This entry is a review of two recent books on Mexican Politics, Los Zetas, Inc. by Guadalupe Correa (University of Texas Press, 2017) and A Massacre in Mexico, by Anabel Hernandez (Verso, 2018).
In 2006, Mexican president Felipe Calderon deployed the Mexican military to attack organized crime in Mexico, which had become heavily militarized and capable of challenging the Mexican state’s monopoly on the use of force. The subsequent War on Drugs has raged in Mexico from 2006 to 2018. 250,000 people were killed in the course of this conflict and another 37,000 disappeared. The elections of 2018 were a major political transformation in Mexico. All of the major political parties – the PRI, the PAN and the PRD – suffered heavy losses while the party of Andres Manual Lopez Obrador (or AMLO) won 53% of the popular vote, supermajorities in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate and legislative majorities in 26 out of Mexico’s 32 states. Whether AMLO’s party can reduce violence in Mexico is open to question and even skepticism, as this review will suggest. The books under review here – Guadalupe Correa Cabrera’s Los Zetas, Inc. and Anabel Hernandez’s A Massacre in Mexico – provide important insights into the roots of Mexico’s violence from which it is possible identify the grave challenges that face Mexico’s new government.
Any account of the Mexico’s drug war must begin by examining the decline of the PRI, which emerged from the Mexican Revolution and governed Mexico from 1928 to 2000. PRI hegemony assumed the form of vertical networks of patron client relationships linking together different segments of the Mexican political class to the central figure of the Mexican President. These networks included narco-trafficking organizations who were given the right to engage in narco-trafficking within specific jurisdictions – referred to as plazas – in exchange for bribes and under certain restrictions imposed by the state – traffickers were not permitted to carry arms or the sell drugs in Mexico (Watt and Zepeda 2012). With the debt crisis of the early 1980s, the PRI lost both political legitimacy and financial resources. Meanwhile, successful U.S. drug interdiction efforts in the Caribbean and South Florida increased the flow of drugs through Mexico and augmented the power of Mexican narco-traffickers . They were rapidly outgrowing their subordinate relationship to a state in the midst of deep structural transformation.
Paramilitary Conflict and Civil War
As the title of her book indicates, Guadalupe Correa focuses on the Zetas. The Zeta were commandos within the Mexican army who received military training in the United States. They were deployed in the Northeastern state of Tamaulipas, which had, since the 1930s, been a hub of illegal commerce from Mexico into the United States. The founder of the Gulf Cartel, Juan Guerra, smuggled whisky into the United States during Prohibition and later added prostitution, gambling and car theft to his portfolio of illegal activities. He operated his organization by means of developing an extensive corruption network with state and federal level officials. Guerra was succeeded in his leadership of the organization by his nephew, Juan Abrego, who contracted with Cali based cartels to dramatically expand transshipment of South American cocaine into the United States from the mid-80s to the mid-90s. Like his predecessor, Abrego relied on corruption networks to operate (Correa 2017, p. 15-36).
Abrego’s arrest and extradition to the United States in 1996, triggered a struggle for power over Gulf Cartel. Osiel Cardenas emerged as the new leader of Gulf Cartel with the assistance of the Zetas. The innovation of the Zetas was to use force in place of historically cultivated corruption networks. Deserting the Mexican army for higher pay, the Zetas brought with them a new and unprecedented level of expertise in the use of force. Correa quotes U.S. military analyst Hal Brands, who notes that the Zetas “make use of an astonishingly large and powerful arsenal” including the standard AK 47, but also shoulder fired missiles, bazookas, grenade launchers, 50-mm machine guns, armor piercing ammunition, dynamite and plastic explosives. Over 90% of the weapons were acquired in the United States through arms dealers and gun show purchases and then smuggled over the border (Correa 2017, p, 90).
At stake in the war on drugs was not so much victory, which has proved elusive, but, as Dawn Paley (2017) has pointed out, new modes of state making. An important part of this project is the ideological conception of the state as a bastion of law and order, which defines itself against a criminal insurgency that is being waged against it (Zavala 2018). Reality is far more ambiguous. The virtue of Correa’s book is that she decodes the ambiguity of the Mexican state. The paramilitaries, like the Zetas and other organized crime groups have no ideological program. They are not out to change Mexican society but rather to loot it. The looting, however, is a complex, multilateral process, with many different points of resistance and collusion from both state and non-state actors. Correa argues that armed conflict in Mexico is similar to the intrastate conflicts that have been fought in the global South with increasing frequency and violence since the end of the Cold War. What is typical of these conflicts is that they are civil wars, fought for the sake of economic opportunities rather than as the result of deep seated grievances (Correa 2017, p. 126-56). These economic opportunities emerge in a context where the centralized administrative capacities of post-colonial states have entered into precipitous decline. State and society become fragmented and fractured.
In the Mexican case, military conflicts with the organized crime proceeded through two phases: an effort to decapitate the leadership structures of the major organized crime groups giving way to a low intensity mode of conflict focused on clashes between different paramilitary groups that have occurred in the penumbra of the military’s widespread deployment across Mexico’s national territory (Correa, 2017, p. 136). The paramilitary forces that have emerged in Mexico are highly heterogeneous in character. They include groups like the Mata-Zetas in Veracruz, who are thought have had links to cartels opposed to the Zetas (like the Sinaloa Cartel), but also participation from the Mexican Marines (Correa, 2017: 113-5). They also comprise the formation of self-defense paramilitaries. In Monterrey, local elites financed paramilitaries as private security forces to fight against the Zetas, but many participants had links to rival cartels. In Michoacan, another epicenter of Mexico’s criminal violence, the federal government provided supported to self-defense groups, which were also infiltrated by the rival cartels. The resulting decentralization of violence has enabled the military to delegate the use of force to vigilante groups and avoid the legal and normative problems associated with human rights abuses (Correa, 2017, p. 107-25).
Drug War Winners and Losers
Correa avoids discussing the intentions of the Mexican drug war and focuses instead on its consequences. One major consequence of the drug war is that Mexico has become, in Correa’s estimate, a fragile rather than a failed state (Correa 2017, p. 97). The difference is that centralized political authority has not disintegrated in Mexico, but it has rather become one of numerous different nodes of power, which both antagonistically and collaboratively co-exist. Antagonisms can be understood in terms of power struggles between rival political factions, organizations, business interests, and organized crime groups, both inside and outside the state. But the collaborations between these groups are perhaps more significant.
They can be seen, for example, in the Zeta assault on the town of Allende near the U.S. border, in retribution for the betrayal of two Zeta affiliated traffickers who operated an important plaza (Eagle Pass) on the U.S. border. The Zetas disappeared 300 residents of Allende, disintegrating their remains in barrels of diesel fuel. The assault lasted for several days, but it never prompted a response by the Mexican army, stationed at a nearby base (Osorno 2014). This is, as Correa suggests, collaboration by omission rather than commission (Correa 2017, p. 223). The result has been to depopulate the town of Allende and its surrounding region. The region is the source of several water springs in an otherwise arid region. Allende is situated with the Burgos Basin, a region that contains rich deposits of natural gas that can be extracted through fracking. But fracking requires large supplies of water. The depopulation of Allende works, in this sense, to the advantage of transnational energy investments, which, in Mexico, have been authorized by the 2014 energy reforms that now encourage foreign investment in Mexico’s energy sector.
One conclusion to draw from Correa’s analysis is that Mexican drug war has given rise to a series of what Saskia Sassen terms predatory formations (2014) that facilitate transnational investment and expulsion of people from highly valued regions. Consider another example of this point: the Goldcorp Corporation’s mining facilities in Guerrero form part of an emerging gold belt in the state. Goldcorp pays royalties to ejidos for the use of the subsoil, but these payments have piqued the interests of organized crime groups that compete to establish their capacity to extort peasants (Correa 2107, p. 184-5). The result of violent competition for the right to extort is the progressive depopulation of the area. Correa sketches out similar dynamics in Coahuila and Michoacan. In the latter state, high prices for iron ore, exported to China through the port of Lazaro Cardenas, instigated inter cartel conflict to control these natural resources. A similar dynamic has played out in Coahulia with respect to coal mining. In these locations, cartels have displaced small and medium sized firms while integrating themselves into the commodity chains dominated by Mexico’s more powerful economic elites (Correa 2017, p. 167-85). These commodity chains straddle the supposed divide between law and criminality, which the official discourse of the state loudly reifies, but which exists, in reality, quite tenuously.
The “Historical Truth” of Ayotzinapa
As noted above, the war on drugs in Mexico has resulted the new forms of state making – in particular, the development of new modes of state/society relations that incorporate political elites, transnational businesses, domestic economic oligarchs and organized crime into predatory formations that facilitate transnational modes of accumulation. Anabel Hernandez’s inquiry into the disappearance of the 43 education students from the Raul Isidro Normal College in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero reveals both the corruption at the heart of the Mexican state but also the state’s deep need to construct a false narrative of itself as the central protagonist in the war on drugs.
Hernandez has painstakingly examined media, human rights and judicial records of the disappearances and interviewed scores of people who witnessed the events or who became caught in the state’s subsequent fabrication of evidence. The central facts of the case centered on the participation of students from the Raul Isidro Normal School (a teachers college) in the commemoration of the 1968 massacre of students in Mexico City. This was an annual event for which students hijacked commercial busses, with the forbearance of the local and state political authorities. 2014 was different, however, because one of the busses that students hijacked was loaded with heroin.
As the two of the commandeered buses departed Iguala, at approximately 10:30 of the night of September 26, they were stopped by the municipal police in Guerrero and then attacked by a combination of state and federal police as well as plainclothes federal agents. Because the students witnessed security forces recovering the heroin, they had to be eliminated. Hernandez draws this conclusion on the basis of an interview with the drug trafficker whose heroin had been intercepted (2018, p. 327-30), but there is no additional evidence from survivors or witnesses to support this claim. This conclusion is, however buttressed by the shift of heroin production from the Golden Triangle in northern Mexico to Guerrero, which made Iguala into an important transshipment point that would be protected by state and federal security forces.
In the aftermath of the disappearances, the state threw the blame on municipal police forces and the mayor of Iguala in order to blunt the criticisms of national and international audiences and to maintain the fiction that Mexico is a functioning democratic state (Ackerman 2016). That this version of events appeared to be true, at least to some observers, was due to the presumption that municipal police across Mexico are invariably corrupt and because of the way in which the mayor of Iguala resigned his post and went into hiding after the events of September 26. The government’s narrative held that local appendages of the Mexican state have been coopted by organized crime, but that the centers of political authority (the state and federal governments, dominated by the existing political class) remained committed to the restoration of law and order. As the Pena Nieto government formulated its so called “historical truth” about the 43 disappeared students, it sought to maintain the myth of righteous state violence that occurs only in response to criminal violence that was besieging Mexican society. This was a view that Pena Nieto’s supporters in Washington wanted to believe. Both the Bush and Obama administrations supported providing arms and training for the Mexican military, frequently ignoring the human rights abuses that were associated with the war on drugs (Frantzblau, 2016).
Hernandez reminds us that human rights abuses in Mexico are about the suppression of popular movements and the defense of elite interests. Historically, Raul Isidro Normal School had been a center of radical agitation. When Pena Nieto assumed power in 2012, he received a high level briefing on so- called governability concerns in Mexico, which included “the activism of the Ayotzinapan normalistas” and their linkages with popular movements in the state of Guerrero (Hernandez 2018, p. 33-35). State and federal security forces had killed two students in 2011 protests while arresting and torturing dozens. In this context, the death of Julio Cesar Mondragon on the night of September 26 is particularly notable. Mondragon’s corpse was found a few meters from the Iquala C-4 (the latter being a communications network between Mexican security forces) headquarters (2018, p. 288). His cranium was crushed and one side of his face had been skinned off, apparently while Mondragon was still alive. Forensic experts noted that his attackers used specialized techniques that were quite beyond the capacities of the local police. In stark opposition to the fate of the disappeared, Mondragon’s body was meant to be found and to instill terror in the population (Fazio, 2018, p. 363-66).
With events of Iguala, a dual image of state terror and obfuscation emerges. The state can inflict terror and then claim impunity through the fabrication of evidence, based on the use of torture to extract confessions from the accused. Much of Hernandez’s account focuses on the different waves of arrests by the state: first the Iguala police, then the mayor of Iguala and his wife, then the Cocula police, who allegedly conspired with Iguala police to deliver the students to Guerreros Unidos, the local gang, who, allegedly, killed them. Finally the state arrested alleged the gang members, who turned out to be impoverished peasants. Like the coerced confessions of the Iguala and Cocula police, the accounts of the framed gang members were inconsistent. One claimed that all the students were dead when they arrived at Cocula garbage dump. Another said they were still alive. A third maintained that only 30 students were transported to the dump (Hernandez 2018, p. 206-15).
While the state coercively manufactured the guilty parties, it also manipulated and distorted evidence that might have inculpated state and federal security forces. Surveillance videos were cut and disabled; C-4 monitors were pointed toward the sky during a crucial sequence of the night that might have recorded the trucks that transported the disappeared students after their arrests (Hernandez, 2018, p. 84-89). The state put forward the idea that the bodies of the disappeared were incinerated, so that their remains could not be identified. These claims followed earlier reconstructions of the killing of the students at different locations, which were rebutted by the lack of DNA remains of the students. To prove that the killings of the students happened in Cocula, the state produced remains of one of the disappeared students, Alexander Mora.
But the provenance of this evidence has never been adequately accounted for. The International Group of Independent Experts, affiliated with the Inter-American Court on Human Rights, contends that the state planted this evidence (Hernandez 2018, p. 254). This group, invited by both Mexican government and the parents of the disappeared to provide technical assistance in the resolution of this case, also concluded that a fire of the magnitude required to completely incinerate the bodies of the disappeared could not have occurred in the Cocula dump (Hernandez 2018, p. 234).
These rebuttals demolished the government’s assertion of the “historical truth” of what happened to the 43 missing students. The case of Ayotzinapa ignited a catharsis of rage and grief from Mexicans, leading to large scale protests in Mexico City and highway blockages and seizures of government buildings in Guerrero. Public support for Pena Nieto cratered, with his approval rating dropping from 50% to well under 20%. This was a prelude to the massive losses the PRI suffered in the 2018 elections– often in regions where it had been the dominant political force for generations – eliminating it as a major political actor in Mexican politics.
The Mexican Deep State
Yet the historical defeat of the PRI does not imply the transformation of the Mexican state. The 27th Infantry Division in Iguala remained immune from the investigation, at one point turning away state investigators (from Guerrero) on grounds of national security (Hernandez 2018, p. 103-4). Fifty-five members of the Pena Nieto administration, thirteen of whom are naval officers, have been accused of torture. The PRG (Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office) ruled that nineteen engaged in torture, but none have been sentenced (Hernandez 2018, p. 370-75). While AMLO, the new president, has convened a commission to investigate the disappearances of Ayotzinapa, he also indicated his unwillingness to prosecute past cases of corruption (Dresser, 2018). Indeed, his undersecretary of Human Rights has indicated that military personnel will not be subject to any investigations related to the disappearances (Carrasco 2018, p. 7). While AMLO campaigned on a promise to demilitarize security in Mexico, his new security plan, issued days before assuming office, calls for creating a National Guard under the command of the military. Mexican analyst Monica Serrano notes that this on account of the growing dependence of the civilian government on the military to maintain domestic order – a result of how the Mexican government has fought the war on drugs - even as this order is laced with protection arrangements for organized crime (Carrasco 2018).
AMLO has also resisted calls to establish an independent Attorney General’s Office (PGR), opting to appoint his attorney general and retain a long-standing arrangement through law enforcement acts as an arm of executive authority. AMLO is rejecting calls for a systematic restructuring of the PGR, ridding it of its legions of poorly trained and corrupt prosecutors (Navarro, 2018). In short, the political impact of the Ayotzinapa was the to blow away the outer shell of corruption – in the form of ruling party – but the “deep state” remains anchored in place. As both Correa and Hernandez’s accounts illustrate, however, it is not only the state that matters but also its disparate and complex interconnections with organized crime, business elites and transnational corporations. These are the modalities through which contemporary neoliberalism operates in Mexico. Their historical transformation will require more than just electoral change.
State
Transformation and the Drug War
In 2006, Mexican president Felipe Calderon deployed the Mexican military to attack organized crime in Mexico, which had become heavily militarized and capable of challenging the Mexican state’s monopoly on the use of force. The subsequent War on Drugs has raged in Mexico from 2006 to 2018. 250,000 people were killed in the course of this conflict and another 37,000 disappeared. The elections of 2018 were a major political transformation in Mexico. All of the major political parties – the PRI, the PAN and the PRD – suffered heavy losses while the party of Andres Manual Lopez Obrador (or AMLO) won 53% of the popular vote, supermajorities in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate and legislative majorities in 26 out of Mexico’s 32 states. Whether AMLO’s party can reduce violence in Mexico is open to question and even skepticism, as this review will suggest. The books under review here – Guadalupe Correa Cabrera’s Los Zetas, Inc. and Anabel Hernandez’s A Massacre in Mexico – provide important insights into the roots of Mexico’s violence from which it is possible identify the grave challenges that face Mexico’s new government.
Any account of the Mexico’s drug war must begin by examining the decline of the PRI, which emerged from the Mexican Revolution and governed Mexico from 1928 to 2000. PRI hegemony assumed the form of vertical networks of patron client relationships linking together different segments of the Mexican political class to the central figure of the Mexican President. These networks included narco-trafficking organizations who were given the right to engage in narco-trafficking within specific jurisdictions – referred to as plazas – in exchange for bribes and under certain restrictions imposed by the state – traffickers were not permitted to carry arms or the sell drugs in Mexico (Watt and Zepeda 2012). With the debt crisis of the early 1980s, the PRI lost both political legitimacy and financial resources. Meanwhile, successful U.S. drug interdiction efforts in the Caribbean and South Florida increased the flow of drugs through Mexico and augmented the power of Mexican narco-traffickers . They were rapidly outgrowing their subordinate relationship to a state in the midst of deep structural transformation.
Paramilitary Conflict and Civil War
As the title of her book indicates, Guadalupe Correa focuses on the Zetas. The Zeta were commandos within the Mexican army who received military training in the United States. They were deployed in the Northeastern state of Tamaulipas, which had, since the 1930s, been a hub of illegal commerce from Mexico into the United States. The founder of the Gulf Cartel, Juan Guerra, smuggled whisky into the United States during Prohibition and later added prostitution, gambling and car theft to his portfolio of illegal activities. He operated his organization by means of developing an extensive corruption network with state and federal level officials. Guerra was succeeded in his leadership of the organization by his nephew, Juan Abrego, who contracted with Cali based cartels to dramatically expand transshipment of South American cocaine into the United States from the mid-80s to the mid-90s. Like his predecessor, Abrego relied on corruption networks to operate (Correa 2017, p. 15-36).
Abrego’s arrest and extradition to the United States in 1996, triggered a struggle for power over Gulf Cartel. Osiel Cardenas emerged as the new leader of Gulf Cartel with the assistance of the Zetas. The innovation of the Zetas was to use force in place of historically cultivated corruption networks. Deserting the Mexican army for higher pay, the Zetas brought with them a new and unprecedented level of expertise in the use of force. Correa quotes U.S. military analyst Hal Brands, who notes that the Zetas “make use of an astonishingly large and powerful arsenal” including the standard AK 47, but also shoulder fired missiles, bazookas, grenade launchers, 50-mm machine guns, armor piercing ammunition, dynamite and plastic explosives. Over 90% of the weapons were acquired in the United States through arms dealers and gun show purchases and then smuggled over the border (Correa 2017, p, 90).
At stake in the war on drugs was not so much victory, which has proved elusive, but, as Dawn Paley (2017) has pointed out, new modes of state making. An important part of this project is the ideological conception of the state as a bastion of law and order, which defines itself against a criminal insurgency that is being waged against it (Zavala 2018). Reality is far more ambiguous. The virtue of Correa’s book is that she decodes the ambiguity of the Mexican state. The paramilitaries, like the Zetas and other organized crime groups have no ideological program. They are not out to change Mexican society but rather to loot it. The looting, however, is a complex, multilateral process, with many different points of resistance and collusion from both state and non-state actors. Correa argues that armed conflict in Mexico is similar to the intrastate conflicts that have been fought in the global South with increasing frequency and violence since the end of the Cold War. What is typical of these conflicts is that they are civil wars, fought for the sake of economic opportunities rather than as the result of deep seated grievances (Correa 2017, p. 126-56). These economic opportunities emerge in a context where the centralized administrative capacities of post-colonial states have entered into precipitous decline. State and society become fragmented and fractured.
In the Mexican case, military conflicts with the organized crime proceeded through two phases: an effort to decapitate the leadership structures of the major organized crime groups giving way to a low intensity mode of conflict focused on clashes between different paramilitary groups that have occurred in the penumbra of the military’s widespread deployment across Mexico’s national territory (Correa, 2017, p. 136). The paramilitary forces that have emerged in Mexico are highly heterogeneous in character. They include groups like the Mata-Zetas in Veracruz, who are thought have had links to cartels opposed to the Zetas (like the Sinaloa Cartel), but also participation from the Mexican Marines (Correa, 2017: 113-5). They also comprise the formation of self-defense paramilitaries. In Monterrey, local elites financed paramilitaries as private security forces to fight against the Zetas, but many participants had links to rival cartels. In Michoacan, another epicenter of Mexico’s criminal violence, the federal government provided supported to self-defense groups, which were also infiltrated by the rival cartels. The resulting decentralization of violence has enabled the military to delegate the use of force to vigilante groups and avoid the legal and normative problems associated with human rights abuses (Correa, 2017, p. 107-25).
Drug War Winners and Losers
Correa avoids discussing the intentions of the Mexican drug war and focuses instead on its consequences. One major consequence of the drug war is that Mexico has become, in Correa’s estimate, a fragile rather than a failed state (Correa 2017, p. 97). The difference is that centralized political authority has not disintegrated in Mexico, but it has rather become one of numerous different nodes of power, which both antagonistically and collaboratively co-exist. Antagonisms can be understood in terms of power struggles between rival political factions, organizations, business interests, and organized crime groups, both inside and outside the state. But the collaborations between these groups are perhaps more significant.
They can be seen, for example, in the Zeta assault on the town of Allende near the U.S. border, in retribution for the betrayal of two Zeta affiliated traffickers who operated an important plaza (Eagle Pass) on the U.S. border. The Zetas disappeared 300 residents of Allende, disintegrating their remains in barrels of diesel fuel. The assault lasted for several days, but it never prompted a response by the Mexican army, stationed at a nearby base (Osorno 2014). This is, as Correa suggests, collaboration by omission rather than commission (Correa 2017, p. 223). The result has been to depopulate the town of Allende and its surrounding region. The region is the source of several water springs in an otherwise arid region. Allende is situated with the Burgos Basin, a region that contains rich deposits of natural gas that can be extracted through fracking. But fracking requires large supplies of water. The depopulation of Allende works, in this sense, to the advantage of transnational energy investments, which, in Mexico, have been authorized by the 2014 energy reforms that now encourage foreign investment in Mexico’s energy sector.
One conclusion to draw from Correa’s analysis is that Mexican drug war has given rise to a series of what Saskia Sassen terms predatory formations (2014) that facilitate transnational investment and expulsion of people from highly valued regions. Consider another example of this point: the Goldcorp Corporation’s mining facilities in Guerrero form part of an emerging gold belt in the state. Goldcorp pays royalties to ejidos for the use of the subsoil, but these payments have piqued the interests of organized crime groups that compete to establish their capacity to extort peasants (Correa 2107, p. 184-5). The result of violent competition for the right to extort is the progressive depopulation of the area. Correa sketches out similar dynamics in Coahuila and Michoacan. In the latter state, high prices for iron ore, exported to China through the port of Lazaro Cardenas, instigated inter cartel conflict to control these natural resources. A similar dynamic has played out in Coahulia with respect to coal mining. In these locations, cartels have displaced small and medium sized firms while integrating themselves into the commodity chains dominated by Mexico’s more powerful economic elites (Correa 2017, p. 167-85). These commodity chains straddle the supposed divide between law and criminality, which the official discourse of the state loudly reifies, but which exists, in reality, quite tenuously.
The “Historical Truth” of Ayotzinapa
As noted above, the war on drugs in Mexico has resulted the new forms of state making – in particular, the development of new modes of state/society relations that incorporate political elites, transnational businesses, domestic economic oligarchs and organized crime into predatory formations that facilitate transnational modes of accumulation. Anabel Hernandez’s inquiry into the disappearance of the 43 education students from the Raul Isidro Normal College in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero reveals both the corruption at the heart of the Mexican state but also the state’s deep need to construct a false narrative of itself as the central protagonist in the war on drugs.
Hernandez has painstakingly examined media, human rights and judicial records of the disappearances and interviewed scores of people who witnessed the events or who became caught in the state’s subsequent fabrication of evidence. The central facts of the case centered on the participation of students from the Raul Isidro Normal School (a teachers college) in the commemoration of the 1968 massacre of students in Mexico City. This was an annual event for which students hijacked commercial busses, with the forbearance of the local and state political authorities. 2014 was different, however, because one of the busses that students hijacked was loaded with heroin.
As the two of the commandeered buses departed Iguala, at approximately 10:30 of the night of September 26, they were stopped by the municipal police in Guerrero and then attacked by a combination of state and federal police as well as plainclothes federal agents. Because the students witnessed security forces recovering the heroin, they had to be eliminated. Hernandez draws this conclusion on the basis of an interview with the drug trafficker whose heroin had been intercepted (2018, p. 327-30), but there is no additional evidence from survivors or witnesses to support this claim. This conclusion is, however buttressed by the shift of heroin production from the Golden Triangle in northern Mexico to Guerrero, which made Iguala into an important transshipment point that would be protected by state and federal security forces.
In the aftermath of the disappearances, the state threw the blame on municipal police forces and the mayor of Iguala in order to blunt the criticisms of national and international audiences and to maintain the fiction that Mexico is a functioning democratic state (Ackerman 2016). That this version of events appeared to be true, at least to some observers, was due to the presumption that municipal police across Mexico are invariably corrupt and because of the way in which the mayor of Iguala resigned his post and went into hiding after the events of September 26. The government’s narrative held that local appendages of the Mexican state have been coopted by organized crime, but that the centers of political authority (the state and federal governments, dominated by the existing political class) remained committed to the restoration of law and order. As the Pena Nieto government formulated its so called “historical truth” about the 43 disappeared students, it sought to maintain the myth of righteous state violence that occurs only in response to criminal violence that was besieging Mexican society. This was a view that Pena Nieto’s supporters in Washington wanted to believe. Both the Bush and Obama administrations supported providing arms and training for the Mexican military, frequently ignoring the human rights abuses that were associated with the war on drugs (Frantzblau, 2016).
Hernandez reminds us that human rights abuses in Mexico are about the suppression of popular movements and the defense of elite interests. Historically, Raul Isidro Normal School had been a center of radical agitation. When Pena Nieto assumed power in 2012, he received a high level briefing on so- called governability concerns in Mexico, which included “the activism of the Ayotzinapan normalistas” and their linkages with popular movements in the state of Guerrero (Hernandez 2018, p. 33-35). State and federal security forces had killed two students in 2011 protests while arresting and torturing dozens. In this context, the death of Julio Cesar Mondragon on the night of September 26 is particularly notable. Mondragon’s corpse was found a few meters from the Iquala C-4 (the latter being a communications network between Mexican security forces) headquarters (2018, p. 288). His cranium was crushed and one side of his face had been skinned off, apparently while Mondragon was still alive. Forensic experts noted that his attackers used specialized techniques that were quite beyond the capacities of the local police. In stark opposition to the fate of the disappeared, Mondragon’s body was meant to be found and to instill terror in the population (Fazio, 2018, p. 363-66).
With events of Iguala, a dual image of state terror and obfuscation emerges. The state can inflict terror and then claim impunity through the fabrication of evidence, based on the use of torture to extract confessions from the accused. Much of Hernandez’s account focuses on the different waves of arrests by the state: first the Iguala police, then the mayor of Iguala and his wife, then the Cocula police, who allegedly conspired with Iguala police to deliver the students to Guerreros Unidos, the local gang, who, allegedly, killed them. Finally the state arrested alleged the gang members, who turned out to be impoverished peasants. Like the coerced confessions of the Iguala and Cocula police, the accounts of the framed gang members were inconsistent. One claimed that all the students were dead when they arrived at Cocula garbage dump. Another said they were still alive. A third maintained that only 30 students were transported to the dump (Hernandez 2018, p. 206-15).
While the state coercively manufactured the guilty parties, it also manipulated and distorted evidence that might have inculpated state and federal security forces. Surveillance videos were cut and disabled; C-4 monitors were pointed toward the sky during a crucial sequence of the night that might have recorded the trucks that transported the disappeared students after their arrests (Hernandez, 2018, p. 84-89). The state put forward the idea that the bodies of the disappeared were incinerated, so that their remains could not be identified. These claims followed earlier reconstructions of the killing of the students at different locations, which were rebutted by the lack of DNA remains of the students. To prove that the killings of the students happened in Cocula, the state produced remains of one of the disappeared students, Alexander Mora.
But the provenance of this evidence has never been adequately accounted for. The International Group of Independent Experts, affiliated with the Inter-American Court on Human Rights, contends that the state planted this evidence (Hernandez 2018, p. 254). This group, invited by both Mexican government and the parents of the disappeared to provide technical assistance in the resolution of this case, also concluded that a fire of the magnitude required to completely incinerate the bodies of the disappeared could not have occurred in the Cocula dump (Hernandez 2018, p. 234).
These rebuttals demolished the government’s assertion of the “historical truth” of what happened to the 43 missing students. The case of Ayotzinapa ignited a catharsis of rage and grief from Mexicans, leading to large scale protests in Mexico City and highway blockages and seizures of government buildings in Guerrero. Public support for Pena Nieto cratered, with his approval rating dropping from 50% to well under 20%. This was a prelude to the massive losses the PRI suffered in the 2018 elections– often in regions where it had been the dominant political force for generations – eliminating it as a major political actor in Mexican politics.
The Mexican Deep State
Yet the historical defeat of the PRI does not imply the transformation of the Mexican state. The 27th Infantry Division in Iguala remained immune from the investigation, at one point turning away state investigators (from Guerrero) on grounds of national security (Hernandez 2018, p. 103-4). Fifty-five members of the Pena Nieto administration, thirteen of whom are naval officers, have been accused of torture. The PRG (Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office) ruled that nineteen engaged in torture, but none have been sentenced (Hernandez 2018, p. 370-75). While AMLO, the new president, has convened a commission to investigate the disappearances of Ayotzinapa, he also indicated his unwillingness to prosecute past cases of corruption (Dresser, 2018). Indeed, his undersecretary of Human Rights has indicated that military personnel will not be subject to any investigations related to the disappearances (Carrasco 2018, p. 7). While AMLO campaigned on a promise to demilitarize security in Mexico, his new security plan, issued days before assuming office, calls for creating a National Guard under the command of the military. Mexican analyst Monica Serrano notes that this on account of the growing dependence of the civilian government on the military to maintain domestic order – a result of how the Mexican government has fought the war on drugs - even as this order is laced with protection arrangements for organized crime (Carrasco 2018).
AMLO has also resisted calls to establish an independent Attorney General’s Office (PGR), opting to appoint his attorney general and retain a long-standing arrangement through law enforcement acts as an arm of executive authority. AMLO is rejecting calls for a systematic restructuring of the PGR, ridding it of its legions of poorly trained and corrupt prosecutors (Navarro, 2018). In short, the political impact of the Ayotzinapa was the to blow away the outer shell of corruption – in the form of ruling party – but the “deep state” remains anchored in place. As both Correa and Hernandez’s accounts illustrate, however, it is not only the state that matters but also its disparate and complex interconnections with organized crime, business elites and transnational corporations. These are the modalities through which contemporary neoliberalism operates in Mexico. Their historical transformation will require more than just electoral change.
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