NAFTA and the war on drugs as competing national security agendas in 1990–92: The triumph of Neo-liberalism and the quest for U.S.-Mexican integration

Abstract

In a provocative 1989 article entitled ‘The War on Drugs: A New U.S. National Security Doctrine?’ dissident writer Waltraud Queiser Morales argued that during the Gorbachev era in the Soviet Union the Cold War had rapidly lost its‘fear potential’. For U.S. policy makers the ideology of anti-Communism was becoming increasingly inadequate as the‘automatic legitimating doctrine of the U.S. national security state’. Queiser Morales claimed that to justify a range of interventions in Latin America, the United States was being forced to augment the propaganda power of the‘master doctrine’, i.e. the Cold War, with appeals to‘subsidiary doctrines’ such as the War on Drugs. For example, the Reagan administration had used the new U.S. crusade against the cocaine cartels to justify the presence of U.S. Special Operations Forces and counternarcotics agents in the Andes and Colombia, who in addition to fighting drugs had also clearly been engaged in counter-insurgency operations. Meanwhile, although a U.S.-backed coup against Reagan's erstwhile Cold War ally General Manuel Noriega of Panama had failed, Congressional figures and two Florida-based grand jury investigations continued to expose the dictator's complicity in money laundering and drug trafficking. Queiser Morales concluded the article by asking whether or not the anti-drug crusade would ever replace the Cold War as a fully-fledged national security doctrine in its own right. She also left open the possibility that the United States would eventually use the War on Drugs as a rationale for a‘bald-faced’ invasion of Panama.1