Negotiating Nature and Environmentalism: Drug Control, Herbicides, and Extraterritoriality in US-Mexican Relations

Reflecting an expansive understanding of migration by exploring issues of the environment and land and sovereignty and territoriality, this paper examines U.S. support for aerial herbicides to defoliate drug crops in Mexico during the second part of the 1970s. It analyzes how the herbicide program intersected with ongoing debates in the United States over the extraterritorial application of the 1969 National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA). A 1978 federal court ruling on NEPA's application to the herbicide program and Executive Order 12114, in 1979, by President Carter on the environmental review responsibilities of U.S. foreign policy agencies demonstrate how drug control contributed to the encoding of environmentalism in U.S. foreign policy. Yet, E.O. 12114, in its nods toward traditions of national sovereignty and preservation of foreign policy prerogatives,  paved the way for continued U.S. underwriting of aerial herbicides in Latin America and precluded NEPA from limiting Washington's support for chemical defoliation in the drug war in Mexico and elsewhere. Moreover, this paper examines the ways in which nature informed policy making. Reference to the natural world often permeated official considerations of the herbicide program, with discussions of geography, terrain, and climate frequently emerging. In all, the herbicide program draws attention to the ways in which nature explicitly and implicitly figured into the defoliation program’s development and implementation and the legal actions resulting from herbicide operations.