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Summary
This is part three of a three-part series, the Drug War Cover-up series that describes the incidents surrounding the DEA-led drug interdiction operation known as the Ahuas massacre on May 11, 2012.
In Part three, host Karen Spring speaks with journalist and researcher, Dawn Marie Paley about the effects of the drug war in the Americas. Paley talks about how people going about their daily life are affected by the drug war, and what accountability may look like.
Read Dawn’s book, Drug War Capitalism: https://www.akpress.org/drug-war-capitalism.html
Find Dawn’s work at: https://www.dawnpaley.ca/
Transcript
Karen Spring:
When a killing or violence occurs, Hondurans, mostly the victims and their families, usually ask, who are the autores intelectuales?, which translates to, who are the intellectual authors of the crime? I think I’ve mentioned this term before in previous episodes, although the term doesn’t translate well into English. Basically what they’re asking is, who paid for the crime? Whose interests did the murder or crime serve? Who is the mastermind behind it?
This is Part III, or the last episode, of the Drug War Cover-Up series. This series looks at the May 2012 DEA-led drug interdiction operation in a town called Ahuás in eastern Honduras. Four Indigenous Hondurans were killed in that mission. And it led to a years-long cover-up by the US DEA, US State Department, and the Honduran government.
Welcome to the Honduras Now podcast. I’m your host, Karen Spring. In each episode, I will be sharing human rights stories from Honduras and connecting them to global issues and North American policy. Thank you so much for listening.
Welcome back, everyone. After taking a short break, I’m happy to bring you the final episode in the Drug War Cover-Up series. Today, I want to bring Part I and Part II of this series together into a broader analysis and discussion of the US-led War on Drugs. If you haven’t heard Part I or Part II yet, I definitely recommend you check them out.
It’s been over ten years since four Indigenous Honduran people were killed in a DEA-led operation in the Moskitia region. As we looked at in Part II, there has been no accountability both in Honduras and, most importantly, in the United States.
Today, I’ve invited journalist and friend Dawn Marie Paley to discuss what this so-called War on Drugs means for accountability, for the affected communities, including those in the United States and Canada. And, of course, communities like Ahuás and others in Latin America.
Dawn Marie Paley is the author of the book Drug War Capitalism. She’s worked as a freelance reporter for over ten years, publishing in a bunch of magazines and newspapers, including The Nation, the NACLA Report, and La Jornada. She’s based in Mexico and holds a PhD in sociology from the Autonomous University of Puebla, Mexico. Without further ado, this is my interview with Dawn Paley.
Dawn, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being with us today. You wrote a really important book called Drug War Capitalism. It provides such an important take on the Drug War, as specifically the relationship between the Drug War and the promotion of neoliberalism in Latin America.
You’ve listened to the last two episodes of Part I and Part II of this series, The Drug War Cover-Up. So I guess after listening to it, and reflecting on all the research and all the writing that you’ve done on the Drug War in Latin America, what do you think the Ahuás massacre tells us about the activities of the US via its Drug War strategy in Latin America?
Dawn Marie Paley:
Thanks, Karen. It’s so nice to be here. And I learned a lot from the first few episodes about the Ahuás massacre. And it got me thinking about this research that many of us have been doing for quite a few years now, even decades, about the impacts of the Drug War, outside of the US as well as inside the US. So I feel like one of the things that really came through in the first two episodes of the podcast, which I’ve also reflected on in my book, is just the level of impunity, the level of irresponsibility, and the level of just outright violence that is used against civilians, with no real reflection, or with no investigation, with no intelligence, with no awareness.
I’ve worked on quite a few cases, as a researcher and as a journalist. And what for sure came through in the podcast episodes is just how people going about their daily lives, in the most humilde way, just traveling back to their community, carrying seeds for their community, people who are participating in everyday life have their lives taken, or have their lives irreversibly transformed, by this really explicit violence.
And there’s a whole kind of, I would almost want to say, like, a body of theory, that would say that they were innocent bystanders, and that it was an accident, and that it never should have happened. And I think that’s true. Clearly, it never should have happened. But I think saying over and over again, that these are unintended consequences, and that this wasn’t supposed to happen this way, and the people who were supposed to be murdered in a boat from a helicopter in the air were bad guys, is also a false dichotomy.
Like we shouldn’t necessarily approach what happened in Ahuás as something that stands alone in terms of, like, people being targeted on the pretext of, they’re smuggling drugs. It happens all the time. It happens in Canada. It happens in the US. It happens everywhere. It happens at regular checkpoints. It happens at borders. It happens all the time. It happens with raids, and in activists’ homes where later drugs are planted. So, you know, the use of drugs, the substance, over and over again, by authorities, on the pretext of protecting this undefined mass of people, we can imagine the American people, let’s say the US people, just comes at such a strong, strong, strong, huge cost for the victims. It’s the policies of prohibition that are so much more harmful than the drugs themselves.
So one of the things I tried to work on in Drug War Capitalism, I tried to open up, which is my first book, in terms of discussion and debate, and how we’re thinking about these massacres or attacks or tragedies that are happening in the context of drug war, is to put them in the context of capitalism. So not thinking of them as taking place on this other terrain, which is all about illegal substances and illegal narcotics and criminal networks, but to think of them as taking place within actually existing capitalism. So thinking about the murders of workers happening in Ciudad Juárez as linked to, and as something that we should be thinking about within the context of, the maquila system, for example.
And in this case, for sure, thinking through the assassination of Indigenous people returning to their home community within its full context. Not just as something happening in the illegal economy, not just as some kind of fight on crime. Because I think that there’s a lot of problems with the idea that it was just innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire. It’s like, no, they were targeted, they were targeted from air, and they were targeting people on this river, because they probably knew they could get away with it. And, honestly, they probably would have got away with it wherever they were doing it.
But also because, it’s like I do think that we need to do the work to understand how this violence is used in specific regions against certain populations, which tend to be super marginalized, as a form of social control. And not just keep attributing it to, like, caught in the crossfire or, you know, a big mistake. It’s like, well, clearly, how many mistakes can you commit? So this year in Mexico, we have gone over 500,000 direct victims since the Drug War started in 2006. And that’s victims of homicide and victims of enforced disappearance. So victims of the most heinous crimes. And in a lot of those cases, potentially in the majority of those cases, you could make the argument that it was the wrong person, and the wrong place at the wrong time, that they were an innocent bystander.
But it’s, like, it’s systematic, right? What’s happening is systematic. And it’s being systematically used against certain communities, people of a certain social class, people from a certain geographical area. And I think that’s the kind of stuff that I try to encourage people to think through, as well as natural resources, and other kinds of wealth, and other ways of protecting land and wealth that folks in communities are using. The drugs just provide such a flexible pretext to go in, to militarize. I mean, obviously what happened in Ahuás is so powerful because it was directly the DEA doing it. I think a lot of the times they’re involved, but their hand isn’t as visible. But it’s certainly not like an exception to the rule. I would say it’s more like a paradigmatic case to understand so many other terrible events that have taken place, not just in Mexico, also Central America, Colombia, and beyond, that have deeply, deeply impacted communal life, deeply impacted people’s ability to survive and people’s own lives. For what, right?
Karen Spring:
Yeah, you’ve pointed out a really important point. And I think this is something that comes up a lot in my work, is that violence is often justified by certain actors, when they’re like, oh, those people were involved in something that they shouldn’t have been. Or they were actually trafficking drugs. Therefore it’s, oh, we’re not going to focus on that case, or that’s not going to be something that we raise, because they were doing bad things, therefore the violence is allowed, or we’re just going to let that one go. And then the Drug War continues, right?
So I think that that analysis is really important, that these are intentionally targeted. And there’s like a geography to violence related to the Drug War, and interdiction, as they called this one specific operation in Ahuás.
So, but one of the things I wanted to ask you about is that, I find that a lot of people are quite taken aback when they hear about the Ahuás situation, and they, you know, maybe when they listened to the first episode, is that the DEA and US forces were so focused on the actual seizure of the drugs. You know, you saw like these agents that propelled down from a helicopter, and get into this boat, they were protecting the drugs. And it wasn’t about anything else except getting this white powder in their possession, and seizing it. And a lot of people ask, these are just the drugs. Even if someone is caught in trafficking drugs, it’s a person in like a small community, they’re actually just small potatoes. They’re not the big guns in this whole Drug War thing that plays out. And so a lot of people are taken aback by how they’re so focused on drugs.
So I guess what I would ask you is, why do you think that the DEA in this circumstance, but also in other circumstances, are so focused on, so they’re focusing their efforts on that, on just seizing the cocaine, or seizing the drugs, and then moving on?
Dawn Marie Paley:
I think part of it has to do with, basically, that we’re talking, like you said, we’re talking about packets of powder, we’re talking about inert material. And that’s a variable that they can control. In fact, they can move it themselves. And they likely are moving it themselves. And they can make it show up, they can make it disappear. It’s not going to give testimony, it’s not going to talk back, it’s not going to give them problems. So it’s a very specific variable that allows them to approach situations just through the lens of that variable.
But, obviously, like, you know, what you’re mentioning about, what about the big guns, the so-called big guns? Well, we know in Honduras, and we know in Mexico as well, through the US court system that extremely high-level people in both of these countries, and I’m sure it’s the same in other places, are the ones who are organizing the drug trade. The drug trade is being organized by state forces, and by people who are in charge of state forces. And in Honduras, it comes to the level of the President. So for them to be actually doing the kind of investigation into these networks and all that kind of stuff, who would they be investigating? They would be investigating their counterparts. And, in fact, they would be investigating themselves. So it’s like, it’s kind of, I don’t know if catch-22 is the right expression. But it’s contradictory.
I think one of the things that has been useful for me in terms of thinking through this is that prohibition does not mean we’re not doing anything, we’re turning a blind eye, we’re looking in the other direction. Prohibition, and the prohibition specifically of narcotics, is a highly managed way of dealing with narcotics. It’s not hands off. It’s not just let it go. It’s a form of management. And that form of management has been militarized.
And that militarization has been extremely, extremely useful. It hasn’t been successful in terms of, like, actually stopping the drug trade or reducing it. But in Drug War Capitalism, I argue that I don’t think that’s the actual goal. Because I do think that the militarization of prohibition has been extremely useful, extremely useful in propping up right-wing allies of right-wing governments, of propping up certain governments themselves, of keeping down left and popular movements, of ensuring social control over all different territories.
I mean, you’ve got Mexico now, completely militarized to the hilt. And this started on the pretext of controlling the War on Drugs. And today it’s being deployed on the pretext of stopping people from migrating from southern Mexico to the US border. But it was the drugs pretext that made it possible. So it’s like, like I said before, it’s a very flexible enemy. Because they can make it show up, they can make it appear.
And we know that they have been, and by they, I mean the DEA, the US State Department, we know that they’ve had direct relationships with narco traffickers in the past. And we know through things like the extradition of Juan Orlando Hernández, or here in Mexico, Genaro García Luna, who’s in the US, who’s the former head of security in Mexico. And also the arrest of [Salvador] Cienfuegos, who was the former defense minister in the previous sexenio, who was then sent back to Mexico and is now free.
But these are the folks who organize the drug trade. The drug trade is not organized by guys on the street corner. And so really investigating the drug trade? It’s like they can’t do it, because their own institution would collapse under the total hypocrisy of what they’re doing.
Karen Spring:
I think that’s a really great way of explaining it, especially your point about the prohibition, and how they can make cocaine disappear or appear. And it’s interesting because, when we were investigating the Ahuás massacre, people in the community would say, you know, everybody knows that the drugs are passing through, it’s been going on for so many years, and we’ve never had such a violent incident before, ever. And so the fact that drug interdiction or the prohibition efforts are actually introducing the violence into these areas where drugs are moving relatively peacefully. So a lot of people in the communities mentioned that.
So one of the things I wanted to ask you about is that, you know, the DEA thought they’d covered up the incident. They thought they could get away with what happened in the massacre, and all the events that happened that night. They were sort of, it was the voices of the local people that kept insisting and insisting, and those voices built, and more people got involved. And it was sort of like the voices of the local people for a long time against the DEA, against the State Department. And, you know, the DEA used that credibility that’s naturally built into these systems of power to try and get away with what happened that night. And it took a long time. They told their version to the media. They told their version to Congress. And they lied about what happened that night to Congress. It wasn’t until we were able to get to the highest levels of Congress. And a bunch of people did this, like taking the lead from the voices in the local community, that they did these internal investigations, and it was exposed that they were lying the whole time.
And so what I wanted to ask you is, why is it so hard for the people of Ahuás, or other communities that are affected by the Drug War and prohibition in general, to get any sort of justice?
Dawn Marie Paley:
Yeah, that’s a huge question. And I think it applies internationally. I think it applies globally. And I think it has to do with holding police accountable at the end of the day. I think police and military forces historically have enjoyed so much impunity for their crimes. And, to this day, they continue to do so. And, you know, when I was thinking about, when have people gotten justice for crimes committed by state security forces? There’s no doubt that in every case, in every single injustice, people have fought, people have fought and people have fought, and they have fought their whole lives, like people fighting here in Mexico from the 1960s and 1970s, who are now in their 70s and 80s. And still fighting, and still demanding truth and justice, for the disappeared. And they’re still not getting it. They’re not getting it. And so I think the DEA is one among many police and military forces that just enjoys, they just wrap themselves in a blanket of immunity, and a blanket of protection, in a blanket of bad apples. If they have to admit something, it’s that someone messed up, or that someone was, and there could be some kind of small sanction. But I feel like, you know, in the US, especially since after the killing of George Floyd, and the massive protests that happened around the country, it brought my attention in a new way to the demand to abolish the police. And how connected that demand is with the fact that we just cannot get justice in these systems as they’re set up today.
Karen Spring:
You know, and this actually is a really good lead into my next question as well. And I kind of struggle with this myself, and I think some people in Honduras do too. It’s sort of like this double-edged sword that, you know, so many people in Honduras and around the world are watching the DEA do all these drug busts, whether it’s officials in the government in Mexico or anywhere else in the world, or Honduras, the US Justice Department extraditing and accusing ex-President Juan Orland Hernández for drug trafficking, and then taking him and trying him in US courts. You know, I am happy to see that happen, because I’ve seen what awful things that Juan Orlando Hernández has done. But it’s also a major double-edged sword, because I don’t want to prop up the DEA and applaud their efforts. Because I know that they lie, and I know what they’ve done, you know, in the case of Ahuás is a really good example. So I don’t want to trust the intentions of the DEA, that they are actually cracking down on drug trafficking by accusing President Hernández.
So I guess my question is, based on your research and experience covering the Drug War, how do you understand the arrest of Juan Orlando Hernández by the DEA, and then his extradition to stand trial in the United States for drug trafficking charges?
Dawn Marie Paley:
Yeah, that’s a really interesting question, especially since it comes from a place that’s so personal, and so deep, and it touches those contradictions within ourselves, right?
So I think that you’re absolutely right to not trust the intentions of the DEA.
Historically, extradition has been used to silence. So we have, for example, the extradition of high-level paramilitaries in Colombia, right at the beginning of what could have become a much more profound peace process than what they ended up living. And that extradition ended up, only the folks who are the paramilitaries who were extradited to the US, who had begun talking in Colombia, they’d begun talking about the connections, about the depth of the human rights abuses that they had been complicit in committing, sometimes together with state forces, sometimes in concert with legislators, for example. All of that was quieted, and they were brought to the US, and the only thing that they were asked about specifically in the US was drug trafficking.
We can see that, as well, like if you look at the expediente against Salvador Cienfuegos, the former defense minister of Mexico, who was in fact the defense minister in 2014 when the 43 students from Ayotzinapa who were disappeared, he was only going to be indicted on drug charges only.
So, historically, these types of forums, the US courts, aren’t places where we can learn about the multifarious ways in which Juan Orlando Hernández or Genaro García Luna were involved in repression, massive rights violations in collusion with XYZ authorities. It’s just a way to reduce the discussion down to those same packets of white powder that you mentioned. And so it has had an impact of limiting the kind of justice that can come from those types of forums.
And it’s also so interesting because, with Juan Orlando Hernández, it opens up a lot more questions about, you know, didn’t Obama sign anti-narcotics agreements directly with this guy? Yes! Right? So where’s the accountability there?
Like it should open a lot deeper questions. And I think that’s always been the work of activists, right? So I’m sure people will be there during his trial, bringing out these contradictions, and bringing out ways in which the US actually fortified and supported and built up the ability of Juan Orlando Hernández, his family, the armed forces under his control, to effectively traffic narcotics all of those years. We’ll be hearing about that because of the work of activists, right? So the trial might open some space, but if it isn’t for the work of activists and journalists, and folks who are getting sort of a more critical perspective on what it means that the President is being indicted as a narco trafficker, then it will stay in a very superficial thing that will be like, well, he’s responsible for money laundering and 35 packets of white stuff getting into the United States, which is the least of his crimes.
Karen Spring:
Yeah, I mean, I think you’ve touched the huge gigantic pink elephant in the room, in the courthouses, and in the Southern District Court of New York. I actually really like going to the drug trials, not because I’m really into, like, oh, the DEA and the Justice Department are doing this great job at cracking down on the War on Drugs, but more because there’s all these little tidbits of information that come out that tell you a lot about land control in the country, and also other names of individuals that are just living a great life, like the oligarchs of the elite in Honduras that are involved in drug trafficking, and how it overlaps. It’s this big pink elephant in the room, both because of the US role in propping up Juan Orlando Hernández, but also the fact that there’s all of these remnants still of what these structures mean, and that are still intact in Honduras.
So I wanted to ask you one more question about your book, about Drug War Capitalism. I think our conversations are really focused on Latin America. But I think that people that listen to this podcast, a lot of people are based in the United States, a lot of them are students. I think it’s really important to talk about, like, we’re not just talking about US foreign policy. Why do you think it’s so important for people in the United States and Canada to read your book, even if they’re not interested in the Drug War in Latin America, or what the US is doing abroad?
Dawn Marie Paley:
I think, increasingly, scholars and activists are considering both things at once, are considering the mass incarceration of so many people in the US, the criminalization of entire communities in the US and Canada, or racist policing and state repression in the United States, as being connected to what’s taking place in Mexico and Honduras and farther south. You know, I think that there’s also a lot of diasporic connections between both or all of these places at this point, and we’re just more and more connected all the time. So I think understanding US foreign policy is connected to understanding just the US at home, how it is, right?
Like one of the things I’ve been thinking about with Ahuás as well and this massacre is, like, these types of violence are exemplary in the sense that, like, the DEA going and shooting from a helicopter at unarmed Indigenous people in a boat, is setting an example. It’s setting an example for Honduran security forces, for any other security forces, that this is behavior that will be tolerated. This is behavior that is considered acceptable. And this is behavior for which there will be no recrimination.
And I feel like that kind of impunity is familiar to people who live in the United States, who have seen over and over, who’ve seen police officers murder people, you know, shoot them in the back, and especially black men, also black women, and like the case of Breonna Taylor, is huge, and basically get away with it, right?
So it’s like, these structures are connected, and these forms of policing are connected. And I think that the more we can sort of understand the connections between them, and the fact that police violence and the need for police abolition isn’t just something that’s important in the US, it’s also something that connects us with struggles, that maybe articulating it in a different way, but the struggles are really pushing for the same thing, whether it’s in Mexico or in Argentina or elsewhere. So I think for me, that would be my attempt at like a, you know, these struggles are connected, and police violence and violence from state forces is global. It’s not just a problem in one place.
Karen Spring:
Before I ask you to indicate where people can read your stuff, is there anything else that you feel like I should have asked you, that you want to mention related to the Drug War in Latin America or other important issues?
Dawn Marie Paley:
Yeah, I think one thing maybe is, that can kind of get lost in these conversations, which are really focused on, like, violence and horror and terror, is the strength of communities, the strength of communal organizing, the strength of activism, and how it’s important to think about how the repression that folks are facing is, in a sense, proportional to their ability to organize, to resist, to conserve their land, to conserve their territory, to conserve their lifeways, right? So understanding, and I know this is something that you do a lot on Honduras Now and in your other work, Karen, is like as an activist and someone who’s accompanied so many struggles is, like, there’s so much inspiring activism, and people always organizing in the most difficult conditions in Honduras. And that’s partly why there’s so much violence against them. It’s because they’re literally, like, unstoppable.
If the state wasn’t using these coercive, repressive measures to keep people down, Honduras would be a completely different country. So would Mexico, so would Guatemala, right?
And this reaches us back through the history of the 20th Century. But I would argue it reaches us much further back, to the conquista, to the colonization, to so many rebellions that happened that were quashed through force.
And so I just think that keeping that present can sometimes be hard in conversations that are so connected with death, with people suffering, with people being disfigured for the rest of their lives, with people just dealing with so much trauma, with people being forced to leave their territories, their ancestral territories, etc.
But to know that there’s still, even in those conditions, there’s so much organizing happening, is, I think, what keeps me going, what keeps me inspired. And I hope through my work also, especially, you know, this is, I’m working on it, right? But it’s something that I can help make visible, because it’s why this repression exists, it’s because of people’s ability to organize for change.
Karen Spring:
Yeah, I think that’s an amazing point. I think it’s an amazing way to end this interview as well. Like, it’s just to make people not feel like this is such a heavy topic, but there’s really amazing things going on all around the world, to resist, and in the United States and Canada, to resist this type of violence.
So Dawn, where can people find your work? And I don’t know if you have a recent article that you’d recommend people to read. Where can people find you?
Dawn Marie Paley:
OK, so I’m on Twitter, it’s @dawn_, or on Facebook as Dawn Marie Paley. And I’ve got a new piece coming out with Truthdig, which is just relaunched, about migration and militarization here in Mexico. But, otherwise, people can read on my work on my website, which is just dawnpaley.ca.
Karen Spring:
Perfect. Thank you so much, Dawn, for talking to us today.
Dawn Marie Paley:
My pleasure.
Karen Spring:
That was Dawn Paley, author of Drug War Capitalism. Definitely read her articles and follow her work. She puts out excellent analysis and pieces from Mexico.
Going back to what I was talking about at the beginning of the episode, I think it’s pretty clear who the intellectual authors or the masterminds of the Drug War really are. The goal now is to continue to push for accountability, particularly in the United States, where the money, the weapons, and the policies leading the Drug War originate from.
This was the last and final part of the three-part series, The Drug War Cover-Up. Although the series has come to an end, the Ahuás case and the pursuit of justice, both in Honduras and the United States, for the victims and their families, is still ongoing. These types of struggles take a while to play out. And I’ll continue to report on any developments in the case, either on the podcast or on the podcast’s Twitter account @HondurasNow.
I’m so grateful to our loyal listeners and donors. You keep this podcast going. For those that are regular listeners and have the ability to do so, please consider becoming a monthly donor. If you’re not able to, share it via social media, or tell a friend about the podcast.
This is Karen Spring, your host, signing off for now. Thank you so much for listening. Hasta pronto.