Drug War Capitalism

The foundational statement of the drug-war-capitalism framework. Paley argues that the Latin American drug war is a pretext for US-funded militarization of resource-rich regions, displacing their populations and paving the way for foreign direct investment and extractive industries. Drawing on David Harvey’s notion of accumulation by dispossession, she treats the terror of cartel-state violence as a mechanism for producing the “outside” that capitalism requires. The book is vulnerable to the charge of functionalism — it identifies beneficiaries more clearly than it demonstrates causal mechanisms — but its structural logic has become a standard reference for scholarship on the land-drug war nexus.