Drug-trafficking and the militarization of public safety

in Mexico and Brazil: comparative perspectives

Thiago Rodrigues
1




Abstract: The war on drugs launched by the United States in the 1970s has been accepted in different
degrees by Latin American countries. One of its pillars has been the mobilization of military commandos
to fight drug-trafficking organizations. The paper intends to propose an overview on this militarization as
a central principle of the war on drugs in order to indicate some conceptual and political challenges
taken from the contemporary experiences of Mexico and Brazil.
Keywords: War on drugs, security, Latin America, Brazil, Mexico




As recently as a century ago, there was no drug trafficking. The majority of drugs
that nowadays are traded by drug traffickers and consumed against the law were not
regulated. A complex process, however, that involved arguments based on morality
and public health led to the illegality of these substances within a few years. The advent
of so-called drug prohibition transformed, during that time, producers, traders and
consumers of particular drugs into criminals. Prohibition was aimed at eliminating a
market; nevertheless, it was able only to render that activity illegal. As a result,
producers and traders became traffickers and consumers became addicts living at
societys margins. What was seen as a moral and public health problem became, with
prohibition, a public security problem.
The prohibitionism found room to assert itself in the United States, and there
found its primary advocate at the international level (McAllister, 2000). The first
international meeting on drug control the Shanghai Conference, in 1909 was
convened by the U.S., as were the subsequent diplomatic meetings, including those
organized in the 1920s by the League of Nations, an organization to which the U.S. did
not formally belong. Although the initiative was American, the prohibitionism found
worldwide support, echoing the political and strategic interests of different countries
(Escohotado, 1998; Rodrigues, 2004).

1
Thiago Rodrigues is professor of International Relations at the Instituto de Estudos Estratgicos [Strategic Studies
Institute] of the Fluminense Federal University (UFF), Rio de Janeiro, and researcher at Nu-Sol/PUC-SP. E-mail:
trodrigues@id.uff.br


These conferences gave rise to the international regime of drug control based on
the logic of criminalization. This international regime established itself after the
publication of the UN Convention on Narcotic Drugs, in 1961, establishing the
prohibitionism as a global framework for combating psychoactive drugs (Herschinger,
2011). Thus, from the beginning, the issue of the control and criminalization of drugs
was an international one.
In addition to the three issues that initially drove the prohibitionism morality,
public health, and public security in the 1970s, an additional issue emerged: national
security. The key moment was the speech in which President Nixon in 1972, proclaimed
that drugs were the number one enemy of the U.S. and that combating them
required declaring a war on drugs. This war would have both domestic targets
consumers and traffickers as well as external ones: the countries classified as the
producers of illegal drugs.
The discourse of the war on drugs both then and now was based on a division of
the world into two blocs: those countries that produced and those that consumed. This
division is artificial and ignores the more complex dynamic of the production and
trafficking of drugs in the world (Passetti, 1991). However, it is a discourse that allows
the U.S. and other countries that consider themselves consumers to point to
external sources of the problem, triggering a discourse emphasizing national security
that gives rise to exceptional actions taken in defense of the state and of society
(Rodrigues, 2003).
In the first half of the 1970s, as a result of the declared war on drugs, the U.S.
reformed its repressive apparatus (creating the Drug Enforcement Administration) and
initiated anti-drug operations in the Caribbean and Mexico. At the end of the 1970s,
with the growth of cocaine trafficking, the U.S. focused on the Andean countries
(Bolivia, Peru and Colombia). Since that time, the U.S. has defended the argument that
successfully combating drug trafficking required using the armed forces of the
producing countries. For this reason, the U.S. invested in the training and education
of special military groups, first in Mexico and later in the Andean countries (Somoza,
1990; Hargraves, 1992).
In the early 1980s, the emphasis on the militarization of the war on drugs was
underscored when the U.S. identified the association between leftist guerillas the
FARC in Colombia and the Shining Path in Peru and cocaine trafficking (Labrousse,
2010). This phenomenon was called narco-terrorism and served as additional justification
for U.S. insistence on the need for military action to combat drug trafficking and for the
Andean governments to adopt emergency laws and repressive measures that resulted
in the widespread increase of violence, without diminishing the supply of cocaine.
During the 1980s, the U.S. increased its presence in Latin America to combat
drug trafficking. Hundreds of military advisors were sent to the region and there


were some missions involving U.S. military participation, especially in Bolivia and Peru
(Dale Scott & Marshall, 1998; Marcy, 2010). The Reagan administration strengthened the
war on drugs by highlighting the drug trade as a threat not only to the U.S., but to the
political and social stability of Latin America. Since then, drug trafficking and illegal
drugs took on another dimension: that of regional security.
Confirming this trend, the government of George Bush met twice with Latin
American presidents to discuss the coordinated fight against drug trafficking on the
continent. The first took place in Cartagena, Colombia in 1990; the second, in San
Antonio, U.S., in 1992. The original U.S. proposal involved creating and coordinating a
multinational military. National presidents and public opinion disapproved of this
proposal, which resulted in a change of tone. In San Antonio, there was no further talk
of a multinational military, but rather a reaffirmation of the need to combat drug
trafficking. This commitment was grounded in the idea of shared responsibility of all
countries in waging a war on drugs, an idea which was adopted at the first Summit of
the Americas in Miami in 1994.
This principle reflected the decisions made at the Vienna Conference on Drugs,
in 1988, which brought up to date the prohibitionist regime established in 1961. The
Conference addressed new issues, such as money laundering, but continued to
emphasize the use of the military and police to combat drug users and drug trafficking.
Furthermore, the report produced at the Conference held that drug trafficking was a
threat to international stability, a finding that went one step further than those made at
previous conferences: drug trafficking as an issue of global security (Herschinger, 2011;
Rodrigues, 2006).
In the 1990s, the Clinton administration implemented an additional form of
diplomatic and economic pressure, the so-called Certification, a report published
annually by Congress that certifies whether a given country has been an ally in the war
on drugs. A country that fails to be certified can suffer cuts in U.S. military and financial
aid, as well as trade barriers with the U.S.
Despite U.S. military and diplomatic pressure, the wide acceptance of the war on
drugs by Latin American countries was not merely the effect of coercion. Each country
had its own way of incorporating the prohibitionist model while taking into account its
internal dynamics. In the Andean countries, the link made between drug trafficking and
leftist guerrillas meant that support for the war on drugs was a means to gain material
resources, diplomatic support and moral authority to wage domestic wars. In sum,
support for the war on drugs by Latin American countries was not merely to succumb
to the U.S. agenda for hemispheric security. U.S. policy goals intersected with the goals
of those countries that supported the prohibitionist regime.
The case of Colombia sheds light on this relationship. The internal Colombian
conflict has existed since the 1960s, involving leftist guerrillas, the state and right-wing


paramilitary groups. The emergence of drug trafficking groups at the end of the 1970s
has further complicated the situation in Colombia (Pcault, 2010). For the Colombian
and U.S. governments, guerrillas, paramilitaries and drug traffickers are involved, to
some extent, with international drug trafficking. In light of this, Plan Colombia, begun
in 2000 with the intent to combat drug trafficking in the country, was from its inception
dubious in identifying its targets. After the terrorist attacks in September 2001, and the
resulting declaration of the war on terror by the U.S., there were no further definitional
problems, since both the FARC and paramilitaries were classified as terrorist groups
and could be targeted as a result of the connection asserted between the war on terror
and the war on drugs (Labrousse, 2005; Rodrigues, 2006).
Since 2001, the FARC the enemy most targeted by the Colombian government
have suffered serious defeats and are vulnerable, in contrast with their standing a
decade ago (Torres del Ro, 2010). One could thus assert that Colombias adhesion to the
U.S. security agenda regarding drugs and terrorism linked its civil war to the global
war, strengthening the Colombian governments dominion over its territory. Plan
Colombia also had an effect on the Colombian drug traffickers the so-called drug
cartels extending its operations and creating room for groups from other countries to
flourish, such as the Mexicans. It is possible that the rise of the Mexican drug trafficking
business, during the 2000s, is linked to the effects of Plan Colombia on the Colombian
groups (Bentez Manaut, 2010). For authors like Rodrguez Luna (2010) the frontal
combat to the Colombian cartels have transferred logistic capacities, economic and
political power to the Mexican cartels. This way, the Mexican groups would have
gained control over the Caribbean and Central Americas cocaine and heroin routes to
the United States.
The worsening situation in Mexico, however, led the government to opt for the
same Colombian recipe: toughening and militarizing the fight against drug trafficking
(Freeman & Sierra, 2005; Gutirrez, 2007). The Felipe Caldern administration (2006-
2012) launched a direct attack to the Mexicans cartels, mobilizing the Army and the
Navy to fight those groups. The Iniciativa Mrida Plan, alike the Plan Colombia, was
established with US support in order to strengthen the Mexican military skills and
equipment to fight drug-trafficking illegal groups. War-like operations started in early
2007, concentrated mainly in the northern states along the US border, the states of the
Mexican Gulf and the south-west states of the Pacific coast.
Then the general framework of violence got worse. On one side, the cartels were
fighting each other aiming the control of the US routes and market. On the other side,
the military commandos started occupying municipalities, small villages and citys
neighborhoods previously under cartels rule. For Cisneros (2010) and Boyer (2012) the
Caldern decision was in part a populist tactic to deal with the loss of legitimacy of his
mandate because of a contested election process. Partially true, the militarization of


drug-trafficking combat in Mexico was not a new strategy. In fact, it has started in the
1970s, following the US declaration of the war on drugs. After that some scandals
related to military involvement with the narcos reached the Mexican high command in
the 1990s. The novelty of the Merida Initiative was the systematic and durable
militarization of the public safety policies, assuming the drug-trafficking issue as the
center cause of violence and crime in the country. This governmental decision has
created a hybrid strategic policy that has fused the national security case with a huge
public safety problem.
The result, since 2006, has been approximately 50,000 deaths, cities occupied by
drug trafficking groups, other cities occupied by the army, and a situation far from
being resolved. Despite of the fact that the Merida Initiative was negotiated with the
George W. Bush administration, Barack Obamas administration has assured the plan
launching in 2009 a second phase called Iniciativa Mrida II. The new Mexican
president Enrique Pea Nieto, a political adversary of Caldern, has not demonstrated
intentions of changing the general plan of militarization.
The Brazilian case was, until now, different. Considered during the 1980s a
"cocaine export corridor," (Labrousse & Depirou, 1988) Brazil is also classified today as
a country that consumes and produces illegal drugs and that is an important market for
money laundering (Farer, 2003; Glenny, 2008). In Brazil, drug trafficking is commonly
associated with the poor and slum dwellers and is linked to the so-called commandos.
Although the situation regarding production, trafficking and consumption of illegal
drugs in Brazil does not fit this simple framework, the link between drug trafficking
and poverty has justified public safety programs that focus on prohibition and
repression as a means to address the drug problem.
The most recent of these programs has been tested in Rio de Janeiro. The so-
called Police Pacification Units (UPP) have been implemented in slums after the
occupation by military police and its special battalions on a project fraught with
military connotations: territorial conquest, strategic occupation, pacification. The
Armed Forces have been engaged in this program since November 2010 in the area
known as the Complexo do Alemo. The visibility of the attacks allegedly sponsored by
groups of traffickers from the Complexo do Alemo, linked to the difficulty in occupying
this set of slums, justified a huge integrated action between civil and military police,
federal forces and the military (mostly the Army and Marines). This was not the first
time that the military acted in the field of public security, by occupying slums. Nor was
it the first time that society applauded the action. However, the use of the military in
public security in Brazil is a controversial topic (Zaverucha, 2008; Arruda, 2007). The
1988 Constitution provides for the use of armed forces to "guarantee law and order," by
presidential order, in extreme cases. The final version of this constitutional article was
completed only in August 2010, three months before the start of the Complexo do Alemo


operation. Previous laws had given police power to the Armed Forces at the border and
the territorial sea, allowing the military to arrest suspects and search vehicles (powers
previously held exclusively by the Federal Police).
One of the most important aspects of the Pacification Force formed to occupy the
favelas in Rio was the fact that some of its elements had previously taken part of the
Brazilian military force in Haiti. They were trained to act in urban combat scenarios
very similar to the ones they have found in Brazil. It remains not clear if the connection
between the Haitian experience of these military commandos and their operation in a
domestic context was a deliberated policy by the Federal government and the military
or if it was contingency (Rodrigues & Brancoli, 2012). The fact is that the so-called
Archangel Operation was the longest military occupation of urban zones in the modern
Brazilian History (from November 2010 until July 2012). Nevertheless, it was not a
novelty for the Brazilian military. Instead, it has a historical involvement in internal
missions. This expression pacification was used in the XIX century to describe the
military victories over regional rebellions, and it was also used in the beginning of the
XX century to name the military control over indigenous peoples in Brazils country
side and in the Amazon. The pacification task is taken by the Brazilian military as part of
its ethos and mission.

This self-assumed role as the civilization keeper in Brazil has reflected over the
long and hard experience of military rule (1964-1985) in which the Armed Forces were
used alike in many other Latin American countries to arrest, torture and kill fellow
citizens taken as criminals and internal enemies. For these reasons, the military
mobilization to face public safety problems highlights a debate over the role of the
Armed Forces in the Brazilian History, especially in the context of the new democratic
rule in the country.
In that sense, the role of the military in public security raises conceptual and
political issues. From a conceptual point of view, there is a challenge to the traditional
division between public safety and national security, because the military is classically
understood as the armed wing of the state for its defense against external attacks
(Figueiredo, 2010). External attacks as understood by international law are those made
by other states (Anand, 2009). Drug trafficking consists of activity that crosses borders
and, therefore, is from other states. But they are not armed forces of other states. Rather,
they are private groups operating a transnational business, without traditional political
goals.
However, drug trafficking has been understood since its inception as both a
national and international problem. It began as a public safety issue that later added
concerns involving national, regional and global security. This process of strengthening
security involves, by definition, the areas of domestic and international security. By


understanding drug trafficking as not only a threat to public safety, but also to national
security, the U.S. and parts of Latin America societies, including in Brazil, defend the
use of the Armed Forces in their fight.
The analysis of the war on drugs and drug trafficking as issues of global security
puts them in the field of study of the "new international conflicts" or "new threats"
(Kaldor, 2006; Kan, 2009), composed of transnational private groups that mobilize
transnational combat fighting producing what I call flux-wars (Rodrigues, 2004a;
Rodrigues, 2010).
From a political perspective, the impact of military involvement in combating
drug trafficking or "organized crime" is substantial. Many countries in Latin America
have recently emerged from long periods of dictatorship led by military governments.
In these regimes, violent repression was justified by the necessity to fight political
opponents deemed to be subversive "internal enemies". Defining these opponents as
"enemies" had the impact of dehumanizing them by treating them as an "Other", an
element that does not belong to society and that contaminates it (Herschinger, 2011).
This act of political and moral discourse is the foundation on which societies like
ours authorize or accept persecution, arrest, torture and murder (Foucault, 2002). In the
case of dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, this "Other" is not a foreigner but a co-
citizen. Democratic regimes, in their own way, also operate systems of selection and
punishment of those who are considered threats to society.
In Brazil's military dictatorship, the political opposition was identified as the
"internal enemy". And, now, in democratic Brazil? The militarization of the fight against
drug trafficking shows what? Does it show that drug traffickers are the new "internal
enemies" that can be combated and eliminated for the good of society? Does it show
that society supports, even if silently, the elimination of people seen as dangerous?
Prohibitionist discourse describes such individuals as a danger to public health, public
security, national security and global security. The prohibitionism is thus a political
practice that produces enemies. Global enemies and internal enemies.
The Roman god Janus, with his two faces, looked at the future and the past. His
two-faced image led the Romans to choose to name the first month of the year, and in
modern times experts, to represent the two dimensions of state security: internal and
external. This division in dimensions of state security is found in the ideals of
democratic constitutions. The fusion of these two faces would be acceptable only in
exceptional moments, such as in a state of war or social upheaval. Yet beneath the
seeming normality of democratic institutions and civil peace is a state of undeclared
war, but which is evidenced by the prohibitionism and the fight against drug
trafficking. In our analysis of the war on drugs we can see that Janus has a single face.
Regarding the militarization of public security, it is interesting to note that the
United States since 1878 has prohibited the use of the Armed Forces in this role, while


advocating since the 1970s that Latin Americans do the opposite. And the fight against
drug trafficking has been a major justification for further using the armed forces as law
enforcement. From an analytical standpoint, the militarization of the fight against drug
trafficking has an advantage: it shows the daily war being waged as a result of the
prohibitionism, both inside and far from the borders, and makes the war on drugs more
than a figure of speech.
Meanwhile, Latin American societies, frightened and desperate for security,
actively support or silently consent to continuing this war, with its thousands of
dead and endless violence.




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