The War on Drugs and the Global Colour Line by Kojo Koram;

Author:Kojo Koram;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

Characteristics of necropolitical wars

Human trafficking and feminicide were practiced prior to naming the anti-drug policy ‘the War on Drugs’. The facts they explain commenced before the ‘narcowar’, but that necropolitical wars can be used as a framework to interpret and name events that began many years ago and have shared characteristics that have been emphasized and intertwined in such a way in recent years that they can be named in this way. The proposal is not to analyse them separately but show that they refer to a type of war (necropolitics) with different objectives and use this basis for the proposal of a typology. Necropolitical wars are such because they share at least three characteristics: 1) the law operates to maintain impunity and conditions in which human rights violations are ‘invisibilized’, especially in the case of women; and 2) the use of forced disappearances, massacres and feminicide constitute techniques of capital accumulation (drugs in the case of the criminal war and women’s bodies in the war for dispossession).

Invisibilization of human rights violations

Human rights violations in necropolitical wars occur in a nebulous area between the private and public; in the war for the dispossession of women’s bodies, the structural impunity affecting the entire legal system obscures the magnitude of these violations. The invisibilization of human rights violations has two basic causes: a) the spatial collapse of the public/private dichotomy for the purpose of identifying State attribution in responsibility for human rights; and b) structural impunity.

COLLAPSE OF THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE

Human rights violations as a legal concept are the product of a process of legal interpretation in which certain events are constructed as human rights violations and others are not. The key point is that violations occur in the public domain, that is, the political-State arena. Criminal activities are not considered public to the extent that legal discourse leads to the belief they do not occur in the political-State sphere.

Feminist lawyers Chinkin and Gal affirm that the public/private dichotomy in the law has always been artificial, constructed through language and in the service of ideological purposes.36 Chinkin believes this division has important consequences for international legislation, especially with regard to human rights, since it defines a State-centric vision of responsibility and attribution. She states that the demand for universal application of human rights assumes a largely unchallenged rationale that distinguishes between the conduct of State bodies and that of other bodies, the definition of which essentially depend on philosophical convictions that refer to the appropriate role of government and government intervention.37

According to the public/private division permeating human rights discourse, criminal activities occur in the criminal economy and do not constitute a social problem, with this being understood as the sphere of State policy. In Mexico, the public/private divide is no longer clear, and this serves to obscure the dynamics of power behind human rights violations, as indicated in the Bourbaki Report, which states that in the narcowar ‘human fatalities’ are not produced in ‘the domain of torts’ (criminal) and the ‘domain of legal order’ (agents of State power), but in a hybrid form.

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