Dawn Paley

Canadian journalist and researcher whose Drug War Capitalism (AK Press, 2014) is the most systematic — and most polemical — attempt to synthesize the drug war and extractivist dispossession under a single political-economic framework. Paley argues that the drug war functions as a pretext for militarizing resource-rich regions of Latin America, displacing their inhabitants, and opening them to foreign direct investment and extractive industries, with terror serving as the mechanism of “accumulation by dispossession.”

Her reporting documents specific cases: federal police bursting into ejido meetings around Chihuahua mining projects, the Army using its trucks to move strike-breaking mining employees, and mass displacements in Tamaulipas’s Burgos Fields where shale gas reserves overlap precisely with zones of maximum cartel violence. Her thesis is compelling as structural description and contested on causal grounds by academic historians, but the drug-war-capitalism framework is now a standard reference point for scholarship on the land-drug war nexus.