You and What Army? Violence, The State, and Mexico's War on Drugs

Abstract

In late 2010, WikiLeaks made public hundreds of private communications between US State Department facilities in Mexico and Washington, DC. The documents contain frank observations made by US bureaucrats and officials about Mexican politics and government, but are especially pointed in their treatment of Mexico's declared ‘War on Drugs', which, since 2006, has been the focus of unprecedented negotiation, cooperation, and tension between the two governments. With a few notable exceptions, geographers have largely stayed away from the study of illegal practices, and relatively little research in this area employs an explicitly spatial analytic. In this paper, we examine how the spatialization of the drug phenomenon operates as an official strategy of intervention – illicit phenomena like the illegal drug trade are rendered in spatial terms in order to become amenable to specific kinds of state intervention. This requires considerable boundary work, and we draw from the WikiLeaks archive to explore how state actors continuously work to materially and discursively isolate trafficking from a larger social, political and institutional context. The paper concludes with a discussion of the contradictory and incoherent narratives and conditions that constantly threaten to overflow these constructed boundaries, along with the structuring assumptions of the drug war.

Extracto

A finales de 2010, WikiLeaks divulgó cientos de comunicaciones privadas entre instituciones del Departamento de Estado de los Estados Unidos en México y Washington, DC. Los documentos contienen observaciones directas realizadas por burócratas y funcionarios estadounidenses sobre la política y el Gobierno mexicanos, pero son especialmente incisivas al abordar la guerra declarada contra la droga en México, que desde 2006 ha sido objeto de negociaciones, cooperación y tensión sin precedentes entre los dos Gobiernos. Con algunas excepciones notables, los geógrafos han permanecido en gran medida apartados del estudio sobre prácticas ilegales, y los estudios en este campo que emplean de manera explícita un análisis espacial han sido relativamente escasos. En este artículo analizamos cómo sirve la espacialización del fenómeno de las drogas de estrategia oficial de intervención. Los fenómenos ilícitos, tales como el comercio ilegal de drogas, se representan en términos espaciales con el objetivo de que sean susceptibles a determinados tipos de intervención estatal. Para ello es necesaria una considerable labor fronteriza; y nos basamos en los archivos de WikiLeaks para estudiar cómo trabajan los protagonistas estatales de forma ininterrumpida para aislar discursiva y materialmente el tráfico de un contexto social, político e institucional más amplio. Concluimos este artículo con un debate sobre los relatos contradictorios e incoherentes y las condiciones que amenazan constantemente con desbordar estas fronteras construidas, junto con las suposiciones estructuradas de la guerra contra las drogas.

摘要

2010年末，维基解密（WikiLeaks）将美国国务院驻墨西哥单位与华盛顿特区之间的数百则私人沟通内容公诸于世。这些档案包含了美国官僚与公务员对墨西哥政治与政府的直白观察，但却特别突出他们如何处理墨西哥所宣称的‘向毒品宣战'。自2006年开始，该战役俨然成为两国政府之间史无前例的协商、合作与冲突的焦点。除了部分着名的例外之外，地理学者大多置身于非法行为的研究之外，而该领域相对而言，则鲜少有研究明确运用空间分析。我们于本文中，检视毒品现象的空间化，如何作为官方介入的策略——诸如违法毒品交易的非法现象，透过空间加以呈现，使其成为特定的国家介入方式可修正的对象。此般研究需要大量的划界工作，而我们运用维基解密档案，探讨国家行动者如何持续在物质与论述方面，将毒品贩运隔离于更广泛的社会、政治及制度脉络之外。本文在结论中，探讨相互冲突且不一致的叙事，以及在毒品战争的结构化假定中，不断威胁溢出这些被建构出的边界之境况。

Résumé

Fin 2010, WikiLeaks a rendu public des centaines de communications privées entre les services du département d'Etat américain au Mexique et Washington, DC. Les documents comportent des constatations franches faites par les bureaucrates et les responsables américains à propos de la politique et de l'administration au Mexique. Qui plus est, ils sont particulièrement significatifs en ce qui concerne leur façon d'aborder la ‘Guerre contre la drogue' au Mexique qui, depuis 2006, fait l'objet de la négotiation, de la coopération et des tensions sans précèdent entre les deux administrations. À quelques exceptions notables près, les géographes ont évité en grande partie d’étudier les pratiques illégales, et rares sont les recherches dans ce domaine qui emploient une analytique explicitement spatiale. Ce présent article cherche à examiner comment la spatialisation du phénomène de la drogue fonctionne comme une stratégie officielle d'intervention – des phénomènes illicites, tels le trafic illégal de la drogue, sont présentés sur le plan spatial pour être classés dans des catégories d'intervention de l’État particulières. Cela nécessite un important travail quant aux frontières, et on on puise dans les archives WikiLeaks afin d'examiner dans un cadre social, politique et institutionnel plus large comment les acteurs étatiques travaillent constamment pour isoler matériellement et discursivement le trafic. En guise de conclusion, l'article discute des récits contradictoires, incohérents et des conditions qui menacent constamment de surmonter ces frontières délimitées, conjointement avec les hypothèses structurantes de la guerre contre la drogue.

Keywords:

• Mexico
• drug trafficking
• counter-narcotics policy
• state theory
• illicit geographies
• WikiLeaks

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank John Agnew and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this manuscript. We also wish to acknowledge Chelsea Manning, who has undertaken great sacrifice to reveal important truths about the USA's conduct abroad. As of the time of writing Manning is serving a 35-year prison sentence for releasing the archive of information referenced in this paper. We urge the US government to accept its own counsel – that ‘transparency and accountability are fundamental to modernization. There is no alternative in today's world of information technology' (10MEXICO83) – by granting Manning the clemency that she is justly due.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 WikiLeaks is a journalistic organization that seeks to provide a secure and anonymous forum for the release of information of interest to the public that is otherwise protected or held secret by government, business or related institutions. Although the activities of the WikiLeaks organization have been severely criticized by US government officials (among others) for publishing classified US government material, it is generally accepted that the organization's activities are journalistic in character and fall under relevant legal protections in the United States and abroad (for example, it is worth noting that although the organization's sources have been criminally prosecuted and imprisoned, to date not a single affiliate or employee of the WikiLeaks organization has been charged or prosecuted anywhere in the world for activities related to the group's conduct). On 28 November 2010 the WikiLeaks organization began the publication of 251,287 cables from US embassy and consulate facilities around the world in a document-dump that has since come to be known as “cablegate”. The cables were released in concert with investigative news stories by The New York Times, The Guardian, La Jornada, Der Spiegel, and a number of other high-profile newspapers who were given an opportunity to review, vet and analyse original and unredacted versions of the cables in advance of their publication. Thousands of news articles have since been written on the material included in the “cablegate” archive, and although the United States government was quick to condemn this leak of classified material, at no time have US officials questioned the veracity of its content. In this paper we draw on a narrow subsection of cables drawn from the “cablegate” leak, related specifically to US State Department facilities in Mexico and filtered according to categories discussed in the body of the paper. In the process we believe that the research presented here demonstrates how this type of leaked government material may be usefully analysed to explore government thought and behaviour, as inchoate or contradictory as these may often turn out to be.