Dawn Paley is one of the best journalists covering the Drug War in Latin America in the English language. Her work has been published in NACLA and many other international publications, covering Latin America extensively.
Dawn’s book, Drug War Capitalism (AK Press 2014), provides a provocative thesis. The drug war is not about crime nor security. Rather, it enables global capitalist expansion through enclosure. In our hour-long interview we discuss how this understanding comes from a sense of justice and activism, from the periphery, from below. Dawn elaborates on how elites collude across borders for their own benefit at the expense of their populations. She describes the consequences of this collusion as militarism, human rights abuses, and insecurity. As the interview develops, Dawn brings optimism back into the equation, with a discussion of resistance in everyday life, activism, and grassroot, peoples’ movements.
This in-depth analysis is crucial for anyone who wants to understand and resist one of US foreign policy’s (and the transnational elites who execute it) greatest, ongoing failures and crimes against humanity.
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Andrew Smolski: Before we discuss the details, could you explain what drives you as a journalist and how that has impacted your understanding of the drug war?
Dawn Paley: What drives me as a journalist, and as a researcher, is I think we need to, as writers, people of conscience, and activists, update much of the received wisdom about the conflicts that are happening around the world. So, Drug War Capitalism came out of a desire to challenge the mainstream media narrative with the hope that eventually different people, like anti-war movement people, people working around policing in the United States, and other folks who might not think of the drug war in Mexico and Central America as being actually a political issue, who might think of it as being more about crime. Or really just the analysis of the mainstream media, which is what we mostly have access to in terms of the drug war, to challenge that narrative and try and bring more people on board in terms of fighting these US policy programs in Colombia, Mexico, and Central America that have done irreparable damage to people in all the countries where they are being applied.
A: Towards the end of writing your book you talk about how you were in Colombia and began to encounter activists who were thinking in a similar way. Do you think it is the activist orientation of your work that brings you into contact with other people who understand that the drug war is a political issue, and not just a manifestation of say Mexico alone, or Colombia alone?
D: It took me a while to find people who had that critique, and it’s definitely something I started to come across a lot more in Colombia, because, as you might have heard, Plan Colombia just turned 15. So, the White House has been celebrating the 15 years of Plan Colombia, and there’s just been a lot more time there for people to really think about and analyze what the experience of it has been. Because, you know as we’ve seen here in Mexico, and during the time of Plan Colombia, it basically puts people into a kind of survival mode. As activists you’re constantly responding to tragedies, like here in Mexico the most famous example is the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School who were disappeared. So, society and activists as well are constantly forced to respond to these tragedies, day to day. It’s like you’re a fish in the ocean trying to get of a macro view of what’s going on and develop a critique of it. It’s not an easy task.
In Colombia and in here Mexico there are critiques of the war on drugs, they are marginalized and harder to find sometimes, but they’re there. Specifically, getting to the idea that the war on drugs is a war on people, and it’s becoming a little bit more mainstream in certain circles and so on. So yeah, I am hoping to have that conversation more in Mexico; the book has been translated, and we are finding a publisher, that’s the next step in kind of widening the circle of these discussions here in Mexico and in the south.
A: Ya, I think it is key to discuss the role that imperialism plays in a war on people, as opposed to saying a war on drugs. In thinking of the role imperialism plays, in the book you discuss an interview you had with Greg Grandin, where he brings up that the “work of national security forces on an international level [is] subordinated, either directly or indirectly, to Washington’s directive.” Can you elaborate on how important understanding U.S. imperialism is to understanding drug war capitalism, especially pertinent when you said the people in D.C. are celebrating 15 years of Plan Colombia?
D: Ya, the bad guys in D.C., cause we also have committed friends in D.C. who have been working for 15 solid years fighting Plan Colombia.
It makes a lot of sense to think about the war on drugs in Mexico, in Central America, in the Caribbean, and in South America within the context of US wars more broadly, and how US wars are conducted throughout the world. Obviously, we can’t talk about Mexico or Syria in the same breath because the situation is so different, or Afghanistan and Honduras, say. But I think that there are certain pieces of the mentality that really translate.