Putting Gender at the Center of the United States-Mexico War on Drugs
By Daniela Philipson
PhD Candidate in Politics and International Relations at Monash University.
Image Source: The FEAS Journal (link)
During his short-lived and unsuccessful bid for the presidency, Ron Desantis modeled himself after former President Donald Trump, resorting to racist tropes and anti-LGBTQI+ rhetoric and policies. He performed hyper-masculinity by showcasing a low-bar disposition for waging war south of the border. Similar to Trump’s vitriolic speech on the Mexico-United States border, Desantis stated that he would authorise a United States invasion of Mexico to “take out” Mexican drug cartels. As part of a broader conservative agenda that includes anti-immigrant rhetoric and increased border security, like-minded far-right lawmakers in the United States are also proposing legislation to label Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organisations.
Yet, policies to criminalise and securitise the border and drugs are redundant and inefficient. Scholars trace the origin of the war on drugs in the United States back to the early 20th century, noting that it intensified due to moral panic over drug use in the wake of the Cold War. Since then, the United States has spent large sums to expand the war on drugs into Mexico. As part of the Mérida Initiative, the United States Congress injected approximately 1.3 billion dollars into Mexico’s security policies and counternarcotics efforts. Nonetheless, evidence shows that using force to curb drug trafficking has unequivocally failed (Paley 2020, Smith 2021, Zavala 2022). Instead, drug trafficking has boomed and drug demand has skyrocketed. According to the 2023 World Drug Report, drug users have increased worldwide by a staggering 23% in the last 10 years.
Militarised efforts to address drug supply have led to catastrophic results in Mexico, resulting in historically high rates of homicides, disappearances, and human rights violations (Intersecta 2022, Flores-Macías and Zarkin 2024). The Council of Foreign Relations estimates over 430,000 homicides since 2006 when then-President Felipe Calderón doubled down on the efforts to “combat drug trafficking organisations” in partnership with United States allies. Notably, the majority of the victims belong to Mexico’s working class, many of who have been racialised and criminalised. Feminist scholars have also drawn attention to the gendered consequences of militarisation. Approximately eleven women are killed in Mexico every day (Kloppe-Santamaria and Zulver 2023 and Anti-military feminist network 2023). However, most victims of drug-related violence are men. In fact, a study by Gamlin and Hawkes (2018) indicated that Mexican men have a life expectancy that is 6.5 years shorter than that of Mexican women, largely due to the country's high homicide rate.
Despite recurring gender mainstreaming approaches to discussing the extreme violence enveloping Mexico, in-depth gender analyses of Mexico’s so-called “war on drugs” are lacking. This is particularly surprising given the intrinsically gendered narrative surrounding the border and the so-called war on drugs. For example, Trump’s original call to “build the wall” was based on the sexist and racist claim that Mexican immigrants are rapists and represent a threat to (White) American women. Indeed, a closer look at the history of the so-called war on drugs reveals a deeper gendered and racist logic to justify United States-led interventions into Mexican territory.
In this article, I argue that gender is critical to understanding the so-called war on drugs and United States-Mexico bilateral security relations. I unpack this argument by explaining that the gender dimensions of the war on drugs play out via three distinct mechanisms. Firstly, the moral panic over drugs fuels the invention and feminisation of a common enemy – narcos. Secondly, the war on drugs is a means for the Mexican government to suppress social movements and dissent. As a result, the war on drugs has exacerbated crime and violence, with marginalised (racialised and feminised) groups bearing the brunt of the consequences. Thirdly, based on Sjoberg’s (2016) concept of gender hierarchy between states, the war on drugs serves as a way for the United States to exert its hierarchy over Mexico and impart “order” at the border, which is equated with chaos and (dis)order.
Gender in War and Armed Conflict
Echoing Cynthia Enloe’s call to ask “Where are the women?” and Sjoberg’s argument that “thinking through war and conflict requires consideration of gender dynamics” (p. 4), I ask where is gender in the so-called war on drugs? In her book, “Gender, War, and Conflict,” Sjoberg argues that gender is pivotal to understanding how states interact and are shaped. “State’s accounts of wars help them place themselves and be placed in relative positions to other states within the gender order among states” (p. 107). Thus, a state’s place in the gender hierarchy can be assessed by the bravery and chivalry of its soldiers. Within states, traditional gender roles are cemented by security policies and military means. This is because militarism relies on chauvinism, which in turn depends on “women serving as biological and cultural reproducers of states, and men serving to protect that reproductive process” (p. 108).
How then is this relevant to the so-called war on drugs? I argue that the so-called war on drugs has its roots in gendered notions about the border and the United States’s intent to assert and grow its control south of the border. Indeed, Smith (2021) and Zavala (2022) situate the origins of the war on drugs in United States conservative politics push, beginning with the Harrison Act in 1914, to regulate morphine use in the United States and its trade with Mexico (Smith 2021: 20).
Inventing and Feminising the “Enemy”
According to Zavala (2022) in his book, “Drug Cartels Do Not Exist,” the so-called war on drugs expanded into Mexico because of the United States-devised myth of “drug cartels.” In reality, Zavala argues that drug cartels are a United States invention driven by moral panic and a need to assert control over Mexico during the Cold War era. In “The Dope,” Smith (2021) reaches similar conclusions, finding that the United States forged the same institutions that invented narco-violence and pioneered narco-culture by funding and promoting a transnational war on drugs (Smith 2021:244).
Zavala (2022) traces the invention of the “narco” back to fictional and colonialist narratives that portray the stereotypical narco as a monolithic, feminised, and exotic “other” dressed in cowboy hats, boots, and ostrich leather goods. Smith (2021:245) also writes that United States security institutions responsible for the so-called war on drugs in the 1970s were rife with institutional racism, with White security agents calling Hispanics “pepper bellies” and “cage agents” (as a reference to monkeys). Moreover, just like in official armed conflicts, there is evidence that rape is used in the war against drugs in Mexico as a strategy to “emasculate” the enemy (Smith 2021:251).
In her in-depth study of narcos, García Reyes (2022) shows that Mexican soldiers and narcos not only have similar backgrounds but also perform the same types of militarised masculinities, which equate manhood with combat, violence, and the use of force. Her research also shows how, despite being equally violent, military violence is justified while narco-violence is condemned as subhuman. Thus, the narratives on military and narco violence are contingent on double standards that justify the former as brave and chivalrous and vilify the latter. The intention behind this argument is not to justify narco-violence. Rather, it points out the contradiction in supporting one type of violence while denouncing the other.
Here, gender plays a role in the war on drugs by feminising, racialising, and dehumanising an invented enemy: drug cartels. Furthermore, it provides a narrative device to justify chivalrous soldiers to criminalise social movements under the pretense of protecting traditional values, which are at risk from the lure and sensuality of illicit drug use.
The War on Drugs as a Means for Repression
In addition to debunking American myths of narcos, Zavala (2022) argues that drug cartels, as an American invention, serve Mexican and foreign corporate interests alike to legitimise the extraction and exploitation of land, labor, and resources. Likewise, Paley (2020) contends that militarised crackdowns on Mexican communities serve to break down social ties and hinder organised resistance to foreign corporate extractivism. In line with Zavala and Paley, Smith writes that the Mexican government embraced United States pressure to wage war on drugs as a convenient, cost-efficient means to deal with the fears over marijuana-fueled student protests, left-wing politics, and the decline in machismo (Smith 2021:240).
Paley’s and Zavala’s research provides powerful evidence to uncover the forces behind the war on drugs. Furthermore, it reveals the Global North's flawed understanding of the criminal groups driving the war on drugs, often reducing it to a simplistic state-against-"drug cartel" narrative (Pereda 2022). Instead, the criminal organisations driving violence in Mexico are composed of complex webs, involving criminal and state operators alike. Both actors often work in tandem to dismantle oppositional and leftist movements. A case in point is the massacre of 43 rural students in Ayotzinapa, a rural community with leftist tendencies in Iguala, Guerrero. Independent forensic and journalistic investigations into the massacre found that state actors collaborated with a drug cartel to perpetrate and cover the killings (Kitroeff and Bergman 2023).
Gender Hierarchy in the Border
In her famous narration of the borderland and mestizaje, Gloria Anzaldúa (1985) refers to the border as an open wound, una hérida abierta, “where the Third world grates against the first and bleeds.” Similarly, Sayak Valencia (2016) writes about Tijuana as a ravaged city where two cultures violently clash and combine into one. Anzaldúa further analyses the borderland wound by drawing parallels with the Malintzín, or La Chingada, which translates to the “fucked one” in Spanish. According to the myth, famously retold by Nobel laureate Octavio Paz (1950), Malintzín was an Indigenous woman who was allegedly romantically involved with Hernán Cortés and served as his interpreter. According to Anzaldúa, the borderland, like the Malinche, represents the betrayal of local traditions by embodying both cultures (or neither) simultaneously.
Building on Anzaldúa, the border’s intrinsic liminality can also be construed as disorder and chaos, threatening traditional values and ways of life. In Anzaldúa’s account, this chaos is perceived as threatening and “feminine” in nature. Valencia (2016) furthers this argument by drawing on transfeminism and portraying the border beyond a binary worldview that is governed by gender (dis)order. According to Sjoberg (2016), gender hierarchy is both a cause and consequence of war. In her words, “gender disorder is taken to be a sign of larger political disorder, and the restoration of gender order becomes associated with restoration of peace and stability (Sjober 2016:87).” Thus, Sjoberg argues that war reproduces and promotes traditional gender roles to instill peace and stability by devising a “gender order.” Understanding the border under this paradigm, as a non-binary and genderqueer, explains the need to use it as a signifier of danger. Furthermore, it explains the rhetoric to securitise and control the border, even when harsher enforcement leads to counterproductive outcomes. Lastly, the need to establish a gender hierarchy at the border fuels racist anxieties over immigration
Conclusion
As with traditional armed conflicts, gender is crucial to understanding both the causes and the consequences of the war on drugs. Overall, the war on drugs has its origins in false claims and a conservative moral panic over drug use. Racism and sexism motivate the need to assert control over the border by inventing and feminising an enemy in common – narcos and drug cartels. In Mexico and the United States, marginalised groups have had to deal with the most harmful effects of aggressive counternarcotics policies. On the other hand, corporate interests in Mexico and abroad have benefitted from counternarcotic policies that target and dismantle social movements, facilitating foreign and domestic extractivism.
Moreover, securitisation of the border has been weaponised to establish a gender hierarchy, control immigration, and ease racist anxieties. Future studies on the war on drugs should consider gender beyond simple gender mainstreaming and consider how it has shaped Mexico and US security relations, conflict, and violence. Ignoring or dismissing gender would result in an important omission that fails to understand the deeper bilateral dynamics of the war on drugs.
References
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Flores-Macias, G. A., and J. Zarkin, 2024. The Consequences of militarised Policing for Human Rights: Evidence from Mexico. Comparative Political Studies 57(3): 287-418. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140231168362
Gamlin, J. and Hawkes, S. 2018. Masculinities on the Continuum of Structural Violence. The Case of Mexico’s Homicide Epidemic. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, Volume 25, Issue 1, Spring 2018, Pages 50–71https://academic.oup.com/sp/article/25/1/50/4158226
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Kitroeff, N. and R. Bergman, 2023. Why did a drug gang kill 43 students? Text messages hold clues. New York Times. Available at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/02/world/americas/mexico-iguala-students-kidnapping.html
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