If the drug trade has helped define the modern Mexican state, writes the author of a new article in The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, so too have wars on drugs. In “ From Bandit Hunting to a War Against ‘Social Poisoners’: Counterinsurgency as Drug War and Drug War as Counterinsurgency in 1960s-1970s Southern Mexico ,” author Alexander Aviña argues that the strategies eventually employed against Mexican drug traders were first developed in the violent suppression of rural guerrilla movements. By dismissing radical dissidence and petty crime alike as acts of “banditry,” the Mexican state laid the foundations for a systematic counterinsurgency which, Aviña writes, would go on to constitute nothing less than “a social war against poor people.”
Using declassified military, police, and spy reports, Aviña focuses on the clashes between bandits, guerrillas, and the Mexican government in the southern state of Guerrero in the 1960s and 70s. While banditry was a real problem for the people of Guerrero’s rural communities, including crimes like abduction, sexual violence, livestock rustling, and, by the end of the 1960s, illicit drug farming, banditry emerged from many of the same systemic issues that local socialist movements were attempting to address through guerrilla revolt.
Campesinos left behind by post-World War II industrialization were often forced to turn to the drug trade to keep themselves afloat. Meanwhile, groups like communist schoolteacher Lucio Cabañas’ Party of the Poor turned to armed struggle to fight for social democracy, posing a serious threat to Mexico’s governing party. When the state decided to quash political resistance, the specter of apolitical “bandits” and “narcos” in the countryside formed the perfect cover for their clampdown.
This inchoate counterinsurgency wasn’t all violent, Aviña writes. Some Mexican troops stationed in Guerrero attempted to build relationships with and bring aid to local communities, in part to gather intelligence and in part to persuade citizens against allying themselves with rebels. But as the 1960s went on, the military’s counternarcotic campaign grew better organized and better funded. Mexican officers were sent to military academies in Europe and the US to study counterinsurgency techniques being developed elsewhere in the anticommunist conflicts of the Cold War and, by the late 1970s, the US government was backing the Mexican military with money, training, and materiel. Violent counternarcotic campaigns like US-financed Operation Condor and the activities of the Group Blood death squad destabilized the country in the name of stopping traffickers, even as the flow of drugs continued to US and other northern markets.
At the heart of Mexico’s counternarcotics campaign, Aviña writes, is a central paradox: the Mexican security apparatus itself depended on the money generated by the sale of drugs. Many of the state’s counternarcotics initiatives resulted in possession of drug farms and routes in order to manage rather than destroy them. “Like the war on bandits,” Aviña writes, “the war on drugs was about regulation, not elimination; control over the trade, not its eradication. Only the socialist guerrillas faced total annihilation.” The real reason for Mexico's drug wars, Aviña concludes, may not have been the conclusion of the narcotics trade, but rather the “depistolization" of rural rebellion, and the permanent “policing of an actual or potentially subversive countryside.”
The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs
From Bandit Hunting to a War Against “Social Poisoners”: Counterinsurgency as Drug War and Drug War as Counterinsurgency in 1960s–1970s Southern Mexico