ABSTRACT
This study examines the recent work of independent journalists Ignacio Alvarado (Mexico), Dawn Paley (Canada), and Federico Mastrogiovanni (Italy), who have demonstrated how the so-called war on drugs declared by President Felipe Calderón (2006–2012) and continued by President Enrique Peña Nieto (2012–2018) was a biopolitical mechanism of forced displacements to facilitate the illegal appropriation of natural resources in communal lands of numerous regions in neoliberal Mexico. Drawing from David Harvey’s concept of “accumulation by dispossession,” this chapter analyzes Mexico’s strategy of militarization as the operative complement of energy reform policies to legitimize the plundering of oil, natural gas, and mining in the zones with the highest levels of violence misleadingly attributed to drug trafficking organizations. Against hegemonic official narratives and academic interpretations explaining migration as the result of the violence caused by “organized crime” and its “narcoculture,” this chapter inquires how the circulation of transnational capital depends on binational geopolitics of militarization and forced displacement to advance extractivist projects with the complicity of Mexico’s political and business class.
