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Drug War Pathologies: Embedded Corporatism and U.S. Drug Enforcement in the Americas

Horace Bartilow’s Drug War Pathologies: Embedded Corporatism and U.S. Drug Enforcement in the Americas offers a carefully researched and pointed critique of the U.S. war on drugs. Politically radical but methodologically conservative, Bartilow first gathers evidence showing that corporate interests largely dictate U.S. drug policy in the Americas, and that a combination of structural power and direct membership within a rotating corporate-governmental power elite—à la C. Wright Mills—helps to explain corporate power over U.S. decision-making. Corporate support for anti-drug policies that focus on military interventions aimed at supply reduction are explained through a variety of interlinked motivations, most notably the fact that drug trafficking networks— the criminal version of capitalism—represent a threat to non-criminal forms of capitalist enterprise. ‘‘Criminal enterprises have the ability to use intimidation and violence to erect a type of nontariff barrier to eliminate legitimate competition, which can lead to monopolistic behavior in how prices are set’’ (p. 1). Corporations—particularly those in extractive industries such as oil and mining—press to build a securitized infrastructure (including roads, ports, and border surveillance), which creates ‘‘a security environment that is conducive to the logic of capitalism’’ (p. 119). Beyond this, something of a military-industrial complex emerges within this broader corporate strategy, generating direct profit from arms sales as part of the drug war. Bartilow gathers evidence showing that pluralist accounts of U.S. policy fail to account for the consistency of U.S. policy toward Latin America, further illustrating his analysis through case studies concerning the lobbying efforts that surrounded Plan Colombia (2000) and the U.S.-Mexican Mérida Initiative (2008). Bartilow goes on to show that the U.S. war on drugs has additional negative sequelae, including a turn toward privatized repression via security forces, paramilitaries, and death squads (Chapters 5 and 6) and support for a ‘‘drug-war national security state’’ that tends toward an imperial presidency and ‘‘low-intensity democracy’’ (Chapter 7). In this latter regard, Bartilow provides statistical evidence showing that while Latin America has its own features that promote illiberal democracies, counter-narcotic aid ‘‘serves as the principal driving force behind regime transitions from liberal to illiberal democracy—increasing such transitions by 44 percent’’ (p. 182). Bartilow further demonstrates that such drug-war-funded repression often targets trade unions, often through the assassination of union activists and political leaders, thereby leading to greater income inequality and an intensification of class antagonism (Chapter 8). Overall, Bartilow argues that despite the fact that overseas interdiction has proven a failure in terms of reducing the flow of drugs to the United States, ‘‘the drug war has not failed; rather, it has been remarkably successful for the corporations and their domestic and political allies that drive its budgetary increases’’ (p. 212). Bartilow’s efforts in gathering data and making his case are commendable. As a qualitative researcher, I admit that I sometimes found his quantitative approach to be wearying, but it always paid off. Nevertheless, Bartilow’s commitment to statistical evidence, and his efforts at engaging pluralist theories (and disproving them through calculation), were prominent features of the book and merit some consideration. It should be noted that Bartilow holds an academic position within political science, and no doubt some of his methodological commitments pertain to that fact alone. Nevertheless, I was struck by the fact that the theories he cites largely