The capacity of Mexico´s civilian government to maintain the domestic order has weakened as a result of the decline of PRI as hegemonic apparatus of rule, the implantation of neoliberalism and the rise of organized crime. As a result, Mexico has undergone a pattern of militarization in which military spending has doubled since 2000 and where, through the Law of Internal Security, the Mexican military can now be deployed by the Mexico´s president unilaterally, with no Congressional oversight and with no accountability for the military itself in terms of how it deploys force. This makes me think of Carl Schmitt's view of soveriegnty as the capacity to decide when a nornal situation exists or not. If not, then we enter into a state of exception where the normal rules of politics are suspended and order is imposed by any means necessary. Since 2000, Mexico has descended into a more or less permanent state of exception. The passage of the Internal Law of Security last spring represents the institutionalization of this political reality.
But the election of AMLO may change this fact. I would like to focus attention on an essay by Oswaldo Zavala that appeared in Proceso on July 15, 2018. Zavala quotes a document from AMLO, El Equipo de Trabaja y Agenda,¨which states that the present crisis of security is more than just a matter of police, narco-traffickers, and thieves,¨ and for this reason, "it is has been an error to reduce the strategy of security to a correlation of firepower between the police and criminal organizations.¨ In a subsequent speech, AMLO added that ¨political corruption is the underlying cause of this wave of violence that, ever since the supposed war on drugs was initiated, has produced 200,000 assasinations and more than 30,000 disappearances." What this signifies is that it is the state rather than organized crime or the drug cartels that establshes, in Zavala´s words, ¨the condition of possibility of the violence.¨
AMLO´s logic here is the exact opposite of Ferdinand Calderon´s, the Mexican president that initiated the War on Drugs. For Calderon, the War on Drugs was initiated in order to protect the lives of Mexican citizens. For AMLO, the war is what started the violence. On the basis of this conclusion, AMLO is proposing not only to de-militarize Mexico, but also to review the contracts that previous governments have made with transnational corporations for the extraction of Mexico´s natural resources. The suggestion here is that resource extraction is a cause of violence.
Another crucial element of AMLO´s approach to security is the offer of amnesty to Mexican citizens that have been involved narco-trafficking for reasons of poverty. This includes campesinos who grow poppy or marijuana because they lack other means of subsistence or impoverished youth that engaged in drug trafficking but have have not committed serious crimes such as murder or kipnapping. The central thrust of AMLO´s amnesty proposals is to the put an end to the criminalization of the poor, which has been a recurrent strategy of the previous governments - a way of mowing down resistance to the implantation of a neoliberalism for the sake of security.
In his closing speech of the electoral campaign, AMLO stated that the details of his security policy would emerge from consultations that his government would undertake with "the relatives of victimes, religious leaders, defenders of human rights, the representatives of non-governmental organizations and social organizations as well as specialists to analyze all useful alternatives and achieve the pacification of the country.¨ Conspicuously missing from this list is the military or any of Mexico´s security agencies. The focus of AMLO´s security policy is not the use of force against bad actors (the drug cartles) but addressing violations of human rights and Mexico´s endemic poverty.
AMLO is going to abolish two security agencies that have been closely linked to violence in Mexico: Mexico´s central intelligence agency, the CEDEN, and the Presidential Guard. This is part of a more general pattern of institutional change in which AMLO will re-establish the the Secretariat of Public Security while gradually diminishing role of the armed forces in the provision of security. What this bureaucratic transformation signifies is a shift from a discourse of national security to one of public security.
This means - or may mean (we will have to see) - dismantling the nexus between militarization and natural resource extraction in Mexico. Wherever the Mexican military or federal security forces have been deployed in Mexico, violence has increased. This violence is often enacted by organized crime groups acting in a paramilitary capacity under the penumbra of federal security forces. Its purpose is to facilitate the displacement of communities who live on lands slated for mining or hydrocarbon development. This is the thesis of Dawn Paley´s book Drug War Capitalism.
Consider, in this regard, the fate of Mexico´s ejidos. These were lands that were distributed to groups of campesinos as communal property to be held by these groups in perpetuity. Under the government of Salinas de Gortari, the Mexican constitution was modified to allow for the sale of ejidos or for their reposession as collateral for unpaid debt. Following these reforms, NAFTA opened the floodgates of trade by eliminating agricultural tarrifs. Heavily subsidized goods from U.S. agribusinesses poured into Mexico. These economic changes were supposed to have eliminated the ejidos, but they continued in the years after NAFTA to blanket the Mexican countryside and block extractive development in Mexico. What we are witnessing with the War on Drugs is not so different from the development of a federal rural police during the era of the Porfiriato, which was similarly deployed to beat back rural resistance to the expansion of an extractive economy.
One can argue that the Porfiriato was more transparent than neoliberal Mexico. Expulsion of people from their living spaces in present day Mexico is carrried out under the auspices of the war on drugs, which divides the world into the forces of good and evil. The state and its regime of legal prohibition of drugs is good and the narcos and their regime of unbridled violence against the people are bad. In several previous posts, I have remarked on the work of Anibel Hernandez, who sees the state has being captured by powerful cartels. Her account of narocpolitics obscures the processes of population displacement. What Dawn Paley and Oswaldo Zavala are suggesting is just the opposite: the narcos are, in fact, instruments of the state. They represent an informal extension of the neoliberal security apparatus into the diverse spaces of Mexican society. I would add (by way of conjecture) that the capacity of the state to control the cartels is questionable. The cartels are a bit like the state´s Frankenstein, a monster that its creator is, in the end, unable to control.
Put differently, the violence of the cartels exceeds the requirements of neoliberal restructuring and has become a liability of neoliberal rule in Mexico. Now poor Mexicans, who use to sell their votes to the PRI, have, in the light of massive cartel violence, recalibrated their political interests and have voted for Morena at all levels of government. What they have received, in return, is a government that is committed to a multipronged attack on the nexus between militarization, cartel violence and neoliberal extraction.
AMLO´s logic here is the exact opposite of Ferdinand Calderon´s, the Mexican president that initiated the War on Drugs. For Calderon, the War on Drugs was initiated in order to protect the lives of Mexican citizens. For AMLO, the war is what started the violence. On the basis of this conclusion, AMLO is proposing not only to de-militarize Mexico, but also to review the contracts that previous governments have made with transnational corporations for the extraction of Mexico´s natural resources. The suggestion here is that resource extraction is a cause of violence.
Another crucial element of AMLO´s approach to security is the offer of amnesty to Mexican citizens that have been involved narco-trafficking for reasons of poverty. This includes campesinos who grow poppy or marijuana because they lack other means of subsistence or impoverished youth that engaged in drug trafficking but have have not committed serious crimes such as murder or kipnapping. The central thrust of AMLO´s amnesty proposals is to the put an end to the criminalization of the poor, which has been a recurrent strategy of the previous governments - a way of mowing down resistance to the implantation of a neoliberalism for the sake of security.
In his closing speech of the electoral campaign, AMLO stated that the details of his security policy would emerge from consultations that his government would undertake with "the relatives of victimes, religious leaders, defenders of human rights, the representatives of non-governmental organizations and social organizations as well as specialists to analyze all useful alternatives and achieve the pacification of the country.¨ Conspicuously missing from this list is the military or any of Mexico´s security agencies. The focus of AMLO´s security policy is not the use of force against bad actors (the drug cartles) but addressing violations of human rights and Mexico´s endemic poverty.
AMLO is going to abolish two security agencies that have been closely linked to violence in Mexico: Mexico´s central intelligence agency, the CEDEN, and the Presidential Guard. This is part of a more general pattern of institutional change in which AMLO will re-establish the the Secretariat of Public Security while gradually diminishing role of the armed forces in the provision of security. What this bureaucratic transformation signifies is a shift from a discourse of national security to one of public security.
This means - or may mean (we will have to see) - dismantling the nexus between militarization and natural resource extraction in Mexico. Wherever the Mexican military or federal security forces have been deployed in Mexico, violence has increased. This violence is often enacted by organized crime groups acting in a paramilitary capacity under the penumbra of federal security forces. Its purpose is to facilitate the displacement of communities who live on lands slated for mining or hydrocarbon development. This is the thesis of Dawn Paley´s book Drug War Capitalism.
Consider, in this regard, the fate of Mexico´s ejidos. These were lands that were distributed to groups of campesinos as communal property to be held by these groups in perpetuity. Under the government of Salinas de Gortari, the Mexican constitution was modified to allow for the sale of ejidos or for their reposession as collateral for unpaid debt. Following these reforms, NAFTA opened the floodgates of trade by eliminating agricultural tarrifs. Heavily subsidized goods from U.S. agribusinesses poured into Mexico. These economic changes were supposed to have eliminated the ejidos, but they continued in the years after NAFTA to blanket the Mexican countryside and block extractive development in Mexico. What we are witnessing with the War on Drugs is not so different from the development of a federal rural police during the era of the Porfiriato, which was similarly deployed to beat back rural resistance to the expansion of an extractive economy.
One can argue that the Porfiriato was more transparent than neoliberal Mexico. Expulsion of people from their living spaces in present day Mexico is carrried out under the auspices of the war on drugs, which divides the world into the forces of good and evil. The state and its regime of legal prohibition of drugs is good and the narcos and their regime of unbridled violence against the people are bad. In several previous posts, I have remarked on the work of Anibel Hernandez, who sees the state has being captured by powerful cartels. Her account of narocpolitics obscures the processes of population displacement. What Dawn Paley and Oswaldo Zavala are suggesting is just the opposite: the narcos are, in fact, instruments of the state. They represent an informal extension of the neoliberal security apparatus into the diverse spaces of Mexican society. I would add (by way of conjecture) that the capacity of the state to control the cartels is questionable. The cartels are a bit like the state´s Frankenstein, a monster that its creator is, in the end, unable to control.
Put differently, the violence of the cartels exceeds the requirements of neoliberal restructuring and has become a liability of neoliberal rule in Mexico. Now poor Mexicans, who use to sell their votes to the PRI, have, in the light of massive cartel violence, recalibrated their political interests and have voted for Morena at all levels of government. What they have received, in return, is a government that is committed to a multipronged attack on the nexus between militarization, cartel violence and neoliberal extraction.
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