Is Mexico Sovereign?

 Sovereignty of the Mexican Nation State:

I read another editorial by Guadalupe Correa from Sin Embargo on the conception of Mexico as a narco-state.  Of course, evidence for this idea is abundant everywhere you look, but Correa suggests that this conception of the Mexico state as ultimately dysfunctional is also a new mode of imperialism.   On this account, an important aspect of imperialism lies with the different ways in which countries like Mexico have been conceived.  There is a whole genealogy of the development that one could reconstruct.  One of its central pillars would be the emergence of the paradigm of development, which has been analyzed by post developmental thinkers like Wolfgang Sachs and Autruo Escobar (see the Development Dictionary).  The point here is simple:  how the world is ideologically constructed opens it up to different forms of governmentality and empowers some actors and lets others off the hook for all of the violence that they perpetrate in the world.  

Correa’s argument follows a similar path.  She argues that the construction of Mexico as a narco state, which is increasingly apparent in the media, the academic world and the non-governmental community, is not just a reflection of reality - although it is undoubtedly is - but also a point of view which as the peculiar virtue of focusing only on the Mexican nation state, permeated from top to bottom with corruption - as the problematic focus of Mexican politics.  Left out of consideration are multinational corporations and financial institutions, international organizations, and foreign governments - particularly the U.S. government.  They are blameless for the terrible state of affairs that has emerged in Mexico since the beginning of the drug war in 2006 and so nothing about what they do is subject to debate.  

This is certainly an interesting argument, but I am not entirely sure where it is going.  Correa suggests that Mexico is no longer being understood in terms of the Westphalian conception of sovereignty, but as a space of multiple sovereignties - a testament, perhaps, to the fragmentation of national space associated with what Nils Gilman refers to as The Twin Insurgency.  In this case, we now have a different configuration than the representations of the War on Drugs discussed by Oswaldo Zavala (Los Carteles No Existen), which suggested a discursive construction of the state as a realm of legality and progress surrounded by a barbarous Mexico - the cartels - against which it is engaged in a life and death struggle.  But the sheer weight of corruption at the upper reaches of the Mexican state - see, in this regard, the arrests of Garcia Luna and Salvador Cienfuegos - have invalidated this narrative and so an alternative is emerging.  Correa: 

La narrativa actual sobre las guerras contra los narcos identifica a dos enemigos a vencer (Estado y crimen organizado), que casualmente son mexicanos y deja de lado toda una serie de intereses que también se han beneficiado del narco. Me refiero, sobretodo, a actores extranjeros, autoridades estadounidenses, a la banca internacional, al complejo militar fronterizo industrial y a las economías extractivas que se benefician de la violencia en México. Además, todos ellos se beneficiarían del reconocimiento de múltiples soberanías pues operan en espacios globales que no reconocen fronteras.

There are a couple of the examples of this new discourse that Correa mentions.  One of them is Forbidden Stories, a network of international journalists that have picked up the stories that journalists in Mexico got killed for reporting on.  I do not see how this initiative fits with the new modes of imperialism that Correa is pointing - although not describing in any detail - in her article.

Note that one potentially interesting parallel to think about here is between discourses of failed states in Africa and failed states in Latin America.  Are their similarities?  One such similarity might lie with the call for a new imperialism, implemented through a form of international trusteeship.  This sorts of interventions have not been scaled to the level of nation states, but have occurred, to some extent, in the context of post conflict reconstruction initiatives.  The leading theorist of these sorts of governance regimes has been Mark Duffield.  The relevance to Correa is that Duffield is theorizing the emergence of new forms of sovereignty in the form of a development/security nexus: 

Following the lead of Foucault and the international political sociology of the Paris School (see Slater, 2008), the development–security nexus can be understood as a dispositif or ‘constellation of institutions, practices, and beliefs that create conditions of possibility within a particular field’ (Slater, 2008: 248). The nexus constitutes a field of development and security actors, aid agencies and professional networks, complete with their own forms of subjectivity, that call forth the conditions of need and insecurity to which collectively, and in competition, they seek to provide solutions. 

This is a narrative threat to follow with respect to Mexico:  the implantation of the development/security nexus, which becomes associated with different waves of neoliberal development, such as the Mayan Train or the development of the Isthmus of Tehauntepec.  The same logic might apply to Central American states as well, where the crisis of the state failure is far more advanced.  The development/security nexus becomes a way of containing violence, which perhaps occludes the extent to which violence (of displacement) is, in fact, a condition of development.  

 

Or perhaps, the development/security nexus is just one aspect of a much larger and complicated skein of state/society relationships in the normal, Weberian conception of the modern states - that actor which monopolizes the use of legitimate force within the territory that it claims to govern - no longer holds.  Sovereignty, in effect, is no longer singular but plural.  There are multiple sovereignties with the Mexican nation state.  This is not a new idea.  There are several important works on Mexican history that emphasize the plurality of the post-revolutionary Mexican state.  One that comes to mind is Alan Knight’s Mexican Revolution which sees the revolution as comprising many different uprisings unfolding within the context of differing regional class structures, connected to the whole process of state formation in a variety of different ways.  The idea of multiple sovereignties within the Mexican state is tied to an understanding of the dynamics of different regions. Correa calls attention to a recent article that appeared in Nexos by Romain Le Cour Granmaison, who argues that

“….las “relaciones político-criminales” —usando un término genérico— funcionan a través de interacciones inestables y a veces violentas, pero constantes, entre múltiples actores públicos y privados, sin que esto lleve a la captura, el debilitamiento o el fracaso del Estado. Al contrario, observo múltiples soberanías superpuestas que colaboran y compiten en un mismo territorio, a partir de la escala local.1

What Le Cour is attempting to theorize here is the complexity and contingency of sovereignty in Mexico.  Clearly, these are ideas that advance the reconceptualization of the war on drugs associated with the work of Oswaldo Zavala.  It is not that the state and organized crime are engaged in a manichean struggle but rather that they form a complex and competitive system in which different groups vy for advantage within the system rather than seeking to destroy it.  An interesting example of what Le Cour has in mind can be illustrated through the case of Michoacan, where the state did not seek to impose itself as a sovereign but to rather reconfigure the fields of petty sovereigns in a way that was most advantageous to the interests of the regime.  I suppose a similar analysis of how relations between local sovereignties get ordered by the state might be found with an account of Ayotzinapa as well.  To return to Le Cour: 

Para decirlo en pocas palabras, en México el Estado no impide el juego violento, puede participar en él de forma activa, y sobretodo busca establecerse como el arbitro capaz de sancionar los actores con los cuales interactúa. El problema, como hemos señalado, es que las interacciones son inestables y sus quiebres suelen dar lugar a más violencia.

One might say that Mexico operates in terms of an economy of violence characterized by the fact that violence is a way of securing power, eliminating or subjugating rivals, but this is a dynamic in which the violence of the system is in fact escalating as time moves on.  Now to return to the Correa one more time, one might notice that the one thing that is absent from Le Cour’s account of the state are capitalist classes and processes of accumulation.  To put this in terms of a rather vulgar Marxism, what Le Cour is depicting is a superstructure of capital accumulation, based on the primacy of the struggle for power.  If one is going to invoke a Marxist perspective, then necessarily accumulation - the production of material existence - has to be the entire point of the social order. This is a Marxist ontology.  The political point, to go back to Correa, is that this account of violence lets capitalism and capitalists, both domestic and foreign) off the hook.  They are merely observers in Mexico’s implicitly organized - in terms of rules that everyone understands - spectacle of violence.