What Is The War On Drugs?

       This is not a new article, it first appeared in January 2015, it is as relevant today as it was the day it was printed. It is taken from a  collection of communiqués released by Chicago-based anarchist group Semillas Autónomas between 2014 and 2017. Some were flyers announcing or calling for specific actions, others were flyers distributed during actions, etc. One statement was written to be read at the Asamblea Popular to be held inside the consulate once it was breached, and was only circulated by video recording. For more information, visit semillasautonomas.org

 

 

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 What is the War on Drugs?” (January 2015)

The Mexican government claims to be fighting a war against narco traffickers. But the government has always been in the drug business, and cartels now control government officials and institutions across the country. The narco-state is indeed waging a war – but it is a war in the interest of the big players of global capitalism. It is part of continuing and enforcing trade agreements such as NAFTA, which force open all of Mexico to the unhindered extraction of profit. The function of the war is to impose a political and economic restructuring of Mexico in the interests of transnational capital. This war is good for big business. This is what social movements call narco-capitalism a form of globalization in which national governments are key players in the global drug trade, and the drug trade plays a key role in expanding the control of transnational corporations over land, resources, and people. Meanwhile, these same governments adopt an official policy of “War on Drugs” as a pretext for increased militarization and for subjugating their people.
        The US-sponsored War on Drugs in Mexico since 2006: 100,000+ people murdered and 30,000+ disappeared; mass graves in Guerrero, Tamaulipas, Chihuahua, and other states; a rise in attacks against transmigrants; increase in torture and executions; expansion of the drug trade and of extraction industries; mass economic displacement, land and water dispossession of indigenous peoples and campesinxs; neoliberal “reforming” of education, labor, judiciary, energy and finance.
       The United States has been funding this war through the Merida Initiative and other “anti-arcotics” programs. About $3 billion has gone to transnational logistics and consulting firms that “restructure” Mexican society to make it friendly to foreign investment, or to buying weapons from US manufacturers and paying private military companies. The same thing happens with the $11.3 billion that Mexico has spent. This is public money, money stolen from people on both sides of the border – and it is going directly to Boeing, Raytheon, Blackwater, Halliburton, and others. The US private sector and government also facilitate the transfer of military-grade weaponry into the hands of the drug cartels – over 90% of the weapons used in narco killings originate in the United States.
      The US sponsors the slaughter, thus justifying an increase of military intervention. As in the case of Colombia, an increase in US-backed (para)militarization correlates with high levels of displacement and dispossession of people, especially indigenous people, living in areas of strategic economic importance, and these displacements serve the interests of mining companies and other transnationals. As the war on drugs expands, transnational corporate control over entire regions expands, and exploitation of the people and the resources deepens.
        The United States has a history of training military and paramilitary forces in the use of terror. The governments tell us that terror is the product of cartel violence and that state military+police forces are the only possible solution. But government forces also strategically use disappearance, execution, torture, and mutilation against specific populations. They target students, workers, campesinxs, indigenous peoples, activists, all those who resist or who could resist, including communities organizing armed self-defense. The goal of terror is political: it is not only about killing people, but also about silencing, intimidation, eliminating political resistance, and destroying lifeways. The United States has perfected the use of terror over decades of experimentation in Central America and the Middle East: it is called counter-insurgency.

Vsit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk