Bare Life in Ciudad Juárez

Neoliberal Exception

Before turning to the specific nature of the conflict in Juárez it is necessary to outline briefly the key parts of Giorgio Agamben’s theory. Agamben (1998) argues that the defining feature of sovereign power is the ability of the sovereign to create a state of exception in which the laws of state do not apply. The inhabitants of this space, he proposes, are stripped of any rights that may usually be inferred from religion, nationhood, or even humanness. These people are reduced to “bare life”—the purely biological status of an animal. He refers to the person reduced to bare life as “homo sacer.” Turning to the ancient Latin root (1998: 79), he rejects the common notion that sacer has always meant “sacred,” drawing instead on a theory proposed by the English historian William Warde Fowler that “sacer esto is in fact a curse; and homo sacer on whom this curse falls is an outcast, a banned man, tabooed, dangerous.” Agamben defines homo sacer, accordingly, as a “person that is simply set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law” and someone “who may be killed and yet not sacrificed” (82). Homo sacer is by his very nature exposed to violence: “This violence—the unsanctionable killing that, in his case, anyone may commit, is classifiable neither as sacrifice nor as homicide, neither as the execution of a condemnation to death nor as sacrilege” (82). Agamben goes on to argue that it was under such a state of exception that the Nazi death camps operated. The Jews, placed outside the law and reduced to bare life, could be exterminated in the way that Hitler had announced—“like lice” (114).

Homo sacer is the present-day slave; the iron words “Arbeit Macht Frei” branded on the history of the twentieth century attest to that. The factory assembly line is a form of dehumanization, and Juárez is a city entirely dependent on manufacturing. The link between violence and Juárez’s position in the local and global economy was first put forward by a group of female academics analyzing the murders of over 200 young women in the city between 1993 and the early 2000s. The killings, which often involved horrific sexual acts of mutilation, became known as the “feminicides” and attracted worldwide media attention on account of both their gruesome nature and the appalling, almost mysterious lack of convictions. Scholars such as Deborah Weissman (2005), Melissa Wright (2004; 2006), and Jessica Livingstone (2004) argued that the murders were connected to the city’s altered economic landscape. Juárez’s transformation into an export processing zone “produced a category of victims: poor women who are subordinated, if not rejected, from social protections in the workplace as well as in their communities” (Weissman, 2005: 827).

In 1965 the local economy along Mexico’s border with the United States was dramatically transformed. The Border Industrialization Program aimed to use the geographic proximity to the United States by transforming the region into a zone of manufacturing for export. The accompanying maquiladora program enabled the creation of foreign-owned manufacturing plants able to import raw materials and component parts duty-free as long as the finished products were exported back to the United States. The companies were then taxed only on the value added as the product crossed back across the border. Although the industry got off to a relatively slow start, by the 1980s it had became the dominant economy on the border as Mexico attempted to use the foreign exchange acquired through the export market to recover from its debt crisis.

Juárez became the center of this economic experiment, and by 2010 one in four employees in Mexico’s manufacturing industry was based in the city (Staudt, Fuentes, and Fragoso, 2010: 25). How did this state of exception manifest itself in Juárez? First and most important, the population ballooned. Between 1960 and 2008 the number of people living in the city grew from around 200,000 to some 1.5 million. The city’s infrastructure was unable to keep up, and many of the new arrivals were unable to find suitable housing (Fuentes and Peña, 2010). This new population spilled over into unplanned housing to the city’s west. Although the wages of a maquiladora worker are not, as is frequently reported, lower than elsewhere in Mexico (Vulliamy, 2011: 126), they are in relative terms very low. The cost of living in Juárez is substantially higher than in central Mexico and is estimated to be around 90 percent of that in El Paso across the border, where wages are significantly higher (Bowden, 2010: 24). Another important factor is that the workforce in the maquiladoras is not unionized. For Mexico this is a rarity and a direct result of a changing economic viewpoint. The lack of unions means that the big multinationals relocating to Juárez are able to create their own terms of employment. The maquiladoras by design employ people who cannot find employment elsewhere in order to keep wages as low as possible. At first most employees were young female migrants from the South, and although this gradually changed the reputation of maquila work as women’s work continued (Weissman, 2005).

Not only was the population growth unmanageably fast but the people arriving in the city were all taking up the same low-paid jobs and entering society at the same low, working-class level. This resulted in a skewed social demographic—a mass of unhoused female migrants, working in manufacturing plants without the usual workers’ rights. The maquiladora workers, displaced and relocated in a space where Mexico’s employment laws did not apply, were not far removed from the status of refugees. Both found themselves in a denationalized space where their protection had been handed over to the international community, in the workers’ case to multinational companies. This lack of protection and the atmosphere of impunity it bred resulted, it was argued, in the feminicides.

The prejudice against female maquila workers, who were regarded as subverting traditional gender roles because they worked and were self-sufficient, was also important. Joanna Swanger (2007) argues, on the basis of interviews with a local nongovernmental organization that worked to support women in Juárez, that a deep and violent sexism existed against the women who had arrived in the city to work in maquiladoras. As factory workers and migrants they were regarded by many as little more than prostitutes: “Much of the popular discourse in Ciudad Juárez propounds that the women who have been disappeared brought it on themselves; they were ‘bad women’ who transgressed gender norms.” Weissman (2005) and Wright (2006) also draw connections between the degradation of prostitution and factory work. Both jobs involve the commodification of bare life, one through the bodily act of sex, the other through the unskilled use of one’s hands. The exclusion of women through manufacturing is similarly highlighted, although identified through a different lens—that of sovereignty—by Ong (2006). She identifies the paradox of export processing zones, which form an important part of the global economy precisely because they are an exception to the general laws that govern it (tariffs, taxes, and workers’ rights). Ong is heavily influenced by Agamben’s theory of sovereignty as defined by the ability to create a state of exception. However, in contrast to Weissman and others, she fails to regard the people living and working in these spaces of neoliberal exception (who, she notes, are predominantly women) as victims.

Yet, Agamben’s theory of homo sacer, “who can be killed but not sacrificed,” is a philosophy of violence, an exploration of the relationship between power and violence in the academic tradition of Thomas Hobbes and Hannah Arendt. It is inherently about victims, those excluded from society and thus exempt from one of its fundamental principles—the protection of its members. In Juárez, through the work of Weissman, Wright, and Livingstone, I see a unification of these elements. The murders were the result of the social exclusion of poor migrant women working in the maquiladoras, reducing them to homo sacer, who could be killed without fear of reprisals. The result was a city where murder went unpunished. Of the 76 cases classified as serial killings, only 3 convictions were obtained, and the accuracy of even these convictions was widely doubted (Simmons, 2006: 495).

Same City, Different Victims

From 2008 on Juárez suffered an increase in violence unimaginable at the time that Livingstone, Weissman, and Wright were writing. On his election in 2006, Felipe Calderón made an antinarcotics drive a pillar of his new government’s policy. His talk of “waging war” against the cartels was not mere rhetoric, and he sent the army and heavily armed federal police into the drug-trafficking heartland. In 2008, as violence in Juárez was beginning to escalate from a turf war between Joaquín “Shorty” Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel and the local Juárez cartel, Calderón sent 10,000 soldiers and federal police into the city. They were supposed to deal a decisive blow to the cartels, partly because they were well trained and heavily armed but also because they were not in the pocket of the drug traffickers. It had long been accepted that the local police were in cahoots with the cartels and therefore entirely ineffective. Far from curbing the rising death rate, however, the army and the police were sucked into the corrupt forces at play in the city.

Although official figures vary, the city saw around 10,000 homicides between 2008 and the end of 2011. That was more than the number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan over the same period and more than double the number of U.S. troops killed in the entire Iraq war. The jump in the murder rate eclipsed the gender violence of the feminicides, with an increasing number of people now dismissing the phenomenon as a journalistic fiction. One influential author on recent events in Juárez told me that they no longer believed that the number of women killed in Juárez during the 1990s was out of the ordinary for a city of its size. The current ferocity of violence has moved the goalposts, making even the feminicides seem ordinary. Many also reject the gender-oriented literature as irrelevant to the current crisis, in which the vast majority of people killed are male. This, however, is an untenable position. If the violence against women was linked to the city’s transformation into an export processing zone, then it stands to reason that the current violence is connected, at least in part, to similar forces.

The feminicides demonstrated a violence and lawlessness linked to Juárez’s position as a space of neoliberal exception. This lawlessness was linked to the dehumanization of female maquila workers, many of whom were denounced as prostitutes whose life was not worthy of recompense. As the military and the federal police entered the fray, the drug war created a similar type of dehumanized person—the drug trafficker. Murders went unpunished, and the violence and lawlessness previously restricted to the female factory workers became part of the fabric of the city. Killings between the cartels, killings by the military and police, and killings by kids on the street corner all became normalized and dehumanized under the banner of the “drug war.”

Until the massacre of 16 innocent teenagers at a birthday party in Juárez in 2010, which shifted public opinion and blew apart the rhetoric, the government line had consistently been that almost all of those dying were involved in the drug trade. The challenging of government rhetoric became a national movement after the son of the Mexican poet Javier Sicilia was killed in Cuernavaca in March 2011. Sicilia turned his grief outward, forming the ¡Hasta la Madre! (roughly “I’ve had it up to here!”) campaign and marching across the country in protest of the drug war. This movement more than anything else highlighted the way in which policy makers had attempted to frame the dead as guilty of their own demise. Sicilia, in the open letter to the Mexican government that signaled the beginning of his campaign, referred to Agamben and the theory of bare life: “Every citizen of this country has been reduced to what philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called, using a Greek word, zoe: that is, bare life, the life of an animal, of a being that can be subjected to violence, kidnapped, ill-treated or humiliated and murdered with impunity” (Sicilia, 2011).

Sicilia’s campaign drew attention to the way the dead had been marked out as drug addicts, criminals, and gang members—dehumanized in a similar way to the female murder victims. One interviewee, arrested for drug trafficking, condemned the drug war for inspiring the “criminalization of a generation” (Campbell, 2009: 115). Bodies continue to be discovered in mass graves or dumped in the desert. Often they remain unidentified, and the crimes almost always go unpunished. Those killed in the so-called drug war have been placed outside the state’s protection—declared homo sacer—in the same way as the women working in the maquiladoras.

View from Below

In order to explore how the violence in Juárez became so widespread, I will argue that those reduced to bare life are not simply helpless victims as Agamben suggests but have the power to wreak destruction themselves. The situation is not simply a matter of cartels’ and government forces’ killing local people but one of a violence that “courses through Juárez like a ceaseless wind” (Bowden, 2010: 105). Agamben’s theory of the state of exception and homo sacer lacks the view from below, from the position of bare life. What does the state look like from there? How is one’s identity changed by being placed outside the law? Within the category of homo sacer exists a tension between production and destruction. This can be seen in the figure of the murdered and abused maquila woman, where the productivity of bare life is pushed over the edge into destruction. Wright (2006: 2) refers to this as the “myth of the disposable third world woman.” This destruction can also, however, be harnessed.

Agamben hints at but fails to develop the power that homo sacer is able to conjure through his own sacred ban. Homo sacer occupies the same space as the sovereign, a space both inside and outside the law. However, the defining feature of the sovereign is his ability to announce the “sovereign exception”—the ability to act from beyond the law in order to change or suspend it. The sovereign and homo sacer may mirror each other, but the sovereign is the original and the homo sacer the reflection, forced to obey. If the mirror stops reflecting the movements of the sovereign, then the entire basis of the state is thrown into question and law and order break down. This I term the “sacred choice”—the decision open to homo sacer to accept or to resist the ban under which he has been placed. Agamben (1998: 79) writes that “sacer designates the person or thing that one cannot touch without dirtying oneself or without dirtying.” In this there is undoubtedly a certain power, the power to “dirty” the very state that expelled you if you choose to meet the threat of violence with violence of your own. The persistence of homo sacer is an undermining of the sovereign power.

The violence to which the disenfranchised are exposed is also harnessed by them. That the violence has changed the choices of people in the city was made clear to me by an American Catholic priest living in a poor barrio in Juárez. “The kids here,” he told me, “see the danger that is now everywhere in this city, and they think, ‘I can either be a victim of it or live the fast life.’ Many take the latter option, and you can see why.” Joining the gangs or the cartels is a way of taking the violence and uncertainty of the city into your own hands, of gaining control in a space where law and order have dissolved and you are “at every instant exposed to an unconditional threat of death” (Agamben, 1998: 184). This violence is made all the more prevalent by the appeal of the persona of the narcotraficante. The image of the narco overlaps with that of Pancho Villa and the myth of the norteño macho. The Observer journalist Ed Vulliamy reinforces this connection in his recent account of the violence along the border: “When the narco trafficker looks in the mirror, he sees not a criminal, but a romantic bandit” (2011: xxv). This image has been described as “the tough survivor of the Sierra” (Edberg, 2004: 112).

A link, therefore, exists between the massacres carried out in a territorial war between cartels and the armed 12-year-olds with no affiliation demanding protection money from shops. The connection between these different layers of violence is the reduction of the inhabitants of Juárez to bare life. The violence correlates with the transformation of Juárez into an export processing zone. There is some form of territorial conflict going on in Juárez. However, this conflict has led to a wider display of violence. In a space of exclusion where inhabitants have been stripped of national belonging and human rights, violence has become the norm among the disenfranchised.

Conclusion

Viewing Juárez as a state of exception is an insightful way of considering the recent violence there. By drawing on Agamben and Ong I have been able to link the feminicides with the current drug-related violence in a coherent theoretical framework. I have provided a reworking of Agamben, arguing first that his theory lacks an economic dimension and second that it pays scant attention to the life of homo sacer. Homo sacer is presented wrapped in the prejudices of the weak and needy refugee: “He can save himself only in perpetual flight or a foreign land” (1998: 184). What I have sought to express is that homo sacer, if not productive, is destructive. In this lies a “sacred choice” between obedience and violence. Homo sacer need not flee; he can stay and fight. The violence unleashed when this possibility becomes a reality is barbarous and terrifying, because homo sacer has nothing to lose, fighting as if he were already dead. The violence inherent in the curse of homo sacer explains the chaotic nature of the violence from the street view. Much as an engineer might build a mock-up of his design to prove that his calculations stand up, this essay indicates how the idea of a state of exception may be used to construct an explanatory narrative of the crisis in Juárez. However, it cannot claim to do much more than that. Extensive field research would be required to back up the assertions made and the links drawn between the different types of violence on the ground.

I have not had the space to explore the gender element clearly evident in the current violence, but it is something that cropped up persistently during my research and demands further study and reflection. Masculinity is closely bound up with the image of the narco along the northern border. Femininity in the region, by contrast, seems to be defined by submission. Today this is manifest in the distinct gender roles being cast in the state of exception: women as maquila workers and men as narcos. This suggests that gender is an important and complicated distinctive feature of the state of exception. Yet Agamben ignores gender entirely in describing homo sacer, who is cast as default male.

Ong’s work has shown that in export processing zones homo sacer is predominantly female, an observation supported by the work of Livingstone, Weissman, and Wright. The role of gender in states of exception therefore demands further research, since it appears to be crucial. I suspect that gender determines in large part how the reduction to bare life is realized in practice. What dehumanizes a woman may not be the same as what dehumanizes a man, and, more important, the ways men and women respond to being dehumanized do not seem to be the same. Indeed, if bare life is understood as the reduction to purely biological parts, the difference of sex is one of the few distinctions that remains.

Field research is difficult and dangerous, but it is paramount that Juárez not be allowed to descend into the state of an infernal “other” as it has so frequently done in the past. The signs are that this is already happening. The vast majority of El Pasoans I met, even those with family and friends on the other side, had stopped crossing the border. This is not surprising. What is more worrying is the lack of academics and journalists crossing the border or corresponding with the journalists and academics who are still based in Juárez. There are exceptions to this, such as the collaboration between Juárez and El Paso universities represented by the collection Cities and Citizenship (Staudt, Fuentes, and Monárrez Fragoso, 2010), but they remain too few. Juárez offers important insight into the strain of development—the violence that can arise out of the productive/destructive tension of neoliberal states of exception. It is important to understand these forces, to unravel the human predicament imposed by these states, and to learn from the mistakes that have been made.