally democratic politics in both countries. The decline in governing legitimacy of the armed forces given their failure to address this economic crisis and the regional wave of democratic transitions went far in strengthening the hand of emerging transnational elites in both Bolivia and Peru. What emerged, and what has been maintained, were low-­ intensity democracies committed to market reforms that were backed by the United States. Thus, the neoliberal age in Bolivia and Peru of civilian rule of low-­intensity democracies had begun its course, laying the foundations for not only a future in which transnational elites would seek and gain power within their states, but one in which the production and distribution of coca, coca paste, and cocaine would represent central contributors to their gross domestic product. It was this latter scenario that the Reagan and Bush administrations were focused on reversing while simultaneously seeking to tie their international drug war agendas to the deepening of neoliberal reform. As William Walker concludes about the U.S. drug policy in the 1980s, the linking of coca production with national security required that “… policy makers had to incorporate drug control into the general spectrum of security concerns and then link over time, the promotion of controls on coca with broader issues in inter-­American relations” (1996a, 7 emphasis mine). An important linkage to broader issues involved policies such as certification, which linked access to the U.S. market and international credit to progress in eradicating drug production and interdicting traffickers (see Chapter 2). As stated above, if the U.S. determined that a specific country was failing in their efforts

Coca eradication and the transnational elite   95 they would be subject to an array of economic sanctions including the elimination of special trade privileges with the United States, the ending of flights from their nation to the U.S. and undermining their ability to receive loans from the IMF and the World Bank. For economies such as Peru and Bolivia that faced absolutely traumatic crises of hyperinflation and the collapse of their formal economies such a lever was a powerful one, representing an important tool in moving these countries down a more prohibitionist path. In addition, the 1986 Anti-­Drug Abuse Act, along with Reagan’s April 16, 1986 designation of narcotics as a national security threat (NSDD 221), centrally placed the “war on drugs” as priority in U.S. foreign policy with Operation Blast Furnace in Bolivia and the Condor campaigns in Peru reflected this new priority. Operation Blast Furnace was a joint counternarcotics plan that began in July 1986 in the Chapare and Beni regions of Bolivia-­central coca-­growing regions in the country (Marcy 2010, 77). The plan was focused upon destroying cocaine production labs with DEA agents and U.S. military personnel working with special Bolivian counternarcotics units to achieve this mission. This was the first time that U.S. military troops were directly involved in a counternarcotic operation in another country (Marcy 2010, 78). The presence of U.S. troops in such an operation led to significant nationalist backlash against this imposition. Campesinos and coca growers protested against the operation,4 the media referred to the Operation as a U.S. “invasion” Bolivia’s president Victor Paz Estenssoro was condemned across the country for undermining Bolivian sovereignty (Marcy 2010, 78). Bolivian coca growers had been organized in a range of peasant and coca growing federations for years, representing an effective activist base to counter prohibitionist strategies. Their organized efforts were largely dismissed by the Reagan administration as being fronts for narcotraffickers and their demands did not prevent the U.S. from exerting direct pressure on different Bolivian governments during this period (Marcy 2010, 75–78). For example, just two years prior to Operation Blast Furnace members of the U.S. Senate threatened to cut off aid to Bolivia if they did not increase their coca eradication while the 1982 election of Hernán Siles Zuazo was followed by a U.S. assistance package with expectations that Bolivia make progress in its counternarcotics efforts (Marcy 2010, 73–76). An important effort to coercively repress this strengthening coca grower movement was Law 1008 of 1988, the first national legislation to control/eradicate coca and controlled substances in Bolivia (Giacoman Aramayo 2011, 21). The law was largely written in response to U.S. demands (Ledebur 2005, 145). In fact, USAID helped in the writing of the law that was passed by the Bolivian Congress on July 19, 1988 with little delay (Transnational Institute 2002, 2). The law did incorporate historical Bolivian antecedents that viewed narcotrafficking as “crimes against public health,” but it removed judicial discretion in drug trafficking cases as well as mandated pre-­trial detention and post-­acquittal detention until the appeals process had run its course. This had the effect of imprisoning thousands of largely poor Bolivians unable to afford attorneys to help them navigate the judicial process sitting in prison without being convicted of a crime

96   Coca eradication and the transnational elite (and even after being acquitted of a crime) (Human Rights Watch 1995, 18–19). While USAID assisted in the drafting of the law, Bolivia’s minister of the interior in 1988, Juan Carlos Durán, stressed that Bolivian lawmakers also were concerned about the “Colombianization” of Bolivia and “put human rights on a balance and asked if narcotraffickers, narcotics, and the crime of narcotrafficking would cause more harm to the country and its citizens than [straying from] orthodox legal procedures” (as cited in Human Rights Watch 1995, 23). Regarding the “harm” to Bolivian citizens one report on the enforcement of the law found that state institutions use high levels of violence during the detention for, and investigation of, offenses defined in Law 1008. This violence includes threats, coercion, and extortion, and even physical and psychological torture. (Giacoman Aramayo 2011, 23) The repressive and sweeping nature of Law 1008 would radicalize the coca growers movement and help to create a national anti-­globalization social movement with coca unions leading the way (Durand Ochoa 2014, 81). Like in Bolivia, Peru witnessed a similar militarization in its drug control campaign during the 1980s. For example, different Condor operations were initiated between 1985 and 1987 that focused upon the destruction of processing and trafficking facilities, with the U.S. providing helicopters for these operations. These efforts were met with resistance, but this resistance was more often than not tied to the violent activities of the guerrilla forces of the Shining Path and the Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru (MRTA) as well as narcotics traffickers. These actors used ambushes and military attacks to disrupt and violently repel eradication forces from their regions of operation. The Shining Path had been in the Upper Huallaga Valley (UHV, the heart of Peru’s coca-­growing) since 1983 and established an alliance with a majority of coca growers in the region while the MRTA would begin its operations in the UHV in 1987 (Marcy 2010, 72). These alliances led to the regular dilemma that different Peruvian governments would face in which coca-­eradication goals would often be subordinated to the defeat of armed insurgents, which was viewed by the armed forces as a greater national security threat. U.S. pressure would work to push back against this position, with President Alan García (1985–1990) committing to an eradication program in order to continue to receive foreign aid from the United States—the Condor programs representing an important part of his government’s strategy. Relatedly, the U.S. was successful in removing one general from his command in the Huallaga Valley due to his insistence that the war against the Shining Path should take precedence over coca eradication. He was relieved of his position in December 1989, despite his military successes against the Shining Path in the Upper Huallaga (Durand Ochoa 2014, 58). However, successful guerrilla resistance to this program and other eradication initiatives undermined coca-­eradication goals as coca production increased from 60,000 hectares in

Coca eradication and the transnational elite   97 1984 to over 100,000 hectares in 1987 (Marcy 2010, 71, 73). As Marcy concludes, Peru had long understood that it could not pursue traffickers and guerrillas at the same time. Antidrug efforts drove peasants into the protective arms of guerrillas, while attacks against the guerrillas gave the drug producers a free hand to pursue their business. The militarization of the War on Drugs forced a simultaneous attack on guerrillas and traffickers, placing the Peruvian government and military in an impossible bind. (2010, 73) Thus, for much of the 1980s and 1990s Peru was highly militarized with about half of the country’s territory and more than half its population under a state of emergency where civilian officials were subordinated to military officers (Rojas 2005, 188). A “dirty war” was applied against the insurgents and rural communities while the Shining Path regularly engaged in violations of human rights in its effort to use coercion/fear as well as protection (especially for coca growers) in order to gain and hold territory. Importantly, despite the economic leverage of certification and the direct use of U.S. troops in Bolivian territory coca production continued to increase in both countries during the 1980s. The 1990s and 2000s would illustrate that genuine progress in coca eradication would not take place until greater cooperation could be obtained across borders, cooperation facilitated by the coming to power of transnational elites in Peru and in Bolivia during the 1990s.

The 1990s–2000s-globalist agenda, multi-­lateralism, and resistance By the end of the 1980s increasing signs of consensus building and cooperation were being promoted in U.S. relations with Peru and Bolivia in contrast to the unilateralist pressures of the previous decade. The objectives would continue to be the same, integrate the region’s armed forces into the war on drugs, strengthen/reform judicial institutions and police forces and eradicate supply while interdicting illegal drugs before they entered U.S. territory. These objectives were linked, and often subordinated to, market reforms and institutionalizing capitalist globalization in the region. For example, the link between low-­intensity democracy, market reform, and drug control were highlighted by a 1995 budget request from the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs division of the U.S. State Department to Congress which stated that, “Neither a stronger democracy nor a stable, growing economy is possible under the pervasive threats of drug-­related crime and violence, corruption, domestic drug abuse and environment damage caused by illegal narcotics production and economic environment” (as cited in Human Rights Watch 1995, 10). In the case of Bolivia, the strengthening of democratic institutions or the promotion of alternative development and foreign direct investment were regularly tied to how

98   Coca eradication and the transnational elite these changes would help to undermine the illegal drug economy (Human Rights Watch 1995, 10). However, in contrast to the direct threats of decertification, the cutting off of economic aid or even military intervention, U.S. governments increasingly sought to negotiate and develop strategies with their counterparts in Latin America. This shift was anticipated and promoted by the InterAmerican Dialogue. In their report, The Americas in 1988, they assert that “the United States should help countries to design and implement their own drug-­control policies, rather than apply pressure and threaten sanctions if countries do not adopt U.S. prescriptions” (1988, 51) and concluding their chapter on counternarcotics policy with “only if each country of the Hemisphere concentrates on doing what it can internally to confront this affliction can Latin America and the United States turn what is now a shared tragedy into an opportunity for cooperation” (1988, 54). Copies of this report were delivered to the president, secretary of state, secretary of defense, the Congress, and the presidential candidates (St. Petersburg Times, April 29, 1988). The first signs of greater cooperation/consensus could be seen in the February 1990 Cartagena Drug Summit. The summit brought President Bush together with the presidents of Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru to discuss drug cooperation efforts between the different governments (Perl 1996, 26). After signing the “Document of Cartagena” Bush stated that In signing the document we’ve committed ourselves to the first common, comprehensive international drug-­control strategy. We, in fact, created the first antidrug cartel. The document, which creates a flexible framework under which the four of us will coordinate our activities. (Bush 1990, emphasis mine) The summit was in line with at least some of the goals set out by the Bush administration in its 1989 Andean Strategy, which not only called for greater emphasis upon reducing demand in the United States, but also increasing economic assistance to the Andean region.5 Increasingly, the administration also sought greater multilateral coordination of military and police forces with the United States playing a leading and collaborative role in reducing state barriers to drug control. However, Andean governments increased their demands that the United States do more to address its demand for these drugs that drove the illegal trade. In addition, these leaders sought greater U.S. assistance for economic development and debt relief in exchange for their commitments to eradicate and/ or interdict illegal drugs (Walker 1996, 241–242). Multilateral cooperation was also emphasized in the 1992 drug war summit in San Antonio with Bush asserting after his meeting with the leaders of Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Mexico that “the purpose of this meeting is to maximize cooperation, and I think each leader—and they can speak to it themselves—will agree that that’s exactly what happened as a result of our discussions here,” while Bolivia’s president concluded that “… what we find here

Coca eradication and the transnational elite   99 is a fraternal multinational effort of cooperation among brethren to combat the same evil in a fully independent way” (Bush 1992). Analogous to this shift to democracy promotion from supporting authoritarianism in the 1980s and 1990s, U.S. drug policies were increasingly seeking greater consensus over unilateral coercion in achieving specific goals (though unilateral economic and military pressure would still be applied from time to time). This was reflected in the politics of both Bolivia and Peru during this period. Bolivia The 1992 summit followed ten years of low-­intensity democracy in Bolivia, with various social conflicts and civil-­military relations punctuating the difficult transition to a neoliberal economic regime. Dominant parties such as the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (Spanish acronym, MNR) and the National Democratic Action Party (ADN) agreed through a series of “party pacts” to a neoliberal direction of the country following a period of severe economic instability and disorder that characterized the leftist government that ruled between 1982 and 1985. Major labor strikes, over 11,000 percent inflation and declining export revenues coupled with a burgeoning foreign debt had brought the country into economic crisis and created the policy space for a radical shift from state capitalist policies. The 1985 election brought to power Victor Paz Estenssoro, head of the MNR, who had finished second to General Hugo Banzer representing the ADN, but with neither winning a majority a compromise was worked within the Congress to allow Paz to come to power. A “Pact for Democracy” was established between the two parties with an explicit commitment to economic reform, a New Economic Policy that included free markets, trade liberalization, and the reduction of state influence/control in the economy (Orias Arredondo 2005, 47). The economics associated with the pact were strongly supported by Bolivia’s capitalist class, which welcomed the shift to a market orientation and the rejection of the statist policies of the past (Conaghan and Malloy 1994, 121–122). The economic crisis of the early 1980s and the fragmentation of the Bolivian left contributed to the political support for these neoliberal party coalitions while a large informal sector (50 to 60 percent of the laboring population) further undermined the ability of the radical left to organize an effective left response (Quintana and Barrios 1999, 225). In addition, the various episodes of resistance, such as the general strike of September 4, 1984, was heavily repressed by the police and army, which detained over 200 hundred leaders while a mass march on the capital in March of 1986 was stopped by the army (Conaghan and Malloy 1994, 149–150). Furthermore, at different times in the 1980s and 1990s Bolivian governments had to sign loan agreements with international financial institutions that regularly required cuts in government spending, in particular military spending. By the mid-­1990s Bolivia had become a regional model of neoliberalism, inflation was low and moderate economic growth was established with increasing levels of foreign direct investment and ownership of the economy (Lehman 2006, 131).

100   Coca eradication and the transnational elite According to Jeffrey Sachs, a key World Bank advisor to different Bolivian governments, the first ten years of Bolivia’s market democracy, Bolivia “made a fundamental turn toward macroeconomic stability” while remaining a “very poor place” (Sachs 2000).6 Given its relative poverty the country has been dependent upon foreign aid, relying upon the United States, the World Bank, and the Inter-­American Development Bank to mitigate the country’s extreme poverty. Of course this aid has been contingent upon Bolivia pursuing neoliberal economic reforms and U.S. “drug war” strategies, which it did throughout the 1980s and 1990s. For example, in 1991 the U.S. temporarily suspended aid because of its alleged “non-­cooperation” with the U.S. in counternarcotics missions (Call 1991, 69). As James Dunkerley has concluded, “a significant degree of compliance with Washington was always necessary for the simple reason that the US accounts for over 30 percent of Bolivia’s foreign trade” (Dunkerley 2007, 81). Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, a member of the InterAmerican Dialogue, a wealthy mining entrepreneur, key architect of its neoliberal plans in the mid-­1980s and president of Bolivia (in 1993–1997, 2001–2003) stated “the dependency is terrible; the International Monetary Fund comes, the United States Embassy comes, the World Bank comes, and they all tell us what to do” (as quoted in Ledebur 2005, 146). By the mid-­1990s Bolivia’s anti-­narcotics programs, antinarcotics police and its central anti-­drug laws had been funded, developed, and influenced by the priorities of the U.S. (Human Rights Watch 1995, 2). As Farthing and Kohl assert, “between mid-­1980s and 2004, drug control policy in Bolivia was dominated by U.S. administrations driven to demonstrate that they were ‘doing something’ about the drug abuse that wracked the United States” (2010, 200). This included the use of the Bolivian armed forces in drug control efforts in 1990 after intensive U.S. pressure as the Bush administration viewed Latin American militaries as central to domestic crime control (Durand Ochoa 2014, 147). In addition, a series of failed alternative development strategies were employed by USAID during this period with the aim of substituting coca production for legal export crops (such as bananas or palm hearts) or creating urban employment to lead coca growers out of the countryside (Farthing and Kohl 2010, 202). This relationship would be key to mobilizing nationalist resistance to these drug control policies and institutions, which were justifiably viewed as simply tools of the U.S. state.7 However, even this level of vulnerability to U.S. pressures and demands did not result in the dramatic reductions in coca production sought by the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s. In fact, Bolivia’s dependency, U.S. demands for greater results in the 1980s and 1990s as well as over $200 million in eradication and interdiction spending did not lead to significant reductions in the area of coca cultivation (Dunkerley 2007, 80). U.S. power was unsuccessful in pressuring Bolivia to expand the use of its army in counternarcotics missions, largely giving up on the idea by 1992 given Bolivian opposition (Human Rights Watch 1995, 13). It was only once representatives of Bolivia’s transnational elite wielded a determining influence over its drug policy that substantial progress was achieved.

Coca eradication and the transnational elite   101 The 1993 election brought Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada to power as president and he sought to build upon the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s while seeking to humanize these economic policies through greater decentralization of political power and state resources (Dunkerley 2007, 84). His economic program included the privatization of 50 percent of the state’s companies, including the national airline, a profitable telecommunications company and the national railway (Dunkerley 2007, 85). However, his economic program to expand privatizations further polarized the country and contributed to growing alliances between coca growers and opponents of economic liberalization forming the basis of successful revolt against this model. Marie Dennis (1997, 39) refers to the impact of these reforms in the following way: Food and transportation subsidies were ended. All social service and health care expenditures were drastically cut…. Thousands of miners, oil workers and other professionals in nationalized state companies were fired to pave the way for privatization. The informal sector of the economy expanded and the coca-­cocaine economy grew in significance. By the early 1990s the Centro Obrero Boliviano (COB) was prioritizing the cause of coca growers—organizing strikes not only against privatization plans, but also against various coca eradication plans.8 Coca growers and labor organizers increasingly viewed the coca issue as a struggle against U.S. imperialism and tied it to the larger nationalist struggle against neoliberal capitalism (Human Rights Watch 1995, 8–9; Farthing and Kohl 2010, 198). The director of the UN International Drug Control Program (UNDCP) concluded that coca growers in Bolivia were being viewed as everything that was “pure and radical” in conflict with “modernization and the tyranny of whites” (Marcy 2010, 227). Kathryn Ledebur describes the power of the Coca Growers Federations as filling “… the void left by the decline of Bolivia’s traditional labor unions and have gained influence and key positions in the umbrella groups organized by peasant farmers and others” as the implementation of U.S. drug policy during this period raising “the profile of the coca growers’ movement changing the political landscape in the country” (2005, 174). Throughout this period the United States was unrelenting in its demands that Bolivia achieve specific yearly coca eradication targets, regardless of the strikes or political instability that these plans caused. Different U.S. administrations in the 1980s and 1990s downplayed the violations of human rights committed by U.S. trained/funded police units dedicated to counternarcotics missions such as its rural antinarcotics police UMOPAR (Human Rights Watch 1995, 2). This included the calling of a “state of siege” in the spring of 1995 by Sanchez de Lozada ostensibly to end violent demonstrations by teachers’ unions resisting neoliberal economic reforms, though his government also targeted the leaders of coca growers. Hundreds were arrested/detained without charges and public meetings were banned (Human Rights Watch 1995, 4 and 16). Prior to the demonstrations and the state of siege the United States had placed an ultimatum on Bolivia demanding that it eradicate over 1700 hectares of coca or face the loss of

102   Coca eradication and the transnational elite vital economic assistance. Thus, according to Human Rights Watch, “the clear intent of the government was to use their detention to exert pressure on the coca growers and their political allies [such as the COB] in the context of the debate over how the government should respond to the U.S. ultimatum” (Human Rights Watch 1995, 4). In 1998 the Bolivian government created a Joint Task Force combining military and police eradication units that went on to heavily militarize the Chapare (Ledebur 2005, 154–155). Between 1997 and 1998 the proportion of the military involved directly in the Chapare increased from 1 percent to 10 percent of military personnel (Quintana 2005, 439). This sharp increase in the expansion in the role of the military took place during the Hugo Banzer government (1997–2001), which committed the Bolivian government to a “Zero Coca” policy referred to as “Plan Dignidad” in order to please the United States. Plan Dignidad was the consequence of a national dialogue begun in October of 1997 to develop a comprehensive strategy of drug control that would focus on development, economic alternatives, and coca eradication with the aim of eliminating all illegal coca production in Bolivia by 2002. As a consequence of this dialogue in December of 1997, President Hugo Banzer launched the “Strategy for the Fight Against Drug Trafficking 1998–2002,” which pledged the elimination of approximately 38,000 hectares of coca by 2002 (Gamarra 2004, 27). Banzer previously ruled Bolivia as a military dictator between 1971 and 1978 and help to form the Acción Democrática Nacionalista (ADN) party in 1979 during Bolivia’s punctuated transition to democratic rule. His party would be central to many of the neoliberal economic reforms implemented by Bolivia in the 1980s as a condition of credit from the United States and IFIs. Regarding Plan Dignidad, the national dialogue of October 1997, which was so important to the development of the plan, was chaired by then vice-­president Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga, and included representatives from different political parties, labor unions, the private sector, the church, and academics (Gamarra 2004, 27). Plan Dignidad was a five-­year project that pledged resources simultaneously for eradication, interdiction, the diversion of precursor chemicals, and eradication (Gamarra 2004, 27). In approximately three years more than 30,000 hectares of coca were eradicated, removing the role of the Chapare in the drug industry as the government mistakenly claimed in 2001 that they achieved the goal of zero coca for the illegal drug industry (Gamarra 2004, 26). Bolivia’s plan was lauded by U.S. policymakers, with the country’s success presented as a model for other countries to emulate. According to the German Technical Co-­ operation Agency GTZ* Bolivia’s success was possible thanks to mass-­scale police and military interventions in the Chapare region, day-­to-day violations of human rights, numerous dead and wounded, the destruction of a negotiation basis with peasant associations and the fact that the compensation promised to the peasants for destroying their crops on a voluntary basis has never been paid. (Transnational Institute 2002, 1)

Coca eradication and the transnational elite   103 Quiroga, the chairman of the national dialogues, was considered the “architect” or “brainchild” of Plan Dignidad. He suggested that at least part of his motivation was to challenge stereotypes of Bolivians being drug traffickers (Gamarra 2004, 28; Hesselroth 2015, 72; Thoumi 2005, 35). Quiroga, who received a bachelor’s degree in engineering and a masters in business administration in the U.S. worked at IBM before returning to Bolivia to pursue a career in politics. Prior to accepting the position of vice-­president Quiroga was the vice-­president, board member, and shareholder of a large private bank in La Paz (1993–1997) and Minister of Finance in 1992 in a cabinet in which business entrepreneurs were prominent (Concordia n.d.; Dunkerley 2007, 58). Quiroga was very much committed to the drug prohibitionist strategy as well as its alleged connections with international terrorism, asserting in January of 2002 that drug production needed to be “taken out” more than eight million Bolivians had the problems of corruption that run rampant based on drug money, consumption that affected our own young people, our own people inside the borders, international stereotypes and stigmas that were applied to us anywhere we went and the constant threat of decertification. (Suarez 2002) Following his time in office, including one year as president following Banzer’s resignation for poor health, Quiroga became active in a number of different transnational policy-­making organizations including as member of the Board of Directors within the InterAmerican Dialogue and a position on the International Advisory Council of the China Economic Club (Concordia n.d.; InterAmerican Dialogue n.d.). Plan Dignidad was also promoted, in part, by the need for the Banzer administration to ameliorate U.S. concerns about Banzer’s political allies who had been linked to drug traffickers in the past (Gamarra 2004, 28). Banzer’s party, as well as other political parties, also contained individuals that benefitted from the narcotics industry. However, Quiroga was embraced for his anti-­corruption initiatives by the World Bank and General Barry M. McCaffrey and members of the U.S. Congress lauded his performance (2004, 29). Quiroga would go on to complete Banzer’s presidential term between 2001 and 2002 as Banzer had to resign due to his struggle with cancer. Ultimately, the success of “zero coca” was premature as coca was not fully eliminated from the Chapare, while it increased in the Yungas region, with the neoliberal technocrat Quiroga ordering 4,000 military and police troops into Chapare in 2001 in order to avert massive blockades as well as ratchet up coca eradication in the region (Gamarra 2004, 30). The military’s increasing internal role was in keeping with the role of the military within low intensity democracies. Furthermore, the maintenance of repression was clearly tied to weakening the cocalero movement, seeking to remove it as an effective opponent to the long term goals of the government that sought to turn the Chapare region into an

104   Coca eradication and the transnational elite agro-­entrepreneural zone where labor and rural day laborers could more easily be exploited (Transnational Institute 2002, 3). This militarization would continue into the second Sanchez de Lozada administration, continuing a polarized and conflictual environment. In response to the government’s more aggressive strategies cocalero unions regularly marched, blocked highways, and worked to prevent the military and police from eradicating fields leading to intense confrontations, while the United States worked to undermine dialogue with the coca unions in order to maintain its militarized strategies (Ledebur 2005, 158–159). Throughout the 1990s the military and police forces were involved in the deaths of coca growers, illegal detentions, and the repression of peaceful demonstrations, with thirty-­three coca growers and twenty-­seven members of the security forces killed in Plan Dignidad operations between 1998 and the end of 2003 (Ledebur 2005, 144–145). The Banzer/Quiroga government, as did previous governments, successfully resisted efforts to prosecute military or police personnel for human rights violations, allowing them the impunity to repress social protest. Peru The election of Alberto Fujimori in 1990 would ultimately solidify Peru’s commitment to U.S. drug control strategies, though his government would also tolerate drug trafficking during the ten years that Fujimori ruled. More importantly for the Bush and Clinton administrations Fujimori would fully begin Peru’s shift into a neoliberal direction after the five years of the heterodox policies of the Alan García administration. Fujimori convincingly won the 1990 presidential election and would soon embrace neoliberal economic strategies early in his administration. Pre-­inaugural meetings between Fujimori and the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank played a role, convincing Fujimori that neoliberal austerity measures were necessary (Dietz 1992, 252). The economic crisis that Peru had suffered in the years prior to the Fujimori administration, with hyper-­inflation and the collapse of Peru’s access to international credit strengthened those neoliberal sectors open to implementing IMF/World Bank austerity. After Fujimori’s April 1992 autogolpe in which he dissolved the Congress and ruled by decree for seven months he shepherded the creation of the 1993 constitution, which institutionalized market orientation within Peru’s political economy. The constitution committed the state to promoting free enterprise (Art. 59), required that national and foreign investment be subject to the same conditions (Art. 63) and that private property is “inviolable” (Art. 70). Alberto Vergara asserts that this constitution “…  cemented the form that the state, market and society would be articulated” (Vergara 2012). This neoliberal direction was supported by leading factions of the armed forces that also sought a market-­oriented shift in Peru’s political economy. Their support was also shared by Fujimori’s central security advisor, Vladimir Montesinos. Montesinos would, with Fujimori, effectively manipulate promotions within the armed forces and the intelligence services to ensure continued loyalty

Coca eradication and the transnational elite   105 by the rank and file. Montesinos, who had made a career as an attorney for drug traffickers after a career in the military, would develop alliances with central drug traffickers who regularly paid him in exchange for information about raids against their operations. He simultaneously played a prominent role in shaping Fujimori’s counternarcotics policy. Though both the Bush administration and the Clinton administration where aware of Montesinos’ possible ties with the drug trade, concerns over the power of the Shining Path subordinated these concerns (Rojas 2005, 191). In fact, only weeks after Fujimori was inaugurated the U.S. embassy in Peru was reporting that the National Intelligence Service (SIN) was planning to engage in extra-­judicial assassinations of suspected terrorists—the plan being “the brainchild of presidential advisor Vladimiro Montesinos” and that “the training of these new ‘assassination teams’ is already underway” with the “tacit approval of President Fujimori” (National Security Archive 1990). These early concerns did little to change the substance of U.S.–Peruvian relations, which proceeded on the grounds of deepening neoliberal economic reforms and expanding drug prohibition. The 1990 Andean Drug Summit in Cartagena was the first example that Fujimori’s administration would utilize its membership within the transnational community to good effect. His government was able to effectively pressure the Bush administration to relent on its demands for greater levels of coca eradication, as the country’s market oriented development and its war against the Shining Path was to take precedence. Three bilateral agreements were signed in 1991, with the aid of the neoliberal technocrat Hernando de Soto who at that time was Fujimori principal drug policy advisor before Montesinos would later take on that role (Jordan 1999, 129). In fact, the agreements were largely drafted by Peruvians with one 1991 “bilateral umbrella agreement” explicitly stating that “this Agreement is intended to transcend the traditional type of cooperation between the United States and Peru in this area” with future cooperation presented as a bilateral affair as opposed to the unilateral impositions of the U.S. (Call 1991, 72). Related to this cooperation new legislation was passed in 1991 (Article 296 of the Criminal Code) relating to illicit drug trafficking, with this legislations being amended in the decades since (Soberón Garrido 2011, 71). De Soto was central in preventing Peru’s decertification and in negotiating a new drug control agreement with the United States in May of 1991 (Rojas 2005, 192). De Soto, a neoliberal economist, former mine owner and GATT technocrat was the head of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD). The ILD was a neoliberal policy planning organization that had been lauded, along with De Soto, by different U.S. governments for their work in promoting private property rights and free market reforms. De Soto directly negotiated with the White House and was central to the U.S. and Peru coming to an agreement that was in line with the commitments of the Cartagena summit, especially the importance of alternative development for coca growers (Cotler 1999, 202–204; Instituto Libertad y Democracia n.d.). In November of 1991 Fujimori would sign a decree formally integrating the armed forces into the drug war, though military linkages with drug traffickers would continue throughout his administration (Rojas 2005,

106   Coca eradication and the transnational elite 193–195).9 In addition, the links between Montesinos and drug traffickers would be ultimately downplayed by the Clinton administration with the CIA concluding that it had “no credible information” to substantiate the connections (as cited in Rojas 2005, 198). This was despite the fact that one 1991 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Peru stated “there is substantial circumstantial evidence linking Montesinos to past narcotics activity … among the police and military figures recommended by Montesinos are men with possible ties to drug trafficking” (Youngers 2010, 2). In May of 1993, General Rodolfo Robles requested asylum at the U.S. Embassy and provided the U.S. with information about the military’s involvement with death squads as well as the linkages between Montesinos the Army’s commander General Nicolás Hermoza with drug trafficking (National Security Archive 1993). These reports to the U.S. Embassy as well as the DEA’s own recognition of Montesinos receiving protection money from drug traffickers did not prevent the CIA from providing the government’s domestic intelligence agency (led by Montesinos) with $1 million in drug control assistance per year between 1990 and 2000 (Durand Ochoa 2014, 62; National Security Archive 1996). The continuing war against guerrilla forces of the Maoist Shining Path contributed to the inconsistent nature of the policy as well as Fujimori’s embrace of neoliberalism. In fact, in 1996 the U.S. Ambassador reported that drug trafficking accusations against Montesinos might actually be the work of drug traffickers seeking to undermine a true enemy of their work (2005, 200). U.S. counterdrug assistance would ultimately increase over the last five years of Fujimori’s administration with his government continuing to show “results” in coca eradication and in the reduction suspected drug trafficking flights (Rojas 2005, 198). In 1995 the United States measured 115,000 hectares of coca in the country, which would decline to 34,000 by 2001 (US State Department 2002, 39). Most of the cultivation was concentrated in the Huallaga and Apurimac/Ene Valleys (ibid.). However, the decline in this production had less to do with coca eradication policies and more to do with declining prices and the spread of a fungus that affected thousands of hectares of coca in the Upper Huallaga (Durand Ochoa 2014, 62). Ultimately, the corrupt regime of Fujimori and Montesinos would succumb to massive protests and demonstrations in response to extensive exposure of its bribery system as well as efforts by Fujimori to remain in power for an additional five-­year term. Montesinos would flee the country and Fujimori would resign from abroad in 2000. They both would eventually be arrested and convicted for their crimes. Following a brief transition period new elections were held in 2001 and Alejandro Toledo would be elected to the presidency. Toledo ran on a campaign to fight poverty, guarantee political freedom, and maintain the neoliberal economic model as well as the U.S. drug war. In September 2002 the Toledo administration committed to a new drug control agreement with the United States to completely eradicate coca in five years, building upon the success of the Fujimori administration (Rojas 2005, 218). In fact, Toledo’s inaugural address referred to drug trafficking as a

Coca eradication and the transnational elite   107 Peruvian national security problem and quickly appointed Peru’s first drug czar (US State Department 2002, 39). Though his administration would sometimes seek to negotiate with protesting coca growers or work out alternative development programs, in practice his administration continued to criminalize their behavior and promote coca eradication in a manner similar to the Fujimori administration (Soberón 2007, 178). He made clear to the visiting Secretary of State Colin Powell in September 2001 that he would make the struggle against illegal drugs a priority of his administration (Rojas 2003, 7). Peru’s first “drug czar” was Ricardo Vega Llona, who served for a few months, and was followed by Nils Ericsson Correa (Rojas 2005, 215). Vega Llona was a businessman and former leader of Peru’s largest business association, CONFIEP (Sanchez 2004). Ericsson Correa was the former Minister of Agriculture during the Belaunde administration (1980–1985) and the former head of the National Committee of Rice Producers and was not only committed to achieving the goals set out by the U.S. in coca eradication, but also in facilitating alternative development plans for coca growers. Both these individuals headed Contradrogas, which was later renamed the National Commission to Develop Life Without Drugs (Devida). They led a drug control plan that was largely consistent with the trends established by the Fujimori administration, though continued differences would emerge between the Toledo administration and the Bush administration as well as within the Toledo Administration itself. For example, Vega Llona had proposed a plan in October of 2001 that emphasized the importance of alternative development and the Toledo administration’s commitment to major investment in coca-­growing regions in order to make alternative development a genuine possibility (Rojas 2003, 7–8). After receiving criticism from the Bush administration, which continued to demand more aggressive eradication strategies, Vega Llona was removed from his position in May of 2002. Soon thereafter the government began to expand its eradication campaign only to be confronted with major protests against this policy (Cabieses Cubas 2007, 89). Despite the eradication policies in 2003 the White House reported that Peru had experienced an over 20 percent increase in the amount of coca cultivated in 2002 from the previous year—a percentage Devida claimed was only 7 to 8 percent (La Republica February 14, 2003). Ericsson, who followed Vega Llona, would later remark that the U.S. has also failed to provide adequate alternative development assistance and that this was in part a result of its shift in focus on counterterrorism (La Republica February 14, 2003). Despite these differences the 2002 drug war assistance agreement that Toledo signed with the U.S. government committed Peru to a “zero coca” objective within five years while conditioning all U.S. assistance on Peru making substantial progress in achieving this goal (Rojas 2003, 15). Peru’s director of drug policy in 2011, Ricardo Soberón Garrido, refers to Peru’s period of low-­intensity democracy (2000–2011) as one in which The general trend under democratic governments has been to reinforce the punitive authority of the state, to reduce the scope of guarantees, and to

108   Coca eradication and the transnational elite apply the rule of progressive expansion, usually lacking any proportionality in the application of the penalties making the problem of disproportionality all the more visible. (2011, 73) This is reflected in increasing prison overcrowding, with drug related offenses centrally contributing to this increase since 2000 with Toledo’s ratcheting up of drug prohibition after 2002 viewed as a central cause of the increase. Peru’s prison population increased over 50 percent between 2000 and 2009 (Soberón Garrido 2011, 75). Toledo’s commitment to the U.S. drug war agenda was in line with his overall embrace of the neoliberal political economy so central to the transnational elite. Toledo, a former World Bank economist, was a strong advocate of free markets and the modernization of the state. Toledo’s principal advisors as well as central candidates for key ministries came directly from the business community supportive of neoliberalism, facilitating their ability to directly influence policymaking. As one U.S. embassy cable described the Toledo cabinet,  President Toledo and much of his economic team have lived and obtained an influential part of their education in the U.S. They have a strong appreciation for the U.S., an understanding of how the U.S. operates that many of their predecessors lacked, and a realization of the benefits that economic integration, through a free trade agreement and increased U.S. investment, will bring to Peru. (Wikileaks 2005) This common understanding was reflected in a number of agreements and drug war aid packages. For example, the Andean Trade Preference and Drug Eradication Act of 2002, signed into law in August of 2002 placed emphasis upon an Andean government meeting its drug eradication targets in order to enjoy the tariff-­free benefits of entering the U.S. market (Rojas 2005, 218). Obviously, a power structure in Peru dedicated to global capitalist integration with strong support from exporters would be more susceptible to such incentives, placing domestic and international pressure upon the government to reach these targets. In the years following the passage of this act and the September 2002 agreement the Toledo administration would become increasingly aggressive with coca growers, especially as remnants of the Shining Path in the Apurímac and Ene River Valley (VRAE) began to launch selective kidnappings and ambushes during the second half of his administration. The VRAE became more central for the cocaine industry increasingly in the 1990s and coca eradication programs in other parts of the country, especially the Huallaga Valleys, pushed illegal coca production into this part of the country (Rohas 2005, 188–189). In 2016 coca production in the VRAE continues to challenge Peruvian authorities. The overall national neglect of the Peru’s interior, consistent with a long history of economic and social neglect of the indigenous communities in the highlands and tropical

Coca eradication and the transnational elite   109 regions of the country, continued to provide spaces for Shining Path activities as well as a financial basis through drug trafficking. Though the remnants of the Shining Path still persisted, future Peruvian drug czar Ricardo Soberón Garrido insisted that Toledo’s willingness to “get tough” on drug prohibition was related to the negotiations for a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States, which was eventually signed with the United States on April 12, 2006. It would later be ratified in June of 2006, further locking in Peru’s integration into capitalist globalization (Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, 2007; Soberón Garrido 2011, 76). The ratcheting up of coca eradication to aid FTA negotiations was coupled with the various trade privileges tied to meeting eradication targets in the 2002 Andean Trade Preference and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA), which provided trade preferences to the U.S. market for Andean exporters in exchange for greater coca eradication (Rojas 2005, 218). The continuation of this economic agenda was aided by an export boom in primary commodities that Peru enjoyed after 2002, which legitimized the strength of neoliberal technocrats and their business allies. While the Toledo administration continued the various neoliberal economic strategies of the Fujimori administration and continued, with U.S. assistance, to finance an internal security role for Peru’s security services (such as crop eradication campaigns), Peruvian civil society increasingly challenged Peru’s embrace of the Washington Consensus as well as the supply reduction strategies of the U.S. drug war. During the Toledo administration sentences for protesters engaged in roadblocks were significantly increased and the armed forces were given greater power to suppress domestic protests (Durand Ochoa 2014, 116–117). With the decline of armed threats by the end of the 1990s this resistance became substantially about mass protest marches, civil disobedience (including the closing down of central highways) and negotiations with the central government over the pace of coca eradication and/or whether such a policy should be pursued at all. According to Rojas these widespread protests against coca eradication were “first initiated during the final phase of the Fujimori regime in late 2000” (2005, 185, emphasis mine) illustrating the extent that such a reaction from civil society had been sidelined by the escalating insurgent/ counterinsurgent war of the 1980s and 1990s. In 2000 “the mobilization of coca growers was the largest in two decades” (2005, 213). However, the low-­intensity continuation of war between the Shining Path and the Peruvian state ensured that “Cocalero peasants were among those caught in the depths of the violence. Like most other peasant communities, the state-­Shining Path essentially destroyed their social fabric” (2014, 54). Resistance to coca eradication was often fierce during these years, with continuing efforts by coca grower leaders to develop a national organization of coca growers to more effectively resist crop eradication policies (Durand Ochoa 2014, 67). However, progress was often short-­lived as Peruvian coca-­growers were largely unsuccessful in maintaining a nation-­wide movement, with coca-­growing organizations focusing on the regional and/or central political leaders being successfully co-­opted into Peruvian politics (Durand Ochoa 2014, 118–119).

110   Coca eradication and the transnational elite As resistance became more violent, with mass strikes and roadblocks, DEVIDA would declare that such activity contributed to drug trafficking and terrorism while the president of the Council of Ministers claimed that these protesters had ties to “narco-­terrorists” echoing the language of U.S. ambassador John Hamilton who in 2002 referred to coca-­growers as “coca-­growing narcofarmers” (Durand Ochoa 2014, 68, 70; Rojas 2005, 217). By the end of the Toledo administration central leaders of the coca growers movement were in jail and co-­opting negotiations with specific coca-­growing communities worked to fracture the movement (Rojas 2005, 219). While Rojas suggests that a new “hard-­line” approach was reflective of the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism” (2005, 217) it was largely consistent with the attitude of different administrations long before 9/11. Both the Toledo administration and USAID, the lead U.S. agency collaborating with the Peruvian government on alternative development, either failed to adequately provide the resources for alternative development and/or held back any support until a particular grower had eliminated their coca crop. What increasingly was different from the late 1980s onwards was the extent state managers in the United States sought to partner with their counterparts in the development of these policies— especially when these counterparts operated largely in similar policy networks. Plan Dignidad in Bolivia and the different coca eradication agreements in the Fujimori and Toledo administrations reflected a type of bilateralism inconsistent with the view of these policies as simply being imposed on the countries for fear of U.S. punishment. These efforts were enacted by an emerging transnational community within the U.S., Peru, and Bolivia. However, as will be shown below, this transnational policy community was disrupted/threatened in both Bolivia and Peru at different points over the last decade leading to related disruptions in militarized eradication strategies. In short, the relative weakness and strength of this policy community in Bolivia and Peru respectively was key to the differing outcomes in the two countries, as this community was able to survive these challenges in Peru, but was unable to maintain its influence in Bolivia. Ultimately, the social movement pressures from below as well as the degree of transnational elite unity from above would be key to understanding how much of the supply reduction strategy would be consistently employed in the two countries.

Consolidation vs successful resistance to the prohibitionist paradigm: 2006–2016 Peru and the García administration: continuation of neoliberalism and militarized drug prohibition The government of Alan García (2006–2011) continued Toledo’s commitment to a free market model, claiming Chile as his country’s model for success (Hearn, 2006, A13). During the second round of the 2006 campaign García received major financial contributions from the banking and mining community,

Coca eradication and the transnational elite   111 including from the largest mining group in the country (controlled by the family of Roque Benavides) who enjoyed extensive ties with transnational mining interests with investments in Peru’s booming mining sector (Durand 2010 71). In the 2006 campaign García defeated the nationalist candidacy of Ollanta Humala. Humala, a former military officer, had expressed sympathy to the regional rise of the anti-­neoliberal left in Latin America as well as solidarity with Peru’s struggling coca growers movement. Humala pledged to break the coca eradication agreements with the United States and supported the industrialization of legal coca production while he rejected the alleged links between coca growing and domestic terrorism (Bruce St. John 2006). The potential threat that Humala posed to the neoliberal model and the prohibitionist drug war agenda was recognized by Peru’s establishment, with its stock market dropping in response to his success at reaching the second round while Peruvian investors ratcheted up their financial contributions to García (Vogler 2006; Durand 2010). The media attacks against Humala escalated, with journalists being fired in part for their failure to toe the line in opposition to his candidacy. For example, the TV journalist César Hildebrandt was dismissed from his job with Frecuencia Latina in response to an interview he completed with Humala. Hildebrandt concluded “They [the media] only talk of democracy when the democracy is going to elect someone who represents them … [In Peru] there is a perfect marriage between economic power and the press” (as cited in Vogler 2006). García repaid his financial backers by instituting favorable systems of taxation for mining investments while his party overwhelmingly supported Peru’s free trade agreement with the United States during the June 2006 congressional vote that approved it (Durand 2008, 72–75). Important environmental and labor protections were removed to benefit transnational corporations seeking to access forestry, mining, and other natural resources (including within the Amazon and indigenous territories). In 2007 García even met with U.S. based transnational corporations represented by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce where he stated “Come and open your factories in my country so we can sell your own products back to the U.S.” (Public Citizen 2010, 1). U.S. direct investment would reach $3.9 billion in 2008, second only to Spain in terms of the source of FDI (Burron 2012, 95). Between July of 2006 and October of 2008 García received visits from over a thousand investors (approximately forty-­four a month), even writing personal letters to the leaders of Chilean-­based transnational corporations promoting Peru’s open economic environment and inviting them to invest (Durand 2010, 163). While the government continued its neoliberal direction the García administration maintained a firm commitment on a militarized drug prohibition strategy. The U.S. embassy viewed him as a “reliable U.S. partner” and “… played a constructive role in a complicated South America characterized by resurgent populism” (Wikileaks 2006a). One U.S. embassy cable to U.S. Southern Command commander Douglas Fraser stated We also share a similar strategic vision, namely that the region’s foremost security threats originate from transnational and non-­state criminal actors

112   Coca eradication and the transnational elite such as narco-­traffickers and terrorists, as well as resurgent populism and the meddling of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his allies. (Wikileaks 2009) This shared “strategic vision” was illustrated by García initiating an effort to streamline extraditions of narcotraffickers to the U.S.,10 the continued use of the armed forces and national police in repressive practices against the civilian population, and forced coca eradication. The resurgence of remnants of the Shining Path11 in the Apurimac valley and in the Valle del río Mantaro resulted in periodic ambushes of state security forces as well as the military’s displacement of peasant communities and accusations against the military for abuses against the population, including beatings and death threats (Navarro 2008). One important component of this internal threat was social movements critical of capitalist globalization and neoliberalism. These movements regularly engaged in marches and sometimes-­violent blockades to prevent the implementation of specific policies, yet failed to coalesce into a national anti-­globalization movement. For example, in February of 2008 different farmer organizations launched a strike in protest of the U.S.–Peru Free Trade agreement that involved the blocking of major highways. The government declared a state of emergency and granted the armed forces control over domestic policing in eight different departments (Rospigliosi 2008, 108; Denvir 2008). Four farmers were killed in the aftermath and 700 farmers were detained (Denvir 2008). In June of 2009 the government was implicated in the deaths of over forty individuals after García sent in the security forces to suppress a protest launched by indigenous communities resisting oil exploration by foreign companies in their Amazonian communities, protests that García associated with terrorist threats.12 In September of 200613 and in 2007 García launched different forced eradication campaigns, with coca growers being too divided to effectively resist these campaigns. In fact, one of the central leaders of Peru’s coca growers movement at that time (Nelson Palomino) had held secret meetings with the Council of Ministers, DEVIDA, and the U.S. Embassy in which Palomino was effectively “bought off,” severely weakening the coca growers movement (Durand Ochoa 2014, 134–136). While the coca growers movement was being linked to the Shining Path, repressed or co-­opted by Peru’s transnational elite, the story was quite a different one in Bolivia. Bolivia-­successful resistance to neoliberalism and militarized drug prohibition In Bolivia, the period between 2000 and 2006 is described as a “revolutionary epoch” by Alvaro García Linera, the sociologist and current vice-­president of Bolivia. A period in which “social sectors, blocs or classes previously apathetic or tolerant of those in power openly challenge authority and claim rights or make collective petitions through direct mobilizations” (2006, 81). The failures of Bolivia’s neoliberal experiment and its draconian coca eradication strategy were

Coca eradication and the transnational elite   113 instrumental to the emergence of this anti-­capitalist globalization bloc. In 2003 the quality of life in Bolivia had worsened than what it had been five years earlier with 90 percent of the highlands population living in poverty, over 3 million with no electricity and the income of the poorest 10 percent of the population declining by 15 percent while the richest 10 percent watched their income increase 16 percent between 2000 and 2003 (Dangl 2007, 79). The continuation of prohibitionist strategies against coca growers simply exacerbated this situation. Beginning with the fierce resistance of coca farmers in the Chapare in the mid-­1990s, massive demonstrations in 2000 and 2003 in which whole cities were occupied by popular protest against the privatization of water utilities (2000) and the failure to nationalize natural gas (2003) a growing nationalist/ populist social bloc emerged with the desire to take state power and replace the neoliberal policy coalition that had governed since 1985. The economic neoliberalism and internal repression/eradication of coca growers and their crops, the central tenets of Bolivia’s low-­intensity democracy began to unravel. Progress toward the institution of a counter-­hegemonic model came about with the presidential election of Evo Morales at the head of his Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party in December of 2005. Morales, the indigenous head of a coca-­growers’ union who had for years struggled against U.S. imposed drug control policies, led a popular movement on an anti-­neoliberal/pro-­indigenous rights platform that was directly tied to the social struggles that had taken place prior to 2005. Prior to the election of Morales the U.S. and its allies among Bolivia’s TNE sought to maintain its power within Bolivia’s political system. In April of 2001 the George W. Bush administration promoted the Andean Regional Initiative, a counternarcotics plan that was an extension of Plan Colombia. The Andean Regional Initiative committed almost $4 billion to support “democracy, development and drug control” (Lehman 2006, 131). With the U.S. “war on terrorism” after 9/11 more efforts were being employed to tie coca growers with terrorism in order to provide further justification for a militarized approach. U.S. influence was also central to Bolivia’s 2002 presidential election of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada for his second term. His campaign was aided by a team of U.S. political consultants14 that supported him in part because, as the pollster Jeremy Rosner put it, “we believe in a particular brand of democracy, which is progressive, social democratic, market-­based and modern” (as quoted in Forero 2006). Sánchez de Lozada’s selection as president (2002–2003) was decided by the Bolivian congress when he only received 22 percent of the vote to Morales’ 21 percent of the vote. Congressional support for Sánchez was brokered by U.S. ambassador Manuel Rocha, who convinced another elite party to support him over Morales (Lehman 2006, 147). This was after Rocha’s comments during the campaign in which he warned Bolivians of the dangers to U.S. aid if they voted for Morales, which led to increased support for Morales’ candidacy. This involvement of Rocha in the 2002 campaign only strengthened the existing perception that Sánchez de Lozada would work closely with the United States at the expense of the Bolivia’s national interests.

114   Coca eradication and the transnational elite By 2002, over a decade since Law 1008 and still with Plan Dignidad in effect, one retired military officer argued that “many Bolivian officials are beginning to question the U.S. occupation of the Bolivian armed forces” while another retired officer asked “where else are we going to get training and equipment? We’ll never get out from under the gringos; we might as well take advantage of it” (as cited in Ledebur 2005, 157). While some in the Bolivian military viewed U.S. influence as overly determining, civilian elites within and outside of the Bolivian state were fully in support of U.S. involvement. Continued access to U.S. markets for Bolivian exporters as well as strengthened police/military forces to address not only resistance to coca eradication policies but also resistance to continuing privatizations were important outcomes of the U.S.–Bolivian drug control alliance. Judicial and rule of law reforms in 2001 were also directly tied to “drug war” aims, with the USAID contracting with Management Sciences for Development, INC to lead a transnational project in reforming Bolivia’s criminal procedures code. According to Kathryn Ledebur the reform of Bolivia’s criminal code in June of 2001 was part of a “…  regional effort to modernize Latin American justice systems and involve the participation of Bolivian legal experts, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and GTZ, the German government’s development agency” (2005, 167). Management Science for Development (MSD) was not only the lead actor in charge of the project, but was also involved in training justice sector officials, police, and district attorneys (Ledebur 2005, 167). This consultant would later be involved in similar justice reform activities on behalf of USAID in Mexico. Transnational elites were convinced that not only should countries like Mexico and Bolivia maintain well equipped coercive forces, but that the judicial process needed to be structurally reformed to aid economic integration and create the necessary institutional environment for capital accumulation. In 2016 MSD had nineteen ongoing projects in Latin America focusing on community based policing in Guatemala and a “rule of law” program in Mexico (Devex.com 2016). MSD is an international consulting firm that according to Bloomberg News “provides training and technical assistance to governments and civil society to strengthen justice systems, improve access to justice, and build a culture of lawfulness” (Bloomberg n.d., emphasis mine). During his second administration Sánchez de Lozada attempted to negotiate with coca grower unions in the first four months of his administration. However, the coca growers proposal for the demilitarization of the Chapare region and a suspension of coca eradication was rejected by U.S. officials and Sánchez de Lozada (Ledebur 2003). The U.S. ambassador to Bolivia (Daniel Santos) argued that Bolivia risked losing access to trade benefits through the Andean Trade Preferences and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA) stating that “participation in the ATPDEA program is marked by certain requirements and conditions that dictate that the war on drugs must continue” (Ledebur 2003). In response to the breakdown of negotiations, coca growers and other social movements began protests throughout the country, which included road blockades. The military and police were utilized to demobilize these protests, leading to the deaths of eleven individuals (including two security members).

Coca eradication and the transnational elite   115 In September and October of 2003 Sánchez de Lozada had to deal with further popular challenges to his power. This period of popular resistance encompassed the rights of coca growers, critiques of anti-­drug legislation, demands that the country’s national gas resources be nationalized as well as an overall objection to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (Ledebur 2005, 163). Sánchez’s government repeatedly turned to the military for support, not only in his confrontation with the police, but against social protest in general. Human rights violations committed by the military in subduing the police in February of 2003 were frustrated by the military’s refusal to cooperate with prosecutors and their insistence that such investigations remain within the military justice system (Human Rights Watch 2004). During the “Gas Wars” in September and October of 2003 the army again was utilized to bring order to the situation as indigenous protesters, miners, and unions from El Alto descended upon La Paz as well as El Alto, successfully encircling and blockading these cities. The mass mobilization represented an effort to prevent the nation’s gas reserves (the largest in Latin America) from being sold to a U.S. company who planned on shipping the gas through a Chilean port (Dangl 2003).15 Bolivia’s Landless Movement called for land occupations, coca growers announced blockades of roads between Santa Cruz and Cochabamba and the central labor confederation called for a general strike for September 30 (Hylton and Thomson 2007, 112). Through October 2003, general strikes, civic strikes, marches, and various mobilizations continued leading to the October 17, 2003 resignation of Sánchez de Lozada. The president fled to the United States in exile, allegedly with millions that he stole from the Bolivian government (Gurney et al. 2016). Rather than continue with difficult negotiations with the central leaders of these demonstrations the government turned continuously to security forces, which killed at least sixty people and injured hundreds during these conflictual months in 2003. In fact, there were cases of soldiers being tortured and killed by their superiors for refusing to shoot unarmed protesters as well as instances of defectors from the military and police who joined the protesters (Dangl 2007, 147). The number of people who died during Sánchez’s fourteen-­month term was near the number of political killings that took place during Bolivia’s military dictatorships with some human rights activists viewing the deaths of civilians in October as unprecedented acts by a Latin American government since the end of the Cold War (Lehman 2006, 152). Despite these events the U.S. Embassy, the Organization of American States and foreign petroleum companies continued to express their support for Sánchez and his continuation in office (Lehman 2006, 152; Dangl 2007, 125). However, the popular anger in response to the deaths, coupled with resignations from his own cabinet and the refusal of the Bolivian army and police to engage in even more extensive violence against these protests, was too much for Sánchez to overcome. Jim Shultz, the director of the Democracy Center, an NGO based in Bolivia, argued that Sánchez de Lozada made too many demands of the military during this period, “Sánchez de Lozada would visit army headquarters and bribe military commanders to ensure their loyalty, but when he

116   Coca eradication and the transnational elite pushed for more repressive measures toward the population, the commanders simply refused, that signed the end of his presidency” (as quoted in Sánchez 2008). Sánchez de Lozada ultimately resigned and fled to Miami on October 17, 2003 and was replaced by his vice-­president Carlos Mesa. The removal of Sánchez de Lozada marked a central turning point in Bolivia’s struggles between the nationalist/anti-­neoliberal forces led by Evo Morales and Bolivia’s transnational elite. Individuals such as Quiroga or Sánchez de Lozada had lost substantial credibility and support from their respective security forces that were unwilling to engage in the required massive repression necessary to defeat oppositional forces in civil society. Carlos Mesa sought repeatedly to seek some form of compromise with this opposition in an effort to continue the influence of the transnational elite while co-­opting Morales and the nationwide movement that he led. The contrast with Peru is striking in that Bolivia’s coca-­growers movement never faced the level of violent repression from the state or from armed insurgents that largely eliminated political opportunities for struggle during the 1980s and 1990s in Peru. In fact, as late as 2011 45 percent of Peru’s coca production was being grown in territory where remnants of the Shining Path still controlled (Stone 2012). Once Peruvian coca growers were able to begin organizing they largely failed to build a national movement beyond their localized/regionalized struggles. Finally, Peru’s transnational elite remained largely unified with even the ostensibly “nationalist” challenge of Ollanta Humala defeated in 2006 and co-­opted by 2011. Bolivia’s nationalist/anti-­ neoliberal opposition would ultimately come to power in the presidential election of 2005. Evo Morales won the December 2005 presidential election with 54 percent of the vote, an unprecedented margin in Bolivia’s republican period. His popularity and connections with Bolivia’s powerful social movements would allow him the space to begin the construction of a counter-­hegemonic bloc within the state. At the end of January of 2006 the government proposed the dismantlement of Bolivia’s Joint Task Force, a U.S. supported and financed project that combined military/police units in coca eradication programs in Chapare (Arostegui 2006a; Chang 2006). Morales promoted individuals such as Wilfredo Vargas and Freddy Bersatti as commander in chief of the armed forces and commander of the army respectively, individuals that openly expressed solidarity with Morales’ “social revolution” and loyalty to the president (Ibaibarriaga 2007). Morales’ defense advisor argued that “The [Bolivian] force for the fight against narco-­ trafficking has become an extension of the American [Drug Enforcement Administration], with all the risk that this implies for our national security. All our organs and institutions must return to government control” (Arostegui 2006a). Even the U.S. ambassador to Bolivia between 2003 and 2006 (David Greenlee) recognized the degree that the United States had dominated Bolivian politics, stating that  Until Evo Morales was elected president at the end of 2005, the U.S. was always courted, paid deference to, because of that. But our presence was

Coca eradication and the transnational elite   117 overwhelming. We were too big, the way we did things, was too big for the bilateral relationship. It was bad for Bolivia, and it was bad for us. The Bolivians were in the habit, the bad habit, of being supplicants, and we were in the position, the frankly arrogant position, of doling out assistance. (Association of Diplomatic Studies and Training 2012, 86) Morales stated during the campaign that his election would be the “worst nightmare” for the United States given his leadership of the coca growers union, but U.S. Ambassador Greenlee suggested that the real concern for the U.S. state was the “ the anti-­globalist in a globalized economy” (Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training 2012, 89). The United States cut off military aid to specific units in response to the changes in government, including $500, 000 from a U.S. trained/funded elite counterterrorism force after the Bolivian government appointed an individual to command the unit that the U.S. did not trust (Arostegui 2006b). In February of 2008 Morales formally ended the long history of sending Bolivian officers/­ soldiers to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly the U.S. School of the Americas) because of its historical ties to dictatorships in Latin America (School of the Americas Watch 2008). Morales remarked that “we will gradually withdraw until there are no Bolivian officers attending the School of the Americas … They are teaching high ranking officers to confront their own people, to identify social movements as their enemies” (as quoted in ¡Presente! 2008). The ending of Bolivian military links with the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation16 coincided with the dismissal of a U.S. diplomat following accusations of spying as well as the dissolving of the Organization for Development of Police research (ODEP), an intelligence unit funded by the U.S. State Department to battle narcoterrorism and terrorism (Arostegui 2008). The removal of suspect commanders, the appointment/promotion of supporters and the reduction of Bolivia’s links to the United States were coupled with weekly meetings Morales held with the high command to ensure their continued support (Ibaibarriaga 2007). Morales coupled this resistance to U.S. military training with a direct challenge to U.S. drug control policies, calling for a “coca yes, cocaine no” policy that would recognize the historical importance of the coca leaf and its legal uses while focusing military/police resources against drug trafficking (Farthing and Kohl 2010, 198). The policy also stressed the idea of development with coca, with the ceiling for legal coca production in the country increasing from 30,000 hectares to 50,000 hectares. Furthermore, the Morales administration sought the legalization of coca products in international markets while increasing investments in infrastructure and economic development in coca-­growing regions (Farthing and Kohl 2010; Farthing and Youngers 2016). In January 2013, the Morales administration would successfully challenge the provisions in UN international drug control treaties calling for the eradication of the coca leaf. They withdrew from the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 2011 and then re-­joined the convention in 2013 with the reservation clause

118   Coca eradication and the transnational elite that allowed it to ignore the requirement to criminalize the use, possession or production of coca leaves (Rosen 2015, 10). Their success, which required the assent of the international community indicated the extent that flexibility over drug control laws were being considered globally. These efforts were opposed by both the Bush and Obama administrations in alliance with Bolivia’s transnational elite (Farthing and Kohl 2010, 205). For example, in 2016 the Obama Administration decertified Bolivia, the ninth year in a row, citing its actions respective to the international narcotics agreements, assertions that it was not cooperating with its allies and its promotion of legal markets for coca (Ledebur and Yanoff 2016). This was despite the fact that Bolivia’s policies have successfully led to the eradication of almost 15,000 hectares of coca in 2009, Bolivia’s overall production increased (Farthing and Kohl 2010, 207). However, by 2016 the Morales’ policies, which involved continuous cooperation and negotiations with coca-­growing unions had led to steady declines in coca production, with a net reduction of 34 percent from 2010. The UNDP concluded that Bolivia’s strategy under Morales “[D]emonstrates that respecting growers and local organizations and ensuring their meaningful participation in the design and implementation of coca control efforts can contribute to reduce poverty and hunger as well as sustain coca reduction” (as cited in Ledebur and Youngers 2016). The success in reducing coca production while yearly being decertified by the United States demonstrated the lie to U.S. drug policy aims. Bolivia’s political and economic orientation under the leadership of Morales represented the true issue, one in which U.S. drug policy would be utilized as a pretext to sanction the regime for its resistance to neoliberal globalization. The hypocrisy of the U.S. position would also be illustrated with the coming to power of Ollanta Humala in Peru. The Humala administration and Peru’s low-­intensity democracy In the years following his 2006 defeat Humala would publicly maintain a critical perspective of neoliberalism, but by 2008 there were indications that Humala recognized the obstacles to achieving electoral success. In different meetings with the U.S. Embassy in the years following his electoral defeat (at least once a year between 2006 and 2009) Humala repeatedly emphasized his ability to act as a co-­opting figure, someone who could properly contain the various social conflicts and protests against mining investments taking place throughout the country. In essence, Humala sought to convince the U.S. that he could lead a low-­intensity democracy that could pre-­empt more radical change through the incorporation of popular forces in the next election. For example, on June 18, 2008 Humala met with Ambassador Michael McKinley where he called for “pragmatic” solutions to these conflicts, claiming that he was not a leftist, but a nationalist. Humala also “… warned that dangerous, anti-­systemic radicals could ultimately threaten the stability of the state,” something that he could control while in office (Wikieaks 2008b). In an April 16, 2009 meeting with McKinley, Humala stressed that he would be able to control radical elements within his

Coca eradication and the transnational elite   119 political coalition, arguing that it was better to have them “inside the tent” rather than “outside.” Humala emphasized in this meeting that these groups could be used to win votes in Pasco, Junin, Cajamarca and in the south and that, according to McKinley, he “…  had no doubt he could control the messaging of the coalition” (Wikileaks 2009b, emphasis added). From these cables it is clear that Humala viewed himself as someone who could legitimize neoliberalism and specifically foreign mining investments and free trade in line with the function of a low-­intensity democracy.17 These meetings with the U.S. Embassy were made long before the 2011 election, but illustrated Humala’s understanding of the obstacles to anti-­neoliberal presidency, obstacles that he would face in his 2010–2011 campaign. The first year of Humala’s administration would illustrate the extent that Humala recognized the preeminent role of the United States. Ricardo Soberón, argued that “…  for the U.S. the true fundamental objective is not the War on Drugs, but that this is a justification for superior interests: the control of territory, natural resources, military presence and the sustenance of political regimes that are useful and functional for the Departments of State and Defense” (as cited in Gomez 2008). In fact, Soberón himself was appointed to head DEVIDA in Humala’s first cabinet suggesting that his administration was going to move in a less prohibitionist direction. For years Soberón had been a trenchant critic of past coca eradication policies and viewed the various efforts to negotiate with coca growers as largely symbolic strategies to co-­opt coca growers as opposed to pursuing genuine alternative development strategies or promoting legal uses for coca production. During his short time in office Soberón called for attacking drug traffickers as opposed to growers through disrupting their money laundering networks and supplies of precursor chemicals (Stone 2012). In particular, Soberón’s call for temporarily halting coca eradication programs led to conflicts with other members of Humala’s cabinet and with the U.S. government (Stone 2012). Ultimately, he was removed from his position in December of 2011 in part for his questioning of the coca eradication strategy promoted by the United States, his removal was seen by even some former military leaders as U.S. influence at work (Interview, April 2012 with Admiral Jorge Montoya). His replacement, Carmen Masias, was a strong supporter of the supply reduction strategy and oversaw the destruction of 14,000 hectares of coca in 2012. She pledged to increase by 50 percent the level of coca eradication in 2013 (Peruvian Times 2013a). Masias had previously worked for an anti-­drug charity that received funding support from the United States and represented someone more clearly in line with the expectations of the United States—the government immediately reversed the suspension of coca eradication upon her appointment (BBC News, January 11, 2012). She would stay at the head of DEVIDA until May of 2014, resigning in part because she disagreed with new efforts by the Humala administration to negotiate with coca growers as opposed to forced eradication (El Comercio, May 28, 2014). Masias was replaced by Alberto Otárola Peñaranda who pledged to largely continue the eradication policies of the past, stating that “el año pasado se erradicaron más de 23.000 hectáreas. El reto para

120   Coca eradication and the transnational elite este año es mayor: por lo menos a 30.000. Habrá una política muy clara, que significa mano dura contra el narcotráfico” (El Comercio, May 29, 2014). Otárola’s goals were in line with Humala’s 2012–2016 counternarcotics strategy which called for a 200 percent increase in eradication from the 2012 goals and increased its counternarcotics budget from $145 million in 2012 to approximately $184 million in 2015 (Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs 2016). Ultimately, the Humala administration, like past administrations continued to ignore addressing the various social and economic factors promoting coca production—objectives that he promised to address during his campaign. One coca grower in the VRAEM asserted in 2016 that we supported the current government in their campaign when humala promised us that they were not going to eradicate the coca leaf in the vraem … we are educating our children, some of our children are in universities—that is being paid with what we earn from the coca leaf … humala can not eradicate without giving us anything in return … or maybe now he considers all of us farmers as narco-­terrorists? (Tegel 2016) The problems with the administration’s continuity of forced eradication policies were even recognized by the country’s own anti-­narcotics forces. Colonel Victor Zanabria, Head of Anti-­Narcotics Forces in the Huallaga valley argued coca crops are not simply a problem of drug trafficking in Peru, but it is also a complex social problem … the state has not consolidated its presence in these regions—so many people only see the state when the police arrive to forcefully eradicate their crops. (Tegel 2016) Finally, former Peruvian drug czar Soberon summarized the situation of coca growers and the Humala administration’s efforts in 2016 by stating that drug trafficking has become a way of survival for all the social sectors that have been excluded from the neoliberal economic growth that peru has enjoyed in the past decade … the government is responding with militaristic measures, with repression and interdiction … instead of social inclusion and participation. (Tegel 2016)

Peru and Bolivia in the eyes of U.S. international narcotics drug strategy reports The underlying importance of complementing and reinforcing capitalist globalization through drug war assistance has been most clearly illustrated in the

Coca eradication and the transnational elite   121 International Narcotics Drug Strategy Reports written and published by the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL). INL is the central agency within the U.S. State Department that oversees and administers global U.S. drug war strategies and has provided yearly reports on the state of this “war” in other countries since the mid-­1980s. These reports are largely an assessment of the quality of governmental cooperation with U.S. strategies as well as quantifiable reviews of how much coca has been eradicated, how many traffickers have been arrested, and/or how many landing strips for illegal drug flights have been destroyed. A particular “drug war” tally is compared to previous years to assess how much “progress” is being achieved as well as what changes a government will implement for these years in which the trend is negative. During the Morales years in Bolivia (2006–2016) the government has regularly been criticized in these reports, reports which have justified presidential determinations that Bolivia had “failed demonstrably” to adhere to its obligations under international counternarcotics (CN) conventions, leading to economic punishments against exporters seeking duty free access to the U.S. market. Yet, the neoliberal regimes of Alan García (2006–2011) and Ollanta Humala (2011–2016) in Peru are often lauded in these reports despite the fact that Peru’s progress in eradicating coca or in arresting traffickers has been comparable to Bolivia’s success rate. For example, in the 2010 report reviewing progress in 2009 Bolivia was criticized for not preventing increases in coca cultivation and cocaine manufacture even though the government met the eradication goals consistent with past bilateral agreements with the United States (Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs 2010, 149).18 In the case of Peru, it also failed to prevent an increase in coca cultivation and cocaine manufacture, yet Bolivia was punished and Peru was viewed as fully cooperating. Or the 2012 report, reviewing 2011, concluding that after decades of U.S. financed counternarcotics programs, including the dramatic reductions in the Fujimori administration and continuous cooperation by governments throughout the twenty-­first century that “Peru has the world’s highest potential production of pure cocaine and the second highest potential production of export quality cocaine.” The report also noted that  The 2010 USG estimate indicated that 53,000 ha of coca were under cultivation in Peru, a 33 percent increase from the 2009 level of 40,000 ha. The United Nations Office of Drug Control (UNODC), using a different methodology, estimated 61,200 ha of cultivation in 2010, a 2 percent increase from the 2009 level of 59,900 ha. USG estimates for potential production increased to 325 MT of pure cocaine (a 44 percent increase from 2009), or 365 MT of export-­quality cocaine (a 49 percent increase from 2009). (Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs 2012, 364) In the case of Bolivia, coca cultivation and potential cocaine manufacture had “stabilized,” but the government was criticized for not reversing the increases of

122   Coca eradication and the transnational elite previous years. In addition, the government was attacked for ending cooperation with the Drug Enforcement Agency, a decision made by the Morales administration in 2008 due to concerns that the DEA was possibly involved in espionage operations against the government and assisting secessionists within the country. Yet, the stability in coca/cocaine production in Bolivia and substantial increases in Peru led to President Obama annually determining that Bolivia had “failed demonstrably,” while Peru was encouraged to expand its efforts and increase funding for its drug control agencies while its exporters would continue to enjoy special access to the U.S. market. Finally, the economic punishment against the anti-­globalist regime in Bolivia was applied despite the small amount of cocaine in the U.S. market that derived from Bolivia. David Greenlee, the ambassador to Bolivia between 2003–2006, argued that We were in the uncomfortable position of being the sharp end, the muscle, in the coca/cocaine issue—even though, at least when I was in Bolivia as ambassador, only about 1 percent of the cocaine on our streets was from Bolivia. (Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training 2012, 88 emphasis mine). The hypocrisy of the U.S. position was demonstrated by the actual results in an array of measures deemed important to counternarcotics efforts. For example, Bolivia has been condemned for promoting a coca industry, yet Peru’s state coca agency ENACO actively promotes coca exports asserting that its mission is “… to be the only legally recognized company in the world, providing coca leaf and industrialized products for national and international markets” including exporting $6.5 million of coca leaf to the Stepan Chemical Company in the U.S., which processes the coca for Coca-­Cola (Ledebur and Yanoff 2016). The coca growing estimates of the United Nations also reveal the hypocrisy of the repeated decertifications of Bolivia. In its 2015 Coca Monitoring Survey it found a decline in coca production in Bolivia between 2009 while Peru and Colombia witnessed increases during the same period as they remained the two largest producers of coca in the world (Ledebur and Yanoff 2016). Bolvian police are even seizing more cocaine relative to Peru, despite the fact that Peru is a larger coca producer (see Table 4.1). Thus, on an array of measures of drug prohibition Bolivia has consistently seen either greater or equal progress relative to Peru or Colombia yet they have Table 4.1  Counter-cocaine progress in the Andes, 2015

Bolivia Peru Colombia

Cocaine-based seizures

Cocaine hydrochloride seizures

Coca leaf seizures

Cocaine labs destroyed (total)

12.68 MT 11.6 MT 42 MT

8.6 MT 8.4 MT 252 MT

362 MT 126.9 MT 775 MT

4,339 546 3,838

Source: Andean Information Network 2016. PG. 192, permission granted 3.9.2017.

Coca eradication and the transnational elite   123 been decertified for almost a decade by the United States. Obviously, their decertification has little to do with U.S. drug control strategies and everything to do with how the U.S. uses whatever policy measures it can “legitimately” apply to harm those governments pursuing a larger political, economic or social agenda that conflicts with capitalist globalization and neoliberalism.

Conclusion Bolivia and Peru represented the earliest application of a militarized neoliberal drug policy, one that directly utilized U.S. troops and DEA in the eradication of coca crops as well as the training of specialized military and police forces solely dedicated to eliminating the source of cocaine. It goes without saying that in neither case were reductions in production sustained, in other words the decades long militarized policy failed in both countries to address the stated objective of the policy. However, the policy successfully tied Peru closer economically to the U.S. and furthered its integration into global capitalism. It also consistently allowed for a policy that justified the repression of various anti-­neoliberal social movements as well as the most marginalized sectors of the peasant sector-­coca growers. The two cases also illustrate the importance of a transnational elite community in facilitating the continued application of policy. Peru’s neoliberal/ transnational elite successfully consolidated its power over the Peruvian state during the Fujimori administration, maintaining this control to the present-­day and easing the implementation of neoliberal economic policies and a militarized drug policy. Even in the case of Bolivia the period of greatest success in the coca eradication coincided with the peak of neoliberal/transnational elite control over the Bolivian state. However, in contrast to Peru, this control was successfully disrupted, contributing to not only a shift in political economy but in the application of drug control policies as well.

Notes   1 The Single Convention’s Article 49 required that “within twenty-­five years from the coming into force of this Convention” (United Nations on Drug Control 1972, 23).   2 In the first half of the 1980s Bolivia’s external debt was the highest in proportion to its population in Latin America (Durand Ochoa 2014, 84).   3 By the mid-­1990s cocaine-­related products represented between 2 and 7 percent of GNP and cocaine exports were equal to 24 percent of legal exports (Human Rights Watch 1995, 7).   4 Their protests included a five-­day siege of 245 narcotics officers at the U.S.–Bolivian forward operating base in Ivargazama (Marcy 2010, 78). The resistance by coca growers was consistent with their years of previous struggles to stop or slow down coca eradication campaigns through regional and national marches and blockades.   5 In the first six years of the program Bolivia received more than three-­quarters of a billion dollars in counternarcotics aid, with Colombia and Peru the second and third largest recipients within the Andean region during this period (Human Rights Watch 1995, 10).   6 Bolivia is one of the poorest countries in Latin America. In 2004 two-­thirds of its population were living in poverty and 30 percent of the population were surviving on

124   Coca eradication and the transnational elite less than $1 a day while it has the second highest infant mortality rate in Latin America (Ledebur 2005, 146). This poverty rate would steadily decline to 38.6 percent in 2015 after nine years of anti-­poverty policies during the administrations of Evo Morales (2006–2009, 2009–2014, 2014–2019) (see World Bank n.d.).   7 Current vice-­president of Bolivia, Alvaro García Linera viewed “anti-­North Americanism” as a central part of the cocalero movement’s identity (García Linera 2008, 396).   8 The collapse of the mining sector and the devastation of the traditional peasantry during the crises of the 1980s contributed to weakening unions representing these sectors as coca growing offered a lifeline to thousands who had been formally employed in these sectors (Durand Ochoa 2014, 95–97).   9 Investigations of military corruption and links to narcotraffickers also strained this agenda with the Peruvian army allegedly receiving payments from traffickers in exchange for allowing them to use airstrips and cocaine processing facilities military facilities in the Upper Huallaga Valley in order to provide more protection for the traffickers (Jordan 1999, 131). 10 In September of 2006 President García personally handed the U.S. ambassador a letter for President Bush proposing increased cooperation on extraditions and his desire to “streamline” the process (Wikileaks 2006b). 11 One owner of multiple coca maceration pits (an essential part of the process of coca leaves into cocaine) in the VRAEM asserted that “the Shining Path assists us by providing security for the transportation of the product … they have now corrected their ways and they are doing a lot of good” (Tegel 2016). 12 Between 2006 and 2011, 191 Peruvians were killed in the repression of social protests, with 153 representing civilians and 38 members of the national police and military (La Republica 2011b). Approximately half of these social conflicts were associated with the societal concerns over the environmental consequences of mining and energy drilling in different parts of the country (La Republica 2011b). 13 In 2006 García also expressed support for the death penalty for drug traffickers (Transnational Institute 2015). 14 This included Mark Feierstein who would go on to become Obama’s Senior Director for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the National Security Council. 15 Popular opposition was in part driven by continued resentment against Chile for taking away Bolivia’s access to the coast after the War of the Pacific (1879–1884). 16 In the case of Bolivia, Hugo Banzer had been trained there prior to his dictatorship as well as Generals implicated in the deaths of over sixty people in the 2003 “Gas Wars” (School of the Americas Watch 2008). 17 In earlier meetings with U.S. ambassadors in 2007 (with Ambassador James Struble) and earlier one in 2009 with McKinley, Humala expressed support for corporate free trade and acknowledged the “… preeminent role the US plays in Latin America” (as quoted in Kozloff 2011). 18 The report stresses that “although the government of Bolivia met its minimum bilateral requirement to eradicate 5,000 hectares of coca, these efforts have not kept pace with rising coca cultivation and cocaine production” (Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs 2010, 149).

5 Transnational advocacy networks and the drug war

The prohibitionist paradigm initiated on a global level by the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century and ratcheted up in an age of neoliberalism and capitalist globalization from the 1980s to today has always had its detractors. Within Latin America national level responses have most clearly been demonstrated by coca growers in Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia. However, by the end of the 2000s groups within Latin America and globally were seeking transnational responses to the global policy of prohibition. Like in the evolution of the “war on drugs” the development and focus of this resistance has involved national and transnational groups seeking to stop or modify the prohibitionist paradigm. Like proponents of the drug war, these groups have more often than not accepted the capitalist globalization model that is so important to illegal transnational drug production, distribution, and consumption. However, there are also groups within this movement, which promote more radical and broader critiques of the larger political and socioeconomic context surrounding the paradigm of drug prohibition. These differences in part replicated many of the schisms that existed within democratization movements of the 1970s and 1980s, with more moderate factions of this movement willing to collaborate with transnational elites and dominant powers while more radical factions wary of the influence of elite negotiations upon actual democratization. A similar dynamic seems to be taking place in the still developing transnational drug reform movement. State managers from historically prohibitionist states (such as the United States, Colombia, and Mexico) are engaged in symbolic rhetoric in an effort to defuse/co-­opt the drug policy reform movement with little progress on substantive reforms tied to social justice. The more well-­financed and effective TN drug reform movements are dedicated to decriminalization and/or regulated markets for psychoactive substances within a context of deepening capitalist globalization creating opportunities for the intensification of legal capital accumulation at the expense of expanding the number of addicts and the deepening of global inequalities.

126   Advocacy networks

Transnational advocacy networks and drug policy reform Within the United States, at least since the Nixon administration, organized political resistance in the U.S. was most prominently manifested in groups such as the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws (NORML) and the Drug Policy Alliance, which was the result of a merger of the Drug Policy Foundation and the Lindesmith Center in 2000.1 By 2016, these, and other organizations, have had their greatest success in the decriminalization, medicalization, and/or legalization of cannabis in different state governments—despite the fact that the federal government continues to maintain its prohibition. By 2017, eight states had legalized cannabis for recreational use, while twenty-­nine states (including the eight that have legalized for recreational use) have legalized the use of marijuana for medical purposes (Governing 2017). Within Latin America, organized resistance within specific Latin American countries has occurred repeatedly at least since the 1980s in Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia in the form of civil disobedience or violence by coca growers against eradication units of their respective national police or armed forces. Much of this resistance was examined above and this chapter is largely dedicated to transnational responses to the drug war. The importance of examining transnational movements or “transnational advocacy networks” reflects the international nature of the war on drugs. The set of prohibitionist policies at the heart of this agenda have been incorporated in a system of international conventions that are regularly monitored not only by the U.S. state, but institutions within the United Nations such as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND), and the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (CCPCJ). These institutions, coupled with various nation-­states, represent important components of a multinational state apparatus dedicated to drug prohibition and control. For example, the CND is the central policy-­making body for the UN drug control system and yearly adopts resolutions on the direction of international drug control for the following year. Importantly, the CND makes the final decision when it comes to recommendations from the World Health Organization as to which drugs to schedule or de-­schedule as substances necessitating prohibition (International Drug Policy Consortium 2016a, 8). Like in the ongoing struggle against capitalist globalization activists throughout Europe and Latin America seeking to change this prohibitionist paradigm have concluded that real progress against the drug war requires more than a domestic response, but the need for transnational advocacy networks. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink in their classic book Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics submit that a transnational advocacy network includes “… those actors working internationally on an issue, who are bound together by shared values, a common discourse, and dense exchanges of information and services” (Keck and Sikkink 1998, 89). They often emerge when channels between domestic groups and their government are  closed, activists believe that networking will assist their goals and where

Advocacy networks   127 conferences create arenas for forming networks (ibid.). Through providing detailed information, symbolic politics or seeking the support of a stronger global actor these networks hope to achieve their specific issue goals. Much of the transnational networks around drug reform have been committed to organizing and presenting detailed information about the drug issue, specifically at international conferences dedicated to this subject. Transnational links have been built between groups within the United States and different organizations in Latin America while other networks have brought together representatives from around the world to present alternatives to the war on drugs. However, these networks have differed in the degree that they seek a radical shift in drug policies that incorporates resistance to capitalist globalization, with certain networks seeking ways of reforming drug laws to facilitate new forms of legal capitalist accumulation while others linking drug policy reforms with larger critiques of capitalist globalization and/or state militarization in their analyses. In an important respect Robert Cox’s distinction between “problem-­solvers” and “critical theorists” in his examination of international relations scholarship is appropriate to this division, with certain groups seeking ways to resolve some of the problems associated with prohibitionist strategies while other groups embed this “problem” within a larger context of TNC power and/or the power of U.S. imperialism. Interestingly, the resistance to capitalist globalization in the sphere of political economy has roughly corresponded with the emergence of different transnational efforts to reform or end the prohibitionist paradigm. The most important challenges in Latin America to neoliberalism and, to an extent, capitalist globalization, emerged with the “pink tide” governments that came to power in the late 1990s and 2000s. These nationalist and populist regimes pursued various policy initiatives that either reversed certain components of neoliberalism (such as privatization or reductions in welfare spending) or more aggressively sought to begin the steps for an alternative economic and political model (with Chávez’s Venezuela going the furthest in this direction). By 2008, a majority of nation-­ states in South America were governed by parties/movements that obtained power through trenchant critiques of neoliberalism, U.S. foreign policy and/or capitalist globalization. Though these “left” governments were not all uniformly supportive of drug policy reforms there were some important steps taken by some of these governments (Youngers 2013). For instance, Ecuador’s 2008 constitution is the only one in the hemisphere that declared drug use to be a public health issue, while Bolivia successfully challenged a provision in the international drug conventions banning the chewing of coca. In general, the leaders of these governments overtly questioned and challenged U.S. priorities in the region—contributing to the political space for governments and groups in civil society to specifically challenge the militarized model of the U.S. drug war. Related to this wave of resistance on a national state level, different transnational alliances were created to bring activists and groups together from around Latin America, or the world, to challenge capitalist globalization. Eduardo Silva asserts that “in the 1990s, the intensification of neoliberal

128   Advocacy networks globalization (world convergence on free-­market economics) and internationalization (increased institutionalized cooperation among states) caused a surge in transnational activism” (2013, 1). For example, the World Social Forum (WSF ) took place for the first time in 2001 in Brazil and brought together tens of thousands of people representing hundreds of different organizations focused upon opposing “… neoliberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism, and are committed to building a planetary society directed towards fruitful relationships among Humankind and between it and the Earth” (World Social Forum 2016). Within Latin America, probably the most prominent transnational advocacy network resisting neoliberalism have involved various indigenous rights movements that coordinated their efforts across the region in opposition to extractive industries and control over their traditional territories. Simultaneously, national level groups increasingly sought ways of linking to the transnational while other social movements continued to focus their efforts on domestic level struggles given the central mediating role that national states play in facilitating (or resisting) the global capitalist agenda (Silva 2013, 1). In the case of drug policy the periodic drug control meetings of the United Nations have created “… opportunities for activists to organize, seeking to influence principles, norms, rules, and procedures of these international institutions as well as their policies” (Silva 2013, 3). Thus, capitalist globalization and internationalization have created important “political opportunities” for transnational advocacy, motivating the coordination by activists beyond the local or national levels (Silva 2013, 3–4; Schneider 2014). In exploring the “transnational counter-­hegemonic project” in Latin America as it regards the “war on drugs” the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy report in 2009 is viewed by Coletta Youngers as “a turning point” in the push for drug policy reform (2013, 2). The Latin American Commission (LAC) is the forerunner of the Global Commission on Drug Policy (GCDP). LAC was co-­chaired by former presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Brazil), César Gaviria (Colombia) and Ernesto Zedillo (Mexico). The 2009 report concluded that the war on drugs was a “failure” and that harm reduction should be considered, while continuing to accept a domestic security role for the armed forces in confronting “organized crime” (Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy 2009, 5–6). Since 2009 this belief that changes to the prohibitionist paradigm were needed continued with the steady legalization of cannabis for recreational use in U.S. states as well as Uruguay’s establishment of a regulated cannabis market for recreational use in 2013. Following the 2009 report, the 2012 Cartagena Summit of Latin American leaders led to the funding of multiple studies by the OAS dedicated to examining the history of drug control policy and potential alternatives to the prohibitionist status quo (Youngers 2013, 3). The reports that were produced not only criticized the prohibitionist model, but also proposed consideration of amendments to the international drug control conventions (ibid., 4). These reports were reinforced by the frustrations of transnational elites in Latin America who rhetorically expressed doubts about whether a militarized strategy still

Advocacy networks   129 remained the most effective means to facilitate capital accumulation on a transnational scale. These elites, and their allies in civil society, were increasingly unable to ignore the failures of the policy and expressed a willingness to consider softening this strategy while maintaining the central pillars of prohibition in place. In particular, leaders like Felipe Calderón, Juan Manuel Santos, and Otto Perez Molina voiced open criticism of prohibitionist drug policies leading them to call for a re-­evaluation of these policies at the United Nations. At the September 2012 UN General Assembly meeting these three leaders issued a formal statement demanding that the UN “review the approach” of current drug policies and to “analyze all available options, including regulatory market measures, in order to establish a new paradigm that prevents the flow of resources to groups involved in organized crime” (as cited in Haase and Youngers 2013). However, the substantive commitment to these policy goals was not clear given the respective histories of these Latin American presidents. They had each been instrumental in state and para-­state repression either through the militarization of their respective drug war policies and/or the need for order in repressing anti-­globalization movements within their countries. Calderón dramatically escalated the militarization of the Mexican drug war between 2006 and 2012 fomenting violence between different cartel organizations as well as human rights violations by the Mexican armed forces and police. Santos as Defense Minister prior to his 2010 election to the presidency oversaw Colombia’s armed forces while its military was engaged in killing thousands of civilians and dressing them up as insurgents in order to improve their combat statistics (the “false positives” scandal). As president he has continued to oversee Colombia integration into the global economy, accelerating the country’s dependency on extractivist enterprises while making little progress in stemming the assassinations of human rights and land reform activists. Finally, during his administration, President Molina increased military involvement in counter-­drug activities and was arrested in the fall of 2015 for participating in an extensive money laundering scheme related to massive bribes to state companies (Lohmuller 2016). Molina was part of a long-­standing network of former military and police leaders that used their positions within the state for their own benefit including working with drug trafficking organizations for personal enrichment. These were the leaders of a reform effort that various transnational advocacy networks rallied behind as they promoted the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on the international drug problem, which took place in April of 2016. One explanation for the ostensibly paradoxical position was offered by Juan Gabriel Tokatlian who suggests that “… some highly pro-­U.S. governments, such as the Mexican, Colombian, and Guatemalan, are inclined to promote regulatory regimes for drugs in order to fight more effectively other forms of organized crime and existing armed ideological challenges” (2015, 84 emphasis mine), while Coletta Youngers suggests that symbolic politics associated with being a “reformer” (especially in the case of Molina) may have played a role (Skype Interview, December 22, 2016). Thus, an apparent openness to a

130   Advocacy networks strategic shift may rest in the need to apply resources toward other threats to the established order. The following highlights how different groups have addressed the questions and the pitfalls that elite drug policy reform groups faced while seeking to humanize U.S.–Latin American drug policies. They were sometimes joined by groups that explicitly linked the drug war with the establishment of capitalist globalization, basing their opposition to the drug war not simply for the immediate and direct consequences to its victims but as part of a larger critique of capitalist globalization and U.S. sponsored militarization. In other words, their resistance was a “multi-­dimensional” one, one that goes beyond regulated cannabis markets or needle exchange programs. While these reformist and radical factions of the drug policy resistance movement are often allied they part ways in terms of their tactics and in the policy networks they find themselves enmeshed in. The following will illustrate these differences through an examination of elite drug policy reform groups such as the Global Commission on Drug Policy and the International Consortium on Drug Policy with what I view to be more radical, anti-­capitalist globalization efforts represented by groups such Global Exchange, Reverdeser and the various “caravan” movements represented by groups such as the Movement for Peace and Justice in Mexico.

UNGASS 2016 and elite drug policy reform groups In response to the call made by the presidents of Colombia, Mexico, and Guatemala in 2012 a United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) was convened for April of 2016 dedicated to international drug policy. A central goal of the session was to review the progress and application of the three core international conventions that structures drug prohibitionist agenda globally: • • •

The 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs The 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances; and The 1988 Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances.

These treaties are supported by 95 percent of member-­states indicating the degree that the international community has committed to a prohibitionist agenda (Rosen 2015, 11). However, the UNGASS of 2016 was important in that it marked a significant attempt to reevaluate and reconsider the prohibitionist bias in these international conventions. This was the third Special Session dedicated to the illegal drug issue, with special sessions taking place in 1990 and 1998. The 1998 special session committed the UN to the goal of a “drug free world” by 2008—a goal that the international community predictably fell short (Jelsma 2003). The special sessions can be periodically called by members of the United Nations to assess and debate global issues such as health, gender, or poverty. The UNGASS of 2016 on international drug policies came about because of a resolution from Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón in the fall of 2012 at the

Advocacy networks   131 end of his six-­year presidential term. Mexico was joined by Colombia and Guatemala who called on the UN Secretary General to organize a special session to explore global drug control and alternative strategies. Mexico’s resolution would eventually be co-­sponsored by ninety-­five countries and was unanimously adopted by the General Assembly. The resolution specifically called for a “review [of] current policies and strategies to confront the global drug problem” (Drug Policy Alliance 2012). The previous UNGASS that focused on drug issues in 1998 focused on the total elimination of drugs from the world, but the 2016 UNGASS was taking place under a different context. Prior to 2012, and most definitely before 2016, multiple member-­states, transnational advocacy networks and other sectors of global civil society had been clamoring for a shift away from the prohibitionist paradigm. In addition, the leading promoter of a prohibitonist agenda for well over a century, the U.S., had been decriminalizing/ legalizing the use of cannabis on a regional level for almost twenty years.2 Important transnational advocacy networks centered on drug policy reform targeted the UNGASS 2016 as a special opportunity to shape and influence drug policy in the years to come. Obviously, the reality of the three core international drug conventions were an important part of this focus given the manner these treaties have helped to legitimate the prohibitionist agenda. In fact, the ultimate failure of civil society in UNGASS 2016 demonstrates the extent that drug prohibition has not only proven a useful set of strategies in deepening/expanding capitalist globalization in Latin America but has contributed to maintaining/strengthening social order and authoritarianism in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Indonesia, and China—states that were instrumental in largely shutting out civil society from the process. However, the focus upon United Nations institutions and conferences demonstrated a real lack of appreciation of the extent that the UN has long been associated as an instrument of powerful states and that the lack of support for such a re-­evaluation by the U.S. or Russia would mean that any effort to push the UN toward a humane approach to drug policy will always be doomed to fail. Why would drug policy reformers believe that they could make progress on reversing or softening drug prohibitionist policies at the UN when so little precedent existed in holding powerful states (globally or regionally) to abide by international law? As Ronald Reagan pointed out decades ago when speaking about the UN’s condemnation of its Central American and Caribbean policies, “one hundred nations in the UN have not agreed with us on just about everything that’s come before them where we’re involved and it didn’t upset my breakfast at all” (as quoted in Gaspar 2002). As is well understood the UN was established after World War II in a manner that would benefit the interests of the most powerful states at that time, in particular the United States and the Soviet Union. This is most fundamentally demonstrated by the veto power wielded by the Security Council (which consists of the United States, China, Russia, Great Britain, and France), which guarantees that the core interests of these five states could never be undermined by UN action (Gaspar 2002). One possible reason that nation-­states or civil society groups periodically turn to the UN is that such efforts often posed “the international community” or

132   Advocacy networks “international law” against the “unilateralism” of the U.S., with the UN being the only arena that weaker states or social groups can resist its power (Gaspar 2002). While no state actively promoted the regulatory markets for all illegal drugs, the debates at the UN over drug policy suggest an emerging factional rivalry within the transnational elite as to the best set of drug policy strategies necessary to maintain the level of stability and political legitimacy within specific nation-­states. As Robert Cox has argued international institutions and organizations represent important agents of hegemony that embody the rules of a particular world order and work to legitimate those norms while co-­opting counter-­hegemonic ideas (1993, 62). He notes that “international institutions embody the rules which facilitate the expansion of the dominant economic and social forces but which at the same time permit adjustments to be made by subordinated interests with a minimum of pain” (Cox 1993, 62). In fact, with the worldwide shift to an era of global capitalism the United Nations has increasingly viewed itself not as a set of institutions serving powerful states, but as a partner of global capital. Institutions and organizations that are part of the UN have represented important components of the transnational state, as Alicia Grant points out “beginning in the 1990s, the relationship between the UN and the private sector began to expand” and that the “… UN requires the active involvement of the private sector in order to address pressing global challenges, and addressing these challenges is necessary for the private sector to flourish” (Grant 2013). The idea that this relationship with the private sector is an essential part of the UN’s mission was nicely captured by former secretary general Kofi Annan (currently a member of the board of directors on the Global Commission for Drug Policy) in a speech he gave at the TN policymaking group, the World Economic Forum in 1998: Markets do not function in a vacuum. Rather, they arise from a framework of rules and laws, and they respond to signals set by Governments and other institutions. Without rules governing property rights and contracts; without confidences based on the rule of law; without an overall sense of direction and a fair degree of equity and transparency, there could be no well-­ functioning markets, domestic or global. The UN system provides such a global framework, an agreed set of standards and objectives that enjoy worldwide acceptance. A strong United Nations is good for business. (As cited in Robinson 2014, 78) At the 1999 World Economic Forum Annan promoted the UN Global Compact that was ostensibly dedicated to a partnership between the UN and transnational corporations in an effort to reach the Millennium Development Goals as well as establish greater “corporate social responsibility” in terms of how corporations treat their labor force and the environment (United Nations n.d.). In 2012 UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon continued Secretary General Annan’s initiative when he announced the creation of a UN Partnership Facility as part of a five-­year action agenda in order to coordinate partnerships between the private sector, civil society,

Advocacy networks   133 philanthropists, and academia (Grant 2013). By 2013, the UN’s primary interactions with transnational capital were through their private donations to UN institutions and integrating TNCs in policy discussions (Grant 2013). One 2013 UN study examining this relationship found that 80 percent of the UN agencies examined received donations from the private sector and over 30 percent regularly engaged in policy discussions with TNCs (Grant 2013). The study concluded that “The vast majority of UN agencies receive donations, both cash and inkind, from private companies to support their activities, making this the most common modality of engagement between the UN and the private sector” (Grant 2013). Over 9,000 corporations are partnered with the UN as well as transnational corporate policymaking groups such as the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) with the ICC signing a joint statement with the UN committing to forging a “… close global partnership to secure greater business input into the world’s economic decisionmaking” as well as an “… effective regulatory framework for globalization” (Robinson 2014, 79). In fact, the ICC is the “collective voice of global business” in the Global Compact and maintains central positions on the Global Compact Board and provides support to the mandate of the Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary General on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises. In addition, the ICC serves as “the main focal point for business in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change” and the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development sessions (CSD) (International Chamber of Commerce n.d.). This has allowed the ICC “… to ensure that the emerging new world, with new poles of power and leadership, stays faithful to the precept that international trade and investment and the market economy system are key factors in raising and spreading wealth” (International Chamber of Commerce n.d.). The relationship between the UN and TNCs is also reflected in the different efforts by the UNDOC and CCPCJ (like the CND, a governing body of the UNDOC) to raise funds from the private sector. The UNDOC’s fundraising strategy report for 2012–2015 concludes that engagement with the private sector is accelerating ($5.2 million–29 pledges) following the adoption of a UNODC policy framework for working with the business community, including an institutional process on partnership development and due diligence. (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2012, 13) Private donors to the UNDOC have included Siemans and the Artoc Group for Investment & Development. The UNDOC also receives contributions from different member-­states (their “major donors”), with multiple agencies within the U.S. State Department contributing to the UNDOC (United Nations on Drugs and Crime 2012, 37). Finally, international financial institutions such as the World Bank contribute to the UNDOC. The UNDOC’s accelerating work with the private sector is related to a 2010 resolution of the CCPCJ entitled “Strengthening partnerships between

134   Advocacy networks governments and business to counter drugs and crime” (Resolution 19/1). The CCPCJ helps to set the agenda and priorities of the UNDOC and its 2010 resolution specifically called for the involvement of the: … private sector, as appropriate, in its activities to counter crime in all its forms and manifestations. As well the strengthening of: …  public-­private partnerships to counter crime in all its forms and manifestations. (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2010, 2) The fundraising strategies of the UNDOC and the CCPCJ resolution illustrate the extent that the UN’s call for greater interaction and policy development with the private sector is also part of the mandate for central drug control bodies within the United Nations. These commissions as well as the CND were the primary focus of a year-­long campaign by different transnational advocacy networks focused upon drug policy reform as they sought to influence the preparations and deliberations of the April 2016 UNGASS that had originally been called for by Colombia, Mexico, and Guatemala in 2012. The 2016 UNGASS (and the public criticisms of war on drugs) suggests that the intensifying violence and corruption associated with the war on drugs in Latin America has been outweighing the benefits of a policy pretext for the strengthening of domestic security forces and the dissemination of “modern” judicial/ police institutions in the eyes of some policy elites (state managers and transnational civil society). We may be witnessing the beginning of elite fracturing over this agenda, something that was important to alcohol prohibition policy in the U.S. The shifts in the views/interests of economic elites in the U.S. over alcohol prohibition were crucial to the establishment of prohibition and its eventual revocation. Elites such as Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie at one time viewed alcohol prohibition as a measure to weaken German, Italian, and Irish based unions in which the saloon was a central location of labor organizing and militancy while simultaneously “improving” the quality/dependability of their workforce. Harry Levine’s history of this period concludes that “if substantial elements of the corporate elite had opposed constitutional prohibition, it probably would never have passed” (Levine 1985, 2). However, almost two decades of rising mafia violence, widespread corruption of police forces and general disrespect for the rule of law (as much of the public continued to consume alcohol) led many of these same economic elites to reconsider their previous prohibitionist positions and eventually support the rescinding of the nineteenth amendment. In addition, fears of greater “lawlessness” overlapped with increasing fears of revolt and revolution with the onset of the Great Depression (Levine and Reinarman 1991, 464–465; Levine 1985, 4).

Advocacy networks   135 A key drug reforming organization among the transnational elite is the Global Commission on Drug Policy (GCDP). Formerly the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, with both groups sharing similar leadership and membership in terms of Latin America’s participation. The Latin American Commission was chaired by the former President of Colombia, Cesar Gaviria and the former president of Mexico, Ernesto Zedillo—two individuals central to their countries neoliberal shift. In addition, other former politicians and journalists long associated with austerity and neoliberalism were also part of the commission including Moises Naim, Mario Vargas Llosa, and João Roberto Marinho (Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy 2009). LAC would eventually become the GCDP and broaden its membership to include individuals from Europe, Africa, and Asia. The GCDP is a transnational policy planning and advocacy network committed to “…  informed, science-­based discussion about humane and effective ways to reduce the harm caused by drugs to people and societies” (Global Commission on Drug Policy n.d.a.). The GCDP began in 2011 and is composed of twenty-­three “political leaders and leading thinkers from across the political spectrum” (Global Commission on Drug Policy n.d.b). The Commission yearly publishes a report assessing the state of drug policy in the world and proposes various public health/regulatory alternatives to the prohibitionist agenda. It also engages in informal advocacy and “quiet diplomacy” in an effort to see its positions become policy on a national and global level. The GCDP played an instrumental role in networking with different governments and drug reform groups in the United States and Latin America in the lead up to UNGASS 2016. The objective for GCDP was to act as a convening organization to bring different parties together in order to establish a united front and position in the face of hard-­line opposition from governments such as Malaysia, Russia, and Iran. They worked with civil society groups in Mexico and the United States (such as Reverdeser and Global Exchange respectively) while coordinating with “like-­minded” member governments in Latin America through the sharing of their research as well as in the hopes that a coalition could actively seek changes at the UNGASS. Zara Snapp, a former member of the Global Commission’s Secretariat and coordinator for GCDP in Latin America, argued that a lot of GCDP’s work in the lead up to UNGASS 2016 was in “… bringing key policymakers up to speed on drug policy and alternative approaches” and that in the CND meetings of March of 2015 the GCDP “… held 17 bilateral meetings with member states” (Phone Interview, November 11, 2016). While the organization’s “commissioners” may represent a range of positions along a narrow political spectrum they, like their predecessors in the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, are disproportionately made up of individuals at the center of expanding capitalist globalization and neoliberalism. Of the twenty-­five commissioners at the head of the GCDP sixteen were either owners/board members of transnational corporations (such as Richard Branson and John Whitehead), former heads of governments that oversaw major neoliberal reforms of their respective economies while they were  in office (such as Cesar Gaviria, Fernando Cardoso, Ernesto Zedillo, and

136   Advocacy networks Olusegun Obasanjo) served central roles in instituting neoliberalism (Paul Volcker) or worked at the head of important transnational capital non-­ governmental organizations (such as Maria Livanos Cattaui the former secretary general of the International Chamber of Commerce—the UN’s partner in the Global Compact) (see Global Commission on Drug Policy n.d.c.). The GCDP’s reports have consistently called for the decriminalization of the personal use of all psychoactive substances while shifting from recommendations that called for greater law enforcement efforts against organized crime (2011) to calling for states to “…  explore regulatory models for all illicit drugs” (2016, 29). Their recommendations lack any attention to rejecting economic models that facilitate greater economic integration (licit and illicit) or that contribute to creating the surplus populations that have been absorbed by these illegal economies. Nor is there much recognition of how the inequalities that have been exacerbated by capitalist globalization not only have contributed to illegal drug economies, but that these inequities are instrumental to an array of organized criminal activities (human trafficking, extortion, or kidnapping). In fact, an ally of the GCDP, the U.S. based cannabis reform group NORML, fully embraces incorporating corporate America in its legalization drive, viewing a “free market” approach as essential to its legalization efforts (Schneider 2014). As John Gibler aptly asserts in To Die in Mexico: legalization will do nothing to address the … underlying economic and social violence that has motivated the U.S. prohibition efforts and drug wars throughout the twentieth century. Bringing pot and cocaine into the legal market economy’s open arms will stop the gangland murders but leave Mexico, for example, to the good old days of living under a bloody authoritarian regime that bows to U.S. economic bullying, concentrates wealth in a tiny fraction of the population while sinking the majority in destitution and misery, prompts the mass exodus of nearly half a million jobless souls annually, and brutally crushes resistance. One can imagine a new wave of child laborers fleeing economic destitution and political violence in Guerrero to pick marijuana buds in Sinaloa (where they already pick tomatoes) for a company owned by the world’s richest man, Carlos Slim (who already controls Mexico’s tobacco industry) and sold abroad in slick $20 packs of rolled joints. (2011, 205–206) The Global Commission on Drug Policy (GCDP)’s narrow focus on drug policy reform is shared by a number of transnational organizations dedicated to this topic. In fact, the GDCP was joined by an array of organizations seeking to influence the deliberation of the special 2016 UNGASS. This included the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC), which is a global network of more than 160 civil society organizations that have come together to promote open debates on national and international drug policies. With partners throughout Latin America, the IDPC has been dedicated to supporting domestic drug reform

Advocacy networks   137 groups with resources and research to assist their efforts within their respective countries and symbolic protest actions that take place simultaneously in different countries. It has also sought to coordinate efforts between civil society groups and member-­states on a transnational basis especially in efforts to influence the UN drug control bodies. Given the centrality of the different international drug control treaties in granting legitimacy to the prohibitionist paradigm the idea of working on a national and transnational level is logical. The IDPC began in 2006 and since that time it has been associated with an array of activities in support of drug policy reform. A year after its founding it established its presence in Latin America bringing in different member organizations from the region. The IDPC has 166 groups as part of its civil society “network” from around the world. There are no membership fees, but these groups need “to be committed to supporting the IDPC vision and mission, strategic directions, policy principles and work plan” (International Drug Policy Consortium n.d.). There are thirty-­nine Latin American groups in their network, with Table 5.1 listing the groups present in Colombia, Mexico, Bolivia, and Peru. These groups are aided by IDPC in the development of their advocacy capacities. For example, in 2013 it published a “Drug Policy Training Toolkit” with the aim of building “… the capacity of civil society organizations for influencing Table 5.1  Members of the IDPC network Colombia

Mexico

Peru

Bolivia

Accion tecnica social

Centro de respuestas Centro de Accion semilla educativas y investigacion drogas Bolivia comunitarias y derechos humanos

Centro de estudios Colectivo por una de derecho justicia y politica integral sociedad hacia las drogas

Andean Information Network

Corporacion humanas Colombia

Equis justicia para las mujeres

Puente, investigacion y enlace

Observatorio de cultivos y cultivadores declarados ilicitos

Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights

Pares en accionreaccion contra la exclusion social

Mexico unido contra la delincuencia

Red Americana de intervencion en situaciones de sufrimiento social

Reverdeser colectivo

Source: International Drug Policy Consortium (n.d.).

138   Advocacy networks drug policy processes as national, regional, and international levels” (International Drug Policy Consortium 2016b). The IDPC has also maintained a pragmatic position as to their partners and members of their network. They, like the GCDP represent more of what Cox refers to as the “problem-­solvers” spectrum of the drug policy reform movement. They do not view the war on drugs as a tactic in a larger effort to integrate economies into global capitalism and/or a tool by domestic elites in Latin America seeking pretexts for a militarized social order. At least part of the explanation for this narrow focus rests in the centrality of the largest funder of the international drug policy reform movement, the Open Society Foundation.

The Open Society and George Soros The IDPC, like the GCDP, is in part financed by the Open Society Foundations (OSF ). The OSF also contributes to the U.S. based Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) and the Amsterdam based Transnational Institute. The OSF was founded in 1979 and financed (and continues to be financed) by the multi-­billionaire financier George Soros. His organization funds a wide range of causes dedicated to civil rights, democracy, and press freedom. Soros views the drug problem as one in which “…  fear had stifled the critical process and had given rise to false dogmas characterized by prejudice and intolerance, which undermine the principles of open society” (Soros 2011, 29) with Soros being convinced that drug prohibitionist strategies were worse than the “disease” of drug addiction (Porter 2015, 186). The OSF is governed by an array of different boards covering topics such as global drug policy, public health, press freedom, and women’s rights as well as boards overseeing funding projects in different regions of the world. At the top of this organizational structure is OSF ’s “Open Society Global Board” which is chaired by Soros and includes several members of his family. Eleven of the twenty-­five members of this global board come from either the financial industry and/or are linked with elite policy planning groups such as the European Council on Foreign Relations or the International Chamber of Commerce. Table 5.2 lists these eleven individuals and their corporate elite affiliations: Regarding drug policy reform, the DEA refers to Soros, and a few other billionaires, as being central to the success of the cannabis legalization movement in the United States, with Soros’ monies contributing to groups like the Marijuana Policy Project and the DPA, which have targeted states for Marijuana legalization initiatives (medical and recreational use). Between 1994 and 2014 Soros, whose wealth was created through hedge fund and financial speculation, contributed over $200 million to U.S. drug reform efforts. In addition, his Open Society Foundation has given about $11 billion since 1979 to a range of causes internationally, including human rights, public health, and drug policy (Sorvino 2014). Within the U.S. drug policy reform effort, his contributions led to other billionaires and millionaires to contribute to the cause (Sorvino 2014). According to the chairman of the DPA, Ethan Nadelmann, Soros “… played a historic role in the evolution of drug policy reform from a movement that was at the

Advocacy networks   139 Table 5.2  Transnational elite members of the Open Society Global Board Name

Affiliation

George Soros

Founder and owner of the hedge fund, Soros Fund Management

Maria Livanos Cattaui

Former secretary general of the International Chamber of Commerce from 1996 to 2005

Mabel Van Oranje

Cofounder and the Executive Chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations

Jonathan Soros

Chief Executive Officer of JS Capital Management LLC, a private investment firm

Andrea Soros Colombel

The board chair of the acumen fund, a social enterprise investment fund

John Pang

A director in a major southeast Asian banking group, he led policy engagement and founded an independent research institute and a council of regional business leaders

Moises Naim

Served as Venezuela’s Minister of Trade and Industry; Director of Venezuela’s central bank, and Executive Director of the World Bank; founder and chairman of the Group of Fifty (G50) and a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy

Mark Malloch-Brown

Chairman of SGO and its elections division Smartmatic, a leading elections technology company. He is on the boards of Investec and Seplat, which are listed on the London as well as Johannesburg and Lagos stock markets respectively. He is also on the board of Kerogen, an oil and gas private equity fund. He is a senior adviser to FTI consulting where he previously led its EMEA practice

Ivan Krastev

Founding board member of the European council on foreign relations

Anatole Kaletsky

Cochairman and chief economist of Gavekal Dragonomics, an investment research and asset management group based in Hong Kong and Beijing. He is a well-known economic commentator, a director of JP Morgan emerging markets investment trust and was chairman of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) from its foundation in 2010 until 2015

Daniel Sachs

CEO and member of the board of Proventus Ab, a familyowned investment company. He is also the founder and CEO of Proventus Capital Management, the leading non-bank corporate lender in northern Europe, providing development capital through loans and bonds to European mid-sized companies

Source: Open Society Foundation (n.d.).

140   Advocacy networks fringe of U.S. politics to one that is in the mainstream” (as cited in Sorvino 2014). For some, the transnational drug reform effort is too heavily influenced by Soros’ money with analysts like Coletta Youngers concerned that if the priorities of OSF change that there are few alternatives as significant as OSF to fill the funding gap (Sykpe Interview December 22, 2016). Soros has defined the mission of his foundation as: “(1) opening closed societies, (2) making open societies more viable, and (3) promoting a critical mode of thinking” (Soros 2011, 12). Soros, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, became one of the wealthiest human beings on earth through his hedge fund Quantum, a fund that fully took advantage of global capital liberalization, including forcing the “… United Kingdom out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and into recession by shorting sterling, making an estimated $1 billion in a single day” as well as contributing to the 1997 Asian financial crisis by “… short-­selling the Thai baht and the Malay ringgit” (Wilson 2015). More recently, Soros’ investments have also included gold mining projects in Sub-­ Saharan Africa that have wreaked havoc upon traditional communities and the environment (Wilson 2015). Global financial capitalism and the whole range of neoliberal economic policies since the 1980s have devastated lives of hundreds of millions of Latin Americans. They have simultaneously expanded a population needing to turn to illegal drug production and distribution to survive while facilitating the laundering of illegal drug profits on a global scale. Thus, Soros has benefitted and manipulated the rules associated with the model of global capitalism to his benefit while contributing monies to ameliorate some of the negative consequences of this economic model such as drug policy reform (along with some former Latin American policymakers at the heart of neoliberal reforms). In fact, Soros wrote that “in spite of its shortcomings, I am an ardent supporter of globalization. I support it not only for because of the extra wealth it produces but even more because of the freedom it can offer” (Soros 2002, 7). This contradiction of benefitting from an economic system so central to the drug trade is also present in Soros’ reformist critiques of this economic model as he has consistently called for greater regulations over financial speculation and policies to reduce inequality in the global economy (in terms of power and income). Soros refers to global capitalism as an “incomplete regime” in which the economic aspects have developed on a global level, but the political and social components remain wedded to nation-­states, asserting that capitalism requires democratic institutions to reduce its excesses (Soros 2000, 177; 181). While Soros has expressed support in softening the rough elements of global capitalism he has also openly supported the creation of a type of transnational state consisting of an alliance of the dominant democratic nation-­states in the world. This “open-­ society alliance” would operate with or without the United Nations and be dedicated to promoting “open societies” in the world and establishing rules to govern the behavior of states within their own territory (Soros 2000, 330). For Soros an “open society” is simply the spread of liberal market democracies, ones in which property rights are protected and basic safety nets are established and in which a

Advocacy networks   141 global alliance of developed democracies intervenes to enforce this model of capitalist democracy (Soros 2000, 133). The various drug policy reform groups financed by the OSF, committed to many of the principles and values that George Soros represents, mobilized on a transnational basis in an effort to influence the outcome of UNGASS 2016.

UNGASS 2016 Despite the elite nature of the drug policy organizations funded by the OSF they would make little progress at the 2016 UNGASS. Years of meetings and reports demonstrating the negative consequences of punitive drug control regime, did little to change the position of central member-­states or the international conventions. The UNGASS Outcome Document, which was largely authored by the CND and presented at the very start of the UNGASS in New York, re-­committed to the prohibitionist approach and excluded acknowledgment of “harm reduction” approaches (Transnational Institute 2016). The negotiations within the CND Secretariat largely excluded civil society participation, despite the substantial efforts of scores of drug policy INGOS, with the CND requiring a “global consensus” in order to approve any substantial changes to the prohibitionist model (Transnational Institute 2016). In fact, the UNGASS Outcome Document continues to explicitly aspire for “a society free of drug abuse” by 2019, which the “Civil Society Statement” on the Outcome Document properly viewed as “delusional and dangerous” (Transnational Institute 2016). The GCDP concluded that the UNGASS outcome document  does not call for an end to criminalization and incarceration of drug users. It does not urge states to abolish capital punishment for drug-­related offences … It does not advocate for harm reduction and treatment strategies that have demonstrated effectiveness. Finally it does not offer proposals to regulate drugs and put governments—rather than criminals—in control. (As cited in Avert 2016)3 The Secretary General of the UN, Ban-­Ki Moon, had promised an open process where different opinions and questions were welcomed. However, the UN Commission on National Drugs, where drug prohibitionist countries retain a great deal of power and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) dominated the process as opposed to the General Assembly. In particular, member-­states from Latin America and Africa lacked permanent representation in Vienna (where these two bodies are based) and could not involve themselves in the entire preparatory process. In addition, institutionally the UN typically is dedicated to seeking “consensus” allowing states who support the current prohibitionist regime the ability to stop any significant changes (Hetzer et al. 2016). Despite the substantial failure of global civil society to utilize UNGASS 2016 to shift away from the prohibitionist paradigm toward one that places greater value on human rights and public health the Transnational Institute (another INGO allied with IDCP and the GDCP) concluded that

142   Advocacy networks The UNGASS process as a whole has set the stage for more substantial changes at the next high-­level meeting in 2019, in relation to human rights, the Sustainable Development Goals, regulated cannabis markets and the creation of an expert advisory group to improve the functioning and coherence of the global drug control system. (Bewley-­Taylor and Jelsma 2016, 1) It is not clear that improving “the functioning and the coherence of the global drug system” would necessarily be opposed by prohibitionist minded states such as the United States. Even though the U.S. had seen substantial progress on a regional level within its country in terms of the regulation of cannabis markets in the years leading up to the UNGASS it explicitly stated at the start of this process that “As a starting point, it is essential that Member States use the UNGASS to reaffirm support for the three UN drug-­control conventions” (as cited in Bewley-­Taylor and Jelsma 2016, 5). In fact, there was a global alliance firmly in support of the UN drug control treaty framework, one that was re-­ affirmed by the fall of 2015 with explicit statements from EU representatives and the U.S. committing only to UNGASS outcome documents that stayed within these prohibitionist paradigms. As the Transnational Institute acknowledged “any discussion about the legal foundations and basic principles of the UN drug control system was thus blocked early on in the process by an explicit, and politically powerful, US-­EU agreement,” which was supported by the G7, several Asian, Middle-­Eastern, and African countries as well as the UN drug control bureaucracy (Bewley-­Taylor and Jelsma 2016, 5–6). Given that much of the transnational advocacy network involved in drug policy reform were aware of this global coalition in support of prohibition before the April 2016 UNGASS it is not immediately clear how the various testimonies/press conferences/strategizing with different member-­states was going to change this reality. This transnational advocacy network and their efforts to directly lobby/convince member-­states consisting of groups such as the GDCP and the IDPC were part of what Ted Lewis, the human rights director of the social justice organization and U.S. based group Global Exchange, viewed as the “insider” strategy. A strategy in which GDCP and IDPC activists/intellectuals coordinated meetings/ strategies with member-­state representatives or gave speeches in civil society forums within the UN in Vienna and New York in the hopes of making headway in reforming/modifying UN positions/treaties on international drug policy (Phone interview, December 8, 2016). The individuals and groups central to this “insider” strategy is reminiscent of other professionalized, international NGOs (INGOS) that have sought to influence institutions such as the UN or the World Bank. For instance, Leslie Sklair summarizes the work of INGOs dedicated to women’s rights, which mirrors relevant issues in the transnational drug policy reform effort, he writes: Early formal successes in establishing organizations and gaining entry to the corridors of power proved to be an illusion, as evidence mounted that

Advocacy networks   143 nothing much has changed in the lives of most of the women on whose effectiveness of the monitoring method, as women’s NGOs followed structures and procedures that the World Bank, UN, and other powerful organizations laid down for them. This professionalization has brought to the fore a new transnational and transcultural class of lobbyists, who appear really on top of their subject and tools, competent and eloquent, who tour the world with a high salary, a high expense account, and an equally high appraisal of themselves. This has led to a hierarchical differentiation among the women’s NGOs. (Sklair 2002, 315) In reviewing the history of INGOS Sklair concludes that “under the conditions of capitalist globalization the ever-­closer connections with officialdom is a mixed blessing for NGOs, and the evidence on such collaborations suggests that it is the agenda of globalizing business and governments, often mutually reinforcing, that drives the process” (2002, 316). A similar process of professionalization and adapting to the structures of the UN are apparent in transnational advocacy networks dedicated to drug policy reform as well as a “hierarchical differentiation.” In contrast to the elite level negotiations and lobbying at the center of the work embarked upon by groups such as the IDPC and GCPD there have been repeated actions by a more critically influenced wing of the drug policy reform movement that explicitly places the prohibitionist paradigm within a larger context of U.S. imperialism and/or the imperatives of global capitalism. Groups such as Global Exchange, and the Movement of Peace, Justice and Dignity (MPJD), and Reverdeser have focused their energies largely within civil society and integrated their critique of drug policy with their critique of global capitalism. More of what Lewis of Global Exchange referred to as an “outsider” strategy as opposed to the “insider” strategy of meeting with state parties in Vienna (Phone Interview, December 8, 2016). Important illustrations of this larger perspective and “outsider” strategy are captured by the different “caravans” that have been organized around drug policy since 2011 in Latin America.

Caravans and an “outsider” strategy The work of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD) is a Mexican based social movement that is committed to organizing against the prohibitionist paradigm promoted by both the Mexican and U.S. states. The MPJD emerged specifically in response to the failed war launched by Calderón in 2006, one that corresponded with substantial increases in homicides and disappearances, with sectors of the local, regional, and national state often working hand in hand with drug trafficking organizations and utilizing the security forces to protect their illegal business relations. The MPJD not only sought the end of this militarization, but promoted a public health paradigm to  psychoactive substances and their legalization while also stressing the

144   Advocacy networks importance of reducing the poverty and unemployment contributing to the strength of Mexico’s cartels. They not only sought to organize within Mexico, but very early on recognized the importance of linking with U.S. activists and pressuring U.S. state managers given their centrality in financing/promoting Calderón’s militarization. One of the more important leaders of MPJD was Javier Sicilia. Sicilia, an internationally renowned Mexican poet, was motivated by the March 2011 brutal torture and murder of his son (as well as six others) by members of a drug gang who had accused two of his friends of reporting them to the police (Padgett 2011). In an April 2011 letter to Mexico’s politicians Sicilia wrote: We have had it up to here because our children, due to the absence of a good government plan, do not have opportunities to educate themselves, to find dignified work and are spit out into the sideline to become possible recruits for organized crime and violence … Sicilia later would go on to condemn Mexico’s political elite, which he viewed as only prioritizing their financial wealth and “unmeasured consumption,” which he categorized as another form of violence in Mexico (Sicilia 2011). Sicilia called for mass protests against the level of violence and impunity in Mexico with the public responding with protests across the country, including a march of over 100,000 people from Cuernavaca to Mexico City in May of 2011 (Scholl 2015, 52). Sicilia’s leadership and the public’s mobilization around this issue helped to launch the MPJD. The organization focused upon networking with different civil society organizations throughout Mexico and emphasizing its opposition to the criminalization of drug consumption and trafficking while promoting developmental and public health solutions to these issues. This objective, along with addressing corruption and impunity in Mexico, were central objectives of the movement. While Sicilia’s call for protests and demonstrations brought tens of thousands of Mexicans to the streets of Mexico, it still faced the challenge of spreading its message throughout Mexico and eventually to the United States. This failure to raise awareness in the United States to drug war violence that had claimed 60,000 by the time Sicilia’s son was killed was disturbing to drug reform activists in Mexico given the centrality of U.S. policy and the links between transnational elites in both countries in specifically crafting the Mérida Initiative. To address this need to reach the wider Mexican and U.S. public, the MPJD decided to utilize caravans of two to four weeks to different regions of Mexico and eventually into the United States (Scholl 2015, 53). As opposed to interacting with member-­state representatives in Vienna or formal presentations at civil society panels in New York, these caravans involved meetings and demonstrations with the immediate victims of the drug war, specifically relatives that had lost loved ones at the hands of the state in the implementation of prohibitionist strategies (Scholl 2015, 53). Scholl nicely summarizes the importance of the caravan strategy, arguing that

Advocacy networks   145 through Caravans, activists aimed to counter misinformation with the physical presence of the victims’ families in many different places, sending a material sign of both indignation and hope. In this way the travelling activists wanted to break with existing dominating communication strategies and an attitude of socio-­cultural indifference to the consequences of entangled power linkages between particular state officials and organized crime in those very places where fear had kept hope and civic engagement at their lowest. (2015, 56) By the summer of 2012, Sicilia and his compatriots in MPJD had completed two separate caravans to the north and south of Mexico and were ready to lead a caravan north of the U.S.–Mexican border. The “Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity” consisted of the mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers of Mexicans murdered and disappeared in the war on drugs. It represented the first time that such a caravan was traveling from Mexico to the United States to directly lobby U.S. citizens and the U.S. state to take responsibility for the violence and instability directly connected to the U.S. prohibitionist agenda (Hayden 2012). Sicilia made it clear during this tour of why the Mexican based movement was coming to the United States The War on Drugs started here in America, and we want Americans to take their share of responsibility and help end it. As citizens of the world, all of us can stop the war by forcing our states to change to a public health policy, to control the trafficking of these arms of destruction, to end the money laundering and use the savings from the legalization of drugs to compensate the victims and recreate the social fabric. (as cited in Hayden 2012) By the end of its U.S. tour it had visited twenty-­six cities, traveled 5,700 miles and received substantial media coverage in key media markets within the U.S. (Global Exchange 2012). At each point special events were held in which U.S. based drug reform activists exchanged experiences and strategies with Mexican activists, or marched together in protest or collectively met with governmental representatives from the U.S. The U.S. based partners of the “Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity” included an array of civil rights and drug policy reform groups, including the NAACP, DPA, the American Friends Service Committee, and Students for Sensible Drug Policy. The caravan also received state endorsements from scores of groups operating in different states across the country. Most importantly, the U.S. based NGO Global Exchange, which managed the logistics for the MPJD caravan in the U.S. Global Exchange is an international human rights organization that is committed to “promoting social, economic and environmental justice.” The organization has been active since 1988 and focuses much of its energies upon promoting fair trade commerce, influencing U.S. foreign policy as well as exposing people living in the United States to the

146   Advocacy networks problems/limitations of U.S. interventions in the world through public education. Ted Lewis, their human rights director at Global Exchange, was centrally involved in the logistics for the MPJD caravan in the U.S. as well as the 2016 caravan (see below). Lewis stated that they “see the drug war as an extension of U.S. militarism in the region … a pretext for U.S. militarization” and that the “drug war” is consistent “with a history in which regional elites use lethal force to deal with social conflict” (Phone Interview, December 8, 2016). The objective of the 2011 caravan was to not only influence the national governments of the United States and Mexico, but more importantly educate and  inform the greater public with the hope that policy changes could be forthcoming. Sicilia and the MPJD were also quite clear that issues of regulation or legalization of psychoactive substances represented only a part of the larger challenges facing societies in both countries. A similar effort in 2016 centered on UNGASS 2016, but also broadened the critique and message to include a larger struggle against capitalist globalization and neoliberalism. UNGASS caravan-­2016 As was noted above in the lead up, and during, the 2016 UNGASS organizations such as the GPDC and the IDPC were engaged in direct lobbying of member-­ states in Vienna and New York, coordinating diplomatic strategies with other state leaders, giving testimony in special sessions reserved for civil society by the CND or bringing awareness through specific publicity campaigns. Simultaneously, activist organizations such as Global Exchange and groups such as Reverdeser in Mexico were organizing another cross-­border caravan. According to Lewis, who coordinated the “No More Drug War” caravan this caravan was made up “… a diverse group of people including victims of the drug war, families who have lost relatives to violence or incarceration, human rights defenders, journalists, faith leaders, activists and others” (Krasovitzky and Lewis 2016). This caravan did receive some financial support from OSF, but this support paled in comparison with the resources dedicated to the “insider strategy” within the halls of the UN Lewis estimates that 90 to 95 percent of OSF funding around the UNGASS 2016 was allocated to the diplomatic work on specific drug policy changes to the international conventions (Phone Interview December 8, 2016). The objective of the 2016 caravan was to complement the diplomatic strategies of the elite drug reform organizations with greater attention to the “local,” to better illustrate how drug prohibitionist strategies were affecting Latin Americans on the ground (Global Exchange n.d.). As the organizers pointed out “the debate must extend far beyond the Chambers of the United Nations” and the caravan represented one way in which this was going to take place. In contrast to the Sicilia-­led caravan, this “No More Drug War” caravan began in Honduras on March 28, 2016 and traveled through El Salvador and Guatemala before driving through Mexico on its way to New York. The aim of the caravan was not only to ensure that the diplomatic representatives attending the April UNGASS would be confronted by those groups most affected by the prohibitionist strategy, but

Advocacy networks   147 also to illustrate the intersections between the “war on drugs” and the various neoliberal economic strategies associated with drug prohibition. As Ted Lewis of Global Exchange, who was central to the organizing of the 2011 and 2016 caravans noted “we have a much different ability and desire to work with grassroots organizations … a pinpoint focus on drug policy tends to ring hollow for the civil society groups that we work with” (Phone Interview, December 8, 2016). Lewis also stressed that this broader perspective is also present in drug policy struggles in Mexico, stating that “… in Mexico the idea that the drug war is simply gringos using drugs and Mexicans dying has been expanded to consider the role that the drug war plays in politics and power within Mexico” (Phone Interview, December 8, 2016). One Mexican based organization, Reverdeser Colectivo illustrates this point. Reverdeser is a group of young drug reform activists who are seeking the end of drug prohibition in Mexico, promoting “… a system of regulation that places at the “center” of their work the “people, communities not the substances.” Their work directly links the need for a regulatory/public health approach to the militarization of resource rich regions in Mexico, killings of Mexican journalists and Mexico’s extreme inequality. Andres Hirsch, a Mexican drug reform activist with Reverdeser, who participated in both the 2012 and 2016 caravans stated that his organization is dedicated to a full spectrum strategy that includes reducing the harm of drug use, defending the interests of families that have lost loved ones to drug prohibition, ending the impunity enjoyed by security forces and reducing the harm to society caused by drug prohibition. (Skype Interview, December 2, 2016) He, and Reverdeser, viewed the 2016 UNGASS caravan as opportunity to expand the debate that was going on in the closed doors of UNGASS to include civil society a “space where victims can speak” (ibid.). For Hirsch the war on drugs has overlapped with a number of different issues including displacement/ disappearances associated with mining investments, increasing the power of military and paramilitary forces, and an array of policies beneficial to large capitalists. The commitment of Reverdeser to the intersection between the war on drugs and capitalist globalization was also shared by the environmental activist Berta Cáceres from the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH). COPINH was part of the larger transnational coalition backing the 2016 caravan, which started in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. On March 3, 2016 Cáceres was murdered by members of the Honduran security forces; demonstrating the intersections between the war on drugs and the interests of transnational capital (Lakhani 2017). Caceres had been fighting for over a decade against a major dam project that would have led to the construction of seventeen dams in her community’s territory. The project represented a joint venture between the Honduran government and multiple TNCs hoping to profit from the construction.

148   Advocacy networks Global Witness concluded in 2014 that Honduras was the most dangerous country in the world, relative to its size, for environmental activists—with twelve environmental activists assassinated during that year and over 100 killed between 2002 and 2014 (Global Witness 2015). Caceres’ colleague Gustavo Castro who was wounded in the attack that killed Caceres concluded that: governments are opening their borders to investment under the mechanisms of free trade. Large companies are vying for the land … The free trade agreements require governments to change laws to facilitate investment. If they do not, the company can sue … [and] the defender who comes in, is beaten up, murdered and nobody knows why. (As cited in Carlsen 2016) Caceres was on an army’s hit list, an army whose many units have enjoyed drug-­ war related training and financing from the United States (Carlsen 2016). In fact, through the Central American Regional Security Initiative (CARSI), the United States has provided almost $1 billion in drug control assistance to Central American governments. In 2016 the Obama administration provided the largest amount of assistance in ten years to the security forces of Central America (Isacson and Kinosian 2016). U.S. marines have trained Guatemala’s brutal and corrupt Kaibiles special forces unit, the DEA has accompanied Honduran forces on anti-­drug missions that have led to multiple civilian casualties while the U.S. Defense Department trained 300 Honduran military personnel in 2011 (Youngers 2013, 15; Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs 2017). Between 2007 and 2014 Honduras led the region in the number of U.S. Special Forces training missions (21) as part of the tripling of such missions for the region as a whole (Kinosian and Isacson 2016). U.S. Special Forces in Honduras have played a larger role in the country’s fight against gangs. They were instrumental in building Honduras’ elite SWAT squad, the Tigres, which was created in 2013 to combat organized crime. U.S. Green Berets now advise and monitor operationsand train Tigre officers in marksmanship and close-­ quarters combat. (Kinosian and Isacson 2016) The expansion of these training relations has occurred despite the military’s 2009 coup against Manuel Zelaya. Zelaya was removed in part for attempting mild redistributive measures—measures that were unacceptable to the traditional and transnational elite of Honduras. He had also been quite public in his criticisms of the U.S. drug war complaining about “U.S. interventionism” under the pretext of the “drug war” while strengthening relations with Venezuela and Honduras (Kozloff and Weinberg n.d.). The rapid transition to a newly elected government made up supporters of the coup was fully endorsed by the United States. The president that received Obama’s endorsement, Pepe Lobo, would later be implicated in multiple investigations of Honduran drug traffickers who alleged that

Advocacy networks   149 Lobo worked directly with them in the shipment of illegal drugs. This included receiving Lobo’s promise not to extradite the leader of Honduras’ most prominent trafficking network and providing security for cocaine shipment for hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes while drug smuggling planes landing in Honduras surged in the months after the coup (Kozloff and Weinberg n.d.). In addition, Lobo’s administration dedicated greater resources to suppressing protesters and democracy activists challenging Lobo’s legitimacy as well as launched accusations against Zelaya of drug trafficking (Bargent 2017; Pachico 2011; Kozloff and Weinberg n.d.). Thus, the administration that has gone the furthest in rhetorically criticizing the drug war in more than a generation is the same one that has ratcheted up the training and financing of the Honduran security forces in order to fight the “war on drugs.” Yet Central America has  become one of the most violent regions in the world in large part because of sectors of these very same security forces, and their civilian allies, have maintained alliances with drug traffickers to facilitate drug trafficking, mining concessions or dam projects.

Conclusion The organizations that are receiving an elite audience in this global drug reform debate are those groups, which not only do not question the core precepts of capitalist globalization, but are being financed and led by transnational elites who directly benefit (and have benefitted) from its expansion and institutionalization. They seek to place a “human face” on drug policy, reducing or softening the prohibitionist edges of the policy while simultaneously promoting market competition and the legalization of the drug trade as the central model of reform. In contrast groups such as Global Exchange, MJPD, or Reverdeser have explicitly contextualized their opposition to prohibition within a larger resistance to capitalist globalization, neoliberalism, and U.S. Imperialism. Transnational advocacy groups around drug policy reform illustrate the extent that capitalist globalization and the transnational elite are shaping the resistance to these policies. The most influential groups within this debate are those financed and/or networked with transnational capital who narrowly focus their attention to mitigating the consequences of prohibition and/or shifting to regulated markets for psycho­ active substances. They do represent important cracks in the long-­standing consensus among the global establishment regarding the effectiveness of this approach given the disorder and violence that increasingly accompanies prohibitionist tactics. Yet, the continued need for a policy pretext to justify greater domestic security, social control, and to absorb surplus populations retains its hold on elites operating through national states and global institutions. The Honduran case illustrates the challenges facing transnational drug reform activists and the limitations of “insider” strategies focused upon international drug control treaties. The need to ensure reliable access to markets for transnational capital and the need to utilize the “war on drugs” to facilitate this effort suggests that drug reform efforts must be embedded in larger struggles for social justice and resistance to capitalist globalization.

150   Advocacy networks

Notes 1 The Drug Policy Foundation was established in 1987 and the Lindesmith Center was established in 1994. Both of these organizations sought to engage in nationwide advocacy against the drug war, with the Drug Policy Foundation representing the first to establish a membership organization (in a substantial way) around challenging the prohibitionist paradigm (Drug Policy Alliance n.d.). The Drug Policy Alliance continues this effort. 2 In 1996 California was the first state to legalize medical marijuana. 3 Of course, the development of regulated markets of cannabis in the United States has increasingly brought the private sector with greater control.

Conclusion

In the book Addicted to Failure: U.S. Security Policy in Latin America and the Andean Region Brian Loveman asks the following Why do U.S. policies ostensibly designed to promote rule of law, respect for human rights, democratization, and political stability instead contribute to widespread corruption, erosion of government authority, human rights violations, increasing socioeconomic inequality, and political instability? (2006, xiv) For over a century the United States has domestically and internationally promoted a set of prohibitionist drug policies that have consistently failed to stop illegal psychoactive drugs from entering the U.S. market or being produced in the region. Nor have different U.S. governments been able to sustainably maintain declines in the use of these substances. This failure continued despite the ratcheting up of a militarized, more aggressive approach in its relations with Latin America during the last decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-­first century. In fact, since the 1980s U.S. drug control policies have contributed to human rights violations, widespread corruption, political instability and even direct support for individuals or institutions directly implicated in drug trafficking into the United States. Realist, Liberal and Marxist perspectives all fall short in addressing this puzzle or to paraphrase Loveman “addiction to failure.” Ostensibly, realists assert that U.S. state policy in the region is governed by the reality of its hegemonic position as well as state survival in an international system of anarchy. One would expect that at the very minimum U.S. policies would not be involved in facilitating drug trafficking given the explicit, and repeated, statements about its threat to the national security interests of the U.S. However, at different periods U.S. intelligence services were facilitating drug trafficking into the United States (the Iran-­Contra Affair), sharing intelligence with an ally of narcotraffickers (Montesinos in Peru) or financing/training militaries with close ties to narcotrafficking organizations (in Colombia and Mexico). Not only did each of these episodes directly or indirectly aid in the trafficking of drugs to the United States, but they each contributed to greater instability and/or human rights violations in the country that was targeted.

152   Conclusion Liberal and constructivist perspectives ask us to focus more upon the domestic arena of ideological/partisan competition and/or the “construction” of threats by the mass media and political elites (i.e., norm entrepreneurs) to explain prohibitionist policy continuity despite over a century of failure. Liberal scholars suggest that the partisan competition is relevant to this policy puzzle, with electoral incentives limiting the policy space available to Democrats or Republicans. Thus, the fear of being viewed as “soft” on crime or drugs and public opinion viewing “drugs” as a priority that needs to be addressed through coercive means has led to political elites maintaining these policies. However, the originator of the contemporary “war on drugs,” Richard Nixon, pursued a policy in which over 60 percent of the federal government’s budget was dedicated to prevention and treatment measures, with the rest for law enforcement and interdiction. This was the last time that this ratio favored non-­law enforcement/ prohibitionist measures as beginning with the Ford administration Presidents have averaged 60 to 70 percent of their “drug war” budget toward law enforcement, supply eradication, and interdiction. This was the case whether the public was clamoring for answers on the “drug issue” or prioritized a concern over psychoactive substances in public opinion polls. In fact, from 1996 to the present-­day over twenty-­nine states legalized the use of cannabis for medical purpose, with seven of these states legalizing the use of cannabis for recreational purposes. In addition, since 2011 a consistent majority of Americans have supported the legalization of cannabis, yet the Obama administration’s budgetary priorities and prohibitionist approach in Latin America remained the same. The U.S. position at UNGASS 2016 was to uphold the prohibitionist international conventions while his administration oversaw billions of primarily security assistance and training to abusive, corrupt, and sometimes drug trafficking security forces in Mexico, Colombia, and Honduras. In other words, despite the sea change in the political costs of promoting regulatory policies or the dramatic (and seemingly permanent) shifts in U.S. public opinion over cannabis legalization the prohibitionist machine of the U.S. state’s “drug war” policy grinds on. Traditional Marxist analyses have fared better in addressing Loveman’s puzzle as it relates to drug policies, but have been weighed down by theoretical blinders associated with structuralist state theory as well as nation-­state biases that view all policy outcomes in Latin America as a consequence of the imperialist interests of the U.S. state. In a wide range of Marxist or radical views of the U.S. drug war these policies are viewed as simply pretexts to obtain access to Latin American resources, markets, and labor on behalf of U.S. based transnational capital. As with the war on Communism during the Cold War this is a symbolic concern over the actual of maintaining U.S. dominance on behalf of capital. This analysis allows these theorists to situate the “failure” of U.S. drug policy, or the human rights violations that it often causes, to the fact that the drug problem is really not the priority. However, what is left unanswered by these theorists is the “how” of this process? In other words, what is it about policy elites in both parties that would lead them to pursue a prohibitionist drug

Conclusion   153 policy agenda ostensibly for U.S. based capital? What explains the noted differences in the levels of militarization as well as cooperation/resistance to this agenda in the Americas? In other words, while the traditional Marxist perspective may resolve certain questions it still leaves many unanswered.

Global capitalism and policy networks What I have sought to demonstrate in this work is that in order to understand this policy puzzle an integrated critical approach is necessary, with a fundamental focus upon the theory of global capitalism and instrumentalist policy networks. It is obvious that U.S. power in the region is part of an asymmetrical system where Latin American states have been in a subordinate position. However, this is not simply (or mainly) a type of hegemony associated with Realist theory that stresses state power, but an economic, political, and social hegemony involving policy elites and norm entrepreneurs across the Americas. This type of transnational elite has not always been present, and has increasingly emerged during this new epoch of global capitalism in which transnational elites have obtained leadership roles within the U.S. state and different Latin America states since the 1980s. In other words, the policy narrative for U.S. drug policy offered by traditional Marxists was more relevant at earlier stages of capitalist development, but with the steady transition to the period of neoliberalism and global capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s this type of analysis increasingly made less sense. This helps us understand the timing of the growing militarization of drug policy as well as the increasing adoption/integration of these policies within Latin American states. Relatedly, the political transitions associated with capitalist globalization that witnessed the region shift from authoritarianism to low-­intensity democracies did not eliminate the continued need for coercive strategies of control, ones that would continue to call for the armed forces to play domestic roles in internal security. The “war on drugs” was utilized as an important justification for such strategies. The societal disruption associated with neoliberalism necessitated a periodic turn to repression. The explosion of the informal market in Latin America and a surplus population ready to fill the ranks of strengthening drug trafficking organizations were and continue to be an important result of this shift. The ratcheting up of prohibition and militarization reflected a central reaction to this development, this growing population required greater supervision and control within the U.S. and Latin America as a whole. The U.S. state has had the capacity to repress and warehouse this population within the U.S., disproportionately African-­American and Latino, but Latin America’s states have fallen short of this type of control. Much of U.S. drug policies genuinely seek to assist these governments establish a punishment oriented rule of law to facilitate the investments of not simply transnational capital based in the United States, but for the investment needs of global capital as a whole. This outcome has been the result of not simply dramatic and often wrenching changes in the global economy, but these policies also reflect the nature of the

154   Conclusion policy networks developing and implementing drug policy in the region. This transnational foreign policy elite is committed to a grand strategy serving the interests of the internationally oriented business community and of capitalist globalization as a whole. The consensus around militarized prohibition and eradication between governments in Colombia, Mexico, and the United States was illustrated in the negotiations and construction of Plan Colombia and the Merida Initiative. In neither case can one conclude that they were simply imposed on these countries by U.S. imperialists as elites based in Colombia and Mexico were fundamental to not simply the implementation of these policies, but in the development and priorities of these drug war aid packages. Likewise, the commitment to coca eradication in Peru and Bolivia was most pronounced when transnational elites governed their respective countries and was significantly disrupted in Bolivia when this elite no longer maintained control over the state. Thus, even the poorest country in South America (Bolivia) who was most vulnerable to U.S. political and economic pressure did not make genuine progress on coca eradication and repression of coca growers until representatives of its transnational elites were in decisive positions of power within the Bolivian state. Finally, importance of global capitalism and this transnational elite is relevant to the international resistance to prohibitionist drug policies. The centrality of George Soros and the Open Society Foundation in the direction and financing of the most important transnational advocacy networks has limited the extent that these networks will challenge not only drug prohibition, but the larger social and economic policies that are so central to the drug trafficking economy or the political uses of the “drug war” itself. Groups operating in civil society and explicitly linking the drug war to the larger issues of militarization and capitalist globalization remain marginal to the funding decisions of elites financing this movement. Despite this important limitation to transnational advocacy networks their activity during the past decade illustrates consequential fractures within the global elite consensus over prohibition. Within the United States and within Latin America there seems to be greater openness to a push against the orthodoxies of the prohibitionist paradigm, whether it be with the ongoing push for regulated cannabis markets on a regional level in the U.S., Bolivia’s promotion of legal coca commodities or the legalization of cannabis on a national level in Canada and Uruguay. Most observers expect that we will see continued progress in this direction, but the incoming Trump administration almost guarantees that this process will continue to face resistance in the halls of the United Nations or in U.S.–Latin American relations. Furthermore, no matter what evidence is presented for the “failure” of these policies they continue to helpfully justify military and judicial reform aid packages that allow the integration of security policies across borders creating receptive business environments in the region. In other words, the “war on drugs” remains useful given how it serves related policy priorities, ones vital to this elite transnational policy community. Only through extending and broadening political struggles beyond a narrow focus upon drug regulation vs prohibition can a genuine shift in paradigms take place, where “representation in international

Conclusion   155 institutions is firmly based upon an articulate social and political challenge to hegemony—upon a nascent historic bloc and counter-­hegemony” (Cox 1993, 63). A shift that challenges the more substantive and consequential paradigm of neoliberalism and capitalist globalization that is not only important in facilitating drug trafficking and production but also creating the conditions in which a relatively small elite must turn to a range of policy justifications and pretexts to retain its power and maintain social order in the region.

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Index

Page numbers in italics denote tables, those in bold denote figures. addiction 2, 31, 39, 138 African-Americans 28, 38, 43, 153 Agency for International Development (AID) 24, 69, 71, 114 alcohol prohibition movement 33 Alcohol Prohibition regime 31 alcohols 31 Alianza para la Seguridad y Prosperidad de America del Norte (ASPAN) 83 al-Qa’ida 67 American drug control policy, elements of 32 American Empire 13 American Enterprise Institute 22, 41 American Friends Service Committee 145 American International Association 39 American Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (APMA) 36; Remington Medal 36 amphetamines 37 Andean coca leaf production 35 Andean Drug Summit (1990) 105 Andean Initiative (1989) 50–8, 113 Andean Trade Preference and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA, 2002) 108–9, 114 Anderson, Perry 20 Andreas, Peter 18, 46 Annan, Kofi 132 Anslinger, Harry 33–6 anti-capitalist globalization 90, 113, 130 anti-capitalist movements 11 Anti-Drug Abuse Act (1986) 48, 95 antidrug programs 47–8 anti-narcotics campaign 29 Arellano Felix Organization (AFO) 62 armed insurgencies 35

Asian financial crisis (1997) 140 Baker, James 55 balloon effect 68 Bananas, Chiquita 83 Ban-Ki, Moon 132, 141 Banzer, Hugo 99, 102–4 barbiturates 37 Baum, Dan 38, 44 Berger, Sandy 69 Bilderberg Group 24 black market, for illegal drugs 31 Bolivia 95; Acción Democrática Nacionalista (ADN) party 102; agroentrepreneural zone 104; anti-narcotics programs 100; civil-military relations 99; coca eradication targets 101, 102; Coca Growers Federations 101; cocalero movement 103; Colombianization of 96; corruption, problems of 103; counternarcotics plan 113; criminal code 114; dependency on U.S. 100; drug control alliance with U.S. 114; economic liberalization 101; foreign direct investment 97; Hugo Banzer government (1997–2001) 102; Joint Task Force 102; labor strikes 99; labor unions, decline of 101; Landless Movement 115; Law 1008 96; military dictatorships 115; National Democratic Action Party (ADN) 99; Nationalist Revolutionary Movement 99; neoliberal economic policies 123; New Economic Policy 99; Pact for Democracy 99; Plan Dignidad 102; political killings 115; resistance to neoliberalism and militarized drug prohibition 112–18;

Index   177 social conflicts 99; state of siege by United States 101; Strategy for the Fight Against Drug Trafficking 1998–2002 102; transition to democratic rule 102; transnational elite 118; U.S. international narcotics drug strategy reports 120–3; violations of human rights 101; war on drugs 99–104; “Zero Coca” policy 102–3 Breier, Kimberly 82 British Petroleum 72 Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) 121 Bush administration: Andean Strategy (1989) 98, 105; Document of Cartagena 98; multilateral cooperation on war against drugs 98; National Security Strategy (2006) 81; war on terrorism 110 Bush, George H.W. 61, 82, 98, 113; drug control policy 50–8 Bush, George W. 78 business elite 30, 91n9 Business Roundtable 22, 41, 59n9 Buxton, Julia 31 Cáceres, Berta 147 Calderón, Felipe 62, 63, 77–8, 80, 130; economic agenda 84 cannabis 36; decriminalization of use of 39; legalization of 126, 131; for recreational use 126 capitalism, state assisted models of 36 capitalist development, principle of 13 capitalist economy 16 capitalist globalization 2, 10–11, 47, 125; expansion and consolidation of 49; integration of Latin America into 26; Peru’s integration into 109 capitalist world economy 11; third epoch in 30 Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity 145 Cardenas, Mauricio 74 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique 128 Carillo Fuentes Organization (CFO) 62 Carnegie, Andrew 134 Carpenter, Ted Galen 40 Cartagena Drug Summit (1990) 98 Cartagena Summit of Latin American leaders (2012) 128 Castro, Gustavo 148 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) 82

Central American Regional Security Initiative (CARSI) 89, 148 Central American Security Initiative 79 Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) 63 Centro Obrero Boliviano (COB) 101 certification policy, enactment of 48, 58 Chavez, Hugo 112 China Economic Club 103; International Advisory Council of 103 Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) 147 civil disobedience 109, 126 civil rights movement 43 civil society groups 1, 131, 135, 137, 147 Clinton, Bill 61, 69 coca boom 94 coca cultivation 100, 107, 121 coca eradication, strategies for 4 coca growers 101; civil disobedience 126; deaths of 104; violence by 126 Coca Growers Federations 101 coca leaves 35–6; trade of 93 Coca Monitoring Survey 122 coca production 4, 29, 68; banning of 92; boom in 94; coca-eradication goals 96; history of 92–7; industrialization of 111 coca-cocaine economy 101 coca-growing narcofarmers 110 cocaine: Andean coca leaf production 35; demand of 94; effects on AfricanAmericans 28; main producers of 29; production of 92–3; sale of 28; sources of 4; trafficking into United States 35, 68; wholesale cocaine trade 46 cocalero movement 103, 124n7 Cold War 13, 14, 55, 56, 115 Colombia: anti-globalization armed insurgency 68; armed forces 4; Clinton administration’s new policies towards 69; coca production 68; counterinsurgency tactics 69; drug policies 68; labor market in 68; Plan Colombia see Plan Colombia; Special Forces 69; transnational elites 73–6; unemployment, rate of 67; US aid and extrajudicial executions in 75 Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (CCPCJ) 126, 133–4 Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) 126 Committee for Economic Development 41, 59n9

178   Index Committee of Santa Fe 42, 58 Communist China 34 “Communist” opium 34 Communist revolution 93 CONFIEP 107 Controlled Substance Act (1970) 38 Convention on Psychotropic Substances (1971) 37, 130 Coors, Joseph 41, 44 corporate (monopoly) capitalism 30 corporate social responsibility 132 Correa, Nils Ericsson 107 corruption: drug-related 80; problem of 103 Council for Inter-American Security 42, 58 Council of the Americas 22, 86 Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) 22–3, 27, 40–1, 54, 64, 71, 80 Council on National Policy (CNP) 44 counter-cocaine progress, in Andes 122 counternarcotics and counterinsurgency operations 37–8 Cox, Robert 25, 127; “problem-solving” theory 2; world orders, concept of 2 crack epidemic 42 crime, impact of globalization on 15–18 criminal “predators” 43 Cuban revolution (1959) 35 dangerous drugs, control of 31 de Graaf, Naná 13–14, 19, 64, 86 de Soto, Hernando 105 debt crisis 10, 17, 45–6, 94 decertification, threats of 98, 103, 122–3 Defense Authorization Law (2002) 72 democracy, defense of 50 Dennis, Marie 54, 101 détente, idea of 40, 42 DeWine, Mike 71 Document of Cartagena 98 Domhoff, G. William 20 drug abuse 5; linkage with minorities 43; and threat to national security 35 drug addiction, disease of 39, 138 drug cartels 3, 58; Gulf Cartel 62; Medellín and Cali cartels 62, 68; of Mexico 63; Sinaloa Cartel 62 drug consumption, criminalization of 144 drug control laws 35, 118; see also laws and legislations, against use of illegal drugs drug czar 56, 89, 107, 109, 120 drug economy, illegal 15, 66, 98 Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) 38, 122

drug free world, goal of 130 drug gangs 58, 144 drug money laundering see money laundering drug panics 43 drug policies, in Latin American countries 18; “globalized-localism” model 18 Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) 126, 138 Drug Policy Foundation 126, 150n1 drug prohibition: Alcohol Prohibition regime 31; influence of the U.S. on 32; UN Single Convention of 1961 on 31 drug scare 42 drug smuggling 44, 149 drug trade: informal economies of 43; international 15 drug trafficking 25; of cocaine 35; as crimes against public health 95; criminalization of 144; economy of 154; problem of 3; threat of 11, 84; transnational organization in 15; into United States 35 drug trafficking industry 25 drug trafficking organizations 42, 49; foreign-based 71 Dunkerley, James 100 Durán, Juan Carlos 96 economic bullying 136 economic crises 30, 46, 93–4, 99, 104 economic freedom and social control, politics of 43 economic globalization 11, 13, 89 economic liberalization, of Latin American economies 45, 101 Ehrlichman, John 38 Ejercito de Liberación Nacional (ELN) 62 Empire of Capital 12 employment 94, 100; industrial 59n10; in Latin America 17 ENACO 122 Enterprise for the Americas Initiative (EAI) 57 Epstein, Edward 39 Estenssoro, Victor Paz 95, 99 European Council on Foreign Relations 138 European Exchange Rate Mechanism 140 European Union 90 failed states, dangers of 58, 67 “false positives” scandal 62, 74–5, 129 Federal Bureau of Narcotics 33, 35 Fellowship of Reconciliation 74, 76

Index   179 financial liberalization 15, 46, 77 Fisher, Richard 82 Fontaine, Roger 42 Ford Foundation 71 Ford, Henry 134 foreign credit, collapse of 10 foreign direct investment 10, 11, 30, 35, 62, 111 foreign intelligence agencies 44 Fortune 200 companies 83 Fraser, Douglas 111 free capital flows 13 free currency convertibility 13 free markets 2, 22, 29, 32, 70–1, 81, 99, 105, 108, 110, 136 free trade: expansion of 10, 13; imperialism of 30; linkage with U.S. drug policy 30 Free Trade Agreement (FTA) 67, 84, 109, 112, 148 Free Trade Area of the Americas 80–1, 115 free-market democracies 70 Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarios de Colombia (FARC) 62–3, 68, 72, 74; founding of 68; revenue sources 69; strength of 69; threat of 88 Fujimori, Alberto 104–7, 109, 121, 123 García, Alan 96, 104, 110–12, 121 Garrido, Ricardo Soberón 107, 109 Garza, Tony 83, 86 Gas Wars 115 Gaviria, Cesar 74, 128, 135 Geithner, Timothy 23 Gibler, John 76, 136 Gill, Stephen 49 global capitalism 15, 68, 123; importance of 154; and policy networks 153–5 global civil society 131, 141 Global Commission on Drug Policy (GCDP) 128, 130, 135, 136, 138 Global Compact Board 133 Global Exchange 130, 135, 142, 143, 145–7, 149 global financial: capitalism 140; markets 46 global inequalities 125 Global Military Policy (U.S.) 71 global security 89 globalization: impact on crime 15–18; and U.S. foreign policy 12–15 “globalized-localism” model 18 good governance, importance of 89

Goodhand, Jonathan 55 Gormand, Paul C. 3 Graham, Bob 71 Gramsci, Antonio 25 Grand Strategy 9n1, 12–14, 20, 26, 29, 61 Great Depression 134 Greenlee, David 122 Guzmán, Diana Esther 18, 68 Hague Opium Convention (1912) 28–9 Haldeman, H.R. 38 Hamilton, John 29, 110 Harrison Act (1914), U.S. 28–9 Hay, John 29 hegemonic power, notion of 13, 21 Heritage Foundation 41, 44; Mandate for Leadership 41 Hermoza, Nicolás 106 heroin 1, 4, 31, 34, 38, 89 Hill, James 64 hippies, war against 38 homeland defense 84 homeland security 84 Honduran coup (2009) 89 Howard, William 29 Humala, Ollanta 111, 116, 118–19, 121; and Peru’s low-intensity democracy 118–20 human rights violation 42, 63, 101–2 Human Rights Watch 102 Huston, Michael 79 hyper-inflation 104 illegal drugs 1, 3–4, 11, 15, 62, 69, 72, 121, 140; campaign to eradicate 34; “Communist” opium 34; costs of controlling 24; destruction of 61; distribution of 46; export of 24; funds generated by trade of 77; interdiction of 5, 38, 56, 97–8; laws against trade of 36; links with national security 35; producers of 33; production of 42, 46; shipment of 149; trafficking of 76; trafficking organizations 56; trans-shipment points for 89; U.S.–Mexican alliance against 85; war on see war on drugs institution building 79 integrated development zones 84 Inter-American Dialogue (ID) 22, 71, 83, 85–6, 98, 100, 103 International Basic Economy Corporation 39 International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) 133, 136, 138

180   Index International Civil Commission on Human Rights 63 International Consortium on Drug Policy 130 International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC) 136, 138; members of 137 international financial institutions 11, 46, 48, 71, 99, 133 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 10, 45, 46, 95, 100, 104 International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, U.S. 97, 120–1 International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) 36 International Narcotics Drug Strategy Reports 120–3 international NGOs (INGOS) 142 Iran-Contra scandal 48 Ives, Ralph 57 Ivy League universities 30 Jacobs, Lawrence 19 job creation 17 Johns, Christina Jacqueline 6 justice/punishment systems, for drug control 18 Keck, Margaret 126 Kennan, George 14 Kerlikowske, Gil 89 Kolko, Gabriel 20, 31 Kotz, David 41 labor market, in Colombia 68 labor relations, fragmentation of 16 Lande, Adolph 36 landownership, in Colombia 67–8 Latin American Commission (LAC) 128 Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy report (2009) 128, 135 laws and legislations, against use of illegal drugs: Andean Trade Preference and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA, 2002) 108–9, 114; Anti-Drug Abuse Act (1986) 48; civilian law enforcement, outside of the United States 44; classification of drugs 38; Controlled Substance Act (1970) 38; against drug crime and drug addiction 39; Harrison Act (1914), U.S. 28–9; Mérida Initiative see Mérida Initiative; Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Statute (1981) 44; Plan Colombia see Plan Colombia; “Rockefeller Laws” of New York State

38–9; sentences for drug possession and dealing 39; against trade of illegal drugs 36; Western Hemisphere Drug Elimination Act (1999) 71 Layne, Christopher 20, 30, 32 League of Nations, Covenant of 31 Ledebur, Kathryn 101, 114 Levine, Harry 134 Lewis, Ted 142, 146 liberal market democracies 140 Lindesmith Center 126, 150n1 Linera, Alvaro García 112, 124n7 Lobo, Pepe 148–9 low-intensity conflict 42, 109 low-intensity democracies see polyarchy Luis Carlos Sarmiento Organization 74 MacArthur Foundation 71 McCaffrey, Barry M. 103 McCormick, Thomas 23–4 McDonough, Terrence 41 McKinley, Michael 118 McLarty Associates 83 Management Science for Development (MSD) 114 Mandate for Leadership 41 Maoist Shining Path 106 Marcella, Garbriel 74 marijuana 4, 39; legalization of medical use of 5, 138; main producer of 29; operation against production and trafficking of 40; use for medical purposes 126 Marijuana Policy Project 138 Masias, Carmen 119 Meese, Edwin 44 Mellon, Richard 41 Merck Pharmaceutical 92 Mérida Initiative 4, 61, 76–90; anti-drug/ anti-terror operations 64; for assisting the Mexican military and police 63; development of 76, 79; enactment of 76; on human rights violations 63; implementation of 85; multi-year plan 78; new mandate 78; Obama administration and 86–90; transnational elites and Mexico 84–6; transnational elites and the United States 80–4; U.S.– Mexican negotiations over 5 methamphetamine 1, 4 Mexican Council on Foreign Relations 83 Mexican Solidarity Network 84 Mexico: border with see U.S.–Mexican border; Calderon’s declaration of war

Index   181 against the cartels 78; capitalist globalization 77; drug trade and shipping of illegal drugs 77; drugs trafficked into the United States 77, 79; financial liberalization 77; Mérida Initiative see Mérida Initiative; Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) 59n4; money laundering, issue of 77; organized crime 78; trade links with U.S. 76; U.S. assistance to military and police forces of 79; U.S. drug control assistance 78; war against DTOs 78 Miliband, Ralph 7, 20 Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Statute (1981) 44 Millennium Development Goals 132 Mills, C. Wright 20 mining investments, taxation for 111, 118–19, 147 minorities–drug use linkages 43 Mintz, Beth 30 money laundering 15, 27n3, 46, 62, 77, 80, 119, 129, 145 Montesinos, Vladimir 104–6 Morales, Evo 113, 116–18, 121–2 Morales, Waltraud 3 Moreno, Luis Alberto 74 Movement of Peace, Justice and Dignity (MPJD) 143–4, 146, 149 Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) 113 Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru (MRTA) 96 Nadelmann, Ethan 18, 138 narco trafficking see drug trafficking narco-cartels, threats of 2 narco-enforcement complex 61 narco-guerrillas 42, 44, 58 narco-terrorism, threat of 11 narco-terrorists 58, 72, 110, 120 narcotraffickers 5, 54, 64, 72, 95–6, 112, 124n9 narcotrafficking paramilitary groups 4 national capitalism 2, 9–14, 19, 21, 30, 36, 42, 45, 48, 58, 82, 84, 133, 136, 147, 149, 153 National Drug Strategy Report (1994) 70 National Human Rights Commission, Mexico 63 National Intelligence Council, U.S. 67; Mapping the Global Future 67 National Liberation Army (ELN) 72 National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws (NORML) 126

National Security Directive (221) 47 National Security Strategy (2006), U.S. 81; development of 72 Nationalist Revolutionary Movement, Bolivia 99 nation-state system 30 Negroponte, John 83 neoliberal economic policies: dissemination of 11; implementation of 123 neoliberalism 15, 68, 93, 125 New Imperialism 12–13 “A New Inter-American Policy for the Eighties” policy 42 Nides, Thomas 85 Niemann, Albert 92 Nixon, Richard 37, 39–40, 126, 152 non-profit organization 45 Noriega, Manuel 48 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 6, 76–9, 81 Northamerican Forum 83 Obama, Barack 23, 63, 79, 88, 90, 118, 122, 148, 152; Mérida Initiative 86–90; transnational elite and foreign policymakers 87–8 Occidental Petroleum 72, 73 Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), U.S. 24, 54, 69 Office of Strategic Services 35 oil pipeline defense, financing of 72 “Open Door” imperialism, strategy of 13–14 open door note (1899) 29 open international economic system 89 open markets, ideology of 29 Open Society Foundations (OSF) 138–41, 154; foundation of 140; Open Society Global Board 138; transnational elite members of 139 open-door diplomacy 13, 29, 33; Layne’s description of 30 open-society alliance 140 Operación Fulminante 40 Operation Blast Furnace (1986) 47, 95 Operation Intercept (1969) 37–8 Operation Snowcap (1987) 47 opium: “Communist” opium 34; consumption of 36; Hague Opium Convention (1912) 29; Harrison Act (1914) 29; opium wars 27n3; poppies 32–3; production/export of 28 Organization for Development of Police research (ODEP) 117

182   Index Organization of American States 115 organized crime 4, 78, 80, 84, 128, 129, 136, 144–5, 148 Page, Benjamin 19 Paley, Dawn 6 Partnership for a Drug Free America 45 Pascual, Carlos 88 Pastrana, Andres 69, 73–4 Patterson, Anne 72 Payne, Rusty 3 Peru: Apurímac and Ene River Valley (VRAE) 108; autogolpe 104; bilateral umbrella agreement (1991) 105; civil society 109; domestic intelligence agency 106; drug control campaign 96; extra-judicial assassinations of suspected terrorists 105; free trade agreement with the United States 111–12; Humala administration and 118–20; hyper-inflation 104; integration into capitalist globalization 109; lowintensity democracy 118–20; mining sector 111; National Commission to Develop Life Without Drugs (Devida) 107, 110, 112; National Intelligence Service (SIN) 105; security services 109; strategies for drug control 104; taxation for mining investments 111; Upper Huallaga Valley (UHV) 96; U.S. international narcotics drug strategy reports 120–3; war on drugs 104–10; Washington Consensus 109 Peschard Sverdrup International 82 Petras, James 6 pharmaceutical drugs, manufacturers of 32 pharmaceutical industry: American Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (APMA) 36; influence over international drug policy 36 Pickering, Thomas 69–70, 73 Plan Colombia 4–5, 61, 67–76, 113; development of 71; for eradication of coca 73; monitoring of drug traffickers 73; relationship between energy interests and 72; spending on drug interdiction 70; strategic objective of 69; transnational elites, Colombia, and 73–6; ultimate version of 73; U.S. “drug war” assistance to Colombia 63, 73 Plan Dignidad (Bolivia) 102–4, 110, 114 plant-based drugs 37 political killings 115 polyarchy 12, 50

poppy and marijuana fields, crop eradication of 37, 40 Powell, Colin 82, 107 prison population, in Latin America 17 problem-solving 3, 6, 15 prohibition, on use of illegal drugs: access to psychoactive substances 31; the early decades 31–4; internationalizing 31–4; during World War II to the 1980s 34–40 prohibitionist paradigm (2006–2016): Bolivia-successful resistance to neoliberalism 112–18; consolidation vs successful resistance to 110–20; militarized drug prohibition 112–18; neoliberalism and militarized drug prohibition 110–12; Peru and the García administration 110–12 psychedelics 37 psychoactive substances 33; campaigns against the use of 45; criminalization of distribution and use of 33; as existential threat 36; as great “evil” 36; legalization of 146; prohibition on global access to 29; use of 28; war against “illegal” 36 punishments, for drug possession and dealing 39, 43; politics of 16; Southern Strategy 43 Quiroga, Jorge “Tuto” 102–4, 116 race and crime, politics of 44 Rastrojos 62 Reagan, Ronald 40, 42, 44, 93, 131; “battle flag” speech 43; declaration of war on drugs 42–3; National Security Directive 221 (NSD 221) 47; neoliberal agenda 43; Reagan agenda 41; Reagan revolution 45 rehabilitation, system of 16 Reiss, Suzanna 34 Reverdeser 143, 147, 149 Rice, Condoleezza 82 Richardson, Bill 72 Robinson, William 10, 13, 57 Robles, Rodolfo 106 Rocha, Manuel 113 Rockefeller, David 39 “Rockefeller Drug Laws” of New York State 38–9 Rockefeller Foundation 71 Rockefeller, Nelson 38–9 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 39 Rosner, Jeremy 113 Rowell, Edward 48

Index   183 Ruiz, Jaime 73–4 Sachs, Jeffrey 100 Sánchez de Lozada, Gonzalo 100–1, 104, 113–16 Sarukhán, Arturo 83, 85–6 Schlosser, Eric 38 Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) 78 Shanghai Conference (1909) 28 Shannon, Thomas 66 Shining Path 96–7, 105, 108–9, 112, 116 Shultz, Jim 115 Sicilia, Javier 144 Sikkink, Kathryn 126 Silva, Eduardo 127 SINTRAMINERCOL (Colombian mining worker’s union) 73 Sklair, Leslie 2, 20, 142–3 smuggling of drugs 31 Snapp, Zara 135 social elite, definition of 30 Social Register 30 social revolution 116 social security and welfare 41 social structure of accumulation (SSA) 41 social welfare states 36 Soros, George 138–41, 154 SOUTHCOM 56, 63–4, 69, 72 Southern Strategy, for controlling drug use and drug crimes 43 Stanley, Morgan 85 state coercion and repression 16 Stepan Chemical Company 122 Stokes, Doug 14 Strategy for the Fight Against Drug Trafficking (1998–2002), Bolvia 102 Students for Sensible Drug Policy 145 Sumner, Gordon 42 Sustainable Development Goals 142 Tambs, Lewis 42, 44 terrorists, transnational 67 Thurman, Maxwell 44 Tokatlian, Juan Gabriel 3, 7, 129 Toledo, Alejandro 106, 108; commitment to the U.S. drug war agenda 108 Torre, Wilbert 85 trade liberalization 11, 57, 84, 99 training, for counternarcotics 1, 5, 35, 44, 56, 70, 105, 123 transnational activism 128 transnational advocacy networks 142; and

drug policy reform 126–30; importance of 126 transnational capital 2, 9–13, 19, 21, 42, 45, 48, 76, 82, 147; investment of 58 transnational capitalist 11, 26n1, 71 transnational corporations (TNCs) 6, 10, 15, 20, 47, 71, 111 transnational counter-hegemonic project 128 Transnational Institute 138, 141–2 Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement 90 Trilateral Commission (TC) 22, 24, 40 Trinity Foundation 44 UN drug control system: policy-making body for 126; principles of 142 UN International Drug Control Program (UNDCP) 101 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (2011) 117 unemployment, rate of 17; in Colombia 67 United Kingdom Department for International Development 71 United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) 9, 141–3; caravan-2016 146–9; Civil Society Statement 141; drug prohibitionist agenda 130; and elite drug policy reform groups 130–8; “harm reduction” approaches 141; “insider” strategy of meeting with state parties 143; Outcome Document 141; “outsider” strategy of meeting with state parties 143–9; on regulation of cannabis markets 142 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) 121, 126, 133, 141 United Nations’ Single Convention on Narcotics Drugs (1961) 31, 36, 93; ratification of 37 United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) 72 United States Agency for International Development (USAID) 24, 62, 69, 71, 95–6, 100, 110, 114 Upper Huallaga Valley (UHV), Peru 96, 124n9 Urabenos 62 Uribe administration (2002–2010) 74 U.S. Chamber of Commerce 111 U.S. Congress 28, 81, 83, 85–6, 103 U.S. drug policies in Latin America 154; 1990s–2000s-globalist agenda, multilateralism, and resistance 97–110; Andean Initiative 50–8; under Bush

184   Index U.S. drug policies in Latin America contd. administration (1989–1993) 50–8, 66; certification policy 48, 58; under Clinton administration (1993–2001) 61, 65; counternarcotics policy 3; drug diplomacy 33; elements of 32; foreign policy establishment 64; Global Military Policy 71; globalization and 12–15; goals of 6; inter-American meetings on 35; key advisors/staff of 51–3; for Latin America 5; limitations of traditional approaches to 2–5; linkage with free trade 30; McCormick’s review of 24; Marxist and radical analyses of 6–9; model for analysis of 26; morality plank 40; neoliberal economic policies 15–16; under Nixon administration (1968–1974) 37–8; objectives of 66; oil pipeline defense, financing of 72; open door policy 29; Operation Intercept (1969) 37–8; Southern Strategy 43; transnational elites, hegemony, and policy networks 18–26; transnational policy network 21 U.S. imperialism, power of 127, 149 U.S. Racism 28 U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations 3, 83, 84 U.S.–Bolivian drug control alliance 114 U.S.–EU agreement, on drug control 142 U.S.–Honduran counter-narcotics operation 89 U.S.–Latin American relations 2, 39; “drug war” assistance to Colombia 63; factfinding mission 39; on human rights policy 39; “open door” grand strategy 14 U.S.–Mexican agreement 4; against illegal drugs 85; Mérida Initiative 5; on military and police aid 15 U.S.–Mexican border 5, 37, 77, 145; drug smuggling 31 U.S.–Mexico Futures Initiative 82 USNORTHCOM 84 Valenzuela, Arturo 69–70, 88 van Apeldoorn, Bastian 2, 13–14, 19, 23, 86, 89 Vega Llona, Ricardo 107

Vergara, Alberto 104 Vienna drug conference (1971) 36 Walker, William 33, 94 Walters, John 54 war on communism 58 war on crime 15 war on drugs 3–4, 15, 25, 30, 33, 47, 50, 58, 68, 89, 127, 154; 1980s and escalation of 40–50; Andean Initiative (1989) 50–8; in Bolivia 99–104; budget for 40; evolution of 125; funding for 44; goals of 44; against “illegal” psychoactive substances 36; in Peru 104–10; as priority in U.S. foreign policy 95; for protecting democracy 11; Reagan’s declaration of 42–3; transnational counter-hegemonic project 128; U.S. sponsored militarization in 5, 40, 56 war on terrorism 26, 58, 72, 110, 113 Washington Consensus 109 welfare queens 43 Western Hemisphere Drug Elimination Act (1999) 71 Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation 117 Westphal, Joseph W. 63 White & Case LLP 83 White, Charles 54 Williams, William Appelman 13, 20, 29 Wilson, Scott 73 Woodrow Wilson Center 22 World Bank 10, 45, 46, 95, 100, 104, 142 World Economic Forum 24, 70, 132 World Health Organization 126 world orders 9, 132; Cox’s concept of 2 World Social Forum (WSF) 128 World Trade Organization 10 Wright, Hamilton 29 Yepes, Rodrigo Uprimny 18, 68 Youngers, Coletta 5, 128 Zanabria, Victor 120 Zapatista communities 12, 64 Zedillo, Ernesto 128, 135 Zelaya, Manuel 148–9 “Zero Coca” policy (Bolivia) 102–3