Forced labour and criminal capitalism: the case of the "prisoners" in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico (1984)

Abstract

The seizure of thousands of tonnes of drugs in Rancho El Búfalo, in the north of Mexico in the state of Chihuahua, was not the only thing that surprised the Army on November 6, 1984. The discovery of thousands of peasants locked up in camps, forced to process the drug under the coercion of arms, uncovered extreme forms of exploitation at the service of criminal capitalism. Using this case study, this research aims to understand social and economic factors that favored the emergence of forced labor as an instrument of organized crime and how this is related to the accumulation processes of criminal capitalism. For a conceptual basis, we use the regulations of the International Labor Organization. The theoretical framework explores the concept of accumulation for dispossession by David Harvey to understand the mechanisms of dispossession of the value of work and collective goods in radical capitalism. There are no official records for its quantification; still, this article will seek to recover evidence of this problem through a hemerographic review that includes regional and national media of the time. The historical trajectory analysis of drug trafficking in Mexico will be used as a method: from its genesis in the 1940s to contemporary times.