Ayotzinapa and Necropolitics

This is from an article in Latin American Perspectives (State Violence, Capital Accumulation and Globalization of Crime) which is focused on interpreting Ayotzinapa in the context of extractivist forms of domination in Mexico.  There is a history to this, which is very much embedded in the rural education school of Ayotzinapa, a legacy of the Mexican Revolution and agrarian reform that was heavily repressed by the Mexican state.  The lineage of Ayotzinapa goes by the Zapta’s liberation army of the South.  Ruben Jaramillo was a member of this army and a leader of the Agrarian Labor Party of Morelos. Jamamillo’s assassination by the Mexican military in 1962 helped to spark and armed movement among the peasantry of Guerrero in the 1960s and a dirty war of repression by the Mexican military in 1970s.  An important episode in this conflict was the guerilla kidnapping of PRI Senator Rueben Figueroa Figueroa, inspiring an antagonism between the Figueroa’s and peasant activists.  Following the Dirty War, peasant activism continued through institutions like Ayotzinapa, which sought to create a radical consciousness among its students and among the peasant communities in which they worked as teachers. This was part of the revolutionary purpose of rural education in Mexico and its association with the Cardenas land reform.  The rural schools were defunded by Diaz Ordaz and subsequent presidents, but not eliminated.  They were a thorn in the side of the dominant classes.  

It is hard to know if the disappearance of 43 of these students on September 26, 2014 was intentional or a misfortune.  The case for the latter is that the students commandeered, unintentionally, a bus loaded with heroin that the narcos and their allies in the security forces wanted to recover. Once the students saw why their bus was being attacked by the police, they had to be eliminated. “Had to be,” however, also underscores the essential disposability of the students. They were superfluous with respect to the processes of economic extraction that had taken root in the state of Guererro. These consisted of mining and poppy cultivation - both products for exports.  These formed the economic basis for a dominant bloc of ruling groups consisting of transnational corporations, like Goldcorp, which operated with the Guerrero poppy belt, narcos, the security forces - local, state and federal - including the military - and finally the political class that operated the governmental structures of the state.  Prominent here was the attorney general’s office of the federal government which formulated the “historical truth” of Ayotzinapa arresting and forcing local police and then local peasants - supposedly narcos- to admit kidnapping and killing the students and then burning their remains.  This is another reflection of necropolitics - the ease with which the state coerces its citizens in order to concoct an official narrative of Ayotzinapa that deflected blame from state and federal security forces.  Political corruption only extends as far as the local police. 

Of course, the other possibility is that the state’s security forces simply set the students up and that the heroin - or the story of the heroin - was a pretext for killing the students, who were, at best, superfluous people, but whose radicalism had transformed them into nuisances for the dominant groups. 

In any event, the central point of the article is that organized crime and corporations operate according to a similar extractivist logic, which renders the presence of peasantry and their claims on land and resources deeply problematic for them.  The formula is that capital accumulation requires dispossession, which entails a necropolitical administration of the region - administering the power to make die rather than make live - to facilitate ongoing processes of extractive accumulation.  What seems particularly notable about the case of the Ayotzinapa is the role of organized crime in killing the people who get in the way.  What one has, as the authors of this article allude to, is a war machine that consists of different components that operate according to their own specific logics, but more or less in synch with one another since their dominant economic logic is the facilitation of extraction.