Beyond the Drug War in Mexico

This volume aims to go beyond the study of developments within Mexico’s

criminal world and their relationship with the state and law enforcement. It
focuses instead on the nature and consequences of what we call the ‘totaliza-
tion of the drug war’, and its projection on other domains which are key to
understanding the nature of Mexican democracy.
The volume brings together chapters written by distinguished scholars from
Mexico and elsewhere who deal with three major questions. What are the
main features of, and forces behind, the persistent militarization of the drug
war in Mexico? What are the main consequences for human rights and the
rule of law; what are the consequences of these developments for the public
sphere and, more specifically, for the functioning of the press and freedom of
expression? And how do ordinary people engage with the effects of violence
and insecurity within their communities, and which initiatives and practices
of ‘justice from below’ do they develop to counter an increased sense of
vulnerability, suffering and impunity?

Wil G. Pansters is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University,

and Professor of Latin American Studies, University of Groningen, The
Netherlands.

Benjamin T. Smith is Reader of Latin American History at the University of

Warwick, United Kingdom.

Peter Watt is Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Sheffield,

United Kingdom.
Europa Country Perspectives

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Haiti: From Revolutionary Slaves to Powerless Citizens

Essays on the Politics and Economics of Underdevelopment, 1804–2013
Alex Dupuy

Darfur’s Political Economy

A Quest for Development
Hamid Eltgani Ali

Contesting Spain?
The Dynamics of Nationalist Movements in Catalonia and the
Basque Country
Edited by Richard Gillespie and Caroline Gray

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A Debate Over Secession Within the European Union
Edited by Xavier Cuadras-Morató

Russian Nationalism and Ethnic Violence

Symbolic Violence, Lynching, Pogrom, and Massacre
Richard Arnold

Beyond the Drug War in Mexico

Human Rights, the Public Sphere and Justice
Edited by Wil G. Pansters, Benjamin T. Smith and Peter Watt
Beyond the Drug War in Mexico
Human Rights, the Public Sphere
and Justice

Edited by
Wil G. Pansters, Benjamin T. Smith and
Peter Watt
First published 2018
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Wil G. Pansters, Benjamin T. Smith and Peter Watt for selection and
editorial material and Routledge for other content
The right of Wil G. Pansters, Benjamin T. Smith and Peter Watt to be
identified as the authors of the editorial material has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Europa Commissioning Editor: Cathy Hartley
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ISBN: 978-1-85743-909-0 (hbk)

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Typeset in Times New Roman

by Taylor & Francis Books
Contents

List of tables vii

List of contributors viii
Acknowledgements ix
Abbreviations and acronyms x

Introduction: Beyond the drug war: the United States, the public
sphere and human rights 1
WIL G. PANSTERS, BENJAMIN T. SMITH AND PETER WATT

PART I
Securitization, militarization and human rights 31
1 U.S. pressure and Mexican anti-drugs efforts from 1940 to 1980:
Importing the war on drugs? 33
CARLOS A. PÉREZ RICART

2 Mexico: A humanitarian crisis in the making 53

MÓNICA SERRANO

3 Effects of militarization in the name of counter-narcotics efforts

and consequences for human rights in Mexico 76
LAURA CARLSEN

PART II
The public sphere and the press under siege 95
4 Violence, co-optation and corruption: Risks for the exercise of
journalism and freedom of expression in Mexico 97
ARMANDO RODRÍGUEZ LUNA
vi Contents
5 State of denial: Crime reporting and political communication
in Sonora 111
VÍCTOR HUGO REYNA GARCÍA

6 Social movements in support of the victims: Human rights and

digital communications 126
RUPERT KNOX

PART III
Justice and reconciliation from below 147
7 Beyond disorder and the Constitution: Thinking about the law in
regions of violence (the case of Cherán) 149
ERIKA BÁRCENA ARÉVALO AND ORLANDO ARAGÓN ANDRADE

8 Combing history against the grain: The search for truth amongst
Mexico’s hidden graves 164
CAROLINA ROBLEDO SILVESTRE

Index 185
List of tables

5.1 Type of criminal risk in El Imparcial (2003–2012) 114

5.2 Location of criminal risk in El Imparcial (2003–2012) 115
5.3 Dominant source in El Imparcial (2003–2012) 119
Contributors

Orlando Aragón Andrade is Professor at the Morelia campus of the National

Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico.
Erika Bárcena Arévalo is completing a Ph.D. in Anthropology at the Centre
for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) in
Mexico City, Mexico.
Laura Carlsen is a researcher and journalist who lives in Mexico City, Mexico
and is director of the Americas Program at the Center for International
Policy.
Rupert Knox is former head researcher on Mexico for Amnesty International
and is currently completing a Ph.D. at the University of Sheffield, United
Kingdom.
Carlos A. Pérez Ricart is a post-doctoral fellow at the Freie Universität
Berlin, Germany.
Víctor Hugo Reyna García is Professor of Journalism at the Colegio de
Sonora in Mexico.
Carolina Robledo Silvestre is a research fellow at the Centre for Research and
Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) in Mexico City,
Mexico.
Armando Rodríguez Luna is a researcher at the CASEDE research centre in
Mexico City, Mexico.
Mónica Serrano is a researcher and Professor at the Centre for International
Studies at the Colegio de México in Mexico City, Mexico.
Acknowledgements

This book is the product of three workshops held in the USA, Mexico and
the Netherlands between 2015 and 2016. They concerned the war on drugs in
Mexico and its links to US–Mexican relations, journalism and the public
sphere, and impunity and justice. The guiding principle of the workshops was
to go beyond the narration of inter-cartel violence and look at the broader
social effects of over a decade of conflict. They brought together scholars and
activists from diverse disciplines, countries, and perspectives.
The workshops would not have been possible without the assistance of
diverse institutions and funding bodies. Most importantly, we would like to
thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom
that provided the basic funds for the three workshops.
We would also like to thank the institutions which helped to host and sup-
port the workshops. These included the Mexico Institute, Woodrow Wilson
Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, Freedom House (Mexico), Colectivo
de Análisis de la Seguridad con Democracía, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte,
Stichting Hester, Peace Brigades International, Institute of the Americas
(University College London), and University College Utrecht.
We would also like to thank the staff at Warwick and Utrecht Universities
who organised much of the logistics surrounding both the grant and work-
shops. Special thanks should go to Kootje Willemse, David Duncan, Liese
Perrin, Katie Klaassen, Mark Philp, and Tracy Smith.
Finally, we would like to thank all those scholars, activists, and journalists
who attended the events, enriched the discussion, and shaped our thinking on
these vital issues. Special thanks must go to Duncan Wood, Mariclaire
Acosta, Raúl Benitez, Arsene van Nierop, Sister Consuelo Morales, Ioan
Grillo, Duncan Tucker, Julio César Márquez, Daniel Gerschenson, Father
Mario Campos, Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, Edwin Koopman, Laura
Alvarez, Paul Eiss, Javier Garza, Nina Lakhani, José Brambila Ramírez,
Julián Cardona, and Thom Rath.
Abbreviations and acronyms

IACHR Inter-American Commission on Human Rights

NAFTA North American Free Trade Agreement
NGO non-governmental organization
OAS Organization of American States
US(A) United States (of America)
Introduction
Beyond the drug war: the United States, the
public sphere and human rights
Wil G. Pansters, Benjamin T. Smith and Peter Watt

Militarisation, totalisation, or ‘What else could we talk about?’1

Just before the 2000 presidential elections that would end more than seventy
years of one-party rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido
Revolucionario Institucional, PRI) in Mexico, the New York Review of Books
published an article that asked if Mexico was a narco-state (Massing 2000).
With hindsight, one might suppose that the author anticipated Mexico’s
imminent future. But that would be incorrect. In fact, while the author dis-
cussed some media reports that hinted at an affirmative answer to the ques-
tion, he believed them to be exaggerated. In his view, the drug trade
constituted too small a part of Mexico’s economy. The article also pointed to
the doubts that surrounded then PRI presidential candidate Francisco
Labastida, a former governor of one of Mexico’s key drug trafficking states
(Sinaloa), who ‘had been dogged by rumours about his complicity with drug
traffickers’ (Massing 2000: 24). The latter’s promise to launch a frontal attack
on the drugs business elicited suspicion. In contrast, his challenger Vicente
Fox from the right-wing Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) was expected to
bring about real change (Massing 2000: 26).
Nearly three presidential terms later, the question as to whether Mexico is a
narco-state is still pertinent. Despite the dominant discourse of democratisa-
tion and transition at the time, few, if any, commentators, journalists and
scholars anticipated what the defeat of the PRI regime would actually mean
for Mexico’s political system, and much less for the complex relationships
linking drug trafficking, violence and politics. The latter years of the Fox
presidency witnessed increasing levels of narco-related violence and high-level
corruption. In 2007, a US State Department report noted that drug-related
‘levels of violence, corruption and internal drug abuse’ had risen and that 90 per
cent of cocaine introduced to the US now passed through Mexico (US
Department of State 2007a). It was estimated that between 2003 and 2006 drug
cartels sent around US$22 billion from the United States to Mexico (US
Department of State 2007b). Mexican authorities expressed similar concerns,
as the Secretary of Public Security admitted that ‘there is not a single zone of
the country without the presence of organised crime’.2 A 2006 Washington
2 Wil G. Pansters, Benjamin T. Smith and Peter Watt
Office of Latin America (WOLA) report stated that organised crime infil-
trated law ‘enforcement agencies, undermined the rule of law and eroded
respect for human rights’ (Freeman 2006). But the worst was still to come:
during the second PAN presidency of Felipe Calderón (2006–2012), the vio-
lence, killings and disappearances, as well as incidences of corruption at all
levels of the state rose exponentially. With the return of the PRI in 2012, little
has changed.
Confronted with an increasingly complex landscape of criminal organisa-
tions, corrupt police forces, escalating and spectacular violence, and US
pressures that pushed for unrestrained enforcement, the Mexican authorities
began to rely increasingly on the militarisation of anti-narcotics policies. With
the police forces and criminal justice agencies deeply compromised, from the
time of Fox (and even President Ernesto Zedillo) the Mexican army was
thought to be the only national institution able to lead the struggle against
both drug traffickers and corrupted security agencies. When Felipe Calderón
assumed the presidency in late 2006, the military (including the navy) was put
in charge of operations.3 In an unprecedented move, the Calderón govern-
ment mobilised soldiers throughout the country.4 The budget of different law
enforcement agencies, including the army, has grown hugely over the years, as
has the public visibility of the armed forces.5 Since 2006, militarisation has
become the key feature of Mexico’s security landscape.6 Although PRI can-
didate Enrique Peña Nieto promised to limit military involvement, the situa-
tion has improved little since his election.7 As the contributions to the first
part of this volume demonstrate, the militarisation of public security came at
a huge cost. In fact, a 2011 Human Rights Watch report concluded that the
policies of public security, which are dependent on the army, have failed in
two ways; ‘[t]hey have not managed to lower levels of violence, but instead
have resulted in a dramatic increase of violations of human rights … The
“war” of Calderón has exacerbated the climate of violence, impunity and fear
in many parts of the country.’
However, Calderón’s frontal attack on organised crime had an additional
and far-reaching effect: it ‘totalised’ the drug war and violence. In terms of
human suffering, between 2006 and 2014 more than 160,000 homicides took
place in Mexico, and tens of thousands are now missing (Human Rights
Watch 2013; Heinle et al. 2015). In addition, there are the large numbers of
people who have suffered from other criminal activity. In addition, these
numbers should be multiplied by the number of relatives and friends of the
victims in order to acquire a realistic sense of the depth of the human tragedy
brought about by the exacerbation of Mexico’s war on drugs.
The war on drugs also has become a major theme in Mexico’s foreign
policy, and strained relations with the United States (Chabat 2012). Though
drug trafficking has long been embedded in the political system, in recent
years it has acquired different forms and meanings. Drug money now deeply
penetrates local political systems (Padgett 2016); drug-related violence and
insecurity have warped and limited the public sphere through the influence
 Introduction 3
they exercise on the media; and drug violence has seriously (and further)
undermined the rule of law. Corruption appears to be unstoppable. Despite
all governmental rhetoric and efforts, police reforms have by and large been a
failure (Sabet 2012; López Alvarado 2017). Perhaps most importantly, this
wave of violence has profoundly damaged the tissue of society in various
parts of the country. In 2014, a leading Catholic priest in Acapulco, one of
the country’s most violent cities, said that Mexican society had become ‘ill’
(Vera 2014). In response, the church opened up clinics for people to talk
about their experiences and pain, work on healing, and obtain psychological
and legal support. The brunt of the suffering and pain has fallen, as always,
on the underprivileged and the young. The gulf between the inflated rhetoric
of the Calderón and Peña Nieto governments and the lived experience of vio-
lence, insecurity, impunity and injustice has grown. A mother who lamented the
unfounded imprisonment of her son wrote:

The president continues to think that he is the only one who has con-
fronted drug traffickers without fear, when the true narco leaders are
calmly sitting untouchable in their mansions, while in the streets a lost
war is waged by a police and military bought by the drug traffickers
where the cannon fodder are thousands of disposable youths that end
their lives in prison or in the cemetery.
(Valdez Cárdenas 2011: 214–215)

Reading the war on drugs

Since the 1980s, most accounts of Mexico’s war on drugs have concentrated
on the confrontations either between organised criminals or between law
enforcement agencies and groups of organised criminals. Starting with the
exposés of US journalists like Elaine Shannon (1989) and James Mills (1987),
such works have become popular on both sides of the border. In Mexico,
particularly after 2006, journalists and commentators specialising in crime
and security have churned out an impressive number of books about specific
drug trafficking organisations or cartels, leading traffickers and their families,
or certain areas of the country. (Millán 2015; Beith 2010; Ravelo 2006; 2013a;
2013b; Langton 2013; Cimino 2014; Fernández Ménendez 2004; 2006). Their
‘[N]arco libros … now clutter airport bookstores from Mexico to Colombia’
(Campos and Gootenberg 2016: 10). Many of these publications are based on
the authors’ daily or weekly reports and, as such, are more informative and
descriptive than analytical. Undoubtedly there are exceptions to this kind of
narrative (Grillo 2012; Osorno 2012; Esquivel 2014, Hernández 2010, Poppa
2010; Bowden 2004; 2011). But most slot into the sensationalist true crime
genre and are deliberately lurid – focusing on the often-unsubstantiated myths
surrounding individual drug traffickers. Most also replicate the traditional
moral binaries of the genre, by presenting the war on drugs as a relatively
simple struggle between a handful of upstanding state officials (the ‘goodies’)
4 Wil G. Pansters, Benjamin T. Smith and Peter Watt
and an array of traffickers and corrupt politicians (‘the baddies’). Finally,
most avoid deeper discussion of the political, social or economic contexts of
these conflicts or turn away from the action long enough to ponder their
broader ramifications outside the world of cops and traffickers.
Like the journalistic accounts, specialists from think tanks, government
agencies and security consultancy firms tend to focus on tracking the inter-
actions of drug trafficking organisations and the state.8 Over the last decade,
one influential agency, the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which
carries out research for members and committees of the US Congress, has
published a number of relevant reports. They follow a similar approach. In
2007 the report provided an overview of Mexico’s five major cartels and their
operations, including the nature of cartel ties to gangs such as the Mara Sal-
vatrucha, and the presence of Mexican cartel cells in the United States (CRS
2007). A few years later, it reported on the seven most significant drug traf-
ficking organisations (DTOs) operating during the first five years of the Cal-
derón administration, and the latter’s ‘successful strategy’ to remove key
leaders from each of the organisations. The report also acknowledged that
this caused fragmentation, struggles over succession, and new competition –
leading to instability among the groups and continuing violence (CRS 2013).
A recent report followed up on this analysis, mentioning nine or perhaps even
twenty major organisations, several of which emerged during the last few
years, thereby posing a daunting challenge of governance to President Peña
Nieto (CRS 2017). It goes without saying that all of these think tanks and
firms dedicate considerable attention to policy recommendations.
Scholars from the disciplines of political science, criminology and security
studies have followed a similar approach to journalists and consultants. In
many ways this is hardly surprising. Many of the first generation of drug war
academics bridged the gap between academia and private consultancy work.
A good example is the work of Grayson (2009; 2010; 2015), who documented
the emergence, composition and main features of particular drug trafficking
and criminal organisations, such as Los Zetas and La Familia Michoacana.
These largely descriptive studies are overwhelmingly based on secondary
sources and approach the topic from within a security framework that lacks
critical socio-economic and political contextualisation, perhaps because these
works were often published ‘al vapor’ (‘on-the-hoof ’) (Bunker 2011; Longmire
2014; Rexton Kan 2012).
In some ways, there are good reasons for such a focus. Particularly in the
last decade, alliances between diverse groups of organised criminals have been
made and broken with dizzying regularity. There is value in understanding
who is confronting whom; there are ways to triangulate evidence and ascer-
tain certifiable facts; and getting at the deeper social effects of drug produc-
tion, trafficking and violence can be a tough, dangerous and depressing job.
Nonetheless, such an approach also contains certain intrinsic problems. First,
such works often misrepresent speculation as verifiable fact, particularly when
it comes to assessing the extent and nature of corruption. As Luis Astorga
 Introduction 5
argues, ‘discovering the precise connections between the [traffickers] and the
leaders in the fields of politics and economics’ is a ‘sterile’ and ‘fruitless’
activity. Knowledge of such links can rarely be gleaned and is ‘reserved for
the initiated’ (Astorga 1995: 89). Second, such an approach also replicates the
mystifying language of the state and the private security industry. As Fer-
nando Escalante Gonzalbo argues, terms like ‘sicario’, ‘cartel’ and ‘plaza’ are
trotted out to explain confrontations and murders. Nevertheless, little atten-
tion is paid to what such terms actually mean. Was the Guadalajara ‘cartel’
really a monolithic, hierarchical organisation directed by a trio of Badir-
aguato exiles? Did the Zetas really control the ‘plaza’ of Monterrey, a com-
plex industrial city of over a million people? Or do these terms carry with
them the leading assumptions of the war on drugs? What better way to stop a
‘cartel’ than taking out the ‘kingpins’? What better way to bring peace to a
geographical area than by calling in the army (Escalante Gonzalbo 2012)?9
Third, by inserting stories of massacres and mass graves into relatively com-
prehensible narratives of state–cartel or inter-cartel confrontation, such an
approach not only normalises violence but also implies the guilt of the deceased.
Just as journalists reporting from Mexico’s most violent areas had already
started to note some time ago (Torrea 2010), a handful of political scientists
have discovered that this framing of the war on drugs pushes many to excuse
deaths and disappearances with the comforting story that the victims were in
some way metidos [or involved] in the trade (Schedler 2015).
Fortunately, a second wave of scholarly work is emerging. It is generally
based on methodologically more sophisticated and diverse research. For
example, with the help of what he calls the ‘state-reaction’ argument, Jones
(2016) identifies two basic types of illicit networks and argues that their dis-
tinctive features shape differential relations with state and civil society actors.
Based on a detailed case study of the Arellano Félix organisation or Tijuana
cartel and a comparative examination of other organisations and networks, he
argues that territorially oriented drugs networks, as compared to transac-
tional or trafficking networks, directly threaten state sovereign interests and
the well-being of local societies. As a result, they become the target of all-out
(military) state responses, which affect their organisational resilience. This
argument claims to explain the logic behind state strategies of attacking some
criminal organisations rather then others. Bailey approaches Mexico’s current
evolution through the lens of the ‘security trap’, ‘a low-equilibrium situation
of relatively high levels of crime, violence, and corruption in which govern-
ment and civil society are unable to generate sufficient corrective measures …
to shift towards a higher equilibrium’ (Bailey 2014: 2). He also investigates
the political agendas and power capabilities of drug trafficking organisations
and their relationships to the state and law enforcement with the concept of
competitive state-building. In a convincing critique of the notion of state
failure, Kenny et al. (2012) also shift the analytical focus from the features of
state-challenging actors such as organised crime to the kind of state being
challenged. Their edited volume employs a notion of security failure that
6 Wil G. Pansters, Benjamin T. Smith and Peter Watt
brings together domestic and international perspectives in a way that recog-
nises the responsibility of the Mexican state for the nature of the criminal
threat it faces, as well as incentives to criminal organisations that result from
the US-led prohibitionist regime (Kenny et al. 2012: 19).
At the same time, some writers have started to examine the broader effects
of Mexico’s war on drugs. Many are journalists, who have moved away from
the certainties of true crime to examine the social consequences of the vio-
lence which has afflicted their communities (Torrea 2010; Rodríguez Nieto
2012; Valdez Cárdenas 2011; 2012; 2014; Turati 2011). But others are aca-
demics. Like many of the authors included in this volume, they tend to bridge
the space between the academy and civil society (see e.g. Ovalle and Díaz
Tovar 2014; Ovalle et al. 2014). Some come from the world of journalism or
NGOs – like Laura Carlsen, Armando Rodríguez and Rupert Knox, and
adopt academic tools in order to understand the broader social and cultural
changes caused by the totalisation of the drug war. Others are activist-
academics, like Orlando Aragón Andrade and Erika Bárcena Arévalo, who
use their expertise in order to advise and aid certain communities. Others still
are anthropologists, like Carolina Robledo Silvestre, who has adopted a var-
iant of engaged anthropology, with which she investigates and works with the
families of the disappeared. She steps into a growing scholarship within
anthropology in which studying conditions of conflict and violence has urged
researchers to reflect on relationships between their own work and struggles
for social justice and the truth. Robledo’s contribution to this volume responds
to Scheper-Hughes’ (1995) call to leave behind moral relativism and embrace
an ‘ethically grounded’ anthropology, and gives concrete content to Low and
Engle Merry’s conclusion that ‘[E]ngagement is transforming the way
anthropologists do fieldwork, the work they do with other scholars and with
those they study, and the way they think about public as well as scholarly
audiences’ (2010: 214; see also Speed 2006).
We subscribe to the idea that building bridges between academia and civil
society has become increasingly important. This edited volume embraces this
trend, seeks to buck the fashion for armchair cartel-watching, and go ‘beyond
the drug war’. To do so, we build on the growing interest among academics
and members of civil society in the ‘totalisation’ of the drug war and the ways
it has fed off and affected broader social and political shifts. Such an
approach already has a developed history in the United States, where political
scientists, sociologists and historians have started to examine how both heavy
policing and the mass incarceration of certain racial groups on minor drugs
charges have shaped electoral politics, economic dependency, urban planning,
family life, social networks and even the making of friendships and relation-
ships (Thompson 2010; Goffman 2014; Coates 2015; Journal of American
History 2015; Clear 2007; Wakefield and Wildeman 2016). The situation to
the south is clearly very different. The levels of violence – at least measured as the
number of homicides per 100,0000 – are much higher in Mexico.10 But there
are also similarities. In both countries there has been a blurring of roles
 Introduction 7
between the police and the military. This, in turn, has caused heavy-handed
security tactics and high-profile state-sanctioned killings on both sides of
the border (Balko 2013; Müller 2012; 2016; Azaola and Ruiz Torres 2011;
Becker 2011; Davis 2013). Impunity for those committing these killings seems
to be the rule in both countries. Although the prison-industrial complex of
Mexico has yet to reach the level of economic backing and political importance
of that of the United States, it is clearly moving in a similar direction
(Documenta A.C. 2016).
There are different ways one could approach the totalisation of the drug
war. Until now, one profitable avenue has been to examine the intersection of
drug trafficking and culture, and for over a decade scholars have analysed the
narcocorridos, narco-películas, narco-telenovelas and narco-novelas produced
in Mexico and over the border (Wald 2001; Latin American Perspectives
2014; Muehlmann 2014; Polit Duenas 2013; Edberg, 2010; Sánchez Godoy
2009; Ramírez-Pimienta and Tabuenca Córdoba, 2016; Domínguez Ruval-
caba 2015). Though Rupert Knox and Victor Hugo Reyna touch on the
intersection of narcoculture and news (or what Paul Eiss terms the ‘narco-
sphere’) we have instead decided to focus on the effects of the drug war on
hitherto understudied fields. In Part I, we look beyond the border and exam-
ine the relationships between US–Mexican relations and drug war policies. In
Part II we examine the effects of the war on drugs on journalism and the
public sphere. In Part III we examine how the war on drugs and the declining
rule of law has generated bottom-up strategies for securing justice.
Beyond moving away from the alarmist headlines, these three approaches
offer distinct advantages. First, they demand a dialogue among practitioners
of the different branches of the social sciences. As a result, we have brought
together political scientists, historians, media studies specialists, lawyers,
anthropologists and journalists to investigate the problems. Second, this focus
allows us to analyse more broadly how this militarised conflict has shaped
Mexico’s hesitant and stuttering transition to democracy. Throughout the rest
of this introduction we contextualise these three fields in turn before offering
some tentative conclusions about Mexican democracy.

The United States, drug war policies and human rights

Mexico’s war on drugs has long roots. In part, it relies on endogenous cultural
beliefs, particularly about indigenous and minority groups, going back to the
late nineteenth century. But, as the three chapters in Part I argue, it also has
more direct political causes. For over half a century, the United States has
pushed Mexico towards a more prohibitionist stance at certain key con-
junctures. At the same time, US authorities have maintained a relatively tight
control of the appointment of its southern neighbour’s drug policy officials.
This has allowed for more direct political influence in the militarisation of the
drug war, a tendency that culminated in President Felipe Calderón’s dis-
astrous political term. The substantial external funding of the military, the
8 Wil G. Pansters, Benjamin T. Smith and Peter Watt
widespread deployment of the army and its employment to do the work of the
police, combined with the absence of the rule of law and impunity of state
actors, has created a massive human rights crisis.
The war on drugs in Mexico has origins in the country’s cultural and poli-
tical heritage. Prohibitionist views on drugs go back to the criminalisation of
indigenous healing practices, especially those that utilised marijuana, during
the final years of the nineteenth century (Campos 2014). They also go back to
the anti-Chinese campaigns of the early post-revolutionary decades, which
employed accusations of opium addiction and opium trafficking to persecute
Chinese minorities in Sinaloa, Sonora and to a lesser extent Durango and
Baja California (Velázquez Morales 2001; Carey 2014; Chao Romero 2011;
Monteón González and Trueba Lara 1988). Furthermore, the concepts
underpinning these movements – especially those that held that drug addiction
‘degenerated the race’ – were periodically modified and redeployed during the
1960s and 1970s to persecute US counterculture tourists, Mexican jipis and
indigenous groups that used mushrooms, peyote and other hallucinogens
(Amaral 2012; Zolov 1999; Lammoglia 1971).
However, as Carlos Pérez Ricart argues in Chapter 1, they also relied on
explicit US pressure exerted on Mexico at particular junctures. In 1940, Harry
Anslinger, director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, forced the Mexican
authorities to halt the short-lived legalisation of narcotics and the treatment
of addicts in open, state-run clinics and return to the criminalisation of drug
users. Seven years later he coerced the government of President Manuel
Alemán (1946–1952) to enlarge its plan of source eradication by starting an
annual programme of sending judicial policemen and soldiers into the
mountains of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua to confront farmers and burn
fields of marijuana and opium poppies. Twenty years later, even with Anslin-
ger gone, US anti-drug tactics remained similar. In 1969, the US government
announced Operation Intercept, a month-long stop-and-search campaign on
the US border. On the surface, the plan was an abject failure. But, as one FBI
agent remarked, the US authorities got what they wanted: ‘For diplomatic
reasons the true purpose of the exercise was never revealed … it was an
exercise in international extortion, pure, simple and effective, designed to
bend Mexico to our will’ (Carey 2014: 245). The Mexican government, which
had held out against an enlarged drug eradication programme, was forced to
sign up to a new anti-drugs campaign. Now backed by the threat of another
border initiative, the United States cajoled Mexican authorities towards stiffer
measures against drug production and trafficking. Though the compulsion
was external, the Mexican authorities were not simply dependent on US
pressure. As Pérez Ricart, argues, state actors often channelled increasingly
aggressive anti-drugs campaigns towards building up certain institutions,
buying military machinery and dominating geographically dispersed and
under-governed groups.
Though the assumptions underlying Mexico’s anti-narcotics policies have
remained remarkably consistent since the 1940s, the broader (inter)national
 Introduction 9
circumstances under which they were operationalised changed. From the mid-
1980s onwards, five major historical processes occurred in the US–Mexican
geopolitical space that profoundly transformed both anti-narcotics policies
and their social context. These were (a) changes in the organisation of inter-
national drug trafficking and production which favoured the role of Mexico;
(b) the gradual decomposition and disintegration of the soft authoritarian
regime, which eventually resulted in the 2000 partisan alternation and an
inchoate democratic transition; (c) the consolidation of a full-blown neoliberal
economic model which tied the country to the United States, Canada and the
global economy; (d) the emergence of a new global securitisation regime in
the aftermath of 9/11 which bled into hemispheric counternarcotics policies;
and (e) the deep and broad militarisation of transnational counternarcotics
strategies since the late 1990s, but especially after 2006.
The contributions by Mónica Serrano (Chapter 2) and Laura Carlsen
(Chapter 3) examine these forces from a number of empirical and conceptual
perspectives. Together these three chapters set the stage for two other major
components of ‘the other side of the drug war’: the public sphere and the
press, and (popular) justice, which are examined in Parts II and III. Under-
standing Mexico’s descent into what Serrano terms ‘a vortex of violence’
during the last fifteen years is the main objective of her contribution. She
investigates and assesses the different explanatory frameworks put forward by
both scholarly observers and policy advisors and decision-makers alike. She
brings together several of the five processes mentioned above and shows both
how they became entangled and how they played out during particular con-
junctures and in determined territorial contexts. She argues that Mexico’s
distinctive period of political liberalisation and transition affected previous
arrangements between political power and law enforcement on the one hand
and drug trafficking on the other, and also displayed a tendency by con-
secutive administrations to downplay the growing influence of organised
crime. Political and institutional shifts undermined the capacity of state
agents to act as overseers and patrons of drug trafficking in Mexico, and
created space for criminal organisations to challenge the established system.
Thus began, as Serrano notes, a breakdown of old arrangements in favour of
a fragmentation of crime syndicates, which increased competition for the
control of territory and trafficking routes.
However, the ‘transition’ argument is insufficient in explaining the ‘carving
up of the country into lawless zones’, and hence the author examines two
additional processes: structural changes in hemispheric illicit drug markets,
and the adoption of particular anti-drugs policies, both of which were deeply
shaped by broader US-enforced international policies and counternarcotics
ideologies. A key process in this context was the opening of the cocaine
transhipment economy in Mexico during the second half of the 1980s.
Already in the 1990s, the financial power of Mexican drug trafficking orga-
nisations ‘allowed them to neutralise state institutions, compromise law
enforcement, and when needed to coerce security agencies’ (Serrano, this
10 Wil G. Pansters, Benjamin T. Smith and Peter Watt
volume). The hugely increased stakes contributed to scenarios in which what
Serrano calls ‘all out criminal wars’ developed. As she shows, these processes
played out around three key urban regions along the US–Mexican border,
especially after 2000.
The last part of the chapter focuses on the rigid implementation by the
Calderón government (2006–2012) of a militarised counternarcotics strategy
informed by the kingpin principle (a ‘decapitation’ strategy that opts to
combat the power of cartels with high-profile arrests and assassinations of the
leaders of criminal organisations). She demonstrates how a selective reading
of the security situation by senior policy advisors to Calderón meant denying
the consequences of certain drug policies for the deepening of violence and
insecurity. Sending in the army ‘fanned out violence across the country’ and
furthered the fragmentation of criminal organisations and turf wars with
active involvement of local, regional and federal law enforcement agencies.
The blind application of military deployments in combination with the
decapitation strategy disregarded the violent dynamics they generated and
lost sight of their aim, which was the protection of ordinary people in these
areas.11 The government failed to recognise that drug cartels were usually
deeply embedded in the territories they control and do not operate in a vacuum,
and thus ended up playing a substantial part in the creation of a ‘criminal
nightmare’ of greater proportion than already existed. Serrano reminds the
reader how Mexico’s leaders’ adoption of the US-led ‘war-on-drugs’ policy’s
tunnel vision produced deep harm to the society.
Carlsen further charts and contextualises the major features of Calderón’s
militarisation, and, above all, the profound consequences for Mexico’s human
rights. Her chapter contains a brief and useful discussion of the concept of
‘militarisation’ itself. For Carlsen, the implementation of the broad and deep
militarisation of the war on drugs does not simply mean more boots on the
ground but also a shift in power between civilian and military authorities.
This can clearly be seen in both the greatly increased influence of the armed
forces on the police and the consolidation of a military perspective on com-
bating drug trafficking, based on the reading of DTOs as a ‘foreign enemy’
and of the logic of territorial control. The militarisation model pursued by the
Calderón administration has given the military and police forces free rein
with almost no accountability. The American military started to train their
Mexican counterparts in Iraq-style operations. Moreover, Carlsen insists that
Mexico’s war on drugs cannot be disconnected from international frameworks
concerning trade and security. Such cooperation was not only built into the
recent Mérida Initiative (2008), but also older accords like NAFTA (1994)
and the Security and Prosperity Partnership (2005).
Carlsen demonstrates how ‘broad militarisation’ has equally broad con-
sequences. While the rhetoric of militarisation claimed that it would enforce
the rule of law, wrest territorial control from organised crime and re-establish
public security, in fact the exact opposite occurred. Militarisation produced
‘the massive erosion of rule of law … [the] rapid deterioration of public
 Introduction 11
safety’ and increasing levels of impunity. Carlsen chronicles Mexico’s human
rights crisis in terms of its staggering human loss, disappearances, arbitrary
detentions, torture and violence against journalists, migrants and women. In
recent years, a handful of high-profile cases, from San Fernando (2010 and
2011) to Ayotzinapa (2014), have started to undermine Mexico’s duplici-
tous public transcript of defending human rights. While Mexican govern-
ments sign up to virtually every international human rights treaty, they are
now regularly condemned by all major local and international human rights
organisations.12

Journalism, the public sphere and social media

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, national and international scholars
lauded the gradual opening of the Mexican press. Many linked the process to
the development of a functioning multiparty democracy. For some, this
opening was ‘market-driven’ and occurred as a result of the country’s neo-
liberal reforms. The increasing power of capitalist corporations and private
advertising freed newspapers from an overweening reliance on official sub-
sidies and government publicity. New business-oriented editors emerged who
rejected the old system of state support and embraced new funding opportu-
nities (Hallin 2000; Calmon Alvez 2005). Others pointed to the rise of ‘civic
journalism’. They harked back to the founding of left-leaning nationals like
Proceso (1976), Unomásuno (1977) and La Jornada (1984). And they empha-
sised the increasing professionalism of Mexican journalists, their growing
links to autonomous civic organisations, and the transformation of newsroom
cultures in the succeeding decade (Lawson 2002; Hughes 2006). Whatever the
reasons, by the turn of the millennium, both journalists and opposition poli-
ticians were confident that Mexico’s free press was capable of fostering delib-
eration and debate, communicating between the state and civil society and
defending the country’s fragile new democracy.
However, over a decade later, such dreams lie in tatters. As we finish this
book, Mexico is ranked 149th in the Reporters Without Borders World Press
Freedom Index. It has the lowest ranking in mainland Latin America. In fact,
Mexico now lies below Afghanistan, Burma, Russia and Zimbabwe in terms of
press freedom (Reporters without Borders 2016). The murder of journalists has
become commonplace; the country has become the most dangerous country to
pursue journalism outside the Middle East. Though the Committee to Protect
Journalists (CPJ) only lists forty journalists as having been killed for their
writing between 1992 and 2016, the actual number is far higher (Committee
to Protect Journalists 2017).13 In the state of Veracruz alone, nineteen jour-
nalists were murdered during the six-year term of Governor Javier Duarte,
and in Nuevo Laredo, one newspaper, the combative daily El Mañana,
experienced the kidnapping of its editors and the killing of four reporters
(Priest 2015; Ureste, 2017). Tragically, violence against journalists has con-
tinued unabated. In late March 2017, Miroslava Breach Velducea was gunned
12 Wil G. Pansters, Benjamin T. Smith and Peter Watt
down in northern Chihuahua, and less than two months later Javier Valdez
Cárdenas was executed in broad daylight in his hometown of Culiacán,
Sinaloa.
Other forms of violence including beating, intimidation and threats are also
frequent. The NGO, Article 19, estimates that between 2009 and 2015 there
have been 1,832 attacks on journalists (Article 19, 2016). In fact, in some
areas censorship has become so omnipresent and intense that many news-
papers have given up reporting on organised crime. In 2010, El Diario de
Juárez ran a front-page editorial, which acknowledged that the cartels were
the ‘de facto authorities’ and asked them to ‘[e]xplain to us what you want
from us, so we know what to abide by … It is impossible for us to do our job
under these conditions. Tell us, then, what you expect from us, as a news-
paper’ (El Diario de Juárez, 19 September 2010). In reaction to the Miroslava
Breach murder, the newspaper El Norte de Ciudad Juárez was closed down.
Uncovering the motives for such attacks against journalists is harder than it
might seem. In fact, in the 1990s, the Tijuana journalist, Jesús Blancornelas,
rather cynically estimated that less than 10 per cent of journalists were
attacked for what they wrote. Most, he argued, were actually killed for
attempted blackmail, links to organised crime, or completely private reasons
(Solomon 1996: 123). As usual in Mexico, looking at the formal prosecutions
for these violent crimes helps little. In a study of fifty-six journalists murdered
between 2003 and 2013, only two of the alleged killers were actually sentenced
(Ríos 2013). Undoubtedly, many are murdered by organised crime groups.
Killings seem to peak during intense turf wars between rival organisations (as
in Ciudad Juárez from 2009 to 2011) and act as extensions of broader, cartel-led
propaganda campaigns (Priest 2015; Rodríguez Luna, this volume; Campbell
2014). New groups like the Zetas employed aggressive propaganda campaigns
and effectively censored newspapers in Tamaulipas and for a time in Ciudad
Juárez (Ríos 2013).
Other murders were committed by the authorities, sometimes in league with
criminal organisations. As Armando Rodríguez Luna discovered in Sinaloa,
most attacks on journalists ‘were done either because of a direct order from
state officials, or at the very least with the protection of the authorities’. In
these cases, covering up collusion between local governments and organised
crime seems to have been a key motivating factor. The shooting of Breach
Velducea was probably a result of her revelations that Arturo Quintana and
his gang, La Línea, were backing certain candidates in upcoming municipal
elections (Castillo and Villapando 2017). However, the perception that critical
journalists were infringing the honour and damaging the public reputation of
state officials also remains a cause at least in certain cases (Piccato 2010;
Smith 2018 forthcoming). Not all the journalists murdered in Veracruz during
the Duarte regime wrote about the connections between criminals and politi-
cians. Rubén Espinosa, shot together with three other women in a Mexico
City apartment in 2015, was probably killed for publishing an unflattering
picture of the thin-skinned governor (Sin Embargo 2015).
 Introduction 13
Beyond the bare statistics, as Rodríguez Luna and Reyna García argue in
Chapters 4 and 5, different configurations and rhythms of state–cartel collu-
sion as well as varied media traditions have combined to produce a hetero-
geneous regional geography of both censorship and news reporting (see Del
Palacio Montiel 2015). In Sinaloa and Michoacán, violence against journal-
ists and media institutions has been relatively high, especially in periods of
confrontation between cartels or between cartels and self-defense groups, or
autodefensas. Nevertheless, the results of such censorship have been markedly
different. In Sinaloa, news reporting about drug traffickers has a long history,
stretching back to at least the 1970s and a number of relatively effective sur-
vival strategies have emerged. A handful of journalists from Noroeste, Debate
and Ríodoce have found a degree of security in careful analysis, fact-checking
and professional conduct (though the recent killing of Ríodoce co-founder
Valdez Cárdenas suggests this arrangement has come to an end). Such find-
ings dovetail with Javier Garza’s assertion that as editor of El Siglo de Tor-
reón he tried to keep reporters safe through a mix of careful, fact-checked
writing and war-zone security tactics (Garza 2015). In Michoacán, local
journalists have no such tradition. In fact, Rodríguez asserts that during the
conflicts of the last decade in the Tierra Caliente, censorship created ‘an area
of informational silence’. In the other regions, violence against journalists has
been much less acute. Still, there have been other impediments to free expres-
sion. In Nuevo León, business elites stifle discussion of private industry; in
Chiapas, the government still floats most papers through official handouts;
and in Mexico City aggressive policing has led to increasing low-level attacks
on journalists.
In Sonora, strategies of censorship and reporting have shifted over time.
Under PRI governor Eduardo Bours (2003–2009), reporting of the nota roja
or crime news increased markedly.14 Editors and journalists freely described
the high levels of criminal and security risk in the state. Between 2003 and
2006, in the region’s main broadsheet, El Imparcial, news on executions, fire-
fights and drug trafficking grew. The paper also started a standalone column
on the issue of organised crime, called rather bluntly ‘Mafia en Sonora’ and
employed one of Sinaloa’s best crime reporters, Alfredo Jiménez, to investi-
gate the problem. Jiménez’s disappearance in April 2005 had ‘a devastating
effect’ on Sonora’s journalistic culture. As one journalist remarked:

his disappearance created a sort of consensus among colleagues, news-

paper managers and the government itself to work on a sort of implicit
order that said: ‘Look, it does happen, but we will only talk about it; do
not publish it … or publish it without giving details … and at your own
risk’.

From then on El Imparcial asked reporters to limit themselves to official

sources in crime reporting; self-censorship imposed itself on the newsrooms.
Such developments led to the suppression of crime news. Although Sonora’s
14 Wil G. Pansters, Benjamin T. Smith and Peter Watt
security situation remained equally perilous in the years following Jiménez’s
death, newspapers now downplayed the violence and toed the official line that
Sonora was ‘open for business’ and ‘the safest of the northern states’.
Because of these dangers, both journalists and members of civil society
have begun to use new technologies in order to combat this narrowing of the
public sphere in the official media. Low-cost, web-based portals are now
where one can find reports on and comments about the intersection of poli-
tics, crime and corruption. As Rupert Knox argues in Chapter 6, online
papers, like Animal Político and Sin Embargo, now vie with traditional pub-
lications like Proceso, Milenio and La Jornada as Mexico’s most serious,
independent news services. Left-wing sites like RompevientoTV, Informémenos
and Subversiones ‘identify explicitly with social causes and movements’. In
fact, recent social movements concerning human rights have gone online to
make links, exchange information and advertise their aims.
In the provinces, public reliance on online sites is even more pronounced.
In fact, in highly controlled states like Veracruz and Tamaulipas, sites like
Plumas Libres and Valor por Tamaulipas are among the few places to which
people turn in order to ascertain what is actually going on. As they are run on
tight budgets, employ minimal staff, avoid flashy graphics and often have a
very limited regional focus, they are not reliant on large state disbursements.
As a result, they provide some of the few remaining spaces for information
exchange and open public dialogue and are extremely popular. During the
administration of President Calderón, the infamous Blog del Narco site gained
a monthly readership of over 25 million by collating stories from these
small-scale independent news sites, citizen journalists and the drug cartels
themselves. For nearly six years, Mexican readers parsed the regional rhythms
of violence by connecting the dots between a gory array of crime exposés,
narco-propaganda and execution videos. Together they formed what Paul Eiss
has termed the ‘narco-sphere’ – a place which brought together old and new
media, censorship and civic journalism, and repression and reading between
the lines (Eiss 2014; 2017).

Justice from below

For over a decade, ordinary Mexicans have faced persistent militarisation,
insecurity and violence. It has led to worsening human rights and an increas-
ingly embattled public sphere, but the effects reach further and deeper. It has
been repeatedly documented that citizens distrust public institutions, espe-
cially law enforcement agencies and political parties. It is not difficult to
imagine that the current waves of violence, insecurity and fear have further
eroded societal trust. Moreover, as Robledo shows, increasing numbers of
people experience impunity and bureaucratic indifference as a form of
‘microviolence’, which adds to the pain of the losing a family member. As a
result, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans are searching for truth, justice and
dignity, and will continue to do so for years to come. What do people do
 Introduction 15
when they believe that access to justice through official institutions and legal
procedures is not feasible? What options do they have, which resources can
they mobilise and how effective are they? These are all questions pertaining to
the third field we discuss in this book. Above all, we have found that people
increasingly engage in popular forms of justice-making and truth-finding. A
look at the recent history of popular justice practices distinguishes between
two types or modalities. The first type involves coercion, armed force and/or
violence. The second type refers to non-violent practices. Both modalities
comprise a variety of symbolically loaded practices or forms, and both speak
to wider questions of legality, legitimacy and, ultimately, morality.
The popular use of coercive and violent means to achieve a sense of justice
can assume different forms. Lynchings are particularly brutal and horrifying,
but, as anthropological research has demonstrated, even the most brutal violence
is essential for what may seem a counter-intuitive form of justice-making
from below. In recent years the phenomenon of lynching has attracted con-
siderable scholarly attention.15 The fact that it is often called ajusticiamiento
popular in Spanish discloses, however, the popularly perceived relationship
with demands for justice. Indeed, across Latin America, as Snodgrass Godoy
argued, residents of marginal urban and rural communities ‘appeared to be
rising up and taking justice in their own hands in response to a growing sense
of insecurity …’ (2006: 5–6). In a perceptive comment on a notorious lynch-
ing incident in Mexico City in November 2004, in which three police officers
fell victim to an irate mob, anthropologist E. Azaola (2004: 125–126) points
to what she calls ‘social rancor’, and to the cleavage between the legal order
and the daily lives of ordinary people. She also suggests that disregard for leg-
ality by the authorities may foster lack of respect for the law by popular
communities.
This is not the place to expand on lynching; suffice to say that it conforms
to justice-making from below due to several key features. Lynching incidents
generally mimic the rules and procedures of formal or state judicial processes. In
addition, there is a deeply political meaning embedded in acts of lynching, as
they articulate a struggle about decision-making powers, the recovery of
forms of local autonomy and the protection and restoration of community
solidarity. They express a sense of abandonment by the state. Goldstein has
stated that ‘[A]t its most fundamental basis … lynching stems from a lack of
confidence in attaining justice in any other way’ (2004: 188). Paradoxically,
then, a mob lynching is motivated by claims of achieving justice by employing
unlawful means.
A different and particularly relevant form of people taking the law and
justice into their own hands has been the formation of local armed defence
forces in Mexico, but especially in regions with strong communitarian tradi-
tions and institutions. Caught between drug trafficking organisations and
(ineffective) law enforcement agencies as well as their complex and shifting
relationships, and unable to count on effective state protection, local indigen-
ous and mestizo communities throughout Mexico have founded armed
16 Wil G. Pansters, Benjamin T. Smith and Peter Watt
defence forces. The spectacular emergence of heavily armed autodefensas in
Michoacán during 2013 and their violent confrontations with organised
criminal groups provides a particularly strong example of such developments
(Pansters 2015). However, this appears to represent the tip of the iceberg; for
example, one report claimed that by 2013 they operated in thirteen Mexican
states (Asfura-Heim and Espach 2013: 144).
At the other end of the coercive spectrum we see the formation of various
community police forces. In these cases, the threat of violence is present, but
in practice often constrained, as the popular policing bodies are embedded in
state and customary law. An early example is the foundation in 1995 of the
Regional Coordinating Body of Communitarian Authorities (CRAC) in
Guerrero. Here, dozens of indigenous communities joined to form community
police forces in response to what they perceived as the indifference of the state
to highway banditry, cattle rustling and other forms of insecurity. From the
beginning this initiative was based on indigenous social and cultural institu-
tions. In 1997, the project of popular policing was broadened to include a
system of adjudication (Campos 2014). By 2010 the organisation had been
established in more than 100 communities in 10 municipalities. In her work
on the organisation Sierra (2010) has pointed to a number of its key features:
it represents an ‘interlegal’ project that combines indigenous judicial tradi-
tions with elements of statutory law. It also positions itself in opposition to
the official legal system, which indigenous people see as excluding and cor-
rupt, but it does not aim to confront the state either. It assumes the respon-
sibility to impart justice for minor and serious crime such as rape, kidnapping
and murder. In addition, its judicial practice is not so much directed at phy-
sical punishment but rather framed by the ethical principles of dignity, respect
and the defence of all (Sierra 2010: 36–37; see also Snodgrass Godoy 2006:
132). The latter principle is even employed in grave cases. In 2010 Sierra
claimed that insecurity in the region had dropped by 90 per cent (2010: 37).
No wonder that similar initiatives emerged elsewhere.
As Bárcena and Aragón show in their contribution to this volume (Chapter 7),
in 2010 and 2011 the Purépecha community of Cherán took matters into its
own hands in a conflict with the Caballeros Templarios (Knights Templar)
cartel over forest exploitation, ousted the municipal authorities and estab-
lished a self-defence force. In terms of restoring security, the effect was com-
parable to what Sierra noted in Guerrero. The remarkable accomplishment of
the Purépecha community of Cherán was also that it managed to provide a
legal basis for its de facto practices of policing, decision-making and munici-
pal administration through a legal process that culminated in a favourable
ruling of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation in 2014 which recog-
nised indigenous rights as the foundation of local self-government. In their
analysis of the case, Bárcena and Aragón do not focus so much on the social
origins or the factual administration of indigenous policing and decision-
making practices on the basis of communal institutions and values, but rather
on the theoretical debates around the relationships between law, violence and
 Introduction 17
legitimate authority. In dialogue with the work of anthropologists Jean and
John Comaroff and that of legal scholar Julieta Lemaitre, the authors exam-
ine the meanings of Cherán’s exceptional political and legal strategy, in which
they themselves participated as legal advisors. Their article is a typical
example of scholar-activist research that seeks to insert their findings and
understanding in broader conceptual and political debates about law, politics
and violence. They criticise the fetishisation of the law and instead develop a
reasoned plea for what is called a humanist and transformative project built
on indigenous codes and customs of justice.
It is important to keep this in mind as the boundaries dividing social
struggles, legal conditions, political interests and drug-related violence are
crossed continuously. Although Serrano suggested some years ago that the
daunting Colombian scenario ‘of a three-dimensional war’ between heavily
armed criminal gangs and organisations, law enforcement agencies and an
armed peasantry has not yet materialised in Mexico, in certain parts of the
country developments have moved in that direction (2012: 154). The militar-
isation of social conflict in Mexico, often under the banner of the struggle
against organised crime, will only further blur the lines that separate the
struggles against crime, corruption and social injustice, and in favour of
security and even-handedness.
It would be incorrect to suggest that subaltern people in Mexico or Latin
America favour coercive or violent means to invigorate their demands for
truth and justice. In fact, the region has produced a range of peaceful forms
of popular justice and truth-finding. One only has to think of the silent
rounds of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. The mothers of
the disappeared became global icons of the fight against repression and above
all against impunity and state denial. Much more institutionally driven, Peru’s
and Guatemala’s truth commissions are paradigmatic exercises of truth-finding
where state institutions were incapable and unwilling to do their job and in
the face of pressures from below. Though no less born out of desperation,
peaceful popular strategies to advance truth-finding and justice-making from
below can be equally powerful and persuasive. Let us turn to what is one of
the most painful and symbolically most powerful realities of today’s Mexico.
The disappearance of people has deep roots in Mexico and elsewhere in
Latin America. In fact, the birth of contemporary human rights activism in the
region is intimately related to the desaparecidos from the dirty wars in
Argentina and Chile. While the issue of the desaparecidos is rightfully asso-
ciated with military dictatorship in the southern cone countries, and while it
has clear precedents in Mexico’s own Cold War repression during the 1970s,
the current situation is of a different order (McCormick 2016). In October
2015, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights publicly stated:

Mexico has at the very least 26,000 missing people, with new cases
occurring every day. The amount of misery attached to that statistic is
impossible to comprehend. The failure of the police, of the justice system
18 Wil G. Pansters, Benjamin T. Smith and Peter Watt
to clarify the whereabouts of the victims and what happened to them, and
above all of successive governments and the political system as a whole to
stop these crimes is not just regrettable, it is deeply tragic.
(Ra’ad Al Hussein 2017)

It is impossible to say how much of this staggering number concerns forced

disappearances.16 But we do know that the disturbing and vicious dynamic of
the war on drugs can be held responsible for a large part of it. We also know
that forced disappearances have been generated by both social conflicts and
violence against women.
Just as in the aftermath of the Argentine dirty war, the struggles of so many
mothers of Ciudad Juárez to find the truth about the fate and whereabouts of
their disappeared and murdered relatives, and to achieve justice, have been
enduring efforts to counteract the forgetting and silencing of these tragedies.
In Monterrey, the disappearance of people in the context of an escalating
drug war energised the activism of sister Consuelo Morales, who founded
CADHAC, Citizens in Support of Human Rights, in 1993. Sister Morales’
organisation has developed a particular strategy in which ordinary people
organise pressure from below to ‘make’ official law enforcement agencies
work and hold authorities accountable (Morales 2016).
Others have gone beyond this approach. Nothing has influenced the agenda
of disappearances in Mexico more than the Ayotzinapa case. In the wake of
this national tragedy which had international reverberations, a movement
emerged in which people across the country appropriated the active search for
the disappeared in the face of what they perceived as an unresponsive or
incompetent state. Some groups already had years of experience, which
resulted in the disclosure of realities unimagined before Ayotzinapa. Within a
month of the forty-three students going missing in Iguala, families and orga-
nisations engaged in search missions found more than a hundred illegally
buried and unknown bodies in the region. This is the central concern of
anthropologist Carolina Robledo’s account of the search for the truth among
Mexico’s clandestine graves (Chapter 8). While most (inter)national attention
focused on the fate of the disappeared students from Ayotzinapa, more than
500 families formed the Committee for the Other Disappeared of Iguala. In the
northern state of Coahuila the group called Grupo Vida has been in existence
for several years. In 2015 alone they located forty clandestine graves. Mirna
Medina heads a similar group in Sinaloa, which represents more than 200
disappeared. Other areas of Mexico, notably Tamaulipas, are simply too
dangerous to stage organised searches by families and ordinary citizens. In
2015, a national Movement for Our Disappeared was formed. Citizen searches
for the bodies of their loved ones, digging the earth, constitutes a bare form of
truth-finding from below, almost in a pre-justice-making phase. It creates
several ethical and legal dilemmas, not least because it is illegal. Robledo
concludes that the exhumation of clandestine graves functions as a ‘social
autopsy’ that lays bare the ruthless workings of sovereign power. In addition,
 Introduction 19
it challenges the truth imposed by the effacement of the crimes. Exhumation
allows one to brush history against the grain and although it does not achieve
the ideals of judicial truth, it fosters the breakdown of dominant narratives,
which above all consist of negating that the disappearances occurred and
minimising their relevance. A member of the Coahuila group told Robledo:
‘We don’t seek justice, that we stopped doing a long time ago, that is very far
away, we only search for our disappeared.’17 Tragically, engaging in these
activities themselves can be dangerous as well. As we were finishing this book,
the founder of the Collective for the Disappeared of Tamaulipas (Colectivo
Desaparecidos de Tamaulipas), Miriam Elizabeth Rodríguez Martínez, was
murdered on Mother’s Day, 10 May 2017, a date that carries much symbolic
weight. In 2012, her daughter Karen had been kidnapped. Her mother dis-
covered her daughter’s remains in a clandestine grave and then gathered evi-
dence about those responsible. They were subsequently jailed. Just a week
before 10 May they escaped from jail in Veracruz and returned to Tamaulipas
to murder their accuser.18

Conclusions
The essays brought together in this volume offer lessons for their individual
subject areas. They show that the drug war has broad and deep consequences
in the fields of policy, international relations, the public sphere and the pro-
vision of justice. Taken together the essays also shed light on the increasingly
negative consequences of the drug war on the consolidation of anything
approaching democratic governance in Mexico. As such, they complement
and complicate political and social processes that seriously challenge
democratic consolidation. Already a decade ago, it was suggested that parti-
cular socio-political realities rather than formal institutional arrangements
formed obstacles for democratic accountability and policy output. Despite the
reorganisation of electoral institutions and broader political liberalisation, the
undue influence of informally powerful interest groups, including business
elites, public sector unions, and partisan groups, mediated and even captured
the relations between citizens and political leadership. As a result, special
interests subverted democratic processes and undermined the quality of public
policies (World Bank 2007).
More recently, however, studies have also pointed at contradictions in
Mexico’s post-transitional institutional arrangements, as a consequence of
political liberalisation. How can we assess the situation and its current evo-
lution? At the beginning of the twenty-first century, an oft-quoted UNDP
report (2002) stated that many countries were facing the central challenge of
deepening democracy through the building of key institutions that would
enhance and consolidate democratic governance. The report broke down
democratic governance as follows: a system of representation, with well-
functioning political parties and interest associations; an electoral system that
guarantees free and fair elections; a system of checks and balances based on
20 Wil G. Pansters, Benjamin T. Smith and Peter Watt
the separation of powers; a vibrant civil society; a free, independent media;
and effective civilian control over the military. These institutional indicators
make clear that democratic governance is not merely a question of citizens
being able to participate in regular elections. Democratic governance is as much
about access to as about exercise of power, which requires ‘a deeper process of
political development to embed democratic values and culture in all parts of
society’ (UNDP 2002: 4).
While this is not the place to examine the quality, fairness and efficacy of
Mexico’s electoral and partisan system, as well as its system of checks and
balances, it is important to identify the risks, fractures and contradictions that
have emerged in the context of Mexico’s political liberalisation and transition.
Merino’s analysis of electoral reforms uses the notion of a hybrid regime ‘with
a mix of democratic and authoritarian elements as a condition of its stability
and permanence’ (2009: 244). The dismantling of the political homogeneity
typical of the PRI-regime, for example, has generated new institutional
‘autonomies’, which in recent years have led to political gridlock (between
executive and legislative powers), and above all to an unprecedented increase
in the political and financial power of Mexican governors. Spectacular cases
of state-level corruption, financial mismanagement and repression – the cases
of Veracruz, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, Puebla, Coahuila and Oaxaca come to
mind – are deeply destabilising Mexico’s chances of democratic governance
(Pansters 2013; Hernández Rodríguez 2008). Piñeyro observed that these
developments were already creating spaces for both regional political cliques
and criminal groups to build networks of complicity and corruption (2004:
168–170).
What this volume makes clear is that in addition to these social and poli-
tical forces, actors and institutional ruptures, the war on drugs generates
another layer of threats that undermines the deepening of democratic gov-
ernance in Mexico. The diversification of organised crime, militarisation, and
persistent violence and insecurity directly affect the party system and elec-
tions, especially at the local and regional levels, as a result of corruption and
obscure campaign financing. The numerous killings of candidates for local,
regional and even federal office provide sufficient evidence for that. The
degree to which law enforcement agencies have been involved in drug-
financed corruption scandals and the protection of elite actors does little to
strengthen the system of checks and balances. They also undermine demo-
cratic governance more indirectly through the violent onslaught on social
organisations, and the weakening of societal trust and state legitimacy. This is
what the Acapulco priest had in mind when he spoke of a ‘sick society’.
During the last decade, exacerbated violence against journalists gravely con-
strains safeguarding free and independent media. In certain parts of the
country it has effectively silenced them. Even if the Mexican armed forces are
operating under civilian control, their increased political significance and
budgets, public visibility, and practical domination of the country’s police
forces have reshaped civil–military relations. Administrations that increasingly
 Introduction 21
depend on the armed forces to govern and guarantee a sense of order are
more likely to yield to their interests. As ‘militarization became a prop for
government legitimacy’, it can be expected that human rights violations by
the army have become a price worth paying for security (Kenny et al. 2012:
221, 212).
In fact, as this volume makes abundantly clear, human rights abuses and
impunity connect all of these phenomena. This puts the question of the rule
of law as a key condition for the deepening of democratic governance and
legitimate authority at the centre of attention. It cannot come as a surprise
that diverse groups and initiatives from below have emerged across the coun-
try, often against all odds, oriented to achieving a sense of justice, security
and truth-telling on their own. Although some of these initiatives possess a
‘democratising potential’, for the moment the forces that undermine the rule
of law outweigh those from below. Taken together, we subscribe to the idea
that it all adds up to an authoritarian reconfiguration of the Mexican state
(Kenny et al. 2012: 200).
Finally, the profound social, political and cultural consequences beyond the
‘war on drugs’ itself have long-term costs. The moving and shocking doc-
umentary Narcocultura (2013) opens with a scene with a few small boys
standing in front of the high fence that separates Mexico from the USA. One
of them murmurs that he has heard that people over there live safely and that
no people are murdered. The narcos are on the Mexican side of the border.
The scene ends with the boy sighing ‘ojalá que ya no hubiera matanzas aqui ’
(‘hopefully there will be no more massacres here’). In the next shot, the viewer
is placed in the midst of a lethal incident of violence, replete with sirens and
crying women. The camera zooms in again on three boys seated on the hood
of a car. Apparently untouched, they talk about how an uncle of one of them
was killed. They speak as if the violence is from a movie, not real and as if it
had just taken place on their street. This is the impression with which with the
viewer is left, far removed from the boys’ reality. The viewer is startled by the
words and manner of the little boys. The first scenes of this extraordinary
documentary draw attention to the perspective of children on the violent
events in Mexico. Although it tells the stories of a forensic medic in the
country’s most dangerous city at the time, and that of a young Mexican-
American singer who writes narcocorridos, the documentary constantly asks
the question of what all this means for a country and its people. Again and
again children or youngsters appear who gaze at all sorts of atrocities with
questioning eyes, or rather seem to experience them as mere daily events.
These children remind us of the long-term and tragic effects of the war on
drugs.

Notes
1 The phrase refers to Culiacán artist Teresa Margolles’ shocking work ( ¿De qué
otra cosa podríamos hablar?) presented at the 2009 Venice Biennale.
22 Wil G. Pansters, Benjamin T. Smith and Peter Watt
2 See interview with Eduardo Medina Mora in Emeequis, 9 October 2006, p. 29.
3 President Fox (2000–2006) had made similar overtures.
4 For detailed reports about the militarisation on the major cities along the US–
Mexican border in the first months of 2008, see Proceso, 30 March 2008, pp. 6–20.
5 For example, between 2008 and 2009 the budget of the Ministry of Public Security
increased from almost 20 mil millones de pesos to 33 mil millones de pesos (Carrasco
Araizaga 2008: 10) ‘El poder’, p. 10.
6 For an early analysis of this trend see Doyle (1993). Artz (2007) has examined the
militarisation of the Procuraduría General de la República (PGR). See also Sierra
Guzmán (2003) and Zavaleta Betancourt (2006).
7 For an early and interesting analysis of the policy continuities between Calderón
and the PRI government of Peña Nieto, see Hope (2013).
8 They include STRATFOR, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the
Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center, and the Instituto para la Segur-
idad y la Democracia (Insyde), the Consejo Ciudadano para la Seguridad y la
Justicia Penal and the Instituto para la Acción Ciudadana in Mexico.
9 For an exploration of the concept of the cartel in the Colombian setting see
Kenney 2008. For an interesting reappraisal of the Guadalajara cartel, see Bartley
and Bartley 2015.
10 Although the national homicide rate is on the slide, some US cities have recently
experienced murder rates commensurate with those in Mexico. In 2015 murder
rates in Baltimore, St Louis, New Orleans and Detroit were over double the Mex-
ican national average or over 40 per 100,000. In Mexico, only murder rates in
Acapulco, Culiacán and Tijuana were similar. See: www.worldatlas.com/articles/m
ost-dangerous-cities-in-the-world.html
11 A recent announcement by the Peña Nieto government that it has captured (or
killed) 106 of its list of 122 ‘primary targets within organized crime’ is evidence that
the kingpin strategy is still a leading element in counternarcotics policy. See: www.
milenio.com/policia/capturados-objetivos_prioritarios-pgr-delincuencia_organizada
-narcotraficante-milenio_0_952704740.html
12 For Mexico’s historical record on the discrepancies between publicly professed
principles, particularly in the international arena, and realities on the ground, see
Keller 2015.
13 Compare the CPJ estimates, which only admit journalists that were proven to be
killed for their work, with the Article 19 estimates, which claim that 103 journalists
have been killed since 2000. See: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2017/03/m
exico-open-season-on-journalists-as-third-reporter-killed-in-a-month/
14 For an excellent discussion of crime news and the war on drugs, see Hernández
and Rodelo 2010. For a historical discussion of the political and social role of the
crime news, see Piccato 2014.
15 Goldstein’s (2004) work on Bolivia and Snodgrass Godoy’s (2006) on Guatemala
provide important insights in understanding some of the dynamics associated with
lynching as a form of community justice.
16 The UN International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced
Disappearance, signed by Mexico in 2008, considers enforced disappearance ‘to be
the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by
agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authoriza-
tion, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge
the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the
disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law’.
See www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/CED/Pages/ConventionCED.aspx, consulted 13
January, 2017. Mexico also ratified the similar OAS mechanism, the Inter-American
Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons.
17 Robledo, ‘Combing history against the grain’, p. 13.
 Introduction 23
18 Though this has been downplayed by the Tamaulipas government, it still seems the most
plausible explanation and one foreseen by Rodríguez herself. See: www.eluniversal.
com.mx/articulo/estados/2017/05/12/me-van-matar-un-dia-decia-miriam-rodriguez,
consulted 23 May 2017.

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Part I
Securitization, militarization and
human rights
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1 U.S. pressure and Mexican anti-drugs
efforts from 1940 to 1980
Importing the war on drugs?
Carlos A. Pérez Ricart

This chapter looks at the relationship between the United States and Mexico
and the ‘war on drugs’ from 1940 to 1980. During this period, the United
States, in particular its drug agencies, deployed a series of pressurizing
mechanisms which shaped drug policy in Mexico, where the state developed a
policy remarkable for its strong prohibitionist and punitive dimensions.
However, this would not have been possible without the combination of two
endogenous factors: the existence of a tradition of low tolerance regarding the
use of psychoactive substances and the assimilation of the ‘war on drugs’
rhetoric by Mexican state officials for the purpose of reaping political and
bureaucratic benefits.
The United States played a fundamental role in shaping Mexican drug
policy. Despite the consensus on this matter (Smith 2016; Toro 1995; Toro
1999; Astorga and Shirk 2010; Walker III 1978), there is less clarity con-
cerning the mechanisms used to achieve this, the actors and specific organi-
zations inside the bureaucracy which participated in this process and the way
U.S. guidelines were assimilated and applied in Mexico. Contributions to
those three core issues will be presented throughout this chapter. Based on
evidence available in federal archives, it seems that the U.S. combined tech-
niques of coercion and persuasion – a dimension often neglected by the bib-
liography. Regarding the actors, I point to the relevance of the U.S. drug
agencies as autonomous organizations whose policies towards Mexico were
not always consistent with the general politics of the country’s central powers.
Often, links between specialist domestic officials and peer-to-peer ties shaped
bilateral relations and decision making more than official rhetoric (Raustiala
2002).
Though U.S. pressure was crucial, drug policies in Mexico were well rooted
in a repressive tradition. At the beginning of the twentieth century, attacks on
opium use were linked with racist discourse against Chinese communities in
the north of Mexico. Likewise the traditional consumption of plants and
mushrooms by indigenous communities was stigmatized (Labate and Cavnar
2016). Similarly, Isaac Campos has recently shown how, in the last years of
the nineteenth century, the Mexican press had already associated the use of
marijuana with criminal acts and insanity. Recreational marijuana was neither
34 Securitization, militarization, human rights
a casual nor a traditional part of Mexican life (Campos 2012: 226). In fact,
quite the opposite was true. The negative representation of drug use, as well
as punitive practices, were well established in the region.
To understand the punitive and prohibitionist dimension of drug policy in
Mexico, it is necessary to understand how local actors reinterpreted foreign
ideas to consolidate their own political and economic power. Although it is
true that by constraining the option of alternatives the United States defined
the general paradigm of drug policy in Mexico, state and federal police
forces, the governors and the attorney general (Procuraduría General de la
República, PGR) had a lot of scope for ‘framing’, ‘grafting’ and ‘pruning’ the
war on drug discourse into specific policies (Acharya 2004). In many ways,
the ‘war on drugs’ provided core actors in the field of law enforcement with
the possibility of gaining bureaucratic autonomy and an expansion of their
functions – two elements that, according to most assumptions, are desirable
for any state organization (Carpenter 2001; Downs 1967; Wilson 1989). This
explains, at least partly, why public policies which had shown serious defi-
ciencies from the start were met with little resistance from the governing
elites. Finally, the chapter addresses the means by which the Mexican gov-
ernment exercised the punitive and prohibitionist policy proposed by the U.S.
to advance its process of nationalization and centralization in regions ‘in the
margin of the state’ (Das and Poole 2004).
This chapter examines how the ‘war on drugs’ began decades before
Felipe Calderón announced his campaign in December 2006 and long before
Richard Nixon did the same in 1973. The ‘war on drugs’ – which should
be understood here as the implementation of a set of policies characterized by
their punitive and militarized dimension, whose final goal is to break the
economic chain which links the points of production with those of drug con-
sumption – has its historical roots in the beginning of the twentieth century
and was institutionalized as state policy concurrently with the process of state
centralization occurring in Mexico in the early 1940s. Although this develop-
ment was not entirely uninterrupted, its continuity is manifest enough to
explain the key elements of today’s war on drugs in Mexico.

The criminalization of the addict: a (trans)national policy

The first official document which touches on the topic of bilateral coopera-
tion over the issue of drugs dates from 1930 and is an exchange of diplomatic
notes. In it the individuals in charge of drug policies in both countries can be
identified: on the one hand Harry J. Anslinger, director of the Federal Bureau
of Narcotics (FBN) from 1930 to 1962 and, on the other hand, the chief of
the chemistry section (Servicios Químicos y Famacéuticos) of the Health
Department (Departamento de Salubridad Pública, DSP), Dr Demetrio
López (Vásquez Schiaffino 1930). Their correspondence highlights one key
element, which marked the first years of the bilateral relationship concerning
drugs: the lack of convergence between the organizations in charge. While
 Importing the war on drugs? 35
drugs were already dealt with by a police institution in the U.S., they were
still under the jurisdiction of a health department in Mexico.
Despite a series of laws prohibiting the cultivation, use and selling of mar-
ijuana and opium, which had been established in Mexico (Schievenini, 2013),
the discussions in Mexico and the U.S. concerning drugs differed dramatically
by the late 1930s. While the United States passed the Marijuana Tax Act
(MTA) in 1937 – a federal law which de facto prohibited the use of mar-
ijuana – at the same time in Mexico Dr Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra began to
spread his ideas in favour of the decriminalization of marijuana and the use
of ambulatory addiction treatments. The radicalism of Salazar’s ideas arose
in answer to the perceived failure of the punitive paradigm and the ‘poor
results of prohibitionist policies’ of the 1920s and 1930s. Already Mexican
officials were questioning the public policy of prohibition and the state’s duty
towards its addicts.
Such ideas soon gained legal weight and on 5 January 1940, President
Lázaro Cárdenas approved a modification of the Federal Regulation on Drug
Addiction (Reglamento Federal de Toxicomanías) of 1931. This reform did
not decriminalize marijuana but opened the door to the creation of state
clinics authorized to supply the substances required by the addicts at a low
price. According to Salazar, this way addicts would not be forced into illegality
when acquiring opiates, thus also reducing the profit margins of dealers selling
illegal substances. In the spring of 1940 the first of these clinics opened in Mexico
City with overwhelmingly positive results (Pérez Montfort 2016: 279). This
experiment reached its end in the summer of 1940 owing to diplomatic pres-
sure. The main tool employed by Anslinger was an embargo on all shipments
of medical supplies to Mexico. The U.S. policy of using coercion to shape
Mexican drug policy had begun. Despite mild protests, the lack of support by
U.S.-based Mexican officials for Salazar’s ideas prevented a major diplomatic
rift. Furthermore, the opposition of the U.S. to the new regulation was
accompanied by home-grown criticism by a conservative press which invented
a series of utterly implausible events around the clinic (Pérez Montfort 2016:
285), and by other physicians who constantly disparaged Salazar’s proposal in
the magazines La Gaceta Médica de México and Criminalia.
As a consequence of the suspension of the 1940 reform and the return of
the Reglamento de Toxicomanías, Mexican drug addicts were now judged to
be ‘potentially harmful subject[s]’ (‘sujeto potencialmente lesivo’) (García
Ramírez 1977: 88). Moreover, during the greater part of the century the
addicts – even without committing a crime – were moved to a sort of judicial
limbo. Here, they were given the status of exhibiting ‘pre-crime danger’
(‘temibilidad predelictiva’) a juristic concept outside the constitutional frame-
work which had guaranteed the criminalization of addicts for several decades
(García Ramírez 1977: 88–89; Poder Ejecutivo 1934: 1112). Furthermore,
until its reform in 1968, the Código Penal de la Federación did not distin-
guish at all between individuals who were trafficking drugs, possessing drugs
without using them, or possessing drugs and using them. The suspension of
36 Securitization, militarization, human rights
the regulation not only shifted policies on addicts, it also highlighted that
from now on Mexican drug policy would be subject to bilateral negotiation.
It was not only about accepting natural interdependence in a complex rela-
tionship between two countries; it also implied recognizing that the asym-
metry of power between the two nations would limit Mexico’s autonomy in
constructing drug policy without U.S. consent.
With the threat of Salazar banished, Mexico’s new health authorities con-
tinued their relationship with Anslinger on good terms. Soon thereafter, the
DSP adopted the farm system, which had been encouraged by U.S. drug
prohibitionists from the late 1920s. The so-called farm model of addiction
treatment implied the reclusion of drug addicts and promoted the separation of
addicts from the rest of society. The clearest example was the institution
based in Lexington, Kentucky, which Anslinger often lauded as the perfect
solution to drug addiction (Smith 2007: 169). Anslinger was not satisfied with
the DSP simply buying a farm in Querétaro and he ordered the representative
of the Office of the Treasury Department in Mexico, H. S. Creighton, to
provide all possible information and any help needed to ensure the Mexicans
would really adopt the model proposed by the United States (Gorman 1940;
Creighton 1940). Even though they were eventually closed down because of a
lack of resources and the boom in private clinics, the farms grew to be ‘the
pillars of mental health politics in Mexico during five more presidential
terms’ (Sacristán 2003: 60). Perhaps more importantly, they also marked
something else: the triumph of the FBN’s system over alternative models of
addiction treatment.
During the 1940s Mexican officials adopted a series of increasingly punitive
drug regulations. The majority of these measures were implicitly or explicitly
endorsed by the United States. Between 1940 and 1942 the number of anti-
narcotics policemen sent to Sinaloa tripled (Peña 1942). And the Office of
Medication Control (Oficina de Control de Medicamentos) of the DSP
adjusted the permits granted for importing and exporting legal drugs to meet
the FBN’s criteria (Anslinger 1946). Most importantly, in 1945 President
Ávila Camacho published a decree which suspended the individual rights of
addicts and drug traffickers (Poder Ejecutivo 1945). The decree permitted
alleged drug dealers and/or addicts to be sent to the federal prison on the
Islas Marías without trial or any other judicial process. The islands, which
were conceived as a sort of laboratory in which ‘scientific management tech-
niques that relied heavily on behaviour modification’ (Buffington 1994: 253)
could be tested, were not only the destination for drug dealers but for all
kinds of addicts who were considered best ‘segregated from society for some
time to cure them from entrenched vices or harmful customs’ (García
Ramírez 1970: 199). To Anslinger, this must have smacked of his favoured
Lexington model. Mexican officials had not only followed U.S. policies, they
had also asked their northern neighbour to help implement them. The Policía
Federal de Narcóticos (PFN) and the Policía Judicial del Distrito Federal
asked the FBN and the Customs Department for the names of the main
 Importing the war on drugs? 37
suspects to be able to detain and transfer them to the penitentiary colony
(Peña 1945b). Even U.S. drugs hawks were surprised by the severity of the
measure. Fred K. Gardner, a contemporary U.S. customs officer, considered
Ávila Camacho’s decision the most restrictive law regarding drug trafficking
in Mexican history (Gardner 1945).
Sending drug addicts to the Islas Marías penal colony was more than just
opposed to the 1940 reform; it also exceeded what was stipulated in the reg-
ulations of 1931, as well as in article 420 of the Health Code (Código Sani-
tario) and article 525 of the Code of Criminal Procedures (Código Federal de
Procedimientos Penales), which all demanded the hospitalization of addicts
but not their direct imprisonment. What is more, the decree was contrary to
the Constitution and at least two major National Court decisions in 1947 and
1953 (Primera Sala 1947; Primera Sala 1953).
Following the decree, in 1947 officials tightened up articles 193, 194 and
197 of the Federal Criminal Code of 1931 (Meza Fonseca and Lara González
2011). The principal move was to increase fines and prison sentences for
health offences. Not coincidentally, the FBN had proposed both of these
measures to the Mexican government eleven months before their enactment
(Williams 1946). Furthermore, that 1947 decree was even more oppressive
than the law applied in the United States. Contrary to what some experts
have claimed (Toro 1995; Nadelmann 1993), Mexico didn’t so much Amer-
icanize its penal code as spearhead a new spirit of prohibition, which was
only later acted upon in the U.S. with the 1951 Boggs Act and the 1956
Narcotic Control Act.
By the end of the 1940s many of the unwritten rules of Mexico’s drug
policy were already in place. By the turn of the new decade, Mexico had
foregone the ambulatory treatment scheme designed by Salazar, surpassed the
United States in terms of addicts’ segregation, apprehended the limitations of
its autonomy in forming drug policy; and removed the topic of drugs from
the official discourse; they now ‘belong[ed] to the world of crime and social
scum’ (Pérez Montfort 2016: 322).

International pressure and the first eradication campaigns in Mexico

The traditional means of restricting Mexico’s opium supply consisted of
sending delegations of sanitary, state and federal police officers, as well as
military forces, to the mountains of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua (the
so-called Golden Triangle), usually between April and May, the poppy flow-
er’s natural blooming season. Records of such eradication campaigns, as well
as records of U.S. customs officials escorting them, exist from at least 1938
(Gray 1938).
During the first years the campaigns conducted were relatively similar.
Months before the launch, U.S. customs officials negotiated the priority
action area with the DSP (from 1938 to 1943) or the PGR (from 1944
onwards) (Peña 1943; Bulkley 1945). The U.S., it seems, had better techniques
38 Securitization, militarization, human rights
for locating the illegal plantations and employed a network of consuls and
citizens who often sent accounts to the FBN and the Customs Office indicat-
ing the location of plantations. This incipient information system provided the
necessary details to select the geographical positions where the delegations
would deploy their resources. Once in the territory, the customs officers’ task
was not merely to accompany the delegations; they actually coordinated them.
And even though the salaries of army and police officers were paid by the Mex-
ican federal government (in a few cases by state governments), Customs Office
officials maintained petty cash funds from which they paid informants and some
of the servicemen’s extra expenses, including entertainment, incentives and
travel allowances (DeLagrave 1946).
The scale and outreach of the eradication campaigns changed in 1947.
From one year to the next it passed from being a fragmented and temporary
endeavour to being a state policy to which the Mexican president committed
his prestige. This transformation can only be explained as a consequence of
the resumption of operations of the international prohibition regime of the
United Nations, and the strong pressure applied by Anslinger to make
Mexico assume responsibility for the drug problem as its own. To understand
this change, it is necessary to step back in time.
At the end of the 1930s, Anslinger, as the U.S. delegate to meetings of the
Opium Advisory Committee (OAC) of the League of Nations, used his posi-
tion to take advantage of the international system to expose Salazar Viniegra’s
plans and compare their discrepancies with the international conventions of the
time. The Second World War put those meetings on hold and it was only in the
mid-1940s that the possibility of using the tools provided by the global prohi-
bition regime to evaluate each state’s anti-drug policy resurfaced (McAllister
2000). As at the OAC, Anslinger led the U.S. American delegation in the
United Nations’ Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) and employed this
platform in his campaign to impose his vision of how the international drug
system should be regulated (Bewley-Taylor 1999).
His first attacks targeted Mexico. During the CND meeting of 1947 he
drafted a series of criticisms, which resulted in an appeal to the Economic and
Social Council (ECOSOC) of the UN to express public disapproval of the
Mexican drug policy. The alleged increase of Mexican opium on the U.S.
American market was sufficient for Anslinger to unleash his criticism of the
Mexican government and publicly, as well as privately, expose a series of
faults, including flimsy punishments for those accused of committing health
related crimes, a legal framework which precluded the use of advanced tech-
niques for obtaining evidence, unstable salaries, poorly trained police officers
who did not have technology at their disposal, and the complicity in the drug
trade of governors and local authorities (DeLagrave 1947b; Talent 1946).
Mexican newspapers published the criticisms (La Voz de Sinaloa 1947) and
forced the government to react immediately. The most visible consequence of
this change of strategy was an eradication campaign, considerably more
broad and complex than all those conducted previously. Not coincidentally,
 Importing the war on drugs? 39
such a programme had been first proposed by a Treasury Department official
in Mexico City.
As in the preceding years, the campaign should have started at the begin-
ning of spring. This, however, brought with it an inconvenience: the ECOSOC
assembly was programmed to take place in January. How to introduce a
substantial change of policies if one had to wait for the poppies to grow
before starting the campaign? To solve the problem, a ‘second’ campaign was
organized for the autumn of 1947, although the poppy plants had been sown
only in September. The Mexican authorities dubbed the crusade ‘the perma-
nent campaign’. In this first improvised effort, 102 fields were destroyed, over
2,000 individuals were imprisoned and a new tactic was launched: dropping
leaflets from military planes informing farmers about the legal consequences
of planting opium. Leaving the numbers aside, the autumn campaign did in
fact allow the Mexican delegation to show off at the ECOSOC assembly. For
the moment it provided elbow room and time for planning the rest of the
strategy for 1948. Mexico would be judged by its success or failure in the
third CND session programmed for May.
As a result, the 1948 campaign was rolled out as a major state policy.
National newspapers wrote hyperbolic articles about it and Miguel Alemán
himself made enthusiastic declarations about the matter. No other president
had previously referred to the topic of drug trafficking in this way. Miguel
Alemán was seeking to ‘give the final blow to opium trafficking and be able
to tell the United Nations that in no less than a year the national territory has
been freed of this plague’ (El Siglo de Torreón 1948). To Excélsior he pro-
mised the ‘implacable persecution of governmental immorality’. What’s more,
the PGR strike would be of ‘indisputable significance and strong moral tra-
jectory’ (Excélsior 1947). Valuable information on the campaign was leaked
to the newspapers to reinforce their stories on it. For instance, El Siglo de
Torreón announced:

Weapons to defend the men who will set out to fight the decisive battle,
portable machine guns, planes equipped with six machine guns, capable
of firing off 30 shots per minute each, and radio transmission systems will
be used in this campaign.
(El Siglo de Torreón 1948)

Although surely there must have been some opposition from local leaders
advocating alternative solutions, the newspapers of the time register mostly
voices supporting the eradication campaigns. Notably, the Medical Associa-
tion for the Struggle against the Vice of Opiates (Asociación Médica de
Lucha contra el Vicio de las Drogas Heroicas) lobbied at the Senate for fur-
ther measures against ‘illicit, immoral and criminal’ drug traffic (Padilla
Ordoñes 2010: 100), a demand which was supported by various members of
Sinaloa civil society.
40 Securitization, militarization, human rights
For this endeavour, Mexican officials announced a 2-million peso budget
(DeLagrave 1947a), which included a modernization plan for equipment such
as planes, jeeps and radio systems. It dwarfed previous operations and prob-
ably indicates why some historians consider that poppy and marijuana eradi-
cation in Mexico began only in that year. Officials employed fifty anti-drug
agents to run the campaign and appointed an officer who had already worked
hand-in-hand with FBN agents, Rafael Palomar Madrazo, to head the effort
(Gaston 1943). Palomar’s designation marked a new system of appointing
officers in charge of drug policy. Those who would from now on be appointed
to hold senior anti-drugs positions had at least to pass through an informal
veto process by the U.S. authorities. Under this system, for example, after
Palomar’s death in a plane accident, Everardo Aceves Águilar was nominated
leader of the anti-narcotics police, another important contact of the FBN in
Mexico (Cauchon 1948).
The 1948 campaign brought another change. That year, the PGR rather
than the PFN took exclusive control of the campaign. Under the leadership
of Palomar, the federal police (Policía Judicial Federal, PJF) formed nine
different groups in the four states where the campaign was conducted: Dur-
ango, Sinaloa, Sonora and Chihuahua. By contrast, in 1947 only two groups
of federal police officers had been organized (Procuraduría General de la
República 1948). The 1948 statistics presented to the CND by Mexico were
convincing: 663 plantations had been eradicated, 2,884 individuals had been
arrested, 100 kilograms of opium gum had been confiscated and 1,600 kilo-
grams of marijuana (Commission on Narcotic Drugs 1948: 530). Had the
campaign brought the desired results? At least from a U.S. perspective there
were reasons for optimism: the prices for prepared opium produced in Mexico
rose substantially and the FBN reported a reduced availability of drugs in the
U.S. (U.S. Bureau of Narcotics 1949: 12).
However, a cost–benefit analysis based in Mexico presented a different
picture. Here drug campaigns had achieved very little because home-grown
drug consumption was so slight and limited to a small section of the Chinese
population and a handful of marijuana smokers. Even the FBN admitted that
the consumption of marijuana was ‘not in the least a problem in Mexico’
(Siragusa 1959). Such facts highlighted the ongoing paradox of Mexican drug
prohibition, which saw annual anti-drug budgets rise despite extremely low
addiction rates. At the same time, campaigns principally targeted poppy
growers who even the prohibitionist press admitted were ‘poor people
deprived of any fortune, ignorant, humble and unable to defend themselves’.
In contrast ‘their exploiters’ – the traffickers and their political protectors –
were barely touched (El Diario de Culiacán 1949). As a public policy its
impact could scarcely be justified. So what were the motivations for the
Mexican government to enforce this kind of policy?
The first factor was the international pressure on Alemán which was led by
Anslinger and the FBN, who suspected that those close to Alemán, including
members of his recently founded secret police force, the Dirección Federal de
 Importing the war on drugs? 41
Seguridad (DFS) were trying to monopolize the Mexican drug trade. Just
before Alemán took power, the nephew of the head of one of the branches of
the DFS, Juan Ramón Gurrola, was arrested in the U.S. for trying to cross
the border with opium valued at $35,000–40,000. What was worse, he was driv-
ing the Cadillac of Senator Carlos I. Serrano, the de facto head of the DFS
(Peña 1947). Perhaps one can interpret the eradication campaign as a way of
deflecting attention away from the ‘grey zone pacts’ between government
agents and drug dealers (Smith 2016).
The second factor was the internal problem of the Mexican army. Alemán
was the first civilian president of the post-revolutionary period and faced
repeated threats of military revolt. The participation of the army in the
eradication campaigns served as a containment measure and occupation
for a force potentially troublesome to the central power. Although officially
it only ‘provided human resources for the deployment’ of such campaigns
(Treviño Ríos 1962) the truth is that its role went beyond that: together
with the PGR it coordinated the deployment of the campaign’s resources.
And in the late 1940s it established permanent troops and barracks on the
border between Sinaloa and Durango (Procuraduría General de la
República 1949). At the same time the eradication campaigns were a way
of granting the military’s high-ranking officials potential means of obtain-
ing wealth and territorial power. It is unnecessary to speculate about the
military leadership’s interest excessively: its participation in the campaigns
provided opportunities to get involved directly with the drug trade or to
charge certain groups for protection. In both cases large incomes were secured
which would otherwise go to other social actors, among them the regional
elites (Smith 2013). Throughout the period, one of the major tensions in
the sphere of drug policy would develop between officials of the PJF, the DFS
and the army, all of them vying for control of law enforcement on the ground.
Under these circumstances, it was hard to expect any of those institutions
to express doubt about the cost–benefit relationship of the eradication
campaigns.
Finally, the central government had an interest in extending its authority in
regions where it maintained only a partial or minimal presence, or, as Salva-
dor Maldonado Aranda puts it, in areas which were ‘peripheral, indomitable
and indolent’ and where shared sovereignties questioned the monopoly and
legitimacy of the national state (Maldonado Aranda 2012). The eradication
campaigns were one more tool of government in regions where central
authority had either not been imposed entirely or was questioned by various
social actors. During the 1940s and 1950s the main fear was not dissident
groups outside the state apparatus; it was the insubordination of the gov-
ernors and other state actors, who did not entirely align themselves with the
central government – a concern frequently undervalued in academic litera-
ture and a subject raised by new discussions on the shaping of the Mexican
state in the twentieth century (Pansters 2012).
42 Securitization, militarization, human rights
The road to militarization: the PGR and its bureaucracy
The criminalization of addiction by the Federal Regulation on Drug Addic-
tion of 1931 and the campaigns of 1947 and 1948 paved the way for the
empowerment of the security institutions involved in the war on drugs. In
addition, new perverse institutional incentives now perpetuated the punitive
paradigm. The PGR was at the centre of this process. In 1948, the aeroplanes
and helicopters used in the eradication campaigns were still borrowed from
the armed forces by the federal police. The PGR did not have its own fleet of
aircraft yet, a situation that caused it a series of problems, including its
inability to coordinate the campaigns alone. Thus, even though international
criticism was directed at the PGR, the institution often replied that it was
handicapped by a lack of resources.
The PGR’s push for greater resources dovetailed with Anslinger’s own
designs, so that he successfully lobbied U.S. companies to sell the PGR its
first planes at a reduced price (Anslinger 1948). In addition, Anslinger
sought – on his own initiative and without being asked by the Mexican
attorney general – to arrange, on behalf of Mexico, the purchase from the
Bell company, of helicopters properly equipped for herbicide spraying (Frank
J. Morris 1948). Anslinger’s intervention resulted in the creation of a division of
Aerial Services (Servicios Aéreos) inside the PGR in late 1948, which marked
the beginning of ‘the path towards operative-aerial emancipation from the
SEDENA’ (Carvente Contreras 2014: 166). As part of its bureaucratic logic, the
PGR aimed to emerge from beneath the army’s shadow: accepting U.S. policy
could mean a unique opportunity; not only would it help the PGR achieve its
ambition of becoming the leading organization in the war on drugs (ahead of
the increasingly limited PFN), but it would also enable it to strengthen itself
against a powerful Mexican army that had eclipsed every other state security
institution since the victory of the Revolution. In this sense, it is no exag-
geration to say that the eradication campaigns worked as a mechanism to
undermine the army’s monopoly of power.
During this period, the Aerial Services division was the pampered depart-
ment of the PGRwhen it came to the transfer of resources from the United States.
Although it is true that the process required several decades and was not free of
interruptions, the PGR gradually became the key recipient of money and
resources from the U.S. In 1961, for example, the PGR received flame-throwers,
helicopters, jeeps and firearms, as the result of an agreement negotiated between the
International Cooperation Administration (ICA) and the Mexican government
(U.S. Embassy in Mexico 1961). The project, which had Anslinger’s full sup-
port, involved an investment of nearly half a million dollars by the ICA and
the training of mechanics and pilots in the U.S. (Flues 1961). It was agreed
that the U.S. would not make the existence of the contract public without
previous authorization from the Mexicans (Salter 1962), demonstrating the
tension between the rhetoric and the defence of national sovereignty, and the
fact that, by that time, drug policy was already set on a bi-national stage.
 Importing the war on drugs? 43
In the following years, more helicopters and aeroplanes were delivered to
Mexico, as requested by the PGR (Siragusa 1963). Between 1961 and 1967,
Mexico received a total of $627,000 worth of anti-drug equipment as part of
the same project (around $4.5 million in 2016 terms). Besides the endowment
of aeroplanes, weapons, helicopters and automobiles, the United States also
trained PGR recruits. During the 1960s, they trained thirty-one Mexicans,
nineteen in the International Police Academy in Washington, DC, one in
Panama, and eleven in other police academies (Sarikadis and DeSonia 1972).
How did the arrival of American equipment affect the structure of the PGR?
The most important repercussion of these measures was of a symbolic nature.
However, given the budget available at the time, these materials definitely
strengthened the eradication campaigns and helped the PGR reduce its
dependence on the army. At the same time, two of the most important events
that took place in the 1960s, namely the creation of the PDR’s Office for the
Control of Narcotics and Other Dangerous Drugs (Oficina de Control de
Estupefacientes y otras Drogas Peligrosas) in April 1965 and the inauguration
of its Training School (Escuela de Capacitación) in January 1964, should be
read in the light of U.S. backing, and of the now nearly monopolistic role of
the PGR in the field of drug policy.

Operation Intercept and the official beginning of the war on drugs

During the 1950s and 1960s, drug policy in Mexico was controlled by a circle
of officers close to the FBN. They included functionaries who had attended
the training academies of the American agency like Juan Barona Lobato, the
attorney general’s adviser for drug policy, Héctor Hernández Tello, assistant
manager of the PJF and Ángel Ignacio García Trejo, director of the Visitaduría
General of the PGR, as well as trusted personnel of the FBN’s Mexico City
office like Manuel Rosales Mirada, director of prior inquiries (Averiguaciones
Previas) at the PGR and later deputy attorney general, and well-known friends
of Harry J. Anslinger like Óscar Rabasa, the Mexican delegate to the CND.
The personal proximity between the Americans and these functionaries – who
also owed their careers entirely to the drug policy of the time – alleviated old
tensions and created a climate of cooperation between Mexico and the United
States. Anslinger’s visits to Mexico City, as well as his knowledge of the com-
plexity of the Mexican political system and the impenetrability of Mexican
geography, also contributed to that effect. All this was crystallized in a series of
high-level annual meetings, in which priorities were determined and common
problems addressed. In addition, the door to new police training programmes
and a further transfer of resources had been opened by bilateral commissions
that began to meet each year from 1965 onwards (Durkin 1965).
Two nearly consecutive events rocked this amicable arrangement. On the
one hand, a process of internal restructuring within the United States resulted
in the fusion of the FBN with another agency and the subsequent creation of
the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) in 1968. Although
44 Securitization, militarization, human rights
this reform was mostly irrelevant for Mexico, it caused the movement of per-
sonnel within the U.S. and, consequently, the loss of old contacts at an inter-
governmental level. On the other hand, the surprise closure of the Mexican
border by the U.S., in a 1969 operation known as Operation Intercept, con-
tributed to Mexico’s reputation as a drug exporting country (Craig 1981).
Intercept was not really directed at Mexico, but rather had the goal of pub-
licizing the new tough policy of Richard Nixon’s administration (Frontline/
NPR 2000a; 2000b). Gordon Liddy, special assistant to the secretary of the
treasury at that time, called it ‘an exercise in international extortion, pure and
simple and effective, designed to bend Mexico to our will’ (Carpenter 1985: 8–9).
The border opened again only when Mexico signed an agreement promising the
joint coordination of future drug policy.
This 1970 agreement over cooperation led to a series of policies that fast-
tracked and deepened the relationship between the BNDD and the PGR.
Amongst other things, the number of drug agents on Mexican territory rose
and a bilateral programme of suspicious plane and boat detection was
implemented (U.S. State Department 1972). Furthermore, in compliance with
U.S. demands, the PGR sent samples of all confiscated drugs to the labs of
the BNDD and accepted it would further develop joint training models.
Throughout the 1970s, the transfer of resources was accompanied by a
series of joint training programmes that took place in the U.S. and Mexico,
and had very different formats. In May 1971, for example, the BNDD orga-
nized a training course in Mexico, in which 142 policemen and members of
the military participated. In January 1972, the model was repeated with a
second course that trained 152 Mexicans, 115 of whom were policemen (Sar-
ikadis and DeSonia 1972). It is very likely that one or two additional semi-
nars took place between January 1972 and summer 1973. The creation of the
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 1973 boosted these efforts. The
officers at the National Training Institute (NTI) of the DEA worked side by
side with their counterparts at the Instituto Técnico of the PGR (created in
1974) to guarantee that every Mexican law enforcement officer was trained by
DEA agents. Thus, by 1974 two thirds of Mexican drug enforcement officers
had attended one of the bi-national schools (U.S. General Accounting Office
1974: 27). Other NTI programmes focused on the customized instruction of
high-ranking foreign officials, allowing senior members of the PGR to travel
to Washington and other parts of the world to learn more about the DEA.
The Americans paid their travel allowances. Everybody won: the DEA suc-
ceeded in acquainting the Mexican functionaries with its operations, and they,
in turn, gained a measure of power over their peers. The war against drugs
channelled symbolic, political and economic capital as never before.

Aerial eradication campaigns and the joint operations of the 1970s

Although the eradication campaigns had continued during the 1950s and
1960s, following a scheme similar to the one proposed in the climate of 1948,
 Importing the war on drugs? 45
and the Mexican government had sent records of the eradicated poppy and
marijuana fields to the CND year upon year, one of the agreements of the
negotiations after Operation Intercept was the duplication of efforts in this
respect. After 1969, there was a quantum leap in the technology utilized and
the type of police activities involved.
Luis Echeverría’s attorney general, Pedro Ojeda Paullada, proved to be
especially amenable to the DEA’s proposal that the police role in the cam-
paign should have a bi-national dimension (Bartels 1975: 13). This meant that
groups of agents of the PJF and the DEA worked together in establishing
combined roadblocks on minor roads, raiding clandestine laboratories, parti-
cipating in interrogations, and conducting surveillance activities as well as
undercover operations, etc. These kinds of bi-national field missions were
nothing new; the difference lay in that they were approved by the highest
state sectors. Many reports written by the DEA office in Mexico to the State
Department indicate the almost unlimited freedom of action enjoyed by DEA
agents in all of Mexico. With hardly any counterbalance, the DEA helped
define the profile of three operations: Seam (1974), Seam Clearview (1975)
and Trizo (1976) – known in Mexico under the single title Canador, an acronym
for cannabis and adormidera (poppy).
It is quite possible that Ojeda Paullada’s willingness to accept the DEA
agents’ unrestricted power to act might in part have had to do with his
aspiration to run for president of the CND, which he made public months
later, and which in fact, with the support of the United States, led to him
holding that office in 1976. The attorney general’s ambitions are relevant if we
consider one of the conditions for the appropriation of foreign ideas by local
actors: the conviction that such policies and ideas will not be harmful and
that supporting their application might result in personal advantage (Acharya
2004: 248).
The eradication campaign was strengthened by three important modifica-
tions. First, advanced technology was imported to Mexico by the DEA to
locate the areas of opium fields (Barona Lobato 1976: 46–47). For this pur-
pose, Mexican technicians and pilots were trained in the United States.
Second, in 1975 the PGR accepted the spraying of herbicides to eradicate
crops, a practice long refused due to its potential ecological effects. None-
theless, the use of herbicides developed national features: while the DEA’s
project focused on spraying chemicals on poppy fields, the Mexicans also
tried to use herbicides on marijuana crops. (The latter provoked a wave of
complaints from civilian organizations which claimed to have identified traces
of the chemical paraquat in marijuana smoked in the United States; an epi-
sode that almost led to the complete withdrawal from Mexico of U.S. anti-
narcotics assistance.) Last, the campaign was extended territorially. Although
there had been brief efforts at manual and aerial eradication in Guerrero and
Michoacán in previous years, starting in 1974 the campaign truly acquired a
national dimension. The golden triangle was now just one of many areas of
operations for helicopters, police and military forces.
46 Securitization, militarization, human rights
These three tactical modifications were not enforced without obvious ben-
efits. PGR officers laid their cards on the table. To operate in the south of the
country, it was necessary to replace one helicopter, repair another, replace five
Cessnas, buy three more small planes and between eight and twelve extra
helicopters, as well as to pay for the fuel for all the campaign’s operations
from 1974 to 1975, the training of thirty-five pilots, the provision of fifty
automatic rifles, radio systems, equipment for pilots and police officers, 100
pistols and 140,000 cartridges of different calibres. The office of the DEA in
Mexico sardonically called the Mexican demands ‘the shopping list’ (U.S.
Embassy in Mexico 1974b). At the beginning of 1976 the PGR already had
thirty-nine planes and helicopters in its hangars: thirty-two more than in 1962.
Far from criticizing such profligacy, Mexican newspapers ran increasingly
alarmist stories about the rising number of child addicts and U.S.-inspired
‘jipis’ (Smith 2013: 150).
Apart from the materials received, the Mexican government had sufficient
reasons for readily accepting the reactivation of anti-drug campaigns. Parti-
cularly welcome was the expansion of the campaign to the regions of Guer-
rero and Oaxaca. These were centres of guerrilla activity at the time. Just as
the military had developed so-called civil sanitation campaigns (campañas
cívico sanitarias) in Tierra Caliente in the 1950s and 1960s as a means of con-
trolling a revitalized cardenista movement (Maldonado Aranda 2012: 21–22),
the new eradication campaigns also acted as instruments of political control.
The United States acknowledged the campaigns as such in 1975:

The eradication program is clearly the strategy preferred by the GOM. It

is highly visible, allows the government the opportunity to show its pre-
sence in some of the more remote and lawless parts of the country, and is
less politically sensitive than other courses of action. Given the social
and operational bounds within which the Mexicans must pursue their
anti-narcotic activity, it is understandable why it is the preferred option.
(Drug Abuse Task Force, Supply Reduction Working Group 1975: 20)

Though an examination of exactly where drug policies ended and counter-

insurgency operations began still awaits thorough scholarly research, by the
early 1980s the CIA naturally assumed their convergence. According to a
partially declassified document, ‘the army also will take advantage of the
eradication campaign to uncover any arms trafficking and guerrilla activities
[…] Army eradication forces may devote as much effort to internal security as
eradication’ (Central Intelligence Agency 1983).
Towards the end of the 1970s the presence of Mexican opium in the United
States had been reduced dramatically. In Mexico, however, the campaigns had
produced different effects. There were unprecedented waves of violence in
Culiacán in 1976 (Enciso 2015: 127–131); many traffickers sought to escape
by migrating south to Guadalajara where they became even more intertwined
with federal structures like the DFS (Lupsha 1991), and many turned to a
 Importing the war on drugs? 47
new venture – exporting cocaine. Despite these problems, the Canador model
was used for the structure of new campaigns in the ‘fight against drug traf-
ficking’ in the following years. It became the basis for subsequent efforts such
as Fuerza de Tarea Cóndor (1977–1987), Fuerza de Tarea Marte (1987),
Fuerza de Tarea Azteca (1996) and Directiva Azteca XXI (2000).

Conclusion
I have examined in this chapter three key episodes of open confrontation
between the United States and Mexico relating to the war on drugs. The first
was the struggle over the radical Reglamento Federal de Toxicomanías of
1940. The second concerned the increase in eradication programmes in 1947.
And the third concerned the closure of the U.S.–Mexican border with
Operation Intercept in 1969. In all three cases the Mexican government
rapidly defused any conflict: the regulation of 1940 was suspended within six
months of its coming into existence; a substantial eradication campaign was
implemented in 1948; and, starting in 1970, the way was cleared for aerial
eradication programmes spraying herbicides, and for the largely unregulated
presence of DEA agents in Mexico. These three cases reveal the limits to the
Mexican government’s autonomy in developing a drug policy: such points of
contention led to threats of medication embargos (1940), criticism at international
summits (1947) and the closure of borders (1969).
Although the United States was very influential in the design, imple-
mentation, execution and evaluation of drug policy in Mexico, it is important
to emphasize that complex and long-term state policies do not work when
imposed or merely exported by hegemonic countries. In Mexico local actors
and structures managed to interpret and adapt the demands made by the
United States to further their own interests. Understanding the process of
policy appropriation is key to comprehending why a flawed policy like the
war on drugs continues to find considerable support within the Mexican
government.
The war on drugs acted as a means by which the state expanded its
authority across the country. The photo cameras attached to the helicopters,
the systems for identifying crops, the newly acquired radio systems, the
expansion of border controls, and the permanent campaigns in the mountains
and in regions with limited statehood are elements which permitted the state
to show its presence – an outcome that could not be guaranteed either today
or during the period studied. Similarly, it has been pointed out that the war
against drugs originated and was designed in the context of support by an
indulgent civil society and a conservative press: something not too far from
the circumstances in which Felipe Calderón’s strategy was designed in 2006.
Ultimately, the United States financed, pressed for and endorsed an intol-
erant and repressive drug policy in Mexico. However, it was not an imposi-
tion. The punitive paradigm could not have been applied in Mexico had
Mexican policymakers not seen the competitive advantages offered to them
48 Securitization, militarization, human rights
by the policies proposed, and if those policies had not reflected traditional
Mexican attitudes, which regarded narcotics as substances which had brought
about racial degeneration long before the war on drugs began.

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2 Mexico
A humanitarian crisis in the making
Mónica Serrano

This chapter examines the changing nature of drug related violence in Mexico
and provides a framework for an interpretation of the country’s human rights
crisis. Three main points are pertinent to the arguments developed here. First,
while it is certain that President Felipe Calderón (2006–2012) declared a war
on drugs and drug trafficking, the actual militarisation of drug policy long
preceded his administration. Second, drug related violence accelerated under
the Calderón administration but had already erupted during the government
of Vicente Fox (2000–2006). Third, the context in which human rights
violations take place and in which international human rights law and
international humanitarian law operate in practice is hugely important in
understanding the nature of the current drug war.
Calderón’s choice of anti-narcotics policy and drug enforcement played a
key role in exacerbating criminal violence. The analysis that follows provides
some insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the main arguments that
have been advanced to explain the violent crisis engulfing Mexico. It looks at
the scale, character and nature of the violence that followed Calderón’s mas-
sive deployment of troops, ostensibly to fight organised crime, as soon as he
took power.

Transition to democracy and the rise of drug violence

At the turn of the century Mexico appeared to be ideally positioned to make
an uneventful transition to democracy. The country had navigated the uncer-
tain and sometimes turbulent waters of a protracted political liberalisation,
despite fears that political violence could trigger a major crisis. Between 1988
and 1994, when the first multi-party election took place, over sixty members
of the left wing Party of Democratic Revolution (Partido de la Revolución
Democrática, PRD) were killed, in what the party interpreted as a campaign
of violent intimidation. In 1994 a chain of high level political assassinations,
including the murder of the PRI’s presidential candidate and the rise of the
Zapatista insurgency, threatened to upset the delicate balance upon which the
transition rested. Nonetheless, the country managed to navigate its way to
democracy. By then Mexico had embraced market reforms and a move
54 Securitization, militarization, human rights
towards greater global and regional integration. The 1994 entry into the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) had been preceded by
structural reforms and new economic rules that moved Mexico towards an
integrated regional economy. By the time democracy was introduced, years of
austerity and economic uncertainty had given way to moderate hopes for
prosperity and a relatively stable political environment that were reflected in a
rapidly expanding literature on electoral politics and democratic government.
However, responses by the illicit drug economy to political change were
largely ignored in critical analyses which concentrated on electoral shifts and
party dynamics. Beneath the superficial stability of democratic institutions,
organised crime was exerting an ever greater influence.
The hopes that accompanied the newly formed government of Vicente Fox
in 2000 were replaced by mounting security concerns. The abandonment of a
hegemonic party system had eroded the regime’s capacity to uphold the
formal and informal rules upon which political stability had rested. Mean-
while, the weakening of presidential authority had created a vacuum that was
rapidly filled by both legitimate and illegitimate actors, including criminal
groups. Besides, external trends beyond the government’s control had left the
country in a vulnerable position. Mexico’s illicit markets experienced a mas-
sive shock with the rise of the cocaine economy’s powerful and brutal drug-
trafficking organisations. Coincidentally, the 9/11 terrorist attacks profoundly
affected US–Mexico relations, adding to the security pressures already facing
the new administration.
The focus of the Fox administration on re-launching NAFTA and meeting
its neighbour’s post-9/11 security concerns was understandable, but the choi-
ces it made would have far reaching consequences (Smith 1997: 143), not
least its apparent downplaying of the challenges posed by drug trafficking
and its laissez-faire attitude to the growth of the cartels. The obvious
intention behind these approaches was to ‘denarcotise’ its relationship with
the US.
A multiplicity of factors has produced the crisis of credibility that haunts
Mexico’s democracy. Under three successive elected governments the pro-
blems besieging Mexico’s democracy became more acute. Halfway through
President Peña Nieto’s term in office, electoral authority, once perceived as
the beacon of Mexico’s democracy, had become increasingly contested. The
main political parties which had infused life into electoral competition were
now much weaker, and increasingly perceived as ‘cartel’ organisations dis-
tanced from the electorate (Smith 1997: 143). Despite the efforts of the Cal-
derón and Peña Nieto administrations to spin the successes of their policies,
doubts about the prospects for Mexico’s democracy deepened. Indeed, the
charade of political pluralism, widespread and systemic corruption and impu-
nity, almost zero economic growth and a growing public debt had drained
democratic hopes (Pardiñas 2014; Silva Hérzog-Márquez 2015), leading to
the erosion of the presidency’s authority, greater power for governors, and
unbridled corruption.
 A humanitarian crisis in the making 55
How much of the criminal security crisis and the attendant exacerbation of
violence can be explained by the failure of democracy still provokes much
heated debate. The reality is that, given the complex nature of the illicit drug
economy, it is unlikely that a more proactive drug policy could have pre-
vented either Mexico’s collapse into criminal violence or the capture of state
institutions by the cartels. The Fox administration, like its predecessor and
successor, had inherited the disastrous consequences of ever more stringent
drug control policies which had given rise to criminal organisations and had put
in their hands the resources to engage in massive corruption and indiscriminate
violence (Kenny and Serrano 2011a; 2011b).

The opening of the cocaine transit economy and changes in

drug related violence
As Mexican authorities considered various drug control strategies, they had
to contend with at least two major and interrelated challenges. The first was that
Mexican drug producers had succeeded through the 1990s in keeping their
traditional market position, which allowed them to continue supplying over
80 per cent of US marijuana imports and 30 percent of the US illicit heroin
market (Andreas 1996: 56; Smith 1997: 128). The second was the opening of
the cocaine transit economy and its impact on existing trafficking activities
(MacCaun and Reuter 2001). Since the second half of the 1980s there had
been evidence that the drug problem was moving and mutating at an accel-
erating pace (Mayorga 2016). A critical element was stiffer drug market
competition caused largely by drug enforcement efforts on both sides of the
US border. In Mexico, the arrest of Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo in 1989 had
triggered the emergence of major regional drug organisations, with Baja
California controlled by the Arellano Félix brothers; the Juárez/Chihuahua
cartel by Amado Carrillo; Sinaloa dominated by Joaquin Guzmán and
Ismael Zambada, and the Gulf cartel led by Juan García Ábrego and subse-
quently by Osiel Cárdenas, founder of the armed group Zetas, in the late
1990s (Blancornelas 2002: 52–59; Valdés Castellanos 2013: 179–180 and 211).
Behind this transformation of Mexico’s criminal marketplace lay the opening
of cocaine routes across Mexican territory, resulting from the closure of the
main US entry point for Colombian cocaine in South Florida (Kenney 2007;
Gootenberg 2011: 39–40; 2012: 160 and 168). The sudden flood of cocaine
caught the unprepared Mexican authorities unawares, confronting them with
unforeseen and formidable difficulties. With 10.5 million Americans reporting
having used cocaine in the early 1980s, doubling to 22 million in the mid-
1980s, and with consumption peaking in the early 1990s, the US had estab-
lished itself as the largest cocaine market in the world, with Mexico now the
major transit point supplying that market (Gootenberg 2010: 72; 2012).
The opening of the cocaine transhipment economy transformed Mexico’s
drug problem into an insoluble conundrum. The 1,000-tonne flow of Colom-
bian cocaine, increasingly diverted via Cali and Panama towards northern
56 Securitization, militarization, human rights
Mexico, radically altered the size, value and organisation of the Mexican illi-
cit drug market (Palacios and Serrano 2010; Serrano 2012). In the late 1980s
one third of cocaine bound for the US market entered through Mexico, rising
by the late 1990s to 85 per cent. As cocaine seizures in Mexico increased,
tripling between 1988 and 1990, the organisations transferring the drug
mutated fast. At first Mexican traffickers coexisted peacefully, and, taking toll
fees from the suppliers, coordinated the delivery of cocaine to the US in
‘relative harmony’ (Blancornelas 2002: 106–107; Valdés Castellanos 2013:
226, 282 and 300; Epstein and Propublica 2016). However, as the number of
players in the market increased, disputes over turf, routes and territory also
increased, fuelling systemic drug violence (Goldstein 1985). Already in the
early 1990s, 40 per cent of the cocaine consumed in the United States was
smuggled by one organisation, the Arellano Félix brothers. As US interdic-
tion efforts pushed the cocaine routes deeper into Mexican territory, market
competition intensified, and previously local and regional drug trafficking
organisations became nationwide cartels able to recruit and mobilise armies
to defend their share of the trade (Epstein and Propublica 2016; Valdés
Castellanos 2013).
Although in the late 1990s cocaine consumption among American users
began to ebb, with millions still of chronic users the US market remained
buoyant (Caulkins et al. 2015). By then, campaigns by the US and Colombian
authorities against the Medellín and Cali cartels had strengthened the hand of
Mexican traffickers and allowed them to change the tolls they had initially
charged Colombians for 40–50 per cent shares in kind, and to make their own
direct purchases. Not surprisingly, their profits soared five to tenfold, as did
their autonomy. As in Colombia, the scale and profitability of cocaine traf-
ficking fuelled the rise of ‘brutal world class’ drug organisations characterised
by their competitiveness, transnational links, innovative capacity, infiltration of
state and business institutions, and, especially, their readiness to resort to
massive bribery and violence (Kenny and Serrano 2011b; Gootenberg 2012:
168 and 174; Valdés Castellanos 2013: 217 and 365–366).
Charging an average fee of $1,250 dollars per kilo of cocaine transported
into the US, a Mexican intermediary between 1985 and 1986 had earned tens
of millions. Once Mexican traffickers started charging one kilo of cocaine for
each transported kilo, their profits rocketed, according to some sources by as
much as 1,000 per cent. Not surprisingly, by the mid-1990s US officials esti-
mated the total value of Mexican drug exports at about $10 billion, while
Mexican estimates put it as high as $30 billion (Gootenberg 2012: 172; Valdés
Castellanos 2013: 193–195 and 291–292). With such enormous profits giving
traffickers the means to buy or coerce state authorities, the risk of legal
penalties was easily neutralised. Mexican traffickers also acquired additional
revenues by exporting methamphetamines to the US after the government
had closed laboratories in California supplying a growing North American
market.
 A humanitarian crisis in the making 57
Mexican administrations, particularly those of the Zedillo government,
could not keep up with the frantic expansion of the new illicit market. The
escalation of turf wars between drug trafficking organisations was a forceful
indicator of violent changes in Mexico’s drug marketplace. Greater control of
cocaine smuggling and distribution enabled the cartels to pay ‘informal taxes’
to institutional actors including the police, the military and politicians, and
ultimately to compromise the state. But when efforts to persuade the autho-
rities actively to favour the criminals did not achieve the intended results, traf-
fickers resorted to more violent means. Indeed, through the 1990s, the economic
weight and power of Mexican drug cartels allowed them to neutralise state
institutions and coerce law enforcement and security agencies.
The first elected government had identified the reform of law enforcement
institutions as a democratic priority, but had failed to recognise the scale of
the task. By the time the Fox government assumed power, violent criminal
confrontations had exposed the transnational dimensions of the country’s
security challenges. The criminal wars between the Arellano Félix and Sina-
loa cartels, and the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels, and the rise of the Zetas and
their capture of the border city of Nuevo Laredo in 2003–2005, were glaring
exposures of security weaknesses and the government’s inability to enforce
the law.

The logic of criminal war

During the Fox administration, criminal competition had led to full scale
criminal wars in the major cities along the border, from Tijuana, to Juárez to
Nuevo Laredo. This section will argue that the rise and evolution of these
wars was closely linked to anti-narcotic policy decisions and drug
enforcement.

(a) Arellano Félix’s reign of terror

In Baja California, where the first elected opposition government assumed
office in 1989, drug trafficking revealed its power over two decades on many
fronts. From the early 1990s main roads were often closed at night to allow
the landing of planes loaded with marijuana and cocaine. By then the Are-
llano Félix organisation was sending two tons of cocaine a day into the US
and was mainly responsible for administering the transfer of drugs across the
Baja California–California border with the connivance of local and federal
authorities and security services (Reyna and Fresnedo 2014). In 1993 the FBI
published a list of the names of over 100 police officers who, it believed, were
on Arellano Félix’s payroll. Backed by a dependable network of police pro-
tection, including that of Enrique Harari, head of the Federal Road Police
(1986–1988), Arellano Félix’s ascendancy remained uncontested for most of
the 1990s. In 1997, they offered the then recently appointed PGR delegate,
General José Luis Chávez García, a choice between the life of his family or a
58 Securitization, militarization, human rights
1 million dollar payment. Two major operations aimed at overhauling the
state’s Attorney General’s Office, and the arrest of nearly twenty-five federal
police officers on charges of criminal association with Arellano Félix organi-
sation did little to erode its power (Proceso 2000, Blancornelas 2002, 193–194
and 248; García and Dávila 2002; Cornejo 2000, Valdés Castellanos 2013:
227).
It is true that the Arellano Félix’s violent hegemony was gradually wea-
kened by sustained efforts at law enforcement, including a series of DEA
operations. However, the pressure of the anti-narcotics policy on Arellano
Félix made room for criminal competition, especially from the Sinaloa cartel
(Cornejo 1997; Avila 2002; Venegas and Cornejo 1996). By 1997, with
Ramón Arellano Félix on the FBI’s most wanted list, the power of the orga-
nisation had suffered a significant diminution (Reyna and Fresnedo 2014). By
the late 1990s, the effects of gang instability were revealed in increasing
numbers of homicides and disappearances, as well as in open attacks on state
authorities and journalists, including Jesús Blancornelas. In 1999 the state’s
total number of homicides doubled to reach 637 and more than 400 minor
traffickers were slain in 1999–2000 for freelancing (Blancornelas 2002: 131;
Valdés Castellanos 2013: 234). As Blancornelas and his colleagues at Zeta
tried to keep track of drug related deaths, their estimated figure for 1997–July
2000 reached 2,094 individuals executed in Baja California (Blancornelas
2003: 69–72; Valdés Castellanos 2013: 233–234).
With the help of young middle-class men known as ‘narco-juniors’, who
acted as mules and triggermen for the cartel, and a whole team of ‘base-
ballistas’, the Arellano Félix cartel had established a reputation for ‘innova-
tive’ and vicious violence. Victims were hung and beaten to death or
disintegrated in barrels of hot lye or acid (Solís 1996; Blancornelas 2002: 201
and 207–212; Epstein and Propublica 2016). The statement given by Santiago
Meza López ‘el pozolero’ upon his capture in 2009, regarding the more than
300 dead bodies that he had helped dissolve in the course of a decade, offered
a gruesome glimpse into the cartel’s callous murderousness (PGR 2009; De
Mauleón 2009; El País 2009).
Although its ongoing corruption of local police forces and authorities
allowed Arellano Félix to keep things reasonably under control, by 2002–2003
the death of Ramón Arellano and arrest of his brother Benjamín exacerbated
renewed internecine conflict and criminal competition. Three years later, in
2006, the capture of the youngest brother, Javier Arellano Félix, by the DEA,
drove violence in Tijuana and Baja California to unprecedented levels, largely
resulting from the DEA’s protracted operations, culminating in Operation
Shadow Game and the arrest of Javier Arellano Félix, which mortally
wounded the Tijuana organisation (Epstein and Propublica 2016). Between
2006 and 2008, open conflict between the lieutenants fighting over the cartel’s
internal succession, Eduardo Sánchez Arellano ‘the engineer’ and Teodoro
García Simental, ‘el Teo’, the latter already recruited by the Sinaloa organi-
sation, left over 1,000 deaths. The Binational Centre for Human Rights
 A humanitarian crisis in the making 59
claimed that at least 1,200 people had been disappeared in the state, with
mounting numbers in 2007 caused by internecine conflict within the Tijuana
organisation. With critical information provided by the rival Sinaloa cartel,
the DEA’s pressures expedited the final downfall of the Tijuana cartel. Ironi-
cally, as DEA agents themselves have acknowledged, the blows they had
inflicted on the Arellano brothers facilitated a takeover by the Sinaloa group.
In the words of Dave Herrod, the DEA agent in charge of the final operation,
‘taking out the Arellano Félix Organisation cleared territory for Chapo’
(Moore 1997; Epstein and Propublica 2016).

(b) The Sinaloa cartel’s march eastward: the battle for Juárez
Having established a foothold in the Tijuana–San Diego corridor, the ascen-
dant Sinaloa cartel pushed turf war violence eastwards. As in Baja California
and Tijuana, for over a decade in Chihuahua a pax mafiosa agreed by the
Juárez/Chihuahua cartel, and firmly anchored in police protection, had sur-
vived. Thus, between 1984 and 1993 the homicide rate in Ciudad Juárez, the
organisation’s main gateway into the US, had remained fairly stable at around
8.6 per 100,000 inhabitants. However, by the end of 1991, the assassination of
Victor Manuel Oropeza, a journalist who had exposed the links between local
police and drug trafficking, set off the first alarms. With 134 murders regis-
tered in the city in 1991, El Norte de Ciudad Juárez described 1991 as one of
the most violent years in the history of Juárez (Molloy and Bowden, 2011:
20–21). Additionally, in April 1993, the killing of Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, a
founder of the Juárez cartel and an ex-regional head of the DFS, together
with the subsequent murder attempt on the man thought to be responsible,
drug lord Amado Carrillo, were obvious symptoms of rising criminal com-
petition (Gutiérrez 1993; de Mauleón 2001; Villalpando and Castillo 2005;
Pérez Espino and Páez Varela 2009). The impact of these events on the extra-
legal peace enforced by the Juárez cartel in Ciudad Juárez manifested itself in
a sudden surge in the city’s homicide rate and the first appearance of an
apparently systematic femicide. In 1994, following the discovery of one of the
first female bodies, El Diario de Juárez called attention to a pattern linking a
series of female killings from 1993 to 1996 (Alvarado Alvarez 2009).
The unexpected death in 1997 of Amado Carrillo, ‘el señor de los cielos’,
opened a further phase of chronic infighting. Internal strife among criminal
gangs and political instability at local and state levels intensified competition
for the control of drug trafficking, a trend reflected in the doubling of the
state’s annual total homicide figure, from 306 in 1990 to 648 in 1997, and the
discovery of the first mass graves in 1999. Throughout the next decade, as had
been the case in Tijuana, the Juárez cartel, led by Vicente and Rodolfo Car-
rillo, managed to maintain formal control of the ‘plaza’. In sharp contrast
with Tijuana, in Ciudad Juárez criminal instability almost immediately resul-
ted in a human rights crisis. Thanks to the hitman El Sicario’s confessions,
the details of thousands of executions, no less than one hundred witnessed by
60 Securitization, militarization, human rights
him, came to light. His testimony revealed indiscriminate killing campaigns,
including one prompted by the disappearance of 3,000 kg of cocaine, target-
ing at least seventy drug dealers and forty-five car thieves. As his account
makes clear, contract killers, like him, working for the Juárez cartel, would
dump the bodies in clandestine graves (Molloy and Bowden 2011: 116–125;
Lomas 2009). Between 1997 and 2007 a rising tide of femicides, involving the
violent deaths of hundreds of women, a rapidly growing number of dis-
appeared persons, reaching nearly 200 by 2003, and the discovery of their
burials were a bleak precursor of things to come (Dillon 1997; Badillo 1999;
Reforma 2002; El Siglo de Torreón 2004; González 2015). Criminal collusion
between local police forces and the Juárez cartel was exposed in 2004: under
the orders of Miguel Angel Loya, chief police officer, dealers who had gam-
bled against the Juárez organisation had been disappeared, killed and buried
in mass graves (Valdés Castellanos 2013: 240–241).
The violence that had descended upon Ciudad Juárez took an ever more
brutal turn as the Juárez and Sinaloa cartels outsourced coercive power to
local gangs. Estimates by the Municipal Public Secretariat calculated that in
the late 1990s the total number of gangs in Ciudad Juárez was around 300
with approximately 15,000 members. The estimated total for the Ciudad
Juárez–El Paso area was 400 gangs and 25,000 members (Pineda Jaimes and
Herrera Robles 2007: 99; Valdés Castellanos 2013: 402). In an effort to bol-
ster ‘La Línea’, the Juárez cartel’s armed branch, members of the gang
known as ‘Los Aztecas’ were recruited. Meanwhile, the Sinaloa organisation
resorted to members of the local gangs known as the ‘Mexicles’ and ‘Los
Artistas Asesinos’ as murderous enforcers of its aims.

(c) The Gulf–Zetas military drug cartel at war in Nuevo Laredo

Thanks to their military strength, their geographical reach and territorial
control, the rise of the Zetas undoubtedly marked a turning point in the history
of organised crime in Mexico (Kenny and Serrano 2011c; Valdés Castellano,
2013: 257). Originally the armed branch of the Gulf cartel, the Zetas started
operations in 1999 and were first recorded in 2002 in an FBI electronic commu-
nication. The Zetas brought together between 14 and 30 former elite officers of
the GAFES (Grupo Aeromovil de Fuerzas Especiales), many of whom had
received training at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, under
the command of Arturo Guzmán Decena, a defector from the Mexican Army.
Following Arturo Guzmán’s death in 2002 and the capture of Osiel Cárdenas the
following year, the leadership of the Gulf cartel fell to Heriberto Lazcano, ‘El
Lazca’. The consequent disruption of the Gulf cartel’s internal structure
pushed the Zetas towards ever more violent activities, including the diversification
of the organisation’s business portfolio to include kidnappings, human trafficking,
arms trafficking and extortion (Cook 2007; Milenio 2015).
With the emergence of a previously unimaginable ruthlessness and effi-
ciency in the escalating use of violence, arising from both the Zetas’ military
 A humanitarian crisis in the making 61
training and the recruitment of ex-Kaibiles, members of the Guatemalan
special forces, Mexico saw the dawn of a new and more extreme era in the
drug wars (Kenny and Serrano 2011c: 62–64). By 2003 both Mexico’s Attor-
ney General’s Office (PGR) and FBI reports highlighted the Zetas’ geo-
graphical expansion and their military power, then estimated at around 350
heavily armed men. In that year the PGR revealed that the Gulf cartel was
active in at least ten states, stretching from Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Ver-
acruz, Tabasco, Campeche and Quintana Roo to Chiapas and Zacatecas,
Jalisco and Mexico City (López Medellín 2015: 31). This expansion, and the
Gulf cartel’s decision to open a Pacific coast route, were responses to the
logistics of transporting cocaine overland from Guatemala to the northern
border. Already in 2001 the Zetas had extended into Michoacán, and, a few
years later, into Guerrero. In January 2004 their military potency was
demonstrated when a sixty-strong armed commando freed twenty-five mem-
bers of the Gulf cartel from a state prison in Apatzingán in Michoacán
(Gómez 2004; Valdés Castellano 2013: 257–258).
As far back as 1999 El Chapo and Arturo Beltrán Leyva of the Sinaloa
cartel had identified Nuevo Laredo as a potential priority for expansion of its
activities. It was, however, the arrest of Osiel Cárdenas, leader of the Gulf
cartel, in 2003, that promoted open competition between the two organisa-
tions. Indeed, not only did Osiel Cárdenas’ capture prompt fierce internal
disputes, pitting five would-be successors to the leadership against each other,
it also invited external challenges. As a result, throughout 2003 violent con-
frontations between armed groups linked to the Sinaloa cartel and the Zetas,
or between the Zetas and the state security forces, became increasingly fre-
quent (Proceso 2003; Gómez and Monge 2003; Crónica 2003; Valdés Cas-
tellanos 2013: 251, 256 and 306). Unsurprisingly, such unprecedented levels of
violence forced the government to deploy troops to Nuevo Laredo to secure
the airport, control entry points into the US and patrol the streets.
Exactly as in Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, indisputable evidence pointed to
local, state and federal police collusion with the criminals and revealed the
cartels’ pervasive capture of state institutions. In the sequence of violent con-
frontations that took place in 2003, local and federal police forces were often
at loggerheads with members of the newly created Federal Investigation
Agency (AFI) allegedly extending their protection to the Sinaloa cartel.
In 2004 Nuevo Laredo’s mayor, José Manuel Suárez, admitted the extent of
police corruption, acknowledging that in the period 1999–2004 at least 868
police officers had been dismissed in that city. Police collusion with organised
crime was suspected in the wave of kidnappings and disappearances that
spread throughout 2003. Investigations following the kidnapping of eight
people, and the abduction and murder of businessman Cervantes Ezpeleta,
confirmed these fears (Proceso 2004). According to the Centro de Estudios
Fronterizos y de Promoción de los Derechos Humanos (Cefprodhac) in 2003
alone the number of kidnappings and forced disappearances registered in ten
municipalities located near the border had reached 240, while the total
62 Securitization, militarization, human rights
number of violent deaths in Tamaulipas for the period 1992–2004 surpassed
3,000, of which nearly 700 were drug related, the majority occurring under
the Yarrington administration of 1999–2004 (Monge et al. 2004). The excep-
tional violence of events taking place in the state can be attributed to the
military origins of the Zetas and the absence of a family structure at the head
of the Gulf cartel, as factors which combined to produce a uniquely savage
and predatory criminal organisation.
The battle for Nuevo Laredo was ferocious. Growing suspicion in the
media over the accuracy of the authorities’ reporting of homicides and their
manipulation of homicide statistics was believed to underlie the assassination
of the editor of the newspaper El Mañana de Nuevo León, who had accused
the police authorities and Francisco Cayuela Villarreal, the state’s Justice
Attorney, of massaging the figures (López Medellín 2015). In 2005 an internal
DEA assessment reported the ascendancy of the Gulf cartel and the Zetas as
they recaptured areas previously under the control of the Sinaloa organisation
(DEA 2009). That same year, an FBI classified report alerted the US
Department of Homeland Security and the Border Patrol to the presence of
training camps where Guatemalan ex-Kaibil officers were training drug traf-
fickers in paramilitary tactics just over the border from McAllen, Texas (Joint
Staff 2004; Smith 2005; Padgett 2005). The Zetas–Kaibil nexus had been first
documented in September 2004 when, at a federal checkpoint in Aguililla,
Michoacán, three men transporting a massive arms shipment admitted their
Guatemalan origin. A year later in October 2005, Deputy Attorney General
Santiago Vasconcelos confirmed that at least thirty Kaibiles were under the
orders of Heriberto Lazcano, el ‘Lazca’, head of the Zetas and the Gulf
cartel. If the unstoppable rise of the Zetas had already signalled the use of
advanced military skills in the drug market, their collaboration with the kai-
biles had also exposed the extent of the arms smuggling that for decades had
fuelled the violence of the drug wars (El Universal 2005; Castillo 2005; Cortés
2006).

The vortex of violence

As we have seen, when Felipe Calderón assumed power in December 2006,
Mexico’s tide of violence was being propelled by criminal wars arising either
from fierce competition between major heavily armed groups, and/or violent
internecine battles within such organisations. There is no doubt that, under-
lying the more than 2,000 violent deaths attributed to drug violence and
organised crime in 2006, was the contest between five criminal organisations
for the control of strategic territories, routes and border cities. Initially the
new government wasted precious time by failing to track the homicide rate,
but the drastic escalation of violence and a 50 per cent increase in recorded
homicides soon prompted a heated debate. Supporters of the Calderón
administration were right in arguing that the violence had preceded their
election, and that its escalation had already been incubated by criminal
 A humanitarian crisis in the making 63
competition. Thus Alejandro Poiré, head of the Executive Secretariat of
Public Security, and the director of Mexico’s intelligence agency, the Centre of
Investigation and National Security (Centro de Investigación y Seguridad
Nacional, CISEN), Guillermo Valdés, went to great pains to emphasise the
emergency context in which the eventual decision to deploy massive federal
forces took place. Government advisors Joaquín Villalobos and Alejandro
Hope concurred with the view that the situation clearly merited an immediate
response, but disagreed on the form it should take. (Poiré 2011; Villalobos
2010; 2012; Valdés Castellanos 2013; 363–379; Hope 2012). As things stood,
critics were right to press for more nuanced explanations for the sharp upturn
in violence in the period 2008–2010. While it was generally accepted that
extreme criminal violence had existed prior to the Calderón administration,
there was heated discussion about the immediate causes of its sudden escalation
and about the role of military and federal security deployments in that escalation.
Government officials argued emphatically that heightened criminal compe-
tition was the main reason for the growth in and diffusion of violence.
Accordingly, they cited as evidence the wars between the Sinaloa and the
Arellano Félix organisations over the Tijuana–San Diego corridor, the vicious
fracture between El Chapo Guzmán and the Beltrán Leyva brothers, as well
as the latter’s decision to close ranks with the Juárez cartel and the Zetas,
resulting in the subsequent violent divorce between the Gulf cartel and the
Zetas, and the spread of these conflicts to the Pacific coast. In the government
view, it was indisputable that the violence resulting directly from these wars
and criminal competition for territorial and market control was entirely to
blame for the massive increase in drug related deaths, from a total of 2,200 in
2006 to 16,987 in 2011.
There is a general acceptance that criminal competition did play a key role
in shaping violent trends in the country. Indeed, the tripling of homicides
between 2007 and 2008 in Baja California was largely the result of the Sina-
loa takeover of the Arellano Félix stronghold. Similarly, the repercussions of
the 2008 rupture between El Chapo and the Beltrán Leyva brothers were not
confined to internal chains of killings and vendettas, but were felt all the way
from Ciudad Juárez to Guerrero and Michoacán (Zepeda Gil 2016; Pantoja
García 2016). Similarly, the drastic escalation observed in 2009 and 2010 of
homicides in Nuevo León and Tamaulipas cannot be explained without
taking into account the violent split between the Gulf cartel and the Zetas
(Kenny and Serrano 2011d: 214; Poiré 2011).
However, missing from the government’s diagnosis is the incendiary role of
anti-narcotics policy and drug enforcement. As the government struggled to
distance itself from responsibility for the violence, it portrayed it as almost
entirely criminal. The Calderón administration’s account stressed the concentra-
tion of violent activities in particular states and particular municipalities.
When official figures were released for the period January 2007–December
2011, a total of 51,501 drug related deaths were reported, but their 51 per cent
concentration in four states – Chihuahua 25 per cent, Sinaloa 11 per cent,
64 Securitization, militarization, human rights
Guerrero 9 per cent and Tamaulipas 6 per cent – was duly highlighted. And
once three other states, Durango, Nuevo León and Michoacán, were inclu-
ded, each one containing 5 per cent of allegedly drug related deaths, as many
as 66 per cent of such deaths were found to be concentrated in just seven
states. The government’s argument did not stop there; it insisted on the emi-
nently criminal, i.e. non-civilian character, of the victims of these deaths.
Accordingly, it contended that the great bulk of such deaths, that is 43,551, or
85 per cent, of total drug related deaths, were the result of either internal
cartel executions (82 per cent), or criminal armed confrontations (3 per cent).
In this analysis just 15 per cent of total drug related deaths had originated in
unilateral and direct criminal aggression against state authorities (7 per cent)
or armed clashes with state security forces (8 per cent). The emphasis on such
statistical abstractions played a key role in the administration’s narrative
(Kenny and Serrano 2011d: 204). By stressing the geographical isolation of
these trends, the government sought to refute its critics’ claims of rising and
widespread violence. Also at the core of the government’s implausible asser-
tions about criminal deaths lay the proposition that killings were exclusively
criminal-on-criminal. In the words of Poiré (2011) and Villalobos (2012),
since 89 per cent of drug related killings registered in the period 2006–2010
were the result of executions, it was reasonable to conclude that victims and
perpetrators alike were involved in organised crime, and that the bulk of the
deaths resulted from internecine conflicts.
Sooner than expected, critics and human rights organisations, including
Human Rights Watch, called into question the procedures the administration
had used to record drug related killings in order to conclude that the great
majority had been perpetrated by criminals on criminals. Partly owing to a
lack of consensus among government agencies over the criteria by which to
define drug related killings, but more because of outrage at their presumption
of a guilty verdict without a proper criminal investigation, the government
was forced to resile from this classification after human rights organisations
argued vociferously that the government’s claims regarding alleged criminal
infighting could be substantiated only through proper judicial investigations.
The government’s narrative continued blatantly to ignore the role of drug
control and enforcement in promoting gang violence, although drug policy
experts had long called attention to the propensity of drug cartels to react
violently to prohibitionist and punitive drug control policies. Indeed, for dec-
ades experts on drug policy and security had highlighted the way in which, by
laying down the rules of the game governing the interactions between state
drug control organisations and criminal organisations, drug policy ultimately
shapes the market’s systemic violence.
Once drug related homicides multiplied further, increasing by 142 per cent
in 2008, reaching 6,824 deaths, the role of drug enforcement again took centre
stage. Obviously the size of criminal organisations and their financial and
military resources could not be ignored, but it was impossible to explain their
expansion and violence without putting drug policy decisions into the
 A humanitarian crisis in the making 65
equation. To many, the succession of criminal wars which had spread along
the border had provided enough warnings about deeply flawed anti-narcotic
policies and enforcement. As critics were keen to point out, it was state policy
and drug control enforcement that had long shaped the decisions of drug
traffickers, inducing them to resort to violence to enforce internal discipline,
settle criminal accounts or secure territory and routes (Reuter 2009).
The contentious debate about the causes of the abrupt escalation in vio-
lence in 2008 included recognition by both the government and its critics of
the existence of rising criminal competition, but beneath this apparent con-
sensus lay significant disagreements. There were important differences in
accounting for the drivers of the increase in drug violence, but essentially the
discussion boiled down to two main arguments. Both highlighted systemic
drug violence but disagreed about the contribution to it of anti-narcotics and
enforcement policy. One emphasised changes in the illicit cocaine market; the
other underlined the role of federal and military deployments.
The logic of the arguments blaming changes in the illicit cocaine economy
can best be understood by pointing to their effects on criminal competition
and systemic violence. In this line of argument, the risk of market saturation and
a possible reduction in cocaine supply and demand are seen as key factors in
increased competition and drug violence. Indeed, evidence of a steady decline
in US cocaine consumption and the prospect of a saturated market has been
highlighted as a potential element in fostering fiercer criminal competition
(Friman 2009; Caulkins et al. 2015; Valdés Castellanos 2013: 290).
Others have instead pointed to changes arising from Colombian anti-drug
policies resulting in an increase in prices and a reduction in the supply of
cocaine from 43.4 million tonnes in 2006 to 16.6 million tonnes in 2010, as
important factors in the drug violence equation (Serrano 2000; Castillo et al.
2014). Whether as a result of a reduction in demand, a smaller volume of
available cocaine, or higher prices, the idea supporting these arguments is that
enforced changes in the illicit cocaine market intensified competition, and
probably exacerbated systemic drug violence among Mexican drug traffickers.
What seems true in all of this, as in previous complex drug trafficking rela-
tionships between Mexico and Colombia, or Turkey and Mexico, is that drug
enforcement efforts in one latitude were bound to have knock-on effects,
including spasmodic violence, in distant locations.
The second theory seems especially compelling, including as it does not
only the decision to deploy military and federal troops, but also the way in
which it was executed. According to this thesis, President Calderón’s all-out
war on drugs spread violence across the country and triggered criminal frag-
mentation, unleashing in turn a tragedy of unprecedented proportions. Critics
started questioning the official strategic narrative, according to which rising
levels of violence were the necessary corollary of what had, of necessity, to be
a long war and clearly indicated success in its conduct. In the words of Vil-
lalobos, ‘This enemy can only be dominated through the full force of the
state, and when that happens its resistance augments, exacerbating in turn its
66 Securitization, militarization, human rights
own wars.’ Drawing on Colombia’s experience, defenders of government
strategy went on to argue that, in the city of Medellín, after ten years of war
and 70,000 deaths, the government’s victory had produced no reduction in
violence. In this account, which echoed that of the government, violence
abated only following ‘the state’s resolution to recover by force the territories
that had been captured by drug cartels, paramilitary and narco-guerrillas’
(Villalobos 2010; 2012).
Notwithstanding the government spin, many critics remained dubious
about the wisdom of Calderón’s counter-drug strategy. In their view, behind
the escalation of violence into a humanitarian crisis lay policy decisions and
law enforcement tactics that shaped the responses of drug trafficking organi-
sations. Distrusting the government’s assumption that rising violence was a
clear sign of success, critics started charting the impact of the government’s
anti-drugs strategy on two main fronts: the effects of the kingpin strategy and
the consequences of military deployment on the ground.
For decades there had been concern within the security community about
the detrimental effects of the headhunting ‘kingpin’ policy devised to elim-
inate the leaders of drug cartels. Designed by the DEA in the early 1990s, this
decapitation strategy has long been blamed for turning a national security
threat into a public order menace. Although over the past decades the scheme
has produced a considerable flow of drug related extraditions to the US, it
soon ran into trouble by exacerbating drug violence. Despite this, security
advisors, compelled by US authorities in both Colombia and Mexico, continued
to endorse it (Kenney 2007: 90–91; Llorente 2014). As a matter of fact, the
strategy had already been deployed by President Calderón’s predecessors.
Indeed, throughout the mid-1980s and 1990s a chain of highly visible arrests,
including those of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo,
Amado Carrillo and others, had been designed to mitigate US certification
pressures. In 1996 the first top Mexican drug trafficker, Juan García Abrego,
then head of the Gulf cartel and also a US national, was extradited upon his
arrest by the Zedillo government. And while it is true that under the Fox
administration 63,456 drug dealers were arrested and set free upon admitting
personal consumption, these individuals were clearly linked to major organi-
sations: 15,849 of them to the Juárez cartel, 6,133 to the Amezcua Contreras
organisation, 12,171 to the Sinaloa cartel and 8,736 to the Gulf cartel. More-
over, no fewer than fifteen top drug lords were captured and extradited among
235 nationals who were handed over to foreign governments (Castillo 2006).
But with the publication in 2009 of an official list, including the names of the
thirty-seven most wanted drug lords, plans for the capture and extradition of
drug traffickers gathered momentum (Finnegan 2012).
The decapitation strategy was enthusiastically embraced by then attorney
general Eduardo Medina Mora, who found inspiration in an uncritical read-
ing of the dismantling of the Medellín and Cali cartels. Disregarding the
relocation of Colombia’s drug marketplace to FARC and the paramilitary,
and the rise and multiplication of a third generation of smaller, nimbler but
 A humanitarian crisis in the making 67
brutally violent criminal organisations, Medina Mora committed himself to
breaking up Mexico’s major cartels into fifty or more smaller entities. For this
he was duly praised by the United States’ General MacCaffrey (ICG 2007;
Kenny and Serrano 2011d). Thus, in the period between 2007 and 2011, more
than thirty drug lords were either killed or arrested, and as many as 505
nationals extradited. As in Colombia, in Mexico the kingpin strategy
informed anti-narcotic policy and enforcement. Not only did these efforts
lead to the capture, extradition or assassination of major drug figures, but
also to the vicious fragmentation of the criminal market place, causing in the
process humanitarian havoc (Oxford Analytica 2015).
It is no surprise that in both countries, the adoption and implementation of
this strategy had been vigorously promoted by US drug agencies, in particular
the DEA. In Mexico, with the blessing of the Calderón government, at least
sixty-two DEA agents were allowed to operate freely, with no restrictions or
reporting requirements, and to work with a network of informants that the
agency had long cultivated. Indeed, in Mexico, as in Colombia, the implementa-
tion of the kingpin strategy came to depend on the information obtained from
talks and negotiations with members of criminal organisations. Using this
information, US and Mexican agencies have been able to seize drugs and to
capture rival traffickers. According to court testimonies of informants, as well
as of Justice Department agents and some DEA officials, some of these rela-
tionships were developed through sustained and frequent contacts dating back to
the late 1990s. A prominent case concerned a Sinaloa organisation lieutenant
whose information led to at least twelve arrests and the confiscation of drug ship-
ments belonging to the Arellano Félix and the Juárez cartels. Nonetheless, it is clear
that under these arrangements criminal and violent activity has been allowed
to continue. And it is also transparently obvious that the expectation of legal
immunity and reduced sentences has encouraged informants to share infor-
mation that has indubitably fuelled brutal criminal violence. While accepting
that these arrangements are ‘deals with the devil’, many continue to defend
them on the basis of intelligence they provide such as ‘where traffickers like to
eat’ or where they may ‘sleep’. Thus ex-ambassador Myles Frechette, who
had been entrusted with the task of re-establishing extradition between the US
and Colombia, claimed success for the kingpin strategy, notwithstanding the
fact that the drug trade continues unabated. More recently, Vanda Felbab-
Brown from the Brookings Institution considered the information exchanges
with the Sinaloa cartel informant as an important intelligence coup, whereas
in the view of Eric L. Olson, based at the Woodrow Wilson Center, ‘What
makes this so hard’ is the fact that ‘the United States is using tools in a
country where officials are still uncomfortable with those tools’. However,
their permissiveness towards brutal behaviour, and their tolerance of the
criminal violence and human tragedy they often unleash, make it hard to see
how official actions can be justified (Thompson 2011; Gómora 2014).
When President Calderón rolled out his military operation for Michoacán
in December 2006, the Attorney General’s Office had identified half a dozen
68 Securitization, militarization, human rights
criminal organisations as being active. Two years later, under the pressure of
anti-narcotics policy and law enforcement, the Tijuana and Sinaloa cartels
had split into four organisations. The ripple effects of the Sinaloa–Beltrán
Leyva divorce produced at least five organisations, while the Milenio cartel
spawned at least two offspring. Towards the end of the Calderón administra-
tion the Attorney General’s Office identified twelve major organisations,
though in some states the level of fragmentation had reached unprecedented
levels: in Guerrero federal authorities estimated that at least four regional
organisations and ten local groups were fully active.
The succession of military and joint operations deployed by President Cal-
derón in early 2007 in Guerrero, Baja California, Tijuana, Chihuahua and the
Golden Triangle, and in 2008 in Tamaulipas, Nuevo León and Sinaloa, fol-
lowed by a deployment to the southern border in 2009, further fragmented the
criminal marketplace. By 2013, although the Attorney General’s Office again
identified eight major criminal organisations, its intelligence branch concluded
that their ramifications spread across eighty sub-groups with a presence in twenty-
four states. According to the PGR analysis, the Barbie cartel commanded twenty-
three sub-groups, the Arellano Félix fourteen, the Sinaloa cartel twelve of the
most powerful cells, the Familia Michoacana five cells, the Zetas three sub-groups,
the Caballeros Templarios and the New Juárez group two sub-groups each,
while the Beltran Leyva had fragmented into nineteen cells (Guerrero 2011;
PGR 2013; Flores 2013). This fragmentation also meant that these groups were
engaging in ever more predatory crime throughout the country. The combined
effect of military deployments and decapitation created a criminal nightmare of
greater proportions, with violent networks spreading ever further.
Criminal violence in various places has created pressure for military inter-
vention, in some instances requested by governors, including PRD governors
in Guerrero and Michoacán. However, it soon became evident that military
involvement had been adopted with little or no awareness of its likely impact
on criminal power balances and dynamics.
The reasoning that drove military deployment was based on two equally
questionable assumptions: that the drug cartels had to be confronted by full
military might, and that by the capture or elimination of their top leaders
they could be destroyed. If voices within the Calderón administration had
raised doubts or called attention to the potential dangers of military action,
they were clearly silenced. By contrast, the security advisors who single-
mindedly argued that ‘200 targets had been identified and that the purpose of
the campaign was precisely to eliminate them’ presumably prevailed. The
proliferation of criminal gangs and explosion of violence immediately fol-
lowing military action revealed the degree of blindness to the complexities of
tackling the drug problem within the Calderón administration.
Indeed, the Calderón government showed little grasp of the probable
repercussions of initiating a war on drugs. On the one hand, by resorting to
the rhetoric of war it inadvertently ran the risk of conferring the status and
legitimacy of belligerents to criminal actors. But more importantly, by declaring
 A humanitarian crisis in the making 69
an all-out war on drugs the government inflated the pressure to use military
force, creating in turn the expectation of a quick, decisive victory. President
Calderón’s policy turned the elimination of illicit drug transactions into a
military target, failing to understand that drug trafficking can never be wiped
out, it can only be regulated. There was certainly a security aspect to the
crisis, possibly even a military dimension, but clearly there was no military
solution to the drug problem.
Any suggestion that the best policy would be either to refrain from the use
of military force altogether or to use it ‘in the proper capacity and in a precise
and principled manner’ did not appear to find an echo within the adminis-
tration, and was possibly dismissed as a sign of weakness (Howard 2002;
Mullen 2010). The failure to understand that criminal organisations held
sway over local communities, and that traffickers were generally embedded
within the population, meant that the use of force was not considered only as
a last resort, nor were tactics aimed at protecting the population. The
accounts of military patrols and operations in cities, including Ciudad Juárez,
reveals how the simple logic of ‘going after the 200’ came face to face with
murky realities on the ground. In Ciudad Juárez, in 2008, after the military
campaign there, the homicide rate reached 1,607 violent deaths, including 175
police officers, and through the next two years the funerary business thrived.
With no clear intelligence policy, and no stated rules of engagement, military
action turned into a desperate search for drug deposits and a brutal witch-
hunt. Having been tortured into forced confessions, hundreds of young men,
many of them dealers, were then left at the mercy of a ferocious war for
criminal survival between ‘La Línea’, the armed branch of the Juárez orga-
nisation, and the Sinaloa cartel. The ripple effects of the drug war spread in
diverse ways. The head of the local police, Roberto Orduña, was forced to
resign upon the warning that every 48 hours a police agent would be killed.
Drug rehabilitation centres were stormed and forced to close. Agricultural
communities like ‘Le Barón’ felt compelled to organise self-defence units.
Notwithstanding these outcomes, in February of that year Fernando Gómez
Mont, then secretary of the interior, announced that the local, state and fed-
eral levels of government had joined forces to expel all criminals from Ciudad
Juárez (Rodríguez Nieto 2009a; 2009b; Chávez Días de León 2009; Alvarado
Alvarez 2009; Turati 2009, Lomas 2009).
The government had sought to defeat its elusive adversary by deploying
9,000 troops, the objective being to trace and detain the enemy as quickly as
possible with little or no concern for the impact on the civilian population.
The absence of clear rules of engagement and a lack of clarity over the use of
firepower in military operations meant that a significant number of civilians was
bound to be affected. Moreover, the fluidity of the violence and its multi-
farious sources meant that it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to identify
who was criminal or non-criminal and thus to establish the non-combatant
status of hundreds of innocent citizens (Strachan and Scheipers 2011; Roberts
2011). If the objective was the total defeat of a criminal enemy, the chances of
70 Securitization, militarization, human rights
civilians being wrongly identified as complicit and thus becoming military
targets clearly increased. As the stories described in the tragic vignettes
included in La guerra por Juárez (Páez Varela 2009) make clear, in the eyes of
the citizens of Ciudad Juárez ‘Operación Conjunta Chihuahua’ was never
designed to use force in a ‘precise and principled’ way so as to protect them
from criminal violence or to diminish the traffickers’ influence over their lives.
On the contrary, it was unrolled blindly with the single and preposterous
objective of re-taking ground, what the administration called ‘public space’.
The result was an undermining of the government’s moral authority each
time a civilian was abused or harmed by its forces.

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3 Effects of militarization in the name
of counter-narcotics efforts and
consequences for human rights
in Mexico
Laura Carlsen

In 2014, the alarming number of massacres and disappearances of civilians by

members of Mexico’s police and armed forces in the context of the drug war
began to reveal an undeniable pattern. Although international human rights
organizations had expressed grave concern over the increase in extrajudicial
executions and torture by security forces since the beginning of the drug war
in December of 2006, the killings in Tlatlaya in 2014, and Apatzingan,
Tanuhato and Calera in 2015, along with the internationally infamous case of
the disappearance of forty-three Ayotzinapa teaching college students by police,
made it clear that such cases were not isolated incidents (Castellanos, L. 2015;
Riva Palacio 2015; Espinosa 2015; Carlsen 2014). The pattern that emerged
clearly showed that human rights violations are a strategic and structural
part of Mexico’s security policy, supported and shared by the United States
government under the cloak of the war on drugs.
The two cases that created the tipping point in exposing the government’s sys-
tematic, deliberate infringements of human rights took place within six months of
each other. In the pre-dawn hours of 30 June 2014 eight soldiers of the 102nd Army
Battalion attacked a warehouse in the municipality of Tlatlaya, Mexico State.
Witnesses claimed the military unit had opened fire on the occupants of the
warehouse while they were sleeping. The National Human Rights Commission
found that, although the people in the warehouse had surrendered immediately, the
soldiers had executed at least twelve to fifteen of the twenty-two dead. The soldiers
had then altered the scene of the crime to make it look like a confrontation,
moving the bodies and placing arms in the hands of the victims.
Investigations by journalists first revealed what happened at Tlatlaya, after
the Defence Ministry had released a brief note stating that twenty-two delin-
quents had been killed in a confrontation, with no injuries received by the
soldiers. Mario Patrón, director of the Centro Pro Human Rights that repre-
sents one of the survivors, called the case ‘the second worst violation in con-
temporary Mexico’ (Patrón 2015). The group discovered an order from army
officials to carry out ‘nocturnal rounds to take out delinquents’. The human
rights experts considered this a direct order to kill suspected criminals under
the cloak of darkness (ABC 2015). Although seven soldiers were arrested for
the crime, all were subsequently released and the senior officials responsible
 Militarization and human rights 77
for the order have not been investigated. Several soldiers have also been
charged with torturing the three women witnesses (BBC 2015). Two witnesses
were held in prison for five months before being released owing to a lack of
evidence (Associated Press 2014). Patrón noted that the case demonstrates
that human rights violations in Mexico are ‘structural and systemic’ (Ordaz
2016) and that Mexico is living through an undeclared war.
Less than three months later, municipal police in Iguala and a masked
commando attacked buses of students from the teachers’ college of Ayotzi-
napa. The attacks of 26–27 September left six dead and forty-three students
disappeared. The federal government at first ignored the crime, then attempted
to pin all blame on the mayor in cahoots with a local criminal gang (Carlsen
2015). An independent investigation by a group of experts from the Inter-
American Commission on Human Rights found that the attacks had been
coordinated among several government agencies, with the direct participation
of at least the federal, state and municipal police, and a criminal organiza-
tion. The report also established the presence of the Mexican Army at the
scene of the crime (Carlsen 2016). The experts’ analysis destroyed the official
explanation that the students had been handed over to organized crime and
incinerated at the local dump, claiming this was physically impossible. At the
presentation of their second and final report on 24 April 2016, they criticized
the government both for obstructing their investigation into the possible use
of torture and for the suppression and destruction of evidence (GIEI 2016).

A human rights crisis

By 2015 a national and international consensus had emerged that Mexico
faced a human rights crisis. Today the commonplace use of violence, viola-
tions and firepower to attack drug cartels in the context of a militarized drug
war has had disastrous effects on public safety, human rights and daily life.
Following the government’s intensification of the drug war, Mexico racked up
more than 164,000 homicides between 2007 and 2014, with a homicide rate of
over 20,000 each year – in stark contrast to the figure of 8,867 in the year
preceding the drug war (Heinle, Molzahn and Shirk 2015).
The United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al
Hussein, recognized the systematic violation of human rights in a statement
following his visit in October of 2015:

For a country that is not engaged in a conflict, the estimated figures are
simply staggering: 151,233 people killed between December 2006 and
August 2015, including thousands of transiting migrants. At least 26,000
people missing, many believed to be as a result of enforced dis-
appearances, since 2007. Thousands of women and girls are sexually
assaulted, or become victims of the crime of femicide. And hardly anyone
is convicted for the above crimes.
(Al Hussein 2015)
78 Securitization, militarization, human rights
The High Commissioner noted that while organized crime contributes to the
violence:

many enforced disappearances, acts of torture and extra-judicial killings are

alleged to have been carried out by federal, state and municipal autho-
rities, including the police and some segments of the army, either acting
in their own interests or in collusion with organized criminal groups.
(Al Hussein 2015)

Al Hussein’s statement came on the heels of an even more devastating report

from a delegation of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
(IACHR) of the Organization of American States just days before:

The Inter-American Commission has been able to confirm on the ground

the serious human rights crisis Mexico is experiencing, which is character-
ized by a situation of extreme insecurity and violence; serious human
rights violations, especially forced disappearances, extrajudicial executions,
and torture; critical levels of impunity; and inadequate and insufficient
attention to victims and their families.
(OAS 2015b)

The IACHR declaration went beyond the UN in that it listed the discriminatory
and politically targeted nature of the violations:

The effect of the violence and the violations of fundamental rights is

especially serious and disproportional for persons in a situation of pov-
erty, migrants, asylum-seekers, refugees and internally displaced persons,
women, children, and adolescents, human rights defenders, journalists,
indigenous peoples, lesbians, gay, bisexual and trans persons (LGBTI),
among others.
(OAS 2015b)

Amnesty International’s September 2015 report on torture in Mexico notes

that the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) received more than
7,741 complaints of torture and ill treatment between 2010 and 2014 (Amnesty
International, 2015). This number is universally considered unrepresentative
of the real occurrence of violations, given that most go unreported. The Mex-
ican government claims there have been seven verdicts in respect of complaints
in the period 2005–2012. Analysing this data, Amnesty International con-
cludes that ‘[r]eports of torture and other ill-treatment increased as violence
spiraled in Mexico after 2006, as a result of the government’s “war on drugs”’.
Juan Méndez, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Torture, calls the
incidence of torture in the country during this period ‘an epidemic’.
The massacre of seventy-two migrants in San Fernando, Tamaulipas and
the subsequent discovery of more than a hundred persons assumed to be
 Militarization and human rights 79
migrants in clandestine graves in the same area, brought international attention
to the impact of Mexico’s human rights crisis on migrants and refugees. Since
homicide rates began soaring with the war on drugs and as the militarization of
borders intensified (see below), so did violence against migrants. A 2013 Orga-
nization of American States (OAS) report on the rights of ‘migrants in an irregular
situation’ in Mexico listed serious forms of discrimination and violence, including
beatings and murder by security agents and organized crime, robbery and extor-
tion, kidnapping, human trafficking, disappearance, sexual violence, violation of
children’s rights, violation of the right to asylum, abuse of authority, lack of
access to justice, and impunity (Navarro and Gordon 2013).
Rising violence against journalists has put them at risk and led to viola-
tions of freedom of expression and the right to information. In 2015 alone,
seven journalists were murdered. The watchdog group Article 19 reports that
there is an attack on a journalist every 22 hours (Mioli 2016). Reporters
Without Borders ranks the nation extremely low in its Press Freedom Index
at 149th out of 180 countries (Reporters Without Borders 2016). In many of
the attacks on journalists, agents of the state are suspected of being the per-
petrators; Mexico is ranked sixth in the world for the number of journalists
killed while covering corruption (Radsch 2016). Human rights defenders also
suffer the brunt of repression in the line of duty. A 2013 UN report docu-
mented twenty-two defenders killed and six disappeared between 2006 and
2012, and eighty-nine attacks on defenders between January 2010 and
December 2012. The Mesoamerican Women Human Rights Defenders initia-
tive registered 616 attacks on WHRD in 2012–2014, noting that women face
gender-specific threats including sexual violence and discrimination and that
current gender-blind mechanisms of protection are insufficient (López and
Vidal 2014). For LGBTI and indigenous people, discrimination and inequality
exacerbate the threats, multiply the attacks and reduce access to justice.
Even more seriously, the IACHR report attributes much of the violence
against these groups to intentional repression:

Violence against families of victims, human rights defenders and journalists is

carried out with the aim of silencing complaints and calls for truth and
justice, and perpetuating impunity for gross human rights violations. The
violence and harassment seek to silence the voices that Mexico most needs.

With the systematic violation of the human rights of journalists, human rights
defenders and victims, it becomes increasingly difficult to break the cycle of
violence and abuse.

Impunity and generalized violence

The Permanent People’s Tribunal on Mexico, an international tribunal of
conscience that has concluded five years of investigation, stated in its
November 2014 report:
80 Securitization, militarization, human rights
[i]n this reign of impunity that is Mexico today, there are murders without
murderers, torture without torturers, sexual violence without abusers, in a
permanent deviation of responsibility in which it would seem that thou-
sands and thousands of massacres, assassinations and systematic viola-
tions to rights of the people are always isolated incidents or marginal
situations and not true crimes in which the State has responsibility.
(Permanent People’s Tribunal 2014)

Both the UN and IACHR 2015 reports, and virtually every report put out in
the past decade by national human rights organizations, find that impunity
lies at the base of this human rights crisis. The IACHR states that:

[t]he lack of access to justice has created a situation of structural impunity

that perpetuates and in some cases encourages the repetition of serious
human rights violations. The threats, harassment, killings, and disappearance
of persons who seek truth and justice have had a chilling effect on Mexican
society, which leads to serious underreporting in official statistics.

The UNHCHR cited the now well known, but no less shocking assessment
that 98 per cent of crimes committed in Mexico go unpunished (Latin American
Herald Times 2016).
These reports were a formal recognition of the crisis rather than an announce-
ment of anything Mexicans did not already know. For years, Mexican pre-
sidents and cabinet members had convinced international bodies that Mexico
was a leader in its respect for human rights. The government had signed up to
standards and protocols, established special mechanisms and prosecutors, and
revised legal frameworks according to international prescriptions. The result
was that the gap between respect for human rights on paper and respect for
human rights in practice grew ever wider.
The IACHR has also recognized the distance between prescriptions and
reality. After referring to gains by the Mexican government in formal adherence
to international standards, it wrote:

the Inter-American Commission confirmed the profound gap between the

legislative and judicial framework, and the daily reality that millions of
people in the country experience. Again and again, throughout the
country, the Commission heard from victims that the process of justice is
a ‘simulation’.
(OAS 2015b)

Ayotzinapa and Tlatlaya exposed this gap. It was not just that the crimes were
too blatant to be ignored. It was also, and primarily, that they were shocking
enough to crack through the apathy of a population that had become
inured to violence. Journalists were exposing the truth, despite severe per-
sonal risks. Hundreds of thousands of people mobilized and marched.
 Militarization and human rights 81
International organizations pressured the Mexican government to tell the
truth. Mexico’s human rights crisis as a public phenomenon is the result of a
combination of the deteriorating human rights situation and the rising
awareness and actions of a society that has concluded that the situation can
no longer be tolerated.
The Mexican government’s response to criticism of its human rights record
has entailed even more violations of human rights. Following the release of
the 2015 IACHR report, the Peña Nieto administration launched a series of
carefully placed news items in a coordinated campaign to denigrate the Inter-
American Commission and insult its members, particularly the Executive
Secretary, the Mexican human rights defender Emilio Álvarez Icaza (Ramírez
2015). This was not the first time that the Mexican government had rejected
an international human rights report and responded with personal attacks.
The report of the Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Méndez, was met with
official statements from the Mexican diplomatic corps calling him ‘unprofes-
sional and lacking ethics’. Later, when the Group of Experts assigned to
investigate the Ayotzinapa case determined that the government’s version was
physically impossible (GIEI 2016), a rash of articles and statements from
government officials attacking its female members in particular hit the press
(Ahmed and Villegas 2016).
The Peña Nieto government has reacted to mounting criticism of its human
rights record with frustration that its carefully crafted image is being shat-
tered. Increasingly, governmental responses have shown signs of defensiveness
and the authoritarianism that have historically characterized one-party rule under
the PRI. In addition to their painting a grim picture of widespread violations,
what really raised the ire of the Peña administration in the international
human rights reports was the word ‘generalized’. The IACHR concluded:

The state of Guerrero, one of the states of the country with the highest
rate of poverty, not only has experienced one of the most tragic events in
the recent history of the country with the disappearance of the 43 stu-
dents, but in the process of their search, clandestine graves were dis-
covered with the remains of 129 persons, most still unidentified, and
families have reported that 450 persons have been disappeared since 2008
alone in this state. This shows that disappearances are generalized in
Mexico and that the tragedy of Ayotzinapa is not an isolated case.
(OAS 2015a)

The Commission repeated the word ‘generalized’ with regard to torture,

echoing the previous report by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan
Méndez, of March 2015 (Méndez 2015): ‘The IACHR confirmed in its visit
that the other serious problem is … the generalized use of torture and cruel,
inhuman and degrading treatment during the moments that follow arrest of a
person and before being tried’. As long as each incident could be treated as
an isolated case, the government could claim to be investigating and
82 Securitization, militarization, human rights
prosecuting the specific case and avoid a more ‘generalized’ questioning of its
actions. When the pattern of government abuses of human rights emerged,
the notion of the government protecting the people against criminal elements
both within and without the country lost credibility among the population
and the international community (México Unido Contra la Delincuencia
2015). At the release of the report, Roberto Campa, Under-Secretary of
Human Rights, held a press conference stating, ‘[t]his preliminary document
does not reflect the situation of the country’. Clearly irate, he added, ‘by any
standard, the case of Ayotzinapa is an extraordinary situation; we do not
think it can be compared to any other in the country, and far less assert that
it’s a generalized situation’ (Milenio 2015). Later, as victims’ groups began to
register and reveal the extent of the problem and the sheer numbers of the
disappeared, it became undeniable that Ayotzinapa was the tip of an iceberg.

The drug war and erosion of human rights

The ‘generalized’ pattern unmasked a fundamental paradox: the Mexico–US
drug war’s supposed effort to enforce the rule of law, by militarily occupying
territory where organized crime operates and taking out kingpins, has led to
the massive erosion of the rule of law and a rapid deterioration in public
safety. The strategy of militarization and confrontation has triggered wide-
spread conflict and is a direct cause of the unprecedented human rights crisis
in Mexico today.
The rise in human rights violations can be traced directly to the war on
drugs model (Carlsen 2012). Then-president Felipe Calderón launched the
war on drugs in December 2006, shortly after he had taken power in an
election widely viewed as marred by fraud. Calderón deployed police and
armed forces to attack drug cartels directly, setting off a series of events that
has seemed unstoppable. When the armed forces were sent into Mexican
communities, the number of human rights complaints against the army and
navy rose and extrajudicial executions correspondingly increased.
Two causes, both compounded by the corruption and impunity that
permeate Mexican society, explain the explosion of violence that followed the
launch of the drug war. The first is the use of the armed forces. The armed
forces are trained to combat an enemy and, unlike the police, have not been
trained to make arrests, investigate and prosecute criminal wrongdoing.
The second is the kingpin strategy. The US Drug Enforcement Adminis-
tration’s kingpin strategy, applied with disastrous results in Mexico, focuses
on removing drug lords, either through incarceration or assassination, in order
to dismantle organized criminal gangs. Taking out capos has immediately pro-
voked battles for succession and turf wars between cartels, some of which can
last for years until one or the other gains control of a route or production
zone. The cartels’ response is never to back off; with an illegal market worth
billions of dollars a year, there are always numerous employees eager to fill
newly vacant senior positions. Sometimes the original cartel simply replaces
 Militarization and human rights 83
its leader. In other cases it may splinter into smaller criminal organizations,
which generally causes even greater levels of violence. Either way, the overall
flow of illegal drugs and the presence of cartel activity in the country continue
unabated. In Mexico, the kingpin strategy has clearly had a negative effect on
public safety, as government intervention often results in territory and traf-
ficking routes becoming available as capos are assassinated or imprisoned.
Accusations abound that Mexican security forces side with one cartel against
another to facilitate rather than eliminate the flow of prohibited drugs. The
massive internal displacement caused by militarization and the inevitable
conflict that results from the strategy indicates that an unspoken objective is
to depopulate areas coveted for resource development. This is the NAFTA
link that binds the US and Mexican governments in a drug war that mili-
tarizes a nation where there is both significant transnational investment and
considerable local opposition.
Mexico’s drug war follows the pattern established in Colombia of dis-
placement of small farms and communities and the immediate incursion of
transnational corporations in search of land and resources. A recent report by
the Pro Center states:

the militarization of public security continues. Moreover, the deployment

of military units in various places responds to the government’s and the
private sector’s interest in guarding areas of natural resources for exploi-
tation by transnational companies, a role that was announced with the
creation of the National Gendarmerie. In this context, and in light of the
patterns of military abuses documented in the past years, it is worth noting
that spending on public relations and advertising in 2013 by the Secretary
of Defence was 22,900% of that of 2004, and 10,000% for the Navy.
(Centro Miguel Agustin 2015)

The UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions, Christof Heyns,

reported in a visit of June 2016, three years after his previous fact-finding
mission to Mexico, that extrajudicial executions, rape and sexual abuse and
excessive use of force by the armed forces have become commonplace. He
noted that the government had made little progress in implementing the
recommendations of his earlier report, in particular, the recommendation to
withdraw the Army from tasks of public security and leave them in the hands
of civilian forces (Tourliere 2016).
The impact on the population especially in ‘hot’ areas where cartels dispute
a trafficking area has been devastating. The IACHR experts recognized the
pattern:

The militarization of citizen security, attributing to the armed forces roles

that correspond to civil police forces, as well as a policy of confrontation
against organized crime and the deployment of joint operations between the
armed forces and state and local security institutions in different parts of the
84 Securitization, militarization, human rights
country, has resulted in an increase of violence and violations of human rights,
and greater levels of impunity. The IACHR considers it indispensable
that the federal government present a specific plan in writing for the gradual
withdrawal from these tasks that by their nature correspond to the police.
(OAS 2015a)

President Peña Nieto has repeatedly responded to these observations by stating

that the Constitution grants him the power to deploy the army in anti-crime
activities and he will continue to do so.
Victims’ organizations have pointed to the relationship between the war on
drugs, militarization, and violence and human rights abuses for years. When the
poet Javier Sicilia founded the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity
after the murder of his son in 2011, a shift in public perception took place.
Rather than attributing all violence and crime to drug cartels and criminal
groups, the public recognized the structural role of the state itself. With the
army and the police in the streets of cities and communities, people began to
register abuses and report them. The National Human Rights Commission
(CNDH) has received more than 9,000 complaints of human rights violations
by the armed forces since 2006 and found serious violations in more than a
hundred cases (Human Rights Watch 2016). Moreover, victims’ families
seeking justice have come face to face with numerous instances of corruption
and collusion between the security forces and public ministries charged with
investigation and prosecution, and the criminals themselves, putting them at
grave risk in a process that was dubbed ‘re-victimization’.
Again, it has become clear that the complicity with criminals and corruption
were not ‘isolated cases’ that could be eradicated. Nearly ten years have gone by
since Calderón began police and armed forces vetting programmes, funded by the
US Mérida Initiative. Despite massive firings of corrupt individuals, corrup-
tion continues and a general perception exists that the situation is as bad or
worse than before the US and Mexican governments spent millions of dollars
on supposed reform programmes. The problem at heart is a lack of political will.
The government – municipal, state and federal – is riddled with corruption and
closes ranks around its members who are exposed as complicit or corrupt.
The dirty money provided by the illegal businesses of organized crime finds its
way into government officials’ and policemen’s pockets, political campaigns,
front businesses and a vast social network that sustains the status quo.

Militarization NAFTA-style
The militarization of Mexico under the drug war has its roots not in a sudden
surge of drug cartel activity, but in the North American Free Trade Agree-
ment (NAFTA). The US strategy of ‘pushing out its borders’ to encompass its
North American partners in an economic and security region originated with
NAFTA. NAFTA proposed and created a regional trade and investment area
between Canada, the United States and Mexico by reducing tariffs, and
 Militarization and human rights 85
investment and transportation barriers. Mexico became the global laboratory
of free trade when the historic agreement came into effect on 1 January 1994.
NAFTA represented the first time a major developing country had entered
into such an agreement with a superpower. Proponents of what represented the
most severe free trade model in modern history promised increased prosperity,
security and an end to the flow of impoverished Mexican workers and farmers
to the United States as undocumented migrants (US State Department).
After the 9/11 attacks, NAFTA became a pillar of the Bush Doctrine for
the Western Hemisphere. The Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP)
emerged out of NAFTA as an agreement between the three presidents in 2005.
By expanding the regional trade agreement into a security pact, the Bush
administration sought to extend its national security doctrine into the terri-
tories of its regional trade partners. This meant that both Canada and Mexico
were to assume counter-terrorism activities (despite the absence of interna-
tional terrorist threats in those nations), border security (in Mexico’s case, to
control Central American migrants), and protection of strategic resources and
investments. Assistant Secretary of State Tom Shannon called it ‘armoring
NAFTA’ (Carlsen 2008b).
In 2007, then-president George Bush announced the Mérida Initiative, a
three-year plan to support Mexico’s new war on drugs (US Department of
State 2016). The Mérida Initiative billed itself originally as ‘a counter-
narcotics, counterterrorism, and border security initiative’, but, given the
absence of international terrorism in the region or security threats from
Guatemala or Belize, the counter-narcotics component became the initiative’s
central feature after Calderón declared the war on drugs. Even so, both
counterterrorism and southern border programmes were still funded by the
plan, as discussed below.
A common misconception is that the Mérida Initiative, named after a
meeting between presidents Calderón and Bush in the city of Mérida on
Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula, originated when Calderón requested assistance
in the drug war from the US government and Bush agreed to help. In fact,
Plan México, as it was first called, is the practical embodiment of the 2005
SPP and the policy of extending the perimeter of the US homeland security
area to the Mexico–Guatemala border (Carlsen 2009). The Bush announce-
ment of the three-year Mérida Initiative in October of 2007 extended US
military intervention in Mexico from this base. Under Mexican law, US mili-
tary personnel cannot operate in Mexican territory; however, the plan has
significantly increased the presence of US agents and intelligence services, US
private security companies, and ‘retired’ military officers throughout Mexico,
providing extensive police and military training for Mexican agencies both
within the country and in the United States.
Both governments’ strategy is in many senses proving far more destructive
than the purported enemy. Several core concepts within the drug war model
ensure that human rights violations will grow and Mexicans will continue to
die and disappear as long as the current policy continues. The first and most
86 Securitization, militarization, human rights
important of its aims is that the US and Mexican governments should prior-
itize halting the flow of prohibited drugs to the US market over security and
public safety. Both governments have attempted to convince the public of the
need for a drug war despite the social costs. In Mexico this has been unsuc-
cessful: polls show that over half the population does not believe the drug war
strategy is working (Consulta Mitofsky 2015). In the United States a combi-
nation of secrecy, fear, special interests and racism have so far inhibited a
broader movement to stop sending taxpayer dollars to fight the war on drugs
in Mexico. The economic interests behind the lobby to extend the Mérida
Initiative include the Pentagon, defence, and security and intelligence companies,
as well as the ‘soft’ drug war lobby of the NGOs, professional associations
and others who receive ‘institution-building’ contracts.
The narrow focus on Mexico as a security threat and a proxy for a US
national security agenda has led to a number of blind spots in the bilateral
relationship. One of the gravest to emerge in recent years has been the
absence of human rights concerns in the midst of a human rights crisis in
Mexico. The controversial and possibly illegal use of the army in maintaining
public safety; the use of military courts to try human rights violations against
civilians; torture and violence used as military and police practice for inter-
rogation; the lack of justice; attacks on opposition leaders and human rights
defenders; increased gender-based violence, and killings of civilians at mili-
tary checkpoints all contribute to this crisis. The State Department’s silence
on these issues and on the correlation between the drug war’s use of Mexico’s
security forces and the increase in human rights violations undermines the
argument that the drug war is an effort to reinforce the rule of law and
strengthen society, and demands a thorough review and reorientation of the
strategy by Congress.
Under this joint strategy, the borders have been particularly affected. The
northern border where drugs pass into the US market has been disputed ter-
ritory ever since the drug war turned the fight against illegal drug trafficking
into a turf war. Since the rise in the number of unaccompanied minors arriv-
ing from Central America to request asylum in the United States in the
summer of 2014, the US government has promoted the militarization of
Mexico’s southern border to prevent the entry of Central American migrants
and refugees fleeing to the United States. The Mérida Initiative in 2015
included $75 million for security measures, in this case anti-immigration
measures, on the Mexico–Guatemala border. The presence of armed forces
and additional police in the border region has caused human rights violations
to soar. On a single day in July 2015, one shelter in Tapachula that housed
about thirty migrants held four Central American women who related accounts
of their rape by Mexican security forces. The combination of armed power,
impunity and machismo has proved deadly to many migrant women. Human
rights groups on the southern border report that militarization is being
extended increasingly further inward from the frontier, noting that military
checkpoints have been installed up to 300 km from the border itself. The
 Militarization and human rights 87
result of having extensive military forces and other types of security agents in
the area has been devastating to the population and the migrants in terms of
human rights violations. In the first year of the southern border plan, border
states reported an increase of 90 per cent in human trafficking and extortion
and 81 per cent in robbery, and a rise in attacks on and kidnapping of
migrants (Ureate 2015). In addition, the right to asylum and refugee status is
being systematically denied. An ACNUR study found that more than half of
Central American migrants interviewed were fleeing severe violence and had a
case for refugee status. Instead, in Mexico, even the children are being sent
back to danger: in 2015, Mexico apprehended more than 35,704 children
from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, up 55 per cent from 2014 and
more than double the 2013 level (Lakhani 2016).
Militarization of the drug war rose to a new level when the Northern
Command created a Mexican Special Command and began training the
Mexican military in Iraq-style tactics (Dozier 2013). A report of 17 January
2013 by the Associated Press revealed that:

The Pentagon is stepping up aid for Mexico’s bloody drug war with a
new U.S.-based special operations headquarters to teach Mexican secur-
ity forces how to hunt drug cartels the same way special operations teams
hunt al-Qaida, according to documents and interviews with multiple U.S.
officials.

Mexican military leaders were even taken on a field trip to Iraq to train and
see the tactics on the ground. These strategies of occupation have effectively
converted a battle against illicit drug flows into an all-out war for territory in
Mexico, as the cartels have been set to fight against each other and to look for
ways to squeeze ever more earnings out of the lands they control.

Defining militarization
The term ‘militarization’ is not as straightforward as it may seem in this
context. A careful analysis of militarization explains in part the contradiction
in Mexico of rising lawlessness in the context of a major binational ‘law
enforcement’ effort.
Militarization is the cornerstone of Mexico’s counter-narcotics programme.
The largest deployment since the ‘dirty war’ of the 1980s began in December
2006 with the deployment of 45,000 soldiers into communities and cities
throughout Mexico to fight the war on drugs. It was not the first time that this
had happened in the country, but it was the first time it had happened on
this scale.
There is an ongoing debate among legal experts as to whether the Mexican
Constitution permits this type of deployment. Like most constitutions in the
world, Mexico’s generally prohibits the use of armed forces in domestic security
tasks except under specific situations and conditions, such as a state of emergency.
88 Securitization, militarization, human rights
A state of emergency, which entails the suspension of some civil liberties, has
not been proclaimed in Mexico because it would affect the image of stability
that the government cultivates so as to remain in good standing both in
global ratings and with investors. Thus, Mexico’s drug war is carried on under
the pall of a constitutional argument that has never been resolved.
Despite its questionable legality under the Mexican Constitution, use of the
Mexican armed forces in the drug war was immediately encouraged by the
US government through the Mérida Initiative. In its early years, the Mérida
Initiative was dominated by direct military aid in the form of expensive
equipment such as helicopters and light planes that also provided lucrative
contracts to US defence manufacturers (Carlsen 2008a). As Mexico’s security
budget also climbed, the Army was equipped to become a domestic crime-
fighter, essentially launching attacks against its own people (Telesur 2016a).
Later, the US government, and particularly the Pentagon, instituted a policy
to include and favour the Mexican Navy as more trustworthy than the Mex-
ican Army. In fact, within the army there were strong elements which
opposed participation in the war on drugs. For years controversy went on
internally, until March 2016 when the Secretary of Defence, General Salva-
dor, publicly stated that the army’s involvement in the war on drugs was an
error (Guevara 2016). ‘Sure, we’ve made mistakes’, he told the press:

and one of those was when we entered fully into the war on drugs … we
shunted them (the police) aside and we ended up with a problem that
wasn’t ours … We’re soldiers, trained for war and we’re taken out to
confront delinquents that aren’t exactly combatants, and the difference in
training in the army and the lack of training of the delinquents has meant
we have serious problems.

When asked if the Army should be patrolling the streets, he replied:

I am of the opinion that the army is not designed for the tasks it’s doing
today. None of us who are in positions of responsibility in the institution
were trained to do police work – we don’t do it, we don’t like it, we aren’t
comfortable with that role.

He concluded saying that he recognized that the Army had to play the role
because there was no one else to do it ‘and it’s an order from the president’.
This astounding admission should have sparked a national debate on the
role of the army in the drug war. Already scores of international human
rights organizations have recommended the withdrawal of the army from
domestic policing, not only as a general rule but also because of the massive
human rights violations the practice has incurred in Mexico. But the use of
the armed forces with US support under the Mérida Initiative has blurred the
line between police and military. Not only does the military perform and
supplant police functions, police forces have themselves become increasingly
 Militarization and human rights 89
militarized, receiving army-style equipment as part of the war on drugs and
often commanded by military or ex-military personnel. For this reason, it is
imperative to understand ‘militarization’ as a model based on armed confronta-
tion with drug cartels as a foreign enemy, rather than the narrow definition of
army troops on the streets.
In this muddled context, many aspects of militarization go beyond count-
ing soldiers. Experts looking at Mexico and other countries have rightly
incorporated into the definition of militarization ‘the relative empowerment
of the military as an actor in domestic security issues and the militarization of
non-military security forces and institutions (Velasco 2005). They add other
criteria, including: military personnel in powerful positions (Guatemala),
military as police officers, use of military knowledge and equipment (police in
the US and Mexico) leading to an ‘institutional hybridization’, and the coercive
institutional influence of non-military security stakeholders.
Mexico has all the characteristics of this broader definition: police forces
commanded by military officials, militarized police, military training such as
the NorthCom Special Forces training, army checkpoints and involvement in
daily life. The theorists above note that ‘when coupled with weak civilian
institutions, especially where military justice is concerned, security forces
become abusive, including committing selective crimes against civilians,
extrajudicial executions and outlaw activities such as the creation of para-
military groups’, all of which we have seen repeatedly in Mexico. Many
Mexican communities are patrolled solely by the military, which has com-
pletely taken over from the police. In Guerrero, particularly following the
Iguala case (Rubido 2014), and in the state of Michoacán (Castellanos, F. J.
2015), municipal police forces have been disbanded following charges of cor-
ruption and taken over directly by the military – a role that violates the con-
cept of a civilian state. There are now military checkpoints throughout the
country and scores of military outposts.
This broadening of the definition of militarization has direct policy impli-
cations. In the debate on the Mérida Initiative and the drug war in Mexico,
some Washington NGOs have stressed decreasing direct military funding or
supporting the police rather than the armed forces. However, with the line
between the two often indiscernible and all security forces enveloped in a
militarized ‘war’ strategy, to support the men in blue over the men in green
does little to demilitarize the current model. While it is absolutely necessary
to remove the armed forces from domestic security tasks – numerous groups
from the United Nations to the Guerrero Truth Commission have made this
recommendation as an essential part of restoring peace and justice in the
country – it is not sufficient. The drug war model mandates militarization of
the conflict, whether by armed forces or police.
Studies of this broadly defined militarization conclude that:

Militarization alters the balance between civilian control and military

authorities, increasing the influence of the latter and weakening civilian
90 Securitization, militarization, human rights
control. It also interferes with the day-to-day life of common people, thus
limiting the freedom of the ‘public sphere’. By doing so, it tends to
undermine both accountability and the democratic rule of law.
(Velasco 2005)

Mexico is a classic example of how militarization increases the repressive

power of the state, not just against criminals, but also against citizens. This is
especially true in Mexico, a state with weak democratic institutions, an
authoritarian past that has yet to be overcome, and a history of the routine
use of repression against dissidents and opposition groups. Military and
police repression of social movements, as in Nochixtlán in 2016 (Telesur
2016b), the intimidation and even elimination of dissidents and reports of what
is euphemistically termed ‘social cleansing’ – the clandestine extermination of
individuals or groups considered undesirable – have risen.
Militarization can be used to underpin non-democratic civilian regimes, as
in the case of Mexico. One study concludes that, ‘the military power could
play a decisive role as a pillar of stability in a highly defective democracy with
very poor social and economic performance’ (Morales Rosas and Pérez
Ricart 2013). In Latin America, military forces have been used repeatedly to
impose unpopular economic measures of privatization, neoliberal develop-
ment and loss of labour and land rights. Mexico, not coincidentally, is facing
those impositions now. The Fray Matías de Córdova Human Rights Center
in Tapachula posits that the militarized drug war strategy of the United States
‘is supported by the Mexican and Central American political and business
elite because it serves as an excuse to militarize territory and expand extractive
projects’ (Regeneración 2015).
The deployment of the armed forces in domestic policing throughout the
national territory has accustomed people to the sight of soldiers with artillery
in marketplaces. The cartels themselves have taken on more military-style
behaviour and tactics as the war becomes increasingly territorial and they
have been forced to fight among themselves in a more hostile and more
heavily armed environment since the state’s declaration of war on organized
crime. The battle for territorial control and greater competition has not only
led to a rise in extortion, kidnapping, etc.; it also imposes the same ‘might
makes right’ concept of physical force and violence that characterizes the
military. In this very patriarchal context, violence against everyone, but espe-
cially against women, has increased significantly. Militarist concepts of force
undermine the rule of law, particularly in a context in which army officers
believe they can shoot suspects on sight because they are stronger and
because such a belief dehumanizes all suspects.

Human rights on hold

Drug war militarization has placed human rights on hold under the pretext of
enforcing the rule of law. In a letter sent to then US president Obama and the
 Militarization and human rights 91
region’s other presidents, over 145 civil society organizations in Central
America identified US policies that ‘promote militarization to address organized
crime’. These policies, the letter states, have resulted only in a:

dramatic surge in violent crime, often apparently perpetrated by security

forces themselves. Human rights abuses against our families and com-
munities are, in many cases, directly attributable to failed and counter-
productive security policies that have militarized our societies in the name
of the ‘war on drugs’.
(Mesoamerican Working Group 2015)

The chilling reality is that the majority of US security assistance flowing to

Mexico and Central America is going to police and military forces that only
two decades ago were engaged in horrifying acts of killing and torture against
political opponents and indigenous communities. The drug war has always
had a cosy relationship with local repression, national counterinsurgency
efforts and geopolitical goals. In Mexico, where the armed forces have been
involved in violations of human rights and crimes against humanity as severe
as assassination of dissidents and forced disappearances, the government’s use
of US aid to strengthen their hand and advance the deployment of the military
against its own people under the guise of the drug war violates international
principles and constitutes a huge threat to local populations as well as to
regional stability.

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Part II
The public sphere and the press
under siege
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4 Violence, co-optation and corruption
Risks for the exercise of journalism and
freedom of expression in Mexico
Armando Rodríguez Luna

Introduction
Freedom of expression is a cornerstone of democratic society and essential for
the formation of an informed public opinion. A society that is not well
informed is never totally free. In this context, the work of the journalist can
provoke political debate by putting important information into the public arena.
In Mexico this can be very dangerous, particularly at the local level, in the
states and the municipalities. Many journalists are unaware of their work’s
social importance and resist both training and professionalisation. This in turn
negatively affects those who practise journalism with professionalism, rigour
and quality. Poor salaries and contracts continue to hamper efficient and
uncorrupted reporting.
Most journalists do not produce high-quality reporting and analysis but
merely reproduce or synthesise governmental information provided to them in
the form of news bulletins compiled by public officials. In many senses, little
has changed since the 1970s, when Renato Leduc condemned Mexican jour-
nalists as boletineros whose only job was to ‘collect a press bulletin accom-
panied by an envelope [of money]’ (Garambella 1982: 67). Nonetheless, even
these journalists are vulnerable, either through naivety or corruption, falling
foul of local politicians, media owners and managers, publicity agencies,
businessmen, political parties, government officials, and criminal groups.
Writing up the wrong bulletin can have terrible consequences. These dynamics
also affect the few independent and professional journalists. The notion that
journalists should simply repeat information they are given in return for cash-
stuffed envelopes or soft benefits permeates local politics and means that
those who do not toe the line are not only highly visible, but often punished.
The categories of risks for journalists are much the same throughout
Mexico (Shoemaker and Reese 1991; Relly and González de Bustamante
2013). On the one hand, there are ‘external risks’, such as those beyond the
journalist’s direct experience, but which still have important effects. These can
be divided into four categories. First, most journalists are employed on pre-
carious contracts. For example, Gregorio Jiménez, the Veracruz journalist
murdered in 2014, received 20 pesos (US$1.30) per story (Díaz 2014). Second,
98 The public sphere and the press under siege
working without a contract means many journalists lack basic social benefits
like medical coverage and pension schemes. Third, despite advances in human
rights legislation, there is still a lack of laws and institutions which specialise
in defending freedom of expression and freedom of the press. In addition, the
laws that do exist are often applied poorly or ineffectively. Last, an aspect that
has sadly gleaned the most column inches over the past decade is Mexican
journalists’ personal safety. Although the Committee to Protect Journalists
estimates that forty-one journalists have been killed between 2006 and 2016,
the actual number is far higher, probably more than a hundred (Priest 2015).
Furthermore, impunity for those responsible for such attacks is a given. Few
perpetrators have ever been brought to trial (Rios 2012 and 2013).
Nevertheless, external pressures account only for the most visible risks to
Mexican journalists. Within the profession, there are also ‘internal risks’
which are general throughout journalism and affect reporters irrespective of
their company, political, or ideological affiliations. The first of these concerns
training and professionalisation. Although more and more journalists possess
a university degree (although not necessarily in journalism or communica-
tions), most have had no formal training. On the one hand, this has an
obvious and direct effect on the quality of the journalism. On the other, it
means journalists are extremely vulnerable to corruption and violence. Many
simply do not possess the skills or the know-how to enable them to corrobo-
rate information, parse official bulletins, or seek help from federal institutions.
The second internal factor relates to the fact that in most regions of the
country journalists remain extremely divided. Increased competition for lim-
ited jobs and poor remuneration have exacerbated existing ideological ten-
sions and many journalists believe their competitors and rivals are on the take
(Solomon 1996: 121–130).1 These dynamics have their own logic and, toge-
ther with the external risks, combine to generate self-censorship and a climate
of fear and mistrust.
Although these are general categories of risk, their interplay differs greatly
throughout the country. Contrary to the assumptions of many commentators
on the Mexican media, the Mexican newspaper industry is not limited to the
gran prensa. Regional newspapers, radio stations, and TV networks have
always played important roles in transmitting news (Del Palacio Montiel
1999 and 2006: 9–46; Hallin 2000: 85–97) and continue to do so. Individual
states and smaller regions have differing traditions through having their own
key mediators of news production, including media ownership and levels of
journalistic repression, as well as strategies and opportunities for free expres-
sion. Over the past two decades, these have combined with new pressures (and
opportunities) generated by the increased power of organised criminal groups
which have not only infiltrated and cannibalised local authorities but also, at
least in some areas, developed relatively sophisticated media strategies.
This chapter examines the interplay of external and internal risks on press
freedom in five Mexican states. The conclusions are based on a larger
research project conducted with the civic association, Collective of Analysis of
 Journalism and freedom of expression 99
Security with Democracy (CASEDE) and the non-governmental organisation
Freedom House, between 2014 and 2015 (Rodríguez Luna 2015: 123). During
this period I visited nine states in total, talked extensively with journalists and
held workshops with reporters, civic organisations, local government officials
and academics. I hope to capture both the geographical diversity of Mexico
and the varying risks affecting the country’s journalists. I have thus chosen to
look at Culiacán and Monterrey in the north, Mexico City and Michoacán in
the centre and Chiapas in the south.

Fear, violence and impunity in Culiacán, Sinaloa

Sinaloa has been the home to Mexico’s most important drug-trafficking
groups for more than seventy years (Astorga 1995; Sánchez Godoy 2009;
Smith 2013: 125–167; Enciso 2014). For decades the state capital of Culiacán
has provided the leaders of the Sinaloa cartel with luxurious villas, upmarket
restaurants, and commercial opportunities. Here, the pressures on journalists
of corruption, violence, fear and impunity have been constant, and having to
deal with these on a regular basis has generated effective survival strategies.
Despite its being the centre of Mexican drug production, there are in Culia-
cán some excellent journalists, who have a wealth of experience in both
investigative reporting and self-preservation. To survive in an environment
where the space for independence and criticism is so narrow can be extremely
difficult. Culiacán’s best reporters have found that writing the truth, backed
up with sustained analysis and checked facts, is actually one of the safest ways
to approach the job. For the director of the city’s Noroeste, Adrián López Ortiz,
survival depends on verifying information several times with different sources as
well as undertaking a daily risk analysis of the political and criminal situation
in the city (Article 19, 2015: 43).
For journalists who want to reveal the networks of corruption, clientelism
and influence-peddling, as well as the links to organised crime which perme-
ate politics in the state, the most effective approach is to carry out high-
quality investigative journalism. This involves intensive, in-depth investigation
into any case, the compilation of multiple interviews, the collation of official
and unofficial documents, the weighing up of such information, and reflection
on the region’s social, political and criminal dynamics. Nevertheless, in my
discussions with many of the city’s reporters, it was apparent that the majority
did not value training as necessary for either their professional development
or to protect their physical integrity (Rodríguez Luna 2015: 24).
In Sinaloa, the principal attacks on journalists appear to be a consequence
of the links between the state government and the region’s criminal organisa-
tions. Ten journalists were murdered in the state between 2004 and 2011.
Eight of those murders have been linked to organised crime (Nuestra Apar-
ente Rendición n.d.). At the same time, there have been regular assaults on
other media outlets, including radio and television stations (Article 19, 2014).
This is still quite rare, even in Mexico. Only the state of Nuevo León has
100 The public sphere and the press under siege
witnessed a similar level of assaults on its non-print outlets. Impunity for
attacks on journalists in Sinaloa is rife, as it is in other states, and attacks on
the media have not resulted in judicial investigations that have identified, yet
alone detained, the perpetrators (Rios 2013). According to López Ortiz, it is
increasingly difficult to demarcate where the politics ends and the narco
begins (Article 19, 2015: 46). As a result, the exposure of official corruption is
very problematic and the best journalists in the state are acutely aware of the
limits of official censorship and that any accusations need to rely on cast-iron
evidence.
Violence is a permanent threat in Culiacán and throughout Sinaloa. In
2015, the city was rated one of the most dangerous conurbations on earth
with 56.09 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. In Mexico, only Acapulco had
a higher murder rate (Economist 2016). The omnipresence of such danger
clearly affects the everyday behaviour of journalists. On the one hand, repor-
ters stated that they lived in a constant state of fear. But the prevalence of this
experience has also begun to normalise being constantly on alert. Like many
other inhabitants of Culiacán, journalists have become accustomed to vio-
lence and fear. For example, in 2014 the Colectivo de Análisis de la Seguridad
con Democracia conducted a survey of perceptions of social capital in ten
Mexican cities, including Culiacán (CASEDE 2014). Inhabitants of Sinaloa’s
state capital were the second most likely to be fearful of going out at night
but were also the most inclined to say they did not consider it risky to carry a
gun. Risks are judged so high that acquiring a gun (still very difficult to do
legally) is seen as a viable means of self-defence. Indeed, many journalists
acknowledged that they frequently carried arms (Pérez Esparza and Weigend
Vargas 2013).
Second, it is no coincidence that the city’s best journalists are experts on
self-protection and security. In the CASEDE report, we estimated that around
90 per cent of the city’s media were controlled directly by the state governor
through expenditure on official advertising and about 10 per cent were not
(Rodríguez Luna 2015: 24). The most notable independent publications were
Noroeste, Debate and Ríodoce. These sought to maintain an independent and
critical line. In 2011, Ríodoce received Columbia University’s Maria Moors
Cabot Prize. In the same year, its principal reporter Javier Valdés Cárdenas
accepted the Committee for the Protection of Journalists’ International
Press Freedom Award. As a result, the paper suffered a range of reprisals,
including denial of access to information or interviews, attempts to discredit
individual journalists and smears on their credibility and reputation, cyber
assaults, and, inevitably, violent attacks, including shootings and even the use
of grenades (Proceso 2009). Though most of these attacks were perpetrated
by members of drug trafficking organisations, independent journalists asserted
that they were carried out either because of a direct order from state officials,
or at the very least with the protection of the authorities. These reporters
claimed that the political and drug trafficking elites were closely linked by
shared business interests, close relations, and even marriages (Milenio 2016).
 Journalism and freedom of expression 101
Unsurprisingly, the principal external risks to journalists originated with
the state government and organised crime. Journalists and academics claimed
that the state authorities controlled newspapers through advertising, bribes
and off-the-book payments. Officials were increasingly buying off media
owners by inviting them to join private enterprises set up by the political elite.
An additional risk was that posed by the ubiquitous presence of the Sinaloa
cartel, which was embedded in both local government and civil society. Fear
of its violent tactics permeated newsrooms and generated a great deal of
self-censorship.
In Sinaloa, the level of professionalisation among the journalists was unu-
sually low. The unemployment rate in the city was high and many journalists
confessed that they chose the career simply out of a need for paid employ-
ment. Such a situation made co-opting journalists relatively easy and few
claimed that they came to the job out of a sense of vocation. This lack of
professionalisation extended to many editors, who lacked the skills, training
or experience to be able to determine an independent and safe editorial line.
Finally, there was also a lack of self-criticism among most Culiacán journal-
ists. The majority of those interviewed failed to recognise that a lack of
knowledge or training was a problem (Rodríguez Luna 2015: 34).

A game of elites: freedom of expression in Monterrey, Nuevo León

Monterrey’s economic dynamism does not extend to its newspaper industry.
The city’s media companies have wide social and economic links to the
industrial, financial and political elites. Together they control the flow of
information and shape the agenda of public opinion. At the same time, the
profile of Monterrey’s journalists has particular socio-cultural characteristics,
which in turn shape their organisation, labour rights, training and capacity for
self-preservation. Journalists in Monterrey remain strictly subordinated to the
city’s newspaper owners and a rigid workplace hierarchy exists. Owners,
alongside the city’s leading families, often impose the editorial line on news-
rooms to the exclusion of independent analysis. As a result, independent
journalists remain on the extreme margins of public debate.
This structure explains in large part the patterns of anti-press violence in
Monterrey. Between 2010 and 2012, as cartels fought over control of the city,
violence intended to cripple freedom of expression increased (Osorno 2013).
In general this was not directed at individual journalists but rather towards
media outlets. Violent attacks on offices and printing presses were frequent;
there were two grenade attacks on Televisa Monterrey alone. During the same
period, three journalists were killed and two were disappeared. Most of them
worked neither for local newspapers, nor national TV networks, which
remained to some degree on the margins of the city’s elite (Proceso 2010;
Universal 2009). It should also be noted that between 2010 and 2012 jour-
nalists from the smaller newspapers began to adopt measures designed to
protect their physical safety. Many took to accompanying each other around
102 The public sphere and the press under siege
the city. Nonetheless, these strategies were disorganised and ad hoc and did
not make up for the lack of more organised security measures (Rodríguez
Luna 2015: 68).
A principal factor underlying attempts to stifle press freedom was the
powerful links between media companies and the political elite, which had
been established for decades. In fact, members of the Monterrey group of
industrial families had their own censor in El Norte until the 1960s (Esquivel
Hernández 2003). These intimate links continued to define the margins of
what could and what could not be said throughout the state and especially in
Monterrey. Although tensions existed among this elite group, they did not
result in serious disagreements and criticism of the elite was extremely rare.
Furthermore, the extremely hierarchical nature of the media industry also
imposed a series of values and norms that governed the ethical and journal-
istic behaviour of journalists. Reporters were well aware of who paid their
salaries and of their responsibilities to the dominant group. This structure
also created ample space for the regular abuse of power by businessmen,
politicians and security officials. Journalists complained of a conspiracy of
silence, which meant that well-known scandals and issues of corruption went
completely unreported (Rodríguez Luna 2015: 73).
In terms of internal risks, the clearest obstacle to concerted action was the
highly visible absence of solidarity among journalists. Union membership and
even friendships among journalists were quite rare. During the years of peak
violence, reporters occasionally moved around in groups and notified each
other if they received warnings from Zeta or Gulf cartel operatives. This
appearance of solidarity, born out of immediate danger, did not translate into
permanent organisations, collaborations or systematic collective action. In
many ways, disunity suited and was probably quietly encouraged by media
owners. It reduced the bargaining power of journalists and served to keep
wages low. The ongoing tensions among Monterrey’s reporters also fed into a
complete lack of collective vision. While there was broad agreement among
Culiacán’s independent journalists over dangers, strategies and training, this
was lacking in Monterrey. The official Association of Journalists was weak
and underfunded and its leaders had no long-term work plan and insufficient
funds for more than a handful of conferences (Rodríguez Luna 2015: 74).

Freedom of the press in Mexico City

Risks in Mexico City differ from those in the rest of the country and the
capital has escaped the worst of the drug violence. Attacks on journalists for
exposing links between state officials and drug traffickers are extremely rare.
Instead risks revolve around the constant rhythm of public demonstrations
and the security forces’ lack of training in basic methods of crowd control as
well as human rights. It is estimated that around 3,000 marches take place
each year in the city. A significant number of these demonstrations do not
correspond to claims directly related to the government of the Federal
 Journalism and freedom of expression 103
District. Instead, the capital hosts thousands of demands addressed to the
federal government by groups from the surrounding states. There is a clear
correlation between these marches and violence towards journalists. Most of
the reporters injured in the past decade have been caught up in demonstra-
tions. The principal perpetrators are not the demonstrators themselves, but
rather the city’s security forces. Very few of the 90,000 police officers in the
city have any training in crowd control or human rights. The danger gener-
ated by this confluence of rowdy demonstrations and untrained security forces
is exacerbated by the capital’s unique political position. As the president lives
in Mexico City, he can use the armed forces, the federal police, and his per-
sonal security staff to disperse crowds. Again, many of these officers have little
or no training in crowd control or human rights.
As a result, the most common risks to Mexico City journalists are from the
small minority of demonstrators who seek to employ violence or from the
actions of state security agents. In fact, over the past decade Mexico City
has registered the highest number of attacks on journalists of all Mexico’s
states. In particular, beatings, illegal arrests, and the smashing of film
equipment have been frequent. The most notorious case occurred on 1
December 2012, when radical groups, including the Unión de la Juventud
Revolucionaria de México (UJRM), the Frente Popular Revolucionario
(FPR), and the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO), and
the student movement, YoSoy132, took to the streets to protest at the inau-
guration of President Peña Nieto. In retaliation, the federal police moved in,
beating marchers and arresting over a hundred protestors. Among the
detained were two freelance photographers, the Romanian Mircea Topo-
leanu and the Mexican Brandon Daniel Bazán, a frequent contributor to
CaféMX. The NGO Reporters Without Borders, also reported that jour-
nalists from Animal Político, El Universal, Cuarto Oscuro, Excélsior, Reu-
ters and Milenio had received injuries of varying degrees of severity
(Reporteros sin Fronteras 2012). Furthermore, the incident marked the
beginning of a pattern which saw, between December 2012 and February
2014, police arresting seventeen journalists during demonstrations in the
capital (Animal Político 2014).
Mexico City has a diversity of journalists, from esteemed national writers
to small-scale reporters, to the hosts of alternative journalists working for
online and social media sites. In general, the level of professionalism is higher
in the capital by comparison with the rest of the country. Journalist organi-
sations, which run training courses, seminars and conferences, tend to be
based in the capital. And the dynamics of the flow of information in Mexico
City is more intense than in the states. As a result, the capital’s journalists
have much more contact with Mexico’s decision makers, which in turn
allows them greater access to first-hand and often privileged information.
On the one hand, better links with journalist organisations often generate
shrill rhetorical support for solidarity but few tangible changes. On the other
hand, promixity to the powerful breeds close friendships, which often trump
104 The public sphere and the press under siege
journalistic integrity. The prevalence and efficacy of backdoor connections
militate against increased formal transparency in government (Rodríguez
Luna 2015: 39).
In short, the most serious external risk remains the public security forces’
lack of training. There are two areas where this shortcoming is particularly
evident. The first is operational and concerns the containment of demonstra-
tions and marches. Police forces often find it easy to confuse the need to
contain demonstrations and to guard against damage to property with pre-
venting such legal marches from taking place altogether. The second is in the
area of human rights, where protocol support is essential. In Mexico City’s
government, there is ample dialogue with journalist and human rights orga-
nisations, but such concessions are rarely extended to the federal or city police
forces. Another external risk is the tension between freedom of expression and
freedom of the press. Though most acts of aggression against journalists have
been orchestrated by the authorities, in a handful of cases demonstrators have
attacked reporters. Perceived ideological differences clearly play an important
role. Finally, there are also the risks derived from the confluence of political
powers which offers certain benefits but also generates its own dangers. The
government of the Federal District is often forced to enter into dialogue with
demonstrators, but when this fails, as on 1 December 2012, the results can be
violent.
Journalists in Mexico City have access to a greater variety of instruments of
protection and self-protection as well as training opportunities than other
Mexican reporters. Still, they lack an organisational framework or clearly
stated common aims. Their rights often end up subsumed into the general
agenda of human rights defenders and, in practical terms, the rights of jour-
nalists as a specific category are generally ignored. For example, there are no
specific laws regarding the behaviour of public security officials towards
journalists.

Michoacán: freedom of expression in a ‘failed’ state.

Since 2006, the state of Michoacán has been increasingly controlled by orga-
nised crime (Pansters 2015: 144–164; Maldonado 2013: 43–66). The effects on
freedom of expression and the press have been overwhelming. At first, they
comprised threats and attacks on media executives and journalists but soon
transformed into exploiting the media to send messages to opposing criminal
groups. During the reign of La Familia (2005–2010) and the Knights Templar
(2010–2014), crime groups developed their own communication strategies.
These reflected an effort to establish parallel political and economic structures
and accompanied criminal control of agricultural production, mining, com-
merce and local govermment. The power of these criminal groups and their
control of the judicial and political authorities made Michoacán’s journalists
particularly vulnerable to intimidation and violence. The result was an infor-
mational black hole, a silence which was occasionally broken only by
 Journalism and freedom of expression 105
members of the national or international media. Even these were selective and
often restricted by the criminal groups themselves. Beginning in 2015, an
alliance of the federal authorities and the self-defence organisations – the
so-called autodefensas – began to reorganise the state’s political, economic
and criminal forces. In the process, the media and journalists played a mar-
ginal or subordinate role. Generally speaking, direct threats to Michoacán’s
journalists have established an atmosphere of fear and self-censorship and
have narrowed the boundaries of what can be said in public.
In the Tierra Caliente – the heartland of both La Familia and the Knights
Templar – the problem is particularly acute. Here, crime groups have com-
monly used disappearances to intimidate journalists.2 As municipal autho-
rities and even the autodefensas have been completely co-opted by the
forces of organised crime, journalists have been offered a choice of death,
enforced exile, or becoming part of the governing alliance. Most choose the
latter. For example, in summer 2015, a high-level meeting took place between
the autodefensas, the presumed new capo of Michoacán’s drug trade, Juan
José Farías Álvarez a.k.a. ‘el Abuelo’, and senior government ministers.
Despite the fact that this was a public meeting, press coverage was virtually
non-existent.
Between 2012 and 2014 during a series of conflicts between the auto-
defensas and the Knights Templar, both groups sought to win what had
become a battle for the media. As the federal government became increas-
ingly involved and because many combatants were returning migrants from
the US, international news coverage was incredibly important. This resulted
in the sort of access granted to Matthew Heineman for his prize-winning
documentary Cartel Land, which followed the increasingly ambiguous efforts
of the autodefensas to remove the Knights Templar from power, or Vice
Magazine’s interviews with the notorious ‘Los Viagras’ criminal organisation
(Vice Magazine 2015). Within Mexico itself, such access led to cases where
criminal organisations exploited journalists to get messages out to the autho-
rities or to spread misinformation. The most revealing and best known
example was that of Eliseo Caballero, who was shown in a 2014 video
broadcast on Carmen Aristegui’s online programme holding a meeting with
the leader of the Knights Templar, Servando Gómez, a.k.a. ‘La Tuta’, and
discussing ideas and strategies for the group to gain greater presence in the
media (Arístegui Noticias 2014). During the conflict many journalists held
similar meetings that were not recorded. Some were forced to work for the
autodefensas or the Knights Templar; others received payments from the
groups. Such meetings transcended the normal patterns of threats and self-
censorship and culminated in relatively sophisticated strategies. In northern
Mexico similar conflicts between drug trafficking organisations in Ciudad
Juárez (where the Sinaloa cartel confronted the Zetas) and Nuevo Laredo
and Reynosa (where the Gulf cartel and the Zetas came to blows) produced
similar results (Priest 2015).
106 The public sphere and the press under siege
Michoacán’s journalists face multiple external and internal risks from poli-
tical and economic elites. Although organised crime groups have undermined
these elites, they still control media outlets. Their aims bear no relation to the
exercise of freedom of expression. Organised crime groups like La Familia
and the Knights Templar have gradually developed their own communication
strategies in order to consolidate territorial, political and economic control.
Their cannibalisation of the state has removed the remaining institutional
support for journalists. The existence of autodefensa groups, which emerged
in late 2012 and by the following year had taken control of much of the
Tierra Caliente, has not improved the situation for Michoacán’s journalists
and has further limited the exercise of free expression. Finally, it should be
noted that Michoacán’s human rights organisations, which might be expected
to offer some support to the state’s media outlets, are predominantly staffed
by the recipients of payments by elites. As a result, they fail to act as a
counterweight to the influence of political and criminal groups (Rodríguez
Luna 2015: 85).

Authoritarianism and corporativism against freedom of expression

in Chiapas
Press freedom in Chiapas is limited by the authoritarian practices of the state
government. While the levels of violence against journalists are not as severe
as in other states, political strategies aimed at limiting public debate have had
the effect of silencing the state’s press. Some journalists have sought to
develop alternative spaces, especially via the internet, but the government has
quickly devised means to co-opt or repress them. Chiapas is one of the few
states in the country with a Specialised Prosecutor’s Office for Crimes Against
Freedom of Expression, but the office’s capacity for action is minimal.
According to local journalists this is due to the lack of training among the
bureaucrats in the Attorney General’s Office and a lack of knowledge, sensi-
tivity and willingness on the part of those charged with investigating crimes
against journalists to take them seriously.
Official control of the media in Chiapas is organised in a number of ways,
which include the allocation of government advertising, which often pushes media
owners to force their journalists to toe the government line. At times govern-
ment agents deliberately interfere in the distribution of critical newspapers.
As a result, most reporters in Chiapas self-censor in order to avoid harrass-
ment and both the print and electronic media overwhelmingly submit to the
authority of political power.
There is a small group of independent journalists who have sought other
ways of practising journalism. These include collaborating with national
organisations that adopt a critical stance, such as Proceso, Animal Político
and La Jornada. Some have also chosen to use blogs or websites dedicated to
publishing information related to acts of corruption, human rights violations,
or organised crime activities (e.g. Chiapas Paralelo). These journalists have
 Journalism and freedom of expression 107
sought to maintain contact with national and international organisations
devoted to maintaining freedom of expression. They have regularly used these
links to access training courses, expose attacks on freedom of expression and
demand protection. But such initiatives have often caused escalating tensions
with the state government, so that pressures, threats and attacks against this
small group are relatively frequent.
Even though these problems are common throughout the state, there are
regional variations, which depend on the political and socio-economic struc-
tures of different areas. In the Soconusco region, especially around Tapachula
on the Guatemala border, organised crime groups have developed networks
dedicated to trafficking drugs, migrants and arms. These networks have gra-
dually incorporated different social sectors, including officials in the munici-
pal police, the state police, and bureaucrats from the National Immigration
Institute, as well as bar owners and taxi drivers. Such extensive influence has
shut down reporting on these issues so that those local reporters who have
sought to expose official complicity with criminals have usually turned to
their colleagues in the state capital in order to publish stories or testimonies
about the southern border.
Around a quarter of the population of Chiapas speaks an indigenous lan-
guage. Community radio has been key in publishing news for nearly two
decades, but even these broadcasters have faced restrictions on the exercise of
free expression. The Federal Telecommunications Law is the primary source
of these limitations because it prevents critical stations from accessing radio
frequences or receiving official advertising. At the same time, the law pro-
hibits community radio stations from receiving commercial advertising
(Ley Federal de Telecomunicaciones y Radiodifusión 2015). In the state
capital, Tuxtla Gutierrez, state officials, Congress officials and members of
the powerful teachers’ union dominate the co-option of local journalists by
giving and withholding official publicity. A principal external factor which
affects independent and critical journalism is co-optation. Government
advertising plays an important role in this, but there are also more direct
pressures on journalists exercised by government bureaucrats, officials in the
judiciary and members of public security authorities. In practice the Office of
the Special Prosecutor for Crimes Against Freedom of Expression is rarely
helpful and there is a consensus among the state’s independent journalists that
the office has not responded to their needs and demands. Impunity for crimes
against journalists still reigns. The director of the Office of the Prosecutor
shows limited acknowledgement or awareness of the importance of guaran-
teeing freedom of expression as a human right. Journalists are constantly
vulnerable to threats and assaults by either members of the teachers’ union or
the security forces. Over the past decades, conflicts between the groups have
been frequent and have often led to journalists being physically assaulted or
the destruction of their equipment. And around Tapachula, organised crim-
inal groups and their allies in local public security agencies also proffer the
risk of violence.
108 The public sphere and the press under siege
Conclusions
The risks to journalism and freedom of expression in Mexico are expressed in
different ways. There is no doubt that the agents of the state and organised crime
groups are the main actors, although there is still debate over the relative responsi-
bility of both groups. Both exercise control over information through violence,
corruption and co-optation. Journalists working in the regions still remain most
vulnerable to these strategies. It should be added that over the past decade,
Mexico has developed some institutional and legal capacity to deal with this
situation, though this has had limited effects in the provinces. In 2010, the Specia-
lised Prosecutor’s Office for Crimes Against Freedom of Expression (FEADLE)
was created within the Attorney General’s Office (PGR). And in 2012, the
Federal Mechanism for Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists
was established. Neither has managed to stem the violence meted out against the
country’s journalists or improved the environment of impunity enjoyed by per-
petrators. In fact, since President Peña Nieto took office in 2012, attacks on
journalists have risen. These broad top-down pressures are compounded by
divisions and distrust at the local level. Regional reporters continue to lack
organisational networks, training programmes and even informal connections
to other writers. In order to confront these external and internal risks, the
state must strengthen its institutional capacity to stamp out impunity. At the
same time, journalists need to develop more cogent training programmes in
both self-protection and the legal bases for freedom of expression.

Notes
1 In fact, at the summer 2015 conference that originated this chapter, these divisions
were clearly evident. Many of the journalists present suggested that a large number
of those who had been murdered were probably on the take. Such opinions echo
those of the murdered journalist Jesús Blancornelas, who suggested that only 10 per
cent of Mexican journalists were killed for what they wrote.
2 For example, the disappearance of José Antonio García Apac, editor of Ecos de la
Cuenca en Tepalcatepec (Campbell 2007).

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5 State of denial
Crime reporting and political
communication in Sonora1
Víctor Hugo Reyna García

Mexican politicians have always tended to deny criminal and security risks.
For most of the twentieth century, it was a staple of state governors’ policy
(Hernández 2008). But during Mexico’s War on Drugs2 this habit evolved
until it became the accepted political communication strategy. Through it,
politicians throughout the country used their economic and political power to
characterize the territory under their jurisdiction as safe and secure.3 In the
current environment, security provision has become synonymous with good
government and politicians permanently campaigning for advancement don’t
want to be seen to fall behind. In the border state of Sonora, politicians
have embraced the strategy of denial wholesale (Beck 2008; Wallace 2008:
395–409).4
For the following decade, the official discourse remained relatively stable.
But media coverage shifted. From 2003 to 2009, Sonoran journalism was
critical and somewhat alarmist; it highlighted an environment of chaos and
fear. But, from 2009 onwards, this critical stance declined. Instead local
newspapers and other media assimilated the official discourse of denial. This
chapter examines these changes and continuities in the reporting of crim-
inal risk in Sonora. As such, it is organized in two parts. The first section
analyses the strategic uses of objectivity, irony and watchdog reporting that
prevailed during the six-year term of Partido Revolucionario Institucional’s
(PRI) Eduardo Bours, 2003–2009. The second section focuses on the prac-
tices of self-censorship, deference and homogenization that arose during
the administration of Partido Acción Nacional’s (PAN) Guillermo Padrés,5
2009–2015.
To this end, I examine the front page of Sonora’s leading newspaper, El
Imparcial. Here, I undertake a content analysis for the years 2003, 2006, 2009
and 2012. In particular, I focus on: (a) the type of criminal risk, (b) the loca-
tion of criminal risk and (c) the type of source. In so doing, I look at how
crime is reported in Sonora and how power relations are mediated by it. I
combine this with a qualitative analysis of the news that has showcased
Sonora as the ‘safest state on the northern frontier’.
112 The public sphere and the press under siege
Irony, objectivity and watchdog reporting (2003–2009)
In Sonora, spectacles of extreme violence began to gain public notoriety at
the start of Bours’ term, during the second half of 2003. Before that, the
crime reports that newspapers like El Imparcial published on their front page
predominantly concerned acts of international terrorism. In fact, the first
news relating to home-grown drug-related violence appeared on 6 May 2003,
under the headline ‘Prende PGJE alerta’ (‘State Attorney General on Alert’).
The piece looked at the rise of homicides in Sonora, but was careful to
downplay the figures by offering a regional context:

Faced with an increase in the number of murders in Sonora, the state’s

attorney general suggested that police corruption and the protection of
criminal groups might be the cause. Miguel Ángel Cortés Ibarra pointed out
that the most recent statistics on crime were now a ‘red flag’ for his office.
During 2002, about ten intentional homicides a month occurred …
‘Obviously, the state’s number of murders can’t be compared with the numbers
of Baja California [italics my own] where 120 intentional homicides and
43 executions occurred during the first quarter of the year, nor those of
Sinaloa, that had 143 deaths.’ Nonetheless, he said that he was worried.
(Arredondo and Larrinaga 2003)

Such news suggests that denying criminal risk by pointing to the regional
context was not an invention of the Bours regime. In fact, it had been
employed by his predecessor, the PRI’s Armando López Nogales’s govern-
ment of 1997–2003, as well as earlier administrations. By comparing Sonora’s
security with that of other northern states, such a strategy not only denied
local risks, but also highlighted those of the region as a whole. The logic
presented by public officials was as follows: ‘Yes, the state has some security
issues, but they aren’t as severe as those of our neighbouring states.’ Sonora
was repeatedly portrayed as comparatively free of, or, in the worst case,
having fewer threats than other northern states. During the most sanguinary
years of the War on Drugs, this systematic denial of criminal risk attempted
to undercut the increasing atmosphere of fear, but had no effect on the actual
incidence of crime.
During the 2000s, this official attitude caused increasing tension between
Bours’ administration and the local press. Bours – a businessman-turned-
politician – maintained a hostile relationship with the media, and especially
with El Imparcial, which he accused of demonstrating a distinct bias in favour
of the opposition party, the PAN. The tensions went back to early 2003,
when, during his campaign for the governorship, El Imparcial had published
a series of articles which questioned his political skill (Guerra 2003; Rodrí-
guez 2003; Sánchez 2003). Hostilities continued into his term in office and
culminated with the governor filing a lawsuit for defamation against the news
organization (Beyliss 2006).
 Crime reporting and political communication 113
In August 2003, with the election just decided in Bours’ favor, El Imparcial
made a bold move. It started to publish a regular news feature entitled ‘Mafia
en Sonora’. The first piece was entitled ‘Caen “capos” en Sonora’ (‘Drug
lords captured in Sonora’) and concerned the capture of a lieutenant of a
major drug cartel, the Sinaloa cartel, in Sonora (Larrinaga 2003). In the fol-
lowing days, while Bours ratified his victory before the Tribunal Estatal
Electoral (TEE), the newspaper used this news feature to keep public inse-
curity on the public agenda and to prepare the ground for six years of poli-
tical confrontation. From then on, crime reporting was employed to pressure
the state government.
As Pablo A. Piccato argues, crime news and the media coverage of murder
has always had a political dimension since the emergence of the nota roja (a
sensationalized form of crime reporting) at the end of the Porfiriato (Piccato
2012: 627–653; 2013: 104–125; 2014: 195–231). This continues to this day. In
fact, at present it may be more pronounced in the regions than in the rela-
tively secure environment of the Mexican capital. As Celia Del Palacio
argues, for years traditional journalism studies tended to downplay the rele-
vance of crime news as a space of political struggle, but recently the political
dimension of the nota roja has come to the fore (Del Palacio 2015). This
academic shift has been paralleled at the level of local newsrooms. Before the
War on Drugs, Sonoran crime reporters had seen the nota roja exclusively as
a site of class conflict. ‘La Policiaca es las Sociales de los pobres’ (‘The crime
news is the society news of the poor’) was a common black joke. Their staple
fare was the gathering of police reports and accounts of relatively minor
crimes. Drugs were viewed as a completely separate sphere. They were a
public health problem and only became a public security problem if a drug
user was caught stealing in order to sustain his or her addiction. But the War
on Drugs changed this perception. The federal government’s confrontation
with the cartels turned drug trafficking and its associated violence into a
major political story.
As Table 5.1 below demonstrates, the conflict between Sonora’s main
newspaper and Governor Bours gradually promoted criminal risk to El
Imparcial’s front pages. News of executions rose from 13 per cent to 18 per
cent of total articles; news on firefights between criminal gangs or between
gangs and the security forces increased from 0 per cent to 16 per cent; and
news on drug trafficking grew from 11 per cent to 19 per cent between 2003
and 2006. In contrast, there was a steady decline of news on drug use (from 8
per cent to 5 per cent), diverse thefts (from 11 per cent to 1 per cent) and even
killings without ‘signs of execution’ (Larrinaga 2009),6 which are traditionally
attributed to organized crime (from 11 per cent to 4 per cent).
During Bours’ successor government, that of PAN’s Guillermo Padrés,
some of these trends persisted but others changed. For example, drug traf-
ficking remained a dominant theme, although it declined from 25 per cent to
14 per cent of front-page stories. News of executions stayed around the same
at 22 per cent of stories. But decontextualized murders – not defined as
114 The public sphere and the press under siege
Table 5.1 Type of criminal risk in El Imparcial (2003–2012)
2003 2006 Variation 2009 2012 Variation
Not identified 0% 0% 0% 7% 8% 1%
Aggression 0% 3% 3% 1% 0% −1%
Drug use 8% 5% −3% 0% 0% 0%
Disturbance 0% 4% 4% 0% 2% 2%
Fraud 0% 3% 3% 1% 0% −1%
Homicide 11% 4% −7% 7% 26% 19%
Theft 11% 1% −9% 6% 9% 4%
Rape 0% 5% 5% 0% 2% 2%
Detonation 24% 13% −10% 6% 3% −2%
Extortion 0% 1% 1% 6% 2% −4%
Execution 13% 8% −5% 21% 22% 1%
Kidnapping 5% 11% 5% 10% 6% −4%
Firefight 0% 16% 16% 11% 3% −8%
Torture 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0%
Drug traffic 11% 19% 8% 25% 14% −11%
Others 18% 7% −12% 0% 5% 5%
Total 100% 100% 0% 100% 100% 0%
Source: Own elaboration.

executions orchestrated by organized crime – re-emerged and became the

most salient danger: 26 per cent of stories dealt with this theme.
Taken as a whole, the data demonstrate a daily and intense circulation of
crime news in Sonora. Contrary to those who claim that there has been a
gradual silencing of the Mexican press (Del Palacio 2015: 19–46; Relly and
González de Bustamante 2014: 108–131; Rodelo 2009: 365–403), in Sonora
there was not a decline but rather a rise in coverage relating to drug violence.
The disappearance of El Imparcial’s Alfredo Jiménez, a 25-year-old crime
reporter, missing since 2 April 2005, did little to slow down the reporting of
criminal risk. As we shall see, it may have changed the way this kind of news
was approached, but it didn’t mark its end.
Table 5.2 examines the location of the reported criminal risk. Here, it is
clear that coverage of Sonoran crimes increased in El Imparcial. In 2003 and
2006, less than a third of reported crime news occurred in Sonora. But, by
2009 and 2012, local crime had grown to account for around half of all crime.
In contrast, news that focused on the international aspect of crime decreased
from 42 per cent in 2003, to 10 per cent in 2006, to 6 per cent in 2009.
El Imparcial is a local paper. Though there are readers and correspondents
dotted throughout the state, most of its readers live in the state capital of
Hermosillo. As a result, it is perhaps no great surprise that the bulk of crime
news focused on this territory. But, the prevalence of such crime news
 Crime reporting and political communication 115
Table 5.2 Location of criminal risk in El Imparcial (2003–2012)
2003 2006 Variation 2009 2012 Variation
Not identified 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0%
Hermosillo 18% 27% 8% 15% 29% 14%
Sonora 32% 27% −5% 54% 49% −5%
Mexico 8% 32% 24% 21% 15% −5%
International 42% 15% −27% 10% 6% −4%
Total 100% 100% 0% 100% 100% 0%
Source: Own elaboration.

countered the narrative put forward by Governor Bours that Sonora was the
safest state in northern Mexico. If it was so safe, readers of El Imparcial
might ask, why were spectacles of extreme violence, from beheadings to gre-
nade attacks, reported on a daily basis on the paper’s front page? Were news
organizations exaggerating the threats? Or were they simply doing their job,
publishing the news which public officials wished to keep quiet?
During Bours’ term it became common to read highly critical reports on
Sonora’s security situation. These highlighted state complicity in criminal
activity. And headlines included ‘Sonora, base de poderosas bandas’ (‘Sonora,
base of powerful gangs’), ‘Temen que Sonora sea igual a Sinaloa’ (‘They fear
that Sonora is becoming like Sinaloa’) or the blunt and alarmist ‘Cuenta
Sonora con los peores polícias del país’ (‘Sonora has the worst police in the
country’) (Ruiz 2005; Castro 2005; Padilla 2006), among others. Throughout
the period, El Imparcial repeatedly stressed its adherence to ideas of journal-
istic independence and objectivity and claimed that such values forced its repor-
ters to warn readers about the progressive penetration of organized crime. But,
undeniably, the strategy also had a political correlative. Such coverage ran
contrary to the state governor’s line and echoed the criticism of opposition
politicians and antagonistic members of civil society:

‘We don’t want to see Sonora becoming a Sinaloa or Ciudad Obregón or

Navojoa, a Culiacán’, explained Juan Leyva Mendívil. The president of
the Alianza Campesina del Noroeste went on to express his concern
over the wave of murders. ‘We can’t close our eyes and say it’s only a drug-
traffickers’ problem, because the presence of gunmen on a regular basis in
our society could “reach” those of us that are not members of those groups.
Let’s not wait until we’re sharing restaurants and public places with drug
cartels, as they do in Tamaulipas, Sinaloa and even Sonora … we must
stop this in time!’ he said.
(Castro 2005)

In contrast, the denial of criminal risk Bours was trying to stress was
ignored, minimized or, if it was mentioned, ridiculed. The last strategy was
116 The public sphere and the press under siege
commonly used to compare the governor’s perception with the newspaper’s
crime accounts. For example, on 11 November, 2005, the paper featured an
article entitled ‘¡Despiertan a balazos!’ (‘They awake to bullets!’) (Moreno
and Quintero 2005). Beside that piece on a gun attack that involved a busi-
nessman and his family in an upscale neighbourhood (Table 5.3), they published
the headline ‘¿Cuál ambiente de inseguridad?’ (‘What climate of insecurity?’).
In it, they mocked Bours’ response the morning after the assault:

‘What climate of insecurity?’ said Governor Eduardo Bours Castelo,

noting that people in Hermosillo were very calm, despite the violent
events that had just occurred. ‘The public perception is that there’s no
climate of insecurity. People are walking down the streets. Last night I
went to dine on some tacos and people were completely calm. There’s no
climate of insecurity; that is very clear in all the surveys we have’.
(Medina 2005)

These stories were, in general, opinion-free and limited to quoting or

paraphrasing the often ludicrously out-of-touch statements of public officials.
This suggests that it was the paper’s editors rather than the reporters that
were asking readers to take the governor’s words in an ironic fashion. Placing
Bours’ denial right next to the story of the attack and picking the quote about
going to dinner out of what was a lengthy public statement was a deliberate
tactic designed to satirize the governor.
Against accusations of sensationalism, El Imparcial ’s journalists could jus-
tify their conduct from a normative perspective, arguing that they were only
doing their job, performing the role of watchdog reporters, exposing what the
authorities insisted on denying. But such claims could not be entirely con-
vincing. That there were political motives behind such moves became appar-
ent as soon as Bours stood down. The leading editor, Jorge Morales,7 later
became Bours’ successor, Padrés’, minister of communication.

Self-censorship, deference and homogenization (2009–2015)

In late 2004, El Imparcial raised the stakes in its confrontation with Bours by
hiring Jiménez, a young Sonoran reporter who already had experience in
Sinaloa, then the most dangerous place for practising journalism in Mexico.
According to El Imparcial’s editor, Morales, who acted as his boss and
mentor, Jiménez was hired to help:

explain what was happening in Sonora: why suddenly in a restaurant

there was a shooting spree where a waiter was killed for no apparent
reason; why on a boulevard there was a gang of eight or ten people with
high-powered weapons killing someone; why folks with bazookas and
grenade launchers [were running amok].
(Morales 2006)
 Crime reporting and political communication 117
On his arrival in El Imparcial’s newsroom, Jiménez took control of the reg-
ular ‘Mafia en Sonora’ feature and started researching and denouncing links
between politicians and organized crime. This kind of journalism was unpre-
cedented in the state and, as such, didn’t last long. As anticipated above in
the previous section, Jiménez disappeared on the night of 2 April 2005, when
he left the newsroom to meet a source that was ‘terribly nervous’ (El Impar-
cial 2005). More than a decade later, his whereabouts are still unknown and
the investigation into the case has stalled.
Jiménez’s disappearance had a devastating effect on Sonora’s journalistic
culture. Risk was no longer hypothetical; it was now very real. Attacks on the
press, which had been on the rise throughout the country, were now occurring
in Sonora. Furthermore, as the authorship of the disappearance was never
revealed, uncertainty ruled and everybody felt vulnerable. Criminal risk was
no longer something reported from afar, but also something experienced by
reporters as part of their daily routines.
In the succeeding years, Sonoran journalism has suffered a paralysis fol-
lowed by a serious setback in journalistic standards. If the 1990s and early
2000s were marked by the technical and professional modernization of
Sonoran journalism – with El Imparcial leading the way – the next six years
witnessed limited advances. There were technological innovations, but norms
slipped as declining sales and violence against journalists pushed editors and
reporters back towards increasingly cosy relations with the political class.
Facing these threats, news organizations like El Imparcial required their
reporters to limit themselves to official sources in crime reporting, as had been
done prior to Jiménez’s arrival. This compromised their editorial autonomy
and was seized on by local governments in an attempt to regain editorial
influence through official advertising (Rosagel 2012). As for the strategy of
watchdog reporting, it saw a rapid rise and fall (Reyna 2011: 111–116; 2014:
93–104) that had eroded its prospects for reproduction. Jiménez’s dis-
appearance demonstrated to young journalists that publishing uncomfortable
truths could end badly. As various journalists commented:

Instead of Alfredo’s work sowing the seeds of denunciation and diffusion,

of close observation of the narco phenomenon, it had the opposite effect.
His disappearance created a sort of consensus among colleagues, news-
paper managers and the government itself to work on a sort of implicit order
that said: ‘Look, it does happen, but we will only talk about it; do not
publish it … or publish it without giving details … and at your own risk’.
(J. Ibarra, interviewed by the author, December 2010)

A clear line in the sand was marked in crime reporting by his dis-
appearance. It was imperative for us to understand that there’s no one
there to save us, that even the bravest reporter is exposed.
(Santana 2012)
118 The public sphere and the press under siege
We, Sonoran journalists, know that we can’t dig up narco stories because
we would end up like Alfredo Jiménez, [whose disappearance is still an]
unpunished case.
(Medina 2012)

As a result, when Padrés’ term began, this spirit of self-censorship was

firmly in place and had been extended to almost every news topic. In crime
reporting, it led to an increasing reliance on official sources and the predominance
of a brief, superficial treatment of stories. In this context, the denial of crim-
inal risk and the description of Sonora as the safest state on the northern
frontier flourished. Public officials’ statements were not interrogated or
mocked, but taken at face value.
The change can be analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively. First, as
Table 5.3 shows, there was a clear growth in the use of the state government
as a dominant news source, from 21 per cent in 2006 to 38 per cent in 2009
and 2012. Second, there was a decline in the use of quotes from international
governments, from 18 per cent in 2003 to 6 per cent in 2009 and 9 per cent in
2012. Among other possible sources, the voices of the victims and victimizers,
as well as those of the academic and medical communities, were also generally
marginalized.
In qualitative terms, these transformations propelled a framing shift that
could be defined as the replacement of sensationalism by denial. Over-the-top
headlines like ‘Mutilan a 9 en Caborca’ (‘9 mutilated in Caborca’) or ‘Vive
Sonora jornada violenta: matan a 3’ (‘Sonora lives out a violent day: 3 killed’)
became less frequent and were replaced by the deliberately moderate ‘Bala-
cera en Sonoyta no es por plaza: GPE’ (‘GPE says that shootout in Sonoyta
is not over the plaza’) or ‘Tiene Sonora menos secuestros que otros estados
fronterizos’ (‘Sonora has fewer kidnappings than other border states’) (El
Imparcial 2009), (Urquijo 2012).
The declining number of negative or alarmist stories is clear. Positive arti-
cles now came to the fore. But the question remains, why did this happen?
Did murders and kidnappings really decline? Did Sonora really become safer?
Or did security continue to be as problematic as before? Was it just that now
Sonora’s journalists were willing to toe the official line? It seems it was the
latter. Watchdog reporting and the use of irony were replaced by the simple
reproduction of official news bulletins. Rather ironically, the state’s first PAN
governor ushered in a return to the type of newspaper coverage first
developed and perfected by the PRI (Rodríguez 2007).
Articles like the following, published in 2012, which compared Sonora’s
security statistics favourably both with those of other states and with the past,
were increasingly frequent:

Compared to other border states, Sonora recorded fewer kidnappings in

the first five months of the year and, also, those that have occurred have
been resolved. Until May, six kidnappings occurred in the state, three
 Crime reporting and political communication 119
Table 5.3 Dominant source in El Imparcial (2003–2012)
2003 2006 Variation 2009 2012 Variation
Not identified 21% 37% 16% 18% 22% 3%
Local government 0% 1% 1% 6% 6% 1%
State government 29% 21% −8% 38% 38% 1%
National government 11% 16% 5% 21% 15% −5%
International 18% 8% −10% 6% 9% 4%
government
Academic community 3% 1% −1% 1% 2% 0%
Artistic community 0% 1% 1% 0% 0% 0%
Medical community 0% 1% 1% 0% 0% 0%
Religious community 0% 0% 0% 1% 2% 0%
Mass media 0% 0% 0% 1% 0% −1%
Private sector 5% 4% −1% 3% 3% 0%
Civil society 3% 0% −3% 1% 0% −1%
Victims 3% 8% 5% 1% 2% 0%
Victimizers 5% 0% −5% 0% 2% 2%
Others 3% 0% −3% 3% 0% −3%
Total 100% 100% 0% 100% 100% 0%
Source: Own elaboration.

fewer than the total recorded in 2011, revealed the National System of
Public Security. Moreover, this figure is similar to the one from 2010,
when six people suffered an illegal deprivation of their liberty in the same
period. The National System of Public Security also reported that from
January to May of this year, Tamaulipas had registered 50 kidnappings,
Nuevo León 29 and Chihuahua 23.
(El Imparcial 2012)

This framing shift was most evident at El Imparcial, because of its previous
emphasis on stressing the state’s insecurity. But it could also be found in the
rest of the state’s print and online newspapers. If one conducts an online
search of the terms Sonora and seguro, one can find at least 190 news items
where Sonora is characterized as a safe state. In them, the homogenization of
news production is striking. The idea that Sonora is ‘the safest state on the
northern frontier’ appears in the headline of nearly all of them and is developed
in a similar fashion, with the same information, in an analogous inverted
pyramid structure.
Some of the headlines include:

Estudio ubica a Sonora como estado más seguro de la frontera norte

(Study ranks Sonora as most secure state on the northern frontier)
120 The public sphere and the press under siege
Se mantiene Sonora como el estado fronterizo más seguro (Sonora
remains the most secure border state)
Sonora se mantendrá como el estado más seguro de la frontera: Sedena
(Sonora will continue to be the most secure state of the border: Ministry
of Defence)
Es Sonora el estado fronterizo más seguro de México: Padrés Elías
(Sonora is the most secure border state in Mexico: Padrés Elías)
Es Sonora el más seguro: SEDENA (Sonora is the safest: SEDENA)
Sonora es el estado más seguro de México: Jan Brewer (Sonora is the
most secure state in Mexico: Jan Brewer)

As well as Governor Padrés, numerous public figures, from government min-

isters like Ángel Osorio Chong, Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda and Pedro Joa-
quín Coldwell, to local politicians like Ernesto Munro Palacio, to U.S.
governors like Jan Brewer, were dragged in to affirm the official discourse.
However, one of the most frequently quoted sources of information was
actually a private company, Prominix, a security consultancy from Nuevo
León, which published a regular security update:

Once again, Sonora was recognized as the safest state on the border
according to the Prominix’s annual Semáforo Delictivo Nacional. In its
2013 edition, with statistical data from 2012, the research showed that
Sonora was the only border state with a ‘green’ or safe security rating,
placing it amongst the top eight safest Mexican states.
(El Imparcial 2013)

Sonora is the safest state on the United States border according to con-
sultancy company Prominix’s annual Semáforo Delictivo Nacional. In a
news release, the Sonoran government stated that in its 2013 edition,
using statistical data from 2012, [Prominix’s] research showed that Sonora
was the only border state with a ‘green’ or safe security rating, placing it
amongst the top eight safest Mexican states.
(Notimex 2013)

These snippets were taken from El Imparcial and the national news agency
Notimex, respectively. As can be seen, the contents are basically the same and
the only meaningful difference is that Notimex makes clear that the informa-
tion comes from a news release by the Sonoran government. It is clear, there-
fore, that the homogenization of crime news comes not from shared values but
rather because news media are simply reprinting the same ready-made infor-
mation. This has always occurred on the political scene. In fact, such was their
reliance on official bulletins, political journalists were often termed ‘boletineros’.
But it is something very new to crime reporting, which has traditionally relied
far more on police reports, direct testimony or interviews.
 Crime reporting and political communication 121
This is where the revolving door between the state’s newsrooms and its
corridors of power played a key role. When El Imparcial’s editor, Morales,
became Padrés’ minister of communication, he brought with him a profound
knowledge of Sonora’s journalistic culture. He was a former crime reporter.
He knew that his erstwhile colleagues were willing to shift their ‘framing’ of
the news if presented with ready-made information. In fact, it seems that the
homogenization of crime news was something he had been pondering for
years. His university dissertation was entitled ‘Proposal for the creation of a
news agency specializing in themes of security, drug trafficking, migration and
the northern border’ (Morales 2004).
Was Sonora more dangerous during Bours’ administration? Did it suddenly
become safer under Padrés? In some ways, it didn’t really matter. Risk is a
matter of perception and can be modified through perception. Morales, as a
communications major, understood this and made denying risk his main
strategy. It was true that Sonora was the only northern frontier state that had
received a ‘green’ or safe rating in Prominix’s Semáforo Delictivo Nacional
from 2011 to 2015. Yet, this rating was for crime in general. In fact, in terms
of the kind of crimes which generated the most fear, homicides and execu-
tions, Sonora was rated ‘yellow’ or ‘red’ or unsafe throughout the same
period. And in the first half of 2016, the state was far above the national
average in terms of homicides related to organized crime (Prominix 2016).
Furthermore, alternative sources – which were hardly mentioned in the press
of the time – highlighted the state’s continued insecurity problems. The
national statistics bureau’s National Survey of Victimization and Perception
of Public Security claimed that Sonora was the border state with the highest
rate of crimes in both 2010 and 2011 and had the third highest rate in 2012,
2013 and 2014 (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía 2016). The
narrative of Sonora’s exceptionalism was just that, a narrative, based on
cherry-picked or incomplete information and dependent on the ruling party’s
ability to influence news production.
The ability of Padrés’ administration to shift news coverage from relatively
open, if alarmist, reporting to risk denial almost overnight is a worrying sign.
It suggests that the efforts to professionalize the world of Sonoran journalism
have not penetrated very deeply. Editors and reporters have been unable to
resist the imposition of the official discourse, either because they wish to avoid
another attack or because they fear losing advertising or losing (perhaps,
even, under-the-table) revenue or ‘chayote’. Jiménez’s disappearance, com-
bined with the ongoing print media’s financial crisis, has pushed Sonora’s
newspapers back towards the deferential and homogenizing practices of the
heyday of the PRI.

Conclusion and epilogue

Crime reporting is a highly disruptive form of journalism. It often reveals
what public officials would rather hide. And, in Sonora, since 2003 it has
122 The public sphere and the press under siege
played a major political role by highlighting the authorities’ inability to
maintain control of the state. Yet, gradually, crime reporting’s unsettling role
has declined, first because of the disappearance of the leading reporter, Jimé-
nez, in 2005, and second thanks to the new publicity efforts of the PAN’s
governor. The trend towards toeing the official line has extended beyond the
leading newspaper, El Imparcial, to other print and online news outlets.
Padrés’ media team, led by the former El Imparcial editor, Morales, have pushed
a discourse that proclaims Sonora is ‘the safest state on the northern border’,
despite ongoing problems with security, drug trafficking, and spectacles of
extreme violence.
In September 2015, a PRI candidate, Claudia Pavlovich, won the gover-
norship of Sonora. During the first months of her term, there were a handful
of serious, high-profile security scares. In February 2016, somebody set fire to
the car belonging to the mother of Pavlovich’s communications minister in
Navojoa. And the following month somebody set fire to a bridge built by the
Padrés administration in Hermosillo. The bridge was painted with Padrés’
omnipresent ‘Nuevo Sonora’ slogan. It is still unclear whether the fires were
politically motivated or random acts of pyromania. But, what is clear is that,
under Pavlovich, the press seems less deferential than under Padrés. Both
incidents pushed journalists to challenge the new governor on security in the
state. Pavlovich, interestingly, replied with a line that could have come from
the Padrés era and suggests just how deeply ideas about managing the per-
ception of risk have penetrated the ideology of Mexico’s public officials: ‘The
security issue is, actually, a matter of perception. What happens is that [with]
globalization [and with] social media, you see what happens in Colombia,
Venezuela or Yucatan and you feel that it’s happening in your state’ (Valero
2016). And like her predecessor, she went on to deny that Sonora was unsafe
(Arteaga and Álvarez 2015). Whether journalists will continue to challenge
the state authorities about their security record or whether Pavlovich’s
perception management will win out, is still unclear.

Notes
1 A previous version of this chapter was published in Spanish (Reyna 2015: 365–403).
2 The so-called ‘Mexican war on drugs’ is the ongoing battle between the Mexican
armed forces and the drug cartels that operate in that country. It was originally
launched by PAN’s Felipe Calderón at the beginning of his six-year term, in 2006,
with the United States’ support.
3 Numerous Mexican politicians have denied criminal risk during the ‘Mexican war
on drugs’. To cite three that did so recently, Silvano Aureoles of Michoacán, Ale-
jandro Moreno of Campeche and José Francisco Olvera of Hidalgo. Even Javier
Duarte, Veracruz’s controversial governor from 2010 to 2016, has defined his state
as safe and sound.
4 Drawing upon Beck and Wallace, we understand the spatial denial of criminal risk
as the systematic denial of the presence of a certain criminal risk in a particular
place. This denial could come from the state or the citizenship and is designed to
characterize a particular territory as safe. Closely linked to the concept of spectacles
 Crime reporting and political communication 123
of extreme violence (puestas en escena de extrema violencia, in Spanish), this denial
is paradoxical as the new generation of dangers operates outside traditional spatial
boundaries and makes its calculation and control fruitless (Beck 2008; Wallace
2008: 395–409).
5 In 2009, Padrés became the first governor of Sonora from a party other than PRI.
By the end of 2016, the Procuraduría General de la República (PGR) ordered his
detention on multiple charges of corruption, embezzlement, and extortion. At the
time of writing, he is in jail, as is his son, Guillermo Padrés Jr.
6 José Larrinaga was a crime reporter for El Imparcial, but became the spokesman of
the Procuraduría General de Justicia del Estado (PGJE) once Bours became
Sonora’s governor.
7 Morales was El Imparcial’s editor-in-chief during Bours’ administration. Owing to
diverse and undisclosed problems, he was relocated to Tijuana to run El Imparcial’s
sister newspaper, Frontera. In 2009, he joined Padrés’ campaign. He became
Sonora’s first Secretary of Communication later that year. At the beginning of 2016
he was jailed on charges of extortion. By the end of that year he was bailed but is
still facing the extortion charges.

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6 Social movements in support of
the victims
Human rights and digital communications
Rupert Knox

Introduction
In December 2010, relatives of more than seventy people killed or dis-
appeared during Mexico’s so-called war on drugs met in a location outside
Chihuahua City. The relatives from across Mexico’s northern states, sup-
ported by a small number of under-resourced human rights organisations, had
come together to share their experiences and combine forces to demand truth
and justice. One by one the traumatised relatives stood up to voice their loss,
bewilderment and outrage. For many, this was the first time they had been
able to share their grief and anger amongst others with similar experiences.
They spoke of how their families had been torn apart, voiced isolation and
anguish; and they highlighted the callous indifference of the authorities or
their complicity with those responsible for the death or disappearance of their
loved ones. These were some of the victims of the violence unleashed by
ex-president Felipe Calderón’s war finding each other and beginning to
challenge the state’s efforts to marginalise and silence them.
In the years since, social movements have emerged around the victims of
the violence, supported by human rights organisations and other social actors,
including a wide network of solidarity supporters inside Mexico and beyond
its borders. So far their successes have been limited, but their mass mobilisa-
tions and demands for justice have significantly marked the administrations of
presidents Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto and undermined the
domestic and international credibility of both governments. In addition, the
movements enabled relatives to sustain their struggle and gain wider public
recognition and legitimacy. They helped change the landscape of under-
standing around the rights of victims, including through legal reforms, and
focused attention on the deep and murky connections among institutions,
political parties, organised crime, violence and impunity.
This chapter looks at the evolving processes of these movements, primarily
in relation to the Movement for Peace and Justice with Dignity (MPJD) and
the mobilisation around the families of the forty-three disappeared Ayotzi-
napa students. It focuses on two aspects of these struggles: first, the role of
human rights claims as scenes of contestation; and second, how digital
 Social movements in support of the victims 127
communications, particularly social media, have formed part of the move-
ment’s practices as well as the wider communications environment. These two
aspects of movement activity shine a light on the development of the repertoire
of collective action (Tilly 2004; Della Porta and Diani 2006) of social move-
ments engaged in contentious politics, the political opportunities and con-
straints (Tarrow 1998) of the war on drugs in the context of Mexico’s political
transition and the changing media environment. They also raise questions
about the development of movement identities (Melucci 1996; Polletta and
Jasper 2001) and the conflicting demands of negotiating with the State and
sustaining an autonomous movement (Foweraker 1995). The study of digital
communications in social movement practices has been theorised (Castells
2013a; 2013b; 1997) and increasingly looked at in practice (Mattoni and Treré
2014; Cammaerts 2012), including in Mexico (Rovira 2014; Treré and Cargne-
lutti 2014), but not in relation to human rights claims. The relevance of examining
the configuration of human rights and digital communications lies in the oppor-
tunities and limitations they afford social movements in the specific context of
contemporary Mexico. This is particularly so in a country where the State
regularly deploys resources and tactics to co-opt or attack critical voices in
order to demobilise social actors and marginalise resistance claims.
The movements considered here did not exclusively rely on human rights
claims or digital communications, but both have formed an integral part of
their repertoire of claims and actions. In some cases this has facilitated inno-
vation, but in others limitations have been exposed. Reference is also made to
the Movement for our Disappeared in Mexico and the #YoSoy132 movement
as part of the developing process of social movement practices. I provide a
number of preliminary conclusions on the basis of a series of qualitative
interviews conducted with a selection of participants in the social movements
and observers as well as the author’s previous extensive experience doc-
umenting human rights violations in Mexico for Amnesty International (AI).
In the first section, the chapter addresses some relevant debates around
human rights and digital communication in relation to social movements. The
second section explores the specific context of the so-called war on drug car-
tels, human rights in Mexico and the plight of victims. The third considers the
two movements and some specific aspects of human rights and digital
communications in relation to their practices and outcomes.

Human rights
Human rights have been a key area of dispute in Mexico’s political transition
(Olvera 2003; Estévez López 2008). Compliance or lack of compliance with
human rights standards is an important indicator of the degree to which
Mexico has managed to move from the authoritarian rule of former PRI
administrations, to greater democratic accountability.
The boomerang and spiral models (Risse et al. 1999; 2013; Keck and Sik-
kink 1998) of how international human rights norms are promoted and can
128 The public sphere and the press under siege
lead to the ratification of treaties and ultimately domestic implementation
provide a possible template for Mexico’s engagement with the international
and regional human rights systems during the democratic transition process
(Anaya Muñoz 2009; 2014). However, the results do not suggest a gradual
move to norm enforcement. Rather they suggest the adoption of a rights
discourse solely for the purposes of legitimation without willingness to
comply. This in turn raises serious doubts about the depth of Mexico’s
democratic transition. Despite a relatively organised, if small, domestic non-
governmental human rights sector and a degree of pressure from international
intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), the gap
between commitment and compliance (Simmons 2009) has become ever
starker.
Mexico provides an interesting example of how official discourse on human
rights is used to legitimate the government for domestic purposes and also in
relation to the international community. Critics have argued that this exposes
the international human rights project as a tool of Western liberal domination
at the service of local elites (Douzinas 2007). Stammers (2009), meanwhile,
suggests that human rights are only emancipatory when articulated and
demanded from below by local social movements. But once they are institu-
tionalised in law, they become part of the State apparatus of power and end
up excluding and demobilising those very same social movements.
In a similar vein, Estévez López (2008; 2015) traces the development of
Mexico’s grassroots human rights movement from its origins in liberation
theology, to its seeming betrayal of such causes during the democratic tran-
sition. This resulted in a professional elite of NGOs engaged in privileged
negotiation around legal reform. These were sponsored by international
funding agencies, which largely excluded social movements. In particular,
movements which demanded economic and social rights. These were anath-
ema to the neoliberal ideology of both Mexican administrations and foreign
investors. According to this view, the Mexican human rights movement has
been largely captured by co-opted NGOs as much as by the State. In doing
so, it has marginalised or demobilised the emancipatory demands of social
movements.
The merit of these approaches is that they value the crucial role of grass-
roots human rights claims in the construction of human rights domestically –
in contrast to the boomerang and spiral theories which tend to privilege the
role of international human rights law and elite legal activists. However, it
also minimises a key dimension of the traction of local movements, which is
the appeal to internationally constituted norms that states such as Mexico
have voluntarily agreed to uphold. The frequently tense combination of spe-
cific local moral claim with international legal norms is what gives human
rights frames ‘resonance’ (Benford and Snow 2000: 619) beyond the location
of immediate claims-making. This can significantly increase the leverage of
claims-makers in their domestic legal system as well as protect them from
repression. As the Zapatistas showed, international solidarity through human
 Social movements in support of the victims 129
rights claims is not just an additional support, but can be vital for survival as
well as advancing other strategic goals, including movement identity (Bob
2005).
In Mexico, human rights were traditionally for international consumption
only (Saltalamacchia and Covarrubias 2011). But since the political transi-
tion, they have become an important terrain of domestic dispute. On the one
hand, governments have asserted their legitimacy via ratification of interna-
tional human rights instruments and, since the Salinas presidency, with
administrative actions that supposedly demonstrate a degree of compliance.
On the other hand, local, national and international human rights organisa-
tions document and publicise patterns of human rights violations. In doing
so, they demonstrate that these measures are ineffective as abuses continue,
and above all, perpetrators almost always enjoy impunity.
President Vicente Fox’s government promised to bridge the gap between
commitment and compliance, but while some politically directed human
rights violations diminished, abuses related to violence against women, the public
security and justice system as well as the denial of social and economic rights
continued unabated. Under Calderón, despite the crucial 2011 human rights
reforms to the Constitution, the contradictions became even starker. His gov-
ernment routinely proclaimed its commitment to human rights, while over-
seeing a massive increase in rights abuses committed by police and security
forces. At the same time, there were also systematic failures of justice and
security institutions to prevent and punish criminal violence. Consistent and
credible evidence presented by national and international human rights orga-
nisations of enforced disappearances, killings and torture, as well as the routine
collusion of public officials with criminal organisations, was simply dismissed or
attributed to ‘rotten apples’. The Peña Nieto government continued this strategy,
but has recently gone further by aggressively rejecting the evidence of the ongoing
human rights crisis as documented by the Inter-American Commission on
Human Rights (IACHR) and UN Special Rapporteurs.
These debates are frequently played out in international, national and local
media, including the burgeoning digital media environment. However, human
rights are often presumed to be a relatively technical discourse, associated
with lawyers and institutions, and lacking popular appeal (Ron et al. 2014).
Many human rights activists believe this is reinforced in sections of the media
by local public officials and some civil society groups close to the government,
such as Stop Kidnapping (Alto al Secuestro). These tend to attack human
rights defenders for protecting criminals above the interests of individuals and
communities affected by violent crime. In this environment, where delegiti-
misation tactics and threats against human rights activists are routine, the
relatively small number of independent human rights NGOs have often
struggled to effectively challenge government policy and attract significant
domestic or international pressure to improve compliance.
However, on occasion this imbalance in power has shifted significantly with
the emergence of social movements, attracting wider participation and
130 The public sphere and the press under siege
echoing victims’ demands for justice. A trigger for these movements is often a
particularly egregious or emblematic abuse or the State’s failure to protect
victims. This enables networked activists to tap into public indignation and
sympathy, such as with the murder of the son of the poet, Javier Sicilia, in
2011 or the enforced disappearance of forty-three student teachers from
Ayotzinapa in 2014. The particularities of the context are therefore important
to understanding the mobilisation. Even so, as social movement theorists have
noted, building and sustaining a coherent movement in the face of internal
pressures in relation to identity, strategy and organisation, and external
threats such as government and media tactics to delegitimise, co-opt and
divert is always extremely difficult, and usually short-lived (Tarrow 1998).

Digital communications
As digital communications have developed with globalisation and broadened
internet access, so their role in social movement practice has increased, par-
ticularly the use of social media platforms. These are ‘websites or applications
that enable personal involvement, interaction and collaborative creativity to
people linked to one another in complex, far-flung social and technological
networks’ (Lievrouw 2011: 177–178). The implications for political participa-
tion have been vigorously debated, from utopian views of their horizontal and
democratising influence (Rheingold 2000; Shirky 2011) to sceptics who argue
they reinforce capitalist inequality and commodification, even facilitating
repression (Morozov 2012). The use of digital communication was identified
as integral to the Zapatista’s success at mobilising a global constituency
(Cleaver 1998; Rovira 2007), but more recently social media platforms such as
Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have played roles in the Arab Spring,
Occupy and Indignado movements. The actual importance of digital com-
munications and the manner in which these movements use them or are
influenced by the technology is contested (Bennett and Segerberg 2012;
Gladwell 2010; Castells 2013b). However, in the aftermath of these high-
profile movements there has been an increasing recognition of the need to
examine the concrete circumstances in which digital communications are used
as part of wider social movement activity and the media environment. In fact,
often those who consider themselves digital activists tend not to believe that
digital communication itself secures change, but that it can facilitate partici-
pation in offline actions (Harlow and Guo 2014), such as protests, which
remain a core element of the repertoire of social movement actions.
Treré and Cargnelutti (2014: 185) suggest four possible ways in which
social media contribute to social movements. First, they facilitate the partici-
pation of individuals with limited political activism via friend networks.
Second, they help create a shared consciousness among participants. Third,
they strengthen mobilisation by allowing others to observe the positive value
of participation. And fourth, they reduce the barriers to participation by
facilitating the organisation of events.
 Social movements in support of the victims 131
When interactive social media platforms emerged, known as web 2.0, much
was made of their affordances to enable information sharing, interaction and
user content creation as part of autonomous deliberative networks (Castells
2013a). These features were heralded for their apparently democratic and
non-hierarchical nature, with the potential to reflect and reinforce global
social movements resisting the dominant economic and political forces lead-
ing neoliberal globalisation. The rise of movements such as Occupy and Los
Indignados appeared to support this argument. However, closer inspection of
some movement practices has frequently demonstrated that use of social
media is not necessarily particularly deliberative or horizontal (Treré and
Barassi 2015; Gerbaudo 2012).
By 2015, 57 per cent of Mexico’s population used the internet, with 70 per
cent of users accessing social media sites (INEGI 2016a). Despite rapidly
growing internet connectivity, large sections of the population remain without
access, particularly amongst older generations, the poor and rural commu-
nities. As with other parts of the world, the digital divide favours the young,
middle-class and urban. However, the security crisis in Mexico has also sti-
mulated social media use in less advantaged areas where the threat of violence
imposes self-censorship on local media, leaving the population uninformed
and distrustful. Social media platforms have enabled the dissemination of
information on local security threats, but their vulnerability has also resulted
in grave reprisal attacks, including killings, against those apparently posting
sensitive information in states like Tamaulipas and Veracruz (Zires 2014).
A key reason why the internet, and particularly ‘alternative’ media, have
become politically important in Mexico and other countries in Latin America
is the domination of mainstream media by corporate and political interests
allied to the governing elites (Huerta-Wong and Gómez García 2013). As
elsewhere, mainstream media are constantly increasing their online presence,
but this has not undercut the potential for low-cost web-based media portals
to report and comment on politics, crime and corruption. A more plural
environment has developed for those motivated to seek information, with
independent online media offering a wide range of news and analysis of
varying political hues and reliability. These include independent portals such
as Animal Político and Sin Embargo, with relatively traditional approaches to
editorial and journalistic standards, whereas more overtly left-wing platforms
such as RompevientoTV, Informémenos and Subversiones identify explicitly
with social causes and movements. In the latter case, the coverage may not
reach far beyond the core constituency of social movement sympathisers, but
they appear to play a part in fostering identification and participation. As the
importance of this sector has grown, so have the threats it has faced, includ-
ing cyber attacks on portals such as Sin Embargo and death threats against
journalists working with Subversiones.
Notwithstanding changes taking place in the media environment, the
influence of ‘alternative’ portals is still dwarfed by the mainstream media, so
visibility in traditional outlets, including international media, continues to be
132 The public sphere and the press under siege
a key strategic objective for many social movements. Gaining wide and rela-
tively positive coverage in national media has become increasingly difficult
under Peña Nieto’s government, which has sought to tighten control over the
national news agenda (Freedom House 2016). In this climate, alternative and
international media coverage is often the best way of gaining attention in the
traditional domestic news media.
Another increasingly important dimension to using digital communications
is growing awareness of their vulnerability to a range of threats. The limited
resources available to social activists engaged in forms of resistance mobili-
sation make them particularly vulnerable. These threats include espionage by
security agencies and internet security companies; automated software attacks
to undermine visibility of social movement causes, known as ‘bots’; and
organised trolling campaigns involving intimidation and threats in order to
discredit and deter social activists. In this climate, social movement organisers
and participants increasingly report limiting their social media use to dis-
tribution of information to coordinate and promote actions, but not to engage
in internal movement discussion or other more interactive practices. Nevertheless,
digital communication, including social media, remains an important part of
the expressive and instrumental activities of social movements, particularly in
relation to mobilisation around major human rights issues.

The ‘war on drugs’ and its victims

On entering office in December 2006, President Calderón announced his ‘war
on the cartels’ with a rapid increase in the deployment of the armed forces in
different regions of the country. The use of the military to combat organised
crime became his cornerstone policy and was given the enthusiastic backing
of the US government. This led to a rapid escalation of violence in several
states, such as Chihuahua, Baja California, Tamaulipas, Coahuila, Sinaloa,
Michoacán and Guerrero. During Calderón’s administration, there were more
than 121,000 homicides; and so far under Peña Nieto’s administration there
have been more than 60,000 killings (INEGI 2016b). More than 27,000
people have disappeared during both administrations and remain missing
(Vicenteño 2016).
Calderón and his officials consistently argued that ‘90 percent of those
casualties are … casualties of criminals themselves that are fighting each
other’ (CNN Transcripts 2010). In this initial period of the ‘war’, reports of
human rights abuses, including disappearances reported by relatives,
remained relatively low. For example in 2007 the National Human Rights
Commission dealt with forty-three cases of presumed disappeared but by
2013 this had risen to 582 (CNDH 2007; 2013). Relatives were almost wholly
reliant on the corrupt and incompetent state public prosecutors offices and
police forces, many of whose members operated in collusion with organised
crime (Human Rights Watch 2011). The network of state and national human
rights commissions usually refused to investigate cases unless relatives could
 Social movements in support of the victims 133
provide evidence of the involvement of public officials. Cases of alleged abuses
by the armed forces were handled by military prosecutors who operated in
secret and failed to press charges in all but a few cases, this despite the
growing reports of military abuses (Amnesty International 2009).
The threat against journalists reporting crime and corruption stories is well
documented, with more than 103 journalists killed between 2000 and 2015
(Inter American Commission on Human Rights 2015, 175). Less well known
is that even during the PAN federal governments, criminal interests as well as
local political and economic elites exerted intense pressure on local media to
avoid reporting on crime and corruption issues, frequently deterring indepen-
dent-minded journalists from investigating killings and disappearances.
Instead, most media embraced a policy of self-censorship. They only reported
official bulletins of violent incidents, or simply ignored violence, such as in
Tamaulipas, whose media became virtually news-free. The majority of
national media, particularly TV channels, continued to present the govern-
ment’s account of the violence uncritically. In this context, citizens increas-
ingly used social media at a local level to identify security risks, however
unreliable the information (Zires 2014).
The government strategy of tarring all victims with the brush of presumed
criminality reinforced public opinion that criminals did not deserve mercy, let
alone rights (Open Society Foundation 2016). In 2010 the Minister of the
Interior suggested human rights defenders were acting as ‘useful idiots’ (tontos
útiles) for organised crime (Martínez and Castillo 2010) and the Minister of
Defence referred to civilian deaths simply as ‘collateral damage’ (Ballinas 2010)
In this climate, prosecutors and police faced little or no pressure to investigate
instances of killings or disappearances reported by relatives, leaving perpetrators,
whether public officials or criminal gangs, to operate with impunity.
The relatives, frequently mothers, wives and daughters, of victims of vio-
lence encountered serious social stigma as a result of the presumed involve-
ment in crime of their loved ones. Those brave enough to go to the authorities
to file reports and ask for information on investigations, often faced indiffer-
ence and contempt and even threats and intimidation. Most relatives were
isolated, without the type of political solidarity networks that facilitated links
between the relatives of victims of political repression during Mexico’s ‘dirty
war’ which enabled the first human rights organisations to form.1
Furthermore, local non-governmental human rights organisations were
fewer and weaker in the northern states, which were predominantly affected
by the violence. Nevertheless, by 2009 small human rights NGOs such as the
Fuerzas Unidas por Nuestros Desaparecidos en Coahuila (FUNDEC) in
Saltillo, Coahuila, and Ciudadanos en Apoyo a los Derechos Humanos, A.C.
(CADHAC) in Monterrey, Nuevo León, increasingly accompanied and
helped organise relatives to document cases and press local and federal
authorities to investigate and search for the missing.
In 2010, two massacres significantly changed public perception of the vio-
lence. In January, in the Villas de Salvárcar neighbourhood of Ciudad Juarez,
134 The public sphere and the press under siege
fifteen young people were killed at a party. The government’s initial attempts
to suggest the killings were the result of a dispute between rival gangs out-
raged parents of the victims. In August 2010, seventy-two irregular migrants
were murdered by members of the Zetas operating in collusion with police in
San Fernando, Tamaulipas, causing national and international shock. The
government assertion that the ‘war on the cartels’ was improving security for
ordinary people rang increasingly hollow.

Movement for Peace and Justice with Dignity (MPJD)

On 28 March 2011, Juan Francisco Sicilia, the son of well-known poet and
public figure, Javier Sicilia, was killed along with six others near Cuernavaca,
Morelos. As usual, local officials responded by implying the victims were
involved in criminal activity. This only added to the popular indignation. In
response, Javier Sicilia and friends rapidly organised public marches in Cuer-
navaca in April demanding justice and calling for peace. The group of acti-
vists around Javier Sicilia – who was a well-known left-wing newspaper
columnist and supporter of social causes – grew rapidly via a network of
personal, political and artistic contacts.
In January 2011, a group of well-known cartoonists had launched a visual
campaign ‘No more blood’ (No Más Sangre / Basta de Sangre), as a social
protest against the bloodshed. This had resulted in a burst of interest and
support on Facebook and Twitter, with the hashtag #nomassangre becoming
a vehicle for sharing criticisms of the war as well as a street art slogan. Javier
Sicilia quickly allied the nascent MPJD with these protest gestures, appealing
to those who sympathised with these grassroots efforts to oppose the violence
to participate in the demonstrations.
As part of the developing organisational and political direction of the
MPJD, Emilio Álvarez Icaza, former president of the Federal District
Human Rights Commission and son of the founder of one of Mexico’s earliest
human rights organisations, the Centro Nacional de Comunicación Social
(CENCOS), took on a leading role, encouraging the participation of human
rights activists and organisations. CENCOS assumed the role of communica-
tions coordination for the movement and Servicio y Asesoría para la Paz
(SERAPAZ), another long-standing civil society organisation, facilitated an
ever-widening participation of individuals, collectives and other groups
sympathetic with the movement’s demands.
In early May, thousands participated in the March for Peace and Justice
from Cuernavaca to Mexico City where they were joined by tens of thousands
more in the zócalo. Coordinated via social media, demonstrations also took
place in thirty other cities in Mexico and in several countries round the world.
Sicilia proposed a citizen’s pact to reconstitute peaceful society. Shortly after,
he announced humanitarian caravans to travel to those regions where the
victims of the violence were most isolated and invisible. The first of three
caravans composed of buses and car loads of activists, relatives and media,
 Social movements in support of the victims 135
set off in June for the northern states most affected by the violence. They were
met at every location by scores of relatives and – where they existed – local
human rights groups. As a result, the caravans were soon overwhelmed with
cases and the traumatic testimonies of relatives, including their humiliating
treatment by the authorities. The presence of journalists and social media
activists on the caravans allowed the scale of the human cost of the ‘war’ to
begin to gain wider acknowledgement, including that relatives of victims of
the violence were also victims in their own right. Two more caravans fol-
lowed: one to the southern states, then one to the USA to capitalise on soli-
darity support and to lobby the US public and government on the realities of
‘war on drugs’.
As a result of the mobilisation and global attention, in June and October
2011, President Calderón and other members of his government held face-to-
face talks with representatives of the MPJD, including victims. Despite a
series of structural demands to address violence, militarisation, social exclu-
sion and other aspects of Mexico’s flawed democracy, discussions quickly
narrowed to mechanisms to improve the attention provided to victims. This
focused on incorporating international human rights norms into institutional
practice and strengthened legal recourse and support for victims. In the October
meeting, the government invited its allies in civil society, anti-crime organisa-
tions, such as Alto al Secuestro, to participate, adroitly sidelining the wider
structural demands and attempting to reduce the agenda further to a focus on
crime and its victims, not human rights violations and other underlying dri-
vers of the violence (Garza 2015). The movement narrowed its focus to legal
and administrative measures to support the rights of all victims to redress and
dignity in line with international human rights standards. It targeted resources
at the legislature to lobby for a General Law on Victims (Ley General de
Víctimas) and a Commission for Victims. Calderón ultimately refused to sign
the law into force, but Peña Nieto quickly did so on taking office.
After the success of passing the law, the movement gradually began to lose
force. This was in part due to internal divisions about strategic direction as
well as the role of victims and solidarity supporters. The exhaustion of two
years of relentless campaigning also took its toll, with many support NGOs
such as CENCOs and SERAPAZ reducing their involvement and leaders
either stepping back or taking on other roles. The effectiveness of the new law
and the Commission also came into question, as the government’s bureau-
cratic implementation failed to deliver substantial change for victims in their
search for truth and justice.
The movement did not dissolve, but the groups of family members of
the disappeared, such as Familias en Búsqueda María Herrera, Plataforma de
Víctimas de Desaparición en México and others, gradually began to emerge
from the shadow of the MPJD. These groups of victims from different regions
organised themselves to conduct their own searches for the missing and used
their own voices to demand that the authorities establish the fate of the
missing, as well as demanding new national legislation on enforced
136 The public sphere and the press under siege
disappearances. Many of these groups gradually began to coalesce into the
Movement for Our Disappeared in Mexico.

Ayotzinapa
On 26 September 2014, despite the heavy presence of federal police and the
military in the town of Iguala, Guerrero, student teachers from a rural tea-
cher training college in Ayotzinapa were attacked and forty-three forcibly
disappeared by police working with a local cartel, Guerreros Unidos. Six
civilians, three of whom were also students, were shot and killed by police
and gunmen. More than 100 suspects, including municipal police and the
local mayor, were arrested – several alleged being tortured into cooperating
with the official investigation, which concluded that the students had been
detained, killed and burnt. Under intense national and international pres-
sures, an IACHR group of international experts was allowed to examine the
case. They were highly critical of the official investigation, arguing it was not
based on reliable evidence and had avoided investigating the federal police or
military.
The state and federal governments initially tried to minimise the tragedy
and present it as a local incident, probably connected to the student teachers’
well-known political radicalism. However, as the parents of the forty-three
young men – poor indigenous families from rural Guerrero – began a digni-
fied and determined struggle to find their sons, support for their demands
rapidly evolved into a national movement. The forty-three became emblematic,
not only of the visceral suffering of mothers and fathers, but also the multi-
layered collusion between security forces, public officials, political parties and
criminal networks.2
Local and national human rights NGOs, particularly the Centro de Dere-
chos Humanos de la Montaña ‘Tlachinollan’ and the Centro de Derechos
Humanos Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez, worked closely with relatives and sur-
viving students to document the case and press for a full investigation, including
the involvement of the IACHR experts. Ayotzinapa students travelled to
Mexico City to canvass student networks nationally and internationally to
support protest actions led by the families. Local left-wing political and social
organisations in Guerrero also supported the campaign of the families. A
series of increasingly large marches took place in Mexico City and several
cities around the world demanding the return of the missing young men.
These global action days demonstrated the capacity of the case to inspire
broad participation in the marches. The national and international mobilisa-
tion was relatively spontaneous, but also drew on existing networks that had
been forged as part of the Zapatista solidarity movement and #YoSoy132 –
the student protest movement during Peña Nieto’s presidential election cam-
paign. These networks had remained latent or active on disparate causes, but
came together to facilitate mass actions and feed back the wide participation
in the protests around Ayotzinapa, encouraging greater involvement.
 Social movements in support of the victims 137
The scale and diversity of the protesters posed a challenge to the authority
of the government of Peña Nieto. At the same time, the responsibility of the
military for the mass extrajudicial killing of suspected gang members in Tla-
tlaya, Guerrero state was coming to light, further eroding the government’s
national and international credibility with regard to the protection of human
rights. The pressure it faced due to national protests and international con-
cern forced it to make the ‘tactical concession’ (Risse et al. 1999, 25–18) of
allowing the involvement of the IACHR international experts. However, the
government took no action to correct or stop the relentless smear campaigns
by its supporters in the media and allied civil society groups against the
Ayotzinapa students, human rights defenders and particularly the IACHR
experts.
In 2015, the mass marches in support of the families of the forty-three
began to lose momentum when police brutality and arrests increased and
some protesters resorted to violence. Media close to the government particu-
larly focused on these incidents of violence, reducing the broad-based appeal
of the movement. Likewise, the internal decision to strengthen the role of
traditional left-wing social and political organisations in Guerrero in the
coordination of the movement began to limit its wider appeal. The support
networks that had facilitated much of the creative drive of the protests began
to dissipate. Furthermore, the strategy of relentless media smear campaigns
against the movement had an impact on its capacity to sustain mobilisation.
Despite this, the solidarity movement remained active, as did the legal strategy
pursued by the families.

Human rights and digital communication

The MPJD rapidly moved from spontaneous pent-up outrage at the violence
to a broad social mobilisation in support of victims. It was a coalition of
many different individuals and groups, with a range of agendas, but the vic-
tims were its moral force and their needs took centre stage. For many victims,
the human rights framework was not necessarily an obvious approach to
formulating their demands given that non-state actors, namely criminal gangs,
were apparently behind most crimes. Understandably, many relatives dis-
trusted the justice system; they simply wanted perpetrators to be caught,
interrogated and punished, regardless of human rights. The involvement of
human rights activists encouraged the formulation of these demands in terms
of Mexico’s international human rights obligations, particularly the responsi-
bility to protect and guarantee rights to truth, justice and reparations. Appeal-
ing to international norms also supported the recognition of relatives as
victims in their own right, reinforcing state obligations in their treatment as
indirect victims. National human rights NGOs had struggled to develop a
human rights agenda focusing the grave human rights consequences of Cal-
derón’s war, where those chiefly accused of responsibility for the violence were
non-state actor criminal gangs (Anaya Muñoz 2013). However, the emergence
138 The public sphere and the press under siege
of the MPJD enabled a much stronger focus on the plight of victims, includ-
ing relatives, and the obligations of the State regardless of whether the per-
petrators were believed to be members of criminal gangs or the security forces
(Gallagher 2012).
Some have argued that this ultimately led to the flawed General Law on
Victims and the Commission for Victims, which has produced few results,
only dissipating the strength of the movement (Estévez López 2015). How-
ever, the appeal to human rights was also an important part of strengthening
the capacity of victims’ groups to work their own cases; to identify the flaws
in the official investigations and demand concrete actions involving relatives,
such as a National Search Mechanism and the exhumation of clandestine
mass graves. Human rights frames also enabled international NGOs, like AI,
Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the Open Society Foundation, as well as
intergovernmental organisations such as UN experts and the IACHR, to
strengthen their analysis of Mexico’s security and human rights crisis, echo the
calls of victims and local NGOs, and press for more effective measures to
address the situation.
The use of human rights frames was not dependent on digital communica-
tion, or vice versa. However, the increasing availability and influence of digi-
tal communications afforded opportunities to facilitate the MPJD’s activities
and impacts, as well as perhaps impose certain limitations. These included
enhanced coordination and information sharing around movement activities
helping to widen participation and international solidarity; increased auton-
omous communication and capacity to spread movement messages; and visi-
bility in the wider media environment. In addition, circulating social media
images and accounts of expressive movement activities contributed to identity
construction and participation. However, digital communications were not
necessarily regarded as strategically vital in their own right by the leadership,
which remained focused on traditional media tactics such as press releases
and press conferences. The assumption that the value of digital communica-
tion was, at least in part, its low cost, led to insufficient recognition of the
need to allocate scarce resources to effectively administer and update content
on official websites, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. This partly con-
tributed to a low level of interactivity on the official movement sites (Treré
and Cargnelutti 2014). In effect, the use of digital communications was
focused on providing information about events.
However, non-official Facebook pages and Twitter accounts of sympathi-
sers and activists appear to have been more active and creative in representing
participation in the movement, even if their reach was limited. The Twitter
account of @mxhastalamadre was associated with Javier Sicilia, but was
maintained by a close associate who also administered the official movement
account. He understood the role of @mxhastalamadre as trying to informally
convey the immediacy of Sicilia’s discourse into less than 140 characters, as
well as using Twitter in emergency contexts during the caravans to galvanise
support. While Twitter use was still relatively exclusive in Mexico at this
 Social movements in support of the victims 139
stage, a growing community of activists who used this platform, some parti-
cipating in the caravans, relayed messages in their networks, contributing to
the movement strategy and identity building. However, this loose affiliation of
activists who coalesced around the movement was less involved or interested
in its organisational or leadership structure.
The relatively spontaneous and rapid formation of the movement in the
form of public actions was facilitated by the use of digital communications.
These helped attract participants and sympathisers as well as media interest,
but this loose alliance was difficult to maintain. The movement struggled to
consolidate an organisational structure that facilitated participation while
sustaining a coherent and agreed strategy. The early negotiations with the
government provided dramatic opportunities to highlight the movement’s impact,
but also imposed a logic of limited legal reform on the process, perhaps
reducing the wider narrative and its transformative potential.
An aspect of the convergence between human rights frames and digital
communication also occurred during marches and the caravans when the speeches
of Javier Sicilia – often imbued with poetic resonance – and many other victims
were streamed or posted almost simultaneously on different platforms, closely
linking speakers and the wider movement audience. This process of bearing wit-
ness to victims’ experiences is a central part of evidencing and legitimating
victims of human rights violations and motivating involvement in solidarity
actions. Their compelling stories of suffering and injustice circulated widely in
digital and broadcast media, increasing the visibility of various of the victims. The
availability of emotionally charged accounts of victims online also provided a ready
movement archive, which continues to be available and is independent of the edited
testimonies available on mainstream media outlets. These personal testimonies
of ordinary victims of the ‘war’ played a valuable part in breaching the wall
of invisibility that Calderón’s strategy had constructed around the victims.
In Ayotzinapa, there was a wide range of social media practices integrated
into the movement’s actions from the outset. Testimonies of surviving stu-
dents and mobile phone footage of the attack circulated on social media
almost immediately, playing an important role in disseminating accounts of
the incident which contrasted with the official versions initially reported by tradi-
tional media. Some of this mobile phone footage has also been incorporated
into the legal case as evidence.
Ayotzinapa took place less than four years after the MPJD, but by then the
use of digital communications, particularly social media, had grown sig-
nificantly. The student movement #YoSoy132 had played an important part
in showing how improvised and creative use of social media, as opposed to
left-wing ideological formation, could mobilise shared disenchantment to
seize the political agenda and inspire collective actions – even if only tem-
porarily (Rovira 2014; Treré 2015). Many of the networks of activists that had
participated in #Yosoy132 remained socially engaged and disposed to recon-
figure their involvement with other networks to support the demands for the
return of the forty-three missing students. For example, in some of the initial
140 The public sphere and the press under siege
calls to protest in Mexico City in support of the disappeared, the name of the
group sponsoring the invitation was not included in the e-flyer or posters.
This anonymity was relatively unusual in social and political activism circles
in Mexico where factionalism frequently prevails. In this case, it helped ensure
protests were not identified with one group or another, allowing social media
circulation of calls to action to facilitate broad participation.
There were several instances of the increasingly complex and knowing
relationship between online and offline activism. For example, in November
2014 the #yamecanse Twitter hashtag (‘I am tired’) satirised the Federal
Attorney General’s own words during a public presentation of the official
investigation. The hashtag quickly became a global trending topic repre-
senting the lack of credibility of the official inquiry and the Attorney
General. Online activists actively sought to promote and maintain its cir-
culation and trending status as a sign of national and international concern at
the case, which in turn was reported globally. The hashtag itself became graffiti
and a rallying cry. The use of automatic bot attacks to undermine the hashtag’s
trending status was also globally reported as part of the apparent covert efforts
to reduce the social media profile of the case (Finley 2015). The battle over the
hashtag indicated how Twitter issues could jump platforms and become politi-
cally contentious beyond Mexico’s borders, contributing to pressure on the
government. The impact this had should not be overestimated, but it should
be understood as a tactical and opportunist use of Twitter as part of the wider
movement strategy of representing national and global concern about the
government’s handling of the case. It also imbued the movement with a cer-
tain degree of confidence to reach a global audience – which in turn appears
to have triggered counter-measures, apparently orchestrated by actors close to
the government, to reduce this impact.
In October 2014, the relationship between the authorities and the dis-
appearance of the young men was dramatically represented by a group of
activists, Rexista, during a demonstration in Mexico City. The group orche-
strated a photo from the top of a building of the slogan, ‘Fue El Estado’ (The
State did it), painted in huge script across the paving slabs of Mexico’s iconic
central square. The image accusing the State of responsibility for the crime
quickly went viral and ‘Fue El Estado’ became a slogan and graffiti tag across
the world, images of which were recirculated on social media. The organisers
of the action were seeking to create an image that could go viral and be used
in multiple contexts. They actively combined offline and online media to
create a strong, provocative message about the nature of state culpability, to
capture the anger of the movement and rejection of the government’s attempts
to deflect responsibility. The message succinctly accused the State of commit-
ting human rights violations, exactly what the government was seeking to
deny before domestic and international opinion.
Another feature of the Ayotzinapa actions has been the visibility of survi-
vors and parents on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to sustain the struggle.
In most cases, prior to September 2014, their use of social media was limited,
 Social movements in support of the victims 141
but force of circumstances led them, often with the assistance of experienced
activists, to develop their social media profile and network as part of the
campaign. The direct presence of parents and survivors on social media,
whether under their own name or appearing in alternative media portals,
helped sustain the visibility and legitimacy of their struggle – especially as the
momentum of the movement slowed and many traditional media reduced
coverage or became increasingly hostile.

Threats
Digital communications may afford a variety of uses to social movement
participants, but they also pose considerable threats. The Mexican federal and
state governments have increasingly invested in digital surveillance capacity as
proven by their purchase of Hacking Team software (Ricaurte Quijano et al.
2014), but there are virtually no official mechanisms to hold security services
to account or monitor their activities. Some private PR companies appear to
provide services for hire to attack opponents online with orchestrated cam-
paigns. Many activists also report the use of bots to undermine political
opponents and social activists. However, these attacks are frequently difficult
to distinguish from less orchestrated trolling incidents (Treré 2016).
In March 2016, Bloomberg Businessweek released the results of an exten-
sive investigation into the activities of Colombian hacker, Andres Sepúlveda,
who claimed to have been hired to conduct digital dirty tricks campaigns to
win elections in several Latin American countries (Robertson et al. 2016).
Despite official denials, Peña Nieto’s 2012 campaign team reportedly made
use of his services, appearing to confirm the willingness of the political
establishment to resort to unlawful digital communications strategies to
undermine opposition.
The 2013/14 telecommunications reforms mobilised online activists, many
of whom had participated in the #YoSoy132 movement. They considered
aspects of the draft bill an attempt by legislators and executive to curtail
online freedom of expression, undermine web neutrality and entrench inade-
quately controlled access to private communications and digital data by
criminal justice and security agencies. These threatened to undermine human
rights protections, but also to reduce the value of digital communications as a
mobilisation tool and an expressive collective environment for social activists.
The final approved law reduced some of these fears, but debates around
threats and regulation of the digital communications environment continue –
even if such discussions are primarily limited to circles advocating digital
rights rather than wider networks of social movement activists.

Conclusions
Social movement theorists have usually focused on the organisational features
and identity formation of collective action operating in conjunction with
142 The public sphere and the press under siege
external opportunities and constraints, as well as the expressive and instru-
mental aspects of movement activity and aims. Media and communications
scholars such as Castells tend to refract these aspects of social movement
practice through their interaction with digital media. In contrast, human
rights scholars usually focus on international human rights instruments and
the socialising process downward through international advocacy networks.
All these provide important vantage points from which to analyse social
movement practice and impacts. However, this chapter is focused on the spe-
cific context of Mexico’s ill-fated ‘war on drug cartels’ and the unfinished
democratic transition, particularly how grassroots social movements have
emerged around victims of the violence to challenge the State’s conduct and
the uses made of digital communications.
Human rights are double-edged. The government has claimed legitimacy
through its adoption of international conventions, without taking serious
measures to comply. On the other hand, victims and human rights NGOs
contest its discourse with evidence of abuse and demand justice. However, the
odds are stacked against victims as impunity reigns and the justice system
often operates under the influence of vested interests. The power to commu-
nicate injustice to a wider national and international community not only
reinforces the chances of success in a legal case, but also empowers victims in
their wider struggle for recognition and legitimacy. However, individual vic-
tims and communities alone frequently find it difficult to attract national or
international attention and may not be interested in or have the knowledge to
frame their demands in human rights terms. It is in this context that the
emergence of social movements, supported by civil society human rights
organisations, have helped frame demands and take strategic actions, capable
of significantly shifting the power dynamic to influence the political and
institutional agenda.
In looking at aspects of the uses of digital communications integrated into
the practices of the MPJD and Ayotzinapa 43 movement, it is clear that they
have added to the creative potential of movements, particularly attracting
younger generations to get involved. They also have enhanced the capacity of
victims and their supporters to influence the domestic political agenda, including
via international solidarity actions. However, the relative ease of involvement
coupled with excitement of participation in vibrant self-reflecting networks,
perhaps encourages an underestimation of the organisational problems
involved in sustaining movements beyond their initial burst of energy.
This tendency of movements to subside has been widely noted, and is fre-
quently identified as part of their ‘life cycle’, but digital communication may
assist in increasing their intensity and reducing their longevity. In the context
of Mexico’s transition, there is deep institutional resistance to transforming
the State so that it respects and protects human rights, as well as frequent
reliance on aggressive counter-measures to undermine claimants. The capa-
city of collective actors to emerge in specific contexts is evident, but their
ability to secure progressive social change remains in doubt and constantly
 Social movements in support of the victims 143
under threat. The gaping void between institutional human rights rhetoric
and actual compliance is testament to that. Yet in the face of some of the
gravest violence and abuses committed in the region for decades, the dignified
human rights demands of victims, supported by sections of civil society, con-
tinue to act as a potent reminder of how far Mexico still needs to travel in
order to secure its democratic transition.

Notes
1 For example, Comité Eureka, founded by Rosario Ibarra after the enforced dis-
appearance of her son, Jesús Piedra Ybarra, in 1975.
2 The IACHR experts documented links between municipal and State authorities and
the criminal gang responsible for the killings and disappearances. It also provided
compelling evidence of a degree of federal police and military participation in the
events in Iguala, which, amongst other troubling issues, federal prosecutors and
police have made efforts to conceal (see IACHR reports available at www.oas.org/
es/cidh/actividades/giei.asp). AI, HRW and Open Society have documented collu-
sion between different levels of authorities in grave human rights crimes committed
by criminal gangs, as well as official failure to effectively investigate (see reports cited
in bibliography). Edgardo Buscaglia also identifies the routine failure to fully inves-
tigate links between organised crime and different authorities as key to impunity
and the failure of the militarised anti-crime strategy (Buscaglia 2013).

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146 The public sphere and the press under siege
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Part III
Justice and reconciliation
from below
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7 Beyond disorder and the Constitution
Thinking about the law in regions of
violence (the case of Cherán)
Erika Bárcena Arévalo and
Orlando Aragón Andrade

Introduction
Asking about the place of law in regions of violence may have an obvious if
rather flippant answer: it is non-existent. However, in the Mexican case, as in
many others, the application of judicial remedies and the use of the language
of rights as a means of supporting social struggle, promoting state legitimacy,
and even to protect the actions of private companies, are definitely growing.
The trend allows us to ponder the relationship between the law and violence,
to think about its emancipatory potential, and to speculate whether it can be
used, particularly by social movements, to reverse patterns of everyday vio-
lence. In this respect the example of Cherán is particularly revealing. San
Francisco Cherán is an indigenous community of the Purépecha people. Over
the past five years, it has gained a degree of notoriety since in 2011 the people
of San Francisco Cherán (called from now on the comuneros) started a social
movement both against the deforestation of their lands and against the violence
inficted on the community by neighbouring groups involved in organised
crime.
In the absence of a response from the municipal, provincial or federal
authorities, the comuneros combined the mobilisation of their community
with a judicial process designed to legitimise their movement. This culminated
in a favourable judgement, which is now considered paradigmatic in relation
to the human rights of indigenous people. For the first time, the Mexican state
was forced to recognise indigenous peoples’ claim to self-determination,
autonomy and self-government as a judicial right. As a result, Cherán is today
the first formally recognised indigenous municipality, governed by a munici-
pal government structure which is chosen according to its usos y costumbres,
the customary and traditional legal and social institutions of indigenous
communities.
Unlike the model of the ayuntamiento, or town council, inherited from the
Spanish colonialists, the current municipal government of Cherán consists of
a series of collegiate bodies or councils, which are in charge of different
agendas and are directly responsible to the assemblies of each of the four
districts into which the community is divided. Councils include one devoted
150 Justice and reconciliation from below
to communal property, one to honour and justice, one to social, economic
and cultural programmes, one focused on young people, and one directed at
women. The overarching authority representing all the councils is the Greater
Council of Communal Government.
This process of self-determination, autonomy, and self-government has
made Cherán one of the safest municipalities in Michoacán. In fact, Cherán
provided a model for many of the more scrupulous members of the auto-
defensas, which rose up against the state’s drug trafficking organisations in
2013.1 Law and the legitimacy that springs from it have been key to the pro-
ject’s success. For the past two years we, as members of Emancipaciones, a
collective devoted to critical studies of the law and the humanities, we have
given judicial advice to the comuneros of Cherán.2 In so doing, we have man-
aged to gain unparalleled access to these communal ideas of the role of law.
This, in turn, has led us to consider the relationships between law and vio-
lence and between law and political emancipation. We rely on two theoretical
models. The first comes from US anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff,
and the second has been developed by Julieta Lemaitre and concerns the
sociology of law. Both engage with the relationship between law and violence
and what they term ‘legal fetishism’.

Only law and disorder?

One of Jean and John Comaroff’s most forceful statements flips traditional
ideas of development and growth on their heads. According to the anthro-
pologists, the countries of Africa are not slowly developing into capitalist,
Western democracies. Instead, capitalist Western democracies are becoming
more and more like the nations of sub-Saharan Africa (Comaroff and
Comaroff 2006; 2012). Here, the expansion of neoliberalism has restructured
relationships affecting the state, market and violence, and generated niches for
the production and circulation of capital which do not rest on legal founda-
tions. The most damaging consequences of such restructuring, such as gov-
ernment corruption, the rise of criminal groups and the expansion of criminal
economies, are particularly noticeable in the global south. But, this is more a
result of the West’s claim to universal ‘knowledge’ rather than the global
south’s unique proclivity for crime or corruption (Comaroff and Comaroff
2006; 2012). Such corrupt practices are also embedded in the political
economies of the global north, but here they are more effectively concealed by
a moral charade of adherence to the law.
However, in Theory from the South (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012), the
authors do not simply point out that the faults of the post-colonial nations exist,
albeit surreptitiously, in the north. They also argue that certain global
structural processes are disrupting the established geographies of centre and
periphery, relocating some of the most innovative and dynamic modes of
value production to the orient and the south.
 Beyond disorder and the Constitution 151
What we suggest … is that contemporary world historical processes are dis-
rupting received geographies of core and periphery, relocating southward –
and of course eastward as well – some of the most innovative and energetic
modes of producing value. And, as importantly, part or whole ownership of
them. Which is one of the things that makes contemporary capitalism
distinctive, thus to alter the lineaments of global modernity tout court.
(Comaroff and Comaroff 2012: 7)

For the Comaroffs, post-colonial nations constitute a reality towards which

the global order is moving. As a result, they are legitimate sources of knowl-
edge, which must shape the theories of the social sciences. The particular area
of theory which we wish to examine looks at the consequences of these new
forms of capital circulation and particularly the growing confluence between
the previously dichotomous values of law and disorder. As the Comaroffs
argue, in many post-colonial states rising rates of violence are accompanied
by paradoxical increases in appeals to state law and a certain legal fetishism.
According to the authors’ argument, post-colonial nations are often asso-
ciated with disorder; they are the archetypes of chaos. Neoliberal policies have
latched on to these nations’ tendency towards informality and traditions of
economic exploitation to create flourishing parallel economies involving a
mix of formal enterprises, criminal groups and the state. These parallel
economies often intersect the ‘decadent markets fostered by liberalization’
(Comaroff and Comaroff 2009: 19). Consider, for example, the market of
forced displacement, which provides significant gains, both for the networks
of people who transport displaced people and for those who supply them with
the false documents necessary to cross borders: ‘zones of deregulation are also
spaces of opportunity, of vibrant, desperate inventiveness and unrestrained
profiteering’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006: 9).
At the same time, the policies of dismantling the welfare state increasingly
demand the privatisation of government functions, for example, by sub-
contracting public services. This, in turn, has led the state to mutate from a
set of bureaucratic institutions to an administrator of concessions, which
simply legalises dispossession and shows its full strength only when these
concessions are threatened.
Here, the Comaroffs employ William Reno’s concept of the ‘shadow state’,
which accounts for how ‘a realpolitik of thuggery and profiteering is con-
ducted behind a facade of formal administrative respectibility’, and involves a
range of actors and practices more or less violent and more or less illegal’
(Comaroff and Comaroff 2006: 16). This, in turn, leads to the fragmentation
of sovereignty where the distinctions between authority and criminality and
between legality and illegality have become so blurred that they do not seem
to exist at all. This does not imply that the sovereignty of the state disappears
altogether, only that in post-colonial nations ‘the dispersal of state authority
in patchworks of partial, horizontal sovereignties is far more advanced’
(Comaroff and Comaroff 2006: 41).
152 Justice and reconciliation from below
In Mexico, this scenario is palpable. On the one hand, functions that were
formerly the exclusive domain of the state, like tax collection, public security,
and the administration of justice, are now performed by different groups,
which are mainly but not exclusively criminal. Working under the law of the
strongest, these groups are expanding the territories where the state seems to
be absent and illegality is the rule. On the other hand, many ‘legal’ groups
also pay for the performance of violence. Transnational extractivist enter-
prises such as Canadian mining companies not only violate fundamental
rights and cause substantial ecological damage, but also often push for the
criminalisation of social movements which have emerged to counteract their
predatory behaviour. They also often team up with organised crime groups
(Reuters 2014).
Michoacán is located in the Bajío of Mexico, where the south-central part
of the state, known as the Tierra Caliente, has historically been a marijuana-
producing area (Maldonado Aranda 2012). Since 2006 it has been at the front
line of the war on drugs. One of President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa’s first
acts was to send thousands of troops to the state to deal with the ‘problem’ of
organised crime. The confrontation between drug trafficking organisations and
the state generated a climate of violence, which reached into non-drug-producing
areas of the state, including the so-called Meseta Purépecha.
The indigenous community of San Francisco Cherán lies at the heart of the
Meseta Purépecha. According to the 2010 census, it is home to 18,141 inha-
bitants and it has a a territory of 20,826 hectares, most of which is forest.
Historically, the principal economic activities of the area have been related to
forestry (Beals 1992; Castile 1974; Calderón Mólgora 2004). It is the only
indigenous community that is also the head of a municipality.
Clandestine logging has always gone on. However, in 2007, with the start
of a new municipal administration, the practice grew and became increasingly
linked to organised crime. Trucks laden with wood crossed the town at all
hours of the day. They were guarded by heavily armed men, who boasted of
the theft of the wood and threatened those who dared intervene, telling them
to keep their eyes down as they passed. At the same time, drug trafficking,
kidnapping and the practice of ‘cobro de piso’, or protection racketeering
were introduced. Throughout the community, businesses were shaken down
for protection.
Despite the patently criminal nature of these practices, the municipal
authorities took no action. No one was arrested, even for easily provable
federal offences, like carrying unauthorised weapons in public. Such negli-
gence persuaded many that the municipal authorities were complicit. Then,
on 15 April 2011, a group of women left mass and confronted a group of the
illegal loggers who were driving three trucks loaded with wood which, on this
day, were not accompanied by armed guards. Equipped only with sticks and
stones, the women stalled the convoy, rang the bells of the church, and called
the community to join their protest. The rest of the community duly assem-
bled. At this point, the truck drivers managed to get out a call to their
 Beyond disorder and the Constitution 153
backers from organised crime, who arrived and threatened the community
with automatic weapons. But the protestors held firm, using fireworks to drive
away the armed thugs. They then arrested the truckers and kept them under
guard for five days before handing them over to the municipal police. Con-
firming the community’s suspicions of complicity, the authorities immediately
freed the drivers.
As the Comaroffs argue, the global south’s zones of liberalisation and
increasing violence are also sources of opportunity. The sympathies of the
municipal authorities were obvious and there was a well-founded fear that the
criminals would return and attack again. As a result, the comuneros decided
to close off the town and provide the security the state was unable to deliver.
To do this, they made use of traditional forms of community organising.
Barricades were placed in each one of the community’s entrances; bonfires
were lit every day in each one of the community’s four barrios where comu-
neros would meet to discuss recent events and share food, and a community
patrol was formed to monitor the streets and the barricades. The structure of
the municipal government was dissolved, the municipal president left the
community, and a series of collegiate commissions were organised to admin-
ister services in the town. They were led by the Greater Council of Commu-
nal Government. The commissions were in charge of everything from garbage
collection to the delivery of justice.
Thus, from a relatively ad hoc response to immediate security concerns
emerged a popular government inspired by indigenous customs. And in Sep-
tember 2011, Cherán’s authorities demanded from the Mexican state the formal
recognition of what in the language of rights is called self-determination. This
claim, which we will review later in detail, was the result of a very particular
context. 2011 was an election year in Michoacán and the comuneros of Cherán
wanted to expel the representatives of the formal political parties, who had
caused divisions, teamed up with members of organised crime, and
remained utterly ineffective in solving such basic issues as guaranteeing public
safety.
Today Cherán is undoubtedly one of the safest places in Mexico. The
municipal police were replaced by the community patrol and a body of forest
rangers who, though not without great effort, have succeeded in keeping
organised crime at bay. Indiscriminate logging has ceased and levels of petty
crime in the community are extremely low. At the same time, the judicial
recognition of the community’s right to self-determination by Mexico’s two
highest courts – the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation and the Electoral
Tribunal of the Judiciary of the Federation – has been crucial to the project’s
survival and success. Legitimated authorities can now channel public resour-
ces towards essential community-based projects. For example, there is now a
nursery which produces trees for reforestation, as well as generating dozens of
permanent and temporary jobs. There is a resin factory, a paving stone fac-
tory, and the largest rainwater collector in Latin America. But, above all, the
structure of government is chosen according to the traditional forms of the
154 Justice and reconciliation from below
community – that is public assemblies. These are called on a regular basis so
that the population has a direct and constant dialogue with their authorities.
By radicalising democracy and relocating politics outside the formal institu-
tions, the comuneros of Cherán have managed to escape the violence brought
by electoral democracy and the economics of plunder.3 Thus, the view from
the global south not only brings to the fore the consequences of untram-
melled neoliberalism, as the Comaroffs argue; it can also suggest solutions to
the increasing levels of violence and conflict generated by these structural
changes.
The Comaroffs also emphasise the fetishisation of the law in those regions
of the global south which have suffered an exacerbation of violence. In this
way, we can see how different sectors of society which resent the effects of
neoliberalism can resort to the judicial and legislative powers to secure an
effective recognition of their rights. However, such fetishisation is also adop-
ted by certain ‘kleptocracies’ and others who infringe the law. They use the
language of rights to protect their interests (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006).
Taken together, such festishisation means that conflicts that were previously
solved through politics are increasingly solved in the courts. In this way the
law gradually displaces and becomes a substitute for politics. Thus the law
becomes:

a repertoire of more or less standardized terms and practices that permit

the negotiation of values, beliefs, ideals, and interests across otherwise-
impermeable lines of cleavage. Hence the displacement of so much poli-
tics into jurisprudence. Hence the flight into constitutionalism, which, in
its postcolonial guise, embraces heterogeneity within the language of uni-
versal rights – thus dissolving groups of people with distinctive identities into
aggregates of persons who may enjoy the same entitlements and enact their
differences under the sovereignty of a shared Bill of Rights. Furthermore,
because social, spiritual, and cultural identities tend increasingly to cross
frontiers, resort to the jural as a means of commensuration also transects
nation-states, which is why there is so much talk nowadays of global legal
regimes. Meanwhile, the effort to make human rights into an ever more
universal discourse, and to ascribe ever more authority to it, gives
impetus to the remapping of the cartography of jurisdictions.
(Comaroff and Comaroff 2006: 32–33)

In general, this is correct. As the Comaroffs argue, with a few notable excep-
tions (like the World Social Forum) most of the time the law is inclined to
favour the interests of capital. But, outside such broad international contexts,
the law can also have emancipatory potential at the local level. Here, as in the
case of Cherán, the law has not so much replaced politics as been used as a
tool at the service of politics. Though Mexican law is often an instrument of
power that preserves the status quo, it also has cracks that can be exploited
by social movements to their own advantage (Santos 2003).
 Beyond disorder and the Constitution 155
The comuneros of Cherán exploited such cracks. Indigenous rights to self-
determination had already been recognised and were introduced into the
Constitution in 2001. And in June 2011, in a climate of increasing violence, a
major reform was made to the Federal Constitution. From this point on the
international treaties on human rights ratified by Mexico were incorporated
into the country’s legal system. Authorities were now mandated to respect the
principles of human rights. Yet, despite these two constitutional changes, the
Electoral Institute of Michoacán (IEM) decided not to recognise Cherán’s
right to stand outside the usual electoral procedures. The IEM argued that
the state’s electoral law overrode such considerations.
Despite this initial decision, the comuneros of Cherán decided to challenge
the ruling by filing a complaint before the highest court in electoral matters,
the Superior Court of the Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judicial Branch
(TEPJF). The trial was unprecedented; in most of the country the 2001 indi-
genous right to self-determination was a dead letter. And the comuneros’
willingness to file the complaint did not demonstrate any great faith in the
country’s legal system, but was rather a defensive measure designed to coun-
teract the stigmatisation of the movement as illegal by its opponents. It was also
designed to give the movement greater space to manoeuvre, by trying to keep
at least one foot in the institutional world (Aragón Andrade 2013).
On the day the challenge was filed in September 2011, the movement was
five months old. The decision did not arrive until November that year. During
the interim period, the community was still lined by barricades and dotted by
bonfires. The comuneros tried to maintain solidarity by using the time to com-
plete community work. All offers of help from representatives of organised
crime or the government were repelled. Thus, politics was not subsumed by the
law. Rather, the law acted as an adjunct to political action.
In November 2011, the TEPJF finally decided to recognise Cherán’s right
to self-determination. In so doing, it determined that the local authorities
could be chosen by usos y costumbres rather than by the procedures of elec-
toral democracy. The state government was forced to execute the court ruling,
stopped imposing electoral rules on the town, and now recognised the indi-
genous government of the Purépecha municipality of Cherán as a valid
interlocutor and political actor. The ruling also had broader consequences.
For example, in 2014 the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN)
issued a judgement on the State Constitution of Michoacán. According to the
comuneros of Cherán and other indigenous population centres, they had not
been consulted on changes to the Constitution with regards to indigenous
rights. The SCJN acknowledged the validity of their case and ordered the
state government to consult with the municipal authorities on all legislative
reforms affecting indigenous matters. Today the right to indigenous consulta-
tion is recognised in the law of citizen participation of the state. Here, the
effects of the consultation are binding (Aragón Andrade 2015a).
That is why, even when political action continued despite pressure from law
enforcement, the decree injected new energy into the movement: the TEPJF
156 Justice and reconciliation from below
recognised the community’s right to self-determination and that it would be
elected according to local customs rather than via the usual electoral
process.
With this ruling the state government was forced to implement the court’s
mandate and recognise the customs explicitly outlined in the resolution. It
also had to recognise what was now the Purépecha Municipality of Cherán as
an interlocutor and a relevant actor in the political context. This was parti-
cularly pertinent in 2014 when the Supreme Court of Justice issued a judge-
ment on proposals advanced by the traditional authorities of the municipality
for a reform to the Constitution of Michoacán concerning indigenous rights.
The SCJN acknowledged, as part of the powers of municipal authorities, the
right to prior, free and informed consultation as specified by legislative
reforms in indigenous matters. It thus gave Cherán a victory over the state’s
executive powers and the Michoacán legislature, allowing the municipality to
achieve the right to indigenous consultation as recognised by law (Aragón
Andrade 2015a).
It could be argued that in this case the law legitimised violence and simply
created more sources of sovereignty. But the project is in fact a relative oasis
of calm amid chaos. As such, the experience of Cherán suggests that there is
space between law and disorder. In this instance, the violence which created
the autonomous municipality is qualitatively distinguishable from other forms
of violence. At the same time, the law is not reduced to a fetishistic practice
that substitutes jurisprudence for politics.

Against the fetishisation of the Constitution

To deepen our understanding of this question it is worthwhile to examine
Lemaitre’s (2011) essay about ‘constitution and barbarism’, which attempts to
rethink the law in ‘lawless’ areas. It reflects on the Colombian experience and
seeks to examine the relationship between violence and the law. In particular
the essay looks at how daily practices of violence affect the way law is viewed
and treated in such areas.
Lemaitre suggests that Marxist theories primarily focus on the power
dynamic of the relationship between law and violence. In doing so, they do
not sufficiently reflect on the role of the law in areas exposed to daily violence.
She suggests that poststructuralism’s contribution to understanding law and
violence is more illuminating. The idea that law is socially situated in certain
geographical and temporal contexts and that its authority has no other
foundation than custom resonates with Derrida’s (1997) remarks on the
mythical foundations of justice and law. She also draws on Pascal’s comments
on religion and the way in which the daily reading of texts considered sacred
evolves into rites and dogmas, thereby convincing people of the existence of
God. Lemaitre takes this formulation and reflects on the implications it has
for the progressive legal academy, which reproduces and defends the rites and
discourses of law and the belief that its foundation is justice, which frequently
 Beyond disorder and the Constitution 157
leads to the moralisation of law and to seeing ‘zones without law’ as an
expression of barbarism and the opposite of civilisation. She notes that:

Because of this moralizing tendency of the progressive legal academy, it is

important to insist on the two arguments that provide greater clarity in
the theorization of law on the violent zones that run through and mark
Latin America: the first is that both violence and the law are social rea-
lities without greater metaphysical foundation than that provided by
custom itself. The second is that, while it is true that both progressive law
and violence reflect very different social meanings of the value of human
life, the advocacy that progressive lawyers make of law is a political
commitment, a political will, rather than a metaphysical truth about the
nature of law or justice.
(Lemaitre 2011: 57)

A consequence of this premise, as developed by Lemaitre, is that where

custom is the law we find varying zones of legality. Where custom involves
violent practices we find areas of illegality, but in both cases custom makes
people naturalise and normalise the law or violence. The absence of the law in
some areas (where violence is customary and denotes what is normal) means
that judicial prescriptions do not necessarily affect reality, or at least not all
realities, nor is the law normalised everywhere.
In the case of the second premise, Lemaitre argues that, even if we
acknowledge that in certain areas there exists a convergence of zones where
the norm is the law and others where the norm is violence, one simply cannot
accept, as per the Comaroffs, the myriad sovereignties (and therefore illegal-
ities) that this assumes. Quite the contrary, we must distinguish what the
realms of violence and progressive law say about the humanity of the Other
and from there establish a political commitment. The difference is that while
the latter is clearly humanist, for violence such a criterion is non-existent,
especially with one’s enemy. Political commitments must relate to the defence
of progressive law; to the extent that the recognition of common humanity is
accepted as normal, extreme violence will disappear.
The author furthermore insists:

That is the political commitment of law, and its necessity makes law not
only a practice in some areas of our countries, but also a political project.
What unites us in taking sides with the law […] is the political will to give
value to these bodies, to insist on their secular sacralization, to try to
build the social consensus that makes it part of the common sense shared
in the societies in which we live.
(Lemaitre 2011: 64)

But if violence or law as social realities have no more foundation than

custom, how do zones of violence move towards progressive law? How do
158 Justice and reconciliation from below
they subvert what is ‘normal’? Walter Benjamin argues that, hypothetically,
violence can serve purposes that are considered legal if they have a ‘universal
historical recognition’ (2007, 116). He points to the fact that the legal order
denies people the right to use violence and as a result violence is monopolised
by legal frameworks. He points out that:

the law sees violence in the hands of individuals as a danger undermining

the legal system. As a danger nullifying legal ends and the legal executive?
Certainly not: for then violence as such would not be condemned but
only that directed to illegal ends.
(Benjamin 1978: 280)

As a result, the law does not monopolise violence to safeguard legal ends, but
to safeguard itself, because violence has the ability to found a new order of
relations and thus a new kind of law (Benjamin 2007).
To claim that violence and the law are mutually exclusive is equivalent to
denying the fact that daily violence occurs in places like Colombia or Mexico
as a result of the processes of neoliberalisation that are facilitated by the state.
Among the clearest examples of this are the areas where the state has granted
massive concessions to private capital, often for the exploitation of natural
resources. Although such concessions may be legal, they usually result from
the legalisation of displacement. The state shows its full force in the face of
challenges by local peoples, either via repression or the use of paramilitarism,
a privatised way of exercising police functions. The ‘norm’, then, is not neces-
sarily either the law or violence, but both are clearly related in increasingly
complex ways.
In fact, situations of severe violence have come to coexist with a constant
appeal to the law and state tribunals. As a consequence, the creation or
modification of public policies through judicial decisions, the legitimation or
revocation of legislative or executive decisions and the creation or extension
of individual and collective rights, have been increasingly subject to judicial
decision-making since the 1980s, giving rise to a particular phenomenon
known as the judicialisation of politics (Sieder et al. 2011).
As noted above, a common effect of this trend has been to substitute the
law for politics, with a wide range of actors employing human rights and
other kinds of law to achieve their objectives. Human rights legislation, for
example, is not exploited exclusively by progressive movements but also by
big transnational institutions like the World Bank.
If, as Lemaitre points out, violence is normalised in areas where progressive
law is seen at best as a farce, reversing such trends is extremely complex.
Normalisation adds to the fact that violence may even have legal origins and
can be based directly or indirectly on human rights. In the case of Cherán, the
movement emerged in a context of violence, but far from normalising vio-
lence and living with it, the community decided to face it and subvert it.
Although we are observing a case which has managed to construct an
 Beyond disorder and the Constitution 159
alternative to violence, which is far from the rule, we do now see in many
areas the emergence of new social movements which are reacting against
plunder and violence.
As Cherán demonstrates, the popular government that emerged as a result
of social mobilisation highlighted the dignity and humanity of those involved.
This did not happen as a result of state law but instead developed from the
community’s own customs and practices. They attempted to respond to the crisis
of legitimacy of the major political parties and to the inevitable violence
engendered by the pursuit of neoliberal policies.
The Constitution and international treaties do provide legality and institu-
tional support to Cherán, but this is more as a result of a process of hybridi-
sation, where state law is employed to complement local knowledge and
culture. It is a rather complex context and one in which, as Lemaitre (2009)
advocates, the political commitment of activists should be with progressive
law and rights. At the same time, she asks whether this does not suggest that
progressive laws can function only if they are grounded in justice. The exis-
tence of a progressive legislation which recognises the humanity of the Other
and has this as its central premise can depend not only on the socio-historical
and geographical context but also on the promotion of a legal framework
which in turn promotes and establishes a political commitment. Again,
Lemaitre is useful here for an understanding of the utility of progressive law
as a means to an end:

The description of the self divided between ‘I know … and yet’ fits with
my own reaction, and that of activists and academics I have interviewed
on the subject of attachment to the law. We know well what the problems
are in the application of the law, and we also know that this is not, or
should not be, more than an instrument to reach an end. And yet desire,
pleasure, and pain exist in a space that is beyond any calculation of
usefulness resulting from victory or defeat.
(Lemaitre 2009: 388)

The question thus becomes one of establishing a political commitment to the

law while recogising its limits and the myriad problems relating to its imple-
mentation. There exists a tendency among activists to subject political strug-
gle to the times, procedures, places and language of the law, without realising
that instead they should be using it as a tool in the service of political
struggle.
This position has been fundamental in the activities in which we have been
involved in Cherán. As noted above, the TEPJF judgement recognised the
right to self-determination for members of the community who pushed for a
judicial decision. This made possible the appointment of traditional autho-
rities to be elected according to the customs of the now indigenous munici-
pality. Although those involved numbered about 2,000, they did not represent
the entire community. As a result, a consultation with all the comuneros and
160 Justice and reconciliation from below
comuneras was organised so that they could articulate their views on whether
to be governed by local customs or whether to continue with a system led by
political parties.
The ruling indicated that the consultation had to be carried out in accor-
dance with international standards, which meant that it should be culturally
relevant and in coordination with the community. In the first meeting with the
staff of the Electoral Institute of Michoacán commissioned to organise the con-
sultation process, we were told that it should be done by means of a secret ballot
and that people should be identified by presenting their voting cards.
Accepting this mechanism would have been detrimental in the sense that
we would have lost control of the consultation process, which was indis-
pensable given that there were various actors ready to defend the interests
of political parties and thus forestall government by indigenous customs. Such
parties would undoubtedly have employed the usual tricks which characterise
the electoral process in Mexico, such as vote-rigging or vote-buying.
The strategy we followed was to organise consultations which were sen-
stitive to the local culture and customs in a similar manner to those estab-
lished by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In this way, the
community would decide on the mechanisms of consultation, thus ensuring
that they would have greater control and encourage an atmosphere of open-
ness and democracy. This also had the advantage of discouraging intrusion
from unwanted actors who generally operate clandestinely in order to subvert
popular democratic participation.
But perhaps a clearer example of the importance of focusing the activist
commitment on politics can be seen in the ruling issued by the SCJN and the
constitutional controversy that we and the traditional Cherán authorities
provoked. The ruling was only declarative because, although it recognised the
right to prior, free and informed consultation, it did not support the Congress
of Michoacán’s legislative power to revoke the reform made to the local
constitution on matters of rights.
If our political commitment had been to indigenous law and not with
Cherán, what could we have done about it by conforming to a ruling that,
while a huge step forward on the path to recognition of indigenous rights, was
something of a defeat because we were unable to make the rights applicable?
What we did do, however, was reinforce the relevant parts of the Court’s
ruling, which recognised Cherán as an indigenous municipality and therefore
sui generis, since it is unlike any other municipality in the country. This was
also incredibly significant in the sense that an indigenous municipality over-
came the executive and legislative powers of the State of Michoacán. This
strengthened Cherán’s position as an obligatory interlocutor, particularly in
the local Congress, to the extent that today the right to self-determination and
the right to consultation are widely recognised and are now a reality for other
communities in the region.
As discussed above, the law has emancipatory potential and we should not
forget that it was never an instrument originally intended for subordinate
 Beyond disorder and the Constitution 161
groups but was instead designed to maintain the stability of the dominant
order and social and racial hierarchies (Benjamin 2007). Political commitment
must always be embedded within movements that make counter-hegemonic use
of the law (Santos 2003). If those of us involved in the activism of legal
accompaniment of social movements know this, in practice we often ignore such
fundamental issues and inevitably fall into a kind of fetishisation of the law
which makes us resist, often mistakenly, the effects of neoliberalism, though
we will never be able to make even minimal changes to its structure.
As we have argued, the literature discussed in this chapter has made sig-
nificant contributions to studying the place of law in regions dominated by
violence. At the same time, it tends to ignore some fundamental aspects
which would help to deepen our understanding of its role. Through our
experience as lawyers of the Purépecha community of San Francisco Cherán
we have tried to show these shortcomings, placing particular emphasis on the
importance of building counter-hegemonic political processes as well as new
projects of social coexistence.
We argue that the proposition of anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff
overlooks the fact that while the contemporary period is one of myriad types
of sovereignty and violence, we cannot not take them all into account, given
that they rarely share the same aims. In this sense, there are kinds of violence
that, while they do not originate with the state, clearly contribute to maintaining
and strengthening forms of domination exercised by the neoliberal state.
Others, as in the case of Cherán, promote alternative projects of peace,
security, democracy and coexistence, thereby including qualitatively different
elements to those of other previous comparable cases.
It is for this reason that Julieta Lemaitre’s humanist project of progressive
law cannot be accepted as belonging uniquely to the realms of the Constitu-
tion and state law. The experience in Cherán clearly demonstrates that a
humanist project, and perhaps one with great transformative potential, can be
built from indigenous forms of justice. This is why in this chapter we give
equal weight to the emancipatory potential of state law, community rights
and indigenous justice. The Purépechas of Cherán did not need to be jurists
or constitutionalists to expand their knowledge and formulate a humanist
political project, which also included protection of the local environment.
This is why one cannot favour the Constitution over indigenous justice, nor
consider that it is an exclusive component of such a humanist project or
defence of life. It is no coincidence that popular rights and indigenous justice
are usually more acceptable to those practising and benefiting from them than
are the law of the state and the Constitution.
These two approaches allow us to understand the law in a pluralistic
manner and how it can play an important counter-hegemonic role. The
fetishisation of the role of law, as theorised by Comaroff and Comaroff, often
functions to preserve systems of domination. However, this does not exclude
the notion that the law can be utilised effectively in social struggle. The
experience of Cherán demonstrates just how this political project, which
162 Justice and reconciliation from below
emerged from the movement which began on 15 April 2011, was underpinned
by a counter-hegemonic use of state law, and how this intervention has been
crucial in achieving stability to this day.
Affirming the emancipatory potential of the judicial system should not lead
us towards a fetishism of the law nor to articulate our political commitment
to the law, as Lemaitre argues. We agree instead with Boaventura de Sousa
Santos (2003) that the law is transformative only when it backs the potential
of the political projects of groups and social movements, which use it to
mobilise change. In other words, our commitment should not be to the law
but to politics and their transformative potential, while recognising that the
law can function as an effective tool in bringing about progressive change.

Notes
1 See this interview: ‘Entrevista al Dr. Mireles con Carmen Aristeguí’, www.youtube.
com/watch?v=WODxRRq2YQ4.
2 For the work of the Colectivo Emancipaciones, consult its web page, https://colecti
voemancipaciones.org/.
3 In this respect Aragón Andrade (2015b) argues that the experience in Cherán has
generated practices that tend towards a dismantling of the market, patriarchy and
neo-colonialisation, which are implicit in the hegemonic view of Mexican
democracy.

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stitucionalidad para la elección por ‘usos y costumbres’ de la comunidad purépecha
de Cherán, Michoacán’, Expresiones. Órgano Oficial de Difusión del Instituto Electoral
de Michoacán, 15.
Aragón Andrade, O. (2013) ‘El derecho en insurrección: el uso contra-hegemónico del
derecho en el movimiento purépecha de Cherán’, Estudos y pesquisas sobre las
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8 Combing history against the grain
The search for truth amongst Mexico’s
hidden graves
Carolina Robledo Silvestre

The shame and silence of the innocent can mask the guilty silences of those
who are responsible.
(Primo Levi1)

Combing the ground

The first time I accompanied a group in a citizen-led search in Sinaloa,
Mexico,2 I witnessed practices and learned concepts that had hitherto been
unknown to me. ‘To brush or comb (peinar) the ground’ was one. This phrase,
used by relatives of the disappeared and familiarised through years of experi-
ence, refers to carefully checking for the location of a suspected mass burial
site. Relatives meticulously scour every inch of the ground in the hope of
finding some indication of a clandestine grave as they endeavour to check
every inch of the place which has been previously marked, looking for clues
that might indicate the presence of a hidden burial.3
‘Combing the ground’ evokes Walter Benjamin’s (2008) phrase ‘combing
history against the grain’. This refers to the exercise of deconstructing history,
rejecting the victors’ narrative and instead privileging the history of the van-
quished. Benjamin’s work highlights the dialectical relationship between the
past and the present by assuming that a critical consciousness does not come
from the great monuments of history erected by the victors but from the ruins
and fragments that have remained buried and hidden.
This chapter presents the results of the first phase of field research which
involved accompanying relatives of the disappeared in citizen-led searches.
Such an approach embraces the possibility of producing a counter-memory to
the amnesia produced by terror (Ferrándiz 2008).
 Mexico’s hidden graves 165
What kind of country is this? The administration of suffering, terror
and impunity
In Mexico we walk on the dead. In Mexico we look at landscapes that mask
clandestine cemeteries of murdered people. In Mexico we swim in waters where
ashes are tossed. In Mexico we eat the missing …
(Salvador Camarena, El Financiero, 10 February 2016)

Although the raw figures are still a matter of debate, official statistics now
recognise the disappearance of 28,168 people in Mexico over the last ten
years.4 Relative’s groups report that this number massively underestimates the
actual figure. Many people are still afraid to report their relatives as missing
because they fear and distrust the authorities. During my participation in the First
Search Brigade in Veracruz, held in April 2016, I had the opportunity of meeting
twenty-nine relatives of missing persons who had given DNA samples to inde-
pendent experts from the Autonomous University of the State of Morelos. Of
these, ten had not submitted any type of complaint for fear of reprisals:

How am I going to file the complaint if the same police patrol that took
my daughter makes rounds in front of my house and stops at the
entrance of my daughter’s school to keep an eye on us? It’s been two
months since my daughter disappeared and I have not approached a
government office. This is the first time I tell this to someone who is not
my family.
(Elena, mother of a young woman who disappeared
during the first half of 2016 in Córdoba, Veracruz)

The fear generated by such a climate of terror leads to a serious under-

estimation of the scale of the problem. Over the past five years diverse
domestic and international human rights organisations have pointed to Mex-
ico’s systematic record of enforced disappearances and other violations of
human rights (GIEI 2015; 2016; CIDH 2016; AI 2013; 2015; HRW 2013;
Open Society Justice Initiative 2016).
In addition to the violence that impedes the full exercise of citizenship and
the recognition of victims, in recent years Mexico has witnessed a spectacle of
suffering and cruelty, or what Cavarero terms horrorismo (Cavarero 2009).
Since the discovery in 2010 of seventy-two bodies of migrants in San Fer-
nando, Tamaulipas, and, especially after the disappearance of the forty-three
normalista students in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, in September 2014, clandestine
graves have been at the centre of a media circus.5 This in turn has had the effect
of normalising everyday acts of cruelty.
Little over a month after the disappearance of the forty-three young men in
Iguala, more than a hundred bodies were found as a result of the efforts of
relatives of the victims accompanied by solidarity brigades. The discovery of
remains that did not belong to the disappeared students suggested the
166 Justice and reconciliation from below
existence of a far wider tragedy. While newspapers, politicians and civic asso-
ciations focused on the tragedy of the young students, more than 500 families
united to form the Committee of the Other Disappeared of Iguala which, since
then, has been dedicated to the search for more clandestine graves.
Despite the prominence they have achieved in recent years, these searches
are not recent. In Tijuana, the first discovery of graves by relatives of missing
persons took place on 6 April 2011, when the remains of human bodies dis-
solved in caustic soda were found on a farm outside the city. The remains
were the work of the notorious Pozolero, a.k.a. Santiago Mesa, who had
spent years disposing of victims on behalf of the cartels. The find was made
possible only by the research of the organisation’s leader, Fernando Ocegueda
Flores, and the technical help of experts from the Attorney General’s Office
(PGR).6
In a similar manner, the civic association Coahuila Life Group has con-
ducted fieldwork under the leadership of Silvia Ortiz and her husband Óscar
Sánchez Viesca, parents of Silvia Estefanía Sánchez, who disappeared in
2006. After years of work the couple has managed to bring together dozens of
relatives who managed to find over forty mass graves in 2015 alone. Accord-
ing to Estefanía’s parents, the criminal groups ‘cooked’ their victims in vats of
acid and then ground the bones to prevent identification.7
These methods of destroying the bodies eliminate the possibility of their
identification and erase any chance of justice. Other disposal techniques that
have come to light in Mexico in recent years include illegal cremation by the
judicial authorities themselves, as in Jalisco8; the use of prisons by the Zetas
in Piedras Negras, Coahuila; unauthorised burials in Tetelcingo, Morelos,9
and disorderly and unlicensed burials in public graveyards.
The terror of such methods goes well beyond the techniques outlined above,
as can be seen in the testimonies of some of the relatives:

There are the relatives of 211 disappeared in the association. I have found
46 bodies and I know I have about 30 in the mass grave that we have yet
to exhume. So I am missing more than 100 bodies, but I know there are
some that I will never find because they were fed to the crocodiles. For
years they had lakes with these animals that they fed with bodies and
only the bones remained. These bones were then crushed and buried. We
found a burial of many bits of bones but the prosecutor’s experts said
they were from animals, so they left them, without providing any proof. I
have to return for them.
(Mirna Medina, leader of the group The Searchers of El Fuerte, Sinaloa,
personal conversation, 12 May 2016)

We (Sandra and her husband) read the statement of the notorious Pozo-
lero in its entirety; it is such a large file (indicating with the fingers the
size of a thick book), and there he tells how, over the years, he perfected
 Mexico’s hidden graves 167
the technique of dissolving the bodies. He explains how he experimented
with chemists until he found the formula that completely disintegrated
the body so that nothing remained.
(Sandra Ruelas, mother of a young man who disappeared in Tijuana in
2007, personal conversation, 11 May 2016).

This landscape of violence acts not only against the body of the victim, but
also acts as a kind of necropolitics against the social body, introducing forms
of control over the population including the right to kill, the right to do so
with extreme cruelty and the right to escape justice. However, this is not the
only way necropolitics shapes Mexican democracy. According to Ariadna
Estévez López (2015), the torment of dealing with government officials and
attempting to gain recognition for real grievances constitutes a form of
bureaucratic violence. From the moment of filing the complaint, family
members are immersed in a labyrinth of papers and procedures that can go
on for years. These are forms of microviolence that not only cause enormous
difficulties and frustrations for the victims’ families, but also very rarely cul-
minate in justice. Faced with this impunity, some relatives of missing persons
end up assuming the role of the investigator, and in doing so put themselves
at risk. For many, this is the only way to sidestep the institutional inertia that
fails to grant them recognition or guarantee their rights:

We have knocked on a thousand doors, and still have many more to go. I
am the one who has done most research. There is a choice: either we stay
at home crying and make ourselves victims again or we go out every day
to search for our son.
(María Guadalupe Fernández, mother of young person
disappeared in Monclova, Coahuila in 2009)

The research is done in official documents and in files, but not in the
field, where our children disappeared … All you want to do is to have
meetings to make it look like you’re searching for our children.
(Communiqué of the collective For the Love of Them, march
on 10 May 2016, Mother’s Day, author’s field diary)

The difficulty of getting bureaucrats to work for them has become all too
familiar to families of the disappeared. The accumulated fatigue, combined
with a lack of results, has generated a gradual awareness, not only of the
absence of the state, but also about its criminal character. It is not, however, a
phenomenon that only they encounter. The National Survey on Victimisation
and Perception of Public Security (2014) by the National Institute of Statistics
and Geography (INEG 2016) indicates that Mexicans in general perceive
impunity as one of their ten most important problems.
168 Justice and reconciliation from below
Impunity in Mexico manifests itself in the absence of criminal sanctions for
perpetrators of violent crimes as well as a lack of penalties for public officials who
deliberately block investigations. According to numerous reports, about 98 per
cent of violent crime goes unpunished. It is estimated that only about 20 per
cent of the total number of crimes committed are ever reported and only one in
every 100 complaints ends in a successful prosecution (Joint Report 2013).
For disappearances since 2006, no one has been prosecuted at the federal
level. Only six federal sentences have been handed down at all for such crimes
committed before 2005. The law relating to this crime considers three aspects:
finding the missing person; punishment of those responsible; and the offer of
reparations for the families of the victims. At present, none of these aspects is
dealt with by the state authorities despite advances in human rights legislation
and the creation of victim assistance programmes.

Ethnography at the foot of a grave

When I began my fieldwork in 2009 accompanying relatives of missing per-
sons in Tijuana, Baja California, I did not imagine that seven years later I
would find myself involved in the search for clandestine graves throughout the
country. This led me to follow the struggle of the relatives of the disappeared.
As a member of the Movement for Our Disappeared in Mexico (MPNDM),10
I participated in discussions of the General Law on Forced Disappearance
during 2015 and part of 2016. I also witnessed the struggle of those tired of
waiting for the laws to work and determined to ‘dig’ the earth with their own
hands in search of their loved ones.
Between March and May 2016 I accompanied citizen-led searches in Los
Mochis (Sinaloa) and Amatlán (Veracruz). Though they started in different
ways and with different strategies, over time the sharing of knowledge
between the two generated a common framework. During my stay in Los
Mochis in March 2016, I conducted group and individual interviews, atten-
ded a meeting with federal authorities, and accompanied a search in which
they found three bones in the vicinity of the nearby small town of San Blas.
Later I attended the Primera Brigada Nacional de Búsqueda de Personas
Desaparecidas, convened by the Red de Enlaces Nacionales, a group which
comprises families of the disappeared from all over the country.
The meeting took place in Amatlán, Veracruz for twelve days in April
2016. Here, I worked with scientists from the Autonomous State University of
Morelos, who took samples of DNA from the relatives of the disappeared.
During my time at the meeting, I assumed different roles and responsibilities:
I participated directly in the search, helping to clear the ground and locate
clues; I worked as media manager, writing communications and coordinating
the logistics of the families’ participation in the field, and I took part in
decision making and planning with other members of the brigade.
The fieldwork of citizen-led searches not only presents strong ethical and
emotional dilemmas, but also generates security problems because of the
 Mexico’s hidden graves 169
semi-legal nature of the work and the ongoing violence in the areas under
study. In view of these challenges I have developed several entrance and
exit strategies as well as other forms of accompaniment that balance my
safety with the need to understand the diverse experiences of the relatives. In
doing so, I have tried to adopt a methodology which produces counter-
memories to the amnesia and silence generated by terror. The complex nature
of the search and the exhumation of graves stimulates what Francisco Fer-
rándiz (2008: 104) terms ‘a productive convergence of anthropologies … of
violence, death, victimisation, human rights, mourning and social suffering,
memory, ritual, communication, art’. It is not easy to witness the exhumation of
clandestine graves, particularly under the current conditions. For Nordstrom and
Robben this type of fieldwork provokes an ‘existential shock’, which highlights
what is often a lack of training on the part of the researcher (1995). Ferrán-
diz, who has worked on the exhumation of graves in Spain, points out that
ethnography ‘at the foot of the grave’ requires a gradual emotional training and
the basic recognition that emotions are an essential part of ethnography itself.
Clandestine graves often provide highly perturbing information and can
provoke struggles over memory and identity as well as traumatic collective
emotions (Ferrándiz 2008: 104–105). Recognising my lack of training, I both
clung to the experiences described by other anthropologists in similar condi-
tions and developed my own understanding of the exhumations as sites of
dispute, of reconstruction of identities and social ties as well as spaces where
one can come to terms with practices ‘that seem to undo the state in its territorial
and conceptual margins’ (Das and Poole 2008: 20).
Dominant social science epistemologies do not tend to engage with the
language of dejection, disappointment, alarm and pain, but this is the lan-
guage that we must use in order to understand the experiences of victims of
political catastrophe and structural violence. It allows us to realise that suf-
fering is often a collective experience and that emotional engagement is a vital
part of research at ‘the foot of the grave’. This forces us to look beyond the
media-constructed spectacle of suffering to generate a discourse that genu-
inely disturbs the collective consciousness and moves it beyond pity to a
deeper understanding of its political, social and cultural implications.
At the same time, the sharing of experiences both between the researcher
and the subjects and between the subjects themselves, creates an emotional
community ‘that encourages the recovery of the subject and becomes a vehicle
of cultural and political recomposition’ (Jimeno 2007: 160). In fact, this pro-
cess can go even further, reconstituting the subject as both a citizen and as an
integral part of a political community. Such attributes have often been stripped
from the subject through experiences of violence and tortuous and ineffective
engagement with the state.
My work is based on a research-activist approach, which aims to support
the struggle of the families of the disappeared. This role generates some ten-
sion between my political commitment and critical analysis (Speed 2006). At
the same time, it forces me to reflect on the nature of the production of
170 Justice and reconciliation from below
knowledge. My direct participation in the search and exhumation group
(especially in the case of Veracruz) has involved a power relationship resulting
in collective decisions into which I have had significant input thanks to my
status as an ‘adviser’.

Clandestine graves and anguished suffering

Son, so long as I have not buried you I will keep searching for you
(The Searchers of El Fuerte)

The anguished suffering of relatives of the disappeared leads to an unending

search for meaning, which often becomes a search for human remains (Panizo
2012).
The liminal character of disappearances inhibits the normal mourning
process as family members have no direct knowledge of the fate of their
relative and the cause of his or her death (Turner 1974). They are also
deprived of the symbolic practices with which to respond to the tragedy, like
funerals, wakes and community rituals (Panizo 2012). Carrying out the search
for human remains and exhuming them allows relatives to come to terms with
death and promote a space for the recovery of a truth which has been denied
them for years.
Clandestine graves force entire communities to forget and to silence
expression of their misfortune. At the same time, they contribute to sustaining
impunity by concealing evidence and discouraging denunciation: ‘The inten-
tional mishmash of unidentified bodies in unnamed graves, injects significant
amounts of disorder, anxiety and division into the social fabric’ (Ferrándiz
2007: 625). Ferrándiz argues that the creation of such graves deliberately
paralyses communities by fomenting a generalised atmosphere of fear and
terror. It is therefore a type of cultural trauma (Alexander et al. 2010) that
erupts from the past and significantly alters present-day collective identities.
The appearance, circulation and consumption of images of the dead with
explicit signs of torture and violence disturbs society’s conscience and poses
profound dilemmas about memory and justice. The media ‘spectacularisation’
of horror limits what Ferrándiz (2008) terms a ‘pact of silence’, which dom-
inates regions afflicted by extreme violence and exposes the ‘dirty washing’
which has hitherto remained obscured.
In this way, clandestine graves have a public role as representations of terror
and forms of social control. They also have, in a very basic sense, a private
function as the repositories for bodies of individuals with names, homes and
families. This combination of functions generates two demands. On the one
hand, there are those that insist on recovering the complete truth, punishing
the guilty and ensuring that such violence is never repeated. On the other
hand, there are those that view the exhumation as a deeply emotional process
which can heal the existential chasm opened up by the disappearance of a
loved one.
 Mexico’s hidden graves 171
Exhumations by international organisations have usually taken place in
post-conflict zones in order to produce a semblance of justice via the estab-
lishment of truth. Such a process has not been a feature of the exhumations
carried out in Mexico. Experiences elsewhere in Latin America indicate that
exhumations have often been made possible by families of missing persons
only because they trained and taught themselves the requisite technical
knowledge and skills (Pérez-Sales and Navarro Garcia 2007).
Although in recent years there has been a tendency among organisations of
relatives of the disappeared to engage in searches for clandestine graves, not
all participate. Many are committed to the dictum that ‘they took them alive,
we want them back alive’.11 This implies the direct involvement of the state in
the disappearances and demands that the authorities responsible return them
alive. Other groups use institutional means to try to achieve justice by
demanding thorough investigations. Some organisations favour the exhuma-
tion of clandestine graves, but only by using rigorous legal and scientific
methods so as to achieve a greater level of accuracy. Finally, there are rela-
tives who, with some support from the state, locate, explore and exhume
clandestine graves independently of legal and forensic teams, as in the cases of
Veracruz and Sinaloa.

Truth and justice?

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights recognises the right to truth so
that families of the victims of enforced disappearances can know the fate and
whereabouts of their loved ones. The General Law of Victims (2013) outlines
the truth as a process of reconciliation and prevention of future violent epi-
sodes as much as the rebuilding of the lives of affected individuals, family
members and groups.
The right to the truth should be interpreted as a basic human right and
should be exercised via public trials, public access to information and/or the
exhumation of clandestine graves (Naqvi 2006: 6). In the exhumations of
clandestine graves in which I have participated, a principal concern is the
search for the disappeared, not the guilty, prioritising the need to know the
whereabouts of relatives. The practice also circumvents legal frameworks that
have been utterly ineffective in promoting justice and reparation to family
members:

We are pressuring the authorities to stop criminalising and obstructing

this work; we are not attempting to seek or accuse individuals or trying to
hinder any investigations.
(Press release, First National Brigade, Veracruz, 9 April 2016)

We do not seek justice; that time is long gone and we stopped doing that
a very long time ago; the only thing we are looking for is our missing. We
172 Justice and reconciliation from below
want to know where our relatives are, in the hope of embracing them or
at least to know where they are so we can light a candle for their
salvation.
(Julio Sánchez Pasilla of the Coahuila Life Group)

Such a position also promotes self-preservation in a context in which the

families of the disappeared are threatened, harassed or become victims of
violence themselves. In the case of the Brigada Nacional in Veracruz, claim-
ing that they are not looking for guilty parties is a way of guaranteeing their
own safety in places where the state is the principal perpetrator of violent
crime:

We say that we are not looking for those responsible in order to protect
ourselves. But the truth is that we all want justice; who wouldn’t want the
culprits to pay for what they’ve done to us?
(Juan Carlos Trujillo, Coordinator of the National Brigade for the Search
of Missing Persons, Amatlán, Veracruz, 9 April 2016)

In the case of the Rastreadoras de Sinaloa, ‘not seeking the guilty’ is the only
way to ensure any kind of collaboration with the state government in respect
of the technical aspects of locating and identifying:

If I told the government that I was looking for those responsible, they
wouldn’t even lend me their dog, never mind their forensic experts. It’s impos-
sible for the government to return the disappeared. Their motto is, if there are
no bodies, there are no dead, and therefore no disappeared. The government
will never deliver the disappeared because it’s not in their interest.
(Mirna Medina, The Searchers of El Fuerte, conversation
with the author, 10 May 2016)

This kind of position often provokes disagreements, particularly among those

who insist that the government must be responsible for locating and exhum-
ing clandestine graves. The interpretation of truth and justice, after all, is
constantly disputed among groups of relatives of disappeared persons and
civil society organisations.
The Juan Carlos Trujillo quote above is part of a heated discussion at one
of the planning meetings that would follow days of searching by The Brigade
in Amatlán. Although they agreed that the possibilities for justice in formal
terms were being harmed by citizen-led searches (because of who took cus-
tody of human remains and possible contamination of evidence), they defen-
ded this as a ‘war on the government’ (José, Chilapa Collective, Guerrero), as
a form of civil disobedience. As Mario, of the Commitee of the Other Dis-
appeared of Iguala, remarks, ‘When I see how stupidly the government con-
ducts the searches, I don’t see why I can’t do them myself.’ Juan Carlos
Trujillo notes, ‘It is a kind of civil disobedience, even if we do not say it in our
 Mexico’s hidden graves 173
press releases’, and ‘we are doing this because there is no state, because they
[the authorities] abandoned us’ (Juan Carlos Trujillo, National Links).
Searching for and exhuming clandestine graves is in this sense a type of
civil disobedience, for it challenges the institutions which no longer recognise
the demands and needs of civil society. At the same time, it contests a hege-
monic discourse that formalises exhumation procedures dictated by scientific
and legal frameworks.
The disillusionment of relatives is a reflection of their grievances and a
recognition that the state’s capacity to deliver justice is non-existent. Fur-
thermore, it underlines the criminality within the state at all levels which
makes achieving justice all but impossible. On the occasions when the state
does participate in searches and exhumations it is either negligent or colludes
with the criminal organisations.
Such an awareness becomes apparent in relatives’ testimonies as soon as
efforts to punish the guilty are abandoned. Based on their own investigations,
many relatives know the identity of the perpetrators. However, despite evi-
dence provided to the Public Prosecutor’s Office over the course of several
years, there exists within offialdom a systematic disregard and contempt for
thorough investigations, aided by institutionalised corruption, which together
impede the pursuit of justice:

I know who took my husband. He was a police officer and it was from
there that he was taken away. Of course they know who he is, they’re all
in it together, so there will never be justice.
(Yolanda, wife of police officer who was disappeared in San Blas,
Sinaloa, conversation with the author, 12 April 2016)

When I hosted Mirna Medina, a member of The Searchers of El Fuerte, she

showed me the posters that the Attorney General’s office had designed for
the searches. They included photographs of the faces of some of the young
people for whom our organisation was searching. Mirna showed me the face
of her son, who was only 19 years old. The poster also showed the faces of those
who had taken him, who were only a couple of years older than he was. For her,
the possibility of justice – understood as punishment for those responsible –
faded as soon as she spoke to the state government representative in Los
Mochis:

On the second day of my son’s disappearance I went with the repre-

sentative and asked him where they were looking. He told me that they
weren’t looking, that they were investigating and had already investigated
my son’s disappearance. From then on we began looking ourselves
because we knew that they wouldn’t and they were not going to catch
those responsible, despite having all the evidence I had given them.
(Mirna Medina, The Searchers of El Fuerte, conversation
with the author, 11 May 2016)
174 Justice and reconciliation from below
Mirna’s experience, confirmed by many of the relatives I have come to know,
underlines the sheer difficulty involved in achieving justice locally and also
internationally. They are aware of the challenges of taking cases to the inter-
national courts, given the scarcity of their resources, the number of require-
ments that have to be met in order to present a case and the effectiveness of
these processes (i.e. the ratio between cases reported and those which result in
a sanction). On the other hand, according to Pérez-Sales and Navarro Gar-
cía’s (2007) assessment of the exhumation of mass graves in fourteen Latin
American countries, search procedures and findings that have been accom-
panied by international organisations have not fully guaranteed access to
justice for the relatives of missing persons, whether led by independent groups
or by government authorities. Only in the cases of Chile and Argentina has
there been some success, at least in the punishment of those responsible. In
addition, relatives are frequently criminalised by the authorities, a practice
which underlines the government’s lack of commitment to achieving justice
and is also an indication of the value it places on human life. Abandoning
hopes of achieving justice via official channels allows family members of the
disappeared to act in the here and now; which in itself becomes a form of
resistance. Although the strategy of not seeking accountability could be
viewed as a rejection of normal justice, we need to understand it in its local
context and circumstances. This surely entails understanding that the practice
of rights goes beyond the law and its transgressions and is found in different
forms in which subjects give meaning and put into action what justice means
for them (Das and Poole 2008). This should allow us to consider other inter-
pretations of justice, particularly in relation to forced disappearance in
Mexico.

The healing and destabilising effect of exhumations

Scholarly literature highlights the healing and restorative effects exhuming
clandestine graves can have for family members and that it also functions as
an act of resistance against the erasure of memory (Pérez-Sales and Navarro
Garcia 2007). This is presumably why it is considered so important among
communities of victims (Beristaín 2000). In El Salvador, for example, the
Truth Commission (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico) considers
the exhumation of victims as an act of justice and in itself a form of reparation.
In the case of the searches in which I have participated, exhuming bodies
allows family members to act on behalf of their loved one, giving them
agency and a collective sense of purpose in the face of official indifference and
impunity. It also grants the disappeared person an identity and a sense of
humanity and allows the remains to be returned to the family.
Nonetheless, exhumations can be unsettling and traumatic because they
allow the fear and terror experienced by family members to resurface, while
also turning private grief and suffering into a public spectacle. In addition,
they break the imposed silence and act as a kind of societal autopsy which
 Mexico’s hidden graves 175
reveals the extent of political corruption. In such a way searches allow indi-
viduals and groups to mobilise around common aims of gaining recognition
and achieving a semblance of justice for their loved ones:

I’m not proud of being a searcher or of having a son who is disappeared

but I do like the fact that we can return a son to his mother or a husband
to his wife. When we find evidence of remains we wish we had claws to
dig. We really hope it’s not a person but an animal. When we find a body
we cry and when we realise it’s one of us we pray, we give thanks. No one
has the right to take them, to do that with anyone.
(Mirna Miranda, The Searchers of El Fuerte, conversation
with the author, 11 May 2016)

These activities are not about the pursuit of individual interests but are acts of
solidarity in which the searchers seek not only their loved ones but all those
who have disappeared. Searches present deep emotional dilemmas for relatives,
who simultaneously hope but also dread finding a family member:

When I go out in the hope of finding my son I wish he were there, but I
also hope that he isn’t. As I do not know, I keep looking for everyone, and
every day that I do not find mine, I still hope that he is alive while also
helping families find some peace.
(Estela, mother of missing youth in Córdoba, Veracruz)

It is important to underline that legitimacy in searching for the disappeared in

Mexico can be something that goes beyond and even subverts traditional
legal frameworks. A strong case can be made that the legitimacy of such acts
lies in the solidarity between family members that runs counter to the indif-
ference and cruelty of the authorities. Though they may be illegal, the sear-
ches are widely considered legitimate because of their human and political
relevance and importance.
The searches bring people together over a common goal and become a kind
of emotional community against a backdrop of chaos and mistrust, while
promoting collective action and moral support. According to Myriam Jimeno
(2007) this allows people to heal and helps restore a sense of community and
common purpose:

It is well-known that one of the effects of violence, whether domestic or

otherwise, is that it affects people’s confidence and trust and therefore has
a detrimental effect on the social fabric … for the victim to overcome
their condition they have to go through a process of rebuilding the self as
an emotional being, and this requires talking about experiences and being
able to share them widely, which in turn makes it possible to rebuild the
political community.
(Jimeno 2007: 170–171)
176 Justice and reconciliation from below
The search experience helps build bonds of affection, which often extend
beyond local communities. The exchange of knowledge and the moral sup-
port that organisations and families provide to others who have experienced
similar things is fundamental to this process:

That’s how it is Nuevo León. More than 50 per cent of the lines of
investigation are carried out by the families, but these surprisingly stop
whenever we entrust what we find to the authorities! That is why we’re
ready to take the next step, because, like you, we’re tired, like many rela-
tives, of trying to get blood out of a stone. And we are serious about
finding our children, brothers, grandchildren and sisters. We cannot wait
any longer.
(Mother of a missing youth in Nuevo León,
Whatsapp message, 30 October 2015)

The moral support that Mario of the Commitee of the Other Disappeared of
Iguala offers to his fellow searchers from other states has extended to prac-
tical support in the field. Not only did he participate in the First National
Brigade, leading the search for twelve days in Veracruz, along with one of his
colleagues from the Iguala Committee, but recently he also travelled to Chi-
lapa, Guerrero, to accompany the first relatives’ search, despite the serious
security risks they faced.
Emotional support is not necessarily confined solely to the relatives of
missing persons. In the searches in Amatlán the Brigade was based in the
village church, where Father Julián Verónica and people from the community
offered lodging, food and spiritual support. Members of the religious com-
munity expressed their support and appreciation to the families for promoting
the search in a place reduced to silence and fear. Likewise in Los Mochis
searches are accompanied by other supportive community members who help
find graves. Yet others, although they have already found their missing family
members, are still searching, along with friends and professionals who also
join the searches.
The act of unearthing and returning the disappeared to the world of the
living and leaving them to rest in an appropriate place helps restore the value
of those lives. However, this does not always happen:

The group The Other Disappeared have recovered 145 whole bodies and
more than 500 bones. Most of the bones have been recovered from the
graves on which the state prosecutor has worked. And apparently 15
bodies were delivered to their relatives without going through the hands
of an independent expert. The government washes its hands, claiming
that the family hasn’t asked for this.
(Brother of a young man disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero,
Whatsapp message, 16 May 2016)
 Mexico’s hidden graves 177
Of the forty-six bodies that we have recovered, only sixteen have been
delivered to their families. The problem is identifying them; it takes a
long time to check all the information and there are always doubts about
whether it was done well or not. We deliver the bodies to the relatives and
hope they are those of their children, but it is something that we are never
sure about.
(Mirna Miranda, The Searchers of El Fuerte, conversation with the
author, 10 May 2016)

At the MPNDM meeting in Mexico City on 9 May 2016, the accurate identi-
fication of bodies was highlighted as the main difficulty in looking for the relatives
of missing persons, a problem which also characterises official investigations:

We are looking everywhere but it’s impossible to get the authorities to do a

proper identification. There are bodies and remains stacked in prosecutors’
buildings and laboratories waiting to be compared with the DNA samples
they have. We need a national forensic search and identification system. At
present there’s not much point searching if we can’t do a proper identification.
(Blanca Martínez, Director of the Diocese for Human Rights Fray Juan
de Larios, MPNDM meeting, 9 May 2016)

We’ve been waiting for the results of some DNA samples for four years.
Every time I call someone I know who works at the lab in Mexico City to
ask about them he tells me that it’s going to take much longer because
their priority is Guerrero.
(Fernando Ocegueda, Baja California United for the Disappeared,
telephone conversation with the author, 1 May 2016)

The absence of independent local experts means there are serious defi-
ciencies in exhumations in Mexico. Although many searches are self-managed,
identification nonetheless remains in the hands of the state and federal
authorities, which do not have the resources to fulfil the current demand for
their services. Faced with this deadlock, the Mexican Forensic Anthropology
Team have proposed the installation of a genetic identification laboratory at the
Autonomous University of the State of Morelos, which will be at the service of the
relatives, while the initiative, Citizen Forensic Science, has proposed the creation of
a biobank for genetic samples. These are encouraging initiatives, though totally
inadequate, given the immensity of the task.

The unsettling consequences of exhumation

In Veracruz, there was clearly widespread fear that prevented families from
making official complaints and from organising search parties. The arrival of
178 Justice and reconciliation from below
the brigade members from other states in Amatlán de los Reyes presented an
opportunity to break the silence, not only amongst the relatives of the dis-
appeared, but also among the general population, some of whom volunteered to
help locate possible clandestine burial and extermination sites. During my stay I
had the opportunity to meet two families who had information about burial sites
in Paso del Macho, a nearby town in which the church had received a number
of anonymous claims and maps indicating the location of graves.
However, the strong sense of fear never disappears. Guaranteeing the safety
of those conducting searches is always a major challenge and many of them
have been threatened because of their work:

Once I was looking for remains up in the hills. I went up there to look for
my son. At times I would come upon a ranch and probably looked like
an apparition. The farmhands would stare at me as if saying ‘where on
earth did she come from!’ Once I ran into a group of bad guys who
stopped their truck next to me and asked where I was going. I couldn’t
stand it and started to cry, I told them I was looking for my son, and that
they should let me keep looking. ‘You cry tears of gold, lady’, one of
them said, and off they went.
(Chely, mother of a missing young man in Piedras Negras, Tamaulipas)

While we were searching on the outskirts of San Blas with the group from El
Fuerte, Sinaloa, one of the members of the brigade, a woodcutter from the
area who had given notice of the bodies found, got separated from the group.
We searched for a couple of hours but we could not find him. He then told us
that he had skirted the hill on the other side because he had seen ‘the bad
guys’ above who were watching and so he decided to leave. During another
search with the Veracruz volunteers we were given a warning signal via radio
when we were going through the coffee plantations about an hour outside
town. Hours earlier the person who had pointed out the grave to us had told
us about the last time, two weeks previously, that someone had been taken
there in order to disappear them.
Many family members will say that the disappearance of their loved ones
has ‘killed everything in them, even fear’, and that they have nothing to lose
since they are now ‘the living dead’. The multiple forms of violence they have
had to face over the years allow them to relativise the risks they face and
develop a resistance that often puts their own lives at stake:

It’s up to all of us to control this, though there is more fear than before,
but we need to stick together, because the missing ones belong to every-
one and we need to fight hard; as Miguel Jiménez Blanco’s grandmother
used to say to us, ‘pray to God but fight back with the hammer’ and ‘I
will keep looking until I find you’… ‘and some day we will’.
(Brother of a young man disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero,
communication via Whatsapp, 30 November 2015)
 Mexico’s hidden graves 179
The exhumation of clandestine graves defies the official version of the truth
which completely denies the fact of the disappearances. Disinterring the
bodies allows the activists to comb history against the grain and, although
this rarely results in legal justice, it does contribute to challenging the official
version which always minimises or denies the significance of the clandestine
graves.
An online exchange between members of the MPNDM about officials dis-
missing the conclusions of an Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
(IACHR) report, notes that the strategy of minimising the extent of forced
disappearance in Mexico is a strategy used to placate both domestic activists
and international observers:

02/03/16 2:26:15 p.m.: FATHER 1: ‘Friends, we have to deal with these

statements, we can’t let them get away with these falsehoods …’ One
international NGO noted that ‘Mexico has been experiencing a grave and
violent security crisis for some years’, in large part ‘because of the “war
on drugs” pursued by ex-President Felipe Calderón’ who, by strengthen-
ing the role of the military in guarding public safety, ‘triggered even more
violence as well as serious violations of human rights for which there is a
complete lack of accountability in relation to international standards’.
02/03/16 2:28:02 p.m.: MOTHER 1: ‘The authorities stress that the
government is constantly working to address the causes and consequences
of violence in the country generated by crime, that they’re working to
establish security, protect, promote, respect and guarantee human rights
and improve access to justice. We therefore expected that the visit of the
IACHR would contribute to the efforts and commitments of Mexico
with conclusions and recommendations resulting from an objective and
well-supported report, which did not happen.’
02/03/16 2:28:57 p.m.: FATHER 1: ‘It’s worse than that, it’s a total
cover-up by the government …’
02/03/16 2:28:58 p.m.: MOTHER 2: ‘Bastards! They see without
seeing …’
02/03/16 2:29:42 p.m.: MOTHER 1: ‘Political schizophrenia.’
02/03/16 2:29:45 p.m.: MOTHER 3: ‘When it comes to denying and
covering up they’re suddenly really efficient …’

Official pronouncements ignore the tragedy and talk of huge achievements in

the field of human rights. But they also attempt to discredit the claims of
relatives. Hours after finding a grave in Amatlán the state attorney’s office
said that they were not human bones, but were pieces of wood and remains of
dead animals. In the end they had to withdraw this verdict thanks to the
evidence presented and pressure exerted by members of the search brigade.
The exhumation of clandestine graves reveals a context in which the state
can decide who lives and who dies in a hierarchy in which rights are granted
to those who have the biggest weapons. Fictionalised and objectified enemies
180 Justice and reconciliation from below
are created based on the establishment of differential rights that classify people
according to their importance and disposability (Butler 2006). The state shares
techniques of domination and assassination with privatised forms of violence,
forming a kind of ‘narcocracy’, or market of death (Estévez López 2015: 10;
Calveiro 2012: 218) which is sustained by armed groups with a polymorphous
and diffuse structure, being divided or merged according to the tasks they are
required to perform and the circumstances in which they are operating.
This is characteristic of neoliberal democracies, in which the state no
longer monopolises political sovereignty and shares the exercise of violence in
a war directed mainly against the marginalised and dissidents (Calveiro 2012:
170). In this context, organised crime (especially drug trafficking) constitutes
a network involving different levels of government, security forces, political
parties and private enterprise at the national level, as well as powerful public
and private groups in the international arena (Calveiro 2012: 208).
The exhumation of graves makes visible these networks and relationships
and completely discredits the official discourse. It demonstrates that this is a
war against a fictional enemy, whose principal victims are ordinary civilians.
In this kind of necropolitics violence is directed at sectors that were hitherto
relatively safe (Das and Poole: 2008: 28). Now, however, they are disposable
and no longer matter. Students, store owners, parents, peasants, social leaders,
ex-combatants or members of criminal gangs are all victims of this ferocious
process, which is exercised through the disappearance of bodies, expulsion of
people from their homes and a climate of fear and terror.

After the search

They wanted to bury us but they did not realise that we were the seed.
(Anonymous)

The kinds of searches for human remains outlined above depart from the
procedures normally required in order to establish a climate of truth and justice
and form the basis of legal, officially sanctioned forensic searches. The sear-
ches in Mexico, however, also become acts of resistance and reject the pre-
established norms of reparations while giving voice to the pain of the victims
by highlighting the complexity and depth of their suffering.
As Juan Villoro notes, these are illegal but legitimate acts that create sites
of resistance: ‘if in Mexico fighting for justice becomes illegal, then long live
illegality’ (UAEM 2016, 31 May). For the victim who has waited endlessly for
some semblance of justice and spent hours in the bureaucratic labyrinths of
government offices and who has abandoned any hope of support from gov-
ernment representatives, the dilemmas and ethical boundaries which arise
when victims search for the disappeared are largely academic. Faced with this, as
social scientists we are forced to expand our own frames of reference, through a
dialogue and epistemology that allows for the horizontal circulation of
meanings among the subjects involved in exhumations.
 Mexico’s hidden graves 181
In Mexico, where the state has abandoned its responsibilities, thereby leav-
ing citizens themselves to establish the truth and a minimal sense of justice,
the wider society will have to face up to the political and ethical dilemmas
involved in producing knowledge about criminal activities taking place
throughout the country. These are issues which the horrors of recent years
oblige us to confront if we are to restore any kind of stability and security.

Notes
1 Quoted in Alberto Cavaglion’s 1959 article, ‘Levi risponde alla figlia d’un fascista
che chiede la verità’, La Stampa, 20 January 2005, p. 29.
2 Fieldwork was carried out between 10 and 15 April 2015 in Los Mochis, Sinaloa
with the search group, The Searchers of El Fuerte (Rastreadoras de El Fuerte).
During my stay, I participated in two searches for clandestine graves in agricultural
lands in the area of San Blas (northern Sinaloa) and found remains of three
human bodies. Although I had previously been on exhumations in Tijuana, Baja
California, this was my first experience as a ‘citizen searcher’. In Tijuana, unlike
Sinaloa, the exhumation of the remains was carried out with the participation of
agents and experts from the Attorney General’s Office, who coordinated the
search. In the case of Los Mochis, the search and part of the exhumation was
carried out by the women of the group, who, after making a find, give notice to
State Attorney experts for the collection of the samples and their collation in the
genetic laboratory. It is clear that in both cases the location of the graves was
identified thanks to the investigation and search undertaken by relatives of missing
persons.
3 Clandestine graves are classified as those which do not fit within legal frameworks
and which do not meet the officially sanctioned protocols for the treatment and
administration of corpses. Overwhelmingly these graves are hidden in order to
conceal the crime of homicide. Mass graves, on the other hand, are those that are
located in public spaces where unidentified bodies are buried or abandoned.
4 Statistics from the Mexican government’s page, National Register of Missing or
Disappeared Persons (Registro Nacional de Datos de Personas Extraviadas o
Desaparecidas), accessed 4 May 2016: https://rnped.segob.gob.mx.
5 The San Fernando Massacre was committed by Los Zetas in August 2010 on the
El Huizachal ranch in San Fernando. The 72 executed – 58 men and 14 women –
were mostly immigrants from Central and South America. Investigations indicate that
they were assassinated after being kidnapped, because relatives would not pay a ransom,
and because they refused to do forced labour for the criminal organisation.
6 Although five years have passed since the discovery, the total amount of organic
matter found at the farms has yet to be uncovered owing to a lack of technical
equipment necessary to identify the remains, according to the authorities. In
addition, no security measures have been implemented to protect them and the
grounds have been abandoned. One area, donated to the group, the Baja Cali-
fornia United Association for the Dissappered (Asociación Unidos por los Desa-
parecidos de Baja California), has similarly been abandoned, apparently because
of lack of resources.
7 The searches and exhumations carried out by Grupo Vida bring together about
100 people, including members of the military, the Attorney General’s Office, the
Special Weapons and Tactics Group (GATE), police forensic experts and search
dogs trained in locating human remains along with relatives who also participate.
8 In 2015 the Jalisco forensic service (Semefo) processed permits to proceed with
cremations of bodies that had not been claimed for ten days and in order to
182 Justice and reconciliation from below
provide death certificates. The urns containing the ashes were accompanied by
medical and legal autopsy reports, alcohol and drug abuse tests, forensic photos,
fingerprints, dental records and, in a few cases, a genetic test. The cremation of
these bodies, which contradicts the principles of the right to the truth embodied in
the 2013 General Law of Victims, eliminates any chance of identifying these
people. Some families of missing persons have received urns but many refuse to
accept that they contain the remains of their loved ones.
9 Thanks to the efforts of María Concepción and Amalia Hernández Hernández,
mother and aunt of Oliver Wenceslado Rodríguez, kidnapped on 24 May 2013 in
Cuautla, Morelos, at least one clandestine grave was located in Tetelcingo, con-
taining at least 150 bodies. The pit, located on private land in a rural area of
Cuautla, was examined by members of the State Attorney’s Office, who did not
follow protocol and failed to provide adequate documentation relating to the
bodies. Some of the corpses lay next to plastic bottles which contained a paper
with the number of the research folder or data indicating their location, according
to the women who witnessed the event (‘Las fosas clandestinas de la Fiscalía de
Morelos’, Proceso, 5 November 2015). After pressuring the Prosecutor’s office they
managed to have Oliver exhumed in December 2014 and were thus able to record a
video of the process, at which point the scale and irregular character of the site
were revealed. At the time of writing, the families have ensured the right to have
an independent expert present from the Autonomous University of the State of
Morelos, in order to guarantee the correct procedure is followed.
10 The Movimiento por Nuestros Desaparecidos en México (Mexican Movement for
the Disappeared) was formed in mid-2015 to put forth a proposal for a General
Law on Forced Disappearance. It gathered opinions from diverse groups to pro-
mote political unity among victims’ families. It comprises more than thirty-five
family organisations from across the country and thirty civilian organisations. To
date it does not have an organisational structure and its discussions and meetings
have revolved around legislative processes and the search for missing persons.
11 This rallying cry recalls that used by groups of relatives of disappeared people
during the dirty war of the 1970s in Mexico.

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Index
Ábrego, Juan García 55
Aceves Águilar, Everardo 40
Acharya, A. 34, 45
addicts, criminalization of 34–7
aerial eradication campaigns 44–7
Aerial Services division of Procuraduría
General de la República (PGR) 42–3
Aguilar Guajardo, Rafael 59
Ahmed, A. and Villegas, P. 81
ajusticiamiento popular 15
Alemán, Miguel 8, 39, 40–41
Alexander, J.C., Eyerman, R., Giesen,
B., Smelser, N J. and Sztompka, P. 170
Alvarado Alvarez, I. 59, 69
Álvarez Icaza, Emilio 81, 134
Amaral, J.P. 8
ambulatory treatment scheme 35, 37
American Broadcasting Company (ABC)
76
Amnesty International (AI) 133, 165;
counter-narcotics efforts, militarization
and 78; social movements in support
of victims 127
amphetamines, exports of 56
Anaya Muñoz, A. 128, 137
Andreas, P. 55
Animal Político 14, 103, 106, 131
Anslinger, Harry J. 8, 34, 35, 36, 38, 40,
42, 43
anti-drugs efforts (1940–1980) 8–9,
33–48; aerial eradication campaigns
44–7; Aerial Services division of Pro-
curaduría General de la República
(PGR) 42–3; ambulatory treatment
scheme 35, 37; army of Mexico, inter-
nal problems within 41; Asociación
Médica de Lucha contra el Vicio de
las Drogas Heroicas 39; Boggs Act
(US, 1951) 37; Bureau of Narcotics
and Dangerous Drugs (US, BNDD)
43–4; Bureau of Narcotics (US) 40;
bureaucracy, Procuraduría General de
la República (PGR) and 42–3;
bureaucratic autonomy, law enforce-
ment and 34; Canador (cannabis and
adormidera) 45, 46; Central Intelli-
gence Agency (CIA) 46; civil sanita-
tion campaigns 46; Código Federal de
Procedimientos Penales 37; Código
Penal de la Federación 35–6; Com-
mission on Narcotic Drugs 40; crim-
inalization of addicts 34–7; Dirección
Federal de Seguridad (DFS) 40–41,
46–7; Drug Abuse Task Force, Supply
Reduction Working Group 46; drug
campaigns, lack of achievements of
40–41; Drug Enforcement Adminis-
tration (US, DEA) 44–5, 46, 47; Drug
Enforcement Administration (US,
DEA), creation of (1973) 44; Eco-
nomic and Social Council (ECOSOC,
UN) 38, 39; El Siglo de Torreón 39,
60; eradication campaigns, central
government authority and 41, 47;
eradication campaigns, international
pressure and 37–41; eradication cam-
paigns, reactivation of 45–6; eradica-
tion campaigns, scale and outreach of
38–40, 45–6; Escuela de Capacitación
(PDR) 43; Federal Bureau of Narco-
tics (FBN) 34, 36, 37, 38, 40, 43; Fed-
eral Criminal Code, tightening up of
articles 193, 194 and 197 of 37;
Frontline/NPR 44; General Account-
ing Office (US) 44; herbicide spraying
42–3, 44–7; International Cooperation
Administration (ICA) 42; joint opera-
tions (1970s) 44–7; Marijuana Tax Act
186 Index
(MTA, 1937) 35; medical supplies,
embargo of shipments of 35; militar-
ization, road to 42–3; Narcotic Con-
trol Act (US, 1956) 37; National
Training Institute (NTI of DEA) 44;
official beginnings of war on drugs
43–4; Oficina de Control de Estupefa-
cientes y otras Drogas Peligrosas
(PDR) 43; Oficina de Control de
Medicamentos 36; Operation Intercept
43–4, 47; Opium Advisory Committee
(OAC) of League of Nations 38; Poli-
cía Federal de Narcóticos (PFN) 36–7,
40, 42; Policía Judicial Federal (PJF)
41, 43, 45; Policía Judicial Federal
(PJF), involvement in eradication
campaign (1948) 40; Procuraduría
General de la República (PGR) 37–8,
39, 40, 41, 42–3, 44, 45–6; punitive
and prohibitionist dimension of drug
policy 34; Reglamento de Tox-
icomanías (1940) 35–6; Reglamento
Federal de Toxicomanías (1931) 35;
Salubridad Pública, Departmento de
(DSP) 34, 36, 37–8; ‘scientific man-
agement techniques,’ testing in Islas
Marías penal colony 36; Servicios
Químicos y Famacéuticos of DSP 34;
Sinaloa-Durango-Chihuahua ‘Golden
Triangle’ 37; Suprema Corte de Justi-
cia de la Nación, Primera Sala 37; UN
Commission on Narcotic Drugs
(CND) 38, 39, 40, 43, 45; United
States, Embassy in Mexico 42, 46;
United States, finance for repressive
drug policy from 47–8; United States,
influence of 47–8; United States, pres-
sures from 33–4, 40–41
Aragón Andrade, Orlando viii, 6, 16–17,
149–63
Arellano Félix, Benjamin 55, 57–9
Arellano Félix, Javier 55, 57–9
Arellano Félix, Ramón 55, 57–9
Aristegui, Carmen 105
Arístegui Noticias 105
Arredondo, L. and Larrinaga, J. 112
Arteaga, A. and Álvarez, J.M. 122
Article 19 (watchdog group) 12, 22n13,
79, 99, 100
Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de
Oaxaca (APPO) 103
Asfura-Heim, P. and Espach, R. 16
Asociación Médica de Lucha contra el
Vicio de las Drogas Heroicas 39
Associated Press 77, 87
Astorga, L. and Shirk, D. 33
Astorga, Luis 4–5, 99
Aureoles, Silvano 122n3
authoritarianism 9, 20, 21, 81, 90, 106–7,
127
autodefensas 105; emergence of 15–16
Avelllano Félix group, reign of terror by
57–9
Avila, D. 58
Ayotzinapa 11, 18; social movements in
support of victims 136–7; teaching
college students, disappearance of 76,
77, 80, 81–2
Azaola, E. 15
Azaola, E. and Ruiz Torres, M.A. 7
Badillo, M. 60
Bailey, J. 5
Baja California United for the
Disappeared 177, 181n6
Balko, R. 7
Ballinas, V. 133
barbarism of ‘zones without law’ 157
Bárcena Arévalo, Erika viii, 6, 16–17,
149–63
Barona Lobato, Juan 43, 45
Bartels, J. 45
Bartley, R.H. and Bartley, S.E. 22n9
Bazán, Brandon Daniel 103
BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation)
77
Beals, R.L. 152
Beck, U. 111, 122–3n4
Becker, K. 7
Beith, M. 3
Beltrán Leyva, Arturo 61, 63
Benford, R.D. and Snow, D.A. 128
Benjamin, Walter 158, 161, 164
Bennett, W.L. and Segerberg, A. 130
Beristain, M. 174
Bewley-Taylor, D. 38
Beyliss, M. 112
Binational Centre for Human Rights 58–9
Blancornelas, Jesús 12, 55, 56, 58, 108n1
Bloomberg Businessweek 141
Bob, C. 129
Boggs Act (US, 1951) 37
boletineros, journalists as 97
Bours Castelo, Eduardo 13, 111, 112–13,
115–16, 121, 123n6
Bowden, C. 3
Brewer, Jan 120
Brigada Nacional in Veracruz 172

Buffington, Robert Marshall 36
Bulkley, J. 37
Bunker, R.J. 4
Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous
Drugs (US, BNDD) 43–4
Bureau of Narcotics (US) 40
bureaucracy: bureaucratic autonomy, law
enforcement and 34; Procuraduría
General de la República (PGR) and
42–3
Buscaglia, Edgardo 143n2
Bush, George 85
Butler, J. 180
Caballero, Eliseo 105
Caballeros Templarios (Knights Templar)
16, 104, 105–6
CaféMX 103
Calderón, Felipe (and government of) 2,
3, 7, 10, 14, 22n7, 34, 47, 53, 82, 85,
122n2, 152; counter-drug strategy of
54, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67–9; social move-
ments in support of victims 126, 129,
132, 135, 139
Calderón Mólgora, M.A. 152
Calmon Alvez, R. 11
Calveiro, P. 180
Camacho, Ávila 36, 37
Camarena, Salvador 165
Cammaerts, B. 127
Campa, Roberto 82
Campbell, H. 12
Campbell, M. 108n2
Campos, I. and Gootenberg, P. 3
Campos, Isaac 8, 16, 33–4
Canador (cannabis and adormidera) 45,
46
capitalist Western democracies 150
Cárdenas, Lázaro 35
Cárdenas, Osiel 55, 60, 61
Carey, E. 8
Carillo, Rodolfo 59
Carillo, Vicente 59
Carlsen, Laura viii, 6, 10–11, 76–94
Carpenter, D. 34, 44
Carrasco Araizaga, J. 22n5
Carrillo, Amado 55, 59, 66
Cartel Land (Matthew Heineman doc-
umentary) 105
Carvente Contreras, V.H. 42
Castellanos, F.J. 76, 89
Castells, M. 127, 130, 131
Castile, G.P. 152
Castillo, G. 62, 66
Index 187
Castillo, G. and Villapando, R. 12
Castillo, J. C., Mejía, D. and Restrepo, P. 65
Castro, F. 115
Cauchon, J. 40
Caulkins, J. P., Kilmer, B., Reuther, P.
and Midgette, G. 56, 65
Cavaglion, Alberto 181n1
Cavarero, A. 165
Cayuela Villarreal, Francisco 62
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 46
Centro de Estudios Fronterizos y de
Promoción de los Derechos Humanos
(CEFPRODHAC) 61–2
Centro de Investigación y Seguridad
Nacional (CISEN) 63
Centro Miguel Agustin 83
Centro Nacional de Comunicación
Social (CENCOS) 134, 135
Centro Pro Human Rights 76–7
Chabat, J. 2
Chao Romero, R. 8
Chávez Días de León, M.A. 69
Chávez García, General José Luis 57–8
San Francisco Cherán: clandestine log-
ging, protection and 152–3; commu-
nity of 16–17, 149–50, 152, 153–4,
155–6, 158–9, 160–61, 162n3; comu-
neros, mobilisation of 149; emergence
of movement in context of violence in
158–9; indigenous rights and self-
determination in 155; municipal gov-
ernment of 149–50; security and
employment in 153–4; see also law in
regions of violence
Chiapas 13, 61, 99; authoritarianism and
corporativism against freedom of
expression in 106–7
Chihuahua 8, 12, 20, 37, 40, 55, 59,
63–4, 68, 70, 119, 132; traumatised
relatives' meeting in Chihuahua City
(2010) 126
Chilapa Collective, Guerrero 172, 176
Cienfuegos Zepeda, General Salvador
88, 120
Cimino, A. 3
citizen-led searches, fieldwork of 168–9
Citizens in Support of Human Rights
(CADHAC) 18, 133
Ciudad Juárez: battle for, drug wars and
59–60; massacre in 133–4; post-
military campaign deaths in 69; vio-
lence and killings in 59–60
civil disobedience 173
civil-military relations 20–21
188 Index
civil sanitation campaigns 46
clandestine graves: anguished suffering
and 170–71; disturbing information
from 169
Clear, T. 6
Cleaver, H.M. 130
CNN Transcripts 132
Coahuila, and Ciudadanos en Apoyo a
los Derechos Humanos, A.C.
(CADHAC) 18, 133
Coahuila Life Group 166, 172
Coates, T.-N. 6
cocaine economy: rise of 54; transit
economy, opening of 55–7
Código Federal de Procedimientos
Penales 37
Código Penal de la Federación 35–6
Colectivo Desaparecidos de Tamaulipas 19
Collective of Analysis of Security with
Democracy (CASEDE) 98–9, 100
Colombian anti-drug policies, changes
arising from 65
Comaroff, Jean and John 17, 150–51,
153, 154, 157
Comisión Interamericana de Derechos
Humanos (CIDH) 165
Commission on Narcotic Drugs 40
Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)
11, 98; International Press Freedom
Award 100
Concepción, María 182n9
Congressional Research Service (CRS) 4
constitutionalism, post-colonialism and
154
Consulta Mitofsky 86
Cook, C.W. 60
Cornejo, J.A. 58
corporativism 106–7
corruption 1–2, 3, 4–5, 14, 17, 20, 112,
123n5, 131, 133, 150, 173, 175; huma-
nitarian crisis, making of 54–5, 58, 61;
journalism, risks for exercise of free-
dom of expression and 97, 98, 99–100,
102, 106, 108; militarization and 79,
82, 84, 89; state-level corruption,
financial mismanagement and 20; vio-
lence and, vulnerability of journalists
to 98
Cortés, Eslava S. 62
Cortés Ibarra, Miguel Ángel 112
counter-narcotics efforts, militarization
and 10–11, 76–91; American Broad-
casting Company (ABC) 76; Amnesty
International (AI) 78; Associated Press
77, 87; Ayotzinapa teaching college
students, disappearance of 76, 77, 80,
81–2; BBC 77; cartel disputes, impact
on local populations of 83–4; Centro
Pro Human Rights 76–7; Consulta
Mitofsky 86; decapitation (kingpin)
strategy 82–3; disappearances of civi-
lians 76; extrajudicial executions and
torture 76; Fray Matías de Córdova
Human Rights Center in Tapachula
90; generalized violence 79–82; human
rights, drug war and erosion of 82–4;
human rights, government violations
of (and response to) 81; human rights,
pattern of government abuses of 82;
human rights, relationship between
war on drugs and 84; human rights,
systematic infringement of 76; human
rights crisis 77–9; human rights on
hold 90–91; Inter-American Commis-
sion on Human Rights (IACHR) 78,
79, 80, 81, 83–4; Interdisciplinary
Group of Independent Experts (GIEI)
77, 81; journalists, investigations by
76–7; journalists, rising violence
against 79; Latin American Herald
Times 80;
lesbians, gay, bisexual and trans per-
sons (LGBTI), attacks against 78, 79;
massacres of civilians 76; Mérida
Initiative (US) 10, 84, 85–6, 88, 89;
Mesoamerican Women Human Rights
Defenders 79; Mesoamerican Working
Group 91; Mexico-Guatemala border,
anti-immigration measures on 86–7;
México Unido Contra la Delincuencia
82; militarization, accommodation to
90; militarization, debates on role of
army in drug wars 88–9; militariza-
tion, definition of 87–90; militariza-
tion, Mexican Special Command and
87; militarization, NAFTA-style 84–7;
militarization, repressive power of
state and 90; National Human Rights
Commission (CNDH) 76, 78, 84; non-
military security stakeholders, institu-
tional influence of 89; North Amer-
ican Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),
link in drug war to 83; Organization
of American States (OAS) 78, 80, 81,
83–4; Peña Nieto, Enrique (and gov-
ernment of) 81, 84; Permanent Peo-
ple’s Tribunal 79–80; Regeneración 90;
Security and Prosperity Partnership

(SPP) 85; State Department (US) 85;
Tlatlaya, army attack on warehouse in
76, 80–81; UN Special Rapporteur on
Extrajudicial Executions 83; UN Spe-
cial Rapporteur on Torture 78, 81; US
national security agenda, Mexico and
86; violence, impunity towards 79–82
Craig, R.B. 44
Creighton, H.S. 36
crime reporting: disruptiveness of 121–2;
limitations on journalists in 117
criminal activities, political and ethical
dilemmas in exposure of 180–81
criminal and security risks, denial of 111
criminal organizations, violence and 2, 4,
5, 6, 9–10, 12
criminal risk, denial of 112, 114, 115–16
criminal security crisis 55
criminal war, logic of 57–62
Crónica 61
Culiacán, Sinaloa, fear violence and
impunity in 99–101
Das, V. and Poole, D. 34, 169, 174, 180
Davis, D.E. 7
De Mauleón, H. 58, 59
Debate 13, 100
decapitation (kingpin) strategy: counter-
narcotics efforts, militarization and
82–3; humanitarian crisis, drug wars
and 66–7
deference 111, 116–21
Del Palacio Montiel, Celia 13, 98, 113, 114
DeLagrave, D.J. 38, 40
Della Porta, D. and Diani, M. 127
Derrida, Jacques 156
Diaz, G.L. 97
digital communications: human rights
and 137–41; social movements and
126–7, 130–32, 142–3
Dillon, S. 60
Diocese for Human Rights Fray Juan de
Larios 177
Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS):
anti-drugs efforts (1940–1980) 40–41,
46–7; humanitarian crisis, drug wars
and 59
disappearances of people 2, 5, 11, 22n16,
58, 60, 61, 105, 108n2, 168, 171;
Alfredo Jiménez, disappearance of
13–14, 114, 116–18, 121, 122; Ayotzi-
napa teaching college students 76, 77,
80, 81–2; counter-narcotics efforts and
76, 77–8, 79, 80, 81, 91;
Index 189
disillusionment of relatives in searchs
173; liminal character of 170;
roots of 17–19; social movements in
support of victims 126, 129–30, 132–3,
136, 140, 143n1–2; underestimation of
165
Documenta A.C. 7
Domínguez Ruvalcaba, H. 7
Douzinas, C. 128
Downs, A. 34
Doyle, K. 22n6
Dozier, K. 87
Drug Abuse Task Force, Supply Reduc-
tion Working Group 46
drug enforcement, drug related deaths
and role of 64–5; see also anti-drugs
efforts (1940–1980); counter-narcotics
efforts, militarization and; law in
regions of violence; Sonora, denial in;
truth among hidden graves
Drug Enforcement Administration (US,
DEA): anti-drugs efforts (1940–1980)
44–5, 46, 47; creation of (1973) 44;
humanitarian crisis, drug wars and
58–9, 62, 66, 67
drug related violence: humanitarian
crisis, drug wars and 64
drug-related violence: changing nature of
53; cocaine transit economy and 55–7;
explosion of 53–5, 57
Duarte, Javier 11, 12
Durkin, W.F.B.N. 43
Echeverría, Luis 45
Economic and Social Council
(ECOSOC, UN) 38, 39
Economist 100
Edberg, M. 7
Eiss, Paul 7, 14
El Diario de Culiacán 40
El Pais 58
El Siglo de Torreón 39, 60
Electoral Institute of Michoacán (IEM)
155, 160
elites, game of 101–2
Emancipaciones 150, 162n2
Enciso, F. 46, 99
Epstein, D. and Propublica 56, 58, 59
eradication campaigns: central
government authority and 41, 47;
international pressure and 37–41;
reactivation of 45–6; scale and out-
reach of 38–40, 45–6
Escalante Gonzalbo, Fernando 5
190 Index
Escuela de Capacitación (PDR) 43 freedom of expression: democratic
Espinosa, Rubén 12 society and 97; risks to 108
Espinosa, V. 76 Freeman, L. 2
Esquivel, J. 3 Frente Popular Revolucionario (FPR)
Esquivel Hernández, J.L. 102 103
Estefanía Sánchez, Silvia 166 Friman, H.R. 65
Estévez López, Ariadna 127, 128, 138, Frontline/NPR 44
167, 180 Fuerzas Unidas por Nuestros Desapare-
ethnography, graves and 168–70 cidos en Coahuila (FUNDEC) 133
Excélsior 39
exhumations: consequences of 177–80; Gallagher, J. 138
effects of: truth among hidden graves, Gallardo, Miguel Angel Félix 55
search for 174–7; by international Garambella, J.R. 97
organizations 171; see also truth García, G. and Dávila, I. 58
among hidden graves, search for García Abrego, Juan 66
Ezpeleta, Cervantes 61 García Apac, José Antonio 108n2
García Ramírez, S. 35, 36
Facebook sympathisers 138–9, 140–41 García Simenta, Teodoro ('El Teo') 58
Farías Álvarez, Juan José (‘El Abuelo’) García Trejo, Ángel Ignacio 43
105 Gardner, Fred K. 37
Federal Bureau of Investigation (US, Garza, Javier 13, 135
FBI) 8; humanitarian crisis, drug wars Gaston, H. 40
and 57, 58, 60, 61, 62 General Accounting Office (US) 44
Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) 34, General Law of Victims (2013) 171,
36, 37, 38, 40, 43 181–2n8
Federal Criminal Code, tightening up of generalized violence 79–82
articles 193, 194 and 197 of 37 Gerbaudo, P. 131
Federal Mechanism for Protection of Gladwell, M. 130
Human Rights Defenders and Goffman, A. 6
Journalists 108 Goldstein, D.M. 15, 22n15
Federal Telecommunications Law Goldstein, P.J. 56
107 Gómez, F. and Monge, G. 61
Felbab-Brown, Vanda 67 Gómez, M.I. 61
Felix Gallardo, Miguel Angel 66 Gómez, Servando ('La Tuta') 105
Fernández Ménendez, J. 3 Gómez Mont, Fernando 69
Ferrándiz, Francisco 164, 169, 170 Gómora, D. 67
El Financiero 165 González, F.A. 60
Finley, K. 140 Gootenberg, P. 55, 56
Finnegan, W. 66 Gorman, T. 36
First National Brigade, Veracruz 171, Gray, C. 37
172, 176 Grayson, G.W. 4
Flores, N. 68 Greater Council of Communal Govern-
Flues, Gilmore 42 ment 153
Fonseca Carrillo, Ernesto 66 Grillo, I. 3
Foweraker, J. 127 Grupo Aeromovil de Fuerzas Especiales
Fox, Vicente (and government of) 1, 2, (GAFES) 60
129; humanitarian crisis, drug wars Grupo Vida in Coahuila 18–19
and 53, 54–5, 57, 66 Guadalupe Fernández, María 167
Fray Matías de Córdova Human Rights Guerra, J. 112
Center in Tapachula 90 Guerrero, E. 68
Frechette, Myles 67 Guevara, O. 88
Freedom House: journalism, risks to Gulf-Zetas war in Nuevo Laredo 60–62,
freedom of expression and 98–9; social 63
movements in support of victims 132 Gurrola, Juan Ramón 41

Gutiérrez, E. 59
Guzmán, Joaquin (‘El Chapo’) 55, 61, 63
Guzmán Decena, Arturo 60
Hallin, D.C. 11, 98
Harari, Enrique 57
Harlow, S. and Guo, L. 130
Heineman, Matthew 105
Heinle, K., Molzahn, C. and Shirk, D.A.
2, 77
herbicide spraying 42–3, 44–7
Hernández, M.E. and Rodelo, F.V. 3,
22n14
Hernández, R. 111
Hernández Hernández, Amalia 182n9
Hernández Rodríguez, R. 20
Hernández Tello, Héctor 43
Heyns, Christof 83
homogenization 111, 116–21
Hope, Alejandro 22n7, 63
Howard, M. 69
Huerta-Wong, J.E. and Gómez García,
R. 131
Hughes, S. 11
human rights 76–91; Binational Centre
for Human Rights 58–9; Centro Pro
Human Rights 76–7; Citizens in Sup-
port of Human Rights (CADHAC)
18, 133; commitment and compliance
on, gap between 129; digital commu-
nications and 137–41; digital media
debates on 129; double-edged nature
of 142; drug war and erosion of 82–4;
drug war policies and 7–11; govern-
ment violations of (and response to)
81; grassroots claims, impostance of
128–9; on hold, counter-narcotics
efforts and 90–91; human rights crisis
77–9; human rights on hold 90–91;
legislation on, regions of violence and
158; official discourse in Mexico on
128, 129; pattern of government
abuses of 82; relationship between war
on drugs and 84; social movements
and balance of power on 129–30; social
movements in support of victims
127–30; systematic infringement of 76
human rights crisis: counter-narcotics
efforts, militarization and 77–9;
humanitarian crisis, drug wars and
59–60
Human Rights Watch (HRW) 2, 64, 84,
165; social movements in support of
victims 132, 138, 143n2
Index 191
humanism, transformative potential of
161
humanitarian crisis, drug wars and 9–10,
53–70; amphetamines, exports of 56;
anti-narcotics policy, incendiary role
of 63–4; Avelllano Félix's reign of
terror 57–9; Binational Centre for
Human Rights 58–9; Calderón, Felipe
(and government of), counter-drug
strategy of 54, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67–9;
Centro de Estudios Fronterizos y de
Promoción de los Derechos Humanos
(CEFPRODHAC) 61–2; Centro de
Investigación y Seguridad Nacional
(CISEN) 63; Ciudad Juárez, post-
military campaign deaths in 69;
Ciudad Juárez, violence and killings in
59–60; cocaine economy, rise of 54;
cocaine transit economy, opening of
55–7; Colombian anti-drug policies,
changes arising from 65; credibility
crisis 54; criminal security crisis 55;
criminal war, logic of 57–62; Crónica
61; decapitation (kingpin) strategy
66–7; democracy, transition to 53–5;
Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS)
59; drug cartels, economic power of
57; drug enforcement, drug related
deaths and role of 64–5; Drug Enfor-
cement Administration (US, DEA)
58–9, 62, 66, 67; drug related deaths
64; drug-related violence, changing
nature of 53; drug-related violence,
cocaine transit economy and 55–7;
drug-related violence, rise in 53–5;
drug trafficking organisations, escala-
tion of turf wars between 57; eco-
nomic growth, lack of 54; Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 57, 58,
60, 61, 62; Fox, Vicente (and govern-
ment of) 53, 54–5, 57, 66; Grupo
Aeromovil de Fuerzas Especiales
(GAFES) 60; Gulf-Zetas war in
Nuevo Laredo 60–62, 63; human
rights crisis 59–60; International Crisis
Group (ICG) 67; Juárez, battle for
59–60; killing campaigns 60; market
reforms, embrace of 53–4; Milenio 60,
82, 100; militarization of drug war
65–6, 67–8, 69–70; North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 54;
Nuevo Laredo, battle for 62; Oxford
Analytica 67; Partido de la Revolución
Democrática (PRD) 53, 68; police
192 Index
corruption 61–2; political instability
54; Procuraduría General de la
República (PGR) 57, 58, 61, 68; prof-
its from cocaine trafficking 56; recording
of drug related deaths 64; Reforma 60;
ruthlessness, emergence of violence and
60–61; Sinaloa-Durango-Chihuahua
‘Golden Triangle’ 68; Sinola cartel
eastward march 59–60; United States,
cocaine use in 55, 56; US-Mexico
relations, 9/11 terrorism and 54; vio-
lence, abrupt escalation of (2008) 65;
violence, vortex of 62–70; war on
drugs, repercussions of initiation of
68–9; Zapatista insurgency 53
Ibarra, J. 117
Ibarra, Rosario 143n1
Iguala, Guerrero: Commitee of the Other
Disappeared of 166, 172, 176; students
missing in 18, 77, 89, 136, 143n2, 165–
6, 178
El Imparcial 13–14, 111, 112–22, 123n6–7
impunity 2, 3, 7, 8, 11, 14, 17, 21, 54, 84,
86, 107, 108, 129; manifestation of
168; Sinaloa, fear violence and impu-
nity in 98, 99–101; suffering, terror
and impunity, administration of 165–8;
violence, impunity towards 78, 79–82,
126
indigenous law, political commitment to
160
institutional inertia 167
Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geo-
grafía (INEGI): social movements in
support of victims 131, 132; Sonora,
denial in 121; truth among hidden
graves, search for 167
Inter-American Commission on Human
Rights (IACHR): counter-narcotics
efforts, militarization and 78, 79, 80,
81, 83–4; law in regions of violence
160; social movements in support of
victims 129, 133, 136–7, 138, 143n2;
truth among hidden graves, search for
179
Inter-American Court of Human Rights
171
interactive social media platforms 131
Interdisciplinary Group of Independent
Experts (GIEI): counter-narcotics
efforts, militarization and 77, 81; truth
among hidden graves, search for 165
International Cooperation Administra-
tion (ICA) 42
International Crisis Group (ICG) 67
investigative journalism, dangers of
99–100
Jiménez, Alfredo 13–14, 114, 116–17,
121, 122
Jiménez, Gregorio 97
Jiménez Blanco, Miguel 178
Jimeno, Myriam 169, 175
Joaquín Coldwell, Pedro 120
Joint Report 168
Joint Staff 62
Jones, Nathan P. 5
Journal of American History 6
journalism, risks to freedom of expres-
sion and 13–14, 97–108; Animal Polí-
tico 103, 106; Arístegui Noticias 105;
Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de
Oaxaca (APPO) 103; authoritarianism
106–7; autodefensas 105; boletineros,
journalists as 97; Caballeros Templar-
ios (Knights Templar) 104, 105–6;
CaféMX 103; Cartel Land (Matthew
Heineman documentary) 105; Chia-
pas, authoritarianism and corpor-
ativism against freedom of expression
in 106–7; Collective of Analysis of
Security with Democracy (CASEDE)
98–9, 100; Committee to Protect Jour-
nalists (CPJ) 98; Committee to Protect
Journalists (CPJ) International Press
Freedom Award 100; contracts for
journalists 97–8; corporativism 106–7;
corruption and violence, vulnerability
of journalists to 98; Culiacán, Sinaloa,
fear violence and impunity in 99–101;
Debate 100; Economist 100; elites,
game of 101–2; external risks for
journalists 97–8, 101, 104; Federal
Mechanism for Protection of Human
Rights Defenders and Journalists 108;
Federal Telecommunications Law 107;
Freedom House 98–9; freedom of
expression, democratic society and 97;
freedom of expression, risks to 108;
Frente Popular Revolucionario (FPR)
103; internal risks for journalists 98,
102, 106, 108; investigative journalism,
dangers of 99–100; La Familia 105;
Ley Federal de Telecomunicaciones y
Radiodifusión 107; local politics, soft
benefits and 97; media and politics,

links between 102; media industry 98;
Mexico City, freedom of press in
102–4; Michoacán, freedom of expres-
sion in ‘failed’ state of 104–6; Mon-
terrey, anti-press violence in 101–2;
Monterrey, Nuevo León, freedom of
expression in 101–2; Noroeste (Culia-
cán) 99; Nuestra Aparente Rendición
99; Peña Nieto, Enrique (and govern-
ment of) 103, 108; Proceso 100, 101,
106; Procuraduría General de la
República (PGR) 108; professionalisa-
tion among journalists 101; Reporters
Without Borders 103; Riodoce 100;
risks for journalists, categories of
97–8; risks to journalists 108; Sinaloa,
attacks on journalists in 99–100; soli-
darity among journalists, absence of
102; Specialised Prosecutor’s Office for
Crimes Against Freedom of Expres-
sion (FEADLE) 106, 107, 108; Tierra
Caliente 105–6; Unión de la Juventud
Revolucionaria de México (UJRM)
103; Vice Magazine 105; violence,
permanent threat of 100
journalism in Mexico 11–14; investiga-
tions by journalists (and violence
against) 76–7, 79; journalistic indeo-
pendence, El Imparcial and adherence
to 115
justice: administration of, performance of
152; bureaucratic indifference and
14–15; for relatives, access to 174; see
also law in regions of violence; truth
among hidden graves, search for
Keck, M.E. and Sikkink, K. 127
Keller, Renata 22n12
Kenney, M. 22n9, 55, 66
Kenny, P. and Serrano, M. 55, 56, 60, 61,
63, 64, 67
Kenny, P., Serrano, M. and Sotomayor, A.
5–6, 21
‘kleptocracies’ 154
Knights Templar (Caballeros Templarios)
16, 104, 105–6
Knox, Rupert viii, 6, 7, 14, 126–46
La Familia (drug cartel) 4, 104, 105, 106
Labate, B. and Cavnar, C. 33
Lakhani, N. 87
Lammoglia, E. 8
Langton, J. 3
Larrinaga, José 113, 123n6
Index 193
Latin American Herald Times 80
Latin American Perspectives 7
law in regions of violence 16–17, 149–62;
autonomy and self-government as
judicial right 149, 150; barbarism of
‘zones without law’ 157; capitalist
Western democracies 150; San Fran-
cisco Cherán, community of 16–17,
149–50, 152, 153–4, 155–6, 158–9,
160–61, 162n3; San Francisco Cherán,
emergence of movement in context of
violence in 158–9; San Francisco
Cherán, indigenous rights and self-
determination in 155; San Francisco
Cherán, security and employment in
153–4; clandestine logging, protection
and 152–3; comuneros, mobilisation of
149; constitutionalism, post-colonialism
and 154; Electoral Institute of
Michoacán (IEM) 155, 160; Emanci-
paciones 150, 162n2; emancipatory
potential of law 160–62; fetishisation
of Constitution, emancipatory poten-
tial and 156–62; Greater Council of
Communal Government 153; human
rights legislation 158; humanism,
transformative potential of 161; indi-
genous law, political commitment to
160; Inter-American Commission on
Human Rights (IACHR) 160; justice
administration, performance of 152;
‘kleptocracies’ 154; law, fetishisation
of 154; law and disorder? 150–56;
legality, Constitution, international
treaties and 159; legality, zones of 157;
Michoacán 150, 152, 153, 155–6, 160;
municipal government of Cherán
149–50; post-colonialism, global order
and 151, 153; privatization 151; pro-
gressive law, defence of 157–8; public
security, performance of 152; self-
determination, claim to (and process
towards) 149, 150; ‘shadow state,’
Reno’s concept of 151; social struggle,
support for 149; sovereignty and vio-
lence, myriad types of 161; state
legitimacy, promotion of 149; Superior
Court of the Electoral Tribunal of the
Federal Judicial Branch (TEPJF) 153,
155–6, 159; Supreme Court of Justice
of the Nation (SCJN) 153, 155, 156;
tax collection, performance of 152;
Theory from the South (Comaroff, J.
and Comaroff, J.L.) 150–51; thuggery,
194 Index
'realpolitik' of 151; transnational
extractivist enterprises 152; violence,
law and 157–8; welfare states, dis-
mantling of 151; World Social Forum
154
Lawson, C. 11
Lazcano, Heriberto (‘El Lazca’) 60, 62
Leduc, Renato 97
legality see law in regions of violence
legitimacy, traditional legal frameworks
and 175
Lemaitre, Julieta 17, 150, 156–7, 158–9
lesbians, gay, bisexual and trans persons
(LGBTI), attacks against 78, 79
Levi, Primo 164
Ley Federal de Telecomunicaciones y
Radiodifusión 107
Leyva Mendívil, Juan 115
Liddy, J. Gordon 44
Lievrouw, L. 130
Llorente, M.V. 66
local politics, soft benefits and 97
Lomas, U. 60, 69
Longmire, S. 4
López, Demetrio 34
López, M. and Vidal, V. 79
López Alvarado, M. 3
López Medellín, M.O. 61, 62
López Nogales, Armando (and govern-
ment of) 112
López Ortiz, Adrián 99, 100
Low, S.M. and Engle Merry, S. 6
Loya, Miguel Angel 60
Lupsha, P. 46
lynchings 15, 22n15
McAllister, W. 38
MacCaffrey, General B.R. 67
MacCaun, R. and Reuter, P. 55
McCormick, G.I. 17
Maldonado Aranda, S. 41, 46, 104,
152
March for Peace and Justice 134–5
Margolles, Teresa 21n1
Marijuana Tax Act (MTA, 1937) 35
market reforms, embrace of 53–4
Martinez, Blanca 177
Martínez, F. and Castillo, G. 133
Massing, M. 1
Mattoni, A. and Treré, E. 127
Mayorga, P. 55
media, business-orientation of 11
media and politics, links between: jour-
nalism, risks to freedom of expression
and 102; Sonora, denial in 116–17,
118–20, 121
Medina, L.A. 116, 118
Medina, Mirna 166, 172, 173–4, 175, 177
Medina Mora, Eduardo 22n2, 66–7
Melucci, A. 127
Méndez, Juan 78, 81
Mérida Initiative (US) 10, 84, 85–6, 88,
89
Merino, M. 20
Mesoamerican Women Human Rights
Defenders 79
Mesoamerican Working Group 91
Mexico: ajusticiamiento popular 15; anti-
narcotics policies in, assumptions
underlying 8–9; army of, internal pro-
blems within 41; autodefensas, emer-
gence of 15–16; Ayotzinapa 11, 18;
Caballeros Templarios (Knights Tem-
plar) 16; checks and balances in gov-
ernance system 19–20; Citizens in
Support of Human Rights
(CADHAC) 18, 133; civil-military
relations 20–21; Colectivo Desapar-
ecidos de Tamaulipas 19; Committee
to Protect Journalists (CPJ) 11; cor-
ruption 1–2, 3, 4–5, 14, 17, 20; crim-
inal organizations, violence and 2, 4,
5, 6, 9–10, 12; democracy, transition
to 53–5; disappearance of people,
roots of 17–18; drugs, accounts of war
on 3–7; drugs, foreign policy and war
on 2–3; drugs, prohibitionist views on
8; Federal Bureau of Investigation
(US, FBI) 8; Grupo Vida in Coahuila
18–19; human rights, drug war policies
and 7–11; El Imparcial in Sonora
13–14; intimidation, violence and 12;
journalism 11–14; justice, bureaucratic
indifference and 14–15; lynchings 15;
media, business-orientation of 11;
microviolence 14–15; militarised coun-
ternarcotics strategy 10–11; militariza-
tion 2, 7, 9–10, 14, 17, 20–21, 22n4;
murders committed by authorities 12;
narco-películas 7; narco-state? 1–2;
Narcocultura (documentary film) 21;
North American Free Trade Agree-
ment (NAFTA) 10; Operation Inter-
cept 8; organized crime, Calderón’s
frontal attack on 2; pain of violence 3,
14–15, 17; police corruption, violence
and 2; political liberalization, contra-
dictions in 20; political liberalization,

transition and 9–10; post-transitional
institutional arrangements, contra-
dictions in 19–20; public sphere, social
media and 11–14; Regional Coordi-
nating Body of Communitarian
Authorities (CRAC) 16; Security and
Prosperity Partnership (SPP) 10;
security landscape 2, 3–4, 5, 7, 9–10,
13–14, 16–17, 21; social media, public
sphere and 11–14; state-level corrup-
tion, financial mismanagement and 20;
totalisation of drug war 7; UN Devel-
opment Program (UNDP) and 19–20;
United States, counternarcotic ideolo-
gies 9–10; United States, drug war
policies and 7–11; violence 1–2, 3, 4,
5, 9, 10–11, 12, 13–14, 15–17, 20, 21;
violence, social consequences of 6;
violence against women, social con-
flicts and 18; war on drugs, origins of
8; see also anti-drugs efforts (1940–
1980); counter-narcotics efforts, mili-
tarization and; humanitarian crisis;
human rights; journalism, risks to
freedom of expression and; law in
regions of violence; social movements
in support of victims; Sonora, denial
in; truth among hidden graves
Mexico City, freedom of press in 102–4
Mexico-Guatemala border, anti-immi-
gration measures on 86–7
México Unido Contra la Delincuencia 82
Meza Fonseca, E. and Lara González,
H. 37
Meza López, Santiago 58
Michoacán: freedom of expression in
‘failed’ state of 104–6; law in regions
of violence 150, 152, 153, 155–6, 160
microviolence 14–15
Milenio 14, 60, 68, 82, 100, 103
militarization 2, 7, 9–10, 14, 17, 20–21,
22n4; accommodation to 90; corrup-
tion and 79, 82, 84, 89; debates on role
of army in drug wars 88–9; definition
of 87–90; of drug war, humanitarian
crisis and 65–6, 67–8, 69–70; Mexican
Special Command and 87; militarised
counternarcotics strategy 10–11;
NAFTA-style 84–7; repressive power
of state and 90; road to 42–3; see also
counter-narcotics efforts, militarization
and
Millán, O. 3
Mills, James 3
Index 195
Mioli, T. 79
Molloy, M. and Bowden, C. 59, 60
Monge, G., Aguilar, R. G. and Guzmán,
J. M. 62
Monteón González, H. and Trueba Lara,
J.L. 8
Monterrey: anti-press violence in 101–2;
Nuevo León, freedom of expression in
101–2
Moore, M. 59
Morales, Consuelo 18
Morales, Jorge 116, 121, 122, 123n7
Morales Rosas, S. and Pérez Ricart, C. 90
Moreno, Alejandro 122n3
Moreno, S. and Quintero, C. 116
Morozov, E. 130
Morris, Frank J. 42
Movement for Our Disappeared in
Mexico (MPNDM) 18, 136; social
movements in support of victims 132–4;
truth among hidden graves, search for
168, 177, 179, 182n10
Movement for Peace and Justice with
Dignity (MPJD) 126–7, 134–6
movements, ‘life cycles’ of 142–3
Muehlmann, S. 7
Mullen, M. 69
Müller, M.-M. 7
Munro Palacio, Ernesto 120
Nadelmann, E. 37
Naqvi, Y. 171
narco-películas 7
Narcocultura (documentary film) 21
Narcotic Control Act (US, 1956) 37
National Brigade for Search of Missing
Persons, Amatlán, Veracruz 172
National Human Rights Commission
(CNDH): counter-narcotics efforts,
militarization and 76, 78, 84;
social movements in support of
victims 132
National Training Institute (NTI of
DEA) 44
Navarro, Á.B. and Gordon, G. 79
Nitimex News Agency 120
Nixon, Richard M. 34, 44
non-military security stakeholders, insti-
tutional influence of 89
Nordstrom, C. and Robben, A. 169
Noroeste (Culiacán) 99
North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) 10; humanitarian crisis,
drug wars and 54; link in drug war to 83
196 Index
Notimex 120
Nuestra Aparente Rendición 99
Nuevo Laredo: battle for. humanitarian
crisis and 62; Gulf-Zetas war in 60–62,
63
Obama, Barack 90–91
Ocegueda, Fernando 177
Oficina de Control de Estupefacientes y
otras Drogas Peligrosas (PDR) 43
Oficina de Control de Medicamentos
36
Ojeda Paullada, Pedro 45
Olson, Eric L. 67
Olvera, A. 127
Olvera, José Francisco 122n3
online and offline activism, relationship
between 140
Open Society Foundation 133, 138
Open Society Justice Initiative 165
Operation Intercept 8, 43–4, 47
Opium Advisory Committee (OAC) of
League of Nations 38
Ordaz, D. 77
Orduña, Roberto 69
Organization of American States (OAS)
78, 80, 81, 83–4
Oropeza, Victor Manuel 59
Ortiz, Silvia 166
Osorio Chong, Ángel 120
Osorno, D. 3, 101
Ovalle, L.P. and Díaz Tovar, A. 6
Ovalle, L.P., Díaz Tovar, A. and Ongay,
L.A. 6
Oxford Analytica 67
Padgett, H. 2
Padgett, T. 62
Padilla, H. 115
Padilla Ordoñes, L. 39
Padrés Elías, Guillermo 111, 113, 116,
118, 120–22, 123n5, 123n7
Páez Varela, A. 70
pain of violence 3, 14–15, 17
Palacios, M. and Serrano, M. 56
Palomar Madrazo, Rafael 40
Panizo, L.M. 170
Pansters, Wil G. 1–29, 16, 20, 41, 104
Pantoja García, J.C. 63
Pardiñas, J.E. 54
Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) 111,
112, 113, 118, 122
Partido de la Revolución Democrática
(PRD) 53, 68
Partido Revolucionario Institucional
(PRI) 111, 112, 118, 121, 122, 123n5
Pascal, Blaise 156
past and present, dialectical relationship
between 164
Patrón, M. 76, 77
Pavlovich, Claudia 122
Peña, Salvador 36, 37, 41
Peña Nieto, Enrique (and government of)
2, 3, 4, 54; counter-narcotics efforts,
militarization and 81, 84; journalism,
risks to freedom of expression and
103, 108; social movements in support
of victims 126, 129, 132, 135, 137, 141
Pérez Esparza, D. and Weigend Vargas,
E. 100
Pérez Espino, J. and Páez Varela, A. 59
Pérez Montfort, R. 35, 37
Pérez Ricart, Carlos A. viii, 8, 33–52
Pérez-Sales, P. and Navarro Garcia, S.
171, 174
Permanent People’s Tribunal 79–80
Piccato, Pablo A. 12, 113
Piedra Ybarra, Jesús 143n1
Pineda Jaimes, S. and Herrera Robles, L.
A. 60
Piñeyro, J.L. 20
Poder Ejecutivo, DOF 35, 36
Poiré, Alejandro 63, 64
police corruption 2, 61–2, 112
Policía Federal de Narcóticos (PFN)
36–7, 40, 42
Policía Judicial Federal (PJF) 41, 43, 45;
involvement in eradication campaign
(1948) 40
Polit Duenas, G. 7
political instability 54, 59
political liberalization 19, 53; contra-
dictions in 19–20; transition and 9–10
Polletta, F. and Jasper, J.M. 127
Poppa, T. 3
positivity, forefronting of 118–20
post-colonialism, global order and 151,
153
Priest, D. 11, 12, 98, 105
privatization 90, 151, 158, 180
Proceso 22n4, 58, 61, 182n9; journalism,
risks to freedom of expression and
100, 101, 106
Procuraduría General de la República
(PGR) 22n6; anti-drugs efforts (1940–
1980) 37–8, 39, 40, 41, 42–3, 44, 45–6;
humanitarian crisis, drug wars and 57,
58, 61, 68; journalism, risks to
 Index 197
freedom of expression and 108; Rodríguez Luna, Armando viii, 6, 12, 13,
Sonora, denial in 123n5 23n18, 97–110
Prominix in Nuevo León 120, 121 Rodríguez Martínez, Miriam Elizabeth
19
Quintana, Arturo 12 Rodríguez Nieto, S. 6, 69
Ron, J., Golden, S., Pandya, A., Peek, S.
Ra’ad Al Hussein, Zeid 17–18, 77–8 and Sparling, L. 129
Rabasa, Óscar 43 Rosagel, S. 117
Radsch, C. 79 Rosales Mirada, Manuel 43
Ramirez, C. 81 Rovira, G. 127, 130, 139
Ramírez-Pimienta, J.C. and Socorro Rubido, A. 89
Tabuenca Córdoba, M. 7 Ruelas, Sandra 166–7
Rastreadoras de Sinaloa 172 Ruiz, R.A. 115
Raustiala, K. 33 ruthlessness, emergence of violence and
Ravela, R. 3 60–61
Red de Enlaces Nacionales 168
Reforma 60 Sabet, D.M. 3
Regeneración 90 Sacristán, C. 36
Regional Coordinating Body of Commu- Salazar Viniegra, Leopoldo 35, 36, 38
nitarian Authorities (CRAC) 16 Saltalamacchia, N. and Covarrubias, A.
Reglamento de Toxicomanías (1940) 35–6 129
Reglamento Federal de Toxicomanías Salter, J. 42
(1931) 35 Salubridad Pública, Departmento de
Relly, J.E. and González de Bustamante, (DSP) 34, 36, 37–8
C. 97, 114 San Fernando, Tamaulipas, massacre in
Reno, William 151 134, 181n5
Reporters Without Borders 11, 79, 103; Sánchez, E. 112
journalism, risks to freedom of Sánchez Arellano, Eduardo 58
expression and 103 Sánchez Godoy, J.A. 7, 99
research-activist approach 169–70 Sánchez Pasilla, Julio 172
Reuter, P. 65 Sánchez Viesca, Óscar 166
Reuters 152 Santana, O. 117
Rexista 140 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa 154, 161, 162
Rexton Kan, P. 4 Sarikadis, G. and DeSonia, W. 43, 44
Reyna, J.C. and Fresnedo, F. 57, 58 Schedler, A. 5
Reyna Garcia, Victor Hugo viii, 7, 13, Scheper-Hughes, N. 6
111–25 Schievenini, J.D. 35
Rheingold, H. 130 Searchers of El Fuerte, Sinaloa 166, 170,
Ricaurte Quijano, P., Najera, J. and 172, 173–4, 175, 177, 181n2
Robles Maloof, J. 141 Security and Prosperity Partnership
Riodoce 100 (SPP) 10; counter-narcotics efforts,
Rios, V. 12, 98, 100 militarization and 85
risks for journalists 108; categories of 97–8 security landscape in Mexico 2, 3–4, 5, 7,
Risse, T., Ropp, S.C. and Sikkink, K. 9–10, 13–14, 16–17, 21
127, 137 self-censorship in Sonora (2009–2015)
Riva Palacio, R. 76 116–21
Roberts, A. 69 self-determination, claim to (and process
Robertson, J., Riley, M. and Willis, A. towards) 149, 150
141 sensationalism, accusations against 116
Robledo Silvestre, Carolina viii, 6, 14–15, Sepúlveda, Andres 141
18–19, 22n7, 164–84 Serrano, Carlos I. 41
Rodelo, V.F. 114 Serrano, Mónica viii, 9–10, 17, 53–75
Rodríguez, J. 112, 118 Servicio y Asesoría para la Paz (SER-
Rodríguez, Oliver Wenceslado 182n9 APAZ) 134, 135
198 Index
Servicios Químicos y Famacéuticos of
DSP 34
‘shadow state,’ Reno’s concept of 151
Shannon, Elaine 3
Shannon, Tom 85
Shirky, C. 130
Shoemaker, P.J. and Reese, S.D. 97
El Sicario (cartel hitman) 59–60
Sicilia, Javier 84, 130, 134, 138–9
Sicilia, Juan Francisco 134
Sieder, R., Schjolden, L. and Angell, A.
158
Sierra, M.T. 16
Sierra Guzmán, J.L. 22n6
Silva Hérzog-Márquez, J. 54
Simmons, B.A. 128
Sin Embargo 12
Sinaloa: attacks on journalists in 99–100;
citizen-led search in 164
Sinaloa-Durango-Chihuahua ‘Golden
Triangle’: anti-drugs efforts (1940–
1980) 37; humanitarian crisis, drug
wars and 68
Sinola cartel, eastward march of 59–60
Siragusa, C. 40, 43
Smith, Benjamin T. 1–29, 12, 33, 35, 41,
46, 99
Smith, F. 62
Smith, P. 54, 55
Snodgrass Godoy, A. 15, 16, 22n15
social media: contributions to social
movements 130–31; public sphere and
11–14; social movements in support of
victims and 126–7
social movement theories 141–2
social movements in support of victims
14–16, 126–43; Amnesty International
(AI) 127; Ayotzinapa 136–7; Bloom-
berg Businessweek 141; Calderón,
Felipe (and government of) 126, 129,
132, 135, 139; Centro Nacional de
Comunicación Social (CENCOS) 134,
135; Chihuahua City, traumatised
relatives’ meeting in (2010) 126;
Chihuahua City, victims meeting in
(2010) 126; Ciudad Jaurez, massacre
in 133–4; CNN Transcripts 132; Coa-
huila, and Ciudadanos en Apoyo a los
Derechos Humanos, A.C. (CADHAC)
18, 133; digital communications and
126–7, 130–32, 142–3; Facebook sym-
pathisers 138–9, 140–41; Freedom
House 132; Fuerzas Unidas por
Nuestros Desaparecidos en Coahuila
(FUNDEC) 133; human rights
127–30; human rights, commitment
and compliance on, gap between 129;
human rights, digital communications
and 137–41; human rights, digital
media debates on 129; human rights,
double-edged nature of 142; human
rights, grassroots claims, impostance
of 128–9; human rights, official dis-
course in Mexico on 128, 129; human
rights, social movements and balance
of power on 129–30; Human Rights
Watch (HRW) 132, 138, 143n2;
Instituto Nacional de Estadística y
Geografía (INEGI) 131, 132; Inter-
American Commission on Human
Rights (IACHR) 129, 133, 136–7, 138,
143n2; interactive social media plat-
forms 131; March for Peace and Jus-
tice 134–5; Movement for our
Disappeared in Mexico 132–4; Move-
ment for Peace and Justice with Dig-
nity (MPJD) 126–7, 134–6;
movements, ‘life cycles’ of 142–3;
National Human Rights Commission
(CNDH) 132; online and offline acti-
vism, relationship between 140; Open
Society Foundation 133, 138; Peña
Nieto, Enrique (and government of)
126, 129, 132, 135, 137, 141; pro-
testers, scale and diversity of 137;
Rexista 140; San Fernando, Tamauli-
pas, massacre in 134; Servicio y Ase-
soría para la Paz (SERAPAZ) 134,
135; social media, contributions to
social movements 130–31; social
media and 126–7; social movement
theorists 141–2; social movements,
emergence of 126; threats, digital
communications and 141; Twitter
sympathisers 138–9, 140–41; ‘war on
drugs’ and victims 132–4; YoSoy132
103, 127, 136, 139, 141; YouTube
sympathisers 140–41; Zapatista insur-
gency 128–9, 130, 136
Solis, D. 58
Solomon, J. 12, 98
Sonora, denial in 13–14, 111–22; Alfredo
Jiménez, disappearance of 13–14, 114,
116–17, 121, 122; crime reporting,
disruptiveness of 121–2; crime report-
ing, limitations on journalists in 117;
criminal and security risks, denial of
111; criminal risk, denial of 112,

115–16; criminal risks (El Imparcial,
2003–2012) 114; deference 116–21;
dominant sources (El Imparcial, 2003–
2012) 119; ‘Drug lords captured in
Sonora’ 113; executions, news of
113–14; governorship of Pavlovich,
press challenges and 122; homicides,
rise in 112; homogenization 116–21; El
Imparcial 111, 112–22, 123n6–7; inse-
curity, climate of ? 116; Instituto
Nacional de Estadística y Geografía
(INEGI) 121; journalistic indeopen-
dence, El Imparcial and adherence to
115; location of criminal risks (El
Imparcial, 2003–2012) 115; media and
politics, links between 116–17, 118–20,
121; media coverage, shifts in 111;
media coverage of murders 113; Niti-
mex News Agency 120; Partido
Acción Nacional (PAN) 111, 112, 113,
118, 122; Partido Revolucionario
Institucional (PRI) 111, 112, 118, 121,
122, 123n5; positivity, forefronting of
118–20; Procuraduría General de la
República (PGR) 123n5; professional
modernization of journalism 117; Pro-
minix in Nuevo León 120, 121; self-
censorship (2009–2015) 116–21; sensa-
tionalism, accusations against 116;
Tribunal Estatal Electoral (TEE) 113;
uncomfortable truths 117; watchdog
reporting (2003–2009), irony, objectiv-
ity and 112–16
sovereignty and violence, myriad types of
161
Special Weapons and Tactics Group
(GATE) 181n7
Specialised Prosecutor’s Office for Crimes
Against Freedom of Expression
(FEADLE) 106, 107, 108
Speed, S. 6, 169
Stammers, N. 128
State Department (US) 1, 44; counter-
narcotics efforts, militarization and 85
state legitimacy, promotion of 149
Strachan, H. and Scheipers, S. 69
Suárez, José Manuel 61
suffering, terror and impunity, adminis-
tration of 165–8
Superior Court of the Electoral Tribunal
of the Federal Judicial Branch
(TEPJF) 153, 155–6, 159
Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación,
Primera Sala 37
Index 199
Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation
(SCJN) 153, 155, 156
Talent, T. 38
Tarrow, S.G. 127, 130
tax collection, performance of 152
Telesur 88, 90
terror, fear in climate of 165
Theory from the South (Comaroff, J. and
Comaroff, J.L.) 150–51
Thompson, G. 67
Thompson, H.A. 6
threats, digital communications and 141
thuggery, ‘realpolitik’ of 151
Tierra Caliente 105–6
Tijuana, discovery of graves in 166
Tilly, C. 127
Tlatlaya, army attack on warehouse in
76, 80–81
Toro, Maria Celia 33, 37
Torrea, J. 5, 6
totalisation of drug war 7
Tourliere, M. 83
transnational extractivist enterprises 152
Treré, E. 139, 141
Treré, E. and Barassi, V. 131
Treré, E. and Cargnelutti, D. 127, 130,
138
Treviño Ríos, O. 41
Tribunal Estatal Electoral (TEE) in
Sonora 113
Trujillo, Juan Carlos 172–3
truth among hidden graves, search for
18–19, 164–81; affection, search
experience and bonds of 176; Baja
California United for the Disappeared
177, 181n6; Brigada Nacional in Ver-
acruz 172; Chilapa Collective, Guer-
rero 172, 176; citizen-led searches,
fieldwork of 168–9; civil disobedience
173; clandestine graves, anguished suf-
fering and 170–71; clandestine graves,
disturbing information from 169;
Coahuila Life Group 166, 172; comb-
ing the ground 164; Comisión Inter-
americana de Derechos Humanos
(CIDH) 165; criminal activities, poli-
tical and ethical dilemmas in exposure
of 180–81; Diocese for Human Rights
Fray Juan de Larios 177; dis-
appearances, liminal character of 170;
disillusionment of relatives 173; eth-
nography and graves 168–70; exhuma-
tions, consequences of 177–80;
200 Index
exhumations, effects of 174–7; exhu-
mations by international organizations
171; El Financiero 165; First National
Brigade, Veracruz 171, 172, 176; Gen-
eral Law of Victims (2013) 171, 181–
2n8; Iguala, Guerrero, Commitee of
the Other Disappeared of 166, 172,
176; impunity, manifestation of 168;
independent local experts, absence of
177; institutional inertia 167; Instituto
Nacional de Estadística y Geografía
(INEGI) 167; Inter-American Com-
mission on Human Rights (IACHR)
179; Inter-American Court of Human
Rights 171; Interdisciplinary Group of
Independent Experts (GIEI) 165; Joint
Report 168; justice for relatives, access
to 174; legitimacy, traditional legal
frameworks and 175; Movement for
Our Disappeared in Mexico
(MPNDM) 168, 177, 179, 182n10;
National Brigade for Search of Miss-
ing Persons, Amatlán, Veracruz 172;
official pronouncements, denial in 179;
Open Society Justice Initiative 165;
‘pact of silence’ 170; past and present,
dialectical relationship between 164;
political catastrophe and structural
violence, experiences of victims of 169;
Rastreadoras de Sinaloa 172; Red de
Enlaces Nacionales 168; research-
activist approach 169–70; San Fer-
nando Massacre (2010) 181n5;
Searchers of El Fuerte, Sinaloa 166,
170, 172, 173–4, 175, 177, 181n2;
Sinaloa, citizen-led search in 164;
Special Weapons and Tactics Group
(GATE) 181n7; suffering, terror and
impunity, administration of 165–8;
terror, fear in climate of 165; Tijuana,
discovery of graves in 166; truth,
denial and 179; truth, right to 171–2;
truth and justice? 171–4; unauthorised
burials 166; underestimation of
disappearances 165; Universidad
Autónoma del Estado de Morelos
(UAEM) 168, 180; violence, landscape
of 167
Turati, M. 6, 69
Turner, V. 170
Twitter sympathisers 138–9, 140–41
unauthorised burials 166
uncomfortable truths 117
underestimation of disappearances 165
Unión de la Juventud Revolucionaria de
México (UJRM) 103
United Nations (UN): Commission on
Narcotic Drugs (CND) 38, 39, 40, 43,
45; Development Program (UNDP)
19–20; Economic and Social Council
(ECOSOC) 38, 39; High Commis-
sioner for Human Rights 17–18; Spe-
cial Rapporteur on Extrajudicial
Executions 83; Special Rapporteur on
Torture 78, 81
United States: Boggs Act (1951) 37;
Bureau of Narcotics 40; Bureau of
Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs
(BNDD) 43–4; Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) 46; cocaine use in 55,
56; counternarcotic ideologies 9–10;
drug war policies 7–11; Embassy in
Mexico 42, 46; Federal Bureau of
Investigation (US, FBI) 8, 57, 58, 60,
61, 62; finance for repressive drug
policy from 47–8; General Accounting
Office 44; influence of 47–8; Mérida
Initiative 10, 84, 85–6, 88, 89; Narco-
tic Control Act (1956) 37; national
security agenda, Mexico and 86;
National Training Institute (NTI of
DEA) 44; pressures from 33–4, 40–41;
State Department 1, 44, 85; US-
Mexico relations, 9/11 terrorism and 54
El Universal 62, 101
Universidad Autónoma del Estado de
Morelos (UAEM) 168, 180
Ureate, M. 87
Ureste, M. 11
Urquijo, M.Á 118
Valdés, Guillermo 63
Valdés Cárdenas, Javier 100
Valdés Castellanos, G. 55, 56, 58, 60, 61,
63, 65
Valdez Cárdenas, Javier 3, 6, 12, 13
Valero, M. 122
Vasconcelos, Santiago 62
Vásquez Schiaffino, J. 34
Velasco, J.L. 89–90
Velázquez Morales, C. 8
Velducea, Miroslava Breach 11–12
Venegas, J.M. and Cornejo, J.A. 58
Vera, R. 3
Verónica, Father Julián 176
Vice Magazine 105
Vicenteño, D. 132
 Index 201
Villalobos, Joaquín 63, 64, 65–6 war on drugs: official beginnings of 43–4;
Villalpando, R. and Castillo, G. 59 origins of 8; repercussions of initiation
Villoro, Juan 180 of 68–9; totalisation of drug war 7;
violence 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10–11, 12, 13–14, victims in 132–4
15–17, 20, 21; abrupt escalation of watchdog reporting (2003–2009) in
(2008) 65; criminal organizations, Sonora 112–16
violence and 2, 4, 5, 6, 9–10, 12; drug Watt, Peter 1–29
related violence 53–4, 55–7, 64; gen- welfare states, dismantling of 151
eralized violence 79–82; impunity Williams, H.G. 37
towards 79–82; intimidation and 12, Wilson, J. 34
53, 90, 104–5, 132, 133; journalists, World Bank 19
rising violence against 79; landscape of World Social Forum 154
167; law and 157–8; microviolence
14–15; Monterrey, anti-press violence YoSoy132 103, 127, 136, 139,
in 101–2; pain of 3, 14–15, 17; per- 141
manent threat of 100; ruthlessness, YouTube sympathisers 140–41
emergence of violence and 60–61;
social consequences of 6; sovereignty Zambada, Ismael 55
and, myriad types of 161; violence and Zapatista insurgency: humanitarian
killings in Ciudad Juárez 59–60; crisis, drug wars and 53; social move-
vortex of 62–70; against women, social ments in support of victims 128–9,
conflicts and 18; see also law in 130, 136
regions of violence Zavaleta Betancourt, J.A. 22n6
Zedillo, Ernesto (and administration of)
Wakefield, S. and Wildeman, C.J. 6 2, 57
Wald, E. 7 Zepeda Gil, R. 63
Waljker III, W. 33 Zires, M. 131, 133
Wallace, A. 111, 122–3n4 Zolov, E. 8