Borders, One-Dimensionality, and Illusion in the War on Drugs

Abstract

In this paper I argue for the necessity and value of using critical theory to review tripartite politics across North and South America in the war on drugs. In particular, Herbert Marcuse's concept of one-dimensionality—a description of social structures and behaviors incapable of perceiving alternatives to existing realities—is elaborated. Using a Marcusian lens, I unpack key policy documents within the Mérida II Initiative, and the United States Northern Command and the United States Southern Command. The paper examines the mechanisms through which particular ‘realities’ emerge as prominent. In doing so, discursive and material tactics, embedded in political strategies which construct tangible problems to be solved, are highlighted. In the course of prescriptive policy measures, three regulating fictions materialize. First, Mérida II is cast in terms of a paradigm shift. Second, unilateral policies become bilateral agreements. And third, the hemispheric scale unfolds into regional divisions. All are tied in with a historical legacy of enacting symbolic illusion and a pattern of thought and behavior reduced to the given system. There are at least two significant outcomes. The first is the rendering of oppositional alternatives as utopian or illusory. The second is the deployment of difference which continuously reproduces North–South divisions and upholds the status quo.