Trump and Biden Ignore How the War on Drugs Fuels Violence in Latin America

When Peruvian coca production was reduced, production shifted to Colombia. When Colombian drug cartels were dismantled, Mexican cartels became stronger. Weakened large cartels allowed smaller organizations to fill the void. Brazil’s overcrowded, underfunded, violent and corrupt prisons became headquarters and training grounds for drug traffickers.

The war on drugs generates criminal and police violence in Latin America, and blurs the boundary between the two. Drug businesses create their own justice systems.

There’s no point calling the police to help you resolve an illegal business transaction. Drug dealers would rather act as the police than have someone else call the police into their neighborhoods.

Drug profits create opportunities for corruption, involving police officers, government bureaucrats and high-level politicians, and all sides create violence when these private-public partnerships go wrong.

Politicians often enlist drug dealers, militia and police officers to eliminate their opponents or to generate societal drama for political gain.

A Vicious Cycle
Combined with the war on drugs, domestic tough-on-crime and restrictive immigration policies in the U.S. generate a vicious cycle of displacement and violence on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Greater border enforcement means that more immigrants have to depend on human smuggling organizations, and pass through territories controlled by drug traffickers, to make the crossing. But these relationships go deeper.

As the book Space of Detention by American cultural anthropologist Elana Zilberg explains, the first wave of Salvadorean refugees to the U.S. were escaping the American-backed civil war and political repression of the 1980s.

Some of these refugees’ adult children joined youth gangs, and were imprisoned and deported from the U.S. due to toughening anti-drug and immigration policies. As they arrived in their parents’ country, one they barely knew, they influenced local youth culture, symbols and gang affiliations, creating transnational youth gangs known as maras.

Maras were then violently repressed by Salvadorean policies that were modelled on U.S. drug/gang measures, including persecuting young adults if they had tattoos.

Police and criminal violence has generated more insecurity, leading some Salvadorean youth to seek refuge in Mexico and the United States.

U.S. conservatives cite criminal violence in Latin America to deny migrants fleeing that violence the right to asylum, and as an excuse to enforce draconian immigration, policing and deportation policies, which in turn exacerbate the same problems that they’re ostensibly aimed at solving.

Whether these immigrants are members of gangs, are carrying drugs, have learned how to be violent or are innocent victims is beside the point. The point is that the American public should no longer pretend that the United States hasn’t played a critical role in creating and fueling this violence. The violence doesn’t only go in a south-north direction.

Luisa Farah Schwartzman is Associate Professor in Sociology, University of Toronto. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation.