Mexico's Peace Movement

Mexico has a peace movement which emerged in response Ferdinand Calderon's phony war on drugs.  I would like to discuss the peace movement, but first a few points about the phony war on drugs. Calderon was president from 2006-12 and declared a war on drugs, but the conflict did not pit the state against the cartels.  As Anabel Hernandez shows in her book Narcoland (Verso, 2013, but first published in Mexico in 2010), Calderon followed in the footsteps of the Vincente Fox administration, siding with the Sinaloa Cartel of "el Chapo" Guzman.  Guzman's cartel was really a federation of different narco-trafficking groups.  Calderon's war on drugs was really a war against the adversaries of the Sinaloa Cartel - the Felix Arellano Brothers in Tijuana and then the Gulf Cartel in Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas.  These conflicts were instigated by Sinaloa Cartel, whose army consisted of the AFI (Agencia Federal de Investigacion), directed by Garcia Luna, who went on to become the Secretary of Public Security under Calderon.

These federal law enforcement personnel were arrayed against the armed wing of the Gulf Cartel, the Zetas.  The latter were ex-members of the military that Fox had deployed to Tamaulipas (in Northeastern Mexico) in order to attack the Gulf Cartel.  The rationale for the deployment of federal troops was the ineffectiveness of local law enforcement.  The irony of this operation is that the leader of the Gulf Cartel managed to recruit soldiers and ex-soldiers, including the leader of the Zetas, Vincente Lazcano, as body guards. After the arrest of Antonio Cardenas Guillen (the leader of the Gulf Cartel), the Zetas took control of the Gulf Cartel. This was not the only front in Calderon's drug wars.

Different cells within the Sinaloa Cartel went to war against one another, creating a difficult situation for the political leaders who had been bought off by the cartel:  which faction were they to align themselves with?  Notice in all of this, the state did not play the leading role; the cartels did. But the discourse of the state is nonetheless powerful because we imagine that the state fights criminal organizations rather than being aligned with them. 

We also imagine that the state is a unitary actor, when the state is really a complex institutional apparatus that is controlled by contending social forces, including criminal organizations.  But these criminal organizations are also linked to businesses of all kinds.  Some are directly established by the drug lords. Their  money laundering is facilitated by Mexican Banks,  which enable them to deposit their earnings (in exchange for hefty fees) and then establish a stake in the formal economy through the ownership of various kinds of assets. 

And here is one other qualification about the war on drugs:  it's not just about drugs. 

Violence is concentrated in particular areas. It is particularly high in the state of Guerrero where there is a lot of mining activity and associated population displacement. Population displacement concerns the removal of people from lands where mining companies want to operate or from land whose real estate value have increased and are coveted by developers.  As Dawn Paley discusses in Drug War Capitalism (AK Press, 2014), cartels acted as para-military forces, using violence and threats of violence to facilitate population displacement.  This points to another important nexus in Mexico between criminal organizations and corporations. 

With respect to Mexico's peace movement, an editorial recently appeared in Proceso (May 26, 2018) from Javier Sicilia, a famous Mexican poet whose son was killed in as the war on drugs.  Mexican civil society protested Calderon's war on Drugs.  On May 8, 2018, the Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia and Dignidad (MPJD), which originated eight years ago, convened a conference among Mexico's presidential candidates.  The purpose of this conference was to discuss the proposal of the MPJD for peace in Mexico, which consists of the following planks:  

1) Veto of the recently approved Law of Internal Security that allows the military, at the discretion of the president, to assume policing activities on cases deemed a threat to national security.

2) Legalization of marijuana (medicinal but not recreational marijuana is currently legal in Mexico)

3) An independent judiciary (which is an important topic in the U.S. as well).

4) A Peace Commission with the support of the international community - on the model of the South African Peace Commission - in order to determine the human rights violations that have occurred over the past 12 years. 

Sicilia argues that this agenda is not just another electoral issue but a common and vital interest of all Mexicans:  "Without it, Mexico will continue being what it today has become:  a barbaric territory of assassins, the disappeared, the dismembered, the enslaved, and the prostituted: a country of secret graveyards, hidden by decorous words and empty policies." 

Another important element of Scilia's discussion is the argument that the MPJD's proposals represent a humane rather than a security response to the violence of the drug wars.   The security response would be to increase the coercive powers to the state through "more police, security cameras, computerized intelligence centers, harsher penalties for offenders, even including the imposition of the death penalty [which does not exist in Mexico]" - all of which are policies that, similar to organized crime, operate on the basis of fear rather than on the basis of justice.  

One might respond here that the state exercises legitimate violence; why shouldn't this legitimate exercise of violence bring about peace?  And why shouldn't fear be the basis of peace?  This is essentially the argument that Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, one the central works of Western political theory.  The answers to this question are complex.  In the first place, the legitimacy of the Mexican state is in doubt.  This is why the MPJD calls for the support of the international community.  Few observers think that the Mexican state, as currently constituted, can act as a final arbiter of justice. The other point to consider is that increased state coercion cannot establish justice; what is required is recognition of past injustices and an institutional transformation of the Mexican state - it should be de-militarized with an impartial judiciary.  On this account, fear, per se, is an inadequate basis for a political order; what is needed in a widely held normative consensus about principles of justice.  It is only in the absence of justice that fear rules.   

All of this is a matter of interminable debate between idealists, who believe that justice establishes the foundations of state and realists who think that power, fear and coercion play this role.

The current moment is of interest here as well.  Mexico's elections for the presidency and for 3,000 other electoral offices at the local, state and federal levels are July 1, 2018.  July 1 is a moment when the Mexican people are able to express their will - to the extent that they are not inhibited by attempts, mainly on the part of the PRI, to perpetrate some form of electoral fraud.  Of the presidential candidates, Sicilia reports that the three major candidates all agreed that the security based response to the war on drugs had been a spectacular failure, but they all remain trapped in one manner or another within the security paradigm.

Sicilia raises fundamental questions about the basis of peace in Mexico or in any society.  How Mexico confronts its violent past (and present) is something that we can all learn from.