Citizens against Crime and Violence: Societal Responses in Mexico 9781978827677
Mexico has become notorious for crime-related violence, and the efforts of governments and national and international NG
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Table of contents :
Contents
1 The Comparative Ethnography of Societal Responses to Crime and Violence in Mexico
2 Local Citizen Security Councils
3 Cultural Activism
4 Sociolegal Activism in Contexts of Criminal and Institutional Violence
5 Churches as Institutions in Regions of Violent Organized Crime
6 A Room of Their Own
7 Key Objectives, Strategic Choices, and the Impact of Societal Responses to Violence
8 Society to the Rescue? Rethinking Responses to Crime and Violence
Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Index
Citation preview
Citizens against Crime and Violence •
Citizens against Crime and Violence • Societal Responses in Mexico
E d i t e d b y Tr e vo r S tac k
rutgers u niversity press new bru nswick, camden, and newark, new jersey, and london
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Stack, Trevor, 1970-editor. Title: Citizens against crime and violence: societal responses in Mexico / edited by Trevor Stack. Description: New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021039404 | ISBN 9781978827639 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978827646 (hardback) | ISBN 9781978827653 (epub) | ISBN 9781978827660 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978827677 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Violence—Mexico—Michoacán de Ocampo. | Crime prevention—Mexico—Michoacán de Ocampo—Citizen participation. | Minorities—Crimes against—Mexico—Michoacán de Ocampo. | Michoacán de Ocampo (Mexico)—Social conditions. Classification: LCC HN120.M53 C58 2022 | DDC 303.60972/37—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.g ov/2 021039404 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2022 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Individual chapters copyright © 2022 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www.rutgersuniversitypress.org Manufactured in the United States of America
For the many Michoacanos who gave their time for our research
Contents
1 The Comparative Ethnography of Societal Responses to Crime and Violence in Mexico 1 Trevor Stack
2 Local Citizen Security Councils: Sustainable Responses to a Crisis of Trust in State Security Provision 29 Irene Álvarez, Denisse Román, and Trevor Stack
3 Cultural Activism: Mobilizing Art and Culture to Build Transformative Sociopolitical Fields 59 Edgar Guerra and Ariadna Sánchez
4 Sociolegal Activism in Contexts of Criminal and Institutional Violence: Challenging Forced Disappearances, Gender Violence, and Assaults on LGBTI+ People and Sex Workers 76 Salvador Maldonado and Iran Guerrero
5 Churches as Institutions in Regions of Violent Organized Crime 93 Trevor Stack
6 A Room of Their Own: Barriers to Women’s Activism against the Continuum of Violence in Michoacán, Mexico 110 Catherine Whittaker
7 Key Objectives, Strategic Choices, and the Impact of Societal Responses to Violence: Lessons for Policy and Practice 134 Pilar Domingo and Sasha Jesperson
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viii C o n t e n t s
8 Society to the Rescue? Rethinking Responses to Crime and Violence 156 Trevor Stack Acknowl edgments 177 Notes on Contributors 179 Index 183
Citizens against Crime and Violence •
chapter 1
•
The Comparative Ethnography of Societal Responses to Crime and Violence in Mexico Trevor Stack
Despite the mushrooming literature on crime and violence around the world and on state responses to them, there are far fewer studies of societal responses. Scholars’ concern with crime and violence may owe something to the penchant for drama that has inspired a deluge of Netflix series. In the Mexican state of Michoacán, on which this book focuses, it appears de rigueur for researchers to reproduce the grisly story of how severed heads were rolled across a dance floor in 2007 to announce a new criminal alliance. The same appetite for drama may explain the media’s and scholars’ attention to Michoacán’s armed autodefensa (self-defense) groups, often illustrated by images of men with guns striking theatrical poses. Throughout this volume, and especially in the final chapter, we draw on the more sophisticated attempts to rethink crime and violence published in recent years (for example, Arias 2018; Auyero and Sobering 2019; Dewey 2015; Felbab-Brown, Trinkunas, and Hamid 2017; Ley and Trejo 2020). Yet our focus is on the often modest and undramatic ways in which local organizations respond to the challenges as they understand them. The images in the volume are typically of council meetings, public forums, and cultural events, rather than of macho posing and bullet holes. Our main contribution, then, is to the small but growing literature on how citizens respond to crime and violence, whether independently or in collaboration with state actors (for example, Arias 2019; González 2016; Ley, Mattiace, and Trejo 2019; Moncada 2016 and 2020). Our account of societal responses to crime and violence rests on an ethnographic project that we—an interdisciplinary team of ten researchers—carried out in Michoacán in the period 2017–2019. We focused on societal responses because Mexico’s institutional responses had proved to be of little effect and had 1
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even exacerbated crime and violence. When the Mexican government deployed the army to fight a so-called war on drug trafficking in 2007, it triggered a spiral of increasingly violent conflict that by 2017 had left over two hundred thousand people dead or disappeared. We chose the state of Michoacán in part because in 2013 it was the scene of an extreme form of societal response. The autodefensas were armed civilian groups that confronted the criminal organization that had monopolized crime in Michoacán and controlled parts of local and state government. Though we include some discussion of the autodefensa groups that in 2017 persisted in some rural areas, our focus in the volume is on other societal responses and other contexts, including urban ones. The initiatives highlighted in the volume include local citizen security councils, artist collectives, activist groups using legal strategies, church-linked initiatives, and women’s groups. What kind of societal responses arise in the face of organized crime, and the violence and corruption that characterize it? What, if any, headway do they make against crime, violence, and related problems? To what extent are societal responses affected by issues such as violence and corruption? What other limitations do they experience? These were some of the questions addressed by our research. We conducted comparative ethnography across six localities in Michoacán to explore the effectiveness of different societal responses. By combining techniques such as structured interviews and direct observation at meetings and other events, we sought to understand and compare diverse initiatives. Our comparative ethnography enabled us to generate insights that are both sensitive to local specifics and relevant to crime and violence experienced in other parts of the world. It also led us to study together forms of civilian participation that are not often combined by scholars, such as the community participation both in security and in art and cultural collectives, women’s groups, victims’ groups, and church-promoted responses. The volume highlights the facts that civic actors and their responses are far from homogeneous and that the responses vary across actors and contexts, even within a single state. Our assessment of them is sober, and we recognize that their effects are often modest. Yet we insist that even small changes can make a difference. We show, for example, that citizen councils may help restore trust in police; activists confronting less visible forms of violence may encounter institutional violence; activists in violent contexts find that art and culture are relatively safe c auses, through which they can aspire to transform their social surroundings; the church’s institutional character is of special relevance when government institutions are compromised by crime; and societal responses can be differentiated by gender, while w omen’s groups may create safe spaces even when not engaging with institutions. All authors in this volume were members of the original project team, but we each developed our own analytical perspectives that reflect, in part, our dif
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ferent disciplines, allowing us to engage with debates across anthropology, sociology, and political science. Of the ethnographers who authored or coauthored the five substantive chapters, Salvador Maldonado, Denisse Román, Catherine Whittaker, and I are anthropologists, while Irene Álvarez, Edgar Guerra, Iran Guerrero, and Ariadna Sánchez are sociologists. We were assisted throughout the project by two researchers who are also policy analysts—Pilar Domingo, a political scientist, and Sasha Jesperson, a criminologist—and who coauthored the first analytical chapter (chapter 7), which draws out the relevance of the findings for global policy debates. The volume ends with a second analytical chapter written by me (chapter 8), in which I draw on the work of political scientists and sociologists to reflect further on the conclusions of the substantive chapters. The volume is thus the work of a single team with expertise across several fields. This allowed us not only to bring different approaches to bear but also to address numerous debates.
The Mexican State of Michoacán I begin this chapter with a brief account of the context of Michoacán, both to set the scene for readers not familiar with Mexico and to explain our focus on societal responses to crime and violence in that context. Mexico is a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that has a two-hundred-year tradition of constitutional democracy. It is also one of the few countries in the world that has signed nearly all human rights treaties, and this has helped its international standing. For seventy-one years, elections were almost always won by a single party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional; PRI), but in 2000, the conservative, business-friendly National Action Party (Partido de Acción Nacional; PAN) won the presidency, and since then t here has been fierce electoral competition at all levels of government. Mexico is known for its pioneering social programs that target some of the poorest members of society, including people living in rural areas and working in informal sectors, although income inequality remains high. The country’s economy may be sluggish, but it is relatively stable, and t here has been no currency collapse since 1994. Despite Mexico’s economic stability and democratic credentials, since the mid-2000s it has been featured in global news with grisly stories of crime-related violence, especially since Felipe Calderón, the conservative president and member of PAN, launched the war on drugs in 2007. In spite of the fact that more than two hundred thousand p eople lost their lives or disappeared in the ensuing decade, Calderón’s successor, President Enrique Peña (PRI), made few major changes in strategy and continued to focus on arresting high-profile criminals such as Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzman. Even after the 2018 election of a left-wing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who promised to focus on building
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peace in the country, it has been hard to detect a coherent new policy line, beyond (paradoxically) giving more power to the military. The violence since the 2000s has changed Mexico’s image in the world, but violence was not new to Mexico. The current news-grabbing violence should be understood within this longer history. Mexico entered the twentieth century with a revolution (1910–1917) that cost millions of lives, and it was followed by other conflicts including the Cristero rebellion (1926–1929), in which peasants armies fought to defend the Catholic Church from secularizing reforms. Notably, some former Cristero regions are now better known as drug-producing territories, reflecting the physical remoteness that harbored first the rebellion and since then drug producers, and that led to residents’ feeling of alienation from government before and a fter the rebellion—a feeling also echoed in high rates of migration to the United States. Government repression of the Cristeros, which continued into the 1930s, prefigured episodes of state repression, of which the Mexican Army’s 1968 massacre of unarmed student protestors in Mexico City was only the most salient. For a long time the southwestern border state of Chiapas was subject to especially intensive military control, some of which was justified in terms of countering drug production, but this was also intended to control the predominantly indigenous population. In 1994 indigenous peasants led by formerly Maoist revolutionaries staged a major rebellion. Though this was contained by the Mexican Army, foreign pressure led to a fitful series of peace talks, during which paramilitary groups linked to the state government and landowners waged a dirty war against the rebels and their supporters. In other parts of Mexico, indigenous communities created autodefensa armed groups— notably in Guerrero, where from the 1990s some of the autodefensa groups entered the struggle for control of the heroin trade. In states like Guerrero, the violence since 2007 can be understood only in that older context. Both before and after 2007, conflict between state and nonstate armed groups has been only part of the violence in Mexico. Gender violence (discussed in chapter 6) came to be emblematized in the killings of w omen in Ciudad Juárez in the 2000s, narrated in prize-w inning documentaries and fueling the struggle to define such crimes as “femicide.” Some femicide is linked to organized crime groups, but gender violence is part of the “chronic violence” that has plagued Mexico historically (Abello Colak and Pearce 2009, 18n2). Within Mexico, Michoacán is one of the states that was associated with crime and violence long before the start of the war on drugs, but it saw a dramatic escalation. The PRI lost the Michoacán governorship in 2002 to the center-left Revolutionary Democratic Party (Partido de la Revolución Democrática; PRD), after a decade of political violence against PRD supporters—which in turn followed years of electoral violence across the state. Michoacán has historically been among the poorest states in Mexico. Its economy remains dominated by agriculture, extractive industries such as mining, and trade through the Pacific port
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of Lázaro Cárdenas. Maldonado has shown that drug trafficking has had a long history in Michoacán, and that state and nonstate violence was essential to that history (2010, 2014, 2018, and 2020). As in the rest of the country, the increase in violence from around 2005 onward was dramatic. One reason was the decision of a group of Michoacán drug traffickers to ally themselves with the Gulf Cartel and its armed group called Zetas, to break the hold of an extended family tied to the rival Sinaloa Cartel. This group of traffickers then broke with the Zetas in the mid-2000s and called itself first La Familia Michoacana and then, a fter a schism in 2011, the Knights Templar. The Zetas set the trend for the utterly ruthless use of violence to impose control—at one point, they hunted down anyone who shared the surname of the family that they sought to drive out of the region. Their successors followed suit, turning on the Zetas and then on each other, while also targeting politicians and officials at all levels of government (Maldonado 2018). In this context, President Calderón chose Michoacán, his home state, to launch the war on drugs, deploying thousands of soldiers and federal paramilitary police in several operations. The federal operations were characterized by human rights abuses, including torture, arbitrary killings, and forced disappearances. These operations disrupted the traffickers’ work and their protection networks: for example, several mayors w ere arrested in 2010. In response, the Knights Templar sought to extend its hold on Michoacán’s state and municipal governments, in a bid to protect themselves from the federal campaigns. By 2013, it appeared that they had succeeded, as state and municipal governments came to terms with the Knights Templar. The organization sought legitimacy among the broader population, claiming to protect Michoacán from outsiders such as the Zetas and to provide them with security. Indeed, its leaders offered their ser vices in mediating inheritance and domestic disputes. Their hold enabled them to extort money from businesses of e very kind across the state and to profit from sectors such as mining and agriculture, where they engaged in price-fi xing. It also allowed them to commit outrages, and t here are abundant testimonies of how Knights Templar lieutenants w ere allowed to torture and kill, as well as to abuse w omen at will. In 2011, residents of the town of Cherán, in Michoacán’s predominantly indigenous central highlands, mobilized to expel illegal loggers protected by the Knights Templar and their local political allies. They set up an autodefensa group that later became a police force and ousted the municipal government, establishing a town council that excluded political parties. Over the next three years, groups of farmers and o thers subject to extortion by the Knights Templar, including some drug producers and traffickers, liaised across the Tierra Caliente plain and coastal strip to buy arms and train members in their use. They staged a series of uprisings in 2013 and 2014, typically disarming the municipal police, running known criminals out of town, setting up barricades on the entrance roads, and
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establishing some kind of council to govern the local autodefensa. Regional autodefensa leaders emerged, serving as spokespeople for the movement while heading forays into new municipalities, where they called for locals to volunteer for autodefensas and establish their own local councils. Within a year, the movement had expanded to around thirty-four municipalities, covering more than half the territory of the state. The autodefensa movement caught the imagination of Mexican and foreign news media, but it was represented in sweeping and often romantic terms, which often echoed regional leaders’ defiant pronouncements. In practice, different autodefensa groups mobilized in different ways and in relation to different economic, political, and social problems, while leaders and followers often had dif ferent motives. Some groups mobilized in moral outrage at Knights Templar atrocities and the evident complicity of municipal, state, and some federal officials. O thers were concerned primarily at the extent of extortion, and businesses preferred to fund autodefensa weapons and wages in the hope of relieving themselves of the extortion. Drug producers and traffickers w ere also subject to extortion and control by the Knights Templar, and some of them saw an opportunity to break f ree from their hold, artfully manipulating the situation to gain the advantage. In 2014, President Peña decided to appoint one of his trusted lieutenants, Alfredo Castillo, as federal security commissioner in Michoacán, which effectively meant that Castillo supplanted the Michoacán state governor in security matters. Castillo negotiated with the autodefensa groups and established a task force with some of their leaders, hunting down and killing or arresting most of the Knights Templar leaders. This is arguably the only occasion on which the Mexican government has managed to disband a criminal organization of that scale. Castillo made gestures t oward combating corruption through canceling government contracts with companies linked to the Knights Templar, and he also secured federal investment in some social development projects intended to undercut recruitment to criminal organizations (Maldonado 2018). In May of that year, Castillo issued a call to autodefensa group members in the state to apply to join a new statewide police force, the Rural Force. He threatened them with arrest if they did not comply. As a result, several autodefensa groups were incorporated into the Rural Force, but many o thers either refused to apply or had their applications rejected. The members of one autodefensa group—together with its charismatic leader, the obstetrician Manuel Mireles— were arrested for continuing to advance to new municipalities rather than applying to join the Rural Force. A criminal group known as Los Viagras deserted the Knights Templar to join the autodefensa movement, only to be deemed a drug-trafficking organization by the government. It remains a powerf ul criminal actor in the state. Even though the Michoacán state government has officially denied the persistence of autodefensa groups, some groups have continued to
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operate and even to collaborate on occasion with regular police and armed forces. This was the case in two of the localities discussed in chapter 2. Castillo was transferred out of Michoacán by the president in early 2015, and in the state gubernatorial election that summer, Silvano Aureoles won the governorship back for the PRD. However, Aureoles allowed Castillo’s trusted lieutenant, Martín Godoy, to control much of the Michoacán security apparatus as state prosecutor. Godoy oversaw the reorganization of the prosecution serv ice across the state—for example, by ensuring that prosecutors w ere trained in the reformed criminal justice system, which was rolled out across Mexico. At the same time, most municipal police forces w ere brought u nder the control of a new police force, the Michoacán Police, which also had the power to decide on the appointment of municipal police chiefs, ostensibly because mayors were under pressure to appoint chiefs acceptable to criminal factions. Regional commanders w ere appointed to facilitate coordination across municipalities, and regional police bases were constructed with surveillance centers linked to networks of cameras. Regional prosecutors were given jurisdictions matching the regional police commanders, to promote better coordination between prosecutors and the Michoacán Police. Regional prosecutors and police commanders held regular meetings with other security actors—notably army, navy, and federal police— and Security and Justice Working Groups were established across the state to bring security chiefs together with civil society leaders (chapter 2). By the time we conceived of our project in 2016, it was looking less and less likely that the state government was adequate to the task of forestalling further crime and violence. Homicide rates had risen again. One reason was the turf war that had followed the dismantling of the Knights Templar, as different factions— including some autodefensa groups—sought to muscle in on the liberated territories, establishing their own protection rackets and illicit businesses while retaining some of the properties that they had expropriated from the Knights Templar. The reorganized Michoacán Police and security apparatus focused its energies on arresting the most visible criminals, but this appeared only to exacerbate the violence. Moreover, the Michoacán Police did not retain citizens’ confidence for long (chapter 2), and police were accused of extorting citizens through traffic stops and of favoring one criminal faction or another. Th ere was also little further state action against corruption. Meanwhile, the state government invested heavily in subsidizing the local and state press, which printed daily reports of the governor’s claims that Michoacán was becoming more secure. The media reports contrasted with local perceptions and with the findings of the few Michoacán civil society organizations that tracked crime statistics. Our project grew out of the need we identified to explore and understand responses to violence that came from outside government, given the lack of headway made by the government. We were especially interested in identifying societal responses that w ere less problematic than the autodefensas had become: by
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2017, some autodefensa groups and alliances had been accused of having become cartels in their own right. In any case, the autodefensas were being studied by numerous researchers, who w ere publishing nuanced accounts of how the groups varied by locality (for example, Fuentes Díaz and Fini 2018; Guerra 2018; Guerra Manzo 2015; Maldonado 2018). Our aim, then, was to focus our attention on other societal responses that were often eclipsed by the dramatic (and masculine) muscle of the autodefensas but w ere at the same time potentially less problematic than them. However, we still intended to conduct most of our research within the contexts most affected by crime and violence, including those that had seen autodefensa uprisings, and thus go beyond the many studies of metropolitan responses in the literature up to 2017.
Beyond Autodefensas: Societal Responses in the Most Affected Contexts Despite the attention paid in Michoacán to the autodefensas, most studies of societal responses to crime and violence in Mexico had focused on city-based and often national organizations, typically of the variety commonly known as civil society organizations. Mexico’s Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, led by the poet Javier Sicilia, is a case in point (Collett 2013; Knox 2018; Maihold 2012; Scholl 2015). Another common focus was on the variety of societal responses in Ciudad Juárez, including t hose that emerged in the context of the 2010 federal intervention in that city (Staudt and Méndez 2015). Comparative research has tended to privilege strategies such as street protests, which are more common in state capitals and other large cities than elsewhere (for example, Ley 2015). Looking beyond Mexico, we found a similar pattern in the literature on civil society responses to organized crime (Cayli 2013; Ralchev 2004; Schneider and Schneider 2003). We draw on the insights of several important comparative studies, but for the most part the cases in t hese studies are large cities: examples are Yanilda González’s (2016) comparison of citizen-police forums in Buenos Aires, Sao Paolo, and Bogotá; Eduardo Moncada’s (2016) comparison of business interventions in Medellín, Bogotá, and Cali; and Enrique Arias’s (2018) study of Miami, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paolo, and Medellín. These metropolitan contexts are typically characterized by the presence of high-level government institutions interacting with well-resourced civil society organizations staffed by highly educated p eople living in conditions of relative security. Although we have included a chapter on organizations in Morelia, the capital of Michoacán (chapter 4), our focus was on societal responses beyond the metropolis, ranging from those in provincial cities to those in remote rural areas. One reason for this focus was that national-and state-level organizations, what ever their influence on government policy, appeared to be having little impact on crime and violence beyond their metropolitan settings. Our intuition was
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that, at least in contexts as challenging as Michoacán, societal actors from within the most affected localities had an important role to play in responding to crime and violence. From the outset, we kept an open mind about what societal responses we might encounter within t hese regions, and even as we developed criteria, we learned to apply them flexibly. The kinds of organizations that we describe in this volume—ranging from local citizen councils and church-linked initiatives to art and culture collectives and women’s groups—were not stipulated at the start of the project. Instead, they were chosen a fter the first stage of fieldwork, when we held extensive discussions about the criteria that we would use for focusing on some responses rather than others. Even then, we decided to be flexible in how we applied our criteria in the research, as we grew to understand the multiple dimensions of the problem being confronted and how it was variously understood by the actors in question. Our original selection criterion was that an organization showed potential for changing what we termed the rules of the game, rather than continuing to pursue its own interests following the existing rules. We were aware from previous research that t here were many organizations in the localities of our study, but most of them w ere concerned with pursuing their interests within extant structures. Examples are the many trader, business, resident, and professional associations that pursue collective interests and t hose of their patrons and protectors. In a context where the existing structures were shot through with criminal interests, and where many of t hese associations had been infiltrated by criminal actors, we decided to focus on actors who sought, to varying extents, to change the status quo.1 However, the criterion proved tricky to apply. We were aware that t here was no easy distinction between actors challenging the status quo and t hose reproducing it. Some business associations sought to reform security policy, even if they tended to hold back when their interests were affected (chapter 2); cultural activists aspired to transform their environment, yet some reined back their activism when appointed to office (chapter 3); organizations in the capital concerned with forced disappearance and gender violence knew that their l egal and political strategies required them to work within the system (chapter 4); Catholic clergy occasionally denounced state complicity in crime but for the most part w ere careful not to cross the line between church and government (chapter 5); and women’s groups w ere sidelined by government, but this led them to shun contact with the government rather than seeking to reform it (chapter 6). Still, we used our ethnographic sensibility to select initiatives across the contexts that—however modest their objectives and regardless of how often they were stymied in achieving them—demonstrated the potential to change the status quo. A second criterion seemed less ambiguous, yet using it also proved trickier than expected. It seemed obvious that we w ere interested in actors who wanted
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to mitigate the crime and violence that drew our attention in the first place. However, we found that relatively few organizations w ere explicit in addressing such issues, not least b ecause of the intimidating environment in which many of them operated. In Morelia, for example, t here were a handful of organizations that declared their intention to address highly sensitive issues such as forced disappearances (chapter 3). Beyond Morelia, we found that organizations avoided being seen as responding directly to crime-related violence, let alone engaging security policy and implementation head-on. For example, artist collectives and church-linked groups pitched their activities in terms of victim support or peacebuilding. Other actors made only occasional references to crime and violence, yet it became apparent through our research that they w ere addressing some of the underlying issues—such as political corruption. Thus, we decided to include organizations that might not address crime and violence specifically but that nevertheless acted in ways that might mitigate the issues at stake. Our team discussed whether to include, as a third criterion, that organizations had to respond to crime and violence in ways that w ere not violent. H ere the case in point was the autodefensa groups, which were often accused of using intimidation, torture, and even forced disappearance. By the time of our fieldwork, even p eople who had participated in autodefensas w ere skeptical of their effectiveness. In fact, two of our researchers conducted fieldwork with two of the autodefensa groups that persisted in 2017, because the groups continued to play a role in the contexts of their research: the rural municipalities of Tancítaro and Chinicuila (Álvarez, Román, and Jesperson 2019). Other members of the team had previously studied the autodefensas, and their experience was important to understanding the autodefensa legacy in t hose contexts (Guerra 2018; Maldonado 2018). Yet as explained above, we elected to focus this volume on responses other than autodefensas. In addition to the checkered record of the autodefensas in 2017 and the abundant literature on the topic, another reason for not focusing a chapter on the autodefensas was that we found that armed groups like autodefensas could not easily be compared to the kinds of intervention that we have included in the volume. In the chapters, we discuss overlaps and connections between artistic endeavors and Catholic peacebuilding workshops, comparing them in turn to the safe spaces sought by women’s groups. Setting up barricades, disarming police, and expelling known criminals was a very different matter. We still refer to the autodefensas throughout the volume—particularly in chapter 2, where we consider how two local citizen councils monitored and managed autodefensa groups, together with the official police. The emphasis of that chapter is on civilian governance of autodefensas, though, rather on the autodefensas themselves. And the volume as a whole sheds light on the host of less dramatic responses that have often passed u nder journalistic and scholarly radars. Selecting organizations b ecause of their potential to change the rules of the game in response to problems related to crime and violence entailed evaluating
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the organizations. We found ourselves arguing about the nature of our evaluation. The term “evaluate” is jarring to ethnographers, concerned as we are with understanding phenomena within actors’ social contexts and their own normative frameworks. Team members were comfortable with explaining why partic ular organizations had appeared in certain contexts and how they had developed over time, as well as identifying some of the limits that they faced. We w ere less comfortable, however, with the idea of somehow measuring the effect or reach of the different initiatives in relation to the problems in question, since this seemed to imply objective normative standards and criteria that w ere separable from context, as well as methodologies for quantifying how actors met t hose standards. We remained acutely aware of the normative differences between, for example, organizations that gave pride of place to men with guns and t hose that considered men with guns to be reproducing the status quo. We were also sensitive to the limits of the comparative ethnographic approach that I describe in the next section. Nevertheless, we grew more comfortable with the gentle and nuanced evaluation entailed in comparing the inroads made by organizations within their respective contexts. We considered how far they responded to the challenges that they identified, on the basis of our ethnographic appreciation of the complex processes within and across the contexts of our study. By applying our selection criteria flexibly and evaluating societal responses sensitively, we were able to document a range of roles played in t hose provincial contexts by an array of social actors. The roles and strategies differed significantly from t hose that we found in the state capital Morelia (chapter 4). Whereas in the capital we found civil society organizations tackling sensitive issues (such as forced disappearances) of a kind that researchers have described elsewhere (Villarreal 2016), we did not find many examples of such organizations beyond Morelia. Instead, while autodefensas confronted violence with violence, local organizations found a variety of other ways of responding to the violence, many of which went beyond the societal responses documented in the literature. They held cultural events (chapter 3) rather than the “protests against gangs” that Arias (2019, 170–171) discusses, and nonviolence workshops (chapter 5) rather than the elaborate citizen participation mechanisms that Moncada found in Colombian cities (2016). An exception was the local citizen security councils that we describe in chapter 2, which do entail what Arias (2019, 175) terms “complex police collaboration.” As such, they bear comparison with the citizen-police forums described by González (2016), although we found the most effective councils in rural municipalities—a far cry from the metropolitan cases that she studied.
The Comparative Ethnographic Approach The few studies of (mainly urban) societal responses to crime and violence have drawn on a variety of methods, some of which proved to be of value to parts of
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our project. For example, Sandra Ley, Shannan Mattiace, and Guillermo Trejo (2019) have built and made effective use of databases to conduct large-scale comparisons. They and other scholars have also used databases produced by the Drugs Policy Program at the Center for Economics Teaching and Research (Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas; CIDE), one of our partner institutions, and by the Justice in Mexico Project at University of California, San Diego—which has a reliable index of deaths attributable to violent crime that was built by cross-referencing media and prosecutors’ data. Attitude surveys have revealed changes in perception of levels of criminal activity and state effectiveness, and studies of national civil society organizations such as the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity have relied on the numerous media reports, as well as literat ure produced by the movement (Collett 2013; Maihold 2012; Scholl 2015). Many of the leading scholars of societal responses have made extensive use of semistructured interviews, generally of state officials and civic leaders (Arias 2019; González 2016; Moncada 2016 and 2020). Although we made some use of t hese and other data sources, and in chapter 2 we draw on the Mexican government’s annual survey of societal attitudes, we decided to pursue our project objectives through comparative ethnography. Our decision was due in part to our own expertise. Of the three project leaders, Maldonado had long used ethnography to study the pol itical economy of the Tierra Caliente region of Michoacán, including the drugs economy (Maldonado Aranda 2010, 2014, and 2018); Guerra’s study of autodefensa groups in the same region was largely ethnographic (Guerra 2018); and I had conducted fieldwork on citizenship since 1992 in the neighboring state of Jalisco and in 2007 extended that fieldwork to conduct a comparison with Michoacán, where I returned for this project (Stack 2012, 2013, and 2018). We designed this project to capitalize on our ethnographic expertise, including in comparative analysis. The team did make use of semistructured, in- depth interviews, which are not in themselves strictly ethnographic. However, we found that many of our richest insights came from field notes in which we documented innumerable informal conversations, sometimes arising from casual encounters. We also recorded our observations of meetings that we w ere able to attend and of other sundry events such as electoral campaigning, cultural festivals, and even church serv ices. Our ethnography allowed us to identify a wider set of societal responses than t hose considered in other studies, through painstaking observation of local contexts. It also led us to study such responses not as singular acts but as processes over time. We paid some attention to how initiatives appeared in particular contexts: for example, how the 2014 federal intervention in the Tierra Caliente region stimulated local cultural activists to pitch their activities in terms of arts for peace (chapter 3) and how Catholic clergy and lay leaders began a process of deliberating on responses a fter a Michoacán priest authored a church policy document on crime-related violence
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in 2010 (chapter 5). Yet we go beyond considering the origins of such responses to consider how they developed over time: w hether they remained coherent or fragmented, how the organizations interacted with other organizations as well as the government, and to what extent they were successful in their ambitions. We describe, for example, whether and how trust in police was generated through months of local security council meetings between civilians and security officials (chapter 2); how cultural activists built their public standing over time, and whether they ended up engaging with state cultural institutions or remaining autonomous (chapter 3); the fractures that emerged over time between different organizations protesting the use of forced disappearance (chapter 4); the course of the antiviolence strategies undertaken by the Catholic Church through the period of our fieldwork (chapter 5); and the fate of gender rights groups in the challenging environment of provincial Michoacán (chapter 6). Tracing t hose complex processes required extended periods of residence in the localities, which also allowed us to build extensive networks and relations of trust. The more formal interviews, which we had transcribed and pseudonymized for the benefit of other researchers, w ere thus only one component of our extensive database. Though some authors placed more weight on the interviews, all of the authors supplemented their interview analysis with the contextual knowledge and grasp of processes that we developed ethnographically. We recruited five postdoctoral researchers to complete the team, stipulating that all should have prior experience of ethnographic fieldwork in contexts of crime and violence, as we expected the fieldwork to be challenging. Not only do societal responses to crime and violence incur risks, as we show throughout this volume, but doing research on responses may itself be risky. All five postdoctoral researchers who joined our team had conducted doctoral fieldwork in some of Mexico’s most challenging locales, ranging from a marginal Tijuana neighborhood to a clandestine mine in San Luis Potosí. Th ere are now several publications on conducting research in hazardous settings, and we took our cue from them (for example, Ghosh 2018). Among other t hings, we were concerned about the prospect that criminal organizations might believe that researchers and research subjects w ere passing on information about their activities. To forestall misunderstandings about our intentions, we agreed not to conceal our research topic and aims and instead to explain them in terms that were unlikely to be threatening. Our interviewees signed consent forms after reading detailed information about the project, in which they were asked not to give specific information about criminal activities in their responses. We were also very public about the academic institutions hosting our project in Mexico—two of Mexico’s most reputable research centers—and about the source of our funding from the U.K. research councils. Furthermore, though we conducted research in difficult settings, including drug-growing regions and trafficking hubs, we chose localities where the project leaders or researchers had previous contacts.
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Managing risk was all the more important b ecause of the scale of the proj ect, which was due to our comparative approach. Our use of ethnography was designed to grasp a range of societal responses within each local context and, to some extent, to compare how effective the different responses were by tracing the processes in which they played out. We also wanted to compare responses across very different contexts, although within the same state. Our aim was to produce an account that, on the one hand, could explain why societal responses developed in different ways in different contexts and that, on the other hand, was likely to be of relevance elsewhere in Mexico and beyond. Dan Slater and Daniel Ziblatt (2013) hold up Robert Putnam’s (1993) famous comparison of civic culture in northern and southern Italy as an example of how subnational comparisons can prove “portable” to other world regions (1304). Putnam’s comparison helped not only establish his study’s representativity within Italy but also homed in on the factors explaining why democracy had developed in some regions but not in o thers. Furthermore, Slater and Ziblatt observe that Putnam’s inclusion both of the industrial contexts of northern Italy, akin to other European and North American regions, and of rural contexts characteristic of much of the rest of the world, made his account easier for other scholars to apply to their regional contexts. As noted, some researchers of societal responses to crime-related violence have used subnational comparison, but most have compared large cities to each other (for example, Moncada 2016). By including a range from rural contexts (chapter 2) to provincial urban (chapter 3) and metropolitan (chapter 4) contexts, we have not only indicated how context shapes what responses to crime are possible but also provided an account that can be usefully compared to many world settings. Our approach differs from Putnam’s in other ways. His comparison was subnational, as was Moncada’s (2016), but we compared cases within a single Mexican state. The locales w ere more closely linked than Putnam’s regions, which complicated our comparison as we were not comparing discrete units. Econom ically, for example, Zamora and Apatzingán are regional markets for farmers and cattle ranchers in Tancítaro and Chinicuila, while the port of Lázaro Cardenas serves the whole state, and Morelia is the main retail hub. Though this might seem to obviate meaningful comparisons, I explain in the section “The Volume: Comparative Analysis of Types of Societal Response” that we were primarily comparing cases of societal responses across different contexts of Michoacán, rather than comparing the contexts themselves. Comparing cases across contexts inevitably involves some comparison of the contexts, but this was not our main concern. We compared cases within the same contexts: for example, different cultural collectives in Apatzingán (chapter 3) and diverse civil society organizations in Morelia (chapter 4). Furthermore, we examined cases that stretched across contexts, such as the programs of the Catholic social pastoral
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teams (chapter 5). Thus, our appreciation of the links and overlaps between the localities added nuance to our comparison, rather than detracting from it. Our comparison was also complicated by our ethnographic methodology. Ethnography entails a finer attention to context than that attempted by Putnam, but taking an ethnographic approach made it harder for us to emulate his broad- brush contrasts in good conscience. Ethnographers are highly attuned to context and for that reason are reluctant to make comparisons across contexts (Schnegg and Lowe 2020). Fidelity to context is important, and we agree with Nicos Mouzelis’s (2008) argument, quoted in Justice Tankebe’s (2010) study of policing, that “all ‘contextless generalisations’ in the social sciences suffer one fate: they are ‘either trivial or actually wrong (wrong in the sense that they are valid only under certain conditions not specified in the theory)’ ” (312). Though ethnographers’ fidelity to context has the virtue of highlighting the contextuality of their generalizations, they are often not unreasonably accused of e ither remaining within the bounds of local contexts or of treating t hose contexts as somehow typical. We believe that comparative ethnography can combine fidelity to context with generating conclusions that rest on more than a single case study. Effectively, we draw on our comparative ethnography to make explicit what Mouzelis terms the “conditions” of our generalizations by highlighting the range of contexts from which they derive. In chapter 2, for example, we set out a set of general postulates on the back of our comparison of three localities in Michoacán, while at the same time drawing attention to the specificities of each one of t hose contexts, as well as of Michoacán. We maintain that by comparing contexts that are similar in some respects, even if we hold back from making the schematic generalizations that other authors have offered, it is possible to reach meaningful conclusions that may also be relevant to contexts elsewhere. Yet it remains true that ethnography does not lend itself easily to the bold comparison that Putnam offers, or that Arias (2019), Moncada (2016, 2020), and González (2016) attempt on the back of their interview-based approaches. Furthermore, while Putnam applied the same comparative framework throughout his project, as Arias, Moncada, and o thers do in theirs, our project varies in the precise ways in which each author uses comparison in their respective chapters. Not only did our researchers go about their fieldwork in their own ways, but some emphasized interviews in their chapters and others focused on observation, while each had the freedom to develop their own comparative strategies. This may give the book nuance and variety, but it makes it harder to draw a single, compelling conclusion in the way that Putnam does, or even to draw up tables like those that Arias, Moncada, González, and o thers use to highlight the salient variables of their cases. Instead, our authors draw specific conclusions in each chapter, while in the final two chapters Domingo and Jesperson draw on those conclusions to indicate the lessons for policy debates and I consider
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the implications for scholarship, in the process rethinking some of the assumptions made in the chapters themselves. We maintain, then, that our ethnographic comparison of cases across the six locales has allowed us to reach conclusions of relevance to contexts across Mexico and beyond, as we explain throughout the volume—and especially in the two analytical chapters.
Michoacán in Six Localities To reach conclusions of broad relevance, we elected to compare cases across six locales with very different political, social, and economic characteristics, while also considering the links between the respective contexts. The most urban site was the state capital of Morelia, a city of over a million inhabitants. Maldonado focused on collectives looking for victims of forced dis appearance and combating gender violence, and Guerrero focused on sexual diversity movements—particularly the increase in violence against them. Morelia was distinguished by the presence of state and federal government institutions, as well as the state’s principal universities. This helps explain the organizations’ focus on legal and political strategies, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, on the openness that, for example, allowed sexual diversity to become an issue (chapter 4). Morelia was also the seat of the Catholic archdiocese, which pursued a series of initiatives to reduce violence (chapter 5). The city was an important market for drugs and other contraband. It was also a site for the negotiation of protection and privileges in relation to the state government, which regularly tops lists of the most corrupt in Mexico. However, most of our research was conducted outside the state capital, since from the outset we wanted to gauge responses in contexts where t here was l ittle tradition of activism and where residents continued to be more exposed than their urban counterparts to the risk of violence. Sánchez was based in the Pacific port of Lázaro Cárdenas, which is connected to the state capital by a federal highway—a five-hour bus journey—and a freight railway service. Lázaro Cárdenas is a major container port created in the 1970s with substantial federal investment, which also funded the construction of a steel mill in the city (now privatized and owned by the Indian magnate Lakshmi Mittal). Like other ports up and down the coast—Acapulco and Manzanillo are the best known—Lázaro Cárdenas has been a hub for a host of types of contraband trade, of which the most controversial is the import of precursor chemicals from China and the export of heroin, crystal meth, and other narcotics. Although the city is connected to trade routes across central and west Mexico, an important segment of the drugs produced in it comes from the highlands of the neighboring state of Guerrero (the port is on the border between the two states) and from Michoacán’s own coastal Sierra Madre del Sur range (Figure 1.1). Since the 1950s
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Figure 1.1. Map of the state of Michoacán, showing the six field sites. Map by Trevor Stack with technical assistance from Alison Hay.
that range has been a key producer of first marijuana and later opium and poppy, and more recently it has been an important site of crystal meth laboratories. In addition, the mountains contain iron ore mines, and the ore has also been exploited as contraband. The autodefensa movement did not reach Lázaro Cárdenas, but in the aftermath of the 2014 federal intervention and collaboration with the autodefensas, the federal police took over the management of security in the port. They found, among other things, thousands of tons of minerals being exported by the Knights Templar. Despite the prominence of the port and its salience to organized crime, Sánchez found that most local organizations w ere more concerned about the dilapidated state of the city. Residents described Lázaro Cárdenas as “a first-class port and a fifth-class city,” one that had suffered from the effects of the privatization of state industries since the 1980s (chapter 3). Chinicuila was a three-hour bus journey west along the Michoacán coast, toward the state of Colima. It was the most rural locality in our study. Located in the coastal foothills of the Sierra Madre, it is mainly a cattle-ranching municipality with some five thousand inhabitants and the municipal seat, Villa Victoria, has only a thousand residents. Although we elected not to conduct research in some of the more notorious mining and drug-producing regions of the Sierra Madre, we knew that Chinicuila also had a history of producing marijuana and, more recently, crystal meth, as well as of trafficking into the neighboring states of
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Colima and Jalisco. Chinicuila was also the site of one of the few autodefensa groups that persisted in 2017, a group linked to the autodefensas of neighboring municipalities. Álvarez investigated the workings of the autodefensa group, but her focus was on how it was regulated locally. As chapter 2 shows, she found that the group was governed by a popular council that had been established in the wake of the center-left PRD’s first victory in the municipal elections of 2002, the same year that the PRD took the state governorship. The PRD has held the municipality since then. The road inland from Chinicuila—a main road, although it has l ittle traffic— leads to the arid Tierra Caliente plain, where lemons and mangos have been grown commercially since the federal irrigation projects of the mid-twentieth century (Maldonado 2010). The plain is dominated by the city of Apatzingán, which hosts institutions of regional government including police, as well as a Catholic diocese. For decades, Apatzingán was also a hub for trafficking the drugs being produced in the Sierra Madre del Sur. More recently, neighboring municipalities have been sites for crystal meth laboratories, which have been jealously protected by armed groups that also extort money from the commercial farmers and packing plants. Apatzingán is a notoriously unpopular destination even for other residents of Michoacán, who are put off by a combination of the climate and perceived danger. The Tierra Caliente region has for decades been one of the leading exporters of labor to the United States, and more workers have emigrated in recent years b ecause of the heightened conflict. Lemon and mango farmers w ere among the many businesses subject to extortion. The main focus of Guerra, our researcher there, was the several cultural and artistic groups in the city, including an important cultural center funded, after the 2014 federal intervention, by the Mexican state publisher, Fondo de Cultura Económica (chapter 3). Above Apatzingán, on the northern flank of the Tierra Caliente, is the municipality of Tancítaro, where Román conducted her ethnography. Until the mid1990s, Tancítaro was as marginal a locality as Chinicuila, but its economy was transformed by the export of avocados to the U.S. market, made possible by the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. Avocado orchards were planted on land that was originally pine forest, in all cases without legal authorization for the change in land use from forestry to agriculture. As Román describes, criminal groups followed the avocado wealth and, in the mid-2000s, began systematically to extort money from growers and packers, as has been repeatedly reported in national and international media. The entire municipal government resigned in 2009 after complaining of intimidation by criminal groups. In 2013, an autodefensa group from neighboring Tierra Caliente went to Tancítaro, and two groups were founded locally and managed (starting in 2016) by a council u nder the auspices of a unity government representing the principal political parties (chapter 2). The unity government also invited a Jesuit peace-building mission to Tancítaro, as described in chapter 5.
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Finally, the road to Tancítaro continues north to my primary field site, the city of Zamora, in a fertile valley in the northwest corner of Michoacán. While the Tierra Caliente and Lázaro Cárdenas saw major government investment, Zamora began to export strawberries and became a major producer without state investment, years before NAFTA led to Tancítaro’s exporting avocados. Zamora is also distinguished from much of the rest of the state by being a bastion of the conservative PAN, the party that won the national elections in 2000 but that was opposed to the center-left PRD that alternated over time with the PRI in the rest of Michoacán. While much of Michoacán’s commercial life centers on Morelia, Zamora is two hours by bus from Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco, and residents shop and do business t here as often as in Morelia. Zamora was the regional base of the Michoacán Police, the prosecution serv ice, and a Catholic diocese that extended as far as Tancítaro. The autodefensa movement did not reach Zamora. Members of a few groups appeared on the streets with autodefensa T-shirts, but they likely belonged to the Knights Templar and were trying to neutralize the risk of an autodefensa uprising by taking the stage themselves. Taken together, the six localities give a fair cross-section of Michoacán, ranging from the very rural (Chinicuila) to the state capital (Morelia) and including a prosperous agribusiness producer (Tancítaro), two agricultural market cities (Apatzingán and Zamora), and the port of Lázaro Cárdenas. Criminal business also has a different history in each context. In the case of drugs, for decades Chinicuila had been a producer, Apatzingán a distribution hub, and Morelia a place to negotiate government protection, while the region of Zamora has only in recent years become a major node of trafficking and consumption. Autodefensa groups took root in Chinicuila and Tancítaro and entered Apatzingán, but they did not enter Lázaro Cárdenas or Zamora. Th ere w ere also political differences among the sites: for example, in localities such as Chinicuila and Lázaro Cárdenas, the PRI’s hegemony was first disputed by the center-left PRD, while in Zamora the pro-business conservative PAN was the first to do this. To add to the complexity, the localities were also connected to each other in multiple ways, as I have mentioned. Together with the economic ties, Morelia controls the state government departments, including the police, in the other localities. The port of Lázaro Cárdenas serv ices not only Michoacán but also surrounding states; and while Chinicuila is the most marginal of localities, and in some respects more closely tied to the neighboring state of Colima, until recently the public prosecutor and courts w ere located in the Tierra Caliente city of Apatzingán, a three-hour ride away. Tancítaro now also reports to Apatzingán regarding legal issues, although it remains part of the Catholic diocese of Zamora. All those differences and connections w ere essential to the nuanced comparison of cases across t hose contexts that we present in this volume.
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The Volume: Comparative Analysis of Types of Societal Response The five substantive chapters (chapters 2–6) are divided not by locality but by types of societal response. This is why several of the chapters are coauthored: the authors conducted fieldwork of relevance to the theme in different localities, which they compare in the chapter. I have noted that we did not select organ izations in advance of the ethnography; neither did we preselect the types of societal response on which each chapter focuses. We went to the field to discover what forms of societal response showed some potential for making headway against violence across the localities of our study. In a series of team meetings, we discussed our fieldwork findings and decided on the kinds of initiatives that showed the most promise, as well as the cases that appeared most fruitful to compare. Each chapter focuses on a form of response that appeared salient across the contexts: local citizen security councils, art and culture collectives, collectives combining legal and political strategies, church-linked groups, and women’s organizations (Table 1.1). Again, the authors were free to tailor their analytical strategy and theoretical tools to the focus of each chapter, which we believe enrichens the volume. Since our primary focus was on contexts beyond the state capital, the volume begins with two chapters that compare cases of a type of societal response across contexts outside the capital. In chapter 2, Álvarez, Román, and I begin with arguably the most successful set of responses that we found in the project, responses from what we term local citizen security councils. Such councils have been created in other countries, including Italy and Colombia, to challenge crime, vio lence, and conflict. In the chapter, we compare these councils across three Mexican localities: the cattle-ranching municipality of Chinicuila, the avocado- growing municipality of Tancítaro, and the northwestern agricultural market city of Zamora. We argue that across t hese contexts, councils emerged in response to what we term a crisis of trust in the authorities, including police, that was made manifest in the 2013–2014 autodefensa rebellion. Councils sought to enable cooperation among citizens and between them and the authorities, in the pro cess restoring the trust necessary for cooperation. We show that across the three different localities, councils had made some headway in strengthening local governance, regulating security responses, and building trust in both police and autodefensa groups. We also stress that the councils w ere messy, local institutions. While two of the three councils had a significant impact on trust and cooperation, generating effective responses to crime and violence, t here were also challenges. Councils were affected by local differences and conflicts and varied in their representativeness of their communities. They also diverged, to varying degrees, from international human rights standards. We conclude that they showed the potential to regenerate trust and cooperation a fter a crisis, but they faced challenges.
table 1.1 contexts and types of societal response by chapter Chapter 2
3
Type of societal response Local citizen security councils
Art and culture collectives
Contexts
Cases
Zamora
Security and Justice Working Group
Chinicuila
Popular Council of Chinicuila
Tancítaro
Municipal Security Council
Lázaro Cardenas
Juksikani Cultural Center La Parota Cultural Center Melchor Ocampo del Balsas Sociocultural Collective
Apatzingán
The Station cultural center Cultural Revolution Naranjo Cultural Center
4
Collectives combining legal and political strategies
Morelia
Gender violence: Women without Violence Forced disappearance: Collective of Relatives of the Disappeared in Michoacán State’s Past, Walking with Justice LGBTI+ and sex worker protection: ConVIHve, Michoacán Network of Trans P eople, Michoacán Is Diversity
5
Church-linked groups
All contexts
Diocesan social pastoral programs Bishops and other clergy’s interventions Citizens’ Council Responsible for Promoting a Healthy Social Fabric (Apatzingán) Social Integration and Assistance Center (Tancitaro)
6
omen’s W organizations
All contexts
Gender analysis of the cases listed above Medicine Woman (Tangancícuaro) We Want Us Alive Michoacán (Zamora) Women without Violence (Morelia)
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In chapter 3, Guerra and Sánchez compare cases across a further two localities beyond the state capital—t he port city of Lázaro Cárdenas and the Tierra Caliente city of Apatzingán—and with reference to a very different set of actors, which they term cultural activists: individuals and groups that mobilize discourses of art and culture to construct sociopolitical fields with a view to transforming social environments. Discourses of art and culture have been mobilized for peace building from Bosnia to Colombia and South Africa. As other researchers have observed, governments and other development actors introduce cultural programs geared to the peace-building agenda, and then cultural activists may choose to collaborate with development actors or develop their own agendas and strategies. In Michoacán, some cultural activists frame their cultural projects as acts of peacebuilding, as the Mexican government has been d oing in response to the violence of recent years, but others pitch them as focused on urban revitalization or identity building. However activists pitch their projects in t hese contexts, and whether or not they collaborate with the government, Guerra and Sánchez found that, given the intimidation that the activists and others face, they used art and culture to carve out safe spaces for themselves from which to address the challenges in their broader environments. While Guerra and Sánchez argue that cultural activists, working on their own or alongside development actors, had the potential to address t hose challenges, that potential was l imited by a range of obstacles. Activists first needed to raise their profile and improve their standing to generate resources and engage the public, and this led them to compete with each other. Even when activists achieved a certain standing, it was often hard to chart what impact they had on the world beyond the field of art and culture. Furthermore, when they collaborated with the government, their projects could become bureaucratic or entrepreneurial, rather than truly transformative. While chapters 2 and 3 concern localities beyond the state capital, in chapter 4 Maldonado and Guerrero focus on the capital, allowing us to consider what is unique to societal responses t here. Their approach is still comparative, in that they compare three different sets of actors in that setting: organizations addressing forced disappearance, gender violence, and the protection of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex (LGBTI+) people and sex workers. The authors observe that t hese actors all had both a focus on less visible forms of violence and some recourse to law in responding to the violence. Maldonado and Guerrero begin by observing that violence is more visible when used by males fighting other males (an observation that is echoed in chapter 6). In Michoacán, the most visible violence involved men in uniform and men in criminal groups. Less visible forms included forced disappearances, gender violence, and assaults on LGBTI+ and sex workers. Activists trying to counter t hese kinds of violence also reported what the authors term institutional violence, which ranges from authorities’ obstructing and intimidating activists to authorities’ perpetrating
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these kinds of violence. Forced disappearance was used by the Mexican government long before criminal groups took it up. To counter the less visible violence and the institutional violence that conceals it, activists in Michoacán—many of them w omen—sometimes used legal strategies such as litigation and legislation. However, they usually combined legal with political strategies, like using the media and lobbying officials, often appealing to Mexico’s human rights commitments. Even when activists achieved the passage of laws or enactment of rulings, Maldonado and Guerrero observe that this did not necessarily reduce rates of violence. Th ere w ere also few successful activists outside Morelia, where it was easier to develop legal expertise and politi cal connections, and to seek protection where necessary. Whereas the previous three chapters are coauthored by the ethnographers of the cases being compared, chapters 5 and 6 have one author each. However, t hese authors draw on the work of their fellow team members across the state, as well as on their own fieldwork. Their themes—the Catholic church’s role and w omen’s activism—also address the themes of the previous chapters, and the authors refer back to t hose chapters. I authored chapter 5, on church-linked initiatives that range from public denunciation to participation in civil society. I argue that churches are not merely social organizations: they are better understood as institutions comparable to those of the state. I argue that the institutional character of the church on which I focused, the Catholic Church in Michoacán, took on special significance in the face of the challenges described in this book. I recognize that the church’s interventions overlapped with other interventions outlined in other chapters in the volume. The church has designed schemes for participation in security councils (chapter 2), drawn on peace-building strategies overlapping with t hose of cultural movements (chapter 3), and been involved in campaigns against gender and LGBTI+ violence and forced disappearance (chapter 4). I emphasize that the church differs from t hese other initiatives with regards to the authority, infrastructure, and networks that characterize it as an institution. As an institution, the church has the legitimacy to denounce crime and corruption in the name of a society that it claims to represent. It thus has a legitimacy that the Mexican state, despite its democratic credentials, often lacks. The church’s infrastructure, from photocopiers and vehicles to buildings and lawyers, has special significance when government infrastructure is compromised. Its social networks among the faithful are crucial in reaching victims of violence, mediating conflicts, and interacting with other organizations, and its institutional character allows it to influence the formation and development of t hese organizations. Chapter 6, written by Whittaker, also refers back to e arlier chapters. She begins by considering the gender dynamics of some of the other organizations
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we studied across localities, drawing on fieldwork conducted by other researchers, and ends by comparing women’s groups in Zamora and Morelia. Both as perpetrators and victims, women are increasingly affected by crime-related vio lence in Michoacán, but if they want to fight violence as activists, women face gendered barriers. Similar to the postconflict environments of Northern Ireland and Bosnia-Herzegovina studied by Fiona Mackay and Cera Murtagh (2019), politics is still considered men’s business in many parts of Michoacán. Nonetheless, w omen have been making important contributions to fighting violence in the state. In political negotiations, female activists often draw on both feminine and masculine stereot ypes, such as combining pink lipstick and high heels with a tough negotiation style. Women also use gender expectations to their advantage. M others of missing persons are powerful advocates b ecause they can evoke sympathy and claim motherly authority. Some activists have also been creating women-only spaces. They exchange resources to push back against sexism and violence within male-dominated power networks. By supporting each other as a loose, diverse collective, female activists can prevent women’s expertise and experiences from being ignored in violence-prevention conversations. For t hese women, addressing inequality and violence requires creating what Virginia Woolf might have called a “room of their own”—not unlike the safe spaces created by the cultural activists studied in chapter 3.
Analytical Chapters: Reflections for Policy and Theory The final two chapters are analytical reflections on the substantive chapters that precede them, and the two chapters are written from different vantage points. The first (chapter 7) is by a political scientist (Domingo) and a criminologist (Jesperson) who are consultants in international development and security, respectively. The authors were members of the project team, but they did not conduct primary research. Instead, they helped translate our findings for the world of policy. Domingo and Jesperson insist that this volume bears out the need for donors to identify and invest in localized responses to crime and violence, as they are understood locally. It demonstrates that state-centered responses cannot be sufficient, b ecause of the intricate realities of capture and complicity among state and other elite interests. However, generalized r ecipes for societal resilience are unlikely to prove v iable, even within a single country like Mexico or a single state like Michoacán. Through subnational ethnographic comparisons, the volume highlights the variation in political economies of crime and state complicity, as well as in the capabilities to respond to the resulting violence. What is possible differs across contexts. The difference is starkest between the state capital (where organizations like W omen without Violence combine legal and political strategies) and the provincial contexts on which
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most of the chapters focus (where even political initiatives such as councils did not all have a legal basis, and softer approaches such as cultural activism and the Catholic Church’s peace-building workshops w ere often preferred). Domingo and Jesperson argue that the lessons apply not only to crime-related violence but also to other conflict settings. The volume exemplifies the kind of granular analysis of societal response mechanisms that ought to inform global policy responses in all such contexts. I authored the second analytical chapter (chapter 8), which I open by reframing the question that we originally set out to answer and by offering a rereading of the chapters in that light. As I have explained, in the first phase of the project we realized that assessing how effectively organizations address a problem required deciding, in the first place, how we understood the problem. We came to realize that violence was only one of the issues related to organized crime, and we elected to include asking respondents w hether and how organizations addressed institutional fragilities ranging from lack of capacity to complicity. Our thinking did not stop in this first phase, and I came to doubt even how orga nized crime was being understood. In chapter 8, I engage with publications during the project on crime, violence, and corruption—among them works by Arias (2018 and 2019), Javier Auyero and Katherine Sobering (2019), and Matías Dewey (2015)—to propose a different way of understanding the problem and the societal responses that we study in the volume. Briefly, I argue that organized crime is best understood not as a malignant force disrupting social order but as a variation on the theme of what Auyero (2013) terms “gray zones,” which for my purposes means perverse modes of association among state, business, enforcement, and “civic actors” (Arias 2018, 342) that make possible business practices that state law is supposed to prevent. In these contexts, I propose that “organized crime” is a term best used for gray zones that enable wholly illegal lines of business (such as drug retail and trafficking) and that make use of wholly illegal enforcement actors (notably, the armed groups that are proliferating in the region). However, the gray zones of organized crime include actors involved in otherwise legal businesses in which drug proceeds are often invested, such as construction, commerce, and agriculture, and who on occasion make use of illegal enforcement actors to enforce contrasts and intimidate competitors. The gray zones also incorporate a panoply of state actors, including the police and military, which not only afford varying kinds of protection but also collaborate in enforcement: police patrols have turned over arrestees to criminal groups, as well as sharing information with them. What I emphasize is that gray zones include civic actors who bring their civic standing to bear so they can mediate the interests of business, whether their own or those of o thers. By drawing attention to the role played by civic actors in enabling business practices that are prohibited by law, I highlight the fact that not all civilian actors are virtuous, and they often navigate blurry boundaries. In the process,
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I raise the question of why some civic actors—i ncluding t hose studied in the volume—challenge the gray zones, or at least try to mitigate the kinds of social harm (including violence) that result. I conclude chapter 8 with a final reflection on the project and this volume. Our sober appraisal of the effect or reach of the range of societal responses across the six localities may seem dispiriting. We did find potential in many of the initiatives, bearing out our decision to include them in our study in the first place. We demonstrate that cultural activism can be a v iable approach when public protest is fraught with hazard; that clergy may on occasion use their position to denounce abuse to powerful effect; and that w omen’s groups in adverse contexts may nourish solidarity by carving out safe spaces. Yet it was hard to be sure that the organizations in question would go on to have an impact on the problems that they faced, and especially whether they would be able to disrupt the forms of perverse association or collaboration that, I argue, were at the root of the issue. Where we take heart is in the possibility of building less perverse forms of association on the back of the initiatives that we have studied. Although our project began by looking for responses from outside government, I consider in chapter 8 how new modes of partnership among government, organizations, and citizens might help offset the wrong kind of collaboration, as well as generate policies and strategies better attuned to the problems at hand. In this regard, the citizen councils that we discuss in chapter 2 are especially promising, since they brought local officials together with other citizens, including the remaining autodefensas, precisely to seek new ways of cooperating—including by reviewing how security is understood in the first place. Through our comparative ethnography, we observed significant limits to the working of the councils, and we note that one of them did little more than lend legitimacy to the state government, while one of the more effective councils was dissolved when a different political party took office. Yet we still find cause for optimism in the possibility of generating modes of collaboration to break the cycles of crime, violence, and corruption that threaten not only Michoacán and Mexico but so many other parts of the world t oday.
notes 1. We recognize that organizations such as traders’ associations have been known to respond to crime and violence, even if on the whole they have served to reproduce existing social and political arrangements. For example, Moncada (2020) draws attention to the way that market traders’ associations respond to protection rackets. I had conducted research previously on street and market traders’ associations (Stack 2013), but t here w ere two reasons for not including them in the study. One was that the associations w ere subject to violent extortion, likely at the hands of criminal groups acting in complicity with association leaders who themselves were in collusion with some state actors, and it appeared too risky to conduct sustained ethnographic fieldwork on them. In addition, there w ere few signs that the associations were able to manage even the terms of their extortion, and thus it seemed that the risk to research participants was not justified by the potential value of the research.
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references Abello Colak, Alexandra, and Jenny Pearce. 2009. “ ‘Security from Below’ in Contexts of Chronic Violence.” IDS Bulletin 40 (2): 11–19. Álvarez, Irene, Denisse Román, and Sasha Jesperson. 2019. “Armed Legitimacy in Mexico: Self-Defense Groups against Criminal Violence.” In Rural Crime Prevention: Theory, Tactics and Techniques, edited by Alistair Harkness and Naomi Smith, 84–94. London: Routledge. Arias, Enrique Desmond. 2018. “Criminal Organizations and the Policymaking Process.” Global Crime 19 (3–4): 339–361. ———. 2019. “Social Responses to Criminal Governance in Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Kingston, and Medellín.” Latin American Research Review 54 (1): 165–180. Auyero, Javier. 2013. “Gray Zone of Politics and Social Movements.” In The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, edited by David Snow, Donatella Della Porta, Bert Klandermans, and Doug McAdam. Oxford: Blackwell. Auyero, Javier, and Katherine Sobering. 2019. “Collusion and Cynicism at the Urban Margins.” Latin American Research Review 54 (1): 222–236. Cayli, Baris. 2013. “Italian Civil Society against the Mafia: From Perceptions to Expectations.” International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 41 (1): 81–99. Collett, Anne. 2013. “Poetry, Activism and Cultural Capital (Javier Sicilia).” Australian Literary Studies 28 (4). Dewey, Matías. 2015. El orden clandestino: Política, fuerzas de seguridad y mercados ilegales en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Katz. Felbab-Brown, Vanda, Harold Trinkunas, and Shadi Hamid. 2017. Militants, Criminals, and Warlords: The Challenge of Local Governance in an Age of Disorder. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Fuentes Díaz, Antonio, and Daniele Fini, eds. 2018. Defender al pueblo: Autodefensas y policías comunitarias en México. Puebla, Mexico: Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. Ghosh, Devleena. 2018. “Risky Fieldwork: The Problems of Ethics in the Field.” Energy Research and Social Science 45: 348–354. González, Yanilda. 2016. “Varieties of Participatory Security: Assessing Community Participation in Policing in Latin America.” Public Administration and Development 36 (2): 132–143. Guerra, Edgar. 2018. “Organización armada: El proceso de toma de decisiones de los grupos de autodefensa tepalcatepenses.” Estudios Sociológicos 36 (106): 1–26. Guerra Manzo, Enrique. 2015. “Las autodefensas de Michoacán: Movimiento social, paramilitarismo y neocaciquismo.” Política y Cultura 44: 7–31. Knox, Rupert. 2018. “Social Movements in Support of the Victims: H uman Rights and Digital Communications.” In Beyond the Drug War in Mexico: H uman Rights, the Public Sphere and Justice, edited by Wil G. Pansters, Benjamin T. Smith, and Peter Watt, 126– 146. Oxford: Routledge. Ley, Sandra. 2015. “Violence and Citizen Participation in Mexico: From the Polls to the Streets.” Washington: Woodrow Wilson Institute. Ley, Sandra, and Guillermo Trejo. 2020. Votes, Drugs, and Violence: The Political Logic of Criminal Wars in Mexico. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mackay, Fiona, and Cera Murtagh. 2019. “New Institutions, New Gender Rules? A Feminist Institutionalist Lens on W omen and Power-Sharing.” feminists@law 9, no.1. https://journals.k ent.a c.u k/index.php/feministsatlaw/article/v iew/745. Maihold, Günther. 2012. “La ‘política del dolor’ ante la (in)acción del Estado en materia de seguridad: Los casos Blumberg en Argentina y Sicilia en México.” Nueva Sociedad 240: 188–200. Maldonado, Salvador. 2010. Los márgenes del Estado mexicano: Territorios ilegales, desarrollo y violencia en Michoacán. Zamora, Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán.
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———. 2014. “You Don’t See Any Violence H ere but It Leads to Very Ugly Th ings: Forced Solidarity and S ilent Violence in Michoacán, Mexico.” Dialectical Anthropology 38 (2): 153–171. ———. 2018. La ilusión de la seguridad: Política y violencia en la periferia michoacana. Zamora, Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán. ———, ed. 2020. Hacia la justicia cuando escasean las garantías: Sociedad civil en contextos de violencia: El caso de Michoacán. Zamora, Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán. Moncada, Eduardo. 2016. Cities, Business, and the Politics of Urban Violence in Latin America. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2020. “The Politics of Criminal Victimization: Pursuing and Resisting Power.” Perspectives on Politics 18 (3): 706–721. Mouzelis, Nicos. 2008. Modern and Postmodern Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Putnam, Robert D. 1993. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ralchev, Plamen. 2004. “The Role of Civil Society in Fighting Corruption and Organized Crime.” Southeast Europe, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 4 (2): 325–331. Schnegg, Michael, and Edward D. Lowe. 2020. Comparing Cultures: Innovations in Comparative Ethnography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schneider, Jane, and Peter T. Schneider. 2003. Reversible Destiny: Mafia, Antimafia, and the Struggle for Palermo. Berkeley: University of California Press. Scholl, Sebastian. 2015. “Mexico: Challenging Drug Prohibition from Below.” In Transnational Institute State of Power 2015. https://w ww.t ni.org/en/s tateofpower2015. Slater, Dan, and Daniel Ziblatt. 2013. “The Enduring Indispensability of the Controlled Comparison.” Comparative Political Studies 46 (10): 1301–1327. Stack, Trevor. 2012. Knowing History in Mexico: An Ethnography of Citizenship. Santa Fe: University of New Mexico Press. ———. 2013. “In the Eyes of the Law, in the Eyes of Society: A Citizenship Tradition in West Mexico.” Critique of Anthropology 33 (1): 66–90. ———. 2018. “Citizenship and the Established Civil Sphere in Provincial Mexico.” In The Civil Sphere in Latin America, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander and Carlo Tognato, 206– 228. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Staudt, Kathleen, and Zulma Y. Méndez. 2015. Courage, Resistance, and W omen in Ciudad Juárez: Challenges to Militarization. Austin: University of Texas Press. Tankebe, Justice. 2010. “Public Confidence in the Police: Testing the Effects of Public Experiences of Police Corruption in Ghana.” British Journal of Criminology 50 (2): 296–319. Villarreal, María Teresa. 2016. “Los colectivos de familiares de personas desaparecidas y la procuración de justicia.” Intersticios 11: 1–28.
chapter 2
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Local Citizen Security Councils sustainable responses to a crisis of trust in state security provision Irene Álvarez, Denisse Román, and Trevor Stack
The meeting of the local Security and Justice Working Group (SJWG) in 2018 was drawing to a close in the provincial city of Zamora. After the governor of Michoacán finished his closing remarks, a woman spoke up. She could not pass up the opportunity, she said, to signal the yawning gap between the reality as heralded by the governor and other officials present and that lived by Michoacán’s citizens, like her and the others present. After the meeting, we heard that the SJWG coordinator, a local businessman, had been embarrassed by her intervention, which ridiculed the governor’s claims to be bringing peace to the state. The coordinator felt vindicated, since he had for long held out against inviting activists like her to the meetings. He had warned many times that they could jeopardize the delicate relationship that the civilian members, most of whom represented business and professional associations, had built with the many state officials who attended the SJWG meetings. Another member who headed a business chamber remarked that “never before had we even sat down with a local prosecutor.” That said, all were clear: the state dignitaries had little if any real interest in what they had to say and time and time again paid only lip serv ice to the agreements that w ere reached in the meetings. In 2018, in the small town of Villa Victoria, in the cattle-ranching municipality of Chinicuila, t here w ere no state dignitaries at the monthly meeting of the Popular Council. The municipal president was present, though. Unlike the functionaries in Zamora, he spoke in deferent terms of the council, which was made up mainly of representatives of the villages and was relatively autonomous of the municipal government. “The council represents the people,” he said, “and I respect that.” One concern expressed at the meeting was about new recruits being sent to join the state police force’s contingent in the municipality, which 29
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since 2014 had been made up of local people. The local chief of the state police was not present on that occasion, but in any case he too was a long-term resident and had been part of the autodefensa (self-defense) movement in 2013. If the new recruits are outsiders, council members asked, how w ill we know if they have links to criminal gangs? Their worry was that the trust between auto defensa group members, police stationed locally, municipal government, and residents—most of which had been built through the previous four years of council meetings—would be lost if they allowed regional police commanders to send in recruits of their choosing. In a third municipality, Tancítaro (located in the avocado-growing region of Michoacán), we attended a monthly meeting of the Municipal Security Council in 2018. Th ere, the chief of the local police department—which was a municipal corporation though funded by avocado growers—sat opposite the leaders of one of the two Tancítaro autodefensa groups. Around them were the municipal secretary, who had convened the meeting; two municipal councillors; and representatives of a citizens’ council set up by the Social Integration and Assistance Center (SIAC), a Jesuit-led civil society organization (CSO), who had been elected by villagers across the muncipality. Th ere was a frank conversation at the meeting about a range of issues, including councillors’ efforts to crack down on drinking in public spaces. During the meeting, one of the autodefensa leaders complained that a SIAC employee had been cited in a New York Times article as saying that despite the autodefensa rebellion of 2013, t here were still meth laboratories in the municipality. O thers, including the municipal secretary, rallied to the SIAC employee’s defense, saying that she might have been misinterpreted. On the one hand, these councillors demonstrated their solidarity with the SIAC, which the municipal government had invited to participate in the Municipal Security Council. On the other hand, their tactful mediation evinced their desire to avoid antagonizing the autodefensa leaders, who had at first refused to join the council or recognize its authority. In this chapter, we compare the workings of the SJWG, the Popular Council, and the Municipal Security Council within the respective contexts of Zamora, Chinicuila, and Tancítaro. We compare them as local citizen security councils (LCSCs), a term that we believe captures what they have in common. We define an LCSC as an organization that meets regularly to make security-related decisions for a specific jurisdiction and that seeks to empower citizens residing in that jurisdiction to participate in decisions about security, as well as to shape understandings and expectations of what security entails in the first place. Though comparable as such, LCSCs can vary considerably—as will be obvious from the vignettes in this chapter. We focus on how LCSCs enable citizens’ trust in police (including autodefensa groups), and we seek to explain how differences between the LCSCs affected the building of trust in police.
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Trust in Police: A Comparative Ethnographic Approach Researchers have long recognized that security provision requires citizens to cooperate with the institutions responsible for it. Minimally, police need citizens to cooperate by reporting crimes and sharing information with them. Citizens will report crimes and share information when they trust police institutions (Asif et al. 2014; Ishiyama et al. 2018; Kääriäinen and Sirén 2011; Müller 2010; Tankebe 2010; Tyler 2011; Tyler and Huo 2002).1 Historically in Mexico t here have been low levels of trust in police (Flores Pérez 2009). Michoacán is especially significant for our purposes b ecause in 2012–2013 a rise in criminal activities, coupled with mistrust in police, led to an uprising of autodefensa groups. The autodefensa groups effectively took security into their own hands, confronting criminal groups in the face of state inactivity and often complicity. Michoacán is also a significant case because of its long history of political organizations either organized by the state, such as the rural police forces created in 1929 by order of Lázaro Cárdenas del Río, then governor of Michoacan and president of Mexico in 1934–1940 (Ginzberg 1999). The autodefensa movement was also based in other organizations that emerged from people’s initiatives during the first years of the twenty-first century—like the community police forces in Ostula and Cherán in 2009 and 2011, respectively (Gledhill 2013; Pansters 2015)—and the examples of indigenous communitarian justice from the neighboring state of Guerrero (Zamorano Villareal 2018). The autodefensa uprising was followed in 2014 by the Mexican federal government’s taking over security in Michoacán and sending in thousands of federal police. The police ended up collaborating with autodefensa groups, some of which became integrated into a new centralized state police force. The autodefensa movement was a manifestation of a crisis of trust in security providers, like the police. However, we argue that even in a situation as extreme as this one, trust in institutions can be generated by developing cooperation between civilians and government officials through what we term LCSCs. Our research compares different cases of LCSCs to determine which conditions can improve trust in public serv ices such as policing. Most researchers of trust in policing have relied on surveys. Survey data produced by the Mexican government indicates that trust in state and local police rose significantly in 2015 and 2016, in the wake of the federal intervention and subsequent reorganization of the state police, but that throughout the period of our research (2017–2018) trust was declining (Instituto Nacional de Geografía y Estadística 2011–2018). Beyond observing this decline, we made little other use of the survey data as it is aggregated by state and thus not suited to analyze the variations across localities that we observed ethnographically. Unlike other studies of trust in policing, this chapter is based on comparative ethnographic research. We believe that our ethnographic approach has
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significant advantages for explaining patterns of trust and cooperation, since these entail complex and dynamic relations among citizens and between citizens and institutions. Ethnographers can track these relations through extended observation over a long period of time—in our case, over nine months, with follow-up fieldwork. Moreover, while other researchers have focused on issues such as whether or not trust in police correlates to perceptions of fair process or performance (for example, Tankebe 2010), our focus has been on the effectiveness of a particular modality of citizen participation—namely, the citizen councils (that is, the LCSCs). Rather than simply asking whether or not people trust authorities, we argue that ethnography is well suited to gauging how and to what extent the interactions in and around the councils are characterized by cooperation and trust. By comparing these processes and interactions across locales within the same region, we were able to identify when and how LCSCs might have helped overcome a crisis of trust in the police. As reflected in the opening vignettes of the chapter, we found that the Chinicuila and Tancítaro LCSCs were, on the w hole, more effective than Zamora’s in restoring trust. This led us to postulate that LCSCs are effective to the extent that government officials are responsive to nongovernment council members; LCSCs are in turn responsive to, and ideally representative of, the broader population; and LCSCs are effectively able to monitor the composition and conduct of police. In the cases of the Chinicuila and Tancítaro LCSCs, we still observed several limitations. Even when government officials are responsive to the councils, t here is no guarantee that their successors will act similarly, which makes the councils vulnerable to electoral outcomes. Building trust in police through LCSCs presupposes trust in the broader community, as well as between security institutions, and the tense exchange in the Tancítaro meeting reflects how divisions within the community and between institutions can obstruct the process. Not only do t hese divisions limit how seriously governments and police respond to civilians in the context of LCSCs, but they also make it difficult to reach a consensus on how security is to be understood in the first place. Even when a consensus is reached on a notion of security attuned to the local context, we found that t hese local notions may be at odds with legal standards, which may further complicate the relationship with state security providers.
Cooperating for Security When Trust Is in Crisis: A Conceptual Framework While trust has been theorized in a variety of ways, we have found Niklas Luhmann’s (1979) approach to be fruitful for analyzing cases in which p eople respond to what we term a crisis of trust (when actors lose their bearings and find themselves paralyzed and unable to cooperate) by seeking strategies to reestablish some sense of control and certainty. Although we also draw on more recent stud-
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ies of trust in policing, we believe that Luhmann’s seminal Trust and Power remains relevant to understanding crises of trust—which, we argue, were characteristic of Michoacán in 2012–2013. Although we do not draw on other aspects of social systems theory, we follow Luhmann’s intuition that trust implies a reduction in complexity that allows us to live in the present, rejecting certain negative scenarios or disastrous fates (Luhmann 2005, 39–52). Trust counters such negative prospects with positive expectations. A measure of distrust may be tolerable and, in democratic contexts, may even be useful in that it motivates citizens to monitor government (Lewicki, McAllister, and Bies 1998; Lewis and Weigert 1985; Luhmann 1979). But as Luhmann warns, distrust must be kept u nder control or it can become a destructive force. In a crisis of trust, when uncertainty reaches an extreme level, t here is a feeling that “anything and everyt hing would be possible” (Luhmann 1979, 4). This is intolerable because it obstructs action—especially cooperative action, for which, as Luhmann notes, trust is especially important (2009, 99). In the case of the economy, for instance, people prefer not to buy durable consumer goods until trust is restored (Instituto Nacional de Geografía y Estadística 2018), and in the case of the 2008 financial crisis, a period of great economic uncertainty about the f uture, people w ere so confused that they dared not act because they could not predict the consequences of their decisions (Morgensen 2014). Confident action and cooperation w ere possible only when t hose anxieties were offset by positive expectations. One of the positive expectations that define modern times is that security is provided by the state (Hobbes 1994; Locke 1997; Weber 1948). When the promise of security is not kept, citizens’ trust in state security institutions loses its footing. For example, the police is an institution that counters threats to the public through the use of force. Institutional trust rests on the perception that police fulfill this instrumental role, giving a sense that things seem to be in order. Distrust is manifest when citizens doubt the capability or integrity of the police, which is when the police lose legitimacy, understood as the attribution of trust by the public. Again, a measure of distrust may prove functional: it may lead to more democratic policing by motivating better monitoring of the police or better communication between the police and the public. However, distrust may also further undermine the possibility of providing security, resulting in a vicious circle if the public ceases to share information with the police. In extreme cases, and especially when the individuals entrusted with managing security infringe upon it, trust in policing or other functions of state security provision may enter a crisis. Just as a financial crisis paralyzes consumption and commerce, a crisis of trust in security provision can lead to losing one’s bearings, which obstructs the decision making required in everyday life. Such a crisis may spiral further out of control if, as we found in our region of study, the police lose the minimum amount of trust needed to empower it to make decisions about security.
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In this chapter, we track how p eople navigate a crisis of trust in state security provision, specifically in policing. In this kind of situation, the responses may include establishing neighborhood associations to patrol local areas, armed militias of the kind that w ere dubbed autodefensas in Michoacán, and even criminal organizations that demand money to protect p eople from them as well as from other illicit groups. Such initiatives, common in our region of study, could be said to reduce insecurity by developing ways of rendering the environment controllable and legible. However, they also generate new risks of their own, including new forms of criminal activity, which can end up prolonging the crisis. Our focus is on initiatives that bring a range of actors together to participate in decision-making processes about collective security, including about how to manage the more problematic initiatives. Specifically, we are interested in collective decision making in the form of LCSCs. We show that LCSCs vary considerably from one to another, even within our region of study, and can have diverse effects. In some circumstances they help reestablish a measure of trust in security provision, whether exclusively by state institutions or by a mix of state and nonstate providers, which in turn helps overcome the crisis and restore the positive expectations necessary for purposeful living, as well as the level of cooperation required to achieve such living.
Navigating a Crisis of Trust in the Mexican State of Michoacán: Citizen Participation in Historical Context Not only have Mexico’s democratic reforms failed to impress many citizens, resulting in long-standing distrust in actors such as Congressional deputies, but police have long vied with deputies for the lowest rank in surveys of public trust. Distrust in police is by no means uniform, however. Federal police, together with the armed forces, have enjoyed significantly higher levels of trust than local and state police. One reason may be the higher professional standards of some federal bodies, such as the Federal Highway Police, which was created in 1931. Another reason may be that citizens distrusted the police that they knew best and encountered most frequently (local and state police). Recent studies suggest that citizens were wrong to have extended the benefit of doubt to federal police. For example, Carlos Flores Pérez (2009) shows that for decades, police commanders—together with their counterparts in the military and in the justice system, as well as in political institutions at all levels—afforded protection to criminals and participated in criminal activities themselves. In this context, it is significant that Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the antiestablishment candidate for president in 2018, picked corruption as his central campaign issue, in addition to making ambitious proposals for addressing the security crisis that was a result of an expansion of organized crime and its protection networks. It is also significant for our purposes that López Obrador
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promised to include a range of voices in the design and implementation of security policy, as a step toward enhancing cooperation and the accountability of the police and other security actors. The presidential election came at the end of our period of research, and we are not therefore in a position to evaluate the implementation of López Obrador’s proposals. What we do offer is an account of citizen participation up to that point, including a history of the citizen councils that were part of his campaign proposals. Citizen participation itself was not a novelty. Parallel to the electoral reforms of the late twentieth c entury, other mechanisms for citizen participation w ere introduced that were intended, at least officially, to ensure the accountability of elected officials and promote cooperation with the citizenry. However, t hese mechanisms were seldom put into practice, and when they were implemented they had little effect. One example was the introduction of citizen councils. One of the first citizen councils in Mexico was the Consultative Council of Mexico City, established in the late 1920s. According to Diane Davis, “It had no legislative power, and its representatives were handpicked by the Calles-dominated PNR leadership. . . . Residents w ere selected who could vocalize the urban demands and redevelopment concerns of well-established constituencies in the capital . . . a nd from groups whose relatively high degree of mobilization or organization meant they could cause political problems if not incorporated” (quoted in Baiocchi 2017, 67–68). In the 1980s, a wave of councils was introduced to consult on local needs and problems, propose solutions, and get to know mechanisms that could be used to access resources (Hevia, Vergara-Lope, and Ávila Landa 2011, 71). In the 1990s, Mexico’s Organic Municipal Law, which regulates municipal governments, was modified to mandate the creation of citizen councils in areas such as health and planning. An important example was the municipal planning and development councils, which were designed to oversee the planning process. However, evidence suggests that only some municipal governments installed citizen councils, the councils were often peopled with cronies of the municipal president, and when the councils expressed criticism of the government, they were simply sidelined (Olvera 2009). A similar pattern holds for Michoacán, even if the politics t here w ere somewhat different. When the conservative PAN triumphed nationally for the first time, in 2000, Michoacán was the home of an opposition left-wing candidate: Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the son of Lázaro Cárdenas del Río (who, as mentioned above, had been president of Mexico). Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas broke from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 1988 to run for the presidency with the support of a left-leaning coa lit ion, which later became the Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD). Though he lost in 1988, the PRD’s candidate in 2002, Lázaro Cárdenas Batel (son of Cuauhtémoc and grandson of Lázaro), won the governorship of Michoacán, and the PRD held that office u ntil 2011, when the
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PRI regained power in an election marred by accusations of vote buying and intimidation. The legacy of Lázaro Cárdenas del Río is known as cardenismo, and it consists of well-established patronage networks—or, as Alan Knight put it, a “whirling galaxy of political groups and individuals: some at the galactic center, some at the periphery; some held by a firm gravitational pull, some tenuously attached and liable to fly off in response to rival attractions” (1994, 81). This is relevant b ecause it was cardenistas from Chinicuila and Tancítaro who created the LCSCs that we discuss below. Both the son and grandson of Lázaro Cárdenas del Río continued this legacy as governors of Michoacán, for instance, by promoting the organization of Michoacán migrants in the United States. After the Cárdenas Batel government, the PRD promoted varieties of citizen participation, including in the creation of the State Development Plan (Ramírez Casillas 2008, 26), and there was an indication of some support for municipal citizen councils. However, evidence again suggests that the councils were ineffective and subject to political manipulation. For example, one of the authors has followed the case of a municipal citizen council for environmental protection that was established in 2011 but sidelined by the municipal government when it became too critical of policy. This was true a fortiori of citizen participation in the domain of security. A new public security law in 1994 mandated the formation of national and state security councils as well as community participation. However, the law gave few specifics, and evidence of effective participation in the years that followed is scarce, even once security became one of the most important political issues of our time. In 2007, Michoacán saw the first shots in what some have called the war on drugs, leading to the violence outlined in chapter 1. It was in this context that a new public security law was passed in 2009, which stipulated the creation of municipal and intermunicipal security councils. It is possible that the security councils led to greater cooperation between security agencies, but there is no evidence that they incorporated citizens effectively, much less that they generated sufficient trust to enable effective cooperation. The Mexican government’s National Survey of Victimization and Perception of Public Security (hereafter abbreviated to Perception of Public Security) began in 2011, four years a fter the start of the war on drugs, but it is notable that its initial findings reflected the long-standing pattern of low levels of trust in police, especially at local and state levels, evidenced in country-level surveys such as the World Values Survey (Instituto Nacional de Geografía y Estadística 2011–2018). Notably, trust in municipal police in Michoacán was only 31.4 percent in 2012 (Table 2.1). As in other contexts, there is clear evidence that the low rates of trust affected, first and foremost, citizens’ willingness to cooperate with the authorities. Also in 2012, the Perception of Public Security survey data show that only 12.8 percent of crimes were reported (Instituto Nacional de Geografía y Estadística 2011–2018).
table 2.1 trust in security and justice institutions (%) Michoacán 2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
Navy
88.4
81.4
86.5
86.1
86.8
92.5
89.4
90.6
Army
84.8
79.6
81.9
78.9
79.5
89.9
87.5
86.3
Federal police
47.4
51.2
47.9
56.8
51.6
66.8
64.3
59.6
Judges
39.7
39.0
42.9
44.0
45.3
60.1
53.7
51.8
State police
34.8
38.3
36.1
36.5
38.2
59.0
52.6
50.1
Detectives (Policía Ministerial)
32.6
33.5
35.9
39.4
42.3
52.6
51.7
48.1
Prosecutors
36.1
33.5
37.3
39.2
44.8
56.6
54.0
50.1
Municipal police
33.9
31.4
35.2
32.1
35.5
56.1
53.6
47.4
Traffic police
26.8
28.5
35.0
28.0
30.9
47.8
46.2
40.2
Mexico 2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
Navy
78.9
81.4
83.1
84.4
81.6
87.0
88.0
88.2
Army
76.1
79.6
80.1
80.7
77.6
84.9
84.8
84.2
Federal police
51.2
51.2
55.0
57.7
56.2
65.1
66.5
66.4
Judges
38.4
39.0
45.3
47.4
46.2
53.7
55.1
55.1
State police
39.6
38.3
43.1
44.1
42.5
55.5
56.4
54.3
Detectives (Policía Ministerial)
34.5
33.5
39.2
42.5
42.4
50.1
52.9
53.0
Prosecutors
33.7
33.5
40.1
41.9
41.5
49.9
53.4
53.1
Municipal police
33.4
31.4
36.5
37.5
36.0
50.2
51.2
48.2
Traffic police
29.4
28.5
33.4
33.5
31.3
43.6
43.1
42.0
Source: Produced by project staff members Gabriel Corona and Dafne Viramontes with data from the perception of public security survey (Instituto Nacional de Geografía y Estadística 2011–2018).
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The Crisis of Trust in State Security Provision: Creation of LCSCs Scholars have argued that trust can remain low for decades without reaching crisis point (Asif et al. 2014). Moreover, the crisis of 2012–2013 in Michoacán, when hundreds of citizens armed themselves to fight criminals across several regions of the state, is not easily explained by, or even clearly reflected in, the Perception of Public Security survey data. The crisis is evident less in survey data than in the extremity of the actions taken in response to crime. The autodefensa movement was mainly aimed at defeating a criminal organization that, in a bid to highlight its charitable activities, called itself the Knights Templar. But the autodefensas’ decision to take up arms stemmed from the realization that local and state police, and possibly also the federal police and army, were in cahoots with the criminals. A pastoral letter by a Catholic bishop in 2013 (discussed at length in chapter 5) was effectively a vote of no confidence in the authorities and served to give further legitimacy to the autodefensa groups. As noted in chapter 1, the federal government responded to the crisis in 2014 by assuming responsibility for security in the state, putting in place a special commissioner, Alfredo Castillo. He began by collaborating with some autodefensa leaders in their pursuit of Knights Templar bosses, which led to the arrest or killing of several prominent criminals. With regard to our focus in this chapter, it is significant that this kind of cooperation had been almost unheard of in Mexico and owed something to Castillo’s prowess in overcoming the distrust with which autodefensa leaders viewed the government at that point. As well as attempting to incorporate autodefensa group members into the official police and outlaw the groups that were not incorporated, the federal and state governments sought to centralize policing in the state, justifying this in terms of effectiveness in crime prevention and arguing that it was harder for criminals to co-opt state-level police commanders than autonomous local ones. One strategy was to create a unified statewide police force, the Michoacán Police, which effectively took over control of the municipal police forces. Of the 113 municipal presidents in Michoacán, 108 agreed to this centralization and signed the Unified Police Command collaboration agreement in 2016, at the start of their three-year term in office. Yet as the opening vignettes indicate, the precise outcomes differed from one municipality to another, and though municipalities like Chinicuila and Tancítaro signed the collaboration agreement, they insisted on overseeing police recruitment and having chiefs of police and officers be local residents. In addition to centralizing policing, the state government sought to enhance cooperation between civilians and government officials in a bid to solve the crisis of trust in institutions. These initiatives took the form of what we term
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LCSCs, but we identify three variations on the theme. The first variety of LCSC promoted a fter 2014 was the municipal and intermunicipal security councils, though most of t hese had very few if any nongovernment members. A notable exception was our case of Tancítaro, where—as we show in this chapter—t he municipal government decided to open up the municipal security council to representatives of autodefensa and other groups. The second variety of LCSC was the SJWG network, which state and federal governments supported from 2014 and is exemplified in our case of Zamora. Together with t hese two varieties of government-sponsored LCSCs, we identified a third variety: LCSCs developed outside of the official framework. One of the first was the system of councils that was created in 2012 in Cherán, a municipality with an indigenous population, which restructured the local system of government around a great council, neighborhood councils, and operational councils, taking security as part of its remit (Román 2014 and 2017). Another such LCSC was the Tepalcatepec Council, created in 2014 to manage the autodefensa groups of that municipality, which has been described elsewhere by a member of the project team (Guerra 2018). Our own third case, that of Chinicuila, was a citizen council that was founded outside the legal framework in 2002—t hough it had municipal government support—and that came to manage the autodefensas in that region in 2014. Each of our three cases, then, is an example of one of the three varieties of LCSCs. The Tancítaro case involves an official municipal security council, albeit one with extended membership; the Zamora case is of an SJWG, which state and federal governments supported; and the Chinicuila LCSC developed outside of the official framework, though it was supported by the municipal government.
Effects of Centralized Policing and LCSCs as Reflected in Survey Data, 2015–2018 Before turning to our ethnographic data, we ask what can be gleaned from the Perception of Public Security survey data about the effect on trust of police centralization and the introduction of LCSCs from 2015 onward (Table 2.1). For 2015–2017, the survey indicates that trust in municipal and state police, as well as federal police, increased significantly in Michoacán. It is revealing that perceptions of public security also improved in 2016, bucking the national trend (Figure 2.1). Our interpretation can be only tentative because as our research was conducted in 2017–2018, we did not set out to explain the increase in confidence in the previous period. Furthermore, it is evident that this increase in trust was not unique to Michoacán and thus could have been linked to national changes, including the radical reform of the justice system implemented in 2016. That said, the increase in trust in Michoacán exceeded the national aggregate increase, and it would seem reasonable to hypothesize that this was related both to the arrest and killing of Knights Templar criminal
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Percent
44.0 33.0 22.0 11.0 0.0
2011
2012
2013
2014 Michoacán
2015
2016
2017
2018
Mexico
Figure 2.1. Perceptions of public security in Michoacán and Mexico, 2011–2018. Graph by Gabriel Corona and Dafne Viramontes with data from the Perception of Public Security survey (Instituto Nacional de Geografía y Estadística 2011–2018).
bosses in 2014 and to the police reforms during the period, including the creation of the Michoacán Police in 2015 and the ceding of control of the municipal police to the Michoacán Police in 2016, which was widely advertised by the state government. It is unclear whether the increase in trust owes anything to the LCSCs introduced during the period, although it is possible that the SJWGs—which were also extensively advertised—were interpreted as a sign of greater openness by state institutions. Just as notable is the fact that the increase in trust in local and state police observable beginning in 2015 tails off after 2017, when we began our research. It thus appears that the recovery of trust and cooperation after the crisis of 2012– 2013 was not sustained. This is also observable in the national aggregate data, but the decrease in 2017 and 2018 is slightly less evident nationally. We did not conduct surveys of our own since our approach was ethnographic, but it seems likely that the decrease in trust correlates to the decline in public security perceptions in 2017 and 2018 (Figure 2.1). During the same years, homicide rates increased dramatically across the state, even compared with 2014—t he year of the federal intervention. The spike in violence, which shows no sign of easing at the time of writing in November 2019, appeared to be related to territorial disputes between criminal groups, sparked a fter the arrest or killing of Knights Templar leaders. Furthermore, distrust of the Michoacán Police became apparent in social media and was made public in the 2018 electoral campaigns at the end of our fieldwork, when several candidates for mayor across the state promised to cancel the Unified Police Command collaboration agreement in response to accusations of extortion and abuse of power by the state police. In addition, we show that the SJWGs began to lose their shine as their members became frustrated with the lack of responsiveness from government, while they were criticized by other local organ izations for being elitist.
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In the rest of the chapter, we focus on showing the headway made by and limits of the SJWGs in generating and sustaining trust, by contrasting the case of the Zamora SJWG with our other two cases: the Tancítaro Municipal Security Council, which included nongovernment members, and the Popular Council of Chinicuila, which developed outside of the official and centralized framework. In each case, we trace ethnographically the relations of trust-linked cooperation that developed around them.
Comparing LCSCs Ethnographically to Gauge the Sustainability of Cooperation a fter a Crisis in Trust Luhmann’s attention to the reproduction of trust is reflected in our choice of methodology, which we consider a contribution to studies of trust in policing as well as of citizen participation more generally. Unlike other scholars who have used focus groups (Agudo 2014), surveys (Schedler 2015; Tankebe 2010), or other statistical approaches (Zizumbo-Colunga 2010) to address similar issues, our ethnographic approach consists of tracking forms of cooperation in and around LCSCs, including in their interactions with security institutions. Our goal was to observe processes p eople used to try to restore the minimal trust required to cooperate with institutions in particular and experiment with modes of cooperation that generate trust in times of crisis. To achieve this goal, we attended the regular LCSC sessions in 2017 and 2018 and carried out semistructured interviews with people involved in LCSCs (including government officials), as well as discussing the councils with a range of other local residents. In addition, during around nine months’ residence in each locality, we witnessed numerous interactions (cooperative or otherwise) involving the respective policing bodies, from autodefensas to municipal and state police and the army. Among other things, we observed whether and how these bodies were managed by the LCSCs. This ethnographic analysis allowed us to understand and contextualize the dynamics of the crisis to which the LCSCs responded, as well as to comprehend the processes by which LCSCs operated in each case. We w ere also able to consider the role of government and other external actors, the political ideologies that w ere dominant in each locality, and the political economy of each context. We believe that our ethnographic approach has the advantage of illuminating t hese contexts in detail, by contrasting divergent ways of conceiving of and addressing issues of insecurity. In particular, it enabled us to detect subtle signs of trust in cooperation and to trace processes that unfolded over months, including through the years leading up to our fieldwork. As outlined in chapter 1 and reflected in our opening vignettes, our approach is also comparative, which is innovative in that ethnographers, sensitive as they are to the density of context, are often reluctant to engage in a detailed comparison of their contexts. To explain how we conceived of our compari-
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son, and to justify our selection of three localities within a single Mexican state, we use the language of “variables” in this chapter, even though we are aware that ethnographers are reluctant to use terms that they associate with quantitative analysis. Comparing the processes related to LCSCs in three localities necessarily requires considering what is similar and different about the pro cesses and how this affects their outcomes, though it also led us to consider what is similar and different about the contexts. Th ese are all variables, then, and we were interested in investigating the relations among them. Our primary goal was to grasp how differences in the form and functioning of the three LCSCs affected the outcome of trust-entailing cooperation processes. For example, did the more official LCSCs generate more or less trust and cooperation than the less official ones? Answering this and other questions was easier b ecause our locales w ere situated within the same region, the state of Michoacán. This gave us more confidence that it was the different LCSC processes that explained the different outcomes, rather than other variables such as state government policy: all three locales were under the same state government. The three cases also broadly shared the long history of illicit economies, complicit governance, and citizen participation that we outlined in the previous section. Since the contexts w ere comparable in at least those respects, we felt entitled to focus our attention primarily on the differences between the LCSCs in explaining the differences in process and outcomes and in proposing some general conclusions on the basis of the comparison. That said, we make clear that even though the three contexts were embedded in a shared history, they differed from each other in certain respects—which means that our conclusions about what LCSC processes are effective in restoring trust are necessarily tentative, and we acknowledge that t here are other ways of explaining the differences in outcome. For example, the SJWG that we studied was situated in one of the state’s largest cities, Zamora. Although we focus on the SJWG’s form and functioning to explain why it was less effective than the other LCSCs, we recognize that the challenges of restoring trust in an urban context are different from t hose in rural contexts such as t hose of the other cases. It may also be that the Tancítaro Municipal Security Council and Popular Council of Chinicuila succeeded because, unlike the Zamora SJWG, they took place in contexts where there had been a previous autodefensa uprising. Indeed, although all three locales were subject to the same state government, we observe in the next section that the political context varied somewhat across the contexts, and t hese differences w ere also no doubt significant in affecting the LCSC processes. As we recognize in our conclusion, adding further cases would have given more weight to our arguments or allowed us to make them more nuanced. For example, adding a second city would have made it easier to appreciate the challenges of cooperative action in urban contexts.
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In sum, we are aware of the limits of our comparative ethnographic approach, but we nonetheless believe that it affords valuable insights into the respective LCSCs’ workings, as well as making possible some sensitive analysis of variables affecting trust and cooperative processes. We suggest that our findings are of relevance to other national and global contexts, especially those that share characteristics such as a crisis of trust in state institutions.
The Three Cases Case 1: SJWG, Zamora (Agribusiness Market and Service City) Our first case was located in the provincial city of Zamora, which has a population of 140,000 and has both a regional agricultural market and an important service economy. Zamora was one of the first municipalities in the country where the conservative, pro-business PAN won municipal elections and local councils in the 1980s. Zamora is also the seat of regional branches of the state and federal governments, as well as the location of community colleges and universities and the headquarters of professional associations, chambers of commerce, and the Catholic diocese. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a single extended family linked to the Sinaloa Cartel dominated criminal business in Zamora and the surrounding region. This family collaborated with businesspeople who laundered the proceeds of criminal enterprises, as well as with municipal, state, and federal officials (who provided the family with classified information and protection) and lawyers (who ensured them impunity in the judicial system). New actors challenged this family’s hold in the mid-2000s through an alliance with the Gulf Cartel and its armed group, Los Zetas, but subsequently broke with them and regrouped, calling themselves La Familia Michoacana and later the Knights Templar. By 2013, the Knights Templar largely controlled public security in the municipal and state governments, thereby consolidating a broad network of protection for their criminal activities. These activities included not only drug trafficking and retail but also the extortion of every kind of business: they even attempted to take control of a local chamber of commerce. Meanwhile, the autodefensa movement managed to advance to Zamora, yet— as in most other cities of Michoacán—it failed to mobilize groups of armed citizens there. After the 2014 federal intervention, Castillo, the special commissioner, placed a woman he trusted in the state prosecutor’s office and controlled who became local chiefs of police, offices that had previously been filled by municipal presidents. The municipal president who took office in 2016 signed the Unified Police Command collaboration agreement, which meant that the municipal police now operated under the command of state-level police commanders. Several notorious criminals w ere arrested, and others were killed.
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Figure 2.2. Meeting of Zamora’s SJWG, 2017. Photo by Trevor Stack.
The Knights Templar fractured in the process, reducing the ability of the remaining factions to conduct extortion on the same scale. In 2015, an SJWG was set up in Zamora, the fifth in the state (Figure 2.2). The SJWGs were modeled on the one established by the federal Interior Ministry in the border city of Ciudad Juárez in 2010 after governance had collapsed in the city. A national CSO, México SOS, started promoting the model nationally in 2011 and, together with chamber of commerce leaders, established the first SJWG in Morelia, Michoacán’s capital, in 2014. The following year, chamber leaders in Zamora decided to accept the proposal to form a SJWG in Zamora, concerned as they were about the prevalence of kidnapping, extortion, and murder. In addition, as one founder explained, they had the disconcerting feeling that they no longer knew who to trust in government, after evidence of complicity between criminals and government emerged, and they realized that they would therefore need to reforge relationships with officials. They invited directors of professional and business associations, representatives of higher education institutions, and Catholic clergy to join the SJWG. It began to hold sessions e very two or three months, which w ere attended by all the relevant security officials in the region—ranging from the state prosecutor and public security minister to army commanders and representatives of other federal institutions. According to its statutes, the SJWG was intended to rebuild “trust between citizens and authorities” (Mesas de Seguridad y Justicia 2015, 7), meaning state and municipal officials, after the crisis of trust and the federal intervention of 2014.
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The citizens who founded the LCSC in Zamora w ere drawn from the m iddle and upper-middle classes. Thus, they had financial, educational, political, and cultural resources and made up a kind of local establishment (Stack 2018). Moreover, they created and sustained the LCSC in collaboration with national and regional CSOs of considerable weight and capacity, and the LCSC was part of a nationwide network that had some influence over government at different levels. Nevertheless, despite the local citizens’ privileged status, in practice t hese actors w ere generally subordinate to the state officials in the LCSC. Those officials had been privileged by the centralization of policing since 2014, which effectively put security in the hands of the public security minister and the state prosecutor—who attended the meetings and tended to dominate the proceedings. The dates and agendas for the SJWG meetings were generally negotiated between the coordinator, who was a Zamoran businessman; his closest associates in the SJWG; and state government officials, especially t hose from the public security ministry. The meetings w ere usually held in the ballroom of a h otel owned by the coordinator’s family and were open only to SJWG members and occasional guests. A press conference was hosted a fter each meeting by state functionaries, but reporters did not attend the meetings. Typically, once the coordinator had opened the meeting, the public security minister or the state governor, if he was attending, would have the first word, giving an overview of the security situation in the state, usually emphasizing the government’s advances, and explaining what he hoped to achieve in the meeting. He also usually stressed that government alone could not solve the issues of insecurity in the state. Reports could also be given by other state and federal officials and sometimes by the municipal president, although municipal officials did not usually play major roles in the proceedings. There would generally be a presentation or two from citizen members or invited guests. In a 2018 meeting, for example, the director of a local addiction clinic gave a report of the clinic’s activities, and in another meeting, a member of the coordinator’s circle presented a proposal for a neighborhood police force after the public security minister had asked citizens in a previous meeting to propose strategies. We found that the citizen members valued hearing the officials’ reports and having the opportunity to ask questions and query statements and proposals. During our fieldwork period, we observed through attending SJWG meetings that the citizen members gained confidence in making proposals of their own. They explained to us in conversations that when the SJWG was founded in 2015, they had been apprehensive about sharing a space at all with state officials, as they had very low expectations of them a fter the evidence of complicity between state officials and criminals had emerged. By the time of our fieldwork in 2017–2018, however, they felt that they had had enough contact with the various officials and learned enough about the issues to make some tentative proposals
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themselves. Beyond the sessions, moreover, the coordinator’s group had been able to hold meetings with the regional prosecutor, and the coordinator explained to us that they had never before been able to meet regularly to discuss the security situation with prosecutors. Some of the members had in the meantime set up a CSO focused on transparency, including of official crime statistics, and the prosecutor eventually agreed to let them (instead of him) present crime statistics in the sessions and to meet with them in advance of the sessions to respond to any doubts they might have about the official statistics. However, the same citizen members emphasized to us the limits of cooperation, and they often expressed frustration in conversations with us, to the point of doubting w hether they should continue participating in the SJWG. Even though most of the citizen members were relatively elite, they were acutely aware that the public security minister, together with other officials, managed to dominate the sessions and skew the proceedings to meet their ends. Indeed, this was evident in the way that security was discussed largely in terms of crime statistics, as is typical of government officials, and of building the capacity of the centralized Michoacán Police, even though the same members often expressed doubts about the effectiveness of state security strategy. We have explained that the CSO members used the SJWG sessions to correct the crime statistics, but they did not generally feel confident in challenging officials’ understandings of security and their responses to it. Furthermore, citizen members told us that they took care to avoid antagonizing officials because they believed that their first priority was to keep the channels of communication open. Indeed, b ecause he was apprehensive that they might be overly critical of the officials, the coordinator tended not to invite to the sessions guests whom he considered to be activists. The members recognized that the cost of reining in their criticism was that the state government, especially the public security minister, was able to use the SJWGs to legitimize the government’s security strategy by claiming it had citizen participation, without giving citizens any real say—not even the relatively elite citizens who attended the sessions. For example, though the minister responded enthusiastically in the meeting to their proposal of creating a neighborhood police force, he made no attempt to follow through on the proposal and did not even refer to it in the following meeting. Furthermore, the members were able to establish working relations with only a few officials (notably, the regional prosecutor), and many of the officials said l ittle, if anything, even during the sessions. We found that other Zamoran organizations had their own criticisms of the SJWG. As shown in the opening vignette, t here were tensions between t hose who represented the Zamoran establishment and t hose who complained that the SJWG represented only the elite and its interests—dwelling, for example, on crimes that affected them most, such as kidnapping and extortion. This allowed
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the municipal government, which was often critical of the SJWG b ecause of its close relationship with the state government, to dismiss the SJWG as the voice of business and not of the citizens, thus undermining its legitimacy. Moreover, the exclusivity of the SJWG meant that only a handful of citizens were in a position to build even the minimally cooperative relationship with officials that the SJWG had managed to achieve with the regional prosecutor. Thus, the overall effect of the SJWG on institutional trust was doubly selective: only a few members built relationships with trust, and they built them with only a few officials. It is notable that police commanders were not among t hose few officials. Our other two cases were taken from among the few municipalities that had rejected the official model of centralized security provision. Even though the Michoacán Police had officers in both municipalities, most of t hose officers were local men and women and were, to some extent, under municipal control. The LCSCs in t hese municipalities were more representative and therefore had more legitimacy in the eyes of t hose who supported them and participated in them. Unlike the SJWG in Zamora, they were not dominated by the officials who attended the meetings, and they had some influence over police forces, including the autodefensa groups that persisted in those municipalities. Our main finding is that, in t hese two cases, t here were signs of greater trust linked to better cooperation and perceptions of security, although we also note limits to this trust as well as significant differences between the two municipalities.
Case 2: Popular Council, Chinicuila (Livestock Farming Municipality) While Zamora is the most important city in the northwest of the state, Chinicuila is a marginal municipality in the southwest, with just 5,271 inhabitants spread over 180 towns and only 1,010 (19.16 percent) in the municipal seat (Secretaría de Desarrollo Social 2013). Chinicuila is a livestock farming municipality with a high rate of migration to the United States, like many rural municipalities in the west of Mexico. It also has a history of drug cultivation that dates back decades. Unlike in Zamora, where PRI and PAN have alternated in power since the 1980s, the center-left PRD has governed in Chinicuila since 2002. Also in 2002 a group of activists founded the Popular Council of Chinicuila (PCC) with the intention that ordinary citizens, including residents of the rural communities, would participate in the planning and evaluation of municipal policy (Figure 2.3). Topics discussed in the PCC’s monthly meetings ranged from environmental issues, such as the control of hunting and fishing and the burning of vegetation for pasture, to public order issues. Although the agreements reached in the meetings w ere not legally binding, municipal officials were often summoned to attend PCC meetings, and the municipal government generally felt obligated to
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Figure 2.3. Monthly meeting of the Popular Council of Chinicuila. Photo by Irene Álvarez.
show respect for the agreements. It is significant that the PCC had no juridical basis, yet it was arguably more effective than LCSCs that did. The same criminal groups that forayed into Zamora fought over Chinicuila, where they w ere initially tolerated. However, this tolerance came to an end around 2012, a fter the Knights Templar achieved a monopoly on criminal business in the region and began using its power to extort almost anyone who received an income—including c attle ranchers, who w ere easy to intimidate since they lived in small and often isolated settlements. Unlike Zamora, Chinicuila was an important headquarters for the regional uprising of autodefensa groups, which were financed by the municipal government and groups of livestock farmers and migrants. During the armed uprising, the PCC began to manage the composition and conduct not only of the autodefensa groups but also of the Michoacán Police unit. The Chinicuila municipal president signed the Unified Police Command collaboration agreement in 2016, as did the Zamora president, but the PCC insisted on approving the selection of officers and required that they all be local people and known to the councillors. Several officers were former autodefensa members. Thus, the PCC was attentive to the risk of the autodefensa groups’ being infiltrated by organized crime, as happened elsewhere in the state, and it monitored the autodefensa group that patrolled the municipality and policed its borders. Likewise, the PCC was responsible for the autodefensas’ weapons and telecommunications equipment, and it laid down protocols for their use that it successfully negotiated with army commanders. In sum, at PCC meet-
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ings, members agreed on strategies to reduce the uncertainty associated with crime and thereby built trust based on interpersonal knowledge and territorial control. We found that its members valued the PCC because it enabled discussion of wide-ranging concerns that, after 2012–2013, included the supervision of police and autodefensa groups, thus enhancing local trust in t hese bodies. Many other residents attributed to the PCC a role in restoring stability to the municipality after the uprising and the expulsion of the criminal groups. However, we also observed that while the PCC repeatedly discussed the threat of the Knights Templar returning to the municipality, members had less to say about ongoing small-scale drug production and trafficking, which was effectively tolerated despite being a crime. Generally, we found that the PCC was concerned less with the rule of law than with upholding local moral codes, which also made it relatively accepting of gender violence. Critics also noted that the PCC, although ostensibly autonomous of municipal government, was in practice dominated by members of the PRD, the party that had controlled the municipal government since 2002. In the opening vignette, the municipal president declared that “The council represents the people and I respect that,” knowing that most councillors had voted for him. Both councillors and party activists agreed that if the PRD did not win the local elections, the PCC would lose influence over the municipal government. As a result, the government would no longer take the PCC’s agreements into account. We return to this point in the chapter’s conclusion.
Case 3: Municipal Security Council, Tancítaro (Agribusiness Producer Municipality) ntil 1997, Tancítaro was a marginal municipality like Chinicuila. However, U since the North American F ree Trade Agreement took effect in 1994, it has under gone a process of transformation because of the Hass avocado, which is cultivated in Tancítaro mainly for exportation to the United States. With 29,000 inhabitants spread over eighty small towns and villages, the municipality has five times more residents than Chinicuila but six times fewer than Zamora. Reflecting its larger population, as well as its greater socioeconomic diversity, Tancítaro has more political parties than Chinicuila, and the PRI, PAN, and PRD have alternated in controlling the municipal government since 1989. Tancítaro is located two hours from Uruapan, the second most important city in Michoacán and where the regional prosecutor’s office and Michoacán Police were based. Tancítaro belongs to the Catholic Diocese of Zamora, which is a three-hour journey by car. Thus, Tancitaro is less marginal than Chinicuila but less central than Zamora in political, economic, and religious terms. From the mid-2000s, earnings from avocado exports became spoils for the same criminal organizations that at the time w ere fighting for control of Zamora
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and Chinicuila. These organizations engaged in direct confrontations with municipal officials, which intensified in the years up to 2009—when numerous officials were forced to resign. Also in that year, the state government established a Citizens’ Council to replace the elected government whose officials had resigned, but even though the name changed, t here were barely any changes in the way of governing. By 2012 the direct confrontations had ceased, and a new government was elected (this one led by the PAN). Although municipal officials knew that they w ere being watched, the city council functioned normally, but the kidnapping, murder, and blackmailing of local people continued. By this time, avocado exports were booming b ecause the export market had been opened to all U.S. states. This resulted in an increase in blackmail and the collection of monthly dues from avocado growers, directly and through the avocado growers’ management body, to the extent that production was effectively controlled by the Knights Templar. As in the case of Chinicuila, the uprising of autodefensa groups in Tancítaro was prompted by the Knights Templars’ control over the local economy. Two autodefensa groups were formed: one led by avocado growers in the northeastern zone of the municipality, linked to the PAN; and the other in the south of the municipality, headed by founders of the local PRD. Although both groups agreed that security entailed freeing the territory from criminal organizations, t here was little consensus about the practicalities of security provision. In practice, the autodefensa groups competed with each other for control of the territory, as well as with the two official police forces in the municipality. Even though the Tancítaro municipal government did not sign the Unified Police Command collaboration agreement in 2016, the Michoacán Police had a unit in the municipality, mostly made up (as was the case in Chinicuila) of local officers. The equivalent of a municipal police force was the Tancítaro Public Security Force (TPSF), which was created a fter the uprising and funded jointly by the avocado growers’ management board and the municipal government. Tancitaro thus had four policing groups compared to Chinicuila’s two, and this larger number complicated the processes of coordination and cooperation in providing security. The municipal government elected in 2016 decided to open the official Municipal Security Council (MSC) to include not only municipal councillors and the chiefs of the two official police forces, the Michoacán Police and the TPSF municipal force, but also leaders of the two autodefensa groups. Unlike the PCC, then, the MSC had a juridical basis in the citizen participation legislation that we outlined, even if the municipal government had expanded its membership beyond the legally mandated minimum. Furthermore, the municipal government decided to include representatives of a second council, the Citizens’ Council of Good Coexistence (CCGC) set up by the Jesuit-led SIAC at the invitation of and with funding from the municipal government, which consisted of representa-
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tives of the eighty villages of the municipality. Each month, the expanded MSC discussed security, which was understood in a way that included not only the composition and conduct of both police and autodefensa groups, but also a range of issues such as illegal deforestation to make way for avocado orchards and planning raids to regulate night-time sales of alcohol. Although the agreements reached at the meetings were not strictly binding, they were generally heeded by the municipal government—especially by the municipal secretary, who called and chaired the meetings and met with its members outside the sessions. Similar to the situation in Chinicuila, the councillors we interviewed valued the MSC’s role in supervising police forces, considering it a contribution to restoring trust in local institutions. Their opinion was shared by many of the local people with whom we discussed the MSC. However, t here was less consensus about the role of the CCGC, whose commissioners made up much of the active membership of the MSC. Some MSC members even objected to their municipal government’s partnering with the Jesuit-led SIAC and providing funding for the CCGC. Among t hese critics were the leaders of the grower-f unded autodefensa group, who had initially challenged the authority of the MSC and— after they eventually agreed to participate in the meetings—were often critical of its functioning, including the presence of the SIAC advisers in the MSC meetings. For instance, the opening vignette for this case shows the tensions between the two groups of autodefensas regarding the work of the SIAC. While one group disagreed with its work and even its presence in the municipality, sometimes arguing that the organization should not be trusted b ecause its members w ere outsiders, the other group not only participated in workshops convened by the SIAC but also trusted it enough to allow SIAC advisers to participate in the MSC sessions. As a result, the MSC had little effect in supervising the grower-funded autodefensa group and struggled similarly in its efforts to manage the Michoacán Police unit, whose commander was distrusted by several MSC members. The MSC was more successful in monitoring the TPSF, and its commander recognized in 2019 that the MSC had been instrumental in generating trust in the police force under his charge. Incoming municipal presidents typically dissolved the official citizens’ councils established by their predecessors and, when they did install a new council, tended to appoint new members of their choice. As of our last visit in June 2019, the municipal president who was elected in 2018 had not convened the MSC, nor had she renewed funding for the CCGC—so the former was not meeting, and the latter hardly operated. Significantly, the new municipal president represented the PAN and was close to the grower-funded autodefensa group, which appeared to be favored by the new government. Therefore, it would seem that the relations of cooperation and trust generated around the MSC were contingent on electoral outcomes.
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Analysis: Potential and Limits of Responses to Crises of Trust in State Security Provision We believe that our approach and findings contribute to global debates on the role of trust in security provision, even though we are mindful of the difficulties of generalizing on the basis of our findings. With regard to our approach, we feel that our comparative ethnography of crises and responses across three locales in the same state constitutes a valuable contribution, as ethnography is an effective way of tracking processes of cooperation and trust over time, and comparing locales within the same region makes it easier to identify salient variables. However, we have been at pains to spell out the contextual conditions of the LCSCs that we describe in the chapter, and therefore the reader should not be tempted to apply our findings to other global contexts as if the findings could be abstracted without reference to the context. If we phrase our conclusions in general terms, then, the conclusions are to be understood not as recipes for building trust in police but instead as hypotheses for focusing research elsewhere, or as thinking points for reflection in policy debates. In this vein, we propose for global research and policy debates that, on the basis of our comparative ethnography in Michoacán, LCSCs may be effective in restoring trust after this enters into crisis, but only to the extent that the following conditions are met: 1. Government officials are responsive to the nongovernment council members. This was the case for the Chinicuila and Tancítaro councils, but not for Zamora’s SJWG. In the case of Tancítaro, the municipal president had taken the initiative of opening up the membership of the MSC, precisely with a view to establishing a dialogue with and among the respective security providers, and had also invested in the CCGC, which provided representatives from across the municipality. It is thus not surprising that the municipal officials were generally responsive to the outcome of MSC deliberations, even if t hese were not strictly binding despite the MSC’s being a legally mandated body. In the case of Chinicuila, the municipal officials were similarly respectful of PCC decisions, even though the PCC was at least notionally independent of the municipal government and did not have an official standing. By contrast, although the Zamora SJWG was set up by business chamber leaders acting in partnership with a national CSO, its members complained about being sidelined by the Michoacán state officials who dominated the proceedings—which meant, among other t hings, that security was understood in terms of official crime statistics. 2. LCSCs are responsive to, and ideally representative of, the broader population. This not only strengthens their legitimacy in dealing with officials but also ensures that the trust they create extends beyond the council members. Again, Zamora’s SJWG is the counterexample. Its leaders resisted opening up member-
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ship of the SJWG, much less holding elections, arguing that they did not want to risk including members who might alienate the government officials by being too critical and thus upsetting the interpersonal relations of trust that they had built with certain state officials. As a result, not only were the relations of trust limited to the SJWG members, but also other Zamora organizations challenged the SJWG for being elitist, undermining its legitimacy and ability to influence the state. 3. LCSCs are able to effectively monitor the composition and conduct of police. This was the case in Chinicuila and, to some extent, in Tancítaro, where the councils played some role in managing official police and the autodefensa groups—although, as we saw in Tancítaro, one of the autodefensa groups resisted being managed. By contrast, Zamora’s SJWG built a relationship with the local prosecutor and arguably improved government reporting of crime statistics, but it had little, if any, influence on the state police force. This was the case even though the state’s public security minister, who was ultimately responsible for the Michoacán Police, participated in every meeting. Even in the cases of Chinicuila and Tancítaro, where the LCSCs managed to generate trust, we observed a number of significant limitations: 1. Even when government officials w ere responsive to the councils, t here was no guarantee that their successors would act similarly—which makes the councils vulnerable to electoral outcomes. We noted that the incoming municipal president of Tancítaro in 2018 neither convened the MSC nor endorsed the CCGC. In Zamora, the SJWG model was favored by the current state government, but if a candidate from a different party is successful in the 2020 elections, state officials may lose interest in it. It is significant that the PCC has existed since 2002, but the municipal presidents have all been members of the same party. If another party were to take power, that might make them less responsive. 2. LCSCs may be hampered by divisions within the community, as well as between the institutions responsible for security. As scholars of postconflict settings know, the more difference and distrust t here is, the harder it becomes for groups (in our case, the LCSCs) to generate cooperation and build trust around it. In this respect, more populated localities with more diversified economies are likely to present greater challenges. Only in Chinicuila, with a population of around five thousand living mainly off cattle ranching, and where the same political party has been in power since 2002, was it possible to establish and sustain a degree of consensus around the LCSC. Even t here, the positive perception of the LCSC was not shared equally by w omen and members of opposition political parties. In the more populous and export-oriented context of Tancítaro, one of the factors that limited trust and cooperation was the division between the autodefensa groups, which was linked to economic standing and political ideology and affected the groups’ collaboration with the LCSC and even the reaching of any consensus over understandings of security. This was reflected
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a fter the local elections were won by the conservative PAN, which did not allow for the continuity of the LCSC’s work. While the autodefensa group akin to the PAN felt that it had regained control of the local government a fter the 2018 election, the other group lost its political influence within the local government. There was also a greater number of state and civil society actors in that context, including the SIAC, and this also reflected the electoral competition among the PRI, PAN, and PRD. In the case of Zamora, not only did the SJWG represent at best only the local establishment, which had few ties with the laboring classes most affected by criminal violence, but it also struggled to navigate the difficult relations between the state security institutions in the city, which mistrusted each other. 3. Although it is important that LCSCs are able to determine their own understanding of security in ways that are responsive to the local population, it is important to recognize that this local understanding, as well as strategies for achieving it, may be at odds with legal standards—which may further complicate the LCSC’s relationship with state security providers. In the case of Chinicuila, the PCC defined security primarily not as the absence of crime, understood with reference to criminal law, but ultimately as respect for the reciprocal relationships that it considered fosters community. This way of perceiving security can be linked to the municipality’s historical marginalization within the state, the illicit economies that had long supplemented cattle ranching, and the recent confidence placed in autodefensa groups in the face of state complicity in orga nized crime. Not only did this lead the PCC to tolerate local drug production and give little weight to domestic violence, but it also meant that the PCC condoned strategies such as torture and abduction when committed by local autodefensa groups. Furthermore, LCSCs that are attuned to local contexts and that prioritize building interpersonal trust among residents may end up stigmatizing outsiders, which was a tendency that we observed in Tancítaro and Chinicuila.
Conclusion: The Limits and Reach of our Comparative Analysis To further substantiate our postulates and to isolate further variables, we would need to research additional comparable cases and ethnographically explore the processes of cooperation in each one. For example, it would be helpful to examine the SJWGs established in settlements that are smaller than Zamora to determine w hether the limit was the SJWG format or the urban characteristics of Zamora. Similarly, it would be interesting to look at the case of Los Reyes, the one city where t here was a significant autodefensa movement, to consider the salience of the autodefensa rebellion in opening spaces for trust-enabling cooperation. Furthermore, to explore the possibility that the centralization of policing was a major limitation in Zamora, it would be beneficial to examine the situation in Morelia—where, unlike in other urban municipalities, the munici-
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pal president in 2016 refused to sign the Unified Police Command collaboration agreement. In addition, although we have emphasized the value of ethnography in tracing cooperation processes, we accept that this approach could usefully be supplemented by survey data disaggregated by municipality. Despite these limits, we believe that our findings are relevant to global debates on the role of trust in security provision, although we acknowledge that they may be most relevant to other contexts with historically low rates of institutional trust. For example, Muhammad Asif and colleagues contrasted the context of Pakistan, which they studied, with that of developed countries: eople [in Pakistan] often fear police and are unwilling to contact them P because they do not expect fair and transparent treatment either in the first instance or during any subsequent l egal process . . . , or believe, justifiably, that they w ill be required to pay for such an experience. All of this suggests that people feel alienated from and distrust the police; that the police are a hindrance to—rather than a promoter of—just process and the rule of law; and that from the perspective of the public, not only are the police primarily a tool in the hands of the elites, they are also corrupt in their practices. Citizens seem to have a very different relationship with a police service that has not been configured to serve them in any meaningful way, in marked contrast with the situation in developed societies, where the idea that a key part of the police role is helping citizens is commonly accepted (albeit, of course, that police have many other roles as well, and that some citizens do not have this type of relationship with police). (2014, 1070)
Like Asif and colleagues, we believe that our conclusions will be of most interest to scholars of developing countries such as Pakistan, especially where trust in police has entered into crisis. Furthermore, we hope that our approach w ill inspire researchers to complement their statistical approaches with ethnographic studies of trust-building initiatives across t hose contexts, especially of initiatives comparable to what we term LCSCs. More broadly, our study is relevant to the extensive literature on citizen participation in policing. We lack the space to develop the implications, but one example is Yanilda González’s (2016) comparison of police-citizen forums in Buenos Aires, Sao Paolo, and Colombia. Though the contexts are very different from those of Zamora, Tancítaro, and Chinicuila, and though her comparison is cross- national and based largely on interviews, González had a similar idea of comparing three variations on an institutional form with close attention to context. She classifies her three cases as examples of thin (Colombia), auxiliary (Sao Paolo), and adversarial (Buenos Aires) participation in state security provision: Participatory security, for instance, may emerge as a thin type of institution, where participation is restricted, the degree of authority granted to societal
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I r e n e Á lva r e z , D e n i s s e R o m á n , a n d T r e v o r S ta c k actors is low, and few or no obligations are placed on police and state officials. This type of institution may be best suited to rebuilding the linkage between citizens and police (and more broadly, the state), by reinforcing the territorial presence of the state and by increasing trust in the institution (Skogan 2006, 30). A second type of participatory security institution is that which provides for a greater role for societal actors, through more inclusive participation and more formal responsibilities for citizens. While this type of institution also serves to build trust in police, it functions as a formal structure for channeling citizen information and demands in a more systematic way than the thin type of participation. I classify this model as auxiliary, because it formalizes a space for citizens to help police identify the most pressing local problems, thereby helping police to better direct the deployment of scarce resources. The third type of participatory security institution studied here, in addition to encouraging closer ties between citizens and police and defining formal responsibilities and authority for societal actors, also imposes formal obligations on police institutions. I characterize this form as adversarial because it places society in a position to conduct oversight of police activity at the community level through formal accountability mechanisms. (2016, 135)
In some respects the Tancítaro and Chinicuila LCSCs fall into González’s “adversarial” category, at least to the extent that, in contrast to Zamora, t hose LCSCs had some control over local police and autodefensas, rather than simply playing an “auxiliary” role. It is notable, though, that González emphasizes throughout the formalization of responsibilities and obligations, while we observed that even the Tancítaro and Chinicuila LCSCs w ere sustained by political w ill rather than formal obligations, leaving them vulnerable to electoral outcomes. Yet González has recognized elsewhere (2019) the complex contingency of participation in her cases, too, and t here may be few cases worldwide in which citizen participation, particularly of the adversarial variety, has been adequately institutionalized.
notes 1. An earlier version of this chapter was written in Spanish and used the term “confianza,” which can be translated as e ither “trust” or “confidence.” We have opted to use the term “trust” throughout this chapter in part because we draw heavily on Niklas Luhmann (1979), and neither in the German original nor in the English translation is a semantic distinction drawn. However, we do not rule out revisiting the possibility of making a conceptual distinction between the terms “trust” and “confidence” in the f uture, as authors in management studies and other fields have done (see, for example, Earle 2009).
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Asif, Muhammad, Ben Bradford, Jonathan Jackson, and Muhammad Zakria Zakar. 2014. “Corruption and Police Legitimacy in Lahore, Pakistan.” British Journal of Criminology 54 (6): 1067–1088. Baiocchi, Gianpaolo. 2017. “A Century of Councils.” In Beyond Civil Society: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America, edited by Sonia E. Alvarez, Jeffrey W. Rubin, Millie Thayer, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, and Agustin Lao-Montes, 27–44. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dasgupta, Partha. 1990. “Trust as a Commodity.” In Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, edited by Diego Gambetta, 49–72. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Earle, Timothy C. 2009. “Trust, Confidence, and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.” Risk Analysis 29 (6): 785–792. Flores Pérez, Carlos Antonio. 2009. El Estado en crisis: Crimen organizado y política, desafíos para la consolidación democrática. Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social. Gambetta, Diego. 1990. “Mafia: The Price of Distrust.” In Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, edited by Diego Gambetta, 158–175. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Ginzberg, Eitan. 1999. Lázaro Cárdenas: Gobernador de Michoacán (1928–1932). Zamora, Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán. Gledhill, John. 2013. “Límites de la autonomía y autodefensa indígena: Experiencias mexicanas.” Oxímora 2 (Jan–Jun 2018): 1–21. González, Yanilda. 2016. “Varieties of Participatory Security: Assessing Community Participation in Policing in Latin America.” Public Administration and Development 36 (2): 132–143. ———. 2019. “Participation as a Safety Valve: Police Reform through Participatory Security in Latin America.” Latin American Politics and Society 61 (2): 68–92. Guerra, Edgar. 2018. “Organización armada: El proceso de toma de decisiones de los grupos de autodefensa tepalcatepenses.” Estudios Sociológicos 36 (106): 1–26. Hevia, Felipe, Samana Vergara-Lope, and Homero Ávila Landa. 2011. “Participación ciudadana en México: Consejos consultivos e instancias públicas de deliberación en el gobierno federal,” Perfiles Latinoamericanos 19 (38): 65–88. Hobbes, Thomas. 1994. Leviathan: With Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1688, edited by Edwin Curley. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Instituto Nacional de Geografía y Estadística. 2011–2018. “Encuesta Nacional de Victimización y Percepción sobre Seguridad Pública (ENVIPE).” Instituto Nacional de Geografía y Estadística. https://w ww.inegi.org.m x/p rogramas/envipe/. ———. 2018. Confianza del Consumidor. Instituto Nacional de Geografía y Estadística, https://w ww.inegi.org.m x/temas/confianza/. Ishiyama, John, Felipe Carlos Betancourt Higareda, Amalia Pulido, and Bernardo Almaraz. 2018. “What Are the Effects of Large-Scale Violence on Social and Institutional Trust? Using the Civil War Literature to Understand the Case of Mexico, 2006–2012.” Civil Wars 20 (1): 1–23. Kääriäinen, Juha, and Reino Sirén. 2011. “Trust in the Police, Generalized Trust and Reporting Crime.” European Journal of Criminology 8 (1): 65–81. Knight, Alan. 1994. “Cardenismo: Juggernaut or Jalopy?” Journal of Latin American Studies 26 (1): 73–107. Lewicki, Roy, Daniel McAllister, and Robert Bies. 1998. “Trust and Distrust: New Relationships and Realities.” Academy of Management Review 23 (3): 438–458. Lewis, J. David, and Andrew Weigert. 1985. “Trust as a Social Reality.” Social Forces 63 (4): 967–985. Locke, John. 1997. “An Essay on Toleration.” In John Locke, Political Essays, edited by Mark Goldie, 134–159. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luhmann, Niklas. 1979. Trust and Power. Toronto: Wiley.
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chapter 3
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Cultural Activism mobilizing art and culture to build transformative sociopolitical fields Edgar Guerra and Ariadna Sánchez
During the same Tancítaro Municipal Security Council meeting with which chapter 2 opened, the autodefensa group leader objected vociferously to the state attorney office’s decision to redraw jurisdictional boundaries, which meant that criminal cases would be prosecuted in Apatzingán rather than in Uruapan. Though Apatzingán was closer than Uruapan to Tancítaro, the leader warned the local police commander that his officers might be targeted when delivering arrestees to the attorney’s office in Apatzingán. The incident displayed the levels of mistrust discussed in the previous chapter, but it also revealed long-standing perceptions of Apatzingán across Michoacán. For decades Apatzingán had been a notorious drug-trafficking hub and renowned for the relentless violence that characterizes the industry. Apatzingán’s public space felt constricted, even in physical terms. With a population of around 140,000, the city was nearly the size of Zamora, but Apatzingán’s downtown was effectively confined to two or three blocks. Our interviewees tended to come to the restaurant of the one hotel on the city square, rather than expect us to travel to their neighborhoods. Apatzingán’s own Security and Justice Working Group met around the corner, in the only other reputable downtown h otel. We heard regular reports of vehicles with armed civilians circling the city square, and one afternoon a police patrol overtook us to address the murder of a taxi driver by the square. On a prominent corner a block away from the square, a hostess bar was open all day, with tables on the street. Beyond that, a ramshackle neighborhood had grown up on land occupied illegally on abandoned train tracks. The former train station stood out in that neighborhood (Figure 3.1). It had been beautifully restored, with immaculate white-plastered walls and a red-tiled 59
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Figure 3.1. The Station enjoys not only funding to produce glossy brochures and events but also an impressive building, created out of the disused train station. Photo by La Estación cultural center.
roof. One wing had been converted into a glass-fronted bookstore, with a display that would be the pride of the main street in the state capital. The building bore the letters FCE, for Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico’s state-f unded publisher. The bookstore and the adjacent reading room, music and dance studios, and theater were all air-conditioned—a luxury in the baking heat that gives the Tierra Caliente region its name. The Station, as it was known, was an arts project first mooted in 2014, as the Tierra Caliente region came to global attention with the autodefensa uprising. The work progressed in fits and starts for four years. Even before it was completed, its director, a local woman, was holding arts classes in the patio around the Station. Neighborhood residents w ere hostile at first, fearing that the Station presaged their long-threatened eviction. But some neighborhood c hildren began to take the classes, and most parents came to support it. One reason for the Station’s success was that it was far from the only cultural initiative in Apatzingán. We quickly found a string of collectives t here: dance troupes, music bands and tutoring, a book festival, and even an organi zation called the Cultural Revolution. Culture, we found, was a useful rubric for activists looking to shore up public life in the intimidating environment. The collectives lacked the Station’s resources, and their projects were scaled accordingly. But in a context where trust in institutions was scarce, they made common cause with the Station and expressed this in a common language of arts for peace.
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In this chapter, we compare a range of cultural collectives and institutions like the Station in Apatzingán, drawing a series of conclusions about what we term cultural activism—t hat is, recourse to discourses of art and culture with a view to transforming social environments—including how cultural activists relate to state institutions like the Station. To develop and give further nuance to our conclusions, we extend the comparison to the port city of Lázaro Cárdenas, which was comparable in size to Apatzingán but differed from it in other respects. This allows us to consider how context shapes cultural activism. In Apatzingán, many of the collectives collaborated with the Station, which helped account for the Station’s success. In Lázaro Cárdenas, by contrast, we found that the relations between societal and state initiatives w ere fraught. One upshot was that cultural collectives in Lázaro Cárdenas made less use of the arts for peace discourse that has been peddled in recent years by state institutions.
The Arts for Peace Discourse and Other Resources for Cultural Activism In recent years, art and culture have been included in programs for reconciliation, dialogue, trust, memory, and peace in contexts such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Thailand, and Uganda (Bergh and Sloboda 2010; Naidu-Silverman 2015). An important referent for t hese initiatives was the 1999 U.N. Resolution 53/243, “Declaration and Program of Action on a Culture of Peace,” which articulated and gave institutional weight to what we term the arts for peace discourse (United Nations 1999). The discourse has also been taken up in Latin America, notably in Colombia and Brazil, and came to Mexico in the 2010s (Aguirre Calleja and Laverde Austin 2014). Sofía Deveaux Durán writes that “the regeneration of coexistence through practices of gathering and enjoyment” allowed many Colombians and Mexicans to “keep coexisting u nder violent regimes.” Art and culture projects “invite people to meet again, touch, and express their feelings [creatively in an attempt to] shatter confinement through the communicative and participative power of the arts and recreational activities in general” (Deveaux Durán 2012, 86, authors’ translation). Adoption of the arts for peace discourse has typically depended on, and been tailored to, local and national values and agendas. A well-k nown Mexican example is Ciudad Juárez, a city where young people from working-class areas have used various forms of cultural production and expression to communicate “the most relevant aspects of their lives, their everyday life, their experiences, and their hopes” (Silva Londoño 2017, 344). Th ese forms of resistance and action demonstrate their agency and challenge other city residents, who are invited to reflect on the social reality in which they live (Silva Londoño 2017). This chapter focuses on the emergence and role of what we term cultural activists and examines how they marshal discourses of art and culture—
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including, but not limited to, that of arts for peace—to construct a sociopoliti cal field that has the potential to transform challenging social environments, although with important limitations. The chapter is based on a comparative ethnography of initiatives across two localities in the Mexican state of Michoacán (see chapter 1 for discussion of our methodology). In both contexts we found examples of cultural activism. However, we identify some salient differences between the contexts, including the challenges initially identified by activists (varying from urban neglect and economic decline to crime-related violence and impunity) and the relationships between activists and state institutions. In each context, we observed that cultural activism had only l imited transformative effects on the social surroundings, and we attempt to account for some of its limitations. As we explain, cultural activism had developed over decades in Apatzingán and Lázaro Cárdenas, adopting different discourses to articulate and justify its aims, but it was inflected by the federal arts and culture programs implemented since 2010 to prevent violence. These federal programs w ere based on the General Law for the Social Prevention of Violence and Crime, which aimed to “combine public policies, programs, and actions aimed at reducing risk factors that favor the breeding of violence and crime, as well as combating the different causes and factors that breed it” (Diario Oficial de la Federación 2012). The later National Crime Prevention Program became the “guiding instrument that articulates public policies, strategies, and actions to prevent violence and crime to influence . . . the improvement of security and civic coexistence and the strengthening of community cohesion” (Diario Oficial de la Federación 2013). In 2014, its cultural component, the Culture for Harmony Program, financed concerts, workshops, public lectures, and theater and dance performances. These events aimed to open up spaces and opportunities for enjoyment in highly marginalized areas where people were vulnerable to violence. Michoacán was one of the states in which the Culture for Harmony Program was implemented, and it was in this context that Fondo de Cultura Económica began work in 2014 on the cultural center known as the Station in Apatzingán. In the second locality that we focus on in this chapter, the port city of Lázaro Cárdenas, the federal and state governments introduced programs two years later, as part of a model communities project intended to “reconstruct the social fabric” and drive development in municipalities with high levels of socioeconomic marginalization, poverty, and insecurity. In both contexts, then, government institutions deployed variations on the theme of the global arts for peace discourse to initiate projects that were intended to reduce violence. Our interviewees in 2017–2018 emphasized that only some local organizations responded to the state and federal calls to participate in cultural programs. In Lázaro Cárdenas, only the director and some teachers from the municipal José Vasconcelos Cultural Center attended the 2018 model communities workshops.
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We introduce the term “cultural activism” to emphasize the role of p eople who did not simply fall in line and promote government projects and who were sometimes critical of them. Even in Apatzingán—where we found that local organ izations engaged more positively with government initiatives, especially the Station—t hey did not do so unquestioningly, and some remained critical. One of our aims in the chapter is to compare activists’ relation to government programs in Apatzingán and Lázaro Cárdenas (where activists kept more of a distance from the institutions). One implication was that the arts for peace discourse was less readily a dopted in Lázaro Cárdenas b ecause cultural activists t here were less inclined to work with the institutions promoting it. Our comparative ethnographic approach enabled us to follow a range of complex organizational processes across the two localities, including how activists defined and articulated their own strategic priorities, rather than limiting us to an analysis of the government programs. In the chapter we cite the semistructured interviews that we conducted with cultural activists in the two localities, but we also draw on our observations of meetings and events that we attended over the course of a year. This allowed us to ascertain, for example, how activists engaged with state officials in each context, and to what effect, as well as to gauge the limitations of what activists w ere able to achieve. Our ethnography made for a sobering account of the promise of the arts for peace discourse, although we endeavor to indicate how cultural activism may contribute to violence reduction.
The Two Contexts Context 1: Lázaro Cárdenas: Port City Visitors to Lázaro Cárdenas, a city of 167,724 inhabitants, are often directed to the Old Pier. The Old Pier is an agreeable development, rebuilt with well- maintained garden spaces and featuring several arenas for social and cultural events. From the Old Pier, visitors can look across the water and admire the gleaming structures of Mexico’s premier Pacific port, completed in 1971. As they do so, they turn their back on the rest of the city, which residents and visitors are less likely to enthuse about. In Lázaro Cárdenas, art and culture are marshaled in ways marked by this discrepancy between the economic standing of its global port and the state of the city’s social and cultural fabric. Although crime and violence associated with organized crime have left their mark on collective memory and everyday life, cultural activism has not arisen as a direct response to those phenomena. Rather, art and culture initiatives are pitched as a reaction to the loss of local traditions and customs—a result of modernizing projects that have been developed in the municipality since the 1970s, a shortage of public spaces and the centralization of cultural spaces, and a deteriorating quality of life due to insufficient government spending and worsening socioeconomic conditions.
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Since the 1980s, the residents of Lázaro Cárdenas have suffered hardships arising from neoliberal policies. The Mexican government abandoned the modernizing projects that in the 1970s had driven the port’s creation and expansion and established a large steel mill in the city. As a result, living conditions deteriorated, aggravated by poor economic and urban planning by state and municipal governments. At the time of our fieldwork in 2017–2018, local activists often spoke of how Lázaro Cárdenas is “a first-class port and a fifth-class city.” Though simplistic, this is a graphic way to describe the effect of imbalanced policies that, on the one hand, transformed the port into one of the most important in the Pacific and, on the other hand, failed to produce a city to match the port’s global ambitions, especially after neoliberal disinvestment. The challenges of urban life in Lázaro Cárdenas have been aggravated since the 2000s by the increase of vio lence linked to the dynamics of organized crime in the broader region, including that of Apatzingán (outlined in the next section). Criminal organi zations used the port to export drugs and many other goods, including iron ore smuggled from mines in the coastal highlands, and to import from China and elsewhere a range of contraband and precursor chemicals for drugs. Drug production in the region was accompanied by a rise in drug consumption, and drug retail in the city accounted for some of the violence, while also producing a surge in petty crime. In the 2000s, when crime-linked violence began to rise on the back of the city’s other woes, t here were two significant initiatives in the arts. One was the José Vasconcelos Cultural Center, funded by the municipality, and the other was the Arcelor Mittal Cultural Center, financed by the steelmaker of the same name, which had bought the steel mill in the city. However, the focus of our chapter is on initiatives by other cultural promoters and local artists, who have developed and often funded projects of their own and thus merit the term cultural activists. Some of t hese more independent projects date back to the 1990s, when a small group of cultural promotors set out to recover and disseminate dance, music, and traditional costumes from the coastal region of Michoacán and, more specifically, the municipal area of Lázaro Cárdenas. Around 2010, other activists began to develop projects situated in neighborhoods on the city’s periphery, observing that the two cultural centers w ere in the city center and inaccessible to residents of the outskirts. Many of t hese activists were not artists, but they came to value art and culture as a way of addressing the problems that they identified in the urban environment, such as violence. The first form of cultural activism that we describe is that of the neighborhood collectives of residents that operate in two iconic areas in Lázaro Cárdenas’s center: the Old Pier and La Pérgola. Through regular, open-a ir cultural events, they seek to foster coexistence, give new meaning to public spaces, and narrate the city’s history to strengthen identity and cultural heritage as antidotes to the general deterioration of the city and its public spaces. With t hese aims, in
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2017 residents of the Old Pier organized an artistic program that paralleled the official Night of the Dead festival, organized by the municipality with state support on the eve of Mexico’s annual Day of the Dead festival. The Melchor Ocampo del Balsas Sociocultural Collective put together monthly cultural programs in the La Pérgola neighborhood. In both cases, activists explained in interviews that their activities led to aesthetic restoration and, among other t hings, served to displace the youths who had been meeting t here for illicit purposes such as to use drugs and assault people. The artistic events in La Pérgola succeeded in restoring it as a public place. Similarly, the Night of the Dead event was intended to rekindle family cohesion in the Old Pier by dislodging the drug users. The second form of cultural activism is the independent cultural centers that are sustained by families in the outskirts of the city and nearby settlements. In the 2010s, activists created La Parota Cultural Center in nearby La Mira and the Juksikani Cultural Center in Las Guacamayas, as well as the Catalina Carbajal Cultural Center in the outskirts of the city. Th ese cultural centers w ere designed to offer financially accessible cultural events in and for their respective neighborhoods. They have become spaces for teaching, practicing, and appreciating art, music, dance, and painting. Activists explained in interviews that they intended to create environments to shield gatherings and social events from the violence of the outside world. Independent cultural centers thus seek to improve the conditions of the community of which they are a part. As a whole, cultural activism in Lázaro Cárdenas seeks to create opportunities to help residents develop a sense of belonging by disseminating regional history and traditions. In addition, activists try to create spaces where the prevailing violence and hostilities of the social environment are not reproduced. In Lázaro Cárdenas, t here has been little interaction between cultural activism and government institutions, as activists explained to us in interviews. One reason is the activists’ distrust of state officials, exacerbated by officials’ seeming complicity with criminals and involvement in other corruption. Another is officials’ seeming disinterest in what cultural activists have to offer. Officials did show interest in neighborhood collectives’ attempts to displace drug users from public spaces. This was the case in La Pérgola, where local collective members convinced the authorities to intervene in negotiations over the relocation of informal traders and later their eviction. However, officials showed little interest in cultural activists’ other initiatives and did little to involve activists in official programs. Residents of the Old Pier, for example, were not consulted by the officials responsible for organizing the Night of the Dead event. Activists also struggled to access existing government funding. Cultural centers and neighborhood collectives have sought to achieve formal standing to access such funding. If they were recognized as civil associations, they would theoretically have the legal status to access public programs and sponsorship from large companies, respond to national and international funding calls, and
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receive legal support should they need to register an initiative or defend it against authorities. Only two of the five cultural initiatives in Lázaro Cárdenas (La Parota Cultural Center and the Melchor Ocampo del Balsas Sociocultural Collective) have had the financial resources and social capital to successfully take that step toward formality. O thers have used their networks to access occasional state resources and programs or collaborate in some capacity with the government in holding activities and events. On the w hole, though, when government officials provide support, they do so not as part of a public program. Rather, they contribute money from their personal income, as they can turn such f avors into political gain. As a result, both sets of activists struggle to secure resources for their proj ects. Widespread shortfalls have plunged collectives and centers into crisis on various occasions and are a constant threat to their survival. An exception is the Melchor Ocampo del Balsas Sociocultural Collective, which supports itself through regular fees paid by its members. Other cultural centers and collectives rely on donations and sponsorship for special events and often use their income to cover any shortfall. Donors or sponsors are usually personal contacts of activists or owners of small businesses and companies based in the community. To remain open and guarantee the continuity of the art courses and workshops they offer, t hese cultural centers charge low fees to students to cover utility bills and remunerate teachers for their work, although teachers are usually flexible about charging fees. Because of the limited resources and institutional support, cultural centers and neighborhood collectives have had l imited success. Furthermore, each of them is dependent on a group of two or three p eople who function as leaders and shoulder the management work. The involvement of other community members in this work is limited, if it exists at all, a fact that can threaten the projects’ long-term viability. An example is La Parota Cultural Center, which even strug gles to attract an audience—whether because of the community’s indifference toward the activities or b ecause people feel that they do not have enough time to attend cultural events. The activists who lead the center are uncertain whether to continue their projects.
Context 2: Apatzingán: Agribusiness Market and Service City The relationship between cultural activism and government was different in Apatzingán. The state’s role was more notable t here, and t here was significant investment in art and culture—especially in the Station, described in the chapter opening. As a result, the state had more success in promoting its arts for peace discourse among activists than it did in Lázaro Cárdenas. Another reason for the relative success of the discourse in Apatzingán was that crime-related vio lence has been a problem t here for longer than in Lázaro Cárdenas, and violent responses such as the autodefensa rebellion were also closer at hand.
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The region of Tierra Caliente is one of the largest geographical areas in the state of Michoacán.1 It is divided into two valleys: the Huetamo Valley and the Apatzingán Valley that contains the city of Apatzingán and the town of Tepalcatepec. The region is rich in natural resources. For example, Tepalcatepec is known for its trade, cattle farming, cheese production, and lime crops, while the economy of neighboring Buenavista is dependent on c attle farming and limes. Apatzingán is the center of the region’s commercial and political power, and its influence extends to the rural municipalities of Tancítaro and Chinicuila (discussed in chapter 2). The Tierra Caliente region was historically known for the planting, producing, transporting, and selling of illicit substances, which explains its reputation as reflected in the opening vignette. Drug trafficking in the region was stimulated beginning in the 1950s by the growth and diversification of global drug markets, which triggered the planting of marijuana and poppies in the region, the production of heroin in laboratories, and the transportation of cocaine and its chemical precursors. This led to the gradual but sustained involvement of a significant proportion of the civilian population in the criminal sphere due to structural conditions of exclusion, marginalization, and development in the region, an involvement that has cast drug trafficking as a way of life. Despite the differences, drug trafficking in Tierra Caliente was marked by some of the same national political processes that affected Lázaro Cárdenas, including the neoliberal state reforms that led to state disinvestment in the port city. As documented by Salvador Maldonado (2010), neoliberal policies from the 1980s negatively affected economic mobility and the funding of development and activities to promote well-being, which led to a lack of opportunities in the Tierra Caliente region, just as was the case in Lázaro Cárdenas. The state’s withdrawal both from its social commitment and its territorial presence contributed to shaping black markets, particularly for drugs (Meza 2016). Furthermore, the politi cal transition of 2000 and administrative decentralization profoundly impacted the functionality, effectiveness, and scope of security institutions, procurement, and the provision of justice. This resulted in more impunity across t hese regions, an environment of distrust in institutions, and a greater perception of insecurity. Whereas Lázaro Cárdenas had only recently seen an upsurge in violence, vio lence in Apatzingán had been building for decades. The criminal violence catalyzed multiple displays of collective discontent. One example was the organization and mobilization of nonstate armed groups, the best known examples of which are the autodefensa groups (outlined in chapters 1 and 2). However, societal responses also included the formation and mobilization of civil society organ izations and youth collectives, and the mobilization of individual social activists. Th ese displays of resistance or protest, both individual and collective, emerged as an alternative and a response to criminal violence, and to make up
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for deficiencies in state institutions—t hough some collectives collaborated with the state. In the region of Apatzingán, cultural activism mainly took the form of small and relatively informal collectives, akin in scale and structure to Lázaro Cárdenas’s neighborhood groups. The most prominent collective in Apatzingán was the Cultural Revolution, a small but enduring group led by the poet Uriel Ramírez. It is revealing to consider the differences between t hese collectives and the Station, the cultural center of the state publisher. Like their counterparts in Lázaro Cárdenas, collectives such as the Cultural Revolution lacked the financial resources to organize events on the scale of the Station’s. They relied on individual donations of consumables for cultural events and on city residents’ often less-than-enthusiastic support. Furthermore, although the Cultural Revolution, like many other collectives in the region, had a programmatic vision of the issues it sought to address, it lacked the organizational capacity to fulfill its objectives coherently and systematically. In contrast, the Station enjoyed relatively plentiful financial resources to use in organizing cultural events, and thus it had an impact buttressed by budgetary allocations and institutional support from municipal, state, and federal governments. It was also better able to advertise its program, for example in the glossy publications of the Fondo de Cultura Económica (Melguizo Posada et al. 2016). In one joint event that we observed, in the morning the Cultural Revolution presented a modest spectacle that consisted of a poetry recital, the creation of poe-mantas (canvas banners bearing political poetry), a discussion, and a per formance by a regional m usic group (Figure 3.2). In the afternoon, the Station convened an event on a much larger scale with a poetry reading, workshops, and conferences, all designed to promote the Station’s numerous regular activities such as poetry readings, artistic creation workshops, popular music classes, and conferences. While in the morning only members of the collectives and organ izations that had organized the events attended them, in the afternoon officials from state and federal government cultural institutions also attended. However, the joint event also illustrates that t here was more fruitful collaboration between cultural activists and institutions in Apatzingán than in Lázaro Cárdenas. Indeed, Apatzingán hosted some organizations with formal status and even a hold over state institutions. The main example was the Naranjo Cultural Center, formally established as a civil association in 2005, which gained effective control of the municipal government’s cultural agencies in 2017. The closer relation of cultural collectives and institutions, as well as the longer history of violent conflict in Apatinzgán, helps explain why Apatzingán cultural activists made more use of the arts for peace discourse than their counterparts in Lázaro Cárdenas did. This was evident in the joint event held by the Cultural Revolution and the Station, where—despite the difference in resources—t he message in both the morning and afternoon events was broadly
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Figure 3.2. The Cultural Revolution collective pioneered the hanging of poe-mantas in public places where criminal organizations had previously hung narco-mantas— banners bearing intimidating messages directed at rivals or government. This poe-manta reads: “Let’s hug each other. Let’s forgive each other.” Photo by Rodrigo Caballero Díaz.
similar: arts and culture offer a way of incentivizing peace building. The Cultural Revolution explained its goal of fostering learning and enjoyment of the arts (particularly regional arts such as traditional music, poetry, and literature) as part of its mission to offer young p eople alternative activities, showing them that in the face of violence, imagination and artistic creation were valid tools for building peace. The Station defined its mission as contributing to a culture of peace building, teaching nonviolent, conflict-resolution skills to the region’s children and young p eople, and positioning culture as a tool for restoring the social fabric.2
Comparing Cultural Activism in Context In the introduction to this chapter, we explained that we analyzed t hese collectives and organizations as species of cultural activism, understood as attempts to marshal discourses of art and culture to construct sociopolitical fields from which to transform challenging social environments. It is notoriously difficult to define activism (Alvarez et al. 2017; Gallagher 2017), but for our purposes, we use the term primarily to refer to the work of p eople who claim some autonomy from state projects and may be critical of them, even when they engage with t hose
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institutional projects and play a part in them. H ere we build on the comparison of the previous section to flesh out our account of cultural activism, while acknowledging how the sociopolitical fields differ between Lázaro Cárdenas and Apatzingán, including in the relation between activists and institutions. We also consider the transformative potential of the respective fields, while noting impor tant limitations in how they operate in t hese contexts.
Cultural Activism as a Field in Construction and Its Relationship with Institutions Cultural activism in Apatzingán and Lázaro Cárdenas can be understood as a field in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense, with its own rules, grammar, and kinds of capital (Bourdieu 1985). We observed that activists began by developing social capital, which consisted of their networks of cooperation and their influence in everyday life. From h ere, they launched their first ventures as collectives, existing precariously while raising their own funds for their activities and seeking public support. Collectives acquired multiple tools to organize, prepare their pre sentations, and connect with government institutions, which served to increase their cultural capital. They gained momentum once they had achieved some financial independence (which was a challenge), built up support from certain social sectors, and gained the know-how to drive their activities successfully. In the process, a sense of solidarity was created between different activists, building identity and social recognition in that all cultural activists come to be seen as actors in a single space, with similar objectives and a common context and history. But t here was also a struggle for position within this space. This was a strategic game in which the different stakeholders sought not only to promote art and culture for different purposes but also to gain symbolic capital, recognition, and social prestige. In Apatzingán, the Cultural Revolution and the Naranjo Cultural Center established themselves as leading actors by mobilizing the discourse of art and culture as an antidote to criminal violence. As a consequence, they made a name for themselves as activists and gained social recognition for their commitment to the community, which gave them the social legitimacy needed to raise their voice and potentially influence the field of cultural activism. This legitimacy in turn allowed them to build relationships of trust and social influence, and thus of power, between citizens, collectives, organ izations, and social movements. When cultural activists had acquired sufficient social, cultural, and symbolic capital, they w ere able to connect more effectively with institutional programs and resources. In Apatzingán, for example, the Naranjo Cultural Center leaders built on their long trajectory as activists to find positions in public administration. Yet the field of cultural activism, as we understand it, serves typically to critique the work of institutions, generating discussions about the role of art and culture in public policy. Even the Naranjo Cultural Center leaders retained
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something of a critical voice, while in Lázaro Cárdenas, the neighborhood cultural centers openly questioned the state’s neglect of art and culture. They argued that not only w ere cultural spaces absent in communities where they could help reduce children’s and young people’s exposure to risky situations, but official cultural programs seemed increasingly to focus on training people for self- employment or providing pure entertainment. This was borne out in an interview that we conducted with the Juksikani Cultural Center’s directors about a street cinema program in Las Guacamayas. The directors were responsible for the program, which was part of the federal Culture for Harmony Program. They stressed that the program’s objectives were to promote social cohesion in vulnerable areas, but they went on to criticize the program’s inflexibility. They explained that it did not allow any adaptation of the content, which compromised their ability to achieve their goal of raising awareness. Other content, they claimed, would connect better with the reality of people in Las Guacamayas. The directors also lamented a lack of opportunity to access other financial resources and programs. While they were aware that the federal Culture Ministry had other funding streams, they said that they had no clear idea of how the ministry’s money was assigned or what it was invested in. They felt that the limited resources for culture were more likely to be used for political ends, since politicians were known to use the money to benefit their own political careers.
Broader Social Effects of Cultural Activism and Its Limitations In our view, cultural activism—however it connects with institutions—can meaningfully be termed “activism” only if it aspires to transform the broader social surroundings. In Apatzingán, for example, the Cultural Revolution and the Naranjo Cultural Center aim to address the lack of cultural opportunities, socioeconomic development, and values that might counteract interpersonal, social, and criminal violence. Accordingly, they propose becoming aware of and seizing artistic alternatives for achieving community coexistence and solidarity. In Lázaro Cárdenas, as we have described, collectives engage in a critique of the workings of government institutions, including the misappropriation of funds for political ends. Does cultural activism in t hese contexts have a transformative effect on the social (and political) environment? It was beyond the remit of our investigation to find a full answer to the question, which is in any case a notoriously difficult one, but we give some indications h ere. In Lázaro Cárdenas and Apatzingán, cultural activists have enabled people to come together through artistic practice and events, and they have promoted regional and national traditions. In Lázaro Cárdenas, young people were encouraged to invest their free time in activities that take them away from drug networks and crime, and the few existing public spaces in the city were being
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reclaimed as places for gathering and socializing for everyone. Some events focused on what are considered vulnerable populations, positing that culture and education were ways for c hildren and young p eople to grow personally and socially. Other events invoked figures from local history as antidotes to the city’s deterioration and decline. In Apatzingán, the Cultural Revolution promoted learning and enjoyment of regional arts such as traditional m usic, poetry, and literature to offer young p eople alternative activities to fill their time outdoors, while teaching c hildren and young people of the region nonviolent conflict resolution. Cultural activists across the two contexts also focused on marginal groups, and they created cultural agendas that were alternatives to those offered by institutional spaces or hegemonic cultural industries. The cultural centers of Lázaro Cárdenas were an example. Despite the challenges of operating in t hese neighborhoods and their restricted reach (sometimes they impacted only participating individuals), it was an achievement that they continued to operate and stay open to the targeted communities as well as the general public. Furthermore, cultural activism could be said to politicize the region’s inhabitants. In Lázaro Cárdenas, both cultural centers and public space collectives portrayed culture as a public good. On the one hand, they championed culture by evoking collective memory and identity; on the other hand, they realized that culture needs to be wrested from the interests and purposes of politics and institutions. In Apatzingán, cultural activism is a clear example of organization, mobilization, and social protest through art and culture. It has produced a legacy of learning how to build civilian spaces in which to discuss common interests or resolve collective problems and needs. According to Rui Matoso (2017), the road to democratic urban governance involves transforming structures of thinking or knowing that encompass ideas, facts, perceptual frameworks, and cognitive functions. The presence of disruptive cultural projects “that question reality and existing living conditions” thus becomes a leading factor in the quest for democratic governance (Matoso 2017, 9), because art and culture broaden horizons of expectation and develop new strategies for community life. In Lázaro Cárdenas, the Juksukani Cultural Center and the Catalina Carbajal Cultural Center showed that reflection can change the direction of cultural projects. The former’s sensitivity to the local community’s needs allowed it to incorporate teenagers’ cultural expressions, which resulted in the building of a cultural café in 2017, featuring graffiti, theater, and literature alongside rock and hip-hop. This event was important for the cultural center’s directors b ecause it was the first time a youth group from outside the workshops became involved in the center’s program. Similarly, the Catalina Carbajal Cultural Center began providing psychological support for women. According to the center’s director, the initiative took shape after the mothers of
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young workshop attendees mentioned domestic violence on several occasions. In response, the director suggested opening an art therapy space for a group of psychologists to give counseling. However, it is important also to address the limitations of the transformative effect of the field of cultural activism as we have described it in Lázaro Cárdenas and Apatzingán. To begin with, cultural activism was strongly conditioned by the sociopolitical dynamics and circumstances in both localities. Its potential was not only limited by a lack of resources and the government’s selective co- opting of individual activists (which produced tensions and conflicts between different groups), but also by government’s colonization of cultural activism (which enabled the government to appropriate culture and art as a way to achieve peace). We observed that activists operated within the margins set by financial, political, and even criminal interests. Of the two contexts, as we have seen, activists in Apatzingán did more to engage with institutions. Chantal Mouffe suggests that critical artistic practices can engage with institutions to provide agonistic spaces where the dominant consensus is challenged, making available new modes of identification (2007, 4). In Apatzingán, activists refrained from participating in disruptive cultural initiatives b ecause their relation to the institutions had changed. In the early years, cultural groups’ activism made claims that were less instrumental than symbolic, articulating shared beliefs about the potential of art and culture to transform the social environment. In later years, though, activists obtained power within cultural institutions or played active roles in their programs. On the one hand, this enabled activists to develop initiatives that w ere more stable and of larger scale than their counterparts in Lázaro Cárdenas. On the other hand, activists became more strategic, and at times almost entrepreneurial, in their self- positioning, and though they were not uncritical, they became less likely to engage in a full-throated criticism of cultural policy. This helps explain why they were quicker than activists in Lázaro Cárdenas to engage in the arts for peace discourse that the government was adopting for its vio lence reduction 3 programs.
Conclusion We examined the role of cultural activism in Lázaro Cárdenas and Apatzingán. In each context, we approached cultural activism as a social field in construction, taking a comparative ethnographic approach to follow the processes of field construction. We paid attention to the adoption of discourses such as arts for peace, including by looking at activists’ relation to the state institutions that promoted them, and we considered the transformative potential of cultural activism, noting important limitations.
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We hope to have demonstrated the utility of ethnographic comparison for understanding how discourses such as arts for peace are deployed, and to what effect. By treating arts for peace as a discourse, we do not disqualify its claims, but we do avoid simply reproducing the assumptions that accompany it. We distinguish between the sociopolitical fields constructed for activism itself—the space in which activists move—and the broader social field that activists aspire to transform. Clearly it is possible to build a relatively secure field of cultural activism that nevertheless fails to impact its social surroundings. Since activists are commonly understood as those who maintain a distance from institutions and may be critical of them, we also emphasized the importance of examining their relationship to institutions, including how this affects their transformative potential. Though this goes beyond the scope of the chapter, it is also important to reflect on the relation of cultural activists to other civic actors, understood broadly as those who have a public profile or standing (see chapter 8). In both contexts, cultural activists collaborated on occasion with members of the Security and Justice Working Groups of their respective cities (see chapter 2). Though in Lázaro Cárdenas and Apatzingán t here were few sociolegal activists of the kind studied in chapter 4, the cultural activists played roles that were in some respects comparable to the Catholic actors who are the focus of chapter 5. Indeed, we note that Catholic initiatives drew on peace-building discourses similar to t hose of cultural activists and faced similar limits, which raises important questions about the relation between seemingly dissimilar social fields.
notes 1. The municipality of Lázaro Cárdenas has 183,185 inhabitants, 91.56 percent of whom live in the urban area that includes the city of Lázaro Cárdenas (the municipal capital) and the outlying districts of Las Guacamayas, La Orilla, Buenos Aires, La Mira, and Playa Azul (Instituto Nacional de Geografía y Estadística 2015). 2. Culture had been a discursive resource in the region for decades. Beginning in the 1930s, the Mexican federal government had sent out cultural missions to teach rural p eople about art and theater. Starting in the 2000s, culture and art began to be perceived as a resource to build alternatives to what the collectives beginning to call narco-culture. The arts for peace discourse was the latest offering, and it w ill no doubt be accompanied by others in time. 3. We do not wish to overstate the difference in discourses between activists in Apatzingán and Lázaro Cárdenas, and we observed similarities in the structure of their discourses, even if the content was inflected somewhat differently. In both contexts, cultural activists’ discourse had three dimensions: (1) a temporal dimension that refers to a mythical past that is peaceful and f ree of violence and that must be recovered in the immediate f uture; (2) a social dimension that appeals to a regional identity that rests on norms, values, and a sense of belonging but is endangered by the uprooting of local society, the proliferation of cultural offerings alien to regional identities and values, and violence and poverty; and (3) a spatial dimension that demands the physical and symbolic recovery of territory from organized crime by restoring spaces for artistic and cultural activities and broadening the cultural offerings in settlements and towns around the municipal capital.
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references Aguirre Calleja, Ana Cristina, and Paula Laverde Austin. 2014. “Genealogía de tres per formance activistas en América Latina: El Siluetazo, No+Sangre y Bordar/Bordando por la paz.” Oximora 4: 41–62. Alvarez, Sonia, Jeffrey Rubin, Millie Thayer, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, and Agustín Lao- Montes. 2017. Beyond Civil Society: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin Amer ica. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bergh, Arild, and John Sloboda. 2010. “Music and Art in Conflict Transformation: A Review.” Music and Arts in Action 2 (2). http://musicandartsinaction.net/i ndex.php /maia/a rticle/v iew/conflicttransformation/45. Deveaux Durán, Sofía. 2012. “Corporalidad y performance en contextos de violencia.” Sociológica 27 (75): 69–93. Diario Oficial de la Federación. 2012. “Decreto por el que se expide la Ley General para la Prevención Social de la Violencia y la Delincuencia.” http://w ww.diputados.gob.m x /LeyesBiblio/ref/lgpsvd/LGPSVD_orig_24ene12.pdf. ———. 2013. “Acuerdo por el que se crea con carácter permanente la Comisión Intersecretarial para la Prevención Social de la Violencia y la Delincuencia.” https://w ww.dof.gob .m x/n ota_detalle.php?codigo= 5287279&fecha=1 1/02/2013. Gallagher, Janice. 2017. “The Last Mile Problem: Activists, Advocates, and the Struggle for Justice in Domestic Courts.” Comparative Political Studies 50 (12): 1666–1698. Instituto Nacional de Geografía y Estadística. 2015. “Encuesta Intercensal 2015.” Instituto Nacional de Geografía y Estadística. https://w ww.inegi.org.m x/programas/intercensal /2015/ Maldonado, Salvador. 2010. Los márgenes del Estado mexicano: Territorios ilegales, desarrollo y violencia en Michoacán. Zamora, Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán. Matoso, Rui. 2017. Activismo cultural e transformação social—casos e estratégias de práticas e políticas urbana. https://www.researchgate.n et/publication/339849957_ACTIVISMO_CUL TUR AL _E _T R ANSFOR MACAO_ S OCIAL _ _C ASOS _E _E STR ATEGIAS _D E _PRATICAS_E _POLITICAS_URBANAS. Melguizo Posada, Jorge Humberto, Antonio Ramos Revillas, Eduardo Antonio Parra Caballero, Julián Flavio Herbert Chávez, Luz María del Consuelo Chapela Mendoza, Blanca Estela Vázquez Hidalgo, and Socorro Venegas. 2016. Cultura de paz, palabra y memoria: Un modelo de gestión cultural comunitario. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Meza, Oliver D. 2016. “El retraimiento del Estado: Cómo la violencia afecta la capacidad de gobernar de los municipios en México.” https://w ww.r esearchgate.n et/publication /299579317_Retraimiento_del_Estado. Mouffe, Chantal. 2007. “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces.” Artistic Research 1 (2): 1–5. Naidu-Silverman, Ereshnee. 2015. The Contribution of Art and Culture in Peace and Reconciliation Processes in Asia. Copenhagen: Danish Centre for Culture and Development. Silva Londoño, Diana Alejandra. 2017. “Rebelarse a la muerte: Artivismo contra la violencia en Ciudad Juárez.” In Vida y vivencia en las ciudades de hoy, edited by Margarita Camarena Luhrs, 343–370. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. United Nations. 1999. “Declaration and Program of Action on a Culture of Peace,” Resolution 53/243. Zelizer, Craig. 2003. “Peace and Conflict Studies: The Role of Artistic Processes in Peace- Building in Bosnia-Herzegovina.” Peace and Conflict Studies 10 (2): 62–75.
chapter 4
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Sociolegal Activism in Contexts of Criminal and Institutional Violence challenging forced disappearances, gender violence, and assaults on lgbti+ people and sex workers Salvador Maldonado and Iran Guerrero
We asked a priest in the port of Lázaro Cárdenas whether the clergy had assisted victims of violence in filing a criminal report. That would be very dangerous, he replied, alarmed. When victims have reported crimes, he explained, they have returned home to find the crime report torn to pieces and nailed to their front doors. Many of our interviewees viewed the judicial institutions with a mix of fear and loathing, as well as the mistrust described in chapter 2. Elites invited to the Security and Justice Working Group meetings encountered prosecutors and police chiefs and on occasion managed to build some rapport with them. But in most of Michoacán, this was the exception. In chapter 3, we saw that cultural activists engaged on occasion with state institutions such as the Station in Apatzingán, but they remained otherwise skeptical of the interests and agendas of the state’s cultural officials. They w ere still more skeptical when it came to institutions of security and justice. However, in Morelia, the capital of Michoacán, some organizations did attempt to pursue legal strategies. A striking example was Women without Vio lence (Humanas Sin Violencia), whose director, Circe López, was a lawyer who had been educated at the state university in Morelia. López was well connected, including to deputies in the state congress, which sat in the capital. She was clear
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about the challenges in pursuing l egal strategies, even in the context of the state capital. Even if crime reports were not being nailed to doorways in Morelia, she had faced formidable obstacles to making headway. She had been the object of a slander case brought by a state politician, a legal proceeding clearly intended to neutralize her efforts. Like other activists whom we discuss in this chapter, López drew attention to kinds of violence that few people wanted to hear about. Until recently, most scholarly and media attention was paid to the spectacular violence of the war on drug trafficking, and especially to the mainly male politicians, police, military personnel, and autodefensa groups waging it. Furthermore, the response from armed groups (predominantly male) has been identified as criminal. We dwell h ere on several less visible yet widespread forms of vio lence that have accompanied the war—namely, forced disappearances, gender violence, and assaults on LGBTI+ people and sex workers. These three forms of violence are not usually studied together, but we find common features among them. Those features include the lack of visibility and the fact that the victims and other citizens who took up their cause face many forms of violence in addition to criminal violence. Criminal violence is often related to, and tends to exacerbate, less visible forms of violence such as gender and anti-LGBTI+ violence. But criminal violence is often accompanied by what we term institutional violence. This includes not only institutions’ own use of violence but also their attempts to hinder, censor, or shut down citizens’ initiatives to seek redress. Such attempts are often experienced as a form of violence in their own right, which is why the term is especially fitting. Our question is: how do victims and other citizens seek to denounce the range of less visible forms of violence, especially when judicial institutions are often part of the problem? We focus on the fact that activists, frustrated by limitations in formal legal instruments, did not give up on those instruments but instead used them in combination with a range of other strategies, such as exerting pressure through the media and lobbying officials and elected representatives. Again, López is a case in point. She cultivated ties to state politicians and functionaries and sought coverage in the media, as well as using legal channels. In so d oing, López and other activists took full advantage of their location in the state capital, where it was easier for them both to develop the necessary relations with media outlets and government officials and to seek protection from authorities for their activism. We observe, too, that the organizations concerned with forced disappearances, gender violence, and assaults on LGBTI+ people and sex workers, unlike initiatives such as the autodefensa movement, are led mainly by women, but we leave to chapter 6 a fuller gender analysis of societal responses.
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Institutional and Other Less Visible Violence: The Challenge for Activists The war against drug trafficking plunged Mexico into one of its worst crises of violence, producing thousands of victims not only of dramatic clashes between armed groups and execution-style murders but also of forced disappearances, kidnapping, torture, and sexual violence. The particularly violent situation in Michoacán, characterized by the emergence of groups of armed citizens dedicated to fighting crime and a new federal strategy against insecurity, galvanized the civil society organizations, groups, and individual activists we worked with. We observe, as other researchers have done, that the obvious criminal vio lence is only one of several kinds of violence that characterized the state. López explained in her interview with us that “the war began with inscribing control on the h uman body.” She was referring to rape, kidnapping, and persecution as symbolically masculine techniques of dominance over feminine and feminized bodies, acts meant to cause terror. Violence as a form of control motivates assaults and crimes against both females and p eople with nonheteronormative sexual orientations. These less visible kinds of violence include what we term institutional violence, which takes different forms.1 The most obvious form of institutional violence is the perpetration of acts by state institutions that are indistinguishable from acts perpetrated by criminal groups. An obvious example is forced disappearances. In fact, forced disappearances were introduced to Mexico by state institutions, which in the 1960s began using them to counteract, repress, and eliminate the armed movements, guerrillas, and political leaders who opposed the regime. This practice has been condemned internationally by organizations such as the United Nations, but Mexican institutions have continued to employ it, and its use has intensified in the context of the war on drugs. Moreover, criminal groups also use the practice against authorities, civilians, and rivals as a show of power and to instill terror. Torture has been used systematically by criminal justice institutions and in recent years has come to be used by criminal organizations, too. However, we use the term “institutional violence” not only for the cases in which state institutions directly commit acts of violence but also for cases in which institutions obstruct or intimidate t hose who would seek justice for such acts. Institutions sometimes use physical violence or the threat of it to neutralize attempts to use institutional channels to seek redress. Even when institutions do not use or threaten physical violence, however, we argue that the term “vio lence” is still appropriate because those seeking justice find themselves revictimized in multiple ways, and their human rights are grotesquely v iolated. As has commonly been observed of rape victims, victims of violence in Michoacán commonly describe their experience of seeking justice as l ittle different from the violence that they experienced in the first place.
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The fact of institutional violence is clear in the following testimony from Ana (a pseudonym), a female victim of domestic violence from the coastal region of Michoacán, whose second husband abused her daughter and threatened to hire hit men to make the two women “disappear.” The case illustrates the violence and heartbreak that turned the mother into an activist in search of her daughter and other disappeared people: One day I said something bad is happening. I started asking . . . [and they] didn’t want to tell me anything, until [they] told me what was happening. Then I started speaking to [my children] and [they] told me, “Mom, if you say something, he [the husband] will put you in a mental hospital, saying you’re crazy, he will put you in the mental hospital and he will kill [X] and she loves [Y], who is the youngest child,” but when he found out what [they] were telling me, then it was time for hit men. He took hit men to the h ouse, the threats w ere strong, and you didn’t have anywhere to go then. I thought I could ask the DIF for help . . . [but] the DIF refused me completely, they d on’t get involved in those problems, so where do you go?2 And the threats of disappearance continued, until the day came when [my daughter] and [my d aughter’s] father disappeared.
The many individuals and institutions involved in this fragment of an extensive interview provide a snapshot of the adverse conditions in which activism develops. Ana endured her husband’s abuse of her and her d aughter for several years because of justice and welfare officials’ refusal to act. Many p eople or families affected or threatened by crime have no other option than to move away from their home regions. A fter Ana’s daughter and former husband disappeared, two of her sons joined self-defense groups to protect themselves from criminal acts. Official armed forces apprehended them and imprisoned them for more than three years. Meanwhile, Ana continued searching for her daughter and defending her imprisoned sons, gathering information about bureaucrats and hit men, despite the formidable obstacles: “We lodged the complaint [about the disappearances]. . . . I didn’t do it straight away, because of the surveillance from [my husband]. . . . He had to go to Uruapan on an errand [and] I took advantage and went to lodge the complaint, a complaint that never went forward. . . . Not just mine, several people’s—they disappeared with the public prosecutor.” Again, we find the term “institutional violence” fully appropriate when t hose seeking justice feel revictimized in this manner. Another case involves a family that experienced the disappearance of relatives in a rural avocado-producing community, where criminal violence permeated everyday life and went beyond physical violence. The family suffered the disappearance of the father and one son and the attempted murder of another son. The presumed perpetrators w ere members of official security forces who had links to criminal groups. The disappearances began when one of the sons was arrested by an army patrol, whose members accused him of having drugs and
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weapons in his h ouse. According to his relatives, authorities conducted a visual inspection of the crime scene a fter his arrest because the father lodged a complaint citing the arrest as arbitrary before the State Human Rights Commission and the public prosecutor. The visual inspection confirmed the detainee’s innocence, and a judge absolved him of any guilt. However, the army returned to his house and arrested him again without further information. The army told the father this was his fault for filing a h uman rights complaint. While the son was in prison, an armed civilian command (“looking like soldiers”) took the father, who is still disappeared. The oldest son subsequently searched for him and was also made to disappear some months later. The relatives claim that this was a ploy to take away their valuable avocado orchards. A fter the incarceration of the son and the disappearance of the father and oldest son, the m other and daughter moved to a new city to protect themselves. From t here, they undertook a search and denounced what had happened. A further case concerns Dolores (pseudonym), whose son and spouse, both lawyers, filed a lawsuit against a mining company that had allegedly been taken over by a criminal organi zation, but they never returned home. Since then, Dolores has been looking ceaselessly for them. The same happened with another family: a fter four brothers and eight of their relatives were made to disappear, the f amily had to leave Michoacán and took refuge in Mexico City. From t here, they built support networks that enabled them to create an organ ization known as the National Links Network, which searches for disappeared p eople. How can the institutional violence in these cases be explained? When Michoacán fell under the rule of organized crime, many institutions that w ere supposed to be seeking justice overlooked, delayed, or dismissed criminal investigations. Endemic corruption and the freedom to act with impunity have made it possi ble for organized crime to appropriate various roles within the apparatuses of justice and security, even capturing areas of local government (see chapter 1). Luis Astorga (2007) and Carlos Flores Pérez (2009) have highlighted the complex links between the political regime and drug trafficking. Michel Misse proposed the concept of “dangerous liaisons” to describe the connections between political power and crime, which lead to violence that is often more lethal than that associated with crime alone (2006, 179–220). Furthermore, criminal and institutional violence tend to be intertwined. Women without Violence’s work with victims of intimate-partner violence, intrafamilial violence, and sexual abuse reveals that the key problems amplifying gender violence include not only criminal violence but also the institutional violence that revictimizes w omen when they seek to denounce (predominantly male) perpetrators. For this reason, despite the consistently high rates of sexual abuse and killing of young women registered in Michoacán, many cases remain unreported. Even when w omen do manage to file criminal complaints, the judi-
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cial institutions, which are primarily staffed by men, often stigmatize women through the use of macho discourses and discriminatory values. Moreover, criminal complaints are frequently shifted to institutions that w ere created to eradicate domestic or intrafamilial violence, which contributes to depoliticizing violence against women as something that happens between family members and does not concern the state. In summary, activism has arisen in a context of not just criminal violence but also institutional violence, which in all its variations has become endemic even in the state capital.
Responding to Institutional Violence: Sociolegal Activism The organizations that we compared ethnographically in Morelia differed in many respects. What they had in common was that they used legal strategies on occasion, but more often they made use of h uman rights rhetoric to underpin their political claims. More broadly, they developed repertoires of strategies related to law in response not only to the violence, visible and invisible, that had inspired their struggles in the first place, but also to the gamut of institutional violence that they encountered on the way. This explains our choice of the term “sociolegal activism.” The activist groups that we compared were, first, groups of relatives and human rights advocates who searched for disappeared persons and judicial clarification of the fates of the disappeared; second, one of the most important organizations working against gender violence, which also promotes reproductive health among young women and monitors femicide; and finally, the main advocates of the rights to same-sex marriage and to legally change one’s gender identity in Michoacán, together with associated groups that promote the rights of sex workers, HIV-positive people, and trans people. Across t hese varieties of activism, we highlight how activists sought to defend themselves from rights violations and abuses from legal groups by strategically using laws to claim rights, both in their legal form and as a political discourse. Through such discourse, legal action was often generated outside of judicial processes and the formal prosecution of cases (Granduque José 2012; Santos and Rodríguez Garavito 2007).3 We build on work by other scholars who highlight the need to think about law beyond legislation and litigation, stressing in particu lar that the appropriation of l egal discourses can be an emancipatory tool (Domingo 2011). Our analy sis has shown that activists perform a balancing act during legal proceedings: they oscillate between legal and instrumental use of the law and social mobilization to advance their demands or achieve social transformation. Similarly, we use the term “socio-legal activism” to show how groups employ legal resources, lobbying, public spaces, protest, and political activities to seek access to justice. For the activists of our study, law was a language of identification, protest, and
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justice. In the context of Michoacán, indeed, the distinction that Janice Gallagher (2017) draws between “activism” and “advocacy” is difficult to apply. Gallagher is concerned with drawing attention to the contact point between activists (who engage in protests, lobbying, and so on) and advocates (who use mainly legal recourses to pursue their ends). In the cases that we outline in this chapter, the legal channels were so constricted that it made little sense to specialize in advocacy, and any would-be advocates were by necessity also activists, blending political and legal strategies to make headway. In this context, we pursued an ethnographic approach, attending a multitude of meetings and events, as well as conducting formal interviews alongside informal conversations, to trace the multifaceted processes through which the language of law was mobilized by the respective movements. Specifically, we found that the activists drew on the rhetoric of human rights. As Charles Epp (2013) argues, human rights have not only figured in litigation but also been used as a rhetorical device. In the 1990s, the feminist movement in Colombia used a human-rights–based language of discrimination and masculine, sexual, or domestic violence to unify its demands and render t hese visible to the state (Lemaitre 2009). This strategy was similar to that of Soviet dissidents, who used the human rights narrative as an antiestablishment politi cal tool to legitimize their claims and gain international allies (Horvath 2014). Under the military dictatorships in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, framing claims in terms of human rights allowed activists to generate transnational networks and register violations outside national borders. By basing human rights narratives on activists’ sociolegal position and emphasizing agency, activists also appropriate international bodies’ narratives and give them new meaning (Stammers 2005). Though different in many respects, the organizations that we analyze have five common traits. First, the violence in each case is less visible than the commonly reported violence of b attles between armed groups, including the police and army; execution-style murders; and the assassination of government officials. Second, the forced disappearances, gender violence, and violence toward LGBTI+ persons share a context of criminal and institutional violence that affects demands for access to justice, both in terms of law enforcement and respect for human rights. Third, in one way or another, all of t hese groups use the law to access justice and use h uman rights rhetoric to encapsulate their demands. However, they are not necessarily committed to strategic litigation, favoring a politi cal rather than a normative way of using the law. Fourth, and importantly, the organizations are all based mainly in the state capital, Morelia, where they are physically closer to the circles of power—including judicial institutions. Finally, most members of t hese organizations are w omen. Though we do not have the space in this chapter for an extensive gender analysis, other studies have suggested that female activists’ relationships and gender ideologies are important
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to understanding subtexts of the dominant narratives related to justice and security (Sieder 2017, 25).
Forced Disappearances fter the disappearance of an activist in 2007, an organization called the Until A We Find Them Committee was founded. It subsequently split into two groups: the first focused on political forced disappearances, and the second focused on disappearances attributable to the war on drugs. The first group, the Collective of Relatives of the Disappeared in Michoacán State’s Past (CRDMSP), demands that the 1,200 disappeared persons from the so-called dirty war be returned to their families alive. The dirty war was the period in the 1960s and 1970s when state armed forces fought against guerrilla movements and individual political activists opposed to the authoritarian regime. The state employed strategies of armed struggle, repression, and kidnapping or forced disappearances. These practices were similar to those of other dictatorial and authoritarian regimes in Latin America. The CRDMSP has documented cases of political disappearances for the Inter- American Commission on H uman Rights, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations. One of its main initiatives involves pressuring judicial authorities to clear up historical disappearances through meetings with prosecutors, public demonstrations, and media outreach. However, it has not secured access to judicial files or records. In response to the lack of prog ress, the CRDMSP legally documents cases on its own—an initiative that a CRDMSP member referred to in an interview as “prosecuting the State.” Thus, e very time its representatives appear before judicial authorities, they formally request information about the status of judicial investigations. Their use of such strategies and of the human rights narrative has had little success. However, they do seem to achieve good results by establishing legal strategies via h uman rights bodies with experience of litigation. Particularly important is the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights case in which the CRDMSP documented the disappearance of five members of one f amily, hoping to secure a recommendation of action to the Mexican state. This particular case is significant b ecause of the hearing given to a surviving relative. However, similar initiatives are often hampered by the lack of international legal cooperation, which prevents obliging national governments from launching investigations into h uman rights violations. Consequently, the committee has focused on commemorative events in memory of disappeared persons. The second group that split from the Until We Find Them Committee is Walking with Justice, which consists of around eight families whose relatives dis appeared following military operations against organized crime. Several of the families w ere known to a visual artist, who proposed a project named “Walking with the Disappeared Person.” Through mapping software, the routes traveled
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Figure 4.1. An event titled “Weaving Memories” held by the Walking with Justice Collective to launch an exhibition of embroidery produced by members to commemorate their disappeared relatives. Photo by Berenice Guevara Sánchez.
by the disappeared persons were mapped out as a way of recalling their absence. The group is not centrally managed, and it is made up of w omen with limited resources and formal education who gradually built their leadership through practice. They are active in public demonstrations and coordinate among themselves to attend public events and request information. In addition, they are well connected with national and state groups. Given the absence of investigations into their relatives’ disappearances, Walking with Justice members have taken courses on human rights and criminal law to deal with the judicial authorities’ delays. One of the group’s most important initiatives consisted of creating an archive of the judicial records of their disappeared relatives. In 2018, they held an event entitled “Weaving memories” to launch an exhibition of embroidery produced by members to commemorate their disappeared relatives (see Figure 4.1). The public visibility of Walking with Justice’s actions has put political pressure on the judicial investigation authorities and attracted support from national and international bodies. For example, before the 2018 National Law for Missing or Disappeared Persons was approved, the group was working on the status of disappeared persons under the state civil code. Its members sought to introduce the juridical concept of the declaration of absence so that relatives could access the goods of disappeared persons, since under the existing penal code such access could be granted only a fter a declaration of death. Such initiatives attempt to use the law for both formal and practical ends.4
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Moreover, the group members’ search for unmarked graves is l imited by considerable personal risk, police and criminal surveillance, and the shortage of funds and time. The search for graves has exposed the group’s members to legal threats of punishment for crimes such as illegal exhumation, unregulated pro cessing of bodies, and trespassing. Therefore, they try to extend their search networks across the state by working with other victims’ relatives, such as by creating the United for the Coast Collective, which has joined the National Caravans for the Search for Disappeared Persons. So far they have been unable to identify new unmarked graves or begin identification of any bodies because of the many stumbling blocks that humanitarian work of this kind f aces.5 Thus, Walking with Justice’s sociolegal activism is a mixture of underground work, public mobilization, and confronting judicial and pol itical authorities. Walking with Justice has managed to change some rules of the game, for example by compiling judicial records to achieve slightly better treatment for victims’ relatives a fter years of humiliation and stigmatization. Before having recourse to such legal means, they sought to overcome their grief by holding bereavement ceremonies or masses without a body. They w ere able to push for change by pressuring prosecutors politically and legally while also protesting in the streets. But their impact is limited, given the complex entanglement of institutional and criminal violence, impunity, and complicity that underlies disappearances.
Gender Violence The issue of forced disappearances is linked to violence against women (and, by extension, gender violence) inasmuch as w omen—mostly young w omen—have been subjected to disappearances, kidnapping, and sexual and physical vio lence at the hands of criminal groups, relatives, and authorities. Although organizations for disappeared persons and against gender violence do not necessarily cooperate on joint projects or mobilizations, they recognize that the two issues are intrinsically inseparable. Women without Violence is one of the most visible associations seeking to eradicate gender violence in Michoacán, rescuing w omen not only from the clutches of criminals but also from the violence of politicians, officials, and their own husbands. Although the use of litigation is not the organization’s primary political pressure strategy, it does employ lawyers when pursuing cases, such as femicides, before judicial authorities. Considered more meaningful for effecting change is the direction of public actions against the government, such as debating its official figures on gender violence and public policies. In this way, the group positions itself as an important voice in the public sphere. Women without Violence gained public attention by preventing the passing of antiabortion laws that would have criminalized women even further and campaigning for the recognition of gender violence as a m atter of justice. In addition, it campaigned for the Gender Violence against Women Alert Declaration,
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which led to an investment of financial resources in municipalities particularly affected by gender violence, especially femicide, to reduce it.6 However, the results were disappointing, and public money was regularly channeled toward public security matters, strengthening the repressive police even further. Women without Violence did manage to have femicide classified in the state penal code as a more serious crime than homicide. Since then, the organization has closely followed reports of violence against murdered w omen to monitor the femicide rate. The Gender Violence against W omen Alert Declaration and the classification of femicide have several objectives: highlighting the large number of women murdered in the state; working with regional prosecutors to reduce that number; prosecuting t hose responsible for murdering w omen and ensuring that t hese murders are classified as femicides; and fighting for justice for the victims. Women without Violence tries to achieve t hese objectives by generating its own statistical data, collaborating closely with authorities to influence public policy, redesigning gender policies to f avor the victims rather than security, and intervening to eliminate the macho culture that is one of the justice system’s main problems. However, like t hose of many human rights groups and civil society organ izations, W omen without Violence’s initiatives are limited by the contexts of crime and political power in which they develop. The main limitations are insufficient financial and h uman resources and ideological disagreements among feminist organizations that prevent them from joining forces. The limitations that the organizations perceive include poor administration of resources by government bodies, influence peddling, difficulty classifying crimes as femicide without a specialized l egal team, lack of autonomy from government bodies, lack of communication with t hose bodies, and the connections some bureaucrats have with organized crime. Furthermore, quarrels and differences in ideology, power, and financial resources between W omen without Violence and other groups concerned with gender violence mean that efforts to reduce gender vio lence remain fragmented.
Assaults on LGBTI+ People and Sex Workers Sexual diversity activism in Michoacán shares several traits with organizations representing victims of forced disappearances and groups against gender vio lence, and at times groups involved in one of the three areas carry out joint activities and public protests with groups active in another of the areas—for example, participating in marches against gender violence in Morelia and the international commemoration of forced disappearances. In Michoacán, organizations calling for recognition of sexual diversity have opposed a historic, institutionalized, and social violence that has stigmatized, rejected, and refused to acknowledge the rights of LGBTI+ people and, in some cases, criminalized nonheterosexual practices, as well as sex work, leading to physical violence against those p eople.7
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When Michoacán experienced its terrible crisis of governance b ecause of the link between political power and crime, the LGBTI+ community and sex workers in Morelia experienced not only institutional and social violence but also criminal violence. Murders and disappearances became so common that, according to a l awyer who provides legal advice for LGBTI+ populations, safety concerns altered their ways of socializing.8 Similarly, sex workers have been exposed to blackmail and arbitrary police arrests, but their situation has worsened even more than that of LGBTI+ people with the rise of violence because their schedules and the clandestine nature of their work mean that their lives and safety are more at risk. In the light of violence and human rights abuses against the LGBTI+ population, sex workers who make up Monarcas, HIV-positive people in ConVIHve, transsexual groups such as the Michoacán Network of Trans People, and other lesbian and gay groups have formed a wider network in support of sexual diversity that is known as Michoacán Is Diversity. This group has generated a solid support network among the LGBTI+ community and has achieved effects at the state level. It currently forms part of a national coalition that brings together sexual diversity activists across the country. The proximity of Michoacán Is Diversity leaders to allies in local politics, prominent activists at the national level, and other actors in Morelia and Mexico City (such as a specialist human rights lawyer whose representation of members of the LGBTI+ community contributed to legal recognition of same-sex marriage in Michoacán) has led to notable legislative progress that translates into regulatory changes not unlike t hose in Mexico City. LGBTI+ activists successfully lobbied for legislation permitting same-sex marriage as well as antidiscrimination legislation in Michoacán. Recently, the Gender Identity Law was enacted, allowing applicants to change their gender identity on official documents via an administrative process. In addition to promoting these initiatives, the organizations and groups that make up Michoacán Is Diversity have joint objectives: to seek recognition and formalization of their rights in public policies and new laws; oppose the conservative narratives of the church and society that stigmatize nonnuclear forms of family; and question historical heteronormative and gender violence that denies people the right to use their bodies in nonheteronormative ways and that appears in numerous everyday forms of violence against LGBTI+ populations. To reinforce their claims, they come together in activities such as annual celebrations of gay pride, World AIDS Day, and marches against discrimination and homophobia (Figure 4.2). The groups represented by Michoacán Is Diversity have in common the vari ous types of violence they experience. In Mexico City and Latin America as a whole, the first sexual diversity activism efforts addressed problems experienced by gay populations (Díez 2018). In Morelia, by contrast, the objectives centered
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Figure 4.2. World AIDS Day march in Morelia, 2019. The banner reads “Sixteenth Silent March for the Victims of HIV and AIDS.” Photo by Iran Guerrero.
around counteracting the spread of HIV and AIDS and opposing the gender vio lence and police harassment experienced by sex workers. ConVIHve was the pioneering organization within the LGBTI+ movement in Michoacán and typically hosts regular meetings. In the approximately fifteen years since it was formed, its objectives have consisted of promoting the human rights of populations with HIV and AIDS, gaining access to free medicine and health care, collaborating in efforts to prevent infection and reducing infection rates, defending the sexual and reproductive rights of HIV-positive p eople, and reinforcing the right to confidentiality of medical reports. With t hese initiatives, they hope to combat discrimination against p eople with HIV and AIDS in terms of access to education, health care, and employment; oppose the homophobia that doubly harms nonheterosexual p eople with HIV and AIDS; reframe religious education and some educational outreach related to sexual and reproductive rights; and collaborate directly in prevention for at-risk groups. Monarcas was also formed approximately fifteen years ago as an organization for sex workers. Since its origin, this organization’s objectives have been convincing the authorities to recognize the legitimacy of the group and its rights claims; advocating that sex work be regulated like any other professional activ-
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ity; enabling access to social rights; and highlighting sex workers’ problems— which, according to one of the organization’s founders, governments have never prioritized. As long as sex workers are neglected by public policy, they are neither considered nor represented in any public space. Armed with human rights rhetoric and backed by a lawyer, sex workers in Michoacán have challenged police harassment and violence, sexual abuse, vio lence by clients, and discrimination. By creating Monarcas, sex workers achieved the legitimacy to participate in occasional negotiations with the authorities. For example, by exerting pressure at the offices of police captains, they have reduced police harassment and arbitrary arrests. Sex workers have a dopted the language of h uman rights in their negotiations and have legitimated and substantiated their demands before the police with the prerogatives of being within the law because they are part of a civil association and pay taxes. Another limited achievement is that through constant negotiation they have intermittently obtained measures protecting them from the Morelia City Council. Finally, at the end of 2018, they presented a motion before the state Congress to regulate sex work, although it was not approved or even discussed. As an emerging group, the Michoacán Network of Trans People focuses on combating stigmatization, discrimination, and physical violence. Above all, this group aims to make the subject of trans identities more visible, which is why its political participation in the approval of the Gender Identity Law was key. The group members want everyone to be able to freely choose their gender identity. They seek to alter the prevailing narrative that associates transsexual people with sex work and to combat homophobic discourse about trans populations. In summary, formal legal progresses were important in the recognition of same-sex relationships and the legal right for anyone to change the gender on their birth certificate. However, given continuing high rates of violence and social discrimination, formal legal progresses remain contingent on bureaucratic negotiations which become intricate mazes to navigate—delaying, breaching, or negating civil society organizations’ initiatives and demands. Bureaucracy creates unnecessary routines, informal norms, and intimidation; manages time at its own pace; and involves unnecessary paperwork. All this ultimately discourages people from continuing to fight for their rights (Gupta 2012). For instance, Irene, an activist and the first person in Michoacán to exercise the right to formally change her gender identity, told us the process has serious problems. As officials in rural areas are not trained to implement such changes, it is possible to complete the process only in Morelia and only for a high fee. This, she explained, has dissuaded many people from changing their birth certificates. The situation is similar for same-sex marriage, which does not enjoy the same rights and social benefits as heterosexual civil marriage.
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Conclusion In all three cases outlined in this chapter, activists responded to a variety of violent practices, including what we have termed institutional violence— understood not only as violence perpetrated by the state but also the state’s obstruction of attempts to seek justice for violent acts, which victims and activists often experienced as an extension of the original violence. From the perspective of the organizations, collectives, and leaders analyzed in this chapter, the intertwining of criminal and institutional violence has been one of the most acute problems preventing changes in the possibilities for justice. The initiatives studied in Michoacán reveal that the relationships between crime and power constitute thick webs of impunity and corruption that directly affect the potential for accessing justice. One lesson is that in the majority of cases, achievements were not obtained by a strictly judicial or legal route. Exerting political pressure, lobbying authorities, mobilizing networks, approaching national organi zations with a higher degree of specialization, and bureaucratic negotiations have been other successful strategies. Organizations against gender violence work differently from dis appeared persons groups, but both types of organization have mobilized networks and political lobbying to contest laws, monitored public policies, and worked in partnership with government entities to intervene against gender vio lence and femicide. A key capacity that organizations like Women without Vio lence have developed is strategizing their political actions, such as deciding when it is possible to confront or negotiate with authorities. For example, they may decide not to join large-scale demonstrations of force but instead to seize strategic political opportunities—which is how Women without Violence achieved the Gender Violence against Women Alert Declaration and the classification of femicide as an aggravated felony. Although t hese measures have had limited results, they have served to position the topic of violence against women in the public sphere and have therefore had unexpected and probably positive effects. However, in light of criminal and institutional violence, the potential of sociolegal activism to effect change is limited. Organizations may achieve laws, rulings, or recommendations, but these do not directly result in important structural changes, better social conditions, or a real reduction in rates of violence or stigmatization. Like gender violence and forced disappearances, t hese issues continue to spread across Michoacán and Mexico as a whole and cannot be changed through laws alone. Another limitation is the fragmentation among the actors we studied. Ideological differences split groups that look for disappeared persons, which are divided between disappeared persons from the past and from the war on drugs. Gender groups are divided over different versions of feminism and their attitudes toward political power, and there are important disagreements among LGBTI+ leaders.
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While the prospect of justice and substantive change remains elusive, organ izations, groups, and individual activists in Michoacán are challenging the prevailing context of violence, both visible and invisible.
notes 1. Angelica Durán-Martinez (2015) observes that criminal groups at times use visible violence and at other times use less visible violence, which she explains with a reference to the kind of state protection afforded to the criminal actors. For example, where a coherent state affords protection to a single criminal actor, violence is kept less visible. This fits with the case of Michoacán around 2012–2013, when the Knights Templar tended to use forced disappearance rather than public assassination. However, much of the less visible violence that we discuss in the chapter is less a matter of criminal strategy than of what Jenny Pearce terms “chronic violence” (2018, 17). 2. The Desarrollo Integral de la Familia (DIF; Family Integral Development Institute) is a federal institution that is responsible for supporting the civilian population through programs that provide food, education, human rights advice, and other serv ices. 3. Although we recognize the importance of analyzing gender and sexuality in relation to activism against forced disappearances, gender violence, and assaults on LGBTI+ people and sex workers, we elected to focus on the sociolegal strategies of the groups we analyze. 4. Collectives of relatives of the disappeared achieved an important victory in June 2021, when Mexico’s Supreme Court of Justice ruled that all authorities must show full diligence in their search and investigation activities after a person is declared disappeared (I[dh]eas 2021). 5. In April and May 2019, the Fifth Caravan for the Search for Disappeared Persons was carried out in five cities of Michoacán. Walking with Justice participated, but various factors prevented anyone from locating a grave or exhuming a body. For one t hing, the police surveillance promised for the activity was not provided. 6. Preliminary research shows a total of 126 registered femicides in Mexico in 2016, although few of t hose w ere classified as femicides in criminal proceedings. In 2017, 144 women were recorded as having been murdered, of whom only 26 were classified as the victims of femicide according to the penal code (Lucio 2018). 7. We are aware of the discussion about w hether sex work should be considered a job. Although we do not address this discussion, we found that many of the sex workers whom we talked to wished to see their activities recognized as work and regulated as such in law. 8. On December 8, 2018, the Morelia police found the incinerated body of a young man who had been missing for weeks. This crime was officially categorized as a homophobic murder b ecause of the level of violence and because the victim was a member of the LGBTI+ community. On December 29, 2018, another murder of a member of the LGBTI+ community was recorded in a neighborhood of Morelia. This time, the sexual organs had been amputated, and t here was a stab wound on the neck. Only a few days separated t hese two crimes, and in the time between them a lesbian couple suffered a physical assault in a bar in Morelia.
references Astorga, Luis. 2007. Seguridad, traficantes y militares. Mexico City: Tusquets. Domingo, Pilar. 2011. “Judicialización de la política: El cambio de papel político del Poder Judicial en México.” In La judicialización de la política en América Latina, edited by Rachel Sieder, Line Schjolden, and Alan Angell, 67–86. Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social. Durán-Martínez, Angelica. 2015. “To Kill and Tell? State Power, Criminal Competition, and Drug Violence.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 59 (8): 1377–1402.
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Epp, Charles. 2013. La revolución de los derechos. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. Flores Pérez, Carlos Antonio. 2009. El Estado en crisis: Crimen organizado y política, desafíos para la consolidación democrática. Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social. Gallagher, Janice. 2017. “The Last Mile Problem: Activists, Advocates, and the Struggle for Justice in Domestic Courts.” Comparative Political Studies 50 (12): 1666–1698. Granduque José, Caio Jesus. 2012. “Reinventar el acceso a la justicia en tiempo de transición paradigmática.” Revista de Derechos Humanos y Estudios Sociales 8: 39–54. Gupta, Akhil. 2012. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press. Horvath, Robert. 2014. “Breaking the Totalitarian Ice: The Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR.” Human Rights Quarterly 36: 147–175. I(dh)eas. 2021. “En decisión histórica, SCJN reconoce que las Acciones Urgentes emitidas por la ONU son vinculantes y obligatorias para todas las autoridades encargadas de la búsqueda e investigación de personas desaparecidas.” https://w ww.idheas.org.mx/comuni caciones-i dheas/sala-de-prensa-idheas/comunicados/en-una-decision-historica-la-scjn -de-mexico-reconocio-que-las-acciones-urgentes-emitidas-por-la-onu-son-vinculantes-y -obligatorias-para-todas-las-autoridades-encargadas-de-la-busqueda-e-investigacion/. Lemaitre, Julieta. 2009. El derecho como conjuro: Fetichismo legal, violencia y movimientos sociales. Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores. Lucio, Charbell. 2018. “En 2017 se registraron 144 asesinatos de mujeres in Michoacán; solo 26 son considerados ‘feminicidios.’ ” Revolución 3.0. https://revolucion.news/2017-se-regis traron-1 44-asesinatos-mujeres-michoacan-solo-26-c onsiderados-feminicidios/. Misse, Michel. 2006. Crime e violencia no Brasil contemporaneo: Estudos de sociologia do crime e da violencia urbana. Río de Janeiro: Lumen Juris. Pearce, Jenny. 2018. “Elites and Violence in Latin America: Logics of the Fragmented Security State.” Violence, Security and Peace Working Paper, London School of Economics. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, and César Rodríguez Garavito, eds. 2007. El derecho y la globalización desde abajo. Barcelona: Anthropos. Sieder, Rachel, ed. 2017. “Demanding Justice and Security: Indigenous Women and Legal Pluralities in Latin America.” In Demanding Justice and Security: Indigenous W omen and Legal Pluralities in Latin America, edited by Rachel Sieder, 1–26. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Stammers, Neil. 2005. “La aparición de los derechos humanos en el norte: Hacia una revalorización histórica.” In Ciudadanía incluyente: Significados y expresiones, edited by Naila Kabeer, 57–74. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
chapter 5
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Churches as Institutions in Regions of Violent Organized Crime Trevor Stack
The priest in Lázaro Cárdenas who dismissed the idea of encouraging victims of violence to file police reports (chapter 4) went on to explain that victims tended to come instead to their parish priests. More visited their priests to share experiences of violence than to confess, he added. Other priests gave similar accounts. Those reports filtered up through the hierarchy of the Catholic Church starting from around 2005, prompting anguished debates among clergy and lay leaders about how to respond to the violence. At the time of our research, t here remained b itter divisions within the Church.1 Many clergy were reluctant to do anything more than provide spiritual succor. Some felt that this was all they could offer, while others believed that it was not for the Church to do more in any case. Yet others felt that the Church could and should respond to the vio lence. Th ose clergy w ere divided about how best to do so, and a bishop who denounced criminal violence and government inaction went on to censure a priest who engaged with autodefensa groups. This volume focuses on the responses of a range of social organizations to crime-related violence, but I argue in this chapter that churches are not merely social organizations. They are better understood as institutions, comparable as such to states. Like states, churches bring together various actors within a relatively stable structure that defines membership in existential terms (respectively, citizens and the faithful) and defines office in terms of vocation (civil servants and priests). As institutions, churches have a moral and political authority that on occasion exceeds that of states; they have an extensive infrastructure that is sometimes comparable to that of states; they generate broad social networks among their faithful and even beyond; and they engender 93
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some social organizations and shape others, just as states do. Th ese institutional features are of special relevance when state institutions are ineffective or have been compromised—such when crime finds a foothold in them. Then the institutionality of churches becomes an important resource. I argue that the institutional character of the church that I analyze, the Catholic Church in the Mexican state of Michoacán, took on special significance in the face of the challenges described in this book. Furthermore, the Church’s interventions overlapped with o thers, described in the previous chapters. The Church has designed schemes for participation in security councils (chapter 2), drawn on peace-building strategies that overlap with t hose of cultural movements (chapter 3), and been involved in campaigns against gender-based and LGBTI+ violence and forced disappearances (chapter 4). But I want to emphasize that the Church’s initiatives differs from others with regard to the authority, infrastructure, and networks that characterize the Church as an institution. As an institution, the Church has the legitimacy to denounce crime and violence in the name of a society that it claims to represent; the Mexican state, despite its democratic credentials, often lacks this legitimacy. The Church’s infrastructure, from photocopiers and vehicles to buildings and lawyers, has special significance when the government’s infrastructure is compromised. The Church’s social networks among the faithful are crucial for their ability to reach victims of vio lence, mediate conflicts, and interact with other organizations. Moreover, its institutional character allows the Church to influence the formation and development of other organizations.
The Role of Churches in Areas of Crime-R elated Violence Despite the growing literature on global crime-related violence, t here are few studies of churches’ responses. In part this reflects the peripheral place of churches in social science. Despite churches’ crucial roles across many world regions, the study of churches is largely relegated to subfields such as the sociology and anthropology of religion (Stack, Goldenberg, and Fitzgerald 2015). In the vast literature on civil society, for example, few authors followed up on José Casanova’s observation that many civil society organisations (CSO) since the 1980s have been linked to churches (Casanova 1996). I argue that in regions like Michoacán and, I suspect, in many other contexts around the world, studies of responses to crime-related violence must necessarily consider the roles of churches. I recognize that t here is an extensive literature within theology and related fields about the character of churches and their role in broader society. Examples of special relevance are the treatise of the theologian William Cavanaugh (1998) on the ecclesiastical response to the Chilean dictatorship and the work of the Jesuit Joseph Palacios (2007) on the “Catholic social imagination” among
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organizations in Mexico and the United States. In this chapter, I discuss the theological account of the Catholic Church’s role in the face of violence that was developed in an influential episcopal document. However, my approach in this chapter is more modest. Th ere is much more to churches than institutionality as I describe it, but for the purposes of the chapter I w ill consider only this aspect. My emphasis on churches’ institutionality is inspired by the provocative description by the religious studies scholar Naomi Goldenberg of churches as “once and future states” (2015, 282). A fter reminding us that churches once exercised many of the functions that are now the purview of government, Goldenberg observes that in contexts in which national states lose their credibility—whether because of civil war or, as in the context discussed here, because of involvement in crime—churches may recover, albeit temporarily, some of those functions that they have long ceased to exercise. While our approaches are different, Goldenberg’s is relevant to this chapter b ecause of how I understand organized crime. As I argue in chapter 1, organized crime is best understood as being organized around state institutions, which offer protection for criminal business. In the face of crime harbored by state institutions, and especially when criminal actors capture state institutions, the church’s institutionality is of special importance. A dramatic example occurred in 2013, when the bishop of Apatzingán Miguel Patiño sent a pastoral letter to Catholics in his diocese, warning that the “[m]unicipal governments and the police are subject to or colluded with criminals, and the rumor is growing that the state government is also at the serv ice of organized crime, which causes hopelessness and disillusionment in society” (Patiño, 2013). The bishop’s letter had important ramifications for the local and national events that followed in Michoacán. Yet it is mentioned in few analyses of t hose events. Neither is the institutionality of churches considered in the few studies on churches in crime-a ffected contexts elsewhere. It is barely mentioned, for example, in Baris Cayli’s (2013) study of the Church-sponsored Libera movement that led the anti-Mafia struggle in Sicily (see also Di Cristina 2000). Cayli observes that Libera shared many characteristics with other sociopolitical movements of the time, but he says little about the fact that the Church in Sicily effectively housed the movement. Th ere is a little more attention to the role of churches in the literat ure on postconflict settings: an example is the volume Religious Responses to Violence: Human Rights in Latin America Past and Pre sent (Wilde 2015). Though that volume does not include chapters on crime- related violence, it does discuss ecclesiastical intervention in peace building, which is relevant because in Michoacán the Church sponsored peace-building initiatives with a view to reducing the violence that was becoming endemic in every sphere of life. This chapter includes a discussion of t hose peace-building projects, but it also discusses several different interventions that have been ignored in the relevant literature.
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The fact that churches are institutions does not mean that they are harmonious, any more than states are, and I observe that t here was opposition within the Church to many of t hese initiatives.
An Ethnographic Approach to the Institutionality of Churches In this section, I consider a range of initiatives linked to the Catholic Church in relation to the problem of organized crime (again, understood as crime orga nized around government), including the violence that it tends to generate. I emphasize the relevance to this problem of the institutional features of the Church—especially its authority, infrastructure, and social networks. At the same time, t here are limits to the Church’s ability to intervene. Th ese limits include resource shortages; the clergy’s concern about not crossing the line between church and state; the resistance of many clergy to undertaking such initiatives; and fear in the face of intimidation. My approach was ethnographic and included conversations with key actors, including priests, lay leaders, and other actors who engaged in one way or another with the ecclesiastical initiatives. I also participated in multiple meetings and activities, such as t hose of the social ministry group of the Zamora diocese. I refer mainly to the case of Michoacán, though I also conducted fieldwork in the neighboring state of Jalisco. Both Michoacán and Jalisco are regions where, on the one hand, organized crime has had a severe impact and, on the other hand, the Catholic Church remains an important institution, despite the historical secularism of the Mexican state and the rise of Protestant churches.2 The Michoacán case is also interesting because the archdiocese and several dioceses have prioritized the issue of crime-related violence, undertaking initiatives that range from public denunciation to therapy for victims of violence, and the Jesuits followed suit with a series of projects. Despite Michoacán’s particu lar circumstances, I maintain that it can be compared to many other contexts worldwide. Within Mexico, Michoacán has a longer experience with organized crime than other states, but today crime affects much of the country. The Michoacán Catholic Church places special emphasis on the issue of violence, but in many other states the Church intervenes in one way or another. Beyond Mexico, comparisons could be made between Michoacán and Nigeria or South Africa, where churches (as well as other religious institutions) have not only confronted problems related to orga nized crime but have also done so in relation to governments of a comparable strength to that of Mexico’s. The most obvious comparisons, though, are with Colombia and Italy, where—unlike in Nigeria and South Africa—a single church has had historical predominance and, despite being diminished in recent times, continues to be the dominant church with an important public personality and manages to speak for society with some credibility. In Colombia and Italy, like Mexico, it is the Catholic Church that has held this dominant
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position. As we w ill see, the Church has certain characteristics of relevance to the role it assumes in the context of organized crime, including the status and hierarchy of the clergy and its commitment to h uman dignity.3
Background: The Bishops’ Exhortation of 2010 One of the first ecclesiastical documents to respond directly to the problem of crime-related violence was written in part by a priest of Michoacán origin, F ather Armando Flores. This priest was responsible for the Zamora diocese’s social ministry from the 1990s to around 2010, and he also served as parish priest in the north of the state, where he witnessed the incursions of the Knights Templar criminal organization. He was then appointed national secretary-general of the Church’s social ministry, and in that capacity, in 2010 he helped draft the Mexican Episcopal Conference’s document titled “In Christ We May Have Dignified Peace” (Conferencia del Episcopado Mexicano 2010). The document is an “exhortation” addressed to Catholic clergy and faithful that dioceses, parishes, and other church organizations w ere expected to consider. Exhortations are expressed generally and are not programmatic: dioceses respond to them by debating and developing their own strategies. For this reason, it is appropriate to summarize both the document and the process it generated in the words of a lay social ministry agent in Zamora, Javier (a pseudonym). Javier explained that “the bishops made the exhortation on the issue of the insecurity that the country was living [in] from a social ministry perspective, rather than from a national security perspective.” He outlined the broad vision articulated in the document of the issue of crime-related violence, which it related to other forms of violence (including gender violence) and the context of neoliberalism and globalization. Javier then explained the process that followed in the Zamora diocese, not only among parishioners but also in meetings with organizations and governmental institutions: “With the priest [responsible for the diocesan social ministry] we presented the document in 135 parishes over two or three years. First, distributing the document in the parishes . . . making it known, with talks on the theme of peace. But not only there—we had the pleasure of presenting it in labor unions . . . also on radio, on television. In 2011 we had a meeting . . . there are about thirty-five municipalities in the diocese of Zamora, [and] we had around eighteen or twenty municipal presidents there.” Finally, Javier pointed out the links that w ere made beyond Mexico, especially with Colombia, through church networks: “Obviously this [crime-related violence] was increasing and in 2013 . . . the priest who was then in charge of the social ministry at the national level . . . begins to look for which countries have lived [through] this situation, especially with the churches, and finds Colombia with a situation very similar to Mexico. Colombia [had] the same situation of organized crime, drug trafficking, and they had already been working on this issue for a decade. They approach the Colombian bishops, and that is when they find out about the Yeast Organism model.”
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Church Initiatives: Institutional Resources and Their Limits I have divided the church-linked initiatives that I identified into four broad categories: public denunciation of violence by the clergy, peace-building initiatives, the promotion of civil society and direct intervention in government, and the role of clergy behind the scenes. I offer examples of each kind of initiative and in each case identify the role of moral and political authority, the infrastructure provided by the institution, and the social networks between clergy and parishioners. I also discuss some of the limits to the church’s ability to act. Public Denunciation of Violence by Clergy. When clergy publicly denounce the workings of crime and its effects, notably violence, their denunciations are comparable to t hose made by CSOs, but they tend to have more impact when delivered in the name of the Church. Furthermore, the dioceses have their own press offices in addition to diocesan weekly newspapers, both of which can be used to publicize the denunciations. Extensive social networks among clergy and the faithful not only are important for dissemination but also give credibility to the clergy’s claims, since it is known that pastors receive information through those networks as well as in parish and diocesan assemblies. A key example is the 2013 pastoral letter that I have mentioned by Bishop Patiño, suggesting that the Michoacán state government was subject to criminal interests. The year 2013 was decisive b ecause (as explained in chapters 1 and 2) it marked the beginnings of the autodefensa movement against the Knights Templar, which had a stronghold in the city of Apatzingán and its region. The bishop’s immediate concern was the pronouncements being made by a priest of the diocese, F ather Gregorio López, in favor of the autodefensa groups. However, the bishop was already hearing from other priests about the brutal acts of the Templars, as well as about the complicity of municipal, state, and federal authorities. Indeed, the bishop’s letter had been written by a group of priests and lay leaders who had convinced the bishop to sign it, along with a second letter that was printed in newspapers at the end of the year. The letters had repercussions both inside and outside the church. They came to the attention of Pope Francis, who publicly expressed concern about the situation, and this appears to be one of the reasons for the Mexican government’s intervention in January 2014. In addition, it seems that the various autodefensa groups felt legitimized by the letters. The clergy’s denunciations became more frequent a fter Carlos Garfias was appointed archbishop of Morelia. Garfias was transferred from the Acapulco diocese in the neighboring state of Guerrero, where he had already participated in various initiatives against violence. However, more recent denunciations have been less provocative than the 2013 letters: they are pitched in general terms and lack similar questioning of the authorities. This is in contrast to the denuncia-
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tions that Father López continued to make, as well as t hose by another priest in Apatzingán, Father José Luis Segura, who made his statements not only via social media but also in public forums—notably, at meetings of the Apatzingán Security and Justice Working Group. One limit to the use of public denunciation is fear. Bishop Patiño told me that in 2013 he feared reprisals for his pastoral letter. He was surprised that the strongest criticisms came from other clergy, which illustrates a second limit on clergy making denunciations of this nature. Many bishops, priests, and lay leaders w ere opposed to the Church’s raising its voice on such issues. Some feared reprisals against the Church, others felt that the Church’s attention should be focused on spiritual and not social m atters, and still o thers were mindful of Mexico’s secularist legacy and wary of the Church’s being accused of overstepping the mark. Secularism also served as an excuse for state officials to dismiss the Church’s pronouncements as illegitimate. Certainly, Archbishop Garfias has trod carefully in voicing concern about the devastating effects of violence, while collaborating with state and federal governments in several initiatives. From Accompaniment to Reconstructing the Social Fabric: Peace-Building Projects. Although the bishop’s letter in 2013 caught the world’s attention, the year began with a new set of projects for the social ministry teams of the Michoacán Catholic Church. Colombian missionaries were invited to an interdiocesan social ministry meeting, and the Michoacán teams agreed to implement projects similar to some of those that had been successful in Colombia. Furthermore, the concept of Yeast Organisms (Organismos Levadura) was outlined the following year in another document of the Mexican Episcopal Conference, which declared “justice, peace, and reconciliation” to be the new goal for social ministry (Comisión Episcopal para la Pastoral Social 2014). Yeast Organisms were local groups that were intended to help community peace- building processes “rise.” Social ministry teams started to identify and train so- called change agents, who among other t hings could help found and work with the Yeast Organisms, increasing their ability to catalyze processes in the wider society. Some of the training was provided by the Colombians in 2014–2016. By 2016, the social ministry teams w ere developing efforts that ranged from so-called accompaniment projects, which provided therapy to victims of vio lence, to projects intended to reconstruct the social fabric, which sought to counteract what Abello Colak and Pearce (2015) term “chronic violence” and its destructive effects on trust and solidarity. It is important to note that these proj ects overlapped with projects of government institutions, such as the federal Culture for Harmony Program mentioned in chapter 3. It is also important that all t hese projects benefited from diocesan infrastructure (including rooms for meetings and therapy sessions, as well as expenses and even salaries for some therapists) and the extensive social networks among clergy and faithful (which
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enabled the social ministry teams to identify and contact victims of violence in the first place). “Accompaniment” refers to the provision of moral and psychological support to people who have suffered the effects of violence. Since distrust in state institutions was at a peak, priests were the only people many of the faithful felt they could turn to. Priests have always been expected to give pastoral care, but during this period, in part through the Colombian training, priests and lay leaders found themselves acquiring specialized knowledge of psychology. In addition, social ministry teams sought out people who had majored in psychology, who worked mostly as volunteers—though a few were hired and paid salaries. “Reconstructing the social fabric” (RSF), a more complex concept, was used not only by church groups (again under Colombian direction) but also by the federal Cultural Ministry (see chapter 3). It is a concept coined in postconflict contexts that includes a range of strategies to counteract the socialization of violence and restore the relations of trust considered necessary to generate social peace. In the case of the Zamora diocese, at the end of the training period in 2016, the bishop asked the social ministry team to propose some concrete actions. The team’s first proposal was to create a civil platform. The second proposal was the creation of Listening Centers, which were small therapy clinics for victims of violence where care was provided by trained psychologists. Th ese are examples of how priests’ pastoral accompaniment was to be supplemented by professionalized care on a slightly larger scale, given the demand. It was not easy to implement the Listening Centers, especially b ecause of the l imited funding available from dioceses. The lack of resources led to conflict when, for example, t here was only enough to pay the salary of one psychologist and the o thers were expected to continue as volunteers. Despite the setbacks, Archbishop Garfias continued to promote the creation of new Listening Centers, and more were implemented in subsequent years. It was agreed in 2017 that each diocese would create three Listening Centers and at least one Yeast Organism. One example of the projects developed under the RSF rubric is the “Sing with Lions” program that the Zamora diocese started in 2018, which offered training in a violence-reduction methodology developed originally by African missionaries and promoted by Catholic Relief Serv ices. The Morelia diocese worked mainly in schools using the methodology of the School of Forgiveness and Reconciliation, which was another result of Colombia’s peace-building programs. The Jesuit mission also introduced a number of RSF programs. One limit that diocesan initiatives shared with government initiatives and social organizations is financial, and this was the reason for the departure of psychologists from the Listening Centers. Fear of reprisals and criticism from other sectors of the Church also limited the effectiveness of the peace-building initiatives. For example, a young psychologist recounted her experience attending to victims in a municipality that had suffered a wave of violence. The parish
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priest ordered the psychologists to stop providing therapy a fter some parishioners reported their alarm about violence being discussed in group sessions, and the psychologist lamented that the victims were abandoned as a result. In general, however, t here was little resistance from other clergy to the peacebuilding program since the peacebuilding programs w ere not considered political, although one social ministry priest regretted that only a few priests and lay leaders actively supported the programs. Church Participation in Civil Society Projects. The Mexican Catholic Church has sought to intervene in society for over a c entury, as it did through introducing Workers’ Circles in the 1900s and Catholic Action groups in the 1920s. In the 1990s, the Church in Mexico and beyond began to appropriate the emerging global discourse of civil society to frame its ongoing interventions.4 In general, the Church does not present itself as civil society but rather as a champion of civil society. This allows the Church to intervene without being accused of crossing the line between church and state. In the Michoacán case, I differentiate between four sets of projects that w ere framed as civil society initiatives: church participation in established civil society forums; CSOs nurtured by the Church; collaboration with government alongside CSOs; and direct participation in government programs, which in this context was undertaken only by a Jesuit mission. For each set, I offer examples to illustrate the role of Church authority, as well as its infrastructure and social networks, before signaling the limits of the Church’s intervention. In the first set of projects, the church is invited to participate by established civil society forums rather than being involved in creating the forums. An example is the clergy’s participation in Security and Justice Working Groups (SJWGs), which are analyzed in chapter 2. When I asked members of the Zamora SJWG whether they had sought to open its membership to make it more representative, they replied that the p eople were represented by the bishop and the priest in charge of the diocesan social ministry. This again demonstrates the moral and political authority of the Church, and it reflects the tendency of Church spokespeople to speak for society. In practice, the clergy’s role in the SWJGs varied from one diocese to another. In Apatzingán, a priest was an active member, but he ended up leaving the group, apparently by mutual agreement with other members, b ecause he antagonized with his criticism the officials who participated in the plenary sessions, and other members worried that this was harming the relations that they w ere eager to build with the officials. In Zamora, the bishop never attended SWJG meetings, and the social ministry priest stopped attending in 2016 in part because of his other commitments and in part b ecause he considered the SWJG to be a talking shop rather than a space for action. By contrast, the same priest participated in a series of public forums on security organized by an academic researcher at
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El Colegio de Michoacán, who was also a long-t ime activist. Through t hose forums, the priest contacted o thers who joined the civil platform that he was then developing. A second set of projects consisted of the Church promoting particular civil society organizations. State institutions engender multiple organizations (such as political parties) and mold others (for example, in Mexico by requiring their registration as civil associations), and churches also play important roles in forging and shaping social organizations. Members of the Zamora social ministry team explained that they sought to create organizations that would later become autonomous, allowing the Catholic Church to intervene in society without crossing the line between church and state. The results varied greatly by context, and I offer two contrasting cases that nevertheless have certain points in common. In both cases, the process of separating the organization from the Church was problematic; moreover, both organizations disappeared within two years. Yet in both cases the organizations left their mark. The first example of a CSO being promoted by the Church is the Consejo Ciudadano Responsable de Impulsar un Sano Tejido Social (CCRISTOS; the Citizens’ Council Responsible for Promoting a Healthy Social Fabric) movement, in which Father López played an important role in Apatzingán in 2014. At that time, the movement received some diocesan and federal government resources and was formally established as a civil association. Its stated goals included denouncing criminal activities, implementing strategies to promote forgiveness and reconciliation, fostering citizen empowerment, and mediating between vulnerable groups and the government. CCRISTOS ended up adopting a model pioneered in the state of Nuevo León that focused on strengthening the police, including by getting involved in recruitment (Guerra Manzo 2015, 16–17). The movement disintegrated after members lost trust in one another, though perhaps also failed because the bishop withdrew his support. In this case, Church support for the organization largely came from F ather López. Despite the movement’s dissolving, the experience left its mark on some of the members, who later organized in other ways— including in an SJWG and in cultural collectives (chapter 3). A second CSO supported by the Church also failed but still led to other forms of organizing. As contemplated in the 2014 “justice, peace, and reconciliation” document of the Mexican Episcopal Conference (Comisión Episcopal para la Pastoral Social 2014), it was decided in Zamora in 2016 to launch a civil platform, which entailed founding an organization that would l ater become independent of the diocese and seek its own relations with other social and political organ izations in the region. After an initial open forum, the group began meeting under the name Awakening Consciences, but by the end of the year there were only three members left: a local psychology lecturer and author, a social leader who had founded a civil association after the 2015 elections before becoming an SJWG member, and one of the social ministry agents. Th ese three met with four
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of the young psychologists who had been trained as Listening Center therapists and agreed to organize a public event in a square in the city of Zamora. An eighth person was included through the first forum organized by the researcher-activist at El Colegio de Michoacán. This eighth person, whom I w ill call Ernesto, distinguished himself not only by being openly affiliated with the Left but also by identifying himself as an atheist. At the public event, about thirty p eople dressed in white gathered around t ables placed in the square. Each table was marked with a theme ranging from “Education” to “Security and Citizen Participation” and had an urn in which attendees could put comments and questions on these topics. Another new organization took part in that event: Insurgent Zamora Organ ization (IZO). This group had been founded days earlier after a series of marches, part of a national wave, that protested a hike in gas prices that month. Ernesto had joined the marches and participated in IZO’s founding, and he then served as a link between IZO and Awakening Consciences. He proposed coordinating the latter group’s event with an IZO march scheduled for the same day. In the end, the marchers arrived halfway through the event in the square (Figure 5.1).
Figure 5.1. Awakening Consciences public event in January 2017. Nearest to the camera are the Insurgent Zamora Organization marchers; opposite them and on the stage are Awakening Consciences’ members, dressed in white. Photo by Trevor Stack.
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Awakening Consciences separated itself sooner than anticipated from the diocesan social ministry team, a fter the young psychologists left the Listening Center to protest that they had not been hired. As the social ministry priest put it, “the birth was painful.” However, the social ministry team continued to train the remaining members in the Yeast Organism model. In addition, in April 2017 the association was integrated into a group of organizations that incorporated members of IZO as well as some environmental groups. Then in 2018, even though Awakening Consciences had stopped meeting, two of the young psychologists supported the social leader’s campaign as an independent candidate for mayor, along with an IZO leader and several environmental activists. Ernesto did not follow them but acknowledged in the same year that, despite his being an atheist, the Yeast Organism model had influenced his preferences and his approach to neighborhood organizing. Thus, despite the multiple ruptures, Awakening Consciences left a number of marks on social organizing. A third modality of the church’s participation in civil society was collaboration with state institutions, usually alongside CSOs. However, such collaboration has not proved easy in practice, and the projects have tended to remain in the planning stages. An example was the Public Security Ministry’s call for dioceses to collaborate in filtering the recruitment of police, as CCRISTOS had done for a time. This plan did not come to fruition, but it was still revealing of the role that state officials imagined the Church should play in security matters. The Public Security Ministry saw the Church’s moral standing as a resource it could use to encourage recruitment in the first place, as well as to ensure that the right people were recruited. Furthermore, it hoped that the Church’s infrastructure and social networks could help reach potential recruits in the first place, w hether through church attendance or through print and online media. A rather different example was the archdiocese’s project to establish an office to compile and analyze statistics, both about parishioners and church attendance and also about social issues such as the incidence of violence. In this case, collaboration took the form of training provided by the federal statistics office to social ministry agents who w ere to assist the office. The priest I spoke to insisted that the purpose was not to compete with but instead to “complement” the official statistics. In this case, the Church sought to take advantage of state institutions’ resources, while insisting that the project be operated in parallel to state serv ices. Again, though, it was unclear in 2019 whether the project would take shape, and what its remit would be. The fourth variety of Church participation in civil society, which is quite dif ferent from the previous three, was the Social Integration and Assistance Center (SIAC) project that the Jesuits launched in Michoacán in 2016. This project had some similarity to the dioceses’ idea of a civil platform, exemplified in Zamora by Awakening Consciences. But even though the SIAC was registered
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as a civil association, it was still considered a Jesuit mission, and the diocesan clergy tended to view it as a form of politics that they could not pursue. The idea for the SIAC came originally from a 2008 visit of the Jesuit who leads it, F ather Jorge González, to the town of Tancítaro, at a time when the municipality was suffering a spike in crime-related violence (chapter 2). During his subsequent studies and experience in Mexico and abroad, Father González encountered the debates about RSF initiatives, which he used to frame the SIAC project in 2016. The project was launched in the municipalities of Tancítaro and Cherán (in the indigenous-dominated central region of the state) and was then extended to Tangancicuaro (close to Zamora) as well as two missions beyond Michoacán. The SIAC was legally a civil association, but Father González considered it “a Jesuit work”—that is, “a set of activities around a mission to respond to a problem in the country.” In the case of Tancítaro, autodefensa groups entered the municipality from neighboring ones in 2015 and helped create a security system, recruiting local people to staff barricades or checkpoints on the main roads into the municipality. Political party leaders and members of the avocado growers’ board decided to back a unity candidate in the municipal elections. F ather González was involved in the discussions about backing a unity candidate, and when the candidate won, F ather González was invited to launch RSF programs and help develop a citizen council. The RSF programs’ activities ranged from developing producer cooperatives to providing f amily reconciliation, and the SIAC leaders for each program delivered training to local p eople. Response to the SIAC’s projects varied. Some autodefensas as well as politi cal party members objected that the municipal government had invested too much money in the programs without seeing results. In 2018 the successful candidate for mayor had promised to scrap municipal support for the SIAC, and she followed through on her promise. That is, the electoral cycle affected the Jesuit intervention, as it did many other initiatives considered in this volume. The four variations on the Church’s participation in civil society share some limits. One is, again, financial, a limitation also shared by social organizations and state institutions. Financial limitations have a way of causing conflict, as we saw when the diocese funded only one of the four psychologists in Zamora’s Listening Center, which also affected the development of Awakening Consciences. Critics of the Jesuit-led SIAC project also dwelled on the burden on municipal budgets. Furthermore, critics considered the SIAC project to violate political secularism, which made diocesan clergy wary of engaging in this sort of project. And priests and bishops were concerned that collaborating with the government would involve them in electoral machinations, which is precisely what occurred with the SIAC in Tancítaro. This directly contributed to the diocesan clergy’s preference for launching civil platforms—even if, as was the case of Awakening Consciences, it proved harder than anticipated to stay on good terms with t hose organizations.
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Clergy’s Behind-the-Scenes Roles. The three varieties of Church intervention described so far—public denunciation of violence, peace-building programs, and Church support for civil society—were very public. But the Church’s responses are often less public, occurring to some degree b ehind the scenes. This does not necessarily make them less institutional, and state officials also engage in off-stage practices, from mediating disputes to resolving complaints and responding to personal petitions. The following four off-stage responses fall within what is expected, institutionally, of clergy: First, priests and bishops are expected to meet periodically with municipal presidents and other state officials to discuss mutual concerns, and this sometimes includes raising issues related to violence and crime. However, the priests I spoke with noted that they raised such issues with caution b ecause of their fear and distrust of the authorities. Second, some clerics reported having had contacts with members of criminal groups, though these encounters varied considerably. Some clergy had been asked to perform a mass outside church—to avoid detection by authorities—or to hear the confessions of known criminals. One priest in the region around Apatzingán said that he had been asked to bless a chapel with an icon of “San Nazario,” a Knights Templar leader killed in 2014 and venerated by some as a saint. The priest explained that he did not refuse the request outright to maintain a dialogue, and he acknowledged that he would likely end up blessing the chapel. In other cases, parish priests w ere obliged to pay protection to criminal groups. These contacts may lead to a third type of response: priests’ mediating in conflicts related to criminal activity. The issue of Church mediation reached the national news in 2018 when a bishop in the neighboring state of Guerrero reported that he had mediated between criminal groups to avoid what he considered unnecessary conflict. The Apatzingán priest was known to have mediated a dispute between criminal groups in his previous parish, although he pointed out to me that the possibility of mediation is usually limited. He gave the example of a conflict in which young people from three families, involved in organizing the festival for their village’s patron saint, had been killed. The most he could do, he explained, was offer medicines from his parish pharmacy to the mother of one of the deceased youths, while encouraging one of the other families to continue participating in the festival organization. A fourth behind-t he-scenes role is gathering information about the social context, which might include criminal activities. As I have noted, victims of vio lence often approached priests since they mistrusted state officials, and this meant that priests tended to receive information that they w ere expected to transmit to their dioceses. Bishop Patiño’s pastoral letter in 2013 report was informed by reports from priests. The most obvious limit to the clergy’s behind-t he-scenes roles was the clergy’s fear of reprisals. Several priests have been killed in Michoacán, and though
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the motives were seldom made public, it appears likely that the killings had to do with the clergy’s behind-the-scenes roles—especially their transmitting information thought to be damaging to criminal or other interests. Another limit was the clergy’s distrust of state officials, which meant that some clergy either avoided meeting with officials altogether or avoided sensitive topics like crime at meetings.
Conclusion: The Institutionality of the Church and Crime-R elated Violence The aim of this chapter has been to understand how, within a context in which crime is not only violent but also tied to state institutions, a nonstate institution such as the Catholic Church can respond. Many of the Church’s projects overlapped with t hose of secular organizations, as well as with government projects. The Church’s peace-building initiatives, for example, are similar to t hose of other organizations and of the government, which even used similar concepts such as reconstructing the social fabric. The clergy’s public and nonpublic roles are more peculiar to the Church, though they are not entirely different from the roles of civil society leaders. The difference is, rather, due to the Church’s institutional character, which is all the more important in contexts such as Michoacán, where the Church enjoys greater moral and political authority than the state. The Church has an infrastructure that bears comparison with the state’s, as well as extensive social networks among the faithful, and like the state, it engenders some social organizations and shapes others. I have also recognized the limits to the Church’s roles. Again, some are shared with social organizations and state institutions. The Church’s roles generate risks, as horrifically shown by the killings of priests, which incline priests to limit their interventions. Church initiatives are further limited by the diocesan clergy’s wariness of crossing the lines between church and state, though the Jesuit mission felt less constrained in that regard than other clergy did. Finally, the actions of priests and lay leaders are limited by opposition from within the Church, especially from the many clergy who give less weight to the Church’s social mission than to its religious one or are concerned about reprisals against clergy. Although this chapter is based on a specific region, the Mexican state of Michoacán, with some material from the neighboring state, I have argued that the analysis is relevant to other regions in which churches develop responses to crime-related violence or other kinds of violent conflict. However, the chapter w ill be of most relevance in contexts like that of Michoacán, where a single church has historical predominance—thus allowing the clergy to speak on behalf of society and lending moral and political weight to the church’s declarations, especially when state institutions have lost their authority and the trust of the
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eople. Specifically, the Catholic Church is distinguished by the standing of its p priests and bishops, which cannot easily be compared with that of leaders in other churches, much less in social organizations. The clergy’s role is important not only in public pronouncements but also in acting behind the scenes, whether in meetings with officials or in mediating conflicts, even among criminal groups. Priests’ extensive networks in regions like Michoacán allow them to gather information, which as I note may help explain the number of priests who have been killed. Finally, though I have considered several limits to church responses, I might go further to indicate how a church might contribute to some of the same prob lems that it seeks to address. For example, the Catholic Church in Michoacán has taken stances on gender and LGBTI+ issues that have led to harassment of activists (chapter 4), as well as shoring up the gender ideology that Catherine Whittaker finds even in activist circles (chapter 6). At the end of the book (chapter 8) I take up a still more troubling possibility, that the Catholic Church is complicit in forms of criminal business.
notes 1. Some of t hese divisions w ere contingent, while o thers were linked to long-standing differences between clergy. These include differences stemming from the Second Vatican Council, which introduced a new vision of the Church’s role in the world. This vision was not accepted by all dioceses, and the Zamora diocese proved especially resistant (Hernández Madrid 1999). 2. Although my focus is on the state of Michoacán, I mention the neighboring state of Jalisco because the diocese t here has taken a different trajectory and also because the criminal dynamics and the actions of the state government are different from t hose in Michoacán. Jalisco lends itself to a complex comparison with Michoacán, although I lack space here to develop it. 3. Comparisons are always complex, though, and I note the importance of Mexico’s secularist tradition, which resembles the situation in France and Turkey more than that in Colombia and Italy. 4. Though the term “civil society” is often used to explain, for example, the uprisings of 1989 that toppled Communist governments in central and eastern Europe, in fact it was only in the 1990s that “civil society” achieved the currency it enjoys today, and the term was applied only retrospectively to the events of Eastern Europe.
references Abello Colak, Alexandra, and Jenny Pearce. 2015. “Securing the Global City? An Analysis of the ‘Medellín Model’ through Participatory Research.” Conflict, Security, and Development 15 (3): 197–228. Casanova, José. 1996. “Global Catholicism and the Politics of Civil Society.” Sociological Inquiry 66 (3): 356–373. Cavanaugh, William T. 1998. Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ. Oxford: Blackwell. Cayli, Baris. 2013. “Italian Civil Society against the Mafia: From Perceptions to Expectations.” International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 41 (1): 81–99.
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Comisión Episcopal para la Pastoral Social. 2014. Directrices para la dimensión de justicia, paz y reconciliación, fe y política en México. Mexico City: Comisión Episcopal para la Pastoral Social. Conferencia del Episcopado Mexicano. 2010. Que en Cristo Nuestra Paz, México tenga Vida Digna: Exhortación Pastoral del Episcopado Mexicano sobre la misión de la Iglesia en la construcción de la paz, para la vida digna del pueblo de México. Mexico City: Conferencia del Episcopado Mexicano. Di Cristina, Monsignor Salvatore. 2000. “The Church’s Moral Condemnation of the Mafia and the Clergy’s Role in the Parish.” Trends in Organized Crime 5 (3): 39–45. Goldenberg, Naomi R. 2015. “The Category of Religion in the Technology of Governance: An Argument for Understanding Religions as Vestigial States.” In Religion as a Category of Governance and Sovereignty, edited by Trevor Stack, Naomi R. Goldenberg, and Timothy Fitzgerald, 280–292. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill. Guerra Manzo, Enrique. 2015. “Las autodefensas de Michoacán: Movimiento social, paramilitarismo y neocaciquismo.” Política y Cultura 44: 7–31. Hernández Madrid, Miguel Jesús. 1999. Dilemas posconciliares: Iglesia, cultura católica y sociedad en la diócesis de Zamora, Michoacán. Zamora, Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán. Palacios, Joseph Martin. 2007. The Catholic Social Imagination: Activism and the Just Society in Mexico and the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Patiño, Miguel. 2013. “Carta pastoral del obispo Miguel Patiño Velázquez, al pueblo de Dios que peregrina en la diócesis de Apatzingán y demás personas de buena voluntad.” 15 October. Apatzingán: Diócesis de Apatzingán. Stack, Trevor, Naomi R. Goldenberg, and Timothy Fitzgerald. 2015. Religion as a Category of Governance and Sovereignty. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill. Wilde, Alexander, ed. 2015. Religious Responses to Violence: Human Rights in Latin Amer ica Past and Present. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
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A Room of Their Own barriers to women’s activism against the continuum of violence in michoacán, mexico Catherine Whittaker
In June 2019, I met seven young w omen at a colorful Zamoran café to eat crêpes and talk about the rising levels of crime-related and gender-based violence in the central Mexican state of Michoacán. Though most of the women knew each other, they had never met collectively before, as they represented different women’s groups with varying perspectives and interests. Yet a fter four hours of excited conversation, they decided to continue meeting to combine their politi cal influence, learn from each other, and develop more effective strategies. One year l ater, Zamora saw its largest feminist march yet. Opening feminine spaces of reflection, connection, and care, I suggest, are key to breaking the masculinized cycle of violence. Predominantly men are fighting for control of Michoacán, although some w omen are becoming involved in cartel business and narco culture (Muehlmann 2014). Rising homicide rates mean that women can no longer feel safe, since anyone can become a target for revenge or accidentally be hit by a stray bullet, and several forms of violence may often be intertwined (Hernández Castillo 2015). As one feminist activist told me, “it doesn’t matter anymore—a ny woman could be a victim now, anywhere.” Social conflict has inspired many citizens to join activist groups that denounce the political corruption and institutional fragility that have rendered official responses to violence ineffect ive. Security thus concerns all genders, yet men have dominated many types of civil organizations. This chapter explores why the renewed appetite for political change failed to translate into more opportunities for w omen’s political participation. Focusing on a lack of protected spaces for w omen alongside other gendered factors, I aim to explain why men have more influence on political decision making in response to violence and insecurity at present, such as through meetings with politicians. 110
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If gender discrimination is partly to blame for women’s marginalization in decision-making processes, is it easier for women to participate politically via women-only antiviolence organizations? Worded differently, can w omen’s organ izations achieve equal political participation among activists? According to the political scientists Fiona Mackay and Cera Murtagh, women’s political participation in peace-building processes depends on “the promise and limits of institutional innovation in a particu lar context, including the potential transformation of gender relations” (2019, 9). Based on their comparative analysis of conflict resolution processes in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Burundi, and Northern Ireland, they conclude that institutions “tend to produce and reproduce unequal gender power relations” (2019, 10; see also Byrne and McCulloch 2012). This chapter adapts and expands upon the conceptual tools established by Mackay and Murtagh in their framework to discuss in what ways both perpetrators and antiviolence activists are gendered actors. I argue that in addition to direct violence and discrimination against female activists, the gendered logic of appropriateness helps explain why women face barriers to participating in certain kinds of activism, as politics is still widely considered men’s business, and women’s organizations rarely challenge the gender status quo via political means. Merely introducing women-only antiviolence organizations is insufficient to promote gender equality: the organizations’ newness is nested in a historically male-dominated context, which means that sexist dynamics tend to emerge even within women’s organizations. As citizen organizations in Michoacán often have powerf ul influence on their local communities, it is important to analyze their internal gender politics alongside t hose of institutions—that is, to study the interaction of formal and informal institutions. Finally, based on the ethnographic material presented here, I introduce the concept of gendered spaces to highlight the importance of feminine spaces in which women exchange resources and help each other navigate the networks dominated by men or create their own networks. The ethnographic material discussed here was generated by the research team responsible for this volume and includes research that I conducted during two brief fieldwork visits in March and May–June 2019. Throughout this chapter, I provide excerpts from my own and other team members’ interviews (I will name the team members), which w ere compiled and made accessible to all members via a shared Nvivo database. I begin the chapter by expanding on the ways in which various forms of violence are enmeshed in Michoacán. I then draw on Mackay and Murtagh’s framework to make some initial observations on the frequently unequal, gendered aspects of activist organizations in Michoacán, and I present some ideas on how t hese gendered aspects may affect activists’ ability to counteract crime-related violence. In the section “Case Studies,” I present three case studies of women’s organizations, and I compare the organizations
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using Mackay and Murtagh’s framework, which I expand in the process. (Note that “womanhood” means different t hings for t hese activists but nonetheless remains a key category of analysis, accounting for shared barriers to political participation.) I conclude that addressing gender inequality in activist organ izations and public institutions should be a priority, as women’s marginalization in or exclusion from political decision making constitutes a major obstacle in responding to the problem of violence in general.
A Feminist Institutionalist (and Activist) Framework Actions and policies against violence tend to set aside women’s interests, treating them as something separate from the common interest. Yet my interviews in Zamora suggest that gender-based discrimination and violence is a crosscutting issue that affects w omen’s political participation in any type of activist organization. Given the historical weakness of institutions and the vitality of many civil organizations in Michoacán, activist organi zations are key to the political inclusion of w omen. Therefore, it seems appropriate to expand Mackay and Murtagh’s feminist institutionalist framework and apply it to activist organi zations. In this chapter, I draw on the key concepts of that theoretical framework—the concepts of nested newness; the interaction of formal and informal institutions; the gendered logic of appropriateness; and gendered actors— to which I add the concept of gendered space (Rizvi 2019). The first concept, nested newness, refers to institutions or organizations that, despite being new or radically reformed, are inevitably shaped by their surroundings, even when they aim to break with the past. Activists have to interact with, and may even depend on, institutions and organizations with differing values or other priorities. In the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina analyzed by Mackay and Murtagh, new initiatives, such as gender quotas, have been applied within existing systems of political competition, internal party hierarchies, and sponsorship as well as patronage systems that prioritize ethnic identity issues over gender rights (2019, 18). Female activists often cannot avoid negotiating with representatives of institutions and organizations with sexist attitudes—for example, when it comes to seeking resources or spaces for events. Moreover, in a male-dominated context, dynamics of gender-based advantages and disadvantages tend to emerge even within w omen’s organizations. The framework also proposes observing the interaction of formal and informal institutions. This means that in addition to norms and informal practices, laws and formal rules are key to promoting or blocking the political participation of women. For instance, the effectiveness of Mexico’s 2007 General Law of Women’s Access to a Life Free from Violence may be undercut by macho behav ior within the institutions responsible for implementing it. To study interactions among laws, norms, and practices that promote or discourage the political par-
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ticipation of w omen activists, one should analyze how gender norms influence the interpretation of the laws and rights that are defended by activist groups. Moreover, it is necessary to compare what the law or people say with what they do, as well as the kinds of political involvement that are generally deemed more (or only) appropriate for women as opposed to men and t hose considered more appropriate for men as opposed to w omen. This latter comparison illuminates the third concept, the gendered logic of appropriateness. This involves common and pernicious narratives about what is appropriate for one gender and not o thers, narratives that are often legitimized on the basis of what is considered the natural or traditional way of doing things.1 Institutions and organizations tend to foster “the symbolic association of men and masculinity with the practices of control and authority, and the devaluing of the beliefs and practices culturally and historically associated with femininity, for example empathy and cooperation” (Mackay and Murtagh 2019, 13). In Michoacán, the sexual division of power is arguably somewhat more complex, since t here are many examples of female leadership among activists. However, among the organizations studied by our team, female activists are more commonly involved in what they would describe as social rather than political activism, such as feminist and environmentalist campaigns. It therefore seems pertinent to ask which gendered logics, w hether limiting or advantageous, affect activists in Michoacán. For example, if many people there believe that men were more intelligent than women, this would cause people to value men’s opinions more highly, which would be a significant limiting factor in the political participation of female activists. Simultaneously, female activists might be valued for introducing what are often viewed as feminine qualities of empathy and care into politics, the display of which has recently earned New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, praise (Rizvi 2019). Not only are institutions and organizations shaped by gendered notions, but the actors within them also have gendered identities and different perspectives on gender. Thus, whether or not a group of activists gives importance to gender, activists’ individual gender identities will condition their ways of perceiving the world and acting in it. Globally, it is more common for women and LGBTI+ people to take an active interest in gender issues than it is for heterosexual men. This means that gender tends to be associated only with females (and, to a lesser extent, gender-queer populations), which allows some p eople to present the struggle for gender equality falsely as a w omen’s problem, rather than as a prob lem that affects everyone. In addition, women in the pol itical arena are often delegitimized as quota women or for allegedly having received their position due to personal connections, while the expectation persists that they should submit to male leadership (Byrne and McCulloch 2012, 574). Th ese examples demonstrate the need to study how women and men behave within institutions and organizations as gendered actors.
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Finally, as Michoacán has often been perceived as a space of masculine vio lence, I introduce a fifth category of comparative analysis: gendered space. In A Room of Her Own (1929), V irginia Woolf describes how British w omen were often denied admission to spaces of knowledge and power, such as Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and lacked private spaces into which to retreat from their everyday duties and reflect on their situation and their choices. Thus, for Woolf, creating spaces for w omen was crucial for them to develop their voices. One might criticize Woolf for promoting gender segregation and thereby entrenching binary, sexist assumptions about gender differences, which ultimately stand in the way of promoting gender equality. Yet her insight stands that w omen’s (and, one might add, nonbinary p eople’s) will and ability to participate—whether in the field of literature or that of politics—needs to be fostered, rather than left to emerge by itself (see also Ahmed 2017, 74). It is easy to take w omen’s ability to seclude themselves for granted, which means that the potential value of protected gendered spaces in contexts where feminism is a historically recent phenomenon is often overlooked. Unlike Woolf ’s individualistic feminism, women’s groups in Michoacán emphasized the need for a collective w omen’s space: a room of their own. Before applying these five conceptual tools to antiviolence activism in Michoacán, I briefly describe both some key characteristics of the current context of violence and the historical conditions that gave rise to specific forms of gender inequality. I argue that the two are closely interrelated. This helps explain why women’s political participation has so far been limited.
The Continuum of Violence in Michoacán The violence and daily terror that Michoacán has continued to experience since the beginning of Mexico’s war on drugs in 2007 has serious implications for the state’s economic and democratic development (Maldonado 2018) and also correlate with rising levels of gender-based violence. Globally, social conflict is often accompanied by an increase in violence against women and girls (Merry 2009; Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004). As women are directly affected by violence in multiple ways, defining violence too narrowly risks neglecting w omen’s needs and perspectives: “Media representat ions of drug violence in Mexico, which focus on the men who do the killing and are predominantly t hose who are killed, make women’s roles in the trade as well as their suffering invisible” (Muehlmann 2014, 24–25). Various types of violence, social exclusion, and suffering are intertwined with gender in different contexts across Michoacán. Thus, it is necessary to represent people as gendered actors, following Murtagh and Mackay. Shaylih Muehlmann describes how many w omen in northern Mexico—as is also the case for w omen in some deprived areas of Michoacán—become sexually or romantically involved
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with drug traffickers in the pursuit of a better quality of life, given that gender expectations often limit economic opportunities for women. In Apatzingán, this has inspired a trend toward the sexualization of women and their increased investment in plastic surgery, according to one of Edgar Guerra’s interviewees. Women are also becoming increasingly involved in the drug trade. Telenovelas such as La Reina del Sur (The queen of the south), about a glamorous female kingpin named Teresa Mendoza, have encouraged some young w omen to imagine themselves as drug traffickers (Muehlmann 2014, 78). The gendered logic of appropriateness (including what roles women might imagine for themselves within narco culture) is thus changing. At the same time, the frequency with which women are becoming victims of criminal gangs is increasing, creating a climate of fear. For instance, a young nurse described being afraid of walking at night, having once been groped, and regularly finding women’s shoes and sweaters on the street near her home in the mornings. Not all cases of criminal violence against women are necessarily marked by gender. As the criminologist Falko Ernst (2019) reported, the time when ordinary p eople in Michoacán’s lowland region of Tierra Caliente were able to stay out of fights between the cartels is over. Using as an example the murder of a young w oman, Ernst argues that when cartels are key employers of men and, increasingly, w omen and frequently fragment and change alliances, anyone can find themselves on somebody’s revenge list, just by their association with f amily members or neighbors who are involved in crime. While gender does not motivate all cases of criminal violence against women, growing up surrounded by violence shapes young people’s gendered aspirations in life. As one interviewee who works with c hildren in Ario de Rayón, a deprived community near Zamora, told me, her pupils often draw images of bloody murders. Young w omen usually become m others before finishing school, and young men work for cartels—either by choice or b ecause they w ere pressured into it— and expect to die young. These young couples, burdened with child care, money problems, and other pressures related to social marginalization, often have violent relationships. She stressed that many young p eople are exhausted by their living situation and, therefore, simply imitate what they see their friends, relatives, and neighbors d oing, without much thought. One of Guerra’s interviewees in Apatzingán said that he was able to avoid working for the cartels only by temporarily fleeing the city when they came looking for him. Thus, individuals whose friends or family members are already cartel members may have limited choices. According to one of Irene Álvarez’s interviewees, a journalist who had been working with Indigenous people in the coastal town of La Ticla since 2010, in addition to gender and class expectations, racism plays a key role in the reproduction of drug culture in Michoacán. The journalist told Álvarez: “What happens when a young man prefers to sell methamphetamines, cocaine, marijuana,
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instead of working the land, instead of pursuing another project? There are no other options for him. [With drugs] he earns more money and much faster. . . . The figure of the narco, with hats, with boots, with a van, with loud m usic, armed, marching, drinking alcohol, macho, as that role model persists, it is very easy to reproduce it. . . . In rural Mexico, Indigenous people are always destined for certain activities.” Following Murtagh and Mackay’s conceptualization, this exemplifies the gendered logic of appropriateness, as the narco is associated with a particular stereot ype of macho masculinity. Beyond this gendered logic, we can also observe class-and race-based logics of appropriateness in this excerpt, as Indigenous working-class men are stereot ypically viewed as having a partic ular propensity for violence and are thus described as destined to be narcos. While t hese young men are not necessarily forced into this role, the perception of its appropriateness may facilitate their adoption of it. Moreover, this quote from La Ticla, like the examples from Ario de Rayón and Apatzingán, illustrates the interaction of formal and informal institutions. Many young p eople from Ario de Rayón and La Ticla appear hopeless, unable to lead a desirable life without violence. Discrimination against rural, poor, and Indigenous populations motivates political neglect and the reproduction of drug culture in both Ario and La Ticla. One of my interviewees studied and deferred marriage u ntil she was about thirty years old, choosing a different path than most of her peers. She thus challenges the stigmatizing perception of some well-to-do Zamorans that marginalization is an inescapable fate for t hose living in Ario, or even an inherent quality of the people t here. However, she was aided by the example of her mother, who was a nurse and the main breadwinner of the family. Her father was an affectionate man, although somewhat controlling—perhaps in compensation for his not being able to act as the chief provider. It is worth noting that the forms of spatial marginalization young people experience are quite different in Ario and in La Ticla, and they involve different kinds of gendered spaces. I experienced Ario as fairly desolate, with its dilapidated buildings and dirt roads, whereas La Ticla was rich in natural beauty and attracts tourists to its quaint beachside towns. Yet while it was easy to commute between Ario and Zamora, La Ticla was a drive of several hours from the next major city, and mobile phone network connectivity was poor. Whereas in Ario t here was a general lack of time and space for women to organize social events, in La Ticla, some wives complained of their husbands’ frequent absences due to their obligatory participation in the local autodefensa groups, and therefore the women had many opportunities to be on their own. In summary, both personal circumstances and the wider social context of violence and deprivation shape and normalize different inequalities and conflicts in contemporary Michoacán. These gender inequalities are linked to long-standing racialized structures of power and violence. The conquest of Indigenous women, for example, was key to the colonial project (Lugones 2007; Stolke 1991). According to the anthropol-
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ogist Lynn Stephen, “cultural scripts of rape” allow Federal Judicial Police agents to sexualize Indigenous men and w omen as targets of harassment (2000, 838). Likewise, autodefensa groups have been accused of sexualizing and harassing women in the communities in which they operate, as shown in the documentary Cartel Land (Heineman 2015). While Mexican masculinities are varied and subject to historical transformation, and are thus irreducible to the stereo typical figure of the macho (see Gutmann 2007), persistent colonial structures of gendered and racialized inequality have led certain men to internalize a desire for controlling and subduing women as a key symbol of the territory. A popular misogynist phrase in Michoacán expresses this desire: “tiene la mujer como la escopeta, siempre cargada en la esquina” (he keeps his woman like his rifle, always charged [that is, pregnant] in the corner). Although gender relations have changed and become more equitable over the past fifty years, and traditional double standards of sexuality have been weakening somewhat (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Cranford 2006, 117–118), several Zamoran women I spoke to claimed that female visitors from other states w ere shocked by the levels of sexism in Michoacán. As a young psychologist put it, “Here, they are macho to the bone.” Moreover, a Zamora-based journalist opined that compared to w omen in Mexico City, women in Michoacán are less confident about asserting themselves against men. Most starkly, Michoacán remains one of the states with the highest rates of feminicides.2 According to the noted feminist anthropologist, politician, and activist Marcela Lagarde, more than six thousand feminicides occurred between 1999 and 2005 in Mexico (2008, 219). Lagarde defined feminicides as a combination of violent misogynist acts against women and girls that violate their human rights and culminate in their killing and that are allowed by the state or happen with impunity—and therefore also constitute a crime of the state (2008, 235). Thus, gender discrimination at the symbolic level is related to serious physical violence against w omen, just as gender violence is linked in turn to other violences such as criminal violence. Recent violent incidences (for example, shoot- outs between police and cartel members in the center of Zamora) are nested in everyday violence that has a long history (such as domestic violence and widespread forms of discrimination), although it is important to analytically distinguish different types of violence (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004). The recent increase in violence is not so much a new phenomenon as one that is nested within a broader historical frame. As gender-based violence and broader violence have historically intersected and continue to intersect, and as they have also deeply affected many women’s lives, many w omen have become members of antiviolence organizations in the region. However, the unequal power relations within activist organizations and public institutions in Michoacán often make female activists’ work difficult, effectively limiting their political participation, as the following section illustrates.
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Gendered Inequalities in Activist Organizations and Public Institutions Both push and pull f actors are key to understanding why the political participation of female activists has been limited. Gender-based discrimination and violence have strongly contributed to keeping women out of certain kinds of activism. Simultaneously, gendered logics of appropriateness and the approval that comes from adhering to t hese logics incentivize women to engage in certain kinds of activism, while men are drawn to other kinds of activism. In addition to seeking justice and security—an activity that female activists share with male activists—t here may be specific ways in which the motivations of men and women in civil organizations differ. In this sense, activists appear as gendered actors in a context of nested novelty: although many organizations are relatively new, in the sense that they emerged only a fter 2010, activism (like the violence it is reacting to) often serves as a canvas for binary performances of gender (Butler 2004). That, in turn, has implications for the types of opportunities for political participation available to men and w omen. For example, many autodefensa groups perform various types of masculinity when responding to violence with violence, as Irene Álvarez, Denisse Román- Burgos, and Sasha Jesperson (2020) have observed in the municipalities of Tancítaro, Chinicuila, and La Ticla. The men’s potential for the strategic deployment of masculine violence earns them fear, respect, and attention, both from their local communities and from international media. In other words, their diverse violent performances of masculinity allow them to claim power. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Adam Baird argues that this power is characterized by gender in that it is “masculine capital” (2017, 5). When gendered logics of appropriateness dictate that men should support their families, but they cannot do so because of a lack of economic opportunities, men lack symbolic masculinity. Recall the example of my interviewee’s caring f ather who acted in a controlling manner to compensate for the fact that he was not the main breadwinner. Using Baird’s analysis, it is possible to see that in rural, poor, and other marginalized contexts throughout Latin America, such a perceived lack of masculinity is endemic. This motivates men to search for occupations that are not just gender-appropriate but allow them to accumulate social capital—occupations that have the potential of making considerable profits and involve wielding firearms—w ithout necessarily being conscious of the gendered implications of their choices. In Michoacán, this applies to autodefensas as well as police officers; the military; and, of course, drug traffickers. What about feminine capital? Among groups looking for missing relatives in Morelia, mothers, instead of other relatives, shoulder the brunt of the work. In some cases, they are the only ones left to search for their family members; in
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other cases, they are more able to leave their work than their husbands and sons are. The m others have in common that they are not seeking to acquire social capital, although they are acting in alignment with gendered logics of appropriateness (according to Mackay and Murtagh), in the sense that it is considered appropriate for m others to let love for their families guide their actions. As one woman put it in an interview with Salvador Maldonado, “Primarily, it is simply the love of your family, . . . such a great love that you . . . cannot cross your arms and stay at home.” Yet the types of femininity that w omen activists represent vary, which complicates what is considered the appropriate kind of activism for them. A Zamoran environmentalist group often uses maternal rhetoric and displays of feminine care when aiming to attract public empathy and gain recognition for its claims. The group’s leader declared at the public opening of a park, “we are not going to seek controversy” and invited t hose present to plant trees, so that one day “our children can enjoy a green space.” A different environmental group deliberately did not use such rhetoric: “Since we are not mothers, we do not have that feeling.” Another member of the group opined that “the nature of women is much more sensitive to all t hese [environmental] tasks.” Her partner said: “But for example, in Cherán, m other earth is recognized by both men and w omen. . . . In Purépecha villages t here is perhaps more equality. . . . We are mestizos, true, and among mestizos one more task has been left for women. . . . I think it is because of discrimination, b ecause it is a less important role, over the years I think that nature lost its importance and then what is the least important, they leave it to the w oman.” To paraphrase, for this interviewee, the sexual division of activist labor stems from mestizo (non-Indigenous Mexican) men not sharing their power with women, and therefore leaving lower-status, but more work- intensive, tasks to w omen. This quote thus highlights a second risk in speaking of gendered social capital in this context—namely, the risk of contributing to the normalization both of gendered power divisions and of the power inequalities that such divisions engender. By contrast, Mackay and Murtagh’s conceptual framework foregrounds the artificiality (the constructed nature) of gendered differences. The masculinization of power hinders female activists in accessing political influence. When they violate gender expectations with their antiviolence interventions, they risk punishment. A 2012 report by the Nobel W omen’s Initiative and Just Associates (JASS) found that approximately half of the female activists surveyed reported being violently targeted because of their work, almost always in a gendered and often in a sexualized manner. Predominantly male government officials and security forces were responsible for such violence in 55 percent of the cases (Just Associates and Nobel W omen’s Initiative 2012). In Zamora, a lawyer and activist admitted that she was often the only w oman present in con-
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versations between politicians and businesspeople. She said that while businesspeople respect her because they are interested only in her qualifications and commitment, not her gender, officials often do not take her seriously, pinching her, ignoring her comments, and preferring men’s opinions. A female environmentalist who was the victim of extortion and threats from male cartel members had a similar experience: “I think we have educated ourselves a lot on different issues, . . . even in the legal area, so when we give our opinion and it is more relevant than that of a man, it is threatening for them. . . . If t here are five men, if someone says, ‘she is making a good point,’ that’s when your voice becomes relevant, but while you are alone as a w oman, . . . t hey listen to you, but you are not part of the decision making.” Sectors and institutions historically dominated by men—such as the police, politics, business, and law, which are generally associated with high incomes, social influence, and corruption—can be hostile spaces for w omen. Consequently, many w omen choose not to participate in leadership and pol itical decision making. As one interviewee explained, “They don’t let us [participate] and [in other cases] we don’t try hard enough, because we are used to visualizing these positions or these places as being occupied by men.” When female activists take on symbolically feminine tasks, it is their own choice, albeit a socially conditioned one. However, gender inequality is not always caused by consciously discriminatory attitudes and actions, as people tend to internalize certain gendered logics as appropriate. At the same time, our team recorded several cases of w omen who have managed to influence politics, such as Mamá Rosa, a notorious Zamoran orphanage director who enjoyed connections with the uppermost echelons of Mexican politics and has been compared to both M other Teresa and mobsters (see, for example, Lomnitz 2018). Like Mamá Rosa, female activists in positions of power often draw on both feminine and masculine stereotypes, such as combining pink lipstick and high heels with a tough or unemotional negotiation style, as in the case of the Zamoran l awyer. In other cases, w omen complied with gendered logics of appropriateness (in the case of the missing people’s groups) or relied on the support and gendered authority of male allies (as described by the environmental activist). Therefore, combined with certain exclusions and discrimination, gendered logics and the social approval that can be obtained by obeying these logics help explain why certain types of activism have been typically dominated by w omen, while others have been dominated by men.
Women’s Organizations in Michoacán ere is a special type of political participation of women in Michoacán that is Th worth discussing in more detail: participation in w omen’s antiviolence organ
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izations, by which I mean w omen’s activism not only against gender-based vio lence but also female-focused action against social violence more generally. These groups w ere founded a fter 2010 in response to rising violence against w omen in connection to the drug war. They are often (almost) exclusively composed of women, but to some extent, they may try to break with common expectations related to femininity, while specifically aiming to promote w omen’s rights. Since promoting women’s political participation is itself a common object of w omen’s rights’ interventions, one might assume that such women’s groups are more likely than other groups to give their female members opportunities for political participation. Thus, if women’s political participation is seriously limited in the studied cases, this indicates that promoting women’s political participation in other kinds of activist organizations is likely to be even harder to achieve. Yet w omen’s participation is crucial for countering the multiplicity of violence and social suffering experienced by the wider population of Michoacán. I therefore systematically compare three feminist organizations—Uarhí Medicina (Medicine Woman) in Tangancícuaro, Vivas Nos Queremos Michoacán (We Want Us Alive Michoacán) in Zamora, and Humanas Sin Violencia (Women without Violence) in Morelia—to discern to what extent t hese organ izations manage to promote the political participation of women, how their female members define political participation for themselves, and what the limitations of their approaches might be. The three urban sites are all located in the northern region of the state, which means that members of the groups know each other. I selected t hese particular groups opportunistically. When I accompanied Trevor Stack on a research visit to Zamora in March 2019, he introduced me to members of the first two groups at a Vivas Nos Queremos picnic, after which I attended a joint event of t hose groups and conducted interviews and a focus group discussion with their members and collaborators. I also draw on Maldonado’s research on Humanas Sin Violencia, as well as its leader’s public statements. While I discuss each group separately to highlight variations in their aims and impact, it is important to note that in practice, t hese groups are entities in flux that often collaborate strategically on issues of common interest, such as the fight for the legalization of abortion. The following analysis might have differed had I selected a different sample of organizations. It is likely that t here would be considerable variation regarding the organizations’ aims, some of which might even contradict t hose of other groups (for example, I might have included both a group in favor of and a group against abortion), and the groups would likely differ in their attitudes toward working with men. However, having read through some of Ariadna Sánchez’s interviews from the coastal city of Lázaro Cárdenas, it seems that many of the gendered barriers faced by the groups I worked with are also faced by w omen’s groups in other parts of Michoacán.
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Case Studies Case 1: Uarhí Medicina The core members of Uarhí Medicina are four women from Tangancícuaro, ages 25–45, who are often accompanied by other women of various ages. The group offers a holistic approach to improving women’s well-being: “the emotional [mental] part, the mental with feminism, the spiritual and attachment upbringing,” as one member told me. Unlike the other groups discussed here, which directly denounce violence against w omen through their groups’ names, the name Uarhí Medicina points to Indigenous feminine healing and care practices. Uarhí means “woman” in the Purépecha language, which is Indigenous to the northwestern region of Michoacán. Uarhí Medicina members view themselves as working to recover local women’s identity and traditions, rather than introducing new gender relations. However, their blending of Purépecha ritual, yoga, women’s circles, and New Age ideas exposes the group to considerable criticism from its largely conservative Catholic community, as I describe. Uarhí Medicina is organized in a very informal way and meets in private spaces, such as in homes or on the grass by Tangancícuaro’s natural spring. The group aims to help women get to know each other to facilitate mutual support and open a space to celebrate femininity through dance, yoga, and spiritual rituals. Rather than directly demanding a change in gender relations and roles, the group’s members value what they call “the feminine essence” or simply “being ourselves.”3As one representative explained, while we w ere sitting by the tree- lined shore of nearby Lake Camécuaro, “The group works so that you know yourself, so that you give yourself space as a person and do not attack other women, so you see them as s isters.” She emphasized the need to create feminine spaces within what she considered a patriarchal society: The space that is being created is precisely for w oman to rest from man. . . . We live in a patriarchal system that was built based on men, they have created everyt hing, . . . t he patriarchal system that is about money. [But as a woman,] maybe with just a nice meal, with a hug, you feel blessed, grateful, and you don’t need anything more, right? This is what we’re missing in society, and we have the most important task to foster it among ourselves to be able to foster t hose who come [a fter us]. . . . And then the coming generations from childhood onward are going have that education of respecting women in a different way. . . . That is why it is important that the w oman recognizes herself so that she can give more and foster love and attachment.
One way in which the group seeks to empower women to provide love and support is by offering workshops in which participants are invited to reflect on their relationships and let go of their pain and grudges, while learning to love them-
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selves and o thers. Uarhí Medicina has no institutional support and rejects ties with political parties, which it perceives as corrupt and masculine entities. One group member said: “I have had acquaintances who have come to work in politics and are disgusted, literally, by the corruption . . . there. And as a woman you have more awareness to say no, this is not right, this should not be done like this and you decide not to go into this.” However, the group’s members recognize that their activities can have political effects, as they help women make better decisions after a process of reflection and of healing their emotional wounds: “by raising awareness you help a lot [of w omen] to improve their decisions both in relation to politics, and in relation to violence, such as stopping violence in their home.” In Tangancícuaro, group members are discriminated against: even their husbands undermine their activities. One interviewee said: “Among other comments from people we have heard: ‘ah no, it is the witches who dance to the fire!’ or t hings like this. Starting with the husbands, maybe they are saying it as a joke: ‘oh yeah, y ou’re going out with your friends, the witches!’ ” On another occasion, this interviewee gave the example of nine-year-old boys refusing to participate in her yoga class because they were suspicious of Indian religion and its sensuality (“yoga is of the devil!”), but they stayed to watch and made comments to each other about her bottom. She was shocked at their misogynistic leering, coupled with moralistic hypocrisy. Remembering a time when she had hit a man for groping her, she said that the police wanted to arrest her and not him: “If you defend yourself, they punish you, especially if you’re not white.” To gain its partners’ and neighbors’ support by involving them more, Uarhí Medicina occasionally organizes mixed-gender events, such as a bazaar. Yet the most important objectives for the group, they point out, are to create a protected, “sacred” space for w omen and to foster female friendships and self-esteem, which often suffer under their frantic schedules as mothers and wives.
Case 2: Vivas Nos Queremos Michoacán Based in Zamora, a city known for its conservative Catholicism, this small group of w omen was founded by a w oman who had majored in anthropology, and the other members also have university degrees. They draw inspiration from other feminist groups around Mexico and the Spanish-speaking world, which they follow online. The name of the group denounces feminicides in line with a wider feminist mobilization in various parts of Mexico and Latin America that has used this phrase or similar ones to alert and criticize governments and society for allowing gender violence to occur with impunity (Figure 6.1). One member explained, “The objective was to denounce violence, at the beginning.”4 However, after receiving much criticism and claiming that they had been “victimizing themselves,” the group has stopped focusing directly on issues of feminicide and violence. Now their goal is to “open up spaces” of feminist solidarity and
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Figure 6.1. One of the few public protests staged by w omen’s groups in Zamora was a march against gender violence in 2018. The nearest banner reads “No more violences against w omen.” Photo by Trevor Stack.
knowledge sharing, as one of the two main members told me in a rooftop café overlooking central Zamora, surrounded by church steeples and hazy blue mountains in the distance (Figure 6.2): “It is useful to say what is happening and to make it visible, but what also helps a lot is to create spaces. . . . There are things we are afraid of, or that shame us, I’d say, oh my, if my husband were to hit me, I would be too ashamed to tell anyone, even a friend. . . . I think now our goal is to create spaces in order to share things about violence, to share a space for awareness about menstruation, spaces for women’s pleasure, many things.” On another occasion, during a focus group discussion, she explained that informal and formal institutions often collude in depriving young girls of their rights. She gave the example of her female pupils’ having been afraid b ecause nobody explained to them what the human papilloma virus vaccination program in their school was for. When she wanted to explain, the other female teacher shushed her because telling the children anything relating to sex education would upset their Catholic parents. She resolved the situation by telling the c hildren that they should always demand to know what is happening with their bodies and not just let people do something to them against their w ill. The other focus group members agreed and noted that women are often taught to be afraid of their own bodies from a young age. As the health workers carrying out the vaccinations had tried to avoid trouble, too, another Vivas Nos Queremos member summarized
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Figure 6.2. Catholicism shapes the skyline of the conservative Zamora. View from the rooftop café where the interview with Vivas Nos Queremos Michoacán leaders was held. Photo by Catherine Whittaker.
the situation as follows: “So there’s a complicity between parents, teachers, health workers, and the Church in leaving c hildren in ignorance about their own bodies—nobody takes responsibility.” Vivas Nos Queremos’s focus lies in expanding its “support network,” which consists of a directory of “doctors, psychologists, lawyers, even men, so that when [women] ask us [for it], [we] know [where to send them],” as one of the members explained to me. They also seek to “open spaces” by inviting p eople in the network to give workshops such as psychological self-help groups for women to develop their autonomy and self-confidence. The group announces its events and shares feminist memes on its Facebook page. Their identification as feminists exposes them to discrimination, she said, pointing out the window: “That university over t here, . . . once we asked them for a space and they told us that they were g oing to lend it to us, and when we told them . . . “We are a feminist collective,” they did not lend it to us. . . . That caused a bit of rejection, that [attitude of] ‘ feminazis [feminist nazis], they are unruly. . . .’ ” However, in several situations the group has had to pragmatically accept working with sexist people. In summary, the tangible impact of Vivas Nos Queremos is limited to date, but one interviewee suggested that the group members are on their way to achieving their goals, which are long-term: “It is a matter of planting a seed
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and opening pathways, because many people have had bad experiences and others refuse to talk about t hings . . . but when one starts opening t hese spaces, that’s when they start talking to each other.”
Case 3: Humanas Sin Violencia This civil association is based in Morelia, Michoacán’s capital, and is also discussed in chapter 4. Maldonado’s interviews with members of different feminist organizations in Morelia makes clear that their relationship has been generally somewhat fraught. One of his feminist interviewees suggested that t here has been bitter competition for funding among the older organizations, whose members are in their forties and fifties. Moreover, different organizations are divided along party lines. Humanas Sin Violencia’s work has been subject to criticism and jealousy. Humanas Sin Violencia’s name, like Vivas Nos Queremos, denounces violence against women by demanding that their human rights be respected, including their right to violence-free lives. On its Facebook page, Humanas Sin Violencia defines itself as an organization that “defends the h uman rights of Michoacán’s women so that they might live free from violence and discrimination” (Humanas Sin Violencia 2016). The group organizes training and experiential workshops, talks, and conferences. Moreover, it develops situation analyses with a gender perspective, aggregates data on gender violence in the state, and monitors state authorities’ compliance with gender legislation. In its ambition and structure, this organization is more professionalized than the other two discussed in this chapter, and it seeks to influence politicians and journalists. A group member explained to Maldonado that “we, too, are the state.” The organization is led by a psychologist Circe López, who received her degree from a prestigious university and also studied gender equality and reproductive health. She has a historical perspective on women’s subjection to violence in Michoacán, viewing it as something deeply rooted, rather than just blaming it on the militarization of the drug war from 2007 onward, which has exposed women to additional danger. In addition to her work for Humanas Sin Violencia, she has founded associations monitoring social-and gender-based violence in the states of Michoacán and Guanajuato and has received prizes for her activism. Humanas Sin Violencia’s main success to date lies in lobbying for the Gender Violence against Women Alert Declaration in Michoacán, which led to the state government issuing a Gender Violence Alert in fourteen Michoacán municipalities in 2016. Those municipalities were then expected to invest in programs to reduce gender violence. However, the Declaration’s implementation remains incomplete because the municipal governments failed to apply for and assign resources to its implementation: by 2019, not a single peso had been spent for
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that purpose, according to Humanas Sin Violencia’s investigations. The group stresses that it is not sufficient to focus on preventing gender violence: there also needs to be an end to impunity.
Case Comparison Nested Novelty All three groups are new, as they emerged in or a fter 2010. Thus, one might argue that the rise in crime-related violence, as well as that of state-sponsored and armed citizen violence responding to it, has disrupted social and political life to the point of opening a window to other kinds of social change, such as new opportunities for women’s rights. Yet despite the groups’ individual and combined efforts, their achievements have been limited, at least in terms of directly influencing political decision making and achieving tangible change for w omen’s livelihoods in the short term. Core spheres of power, including politics and the Catholic Church, remain patriarchal in structure and often macho in attitude. Humanas Sin Violencia is an exception, as it is based in Morelia, Michoacán’s largest and most socially progressive city, where the state’s main government institutions are also based. Mexico’s highest-ranked university, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, also has a campus in Morelia. Zamora is also a university city, while Tangancítaro is not, but both are more conservative places than Morelia—in part due to the greater influence of traditional Catholic and rural family values, as agriculture is key to their local economies. Accordingly, feminist groups have existed in Morelia for decades, have ties to political parties, and have easier logistical access to state authorities. Conversely, in the other two cases, the groups’ lack of political influence can be attributed to a lack of historical precedents, logistical challenges, and the fact that female activists in the groups do not seek to engage directly with politicians and lawmakers and do not define themselves as political activists. To no small extent, this is due to having frequently experienced sexist, exclusionary attitudes and to antifeminist discrimination from male power holders. As female activists cannot build on a history of feminist groups in Michoacán, much of their time and energy is dedicated to opening new meeting and exchange spaces for themselves and other women. Thus, adding to Mackay and Murtagh’s four original concepts (the rest of which I discuss in due course), I suggest introducing an additional concept to compare the cases above: gendered spaces.
Gendered Spaces For some p eople, worrying about w omen’s political participation might almost seem like a luxury problem. The women of Uarhí Medicina describe struggling
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to find time between their f amily and work obligations, while also having to fight social stigma to simply gather and carve out a space for themselves. Evoking Woolf ’s (1929) classic argument, women need space to think before they can develop political passions. Taking the notion of gendered spaces into account helps us understand why Vivas Nos Queremos and Uarhí Medicina do not directly intervene in political responses to violence, which are decided mostly by men in the masculine spaces of government and policing and often carry the imprint of masculinity in their emphasis on militarized shows of force. Instead, t hese women’s groups offer an alternative way of responding to violence by creating feminine spaces in which to meet in person, or digitally via social media, and in which they promote symbolically feminine care practices and propose ways of breaking the cycle of vio lence. Although Humanas Sin Violencia does intervene in the male-dominated space of politics, its aim in d oing so could also be framed as seeking to carve out a virtual dedicated space for women within the government’s response to violence. This leads us to the next concept.
The Interaction of Formal and Informal Institutions Humanas Sin Violencia intends to change official gender policies through mea sures such as the Gender Violence against Women Alert Declaration. However, it is actually more effective in promoting conversations on the subject informally, such as when it denounced the government and Inmujeres (the National Women’s Institute, a government agency dedicated to promoting gender equality) for not developing and implementing mechanisms to combat gender violence and comply with the alert.5 The group also campaigned against impunity in cases of gender violence—which, as Uarhí Medicina pointed out, particularly affects women who are perceived as Indigenous. In the case of Vivas Nos Queremos, the informal solidarity among women helped group members form a support network of female professionals whose serv ices are linked to formal institutions but who are willing to offer their ser vices informally. In other words, this group seeks to create links with p eople (mostly w omen) who are representatives of institutions, but it does not typically approach the institutions themselves. Due to the stigmatization of feminism, the group sometimes has difficulty finding places for its events within formal institutional spaces. This stigmatization also applies to the other groups discussed in this chapter, and in the case of Uarhí Medicina, it intersects with anti- Indigenous and religious discrimination. Thus, informal institutions are fundamental to the efforts of these three groups. Only Uarhí Medicina avoids political institutions completely and does not usually meet in public spaces. By contrast, Humanas Sin Violencia and other feminist groups in Morelia have party affiliations.
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The Gendered Logic of Appropriateness Overall, the image of politics as men’s business remains intact. According to Uarhí Medicina, politics is a corrupt and masculine space, and it is not for them. Similarly, Vivas Nos Queremos shows little interest in directly engaging in politics, except by joining demonstrations or petition campaigns. Although Humanas Sin Violencia tries to influence politics directly, its success is limited, as the government has failed to allocate sufficient resources for the effective implementation of the Gender Violence against Women Alert Declaration. Thus, the male-focused structure of state-level politics, which prioritizes financing symbolically masculine, militarized responses to crime-related violence, presents a clear barrier to alternative feminine and feminist responses. Accordingly, in all three cases, we can observe women’s exclusion from direct political influence. Women remain closely associated with the domestic sphere or a social activism that carries out the onerous and slow work of raising awareness, rather than being high-profile political activists, with the exception of Humanas Sin Violencia and one of the founders of Vivas Nos Queremos. In the case of Uarhí Medicina, the members’ neighbors and families represent the main barriers, denigrating them as “witches” for their spiritual practices and criticizing them for selfishly taking time only for themselves. Meanwhile, Vivas Nos Queremos and Humanas Sin Violencia face antifeminist prejudice and are often denigrated as “feminazis.” Therefore, the logic of appropriateness promotes the gender status quo, as well as the intersecting race and religion status quo, by delegitimizing women’s activism. Consequently, little progress has been made in the area of gender rights in general, and most public discussion has focused on mestizo (that is, non-Indigenous) urban feminists’ interests. Uarhí Medicina is thus doubly marginalized, as it clashes with both gendered and racialized and religious logics of appropriateness. Seeking to avoid attacks, Uarhí Medicina and Vivas Nos Queremos have decided to focus their time and energy on transforming w omen’s intimate lives and fostering women’s networks of support. Thus, local gendered logics of appropriateness inspire the creation of gendered spaces. These groups’ potential to transform the social sphere by raising consciousness, primarily among women and children but also within broader society, must be evaluated longitudinally.
Gendered Actors Since t hese groups define themselves as women’s and/or feminist groups, their members are aware of being gendered actors with gendered objectives. Yet I observed different ideas on the meaning of “womanhood” and “feminism,” both at the group level and at the individual level. While Humanas Sin Violencia and Vivas Nos Queremos are openly feminist groups, Uarhí Medicina has sought to
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achieve its objectives without directly challenging male privilege and violence. Performances of femininity vary considerably, ranging from edgy urban styles that signal sexual self-possession to more chaste and feminine looks. While not everyone uses makeup, for example, I have not encountered any “butch” personas (that is, intentionally masculine self-fashioning among female-identifying individuals) among t hese activists, although t here was one among the environmentalists I spoke with. Uarhí Medicina members place an explicit emphasis on their Purépecha heritage, which intersects with their femininity and sexuality. Significantly, it exposes them to racist and religiously motivated suspicion and discrimination. Beyond the specific influence of their local communities, other crucial dimensions for w omen’s identity formation in all three groups w ere their levels of education, socioeconomic standing, and geographic location, all of which have a strong influence on their ability to accumulate material and ideational resources for their work.
Conclusion In this chapter, I have expanded Mackay and Murtagh’s (2019) feminist institutionalist framework and applied it to recently formed activist organizations in Michoacán. Activists are pivotal players in the response to intensifying crime- related violence in the state, given the historical fragility of institutions and their frequent infiltration by members of criminal organizations. While focusing on female activists’ pol itical participation, I expanded my analysis beyond a strict focus on gender to also highlight racialized and religious dimensions of antiviolence activism. The strong influence of the—in multiple respects— patriarchal institution of the Catholic Church in Michoacán represents a key barrier to the work of one of the case studies, Uarhí Medicina, but it also limits the work of the other case studies. My comparison shows that w omen’s political participation in antiviolence activism has generally been l imited because of certain gendered barriers, and it complicates the notion that w omen are oppressed simply because they accept inequalities. I argue that in many parts of Michoacán—similar to the situation in the postconflict environments of Northern Ireland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Burundi studied by Mackay and Murtagh—politics is still considered men’s business, a site where powerf ul male actors negotiate political decisions within networks dominated by men. Even organizations fighting for the politi cal inclusion of women, such as my case studies, often choose to avoid conflict, and this favors the status quo in the short term. However, I also observed women’s ability to create feminine spaces and form alternative networks in which they exchange resources and help each other navigate networks dominated by men.
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Within a context of high levels of inequality, such as Michoacán, in which omen have rarely held important political positions, t here are limits to what w small, fledgling feminist groups can achieve. At first glance, it seems that Humanas Sin Violencia has achieved the most remarkable political results, although they are l imited. By contrast, the humbler, more personal-seeming objectives of Uarhí Medicina encountered obstacles every step of the way. However, feminists have long been critical of the analytical distinction between the private and the political, historically used by John Locke and others to argue for the exclusion of women from political decision making and their relegation to the home (Millett 2016). While I defined “political participation” narrowly in this chapter, linking it to the ability to influence political decision making and hold leadership positions, such a definition clearly fails to acknowledge the potential impact that many female activists might have without directly interacting with politicians and authorities. If we accept that “the personal is political” (Hanisch 2006) but do not want to collapse the distinction between dif ferent spheres of power altogether, the value of the nonconflictive approach of Uarhí Medicina and Vivas Nos Queremos becomes clearer. Th ese groups create a room of their own by opening collective feminine spaces for reflection with the objective of working t oward long-term social and political change. W hether this approach w ill be successful cannot be evaluated in a short-term study such as this, but consciousness-raising within protected spaces continues to be considered a cornerstone of feminist activism in general (see Ahmed 2017). This does not devalue Humanas Sin Violencia’s strategy of political lobbying. As the feminist focus group suggested, different women’s groups benefit from exchanging expert knowledge and experiences and establishing best practices, as well as collaborating to build networks, social capital, and achieving a critical mass in their pol itical lobbying and social consciousness-raising projects. One interviewee said: “We must not romanticize relationships between women— we d on’t all get along or want the same t hing. But . . . we can still coalesce around certain issues.” More broadly, why does a gender analysis matter in the context of antiviolence activism in Michoacán? First, it illustrates the often ignored connections between gender inequalities on the one hand and widespread violence and social suffering on the other hand. Second, making social inequalities—a nd their reproduction within civil institutions and organizations—v isible highlights the need for achieving justice and security for women within these spheres of political action. Third, becoming aware of and preventing the use of exclusionary practices, language, and symbols helps antiviolence activism claim authenticity. In conclusion, the example of Michoacán strongly suggests that gender inequality within activist organizations and public institutions constitutes an important obstacle to addressing the problem of violence in general.
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notes 1. I write of “genders” in the plural to acknowledge the fact that many gender identities exist beyond the heteronormative male-female binary (see, for example, Rizvi 2019). 2. Feminicides differ from femicides in that they are not just murders of women but gender-based murders of w omen. In the first two months of 2019, twenty-four women were killed in Michoacán, which makes it the state with the tenth highest incidence of femicide in Mexico (see Martínez Elorriaga 2019). 3. For an ethnography of Uarhí Medicina’s conceptualization of femininity, see Chávez 2017. 4. In several Mexican cities, large feminist protests took place on April 24, 2016, u nder the hashtag #VivasNosQueremos, driven by anger over a court case in which a young woman had survived abduction, battery, cuts, and rape only to be charged with murder for having stabbed one of her attackers so she could escape (see Long 2016). 5. See Arroyo 2017.
references Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Álvarez, Irene, Denisse Román-Burgos and Sasha Jesperson. 2020. “Legitimidad armada en México: Grupos de autodefensa frente a la violencia criminal.” Unpublished manuscript. Arroyo, Cynthia. 2017. “Humanas sin Violencia toma distancia del gobierno y anuncia sistema de denuncias.” Mi Morelia.com. https://w ww.mimorelia.com/humanas-sin -v iolencia-toma-distancia-del-gobierno-a nuncia-sistema-denuncias/. Baird, Adam. 2017. “Becoming the ‘Baddest’: Masculine Trajectories of Gang Violence in Medellín.” Journal of Latin American Studies 50 (1): 183–210. Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. London: Routledge. Byrne, Siobhan, and Allison McCulloch. 2012. “Gender, Representation, and Power- Sharing in Post-Conflict Institutions.” International Peacekeeping 19 (5): 565–580. Chávez, Cristina. 2017. “Procesos de resignificación en torno a la feminidad de las mujeres del Colectivo Uarhí Medicina. Tangancícuaro, Michoacán, 2011–2016.” MA thesis, El Colegio de Michoacán. Ernst, Falko. 2019. “Mexico’s Hydra-Headed Crime War.” International Crisis Group. https://w ww.crisisgroup.org / latin-a merica-c aribbean/mexico/mexicos-hydra-headed -crime-war. Gutmann, Matthew C. 2007. The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City. 10th anniversary ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hanisch, Carol. 2006. “The Personal Is Political: The Women’s Liberation Movement Classic with a New Explanatory Introduction.” http://w ww.carolhanisch.org/CHwrit ings/P IP.h tml. Heineman, Matthew. 2015. Cartel Land. New York: A&E IndieFilms. Hernández Castillo, R. Aída, ed. 2015. Multiple Injustices: Indigenous W omen, Law, and Political Struggle in Latin America. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierette, and Cynthia Cranford. 2006. “Gender and Migration.” In Handbook of the Sociology of Gender, edited by Janet Saltzman Chafetz, pp. 105–126. New York: Springer. Humanas Sin Violencia. 2016. “Humans Sin Violencia, A.C.” https://w ww.facebook.com /HumanasMich/ Just Associates and Nobel W omen’s Initiative. 2012. “From Survivors to Defenders: Women Confronting Violence in Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala.” http://nobelwom ensinitiative.org/w p-c ontent/uploads/2 012/06/Report_ A mericasDelgation-2012.pdf.
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Lagarde, Marcela. 2008. “Antropología, feminismo y política: Violencia feminicida y derechos humanos de las mujeres.” In Retos teóricos y nuevas prácticas, edited by Margaret Bullen and Carmen Diez Mintegui, 209–239. Donostia, Spain: Ankulegi. Lomnitz, Claudio. 2018. “Los “presuntos culpables” del caso Mamá Rosa.” La Jornada, November 7. https://w ww.jornada.com.m x/2018/1 1/07/opinion/0 21a2pol. Long, Ellioté. 2016. “#VivasNosQueremos and the Start of Something Powerf ul.” Amnesty, March 4. https://ucluamnestysoc.wordpress.c om/2016/04/3 0/vivasnosqueremos-and-t he -start-of-something-powerful/. Lugones, María. 2007. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia 22 (1): 186–219. Mackay, Fiona, and Cera Murtagh. 2019. “New Institutions, New Gender Rules? A Feminist Institutionalist Lens on W omen and Power-Sharing.” feminists@law 9 (1). https:// journals.kent.a c.u k/i ndex.php/feministsatlaw/article/v iew/745 Maldonado, Salvador. 2018. La ilusión de la seguridad: Política y violencia en la periferia michoacana. Zamora, Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán. Martínez Elorriaga, Ernesto. 2019. “Reportan 24 feminicidios en Michoacán en lo que va de 2019.” La Jornada, July 3. Merry, Sally Engle. 2009. Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Millett, Kate. 2016. Sexual Politics. New York: Columbia University Press. Muehlmann, Shaylih. 2014. When I Wear My Alligator Boots: Narco-Culture in the U.S.- Mexico Borderlands. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rizvi, Jamila. 2019. “Jacinda Ardern Just Proved Typically ‘Feminine’ Behaviour Is Power ful.” Sydney Morning Herald, March 19. https://w ww.smh.com.au/lifestyle/life-a nd -relationships/jacinda-a rdern-just-proved-t ypically-feminine-behaviour-is-powerful -20190318-p 5157k.html. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Philippe Bourgois. 2004. “Introduction: Making Sense of Violence.” In Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology, edited by Nancy Scheper- Hughes and Philippe Bourgois, 1–31. Malden, UK: Blackwell. Stephen, Lynn. 2000. “The Construction of Indigenous Suspects: Militarization and the Gendered and Ethnic Dynamics of H uman Rights Abuses in Southern Mexico.” American Ethnologist 26 (4): 822–842. Stolke, Verena. 1991. “Conquered Women.” North American Congress on Latin America Report on the Americas 25 (5): 23–28. Woolf, Virginia. 1929. A Room of One’s Own. Feedbooks. http://w ww.feedbooks.com /book/6655/a-room-of-one-s-own.
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Key Objectives, Strategic Choices, and the Impact of Societal Responses to Violence lessons for policy and practice Pilar Domingo and Sasha Jesperson
Policy discussions on violence have primarily been centered on violent conflict. Over the last decade, debates have raged over whether violent conflict is continuing to rise or beginning to decrease, with numerous sources collating data on numbers of active conflicts and their severity, usually based on fatality rates. What is often missing from t hese debates is a focus on criminal violence. Even in 2013, the H uman Security Report had recognized that “the large majority of countries in the world are not plagued by wars, while all suffer from lethal criminal violence” (Simon Fraser University 2013, 7). Steven Zyck and Robert Muggah (2012) have pointed to “the growing scale and significance of chronic organized criminal violence, often sustained by transnational crime networks” (2012, 68). Latin America is currently the most violent region in the world, in terms of per capita violent deaths. A 2018 report (Muggah and Aguirre Tobon 2018) estimates that t here were 2.5 million violent deaths (mostly homicides) in 2000– 2016 in the region. Latin America has just 8 percent of the world’s population, yet 33 percent of the world’s murders are committed t here. The annual homi cide rate is 21.5 per 100,000 people, compared to the global rate of approximately 7.0 per 100,000. Furthermore, homicides in Latin America are likely undercounted b ecause of the high number of disappearances as well as the low clearance rates for criminal violence across the region.1 In Mexico alone, drug-related violence accounted for 60,000 deaths in 2007–2012 (Shirk and Wallman 2015), and t here were 211,000 murders between 2007 and 2017 (Pansters 2018). 134
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Many responses to organized crime fail to address the impact of the violence, however. When flows of illicit goods begin in or move through the Global South, international development regimes have, by and large, focused their efforts on containing the commodities and violence associated with organized crime before they reach Europe or the United States. The regimes’ containment strategies—increasing the capacity of law enforcement agents, and more militarized approaches—have been extensively analyzed (for example, European Commission 2013; Jesperson 2016; Reitano et al. 2017). Organized crime has evolved in response to these strategies, which encourages further analysis into the changing nature of illicit flows. It also highlights the fact that to avoid detection, many groups have become more businesslike and less violent, and so more akin to illicit entrepreneurship. This is not to say the violent impact of organized crime is not recognized. Physical impacts feature strongly in the literature that engages with the impacts of organized crime, including the use of violence and intimidation (that is, the threat of violence) to control territory or maintain business activities (Felbab- Brown 2013; Moriconi and Peris 2019; United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2010). The second-order effects of this violence (such as increased demand for health care) or fear of it (which can affect access to social services and deter politi cal participation) have also been recognized (see, for example, Arias 2013; United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the Latin America and Carib bean Region of the World Bank 2007; Vilalta 2016). In response to t hese analyses, t here have been attempts to identify strategies to prevent violence. The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab conducted a systematic review of violence prevention programs. The review identifies approaches that are relevant in preventing violence and deterring individuals from participating in gang violence, although the focus is not explicitly on organized crime. Examining 260 evaluations of violence prevention programs, the review identifies six types of interventions that can be done to at-risk individuals or offenders: such as cognitive behavioral therapy, multidimensional therapy, drug courts and drug treatment, focused deterrence, controls on the sale and abuse of alcohol and hot-spot policing (Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab 2018). These strategies all imply intervention by an external agent. However, t here is far less research in the policy and practice literature on the strategies that affected societies develop to survive, counter, or challenge the multiple forms of violence that is not related to conflict. Often, as in the regions of Michoacán discussed in this volume, communities and other groups are neither paralyzed nor passive. Citizens who experience crime-related violence as part of their daily lives must develop response mechanisms of some kind. Like experiences with conflict-related violence, experiences of violence in crime-affected contexts are diverse and multidimensional. Ethnic and territory- based identities and socioeconomic, gender-based, and other inequalities intersect and shape vulnerabilities to different forms of violence and insecurity, as
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well as affecting the capabilities of individuals and groups to counter violence. These variables affect the response mechanisms, capacity for agency, and response strategies that affected populations may develop. As this volume shows, societal response strategies vary. Communities, individuals, or groups may seek to protect themselves, fight for their rights, hold perpetrators of violence to account, or oppose violence. The various dynamics of how state institutions and crime- related actors and interests interrelate create different barriers to response capabilities, but in many cases activism is a m atter of survival: communities are not waiting for an intervener to stop or prevent violence. This chapter situates the societal responses to violence that have been investigated in earlier chapters within a wider discussion of the need to problematize the multidimensional complexities of violence and response mechanisms (across state and society). It reviews the findings of the different chapters in this light, asking—in relation to the nonviolent societal approaches reviewed—why and to what end citizens undertake different response strategies; how t hese response strategies challenge different forms of violence, related power asymmetries, and structural drivers of violence (noting that the strategies’ objectives are often not explicitly articulated); and what their impact and limitations are. Using ethnographic approaches, the chapters engage in deep contextual analysis. This has enabled the embeddedness of t hese response strategies to be captured in ways that reflect the significant substate variation in terms of the features of violence that communities at the individual and collective level encounter. Significantly, as shown in chapter 6, t hese experiences are deeply gendered. It is important to highlight this fact, as the gender lens applied in chapter 6 signals the intersecting inequalities and gendered power dynamics that characterize the pol itical economy of violence in Michoacán. The chapter also reflects on how the experiences in Michoacán documented in this volume can inform wider global policy debates on responses to violence, whether related to conflict or crime, with a focus on international efforts to address violence. In d oing so, the chapter points to the need for much more cross- fertilization across the literatures of violence based on both conflict and orga nized crime. This chapter situates the experience of Michoacán in the context of a broader literature on the challenges that societies face in seeking to survive and counter or reduce their vulnerability to different forms of violence.
Multidimensional Complexities of Violence and Response Mechanisms In recent years, much of the analysis of international support for countering vio lence and building states has focused on conflict-related violence. This litera ture responded to the internal wars that dominated the period immediately after the Cold War and spoke of a diverse array of actors—paramilitary groups, gangs,
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foreign mercenaries, disenfranchised civilians, and forcibly recruited combatants, as well as state armies—t hat blurred the bounda ries of war, organized crime, human rights violations, guerrilla warfare, and counterinsurgency (Akkerman 2009; Kaldor 2006). International support in conflict-affected settings has tended to be oriented t oward newly independent or transitioning states with inadequate structures for providing security and basic services for the populations, prompting nonstate actors to take up arms. Many of these conflicts became protracted, with lucrative war economies that encouraged belligerents (many of whom had long suffered at the bottom of elite patronage systems) to become spoilers to maintain their own financial gains. This has led gradually to the recognition that conflict-related violence is often enmeshed in illicit economies and organized crime. In terms of international policy and practice, until around 2010, most examples of international support for countering violence—whether based on armed conflict or crime or in other settings—shared several key features. First, the emphasis was on state building and strengthening state-centered capacity to provide security and safety. Second, where drug-related organized crime was present, the emphasis was on criminalization and the eradication of crops. Third, despite growing acknowledgment of the complexities of different d rivers of vio lence and the need for multidimensional responses, reform efforts and support remained siloed across sectors. This reflects both the siloed nature of technical expertise among practitioners and the thematic and disciplinary divides within academic scholarship. Fourth, and relatedly, the policy-relevant literatures on responses to crime-related and conflict-based violence have tended to remain separate until recently (World Bank 2011; United Nations and World Bank 2018).2 This has begun to change. In recent policy debates t here has been a more explicit effort to engage with the multidimensional nature of violence in society, its drivers, how it is experienced, and the multilevel responses to it (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2016). This reflects a growing appreciation of the fact that effective responses to violence do not always primarily rely on state capacity, particularly when the state is complicit in the violence. Instead, bottom-up (people-centered) responses that engage with the harm created by violence are increasingly taken into account and become the object of study. There is also a greater awareness of the diverse forms of state- society relations (including legal pluralism) and how the nature of the violence affects needs to inform policy responses. As the chapters in this book show in the context of Michoacán, subnational variation is significant even within the same state, reflecting diverse social, political, economic, and geographic ecosystems with singular manifestations of crime-related violence, forms of state complicity with or capture by criminals, and societal response capabilities. Our key point h ere is to underline the need to conduct more multidimensional analysis and research. Such work would help capture the full breadth of
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the relationships and practices that either reproduce crime-related violence or result in processes of disruption and often violent confrontation, along with the articulation of new settlements and pacts among different actors, the levels and forms of violence they are willing to tolerate, and on whom the task of security provision (and oversight of and accountability for it) w ill fall within these arrangements. The point is borne out by several recent studies in Latin America. For example, Jonathan Rosen, Bruce Bagley, and Jorge Chabat (2019) point to several f actors that m atter in defining the relationship between the state and orga nized crime in Latin America.3 One is indeed the state’s capacity for maintaining the rule of law (or its susceptibility to different forms of capture, penetration, or subversion by, as well as complicity with, criminal interests). Other variables include the specific pathways by which organized crime has evolved (which vary at national and subnational levels—for example, in response to shifting regional and transnational change in criminal organizations); broader market and politi cal economy conditions, which depend on the specific context at national and subnational levels; and the role of civil society in responding to violence (taking account of diverse forms of civil society and the issues they give voice to). How these variables develop and interact produces different dynamics of violence, change, and stability over time, which in turn affect the scale and type of crime- related violence and its effect on state and society, as well as entry points for response. Wil Pansters (2018) and Salvador Maldonado (2012 and 2014) unpack further the complexities and contradictions in the relationship among organized crime, governance (good, democratic, or other), and society. Pansters (2018) underlines the different textures and qualities of “stateness” in Latin America and how this varies within the same polity. The state can be experienced in uneven and contradictory ways. Sophisticated state capabilities—for instance, in central bank governance—can coexist with high levels of state capture by or complicity with organized crime or the state’s lack of capacity to provide basic security and protection to the population.4 Arguably, all societies have different experiences of “stateness.” But greater susceptibility to such f actors as institutional fragility, corruption, conflict, and capture by criminal organizations has an impact on the quality and evenness of state presence. The authors show that this variation in state presence also takes different forms at subnational levels and over time, reflecting shifting political and economic alliances in relation to organized crime.5 In the case of Mexico, Maldonado (2014), one of the authors in this volume, explored how criminal activity is embedded in subnational political economies, often generating quite stable dynamics of acceptance, tolerance, and complicity among local elites. As t hese dynamics change over time in response to subnational, national, and transnational political and economic changes, as well as specific policy responses (including in neighboring countries), the nature of
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crime-related violence also changes. How crime-related violence is reproduced and relationships among organized crime, state, and society are contested and renegotiated over time. Evolving power asymmetries among different interest structures also affect t hese relationships. The web of informal institutions, networks, and practices that characterize how organized crime is embedded in state and society may be more or less stable—mirroring, for instance, relative economic stability associated with the market conditions of drugs and the control of their production and trafficking (Maldonado 2014). This in turn can sustain systems of state capture, patronage, and bossism (caciquismo) or big man politics for long periods, including in ways that coexist with less visible or more tolerated forms of violence and abuse. In Mexico, t here is a fairly strong though uneven state presence across a range of economic, security, and basic-services functions, and since the 1940s there has been a relative absence of violence related to political conflict (Flores Pérez 2009). The federal pact that Mexico formed in the 1930s around the new political elites that emerged a fter the 1917 revolution included a number of key features that combined to sustain political stability until the crisis of 1994. This included the combined effect of dominant party rule with restricting each president to a single term in office. The latter meant that t here was enough alternation in power at the top to allow for sufficient changes in different interest groups’ access to political power, government posts, and patronage. With political reforms in the first decade of the twenty-first c entury and changes in the political economy of drugs, Carlos Flores Pérez (2009; also see Rubio 2017) contends that Mexico has seen not necessarily more corruption but rather less predictable patterns of corruption and deals between public officials and organized crime. Changes in illicit economies and conflict among different criminal organizations at the subnational level, combined with changes in political and institutional reform at the national level, have led to fractured subnational bargains between political or economic elites and organized crime. A police chief in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl pointed out that “unfortunately all too often in our country police chiefs and politicians have seen security not as a public serv ice but as a business, as a way to make money” (quoted in Grant 2018). The complicity of elements of the state bureaucracy means that civilians often have no way to get justice or receive an effective official response. Th ere has certainly been an escalation in violence since the militarization of the war on drugs in the administration of President Felipe Calderón (2006–2012). However, the threat and use of violence have long been indications of how political stability has been negotiated and imposed across the national territory, with considerable subnational variation. In Michoacán, as explored by Maldonado (2018), the history of violence is embedded in the legacies of the political and institutional dynamics of postrevolutionary Mexico. Political stability has been secured through bargaining
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among elites that has adapted over time to changing political and economic conditions. Alternating ruling coa litions have consistently defied the development of the rule of law and accountable governance, yet through sufficient alternation in political power and sophisticated response to social change, the political system has displayed remarkable resilience and sustainability. Violence and the threat of violence have traditionally been featured at national and subnational levels as routine forms of coercion that target individuals and organizations perceived as threats to either the status quo or the interests of dominant social, political, and economic actors. Although some Mexican cartels have built political capital by providing socioeconomic goods and governance, for the most part, organized crime groups have also been violent, using extortion not just as a source of income or the foundation of a protection economy but also as a source of authority, with violence deployed to ensure compliance (Felbab-Brown 2019). The result has been a “complex, multipolar and out-of-control market that generates deleterious effects on Mexican society” (Felbab-Brown 2019, 4). This recourse to violence has had community-specific effects in Michoacán on the use of natural resources, for instance, relating to mining or the cultivation of avocados (chapter 2). These changes have resulted in unique patterns at the local level of relationships between organized crime and pol itical and economic power, further undermining the already weak mechanisms of justice and security at the state level (Maldonado 2018; Gledhill 2017). The violence in Michoacán has produced thousands of victims of forced disappearance, kidnapping, torture, and sexual violence, suggesting a much wider repertoire of violence than is captured solely by data on homicide rates. Protection from violence, safety, and access to justice are unattainable for most victims and the wider population. Many perpetrators of vio lence are protected by formidable layers of impunity, reflecting problems of complicity, capture, and capability gaps on the part of subnational and national governance, security and justice offices, and other agencies within the state bureaucracy.
Nonviolent Societal Responses in Michoacán Given the violence of Mexico’s cartels, it is no surprise that some groups—notably the autodefensa (self-defense) groups—have responded with violence. Different types of self-defense groups have formed in Mexico throughout much of the twentieth century. In Michoacán, self-defense groups began to surface in Cherán as early as 2011 in response to the growing levels of violence (Felbab-Brown 2016), although initially the central government did not acknowledge their presence. Then in 2013, in direct response to extortion by the Knights Templar criminal organization, particularly targeting the avocado industry, growers created self- defense groups in twenty-two municipalities. In general, self-defense groups have
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varied significantly not only in Michoacán but across Mexico. They have also evolved in different ways, reflecting various ways of engaging with the state, the representation of different interests, and varying capacity to limit crime-related violence (or, in some cases, accommodate it). However, they represent a stark response to the Mexican state’s inability to address the rapidly deteriorating security conditions u nder the escalation of crime-related violence (Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos 2016). While the formation of self-defense groups constitutes one response, as this volume has highlighted, t here is a much wider range of nonviolent societal responses. However, the example of the self- defense groups is used to highlight the difference in nonviolent responses. A nonviolent response mechanism discussed in chapter 2 has been the establishment of different forms of local participation to seek security and protection from violence. In a number of cities in Michoacán, elites have leveraged their networks to improve the oversight of government agencies through the establishment of different forms of local participation. An example is the Security and Justice Working Group (SJWG) in Zamora discussed in chapter 2. Zamora’s SJWG members, drawn predominantly from the business and professional elites, use their meetings with security officials to call on the officials to take action to defend the elites’ collective interests. The SJWG is supported by a well-resourced civil society organization (CSO) based in the state capital, works closely with the government, and develops statewide networks. Some SJWG members have also been active in pushing municipal governments to be more transparent in reporting their policies and implementation. This has improved the information on what the governments are doing and how their funds are being spent. Though primarily of interest to the city’s business and professional elites, government transparency may in turn improve conditions for non-elite initiatives, like t hose of Zamora’s activists groups. Other participatory mechanisms discussed in chapter 2, in the cases of Tancítaro and Chinicuila, include community networks that have formed in numerous areas to act as assemblies on various issues, from the provision of environmental serv ices to neighborhood politicization. Th ese citizens’ councils focus on injustices that are not necessarily linked to criminal violence, such as political marginalization, lack of services, and environmental damage. However, they support initiatives that can contribute to self-sufficiency, such as introducing recycling to fund soccer programs. Th ere are plans to link neighborhoods into citywide networks, which amplify the political voice of marginal neighborhoods. These groups tend to focus on local issues rather than transformational strategy. However, the act of forming t hese networks strengthens communities. Another form of response, discussed in chapter 3, has been the use of art and cultural activities to c ounter violence. The diverse uses of artistic expression, cultural activities, and cultural policy provide collective alternatives to the language of violence. For instance, using cultural activities to recover public space
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for civic use can help restore a sense of community and reduce vulnerability to violence. In addition, artists and cultural entrepreneurs have taken on the task of making visible otherwise invisible experiences of violence, as well as strengthening social bonds that have been damaged by the violence. Despite a systemic absence of the rule of law and a heightened sense of insecurity, vulnerable groups have resorted to different forms of legal mobilization aimed at seeking redress, protection, or the recognition of past and ongoing experiences of violence. Such strategies are the expression of both individual and collective agency, sometimes conducted as one of multiple strategies and often driven by desperation rather than high hopes of success. As outlined in chapter 4, this strategy has mostly been pursued by groups with specific identities— for instance, victims of forced disappearance, gender-based violence, and violence directed at sex workers. Some groups have used sociolegal strategies to mobilize for legal change or the recognition of new rights. Although in some areas church organizations have been complicit with criminal groups, in other areas church organizations have looked to c ounter criminal activities, as explained in chapter 5. Priests have been killed for this resistance, but they nonetheless continue to resist. In reaction to the violence of the Knights Templar in Michoacán, church organizations have addressed the traumatic effects of criminal violence. In 2013 the bishop of Apatzingán, Miguel Patiño, published an incendiary pastoral letter, accusing the state government of having links with crime. This was followed by further letters in 2014, and when a new archbishop of Michoacán, Carlos Garfias, was appointed in November 2016, a new ecclesiastical intervention program was promoted. This included providing pastoral care, focusing particularly on victims of violence, prisoners, and migrants. The Catholic Church manages shelters for women affected by violence and schools for forgiveness and reconciliation, and it attempted to provide legal aid for prisoners, who are usually not criminals but have been arrested as a show of dominance. In Morelia, the capital of Michoacán, the Church has participated in security provision with government officials, the police, and social leaders, introducing new forms of oversight. Although not immune from violent attacks, the Church is a powerf ul actor because of its ubiquitous presence and support: while individuals within the church can be targeted, the institution itself cannot be destroyed. However, it can restrict the forms of activism that communities engage in.
The Varied Objectives of Societal Responses Whereas previous chapters have provided a detailed discussion of each form of activism, in this chapter we consider the impact that each has had on criminal violence in light of the objectives pursued and the strategic choices made, as well
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as of the capabilities and resources deployed. Across the different societal responses, a number of objectives recur, though strategies diverge. Objectives are rarely articulated explicitly and evolve and change over time.
Security Provision and Protection All of the forms of activism studied in the volume seek to counter the effects of crime-related violence through improving state, community, or individual capacity for protection and security provision. Self-defense groups are not the focus of this volume, but they do the same t hing through the dramatic taking up of arms to counter violence with violence. In contrast, the societal responses discussed h ere use various nonviolent means. But the forms of violence are multiple, so protection and security measures include identifying the different forms of violence in play locally. The groups that invoke the law and seek legal change aim to strengthen protective measures. Importantly, protection is sought not only from organized crime or gangs but also from complicit state bodies. For instance, sex workers are particularly vulnerable to extortion and violence not only from clients but also from local police. Their activism includes improving the protection from violence owed them by the police. Similarly, local councils also seek to hold state bodies accountable for preventing or responding to violence.
Giving Voice and Visibility to the Experience of Violence Making the experience of violence visible is a recurrent if often not explicit objective of several of the responses discussed in previous chapters. This is especially so when redress is unlikely or when some violence is more invisible, either because of impunity and intimidation or because it is a form of violence that has become normalized and tolerated. The groups working on gender-based violence (GBV) specifically focus on giving visibility to forms of GBV that would other wise go unreported. This is also true for undocumented forced disappearances, the veracity of which is often questioned or swept u nder the carpet b ecause of layers of complicity within the bureaucracies of local law enforcement actors. Exercises in documenting individual cases, investing in data systems, or accompanying victims in their quest for some form of judicial recognition of their experience serve to testify to the existence of forms of violence that would otherw ise be invisible. Art and cultural activism purposefully gives voice and visibility to localized forms of violence, which in turn gives voice to people who might not have other channels of expression. This possibility of truth telling can contribute to enabling a degree of individual agency and empowerment.
Changing Spaces, Social Order, and Power Relations Seeking alternative life options for t hose who have experienced violence is in some cases a less explicit objective. Cultural activism has sometimes sought to
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recover physical space previously used by local gangs for criminal activities. As the communities recover urban space for use in cultural or other civic activities, it becomes possible to reimagine community life in less violent terms. This is also an outcome of the local councils: by coming together, they reclaim public space and push back against its closure as a result of criminal violence. Relatedly, several forms of activism seek to change both socionormative and formal institutional o rders, as well as the forms and language of engagement with political power. Groups working on GBV, for instance, have sought and achieved legal or policy change, improved the monitoring of femicide, and raised awareness of GBV. Altering social norms in relation to attitudes t oward sex workers has included working to prevent the arbitrary arrest and extortion of members of this group. Seeking to challenge and transform power relations that sustain forms of vio lence has been the primary focus of self-defense groups, which directly challenge criminal violence. In an ideal governance system, managed by effective state structures, the governing power must balance the needs of all interest groups. In the Michoacán case, t hese groups would include the state, the community affected by violence, avocado growers, and other groups, all of which have different interests. The state should focus on controlling violence, but in Mexico this may not be the case, as state interests have profited from criminal activity. For communities, the priority is stopping violence and ensuring safety, while the agriculture industry is focused on protecting crops and preventing extortion. Because the self-defense groups are not governed by democratic princi ples, some interests are likely to be prioritized over others, which because of their use of violence is more of a problem here than in any of the nonviolent responses.
Seeking State Accountability Seeking accountability for state actions characterizes several forms of activism discussed in this volume. Specific objectives include improving community-level or citizen oversight over how security is provided—for instance, through the local councils. Some efforts at legal mobilization include not only seeking to hold perpetrators accountable but also revealing the complicity of law enforcement agencies and local political and economic interests.
Managing the Risk of Nonstate Predation One key point about all of the forms of activism discussed in this volume is that even though they responded to a vacuum or weakness in the state’s response to criminal violence, they did not seek to subvert or undermine the state. Rather, their aim was to work with the state and strengthen or rebuild its capacity to respond. In Tancítaro and Chinicuila, the municipal governments supported and gained some legitimacy from the citizen councils. In Zamora, the state govern-
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ment reaped the rewards of activism. Mobilization strategies aimed at legal remedies use formal state rules and institutional forms to denounce rights violations, impunity, and complicity with violence both within the state and among powerf ul interests, while identifying structures and practices of impunity and complicity with violence as well as corruption. And the recourse to art and culture provides alternative channels through which to give voice and visibility to experiences of violence that otherwise would remain invisible. As discussed briefly in chapters 1 and 2, the relationship between government and the self-defense groups is more complex.6 Matt McDonald and Lee Wilson (2017) acknowledge that such groups may be considered a threat to the state and its monopoly on the use of force, requiring security measures to respond. Since 2014, the state has attempted to incorporate self-defense groups into the police and centralize command of municipal police in the state capital. However, the relationship between state and self-defense groups has been more subtle in other contexts, especially where nonviolent civil groups play a role in monitoring them. In Tancítaro, for instance, civilian municipal security councils have been created to monitor both self-defense groups and police. In the process, state officials have collaborated with nonviolent civil groups to harness the power of the self-defense groups and ensure that they are effectively managed rather than to eradicate them. This suggests that the state considers the groups legitimate actors and a way to maintain control over the cartels, and that the groups’ effectiveness depends on their being recognized by the state. At one level, the self-defense groups in Michoacán can be seen as another security actor vying for power. From this perspective, Michoacán has become a marketplace in which violence functions as wealth and criminal actors, nonstate armed groups, and state actors can be understood to be in competition for government and governance. Like criminal and state actors, self-defense groups can be seen as a protection racket—providing security in exchange for financial support. Charles Tilly (1985) famously referred to state making as organized crime— positing protection rackets as organized crime at its smoothest. He argued that “state making, quintessential protection rackets with the advantage of legitimacy, qualify as the largest examples of organized crime” (1985, 169). Protection rackets exist on a spectrum between protection and predation, establishing power on the basis of the use of force. Th ere is a risk that self-defense groups could deteriorate and become more predatory, increasingly resembling criminals rather than actors serving a public good. There is also a risk that tackling criminal violence with violence will further entrench, rather than challenge, a culture of violence. In some areas, as shown in chapter 2, this risk is managed by citizens’ councils, which may provide some oversight for the self-defense groups. The councils are responsible for controlling the technical devices associated with security management, including weapons and radios used for communication. They do not restrict the use of weapons, although they may contain them and, in some
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cases, establish protocols for their use. The same can be said about radios—which, although they can be acquired by anyone, are reserved to communicate m atters related to the security of the municipality. Further, the community assembly decides who is in charge of the police and self-defense groups. A question remains as to whose voice is represented in the community assembly. In sum, the self-defense groups take a much more confrontational approach to social change than do nonviolent responses, which use different strategies to influence change by seeking to (re)build state capacity to respond to violence. As a result, they have a more complex relationship to the state.
Narratives of Legitimacy as a Resource for Societal Responses The societal responses observed in this volume have drawn on different resources, strategies, and capabilities. They have also invoked different discourses of legitimacy, consent, or consensus, and their objectives or the interests that they represent also vary—in most cases, changing or evolving over time. The acceptability or perceived legitimacy of the response mechanisms is important and contributes to their sustainability. The legitimacy narratives in Michoacán range from nonstate to state- sanctioned legitimacy. The self-defense groups mentioned in several of the chapters derived their legitimacy from providing what is perceived as effective security and protection from violence where the state fails to do this. In traditional political theory (from Thomas Hobbes through John Locke to Max Weber), the state is understood to be the primary actor, providing security for its citizens. While scholars have debated the identity of the referent object of security— the object to which security should be provided— t here has been limited critique of the state as the provider of that security or of the role of other actors. Aoife McCullough (2015) argues that t here are various ways for nonstate groups to gain legitimacy, which can include filling perceived gaps in state performance. This is clearly evident in Michoacán, where the state was not actively controlling criminal violence and thus created a governance vacuum. This does not mean that the self-defense groups are necessarily acting in the public interest, but they were hailed as bearers of order and protection by the communities or interest groups that they represented or that called on them to address the vio lence of criminal organizations. This clashes with the legal basis on which the Mexican state is founded—t hat is, that the state holds the monopoly on the use of violence for providing law and order. In the absence of the state or given its capture or control by criminal or other nonstate elite interests, trust in the state’s capacity to provide security (chapter 2) was displaced as individuals and communities turned to nonstate actors to provide them with better protection and security. This trust is uneven, and the associated legitimacy is contingent and fragile, in part because of the changing character of self-defense groups.
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At the other end of the spectrum, in Morelia (chapter 3) t here are strategies that work through the state. They include response strategies deployed by CSOs that use the law and legal mobilization strategies. Th ese strategies draw on the language of rights (both human rights and constitutional rights), seeking to make the state and others more accountable. This carries weight in the “socionormative” imaginary of citizens in Mexico, albeit in a context where trust in the state as a guardian of rights is low and the rule of law is weak. The groups that draw on the language of rights and legality can contribute to challenging prevailing social norms that reproduce stigmatization, social exclusion, and discrimination, which perpetuate practices of violence and entrenched patterns of vulnerabilities. These strategies may contribute to a piecemeal reframing of the terms of public discourse on right and wrong, partly by invoking international norms on rights and justice. The expectation is not primarily or even mainly that justice will prevail, but t hese strategies can underline the illegitimacy and illegality of both state agents who perpetuate impunity and the violent actors or discriminatory social norms that they protect. Between the nonstate and state-sanctioned ends of the spectrum lie most of the other societal responses studied in this volume. Indeed, the capacity to redefine the contours of public space and establish new social truths that denounce or reject vio lence can be represented by vulnerable groups or marginal communities in other ways. For instance, the art or cultural activities that recapture physical space used as sites of gang activity appear to be generating new dynamics of social cohesion. These types of activism can also promote inclusion and participation, giving voice to the community in contexts where public space has been closed by criminal vio lence. In the process, such activism may build new legitimacy narratives on the use of public space. Some of these types of activism are not indifferent to the state—for instance, the cultural activists in Apatzingán are mostly happy to work with the Station, the state-funded cultural center—but they are not reducible to it either.
Evaluating the Impact of Societal Responses The ubiquity of violence in Mexico creates an environment that fosters low-level criminality, exacerbated by the low prosecution rates that are inherent in weak state response. However, the examples discussed throughout this volume are testament to the forms of action that individuals and communities take to push back against criminal violence when the state does not. In cities, well-connected and -resourced groups disgruntled with the scale of corruption and confronted by a lack of security have allied with state and national CSOs to improve the oversight of government agencies. Nonelite groups facilitate autonomous collective action and the political representation of marginal neighborhoods and vulnerable groups. The Catholic Church as well as unions are impor tant institutional actors that nurture and sponsor initiatives, though often with
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preset limits. Even in the absence of the rule of law, recourse to a language of rights and justice has some value in giving voice to survivors of violence. And finally, expressions of art and culture can create alternative forms of social engagement and exchange, even recovering physical public space in towns and villages for nonviolent civic activities and thus helping increase social cohesion. All these response reactions draw on different resources, capabilities, and networks available to citizens, and they accordingly have varying degrees of power to push back against crime-related violence. What they achieve is nuanced and does not respond directly to the cartels but is nevertheless a valuable contribution to society. Several factors need to be considered in accounting for the achievements and impact of t hese response mechanisms. The ongoing presence of criminal networks and the formidable networks of complicity that they generate act as a powerf ul constraint on the possibility of bottom-up action aimed at countering violence. Inequalities and power asymmetries among the actors involved in the responses to violence, as well as the different vulnerabilities they represent, mean that any impact w ill have differential effects on the communities, groups, or individuals involved. The effects of activism on violence are also diffuse and hard to measure, and often the level of violence is not directly reduced. In all cases, however, the chapters show that some measure of change resulted from different forms of activism, even though this may be subtle—such as reclaiming public space or improving social cohesion. And the experience of acting to c ounter different forms of violence contributes to increasing the possibility of that the different social groups and communities studied in this volume will find voice and agency in the face of widespread violence.
Activism through the Church The involvement of the Catholic Church presents a powerful avenue for nonviolent action. As described in this chapter and in more detail in chapter 5, the church has been able to pursue and achieve concrete objectives in the form of pastoral care for women and prisoners and, in the case of Bishop Patiño, even directly challenging state involvement with crime. For individuals frustrated by the extent of criminal violence, engaging through the Church is one of the safest options. The extent of the Church’s network throughout Mexico and its international connections mean that a direct attack against the Church is unlikely, giving it the power to be more direct and confrontational in its approach than other organizations empowering activists who feel they can confront the challenges head-on. However, engaging in activism through the Church comes with some trade- offs, as t here are some issues that the Church is unwilling to focus on—such as those that violate conservative social norms. While perhaps more powerful than some of the other forms of nonviolent action discussed here, Church-based responses are limited in their scope.
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Art and Culture Cultural activities and policies have been employed to subvert criminal violence. At one level, the expansion of cultural life in the community has created the opportunity for recovering physical space from criminal or gang activities. This reappropriation of public space by the community to carry out cultural activities contributes to rebuilding social bonds and safe space for family and community life.7 In addition, different art forms are a channel for giving voice and visibility to the experiences of violence at the individual and collective level, both through denunciation and through creating new imaginaries of what constitutes alternative modes of social engagement. Some of t hese expressions are directly intended to subvert violence. For instance, poe-mantas are created to transmit denunciatory poetry on violence and in opposition to pervasive cultures of violence. The poe-mantas constitute a subversive use of narco-mantas (banners put up by criminal organizations with messages of threat and intimidation).
Legal Mobilization Strategies It is surprising to find in Michoacán recourse to law, legal mobilization, and efforts to change the law to counter different forms of crime-related violence, address vulnerabilities that are amplified by crime-related violence, or strengthen rights and protections, given the systemic absence of the rule of law and rights protection. Such strategies are the expression of both individual and collective agency, sometimes conducted as one of multiple strategies and often driven by desperation rather than high hopes of success. The impact of legal mobilization has been diverse, reflecting different strategies and objectives. In e very case studied in this volume, gains include advances in raising the visibility of specific experiences of violence as well as of the wider scale of violence and related forms of impunity and complicity. In the cases of forced disappearances, where t here are deliberate efforts to deny violence, achieving any recognition of the incidence of violence and of the plight of survivors in their struggle with state bureaucracies or justice and security officials appears to constitute an empowering experience. The greater visibility of cultures of impunity that mobilization efforts related to the law advances can create reputational challenges for local government and state officials. This can contribute to generating some constraints on the power of public office, even in the absence of institutional guarantees and commitments to address violence-related problems. In some cases, achievements have included concrete changes in the law or the creation of databases that document violence, contributing to a progressive public reframing of social narratives of violence, injustice, and discrimination. Even in the absence of the rule of law, legal change counterbalances public
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decisions that protect impunity and that would otherwise go unquestioned. Improving records of forced disappearance, establishing the Gender Violence Alert Declaration, improving the monitoring of femicide and awareness of GBV, and preventing the arbitrary arrests and extortion of sex workers constitute small but not insignificant steps toward countering pervasive structures of impunity and against a backdrop of adversity and aggression.
Local Citizens’ Councils The local citizens’ councils may appear to be the least powerf ul and the least direct challenge to criminal violence. In some cases, the councils have been formed in response to municipal security crises (Tancítaro and Zamora); in other cases, the councils are political projects associated with the democratic transition in Mexico that, since 2013, has had to address issues of security and justice in a context of radical insecurity. Although they are peripheral to institutionalized politics, the councils coexist and interact in different ways with self-defense groups, police agencies, and armed forces, as well as with officials and citizens in their local areas, which gives them quite a significant role. The councils that are active in Michoacán do not directly challenge criminal violence or the cartels, but they change the operating environment, making it more challenging for cartels to maintain their activity and subverting the restrictions that cartels have placed on communities. The councils’ methods vary from the reconstruction of public space, strengthening local governance structure, and even regulating security responses by managing self-defense groups and municipal police. Their main contribution has been to create an arena for discussions of issues that include, but are not limited to, organized crime and the violence that accompanies it. The cartels had closed down public discussion, and the councils created a space for reopening it. This includes the discussion of what is understood by “security” in the first place, as well as ways to achieve it. While the councils are quite subtle in their approach, their results are very important.
Self-Defense groups While self-defense groups are not the focus of this volume, they have been the most direct and explicit challenge to the cartels (Álvarez, Román, and Jesperson 2019). Since the cartels w ere threatening the economic interests of avocado growers, they were willing to use their own resources to mount a defense. The effectiveness of the response gave the growers the power to continue to hold the government to account. However, without the continued threat of violence, this power has waned somewhat. B ecause the self-defense groups responded to criminal violence in a localized way, they were not able to achieve a wider transformation that challenges the structural features of cartels. Moreover, the groups active across Michoacán are diverse and prone to mutations over time, which can undermine their positive influence.
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Self-defense groups successfully challenged the cartels and subsequently created governance bodies, but the state’s effort to disarm them has created an opening for criminal violence that the state is still not controlling. The coercive power of the self-defense groups also creates a risk that they w ill become as oppressive as the criminal groups they seek to challenge. This is quite different from the nonviolent responses, which are able to apply their approach more consistently.
Elite Networks Although less powerful than the self-defense groups, the elite and statewide networks are the most sustainable, as their power is more tenacious. But citizens’ councils have the most reach, and they have even played a role in entrenching the effects of self-defense groups. In all three cases discussed in this volume, councils w ere able to monitor not only criminal activity but also the performance of local government and policing. In the smaller settlements, council discussions focused on the specific cases reported, though in Zamora the focus was more on the reliability of crime statistics and on the picture of crime that these painted. In the cases of Tancítaro and Chinicuila, where the councils played a role in managing the self-defense groups and to some extent the municipal police forces, council discussions led to specific police operations, albeit with l imited success. Those councils also helped create citizen participation in security governance as well as recruiting for and giving legitimacy to the self-defense groups. In Tancítaro, the councils also helped ensure that the rest of the population participated in the checkpoints designed to prevent members of criminal organ izations from reentering the town. In Zamora, by contrast, the council had no evident effect on police recruitment or on broader citizen participation.
Conclusion: Learning from Community Activism in Michoacán State capture has become a key focus of the study of organized crime, with a growing body of literature assuming that state penetration is a core focus of criminal groups to maintain their activities (for example, Chabat 2019; Cockayne 2016). While this may be the case, and Mexico is a clear example of state complicity or at least inaction, this perspective hides an important element of the response to organized crime and particularly criminal violence. Ordinary citizens who experience criminal violence are not passive victims but engage in activism to the best of their ability, using the varied resources and capabilities they have available. The result is not perfect. As this chapter has outlined, societal responses or forms of activism vary widely. But so do the kinds of violence that penetrate society, and violence affects different communities in different ways. We know much more about homicidal violence because it is more researched, but the kinds of activism discussed in this volume also respond to
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invisible forms of violence that are often ignored in discussions of criminal vio lence, such as disappearances and gender-based violence. Accordingly, a range of responses has emerged that focuses on different experiences of violence, using different strategies to achieve different aims. This chapter sought to situate t hese societal responses within the broader discussion of the multidimensional complexities of violence and responses to vio lence. This analysis is important because the dominant response to organized crime continues to rely heavily on state law enforcement responses—a strategy that has proven to be flawed. A deeper understanding of how citizens respond to criminal violence and the successes they achieve begins to open the door to alternative strategies and, thus, a broader arsenal of policy responses. Community- based responses are messy and unpredictable and at times seem ineffective beyond the immediate local level. Viewed in hindsight, though, they can transform a situation rather than just respond to its symptoms. Thus, policy makers can learn from community activism and begin to respond more effectively to organized criminal violence. In this vein, the biggest lesson that emerges from this chapter’s review of the experiences recounted throughout this volume is the impact of nonviolent action. While at first glance the self-defense groups appear to be the most effective because they directly challenge the cartels, the nonviolent forms of activism actually have a more sustainable effect. It is difficult to measure transformative effects. This is partly because change is inevitably multilevel and multidimensional, pathways are uncertain, and intended change processes are mostly not clearly articulated, especially given the diversity of the types of violence that activists must respond to. While t hese strategies rarely directly prevent violence, they build societal resilience and coping strategies that enable communities to counter violence in more subtle ways in the long term. From the perspective of lessons for international supporters of societies afflicted by crime-related violence, the chapters in this book confirm that it pays to invest in societal capability to engage in locally grounded problem solving and the strategic deployment of available resources (such as art, law, participatory devices, denunciation, and strategic alliances). It is also evident that paying attention to localized manifestations of violence is critical. The specific context of violence goes beyond national histories of crime, state, and society. Variation is substantial at the subnational level of the political economies of crime, capture, and complicity, as well as in the capabilities to respond to the violence that results. International supporters need to avoid generalizations. Two other lessons are clear from the chapters in this volume. First, specific experiences of crime-related violence and responses to it are relevant for other conflict-affected settings. Experiences of violence are not dissimilar. And many conflict situations the world over are already enmeshed in the political economies of local and transnational criminal activities. Global policy responses stand
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to gain from granular analyses of societal coping and response mechanisms. Second, it pays to invest in societal capabilities to counter the devastating impact of crime-related violence, as state-centered responses cannot be sufficient. This is so not least because of the intricate realities of capture and complicity among state and other elite interests and the illicit economies that contribute to multiple forms of violence. A deeper understanding of the coping and response mechanisms that societies develop in the face of violence would provide valuable lessons for international efforts to address conflict-and crime-related violence by building up societal resilience.
notes 1. Clearance rates refer to the proportion of crimes resolved by police through an arrest or other means. 2. The World Development Report of 2011 (World Bank 2011) represented an important recognition in the policy world of the complexities of violence, both conflict-and crime- related. Since then there has been growing acknowledgment of the need to take into account the connections between crime and conflict and their effects on social cohesion. 3. The scholarship on organized crime is large, yet, as signaled by Chabat (2019), the complexity and diversity of the phenomenon are such that generalizations on t hese questions need to be avoided. By one calculation t here are 180 definitions of organized crime (Klaus Von Lampe, cited in Chabat 2019, 15). 4. Guillermo O’Donnell’s (1999) color categories of state presence provide theoretical insights into explaining the different textures of state qualities and the social, political, and economic interests that sustain or challenge poor governance structures. 5. Of course, t here are many other factors that affect changes in how organized crime and illicit economies are embedded in state-society relations—including changes in production and consumption patterns, changes in political or policy choices in neighboring countries, and shifting power balances among different criminal organi zations (such as t hose that arise as a result of changes in policy or market conditions). 6. This volume did not present findings on self-defense groups. However, t hese were investigated as part of the team’s wider ethnographic research in Michoacán. For more details, see Álvarez, Román, and Jesperson 2019. 7. There is a large literature on the performative value of art therapy to address domestic violence (and other experiences of violence), especially where state protection is weak or absent. Cultural workshops targeting youth with activities relating to graffiti, reggae music, or other relevant art forms enable alternative forms of social engagement. Domestic violence survivors can use cultural workshops to share their experiences. This has involved working with psychologists to provide counseling and therapy through art and performance.
references Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. 2018. “What Works in Preventing and Reducing Violence among Youth? A White Paper on Youth Violence, Crime Prevention, and the Mexican Context.” http://w ww.p ovgov.c om/storage/uploads/publication_files/what-w orks -to-prevent-v iolence-a mong-youth-a-w hite-paper-on-youth-v iolence-c rime-preven tion-a nd-t he-mexican-context_1580962335.pdf. Akkerman, Tjitske. 2009. “New Wars, New Morality?” Acta Politica 44 (1): 74–86. Álvarez, Irene, Denisse Román, and Sasha Jesperson. 2019. “Armed Legitimacy in Mexico: Self-Defense Groups against Criminal Violence.” In Rural Crime Prevention: Theory,
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Tactics and Techniques, edited by Alistair Harkness and Naomi Smith, 84–94. London: Routledge. Arias, Enrique Desmond. 2013. “Getting Smart and Scaling Up: The Impact of Organized Crime on Governance in Developing Countries: A Desk Study of Jamaica.” https:// assets.publishing.service.gov.u k /media/57a08a2440f0b652dd0005ac/61000-k avanagh _crime_developing _countries_jamaica_study.pdf. Chabat, Jorge. 2019. “Criminally Possessed States: A Theoretical Approach.” In The Criminalization of States: The Relationship between States and Organized Crime, edited by Jonathan D. Rosen, Bruce Bagley, and Jorge Chabat, 15–30. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Cockayne, James. 2016. Hidden Power: The Strategic Logic of Organised Crime. London: Hurst. Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos. 2016. Informe especial sobre los grupos de autodefensa en el estado de Michoacán y las violaciones a los derechos humanos relacionadas con el conflicto. Mexico City: Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos. Eu ro pean Commission. 2013. “Mid- Term Review of the Cocaine Route Programme Financed by the EU Instrument for Stability: Final Report.” http://w ww.iqpc.com /media/8085/11684.pdf. Felbab-Brown, Vanda. 2013. “Crime-War Battlefields.” Survival 55 (3): 147–166. ———. 2016. “The Rise of Militias in Mexico: Citizens’ Security or Further Conflict Escalation?” PRISM 5 (4): 172–187. ———. 2019. Mexico’s Out-of-Control Criminal Market. Washington: Brookings Institution. Flores Pérez, Carlos Antonio. 2009. El Estado en crisis: Crimen organizado y política, desafíos para la consolidación democrática. Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social. Gledhill, John. 2017. “When State Capacity Dissolves: Explaining Variation in Violent Conflict and Conflict Moderation.” European Journal of International Security 2 (2): 153–178. Grant, W ill. 2018. “Patrolling Mexico’s Most Densely Populated Suburb.” BBC News. http://w ww.bbc.co.u k/news/world-latin-a merica-43302244. Jesperson, Sasha. 2016. Rethinking the Security-Development Nexus: Organised Crime in Post-Conflict States. London: Routledge. Kaldor, Mary. 2006. New Wars and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era. Cambridge: Polity. Maldonado, Salvador. 2012. “Drogas, violencia y militarización en el México rural: El caso de Michoacán.” Revista Mexicana de Sociología 74 (1): 5–39. ———. 2014. “You Don’t See Any Violence Here but It Leads to Very Ugly Th ings: Forced Solidarity and Silent Violence in Michoacán, Mexico.” Dialectical Anthropology 38 (2): 153–171. ———. 2018. La ilusión de la seguridad: Política y violencia en la periferia michoacana. Zamora, Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán. McCullough, Aoife. 2015. “The Legitimacy of States and Armed Non-State Actors: Topic Guide.” Birmingham, UK: Governance and Social Development Resource Centre, University of Birmingham. McDonald, Matt, and Lee Wilson. 2017. “Trouble in Paradise: Contesting Security in Bali.” Security Dialogue 48 (3): 241–258. Moriconi, Marcelo, and Carlos Anibal Peris. 2019. “Merging Legality with Illegality in Paraguay: The Cluster of Order in Pedro Juan Caballero.” Third World Quarterly 40 (12): 2210–2227. Muggah, Robert, and Katherine Aguirre Tobon. 2018. Citizen Security in Latin America: Facts and Figures. Río de Janeiro: Igarape Institute. O’Donnell, Guillermo. 1999. “Polyarchies and the (Un)Rule of Law in Latin America.” In The (Un)Rule of Law and the Underprivileged in Latin America, edited by Juan E. Mén-
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dez, Guillermo O’Donnell, and Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. 2016. State of Fragility 2016: Understanding Violence. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Pansters, Wil G. 2018. “Drug Trafficking, the Informal Order, and Caciques: Reflections on the Crime-Governance Nexus in Mexico.” Global Crime 19 (3–4): 315–338. Reitano, Tuesday, Ruiz-Benitez de Lugo, Lucia Bird, and Sasha Jesperson, eds. 2017. Militarised Responses to Transnational Organised Crime: The War on Crime. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rosen, Jonathan D., Bruce Bagley, and Jorge Chabat, eds. 2019. The Criminalization of States: The Relationship between States and Organized Crime. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Rubio, Luis. 2017. “Corruption Is Mexico’s Original Sin.” Foreign Policy. http://foreignpolicy .com/2017/12/26/corruption-is-mexicos-original-sin/. Shirk, David, and Joel Wallman. 2015. “Understanding Mexico’s Drug Violence.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 59 (8): 1348–1376. Simon Fraser University. 2013. Human Security Report 2013: The Decline in Global Violence: Evidence, Explanation and Contestation. Vancouver, BC: Simon Fraser University. Tilly, Charles. 1985. “War Making and State Making as Organised Crime.” In Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, 169–187. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. United Nations and World Bank. 2018. Pathways for Peace: Inclusive Approaches to Preventing Violent Conflict. Washington: World Bank. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. 2010. “Crime and Instability: Case Studies of Transnational Threats.” Vienna: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. https:// www.u nodc .org /documents/f rontpage/Crime _ a nd _ i nstability_ 2 010_ f inal _ low_ res .pdf. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the Latin America and Caribbean Region of the World Bank. 2007. Crime, Violence, and Development: Trends, Costs, and Policy Options in the Caribbean. Vienna: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. https:// www.u nodc.org/pdf/research/Cr_ a nd_Vio_Car_ E .pdf. Vilalta, Carlos J. 2016. “Does the Mexican War on Organized Crime Mediate the Impact of Fear of Crime on Daily Routines?” Crime and Delinquency 62 (11): 1448–1464. World Bank. 2011. World Development Report: Conflict, Security, and Development. Washington: World Bank. Zyck, Steven, and Robert Muggah. 2012. “Preventive Diplomacy and Conflict Prevention.” International Journal of Security and Development 1 (1): 68–75.
chapter 8
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Society to the Rescue? Rethinking Responses to Crime and Violence Trevor Stack
In 2017, leaders of a civil association with a focus on transparency w ere invited to a gala dinner in the provincial Mexican city of Zamora, together with local reporters and o thers considered to be opinion leaders. I did not attend the dinner, but some of the guests confided to me afterward that they had doubts about the real agenda behind it. Among their hosts were not only the municipal president but also a hotelier and a lawyer, both of whom, they said, had a reputation for being linked to organized crime. What I want to emphasize is that, despite the guests’ remarks about the hotelier and lawyer, t hese individuals were not pariahs in Zamora society. They had social, political, and business relationships with many of the city’s other public figures, including some of the other dinner guests—among whom w ere professionals, business o wners, and representatives of the media. The hotelier and l awyer w ere even members of one of the city’s elite recreational clubs, whereas Pablo Escobar was famously refused membership in the Medellin Country Club. It would thus be difficult to give an account of Zamoran civil society that excluded this pair unambiguously. By the same token, it is important to ask how they related not only to the municipal president and other government officials, but also to the more obvious candidates for membership in civil society, including the civil association that had attended the dinner. This is especially important since both the hotelier and the lawyer w ere linked not only to criminal business, but also to the kinds of business that the civil association’s members w ere involved in, such as real estate development. In this volume, we have drawn on material from a comparative ethnographic project that was conducted mainly in 2017–2018 on societal responses to crime and violence in the Mexican state of Michoacán. In this final chapter, I would 156
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like to slightly reframe the questions to which the authors have responded, and to provide some answers based on my own reading of the chapters. My reframing draws initially on a consideration of my own field site, the city of Zamora, in the light of some recent writings on crime and violence. This chapter is thus not a conclusion in which I simply draw together the conclusions of the other chapters. Rather, it is an analytical chapter, designed to follow chapter 7 (by Pilar Domingo and Sasha Jesperson, on policy debates), in which I reconsider our findings in the light of ongoing scholarly debates. For reasons of space, I refer to only some of the relevant scholars. To understand crime and corruption, I engage with Matías Dewey’s El orden clandestino (2015), though I also refer to Richard Snyder and Angelica Duran-Martinez’s (2009) seminal essay on state protection and violence and to Javier Auyero and Agustín Burbano de Lara’s (2012) work on the different kinds of harm that result. To understand responses, I pay par ticular attention to the work of Enrique Arias, drawing out the ambivalence of his category of “civic actors” (2019, 342). My reframing is intended to avoid presupposing a set of worthy societal actors—often collectively labeled “civil society”—who fight a Manichaean struggle against the forces of evil, in this context commonly referred to as “orga nized crime.” My standpoint is not one of moral neutrality. In fact, my aim is to achieve a clearer understanding of the social fields that we describe in this volume, including the difficulties presented in disrupting established dynamics. This is one reason for the vignette with which I begin the chapter. In reality, the civic space—by which I mean the space in which notions of public good are s haped, including for public policy—is inhabited by a wide range of actors who have complex and dynamic relationships with one another. They include a gamut of business actors, legal and illegal, and state actors who themselves play a range of roles. The vignette also reminds us that “organized crime” needs to be understood in relation to the civic space, including vis-à-vis the actors who claim to stand against it. Rather than simply ask how society responds to crime and violence, presupposing a set of benign actors struggling against malign actors such as those involved in organized crime, I ask two questions: First, how, to what extent, and with what consequences do some societal actors break with the established dynamics of the civic space? And second, how do t hose actors relate to all the other actors who either play along with or remain complicit in the existing dynamics?
Reframing the Question Illegal Margins for Business and the Role of Civic Actors in Gray Zones My rephrasing of the question derives from a consideration of the case for which I was responsible. The locality that I studied was the city of Zamora, the main city in the northwest of the state (chapters 1 and 2). On the basis of my fieldwork,
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I propose that organized crime needs to be understood there, and arguably elsewhere, as a variation on the theme of defective regulation of business. Business everywhere is regulated to uphold the public interest and to avoid various kinds of harm such as environmental degradation and violence. In Zamora, as in many other contexts around the world, I found that officials do not fully implement the regulations that are supposed to govern business, making exceptions that benefit business actors and allowing them to engage in business practices that the law is supposed to restrict or prevent. I use the term “illegal margins of action” for the business opportunities made possible by this selective enforcement (Dewey 2015) of business regulations. In some cases, the line of business enabled is illegal, while in other cases, the line of business may be legal, but the relevant businesses are given a margin of action that the law was designed to prevent them from having.1 Examples of margins of action that enable illegal or criminal business in Zamora are police tolerance or protection of t hose involved in drug dealing, money laundering, and extortion. Examples of illegal margins for otherw ise legal business in Zamora range from allowing urban developers to bypass planning regulations to allowing agribusinesses to drill for water without the required permissions. Selective enforcement of business regulation can serve ends other than business—for example, when the proceeds of extortion are used for political patronage and to fund campaigns (Dewey 2015). However, in the case of Zamora, it appeared that even filling campaign coffers was ultimately tied to business interests. Thus, my emphasis is on the business interests, though I pay attention to the politics that facilitates them. I argue that the endemic violence in Zamora (and in the other contexts discussed in this volume) needs to be understood in relation to the illegal margins of action for business—t hat is, in terms of the selective implementation of business regulation. First, violence (or the threat of it) is a way for wholly illegal lines of business, such as drug retail, to enforce contracts, since the people involved in such business are unable to use the law to that end. Second, this violence becomes socialized as a way of enforcing contracts in other lines of business and for intimidating competitors, and it becomes “chronic” when it recurs even in disputes between kith and kin (Abello Colak and Pearce 2015). Third, violence is used on occasion to maintain the illicit margins of action, w hether for legal or illegal lines of business, by ensuring selective implementation. In t hese contexts, violence is used or threatened to press police to form pacts with drug retail networks or convince the municipal government to authorize land use changes or refrain from enforcing building regulations (Dewey 2015; Auyero and Sobering 2019; Ley and Trejo 2020). Such violence may be used by illegal armed groups, but I consider t hese to be part of a broader set of what I call enforcement actors. The term is meant to include t hose commonly known as criminal enforcers and t hose who in the United States are termed law enforcement officers, as well as many people between these poles such as employees of legal private security com-
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panies and members of autodefensa groups with community legitimacy. Enforcement actors use force or the threat of it, in different measures and vari eties, to enforce norms and contracts as well as offering protection of various kinds (including from enforcement by other actors). Thus, they play various crucial roles, of both commission and omission, in the selective implementation that makes possible all kinds of business that state law is supposed to prevent. What I emphasize from my observation of Zamora is that enforcement actors are not the only ones playing roles in holding open illicit margins of action for legal and illegal business. Here I develop Arias’s concept of “civic actors” (2018, 342). Drawing on his research in Miami, Kingston, Río de Janeiro, and Medellin, Arias extends the insights of the literature on the role of civic organizations in policy making, to appraise the ways in which criminal organi zations also intervene in policy. He argues that criminal organizations frequently engage with civic organizations in a bid to influence policy, especially when the former organ izations lack the legitimacy to liaise directly with policy makers. Arias thus highlights the complexity of the relations among criminal organizations, civil organizations, and state policy makers. In the process, he also problematizes the assumption that civil organizations necessarily work against criminal ones, signaling that civic actors may serve (willingly or otherw ise) as mediators for criminal actors. Arias does not offer a clear definition of “civic actors,” but I use the term to designate all t hose organizations and individuals who by virtue of their public standing—rather than solely of their office or technical ability or resources—a re able to influence public policy processes. Public standing can have many sources, including representation, as in the case of neighborhood or chamber of commerce leaders; the acumen and professional standing claimed by lawyers; the expertise and influence of education professionals; and the moral authority of clergy. The term “civic actors” may have a positive ring, but I observe, as Arias indicates, that some civic actors in t hese contexts use their standing to open and maintain illegal margins of action. Th ese actors range from city councilors who have advanced the interests of urban developers or agribusinesses to lawyers and business chamber leaders who, in one way or another, represent criminal business interests. This also explains the vignette with which I began the chapter. Thus, we can identify four overlapping sets of actors involved in enabling illegal margins of action for business (Figure 8.1). I have described each of the sets broadly, with the result that the sets overlap in practice, but I maintain that the distinctions among them remain important. One set is the full range of l egal and illegal business actors who take advantage of the margins of action to engage in forbidden business practices. Another set is the state officials who enable t hese margins of action by helping facilitate the selective implementation of business regulation. These officials range from city councilors, city managers, and planning officers to members of the police and military entrusted with preventing
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T r e v o r S ta c k Illegal margins of action for business practices State actors
Civic actors
Illegal margin Business actors Business practices
Enforcement actors
Figure 8.1. State, business, enforcement, and civic actors are associated with (and overlap in) all governance of business. However, illegal associations between t hese actors lead to partial implementation of regulation, enabling illegal margins of action for business (whether illegal or otherw ise legal). Graphic by Trevor Stack with technical assistance from Alison Hay.
criminal business. They overlap with the third set—t hat of enforcement actors, which includes nonstate enforcement actors who may impose their own alternative business norms on the community, enforce contracts within illegal business, or alternatively use or threaten force to protect business actors from state enforcement, holding open the margins of action that way. The main object of my framework is to highlight the role of the fourth set, that of civic actors, who I argue may use their civic standing to mediate nefarious business interests, often by influencing state actors. Just as business, state, and enforcement actors overlap, as I have defined them, civic actors also overlap with the other three sets. Professional or community leaders may run for state office, perhaps as municipal councilors; and business actors may also cultivate civic standing and bring this to bear on state actors (Moncada 2016). Auto defensa leaders such as the obstetrician Manuel Mireles relied on their civic standing to recruit and legitimize enforcement actors, and Mireles went on to seek office as a state actor. Yet I argue that the distinctions among the four sets help illuminate the complex dynamics of selective implementation in t hese settings. Certainly, I found the framework valuable in appreciating how certain business practices came to be reproduced in Zamora. Arguably, all governance of business entails regulating the associations between t hese four sets of actors. Thus, the distinctions among them are normative as well as analytical. For example, developers everywhere are consulted
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by planning officers on local development plans, alongside other parties such as environmentalists, while the police may be called upon to intervene in the event of serious violations of planning law. The relation between t hese sets of actors is subject to legislation designed to avoid improper association. Overlaps between state and business actors are regulated to avoid conflicts of interest, while lobbying legislation constrains how business actors approach government officials. Police are state enforcement actors and as such are subject to stringent rules and regulations—including judicial and often civic oversight—over and above the restrictions on the business of private security. Civic actors like environmentalists are typically required to register and comply with official criteria to participate in planning and other policy processes. Civic actors also use their public standing to run for office or are appointed on the basis of that standing, but formal and informal norms restrict their freedom of action in office, including their role in implementing business legislation.2 In practice, it is often hard to regulate such relations between actors, and illegal association is by no means uncommon. Auyero uses the term “gray zone” to refer to illegal associations between state and nonstate enforcement actors (2013). Mexico has a long history of security and police officials collaborating with nonstate armed groups to intimidate opposition for both political and business ends. I extend Auyero’s term “gray zone” to include illegal connections among state, business, and civic actors as well as enforcement actors, and I observe that collective violence is only one objective of such associations.3 The hotelier and lawyer of my opening vignette were said to use their civic standing to influence state and other civic actors, not only in public forums such as the gala dinner but also in behind-the-scenes negotiations. They sought influence to further their own business interests as well as t hose of their clients, whether or not their clients’ business (or their relationship to their clients) was legal. Part of their clout stemmed from their no doubt illegal association with state and nonstate enforcement actors, and the lawyer also had his professional prowess to offer, but as civic actors their public standing—which presumably the gala dinner was meant to enhance—was a major asset. By operating in the gray zones of business governance in Zamora, they and o thers like them helped enable illegal margins of action for business that, it was said, included irregular real estate development, street markets that sold stolen goods, commercial agriculture that used clandestine irrigation, and drug retail and trafficking—as well as the laundering of the proceeds from t hese activities. In t hese contexts, I argue that the term “organized crime,” commonly used by citizens, officials, and scholars alike to evoke a malignant force disrupting social order, is better understood as a variation on the theme of the gray zone. “Organized crime” is best used for gray zones that enable wholly illegal lines of business (such as drug retail and trafficking) and that make use of wholly illegal enforcement actors (notably including the armed groups that are proliferating
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in the region).4 However, the gray zones of organized crime include actors in otherw ise legal business (such as construction, commerce, and agriculture) in which drug proceeds are often invested, and who on occasion make use of illegal enforcement actors to enforce contracts and intimidate competitors. The gray zones incorporate a panoply of state actors, including police and military, who not only afford varying kinds of protection (Moncada 2020; Snyder and Duran- Martinez 2009) but also collaborate in enforcement: police patrols have turned over arrestees to criminal groups, as well as sharing information with them. The hotelier and lawyer are examples of civic actors who also participate in the gray zones that make up organized crime. By implication, t hose gray zones overlap and intersect with the many other gray zones of illegal associations among state, business, enforcement, and civic actors, as do the illegal margins of action for business that they enable. Illegal margins for real estate development facilitate the investment of proceeds from illegal lines of business such as drugs, and semilegal and illegal street markets are used for drug retail while being subject to extortion by state and nonstate enforcement actors. Proceeds are invested in electoral campaigns, where civic actors mobilize their public profile to compete for public office—which affords them further opportunities to operate illegal margins for business of any and e very kind. I emphasize in the rest of the chapter that the gray zones of illegal association among sets of actors that sustain illicit margins of action for business vary considerably from one context to another, even across the region of our study. However, my primary concern is to consider the potential for some civic actors to reduce the illegal margins or at least to mitigate their more damaging effects, which range from violence and drug addiction to environmental degradation.
Civic Actors’ Reducing Illegal Margins of Action for Business and Mitigating Their Effects In emphasizing how civic actors through participating in gray zones enable the illegal margins of action that make possible illegal and otherw ise legal business, my main aim is to address the questions of when and why some civic actors come to problematize and ultimately reduce t hose margins. Scholars have often assumed that ills such as crime and violence w ill bring out the forces of good to rally against them. It is worth noting that even when civic actors do seek to address illegal margins for business, or at least to mitigate their effects, their motives are often less than glorious. For example, businessmen may be more concerned about their cars being stolen than about murders in poorer neighborhoods. Furthermore, we found that civic actors who tried to reduce some margins of action (for example, by challenging police protection of drug dealing or demanding transparency in municipal contracts) benefited from other illegal margins (such as by seeking exemptions to planning regulations in their own real estate business). I found that civic actors only
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occasionally seek to reduce illegal margins, and even then they do so selectively. But this makes it all the more important to understand when and why they do, and with what consequences. In my reading of the chapters, in the next section, I distinguish between actors who try to reduce illegal margins of action for business, including the gray zones of illegal association that enable them, and t hose actors concerned with mitigating the effects of t hose margins. My intention is not to minimize the importance of the latter, and it is clear from the cases discussed in this volume that impeding the socialization of violence is a crucial endeavor (Abello Colak and Pearce 2009). However, I hope it is clear from my account that, without addressing the illegal margins for business, the effects of the business are unlikely to disappear, and thus it is important to ask why some civic actors choose to address the margins while o thers prefer to address the effects. One reason why civic actors choose not to tackle the gray zones and the margins of action that they enable is the risks involved. Violence is an obvious risk in t hese contexts, but civic actors may also worry about disrupting their relations with the civic and state actors in the gray zones. I have mentioned that the hotelier and l awyer w ere far from pariahs in Zamoran society, and they had social, political, and business relationships with some of the other dinner guests. Another reason for civic actors to focus on the effects rather than the margins is that the gray zones enabling them are opaque b ecause they are clandestine. Thus, they are not easy to apprehend, much less to address. In the case of the gala dinner, I found that my interlocutors—even though they were reporters and members of a civil association—could do little more than speculate on the relations between actors that went into organizing the dinner, and that the dinner was presumably intended to strengthen. By stressing how civic actors commonly participate in gray zones of illegal association that enable illegal margins of action for business, I raise the question of w hether and to what extent, across the contexts described in the chapters, civic actors sought to rework their associations with state, business, enforcement, and other civic actors. The chapters offer a wide range of examples of civic actors trying to relate differently to state, business, and enforcement actors. One example, described in the first two chapters though not compared as a case, is that of leaders of autodefensa groups (many of whom are businessmen), who mobilized armed actors to attack the armed groups linked to certain criminal businesses—whether in defiance of or complicity with state actors (Álvarez, Román, and Jesperson 2019). The Security and Justice Working Group (SJWG) discussed in chapter 2 was dominated by businessmen who wanted to build relationships with senior functionaries and hoped to rely on police and armed forces to defend their interests. A very different example is that of the women’s groups studied by Catherine Whittaker in chapter 6, which generally avoided contact with state actors, concentrating instead on building “rooms of
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their own” from which to offset the “continuum of violence” on which criminal violence was only one point. As well as considering how civic actors rework their association with state, business, and enforcement actors, I ask how civic actors relate to each other across the contexts described in the chapters. First, I consider how t hose civic actors who seek to address illegal margins of action relate to t hose other civic actors who—like the hotelier and lawyer—appear to enable those margins. In the vignette I began with, I noted that, despite the reporters’ and civil association members’ suspicion of their hosts, they did not denounce them publicly but instead continued to share the same public spaces and, in some cases, to participate as clients or partners of their businesses. In chapter 5 I gave the impor tant example of how Bishop Patiño denounced the seeming complicity of state actors in criminal business, but he fell short of mentioning the role of other prominent public figures. Second, I ask how t hose civic actors who try to reduce the margins of action relate to each other. The relationship is often far from harmonious. The chapters present accounts of the tension between, for example, the elite actors in Zamora’s SJWG and the nonelite organizations whose members resented the actors’ privileged relationship to officials and disputed their response to the problem of security—as well as their vision of security in the first place. Like the w omen’s organizations, some Catholic Church actors tried to mitigate the vio lence, but the w omen’s organizations—as well as the LGBTI+ activists discussed in chapter 4—tended to see the Catholic Church as another problem for them. Finally, I ask how civic actors develop their public standing in the first place—as well as how this standing can be undermined. I have said that civic status has different sources, but it also has degrees and levels of stability. Examples in the chapters range from the more established forms of civic standing that characterize business chamber leaders and priests to the use of art and culture by young activists to build standing for themselves. It is also important to ask how public standing can be maintained when, for example, t here are rumors about criminal association, as in the vignette in this chapter. The volume provides a wealth of material to respond to t hese questions, for which I am indebted to the team members who conducted the research and authored the other chapters.
Reading the Chapters for Civic Actors’ Responses to Illegal Margins of Action for Business I draw first on the material of chapter 2, which addresses one way in which civic actors have responded to insecurity across several localities of our study: by forming what we term local citizen security councils (LCSCs), bodies that bring government officials together with other citizens to deliberate on issues of security within local contexts. In the chapter, Irene Álvarez, Denisse Román, and I
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compare LCSCs in three very different localities. We asked whether t hese three LCSCs—Zamora’s Security and Justice Working Group, the Chinicuila Popu lar Council, and the Tancítaro Municipal Security Council—were effective in restoring trust in government (especially in the police) in the wake of the state’s capture by a criminal organization and a subsequent autodefensa rebellion. In all three contexts, armed groups in association with criminal businesses and state actors, calling themselves the Knights Templar, had come to extort money from legal and illegal businesses ranging from mining and agriculture to drugs and kidnapping. Among other effects, this had diminished the state’s ability to implement taxation, fund the implementation of public policy, and regulate business. The results included massive deforestation and shambolic urbanization. Civic actors of the kind exemplified in this chapter’s opening vignette played important roles in facilitating this selective implementation of business regulation. L awyers and notaries w ere employed to legalize the expropriation of properties by criminals, other actors founded civil associations that served as a front for criminal interests, and political parties became vehicles for the same interests. In 2014, the federal government intervened to shut down some of t hese gray zones and the margins for business they enabled. For example, the state’s interior minister and some of his political and business associates were arrested. Yet this happened only after other civic actors had begun to use their public standing to respond to the harm, including the violence used by enforcement actors—both the illegal armed groups and their allies in the police and military. In two of the three localities discussed in the chapter, in 2012–2013 civic actors had drawn on their public standing to recruit and lead autodefensa groups, intended to replace the existing police. Though the autodefensas w ere effective in dismantling the Knights Templar, many autodefensa leaders ended up using their position to pursue business interests of their own, in some cases extorting businesses in the name of supporting their autodefensa groups. Some took for themselves properties that the Knights Templar had expropriated, and others engaged in illegal business such as drug production, trafficking, and retail. Autodefensa groups ended up embedded in new gray zones of illegal association that resembled the zones that they claimed to have eliminated and that served to reproduce “local o rders” (Felbab-Brown, Trinkunas, and Hamid 2017, 20). Within t hese orders, abduction and torture were justified as necessary to keeping the Knights Templar from returning, and environmental regulation was once again placed on hold when, for example, autodefensa groups protected or engaged in damaging agricultural practices (Maldonado 2018). To the extent that LCSCs helped monitor police, whether uniformed or as autodefensas, we suggest that the organizations had the potential to ensure that instead of extorting citizens and associating in gray zones to protect o thers’ illegal business, state and nonstate enforcement actors might begin to c ounter the
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harm of business like extortion, drugs, and kidnapping and even to enforce environmental protection to counter, for example, felling trees for avocado orchards. In chapter 2, we focus on trust as a crucial ingredient of effective policing, since without trust the public does not share information or even report crime (Tankebe 2010). Building trust in police was a major challenge in contexts where police had conducted their own illegal business and consorted with known criminals. But we found signs that building trust was possible. By comparing LCSCs in three localities, we observed that some LCSCs proved more effective than o thers as ways for civic actors to reduce illegal margins of action for business, including by monitoring and building trust in police. To begin with, we found that LCSCs were more effective in the two localities where state officials included in the LCSC w ere responsive to its nonstate members. In the case of Zamora, in contrast, even though the LCSC had been set up by business chamber leaders and elite professionals, they complained that the Michoacán state officials, including police commanders, dominated the proceedings. Although Zamora’s LCSC made some headway in improving government reporting of crime statistics, which is significant for reducing illegal margins, it had little influence on the state police force—even though the state’s public security minister, who was responsible for the state police, participated in e very meeting. This was a significant limitation because, although the centralization of the police under state command was intended to reduce the margins of action that had benefited the Knights Templar, it became evident that the Michoacán police force was operating wide margins of its own, permitting business in the form of systematic extortion as well as the illicit resale of drugs and weapons from mostly illegal raids. A second condition that rendered LCSCs effective is also relevant to the question of gray zones’ enabling illicit margins of action. The two more effective LSCSs were representative of the broader population, which not only strengthened their legitimacy in dealing with officials but also ensured that the trust they created extended beyond the council members. Again, Zamora’s LCSC was the counterexample. Its leaders resisted opening its membership to representatives of other organizations, arguing that they did not want to risk including members who might alienate government officials by being too critical or upset the interpersonal relations of trust that they had built with certain state officials. These interpersonal relations can also be read as a kind of gray zone, in which businessmen and w omen were able to secure a rapid response from the authorities in the case of robbery, for example. As a result, not only were the relations of trust l imited to the LCSC members, but also other Zamora organizations challenged the LCSC for being elitist—which undermined its legitimacy and ability to reduce margins and weakened solidarity between civic actors. In chapter 3, the “cultural activism” on which Edgar Guerrero and Ariadna Sánchez focus was mainly oriented toward mitigating the effects of illegal mar-
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gins of action for business, mainly by impeding the socialization of violence from criminal businesses such as drug retail, rather than reducing the margins themselves. However, I suggest that cultural activism may play some role in countering illegal margins, and the gray zones that enable them, by opening public spaces that are not dominated by any business interests. In the two contexts studied, the Tierra Caliente city of Apatzingán and the Pacific port of Lázaro Cárdenas, the authors found illegal margins of action enabling a variety of criminal and noncriminal businesses. Moreover, in both contexts civic actors played a role in the gray zones of illegal association that made t hese margins possible. In Apatzingán, t here was a history of margins in the policing of drug production and trafficking, as well as in the enforcement of environmental regulations for commercial agriculture. In the port city, t here was protection for e very type of contraband, including drugs. Th ere was also legal and illegal mining in the vicinity, and the steel g iant Lakshmi Mittal was said to benefit from some of the illegal mining, as well as to launder illicit money from elsewhere in the world. Interestingly, the steel mill also funded one of the only two cultural centers that existed u ntil recently in the city, which was one obvious connection between civic and business actors in that context. Meanwhile, lawyers and other public figures associated with officials and criminal businesses to facilitate the passage of contraband through the port. The effects in both regions included not only violence but also the degeneration of urban and rural environments. In the port, for example, government prioritizing of business interests, including those of illegal businesses, meant that the port had been modernized at the expense of planning and investment in the city, where most of the workers lived. Residents complained that Lázaro Cárdenas was a “first-class port and a fifth-class city.” The focus of Guerrero and Sánchez’s chapter is on how some civic actors appealed to the global discourse of “arts for peace” to develop cultural responses to the problem as they perceived it, and to access state and nonstate funds in the process. In both localities, the Mexican state had long sponsored cultural activities—for example, in the form of cultural missions introduced in the 1930s and intended to civilize the rural population. Nonstate organizations had in recent decades promoted local and regional history, conducted literacy campaigns, staged musical and theatrical performances, and hosted art installations and exhibitions. Faced with the spike in violence beginning in the 2000s, the Mexican state, together with national and international nongovernmental organizations, began to reframe its sponsorship of arts and culture using the discourse of arts for peace developed in conflict zones such as Colombia. Some local practitioners and promoters followed suit. Guerrero and Sánchez observe that not all local practitioners bought into the discourse, and t hose in Lázaro Cárdenas were less quick to take it up than their counterparts in Apatzingán. One reason was that the former group was suspi-
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cious of state institutions; another was that it was more concerned about urban decay than about violence. Even in the case of Apatzingán, the authors contrast the style of “collectives” that worked independently and the style of state- sponsored organizations. Despite this contrast, it is notable that the Station, an arts center sponsored by a state-f unded publishing h ouse, was headed by a local woman of public standing, who managed to engage with several local activists. The Station is an important example of productive (and l egal) association between state and civic actors, despite the tensions between them. These arts-related initiatives tended to focus on mitigating the effects of illegal margins of action, specifically by countering the socialization of violence and, in the case of Lázaro Cárdenas, urban degradation. It would seem unlikely that the initiatives managed to interrupt the use of violence for criminal business ends or for holding open the margins, but the authors find it plausible that the activities of the initiatives did help counter the normalization of violence. I would add that, in the process, the actors were effectively opening spaces (both physical and social) that w ere free not only from violence, but also from at least the more rapacious of business interests. Thus, the actors w ere in some respect reducing the institutional margins of action that illegally gave free rein to business interests. A graphic example is the poe-mantas campaign in Apatzingán, which hung poems on canvases in public places where armed groups had previously hung messages threatening other groups and state officials. Furthermore, the activists w ere acquiring a civic standing that could enable them to achieve their broader agenda, including countering violence. To my mind, this is another key insight of the chapter. Civic actors are not born with public standing, and those who aspire to transform public life, including by challenging gray zones, must find ways to acquire it. Art and culture proved to be an avenue for civic actors to build their standing and develop their ties to a range of state and business actors, while arguably encouraging t hose actors’ commitment to public ideals. In chapter 4, Salvador Maldonado and Iran Guerrero are concerned with initiatives that respond to less visible forms of violence, such as that practiced against w omen and LGBTI+, including by police and other state officials, as well as the use of forced disappearance by state and criminal actors. Although the object of such violent practices was not always to engage in business, the authors found a close relationship between t hese kinds of violence and the violence perpetrated in relation to criminal business. Forced disappearance, introduced by the Mexican state in the 1960s as a less visible though more insidious form of violence, became used by criminal actors in the 2000s, including against officials. The organizations that took up the cause of forced disappearance w ere motivated by victims’ frustration at the evident complicity between perpetrators and government officials, or at least the reluctance of officials to implement legal protocols to redress the wrong—which the authors gloss as “institutional
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violence.” Moreover, violence against women and LGBTI+ can be considered an example of the socialization of violence, a common result of violence generated by war or crime (Abello Colak and Pearce 2015). Th ose who organized in the face of perpetrators’ impunity came predominantly from groups generally targeted by such violence—notably, women. This suggests that actual or potential victims of violence may, despite the odds, seek ways to redress it, especially when they have the networks and wherewithal to do so. What is notable about the initiatives compared in chapter 4 is that, despite their pessimism about the use of legal channels to pursue justice, the organ izations in question did make some use of law. Activists made use of their own training and experience in law, as well as their presence in the state capital. However, the authors insist that the organizations all complemented their use of law with the use of other strategies, including various kinds of lobbying—aware as they were that the use of law alone, in t hese contexts, was unlikely to bear fruit. The authors note, moreover, that the organizations did not litigate as much as they appealed politically to Mexico’s international treaty obligations, as well as to the Mexican Constitution and federal laws. They used these law-related strategies to mitigate the effects of violence, such as by seeking redress for the use of violence. Yet the organizations often did so in ways that might have had the effect of serving to reduce the margins of action, especially by limiting impunity. The authors give examples of success, such as having femicide classified in the state penal code as a more serious crime than homicide. Yet they also recognize that, despite the activists’ resources and determination, the organizations found it hard to make advances. This illustrates, again, one of my broader points. Paying attention to the gray zones of illegal association that enable illegal margins for business helps explain the challenges faced by the civic actors who choose to address the margins themselves. Th ose who used legal channels, for example, found themselves bogged down in bureaucratic procedure. The threat of violence was also a deterrent, but it was not the only one, and the law itself could be used against them. Indeed, one activist found herself the subject of a legal suit for defamation by a state official. It is also important to recognize the divisions between the civic actors, which again accounts of civil society tend to overlook. For example, some campaigners for victims of forced disappearance in the 1960s and 1970s objected to extending their remit to the victims of criminally motivated disappearance, since this appeared to assume a moral equivalence between the two cases. There w ere also tensions between groups that championed sexual diversity rights and the Catholic Church, which tended to take a stand against sexual diversity—a lthough some clergy showed solidarity with LGBTI+ people. With regard to strategy, the participants in the movements studied can be termed activists b ecause of their confrontational attitude toward government institutions, which put them at odds with civic actors who were close to the institutions.
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In chapter 5, I focused on the Catholic Church, but I begin h ere with the endpoint of the chapter: the Church has been complicit in gray zones enabling, among other t hings, illegal margins for business. For most of the twentieth century, the Church operated in a gray zone, with church leaders meeting regularly with government officials, even though this was legally at best problematic. More relevant for our purposes, state actors allowed individual clerics and Church institutions to make financial transactions in violation of regulations on Church finances. Moreover, some Church-linked investments were made in lines of business that were themselves only selectively regulated, such as real estate, agribusiness, and gas stations—which, for example, were said to sell contraband gas. Enforcement actors, including police, were integral to the gray zones that enabled the illegal margins of action, whether or not clerics were directly associated with them. Clerics (important civic actors in their own right) were more likely to associate with other civic actors such as notaries and lawyers, who were themselves linked to state officials in a position to facilitate their investments. By starting with the Church’s complicity in gray zones, I avoid the assumption that the Church would inevitably stand on the side of the angels—again raising the question of why some Church actors moved to disrupt the dynamics from which others profited, or at least to mitigate the effects of t hose margins of action. One reason, in this context, was that priests became at times the only confidants of parishioners, and not only did the priests seek their own local responses to the violence reported to them, but they also channeled reports to their superiors of the violence faced by parishioners, which prompted a series of institutional responses. It is significant that a Michoacán priest, who had witnessed violent acts close-up, was a prime mover of the church’s national peace- building strategy that was announced nationally in 2010. Like the cultural activists described in chapter 3, Church actors w ere mainly concerned with mitigating the effects of illegal margins of action, especially by reducing violence through peace-building programs, rather than with addressing directly the gray zones and the margins that they enabled. However, clerics did at times try to reduce the margins, and I emphasize in chapter 5 that Church actors differed from many other civic actors to the extent that the Church was not a mere organization but an institution in its own right, comparable as such to the state. Church actors could draw on the church’s moral legitimacy, considerable infrastructure, and extensive social networks. The Church’s institutional resources w ere especially significant in challenging the collusion of powerf ul state actors with criminal businesses and illegal enforcement actors. A dramatic example was Bishop Patiño’s denunciation in 2013 of the state government’s failure to act on information provided about criminal activities in their dioceses, which served to publicize the degree of complicity between state and criminal business actors in the state.
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Furthermore, I explained in the chapter that the Church acted as an institutional sponsor of the kind of association between actors commonly known as civil society. Though my w hole approach is designed to avoid presupposing a good civil society fighting the forces of evil incarnated in organized crime, it is nonetheless revealing to observe that the Church used not only its infrastructure but also its moral legitimacy to engage with a particu lar set of civic actors. By tracing ethnographically the processes by which Church actors engaged with other civic as well as state actors, I was able to distinguish among four ways in which the Church could be said to sponsor civil society: by participating in forums of civic actors that were already established as part of civil society (for example, the Zamoran civil association mentioned in my opening vignette); nurturing organizations that then declared their autonomy from the church; performing functions analogous to t hose expected of civil society—for example, generating statistics designed to complement the state’s own data; and, in the case of a Jesuit mission, partnering directly with state institutions in policy design and implementation. Notwithstanding the Church’s institutional resources, I found that Church actors’ responses to the illegal margins of action and the harm that they caused faced limits that were comparable, in some respects, to t hose of art and cultural collectives (chapter 3) or of sociolegal associations (chapter 4). One limit was the fear of violence, which was real enough—several priests have been killed in Michoacán. Another limit was distrust of state institutions, which impeded clerics’ engagement with the institutions in any way that might challenge the gray zones. Furthermore, parish clergy w ere reluctant to be seen to interfere in politics, both b ecause of Mexico’s secularist tradition and because they feared being associated with political actors who might then lose an election or be discredited. Even when they did intervene, clergy w ere clear that it was hard to reach violent actors engaged in crime b ecause they w ere often separated from the Church, while the clergy appeared reluctant to denounce such figures of public standing in anything but general terms. In that respect, t here was little difference between their posture and that of the Zamoran civil association in the vignette. Finally, in chapter 6 Whittaker offers a reflection on the gender dynamics of the diverse initiatives that we review in the volume and, in the process, contributes to our appreciation of the role that civic actors play in relation to illicit margins of action. Whittaker draws our attention to the gendering of civic actors of public standing who claim to confront violence across the state. Although expressing reservation about the terms, she argues that “masculine capital” adds to the standing of autodefensa leaders, and that the same could be said of the LCSCs examined in chapter 2 (most of whose members w ere male) and, indeed, of the Catholic priests described in chapter 5. “Feminine capital” was mobilized on other occa-
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sions, she explains—for example, by the relatives of the disappeared who positioned themselves as mothers. Whittaker highlights how gender was deployed to denounce some of the w omen activists in her study as “feminazis” and thus succeeded in undermining their civic credentials. For example, she cites a civil association member who explained that the men who dominated public meetings often accepted her opinion only if another man agreed with her. Once again, t here is little reason to suppose that civic actors have shared interests, and every reason to suspect that responding to issues like crime and violence can effectively reproduce gender hierarchies. This is especially concerning since Whittaker draws our attention to the gendering of the violence itself, which helps us understand how some forms of vio lence become more visible than others and thus attract more attention. Whittaker recognizes that women are increasingly drawn into criminal businesses such as drug retail and trafficking and, alongside men, tend to become targets of business- related violence. She also reminds us that violence long predates the drug wars of recent years, extends into the domestic space, and is thus inevitably gendered and forms a continuum from emotional abuse to extreme forms of physical violation. Gender violence was the focus of W omen without Violence (an organ ization discussed in chapter 4), which succeeded in persuading the government to declare a Gender Violence Alert. It is important here to emphasize the contrasting case of Chinicuila (chapter 2), which illustrates that gender violence is unlikely to be taken seriously u ntil women acquire the public standing to interact with state and other actors on equal terms with men—in the process, reworking the relationships between civic, state, business, and enforcement actors. Whittaker’s chapter reinforces what I have said about cultural activism (discussed in chapter 3) by indicating that some w omen’s organizations choose to avoid engaging directly with state actors and instead focus on creating what she (drawing on V irginia Woolf) terms “a room of their own.” Not only does this give them spaces in which to relate safely to each other, but it also allows them to bring in other w omen—whether as new members or, more frequently, as participants in workshops on topics such as teenage sexuality—which helps mitigate all types of violence. The main examples she draws on come from the provincial context of Zamora, whose p eople are more adverse to engaging with state actors than t hose in the state capital of Morelia (where W omen without Vio lence is active). This reminds us of the difference highlighted in chapter 4 between metropolitan contexts like Morelia and the rest of the state.
Reworking Societal Responses to Crime and Violence: Virtuous Collaboration The relationship between business and government is a fraught one everywhere. Some of what I have discussed in this chapter, in reflecting on the other chap-
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ters in this volume, w ill be familiar to readers wherever they are located. In my home city, Aberdeen, t here have long been disputes about the proper relationships between property developers and city councillors and officials. The term “corruption” is rarely used t here, yet shortly before my arrival in Aberdeen in 2002, a scandal erupted a fter it transpired that several council properties had been sold at less than half their market value. The m atter was investigated by the police, but for reasons that are unclear, it was decided that prosecution was not in the public interest. Civic actors were involved in all sides of the debate, with some defending the councillors who w ere apparently linked to the developers, and of course lawyers were among those actors. I mentioned the case to a local politician in Mexico, and he responded with the Mexican saying that “beans are cooked everywhere,” meaning that illicit goings-on are universal. Gray zones and illegal margins of action vary considerably, though, and so do the roles that civic actors play in maintaining them. As far as I know, t here was no suggestion in Aberdeen that enforcement actors might be linked to the property developers or their alleged accomplices in government, which was often the case in the Mexican context. Nor was t here talk in Aberdeen about links between the apparently illicit property sales and other criminal business that has been reported in the city, including extensive drug retail as well as the laundering of money from overseas crime through city restaurants. Despite the lower degree of intimidation in the Aberdeen context, t here was even less denunciation of civic actors for facilitating margins than is usually the case in Mexico, possibly b ecause of the risk in Aberdeen of lawsuits for defamation. I did ask one city councillor about the land sales, and he replied that I might look into the conduct of some other councillors, but he did not name them. I believe that the Mexican case is helpful in drawing attention to the need to understand how state, business, enforcement, and civic actors interrelate, even in cases like that of Aberdeen. More broadly, I hope that my analysis serves as an antidote to much of what is said and written about civil society in contexts around the world. In the first place, it is a m istake to assume that civil society will come to the rescue, or even to assume that t here is consensus about what or who needs rescuing, and my opening vignette served to raise the more specific question of when and why some actors use their public standing to address illicit margins of action in public policy, rather than reproducing them. It is also a mistake to assume that civic actors necessarily have a common interest or that they are likely to act in consort, as should be evident from the sheer variety of civic actors described in this volume and our account of the conflicts between, for example, elite and nonelite associations in Zamora, among different autodefensa leaders in Tancítaro (chapter 2), among the groups against forced disappearances in Morelia (chapter 4), and between social pastoral clergy and their opponents in the Catholic Church (chapter 5).
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To reduce the illegal margins of action that make violence possible requires restricting the gray zones of illegal association among state, business, enforcement, and civic actors. Mexican politicians frequently call on civil society and citizens to collaborate with government in combating crime, but the kind of association they have in mind does not translate into effective governance or security. In August 2019, Silvano Aureoles, head of the state governors’ body, and governor of Michoacán, pledged to respond to unabated violence by “reinforcing the strategies of capture of criminal targets and the dismantling of their structures,” emphasizing interinstitutional collaboration. Aureoles did not mention the fact that the dismantling of the Knights Templar in Michoacán in 2014 was followed by further violence, as authors in this volume describe, despite improving interinstitutional collaboration. He has called on other occasions for civil society and citizens to collaborate with government, but he has fallen back on models that have failed to generate effective collaborations that can reduce crime and violence. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s administration hosted peace and reconciliation forums in 2018, but these similarly failed to engage communities, and the president is now accused of reproducing old models of security policy. The challenge, then, is to generate more effective forms of collaboration between state, business, enforcement, and civic actors—or at least less perverse forms. It is clear that regulating association is not enough by itself, especially since legislators first need to understand what forms of association are effective. This volume has provided many examples of collaboration, ranging from cultural and religious organizations (chapter 3 and 5) to organizations that make use of legal resources (chapter 4) and councils governing autodefensa militias (chapter 2). Th ese different modes have varying degrees of effectiveness, and throughout the volume we have been clear about their limitations. Much work remains to be done to understand how to overcome t hose limitations to design and implement security policy capable of addressing the startling range of issues that the authors have documented.
notes 1. I use the terms “illegal” and “illicit” interchangeably in the chapter, but t here is much to be said for distinguishing between the two in contexts where legality is not the only normative framework. In some of the localities of our study, for example, drug production was considered relatively licit in the sense that it was socially acceptable, even though it was illegal. 2. Notaries are another example that illustrates the normative as well as analytical importance of distinguishing among the four sets of actors, both in spite and b ecause of the overlaps. Notaries are appointed by state governors to provide faith in legal transactions, which is an essential state role. They are expected to have public standing to begin with, and in Mexico they typically develop their standing further as a result of their state role, which may give them influence in public affairs—whether as representatives of notaries’ professional associations or in their own right—a nd even lead to their being elected to public office. However, their public standing is normatively separate from their state function. The same applies a fortiori to the business interests that some notaries appear to pursue. Notaries are
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notoriously discreet about their business interests, even when these are in legal lines of business such as real estate—which reflects the grayness of their role in the public arena. They are even more discreet about their role in criminal business, but my interviewees told of notaries’ collaborating in transferring property titles under duress to criminal actors. 3. Though I use Auyero’s (2013) term “gray zone” in this article, I am aware of issues surrounding his adoption of the term from Primo Levi’s (1988) reflection on his experiences in Auschwitz, and I also realize that other scholars have used different terms to describe similar phenomena. Examples include Dewey’s use of “clandestine o rders” (2015) and Wil Pansters’s “informal order” (2018). That said, I believe the term “gray zones” is useful to highlight the opacity of the illegal associations that I study (though so is “clandestine”), while it also neatly offsets the Manichaean slant of much social science. 4. These lines of business can also be described as “criminal” in the sense that Michel Misse (2017) uses it: to refer to t hose illegal activities that are most stigmatized and actively pursued by state actors. As Ernesto Isunza pointed out in a project workshop, creating irregular urban developments is a federal crime in Mexico, just as drug trafficking is, but the former is seldom treated in the same fashion as the latter by the authorities. Furthermore, some illegal business and enforcement actors assume a “criminal” identity, usually a fter being signaled out by the authorities, and this can add to their capacity for intimidating followers and competitors.
references Abello Colak, Alexandra, and Jenny Pearce. 2009. “ ‘Security from Below’ in Contexts of Chronic Violence.” IDS Bulletin 40 (2): 11–19. ———. 2015. “Securing the Global City? An Analysis of the ‘Medellín Model’ through Participatory Research.” Conflict, Security and Development 15 (3): 197–228. Álvarez, Irene, Denisse Román, and Sasha Jesperson. 2019. “Armed Legitimacy in Mexico: Self-Defense Groups against Criminal Violence.” In Rural Crime Prevention: Theory, Tactics and Techniques, edited by Alistair Harkness and Naomi Smith, 84–94. London: Routledge. Arias, Enrique Desmond. 2018. “Criminal Organizations and the Policymaking Process.” Global Crime 19 (3–4): 339–361. ———. 2019. “Social Responses to Criminal Governance in Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Kingston, and Medellín.” Latin American Research Review 54 (1): 165–180. Auyero, Javier. 2013. “Gray Zone of Politics and Social Movements.” In The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, edited by David Snow, Donatella Della Porta, Bert Klandermans, and Doug McAdam. Oxford: Blackwell. Auyero, Javier, and Agustín Burbano de Lara. 2012. “In Harm’s Way at the Urban Margins.” Ethnography 1 (4): 531–557. Auyero, Javier, and Katherine Sobering. 2019. “Collusion and Cynicism at the Urban Margins.” Latin American Research Review 54 (1): 222–236. Dewey, Matías. 2015. El orden clandestino: Política, fuerzas de seguridad y mercados ilegales en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Katz. Durán-Martínez, Angélica. 2015. “To Kill and Tell? State Power, Criminal Competition, and Drug Violence.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 59 (8): 1377–1402. Felbab-Brown, Vanda, Harold Trinkunas, and Shadi Hamid. 2017. Militants, Criminals, and Warlords: The Challenge of Local Governance in an Age of Disorder. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Levi, Primo. 1988. The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Summit Books. Ley, Sandra, and Guillermo Trejo. 2020. Votes, Drugs, and Violence: The Political Logic of Criminal Wars in Mexico. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maldonado, Salvador. 2018. La ilusión de la seguridad: Política y violencia en la periferia michoacana. Zamora, Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán.
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Misse, Michel. 2017. “Mercancías políticas.” In Estado, violencia y mercado: Conexiones etnográficas en América Latina, edited by Brígida Renoldi, Santiago Álvarez, and Salvador Maldonado, 39–46. Buenos Aires: Antropofag. Moncada, Eduardo. 2016. Cities, Business, and the Politics of Urban Violence in Latin America. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2020. “The Politics of Criminal Victimization: Pursuing and Resisting Power.” Perspectives on Politics 18 (3): 706–721. Pansters, Wil G. 2018. “Drug Trafficking, the Informal Order, and Caciques: Reflections on the Crime-Governance Nexus in Mexico.” Global Crime 19 (3–4): 315–338. Snyder, Richard, and Angelica Duran-Martinez. 2009. “Does Illegality Breed Violence? Drug Trafficking and State-Sponsored Protection Rackets.” Crime, Law and Social Change 52 (3): 253–273. Tankebe, Justice. 2010. “Public Confidence in the Police: Testing the Effects of Public Experiences of Police Corruption in Ghana.” British Journal of Criminology 50 (2): 296–319.
Acknowledgments
This project was financed by a grant by the Economic and Social Research Council and was hosted by the University of Aberdeen, El Colegio de Michoacán, and Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas. We would like to thank our project manager, Dafne Viramontes. We were grateful for the administrative support of Alfonso Valdivia at El Colegio de Michoacán, as well as the support of its president, José Antonio Serrano, and of Glenys Milton, at the University of Aberdeen. Berenice Guevara Sánchez carried out fieldwork in Morelia for chapter 4. Gabriel Corona provided valuable support as a research assistant. Ernesto Isunza commented on several drafts and proved a vital ally. Others who provided critical feedback at different stages include John Gledhill, Guillermo Paleta, and Jenny Pearce. Our thanks to Rutgers University Press and especially the commissioning editor, Kimberly Guinta, who remained committed to the project through the trying period of the pandemic.
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Irene Álvarez (Colegio de México) has a PhD in sociology from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa, in Mexico City. She is interested in the strategies p eople develop in adverse conditions, with a particu lar focus on security, social movements, and environmental conflicts. Combining ethnographic methods with social theory, she has analyzed a variety of case studies, such as antimining social movements, indigenous movements, and social organ izations that claim rights over territories in dispute. Her publications include the 2015 “La lucha territorial de los huicholes: Reconocimiento político e integridad cultural en un mismo enunciado” (The territorial struggle of the Huichol people: Political recognition and cultural integrity in one declaration). Pilar Domingo (Overseas Development Institute) is a senior policy analyst and expert on politics and governance, with particu lar expertise on governmental and institutional fragility in Latin America and beyond. At the Overseas Development Institute, she has worked on state building, c hildren and w omen’s rights, justice and security reforms, and the challenges of working with nonstate actors and institutions in fragile settings. She has a PhD in politics from the University of Oxford and has been a lecturer at the Institute for the Study of the Amer icas, University of London, and several other universities. Edgar Guerra (Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas) is a sociologist of armed groups, social movements, and drug policy. He received a PhD in sociology from the University of Bielefeld, in Germany, and has been a visiting researcher at Newcastle University. His main research topics are nonstate armed groups and criminal organizations; protest, violence, and state institutions; and the effects and consequences of politics and the war on drugs. Recent articles include “Demands, Identities and Repertoire of protest: An Analysis of the Mexican Cannabis Movement” (2018) and “Organización armada: La dinámica 179
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operativa de los grupos de autodefensa tepalcatepenses” (Armed organization: The operative dynamic of self-defense groups in Tepalcatepec, 2018). Iran Guerrero (Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo) has expertise in the fields of h uman rights and legal activism. He holds a law degree from the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo and a PhD in social sciences from the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales. In addition to working on the project described in this volume, he is a member of the Collective of Critical Studies of the Law “Emancipaciones,” which provides legal assistance to some indigenous communities in Michoacán. Sasha Jesperson is an independent research consultant and analyst with expertise in governance, organized crime, illicit markets, conflict, human trafficking, security and development, and armed groups. She has worked with U.K. government departments, the European Commission, the Economic Social Research Council, and United Nations University to deliver technical advice for policy making and programming. She has also been a campaigner for Amnesty International and the W omen’s International League for Peace and Freedom. After earning a PhD in government from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2014, she has been a research fellow at the Royal United Ser vices Institute and director of the Centre for the Study of Modern Slavery at St. Mary’s University, London. Salvador Maldonado (Colegio de Michoacán) is Mexico’s foremost expert on violence in Michoacán. A sociologist and anthropologist, he has studied reforms of the state, citizenship, and local democratization; processes of violence production associated with drug problems; and theoretical debates about power, vio lence, legality, and the state. His key publications are Los márgenes del Estado mexicano: Territorios ilegales, desarrollo y violencia en Michoacán (The margins of the Mexican state: Illegal territories, development, and violence in Michoacán) and La ilusión de la seguridad: Política y violencia en la periferia michoacana (The illusion of security: Politics and violence in Michoacán’s periphery). Denisse Román (University of Aberdeen) is a Newton International Fellow. Her main areas of interest include factionalism, clientelism and caciquismo, state formation, ethnicity, and multicultural politics. Among her publications are her 2014 PhD thesis, “El espejismo del orden: Etnografía histórica sobre política local en Cherán, Michoacán (1856–2014”) (The mirage of order: A historical ethnography of local politics in Cherán, Michoacán [1856–2014]), and the 2019 article “ ‘We Are Indigenous of the Purhépecha People’: Hegemony, Multiculturalism, and Neoliberal State Reforms in Mexico.” Ariadna Sánchez is a political sociologist who has studied for her PhD at the Colegio de México. She previously studied at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja
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California and the Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. Jose Maria Luis Mora. Her principal areas of research are urban sociality, everyday life, the state, and urban violence. She has been a research assistant at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte and the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Iztapalapa, Mexico City. Trevor Stack—director of the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law at the University of Aberdeen—was the principal investigator for this project. He is an anthropologist who teaches courses in Spanish and Latin American studies. He has been carrying out research in Mexico since 1992 and has over ten years of research experience in Michoacán. He is the author of the monograph Knowing History in Mexico: An Ethnography of Citizenship (2012) and is lead editor of the volume Religion as a Category of Governance and Sovereignty (2015), coeditor of Breaching the Civil Order: Radicalism and the Civil Sphere (2020), and lead editor of Engaging Authority: Citizenship and Political Community (2021). Catherine Whittaker (Goethe University Frankfurt) is an assistant professor in social and cultural anthropology in Frankfurt and a visiting researcher at the University of California San Diego. Recently, her research has focused on vigilance and subjectivity among Hispanic residents in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands; women’s power, the relationship between love and violence, and the politics of indigeneity in the south of Mexico City; and the role of gender in antiviolence activism in Michoacán. Her publications include her 2019 PhD thesis “Warrior Women: Contested Conceptualisations of Violence and Gender in Highland Mexico” and the articles “Felt Power: Can Indigenous Mexican W omen Finally Be Powerf ul?” and “Aztecs Are Not Indigenous: Anthropology and the Politics of Indigeneity” (both 2020).
Index
Note: Page numbers in italics refer to figures; numbers in bold refer to tables. Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, 135 activism: vs. advocacy, 82; sexual diversity, 86–89. See also cultural activism; sociolegal activism advocacy, 82 Álvarez, Irene, 115, 118 anthropology, 3 Apatzingán: autodefensa group in, 19, 67–68; Catholic diocese in, 18, 95, 106; cultural activism compared to Lázaro Cárdenas, 70–74, 74n3; cultural activism in, 22, 61–63, 66–69; Cultural Revolution, 68–72, 69; drug trafficking in, 18, 19, 59; gray zones in, 167; Naranjo Cultural Center, 70–71; public prosecutor and courts in, 19; regional government and policing in, 18; as regional market, 14; Security and Justice Working Group (SJWG), 59, 99, 101; the Station, 59–62, 60, 68, 76, 147, 168; violence in, 59, 67–68 Apatzingán Valley, 67 Arcelor Mittal Cultural Center, 64 Ardern, Jacinda, 113 Argentina, 82 Arias, Enrique, 8, 15, 25, 157, 159 Ario de Rayón, 115–116 art and culture, activists’ use of, 61, 63, 64, 66, 69, 149, 164, 168. See also cultural activism art and culture collectives, 2, 9, 10, 14, 21, 22, 109, 171; in Apatzingán, 60–61,
66–68, 70, 72, 168; in Lázaro Cárdenas, 61, 64, 66–68, 70–72, 90 arts for peace discourse, 60, 61–63, 74, 167 art therapy, 73, 153n7 Asif, Muhammad, 55 Astorga, Luis, 80 Aureoles, Silvano, 7, 174 autodefensa (self-defense) groups, 1, 2, 79, 140, 143–144, 163; in Apatzingán, 19, 67–68; beginning of, 98; and the Catholic Church, 93; in Cherán, 5–6; in Chinicuila, 18, 19; collaboration with police, 31–32, 38; compared to cartels, 8; harassment of women by, 117; impact of, 150–151; infiltration of by organized crime, 48; involvement in gray zones, 165; vs. the Knights Templar, 38; LCSC control over, 56; legacy of, 10; legitimacy of, 146, 159; in Los Reyes, 54; in Mexico, 141, 145; in Michoacán, 31, 34, 140–141, 145, 150–151; in Morelia, 54–55; objection to redrawing jurisdictional boundaries, 59; obligatory participation in, 116; performance of masculinity in, 118; rebellion, 66, 165; relationship with local police, 30; relationship with the state, 145; research on, 8; skepticism regarding, 10; spread of, 6–7; in Tancítaro, 19, 50–51, 105; in Tierra Caliente, 18; uprisings, 48–49; use of violence by, 143–146; and the war on drugs, 77; in Zamora, 43–44
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184 I N D E X Auyero, Javier, 25, 157, 161 avocado cultivation, 18–20, 30, 49–51, 79–80, 105, 140, 144, 150, 160 Awakening Consciences, 102–104, 103, 105 Bagley, Bruce, 138 Baird, Adam, 118 blackmailing, 50 Bosnia-Herzegovina, 24, 61, 111–112, 130 bossism (caciquismo), 139 Bourdieu, Pierre, 70, 118 Brazil, 61 Burbano, Agustín, 157 Burundi, 111, 130 business: associations, 9, 44; civic actors’ responses to illegal margins for, 164–172; and enforcement actors, 158–159; illegal margins for, 157–162, 170, 173–174, 175n4; reducing illegal margins for, 162–164; selective implementation of regulations, 158, 165 Calderón, Felipe, 3, 5, 139 Cárdenas, Cuauhtémoc, 35–36 Cárdenas Batel, Lázaro, 35–36 Cárdenas del Río, Lázaro, 31, 35–36 cardenismo, 36 Cartel Land (documentary), 117 cartels, 5, 8, 115, 140, 145, 148, 150–152. See also drug trafficking Casanova, José, 94 Castillo, Alfredo, 6–7, 38, 43 Catalina Carbajal Cultural Center, 65, 72–73 Catholic Action groups, 101 Catholic Church: antiviolence strategies, 13, 169–171; in Apatzingán, 18, 95, 106; Catholic Relief Serv ices, 100; and citizen security councils, 23; collaboration with state institutions, 104; influence of, 23, 127, 148; institutionality of, 94–97; in Jalisco, 96; Jesuit organizations, 30, 50–51, 104–105, 171; legitimacy of, 23; letter from bishops to the press, 38; on LGBTI+ issues, 108, 169; Mexican Episcopal Conference, 97, 99, 102; in Morelia, 100; and organized crime, 95–96; participation in civil society projects, 94, 101–105; and patriarchy, 127, 130; peace-building strategies of, 23, 25, 94–95, 99–101, 107; response to disappearances, 94; response to violence, 93–108, 142, 164; role of, 94–108, 147–148; and Security and Justice Working
Groups (SJWGs), 101–102; Social Integration and Assistance Center (SIAC), 104–105; social networks of, 23; in Tancítaro, 18, 49; in Zamora, 19, 96, 97, 100, 108n1, 125 Catholic clergy: behind-t he-scenes role of, 106–107; Bishop Patiño’s letter, 18, 38, 95, 98–99, 106, 142, 148, 164, 170; Bishops’ exhortation of 2010, 97; deaths of priests, 106–108, 142; denunciation of crime and violence by, 9, 98–99; in SJWGs, 44; social pastoral teams, 14–15, 97 Cavanaugh, William, 94 Cayli, Baris, 95 CCRISTOS (Consejo Ciudadano Responsable de Impulsar un Sano Tejido Social; the Citizens’ Council Responsible for Promoting a Healthy Social Fabric), 102, 104 Center for Economics Teaching and Research (Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas; CIDE), 12 Chabat, Jorge, 138 Cherán, 119; autodefensa group in, 5–6, 140; council system in, 39 Chiapas, 4 Chile, 82, 94 Chinicuila: autodefensa group in, 10, 18, 19, 118; drug production and trafficking in, 17–18, 19; farmers and ranchers in, 14, 20; gender violence in, 172; municipal government in, 144; politics in, 19; rural location of, 17 Chinicuila Popular Council, 29–30, 32, 39, 41, 42, 47–49, 48, 141, 151, 165; comparison of, 52–56 churches. See Catholic Church church-linked initiatives, 2, 9, 10, 21. See also Catholic Church CIDE (Center for Economics Teaching and Research (Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas), 12 citizen councils. See local citizen security councils (LCSCs) Citizens’ Council of Good Coexistence (CCGC), 50–51 citizen security councils. See local citizen security councils (LCSCs) Ciudad Juárez, 4, 8, 44, 61 Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, 139 civic actors, 159–161, 160; collaboration with state institutions, 174; environmentalists, 119–120, 161; participation in gray
INDEX zones, 163–164; public standing of, 164, 168, 174–175n2; reducing illegal margins of action, 162–164; responses to illegal margins of action, 164–172. See also civil society organizations (CSOs); local citizen security councils (LCSCs) civil society organizations (CSOs), 8, 11, 30, 44, 45; Awakening Consciences, 102–104, 103, 105; and the Catholic Church, 94, 101–105; Consejo Ciudadano Responsable de Impulsar un Sano Tejido Social (CCRISTOS; the Citizens’ Council Responsible for Promoting a Healthy Social Fabric), 102, 104; in Mexico, 147; in Morelia, 147; role of, 159; supporting SJWGs, 141; in Zamora, 141, 156 cocaine, 115 Colima, 19 Collective of Relatives of the Disappeared in Michoacán State’s Past (CRDMSP), 83 collectives: combating gender violence, 16; combining legal and political strategies, 20, 21; informal, 68; neighborhood, 65–66; of relatives of the disappeared, 16, 91n4; youth, 67. See also art and culture collectives Colombia, 61, 96, 97, 99, 167 conflict mediation, 23, 30, 106 conflict resolution, 69, 72, 111 Consejo Ciudadano Responsable de Impulsar un Sano Tejido Social (CCRISTOS; the Citizens’ Council Responsible for Promoting a Healthy Social Fabric), 102, 104 Consultative Council of Mexico City, 35 ConVIHve, 88 corruption, 6, 7, 25, 26, 34, 90, 120, 138, 145, 147, 157, 173; and the Church, 23, 170; and organized crime, 2, 80, 139; political, 10, 34, 65, 110, 123, 139 CRDMSP (Collective of Relatives of the Disappeared in Michoacán State’s Past), 83 crime: in Chinicula, 48; comparative ethnographic approach to, 11–16; and the Mexican government, 144, 151, 159; in Mexico, 138–139; political economies of, 24; transnational, 134; violence related to, 10, 12–13, 64, 66, 79, 81, 82, 91n1, 93–108, 110, 127, 135, 139, 141, 143, 149, 151–152. See also organized crime; violence criminal networks. See organized crime Cristero rebellion, 4
185 crystal meth, 17. See also methamphetamines cultural activism, 26, 59–74, 141–144, 166–167, 172; in Apatzingán, 22, 61–63, 66–69; art therapy, 73, 153n7; comparison of in context, 69–74; defined, 69–70; impact of, 148, 149; in Lázaro Cárdenas, 61–66; poe-mantas, 68, 69, 149, 168; resources for, 61–63; used to recapture public spaces, 71–72, 141–142, 144, 147. See also art and culture; art and culture collectives cultural activists, 9, 13, 22, 24 cultural centers, 167. See also art and culture collectives Cultural Revolution, 68, 68–69, 70–72 Culture for Harmony Program, 71, 99 dangerous liaisons, 80 Davis, Diane, 35 deaths, 2, 5; attributable to violent crime, 12; in Latin America, 134; of priests, 106–108, 142. See also murder; violence deforestation, 51, 165, 166 Desarrollo Integral de la Familia (DIF; Family Integral Development Institute), 91n2 Deveaux Durán, Sofía, 61 Dewey, Matias, 25, 157 disappearances, 77–82, 90, 140, 142, 149–150, 152; activist response to, 83–85; autodefensa groups accused of, 10; crimes associated with, 85; by Knights Templar, 91n1; in Latin America, 134; in the LGBTI+ community, 86–87, 91n3; in Morelia, 16, 22–23, 86–87, 173; organ izations addressing, 9, 10, 11, 13, 16, 22, 23, 77, 94, 169, 173; by state institutions, 2, 5, 22–23, 78, 168; undocumented, 143; and the war against drug trafficking, 78; of w omen, 85; women searching for missing relatives, 118–119 drug cultivation, 17, 47, 67 drug trafficking, 165, 166; in Apatzingán, 18, 19, 59; government war on, 2, 3, 5, 77–78, 114; and the gray zone, 161; and Indigenous people, 115–116; in Michoacán, 5; in Tierra Caliente, 67; tolerance of, 49. See also cartels Duran-Martínez, Angélica, 157 elite networks, 151. See also citizen councils enforcement actors, 158–159 environmental regulations, 165, 167
186 I N D E X Epp, Charles, 82 Ernst, Falko, 115 Escobar, Pablo, 156 extortion, 46, 120, 150, 158, 166; by Knights Templar, 5, 6, 44, 140, 165 Federal Highway Police, 34 Federal Judicial Police, 117 federal police, 7, 17, 31, 34, 38, 39 femicide, 4, 81, 86, 90, 91n6, 150, 169 feminicide, 117, 132n2 feminine capital, 118–119, 171–172 feminism, 90, 110, 127; in Colombia, 82; institutionalist framework, 112–114; in Michoacán, 129–131; in Morelia, 128 Fifth Caravan for the Search for Dis appeared Persons, 91n5 Flores, Armando, 97 Flores Pérez, Carlos, 34, 80, 139 Fondo de Cultura Económica, 68 Francis (pope), 98 Gallagher, Janice, 82 Garfias, Carlos, 98, 99, 142 gender discrimination, 111, 117 gendered spaces, 111, 114, 116, 127–128, 129 gender equality/inequality, 112–113, 116–117, 126, 131; in activist organizations and public institutions, 118–120 Gender Identity Law, 87, 89 gender rights groups, 13 Gender Violence against Women Alert Declaration, 85–86, 90, 126, 128, 129, 150 General Law of Women’s Access to a Life Free from Violence, 112 globalization, 97 Godoy, Martín, 7 Goldenberg, Naomi, 95 González (Father), 105 González, Yanilda, 8, 15, 55, 56 gray zones, 25–26, 161–162, 163, 165, 169, 173, 174, 175n3; Church complicity in, 170 Guerra, Edgar, 115 Guerrero, 31 Gulf Cartel, 5 Guzman, Joaquín “El Chapo,” 3 HIV/AIDS, 88 Hobbes, Thomas, 146 homophobia, 87, 91n8 Huetamo Valley, 67 omen Humanas Sin Violencia. See W without Violence (Humanas Sin Violencia)
human rights, 3, 5, 23, 80; and activism, 82; and the LGBTI+ population, 87; of sex workers, 89 Human Rights Watch, 83 Indigenous people, 4, 39, 115–117; communitarian justice, 31; and drug trafficking, 115–116; healing and care practices of, 122–123 Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional; PRI), 3, 19, 35, 49, 54 Insurgent Zamora Organization (IZO), 103–104 Inter-A merican Commission on Human Rights, 83 Italy, 96 Jalisco, 96, 108n2 Jesperson, Sasha, 118 José Vasconcelos Cultural Center, 62, 64 Juksikani Cultural Center, 65, 71, 72 Just Associates and Nobel W omen’s Initiative (JASS), 119 kidnappings, 44, 46, 50, 85, 140, 165, 166 Knight, Alan, 36 Knights Templar: in Apatzingán, 98; arrest/killing of leaders, 6, 38, 39–40, 106; beginning of, 5, 43; and the Catholic Church, 106, 142; in Chinicuila, 48–49; companies linked to, 6; control of drug trafficking by, 6; desertion by Los Viagras, 6; dismantling of, 7, 43–44, 165, 174; extortion by, 5, 6, 44, 140, 165; use of forced disappearance by, 91n1; groups mobilized against, 6, 38, 39–40, 50, 98, 165; loggers protected by, 5; minerals exported by, 17; properties expropriated from, 7, 165; and the state, 5; in Tancítaro, 50; in Zamora, 19, 97, 166 La Familia Michoacana, 5, 43 Lagarde, Marcela, 117 La Mira, 65 La Parota Cultural Center, 65, 66 La Pérgola, 64–65 Las Guacamayas, 65, 71 La Ticla, 115–116, 118 Latin America, relationship between state and organized crime, 138. See also Mexico Lázaro Cárdenas, 74n1; contraband trade in, 16–17; cultural activism compared to
INDEX Apatzingán, 70–74, 74n3; cultural activism in, 61–66; cultural activists in, 22; drug trafficking and manufacture in, 64; federal police in, 17; gray zones in, 167; La Pérgola, 64–65; neoliberal policies in, 64; Old Pier, 63–65; politics in, 19; as port, 14, 16–17, 19, 62, 63, 64, 167; urban degradation in, 167, 168; women’s groups in, 121 Ley, Sandra, 12 LGBTI+ issues, 113, 164, 168–169; and the Catholic Church, 108, 169; disagreements among groups, 90; gay pride, 87; gender identity, 89; HIV/ AIDS, 88; homophobia, 87; human rights, 87; recognition of sexual diversity, 86; same-sex marriage, 81, 89; trans p eople rights, 81; violence, 22, 23, 77, 82, 86–89, 94, 91n8; World AIDS Day, 87, 88 Libera movement, 95 Listening Centers, 100 literacy campaigns, 167 local citizen security councils (LCSCs), 2, 9, 11, 20, 21, 26, 29–56, 164–165; citizen council systems, 39; comparison of, 41–51, 166; control over local police and autodefensas, 56, 145–146; cooperation in and around, 41–43; creation of, 38–39; effectiveness of, 166; hampered by divisions within the community, 53–54; impact of, 150; introduction of, 35; monitoring of police by, 53; municipal and intermunicipal security councils, 39, 47–51; relationship with state security providers, 54; responsiveness of government officials in, 52; responsiveness to broader population, 52–54; trust in, 43–56; variations among, 34; vulnerability to electoral outcomes, 53; in Zamora, 29, 52, 54, 150, 151, 166. See also Chinicuila Popular Council; Security and Justice Working Groups (SJWGs); Tancítaro Municipal Security Council Locke, John, 131, 146 López, Circe, 76–77, 126 López, Gregorio, 98–99 López Obrador, Andrés Manuel, 3, 34–35, 102, 174 Los Reyes, 54 Los Viagras, 6 Los Zetas, 5, 43 Luhmann, Niklas, 32–33, 41
187 Mackay, Fiona, 24, 111–112, 114, 119, 127, 130 Maldonado, Salvador, 67, 119, 126, 138 Mamá Rosa (orphanage director), 120 marijuana, 17, 115 masculine capital, 118, 171 Matoso, Rui, 72 Mattiace, Shannan, 12 McCullough, Aoife, 146 McDonald, Matt, 145 Melchor Ocampo del Balsas Sociocultural Collective, 65, 66 methamphetamines, 17, 30, 115 Mexican Episcopal Conference, 97, 99, 102 Mexican government: cultural missions of, 74n2, 167; Culture for Harmony program, 71, 99; Culture Ministry, 71, 100; federal laws, 169; forced disappearances by, 2, 5, 22–23, 78, 168; National Survey of Victimization and Perception of Public Security, 36, 37, 39–40, 40; relationship with autodefensa groups, 145; relationship with crime, 144, 151, 159; security initiatives in Michoacán, 31. See also war on drug trafficking Mexico: autodefensa groups in, 141; citizen participation in, 34–36; corruption in, 139; crime in, 138–139; drug production in, 4; indigenous population of, 4; trust in security and justice institutions, 37; violence in, 4–5, 134, 147 Mexico City, 87 Mexico Project (University of California, San Diego), 12 México SOS, 44 Michoacán, 3–8; autodefensa groups in, 31, 34, 140–141, 145, 150–151; citizen’s councils in, 150; drug trafficking in, 5; historical context of citizen participation, 34–36; legitimacy narratives in, 146–147; map, 17; nonviolent societal responses in, 140–142; organized crime in, 96–97; response to criminal violence, 144–145; state accountability in, 144; State Development Plan, 36; trust in security and justice institutions, 37; Uruapan, 49, 59; violence in, 114–117, 139–140; war on drugs in, 36; women’s organizations in, 120–121. See also Apatzingán; Cherán; Chinicuila; Lázaro Cárdenas; Los Reyes; Morelia; Tancítaro; Tierra Caliente region; Villa Victoria; Zamora Michoacán Is Diversity, 87
188 I N D E X Michoacán Network of Trans P eople, 89 Michoacán Police, 7, 19, 38, 40, 46–47, 166; in Chinicuila, 48; in Tancítaro, 49 military dictatorships, 82 mining, 4, 5, 17, 47, 80, 140, 165, 167 Mireles, Manuel, 6, 160 Misse, Michel, 80 Mittal, Lakshmi, 167 Monarcas, 88–89 Moncada, Eduardo, 8, 15 money laundering, 158 Morelia: Catholic archdiocese of, 100; civil society organizations (CSOs), 147; forced disappearance in, 22–23; gender violence in, 22; Humanas Sin Violencia (Women Without Violence), 121, 126–131; legal strategies in, 76–91; organizations meeting study criteria, 10, 11; protection of LGBTI+ people and sex workers in, 22; as retail hub, 14; SJWG in, 44; sociolegal activism in, 81–89; state government in, 19; women’s groups in, 24. See also Women without Violence (Humanas Sin Violencia) Mouffe, Chantal, 73 Mouzelis, Nicos, 15 Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, 8 Muehlmann, Shaylih, 114 Muggah, Robert, 134 murder, 44, 50, 59. See also deaths Murtagh, Cera, 24, 111–112, 114, 119, 127, 130 Naranjo Cultural Center, 68, 70–71 narco culture, 74n2, 110, 115–116 narco-mantas, 69, 149 National Action Party (Partido de Acción Nacional; PAN), 3, 19, 35, 43, 49–50, 51, 54 National Law for Missing or Disappeared Persons (2018), 84 National Survey of Victimization and Perception of Public Security, 36, 37, 39–40, 40 neoliberalism, 64, 67, 97 Nigeria, 96 nonviolence workshops, 11 nonviolent initiatives, 69, 72, 136, 140–146, 148, 151, 152 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 18–19, 49 Northern Ireland, 24, 61, 111 Nuevo León, 102
opium, 17 Organic Municipal Law, 35 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 3 Organismos Levadura (Yeast Organism model), 97, 99, 104 organized crime, 80, 148, 153n3; and the Catholic Church, 95–96; civil response to, 8; drug-related, 137; expansion of, 34; and the gray zone, 161–162; infiltration of autodefensa groups by, 48; in Lázaro Cárdenas, 63; protection networks, 34, 145; relationship with the state, 138, 153n5; responses to, 135; societal response to, 2; and state institutions, 95–96, 159; understanding the problems of, 25; violence associated with, 25; in Zamora, 158 Pakistan, 55 Palacios, Joseph, 94–95 PAN (National Action Party; Partido de Acción Nacional), 3, 19, 35, 43, 49–50, 51, 54 Pansters, Wil, 138 Patiño Velázquez, Miguel, 38, 95, 98–99, 106, 142, 148, 164, 170 patriarchy, 122, 127, 130 patronage, 139, 158 PCC (Popular Council of Chinicuila), 29–30, 47–49, 48 peace-building initiatives, 10, 18, 22, 69; of the Catholic Church, 23, 25, 94–95, 99–101, 107; Culture for Harmony program, 71, 99; Listening Centers, 100; reconstructing the social fabric (RSF), 100, 105; “Sing with Lions” program, 100; violence resulting from, 100–101; women’s participation in, 111; Yeast Organisms (Organismos Levadura), 97, 99, 104 Peña, Enrique, 3, 6 poe-mantas, 68, 69, 149, 168 police: accountability of, 35; centralization of, 38–40; collaboration with, 11, 31–32; complicity with criminal groups, 159–160, 162; criminal activities of, 34; disarming, 10; fear of, 55; in Michoacán, 7; monitoring of by LCSCs, 53; professional standards of, 34; state police force, 29–30; trust/distrust in, 2, 13, 31–34, 36, 39–40, 55, 166 political capital, 140 political science, 3
INDEX poppy cultivation, 17 Popular Council of Chinicuila (PCC), 29–30, 47–49, 48 PRD (Revolutionary Democratic Party; Partido de la Revolución Democrática), 4, 7, 18, 19, 35, 36, 47, 49, 50, 54 PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party; Partido Revolucionario Institucional), 3, 19, 35, 49, 54 protection networks, 34, 50, 145 Protestant churches, 96 public spaces: recovery of, 71–72, 141–142, 144, 147, 167; redefining, 147 Purépecha, 119, 122–123 Putnam, Robert, 14 racism, 115, 130 Ramírez, Uriel, 68 reconstructing the social fabric (RSF), 100, 105 religion: Protestant churches, 96. See also Catholic Church; Catholic clergy Revolutionary Democratic Party (Partido de la Revolución Democrática; PRD), 4, 7, 18, 19, 35, 36, 47, 49, 50, 54 Román, Denisse, 118 Room of Her Own, A (Woolf), 114 Rosen, Jonathan, 138 Rural Force, 6 safe spaces, 2, 10, 22, 24, 26, 149 same-sex marriage, 81, 89 Sánchez, Ariadna, 121 San Luis Potosí, 13 secularism, 99, 105 security: private companies, 158–159, 161; security forces, 119; state provision of, 6–8, 33–34, 137–147, 149–151, 161, 164–166, 174; for women, 131. See also local citizen security councils (LCSCs) Security and Justice Working Groups (SJWGs), 29, 30, 39, 40–41, 74; in Apatzingán, 59, 99, 101; Catholic Church’s participation in, 101–102; criticism of, 46–47; meetings of, 45–46; in Morelia, 44; in Zamora, 29–30, 39, 41–47, 44, 52–53, 101–102, 141, 163, 164, 165 security councils. See local citizen security councils (LCSCs) Segura, José Luis, 99 sexism, 24, 111, 112, 114, 117, 125, 127 sexual abuse, 80–81 sexual diversity activism, 86–89
189 sex workers: arrests of, 150; attitudes toward, 144; protection of, 22; regulation of, 88–89, 91n7; rights of, 81, 86–89; violence against, 22, 23, 77, 86–87, 142 Sicilia, Javier, 8 Sicily, 95 Sinaloa Cartel, 5, 43 “Sing with Lions” program, 100 Slater, Dan, 14 Snyder, Richard, 157 Sobering, Katherine, 25 social capital, 70, 118, 119 Social Integration and Assistance Center (SIAC), 30, 50–51, 54, 104–105 social ministry, 99, 102 social systems theory, 33 sociolegal activism, 76–91, 169; common traits of organizations, 82–83; impact of, 149–150; in Morelia, 81–89; responding to institutional violence, 81–89 sociology, 3, 94 South Africa, 96 state capture, 139 State Development Plan, 36 Stephen, Lynn, 117 street protests, 8 Tancítaro, 10; autodefensa group in, 10, 18, 19, 105, 118; avocado cultivation in, 18–20, 30, 49–51, 79–80, 105, 140, 144, 150, 160; Catholic Church in, 49; farmers and ranchers in, 14; Jesuit peace- building mission in, 18; municipal government in, 144 Tancítaro Municipal Security Council, 30, 32, 41, 42, 49–52, 59, 141, 150, 151, 165; comparison of, 52–56 Tancítaro Public Security Force (TPSF), 50–51 Tangancícuaro, Uarhí Medicina (Medicine Women), 121, 122–123, 127–131 Tankebe, Justice, 15 Tepalcatepec Council, 39, 67 Tierra Caliente region, 167; agriculture in, 18; autodefensas uprising in, 60; cartels in, 115; drug production and trafficking in, 67; l abor export to U.S. from, 18. See also Apatzingán Tijuana, 13 Tilly, Charles, 145 torture, 5, 10, 140, 165 traders’ associations, 26n1 Trejo, Guillermo, 12
190 I N D E X trust: and confidence, 56n1; crisis of, 32–34; in government, 165; institutional, 33, 55; in local citizen security councils, 43–56; in police, 2, 13, 31–34, 36, 39–40, 55, 166; restoration of, 33, 44; in security and justice institutions, 37; and social peace, 100; in state security provision, 32–34, 38–39 Trust and Power (Luhmann), 33 truth telling, 143 Uarhí Medicina (Medicine Women), 121, 122–123, 127–131 Unified Police Command, 38, 40, 43, 55 United for the Coast Collective, 85 United Nations: condemnation of forced disappearances by, 78; and political disappearances, 83; Resolution 53/243, “Declaration and Program of Action on a Culture of Peace,” 61 Until We Find Them Committee, 83 Uruguay, 82 Villa Victoria, 29–30 violence: anti-LGBTI+, 22, 23, 77, 82, 86–89, 94, 91n8; in Apatzingán, 59, 67–68; chronic, 4, 99; comparative ethnographic approach to, 11–16; conflict-related, 135–136; continuum of, 164; crime-related, 10, 12–13, 64, 66, 79, 81, 82, 91n1, 93–108, 110, 127, 135, 139, 141, 143, 149, 151–152; danger involved in reporting, 76; domestic, 73, 79, 82, 117; domestic/intimate partner, 80–81; drug-related, 5; functioning as wealth, 145; gender-based, 9, 22, 49, 77, 80, 81, 82, 85–86, 94, 110, 112, 114, 117, 124, 142–144, 152, 172; gendering of, 172; increase in, 40; institutional, 2, 23, 77–83, 168–169; intrafamilial, 80–81; in Latin America, 134; localized manifestations of, 152; masculine, 114, 118; in Mexico, 4–5, 134, 147; in Michoacán, 114–117, 139–140; multidimensional complexities of, 135–140; nonviolent response to, 152; racialized structures of, 116–117; resulting from peace-building initiatives, 100–101; second-order effects of, 135; sexual, 140; against sex workers, 22, 23, 77, 86–87, 142; socialization of, 100, 163; societal responses in, 172–174; strategies to prevent, 135–136; use by autodefensa groups, 143–146; victims of, 2, 10, 78–79, 100, 143, 151; and the war on
drugs, 77; against women, 4, 85–86, 114, 115, 117, 142, 168–169; in Zamora, 158–159. See also crime #VivasNosQueremos, 132n4 Vivas Nos Queremos Michoacán (We Want Us Alive Michoacán), 121, 123–131 Walking with Justice Collective, 83–85, 84 “Walking with the Disappeared Person” project, 83–84 war on drug trafficking, 2, 3, 5; and forced disappearances, 78; violence associated with, 77, 114 “Weaving Memories” event, 84, 84 Weber, Max, 146 Whittaker, Catherine, 108 Wilson, Lee, 145 women: abuse of, 5; as activists, 23, 24, 29, 82–84, 110–131; empowerment of, 122; as environmentalists, 119–120; and feminine capital, 118–119, 171–172; harassment of, 117; Indigenous, 116–117; kidnapping and disappearance of, 85; mothers of missing persons, 24; and the narco culture, 110, 114–115; and politics, 130–131; rights of, 121; searching for missing relatives, 118–119; sexual abuse of, 80–81; sexualization of, 115; shelters for, 142; and sociolegal activism, 82–83, 84; violence against, 4, 85–86, 114, 115, 117, 142, 168–169. See also femicide; feminicide women’s groups, 2, 9, 21, 24, 163–164, 172; interaction between formal and informal institutions, 128; protests by, 124; Uarhí Medicina (Medicine Women), 122–123, 127–131; Vivas Nos Queremos Michoacán (We Want Us Alive Michoacán), 121, 123–131. See also Women without Violence (Humanas Sin Violencia) Women without Violence (Humanas Sin Violencia), 24, 76–77, 80, 85–86, 90, 121, 126–131, 172 Woolf, Virginia, 114, 128, 172 Workers’ Circles, 101 World Values Survey, 36 Yeast Organism model (Organismos Levadura), 97, 99, 104 Zamora: agriculture in, 19; Catholic diocese of, 19, 96, 97, 100, 108n1, 125;
INDEX citizens’ councils in, 29, 150, 151; civic actors in, 157–158; civil society organ izations (CSOs), 52, 54, 141, 156; drug trafficking and use in, 19; environmental group in, 119; Knights Templar in, 19; LCSC in, 166; organized crime in, 158; politics in, 19; as regional market, 14, 20; regulation of business in, 158; Security and Justice Working Group (SJWG) in, 29–30, 39, 41–47, 44, 52–53, 101–102, 141,
191 163, 164, 165; SJWG compared to other LCSCs, 52–56; social ministry team in, 102; state response in, 144–145; violence in, 157, 158–159; Vivas Nos Queremos Michoacán (We Want Us Alive Michoacán), 121, 123–131; women activists in, 24, 119–120 Zetas, 5, 43 Ziblatt, Daniel, 14 Zyck, Steven, 134