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Bare Life in Ciudad Juárez
Bare Life in Ciudad Juárez
Bare Life in Ciudad Juárez
At least 60,000 people have been killed in Mexico since former President Felipe
Calderón declared war on drugs in 2006. Much of the worst violence has centered on the
border city of Ciudad Juárez. Despite the death toll, the killings have received scant aca-
demic attention. A study based on field research and using Giorgio Agamben’s theory of
homo sacer to construct a theoretical framework proposes that the violence is rooted in
Juárez’s role as an export processing zone, where cheap labor diminishes the value of life.
It connects the recent drug-related violence with the murders of hundreds of women in the
city during the 1990s and early 2000s.
Han muerto por lo menos 60,000 personas en México desde que el anterior presidente,
Felipe Calderón, declaraba una guerra contra el narcotráfico en 2006. Una gran parte de
la peor violencia se ha centrado en la ciudad fronteriza de Ciudad Juárez. Pese al gran
número de muertos, las matanzas han recibido poca atención académica. Un estudio
basado en investigación de campo y aplicando la teoría de “homo sacer” de Giorgio
Agamben propone que la violencia tiene sus raices en el hecho de que en Juárez, como zona
de exportación, la mano de obra abaratada disminuye el valor de la vida. Se conecta la
narcoviolencia con los homicidios de cientos de mujeres en la ciudad durante la década de
1990 y comienzos de la de 2000.
I am sitting in a house in the western part of the Mexican border city Ciudad
Juárez. On the other side of a magazine-cluttered coffee table a middle-aged
woman, who runs a hardware store in the neighborhood, is talking. Her friend’s
husband has been kidnapped, she says. The ransom is 1 million pesos
(US$79,000). This is the second time he has been kidnapped. Last time they
paid; now they cannot—they are still paying off the debt from the time before.
She speaks matter-of-factly but with a noticeable jitter and an occasional causal
and chronological incoherence, as if everything were so interlinked that the
precise order were insignificant.
She explains that shops in the area are being forced to pay protection money
(la cuota) by youths, sometimes as young as 12, armed with guns. How these
children and young men relate to the so-called drug war is unclear, she says.
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 195, Vol. 41 No. 2, March 2014 99-109
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X13509786
© 2013 Latin American Perspectives
99
100 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
weapons used—that you can write. Anything else, any analysis as to who
might have been responsible and why, no.” In such a climate rumors run riot
and academic analysis is both difficult and dangerous.
I do not, however, believe this to be an adequate excuse for the scant aca-
demic attention being paid to the drug-related violence going on in Mexico at
the moment. This essay aims only to provide a blueprint for further research. It
is an attempt to force a debate on a topic that, although attracting a lot of media
attention, is weak on substance. The briefness of my fieldwork, combined with
the access difficulties, means that this essay is heavily reliant on theory. I do not,
however, consider this a weakness, since a framework for assimilating the
seemingly contradictory information emerging from ongoing events is particu-
larly needed. The argument I propose emerges from an analysis of Juárez’s
position in the Mexican and global economy. I suggest that today’s violence is
best understood as a means by which the disenfranchised gain a sense of
belonging in a space of exclusion outside the law and the protection of the state.
Juárez, situated in a desert borderland historically suffering from frequent
periods of lawlessness, has long been excluded from Mexico’s national space.
The Apache roamed this terrain before and after lines were drawn in the sand
separating Mexico from the United States. The Mexican Revolution began here,
where Pancho Villa turned from smuggler to revolutionary, entering the politi-
cal fray from a space outside the state. Prohibition again saw Juárez become a
center for lawlessness, dominated by brothels, gambling dens, and cheap alco-
hol. But the point from which I want to pick up the story is 1965, when Juárez
officially became a space where a number of Mexican laws did not apply—an
export processing zone. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s (1998; 2005) notions of
sovereignty, the state of exception, and homo sacer (the “sacred” or “accursed”
man, who resides in this state and is reduced to bare life), I argue that becoming
an export processing zone turned Juárez into a city where people were disen-
franchised and life was cheap. This disenfranchisement is inherently violent,
and Juárez has been balanced on a knife edge between production and destruc-
tion ever since. In 2008 it tipped dramatically over into the latter, but the vio-
lence already had a precedent in the city in the form of the murders of hundreds
of young women known as the feminicides.
Although Agamben’s theory of the state of exception is crucial to my analy-
sis of Juárez, I suggest that it is limited by its focus on Nazi extermination
camps. Its concentration on eugenics seems to overlook the sign that hangs
over the gate to Auschwitz, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes One Free). The
dehumanizing potential of human labor is vital to an application of Agamben’s
ideas to the localized spaces of the global economy. These have been explored
by Aihwa Ong (2006) in her study of Asian export processing zones as spaces
of “neoliberal exception.” That the situation in Juárez deteriorated in line with
the global economy is not surprising given that the majority of the population
was connected to the manufacturing sector, which was strongly tied to the
health of the U.S. economy. As the financial crisis hit consumption, factories
laid off workers and unemployment rocketed. A city whose infrastructure had
failed to keep up with its rising population, swelled since the 1980s with
migrants arriving to work in the factories known as maquiladoras, became a
hotbed of violent crime and murder.
102 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
In the first section of this paper I explore the relationship between Juárez’s
position as an export processing zone and the violence against women that
swept the city in the 1990s. In the second I describe how this violence spread to
all parts of society as cartels battled for turf and the army and the federal police
arrived in force. In the third and final section I develop Agamben’s theory of
bare life to suggest that homo sacer is not merely a victim but also capable of
extreme violence.
Neoliberal Exception
In 1965 the local economy along Mexico’s border with the United States was
dramatically transformed. The Border Industrialization Program aimed to use
the geographic proximity to the United States by transforming the region into
a zone of manufacturing for export. The accompanying maquiladora program
enabled the creation of foreign-owned manufacturing plants able to import
raw materials and component parts duty-free as long as the finished products
were exported back to the United States. The companies were then taxed only
on the value added as the product crossed back across the border. Although the
industry got off to a relatively slow start, by the 1980s it had became the domi-
nant economy on the border as Mexico attempted to use the foreign exchange
acquired through the export market to recover from its debt crisis.
Juárez became the center of this economic experiment, and by 2010 one in
four employees in Mexico’s manufacturing industry was based in the city
(Staudt, Fuentes, and Fragoso, 2010: 25). How did this state of exception mani-
fest itself in Juárez? First and most important, the population ballooned.
Between 1960 and 2008 the number of people living in the city grew from
around 200,000 to some 1.5 million. The city’s infrastructure was unable to keep
up, and many of the new arrivals were unable to find suitable housing (Fuentes
and Peña, 2010). This new population spilled over into unplanned housing to
the city’s west. Although the wages of a maquiladora worker are not, as is fre-
quently reported, lower than elsewhere in Mexico (Vulliamy, 2011: 126), they
are in relative terms very low. The cost of living in Juárez is substantially higher
than in central Mexico and is estimated to be around 90 percent of that in El
Paso across the border, where wages are significantly higher (Bowden, 2010:
24). Another important factor is that the workforce in the maquiladoras is not
unionized. For Mexico this is a rarity and a direct result of a changing economic
viewpoint. The lack of unions means that the big multinationals relocating to
Juárez are able to create their own terms of employment. The maquiladoras by
design employ people who cannot find employment elsewhere in order to keep
wages as low as possible. At first most employees were young female migrants
from the South, and although this gradually changed the reputation of maquila
work as women’s work continued (Weissman, 2005).
Not only was the population growth unmanageably fast but the people
arriving in the city were all taking up the same low-paid jobs and entering
society at the same low, working-class level. This resulted in a skewed social
demographic—a mass of unhoused female migrants, working in manufactur-
ing plants without the usual workers’ rights. The maquiladora workers, dis-
placed and relocated in a space where Mexico’s employment laws did not
apply, were not far removed from the status of refugees. Both found themselves
in a denationalized space where their protection had been handed over to the
international community, in the workers’ case to multinational companies. This
lack of protection and the atmosphere of impunity it bred resulted, it was
argued, in the feminicides.
The prejudice against female maquila workers, who were regarded as sub-
verting traditional gender roles because they worked and were self-sufficient,
was also important. Joanna Swanger (2007) argues, on the basis of interviews
with a local nongovernmental organization that worked to support women in
Juárez, that a deep and violent sexism existed against the women who had
104 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
Although official figures vary, the city saw around 10,000 homicides between
2008 and the end of 2011. That was more than the number of civilian casualties
in Afghanistan over the same period and more than double the number of U.S.
troops killed in the entire Iraq war. The jump in the murder rate eclipsed the
gender violence of the feminicides, with an increasing number of people now
dismissing the phenomenon as a journalistic fiction. One influential author on
recent events in Juárez told me that they no longer believed that the number of
women killed in Juárez during the 1990s was out of the ordinary for a city of its
size. The current ferocity of violence has moved the goalposts, making even the
feminicides seem ordinary. Many also reject the gender-oriented literature as
irrelevant to the current crisis, in which the vast majority of people killed are
male. This, however, is an untenable position. If the violence against women
was linked to the city’s transformation into an export processing zone, then it
stands to reason that the current violence is connected, at least in part, to simi-
lar forces.
The feminicides demonstrated a violence and lawlessness linked to Juárez’s
position as a space of neoliberal exception. This lawlessness was linked to the
dehumanization of female maquila workers, many of whom were denounced
as prostitutes whose life was not worthy of recompense. As the military and the
federal police entered the fray, the drug war created a similar type of dehuman-
ized person—the drug trafficker. Murders went unpunished, and the violence
and lawlessness previously restricted to the female factory workers became
part of the fabric of the city. Killings between the cartels, killings by the military
and police, and killings by kids on the street corner all became normalized and
dehumanized under the banner of the “drug war.”
Until the massacre of 16 innocent teenagers at a birthday party in Juárez in
2010, which shifted public opinion and blew apart the rhetoric, the government
line had consistently been that almost all of those dying were involved in the
drug trade. The challenging of government rhetoric became a national move-
ment after the son of the Mexican poet Javier Sicilia was killed in Cuernavaca
in March 2011. Sicilia turned his grief outward, forming the ¡Hasta la Madre!
(roughly “I’ve had it up to here!”) campaign and marching across the country
in protest of the drug war. This movement more than anything else highlighted
the way in which policy makers had attempted to frame the dead as guilty of
their own demise. Sicilia, in the open letter to the Mexican government that
signaled the beginning of his campaign, referred to Agamben and the theory of
bare life: “Every citizen of this country has been reduced to what philosopher
Giorgio Agamben has called, using a Greek word, zoe: that is, bare life, the life
of an animal, of a being that can be subjected to violence, kidnapped, ill-treated
or humiliated and murdered with impunity” (Sicilia, 2011).
Sicilia’s campaign drew attention to the way the dead had been marked out
as drug addicts, criminals, and gang members—dehumanized in a similar way
to the female murder victims. One interviewee, arrested for drug trafficking,
condemned the drug war for inspiring the “criminalization of a generation”
(Campbell, 2009: 115). Bodies continue to be discovered in mass graves or
dumped in the desert. Often they remain unidentified, and the crimes almost
always go unpunished. Those killed in the so-called drug war have been placed
106 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
outside the state’s protection—declared homo sacer—in the same way as the
women working in the maquiladoras.
the narco trafficker looks in the mirror, he sees not a criminal, but a romantic
bandit” (2011: xxv). This image has been described as “the tough survivor of
the Sierra” (Edberg, 2004: 112).
A link, therefore, exists between the massacres carried out in a territorial war
between cartels and the armed 12-year-olds with no affiliation demanding pro-
tection money from shops. The connection between these different layers of
violence is the reduction of the inhabitants of Juárez to bare life. The violence
correlates with the transformation of Juárez into an export processing zone.
There is some form of territorial conflict going on in Juárez. However, this con-
flict has led to a wider display of violence. In a space of exclusion where inhab-
itants have been stripped of national belonging and human rights, violence has
become the norm among the disenfranchised.
Conclusion
determines in large part how the reduction to bare life is realized in practice.
What dehumanizes a woman may not be the same as what dehumanizes a
man, and, more important, the ways men and women respond to being dehu-
manized do not seem to be the same. Indeed, if bare life is understood as the
reduction to purely biological parts, the difference of sex is one of the few dis-
tinctions that remains.
Field research is difficult and dangerous, but it is paramount that Juárez not
be allowed to descend into the state of an infernal “other” as it has so frequently
done in the past. The signs are that this is already happening. The vast majority
of El Pasoans I met, even those with family and friends on the other side, had
stopped crossing the border. This is not surprising. What is more worrying is
the lack of academics and journalists crossing the border or corresponding with
the journalists and academics who are still based in Juárez. There are excep-
tions to this, such as the collaboration between Juárez and El Paso universities
represented by the collection Cities and Citizenship (Staudt, Fuentes, and
Monárrez Fragoso, 2010), but they remain too few. Juárez offers important
insight into the strain of development—the violence that can arise out of the
productive/destructive tension of neoliberal states of exception. It is important
to understand these forces, to unravel the human predicament imposed by
these states, and to learn from the mistakes that have been made.
Notes
1. I was later informed that the pharmacist was released safely a few days later, although my
source was unable to tell me what the terms of this release had been.
2. Molly Molloy, editor of the Frontera List, who has counted the murders since violence esca-
lated in Juárez, puts the figure at 10,882.
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