Poverty, Violence, and Coercive Drug Rehabilitation in Mexico City and Guatemala City

This proposed project is an ethnographic analysis of coercive, drug rehabilitation centers located in Mexico City and Guatemala City. These informal, unregulated centers detain drug users against their will, and utilize physical and psychological violence to treat addiction. Run and utilized by poor and working class people, they account for the majority of residential drug treatment centers in Mexico and Guatemala, and are growing throughout Latin America. This research foregrounds the social and economic context of these centers, describes their constituencies and therapies, and demonstrates the impacts of poverty and drug violence as mediated through coercive drug rehabilitation.