Clinton: Dangerous Confusions

In the context of a conference about foreign politics carried out in Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton confirmed that drug cartels in Mexico are exhibiting increasingly higher levels of insurgency. The secretary supported her words with the irrefutable fact that bands of drug traffickers control diverse regions of the national territory, which, she said, places our country in a situation similar to that of Colombia 20 years ago.

These declarations are as unfortunate as they are inappropriate. In the first place, to affirm that organized insurgency and delinquency are one and the same – because they exercise control over parts of the territory – confuses and distorts the understanding of social and criminal phenomena.

In her remarks, Hillary Clinton blurred the identity of guerrillas and drug trafficking, which is based on a fallacy: The exercise of power over the territory implies that certain criminal groups and guerrilla movements share the same environment – one in which other actors are also found, starting with the state – but they don’t share the same goals. Although the insurrectionists have the objective of political and social change, the criminal organizations are not the protagonists of political opposition to the government. Instead, their motivation is mercantile, for economic gain. In order to attain this goal, criminal groups take advantage of conditions provided to them by the neo-liberal economic model – with its principles of maximum profitability, deregulation, and commercial globalization – and the policies of prohibition of consumption, production, and transportation of narcotics applied by the federal government and promoted by Washington.

The most worrisome aspect of Clinton’s nonsense is that, by comparing bands of drug traffickers and insurgent organizations, she gives grounds for confusion that feeds, in turn, the criminalization of movements and social activism, in the pretext of fighting drug cartels. One should remember that, decades ago, the national governments in Colombia and Washington coined the term, “narcoguerrilla,” with the objective of giving ideological and moral pretext to the counter-insurgency and also to cover up the high infiltration of state agencies by the drug traffickers through the paramilitaries.

Certainly, drug trafficking and social movements, whether insurrectionist or not, that traverse the country have a common origin. Both are consequences of the pillage and devastation of the neo-liberals, although the first capitalizes well on the disastrous consequences of the current economic model: Providing work where there is none, it becomes the authority by which the state abdicates its responsibilities and creates welfare mechanisms, even before dismantling social welfare policies. Aside from this, the only possible reason to identify insurrection with drug trafficking is an undeniable interventionist and counterinsurgency plan.