Drug War Capitalism

Analytic framework associated with Dawn Paley’s Drug War Capitalism (2014) that reads the Latin American drug war as a pretext — and a productive mechanism — for militarized territorial control that opens resource-rich regions to foreign direct investment and extractive industries. Paley draws on David Harvey’s notion of accumulation by dispossession to argue that the “outside” spaces capitalism requires are actively produced through the terror of cartel-state violence, displacing populations from lands overlapping shale gas, mining, and agribusiness frontiers.

The framework is powerful as structural description but contested on causal grounds: academic historians (Morris, Gootenberg, Smith) generally accept its structural logic while insisting on more granular, archive-based mechanisms linking specific extractive interests to specific instances of violence. Sits in productive tension with the narcopopulism and state-crime-coconstitution frameworks.