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4 Under
the mask of the war on drugs By
Lars Schall
"If you look at the drug
war from a purely economic point of view, the role
of the government is to protect the drug
cartel."Milton Friedman
Oliver
Villar is a lecturer in politics at Charles Sturt
University in Bathurst, Australia, a country where
he has lived for most of his life. He was born in
Mendoza, Argentina. In 2008 he completed his PhD
on the political economy of contemporary Colombia
in the context of the cocaine drug trade at the
UWS Latin American Research Group (LARG). Whilst
completing his PhD, Villar's research interests in
political economy, Latin America and the global
drug trade followed teaching positions in politics
at UWS and Macquarie University.
For the
past decade his research has been devoted to the book
(co-written with Drew
Cottle) Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on
Terror: US Imperialism and Class Struggle in
Colombia" (Monthly
Review Press. He has published broadly on the
Inter-American cocaine drug trade, the US War on
Drugs and Terror in Colombia, and US-Colombian
relations. This abiding interest extends across
economic thought, economic development and the
development of social and political relationships
between the First World and Third World (in
particular between the United States and Latin
America) and the impact of neoliberal economic
globalization.
Lars Schall:
What has been your main motivation to spend 10
years of your life to the subject of the drug
trade?
Oliver Villar: The
main motivation goes sometime back. I think it has
to do firstly with my own experiences in growing
up in working class suburbs in Sydney, Australia.
It always has been an area that I found very
curious and fascinating just to think about how
rampant and persuasive drugs really are in our
communities, and just by looking at it in more
recent times how much worse the drug problem has
become, not just in lower socio-economic areas,
but everywhere.
But from then on, when I
finally had the opportunity to do so, I actually
undertook this as a PhD thesis. I spent my time
carefully looking at firstly what was written on
the drug trade, but as coming from Latin America,
I was very interested in particular in the Latin
American drug trade as well.
So I looked
at the classic works such Alfred W McCoy's
Politics of Heroin, Peter Dale Scott's
Cocaine Politics, Douglas Valentine's
The Strength of the Wolf, and works that
related not just to the drug trade, but from
various angles including political science
perspectives to see what we know about drugs.
I found there were a lot of gaps missing,
and there was a lot written on Asia, on Central
America, particular from the 1980s, if you recall
the Iran-Contra theme and scandal, but nothing
really on where drugs actually come from.
Eventually my research took me to Colombia, and in
the Western hemisphere at least, cocaine became
that subject of investigation. I looked at it from
a political economy perspective, and so from there
on you can kind of get an idea about some of the
influences in my background in eventually taking
that much time to do it.
LS:
Does the drug trade work very differently than
people usually assume?
OV:
Well, yes. What do people usually assume? Well,
it's a criminological subject of investigation,
it's a crime approach, it's criminals, it's pretty
much a Hollywood kind of spectacle where it
becomes clear who the good and the bad guys are.
But what I found, it's far more than just simply
criminals at work.
What we do know, if you
go back to the history of the global drug trade,
which I did pursue, you find that states, not just
individuals or criminals, were also part of the
process of production and distribution. The most
notorious example is the British colonial opium
trade, where much of that process was happening in
a very wide scale, where the British not only
gained financially but also used it as a political
form of social control and repression.
What did they do? In China they were able
quite effectively to open up the market to British
control. This is just one example. And from there
on I looked at other great powers and the way they
also somehow managed to use drugs as a political
instrument, but also as a form of financial
wealth, as you could say, or revenue to maintain
and sustain their power. The great power of today
I have to say is the United States, of course.
These are some of the episodes and investigations
that I have looked at in my new book.
LS: From my perspective as a
financial journalist it is remarkable to see that
you treat cocaine as just another capitalist
commodity, like copper, soy beans or coffee, but
then again as a uniquely imperial commodity. [1]
Can you explain this approach, please?
OV:Again drawing upon past
empires or great powers, it becomes an imperial
commodity because it is primarily serving the
interests of that imperial state. If we look at
the United States for instance, it becomes an
imperial commodity just as much as opium became a
British imperial commodity in a way it related to
the Chinese. It means the imperial state is there
to gain from the wealth, the United States in this
case, but it also means that it serves as a
political instrument to harness and maintain a
political economy which is favorable to imperial
interests.
We had the "War on Drugs", for
example. It is a way how an imperial power can
intervene and also penetrate a society much like
the British were able to do with China in many
respects. So it is an imperial commodity because
it does serve that profit mechanism, but it is
also an instrument for social control and
repression.
We see this continuity with
examples where this takes place. And Colombia, I
think, was the most outstanding and unique example
which I have made into an investigative case study
itself.
Another thing worth mentioning is
what actually makes the largest sectors of global
trade, what are they? It's oil, arms, and drugs -
the difference being that because drugs are seen
as an illegal product, economists don't study it
as just another capitalist commodity - but it is a
commodity. If you look at it from a market
perspective, it works pretty much the same way as
other commodities in the global financial system.
LS: Cocaine has become one
more means for extracting surplus value on which
to realize profits and thus accumulate capital.
But isn't it the criminalized status of drugs that
makes this whole business possible in the first
place?
OV: We have to think
about what would happen if it was decriminalized?
It would actually be a bad thing if you were a
drug lord or someone to a large extent gaining
from the drug trade. What happens if it is
criminalized is that you are able to gain wealth
and profit from something that is very harmful to
society. First of all, it will never be
politically acceptable for politicians to say: You
know, we think that the war on drugs is failing,
so we decriminalize it. That would be almost
political suicide.
We know it is very
harmful to society, and by keeping it criminalized
it leaves a very grey area, not only in the
studies and investigations that I've noticed on
the drug trade, but it also leaves a very grey
area in terms of how the state actually tackles
the drug problem.
In many ways for law
enforcement it allows a grey area in order to
fight it. For instance, we can look for example at
the financial center, which gains predominantly
from it. But it also allows the criminal elements,
which are so key to making it work, flourish.
And by not touching that, by largely
ignoring the main criminal operation to take form
and to operate, then what you are doing by
criminalizing drugs is that you are actually
stimulating that demand. So there is also that
financial element to the whole issue as well.
That's why this business is actually possible by
that criminalized status.
LS: Do you think that those
who were responsible to make cocaine or opium
globally illegal were unaware that they were
creating a very profitable business with that
arrangement?
OV: If you are
looking at the true pioneers who started much of
the cocaine trade in South America, these were
drug traffickers from places like Bolivia, which
had a clear monopoly of coca production, and also
at the people that formed the cartels in the
1980's like the Medellin cartel or the Cali cartel
and other groups, I think they were not aware of
the way things would eventually turn out.
But the other element, the state element,
which made it part of their imperial interests to
allow the drug trade to flourish, I think they
perhaps had some sense - just looking at things in
retrospective, of course - that this would be a
very profitable business within that arrangement.
At the time of the 1980s in Latin America,
it was pretty much seen as a means to fund
operations, and at that time these were
essentially counter-insurgency operations in the
context of the Cold War. There was no real big
ambition to say "We will create the drug trade
because it is a very large business opportunity."
I think it just became that because it was
something that was of convenience - and that's
exactly what we see now in how the banks operate
today: it's of financial convenience, why get rid
of it? Out of these historical patterns it has
become what it has become, but for different
reasons.
I don't think that even Pablo
Escobar would have imagined just how enormous the
global drug trade would become. They were largely
driven by self-interests and their own profits.
But then the state made it much bigger and made it
into a regional institutionalized phenomenon that
we see to this day. And we can see also how the
state in parts of South America, like Bolivia with
the 1980 Cocaine Coup as it was known, and also
the rampant institutionalization of cocaine in
Colombia, has become very much part of this
arrangement.
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