Drug War Geopolitics Lecture Notes: Week 1-11

Week 1 ● Key themes: ○ Critical & feminist geopolitics ○ What are drugs? ○ The “War on Drugs”/drug war/international drug prohibition regime ○ Drugs and drug plants in the Americas ○ Importance of drugs to Latin America & its history ○ Drugs as commodities and central to cultural identity ● Critical Geopolitics/Feminist Geopolitics ○ Emerged out of the discipline of geography in response to traditional geopolitics, IR, and IPE; has since been modified largely throughout feminist critiques in geography ○ Situates power in relational ways, traversing a spectrum of scales of social life (not solely in the hands of sovereign state or individual) ○ Challenges taken for granted understandings of ‘peace, violence, war, danger, and security”; generally questions assumptions about the world and asks how they became so powerful/ubiquitous by examining assumptions, constructions, and power relations ○ CG very concerned with discourse analysis; FG responded to tendency toward disembodied analysis by bringing in everyday life and the people represented as “other” yet excluded from dominant understandings/assumptions ● “Drug” ○ 1.) Pharmacology ■ “A chemical substance used in the treatment, cure, prevention, or diagnosis of disease or used to otherwise enhance physical or mental well-being ○ 2.) Any substance recognized in the official pharmacopoeia or formulary of the nation, any substance intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease, any article, other than food, intended to affect the structure or any function of the body of humans, any substance intended for use as a component of such a drug but not a device or a part of a device ○ 3.) a habit-forming medicinal or illicit substance, especially a narcotic ● Definition (from Dangerous Harvest reading) ○ “A substance that produces significant changes in the body, mind, or both when consumed even in small amounts (p.16) ■ What are some substances that ‘count’ as a drug by this definition? ● What do you think about the idea that drug use could be considered a ‘primordial human trait’? Week 2 ● Key Themes: ○ Birth of the global prohibition regime; timeline ○ Prohibition regime in Americas, its geographies, & its effects – timeline ○ Primary drug control approaches ○ Common drug war logics ○ (Drug war) geopolitics ○ Stimulus of prohibition ○ Major drug trade & control trends in the Americas ○ ‘Partial victories’ ○ Balloon effect ○ Cockroach effect ○ Drug war failure or success? ● Making Drugs (il)legal: The “war on drugs” and the international drug policy regime ● Timeline of major events in the Birth of the global drug prohibition regime: → 1907-1925, first global drug controls (focused on Opium) starting with the US and Britain attempts to control Opium production in Asia, US encouraging domestic drug control legislation to be passed during this period → 1914, Harrison Act is passed, the first major demand-side prohibition in the US → 1912-1960, Different treaties and ongoing debates globally and locally; regulatory agencies formed; focus on regulation of drug trade and making drugs available for medical and scientific purposes development of illegal market emerges, US pushing control of coca and cocaine as a priority over this period → 1961, UN conventions, the international basis for global drug war regulation of drug plants and their farmers; amended in 1972 by protocol; 1971(synthetic drugs); 1988 (strengthened/focus on organized crime) →1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs: targeted plant based drugs used for traditional purposes (in the Global South); assumes that narcotic drugs should be considered hazardous until proven not to be, Precursor chemicals weren’t included. → 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances: concerned synthetic drugs (largely manufactured in the Global North); reverse burden of proof: undress substantial proof that a substance was harmful, it should remain uncontrolled. → 1971, US President Nixon declares a “war on drugs” (focus on Opium and International trade drug circuits) → 1980s, US President Reagan focuses drug war on Latin america, cocaine, and regional diplomacy, and domestic control, time of the communist scare in LAC and the US concern to end communism globally → Under Reagan, beginning of huge rise in US prison population due to strict domestic control (ex: mandatory minimum sentences) → Nixon - “drug abuse is a national emergency … the question was not whether we will conquer drug abuse, but how soon” → Reagan - drugs are a national security threat, declares drug war in Latin America and is tied up with communism in the region ● Globally, the US remains the largest consumer of cocaine with Europe as a whole trailing in second, Brazil is third, Argentina is fourth in consumption → 1970s/80s, boom in cocaine production; substantial amounts of heroin and marijuana being grown in the Americas; debt crisis in LAC contributed to this boom in addition to the “stimulus of prohibition - Coca was largely produced in Bolivia and Peru, cocaine was produced in Colombia, and transport followed Caribbean routes to the US/North → 80s, Reagan focuses drug war in part on Carribean drug flight routes, pushing routes into Mexico; Colombian and Mexican cartels begin to work together → 80s, contra-war in Nicaragua (US funded military trained to fight against Nicaragua’s communist government, they turned a blind eye to contra CIA informants who were selling cocaine in the US to fuel the civil war) - Supply side eradication of drug plants achieved by hand and through defoliation - Eventually leading to health issues and fatalities - Rising production of marijuana and heroin in Latin American; In the 90s enforcement and supply side eradication policies pushes marijuana production from Colombia to California; pushes coca from Bolivia and Peru to being grown in Colombia → 1990s, Colombia long producing the cocaine; Medellin cartel disbanded (Escobar’s death); the Cali cartel takes over is fragmented within 2 years; small cartels and FARC (communisit advocates, drug group) fill the vacuum, meanwhile, Mexican cartels are fragmenting and taking control of the South American to US cocaine trade route → President Clinton, wins approval forPlan Colombia - Domestically, the US moves towards a harm reduction approach, focusing more on the impacts of the drugs on users and how to best help them, but in LAC, it still is tough … → 2008, Merida Initiative and Mexican President Calderon’s drug war (2007-2014) 164,000 people died in Mexico by homicide; 35,558 in 2019 alone → deadliest year to date - Calderon’s drug war pushes Mexican DTOs to begin working in Central America and Central American transport cartels emerge Primary Drug Control Approaches ● Treatment ○ Focuses on the rehabilitation of drug users, with the assumption that this is a medical or mental health issue rather than a criminal one ● Law Enforcement ○ Model treats drug possession, as well as sales, as a criminal matter and publishes offenders through the justice system ● Eradication ○ Attempts to reduce production of the illegal substances in other countries ● Interdiction ○ Involves reducing the flow of illegal drugs in to a country by more vigilant patrolling of the nations borders and interdicting drugs in transit ● Alternative Development/Crop substitution ○ Provides another economic option in exchange for self-imposed eradication ○ Largely failed Drug War Logics ● Most illegal drug use is ‘problematic’ (leading to addiction, etc.) ● Illegal drugs are more dangerous than legal ones ● Eradicating drugs at their sources will make drugs too expensive for people to continue using ● Eradicating drugs at their source will reduce or eliminate supply (and consumption) Balloon Effect: Proliferation of areas of drug cultivation and of drug smuggling routes throughout the hemisphere, if you squeeze on production in Columbia, it will rise in Bolivia/Peru Cockroach Effect: dispersion and fragmentation of organized criminal groups or networks within countries and across subregions, if you shine a light, they all scatter ● Discussion Questions: ○ Why does McCoy place such an emphasis on treating drugs as ’global commodities’? ■ The idea that legal activity could eliminate the high prices of drugs and reduce the violence created with the substances being illegal ■ The policies/illegality of substances has in a turn created the drug war, ● We have been addressing the problem the same supply way for 50 years ○ What is the market logic (of supply and demand) behind international drug prohibition, and why does this logic fail in the drug war? ■ Two forms for the market logic: inelastic and elastic ■ Inelastic, the demand for cocaine never lessons but the supply does and is elastic ■ Inelastic- demand does not lessen ○ What does McCoy mean by “The Stimulus of Prohibition” (reading title)? ■ With this prohibition in place for these substances, policymakers have “stimulated” the market for them and created more of demand ● Drugs as commodities: ○ An article of trade or commerce, especially a product, as distinguished from a service ○ Something of use, advantage, or value ■ Why is it equally important to consider drugs as playing a role in cultural identity? ■ What’s the relationship between commodities and cultural identity? ● Another underlying logic → Science and medicine can and should drive drug policies ○ Limiting drugs and their uses to “scientific and medical purposes” ○ Gives impression that controlling drugs is all about preservation of health for ‘mankind’ and worries over the negative health effects of drugs; drugs thus placed into ‘bad’ and ‘good’ categories ■ Are those lines blurry? How? ■ What are some other possibly ‘legitimate’ uses of illicit drugs that may not cause harm to health? ● What is the logical inconsistency described by Thoumi? ○ ● Why are the social sciences important to understanding ‘drug problems’? ○ “Physicians may support the limit of drug use to ‘medical and scientific purposes’ but economists or sociologists may argue that the implementation of that policy, through strong law enforcement actions, would destabilise the economy and social structures of a country and lead to violence.” (pg.25) ○ Medical professionals/psychologists can make their opinions know, but without an understanding of the social science drug policy, whether prohibition or legalization/decriminalization, will fail ○ Differing morales in different cultures, the US/UN can not understand and define what a substance means to a culture (like Coca) and cannot respond to it adequately without understanding the social situation around it - Week 3 Coca and cocaine in Latin American history Emergence of coca and cocaine as respected global commodities Origins of US anti cocainism Role of pharmaceutical companies and Coca-Cola in US drug control policies Historical (social) construction of coca and cocaine Social Control Drug ‘scares’ - Drugs as (existential) threat ● Making drugs (il)legal: Early enforcement and the social construction of drugs (and drugs as a threat) ○ In all the readings for this week, we see that understanding drugs, imbuing them with meaning, and attributing problems to them are not just a product of the physiological or physical effects of drugs in bodies as such. ○ However, this focus on the historical social construction of drugs as problematic and things that need controlling is NOT to discount the very real problems that the ingestion of drugs can cause for certain individuals, and the familial and societal problems that emerge from drug use. ● Coca and Cocaine in Latin American history ○ Early refejection of by Europeans in the early colonial period to its embrace (but denigration) ○ Respect for and even ‘romance’ with coca in Europe, US, Latin America (as global commodities) ○ US ‘Coca Mania’ and ‘Coca Diplomacy’ ○ US Anti Cocainism; eventually spread globally ○ Birth and spread of illicit cocaine trafficking networks ● Social construct: ○ A concept or perception of something based on the collective views developed and maintained within a society or social groups;; a social phenomenon or convention originating within and cultivated by society or a particular social group, as opposed to existing inherently or naturally. ○ How we know drugs, their properties, best uses, their association with moral character, relative danger, whether or not they should be illegal → is a product of historical socio-political processes ○ In other words, the qualities with which we imbue drugs can and will change over time WEEK 4 ● Week Themes: ○ Political economy (of the drug war and narcotrafficking) ○ The political economy of supply-side failure ○ “Cost transfer” ○ Economic underpinnings of strict prohibition’s collapse ○ Drug war capitalism ○ Human rights ○ Transnational Corporations ○ Narco land grabs ○ Environmental change ○ Development, security, and the drug war ○ Money laundering WEEK 5 ● Week Themes: ○ Critical & Feminist geopolitics ○ Social reproduction & livelihoods ○ Role of the UN conventions ○ Scales of production ○ Why do people make drugs & grow drug plants? ○ Grounding cocaine and coca control ○ Supply-side approaches ○ Transnational manifestations of cocaine control ○ “Unintended consequences” of international drug control ● Role of the UN 1961 Single Convention: ○ “The bedrock of the current UN based global drug control regime” (BewleyTaylor/Jelsma 2013, p.72) ○ The moment when the multilateral framework moved from one of regulation, to one of prohibition (hence, the ‘international prohibition regime’) ○ Broadened the purview of the regime to include prohibition of plant cultivation of ‘drug plants’ (oprium, cannabis, coca leaf) ○ Objective to end all ‘quasi medical’ and traditional uses of the three plants ○ Countries were allowed to make reservations, but were expected to be transitional (eradication of opium in 15 years, coca and cannabis in 25) ○ ‘Schedules’ list drug plants alongside other drugs deemed dangerous, harmful, at risk of abuse (with potential therapeutic uses) like cocaine, heroin, morphine, etc. ○ Potential dichotomy of developing producer countries (subject to cultivation controls) versus developed consumer countries (driving the Convention) ○ Few exceptions were made (Coca-Cola example), no extinctions were made between say coca leaf and cocaine, chewing coca was comparable to the Western coffee drinking ○ Officials are beginning to acknowledge the outdatedness of the Convention in private, but hesitate to do so publicly because of the potential political and economic costs on their own state ○ There is no political will really to enact changes to this convention ● Social Reproduction: ○ Generally refers to the work that makes and maintains the social world, variously but relatively defined as: ■ The sustaining of the particular social configurations including patterns of inequality, the physical reproduction of people and bodies through consumption and the reproduction of labor or the making of people into workers; ■ The maintenance of already existing life and reproduction of the next generation; ■ The “messy stuff” of everyday life that many labors that make a life and reproduce social life’s material bases; ■ The activities and attitudes, behaviors and emotions, responsibilities and relationships directly involved in the maintenance of life on a daily basis, and intergenerationally; ■ And a situation of the work that reproduces people ○ The reproduction of the social world … demands consideration of how all people are engaged in world-making .. it also demands recognizing that marginalization and oppression happen in the spaces of everyday life. ● Livelihood ○ Is generally used to describe the ways that people make a living; ○ More specifically, it is an actor-oriented approach that foregrounds the lived experience of people in their daily lives, and is concerned with how people understand their own livelihood situations ○ Not only interested in primary income earning activities, but also non-material aspects of wellbeing, the diverse ways in which people earn money and also attain food, shelter, clothing, and other material goods, as well as their relative ability to access the things necessary or desirable in life ● How do the terms ‘social reproduction’ and ‘livelihoods’ expand an economic-centric notion of ‘production’ while still being about the (political) economy? ● As you read for this week, think about the many ways that livelihoods/social reproduction influence people's decisions to make drugs/drug plants beyond the ‘purely’ economic (post) ● Review: Critical Geopolitics/Feminist Geopolitics: ○ Situates power in relational ways, traversing a spectrum of scales of social life (not solely in hands of a sovereign state or individual) ○ Challenges taken for granted understandings of peace, violence, war, danger, security; generally question assumptions about the world and asks how they became so powerful/ ubiquitous by examining assumptions, constructions, and power relations ○ CG is very concerned with discourse analysis; FG responded to tendency toward disembodied analyses by bringing in everyday life and the people represented as “other” yet excluded from dominant understandings/assumptions ○ Recognizes that global processes are experienced in local and embodied ways ○ Shifts scale of analysis of geopolitics: asks security for whom?; and recognizes human security as fundamentally tied to state security; advocates security that is accountable to people, individuals, and groups ○ Considers how opportunities are shaped by geopolitical power, state power, political economic power, as well as everyday social relations and social differences (race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, etc.) ● How does what you’ve learned so far in this class fit into a critical geopolitics framework? Do you think it’s a useful perspective for discussing the Drug War? WEEK 7 (Breakout room #4 or #5) ● Do narco-corridos and narcotelenovelas ‘market violence’? Should they be censored? ○ Censorship diverts attention from the root of the problem → the drug war itself ○ Hard question to answer: there are glorification of it and encourages, but it is a way to show out self expression ○ A way of their culture that has been integrated ● What purposes do these ‘cultural artefacts’ serve? Why are they so popular? ○ The popularity of narcoculture in the US was surprising ○ A way to process to the drug war ○ The “excitement” of the narcocorridos ○ Takes away from the sense of reality, the songs do ● Are narcotelenovelas, narcocorridos, and films that glorify drug trafficking different than mainstream TV, music, and film forms produced in the US (in English)? How or how not? ○ Not a huge difference between the descriptions of the teleneuvas in the US and this narco culture ○ Follow similar sorts of storylines ○ ● Why is studying the ‘narco culture’ phenomenon important in a class on drug war geopolitics? - Does social control, a lauded example of “drug policy reform” represent a “break” with the drug war? Why and why not? - - Are lessons from Bolivia’s approach transferable to other geographic/geopolitical contexts? If so, what are they? If not, why not? Week 8 → Cocaine Trafficking in Central America ● Key Themes: ○ Cocaine trafficking in C.A. ○ Cocaine traffickers and interdiction forces as “complex adaptive systems” (Week 5) ○ Political economy ○ Illicit capital & agrarian change in Central America ○ Money laundering ○ Rural development ○ Land grabs ○ Dispossession ○ Land Use Land Cover Change consequences of cocaine flows ● General Background ○ Transnational DTOs often oversee or work with smaller cartels and transportistia DTOs locally, which earn huge profits for their services ○ The central american “ nodes” where planes and boats carrying cocaine first arrive (primary movements) are often far from law enforcement or military presence, and include forested areas, conservation zones, indigenous territories, and communal lands ○ Payments are made locally to ensure silence and complicity; to compensate locals for their labor in carrying the product, keeping landing strips clear of debris, and acting as guards along the trails and as “coordination” payments for regional actors who enrol land or labor on the ground ○ Cocaine transport nodes are highly dynamic in response to interdiction efforts, with development impacts ● Cocaine traffickers and interdiction forces as a complex adaptive system ○ About 18% total federal drug control spending spent on interdiction in 2016 ○ Through interdiction efforts, transit zones in the Americas grew to 2 to 7 million square miles between 1996-2017 (balloon effect) ○ Spatial proliferation and resilience of narco trafficking not a consequence of ineffective interdiction, but a consequence of interdiction ● Effect 1: Political Economic ○ Land speculation ○ Inflation of land values ○ Privatization of community lands ● Effect 2: Governance ○ Corruption of land titling process ○ Local government and state force collusion with narcos ● Effect 3: Environmental Change ○ Land cover change: ■ Forest loss ■ Ecological simplification ■ Biodiversity impacts ■ Socio Ecological impacts ○ Forest → pasture ○ Pasture → oil palms ● Effect 4: Land Grabs ○ Land monopolization aka ‘land grabbing’ ○ Cattle (especially in Honduras) ● Effect 5: Peasant Dispossession and Rural Violence ○ “People who talk about narcotrafficking don’t last long” indigenous Olancho (2014) ● Effect 6: Division of Labor and Proletarianization ○ “is the social process whereby people move from being either an employer, unemployed or self-employed, to being employed as wage labor by an employer, downward social mobility” ○ Wage inflation ○ Labor displacement from food production to agribusiness ○ Income inequality ● Nexus of Drug War, Neoliberal Capitalism, Inequality, Poverty, and Corruption ○ Drug war pushes traffickers into new spaces; new actors become involved; new spaces are implication in money laundering ○ “Neoliberal” capitalization has made trafficking and money laundering easier: ■ Expansion and integration of transportation and energy infrastructure (To stimulate export markets and accelerate trade in natural resources) ■ Deregulation of banking and finance institutions ■ Global land and agribusiness markets are smart, reliable, investments ○ In Central America, traffickers have been asmassing and transforming land, in some cases Central American traffickers and in other cases are Mexican traffickers Week 11 - Plan Columbia Part 1 ● Key Themes ○ Plan Colombia ○ Drug war geopolitics ○ Intimate geopolitics ○ Anthropology of policy ○ Role of discourse in producing threat ○ Construction of “narco guerrillas” ○ Militarization of law enforcement & domestic drug policy ○ Paramilitaries as “proxy” state violence ○ Human rights & unintended consequences ○ Activists and NGOs as ‘policymakers’ ○ Cocaleros as ‘policymakers’ ○ State-society relations and complexities ●