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This chapter considers the uses of the anti-trafficking agenda of the authoritarian government of Belarus. It identifies the ways the Belarus government uses anti-trafficking as a basis for other self-sufficient and nationalist agendas, and by making travel abroad by students and young people more difficult. It notes that the trafficking indicators of the State Department ignore other forms of human rights repression or the excesses of policing systems in Belarus. This chapter also emphasizes the relevant theme of the importance of global indicators in authoritarian contexts, an area that also lacks research.

To test the theoretical components of the argument presented in chapter 5, this chapter develops an empirical model of how U.S. transnational corporations and paramilitary death squads mediate the U.S.-sponsored drug war’s effect on human rights repression in Latin America. In outlining this empirical model, this chapter is organized as follows: It first juxtapose the theoretical arguments of dependency and neoclassical liberal theories regarding the human rights effects of transnational capital by highlighting the theoretical and empirical limitations of neoclassical liberal claims. This is followed by a discussion of the empirical model, which draws on the extant human rights literature to identify important control variables that are important predictors of state repression. It then discusses important theoretical modifications that are incorporated into the overall empirical model. This is followed by a discussion of the limitations of the indicators used to measure the model’s mediating variables. structural equation modeling is used to analyze cross-national data for thirty-one countries from the Latin American region covering the period 1980 to 2012. All the components of the theoretical argument found strong statistical support.

Building on the arguments presented in the previous chapters, this chapter is motivated by the following question: How does the drug enforcement regime’s addiction to increasing counternarcotic aid facilitate the expansion of American and other transnational corporate investments in Latin America and, in the process, create the conditions that give rise to corporate-induced repression? In answering this question, the chapter develops a theoretical framework that draws insights from the literature on foreign aid and its effect on foreign capital flows and then integrates these insights into theories of repression in dependent capitalist societies. It is argued that, in addition to combating drug trafficking, U.S. counternarcotic aid facilitates the expansion of American and other transnational corporate investments in Latin America by financing countries’ infrastructure development. In conjunction with neoliberal economic reforms, drug war infrastructure financing in Latin America is likely to facilitate the expansion of corporate investments by resource-seeking industries that require greater land use, which encroaches on the ancestral territories of Indigenous peoples. And, in response to Indigenous resistance to corporate appropriation of ancestral lands, resource-seeking transnational corporations will collude with local security forces, private security firms, and paramilitary death squads to repress and eliminate resistance to capital accumulation.