Dawn Paley, journalist and author of Drug War Capitalism (2014) and Guerra neoliberal: Desaparición y búsqueda en el norte de México (2020), discusses her research in Latin America drawing parallels between the historical destruction of communities and the present-day environmental and social destruction amassed by Canadian mining companies in Argentina. Noting that the problems within the extractive industries were only part of the problem, Paley elucidates how transnational companies in Mexico and Colombia take advantage of the structural problems created by the drug war to amass their fortunes while dividing communities, polluting the ecology and taking control of communal land inhabited by indigenous people, peasants, and the urban poor. Paley brings into the discussion the grassroots organising within Mexico which is fighting against the phenomenon of disappearance in the city of Torreón, Coahuila underscoring how disappearance is both a material and semantic removal of life.

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