Bodies, Territories and Serious Violations of Human Rights in Mexico (SpringerBriefs in Criminology) [1st ed. 2023] 3031427114, 9783031427114

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction
References
Chapter 2: Forced Disappearances of Persons in Mexico: Drugs, Social Control, and Regimes of Violence
The Frameworks of the Forced Disappearance of Persons in Mexico
Methodological Note
Disappearances in the Center-South Region
Forced Disappearance: Between Vulnerability and Helplessness
Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: Forced Internal Migration in Mexico: Displacement, Stigmatization, and Expectations in Chichihualco, Guerrero
Between Losses, Sieges, and Crime
Archives, Dispossession, and Rexistences
References
Chapter 4: Systemic Gender Violence in Mexico: Normalization, Silencing, and the Colonization of Bodies-Territories
With Violence in the Body
The Institution of Rottenness
Intersectionalities in Bodies-Territories
Final Considerations
References
Chapter 5: Conclusions: State Violence – Archives, Bodies, Territories
Introduction: “It Was the State”
On the Displacement of the State of Exception and the Legitimate Monopoly of Violence
Indeed, It Was the State: The Consignas Resistance
Conclusions
References
Index

Citation preview

SpringerBriefs in Criminology Miguel Angel Martínez Martínez

Bodies, Territories and Serious Violations of Human Rights in Mexico

SpringerBriefs in Criminology

SpringerBriefs in Criminology present concise summaries of cutting edge research across the fields of Criminology and Criminal Justice. It publishes small but impactful volumes of between 50-125 pages, with a clearly defined focus. The series covers a broad range of Criminology research from experimental design and methods, to brief reports and regional studies, to policy-related applications. The scope of the series spans the whole field of Criminology and Criminal Justice, with an aim to be on the leading edge and continue to advance research. The series will be international and cross-disciplinary, including a broad array of topics, including juvenile delinquency, policing, crime prevention, terrorism research, crime and place, quantitative methods, experimental research in criminology, research design and analysis, forensic science, crime prevention, victimology, criminal justice systems, psychology of law, and explanations for criminal behavior. SpringerBriefs in Criminology will be of interest to a broad range of researchers and practitioners working in Criminology and Criminal Justice Research and in related academic fields such as Sociology, Psychology, Public Health, Economics and Political Science.

Miguel Angel Martínez Martínez

Bodies, Territories and Serious Violations of Human Rights in Mexico

Miguel Angel Martínez Martínez Consejo de Ciencia y Tecnología del Estado de Puebla (CONCYTEP) Puebla, Puebla, Mexico

ISSN 2192-8533     ISSN 2192-8541 (electronic) SpringerBriefs in Criminology ISBN 978-3-031-42711-4    ISBN 978-3-031-42712-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42712-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgments

In the preparation of Bodies, Territories and Serious Violations of Human Rights in Mexico, the courage, patience, and support of Ana Luisa Sánchez Hernández have played a vital role. Thank you, Ana, for your unconditional encouragement and willingness. I thank my parents Elisa (deceased) and Ricardo (deceased), my sisters Rosa Elena (deceased in 2017), Vicky, and Alma, and my brothers Ricardo, Jorge (deceased in 1995), and Julio, for their presence and their testimony in my life. They are a wonderful tribe. My thanks to Bruno Fiuza for his interest for the initial proposal. Throughout the process of writing this manuscript, I have also benefitted considerably from the incisive feedback that the external evaluators provided. Thanks to the team at Springer, and the team of Springer Briefs in Criminology, who brought this book into this world. I am indebted to collective Voice of the Disappeared in Puebla (Voz de los Desaparecidos en Puebla) for their generosity and hospitality, for their force and their word. Finally, this book is for my daughter Alba Sabina, my little bird, because this world in resistance is also hers.

v

Contents

1

Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    6

2

Forced Disappearances of Persons in Mexico: Drugs, Social Control, and Regimes of Violence�����������������������������������������������    9 The Frameworks of the Forced Disappearance of Persons in Mexico������   13 Methodological Note ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   17 Disappearances in the Center-South Region����������������������������������������������   18 Forced Disappearance: Between Vulnerability and Helplessness��������������   21 Conclusion ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   24 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   25

3

Forced Internal Migration in Mexico: Displacement, Stigmatization, and Expectations in Chichihualco, Guerrero ������������   29 Between Losses, Sieges, and Crime����������������������������������������������������������   32 Archives, Dispossession, and Rexistences ������������������������������������������������   41 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   43

4

Systemic Gender Violence in Mexico: Normalization, Silencing, and the Colonization of Bodies-Territories��������������������������������������������   47 With Violence in the Body ������������������������������������������������������������������������   47 The Institution of Rottenness ��������������������������������������������������������������������   50 Intersectionalities in Bodies-Territories ����������������������������������������������������   52 Final Considerations����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   54 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   55

vii

viii

5

Contents

 Conclusions: State Violence – Archives, Bodies, Territories����������������   59 Introduction: “It Was the State” ����������������������������������������������������������������   59 On the Displacement of the State of Exception and the Legitimate Monopoly of Violence��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   63 Indeed, It Was the State: The Consignas as Resistance ����������������������������   66 Conclusions������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   68 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   69

Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   71

Chapter 1

Introduction

The news of the death of former President of Mexico Luis Echeverría Álvarez (1970–1976) reached us as I was writing this text. He died at the age of 100 and with the repudiation of millions of people due to the acts of repression he exercised against dissident movements in the country during his tenure as Secretary of the Interior and during his presidency, among them, the massacre of students in Tlatelolco in 1968, the other massacre of students on June 10, 1971, and the razing of entire communities during the counterinsurgency campaigns to extinguish the rural guerrillas in the state of Guerrero in the early 1970s. Echeverría’s government ended with an inflation rate of almost 30%, the devaluation of the Mexican currency, and with the selection of his successor: his youthful friend José López Portillo. The supposed post-revolutionary promise that had claimed to bring Mexico out of a dictatorial government and had offered economic, social, and political progress to the country had reached its peak. The ballot that Mexicans received in the elections on July 4, 1976, had only one name on it: the one of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate, José López Portillo. The right-wing opposition National Action Party (PAN) had not been able to reach an agreement to nominate a presidential candidate and, although the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) obtained one million votes, they were not counted since the candidate was not officially registered. As López Portillo himself would later declare, his mother’s vote alone would have assured him the presidency. Having a single candidate, stripped the PRI regime of its democratic trappings, so in 1979, a political reform (the instauration of the Federal Law of Political Organizations and Electoral Processes) was implemented, allowing better conditions of competition to the opposition, incorporating groups and parties of the historical left hitherto excluded from the party system. This generated an intensification in the mobilization of opposition parties that gradually won local elections, which, together with the rupture within the PRI as a result of the incorporation of neoliberal

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. A. Martínez Martínez, Bodies, Territories and Serious Violations of Human Rights in Mexico, SpringerBriefs in Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42712-1_1

1

2

1 Introduction

policies and the fraudulent elections of the 1980s, laid the foundations for the first peaceful political alternation in 2000.1 In the midst of this seemingly democratic transitional process, however, serious violations of human rights are systematically and continuously taking place. The single-party hegemony of the twentieth century that built an external image of democracy, progress, and liberalism was indeed based on the silence and opacity of situations that contrasted with the promises of the State. Within its political continuity, repressive mechanisms were deployed giving birth to a low-intensity war (the so-called Dirty War)2 (Mireles Chávez 2021; Vicente Ovalle 2019). Whether due to the “perfect dictatorship” pointed out by Vargas Llosa or “the hegemonic system of domination” considered by Octavio Paz in the 1990 Vuelta meeting,3 the economic, political, and social disaster found differentiated expressions in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Along with the fleeting enthusiasm of the party transition in the Executive Power, there was a continuity of the traditional use of power. The predominant use of force from different figures of authority—legal or paralegal (Reguillo 2007)—condensed scenarios of exceptionality whose displacement and mobility configured different fields of violence: military roadblocks, arbitrary curfews, surveillance of territories that derived in states of siege, militarization of public security, extrajudicial executions, forced disappearances and forced internal displacements, femicides, torture, among other expressions where an intentional use of physical force is exercised to cause death, laceration or physical or symbolic mistreatment of vulnerable people or people of public interest, and/or provocation of social instability and social fear (Causa Común 2022). The historical coordinates of the world order demand conditions that make viable the realization of a project that not only implies a representation of humanity but also configures the subjective experiences of human singularity. In this sense, the modern striving for objectivity can lead to descriptions that, at times, may seem abstract and metaphysical entities. However, this text is focused not only on the serious violations of human rights, as abstract views of reality, but also on their continuity and systematicity in the Mexican territory. One of the elements of interest consists in showing the historical contradictions of democratic aspirations in territories crossed by precariousness and violence; in this sense, traditional  In the year 2000, Vicente Fox Quezada, of the National Action Party (PAN), was declared the winner of the presidential elections, unseating 80 years of single-party continuity carried out by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). 2  “Dirty War” is the term that has been used to refer to the repressive practices of the Mexican government carried out approximately between 1960 and 1980. The mechanisms of repression are as varied as the criminal imagination of the agents allows, but systematically, murder, torture, and forced disappearance of people, as well as rape by State agents, were and are used to establish fields of political repression. 3  During the last days of August and the first days of September 1990, several encounters of political, historical, and moral reflection were held in Mexico City under the name “The Twentieth Century: The Experience of Freedom,” which were broadcast in their entirety on private television (Krauze 1991; Caballero Escorcia 2020). 1

1 Introduction

3

methodologies reiterate diagnoses that seem to inhibit the urgency of social and singular conditions. The complexity of human rights violations in current times is part of the country in which I live, of the ambivalent experience as a national society, as well as of the intersectionalities that integrate it. My different theoretical approaches are part of a set of tools confronted by the “end of the world in which I grew up and the beginning of a different one, which does not end up being constituted and in relation to which I still do not know how or where to orient ourselves” (Calveiro 2019, p. 7). Amidst the horror of Mexico’s historical reality, yearnings, ideals and criticism towards different forms of government and civil society emerge to account not only for a set of traumatic and acute injuries that transform the perception and organization of the field of human rights, but also for the configuration of violence that is expressed in the classification of populations, the stratification of races and in the relations of subordination, epistemic marginalization and processes of dispossession and extractivism. The privileged consideration of the discursive framework of human rights is dismantled in the face of the struggles and concerns of the historical situations that cross bodies, territories, and subjectivities. If human rights currently have a consensus for the recognition of the human condition, its significance is crossed by the oblivion of the social and political, open and clandestine activism that generated it. For this reason, their formulation, recognition, and protection constitute today a fundamental strategy of legitimization for political systems with democratic classifications. The discursive legitimacy of the human rights tone generates a convening capacity, which moves between persuasion and rhetoric, to encourage processes of dignified life that are inscribed in a legal and institutional field. These resources attenuate the emancipatory political potential, as well as the historical character of processes of precarization and aggravation of multiple sectors of the population (Gándara Carballido 2019). The suspicion that covers human rights as an alibi and strategy of new forms of colonialism, of ideological subjugation, and cancellation of practical experiences of emancipation fields extend into the reality of the interests of the economic, political, and social elites that postulate themselves as paradigms of forms of life worthy of being lived.4 The human is installed in conditions of standardized and organized life from discourses and institutional projects that regulate the experiences of everyday life (Dahbar 2017). The discomfort generated by the contrast between the promises of democracy and the aggressions to human rights intensifies the experiences of grievance and indignation. Thus, writing is also a device for action and an exercise in dialogue with those who are mobilized by the catastrophe and disaster of the processes of dispossession and extraction. It is a device to read the grammars of the sovereignty of the neoliberal program in which the commodification of life, of the body, and of affections builds scenarios where it is intended to capture all imaginable possibilities to transform them into economic and political resources.

 From here on, in order to keep in mind these implications of the human rights concept, I will place it in italics. 4

4

1 Introduction

In these scenarios, how can we talk about the serious violations of human rights without perpetuating the spectacle of violence? What are the methodologies that open up other forms of understanding and creative action to intervene the necropolitical machinery? Will the aggressions to human rights be a differentiated archive to research and explore territories of violence in times of democracy? How does academic reflection interrupt the errands of power, exclusion, and the constant violation of human rights? Which of the archives, bodies, and territories appear as trans-disciplinary methodological fields? While the above questions appear in the dystopia of our current historical reality, they nourish the interpretative exchange around the constant political exceptionality in Mexican territories. The machineries of power show a fabric that contrasts with the external image constructed from the hegemonic single-party system where democracy, progress, and liberalism were part of a folkloric and exotic scenario. There is also a hidden, silenced, and insulted reality that encrypts the suspension not only of people’s fundamental rights but also of relationships of care and attention, both from legal organizations and paralegal instances. From the surreptitious to the crude, from scenarios of exceptionality to the normality of violence, from the unbelievable to the unspeakable, the frenetic and repeated aggression against human rights calls into question the very concepts of their enunciation, of the possibilities of their interference, and of the importance they claim to represent. The problem that summons us intertwines corporealities, territories, and archives. The concrete experience of the serious violations of human rights reactivates the archive of evil, to say it with Derrida (1997), and marks violence as a trace of events that pretend to be erased, denied, destroyed, and manipulated in the name of a power that denies or authorizes them; bodies and territories become archives, supports in which classificatory orders show the performative and interpretative hegemonic power. Between corporealities, territories and archives, considerations are woven from a kind of high-risk thinking due to the urgency of responding to the living conditions in territories where serious aggressions to human rights are carried out on a daily basis. From these coordinates, the analysis of Mexico‘s historical situations is carried out from the democratic transition and the “War on Drugs.” The text presents analyses of the forced disappearance of persons, forced internal displacement, and gender-­based violence as crystallizations of the systematic reiteration of State violence. These fields of research will allow us to point out the tensions, ambivalences, and contradictions between social practices, institutional fragility, and processes of subjectivation in territories and situations where human rights violations are both realized and accounted for. The thematic knot between bodies, archives, and territories is anchored in the processes of conformation of a memory that expresses the actuality of the dispute for the monopoly of violence, in which minority anamnetic resistances allude to forms of registration, and control. Bodies-territories form the scenarios where intersectionally knotted violences are awakened. The body as territory is a concept that has been worked on in processes of recognition of women’s human rights and that has its origin in indigenous feminisms that have assumed a political positioning that responds to ontologies and epistemologies

1 Introduction

5

around the self and being in the territory. From communitarian feminism, both the body and the land are elements that generate the conditions for the reproduction of vital experiences (Marchese 2019); “the territory is a living being and represents women” (Romero 2015) and the “bodies as living and historical territories [...] allude to a cosmogonic and political interpretation” (Cruz Hernández 2020, p. 44). Tarcila Rivera Zea (quoted in Mangas Urkizu and Grau Vila 2018), Quechua feminist, assures that: The first [priority of indigenous feminism] is the fulfilment of the collective right to land, territory and natural resources, because it is the space from which we develop. The second has to do with the right to not to be violated: neither in the territory, because we are against wars, expropriations and subjugations, nor in our bodies. We no longer speak of violence, we speak of violences. Other priorities are economic development, education, health and political participation, from the community upwards. And very importantly, we see everything in an intergenerational way.

For Lorena Cabnal, a Maya-Xinka feminist who affirms not to name herself decolonial in order to overcome colonial temporality and include in her epistemology millenary forms, bodies experience dispossession and plundering, and by enduring it, they become territories in dispute. The defense of the territories-bodies-land comes then as a proposal of recovery and emotional and spiritual healing of women in struggle, and assuming the individual corporeality as their own and unrepeatable territory allows strengthening the sense of affirmation of their existence of being in the world (Cabnal 2010). Similarly, Delmy Tania Cruz Hernández (2020) assures that women are often left alone in the defense of the territory when facing patriarchal alliances between capital and macho community relations and it is from the body that they live the organization in defense of the territory. This is why both body and territory are configured with each other and articulate a geopolitics in the face of extractive processes and the wounds of colonial processes. Cabnal (2019) assures that in the case of Guatemala, territorial community feminism was gestated in the historical moment of strengthening of the peace agreements after 36 years of counterinsurgency war, at the moment when the desire of outraged bodies of indigenous women was born to denounce hunger, malnutrition, sexual violence, femicide, and the abduction of girls within their communities. In 2005, she says, the statement of the “body as the first territory of defense” emerged and, in articulation with the struggle against mining in 2007, they established the slogan in Xinka “Liki tuyuhaki na altepet kwerpo-naru,” that is, “recovery and defense of the territory-body-land,” an epistemic proposal coming from indigenous women that: did not pass through the academy, did not pass as a result of an international cooperation project; that does not pass through any of these logics [...] It is born from outraged bodies, from bodies that have been traversed by multiple violences [...] And it begins to question other feminisms [...] that standardize oppressions or that standardize emancipations [...]. It is an epistemic proposal, it has its own way of interpreting its realities and how it decodes the oppressions in the community. It is a spiritual proposal, it addresses a lot the elements of cosmogony, in this case, of the Mayan people and the Xinka people [...] to make a reinterpretation of why the web of life of the indigenous communities is broken (Cabnal 2019).

6

1 Introduction

From this construct, bodies and territories have the memory of where patriarchal, colonialist, racist, and capitalist oppressions have been constructed from the dispossession and plundering of peoples (Cabnal 2019). Different theoretical approaches, as well as interdisciplinary, are mobilized to make a critical approach to capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy as axes of public policies and protectionist narratives of the Global North. Survival will be the experience that forges the gaze from which the needs, interests, and preferences of those who have suffered serious human rights violations are evinced. Chapter 2, thus, examines the phenomenon of forced disappearance of persons in Mexico in its current historical forms, as well as the struggles for memory generated by a diversity of collectives of family members organized around searches of people. Chapter 3 addresses the political and community dimensions of internal forced displacement, focusing on the singularity of this practice in contexts where the coalescence of organized crime and the different levels of government deploy criminal conditions against humanity. Chapter 4 situates the issue of gender-based violence in a systemic manner and the discrepancies of human rights discourse. Chapter 5 explores State violence and its relationship with the systematic violations, continued and reproduced during the democratic transition, as well as the silenced expressions of crimes and massacres generated in the contemporary Mexican cultural framework. The set of reflections aims to analyze the systematic denial of serious human rights violations in the processes of democratic transition without losing sight of Mexico’s cultural and community experience.

References Caballero Escorcia, B.A. 2020. Hegemonía cultural disputada en México. Las revistas Nexos y Vuelta enfrentadas (1990-1992). Anuario de Historia Regional y de las Fronteras 25 (2): 149–186. DOI. https://doi.org/10.18273/revanu.v25n2-­2020006. Cabnal, L. 2010. Feminismos diversos. Madrid, Acsur Las Segovias: El feminismo comunitario. ———. 2019. Humus - Capítulo 2. Lorena Cabnal: El cuerpo como territorio de defensa. La tinta. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOkbzksSakQ. Calveiro, P. 2019. Resistir al neoliberalismo. Ciudad de México: Siglo XXI. Causa común. 2022. Galería del horror. Atrocidades y eventos de alto impacto registrados en medios. Enero-junio 2022. México: Causa Común. Cruz Hernández, D.T. 2020. Mujeres, cuerpo y territorios: entre la defensa y la desposesión. In Cuerpos, territorios y feminismos, Delmy Tania Cruz Hernández and Manuel Bayón Jiménez (coords.). Ecuador, México: Abya Yala, Instituto de Estudios Ecológicos del Tercer Mundo, Libertad Bajo Palabra, Bajo Tierra. Dahbar, M.V. 2017. ¿Qué hacemos con las normas que nos hacen? Usos de Judith Butler. Sexualidades Doctas: Córdoba. Derrida, J. 1997. Mal de archivo. Una impresión freudiana. Madrid: Trotta. Gándara Carballido, M. 2019. Los derechos humanos en el siglo XXI. Una mirada desde el pensamiento crítico. Buenos Aires: CLACSO. Krauze, E.G. 1991. Hacia la sociedad abierta. La experiencia de la libertad. T. 1. Ciudad de México: Fundación Cultural Televisa.

References

7

Mangas Urkizu, M., and C.  Grau Vila. 2018. Tarcila Rivera: “Las mujeres indígenas tenemos que construir nuestro propio concepto de feminismo”. El Salto. https://www.elsaltodiario. com/feminismos/tarcila-­rivera-­zea-­mujeres-­indigenas-­construir-­nuestro-­propio-­concepto-­ feminismo. Marchese, G. 2019. Del cuerpo en el territorio al cuerpo-territorio: Elementos para una genealogía feminista latinoamericana de la crítica a la violencia. EntreDiversidades. Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades 13: 9–41. https://www.redalyc.org/journal/4559/455962140001/html/. Mireles Chávez, V.  M. 2021. Buscando a los desaparecidos de la “guerra sucia”: ontologías computacionales y la búsqueda de verdad. Iberoformum. Revista de Ciencias Sociales, 1–40. https://doi.org/10.48102/if.2021.v1.n1.149. Reguillo, R. 2007. Invisibilidad resguardada: violencia(s) y gestión de la paralegalidad en la era del colapso. Revista Crítica Cultural: 6–13. Romero, J. 2015. ¿Qué pasaría si se desvía el arroyo Bruno? https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=7jDDOaaOPCU Vicente Ovalle, C. 2019. [Tiempo suspendido] Una historia de la desaparición forzada en México, 1940–1980. Bonilla Artiga Editores: Ciudad de México.

Chapter 2

Forced Disappearances of Persons in Mexico: Drugs, Social Control, and Regimes of Violence

There the arrest is coming, there the dreams are gone. Ramón Galaviz Navarro (Interview with Ramón Galaviz Navarro, conducted by Camilo Vicente Ovalle, December 9, 2017, Culiacán, Sinaloa (Vicente Ovalle 2019, 19))

Forced disappearance of persons in Mexico has been a constant phenomenon for more than half a century. The complexity of the problem is articulated in the serious existing human rights crisis, of which the forced disappearance of persons is one of the most pressing. Based on the National Registry of Disappeared and Missing Persons, as of February 21, 2023, in Mexico, there were 111,627 disappeared persons,1 of which it is not known precisely how many are in a situation of forced disappearance; the documentary and methodological confusion of the filing systems presents a series of contradictions that intensify the disappearance of those already missing. The Mexican legal framework generally considers a disappeared person to be a person whose whereabouts are unknown and who is presumed to be the victim of a crime. In this context, the disappearance of persons is related to legal concepts such as non-localization and disappearance committed by private individuals, in which kidnapping, human trafficking, femicide, illegal deprivation of liberty, homicide, among other crimes, intensify the difficulty of documenting it. The General Law on Forced Disappearance of Persons, Disappearance Committed by Private Parties and the National Search System, approved since 2017, in its Article 27, provides the following: “commits the crime of forced disappearance of persons the public servant or private individual who, with the authorization, support or acquiescence of a public servant, deprives a person of freedom in any form, followed by the abstention

 National Registry of Disappeared and Missing Persons (RNPDNO), Contexto General, (Secretaría de Gobernación 2020). 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. A. Martínez Martínez, Bodies, Territories and Serious Violations of Human Rights in Mexico, SpringerBriefs in Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42712-1_2

9

10

2  Forced Disappearances of Persons in Mexico: Drugs, Social Control, and Regimes…

or refusal to acknowledge such deprivation of freedom or to provide information about her or her fate, destiny or whereabouts.” These legal and administrative considerations hinder the classification, investigation, and search for disappeared persons, intensifying the suffering and tribulation of victims, families, and social environments where the forced disappearance of persons takes place because they seem to place in a field of interpretations from the economic, social, or political-administrative privilege and prestige. In this sense, the fundamental knots of social inequality are axes that dismiss equality before the law for various expressions of precariousness and exclusion, deepening the violent scenarios derived from hegemonic systems and networks of domination and influence. The forced disappearance of persons shows more clearly the relations of the neoliberal model with structured aspects of social inequality, where political, economic, and social violence are articulated with the networks generated by organized crime. The environments crossed by violence and impunity intensify precarious social conditions where disappearances, all of them, are propitiated by high levels of decomposition in environments immersed in fears, uncertainties, and mistrust (Valencueza Arce 2017). From these framework, forced disappearance is when one or more persons are detained, or deprived of their freedom by government agents, or by private gropups or individuals acting on behalf of the government, and who then refuse to reveal the fate or whereabouts, thus removing them from the protection of the law (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights 1992; Comité Cerezo Mexico 2018). In spite of the regulatory framework that allows for the administration of justice, federal, state, and municipal authorities have shown a lack of will to carry out adequate and effective investigations to determine those responsible and to know the whereabouts of the disappeared. The different mechanisms for the search of disappeared persons are constantly questioned and under suspicion by relatives and human rights defenders, who have to fight to be considered in the search and investigation processes, multiplying the functions of their tasks. In addition, on multiple occasions both victims and family members are criminalized and accused of belonging to organized crime or of illegal or illegitimate practices to discredit the search and/or investigations before public opinion or civil society. The growth of disappearances in the last 20 years remains constant and seems to mock the efforts to strengthen the institutional bodies that claim to combat it. The creation of the General Law on the Forced Disappearance of Persons has installed new institutional bodies to combat disappearances, such as the National Commission for the Search for Persons of the Ministry of the Interior (2020), as well as the Special Prosecutor’s Office for the Investigation of the Crimes of Forced Disappearance of the Attorney General’s Office and the recently created National Center for Human Identification,2 responsible for identifying the more than 52  The General Law on Victims, as well as the National Registry of Disappeared and Missing Persons, has also been created; local search commissions have been created in the different states of the Republic, as well as the adoption of the Homologated Protocol for the Search for Disappeared and Missing Persons and the Additional Protocol for the Search for Children and Adolescents, and 2

2  Forced Disappearances of Persons in Mexico: Drugs, Social Control, and Regimes…

11

thousand bodies in forensic services whose identity is unknown (Tapia Olivares 2022). The unprecedented construction of these bodies shows the institutional paradoxes in the face of the forced disappearance of persons. Institutional inefficiency has generated the organization of relatives of disappeared persons who carry out the search not without tensions with authorities and other para-state agents. The search carried out by the relatives maintains an ethical-­ political position, despite the forces that seek to silence and maintain impunity. Their demand for truth, justice, and reparation, as well as guarantees of non-­ repetition, encourages multiple and varied groups from civil society and academia to point out the implications that such a situation has on the bodies-territories of Mexico. In this sense, if we consider that Mexico does not show an authoritarian regime or a declared internal conflict, the democratic-electoral conditions are energized with alarming levels of violence, as well as with links of complicity with organized crime and concessions to transnational extractivist companies. The international finger-pointing of high-ranking officials in the public service has shown the rogue structure of the government apparatus. With such an indication, state responsibility is established without subtracting the implication of other extra-­ legal and para-legal agents, where organized crime and private individuals intervene in its commission. However, the conditions of simulation, impunity, and profitability of disappearance set up territorial conditions for the commission of serious human rights violations, where disappearance has increased considerably. Understanding this situation calls not only for legal reflections but also for crossing disciplinary, quantitative, and qualitative elements, as well as academic-militant perspectives that seek the truth and justice that the institutional apparatuses have systematically denied, bureaucratizing the life and pain of families. All government institutions and agencies are guided by the principles of effectiveness and completeness, by a differential, specialized, humanitarian, equal, and non-discriminatory approach, and by the principles of maximum protection, non-­revictimization, joint participation, gender perspective, and presumption of life and truth. However, they have not been sufficient to operate the processes of the possibility of incorporating those who participate in the searches in the Protection Mechanism for Human Rights Defenders and Journalists. The creation of centers and units dedicated to human identification is recognized (the Regional Center for Human Identification in Coahuila; the Integral Unit of Forensic Medical Services in Nogales, Veracruz; the Directorate of Human Identification in Jalisco; and the forensic shelter center in Guerrero, Tamaulipas and other localities), as well as the creation of the Extraordinary Mechanism for Forensic Identification and the conformation of its Coordinating Group. Regarding the disappearances that occurred between 1965 and 1990, the Commission for Access to the Truth, Historical Clarification and the Promotion of Justice for Serious Human Rights Violations committed between 1965 and 1990 was created; also the Presidential Commission for the Ayotzinapa case, as well as the Special Investigation and Litigation Unit for the Ayotzinapa case and the Transnational Mechanism for Access to Justice for Migrant Persons and the Search Table for Missing Migrant Persons within the framework of the National System for the Search for Persons. These are the national organizations in charge of resolving the growing problem of forced disappearance of persons in Mexico.

12

2  Forced Disappearances of Persons in Mexico: Drugs, Social Control, and Regimes…

investigation and search for disappeared persons. Moreover, the specific objectives of the different laws seek to establish the distribution of competences and the form of coordination between the authorities of the different orders of government to search for disappeared and missing persons and clarify the facts, as well as to prevent, investigate, punish, and eradicate the crimes of forced disappearance of persons and disappearance committed by individuals and related crimes established by law, as established in Article 2 of the General Law on Forced Disappearance of Persons; however, the disappearance continues to increase in its incidence and prevalence3 (González Villarreal 2022a, b). After reading this section, it is expected that not only a general overview of the situation of forced disappearance in Mexico in the last two decades will be obtained but also an understanding of the semantic core that sustains such practices in different states of Mexico.4 Although forced disappearances in the past are not the same as they are today, social, political, and economic conditions form matrixes of understanding of criminality that I call the rationalities of disappearance. The present considerations take into account the search experiences carried out in the National Search Brigades for Disappeared Persons organized by the National Links Network, from 2017 to 2022, as well as the close relationship with groups and collectives of relatives with disappeared persons, especially that with the collective The Voice of the Disappeared in Puebla (La Voz de los Desaparecidos en Puebla); Relatives in Search “María Herrera” (Familiares en Búsqueda María Herrera); Warrior Hounds, Culiacán, Sinaloa (Sabuesos Guerreras, Culiacán, Sinaloa); Voice and Hope, Until We Find Them, Puebla (Voz y Esperanza, Hasta Encontrarles Puebla); Relatives in Search “María Herrera” of Poza Rica, Veracruz (Familiares en Búsqueda María Herrera de Poza Rica, Veracruz); as well as the Human Rights Center Miguel Agustín Pro-Juárez (Centro de Derechos Humanos Miguel Agustín Pro-Juárez, the Human Rights Center of the Mountain, Tlachinollan (Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Montaña, Tlachinollan) and the Cerezo Collective of Human Rights (Colectivo Cerezo de Derechos Humanos). From these links, the different dynamics of disappearance in situations energized by organized crime, common delinquency, extractivist projects, and governmental impunity in the democratic aspirations of our country will be reported. Forced disappearances continue to be committed directly or indirectly by public agents at the federal, state, and municipal levels of the government. In addition, organized crime has become a central perpetrator of disappearances, with various forms of connivance and varying degrees of participation, acquiescence, or omission of public servants. Therefore, the objective of this chapter is to point out that the forced disappearance of persons in Mexico is a state action, whether by direct  In Mexico, there are only 36 convictions for the crime of enforced disappearance (UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances 2022). 4  The tracing that is carried out touches on some elements that appear in regions such as southcentral, integrated by the State of Mexico, Guerrero, Puebla, Morelos, and Veracruz, from which they are linked to the western zone (Aguascalientes, Colima, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Michoacán, Querétaro, Nayarit, and Zacatecas). 3

The Frameworks of the Forced Disappearance of Persons in Mexico

13

participation of state agents, omission in their public security tasks, or collusion with criminal organizations. The intimate relationship between the increase of disappearances and the War on Drugs has generated a great diversity of perpetrators, modalities, and victims, who are stigmatized, stereotyped, and criminalized as a strategy of a state that denies its effective responsibility in the administration of justice and the clarification of the truth, as well as the ways in which the guarantees of reparation and non-repetition are materialized.

 he Frameworks of the Forced Disappearance of Persons T in Mexico In May 2022, Mexico surpassed the figure of one hundred thousand missing persons. The inheritance of structural factors is evident in the processes of militarization of public security initiated with Vicente Foz Quezada (President 2000–2006), conjured by Felipe Calderón Hinojosa (President 2006–2012), continued by Enrique Peña Nieto (President 2012–2018) and Andrés Manuel López Obrador (President 2018–2024). The presence of military-trained personnel in public spaces was justified as a support strategy to “establish order” and “recover peace” by temporarily assisting civilian police forces. The inherent contradiction of war as a political strategy has intensified and extended serious human rights violations, of which the forced disappearance of persons is established as a field in which the knot of the increase of violence in a country with a political transition with high indexes of cruelty is shown, both in facts and in legislations (Martínez Martínez and Díaz Estrada 2021). The War on Drugs, declared by Felipe Calderón one day after taking office, on December 10, 2006, that ordered the deployment of the Army in the Tierra Caliente region of Michoacán, then plagued by the Familia Michoacana cartel, presented an argument that no one could refuse: “so that drugs do not reach your children.”5 Fighting for the children, for sons and daughters, and for the future becomes an ideology where only one side is allowed, a single unquestionable side that justifies every defense and every attack. Since then, Mexico continues to face problems related to drug trafficking, reflected in the high levels of violence and the increase of illicit activities, both federal and common. This situation has generated an exponential growth of 98% of disappearances in the country between 2006 and 2021 (UN Committee on Forced Disappearances, 2022). The close relationship between the processes of militarization of public security, territorial reorganization by

 This phrase was used to defend the government’s security strategy and the creation of the New Life Centers, which were intended to provide primary care to users of psychoactive substances (Morales Oyarbide 2011; Pereyra 2012; De Thomas Murillo 2022). 5

14

2  Forced Disappearances of Persons in Mexico: Drugs, Social Control, and Regimes…

organized crime, and forced disappearances indicate a link where state authorities participate in the perpetration either action, coalescence, or omission.6 Based on the National Registry of Disappeared and Missing Persons, it can be shown that the highest accumulated incidence of disappeared people is found in Jalisco, Tamaulipas, State of Mexico, Veracruz, Nuevo León, Sinaloa, Sonora, and Guerrero, but the states with the highest rate of disappearance are Tamaulipas with 302.3 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, Colima with 157, Sinaloa with 153.1, Jalisco with 121.8, and Chihuahua with 109.3 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. In this category, the national rate is 57.7 disappeared persons per 100,000 inhabitants (González Villarreal 2022a, b, 18). The uniqueness of the Mexican case becomes more consistent when considering the 60 years of armed confrontations in Colombia between the army, guerrillas, and drug trafficking organizations, which account for more than 80,744 victims of forced disappearance between 1958 and 2018 according to the Observatory of Memory and Conflict of the National Center of Historical Memory (CNMH) (Centro Nacional de la Memoria Histórica 2020). In Argentina, military dictatorships left around 30,000 people disappeared, according to the count of non-­ governmental organizations; in Guatemala, during three decades of conflict and government repression between 1970 and 2000, 45,000 people disappeared according to Amnesty International (2012). In Mexico, disappearances occur in a context of formal democracy, but in a framework of impunity and corruption that has made organized crime the main perpetrator of this crime, with various forms of connivance and different degrees of participation, acquiescence, or omission of public servants. According to statistics from the National Registry of Disappeared and Missing Persons, men between 15 and 40 years of age are the most affected. However, there is a notable increase in the disappearance of boys and girls from the age of 12, as well as adolescents and women, as a strategy to hide sexual violence, human trafficking for sexual exploitation, and femicides.7 The forced disappearance of persons is developed as an incidental or frequent practice, for Roberto González Villarreal, it is “a systematic technology of population control” (2022a, b, 18). Rodolfo Gamiño Muñoz considers that it is the result of a permanent construction of “micro-spaces of exception that are flexible, mobile and timeless. Spaces in which the forced disappearance of persons has been perpetuated in an uninterrupted manner” (2020, 34). For Ansolabehere and Martos, “the victims of disappearance constitute sectors considered to be dangerous or ostracised” (2021, 75).  Government after government, practices are replicated, such as the thousands of testimonies of family members in search (Velasco Vargas 2020, Romero Laullón and Tirado Sánchez 2016). 7  In this context, the research work on forced disappearances in the state of Puebla, promoted by the Council of Science and Technology of the State of Puebla, is fundamental, where it was possible to verify the links between state agents, people linked to organized crime that link the disappearance of people with crimes such as trafficking for sexual and labor exploitation, as well as the replacement of criminal personnel (Martínez Martínez and Donoso 2022). 6

The Frameworks of the Forced Disappearance of Persons in Mexico

15

Disappearance is exercised by people associated not only with organized crime, but also with practices that reproduce the monopoly of legal or illegal violence. Power establishes a regime of identity scandalized by risk and disappearance; that is to say, if power is threatened, it whips detection/detention/disappearance, while hardening the regime of normalization of the omnipresence of violence, instrumentalized by the sensationalist press for its profitability and subsequent trivialization and bureaucratization of pain.8 The variation of historical-social conditions in the Mexican context has also generated a series of disappearance devices that integrate not only the perpetrators but also the victims, the forms of operation, the territories, the state jurisdictions and governmentalities, as well as the forms of social organization and the subjective dimension that impacts on the valuation of violence in the different environments in which forced or involuntary disappearance takes place.9 However, the intellectual matrixes that make hybrid disappearances possible10 respond to discourses, practices, institutions that crystallize a field of disappearance articulated from pacts between state agents and members of organized crime. Such a strategy includes open circuits, series of operations, and flexible procedures for their detection, detention, and subsequent disappearance. The first moment of the strategy (detection) responds to the identity regime inherited from modern discourses, in which stigmatization, subordination and the multiple intersectional marks of race, social class, age, gender and social prestige forge an open system of disappearances that impedes the investigation and location of disappeared persons. The set of stereotypes, prejudices, images, and narratives of disposable persons installs a device of disappearance and a logic where perpetration unfolds with extreme cruelty. The war of interpretations is carried out through the different media where the responsibility for the disappearances falls on the victims or on the environments discredited by hegemonic or dominating images; that is, a

 The constant communications from relatives of missing persons, the discovery of clandestine graves, the overflow of corpses in the SEMEFOs (Forensic Medical Services), the increase in the disappearance of children, the dissemination of femicide, the persecution of human rights defenders and journalists, the exposure of mutilated bodies have become daily spectacles. 9  In this sense, I share the precision made by Pilar Calveiro who considers that the disappearance of persons is linked to forced disappearance. “Firstly, because every involuntary ‘“disappearance”’ is literally forced and, secondly, because in a large number of cases where the responsibility of the State is not identified, it nevertheless underlies it in a subterranean manner” (Calveiro 2021). 10  Hybrid disappearances are understood as those that unfold in a framework of defenselessness due to the coalescence between organized crime and state agents. The porous nature of the Mexican judicial framework is intertwined with a system of impunity that prevents access to truth, justice, reparation, and non-repetition. There are multiple cases of municipal presidents, governors of different states, and officials of all levels who have been placed in strategic positions by organized crime and unscrupulous businessmen. The case of Genaro García Luna, charged by the US justice system, shows the difficulty of trials for the hundreds of thousands of crimes committed in national territory due to the infiltration of organized crime in the functions of the state (Martínez Martínez and Díaz Estrada 2021). 8

16

2  Forced Disappearances of Persons in Mexico: Drugs, Social Control, and Regimes…

common point of view criminalizes or revictimizes the disappeared persons and their relatives as they represent a precarious and marginalized sector. The sole existential condition or way of life constitutes a motive for disappearance. The plurality of life manifestations is agglutinated in the destructive violence that bursts and disrupts the daily flow in a deep and continuous way; until the effects of disappearance appear to persist in the survivors, the body-territories show the power of archiving by safeguarding the pain as chalk that inscribes the position in the multiple power relations where stigma, contempt, and perjury instruct the distribution of the value of life. The detection traced by hegemonic discursive regimes generates uncertain or random disappearances, whose function installs social control devices. Fear inflames the imaginaries and expectations of power to place a space of doubt in popular narratives where not-knowing opens the space of ambiguity and revictimization of people who have been woven from this serious violation of human rights. Relatives of disappeared persons listen, with despair and impotence, to statements of authorities who link the practices of people with the causes of their disappearance to cover up and deny their responsibility.11 “Disappearances do not count” and “without a body there is no crime” form the strategies of authorities who use disappearances to reduce crime rates in their territories (Sanz 2022). In the field of hegemonic collusion between organized crime and the impunity of some state agents, disobedience and owing superiors are conditions that expose more rigorously to disappearance. Being in the “wrong moment” forms the accumulation of expressions that make the relatives refrain from pointing out the perpetrators, be they institutional authorities or members of organized crime, in order not to generate reprisals that add to the accumulation of disasters that occurred with the disappearance. The detection regime allows the continuation of an identifying registry that generates terror and imposes an iron order, immovable in its meanings and transmissible in its contents through images, representations, and narratives that are sedimented in the culture and become part of the micropowers that materialize the bodies in different ways and moments of history. The multiplicity of circumstances surrounding forced disappearances maintains relations of coherence and continuity in intersectionality, that is, in the imaginaries of disposability of the disappeared, profitability of the disappearance, and prestige for the perpetrators. This unfolds a matrix of intelligibility whose register is installed in the body, in the way of appearing in the world, through regulatory practices that produce coherent identities in the framework of a disseminated sovereignty that generally coincides with the beginning of periods of violence or when repression becomes necessary to maintain the political order. On the other hand, disappearance implies the practice of detention. Detention-­ disappearance is a complex of exceptionalities and continuities that dislocates the  The voice of the hundreds of collectives seems to reproduce the same structure in pointing out the link between authorities and perpetrators (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= WT2GCqiBVn0&t=450s). 11

Methodological Note

17

investigation. It can pass for a kidnapping, but there is a refusal to recognize the detention, as well as the possibility of exercising unusual violence, of humiliations that go beyond any form of imagination. Detention-disappearance (Gatti 2008) is mainly carried out by means of state agents. They may be officers of the different security forces (police, military, marines), members of organized crime in official uniforms or in semi-official clothing, or they may be a combination of state personnel and members of organized crime in collusion with each other (Ansolabehere and Martos 2021, 76). In both the north of the country and the south-central zone, the expected outcome of arbitrary detention is disappearance. The official narrative has explained arbitrary detentions as “levantones” as a cruel and brutal aspect of criminal practices. However, versions of the failed state encourage interpretations that dissolve state responsibility and control of territory and repression. The Cerezo Collective has been one of the few references that maintains the strategic use of organized crime to guarantee the monopoly of violence, pointing out that organized crime responds to the interests not only of economic flows but also to the political continuity established by the State: It is erroneously believed that the policy of forced disappearance developed by the Mexican State in the period known as the “dirty war” was mechanically transferred as a practice of organized crime to what was called “levantones”. This explanation is based on the fact that military and police from different state security organs became corrupted and became part of organized crime and transferred the policy of forced disappearance to the territorial and market fight between the different organized crime groups. In this explanation, disappearances in Mexico are mainly due to the practice of disappearance committed by organized crime (Comité Cerezo Mexico 2018, 20).

Another matrix of intelligibility of disappearance is forged not only from neoliberal coordinates (Calveiro 2021) but also by the conditions generated by a policy subordinated to economic flows that become intermediate actors with influence in both legal and paralegal instances. In this sense, the framework of intellection is carried out from political-economic logics that monetize the disappearance of persons; that is to say, forced disappearances have been impregnated with economic motives. The connection between human trafficking for the purpose of sexual and labor exploitation establishes closer links between femicides and forced disappearances (femi-­ disappearances) and the progressive profitability of repressions. This matrix of intellection claims structures of production, circulation and distribution of goods, currencies, privileges, and influence with which inequalities are produced and reproduced.

Methodological Note In order to consider these ways of understanding the forced disappearance of persons in Mexico, we have mainly considered the central-southern region of the country (Guerrero, Puebla, State of Mexico, Puebla, Veracruz), as well as the northwestern region (Michoacán, Jalisco, Sinaloa), through the links established with the

18

2  Forced Disappearances of Persons in Mexico: Drugs, Social Control, and Regimes…

collectives of relatives of disappeared persons articulated in the Network of National Links (Red de Enlaces Nacionales) and human rights organizations, as Miguel Agustín Pro-Juárez Center, Tlachinollan and the Cerezo Collective. The MORLAN initiative12 was used for the open information of the official websites offered by the government. Stata was also used, but especially were ethnographies in the National Search Brigades (BNB) in Huitzuco, Guerrero, in 2017; the V BNB in Papantla, Poza Rica, Tihuatlán, in 2020; and the one carried out in Morelos in 2021 and 2022. Also the collaborations carried out in the field searches with the collective The Voice of the Disappeared in Puebla generated elements that allow to deepen, sensitize, and document in a qualitative way the dynamics of disappearance through interviews, testimonies of family members, and documentary analysis. Although there are many limitations to recover information, especially the information that is generated in rural and ancestral communities, as well as in territories where investigations and consultations become impossible, the silent solidarity of a multitude of academics and journalists who generate local investigations and cover the space between the normality of daily life and the harsh reality of the forced disappearance of persons that affect thousands of families is used.

Disappearances in the Center-South Region With the limitations on our shoulders, we have managed to trace certain elements that allow us to consider the dynamics and rationalities of forced disappearance. The need to establish certain indexes of the network of actors, logics, and frameworks of disappearance has allowed the territorial elaboration forged from the crossings established with the collectives linked through the Network of National Links, which cross the juridical limits of the different entities of the country, due to the search for their disappeared relatives. Some territories and regions seem to live in undeclared wars where the vast majority of the population finds itself assimilating the banality of the atrocious and the unsustainable (Diéguez and Perrée 2018). Bodies embroidered amidst violence, woven with pain, articulate an archive of feelings, practices, and resistances. They become bodies-archives grounded in the processes of shaping memories where the political violence of the state takes place. Archives made bodies-territory, materialities situated and aggrieved by shared forms of violence and impunity. Thus, from Colima, Jalisco, and Sinaloa, the social tragedy is shared with Puebla, State of Mexico, Guerrero, Morelos, and Veracruz, as regions that can be considered as a geographical, social, economic block, unified by the serious violations of human rights, in general, and the forced disappearance of persons, in particular.

 It is a crate to consume public data especially from the Public Version of the National Registry of Missing and Unaccounted for Persons in Mexico. 12

Disappearances in the Center-South Region

19

The importance of these states lies in establishing a production, circulation and distribution belt not only for the external market but also for the internal market, in which links with the North American and South American markets are strengthened (not only for drugs but also for human trafficking for sexual and labor exploitation, as well as with transnational businessmen who seek the territories and south-north corridors). One of the specific elements of this region is the high level of violence linked to drugs, humans, arms, and fuel trafficking. The traditional Golden Triangle of Chihuahua, Sinaloa, and Durango, where more than 12,000 tons of poppy and marijuana were planted, has given way to the geographical strip dominated by the Jalisco Cartel – New Generation (CJNG), which has a presence in 22 of the country’s 32 states. This is in stark contrast to the beginning of the decade, when the organization only had control in the state of Jalisco (Infobae 2022, Chávez Llamas et al. 2022). In the context of economic and migratory problems, the specific problems of the localities, the destruction of the social fabric, and the irruption of synthetic drugs, with which the drug trafficking industry is established and the territory is reorganized, mainly by the Sinaloa Cartel and CJNG, are added to the above-mentioned problems (Iantia Intelligence 2020). The social decomposition that has generated the ecosystems of violence establishes an economic, political, and cultural base knotted to precariousness, vulnerability, and defenselessness as frameworks of intelligibility of forced disappearance. The mark of disappearance has to be considered from the political regime where it occurs (Tassin 2017, Calveiro 2021), and its logics are established from not only institutional practices but also from procedures and tactics oriented to the modulation of the population, the disposition of resources and people’s behavior, from security strategies, and from the dissemination of discourses and truths. In the context of drug and hydrocarbon trafficking, human trafficking for sexual and labor exploitation, as well as forced disappearance, precariousness, vulnerability, and defenselessness forge logics of disappearance in the central-southern region. The constant and unpunished presence of violence generates an extreme subalternity that crystallizes in the criminal nodes and, under the installation of a network of public, private and clandestine mobile devices, offers a framework of impunity. However, it also provokes the emergence of collectives of relatives and the existence of institutional organizations that, driven by the families (with the objection of the political groups in office), show the ways in which power and its resistances establish territorial tensions that go beyond the demarcations of the federal entities. The map in Fig. 2.1 identifies a strip where not only the most emblematic cities of the country are concentrated, but also the region of the states where homicides occur with greater forcefulness. The consideration of homicides is established according to the relationship with disappearance, since the concealment of bodies reduces homicide rates and, with this, the image of stability and efficiency of public policies is highlighted. However, one of the characteristics of this region is the high levels of violence and the ways in which crime establishes strict systems of regulation to guarantee the continuity and supply of drugs and humans and arms trafficking, both for the internal and external markets. The collusion of state agents with

20

2  Forced Disappearances of Persons in Mexico: Drugs, Social Control, and Regimes…

Fig. 2.1  Map of homicides. (Source: Crime in Mexico. Valle Jones 2020)

organized crime has been one of the inconsistencies of the War on Drugs, initiated in 2006 with Felipe Calderón, continued by Enrique Peña Nieto and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, which has generated processes of militarization of public security increasing the serious violations of human rights.13 The militarization process does not stop with the disappearances; on the contrary, the strategic linkage between military (National Guard) and state and local police unifies under one same command. These practices translate into a national deployment of military operations under a highly punitive scheme, under the argument of the corruption of solid and incorruptible civilian institutions, reason for which the processes of militarization of internal security are motivated and incentivized with the negative consequences on civil-military relations (Mendoza Cortés 2016, Human Rights Watch 2013). The convergence of human and material resources, open communication circuits, and paralegal pacts with the authorities has led organized crime to generate disappearances based on a military rationality that is not guided by a symbolic subjective construction of values, but by protocol elements and codes of behavior. Karina García (2021), after listening to narratives of hired assassins, suggests the production of precarious subjective and material conditions, generating a systemic prejudice and impregnated with unattainable expectations that establish spirals of unimaginable violence and cruelty. Thus she also points out the reiteration of a military governmentality that establishes disciplinary mechanisms and personnel organization regimes that are displaced to organized crime: “in that aspect, as in many others of the training, the closeness of their practices with military training was

 As I am writing this, the news of the murder of six young men at the hands of the military in Nuevo Laredo breaks out. 13

Forced Disappearance: Between Vulnerability and Helplessness

21

evident (…) the military do the same, even worse things than the cartels” (García Reyes 2021, 57). Danilo Martucelli (2010) analyzes the imprint left by the capitalist mode of production on social relations in Latin America, as well as the role of labor, wealth, and the individual in the field of neoliberal deregulations. In this field, in areas where the collusion between organized crime and public service has become a very lucrative activity, it is not enough to guarantee a status and social prestige, a sphere of recognition and validation to those who have taken these practices as axes of their profession. Their validation continues to be linked, first and foremost, to geographical, ethnic, social, generic, and educational conditions. For his part, Gilles Bataillon (2015) considers the collaborator of organized crime, the mafioso, the member of la maña, a term used to designate those who, because of their ambiguous activities whether legal, illegal, or paralegal, are stigmatized not only for their activities but also for their intersectionalities. In this sense, the variety of forms in which the forced disappearance of people is deployed, whether as expressions of repression and social and territorial control, or because they refuse to cooperate with criminal activities, or as in all groups, what is most punished, is, “firstly, the theft of money or merchandise, and secondly, betrayal of the cartel, including betrayal of people at different levels of government who were colluding with the organization” (García Reyes 2021, 58). From a materialist point of view, each mode of production (in this case capitalist) entails a specific sexual order that determines how desires and pleasures are socially structured, how they are regulated, and how they are distributed according to a particular system of organization of production and reproduction. The paradoxical condition of forced disappearance is found in the conditions of recognition that social environments establish. Between political transitions, democratic aspirations, demands for recognition, and validation are forged between precariousness, vulnerability, and defenselessness. Although the logics of invisibilization of forced disappearance in the central-south zone of Mexico show a variety of expressions, the varied ways of its realization show the way in which forced disappearance seeks to go unnoticed by all possible means, not only denied by the authorities but also silenced by the rest of the societies.

 orced Disappearance: Between Vulnerability F and Helplessness How to understand life regulated by the rhythms of work, daily activities, and the struggle with the insistence of precariousness, family care, and forced disappearances? These frameworks of understanding make it possible to understand some referential elements of forced disappearance in Mexico during the last few years and call to make visible and point out the devastation of bodies-territories in order to distinguish the lives-bodies-territories that are susceptible to care and those that

22

2  Forced Disappearances of Persons in Mexico: Drugs, Social Control, and Regimes…

are to disappear. Philippe Bourgois’s acute text, In Search of Respect (2010), also questions the way in which bodies, territories, subjectivities are likely to be valued, recognized, and appreciated in a framework organized by the “criminal industry” (Gonzalez Villarreal 2022a, b, 1), which forms the economic, political, and cultural base that abrogates the power and the right to decide who is worthy of being recognized or disappeared. Precarization,14 exclusion, vulnerability, and defenselessness, as an initial approximation, can be considered as notions where the collusion between government and organized crime produces or appropriates goods and services that distribute, circulate, and regulate them. In other words, they build social relations, delimit jurisdictions, create and regulate communities as vectors of political production (González Villarreal 2022a, b, 503). It is in this framework where life persists and unfolds from eminently social and political notions that maximize the risk of this life ceasing to persist and/or appear.15 Economic, historical, and cultural conditions generate social precariousness that outlines fundamental structures of the human condition, different from any other social or political organization. The body is a territory in conflict and subject to norms and to social, political, legal, and paralegal organizations, which have historically developed in order to maximize precariousness for some and cancel it for others. In this sense, forced disappearance generates a device that affects the most radical condition of the human being’s situation in the world, the body. The forced disappearance of the body is the result of a regime of property, accumulation, and performance as a form of control and social production. The multiple discursive conditions not only exert their effect in terms of power, but also in the productivity and emergence of violence. Iniquity crystallizes by sedimenting situations of dignified lives, desirable to be lived, whose environments are articulated by affirmative

 I follow Butler’s considerations in Precarious Lives (2006) but I do not consider the distinction between precariousness and precarity, which in the Spanish translation ended up being expressed as precariedad and precaridad respectively in the translator’s note in Frames of War (2010, 15). 15  There are many cases of forced disappearance that are woven from defenselessness and discrimination. Based on the closeness of the collective The Voice of the Disappeared in Puebla, we have met Eladio Ramírez Romero and María Juliana Hernández, parents of Jorge Ramírez Hernández, who was disappeared in June 2019 in Huejotzingo, Puebla, to whom we express our solidarity. In that place was “where a month later authorities found a clandestine grave with five lifeless bodies after the plagiarism of a state official, which they refused for a long time to identify. Three and a half years later, his parents were informed that among the bodies found was Jorge, who had spent three years in a mass grave when his family was looking for him. The State General Prosecutor’s Office (FGE) refused to compare Jorge’s genetic profile with the bodies found, stating that his halfsibling did not match, so he was sent to the mass grave. The disappearance of the civil servant provoked a broad and coordinated search, which evidenced a selective and discriminatory action, since the rest of the people found in the grave were not identified. On June 27, 2019, Jorge was deprived of his freedom in a business of buying and selling scrap metal in the auxiliary board of Santa Ana Xalmimilulco, when a green military van from which hooded and armed subjects descended took him away. Jorge’s remains have still not been delivered to his relatives for funeral services, so the IDHIE demanded that his relatives be treated with dignity in the process, and that his disappearance be clarified” (Juárez 2023). 14

Forced Disappearance: Between Vulnerability and Helplessness

23

intersectionalities and valued by social diversity. However, disposable lives (Ansolabehere and Martos 2021) and disappeared bodies manifest the regimes that define the possibilities of living or dying. Defenselessness is produced by the economic, political, and social regimes, which is what makes the historical materiality of the body become an ontology of disappearance. The body exposed to social and politically articulated forces makes the disappearance of bodies possible: material extensions, bodies-territories.16 In the face of insecurity, scarcity, low quality of jobs, instability—attributes that are identified in the precariousness of the body-territories—persistence unfolds. The theological, moral, and political illusion pretends to situate the good and the bad, the just and the unjust, the pleasant and the unpleasant, outside the immanence of the human condition, but the body puts in relation the historical character and the socio-cultural condition, which constitute the life of the body, the idea that “the parts of the body are preserved” (Spinoza 1987, IV, Proposition 39) in conditions where the historical processes take the bodies-territories to clothe them with lacking insignia. From this intellectual tradition, the passage from potency to act implies the movement that culminates, perfects and fulfils that which manifests and acts exempt from effects. The good and the bad are not defined in relation to abstract conditions, but to concrete affections in relation to the persistence of life, of the materiality of bodies. Bodies-territories become archives of the violence of power that narrate the assemblages of forced disappearance, a phenomenon that is configured in a network of ongoing, unstable and circulating formations. Disappearance attempts to erase the link between flesh and multiple political, social, and economic constructs; however, in its cancellation, they are shown in the obscene perpetuation of institutions, discourses, practices, desires, technologies, languages, relations, circuits, and cultural artifacts. Disappearance makes visible both the cooperation of interests and the dynamics of intersectional domination. In forced disappearance, the reverse of the epistemes of Western capitalist modernity is made visible, circulating in the different categories and socio-political hierarchies that frame certain subjects as disposable so that the pinnacle of civilization and development maintains its gaze on the world and its forms of relation on earth: the liminality of the disappeared body (Diéguez Caballero 2021). Forced disappearance is part of the exalted democratic emergence urged by the great chain of humanity, the legitimization of desirable forms of life to be lived anchored in the systematic denial of the violence exercised on the bodies of others while their clamour and suffering are silenced or mocked. The forced disappearance of bodies must be considered from an anamnetic territoriality, archival-territories whose corporeality is the scene of political violence  I recover the case of the young people murdered in Nuevo Laredo (Ferri 2023) to underline the damaging character of the discourses mobilized from stereotyped, stigmatizing, and criminalizing positions toward precarious and discredited young people located in a structural condition where futures are questioned. The media and the conservative positions of civil society are present, close, and make sure that the majority of the population identify these young people as the cause of social violence: death machines that must be eliminated (Valenzuela Arce 2017, 39). 16

24

2  Forced Disappearances of Persons in Mexico: Drugs, Social Control, and Regimes…

perpetrated by the state. The persistence of the forced disappearance of persons has become a cultural artifact not only showing the critical causes of violence and power but also where political violence denies the legal identity of the subject as property of the body (habeas corpus). This difference, subtraction, does not evaporate in the cosmic dynamics, but is installed as a device that increases the privilege by the subtraction of the body, in the symbolic order, and the invisibilization of the flesh, pre-­ critical order. In this sense, the different mechanisms that the law establishes are the same processes by which the social disappeared experience the “cartographies of abandonment” (Gatti 2022) and suffer the processes of administrative cruelty in which bodies-territories are maintained in their existence, and carry with them, communicate and transform knowledge and memories, both personal and collective. Bodies-territories, hieroglyphs of the flesh (Spillers 1987), are undecipherable from thought but transmissible through the senses, an epidermal turn that not only goes beyond representation, but also implies it. In this way, the disappeared bodies are the territories denied by regimes of power and ontologies of profitability. There, in the midst of soporific conditions, the dynamics by which subjugation keeps the disappeared and their families without justice are unveiled. Delving into the subtle materiality of disappearance, into the assemblages of disappearance, requires overcoming the conceptualizations that underline the hypercategorizations of power and violence. When considering the body-territory, life is embroidered underlining the marginal care and the daily practices of transformation of reality from sweetness and joy, from the solidarity established in the life of leftovers, from minor emancipations generated from clandestine life (Sánchez Hernández 2021) because the zones of total abjection do not completely annihilate the (im)possible possibilities of existence, of relationships, of differentiated ways of inhabiting the world. The body-territory allows to exist, to live, to relate to each other (Marchese 2019). The radical sense of location, affection, and thought unfolds in the place of the body, historical construction of memory, where the body occupies and uses a material space as a dynamic sphere of understanding and as the sustenance of vital experiences, deep and superficial, trivial and fundamental. The body-territory is the scenario where violence is opposed and healed. From the singularity of the body, from the difference of the territory, the marks, the histories, and the traces of life that become necessary to recognize, reappropriate, and heal them are displayed.

Conclusion Forced disappearances have not ceased in Mexico, a country plagued by impunity. The governmental regime of forced disappearances has become visible, as well as the multiple forms of violence and criminality that exist around them. The different objectives of forced disappearance, as control, discipline, profitability, both of bodies and territories, are dynamized in the mobile assemblies that guarantee their continuity.

References

25

Forced disappearance is linked in a legal-paralegal feedback that persists in the social and political dynamics, as well as in the rogue institutions that maintain the security strategies that result in the increase of this historical disaster. In the factious participation of state agents, forced disappearances have multiplied in light of the processes of militarization of security. Disappearance is a criminal act, a crime committed by the collaboration, omission, or coalescence of state agents. This situation facilitates misinformation about the specific numbers of people in situations of forced disappearance, as well as the lack of investigation and articulation between the different instances responsible for justice.

References Amnesty International. 2012. City of the Disappeared: Three decades searching for missing persons in Guatemala. November 19. https://www.amnesty.org/es/latest/news/2012/11/city-­ disappeared-­three-­decades-­searching-­guatemalas-­missing/. Last accessed 17 Jan 2023. Ansolabehere, Karina, and Álvaro Martos. 2021. Disappearances in Mexico: an analysis based on the Northeast Region. In Disappearances in the post-transition era in Latin America, ed. Barbara A.  Frey, Leigh A.  Payne, and Karina Ansolabehere, 73–96. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bataillon, Gilles. 2015. Drug trafficking and corruption: The forms of violence in Mexico in the 21st century. Nueva Sociedad No 255, January–February: 54–68. Bourgois, Philippe. 2010. In search of respect. Selling crack in Harlem. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. Butler, Judith. 2006. Precarious life. The power of grief and violence. Buenos Aires: Paidós. ———. 2010. Frames of war. Las vidas lloradas. Barcelona: Paidós. Calveiro, Pilar. 2021. Disappearance and governmentality in Mexico. Historia y Grafía, year 28, no. 56, January–June: 17–52. https://doi.org/10.48102/hyg.vi56.355 Centro de Memoria Histórica. 2020. Observatory of memory and conflict. January 17. http:// micrositios.centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/observatorio/portal-­de-­datos/base-­de-­datos/. Last accessed 12 Feb 2023. Chávez Llamas, N.E., I.  Vargas, S.E.  Velázquez Moreno, and A.  García De Loera. 2022. Methamphetamine and the CJNG. Analysis of a reconfiguration of the illegal substance market in western Mexico. Kaleidoscope – Revista Semestral De Ciencias y Humanidades 26 (47). https://doi.org/10.33064/47crscsh3362. Comité Cerezo Mexico. 2018. Vivos los queremos. Keys to understanding forced disappearance in Mexico. Mexico City: Viandante. Diéguez Caballero, Ileana. 2021. Liminal bodies. The performativity of the search. Córdoba: DocyumentA/Escénicas. Diéguez, Ileana, and Caroline Perrée. 2018. Preface. Bodies and memories. Living and thinking in contexts of violence. In Cuerpos memorables, Ileana Diéguez and Caroline Perrée (coordinators), 9–26. Mexico City: CEMCA. Ferri, Pablo. 2023. La muerte a balazos de cinco jóvenes supuestamente a manos del Ejército siembra el caos en Nuevo Laredo. El País, February 27. https://elpais.com/mexico/2023-­02-­27/ la-­muerte-­de-­cinco-­jovenes-­supuestamente-­a-­manos-­del-­ejercito-­siembra-­el-­caos-­en-­nuevo-­ laredo.html. Gamiño Muñoz, Rodolfo. 2020. The homeland of the absent. Un acercamiento al estudio de la desaparición forzada en México. Mexico City: Las Brechas en el Tiempo/Universidad Iberoamericana.

26

2  Forced Disappearances of Persons in Mexico: Drugs, Social Control, and Regimes…

García Reyes, Karina. 2021. Dying is a relief. The revealing stories of 12 ex-narcos who managed to escape organized crime. Mexico City: Grijalbo. Gatti, Gabriel. 2008. The detainee-disappeared. Narrativas posibles para una catástrofe de la identidad. Montevideo: Trilce. ———. 2022. Desaparecidos. Cartografías del abandono. Mexico City: Turner/Noema. González Villarreal, Roberto. 2022a. La desaparición forzada en México. From repression to profitability. Mexico City: Terracotta. ———. 2022b. Forced disappearance in Mexico. From repression to profitability. Mexico City: Terracotta. Human Rights Watch. 2013. Mexico‘s Disappeared. The lingering cost of an ignored crisis. New York: HRW. Iantia Intelligence. 2020. Criminal map. Mexico 2019–2020. Executive version, Mexico City: Iantia Intelligence. Infobae. 2022. War map: the regions where the CJNG extended its power in 2021. Infobae, January 13. https://www.infobae.com/america/mexico/2022/01/13/ mapa-­de-­guerra-­las-­regiones-­donde-­el-­cjng-­extendio-­su-­poder-­en-­2021/. Juárez, Guadalupe. 2023. Jorge Ramirez, missing since 2019, located; authorities blocked his identification. Manatee. We are what we count, January 27. https://manati.mx/2023/01/27/fiscalia-­ de-­puebla-­bloqueo-­identificacion-­de-­jorge-­ramirez-­desaparecido-­desde-­2019-­huejotzingo/?fb clid=IwAR3qOkhfpmpq3tKfZM6yJk5V4Y1qiHQEXP_YIml_plWr2voNCiPIV4UrFqg. Marchese, Giulia. 2019. From the body in the territory to the body-territory: Elements for a Latin American feminist genealogy of the critique of violence. EntreDiversidades. Journal of social sciences and humanities 13: 9–41. https://doi.org/10.31644/ED.V6.N2.2019.A01. Martínez Martínez, Miguel Angel, and Francisco Díaz Estrada. 2021. Las desapariciones forzadas: filosofía biopolítica y tragedia social. Mexico City: Castellanos. Martínez Martínez, Miguel Angel, and Javiera Donoso. 2022. Human trafficking and forced disappearances in the Sierra Norte de Puebla. Análisis de contexto regional, Puebla: ­ CONCYTEP. Martucelli, Danilo. 2010. Are there individuals in the south? Saniago de Chile: LOM. Mendoza Cortés, Alma Paloma. 2016. Mexican army operations against drug trafficking: Review and current events. Revista Política y Estrategia 128: 17–53. Ministry of the Interior. 2020. National Registry of Missing and Unaccounted for Persons. June 21. https://versionpublicarnpdno.segob.gob.mx/Dashboard/ContextoGeneral. Last accessed 21 Feb 2023. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. 1992. International convention for the protection of all persons from forced disappearance of persons. https://www.ohchr. org/es/instruments-­mechanisms/instruments/international-­convention-­protection-­all-­persons-­ enforced. New York: OHCHR. Romero Laullón, Ricardo, and Arantxa Tirado Sánchez. 2016. La clase obrera no va al paraíso. Crónica de una desaparición forzada. Madrid: Akal. Sánchez Hernández, Ana Luisa. 2021. Life in the shadows. Guerrilla subjectivities [David Cabañas and the Party of the Poor]. PhD Thesis, Puebla: UDLAP. Sanz, José Abraham. 2022. No body, no crime. Ya nunca apareicó. Noroeste, January 24. https:// www.noroeste.com.mx/inndaga/sin-­cuerpo-­no-­hay-­delito-­ya-­nunca-­aparecio-­GL1814778. Spillers, Hortense J. 1987. Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book. Diacritics 17 (2): 64–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/464747. Spinoza, Baruch. 1987. Ética. Madrid: Alianza. Tapia Olivares, Luis Eliud. 2022. Manual sobre desapsrición de personas. Mexico City: Suprema Corte de Juisticia de la Nación. Tassin, Etienne. 2017. Disappearance in bookish societies. In DEsappearances. Usos locales, circulaciones globales, ed. Gabriel Gatti, 99–117. Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores.

References

27

UN Committee on Forced Disappearances. 2022. Report of the Committee on Forced Disappearances on its visit to Mexico under Article 33 of the Convention. Mexico City: UN. Valenzuela Arce, José Manuel. 2017. Ayotzinapa: juvenicidio, necropolítica y recarización. In Precriedades, exclusiones y emercencias. Necropolitics and society in Latin America, ed. Mabel Moraña and José Manuel Valenzuela Arce, 37–52. Mexico City: Gedisa/UAM. Valle Jones, Diego. 2020. Crime in Mexico. January 17. https://elcri.men/. Last accessed 1 Feb 2023. Velasco Vargas, Magali. 2020. Necronarratives in Mexico. Discurso y poética del dolor (2006–2019). San Luis Potosi: Colegio de San Luis. Vicente Ovalle, Camilo. 2019. [Time suspended] A history of forced disappearance in Mexico, 1940–980. Mexico City: Bonilla Artigas.

Chapter 3

Forced Internal Migration in Mexico: Displacement, Stigmatization, and Expectations in Chichihualco, Guerrero

In some parts of Mexico, it is difficult to consider when things went wrong because they were never right. The multiplication of violence in the last two decades has generated a series of catastrophic consequences for a population that moves between grievance, indignation, and demands for justice in a transgenerational way. There is a broad consensus in considering the War on Drugs and the processes of militarization of public security as a catalyst for the precariousness of the human rights of Mexicans and foreigners that have been violated systematically and, in some cases, in a generalized manner. In Mexico, all people can affirm the existence of serious violations of human rights, where forced internal displacement is linked to the damage that people suffer in their bodies, environments, and projects. This has forged imaginaries in which horrifying realities are entrenched that surpass the fantasies offered by the outbursts of failed governments, the intimidation of frightened societies, and the excesses of unstoppable criminal systems. In this sense, the human rights discourse has served as a field that mobilizes to point out, make visible and demand, politically and legally, truth, memory, justice, reparation, and non-repetition for those affected. It is a discourse that is used politically when legal resources are limited. The human rights crisis is exacerbated by the national and international consensus of the various specialized jurisdictional and non-jurisdictional bodies to address the situation as a whole and in an individualized manner in certain regions of Mexico. The call for attention has the objective that human rights be respected, protected, and guaranteed and that possible future aggressions be prevented (Anaya-­ Muñoz and Frey 2018, ITESO/CMDPDH 2018). According to data from the Refugee Agency of the United Nations (UN), Mexico presents more than 40,000 people in a situation of internal displacement (UNHCR 2022) of which 2021 registered the highest number ever recorded of displaced people due to situations of violence and serious human rights violations. This was almost double the number recorded in 2020. In this sense, Michoacán is positioned as the state with the highest © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. A. Martínez Martínez, Bodies, Territories and Serious Violations of Human Rights in Mexico, SpringerBriefs in Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42712-1_3

29

30

3  Forced Internal Migration in Mexico: Displacement, Stigmatization…

number of forced internal displacement with 26,508 people, followed by Guerrero with 23,598 and Chiapas with 22,070 (CMDPDH 2022, 73). The organization of territories through the failure of security policies, articulated with social ostracism and the hegemonic dynamics of organized crime, results in political violence, social conflict, and human rights violations that force people to move. In this sense, forced internal displacement is characterized by persons or groups of persons who are forced to flee their homes or habitual residence in order to avoid the effects of violence generated by organized armed groups,1 by situations of generalized violence, intimidation, or hostilities that violate human rights and that are maintained in the national territory. Although the phenomenon of forced internal displacement in Mexico has persisted since the 1960s, caused mainly by religious issues, territorial conflicts, or access to natural resources, in subsequent decades, it was linked to political-military elements where guerrillas or clandestine armed movements were intervened by the Army. In the last decade of the twentieth century, mobilizations intensified due to the conflict in Chiapas that originated an unprecedented internal population displacement (CMDPCH 2014). Since 2006, with the War on Drugs, to the previous situations was added the militarization process in the different territories of the country where armed violence spread, generating multiple aggressions against the population, as well as prolonged displacements and the uncertainty of internally displaced persons in the absence of consistent solutions, many of whom are waiting to be recognized as “victims” by the state or with the possibility of asylum mainly in the United States. Forced internal displacement in Mexico affects society as a whole by generating uncertainty and intensifying feelings of abandonment in daily, existential, and emotional aspects. The seriousness of forced internal displacement not only underlines the vulnerability of life but also of records that are difficult to objectify, especially in structurally vulnerable populations: the elderly, children, women, and indigenous and peasant populations, who flee their homes as a result of criminal acts committed against them or against their immediate surroundings, or due to elaborate fears in situations of high insecurity and impunity. Guerrero and Chiapas are the states that have maintained displacements in the last four years, where violence and disputes over territories are the main causes and the indigenous population is the most affected. Of these territories, in the Montaña de Guerrero, forced displacements are culturally and politically unnoticed as they belong to the interstitial world between the legal and the illegal. In a region abundant in forests and water, with subsoils rich in minerals, gold, silver, and iron awaiting extraction, the bodies-territories are linked to processes of colonization, exploitation, and dispossession by the collusion of legal and paralegal actors. Whether among the traditional chiefdoms, cattle ranching, cultivation of illicit crops (poppy, marijuana, and logging), life is sustained in conditions of poverty and the

 Organized armed groups are defined as cartels, groups, associations, or gangs dedicated to criminal, paralegal, or illegal activities. 1

3  Forced Internal Migration in Mexico: Displacement, Stigmatization…

31

most precarious population resists by putting the body as an archive of violence and grievances (Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Montaña, Tlachinollan 2022a, b; Illades and Santiago 2019; Giménez Delgado 2021). The zone has been witness of events that go from the low intensity war, initiated in the sixties against the guerrilla movements of Lucio Cabañas, the disappearance of the 43 missing students on September 26, 2014, to the constant displacements that mobilized a 91-day sit-in in front of the Secretary of the Interior in Mexico City to get the government’s attention on the situation in the municipalities of Leonardo Bravo and Zitlala, Guerrero (Centro Morelos 2021). With this demonstration, women, girls, boys, men, and elderly people showed the network of impunity that is woven in the municipal and state governments to strengthen the economic interests of caciques, criminal, and business bosses. The voracity shown by the “gold belt” of the state of Guerrero, where thousands of hectares are concessioned to mining companies from China and Canada, has led to a “fierce dispute between the different organized crime groups to take control of the territory” (Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Montaña, Tlachinollan 2022a, b), as it has also been demonstrated by the José María Morelos y Pavón Human Rights Center (Centro de Derechos Humanos José María Morelos y Pavón) in its accompaniment of the communities in the region since 2011. Faced with the task of dealing with these events, the need arises to attenuate the effect or impact on personal experience, especially in order to give the necessary weight to the serious violations of human rights. The experiences shared with the Centro Morelos de Derechos Humanos accompanying the displaced women and men of Leonardo Bravo (Chichihualco), Filo de Caballos, Carrizal de Bravo demands, in an unpostponable way, the exercise of common thought and deliberation. Listening to the uneasiness, pain, and suffering gave rise to ethnographies that allow us to consider once again the serious violations of human rights in places where the lives of certain sectors of the population are organized by dispossession and exploitation. The radicality of disproportionate experiences makes forced internal displacement an experience of horror that ties the political and the historical to deeply emotional instances and distresses that tear us apart. Fragmentation of life, of territories, of the links established in communality (Martínez Luna 2015) generates a perspective far from persuasive pretension. Considering the conditions and situations of the bodies, territories, and experiences of the displaced allows us to trace the marginalized zones of biographies archived in annulment and prejudice. In this sense, the challenge for these considerations will not only be to show the serious violation of human rights but also to insist before the exhaustive, discursive rationalities, organized in theories of specific representation, that the violated lives are annulled in the silence of academic and scientific opacity, that a multiplicity of bodies and territories are fueling economic progress at the point of contempt and dispossession. These considerations can be interpreted as one more denunciation of institutional and hegemonic violence, one more demand for the respect and fulfillment of human rights, one more reflection on the injustices and situations that occur in the territories of the Third World. This insistence is deployed by virtue of a constant, deep,

32

3  Forced Internal Migration in Mexico: Displacement, Stigmatization…

and aggravated indignation that is rooted in the struggle for daily survival of dozens of indigenous and peasant families who do not find peaceful ways of living in their territories. On their lands they suffer plundering and dispossession generated by unscrupulous politicians and businessmen, where contempt and disdain organize the daily way of exercising power. As victims of violence by the military, municipal, state and federal police they are exposed to the impunity of organized crime, they suffer the scourge of racial and ethnic discrimination by a civil society that reproduces colonialism and the subordination of a power that does not cease to inscribe itself in the bodies, in the territories. The bodies-territories that resist in these scenarios inspire and oxygenate life, their persistence encourages and strengthens us, their testimony comforts and vitalizes the story as a call.

Between Losses, Sieges, and Crime The historical, socio-political, and territorial condition of these localities has generated the constant mobilization of indigenous and peasant communities seeking the transformation of the imposed order. The indigenous population of the mountain transcends the organizational practices that confront the different expressions of state political violence, as well as the predatory logics of businessmen and organized crime. The discourse of marginalization and exclusion, coming from urban and centralized communities, has undermined the forms of organization and historical intervention of national relevance that have taken place in the region.2 Resistance, organization and political positioning have been maintained since colonial times (Dehouve 2009, 2016) up to the current multiple social and peasant struggles that unfold in the territory of the entity. The construction of territoriality and the distribution of spaces are marked by processes of racialization and the configuration of certain bodies articulated as disposable, as opposed to others that are understood from the place of life worthy of being lived (Butler 2006). When the region is translated from exploitation, dispossession, and impunity, the racialized illegality and the criminalization of the most unprotected allow the invisibility of their value as human beings. The value of bodies, territories, and differences becomes unintelligible because they are woven from stigmatized places. The existence of stigmatized territories makes invisible the processes in which the presence of the military and organized crime manages spaces. The discriminatory effects unfold disproportionately, annulling the cruelty and dissolving the consequences for bodies and communities. In this vein, the consequences of structural reforms have led to greater precariousness in the peasant and indigenous  The different territorialities form a continuum of segregation for the indigenous and peasant peoples of the region, intervening the organizational bases with caudillos and caciques who seek to maintain control and power. 2

Between Losses, Sieges, and Crime

33

economy, contributing to migration and the incursion into the market for the production of natural drugs such as poppy and marijuana, while young people are recruited by the cartels (Hernández Castillo 2017; Giménez Delgado 2021; Illades and Santiago 2019). The mountains of Guerrero, along with other regions of the country, have been particularly affected by militarization and violence generated by criminal groups, by virtue of the fact that these marginalized regions configure a field of isolation necessary for the production of illicit activities and unpunished practices. In this sense, the racialized and stigmatized geography unfolds in confined territories, with low population integration, road communication difficulties, an aggressive and exuberant geography, high levels of poverty, and low institutional intervention (Emmerich 2015). In the Montaña de Guerrero, there have been contexts of intense indigenous and peasant mobilizations against the militarization of communities, the dispossession of territories, and the impunity of collusion between organized crime and the state. Political violence by the state, through the security forces or, in a veiled manner, using paramilitary groups linked to organized crime, is part of the collective memory of the inhabitants of these regions. Violence and dispossession in the region have also been shaped by the racial and gender hierarchies that continue to prevail in our societies. It has been the indigenous and peasant peoples who have most resisted the vortex of privatization and commodification of resources, from epistemologies and worldviews that confront the utilitarian and individualistic perspective of capital. This resistance has earned them the labeling from hegemonic discourses as “backward and anti-progressive” and, in the worst cases, as terrorists and violent. Their territories are being violated by mining transnationals, energy megaprojects, the war on drugs, hydroelectric projects, often resulting in displacements that leave their lands “free” for capital (Hérnández and Aída 2014):3 The territorial dispute in the southern highlands has been sordid. As it is an inextricable region, the law is settled in the daily fights that take place between criminal organizations that settle in strategic niches to maintain their dominance. Municipal presidents and police officers are subordinate to the real power imposed by the highland bosses. The fierce dispute over the planting, transfer and commercialization of drugs is mixed with the economic interests of the mining companies. Carrizalillo and Media Luna show us the size of the environmental and community catastrophe that entails a high cost in human lives, massive forced displacements and a serious risk to survive under the shrapnel. This predatory model has intertwined the macroeconomic interests of transnational corporations with the baleful interests of organized crime. Armed groups are anointed as the guardians of big capital, those with a license to kill and assault populations that refuse to engage in illicit activities (Tlachinollan. Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Montaña 2020, 27).

 In Guerrero, where the disappearance of the young students took place, there have been important mobilizations against mining concessions in indigenous territories. According to government reports, there are 42 mining deposits in the state, ready to be exploited. But the places where mining is permitted coincide with 200,000 hectares of territories inhabited by members of the Nahua, Me’phaa, and Na savi indigenous communities. These peoples of the Montaña and Costa Chica have not been consulted in the granting of these concessions (Tlachinollan 2013). 3

34

3  Forced Internal Migration in Mexico: Displacement, Stigmatization…

The state of insecurity (Lowrey 2016) reproduced by rogue discourses have contributed to stigmatize the bodies organized by the axes of domination as disposable bodies of criminals who violate each other. Clientelism, corruption, militarization of security, extractivism, the continuity of exclusions, and structural discriminations are rooted in the organization of the political division, the economic system, and social inequalities. The articulation of these situations has led to prolonged displacements and to violence that is concentrated in the most vulnerable populations. For small communities in the mountains of Guerrero, the struggle for territory is intensified due to forest and mineral wealth, as well as the capture of labor for the cultivation of opioids and the emergence of new synthetic substances, such as fentanyl.4 Displacements are caused by a generalized violence motivated by organized armed groups, which are in permanent dispute for the control of the bodies-­ territories. The population is caught up in confrontations, intimidation, and armed incursions that not only cause damage to property and people’s bodies but also generate an environment of fear and threats, caused by assassinations, disappearances, and arbitrary detentions: Planting and trafficking has caused serious damage within the communities. There are internal divisions, organized crime groups that have imposed their law, assassinations of community authorities and agrarian leaders, disappearances, destruction and burning of homes, cattle theft and expulsion of families. The lives of children are being threatened and the physical integrity of women, especially young women, is being undermined (Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Montaña 2022a, b).

The Morelos Center for Human Rights (Centro de Derechos Humanos José María Morelos y Pavón) has provided close accompaniment to groups of people living in a situation of forced internal displacement. Some families from Leonardo Bravo (Chichihualco) and Zitlala carried out a 91-day sit-in, which ended on December 23, 2021, in front of the offices of the Ministry of the Interior, in order to obtain government protection through the Executive Commission for Attention to Victims, of the federal government.5 In this activity, girls, boys, women, men, and elderly  Fentanyl was invented for medical use, for chronic pain and anesthesia, but since the end of the last century synthetic opioids have been developed to replace the gum extracted from the poppy. Fentanyl increases the potency 50 times more than heroin and, therefore, its volume is much smaller. The privileges of fentanyl displaced poppy planting and striping, which led to community fragmentation and the persecution of populations due to the weakening of social support networks (Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Montaña 2022a, b; Giménez Delgado 2022). 5  Based on information provided by the National Human Rights Commission. (2018), since 1993, the rights of crime victims were included in Article 20 of the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States until the inclusion in 2008, as well as the constitutional reform on human rights in 2011. It has been building a solid constitutional foundation that recognizes and protects the rights of victims of crime and human rights violations. The constitutional change has led to the adaptation of the legislative and regulatory framework on the subject, as a result of the decisive impulse of social organizations and victims’ families. In this sense, the General Law on Victims was passed, an instrument that reflects international standards on the subject and provides for the creation of a National System of Attention to Victims, made up of public institutions and entities at the federal, state, federal district and municipal levels, autonomous agencies, as well as public and private 4

Between Losses, Sieges, and Crime

35

people, as well as the company of some people in solidarity, “gave strength and vitality to a just struggle where, unfortunately, the fulfillment of our rights continues to depend on the good will and sensitivity of the officials who have the obligation to fulfill them” (Centro Morelos 2021). Entire families displaced by threats from organized crime have attested to the way in which the harvesting of drugs, mainly poppy, has shifted to the exploitation of timber and mining. Almost no one grows poppy flowers anymore. The decrease in the price of opium gum has generated a series of problems in this regard. According to Teodomira Rosales, Director of the Morelos Center for Human Rights, “our work is in favor of the victims” and, as a result, the stigmatization of peasant and indigenous families, forced to cultivate poppy by organized crime, has been pointed out as criminals by a sector of the Mexican government. The difficult situation gave rise to a demonstration in front of the offices of the Ministry of the Interior, due to the double exposure of more than 130 families from the mountains of Guerrero: to the Mexican State and to organized crime. For some, they are criminals, while for others, they are cheap and safe workers. In an interview conducted on February 4, 2022, in Chilpancingo, Guerrero, with some displaced people from Izotepec, Los Morros, Campo de Aviación and Leonardo Bravo (Chichihualco), they shared the ways in which armed people burst into their communities, wound, kill and disappear to provoke terror, set fire to houses and crops to cancel all possibilities. Mrs. T tells how she searched for her disappeared son until she found him without being able to claim his body, “the maña (members of organized crime) were the ones who told me if I wanted to find my son. I said yes and they took me to where they had him. They told me: you know where he is, so you’d better get out if you don’t want to end up the same way” (Anónima 1 2022). The normality of the collusion between organized crime and local governments increases the impotence when mentioning the names of the leaders of criminal groups. Most of the displaced are in shelters due to the risk they suffer, while the recognition before the authorities as victims of internal forced displacement of multiple cases is being managed. In November 2018, 300 families were sheltered for several months in the Municipal Auditorium of Chichihualco. The material conditions of the building aggravated the precariousness of the displaced, and more than a hundred families still remain in different houses, waiting for protection or the support of relatives living in the United States or Canada to offer a shelter space. In environments threatened by violence and fear, maintaining memory and trust is not easy, especially when approaches privilege liberal normative perspectives that consider the violence generated against bodies-territories as an expression of a process of development and progress. These gloomy expressions of extractivist organizations related to victims. With this new legal framework, the Social Attorney’s Office for Attention to Victims, created in September 2011 to provide assistance and support to victims, was transformed in January 2014 into the federal Executive Commission for Attention to Victims (CEAV), which is empowered to provide legal advice and has a Fund for Aid, Assistance and Integral Reparation.

36

3  Forced Internal Migration in Mexico: Displacement, Stigmatization…

capitalism take the violence of the State as an armed arm, in the face of the efforts of peasant and indigenous groups, who claim for the defense of the territories they both inhabit and work in. Violence, in its most obscene expressions, is deployed against those whose body-territory conditions do not adhere to the normative demands of a capitalist, colonialist, and extractivist system. In spaces where the ideology of productivist success is not realized, the dynamics of property and exploitation seek to dismantle the cultural, organizational, and indentitary processes anchored in negative figures, narratives, images, and representations of the past in order to subsume them (Oliva and Sáenz de Sicilia 2023) to circuits of accumulation and profit: That is to say, a system organized through accumulation and appropriation legitimizes and justifies mechanisms of eviction and repudiation of the unproductive. The possibility of losing living conditions and resources makes the precariousness and limitation of resources unbearable. Unproductivity breaks with the rationality of calculation, instrumentalization and the dynamics of accumulation. Anaclitic accumulation indicates the imposture of an image that is transformed into law through the relationship with the property with which it is identified. That is to say, the fetish of accumulation generates a relation that suffocates the impact of the real through the fictions of merchandise, money and capital. Therefore, the exaltation of an economy of abundance and accumulation has generated an identification with cultural ideals that mask an anthropological and cultural structure that disavows unproductivity; that is, if the land does not offer everything that capital requires, then it is necessary to exploit it, violate it, and instrumentalize it so that it does so (Martínez Martínez 2021, 85).

Forced internal displacement leads to the destruction of the bodies-territories where it unfolds, multiplies the precariousness for those who suffer it and also of the environments necessary for life. In the state of Guerrero, the different communities confirm the tensions generated between mining, the government and organized crime, linked by war and control rationales. However, among the statistics of the disaster, the comparative quantification installs a mathematics of devastation where data and verifications are required to prove the calamity. For those who do not recognize themselves in the stigmatized, racialized, and discriminated skin, or who see their cis-tem6 at risk because of it, the narratives on serious violations of human rights are disdained because they enter into confrontation with the sublime charm of their ideologies and are identified with their fantasies of control and human admissibility. The memory of the grievance, the demands for justice, the demand for reparations will also be scorned. For those who condition listening to pain, forgetting is beneficial as a political and cultural criterion. Forced internal displacement escapes from simulations, opacities, and solemnities, but they can be cancelled by a strong dose of denial of historical reality, by impudence, and by power. Faced with the siege of extractivism, illicit crops, the militarization of the area, the social intimidation generated by arbitrary arrests,  This modification in the spelling refers to the epistemic binarism that is installed as a conditio sine qua non of life, body, affections, practices, and knowledge to generate a record of admissibility, while installing an assimilationist disciplinary regime that integrates and normalizes based on heteronormative and hegemonic criteria. An odious and standardized human correction. 6

Between Losses, Sieges, and Crime

37

disappearances, homicides, and a series of normalized violence, internal forced displacement installs certain historical-geographical units that, within their socio-­ cultural, economic, and political complexity, generate a greater field of intelligibility. In this sense, the area of Chichihualco, belonging to the municipality of Leonardo Bravo, very close to Chilpancingo, capital of the state of Guerrero, is key to territorial control in terms of mining extractivism and drug trafficking, but it also sets up complex circuits of organized crime groups, private and state actors, and displaced populations that leave behind them spectres of violence and impunity. The dispute for this territory began between 2013 and 2014 when the fall in poppy prices coincided with the entry of mining companies and generated a diversification of organized crime activities: extortion (collection of the “derecho de piso”),7 kidnapping, robbery, among other common criminal activities. This generated a consistent detriment in productive activities, the loss of professional services provided in the area (especially in the health and education sectors) and a progressive abandonment of the territories in the area (Hernández Ortíz 2019). The various government reports present displacement as isolated events to suggest a local and situated problem (National Human Rights Commission 2018). But, rather than a criterion of enunciation, the coverup of a situation that had been going on for a long time unfolded incessantly, sometimes in groups and sometimes in a more segmented manner. The stories were condensed in newspaper reports, reports from some centers for the promotion and defense of human rights, as well as investigative articles (Ocampo Arista 2020; Cervantes 2021; CMDPCH 2014; Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Montaña, Tlachinollan 2022a, b; Hernández Castillo 2017; Hernández Ortíz 2019). The dispute for control of the territory was evident and the forced displacements were the sign of increased violence and abandonment of the region, evidence of the differential impact among the population.8 The desire to condense the dispersed power in order to transform it into a visible, tangible reality (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009) materialized in hybrid situations where  The “derecho de piso” is a fee charged by an organized crime operator in order to guarantee the physical integrity of both the users of a building and the building itself, as well as to provide guarantees for the continuity of commercial activity or to offer security and/or protection against the siege of other criminal groups. This system shares revenue collection with the State and economically asphyxiates small merchants. Large companies can collaborate with this illegal system to guarantee the trade of products without suffering theft of merchandise or the protection of their personnel. Quotas are set by the operator and are increased based on unilateral criteria. 8  The consequences suffered by the population, especially due to gender and age differences, are not part of the objectives, but intersectionally there is a differentiated impact. Women tend to emphasize the illnesses experienced due to forced internal displacement, where diabetes, hypertension, stress, and depression are some of the ailments. The violence suffered by children, as well as the demands of care by their helpers, increases the burden of undesirable situations, especially when strategies were generated to protect them in the midst of gunfights when they had to hide in the countryside, in neighbors’ houses, or generate mechanisms so that the children would not become aware of the aggressive potential of the incursions of armed groups in the communities (entertain the children so that they would not hear the gunfights, see the wounded and dead). The men were concerned that charging “derecho de piso,” extortion, or the security they provided was unsustainable for small businesses. 7

38

3  Forced Internal Migration in Mexico: Displacement, Stigmatization…

(pre-­modern) power was articulated in complex transnational networks with the connivance of legitimate and illegitimate actors. On November 11, 2018, three thousand armed civilians entered different communities of Leonardo Bravo. The dissemination of terror took place, at the same time as the claim and denunciation of justice. The three thousand armed people were part of the United Front of Community Police of the State of Guerrero (FUPCEG) and made incursions into the spaces of influence of the Southern Cartel or New Cartel of the Sierra. The FUPCEG established alliances with the Community Police of Heliodoro Castillo and with armed civilians from Teloloapan, Apaxtlán, and Cocula, known as Autodefensas Comunitarias, which had been installed as a mechanism generated against organized crime, but the inhabitants of the region did not trust them because they did not adhere to the community sense of organization, decision-making, resources, and hierarchies; the FUPCEG had a strong military drift and reproduced military practices. According to María Giménez, the Southern Cartel was based in Chichihualco and had the protection of the municipal government and had emerged from the ruptures with the Beltrán Leyva cartel (Giménez Delgado 2022). The displaced people pointed to the community police with distrust. Due to the weaponry they used, they were made to understand the links with organized crime and the impunity provided by the different levels of government, especially when the incursions were carried out on the civilian population as the target of threats, extortion, and aggression. “First the community police would arrive, but then, behind them came people armed with high-powered weapons, they would throw grenades and burn the pickup trucks and houses... with that they would make people run to shoot them. They killed people and we got out as best we could” (Anónima 2 2021). The normalization of violence, the recurrence of homicides, extortions, disappearances, and displacements disseminated the sensation of social decomposition and a state of irregular warfare in the territories of Leonardo Bravo. The effective presence of armed groups imprisoned the civilian population through fear and family ties to organized crime, as well as clandestine labor relations. Between coercion and subjugation, forced collaboration was deployed and anchored in a “metaphysics of disorder” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009, 12) which influences local, regional, and national social imaginaries, disseminating perceptions of precariousness and of a state collapsed before the demands of an inclement market that turns the law, people’s daily lives, and the interaction of multiple forms of power into a fetish. The cis-tem of domination installs mechanisms where fear is confused with respect, submission with willingness. Between obeisance and entreaty, mistrust and resentment loom due to the unpunished use of violence by the different armed groups, whether legal or illegal. The malaise generated by social conditions is a claim to the State. This is the only instance of appeal in many circumstances, a State where the law bows before force and grants freedom to alienate in the name of a security that appears as an absent promise and political strategy in the face of the historical conditions in which internal forced displacements become.

Between Losses, Sieges, and Crime

39

The different historical contexts have woven the displacement with excesses of violence and atrocities committed on body-territories, which condition practices and ways of living. An avalanche of losses is hurled against people in a situation of forced displacement. The systematic precariousness of people in this situation is not only a characteristic of the ontological dimension of the human condition, but it is also a radicalized historical situation in the ways in which land, home, territories, and life are lost. The different spheres of meaning are disrupted by dispossession, pillage, and violence generated by armed civilians who intervene in the world of life. In such situations, to lose is not a metaphor, it is a subtraction of the material conditions that sustain life. Loss is not directly related to failure, but to the consequences of the power of violence, to the historical construction of the backwardness generated by dispossession and impunity that is installed according to hegemonic criteria established by the discourse of capital. Dispossession, in this sense, exacerbates the defenseless condition and accentuates the plundering of homes, built on the effort of years of savings and work, product of solidarity and migration, as well as economic activities “It is very ugly not to be able to return to the house, not knowing when one can return to walk those roads. It hurts me a lot to remember it, so much sacrifice with which we made it. The family photos, the memories of my children. When I return I will find nothing. Pure desolation” (Anónima 3 2021). The loss and invasion of material goods are accompanied by the loss of symbolic and significant elements that organize the meaning of life and territories. Between dispossession, displacement, and looting, the pain intensifies. The territories are no longer the same; the land is transformed into a strange space, impregnated with effective hostilities in the different spaces. Forests, rivers, animals, and fruits are not the same, they are organized by an expropriation of subsistence spaces and of the possibility of accessing the multiple common and shared spheres that community life generates. “One can no longer walk safely on the street, one can no longer walk through the paddock, through the gully, then they find you and ask you where you are going. When that happens you realize that things are no longer right” (Anónima 3 2021). The dissolution of the means of subsistence and access to common territories affect community and emotional care, and even the very links with ancestors, “on the Day of the Dead we had plenty of flowers in our bouquets, but now we don’t” (Giménez Delgado 2022, 294). The meaning of work was also abruptly disrupted. The different workshops, services, the market itself, among the multitude of trades, were altered in their dynamics. People in a situation of forced displacement offered their labor without the possibility of negotiation. Exploitation doubles; dispossession worsens; people no longer only work for a precarious salary, but for the obligation generated by extortion, swindling and the pressure of the responsibilities of daily life. Precarious jobs offer offensive salaries, aggravating not only the material conditions of subsistence but also the affective conditions of affirmation and appreciation. In such circumstances, people in a situation of forced internal displacement were forced to migrate to northern states, such as Nuevo León, Sinaloa, Sonora, as well as to the northern countries such as the United States and Canada. Such journeys require documentary

40

3  Forced Internal Migration in Mexico: Displacement, Stigmatization…

proof, especially in hyper-bureaucratized passages anchored in regulations and protocols for verification of identity and belonging. Losing the documents that allow access to different services, benefits, or support from both the government and non-­ governmental organizations becomes a constant suffering. The management of identification credentials, birth certificates, diplomas, labor certifications, and passports and the diversity of documents required for the multiple civil procedures are hindered and generate expenses that are intensified by the already precarious situation in which they find themselves. A multitude of illnesses are triggered among displaced persons, as previously mentioned. Depression, hypertension, and diabetes are health conditions associated with forced displacement. “Since the shooting he became hypertensive,” “he became nervous since that day,” “he has not been able to sleep well since we left the village,” among many other expressions linked to forced displacement are repeated among the different families. Health is compromised and the conditions of its care fall on customary distributions, that is, most of the charges and overloads of health care are still provided by women,9 although the stories of care do not refer only to them but also to those who bear the burden of the stripped reality.10 From this register, the loss of health appears as an expression of the exercise of control and biopolitical administration of bodies, as well as the product of a normative and hegemonic cis-tem of capital; that is to say, although the discomforts of standardized health criteria are suffered, the criteria of medical discourse enunciate imbalances that put bodies at risk. The materiality of bodies struggles to establish another order and those who carry out this struggle may lose, but they are not willing to accept submission to criteria generated from coordinates of impunity and exploitation. In this sense, the body exposed to illnesses, demanded to resolve extreme situations, appears not only as an object of medical discourse and the connivance of violence but also as a generator of alternatives. Its productive character is not deployed by the specific task, but by the constant suffering of the vectors of power. It is not that they are not sick, but rather that, with the regret of spoils, mistreatment and illness, the body itself displays agency as it suffers. The appearance of a failure

 While feminist approaches highlight the issue of care because of its implications of relegation and invisibilization that occur in the distribution of tasks in the various spheres of life (especially in the domestic and private spheres) and that are essential for the functioning of the multiple expressions of life, the field of care is not only inscribed in the register of health but also is disseminated in the forms of attention, protection, and accompaniment in conditions where life is at risk. In this sense, care has become key to the analysis and research on the social framework and institutional forms of social protection. It is a concept in dispute, but one that allows genealogical efforts to dismantle bio-, anatomo-, and necro-political strategies in the different fields of interest (Battahyány 2021; Tronto 1987; Groys 2022; Malatino 2021). 10  Some considerations on care, affections, and resistances are under revision to be published as axes that articulate practices in territories marked by repressive traditions. This work considers, as a starting point, the contribution made by the ethics of care, in the face of the constant political violence exercised in the Montaña Baja de Guerrero, is the framework from which the listening of life trajectories, the analysis of affective experiences, and alternative forms of resistance as contingent, limited, and situated restorative practices are carried out (Martínez Martínez 2023). 9

Archives, Dispossession, and Rexistences

41

in the biological register dynamizes the links with the earth, with the social matrix, and with oneself from a fracture. The body, while exposed to diseases and vulnerable to violence, narrates the weak force that insists on the wandering to inhabit the world, in wanderings that move between the gorge of culture and disaster, marked by drifts, ruptures and violence threaded between mountains and valleys, between the rural and the urban, set in a long and clandestine journey of resistance and insurrection.

Archives, Dispossession, and Rexistences The different management mechanisms in the Sierra de Guerrero are carried out through agreements based on the use of money and weapons and the domination of territorial bodies. The consensuses of power forge epics of violence that are added to the aggrieved and insulted bodies. Scoundrel governments routinely mobilize violence as a means of producing precariousness. A nightmare is the knot that articulates the politician-criminal. These considerations pose “a problem, an assumption and a paradox” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009, 9–10), which will not be developed here, but which popular opinion does not hesitate to subscribe to. The sit-in held in 2021 by displaced persons from Leonardo Bravo, Zitlala, Filo de Caballos, among other communities in the Sierra de Guerrero, in front of the offices of the Ministry of the Interior, succeeded in making the situation of displaced persons visible to the federal government, but the conditions for a safe return to their territories were not obtained, nor were the comprehensive reparation of damages or guarantees of non-repetition fulfilled. This consolidated the image and narrative of the collaboration of State agents in internal forced displacement, whether by action, omission, or coalescence. On Tuesday, December 10, 2019, at the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, in Mexico City, in the framework of the forum “Stories and Reflections on Forced Displacement in Mexico“, it is heard to say: When they entered through the community of Filo de Caballos, Los Morros, Campo de Aviación, the women were looking for (the authorities) to support them, to stop the armed people, so we think that the State is linked to the armed groups. From there all those people were displaced to the municipal capital of Leonardo Bravo, many people left, few families were the ones who stayed, they were afraid that the armed groups would arrive there (inaudible)… That is all I can tell you (2019).

The tympanum of disciplinary knowledge hardens and reiterates the hegemonic criteria as paradigmatic instances of life; reiterates the promises of happiness, recognition and security, which are key to the criteria of social aspiration and to the deployment of a happy life (Ahmed 2019; Mattio 2020) establishes assemblages as forms of governance of self and others. In this order of ideas, the narratives presented to manage the damaged, wronged and reviled life express no tolerance for those experiences and situations that do not reproduce the cis-­temic matrix. The forms of understanding, intelligibility, and valuation of life have a formation of commitment from the economic, liberal political register, whose promises aspire

42

3  Forced Internal Migration in Mexico: Displacement, Stigmatization…

to a full existence within the framework of the life of consumption, property, and stability. The human experience from the situation of internal forced displacement can contribute to resignify such intelligibility and comprehension matrixes by which a life is desirable to be lived, as well as to enable other effectively existing figurations. The dispossession of those who live in conditions of forced internal displacement interrupts and questions the compulsive disposition to generate property. The accumulation of privileges, of property, is disrupted by those who are dispossessed, and the obligation of a cultural, economic, and political mandate carried out by capitalism is dislocated because the displaced are completely removed from the rule established by contemporary contracts and ways of inhabiting the world. The way of life in its totality no longer corresponds to the intelligibility matrices installed from property, accumulation and consumption, as grammars of assimilation and adaptation; that is to say, the disposition to deploy ordinary life in the circuits for the generation of individual and inexpropriable resources is interrupted by the very voracity of the regime that generates it. The discourse of capital that demands the necessary exhibition of power, to evidence the appropriation of the bodies-­territories, of time, and of forests and mountains generates the coordinates of the internal forced displacement that interrupts it. The excessive and disproportionate conditions expressed by the experience of dispossession, where the loss and the effective impossibility of actively participating in the generation of wealth, production of goods, and consumption of goods and services are the main characteristics, show how Western frameworks of intelligibility do not establish an effective limit to their destructive power. On the contrary, the absence of an internal limit shows the failure of these social matrices, but not their end. People in a situation of forced internal displacement are archives of pain, of evil, in which disaster is recorded; they are body-territories where the unspeakable and the unexpected are endured, where mandates as orders of classification, retention and interpretation safeguard an impossible memory, a trace as an instance that allows articulating a question about life that is sustained in undesirable conditions, where resistance is a way of inhabiting the world, of relating and living, just as insubordination is not an argumentative but a vital element in which the ordinary frameworks of understanding are dismantled and, in their folds, words and figures yet to be lived are inscribed against the grain of history. The cruelty of power, in its trail of destruction, threads the meaning of its failure, not its end. The activities that make it possible to relaunch the accumulation of capital and death provoke the training of the look, the listening, and the word that becomes a system of beliefs that impose themselves as tools and reasons anchored in mastery. The normality of the spectacle of precarization naturalizes the forced expropriation that intends to colonize the whole of life. However, the radical reception of its vectors installs mechanisms of resistance, a corrosive passion that is part of the life generated by the conditions of displacement. They are not the same tools of the master, they are affective intensities that intensify the energy even in the death that dismantles the culture by evidencing the circuits of violence.

References

43

Internal forced displacement as an experience of historical memory generates memory and embodies the living metaphor of destroyed spaces. The memory of violence configures history, memories are perceived not only through the nostalgia of property but also in the violence of dispossession, mistreatment, and aggravation, mobilized from the singular experience in which power is incarnated. Cruelties are lived in a differentiated way, not without the ghost of political spaces forged from social matrices, but brought to life through imagination in solidarity and common logics. The experience of forced internal displacement is carried in the skin, in the feeling of hunger and cold, in the exposure to the indecent looks of a citizenship forged in the ownership fearful of the always possible expropriation of goods. A fearful citizenry is transformed in a free market system as a gathering of subjects threatened by the spectre of loss. The catastrophe is found in the immobility generated by the terror of losing property, which corresponds to them by right, merit, or tradition. Non-transferable property cannot be taken away, nor shared, nor socialized. Their property is a sign of their redemption, a phantasmagoria that adheres to all in general or universal prosperity. But it is not always so. In the imposition of a univocal regime, vestiges appear to contain fearless memories, impossible practices, and knowledge where ownership is dismantled in all dimensions of life. In this sense, the monumental character of property, the universal desire for prosperity, and the formal abstraction of the good are deautomatized in limited, fragile, and inconsequential practices. Radical contingency is not annulled by transcendence, it is repudiated. Therefore, in situations of internal forced displacement, the majesty of life is subverted in the detail of care, memory, practices, knowledge, and looks, where words, in their radical contingency, appear tiny, in brief, subtle, uncertain companies. Between anguish and fear, in the midst of threat and backwardness, feeling in one’s own flesh the vulnerability, precariousness, exposure, and violence, everything vital appears from a differentiated look, word and listening as an act of profound insurrection.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2019. La promesa de la flicidad. Una crítica cultural al imperativo de la alegría. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra. Anaya-Muñoz, Alejandro, and Bárbara Frey. 2018. Mexico‘s human rights crisis. Pennsylvania: University Pennsylvania Press. Anónima 1, interview by Miguel Angel Martínez Martínez. Buscar a mi hijo (4 de febrero de 2022). Anónima 2, interview by Miguel Angel Martínez Martínez. 11 de noviembre en Chichihualco (4 de febrero de 2021). Anónima 3, interview by Miguel Angel Martínez Martínez. Lo que se deja (5 de febrero de 2021). Battahyány, Karina. 2021. Políticas del cuidado. México City: UAM-Cuajimalpa/CLACSO. Butler, Judith. 2006. Vida precaria. El poder del duelo y la violencia. Buenos Aires: Paidós. Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Montaña, Tlachinollan. 2022a. A las niñas indígenas nadie las defiende. 18 de julio de 2022. https://www.tlachinollan.org/a-­las-­ninas-­indigenas-­nadie-­las-­ defiende/ (último acceso: 22 de febrero de 2023).

44

3  Forced Internal Migration in Mexico: Displacement, Stigmatization…

———. 2022b. Los desplazados y olvidados de Guerrero. 18 de julio de 2022. https://www.tlachinollan.org/los-­desplazados-­y-­olvidados-­de-­guerrero/ (último acceso: 19 de febrero de 2023). Centro Morelos. 2021. Desplazamiento forzado interno. Boletín de prensa, Ciudad de Mëxico: Centro Morelos. Cervantes, Zacarías. 2021 Ofrece segob refugio y empleo a desplazados de Chichihualco y Zitlala, informa Centro Morelos. El Sur. Periódico de Guerrero, 8 de diciembre de 2021. https://suracapulco.mx/impreso/2/ofrece-­segob-­refugio-­y-­empleo-­a-­desplazados-­de-­chichihualco-­y-­zitlala- ­ informa-­centro-­morelos/. CMDPCH. 2014. Desplazamiento interno forzado en México. México City: CMDPCH. CMDPDH. 2022. Episodios de desplazamiento interno forzado en México. Informe 2021. Informe, México: CMDPDH. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 2009. Obsesiones criminales después de Foucault: Poscolonialismo, vigilancia policial y la metafísica del desorden. In Violencia y ley en la poscolonia: una reflexión sobre las complicidades Norte-Sur, ed. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, 66–131. Madrid: Katz. Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos. 2018 Atención a Víctimas de Violaciones de Derechos Humanos. 25 de septiembre de 2018. https://www.cndh.org.mx/programa/31/atencion-­ victimas-­del-­delito (último acceso: 15 de marzo de 2023). Dehouve, Danièle. 2009. La ofrenda sacrificial entre los tlapanecos de Guerreo. Centro de estudios mexicanos y centroamericanos: 303-311. Disponible en Internet: http://books.openedition.org/ cemca/897. ISBN: 9782821828087. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.cemca.897. ———. 2016. Antropología de lo nefasto en comunidades indígenas. San Luís Potosí: Colegio de San Luís. Emmerich, Norberto. 2015. Geopolítica del narcotráfico en América Latina. Toluca: IAPEM. Giménez Delgado, Inés M. 2021. Desplazamiento forzado como arma de guerra y despojo en la Sierra de Guerrero, México. Revista de Paz y Conflictos 14: 107–131. https://doi.org/10.30827/ revpaz.v14i1.15646. Giménez Delgado, Inés María. 2022. La guerra en el cuerpo. Dispositivos de lo ilícito, desplazamieto forzado, despojo y resistencias en Guerrero, México. Un acercamiento etnográfico y audiovisual. Tesis, México City: UNAM. Groys, Boris. 2022. Filosofía del cuidado. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra. Gutiérrez, Maribel. 1998. Violencia en Guerrero. México City: La Jornada. Hérnández, Castillo. 2017. Aída. «La guerra contra el narco. Violencia de género, militarización y criminalización de los pueblos indígenas.» En Pueblos indígenas y Estado en México, de Santiago Bastos y María Teresa Sierra (Coords.), 184–200. MéxicoCity: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social. Hérnández, Castillo, Rosalva Aída. 2014. Cuerpos femeninos, violencia y acumulación por desposesión. En Desposesión: género, territorio y luchas por la autonomía, de Marisa Belausteguigoitia Rius y María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo (Coordinadoras), 79–99. México City: UNAM/Instituto de Liderazgo Simone de Beauvoir/Debate Feminista. Hernández Ortíz, Esteban. 2019. La narcoeconomía en la Sierra de Guerrero: 1965–2018. Tesis, Chilpancingo de los Bravo: UAGro. Illades, Carlos, and Teresa Santiago. 2019. Mundos de muerte. Despojo, crimen y violencia en Guerrero. México City: UAM/Gedisa. ITESO/CMDPDH. 2018. La situación de la violencia relacionada con las drogas en México del 2006 al 2017: ¿es un conflicto armado no internacional? The Situation of Drug-Related Violence in Mexico from 2006–2017: A Non-International Armed Conflict? Guadalajara: ITESO. Lowrey, Isabell. 2016. Estado de ineguridad. Gobernar la precariedad. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños. Malatino, Hil. 2021. Cuidados trans. Barcelona: Bellaterra. Martínez Luna, Jaime. 2015. Conocimiento y comunalidad. Bajo el Volcán 15 (23): 99–112. Martínez Martínez, Miguel Angel. 2021. Adaptación al cambio climático: narrativas y desacuerdos. Miradas desde los márgenes. Pacha. Revista de Estudios Contemporáneos del Sur Global 2: 79–93.

References

45

———. 2023. Cuidados, afectos y resistencias: contribuciones políticas desde la Casa de los Saberes en la Montaña de Guerrero. Entre Diversidades: sd. Mattio, Eduardo. 2020. Felicidad obligatoria y fracaso marica. Notas para una gramática disidente de las emociones. En Afectos, emociones y gobierno de los cuerpos, de Ianina Moretti y Noelia Perrote (Edicón y coordinación), 111–128. Córdoba: Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Ocampo Arista, Sergio. 2020. Violencia en la sierra de Guerrero obliga a 800 a huir y abandonar todo. La Jornada, 26 de marzo de 2020. https://www.jornada.com.mx/2020/03/26/ politica/011n3pol. Oliva, Carlos, Sáenz de Sicilia, Andrés. 2023. Las tenologías desubsunción en el capital. Revista Ciencias Sociales: 31–44. Recuperado a partir de https://revistadigital.uce.edu.ec/index.php/ CSOCIALES/article/view/4128. https://doi.org/10.29166/csociales.v1i44.4128. Tlachinollan. Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Montaña. 2020. Como una noche sin estrellas. XXVI Informe de actividades (septiembre 2019–agosto 2020). Informe de actividades, Tlapa de Comonfort: Tlachinollan. Tronto, Joan. 1987. Más allá de la diferencia de género. Hacia una teoría del cuidado. Signs. Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12. Chicago. UNHCR. 2022. Global trends. Forced displacent in 2021. Informe, UNHCR. Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana. 2019. Foro Historias y reflexiones sobre desplazamiento Forzado en México. México, 10 de diciembre de 2019.

Chapter 4

Systemic Gender Violence in Mexico: Normalization, Silencing, and the Colonization of Bodies-Territories

The systematic repetition of gender violence in Mexico and its unacceptable ­consequences are the focus of this chapter. The invisibilization, normalization, and silencing that converge crystallize in the exposure of the body as a territory of ­hostilities and violence. From domestic violence to femicides in Mexico, elements are outlined to consider them crimes against humanity and serious human rights violations due to omission, negligence, and indifference crystallized in State policies, as well as in the operational forms of aggressions, impunity, and social acceptance of violence against body-territories.

With Violence in the Body In Mexico, in the first decade of the twentieth century, a situation lodged in bodies began to be named. Its enunciation implied a series of aggressions and deadly hostilities generated by an obligatory normative framework where violence and power structures, which govern the gender order, crystallized in coordinates of production of bodies and subjects. Bodies inhabited by symbolic and signifying frameworks that are immediately linked to mechanisms of naturalization or essentialization of precariousness, a sensitive record of a historical situation, formed by the dismantling of social and institutional attention and care. In this field, the structural exposure of precariousness disseminated the conditions for the systematic use of sexual violence. A multitude of testimonies can describe the diverse forms of violence that normalize, reproduce, and silence the gender order as a mechanism for the reiteration of disastrous practices. The growing sensitivity to sexual assault and violence shows the profound discomfort of the normalization of violent and intrusive sexual behaviors. Given the multiple and varied forms of subjection and sexual subjugation, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. A. Martínez Martínez, Bodies, Territories and Serious Violations of Human Rights in Mexico, SpringerBriefs in Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42712-1_4

47

48

4  Systemic Gender Violence in Mexico: Normalization, Silencing, and…

bodies-territories are spheres of memory that traverse the spaces that are inhabited and of all those who have passed through such spaces. Bodies-territories, sexualized, violated, and racialized geographies, socialized in the historical position of a grammar that exerts a significant incidence in the constitution of life trajectories, experiences, and affections, must be challenged to consider the conditions of contemporary historical reality. In this sense, the conceptual construct body-territory allows us to think the identity vectors that inform the attributes, precariousness, and intersectionalities that generate scripts in a disciplinary field. That is, in sexual aggressions, we can read a language that addresses bodies, genders, and sexualities. Between conceptual and practical conflicts, a field sown with women’s bodies that has detonated massive movements is reproduced, in whose scenario folds slide demanding the transformations of an obligatory normative system that enjoys the precariousness in the forms of attention and research. The gender trouble (Butler 2007) seems to have obliterated the experience in which precisely it occurs when bodies expose their precariousness, especially in sexual behaviors, whose hostility is manifest; there is the demonstration of unlimited power against those who cannot resist aggression. These social dynamics generate ruptures of vulnerabilities due to neoliberal and patriarchal practices and mandates that ravage and cross the diversity of spaces and pacts of complicity. The visibilization of violence against women has questioned and politicized the somatic inscription of gender, as well as the frameworks in which intersectionalities have been cancelled in the spaces of daily coexistence. Its assemblage is condensed and displaced in the coordinates of modern politics that maintain in force the systems of domination, violation, and subordination. In this sense, the violent inscription of sexuality inscribes a domesticating act as a silenced framework of shame, suspicion, and distrust, insofar as it conjugates not only physical but also moral control of people (Segato 2013). Gender informs the structure of relationships and the body inscribes the different expressions of vulnerability that configure hierarchical relationships not only between men and women but also in the multitude of possibilities between different genders and among themselves, where the intersectionalities unfold in the practices of aggression, violence, and cruelty.1

 I consider aggression, violence, and cruelty as a triad of signifiers that broaden the framework of sexuality in relation to power. Thus, aggression from the Latin aggrĕdi, meaning “to go towards, to approach to,” performs a reduction of distances between two, it is an attempt of the use of force to invade and dissolve space to an approximation that can perceive the totality of a person. The more aggression is carried out, the more it dissolves the distance and the more the space of perception offers only partialities and fragments of the integrity of the other. For its part, violence, a word of Sanskrit origin vàyah (vitality), which passed into Latin as vīs: force, violence, vigor, crystallizes an affective intensity to install a circuit of relationship and trajectories where subjugation is imposed, whereas, the word cruelty, from the Latin cruĕntus: who delights in blood, who pours blood, sanguinary, is also related to cruor (blood) and is close to the word crudo (Ortiz Aguirre 2015; Corominas and Pascal 1991). 1

With Violence in the Body

49

Since the last decade of the twentieth century, until the processes of political transition in Mexico (2000), violence has been regulated by power structures between genders based on the use and abuse of one’s body by the other. The expendable corporeality evidenced by the multitude of femicides could not be made visible as a political fact until critical epistemologies and social movements contributed elements to point out the feminicidal rationality (Segato 2015; Monárrez Fragoso 2009; Bautista Moreno et al. 2022; González Rodríguez 2002). If there is a political dispute taking place in the bodies, where sexual exchange plays a relevant role, we want to discuss it, not only in gender key but also in the ordering that this commands, both ad intra and ad extra, to install its normative relations and link them with the concept of intersectionality and the construct bodies-territories. The symbolic economy of power established by sexual violence subsumes the discourse of human rights and gender, and its systemic character is installed as a vector within the societies of control administered from within a power structure that is based on the dosage and instrumentalization of pain, grievance, and injury. The legitimate demands for justice contrast with the silence that absorbs the sexual violence that occurs in a hidden way in the register of the unspeakable, in an indescribable and unapproachable space where the experience of aggression remains mute. In this register, violence of a sexual nature is reproduced in the systematic continuity of the normative formations that implement the function of a State policeman and that provide conditions for a normalized repetition of violence, in the silences that weave dishonor, shame with experiences of aggravation, and contempt. The little mobility of the juridical structure in the processes of administration of justice seems to indicate a mechanism of control and corpo-affective regulator and at the same time of the activation of a series of mechanisms and devices that pretend to guarantee security and, with it, increase the control to point out the location of each one. In the face of increasingly radical and somber imperatives, in the midst of a profound social, economic, and symbolic upheaval, the condition as desiring beings, tied to life, to the body, and to the territory of living language, also appears through questions that relate to the social frameworks that confer intelligibility and acknowledgement, which implies that they also convey what could be the social risks of intelligibility. Considering the social frameworks of memory from the horizon of gender violence dynamizes perspectives, listening, and sensitivities in terms of fields of justice anchored in memory, in reparation, and non-repetition where the logics of domination do not have validity and symbolic effectiveness. The interweaving of body-gender-sexuality installed through aggression-violence-cruelty consolidates the cis-temic character made visible by millions of voices, whose eloquent demands and forceful protests have emphasized the inflexible obligatory nature of hegemonic criteria, internalized and assimilated as their own in the current economy of power between genders. The necessary and urgent visibilization of the “war against women” (Segato 2015) has served as a strategy of a complex grid of knowledge, practices, and demands for recognition as a social and cis-systemic problem that marks situations and installs processes considered isolated, individual, or silenced, and has also

50

4  Systemic Gender Violence in Mexico: Normalization, Silencing, and…

shaped strategies with a circulation of care, solidarities, circuits of mourning generated by ancestral violence that unfold in new scenarios; that is to say, the violence dispersed in multiple genders permeates all social levels, including the educated classes that have social and cultural capital, but which reproduce, by hook or by crook, the machine of verification and reaffirmation of hegemonic, normative, and colonial criteria. While poverty, precariousness, and discrimination in the globalized world are no longer news, neither is sexual nor gender violence, with their multiple expressions and variants in diverse communities. The strident situations of femicides, disappearances, human trafficking, forced displacements, sexual torture, and massacres in Mexico are accompanied by a multitude of sexual violence that remains suffocated in the silence of the discourse, but that allows us to think about the direct links that gender constructions have with the uninhibited exercise of violence in its different registers and intensities.

The Institution of Rottenness The uncanny lurks discreetly in our places, and there is a threatening intensity that besieges us and whose presence is instituted as an expression of organization and administration of life. This force is threaded between bodies, sexualities, and genders as a dark background of vulnerability, precariousness, and exposure. Insecurity and defenselessness are associated with it and, because of it, mechanisms and circuits of security are installed that establish representations and narratives that provoke repressive, productive, and violent reactions by those who feel how their securities are shaken. “Like Schreber’s ‘fundamental language’, there is ‘something of the archaic’ even though it does not lack ‘presence’. That something is like a ghost returning to the stage” (De Certeau 2011, 126). Rape and other expressions of sexual aggression refer to that “something of the archaic” that announces a relationship of rejection to that thing that one does not want to know, that strange and close discourse that disproportionately affects women and girls—and that also crosses people with diverse gender expressions— but that, due to widespread discrimination, makes it difficult to record data and information (All Suvivors Project 2022), the formation of a multitude of aggressions and violence perpetrated by a variety of actors with different motivations, but which is a manifestation of intersectional discrimination of power and dominance dynamics, as well as normative rationalities. Now, in today’s societies, law and economy are privileged registers in which a passage from seeing to listening takes place, which has provoked “a semi-blindness of the subject creates the void where the word of the Other sounds” (De Certeau 2011, 128). Such registers inscribe, in the annulment, the witness of power, dominance, and privilege. The fascination of sexual violence exacerbates existing vulnerabilities and creates new risks, not only for women but also for men, girls, boys, and people with diverse sexual orientation or gender identity (International Labor Standards Department 2019).

The Institution of Rottenness

51

The suggestive report of the International Red Cross (2022) points out that many agencies not only discriminate against sexual violence against women and girls but also omit and/or completely neglect aggressions against men, boys, and sexual minority groups when conducting surveys, evaluations, context analysis where they interact with communities or collect information and follow-up of differentiated programs. The generalization of sexual violence shows the systematization with which it is carried out. The All Suvivors Project (2022) specifies that survivors of sexual violence often suffer highly detrimental consequences to their physical and mental health, as well as social and economic harm, often requiring emergency medical care and longer-­ term psychosocial and mental health support. The consequences of widespread sexual violence vary by gender and other intersections that intersect individuals, but in the case of male and/including LGBTI+ victims/survivors, negative social and cultural attitudes toward sexual violence affecting men, structural discrimination against people with diverse sexual orientations, gender, sexual identity, expression and gender characteristics (SOGIESC), as well as discriminatory laws criminalizing consensual same-sex relationships, diverse gender identities and diverse gender expressions contribute to discouraging victims/survivors from disclosing and seeking medical care and other support. Dictated by a voice, the rottenness of the subject is the condition for there to be the theatrical institution of “omnipotence in all its purity,” a representation that enunciates the intersectional character of the place that originates “the pure gold of revealed truth” (De Certeau 2011, 128). The majesty of power is inscribed in the body altered by the subjugation that conceals the inverse writing that constitutes it. The violated suspends the dialectic of the master to manifest the semblance that runs through it. The tort of violation authorizes signification “in the manner of the poem that nothing precedes it and that creates indefinite possibilities of meaning” (De Certeau 2011, 129). It makes one believe more than it is believed. “Its signifier coming from the other in the manner of a sword touch” (De Certeau 2011, 130). Thus iniquities and shames are silenced, grievances are muted and humiliations are silenced, the prevalence of sexual violence is underestimated and its cis-temic character is scorned as an impossibility of the dignity of our times and our institutions (Ziga 2016). Sexual aggressions promoted by discourses related to social and cultural norms generate affectations that consolidate the stigmas associated with this same violence.2  The International Committee of the Red Cross considers that gender-based sexual violence may target transgender women and girls—people who were assigned male gender at birth but do not identify as men or boys—specifically as a measure to “correct” their gender identity. Likewise, homosexual men who live in contexts where homosexuality is a reason for detention are at greater risk of sexual violence. It also underscores the danger that children are at risk of various acts of sexual violence and, because of their gender, may be exposed to situations of sexual violence by weapon bearers, be abused or sexually exploited by humanitarian or peacekeeping personnel, or be victims of trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation. It highlights that while sexual violence against men, boys, and LGBTIQ+ persons is prohibited under international humanitarian law (IHL), national laws are less uniform in this regard. Hence, the report’s call for States to take joint 2

52

4  Systemic Gender Violence in Mexico: Normalization, Silencing, and…

The systematic character of sexual violence is anchored in the insignia of power, in the hegemonic emblems installed in human societies (Lonzi 1975). The different nominations that come from it assign a place of belonging, and establish a vocation to become that which is commanded by social structures. The body becomes a territory of enunciations, it gives body to the signifier it embodies, it is subject to the fragility and weakness of beliefs (De Certeau 2006). Sexual aggression is part of the care of the social structure and “becomes a duty within the social groups engaged in continuing the reproductive model” (Fuentes Ponce 2010, 257), hegemonic and dominating (Fortunati 2019).

Intersectionalities in Bodies-Territories The monopoly of sexual violence is shaped by the signifier of the other. In this field, sexual violation is systematized, at the same time as it is silenced, as a tool of social organization that designates the effective relationship between decomposition and institution; that is to say, rottenness is installed as the absent core of the law that guarantees the common order. “This madness is not a particular madness. It is general. It is possessed by every institution that ensures a language of meaning, of law or truth” (De Certeau 2011, 130). The decomposition presupposed in the clear and transparent institutional appearance requires digging in clandestine graves denied by the institution, whose unveiling of the rottenness, at the same time, is both effect and motive of the belief in justification. The classification of people under the sign of injury and discredit is the point through which the institution of true discourse is implanted. In the effort to resist the moral consideration of sexuality, as well as the political instrumentalization of violence, intersectionality is taken as a dynamic concept that focuses and resonates the axes of domination. It refers to the ways in which sociocultural traits are threaded into countenances that define bodies-territories as categories of sociopolitical stratification (Migliaro González et al. 2019). In this way, the ascription of class, race, and gender configures the conditions in which violence is exercised while power is safeguarded. I think, for example, of the word “nobody” as an instance that allows us to consider the suspension, annulment, and/or negation of the materiality that demands a violence of interpretation in order to be named and to become “somebody.” The consideration of “nobody” is located in different forms of negation experienced by subjects and on which societies are organized, and by which “somebody” is affirmed from registers of privilege, hegemony, and domination. Inequalities are intertwined in the lives, in the bodies-territories in a complex way; therefore, it is necessary to situate the tangle of power to unravel with patience each of the threads that weave privilege and its derivations. action to establish inclusive and non-discriminatory national legislation that prohibits sexual and gender-based violence and ensures that all victims/survivors have access to justice (International Committee of the Red Cross 2022).

Intersectionalities in Bodies-Territories

53

In this register, the historical dynamics of the invention of bodies, genders, and sexualities are shown in an intersectional key (Williams Crenshaw 2012; Curiel 2013; Wade 2009; Migliaro González et al. 2019). This implies a double consideration. On the one hand, it evidences multiple systems of domination that act as interconnected vectors, which are condensed, displaced, and relocated to empower each other and relate as a single reality; on the other hand, the approach allows locating in a singular way the histories, narratives, and impacts that actualize inequities. The intersection, in this horizon, is a geometric application that considers the multiple domination of different effective and historical inequalities that are embodied in people and actualized in life trajectories. Although it comes from feminist perspectives as an analytical tool to understand and interpret in a complex way the social dimension, the application to sexual violence allows us to consider the way in which the combination of elements that intensify exposure through gender, class, race, age, geographical origin, and other references that translate into the actions of subjugation and silencing experienced by the assaulted bodies-territories is evidenced and intensified. It also makes visible the power relations and the impact on people and their life trajectories. In this line, intersectionality is a way of showing how the intersection of different elements of oppression is installed and maintained to generate a framework of domination. Patricia Hill Collins (2000) shows that intersectionality has historically and socially intersecting systems of oppression and that intersecting systems of oppression are organized through structurally, disciplinarily, hegemonically, and interpersonally related systems of domination. But how does intersectionality intersect with systemic sexual violence? Systems of oppression are not exclusive to a single discursive field. The fundamental derangement is not resolved by cultural artifices, rather they are further complexified by the overlapping of oppressions, the normalization of precariousness, and the essentialization of vulnerabilities. Both Aura Cumes (2014) and Lorena Cabnal (2019) consider the systematic way in which sexual aggressions are carried out, and understand corpoterritorial elements as the spaces in which the axes of domination and ancestral instances are related. Although their reflections take the female corporeality as the center of their attention, the human body is the space of daily confrontation. Insurrection unfolds in the bodies, where the complexity of oppressions and violences suffered is unraveled. The body suffers, the territory suffers; both in the present and in the ancestral past, the body is articulated as land and territory. The materialization of power is embodied in the body, because it is on bodies that oppressions have been built (Bilbija et al. 2017; Aucía et al. 2011; Cabnal 2019; Cobo 2019; Cruz Hernández 2020; Cumes 2014). The complexity of the efforts to establish dignity as a custom, as a framework of understanding and spontaneous relationship begins from the body. Bodies-territories experience dispossession, plunder, subtraction, and the imposition of times, images, and representations organized by exploitation and vassalage. The specific attack is located in the body-territory, and the singularity of violence materializes in offense, contempt, impoverishment, as well as exposure to sexual violences that occur within institutions that modulate and normalize social reproduction (Gargallo 2019; Cobo

54

4  Systemic Gender Violence in Mexico: Normalization, Silencing, and…

2019; Bilbija et al. 2017; Lerner 1990). As stated by Julissa Mantilla (2019), it is not an isolated fact, but a result of the framework of inequality and inequity beyond the temporal limits of social conflict. In this line, it can be accepted that the normative system systematically installs sexual violence as the axis of its relational framework. But it is necessary to point out frankly that bodies are a direct expression of hegemonic intersectionality, where the pretended rights of property and freedom generate circuits of relation organized by the systematic precarization of bodies-­ territories (Cabnal 2010; Bilbija et al. 2017; Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo 2020; Cruz Hernández 2020). From them is denounced the license to sexually assault that emanates from the savage domination that characterizes, distinctively and frighteningly, the pressure to participate in their models of life and the demand to reproduce it in an unlimited way (Rubin 1986; Segato 2016; Sonderéguer et al. 2011; Vance 1989). History has forged criteria of inequality and profound asymmetries, and it is very unfortunate that these inequities are maintained under the criteria of the stupid charm of the insignia of domination, power, and lordship. Although the historical conditions of vassalage and subordination in Latin America in general and in Mexico in particular are reiterated, it is recognized that in the conquest, domination was forged through the sexual appropriation of women, as an emblematic moment of the victor’s affirmation of superiority. However, it was also accompanied by the silencing, shame, and impotence of the rape perpetrated, in a systematic manner, which forged the foundation of the hierarchies of race, gender, and class present in our societies. Forged in these bodies-territories, they were forged as a continent that the classic discourse of oppression has not picked up (Carneiro 2009); because in these bodies-territories, the qualitative difference of precariousness, exposure, and vulnerability forges a singular and disruptive way of inhabiting the world, of sharing, and of relating to each other. These bodies-territories, we, these exploited speaking bodies, are the workers and subordinates of people who have enjoyed their social, political and economic rights and freedoms. And even in this corpoterritorial condition, we feel and live a singular identity that does not annul diversity—to be man without being only man, woman without being only woman, to be girl and boy, without being only girl and boy, to be old man and old woman, stone and comal, stone and metate, where life unfolds in the midst of the conditions established by race, gender, and sex.

Final Considerations It has been through feminist perspectives that relevant contributions have been made regarding cis-temic sexual violence, especially when considering the aggravation generated in the bodies-territories as a construct not only conceptual, but mainly as a space of personal experience and place of enunciation. In this vein, the body-­ territory appears as a framework for the recovery of narratives, representations, images, and experiences that have been disavowed by the emblems of power and

References

55

hegemonic, patriarchal, and imperial androcentric discourses. Precariousness, vulnerability, and exposure have been pointed out as nodes of experiences where they articulate and thread together forms of power and domination, as well as of struggle and resistance in complex, contradictory, paradoxical, and aporetic spheres. In these, the different layers or levels of inscription of power deploy frameworks not only of interpretation as conditions of continuity but also of contestation of the dominant logics. From an intersectional approach, the experience of the body-territory brings closer the possibilities to make visible and listen to the circuits and processes through which the forms of domination that are woven, knotted, and threaded like the fibres of a loom are articulated. These operate structurally and emerge in a situated historical moment. They configure a gaze that recognizes and a tympanum that listens to oppressive relations, as well as the wefts of strategies in dispute and the re-significations that are carried out in a personal and collective way. In short, the intersectional analysis of the experience of the body-territory in environments of systemic sexual violence is an effort to maintain vital intensity in conditions of subtraction from the material conditions of existence, as a call to insistence, to the impossibility of sustaining erasure, to the force of the offense and the intensity of shame. People’s life experience unfolds between bodies-territories. The different life trajectories are socio-historical constructions, instances that allow us to approach, from the borders, porous, paradoxical, as contradictory as the material relations of existence. In this sense, the problems raised intends to point out not only sexual aggression in a systematic way, but also the way in which frameworks of precariousness, vulnerability, and exposure are installed to institutionalize the rottenness of hegemonic representations. The systematization of sexual violence, its silencing, pretends to be concealed by mechanisms that guarantee social stability, while at the same time generating cracks that evidence the multiplicity of dominations that hover over the bodies-territories as subjects of history. In this sense, intersectionality allows us to look, listen, and speak critically about what the body thinks and what germinates in the territory. Thus, the earth of the body and the skin of the territory sharpen the ear, the gaze, and the sense of smell and intensify the affections to understand senses, interrupt inequalities, and share experiences.

References All Suvivors Project. 2022. The Issue. 2 de febrero de 2022. https://allsurvivorsproject.org/the-­ issue/ (último acceso: 10 de mayo de 2023). Aucía, Analía, Florencia Barrera, Celina Berterame, Susana Chiarotti, Alejandra Paolini, and Cristina Zurutuza. 2011. Grietas en el silencio: una investigación sobre la violencia sexual en el marco del terrorismo de Estado. Santa Rosa: CLADEM/INSGENAR. Bautista Moreno, Quetzali, Abel Lozano Hernández, and Martín De Mauro Rucovsky. 2022. Cuerpos prescindibles. Aportes para una crítica de la razón feminicida: epistemologías críticas y movimientos sociales en América Latina. Córdoba: UNC.

56

4  Systemic Gender Violence in Mexico: Normalization, Silencing, and…

Bilbija, Ksenija, Ana Forcinito, and LLanos, Bernardina. 2017. Poner el cuerpo: rescatar y visibilizar las marcas sexuales y de género de los archivos dictatoriales del Cono Sur. Santiago: Cuarto Piso. Butler, Judith. 2007. El género en disputa. El feminismo y la subversión de la identidad. Barcelona: Paidós. Cabnal, Lorena. 2010. Acercamiento a la construcción de la propuesta de pensamiento epistémico de las mujeres indígenas feministas comunitarias de Abya Yala. ACSUR-Las Segovias, Feminismos diversos: el feminismo comunitario: 11–25. ———. 2019. El relato de las violencias desde mi territorio cuerpo-tierra. In En tiempos de muerte: cuerpos, rebeldías, resistencias. T. IV, ed. Xochitl Leyva Solano and Rosalba Icaza, 113–123. San Cristobal de las Casas: CLACSO/Ed. Retos. Carneiro, Sueil. 2009. Negra cubana tenía que ser. 28 de julio de 2009. http://negracubana.nireblog.com/post/2009/07/28/sueli-­carneiro-­ennegreceral-­feminismo (último acceso: 26 de mayo de 2023). Cobo, Rosa. 2019. La cuarta ola feminista y la violencia sexual. Revista Universitaria de Cultura, Núm. 22: 134–139. Colectivo Miradas críticas del territorio desde el Feminismo. 2020. (Re)patriarcalización de los territorios. La lucha de las mujeres y los megaproyectos extractivos. En Cuerpos, Territorios y Feminismos. Compilación latinoamericana de teorías, metodologías y prácticas políticas, de Delmy Tania Cruz Hernández and Manuel Bayón Jiménez (Comps.), 23–43. Quito/Ecuador/ México city: Abya Yala Comité Internacional de la Cruz Roja. 2022. “That never happens here”. Sexual and gender-­ based violence against men, boys, and/including LGBTIQ+ persons in humanitarian settings. Reporte, Ginebra: CICR. Corominas, Joan, and José Antonio Pascal. 1991. Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico. Madrid: Gredos. Cruz Hernández, Delmy Tania. 2020. Mujeres, cuerpos, territorio: entre la defensa y la desposesión. In Cuerpos, territorios y feminismos. Compilación latinoamericana de teorías, metodologías y prácticas políticas, ed. Delmy Tania Cruz Hernández, Manuel Bayón Jiménez, and del Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo, 45–61. Ecuador: Abya Yala. Cumes, Aura. 2014. La “india” como “sirvienta”. Servidumbre doméstica, colonialismo y patriarcado en Guatemala. Tesis Doctoral, México, City: CIESAS. Curiel, Ochy. 2013. La nación heterosexual. Análisis del discurso jurídico y el régimen heterosexual desde la antropología de la dominación. Bogotá: Brecha Lésbica y en la frontera. De Certeau, Michel. 2006. La debilidad de creer. Buenos Aires: Katz. ———. 2011. La institución de la poredumbre: Luder. In Historia y psicoanálisis, ed. Michel de Certeau, 125–139. México City: Universidad Iberoamericana. Departamento de Normas Internacionales del Trabajo. 2019. Documento de información sobre la protección contra la discriminación basada en la orientación sexual, la identidad de género, la expresión de género y las características sexuales (SOGIESC). Documento, Ginebra: Oficina Internacional del Trabajo. Fortunati, Leopoldina. 2019. El arcano de la reproducción. Amas de casa, prostitutas, obreros y capial. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños. Fuentes Ponce, Adriana. 2010. ¿Acaso se puede tapar el sol con un dedo? La violencia como herramienta de estabilidad social. En Florilegio de deseos. Nueos enfoques, estudios y escenarios de la disidencia sexual y genérica, de Mauricio List Reyes y Alberto Teutle López (coords.), 227–258. México: Eón/BUAP. Gargallo, Francesca. 2019. Los feminismos y las políticas de las mujeres en el horizonte de poner fin a los mandatos patriarcales de la violencia. In En Derechos de los pueblos, ed. Katz de Jessica, Guerrero Mariana, and Ana Luisa Visotsky, 136–149. Concepción: Nuestra América Desde Abajo. González Rodríguez, Sergio. 2002. Huesos en el desierto. Barcelona: Anagrama.

References

57

Hill Collins, Patricia. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Lerner, Gerda. 1990. La creación del patriarcado. España: Crítica. Lonzi, Carla. 1975. Escupamos sobre Hegel. Escritos de “Rivolta Femminile”. Buenos Aires: La pléyade. Mantilla Falcón, Julissa. 2019. Diálogos posibles en la investigación de la violencia sexual: Estándares interamericanos y el caso peruano. IUS ET VERITAS 59, 18–27. https://doi. org/10.18800/iusetveritas.201902.001. Migliaro González, Alicia, Mazariegos García, Diana, Rodríguez Lezica, Lorena, and Díaz Lozano, Juliana. 2019. Interseccionalidades en el cuerpo-territorio. En Cuerpos, territorios y feminismos. Compilación latinoamericana de teorías, metodologías y prácticas políticas, de Delmy Tania Cruz Hernández, Manuel Bayón Jiménez, and del Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo (coords.), 63–82. Quito/México City: Abya Yala. Monárrez Fragoso, Julia Estela. 2009. Trama de una injusticia. Feminicidio sexual sistémico en Ciudad Juárez. Tijuana: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte. Ortiz Aguirre, Víctor. 2015. De agresores y agredidas. En Topografías de las violencias. Alteridades e impasses sociales, de Susana Bercovich y Salvador Cruz Sierra (coords.), 125-148. Tijuana: Colegio de la Frontera Norte. Rubin, Gayle. 1986. El tráfico de mujeres. Notas sobre la economía política del sexo. Nueva Antropología, VIII(30) (UNAM): 95-145. Segato, Laura. 2015. La guerra contra las mujeres. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños. Segato, Rita. 2013. La escritura en el cuerpo de las mujeres asesinadas en Ciudad Juárez. Territorio, soberanía y crímenes de segundo estado. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón. ———. 2016. La guerra contra las mujeres. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños. Sonderéguer, María, Correa, Violeta, Cassino, Miranda, González, Amaranta. 2011. Violencias de género en el terrorismo de Estado en América Latina. Buenos Aires. http://conti.derhuman. jus.gob.ar/2011/10/mesa_9/sondereguer_correa_cassino_gonzalez_mesa_9.pdf: Ponencia pronunciada en el IV Seminario Internacional Políticas de la Memoria, 29–30 septiembre y 1 octubre, Centro Cultural de la Memoria Haroldo Conti. Vance, Carol. 1989. El placer y el peligro: hacia una política de la sexualidad. In Placer y peligro. Explorando la sexualidad femenina (selección de textos), ed. Carol Vance, 9–50. Madrid: Hablan las Mujeres. Wade, Peter. 2009. Race and sex in Latin America. New York: Pluto Press. Williams Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 2012. Cartografiando los márgenes. Interseccionalidad, políticas identitarias, y violencia contra las mujeres de color. Intersecciones: cuerpos y sexualidades en la encrucijada, ed. Raquel (Lucas) Platero, 87–124. Barcelona: Bellaterra. Ziga, Itziar. 2016. Malditas. Una estirpe transfeminista. Tafalla: Txalaparta.

Chapter 5

Conclusions: State Violence – Archives, Bodies, Territories

Introduction: “It Was the State” A clamor runs through our territories, crosses bodies, and resounds in the midst of the tradition of hegemony and privilege. In the face of those who pretend to position themselves as owners of the inappropriate, the claims resound, circulate, and forge narratives through consignas1 that defy the emblems of power. The clamor comes from the aggrieved of history, from those who are accompanied by pain and violence structured in bodies. These are receptacles and deposits of aggression, violence, and cruelty, and their dynamics crystallize the relations and processes of specific historical conditions. They solidify a framework of atrocities where the Nation-State is none other than that of a front of exploitation of the bodies-territories, by hook or by crook, with the expanding business interest, whose policies, woven between capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy, forge the grid of a domination normalized by frameworks of shared intelligibility. There, bodies-territories are crystallizations of the triadic history (capitalism-­ colonialism-­patriarchy), in whose spaces of subjection and subordination, practices of resistance and emancipation also arise. These signifying operations mobilize complex repertoires where affects, reflections, and practices are articulated in a tangle of tensions mobilized with the weight of language and thought. Hence, bodies-­territories are fields of experience that enable not only the spatiality implied by the ways of inhabiting the world but also the experience and sensibility thought as registers of the ways of being impacted by hegemonic discourses. Thus, what is weakened by the epistemic cis-tem of patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism shows the dynamics, places, and agents of power enabling the deregulation of mandatory

 A short formula used as an expression of a political idea commonly shouted during demonstrations and protests. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. A. Martínez Martínez, Bodies, Territories and Serious Violations of Human Rights in Mexico, SpringerBriefs in Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42712-1_5

59

60

5  Conclusions: State Violence – Archives, Bodies, Territories

normative frameworks from the axes of political sovereignty to affective and sexual experiences, passing through the series of hegemonic intersectionalities. In this framework, bodies-territories become dynamic as a critical archive, they open the possibilities for a systematic manifestation of the vassalages of capitalism, patriarchy, and coloniality. It is the bodies-territories that can subvert the modes of representation, the narratives, and the images of hegemony due to the intimate relationship with memory, the material configuration of mourning, grievance, and humiliation. Bodies-territories are a source open to the unspeakable instances of hegemony, since they question the conceptual, epistemic, and ontological stabilities with which the institutional ways of inhabiting the world, of relating to, and of understanding historical reality are often described. In this register, in the State’s monopolistic use of violence, determined by the ambivalent and incompatible condition of its representative pretensions and its unquestionable loyalty to capital, lies the tactical knot of the failure of its policies. State and capital offer with one hand what they take away with the other. There the clamor occurs to rethink the situated character of the grievances and humiliations in the use of violence committed by State agents, which require a formulation that allows us to approach and help us to understand them. From these coordinates, the anthropological dimension of space, articulated in the bodiesterritories, allows us to deploy a critical reflection that annotates counter-hegemonic, anti-colonial, and anti-patriarchal orientations. Likewise, they account for the exposure to a rational and bureaucratized organization for the production of uncertainties, stigmas, and villainies. The clamor, in this context, is not understood as a supplicant and pious articulator, which passes through the conscience of guilt and the hope of reconciliation; in it those who have suffered injustice, oppression, the contempt of history —that has deprived of any word those who have been disappeared, displaced, humiliated— resonate. The clamor is an archive of indignation, its effective rejection of circumstances that deny, cancel, and destroy the different ways of inhabiting the world. It is the political limit of what must be endured. The clamor singularizes pain and summons the community to express the word and formulate consignas, invent them, politically poeticize pain and grievance with the singular-group intoned claim. They seek the eyes of justice, the word of truth to raise the heart in a fist. This file of insurrection ascends life against a form of power, they appear where it is not allowed, they speak where it is usually silent, they announce where silence is custom and mandate. Insurrection appears in the clamor with an insubordinate force, which is not only its own but also shared. To bear the serious violations of human rights in the bodies-territories becomes a biographical and historical impossibility where the institutions of the State lull, extend and produce unbearable conditions that decimate the communities, the bodies-territories that, paradoxically, reject those conditions and point to the institutions as responsible for commission, acquiescence, or omission. The attitude and disposition of State agents, in the face of the series of indignations, grievances, and humiliations experienced singularly and collectively, exasperates and degrades. Claiming implies reflecting on the intolerable suffering

Introduction: “It Was the State”

61

and the neglectful responsibility of the institutions, claiming the grievance to point out: “It was the State.” The clamor and the consigna forge the course of the recognition of the systematic character of the subjugation inflicted not only for a singular subject but also for a collectivity articulated in a “we” that clamors and claims in the consigna that cries out for truth and justice to undo oppression and subjugation. In the consigna the wound cries out, the pain points out the injustice to repair time through bodies-territories that always have a poetic way of manifesting their clamor. Their consigna denounces the injustices imposed by the existing institutional and state practices. In this sense, “It was the State” is a rallying cry that condenses the critique and points out the hostilities that, for decades, have been expressed in popular narratives to refer to the direct responsibility of State agents in the enactment of serious human rights violations. In Mexico, institutional discrediting is on the rise due to the precariousness of living conditions and the feeling of a degradation of the public life of societies. Expectations of a dignified life, health, and social mobility have been let down by a democracy that has not yet been consolidated and by a State transformed into a residue of modernity ready to generate authoritarian and populist alliances. The modern “legitimate” monopoly of violence is now in tension due to the intervention of specific groups that have political resources, institutional influence, financial means, and a great potential for violence, and that aim to mobilize State institutions to serve their own interests. In Mexico, the classical promise of the common good is subverted into a terrible “business as usual” for people who live in precarious conditions. The “failed State”2—considered in this sense due to the inconsistency of its fundamental functions—turns into a State overthrown by factual powers that carry out its tasks (Mancero García 2018); e.g., during 2020 due to the crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemics, distinct criminal groups involved in drug trafficking delivered groceries to marginalized communities in at least 64 municipalities of 15 states of the country during 85 events (Sánchez Valdez and López Cerón 2020). In Mexico, the capture and co-opting of State institutions (Vázquez Valencia 2019) provoke a set of popular expressions and narratives that are found as an  I agree with Rodolfo Gamiño Muñoz (2021) who argues that the implementation of a security policy based on militarization accelerated the predatory violence of the narco to eliminate competition while adjusting to the new rules of the transitional federation, causing “the impression of the existence of lawless areas, which are identified as micro-spaces of exception” (p. 117). Contrary to a failed State, “in Mexico, we are witnessing a democratic state of exception in which repressive and illegal practices, practices that violate human rights, and constant violations of the rule of law by actors who act diachronically in a focused manner prevail in a synchronic manner. It is important to highlight that these actions do not arise in an isolated, spontaneous manner, they are not accidents, they are niches, spaces, areas, regions chosen and protected by the State itself, that is to say, they are micro-spaces of exception constructed by the Mexican State itself. Micro-spaces of exception, zones in which lives are subtracted from the law and judicial control, lives stripped of all juridical identity, lives deprived of their citizenship. These micro-spaces of exception have become more extensive and complex over time, but a rule continues to govern them: the suspension of legality within a rule of law formally recognized nationally and internationally” (Gamiño Muñoz 2021, p. 119). 2

62

5  Conclusions: State Violence – Archives, Bodies, Territories

imperative of understanding in the face of constant and disproportionate situations of violence. In this sense, the objective of the following considerations is to analyze the popular narratives on the inconsistencies and failures of the State in the face of situations of excessive violence. Departing from this point, I will consider two elements: (1) popular doxa as a hermeneutic place and (2) the displacement of States of exception generated by factual powers. In this sense, the circuits of relationships between organized crime, State institutions, and the empresariat3 establish geopolitical coordinates to extend the “ineffectiveness” of the State before the violation of the fundamental rights of citizens (Gamiño Muñoz 2021). Defenselessness becomes a permanent situation for those who inhabit territories mobilized by macro-­economic interests. The consigna “It was the State” is a narrative resource generated by the effects of the State fabric, which leaves the marks of its ways of managing economic, political, and social organization, where large corporations establish criteria of subordination and territorial availability. “It was the State” is an expression of popular activism that constantly tries to build a theory of opposition and resistance capable of accounting the atrocities that, in the name of progress, freedom and development are carried out with total impunity. “It was the State” is a criterion of popular action that establishes the side that reacts to the disproportionate forces of the empresariat and the repressive apparatus of governments (police and armed forces) to confront them with dignity and resolution. “It was the State” is the synthesis of a consciousness and a praxis of resistance to the repressive character of transnational forces mobilized by the discourse of capital. “It was the State” is the evidencing of the extreme violence in Mexico: only during 2020, there were 529 massacres, more than 5330 atrocities, and 8759 victims of all ages and social conditions (Causa en Común 2022). The condensation of meanings through this consigna marks the continuity of an authoritarian regime configured by democratic means: the votes, the institutions, the media that mobilize a regime that can carry out espionage, infiltration, and counterinsurgency strategies to subdue and dominate, as well as to build a historical scenario where reality installed through simulation is appalling. In this scenario, popular narratives are mobilized as archives that condense the unsaid and the recorded into aggrieved political affectivities and subjectivities. Popular doxology turns into another body-archive, a territory to explore where cartographies, topographies, anomalies, scenographies, and resistances are inscribed. The palpitating word of the communities insists on and resists a structure that has been naturalized for generations and does not cease to inscribe violence after violence. Founded on massacres, the Mexican State has deeply structured ways of life and organized coexistence, while fracturing plurality and difference. From these considerations, popular narratives, spontaneous doxologies, crystallize as a body-archive,  In Spanish, empresariato, a word we derive from the term sicariato, means the institution of contract killings. We call empresariat the set of businesses that arise from the scheme of private initiative to carry out criminal actions under the protection of impunity generated from complicit relationships with political and governmental elites. 3

On the Displacement of the State of Exception and the Legitimate Monopoly of Violence

63

where language and yell insist on the memory of repression and subordination, where popular memory resists the amnesiac project of a State that, in its historical conformation, has consolidated a system of subjections and subjugation that homologizes knowledge and discredits emerging narratives, and where the popular voices and their insinuations and considerations are the place of interpretation in which the revision of the notions of the State is carried out with uncertainty. The analysis of collective and popular positions on social mobilization, resistance, and intervention is not determined by the theoretical concordance of certain academic explanations but by the experience of sustaining life in the face of the force of the apparatuses of subjection and subjugation that are deployed with the violence of neoliberal democracies.

 n the Displacement of the State of Exception O and the Legitimate Monopoly of Violence Along the political genealogy of the West, the discourses of power have first silenced the violence it exercises4 and then oriented, structured, and rectified it. Its approach highlights the threshold of politicization that structures the West. Moreover, violence is the constitutive element of the modern State (Weber 2004). Although this claim may seem exaggerated, it is no more scandalous than the systematic commission of crimes whose impunity in Mexico is 96.11%, according to the data from the National Survey of Urban Security conducted by the National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Informatics (INEGI 2022). It is commonly acknowledged that the various state apparatuses act as guarantors of political and social stability and the health of the bodies-territories. However, the multitude of aggressions and hostilities has not been invisible, not because of the efforts of the State guarantees, but because of the blood, pain, and lives lost in history (Bourke 2009; Cobo 2019). In the democratic transition, the dismantling of the institutions which for decades served as a regulatory body of the organized crime, especially drug trafficking, modified the idea of the solid State to consider the subordination to privileged elites. In this sense, the “legitimate” monopoly of violence was allocated to build a political-business-criminal hybridization. The following case is emblematic.

 The figure of the State is not oriented toward the construction of a social and politically just order, more horizontal between people and institutions. This tendency is found in the German public law of the nineteenth century, in relation to establishing the constitution of the political order and the ways to maintain and preserve domination (Weber 2004). From this perspective, political action is domination and the political order is maintained through this exercise and not through the will of the citizens. 4

64

5  Conclusions: State Violence – Archives, Bodies, Territories

On March 28, 2022, the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) presented the third report for the case of Ayotzinapa.5 It exposed the government of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012–2018) as perhaps the most grotesque representation of a democratic regime elected at the ballot box in Mexico. If Mexico was once considered the “perfect dictatorship”6 because of the permanence of the hegemonic political party (PRI) at the executive power until 2000, the “democratic transition” that allowed political alternation only exacerbated the neoliberal globalizing economic policies, which brought, along with the dismantling of corporatism and the increase of “diverse” political representation at the legislative level, the displacement and continuous movement of zones of State of exception along the country. The cycle of “democratic alternation” was celebrated by the international community (CNN 2000), while it was legitimized through the War against Drugs inaugurated by Felipe Calderón (2006–2012). The deployment of the army in the streets, the subsequent militarization of territories, and the confrontations with civil society only aggravated the intimidation to human rights defenders and journalists, the phenomenon of people disappearance, and an increased number of aggressions against women. Simultaneously, the alternation regimes not only brutally repressed civil liberties (as the right to strike and protest) but also dismantled independent organizations, disarticulated and stigmatized the different associations that impeded the objectives of voracious economic policies and persecuted political adversaries, discrediting and even criminalizing them.7 The media hid, applauded, and simulated the disaster8 in accordance to their interests of maintaining privileges and favoritism of the public spending.9

 During the night of September 26, 2014, following the seizure of several buses in Guerrero, students from the Teacher’s Training Rural School of Ayotzinapa were attacked at different times and events in which members of criminal groups, police, army, and navy were involved. Nine people were killed, including students Julio César Ramírez Nava, Daniel Solís Gallardo, and Julio César Mondragón. More than 40 people were injured and 43 students are still considered “disappeared.” The GIEI—constituted by Angela María Buitrago Ruiz, Carlos Martín Beristain, Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey, Francisco Cox Vial—has been pointing out the inconsistencies, simulations, and manipulation of the official investigation since 2014. 6  “Mexico is the perfect dictatorship,” said writer Mario Vargas Llosa in 1990. 7  The documentary “Hasta los dientes (Up to the teeth)” shows one example of how the army engages in perverse criminalization practices. 8  Since 2008, the extreme violence in Mexico has left headless, bagged, and shot people all around the country. 9  There are multiple cases that exemplify the subordination of the media to the government agenda. For instance, while there is no attention at all from the most reknown TV stations about situations as the daily violence in Aldama, Chiapas, there are other events that deserve even a live hoax (as the Florence Cassez case in 2007 and the Frida Sofía case during the 2017 earthquake). It is also important to mention the words of the newscaster Jorge Zarza during the events of March third and fourth, 2006, in San Salvador Atenco: “I don’t know why the government is waiting to give a stronger and more effective and precise order to finish with these men that are attacking the police elements. The authority of both the state [Estado de México] and the [federal] government is being called into question [my emphasis]”. Needless to say that the Atenco Case was taken to the Inter-­ American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), which sentenced the Mexican State after finding it 5

On the Displacement of the State of Exception and the Legitimate Monopoly of Violence

65

The idea that the State can dispose of the bodies-territories produces, repeats, and renews systematic violations to people’s lives (Cruz Hernández 2020; Martínez 2021). Subjection and domination have generated movements, circuits, and oscillations of freedom-oppression, possibility-coercion, and normality-abnormality. In this sense, between the State legal prohibition and the ideological apparatuses of the state (Althusser 1988) are interspersed a set of mechanisms, processes, situations that reveal how legal, medical, religious, and political discourses are confronted with the narratives and experiences of the singular forms of life (Agamben 1998; Butler 2007; Gramsci 1972b; Foucault 2005). Repressive powers are dispersed in surveillance mechanisms and/or security devices that maintain the social order, although they can also be disarticulated by an accumulation of popular practices and collective movements (Laclau 1987, 2005; Mouffe 2007; Marchart 2009). Thus, based on the regulation of territory and population, the economic, social, and political benefits that justify the subjugation of bodies-territories,10 as well as the cancellation of difference, deploy a set of mechanisms that disseminate State’s sovereignty to distinct groups according to the market demands. In such a way, large infrastructure works are handed over to the highest bidder, and megaprojects, in the hands of the army or the empresariat, as in the case of the Mayan Train and the Morelos Integral Project, favor the militarization of the southern border and the disappearance of migrants, the murder of community leaders, the appropriation and extraction of resources, the tearing apart of the social fabric, and the criminalization and repression of protests. Nevertheless, to the top-down or vertical vision of State power (Althusser 1988; Gramsci 1972a; Poulantzas 1969), we need to adhere a vision from below, from the social externalities and affectivities. From these coordinates, the State may be captured, dislocated, by different networks from different spaces, places, or fields of public policy, so that recovery will involve dismantling not one, but several networks in different areas simultaneously. In any case, an approach to reality allows us to consider that popular doxology can be considered as one of the most specific keys of action applied in this interpretative framework, where sufficient and pertinent experiential information is condensed to identify the network that paralyzes the responsible for “sexual violence, rape and torture” during the police operative whose objective was to repress the protests against the construction of a new airport. More than 3500 police attacked the inhabitants, leaving two youths dead and 207 people arrested; the then governor of Estado de México was Enrique Peña Nieto. 10  One of the most important real factors of power in Mexico today is organized crime. With the popular expression: “either silver or lead”, it shows one of the political resources and persuasion of violence with which participation, from the legal field, installs circuits of cooperation that reproduce the structural conditions of capitalism to increase the political resources of the para-legality framework. The pressure mechanisms exerted by organized crime not only for extortion, but for forced collaboration, make sometimes impossible for both citizens and public officers to refuse their requests. According to Garay (2015), public officers cannot resist because “these groups can resort to procedures other than bribery, such as threats and murder, which, in fact, are more effective and persuasive in the short term, as well as the association or formation of political parties and other institutions in a long-term perspective. Thus, it is to be expected that the nature and scope of state capture will change substantially to the extent that the capturing agent is an illegal group with private armies highly trained in homicidal techniques” (p. 11).

66

5  Conclusions: State Violence – Archives, Bodies, Territories

State, the characteristics and the points through which the insistence on the daily transformation of reality is maintained, from a recovery of practices disdained by the contemporary academic elite.

Indeed, It Was the State: The Consignas Resistance Memory is the archive of resistance. In the cry of protest yelled at the streets, during demonstrations, through the communitarian radios, the public space taken away by the omissions and coalescence of the Mexican transitional State is recovered. The violent forms of the State oscillate between repression and collaboration, between subjection and domination. Be it a captured State, failed State, minimal State, it is accused and identified by the communities due to the repressive policies and the grievances committed to subdue the communities and which has generated hundreds of thousands of victims. In the massacres in Chihuahua (1965, 2008, 2010), Guerrero (1960, 1967, 1995), Puebla (1968), Mexico City (1968, 1971), Chiapas (1997), Oaxaca (2002, 2016), Tamaulipas (2010, 2021), Coahuila (2011), Estado de México (2014, 2021), Veracruz (2019), Michoacán (2021, 2022), in the disappearances of more than 100,000 people and more than 50,000 unidentified corpses, on behalf of millions of people who are still waiting for a breath of justice in their lives, the State maintains its apathy, omission, or coalescence. Before the offended and systematically humiliated people who have remained anonymous, the vindication of their memory and the restoration of their rights that have been cancelled by the State are presented as open and critical calls to seek justice by all possible means. There, here, the cry and the dignified rage is condensed in brief expressions, forceful versifications that are expressed at the squares and at the streets, in different spaces where the demand for justice and indignation are turned against impunity. The cry “It was the State” is the accusation that makes visible the infamy, the cynical brutality, and violence exercised from the institutions against all those who dare to demonstrate or against those who seek better living conditions through the announcement and denunciation of rights. In the face of state “failure,” institutions seek to regain control and dominance through discourses and actions that seek to legitimize their permanent positioning (Berrio 2003; Nay 2013). Popular slogans, however, point out the magnitude and diversity of the acts of violence in the face of the inoperative responsibility of the State and the constant demand for truth and justice for the type of violence that occurs in each specific case. There are some scholars, though, that seek to dissolve the State’s responsibility. In the case of the Teachers’ Training Rural School Isidro Burgos of Ayotzinapa, Fernández (2014) tries to explain: “In reality, it is one thing for criminals to act with the “acquiescence, protection and complicity of the State”, and quite another for them to be the State […] It is time to sweep outward. The State, captured by the narco at the municipal level, is guilty in Iguala; the current federal administration has the obligation to rescue the Mexican State as a whole or resign itself to be considered an obstacle to this” (❡ 8). But it is not only a matter of the corrupted

Indeed, It Was the State: The Consignas Resistance

67

municipal government, but the rationality of the State itself is the one that installs an exercise of self-preservation and conservation at any cost. According to the third report delivered by the GIEI, the students of the Isidro Burgos School were subject to monitoring during at least the previous 4 years in the manner of the counterinsurgency activities that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s. In addition, the student movement of Ayotzinapa was infiltrated, as revealed in the report, with young people who acted as students and intelligence agents. Foremost, “all the corporations, Army, CISEN, Federal and State Police, followed up and reported in real time all the activities of [the students]” (GIEI 2022, p.  11, my emphasis). That is to say, all the information on the movement of the students was known before and during the events that led to their disappearance. It was the State. With this third report of 2022, the consigna of struggle and resistance that was first written on Mexico City’s Zócalo floor on October 22, 2014, has been validated. As it has also been shown (GIEI 2022), it is still the State that alters the crime scenes to hide its participation, omission, or coalescence before the different activities that seek to subdue and dominate the population that fights for truth and justice before the multitude of grievances that unfold in the body-territories. The consigna is the archive that is presented as praxis, as an assembly of concrete practices, of consensuses and procedures for the registering of words and deeds, of oral documents and acts that cannot be circumscribed to any institution and that cannot be organized vertically under any modality. The consigna condenses criticism in public spaces. It describes the regularities, the social actors involved, the relations established between them, the circuits of intimacy and trust, while at the same time abridges the set of statements that historically disposes to the generational responsibility of specific practices. It could be pointed out that any consigna, in a general way, and the expression “It was the State”, in a particular way, establish the “positivity of the discourse” as a “derivation of the historical a priori [that] bets on a specific analysis strategy of the ways of doing and saying that have been established in the archive of an epoch” (Tello 2018, p. 54). The effective interpretation carried out by the consigna “It was the State” replaces the use of the privileged schemes of comprehension of the historical reality and mobilizes intelligibility and knowledge from registers disallowed by the systems of verification of meanings. The focus on singularities condenses the contexts to express them in forceful statements; this manages to politicize the virtuality of the situations that motivate them. It may be, in this sense, that each of the singular voices that come together in an indignant and aggrieved chorus, in the middle of the square and the street, mobilizes new memory archives, as Fréderic Gros (2007) points out: “tries to consider the discourse in its dimension of existence, of practice, of event” (p. 74). Considering popular doxology as an archive—the political slogan as an archive— not only summons the conventional notion of a repository of private or institutional documents that seek to contain specific historical references but also creates a condition of possibility of evidencing, of new insinuations of truth and justice, as a historical a priori where events are limited and institutional regulations are revised. In other words, the consigna is the archive, it is the place where sayings and facts that “brush history against the grain” within a society emerge, it is a record of the pointing out and denouncing of situations, contexts, characters, and institutions that

68

5  Conclusions: State Violence – Archives, Bodies, Territories

make audible and sayable that what escapes the gaze and the listening. As this happens, a whole field of forces, tensions, and contradictions that run through all archives also emerge.

Conclusions In Mexico, the different systems that introduce statements in the manner of pre-­ established schemes of understanding reality perceive popular statements as expressions prone to be discredited and as examples of folkloric exotism. However, the consigna “It was the State” condenses all the thickness of the practices of resistance before a system that installs forms of specific repression, subjection, and domination. In the consignas, in the popular, the struggle against power unfolds as an act of memory against oblivion. This is the field of action of consignas. Different systems of enunciation establish criteria of cancellation of certain political potentialities, but this one resists in the condensation of (common) evil, of grievance and humiliation, so that iniquity does not agglomerate in an amorphous nihilistic multitude, nor inscribes itself in linear and progressive teleology (even with ruptures). It resists so that it is grouped in specific communities, in the manner of codes of complicity in which they compose one another, one to the other, according to dynamic and multiple relations, with the radically immanent pretension of sustaining themselves in the face of the deployment of the economy of power over discourses, registers, and interpretations. The clamor is a consigna in the face of the machine that produces disappearances. In Mexico, more than one hundred thousand disappeared and more than three thousand clandestine graves are an indication of the meaning of life and death in the processes of political parties’ transition. What began as a strategy of repression and counterinsurgency became a process of profitability of disposable bodies-territories. The links of private civilian government (organized crime), the extractivist practices, the linkage of serious human rights violations intertwined with economies of dispossession do not announce the end of the cis-tem, but new expressions of a generation of sacrificed people who are part of spectral communities as a deadly insignia of contemporary domination. Around disappearances is the institution forged in humiliations, grievances, and clamors that proclaim for a renewal of all things, that this history must stop and change. “Because they were taken alive!” Clamor and disappearance are knotted in the consigna, in the proclamation, in the legitimate demand for truth and justice to an institution that, by subsuming disappearance in despair, punctuates the domain of a void of memory and singularity. The tragic situation of forced disappearance in Mexico continues to point to the State as responsible for an intolerable circumstance shared by hundreds of thousands of stories, individual and group, who could never again speak out and forms of life suspended in the constant vacuum of coalescence and impunity. The clamor becomes indignation as an angry rejection of situations that deny and destroy the dignity of the bodies-territories. Internal forced displacement crystallizes a multiplied fracture of spaces, of places, of the community, atopia generated

References

69

by violence. Although forced internal displacement in Guerrero has been attested as a practice with agrarian, religious, or developmentalist motives, it has now been transformed into a strategy of war against bodies-territories. The generation of the politician-criminal installs local governance mechanisms energized by organized crime and unscrupulous businessmen. The continuity of this lacerating practice is based on the creed emanating from an image that modernity built to the measure of the powerful patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist nucleus. Colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist authoritarian expressions coincide in the establishment of order in bodies-territories. Their repressive practices occur within the framework of gender relations, reinforced and modulated by the mandates established in each of the sex-gender orientations. Thus, systemic sexual violence is deployed not only by the catastrophic permissiveness of the multiple forms of violence against women but also against the various corporealities in order to control, discipline, and safeguard the normative vital frameworks. Cis-temic sexual violence is the expression of a disciplining of bodies and subjectivities, of practices and territories that are linked in the symbolic reproduction of disposable people, despicable beings that not only consolidate a gender gap, but also the silenced, hidden, and cancelled experiences by a mechanism of restriction that cis-temic sexual violence itself establishes. The need for its approach is found in the political articulation of sexuality and the intersectional framework that strains the control devices from hegemonic features. From this perspective, the generalized hostilization of gender-­ sexual violence in multiple fields of action to reinforce the colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist cis-tem is highlighted. The heterogeneity of the consignas, of the condensed political statements and analyses, points to the heterogeneity of the technologies of registers, to their modes of operation among a multiplicity of networks, fabrics, interests, and affections that generate tensions, contradictions, and aporias. Hence, the problem of the consigna is a political threshold that summons the order of registers and their associated practices in permanent debate. Pointing at the State, accusing it, demanding it through popular instances deepen the problem of both the State itself and language due to the subversive character of the archive, which seems to be necessarily crossed by the urgency of settling an imperative that articulates the disagreement, that resolves it, in order to persist without further ado with the continuous spiral of progress and freedom.

References Agamben, G. 1998. Homo sacer: el poder soberano y la nuda vida. Valencia: Pre-Textos. Althusser, L. 1988. Ideología y aparatos ideológicos del Estado. Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión. Berrio, M. 2003. Los Estados fallidos. Cuaderno de Estrategia n° 120. Nuevos riesgos para la sociedad del futuro, 199–227. Bourke, J. 2009. Los violadores. Historia del estupro: de 1860 a nuestros días. Barcelona: Crítica. Butler, J. 2007. El género en disputa. El feminismo y la subversión de la identidad. Barcelona: Paidós. Causa en Común. 2022. Galería del horror: Atrocidades registradas en medios periodísticos durante 2021. México. https://causaencomun.org.mx/beta/atrocidades-­2021/.

70

5  Conclusions: State Violence – Archives, Bodies, Territories

CNN. 2000. Chronology of Mexico’s transition to democracy. https://edition.cnn.com/2000/ WORLD/americas/11/29/mexico.transition.reut/. Cobo, R. 2019. La cuarta ola feminista y la violencia sexual. Revista Universitaria de Cultura 22: 134–139. Cruz Hernández, D.T. 2020. Mujeres, cuerpos, territorio: entre la defensa y la desposesión. In Cuerpos, territorios y feminismos. Compilación latinoamericana de teorías, metodologías y prácticas políticas, ed. D.T. Cruz Hernández, 45–61. Ecuador: Abya Yala. Fernández, A. 2014. ¿Fue el Estado? Letras Libres. https://letraslibres.com/revista-­espana/ fue-­el-­estado/. Foucault, M. 2005. Historia de la sexualidad, vol. 1. La voluntad de saber. Madrid: Siglo XXI. Gamiño Muñoz, R. 2021. Estado, narcotráfico y desaparición forzada: la construcción de microespacios de excepción flexibles, móviles y atemporales. In De las fosas clandestinas a la tumba vacía: Narrativas de dignidad y esperanza en tiempos de horror, ed. P.R. Carlos Mendoza-­ Álvarez, 38–79. México: Universidad Iberoamericana. Garay, L. y. 2015. Drug trafficking, corruption and states. How illicit networks shaped institutions in Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico. Bloomington: iUniverse/Small Wars Journal/El Centro and Vortex Foundation. GIEI. 2022. Informe Ayotzinapa III. Mandato Medida Cautelar MC/409/14 CIDH. México: CNDH. Gramsci, A. 1972a. Notas sobre Maquiavelo, sobre la política y sobre el Estado moderno. Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión. ———. 1972b. Cultura y literatura. Barcelona: Península. Gros, F. 2007. Michel Foucault. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu. INEGI. 2022. Encuesta Nacional de Seguridad Pública Urbana (ENSU). México: INEGI. Laclau, E.M. 1987. Hegemonía y Estrategia Socialista. Hacia una radicalización de la democracia. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. Laclau, E. 2005. La razón populista. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Mancero García, A.C. 2018. Los Estados fallidos: una visión desde la Geopolítica. URVIO, Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios de Seguridad, 41–57. https://doi.org/10.17141/ urvio.22.2018.3081. Marchart, O. 2009. El pensamiento político posfundacional: la diferencia política en Nancy, Lefort, Badiou y Laclau. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Martínez Martínez, M.A. (2021). Neopatriarcalización, extractivismo y despojo: por la defensa de los cuerpos-territorio. En M. L. (Coords.), Violencia, sexualidad y género. Manifestaciones, resistencias y acciones de intervención (141–153). México: Ediciones del Lirio/BUAP. Mouffe, C. 2007. En torno a lo político. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Nay, O. 2013. Fragile and failed states: Critical perspectives on conceptual hybrids. International Political Science Review 34 (3): 326–341. Poulantzas, N. 1969. Hegemonía y dominación en el Estado moderno. Córdoba: Pasado y Presente. Sánchez Valdez, V.M., and López Cerón, S. 2020. Narcoayudas: ¿dónde y quiénes? Nexos. https:// seguridad.nexos.com.mx/narcoayudas-­donde-­y-­quienes/CNN. Tello, A.M. 2018. Una archivología (im)posible. Sobre la noción de archivo en el pensamiento filosófico. Síntesis. Revista de Filosofía I (1): 43–65. Vázquez Valencia, L.D. 2019. Captura del Estado, macrocriminalidad y derechos humanos. México: FLACSO México/Fundación Böll-México. Weber, M. 2004. Economía y sociedad. Esbozo de sociología comprensiva. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Index

A Archives, 4, 18, 31, 41–43, 59–69 B Bodies, 3–6, 10, 11, 16, 18, 19, 22–24, 29, 31, 32, 34, 35, 40, 41, 47–55, 59–69 Body-territories, 16, 23, 47, 67 C Civil society, 10, 11, 23, 64 Crime, 6, 9–12, 14–17, 19–22, 25, 30–38, 47, 62, 63, 65, 67–69

H Human rights violations, 3, 4, 6, 11, 13, 29, 30, 34, 47, 61, 68 I Indigenous feminism, 5 M Mexico, 1, 2, 4, 6, 9–25, 29–43, 47–55, 61–68 Militarization, 2, 13, 20, 25, 29, 30, 33, 34, 36, 61, 64, 65 R Regimes of Violence, 9–25

D Dirty war, 2, 17 Domestic violence, 47 Drugs, 13, 14, 19, 33, 35, 37, 61, 63, 64 F Femicide, 2, 5, 14, 17, 47, 49, 50 Forced disappearances, 2, 4, 6, 9–25, 68 Forced internal displacement, 2, 4, 29–31, 34, 36, 37, 39, 42, 43, 69

S State violence, 4, 6, 59–69 T Territories, 2–6, 15–19, 22, 24, 30–34, 36–41, 47, 49, 52, 53, 55, 59–69 V Violence, 2, 4–6, 9–25, 29–43, 47–55, 59–66, 69

G Gender violence, 47–55 Guerrero, 1, 14, 17, 18, 29–43, 64, 66, 69

W War on Drugs, 4, 13, 20, 29, 30, 33

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. A. Martínez Martínez, Bodies, Territories and Serious Violations of Human Rights in Mexico, SpringerBriefs in Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42712-1

71