Lubna Alli

The idea that drug traffickers are significant actors in social and environmental change in rural areas and in agribusiness is one that struck me as important in the interest of framing. The McSweeney et al. reading also goes on to define drug traffickers as a “narco-bourgeoise” due to their use of cocaine profits to establish and extend private property relations on lands that were previously off limits for capital accumulation.

This idea that drug traffickers have an important relationship with drug control policy and capitalism, and as an extension of that their role in illicit capital in land use exchange is one that is atypical in the discourse of power and politics. Who really has the upper hand—is it the local drug lords or is it the local communities? Does drug trafficking work with or against the illicit processes shaping frontiers, such as state-endorsed “land grabbing”? And, what does this mean for actors in the international context of the War on Drugs?

Comparing this to Week 6’s Ojeda and González paper, there is some overlap in school of thought as they both provide a strong case for these issues concerning legitimacy of identity as it concerns legitimacy to rights and land ownership for the continued marginalization that Afro-Colombians, Indigenous, and peasant populations face in Colombia as a result of resource politics. The McSweeney et al. reading also goes on to say that “global drug policy orthodoxies (prohibition and interdiction) first produce and enrich traffickers, and then keep them perpetually moving into new rural landscapes,” which beg the question around who gets the blame?

The dichotomous relationship between poverty and wealth, gangsters turned philanthropists, and governments turned criminals

If the policies that are implemented from a top down approach continue to provide alternative loop holes for others to get around, then maybe this is saying something about the bigger picture around not just drug control and trafficking policy but also about the social and economic problems that Latin America as a whole might be facing. The Ballvé reading attempts to explain this, being Narco-frontiers, as a symptom of uneven war, neocolonial histories, political violence or outright war, and drug-fuelled primitive accumulation. This dichotomous relationship between poverty and wealth, gangsters turned philanthropists, and governments turned criminals is one that continues to drive the discussion around framing the narrative around ownership and access to the land. 

Sources:

Teo Ballvé. 2019. Narco‐frontiers: A spatial framework for drug‐fuelled accumulation. Journal of Agrarian Change. 19(2), 211-224.

Kendra McSweeney, Nazih Richani, Zoe Pearson, Jennifer Devine, & David Wrathall. 2017. Why do Narcos invest in Rural Land? Journal of Latin American Geography, 16(2), 3-29.