The Land–Drug War Nexus: Three Frameworks
The historiographical question is not whether Mexican land politics and Mexican drug-war politics are connected — at this point, the archival case is made. The question is how. Three frameworks compete for the theoretical high ground, and they are not fully commensurable.
1. Drug war capitalism (Paley)
Dawn Paley’s Drug War Capitalism (2014) reads the drug war as a pretext for militarized territorial control that opens resource-rich regions to extractive capital. Population displacement is theorized through David Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession”: the “outside” capitalism requires is actively produced through the terror of cartel-state violence. Paley gives specific cases — federal police bursting into ejido meetings around Chihuahua mining projects, mass displacements in the Burgos Fields where shale gas reserves coincide with peak cartel violence.
Strengths: structurally compelling, especially in the overlap between violence zones and extractive frontiers. Weaknesses: vulnerable to functionalism — identifies beneficiaries more clearly than it demonstrates causal mechanisms linking specific capital interests to specific acts of violence.
2. Narcopopulism as agrarian substitute (Smith)
Benjamin Smith’s Sinaloa case makes a quieter but in some ways more surprising claim: in the 1940s Sinaloan settlement, the drug trade functioned as a substitute for aggressive land reform. Peasants were “dissuaded from aggressive land reform” by opium income; large landowners laundered drug profits and were spared expropriation; middle ranchers rose as contrabandistas; local PRI officials regulated the whole arrangement as a set of franchises. The 1940 Mazatlán pact is the explicit instance: ejidos preserved, further redistribution halted, ranchers compensated through opium.
The implication is that the drug trade is not an aberration from Mexico’s developmental path but a structural component of it, and the collapse of the narcopopulist settlement in the 1960s–90s (under centralization, the Dirty War, NAFTA, and agrarian counter-reform) is the precondition for the catastrophic violence after 2006.
3. Autodefensas as the nexus in action
The 2011–13 autodefensa movements in Cherán and Michoacán’s Tierra Caliente are less a framework than a case study — but they are the cleanest empirical demonstration that the two processes (land and drugs) are articulated at the community level. Cherán expelled illegal loggers, police, and the municipal government on April 15, 2011, reconstituting governance under usos y costumbres. The lime and cattle ranchers of La Ruana and Tepalcatepec rose against the Knights Templar in February 2013 and within a year controlled half of Michoacán.
In both cases the communities are the same ejido and indigenous communities whose livelihoods and land access had been destabilized by the combination of NAFTA, the 1992 reforms, and subsequent criminal territorial control. The autodefensas are therefore less a security phenomenon than an agrarian one — the historical manifestation of exactly the connection the theoretical frameworks predict.
How to read them together
The frameworks are not rivals so much as operating at different scales. Paley is a theory of structural relation (drug war and extractive capital). Smith is a theory of the political settlement (how the drug trade stabilized the PRI order). Morris is a theory of agency from below (how peasant communities use and contest both). A full account needs all three: a political-economic structure, a regional settlement, and subaltern agency. Dropping any one of them produces an impoverished history.