Corporate power, US drug enforcement and the repression of indigenous peoples in Latin America

Horace Bartilow

Third World Quarterly, 2019, vol. 40, issue 2, 355-372

Abstract: The question that motivates this article is: what are the mechanisms through which the prosecution of the drug war in Latin America lead to human rights repression? In answering this question, I theorise that drug enforcement is a coalition of actors that facilitates domestic and international consensus around prohibition as a mechanism for corporate expansion. Drug war infrastructure financing is likely to facilitate the expansion of corporate investments by resource-seeking industries that require greater land use, which encroaches on the ancestral territories of indigenous peoples. And, in response to indigenous resistance to corporate appropriation of ancestral lands, resource-seeking transnational corporations will collude with private security firms and paramilitary organisations to repress and eliminate indigenous resistance. In the process of accumulating capital in Latin America, transnational corporations, domestic security, and paramilitary organizations are the drug enforcement coalition’s mediators of terror.

Date: 2019
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DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2018.1552075

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