Violence, Coercion, and State-Making in Twentieth-Century Mexico: The Other Half of the Centaur

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Violence, coercion, and state-making in twentieth-century Mexico : the other half of the centaur /edited by Wil G. Pansters.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-8158-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8047-8447-4 (ebook)

1. Mexico—Politics and government—20th century. 2. Violence—Political aspects—Mexico—History—20th century. I. Pansters, W. G. (Wil G.),

editor of compilation.

F1234.V865 2012

972.08'2—dc23

2011052267

Typeset by Westchester Book Group in 10/12 Sabon

Violence, Coercion, and State-Making in Twentieth-Century Mexico

The Other Half of the Centaur

Edited by Wil G. Pansters

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

For my lovely daughter Ifigenia, whose mere presence is disarming

Table of Contents

Copyright

Title Page

List of Figures

List of Tables

Preface and Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

About the Contributors

PART I: INTRODUCTION

1. Zones of State-Making: Violence, Coercion, and Hegemony in Twentieth-Century Mexico

Wil G. Pansters

PART II: COERCIVE PILLARS OF STATE-MAKING: BORDERS, POLICING, AND ARMY

2. States, Borders, and Violence: Lessons from the U.S.-Mexican Experience

David A. Shirk

3. Policing and Regime Transition: From Postauthoritarianism to Populism to Neoliberalism

Diane E. Davis

4. Who Killed Crispín Aguilar? Violence and Order in the Postrevolutionary Countryside

Paul Gillingham

PART III: IN THE GRAY ZONE: DRUGS, VIOLENCE, GLOBALIZATION, AND THE STATE

5. Narco-Violence and the State in Modern Mexico

Alan Knight

6. States of Violence: State-Crime Relations in Mexico

Mónica Serrano

7. Policing New Illegalities: Piracy, Raids, and Madrinas

José Carlos G. Aguiar

PART IV: STATE-MAKING AND VIOLENCE IN SOCIETY: CORPORATISM, CLIENTELISM, AND INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES

8. The Rise of Gangsterism and Charrismo: Labor Violence and the Postrevolutionary Mexican State

Marcos Aguila and Jeffrey Bortz

9. Political Practice, Everyday Political Violence, and Electoral Processes During the Neoliberal Period in Mexico

Kathy Powell

10. Violence and Reconstitution in Mexican Indigenous Communities

John Gledhill

PART V: COMPARATIVE CONCLUSIONS

11. New Violence, Insecurity, and the State: Comparative Reflections on Latin America and Mexico

Kees Koonings

Notes

Index

Figures

1.1 Hegemonic and Coercive Zones of State-Making

1.2 The Shifting Focus in Scholarship on Mexican State-Making (Twentieth Century)

2.1 Drug-Related Killings in Mexico, 2000–2010

2.2 Extraditions Between Mexico and the United States, 1996–2009

4.1 Three-Year Moving Averages of Homicide Rates per 100,000 Population, Selected Mexican States, and Colombian Departments, 1948–1960

4.2 Successful Prosecutions per Annum, Guerrero and Veracruz, 1930–1953

4.3 Reported Homicides per 100,000 Population, 1940–2000

7.1 Exchanges Between Police and Piracy Sellers

Tables

1.1 Typology of Violence: Motivation, Modalities, Manifestations, and Relationship to the State

2.1 Typology of Border Relationships from State Formation to Greater Regional Integration

2.2 Major Mexican Drug Cartels

4.1 Homicide Rates in Selected Mexican and Colombian Municipios, 1949–1953

7.1 Police Action Against Piracy in Mexico, 2000–2006

Preface and Acknowledgments

When the first ideas and initiatives for this volume were taking shape, its core subject—violence, coercion, and state-making in postrevolutionary Mexico—was slowly moving toward a more prominent position in debates, both public and scholarly. However, none of the participants at the workshop in the sunbathed center of Utrecht in June 2007 could have anticipated the spiral of violence, militarization, human rights abuses, and fear that would soon engulf Mexico. Clearly, the symptoms of a deepening security crisis were already there: in an unprecedented decision taken only a few days after our event, President Felipe Calderón purged 284 federal police commanders, including those of all thirty-one states and the Federal District. But even given such changes, anyone who had predicted then that around 15,000 people would be killed in the mayhem of drug-related violence in the year 2010 alone—a daily average of more than 40!—would not have been regarded as credible.

Although the escalation of violence in Mexico in the 2000s in and of itself constitutes a strong cause for scholarly reflection, it was not the only one. This volume also arose out of a critical reading of much of the recent work that has examined Mexico’s major social and political developments in the wake of the neoliberal takeover and the intensification of political competition in the mid-1980s: the fraudulent 1988 presidential elections, the spectacular Salinas presidency, the annus horribilis of 1994 with NAFTA, the zapatista rebellion, the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio and the infamous errors of December, the disintegration of the PRI-government pact during the wavering presidency of Zedillo, and, finally, the spectacular rise to power of Vicente Fox and Mexico’s subsequent political-electoral reconfiguration that led to the showdown between the left and the right in the 2006 presidential elections. Most of this work was, and still is, profoundly shaped by the political and scholarly discourses of transition and democratization. However, just as elsewhere in Latin America, it became gradually and disturbingly clear that the institutional reforms of democratization and transition coexisted with violent conflicts and deepening insecurity. Paradoxical sociopolitical realities, as well as contrasting scholarly accounts of those realities, began to raise new questions and problems of interpretation. What were the key features of posttransitional violence and insecurity? What are the connections between the different floors of Mexico’s and Latin America’s social and political structures? What consequences does all this have for our understanding of democracy and the rule of law in the region? It is perhaps no surprise that coming to terms with these issues has recently generated such a concept as violent democracies, one that would have sounded utterly oxymoronic just a few years ago. It appears that the uncommon democracy of one-party rule has given way to the uncommon democracy of violence.

The third and final rationale for this book was that in the case of Mexico, interpretative obstacles for coming to terms with the recent wave of criminal and political violence, as well as with the contradictory features of the transition, appear to be rooted in broader understandings of the role of violence and coercion, as opposed to nonviolence or hegemony in postrevolutionary (particularly post-1940) state-making. Hence, this book also deals with a critical reexamination of the interpretative perspective on postrevolutionary state-making and power, often identified as Mexican exceptionalism, which unwittingly underestimated the meanings and functions of violence and coercion. In sum, understanding Mexico’s current security crisis calls for critically engaging the simultaneity of multiparty (electoral) democracy, violence, and the multiplication of armed actors, and recasting influential interpretations of postrevolutionary state-making. Unsurprisingly then, this book is the fruit of a collaborative effort among historians, anthropologists, and political scientists from Mexico, the United States, and Europe.

If organizing an international workshop is one thing, managing the follow-up is quite another. During the latter phase of the project, I sometimes felt as though I was becoming far too well acquainted with the labors of Sisyphus. As I tried to roll the proverbial stone toward publication deadlines, participants found themselves overtaken by other, equally important, obligations; some to such a degree that despite their active involvement during workshop deliberations in Utrecht, and later at a panel at the 2007 Latin American Studies Association conference, they had to withdraw altogether. I especially appreciate the input of Celia Toro and Marcelo Bergman in this respect. But others would come on board later. A special word of appreciation goes to those contributors who provided me with ideas and excellent advice about the project as a whole: Alan, Diane, Kees, and Paul. Many thanks to you all.

Of course, many others provided help as well. During the preparations for the initial workshop at Utrecht University, an extremely efficient honors student, Vera Borsboom, saw to it that everything went well logistically and socially. Kootje Willemse, the longtime administrator of the Department of Cultural Anthropology, deserves special mention. She was, and is, a great help in resolving all sorts of practical issues (she always knows whom to call!), finding the resources to finance my wish list of international colleagues and, above all, with her bonhomie that keeps everyone’s spirits up. My colleagues at the national research school in development studies, especially Lolita van Toledo, were supportive in synchronizing the Mexico workshop and their annual summer school. I also wish to express my gratitude to Henk van Rinsum, the senior university policy-maker who strives to articulate the voice of the intellectual within our increasingly managerial- and finance-driven university (non scholae sed vitae discimus!), and who is also my snooker buddy, because of his support for, and interest in, my research endeavors. Finally, I thank my editor at Stanford, Norris Pope, for his encouraging and professional style, as well as editorial assistant Sarah Crane Newman. In the recta final, Andrée Mulder’s assistance in preparing the final manuscript has been invaluable.

WIL PANSTERS, UTRECHT/CIUDAD JUÁREZ, MARCH 2011

Abbreviations

About the Contributors

José Carlos G. Aguiar is assistant professor at the Department of Cultures and Languages of Latin America at Leiden University. He is primarily interested in illegal commodities, liminal spaces, and policing in Latin America. He combines the ethnography of illegalities with sociological theory. His dissertation, entitled Dirty CDs: Piracy, Globalisation and the Emergence of New Illegalities in the San Juan de Dios Market, analyzed the rise of commodity chains and transnational networks in the retail of illegal CDs and DVDs in the Mexican marketplace. He is also a member of the editorial board of Etnofoor.

Marcos Aguila holds an academic position at UAM-Xochimilco, Mexico. He studied economics at UAM-Xochimilco and UNAM, and received a PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin (1997). He belongs to the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores since 1990. He has specialized in the study of labor and miners in Mexico during the decade of the 1930s. He has published several books, including Economía y trabajo en la minería mexicana: La emergencia de un nuevo pacto social entre la Gran Depresión y el Cardenismo (Mexico, 2004). He coauthored two textbooks, Vivir la Historia II and III (Mexico, 1998 and 2000). He also coedited Personajes, ideas, voluntades: Políticos e intelectuales mexicanos en los años treinta (Mexico, 2011). With Jeffrey Bortz, he published Making a Living: A History of Real Wage Studies During XXth Century Mexico, in Latin American Research Review, vol. 41, no. 2, 2006.

Jeffrey Bortz teaches history at Appalachian State University. He is the author of numerous books and scholarly articles on Mexican labor affairs. His most recent book is Revolution Within the Revolution: Cotton Textile Workers and the Mexican Labor Regime, 1910–1923 (Stanford, 2008).

Diane E. Davis is Head of the International Development Group in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has published widely on problems of urban power and management. In 1994 she published Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century. In recent years, she has done research about the police and other actors of violence in Latin America and elsewhere. She coedited Violence, Coercion, and Rights in the Americas, a special issue of Latin American Perspectives (2000), and Irregular Armed Forces and Their Role in Politics and State Formation (Cambridge, 2003). She is also active in social theorizing in a more general way. She is editor of Political Power and Social Theory and published Discipline and Development: Middle Classes and Prosperity in East Asia and Latin America (Cambridge, 2004).

Paul Gillingham holds an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at the Penn Humanities Forum of the University of Pennsylvania. He has published widely on state formation and nationalism in Mexico. Recent articles and book chapters focus on village schoolteachers, popular protest, bullfighting, violence, military politics, and archaeological fraud in Latin America. He is the author of Cuauhtémoc’s Bones: Nationalism & Forgery in Mexico (Albuquerque, 2011) and the coeditor of Soft Authoritarianism in Mexico, 1938–1968 (Durham, forthcoming.). His articles have appeared in Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, the Journal of Latin American Studies, and Past & Present.

John Gledhill is Max Gluckman Professor of Social Anthropology and Co-Director of the Centre for Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester, Co-Managing Editor of Critique of Anthropology, and Chair of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (2005–2009). His publications include Casi Nada: Agrarian Reform in the Homeland of Cardenismo (Albany, 1991), Neoliberalism, Transnationalization and Rural Poverty (Boulder, 1995), Power and Its Disguises: Anthropological Perspectives on Politics (London, 2000), and Cultura y desafío en Ostula: Cuatro siglos de autonomía indígena en la Costa-Sierra Nahua de Michoacán (Zamora, 2004).

Alan Knight studied at Oxford University and has taught at the University of Essex, the University of Texas at Austin, and Oxford University, where he holds the Chair of Latin American History and has been Director of the Latin American Centre. He is the author of The Mexican Revolution (2 vols.) (Cambridge, 1986) and the first two books in a planned trilogy, Mexico: From the Beginning to the Conquest and Mexico: The Colonial Era (both Cambridge, 2002). He has also written on U.S.-Mexican relations, Mexican politics, and themes in broader Latin American history (revolutions, populism, democracy). He is currently working on the third volume of the trilogy (Mexico Since Independence) and a study of Mexico in the 1930s, provisionally entitled The Triumph of the Revolution?

Kees Koonings is Professor of Brazilian Studies at the Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation (CEDLA) in Amsterdam, and Associate Professor of Latin American Studies at Utrecht University. His research interests include urban and regional development, citizenship and social movements, conflict and violence, the military, and democratization, particularly in Brazil and Colombia. He has coedited a number of volumes in recent years, among them Armed Actors: Organised Violence and State Failure in Latin America (London, 2004) and Fractured Cities: Social Exclusion, Urban Violence & Contested Spaces in Latin America (London, 2007).

Wil G. Pansters is Professor of Latin American Studies and Director of the Mexican Studies Centre, both at the University of Groningen, and Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. His research interests include regional and urban politics, caciquismo, political culture and democratization, violence and insecurity, and higher education in Latin America, especially Mexico. He has also been active in the wider field of development studies. He has published widely on these topics. Among his most recent publications are the coedited volumes Globalization and Development: Issues and Debates in Current Research (Dordrecht, 2004) and Caciquismo in Twentieth-Century Mexico (London, 2005).

Kathy Powell is an anthropologist and lecturer in the School of Political Science and Sociology at the National University of Ireland Galway. Her research interests include the impact of neoliberalism upon social economy and political-cultural practices in rural Mexico, focusing on relations of power, clientelism, and political ideology. Her interests also include political identity and informality in Cuba. Among her most recent publications are "Mexican Campesinos, the Neoliberal State and Contesting Interpretations of Social Justice," in Irish Journal of Anthropology vol. VII, no. 1, 2004 and San Sebastián: The Social and Political Effects of Sugar Mill Closure in Mexico in New Solutions, vol. 17, no. 1, 2007.

Mónica Serrano is Executive Director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (New York), Professor of International Relations at El Colegio de México (Mexico City), and a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for International Studies, Oxford University. She has written extensively on international security and the international relations of Latin America, with particular reference to international institutions, security, transnational crime, and civil-military relations. She is the author and editor of numerous publications including The Human Rights Regime in the Americas: Theory and Reality (Tokyo, 2010), Regionalism and Governance in the Americas: Continental Drift (Basingstoke, 2005), and Transnational Organized Crime and International Security: Business as Usual? (Boulder, 2002).

David A. Shirk is the Director of the Trans-Border Institute and Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of San Diego. He was a fellow at the UCSD Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies from 1998 to 1999 and 2001 to 2003, and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in 2009–2010. He is currently the principal investigator for the Justice in Mexico project (www.justicein-mexico.org), a binational research initiative on criminal justice and the rule of law in Mexico. He conducts research on Mexican politics, U.S.-Mexican relations, and law enforcement and security along the U.S.-Mexican border. His recent publications include the coauthored book Contemporary Mexican Politics (Plymouth, 2009), Reforming the Administration of Justice in Mexico (San Diego; Notre Dame, 2007) and Mexico’s New Politics: The PAN and Democratic Change (Boulder, 2005).

PART ONE

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Zones of State-Making

Violence, Coercion, and Hegemony in Twentieth-Century Mexico

WIL G. PANSTERS

You must understand, therefore, that there are two ways of fighting: by law and by force. . . . The ancient writers taught princes about this by an allegory . . . [of] the centaur, so that he might train them his way. All the allegory means, in making the teacher half beast half man, is that a prince must know how to act according to the nature of both, and that he cannot survive otherwise.

—Niccolò Machiavelli¹

Today, as in the past, the fundamental reinterpretations of Mexican history must originate in a moment of frightful crisis.

—Arthur Schmidt²

VIOLENCE IN MEXICO: A FIRST APPRAISAL

Acapulco, Guerrero, Wednesday, July 12, 2006. In the evening, the police discovered the dead bodies of two men wrapped in blankets in an abandoned van in the Costa Azul neighborhood of the mundane tourist center. One belonged to Eusebio Palacios Ortiz, the police chief of Acapulco and a former Navy officer, who had been abducted the previous day upon leaving a cinema with his family. The other was Marcelo García Nava, a Navy intelligence agent who worked for the DEA and was, presumably, engaged in undercover operations related to drug-trafficking. He too had been abducted the previous day, but from his own home. Both victims had been cruelly tortured and then killed.³ This incident occurred in the immediate aftermath of the controversial 2006 presidential elections.

Monterrey, Nuevo León, July 24, 2006. In a press conference, Marcelo Garza y Garza, head of the Agencia Estatal de Investigación, the provincial branch of an agency equivalent to the American FBI, announced that the decapitated body of a seventeen-year-old boy had been found with his feet and hands tied. The victim’s head, wrapped in a plastic bag, was found nearby. The killers had left two messages on the body; one read, "These are the guys responsible for the killings in Nuevo Laredo and the plaza of Guadalajara on behalf of El Chapo’s people."⁴

San Pedro Garza García, Nuevo León, September 5, 2006. The day Felipe Calderón was declared president-elect by the Federal Electoral Tribunal, Marcelo Garza y Garza was shot dead point-blank in a square surrounded by a church, a playground, a school, and a cultural center. He had left the cultural center, where he was with his daughter, to attend a phone call. He was unprotected. Shortly before, he had denounced that former officials from an elite police team were working as sicarios (hit men) for drug lords and repeatedly announced his intention to investigate police corporations for corruption and links with organized crime.⁵

Oaxaca, Oaxaca, October 27, 2006. In violent confrontations among sympathizers of the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO), the police, local state officials, and supporters of the local government, four people were killed. Two days later, the federal government ordered 4,500 Federal Preventive Police to end the protests and restore order. Over the following five days, more protesters died as a result of the use of lethal force by the police, and scores of arrests were made.⁶

Nuevo Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, March 14, 2008. Around noon, a group of armed men approached peasant leader Armando Villareal Martha in front of his house and shot him in the head several times. Villareal had played an active role in peasant protests earlier that year in favor of a revision of NAFTA. He had also played a leading role in protests against rising electricity rates for agricultural producers.⁷

Petatlán, Guerrero, May 4, 2008. Around midnight, forty armed individuals dressed as members of the Federal Agency of Investigation attacked the house of Rogaciano Alva Álvarez, leader of a regional cattle ranchers union. The assailants allegedly put Alva against a wall and shot him dead from behind. In this incident, nine other people also perished. Alva Álvarez was a controversial figure, an old-style Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) cacique (local boss) and former mayor of Petatlán, purportedly linked to drug-trafficking and the assassination of the human rights activist Digna Ochoa in 2001.⁸

The list of violent killings related to criminal activities and social conflict is endless. In recent years, spectacular narco-killings have undoubtedly caught more attention than the victims of the social struggles that often underlie them. Drug-related killings in Mexico increased from around 900 in 2004 to almost 2,300 in 2007, more than doubled to reach a staggering figure of 5,000-plus in 2008, and surpassed the 7,500 mark in 2009.⁹ In 2010, the numbers went through the roof, totaling more than 12,500 deaths. In December 2010, a government source put the number of drug-related killings during Calderón’s four years in office at more than 30,000.¹⁰ The strategies adopted by the Mexican state to confront the violence and corrupting power of organized crime, including the militarization of increasingly large parts of the country, have included repressing social movements. Once the military takes control of contentious, violent regions, it becomes difficult to distinguish between the force employed to combat organized crime and that directed at curtailing social protest and political conflict. Nowhere is this more evident than in the impoverished, conflictive state of Guerrero, though this is certainly no exception.¹¹ The number of victims of social and political violence is qualitate qua more difficult to establish. In contrast to drug-trafficking, no one collects such data systematically. Nevertheless, there is a long list of notorious incidents, such as the massacres in Aguas Blancas (1995) and Acteal (1997), the repression in Atenco (2006) and Oaxaca (2006), the raid on strikers in Michoacán (2006), and the hundreds of atrocious crimes committed against women in Ciudad Juárez and elsewhere.¹² Drug-trafficking is by no means the only cause of violence and insecurity in today’s Mexico. Social and political conflicts in Oaxaca (2006) led to political stalemate, repression, mass mobilization, provocations, and more violent repression, resulting in many deaths.¹³ Political violence in Oaxaca became a warning about the dangers of exacerbating the national postelectoral crisis that unfolded simultaneously.¹⁴ Developments in the summer of 2006 dramatically illustrate the contrast between violent political and social conflicts and pervasive criminal violence on the one hand and the nonviolent ending of the profound political crisis caused by the presidential elections on the other.¹⁵ How should we judge the perplexing coexistence of the violence of México bronco (untamed Mexico) and militarization, with the alleged resilience of civilian and institutional conflict-resolution, that is, bullets and ballots?¹⁶

This proliferation of distinct forms and meanings of violence in Mexico is no exception in the region, nor is their puzzling coexistence with, and connections to, formal democratic processes and institutions. Democratization in Latin America was not accompanied by diminishing violence and coercion, but rather their displacement, or even democratization and decentralization; where violence previously revolved around defending or challenging state power, recent decades have seen the emergence of a greater variety of social actors pursuing a wide range of objectives using coercive strategies and methods.¹⁷ The violent actors of postauthoritarian Latin America are not so much (or only) guerrillas and repressive armies, but gangs, criminal organizations, trigger-happy or corrupt police forces, paramilitaries, and privatized security agencies, including vigilantes. Recent comparative research has analyzed specific aspects of the broader field of violence, coercion, and insecurity in Latin America, such as urban violence, state violence, crime, policing, drug-trafficking, nationalistic violence, and state failure.¹⁸ All these pose serious threats to democratic legitimacy and the rule of law. In general, this work rarely mentions Mexico. Moreover, cross-national comparison crowds out the historical and systemic embedding of particular aspects (e.g., drugs or policing) of violence, insecurity, and state-making. In contrast, this volume examines the interconnections and historical roots of different dimensions, actors, and manifestations of violence, coercion, and insecurity in relation to broader processes of state-making in Mexico. Also, it places the comprehensive and in-depth case study of twentieth-century Mexico in the context of violence in Latin America as a whole (especially in Koonings’ concluding chapter). Interestingly, in debates about the transformation of state and counterstate violence associated with military regimes in South America and equally repressive oligarchic regimes in Central America, toward more decentralized forms of economic, social, and political violence, Mexico has long occupied a somewhat exceptional position. Is the country normalizing to a Latin American pattern?

VIOLENCE, COERCION, AND STATE-MAKING IN MEXICO: THE ARGUMENT

It is fair to assert that much scholarly work on Mexico has tended to focus on ballots but has had troubles accommodating the bullets in a comprehensive interpretation. Political scientists tend to attribute the nonviolent end to the crisis of the 2006 presidential elections to the civic-mindedness and political maturity of the Mexican citizenry, and to the stability and legitimacy of Mexico’s institutional and legal framework.¹⁹ This interpretation rests on the voluminous research on Mexico’s sociopolitical and political-economic transformations over the last twenty years. Research and countless conferences have led to the publication of a staggering number of books, edited volumes, and journal articles about the forces that have driven and shaped the dynamics of Mexican politics, state, and society since the early 1980s. The key concepts in this work are democratization and transition, operationalized in research on party development; shifting electoral behavior; political culture; the changing relationships among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches; the role of the media; institutional, legal, and public sector reform; the connections between market reform and political change; and the dismantling of the authoritarian, corporatist state.²⁰ Upon looking at Mexico through the lens of this body of work, we see a country that is moving, haltingly, from authoritarian one-party rule to democratic pluralism; a country that is building democratic institutions, whose electorate is coming of age and leaving behind state and partisan tutelage; one that sticks to its institucionalidad while advancing toward democratic consolidation with yet another round of institutional and legal reforms.²¹ The general trend of this work has been optimistic but . . . Schedler’s study of Mexico’s political transition suggests that the defeat of the PRI in 2000 marked the symbolic end of the democratic transition [and] signalled that democratic consolidation had been accomplished too.²² Similarly, Levy and Bruhn, writing in 2006, recognized the persistence of antisystem threats (notably drug-trafficking) and the negative trade-offs of profound inequality, but nevertheless concluded on an optimistic note.²³ The fact that the most severe political crisis of the last two decades (the 2006 presidential elections) did not lead to violence dovetails with the interpretations of the transformations of Mexican politics produced by this influential institutional perspective and supports its basic claims.

Unsurprisingly, many of these publications pay scant attention to the challenges of violence (political or criminal), the militarization of public security, and repression of popular movements. A recent volume on the dynamics and prospects of Mexico’s democratic transition contains only one chapter about law enforcement and crime, and only from the perspective of institutional performance.²⁴ Those studies, though they are important and not to be criticized for what they do not do, insist on an interpretation of the transformation of politics and the state that fails to appreciate the role of violence and coercion. I therefore agree with Raquel Sosa, who once ironically observed that although the authors of many of those works recognize the penetration of drug-trafficking networks into the highest circles of government, they do not fundamentally alter their belief that Mexico is a consolidating democracy.²⁵

The first point that this volume intends to establish is that there has been a remarkable lack of theoretical and empirical work that critically engages the issues of violence, coercion, and insecurity in postrevolutionary state-making in Mexico with the capacity to propose innovative answers. Violence, coercion, insecurity, and impunity speak of realities that have long been hidden from systematic scholarly attention, as if they constituted aberrations or issues relevant only to the fringes of mainstream Mexico. Also, the book impugns the view that these contrasting realities are separate and disconnected, as if they pertained to two different worlds, one interesting to most of the social science community, the other perhaps to criminologists and journalists.²⁶ Is it logical to regard the current security crisis as one in which the world of crime and violence is foreign and inimical to the institutions of the state and the political system? What does it mean when President Calderón portrays the state as endangered by violent nonstate adversaries and stresses the state’s responsibility to reconquer territories from narco-interests?

Despite studies of political and electoral violence and publications on urban crime, policing, judicial reform, and security, what is needed is a fresh, systematic, comprehensive, and historical analysis of the significance and meanings of violence, coercion, and crime for state-formation, power, and politics in Mexico. After all—and this is the second focal point of this volume—the study of Mexican politics, power, and the state after circa 1985 has been dominated by an influential conceptual framework that privileges changing institutional and noncoercive forms and modalities, thereby (unintentionally) obscuring the harsh realities of a darker Mexico of bullets and blood, one that seems to exist (and to have existed) at a distance, albeit functional, from the institutional realities of ballots and legal battles. On a deeper level and from a long-term perspective, this framework builds on the broader theory of Mexican exceptionalism.²⁷ Typically, scholars have stressed the incorporative and co-optational capacities of the state: "Since 1940, Mexico has had a pragmatic and moderate authoritarian regime . . . an inclusionary system, given to cooptation and incorporation rather than exclusion or annihilation; an institutional system, not a personalistic instrument; and a civilian-dominated government, not a military government.²⁸ The point is not to dispute Mexico’s peculiarity compared to the rest of Latin America, but to ask if the influential conceptual and methodological perspective of Mexican exceptionalism has not unintentionally contributed to underestimating or masking violence and coercion—the dark side"—in state-making during much of the twentieth century, and their increasingly destabilizing effects on democratic development, the rule of law, and social integration. This book argues that the theory of Mexican exceptionalism has prevented the concerted, systematic study of violence and coercion, not only during the last two decades, when their visibility has grown notably, but throughout the postrevolutionary period.

From a broader historical perspective, this comes as no surprise. Since Independence, major political and social transformations were accomplished only after prolonged periods of violent conflict and civil war. One need think only of the years preceding the Reforma in the second half of the nineteenth century, the devastating violence during the Mexican Revolution (1910–17), and the many armed uprisings in the ensuing decades. The subordinated incorporation of the armed forces into the ruling elite and party from the late 1930s onward gradually, though haltingly, began to change this, certainly when compared to the prominent role of the military in politics in the nineteenth century, that marathon of violence, and the (c)overt involvement of the armed forces elsewhere in Latin America during the twentieth century.²⁹ Nevertheless, we should not overlook numerous lost rebellions, (unsuccessful) armed mobilizations, and varied forms and conjunctures of state repression, especially at the local level, since they pointedly question the institutional nature of conflict resolution.³⁰ One can think of the repression of different labor, peasant, and popular movements and protests from the 1920s through the 1940s (Padilla’s important study of the Jaramillista peasant movement unequivocally argues that state terror undergirded Mexico’s ‘perfect dictatorship’ ), railroad workers in the 1950s, students in the 1960s, peasants again in the 1970s, and political opposition during the entire period.³¹ Undoubtedly, long before 1968, [the Mexican state] was willing to make massive shows of force to curtail social activism.³²

The third key question raised here, therefore, concerns the dominant perspective on the nature of Mexico’s sociopolitical system and state-making process during the period between circa 1938 and 1982, which includes the so-called golden years of PRI rule, allegedly based on a combination of economic growth, modest redistribution, mass clientelism, and institutional (i.e., nonviolent) conflict resolution. Recent historical work suggests that this perspective is flawed and incomplete, certainly for the period until 1952, and even beyond.³³ How peaceful was the pax priísta and how long did it last? Could it be that just as much scholarly work on current Mexico misjudges the significance of violent social, political, and criminal conflict (recall Sosa’s irony), the overall interpretation of post-revolutionary state-making, nation-building, and sociopolitical development has also been misleading in its appreciation of the role of violence and coercion? The thrust of this book’s historical perspective is that the current interpretative disjunction of Mexico as a country that simultaneously moves toward democratic consolidation and rule of law and toward violence, coercion, insecurity, and militarization compels us to ask questions ex post facto about the history—the PRI-history—of the current situation and, more importantly, the dominant interpretations of that history. After all, recalling Schmidt’s quotation from the beginning of this chapter, fundamental reinterpretations of Mexican history must originate in a moment of frightful crisis.³⁴ Today’s frightening security crisis pushes us to rethink long-term processes of state-making and the role of violence and coercion, to recast influential interpretations of the circa 1938–82 period, and then to come to terms with how Mexico’s current multiparty (electoral) democracy blends with violence and the multiplication of (privatized) armed actors. By looking at twentieth-century state-making in Mexico through the lens of different agents and forms of violence, coercion, and crime, the chapters in this volume are an attempt to open a fresh perspective, by mapping different actors and meanings of violence and coercion, and by examining the connections between the enlightened and dark sides of state-making, between apparently transparent formal institutions and obscure informal coercion and violence.

After a brief appraisal of additional features of violence in contemporary Mexico, the remaining part of this chapter further explores the key concepts, arguments, and claims of this book. One section explores the boundaries of the concept of violence and develops a general typology. I illustrate my general points with examples from twentieth-century Mexico. One important caveat is in place from the start; within the scope of this volume the wide variety of forms and sources of violence and coercion is limited by two key variables: their collective nature and their relationship to state(-making). The next section briefly charts theorizing about violence, coercion, and state-making through a comparative approach to this process, war, and the monopolization of violence and taxation, as well as class and legitimacy. Next, I outline an analytical framework that proposes to look at state-making through what I call the zones of hegemony and coercion. I develop this framework further by returning to the issue of Mexican exceptionalism, using my framework as a device to critically assess the relative weight of violence/coercion and hegemony in scholarship on Mexican postrevolutionary state-making. This lays out a field for research on violence, coercion, and state-making in twentieth-century Mexico, to which this volume proposes to make a substantial contribution. The closing part of this chapter appraises the main arguments and findings of the chapters by placing them in a broader scholarly context.

VIOLENCE IN MEXICO: A SECOND APPRAISAL (STATISTICS, SOURCES, AND POLICIES)

The spectacular rise of lethal, drug-related violence in recent years runs against longer-term historical tendencies. Statistical evidence shows that the basic trend in homicides in Mexico rose from around 12,000 per year in the early 1980s to around 16,000 in the early 1990s, an increase of almost 35 percent.³⁵ After that, however, the number steadily declined, approaching 10,000 early in the new millennium and 8,500 in 2007, a decline from almost 20 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants to 8 in 2007.³⁶ Hence, contrary to frequently made claims, lethal violence in Mexico is still well below the levels seen in Colombia in the early 1990s.³⁷ However, after 2007, the number of homicides began to increase again, reaching and then surpassing the levels of the early 1990s with more than 12,500 narco-related killings in 2010 alone. Certain regions in the country experience the brunt of this violence: the homicide rate in Sinaloa increased from 28 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2007 to almost 44 in 2008, while Chihuahua experienced an increase from 18.5 in 2007 to 42 in 2008 and then almost 60 in 2009.³⁸ In 2009, the business community of Ciudad Juárez claimed that the homicide rate stood at an astonishing 150 per 100,000 inhabitants.³⁹

What has changed is the geography of violence. The significant rise in lethal violence in the early 1990s (and the subsequent decrease) largely occurred in the predominantly rural and indigenous regions of southern and central Mexico, where the root causes were the agrarian crisis combined with land conflicts, socioeconomic marginalization, alcoholism, religious divisions, and factional and family feuds, the latter of which have erroneously been called cultural peculiarities.⁴⁰ In recent years, rising homicide rates are explained by developments in states in northern Mexico, especially in medium and large urban areas. The most notable exceptions to this are Guerrero and Michoacán. However, what appears to have changed most is the meaning-making related to violence. When homicide rates went up in the late 1980s, there was no comparable public outcry. Is the country inoculated against knowing about violence and coercion in Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Chiapas because of the cultural peculiarities of their indigenous populations? After all, when rates went down, perceptions of violence, fear, and insecurity increasingly pointed in the opposite direction. To understand this paradox, Fernando Escalante points to the shifting social profile of homicide victims (rural to urban, indigenous to mestizo, southern to northern Mexico), the changing attitudes in the media and social sensibilities.⁴¹ In addition to social meanings of violence, the distinct semantics of recent violence and crime (decapitations, torture, narco-messages) helps us understand this paradox. The same can be said of the substantial geopolitical differences between a war on drugs on the doorstep of the United States and violent social, political, and ethnic conflicts deep inside rural Mexico. In other words, examining violence in contemporary Mexico goes far beyond its statistics to speak to social and ethnic hierarchies, politics, cultural meanings, international relations, and global security discourses.

Apart from drug-related violence, a cursory appraisal of Mexico since the 1980s identifies several forms and sources of violence. First, the mid-1980s saw a significant increase in political and electoral violence, leading up to the fraudulent 1988 elections and beyond. Salinas de Gortari’s presidency (1988–94) was marked by an explosion of (local) electoral conflicts that often ended violently. Occasionally, this produced flash-backs to the democracia pistoleril of the 1920s through 1950s that returned with a vengeance in Guerrero and Michoacán in the 1990s. One study speaks of state violence and more than 600 political assassinations between 1988 and 2000.⁴² The persecution of members of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) is proof of the painful transition from presidential authoritarianism to more competitive electoral politics, especially in provincial arenas. In 1994, violence also reached the heights of the national political system with the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio of the PRI and other high-level politicians.⁴³ Second, there has been a rise in ethnic violence since the 1990s, a development that began with the 1994 Chiapas uprising but that cannot be reduced to it.⁴⁴ Third, the long-term history of economic downturns and the onset of neoliberal reforms since the 1980s created the conditions for a surge in urban crime and violence (armed robberies, car theft, assaults, kidnappings, lynchings) in the mid-1990s. This was even more remarkable since, compared to major cities in Brazil and Argentina, urban Mexico had been relatively peaceful until the 1990s, allegedly due to the PRI’s dominance over the country’s political and social system.⁴⁵ Urban violence and crime exacerbated feelings of a deepening crisis of security and the judicial system, and strengthened popular discontent with law enforcement, especially because of the perceived incompetence (or unwillingness) of the authorities to resolve corruption and white-collar crime.⁴⁶ Aside from disquieting developments in Mexico City, the depressing situation in several cities along the U.S.-Mexican border comes to mind, a product of the destructive interconnections between drug-trafficking, (illegal) migration, and fragile social structures (see also Shirk’s Chapter 2).⁴⁷ Fourth, there is the broad area of domestic violence, a theme long ignored by authorities and the scholarly community, but one generally perceived to be a breeding ground for other forms of violence.⁴⁸

Whereas citizens worry about increasing levels of violence and insecurity, official statistics on especially nonlethal crime and violence in Mexico are generally considered untrustworthy and believed to be well below real levels.⁴⁹ This is partly explained by inconsistencies among different government institutions, imprecise and changing categorizations, and the lack of disaggregation. Most importantly, however, unreliable statistics result from the fact that they are based only on crimes actually reported to the police or the prosecutor’s office. Real crime rates can be estimated only when unreported crimes are taken into consideration.⁵⁰ Victimization surveys consistently show that almost three out of every four victims do not report a crime. In the case of kidnapping, a conservative estimate is that four out of ten cases go unreported.⁵¹ The massive size of the dark (unreported) number of delinquencies can be attributed entirely to a key aspect of Mexico’s (in)security regime: the (perceived) ineffectiveness of the country’s institutions responsible for preventing and investigating crimes and processing them judicially.⁵² The flip side of the crisis of violence and insecurity is impunity and the crisis of the justice system.

The deepening problems of violence and insecurity are substantiated by a string of policy initiatives designed to strengthen the capacity and effectiveness of Mexican law enforcement agencies. In 1995, the Zedillo government created the National Public Security System, which allocated resources to state-level public security programs and sought to integrate federal, state, and local levels of government to create better instruments to sanction police corruption and criminal infiltration in such agencies. In 1999, a new federal police force was established, the Federal Preventative Police, with a decidedly militarised character.⁵³ Moreover, Zedillo reformed the country’s criminal justice system and involved the army in the struggle against organized crime. None of these efforts were notably effective.⁵⁴ In 2000, the Ministry of Public Security was created and took charge of the Preventative Police and of the National Public Security System. In 2001, Fox’s administration eliminated the notoriously corrupt judicial police and founded the Agencia Federal de Investigación (AFI), hoping to increase the effectiveness and professionalism of criminal investigation. In the face of the escalation of violence and insecurity, Fox reorganized the security apparatus again in 2005 and created the federal security cabinet, after a major justice and police reform project presented in 2004 was not ratified.⁵⁵ Finally, in late 2008, President Calderón managed to push through Congress a new Public Security System law that aims to establish a system of controls involving all police forces, the attorneys general, and penal systems. The Federal Preventative Police would be replaced by the Federal Police.⁵⁶ What is most significant in this recent round of reforms and reorganizations is the ever-more-pronounced role of the president and the military in managing Mexico’s law enforcement system.⁵⁷ Budgetary allocations to different law enforcement agencies have substantially increased over the last ten years.⁵⁸ All these reforms and policy initiatives are a response to the mounting problems of violence and public insecurity, but they are also, and perhaps more importantly, informed by a profound shift toward viewing these phenomena, especially drug-trafficking, as issues of national security. This conceptual shift has its roots in the 1990s but fully materialized after 2000, and even more after 2006, when the role of the Mexican military in combating crime, violence, and insecurity increased dramatically. Militarization is now a key feature of Mexico’s security landscape.⁵⁹