I would file this article by Alejandro Lerch, Police Protection Rackets and Political Modernity in Mexico, as an example of the geopolitics of development in Mexico. Central to the geopolitics of development in Mexico are processes of state formation in which the development of state capacity plays a central role and, of course, integral to state formation are the development of the police, which provide the political and administrative underpinnings for capitalist development. From this point of view, to draw on Lerch’s review of the critical literature on policing, “The police is the tool allowing for the unequal distribution of resources and skills required by the capitalist division of labor” (3), its main functions being to quell riots, protect property and break up strikes. From the point of view of Stuart Schrader, the police provide the means through which dominant groups can avoid negotiating a social contract with subaltern groups. In place of that, the police coercively impose the order of the dominant groups: for example, disciplining the mob into a regiment, to draw on Richad Slotkin (1992). More generally still, the police are a means of pacification.
Adjacent to the study of police is the study of banditry. Banditry becomes more common in the context of transitions to capitalism and more pervasive in peripheral regions where the state is weak. There is, potentially, a slippery slope from banditry to revolt: crime can turn into looting, looting into rioting, and rioting into revolt. In the Mexican context, a figure like Pancho Villa embodies a thin line that separates banditry from insurrection. Villa was something like a Mexican version of Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.
On the other hand, it is also the case that bandits and various criminal gangs can be instrumentalized by the state. This is the story of the Italian mafia, which functioned as a kind of informal extension of the state by means of suppressing communists and socialists, establishing patronage ties and relations, and establishing the degree of security that capital accumulation required in Italy. In this chapter, “Brigandage, Piracy, Capitalism and State Formation: Transnational Crime from a Historical World Systems Perspective,” Thomas Gallant notes that “in peripheral areas, capital accumulation occurred in the form of large landed estates that were usually created through the extirpation of small, subsistence oriented peasant forms of agriculture” (5). This process would be managed through the recruitment of rural guards from the disgruntled and displaced peasantry, who would be given license to rob, kidnap and extort, so long as they suppressed more general stirrings of peasant discontent. As these groups became institutionalized into state recognized police forces, they established protection rackets but at the same time imposed order. Order was not the antithesis of extortion but rather extortion served as a predicate of order. This is essentially the story of Mexican policing that Lerch tells.
This is also the story of the Porfiriato [the period of authoritarian rule in Mexico from 1876 to 1910, which preceded the Mexican Revolution] in Mexico, where the Rurales (the federal rural police) emerged from the peasantry as paramilitary forces to liquidate the adversaries of the liberals. Then they were amnestied and incorporated into the new body of the federal police. By 1905, 80% of Rurales were in factories to keep workers in line. After the revolution and the Cardenas reforms, a new federal police apparatus emerged in Mexico, the Direccion Federal de Seguridad (DFS), established in 1947, under the rule of Miguel Aleman. The attachment of policing to capital accumulation was renewed. Criminals were recruited to work in the DFS. The corruption started at the top with the appointment of Colonel Carlos A. Serrano, a former bootlegger from Veracruz who had worked to boost Aleman to the governorship of that state and who was also linked to a wave of political violence that targeted left wing politicians and peasant organizations. Serrano, tied by the FBI to over 45 murders in Mexico, was active in the demobilization of the Cardenista period of political ferment and reform. Members of the DFS worked on the cheap, but engaged in crime and extortion to boost their incomes. The police itself was a racket, with positions sold, the price of which would be paid for extortion carried by the newly minted officer and his subordinates. Politically, the DFS attacked working class and peasant organizations, securing their pacification within the mass organizations of the PRI [the Partido Revolucionario Institucionalizada - or, literally, the party of the institutionalized revolution - which governed Mexico from 1928 to 2000].
By the 1960s, both workers and peasants had lost income and had become newly restive. The unrest caused no new social contract, but rather counterinsurgency campaigns in which the DFS participated. Miguel Nazar Haro, a graduate in counterinsurgency doctrine from Fort Gulick in Panama, led a key strike force, the Brigada Especial Antigurrillas (BEA), and also served as a paid asset to the CIA, which coordinated various dirty wars that were being waged in Latin America over the course of the 1970s. Nazar was also notoriously involved in drug trafficking. When the FBI sought to indict him, they were rebuffed by the U.S. Department of State because his apprehension would put into jeopardy all the clandestine intelligence operations of the U.S. in Mexico and Central America (11). The FBI dropped its case and fired the agents who brought it in order to assure the DFS that no other similar disclosures would be forthcoming. This suggests is U.S. protection of DFS drug traffickers to advance capitalist interests, which is Lerch's argument. I would tweak this formulation: what was at stake here were geopolitical interests in pacification, which would eliminate threats to continued capitalist accumulation.
One question to raise here is the role of drug trafficking in policing. In the case of BEA operations in the state of Guerrero, there was a close link between Captain Arturo Acosta Chaparro, a graduate in counterinsurgency from Fort Bragg, and opium growers in the state; Acosta himself even owned Marijuana and Opium plantations in the mountains of Guererro. This pattern was also replicated in urban law enforcement where BEA officials headed the Division de Investigaciones para la Prevencion de la Delincuencia, which financed its operations by means of extortion rackets with lower officials paying monthly quotas to higher officials. Essentially, then, the police is a predatory formation which operates to liquidate revolutionaries and activists. Mexico’s President (Portillo Lopez) remarked to the U.S. ambassador on the normality of these arrangements: “...law enforcement and criminal activities frequently intertwine, not only in Mexico, but in other countries as well” (13). In Lerch’s summation, “By virtue of these rackets, the state not only brought “order: to criminal markets but, more importantly, instrumentalized these economies to support in a very material sense the routine of security, policing and repression at the height of rural and urban protest in Mexico” (13).
What we see in all of this is drug interdiction taking a back seat to counterinsurgency. Operation CONDOR, heavily financed by the United States, was focused more on counterinsurgency than eradication of opium and marijuana farms. CONDOR “bolstered the capacities of federal agents to the “pacify” dissent, but also to engage in a wide ranging federal cooptation of narco-trafficking by creating a network of protected traffickers while eliminating the remainder. Traffickers who didn’t pay their quotas would be subject to arrest or worse. In this context, the Mexican state also began to popularize the concept of the cartel, framing narco-trafficking groups as autonomous actors rather than as agents of the state (15).
The PJF (Policia Federal Justicia) was the agency that replaced the DFS after the capture and execution of U.S. DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency] agent Enrique Camarena by a DFS protected narco-trafficker. No matter: the government transferred half of DFS into the new agency. The new PFJ had plenty of work to do because Mexico under Salinas de Gortari, was busy dismantling its inward oriented model of development. As Salinas pointed out, how would widespread and profound structural adjustment be accomplished without suppressing the social mobilization that such measures would undoubtedly incite? (16). The PJF continued and formalized the practices of the DFS, establishing a wall defined plaza system in the context of expanded cocaine shipments from Colombia through Mexico. Lerch notes in this regard how instrumental the PJF was in facilitating narco-trafficking.
"The PJF was situated in a privileged position to recoup this market because cocaine originated elsewhere (Colombia) and thus required infrastructure run by the federal government (airports, federal highways, border customs, ports, etc.). Emphasizing the successful control exerted by the PJF during these two decades, Valdés characterizes the plaza system as one of “PJF shareholders.” The plaza system under the PJF managed to keep cocaine traffickers in a subordinate position (as well as violence levels remarkably low) until political decentralization, beginning in the late 1990s, empowered increasingly antagonistic synapses between drug traffickers and power brokers at local levels. The porosity of the US-Mexican border expanded further under NAFTA, facilitating flows and guaranteeing Mexico’s position as the most prominent drug corridor in the world. Pansters notes how the growing share of cocaine consumed in the United States arriving from Mexican corridors rose from 20 percent in 1984, to 30 percent in 1989, to 50 percent by the mid-1990s, and to 80 percent by 2000. In other words, after the 1990s, the development of cocaine markets took place amid political decentralization and the weakening of the federal state, but the violence that followed resulted less from the increased value of drug markets than from the central government’s declining ability to establish an effective protection racket over these flows (31)."
What is described in this passage is the breakdown of state directed protection rackets. Note that included within the remit of these protection rackets were also human trafficking networks. So the Plaza system orchestrated illegal flows of substances and people to the United States while also pacifying Mexican society in the context of structural adjustment and Mexico’s entry into NAFTA. But, at the same time, this was a process that was slipping beyond the control of the state because of sheer growth of narco-trafficking and consequent enrichment and empowerment of traffickers. Diane Davis notes how the Mexican slide into chaos coincided with both erosion of PRI hegemony, which reduced patronage opportunities and encouraged law enforcement to engage in more anti-social activities such as kidnapping and armed theft (18). There was an austerity driven shift from policing to criminality on the part of the police, so that, for example, the PJF carried out a wave of kidnappings in Mexico City in the mid 1990s, which was driven by still extant demands to meet extortion quotas - even during periods of austerity.
According to one of Mexico’s prominent police goons, Guillermo Gonzalez Calderoni, whom Salinas appointed as national drug czar, policing was not meant to suppress criminality, but to enable it:
"They [federal police] don’t only pay to get appointed. They also pay to get a job, or to get a certain geographical territory. People will pay a lot of money for an appointment at the border. If they do not have enough cash to pay for it, then they will have to borrow the money. But they are counting on making it back. For a border region, people will pay a lot of money. . . . For a border assignment, you can get charged U.S. $1 million. And then you would have to pay $200,000 or $300,000 per month to your bosses in Mexico City in order to remain in that position."
At the same time, though, the PJF used its contacts with narco-trafficking groups to carry out assassinations against prominent opposition politicians such as Francisco Javier Ovando and Roman Gil Hernandez (19). Then the PJF corruption was exposed in a number of media exposes, leading to their dissolution and replacement by a new policing agency, the Agencia Federal de Investigacion, which was directed by Genaro Garcia Luna, now on trial in the United States for narco-trafficking. In 2000, the PRI finally lost the presidency, but PAN control of the state did nothing to change the character of policing in Mexico. What is the lesson that we should draw from all of this? Lerch:
"While reflecting the strong institutional hysteresis of criminality within the police,150 the apparent failure to disrupt criminal rackets in federal institutions is more aptly understood, at least in the framework advanced by this essay, if we reject the idea that the aim of policing in Mexico is the suppression of illegal economies. What the historical trajectory of policing in Mexico suggests, rather, is the centrality of criminal economies to the country’s pacification project."
Lerch continues: "In summary, the entanglements between the criminal and the police described by this article were key pillars behind the everyday policing routines and targeted interventions bringing order and discipline to Mexican society. Rather than corruption or deviance, the police protection racket was a key mechanism supporting Mexico’s state formation process. Federal police and law enforcement were less invested in suppressing crime than in instrumentalizing some of this crime to pacify the sharp antagonisms in Mexican society."
What Lerch calls attention to in his article is the way in which policing in Mexico has always been a question of historical context. The Rurales (the federal rural police of the late 19th century) oversaw the dispossession and exploitation of the Porfiriato (the period of autocratic rule in Mexico under Porfirio Diaz from 1876-1910), until it overwhelmed them. The DFS functioned as a cold war counterinsurgency police, facilitating rapid capitalist growth in Mexico after World War Two. The PJF oversaw the transition to neoliberalism, marked by the expansion of narco-trafficking and the need to suppress political and social dissent to economic restructuring. Lerch: “The PJF and subsequent federal policing agencies operated less with “peasant wars” than by pauperized, criminally driven, violent social eruptions” (21).
Later in the article, Lerch discusses Eric Wolf: “When market forces go unchecked, “the crisis of power deranges the networks which link peasant populations to the larger society” (see Peasant Wars, 280). There was a resulting contradiction between the economic and political spheres of society, which diminished the state’s capacities to centralize and control the means of violence (22). What does this mean? To my mind, the state as a territorial apparatus of control was outpaced by an expanding space of flows - both licit and illicit. Reviewing the literature on narco-violence in Mexico, Lerch notes that it (narco-violence) casts state weakness and the empowerment of local actors as the decisive cause driving conflict in contemporary Mexico. These explanations miss, however, the deep social roots of Mexico's criminal insurgency: In fact NAFTA prompted large segments of the peasantry to align themselves with narco-traffickers. See, in this regard, the ethnography, When I Wore Alligator Boots, which explores the incentives peasants in Northern Mexico had to join the criminal insurgency as traffickers. Peasants also joined the criminal insurgency as cultivators in response to NAFTA and disintegration of Mexico’s peasant sector. And from a socioeconomic perspective, Gamblin and Hawkes connect neoliberal dispossession with the formation of violent masculinities as male capacities to earn a dignified living by non-criminal means deteriorated. Indeed, Gambin and Hawkes begin their article with a passage La Jornada on the identity of the paramilitary groups in Chiapas that launched attacks on Zapatisa communities in 1997.
"[T]he agrarian inertia combined with demographic growth gives neither land nor work, at least not agricultural, to young men who are old enough to acquire a piece of ejidal (communally owned) land. Those who are married, like their parents, have been vagrants in search of work, surviving on miracles or thefts from other peoples’ land. Forced to live like delinquents, not only do they lack a means of subsistence but they have no reason to attend community assemblies and so become excluded from decision making processes in the same ejidos in which they have become pariahs. First conclusion: these criminals are products of the system and their economic, agrarian and employment options."
The final conclusion is that “the success of bandits and criminals in the current conflict will depend on their instrumentality to advanced forms of capitalist power.”
Comments
Post a Comment