Beyond Supply and Demand: Obama’s Drug Wars in Latin
America
Feb 24 2010
Suzanna Reiss
This article originally appeared in the
January/February 2010 edition of NACLA Report on the
Americas.
In its first year, the Obama administration has embraced and even extended its
predecessors’ militaristic counter-narcotics policies in the Americas. In
doing so, it has also adopted the basic tenets and priorities that have shaped U.S. drug
control policies for decades. Among the most prominent examples are the
administration’s decision to deploy U.S. military personnel to Colombian bases,
the decertification of Bolivia and Venezuela as having “failed demonstrably” in
upholding counternarcotics agreements, the continued funding for Plan Colombia
(an estimated $672 million in 2009), and Obama’s expansion of the Merida
Initiative, the “regional security partnership” brokered by the Bush
administration with Mexico in October 2007.1 Under Obama’s watch,
funding for the Mexican initiative almost doubled in 2009 to $830 million,
making it the largest U.S. foreign aid program.2
All of this unfolded even as the director of National Drug Control Policy, R.
Gil Kerlikowske, suggested on various occasions that the new administration was
making a historic shift on drug policy. In October, for example, Kerlikowske
told the Association of Chiefs of Police that “it’s become increasingly clear
that the metaphor and philosophy of a ‘War on Drugs’ is flawed. . . . . it’s
time to adopt a different approach.”3 This echoed sentiments he
expressed in June, when he emphasized the need to move away from “divisive ‘drug
war’ rhetoric” as part of a broader U.S.-led effort “to reduce the demand for
drugs which fuels crime and violence around the world.”4
The Obama administration has made some gestures in this direction, most
significantly making it a low priority for federal law enforcement to go after
state-authorized medical marijuana retailers and suggesting a new orientation
toward prevention and treatment. But to genuinely change the philosophy
animating the so-called War on Drugs, it is essential to understand and question
the international political and economic foundations of U.S. drug
policy. These much-neglected foundations continue to fuel violence, repression,
and economic coercion both within and beyond the United States’ borders.
The drug war has failed to achieve even its stated goals, as critics have long
emphasized—there has been no net decrease in illicit drug production and
trafficking, even while the devastating human and environmental costs of drug
war militarism continue to rise. Meanwhile, rarely discussed is the drug war’s
great success in helping to achieve unstated goals: extending global U.S. military hegemony and extending the reach of
the legal U.S.
drug economy, which often depends on raw materials and consumer markets in the
very same territories forced to participate in the U.S.-led drug control regime.
This analysis gets submerged by the language of supply and demand and the
notions of legality that permeate drug policy discourse. Both indicate
capitalism’s shaping influence on the ideology of U.S. drug war policies. This
obfuscating language—and the idea that regulating the drug trade is a question
of effectively policing supply and demand—is itself a legacy of the economic and
imperial logic that created an international drug control apparatus, which rests
on the unquestioned power of the United States to designate players in the drug
trade as either legal or illegal. Rather than presuming that the international
flow of drugs is a consequence of the natural workings of a mythical, though
often naturalized, free market, it is more useful to ask: Who gets to supply
what and who gets to demand? Inequities between the global North and the South
have historically structured the answer to these questions.
*
The language of supply and demand, much like the designation of legal or
illegal, must be understood as a political and historical construction rather
than as a set of neutral descriptive categories. The system of drug control
itself has given these categories and labels substantive power. Attempts to
control coca in the Andes provide an
instructive example, since the region has been on the international drug control
radar since the aftermath of World War II. In 1949 the UN Committee on Narcotic
Drugs sent a commission to Peru
and Bolivia
(at that time the two primary producers of the coca leaf) as part of a broader
effort to regulate “raw materials.” Arguing that indigenous people’s consumption
of coca was addictive and destructive, the UN commissioners recommended that it
be abolished.5 The only “legal” market for Andean coca leaves would
be their primary international market, the United States.
This goal was codified in the 1961 Single Drug Convention, which dictated that
all traditional domestic coca consumption be eradicated in 25 years and that the
export market be carefully monitored to ensure supplies remained in “licit”
channels. Thus, the international drug control regime itself structured Andean
countries’ participation within the drug trade as a “supply side” source of raw
materials.
To this day, coca leaves are processed by pharmaceutical companies authorized by
the U.S.
government to produce a flavoring extract for Coca-Cola (the biggest coca
“consumer”) and to manufacture cocaine for use in research laboratories and as a
local anesthetic in medicine. The drug control regime that emerged in the 1950s
was just that, a system of control—not outright prohibition. Drugs themselves
were not illegal. Cocaine and other controlled substances straddled the
licit-illicit divide, since their legal status depended on their circulation
within the marketplace and on the question of who grew, manufactured, sold, and
consumed them.
One of the more dramatic, and mostly unquestioned, contradictions is that while
the United States spends billions of dollars attacking “drugs,” the legal drug
industry is regularly among the top five most profitable industries in the
country.6 North Americans are notoriously quick to turn to drugs to
answer their ailments, medical or otherwise; meanwhile, through direct
marketing, the pharmaceutical industry encourages the excessive consumption of
drugs that are often of questionable medical value.7
Internationally, drugs have always served as a measure of the United States’
wealth and influence. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, pharmaceutical
preparations represent by far the most profitable
U.S.
exports, which is partly the result of free trade agreements— like the Andean
Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATDPEA), whose title alone indicates
the intimate connection between economic relations and U.S. police and
military collaboration. Beyond chemicals’ prominent and controversial role in
drug crop fumigation campaigns, these agreements establish preferential access
for legal U.S. drugs in
foreign markets, extend their patents, and include a number of other measures
that propel the dominance of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry around
the world.8
The United States
does not so much wage war on drugs as wage war with drugs. Throughout the 20th
century, the U.S.
government has considered certain drugs, including most recently flu vaccines,
strategic materials and has subsidized their mass-production and stockpiling in
the interests of national security.9 Drugs, among other things, can
numb a soldier’s pain, stimulate and ease labor, and vaccinate against disease,
giving them special strategic value. Obama’s continuation of the U.S. embargo
against Cuba, including policies that limit the availability of critical
medicines, shows how drugs’ medicinal value has also been deployed to exert
coercive diplomatic leverage.10 A U.S. company selling drugs to Cuba
would in this context be committing a crime, revealing the limits of drug war
rhetoric focused on an underworld of “illicit” drug profiteering.
This dynamic interplay between the legal and illegal drug economies and
political and economic interests continues to determine drug enforcement’s
focus. The Obama administration’s handling of the concurrent crises in Mexico of drug
trafficking and the swine flu, or H1N1 virus, is emblematic. On April 30,
congressional hearings on the president’s fiscal year 2009 War Supplemental
Request included a discussion that linked the two issues: The U.S. government
would provide sufficient resources and support for the mass production of
(privately patented) flu vaccines (especially ensuring adequate supplies to the
U.S.
military), while waging war against drug cartels. Senator Patrick Leahy (D.-Vt.)
reflected the consensus in government when he strongly supported “helping
Mexico, which is facing real threats from
heavily armed drug cartels and is now dealing with the H1N1 virus.”11
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained that USAID had given $5 million to
the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Pan-American Health Organization to
“help detect and contain the disease in Mexico,” an insignificant amount when
compared to the some $2 billion the Obama administration has spent stockpiling
vaccines for U.S. citizens.12
These efforts at “helping”
Mexico
reflect broader political and economic inequities in access to legal drugs.
Linked to the U.S. practice of securing adequate national drug supplies is the
power to determine who gets to consume them—a politically charged issue on
tumultuous display recently regarding the H1N1 vaccine. U.S. (and
European) drug patents price most of the world’s population out of the market,
and power dictates who receives the drugs that are produced and distributed,
even in the context of the swine flu “emergency.” The WHO has warned that there
will be a critical shortage of the H1N1 vaccine in the developing world, since
some 90% of it has already been pledged to “high income countries.”13
On the domestic front, Michigan Democratic representative Bart Stupak, referring
to plans to vaccinate prisoners at Guantánamo (presumably to protect their U.S.
guardians from infection), complained in October that “while much of America
waits in line to receive their H1N1 vaccination, the Pentagon is giving priority
status to accused terrorists.”14
Perhaps without knowing it, Stupak seemed to intimate how some people are more
worthy of medical care than others. Obama chillingly echoed these sentiments
when giving his own assurance that health care provision will “not apply to
those who are here illegally.”15 The president also indicated that he
might allow an exception for “children who may be here illegally but are still
in playgrounds or at schools, and potentially are passing on illnesses and
communicable diseases,” presumably to “legal” children—a distinction that
dramatically embodies the dehumanizing impact of U.S. drug wars.16
*
Drug warriors in the United States
and at the United Nations, the main international body regulating the drug
trade, typically divide the countries of the world into drug suppliers (mostly
in Latin America and Central and Southeast Asia) and consumers (primarily North
America and Europe). This formulation has had a
definitive impact on both the thrust of drug control initiatives, and on the
arguments presented by their opponents. So, for example, the United States
spends the vast majority of drug war funding on interdiction campaigns in
“supply” countries—constituting some 65% of federal drug control expenditures.17
Some governments in Latin America have welcomed this funding, in particular the
presidents of Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, who have all embraced the drug war as
a powerful tool in their efforts to consolidate political control and finance
counter-insurgency wars against political and economic dissidents. But there
have also been demands from across the region, including among the United States’ allies, that the U.S. government
do more to limit domestic consumption, as well as to limit its involvement in
supplying the precursor chemicals and weapons that are essential to illicit
production and distribution.
The Obama administration has had a somewhat novel response to this diplomatic
challenge. Unlike his predecessor, Obama acknowledged a deeper U.S. role in the
illicit drug trade. In April, when a number of administration officials,
including the president and secretary of state, traveled to Mexico to show support for President Felipe
Calderón and his war on the cartels, Obama declared he would not pretend that
combating drugs “is Mexico’s
responsibility alone.” He continued: “A demand for these drugs in the United States
is what is helping to keep these cartels in business. This war is being waged
with guns purchased not here, but in the United States.”18
Yet the administration’s acknowledgement of “shared responsibilities” has helped
only to cement the ongoing militarization of the region. The devastating impact
of this approach has been well documented: increased levels of violence,
political corruption, and a blurring of the line between the police, the
military, and drug cartels in ways that profoundly undermine democracy and human
rights.19 The limits of a supply-demand framework extend to the
weapons deployed in the conflict. The Obama administration provides Mexico with billions of dollars to buy
U.S.-manufactured weapons, Black Hawk helicopters, surveillance equipment, and
police training, making the U.S.
the major source of both legal and illegal weapons that are flooding the streets
of Mexico.
Embodying the U.S.
orientation toward “supply-side” interdiction, the U.S. president each year identifies
“major” illicit drug “producing” as well as “transit” countries and then
determines whether they cooperate with international drug control. In September,
Obama identified 20 countries as “major drug transit or major illicit drug
producing countries”; of these, 15 were in Latin America and the Caribbean,
including the Bahamas, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombian, the Dominican Republic,
Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and
Venezuela (the rest included Afghanistan, Burma, India, Laos, and Pakistan).20
Of the “major” supplying countries, Obama designated three—Bolivia, Burma,
and Venezuela—“
as countries that have failed demonstrably during the previous 12 months to
adhere to their obligations under international counternarcotics agreements.”21
This designation, or “decertification,” as it is known, empowers the United States
to withhold aid and deny preferential treatment under existing trade agreements
with those countries. The supply-demand formulation deployed in this context,
together with the selective designation of countries as “major” drug suppliers
and as having “failed” by assessing their willingness to collaborate with a
particular system of international drug control, recasts diplomatic struggles
not as political or economic but as conflicts over the pursuit of criminality
and terrorism.
The political ideologies associated with governments in the hemisphere—not the
actual health consequences or “violence” emanating from struggles over control
of the drug trade—have determined the certification process. If this were not
the case, Colombia
and Mexico,
as the major “producer” country and the largest “transit” country, respectively,
would undoubtedly top the blacklist of drug war failures with their thousands of
displaced peoples, environmental devastation, and documented human rights
abuses. Yet it is Bolivia
and Venezuela that have been
branded as drug-control rogue states, primarily as an outcome of political
tensions between these nations and the United States.
Bolivia
again provides a useful example of how drug war spectacle masks political
conflict and how decertification is used as a tool to criminalize challenges to
U.S.
hegemony. The Obama administration’s decertification of Bolivia, continuing the
Bush administration’s policy by maintaining Bolivia’s suspension from the
ATDPEA, defies any rational, fact-based justification.22 It seems
instead to be a retaliatory move for actions the Bolivian government took in the
fall of 2008, when it did not renew USAID contracts, accused the DEA of spying,
expelled the U.S. ambassador, and alleged that the United States was providing
covert support to the violent and economically
powerful U.S.-aligned opposition.23
After the White House said Bolivia had failed to live up to its “shared
responsibility,” Bolivian president Evo Morales fired back, accusing Obama of
having “lied to Latin America” at the Summit of the Americas in April, when the
U.S. president said “there is no senior partner and junior partner” in the
United States’ hemispheric relations.24 Further challenging the
inequality built into the economic roles assigned to various countries in the
drug economy, the Bolivian government formally submitted a request, now under
review before the United Nations, to have coca leaf removed from the 1961 Single
Drug Convention.
The convention’s “restrictions on and prohibition of coca leaf chewing,” the
Morales administration argued, violates the UN Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples (among other international treaties), which maintains that
“indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop
their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural
expressions, as well as the manifestations of their sciences, technologies and
cultures, including human and genetic resources, seeds, medicines and knowledge
of the properties of fauna and flora. . . . ”25
Morales, reelected to a second term in December, is not alone in challenging the
U.S.
drug war. Leaders across Latin America are
seeking not only to expand their right to participate in the legal drug market,
but also to question the validity of the control and enforcement regime. They
increasingly question U.S.
drug control priorities, emphasizing its many failures. In August, the First
Latin American Conference on Drug Policy, which brought together representatives
from an array of the region’s governments, international organizations, and
community groups, concluded that “Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, the three
countries that together produce the entirety of the world production of cocaine,
did not manage in 10 years to reduce the acres of [coca] cultivation, but
instead gained 2 million refugees, put peasants in jail, and sprayed pesticide
that degrades the environment.”26
*
The capitalist ideology that sustains the United
States’ ongoing drug war in the Americas
manifests not only in the assumptions built into the supply-demand model. It is
also present in the very notion that drugs themselves “cause crime and
violence,” as Kerlikowske said when he announced the administration’s
professedly forward-thinking and practical approach to drug policy.
Focusing on the commodity overshadows the people and political struggles at the
heart of the “drug” conflict. It is not drugs per se, but rather competition to
control their production, distribution, and consumption that has generated
violence over the last half-century. Personifying drugs themselves as criminal,
violent agents has served as a useful mechanism for obscuring the real human
impact of drug control policy since well before the Nixon administration, which
officially launched the drug “war.” Despite the frequently staged spectacles of
drug enforcement officers burning marijuana fields in
California or airplanes fumigating coca fields in the
Andes, it is necessary to restate the obvious: The United States has
never waged a “war on drugs.” Rather, it has waged various “wars” on specific
groups of people.
Take, for example, African Americans, who are disproportionately represented in
the U.S.
prison population, even though most illicit (and licit) drug users in the United States
are white. The domestic drug war, since the introduction of the first mandatory
minimum sentences in the
United States in the 1950s, has always been
structured by racial and economic bias. Similarly, the burdens of U.S.-led drug
wars in Latin America have fallen
disproportionately on indigenous communities, many of which have fled drug war
violence or lost access to their economic means of survival—caught in the
political crossfire between governments and insurgencies, which both capitalize
on the drug trade as a means of waging war.
The Obama administration’s early rhetorical shift away from drug war rhetoric
continues the government’s dishonest assessment of what fuels drug production
and consumption. It fails to acknowledge the violence that maximizing profits
and monopolizing international drug flows requires. Domestically, in the country
with the world’s highest incarceration rate, the fact that most imprisoned
people are serving time for drug-related offenses has yet to become a serious
topic in the Obama administration’s deliberations on drug policy.27
On the international stage, the power hierarchies of who gets to supply and who
gets to demand also ripple through racial, economic, and social disparities.
Until the administration pays attention to the structural origins of the drug
war, as well as the profound international dependencies upon which it has always
rested, it will be fated to continue pursuing an ill-conceived, destructive, and
failed policy under which the value of drugs is determined by violence and
economic inequality.
Suzanna Reiss teaches history at the University of Hawaii,
Manoa, and is a Fellow at the Charles Warren Center
for Studies in American History at
Harvard
University. She is the
author of
Policing for Profit: U.S. Imperialism and the International Drug Economy
(forthcoming).
1. The White House, Presidential Determination No. 2009-30, September 15, 2009;
“Joint Press Conference With President Barack Obama and President Felipe of
Mexico,” Obama speech transcript, Los Pinos, Mexico City, Mexico, April 16,
2009; June S. Beittel, “Colombia: Issues for Congress,” Congressional Research
Service Report for Congress no. RL32250 (August 7, 2009): 29.
2. Claire Ribando Seelke, “Mérida Initiative for
Mexico
and Central America: Funding and Policy
Issues,” Congressional Research Service Report for Congress no. R40135 (August
21, 2009): i–5.
3. “Statement of R. Gil Kerlikowske, Director, National Drug Control Policy,
Remarks at the 2009 International Association of Chiefs of Police Annual
Conference,” transcript, October 8, 2009.
4. “Statement of R. Gil Kerlikowske, Director, National Drug Control Policy,
Remarks at Release of the World Drug Report,” transcript, June 24, 2009.
5. Report of the Commission of Enquiry on the Coca Leaf, May 1950, Fifth Year:
Twelfth Session, Special Supplement no. 1, Official Records, Economic and Social
Council, United Nations (Lake Success, New York, United Nations, July 1950).
6. See annual rankings at “Top industries: Most profitable. Fortune 500: Annual
Ranking of America’s Largest Corporations,” Fortune, money.cnn
.com/magazines/fortune.
7. Marcia Angell, “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption,” The
New York
Review of Books 56, no. 1 (January 2009).
8. U.S.
Census Bureau, “Exhibit 7—Exports by End-Use Category and Commodity,” US
International Trade in Goods and Services (FT900). For discussions of the U.S.
pharmaceutical industry’s advantages under free trade agreements, see Davinia
Ovett, “Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and Human Rights: A Serious Challenge for
Latin American and the Caribbean,” Puentes 7, no. 1 (January/February
2006); Economist Intelligence Unit, “Peru Pharma: A Fair Trade?,” March 4, 2009;
Karen Hansen-Kuhn, “Andean FTA: Threats to Development,” The Development Gap
(July 2004); Ellen R. Shaffer and Joseph E. Brenner, “A Trade Agreement’s Impact
on Access to Generic Drugs,” Health Affairs 28, no. 5 (August 2009):
w957–w968.
9. See for example, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Strategic
National Stockpile,” bt.cdc.gov/stockpile.
10. Peter Schwab, “Cuban Health Care and the U.S. Embargo,” The Monthly Review
49, no. 6 (November 1997): 15.
11. “The President’s Fiscal Year 2009 War Supplemental Request,” Hearing Before
the Committee on Appropriations United States Senate One Hundred Eleventh
Congress, First Session, April 30, 2009 (Washington: Government Printing Office,
2009), 4, 47.
12. Ibid., p. 4; Michael D. Shear and Rob Stein, “Why Such a Shortage of Swine
Flu Vaccine?,” The Washington
Post, October 27, 2009.
13. Jennifer Gonzalez, “WHO: Poor Nations Urge Global Access to Swine Flu
Vaccine,” the Associated Press, July 3, 2009.
14. Representative Stupak (MI), Congressional Record, House, vol. 155, October
29, 2009, H12122, wais.access.gpo.gov.
15. “Remarks by the President to a Joint Session of Congress on Health Care,”
transcript, September 9, 2009.
16. Brian Montopoli, “Obama: No Health Care for Illegal Immigrants,” CBSNews.com,
July 21, 2009.
17. The White House, National Drug Control Strategy: FY 2010 Budget Summary, May
2009, p.13
18. “Joint Press Conference,” transcript, April 16, 2009.
19. Charles Bowden, “We Bring Fear,” Mother Jones (July/August 2009):
29–43.
20. The White House, Presidential Determination no. 2009-30, September 15, 2009.
21. Ibid.
22. Kathryn Ledebur and John Walsh, Obama’s Bolivia ATPDEA Decision: Blast From
the Past or Wave of the Future? (Washington
Office on Latin America, August 11, 2009).
23. Roger Burbach, “The United States:
Orchestrating a Civic Coup in
Bolivia,” GlobalAlternatives.org, November 17,
2008.
24. “Remarks by the President at the Summit
of the Americas Opening Ceremony,” transcript, Port of Spain, Trinidad and
Tobago, April 17, 2009.
25. Economic and Social Council United Nations, “Substantive Session of 2009,” Geneva, July 6–31, 2009, E/2009/78, pp. 4–5.
26. Press Release no. 9, July 8, 2009, First Latin American Conference on Drug
Policy.
27. See “Statistics on Drugs and Crime,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S.
Department of Justice, ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/drugs.htm.
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