The Reframing of the War on Drugs as a “Humanitarian Crisis”: Costs, Benefits, and Consequences

Abstract

The War on Drugs has had grave humanitarian consequences for Latin America. It has encouraged a highly militarized and ultimately unsuccessful approach to drug control, leading to violence, displacement, and human suffering throughout the region. In acknowledging and responding to this suffering, humanitarian organizations have recently begun to frame this situation as a “humanitarian crisis” to facilitate humanitarian entry into new spaces. There is a need for a conceptual conversation about the use of the label “humanitarian crisis” in reference to the human costs of the War on Drugs in Latin America, particularly its rhetorical and normative use by the media and civil society and its strategic and moral use by humanitarian actors. La Guerra contra las Drogas ha tenido grave consecuencias humanitarias para América Latina. Ha promovido un enfoque altamente militarizado y en última instancia fallido, para controlar las drogas, lo que ha provocado violencia, desplazamientos y sufrimiento humano a través de la región. Como reconocimiento y respuesta a este sufrimiento, las organizaciones humanitarias recientemente han empezado a plantear esta situación como una “crisis humanitaria” para así facilitar la entrada humanitaria en nuevos espacios. Es necesario que se dé una conversación teórica sobre el uso de la categoría “crisis humanitaria” en referencia a los costos humanos de la Guerra contra las Drogas en América Latina, especialmente su uso retórico y prescriptivo por parte de los medios de comunicación y la sociedad civil y su uso estratégico y moral por parte de los agentes humanitarios.

Drug-Trafficking in Colombia: The New Civil War Against Democracy and Peacebuilding

“…The first focuses on the lack of consensus on whether violence derived from drug-trafficking organizations is a (new) civil war or not. Despite public policy and international discourse being built around the slogan "War on Drugs" (Arias, 2017;Armenta & Jelsma, 2015;Sandvik & Hoelscher, 2017) or academics using terms as "drug wars" (Albarracín & Barnes, 2020;Kalyvas, 2015;Lessing, 2018;Mackey & López, 2009) there is not a common ground on the acerbity of classifying this type of violence as a kind of war, even if it is accompanied with a complement such as new civil war (Kaldor, 2001), postmodern civil war (Giraldo, 2009), or by a substitute, like conflict, armed-conflict, or cartel-state conflict as described by Lessing (2018).…”

“…A kind of armed confrontation has gained strength over the past few decades due to the violent capacity it has showcased and how it has been increasingly executed, namely, drug-trafficking. The study of the phenomenon as a potentially "new" way of civil war has received different names in the literature over recent years, such as drug wars (Kalyvas, 2015), cartel-state conflicts (Lessing, 2018), or non-conventional violence (Sandvik & Hoelscher, 2017). It has been addressed from diverse disciplines and angles (Albarracín & Barnes, 2020;Kalyvas, 2015, pp.…”

“…Drug wars have taken place mostly in Latin American, more specifically in Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, where the civil population has been placed under a humanitarian crisis framework as the number of victims from urban violence, displacements, land grabs, massacres and a series of systematic human rights violations has risen dramatically throughout the past few decades (Sandvik & Hoelscher, 2017). The former has come to the attention of the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations such as the International Red Cross, and Medecin Sans Frontiers, to mention a few, who have been deployed in these countries for over a decade.…”

From armed conflict to urban violence: transformations in the International Committee of the Red Cross, international humanitarianism, and the laws of war

“…On the other hand, there is a body of more critical literature that questions the discourse of ‘urban violence’ and ‘fragile cities’ (Miklos and Paoliello, 2017), and related works that problematise the framing of urban violence specifically, and of non-conflict violence in general, as humanitarian crises (Fiori et al, 2016; Reid-Henry and Sending, 2014; Sandvik and Hoelscher, 2016). It is widely recognised that the framing of an issue or a situation as a ‘humanitarian problem’ or a ‘humanitarian crisis’ tends to depoliticise, dehistoricise and decontextualise it (Bradley, forthcoming: chapter 1).…”

“…It is not clear whether this necessarily limits the possibilities for political solutions (compare Malkki, 1996: 398 and Scott-Smith, 2016: 3), but in practice a humanitarian frame is frequently seen to have this effect. For these reasons, a number of commentators have raised concerns about the humanitarianisation of urban violence and the so-called war on drugs (Fiori et al, 2016; Reid-Henry and Sending, 2014; Sandvik and Hoelscher, 2016).…”