Ben Smith – The Rise And Fall Of Narcopopulism Notes

Ben Smith – The Rise and Fall of Narcopopulism: Drugs, Politics, and Society in Sinaloa, 1930-1980

• We have to understand politics and the drug trade in Mexico as inextricably linked; messy, multivalent

  • The idea of separate spheres denies moral ambiguity, but is a false representation, relying on unconvincing models of the state and the Mexican trade

    • The model for studying the trade is often that of Colombia, where drugs and politics are mostly separate

    • The Mexican state is often understood as static, unified and corporatist, with clear lines of command from the president and party through local governors, down to peasant commissars

    • Traffickers are often viewed as powerful, independent criminals: heaving armed, profit-maximizing rational actors

• To understand the trade and the Mexican state, we need to abandon these reified, self-contained models and explore their interrelations

  • The Mexican state was never all powerful: rather, stability arose from the government’s day-to-day engagements with grassroots society

    • The success of these particular bargains was highly specific to the political culture of the region concerned

    • Govt control rested not on centralized power but on a series of decentred, interlinking, constantly renegotiated pacts among federal authorities, regional politicians, and various local interest groups

      • These arrangements included land, cash crops and state policy, but also illegal activities like the drug trade

  • In Sinaloa the opium trade played a crucial role in maintaining social equilibrium, appeasing both left and right

    • But this system began to fall apart in the 1960s, and the pact between radicals and reactionaries was redrawn

      • The drug trade now became an agent of repression, with both the war on drugs and drug traffickers used to persecute student and peasant insurgents

        • Evidence of ongoing pact between federal govt and drug industry in suppressing dissidents

      • This marked the rise of a new mixture of mafia capitalism and state repression

  • From 1930s to 70s state governors controlled the Sinaloa drug industry, not traffickers

    • Traffickers in this period were not as powerful as their successors e.g. Felix Gallardo had links to the pinnacle of national govt

    • We can trace the peak in violence of the early 1970s as resulting from the collapse of state hegemony, as well as e.g. international demand and federal interference

Sinaloa’s Narcopopulist Regime (1930-1965)

• In the immediate postrevolutionary period, federal and state administrators tried to stabilise rural Mexico through a combination of military pacification, land and labour reforms and unifying cultural programs

  • These mechanisms caused widespread local discontent

    • E.g. land reforms caused beef between peasants and large landowners

  • The local government was able to pacify all parties by disbursing drug cultivation and trafficking

    • Large landowners were able to recoup status, wealth and local power

    • Wages increased, placating local agraristas – and also state leaders could make token donations of land, secure in the support of large landowners

    • A pro-peasant political style masked the continuation of broad class divisions

• Agrarian reform barely took off in Sinaloa until the Cárdenas era

  • In response, lowland latifundista elites allied with highland ranchers to form anti agrarista groups

    • Ranchers comprised the mass of paramilitaries

    • Battles and killings between peasants and these groups continued from 1934-40, with daily killings

• In 1940 state authorities, agraristas and right wing paramilitaries met in Mazatlán to sign a pact of nonaggression

  • Land grants and armed support for peasants were scaled back by the governor

  • Agraristas were allowed to maintain their ejidos (land grants)

  • Ranchers were permitted to dominate local political appointments and make up...

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