Abstract
Michael Kearney’s and Rodolfo Stavenhagen’s combined works have had an enormous influence on my own thinking and anthropological practice. While in graduate school in the mid-1980s I had the opportunity to meet and talk with each of them before embarking on my fieldwork with rural Mayan widows in the end stages of the more overt and brutal forms of political violence in Guatemala. The resonance of their work speaks not only to the power of their conceptual insights, of which there are many, but also to the power of capitalist relations to orchestrate how marginalized people live and die.
Stavenhagen’s and Kearney’s work on Latin America embodies a constellation of theoretical concerns about the ways in which processes of capitalist accumulation and fields of power produce inequalities manifested through relations of gender, race, class, and sexuality. It has importantly documented the multiple and often contradictory ways in which ordinary people respond to their problems in the present—loss of land and livelihoods and their vital connections with each other. Moreover, it has interrogated strands of the past to show the mediated range of options available to rural peoples, among them internal differentiation, social mobilization, rural-to-urban migration, and, more recently, transnational border crossings. The entire panoply of violence—structural, political, symbolic, everyday —is integral to this deployment of power.
It is to this constellation of issues that I turn here, suggesting that a matrix of violence may allow us not only to capture more fully the social and economic dimensions of capitalist relations (what Gavin Smith calls “historical realism”) but also to interrogate hegemony in the Gramscian sense, not only in terms of its making social phenomena appear natural but in terms of its uncovering “how power blocs attain and retain hegemonic leadership” (Smith, 1999). Impunity—not only in its juridical sense but also as a social process that is enabled by a characteristic mixture of silence and memory among its victims and historical amnesia and indifference on the part of the dominant class (Green, 2008)—is a crucial component of this dynamic. In this sense a historicized violence takes into account and holds accountable those responsible for crimes of considerable magnitude—the dispossession, dislocation, and attendant despair that circumscribe the lives of many million Latin Americans. Structural violence, symbolic violence, everyday violence, as much as political violence, are crimes against rural and indigenous peoples as they are torn from their history, their kin, and their sense of space and place—key features of their identity and their well-being.
The loss of land as a basis of livelihood and of water rights and the unlawful extraction of raw minerals, especially on indigenous lands, have been particularly devastating because land held collectively not only organizes material production practices but also embodies the essence of their social and cultural reproduction—their way of life. The history of Mexico and Central America is replete with such instances. The utter devastation wrought upon indigenous peoples of Nicaragua through the destruction of comunidades indígenas at the beginning of the twentieth century, as Jeff Gould (1998) describes it, the massacre in 1932 El Salvador (Gould and Lauria, 2008), the genocide of 1980s Guatemala (Falla, 1994; Green, 1999; Manz, 1988), the ongoing violence against the Zapatistas of Chiapas, and the less well-known but equally destructive selective repression of the Zapatecs of the Oaxacan Sierra are but few examples. Yet this long, sordid history of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2005), now enshrined in free-trade agreements, has been very beneficial for some, along the way enriching transnational corporations, state actors, and more recently mafia-like drug cartels. As the New York Times has reported (March 17, 2014), the ruthless Mexican drug cartel the Knights Templar is reputedly making more money from illegal mining than from its drug trafficking pursuits.
These processes and forces, although opposed quite markedly by the left, are mostly understood both in the academic literature and in popular discourse as unfortunate by-products of progress and development. And while rural peoples have hardly been passive victims of the vicissitudes of capitalist social relations, as the large-scale rural mobilizations in 1970s and 1980s Latin America and particularly in Central America well attest, the states’ responses were brutal.
I want to call attention to a less well-acknowledged violence—the insidious large-scale migration driven by the neoliberal economic policies that were central to the negotiated peace accords across Central America in the 1990s. Adolfo Gilly’s (2005) characterization of neoliberalism as not only an economic model but also a mode of domination is apt. In Guatemala, for example, the 1996 peace accords facilitated the successful practical and rhetorical delinking of two crucial instruments of violence utilized against the poor, impunity and “free-market” capitalism. Moreover, two oft-unacknowledged partners to these crimes waged against the Mayan people of Guatemala as elsewhere—in both wartime and peacetime—are the international financial institutions, notably the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the U.S. military (Green, 2006).
Simultaneously and somewhat contradictorily, migration is a survival strategy for millions of indigenous and marginalized people across Mesoamerica, one of the few remaining options for creating a future for themselves and their families. For indigenous peoples these processes facilitate an ethnocide, as people are torn from the their land, their history, and each other, the collective basis of indigenous well-being. To survive many are forced to struggle alone as individuals each step of the way.
Human Rights and the Rule of Law
Stavenhagen’s work with the UN has been emblematic in helping to establish and make viable UN charters on human rights in the wake of the Central American wars. Unfortunately, however, the rule of law has its limits in capitalist societies, as is well evidenced in the borderlands of the American Southwest. As Mattei and Nader (2008) demonstrate, a juridical notion of plunder that restricts its definition to heinous acts renders invisible the centrality of the “rule of law” in the production of historical and contemporary forms of social and economic inequality.
Since 1999 the Arizona-Mexico borderlands have become the site of massive crossing of migrants from Mexico and Central America. For well over a decade, the skeletal remains of an average of 200 human beings have been found by happenstance every year in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, where 100+ degrees F. summer temperatures are the norm. Yet these deaths are met with little public outcry, whether because of disregard, ignorance, or silent indifference, by large swaths of the American public.
In Arizona state and federal policies that criminalize migrants have contributed to a social and political climate that is vicious and brutal. Assaults are perpetrated not only against putative “illegals” but against all people of color, whatever their documentation status. The infamous SB 1070 and the federal Secure Communities program are but two of the most egregious examples. Operation Streamline is another. Every weekday at 1:30 p.m. tens of undocumented migrants, legs and hands shackled, shuffle en masse into a room on the second floor of the Special Proceedings U.S. District Court, where they plead guilty to “illegally” crossing the border (which until quite recently was a minor civil violation). In court the felony charges are mostly reduced to a federal misdemeanor as part of the plea agreement, and after an obligatory 30–180 days in private prison complexes the migrants are deported. Many will try again, especially those who have established lives in the United States. Since 2008, when Streamline was first instituted in Tucson, the court proceedings have made a mockery of the rule of law and the notion that American jurisprudence is fair, unbiased, and available to everyone, and their costs are staggering. Pima County taxpayers pay over US$11 million per month to stage this event.
While public policies and law enforcement practices that sanction brutality have often been reserved for the marginal in societies, only recently have they spilled into plain sight. Such practices are now readily apparent in the militarization of the borderlands of southern Arizona where I live. Not surprisingly, contradictions abound. The Border Patrol is a law enforcement agency, yet it has actively recruited from the ranks of combat veterans of the global war on terror—many veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. The academic and the medical literature have well documented the profound social, psychological, and physical consequences of these wars for the young men and women in the military who were trained to use deadly force and ask questions later.
Since 2010 at least 22 people have been killed by Border Patrol agents along the southern border. All the victims were unarmed—this is the Border Patrol’s equivalent of “Stand Your Ground” against rock throwers. At least 6 of them were been shot while standing on Mexican soil; others were either shot in the back multiple times or killed at point-blank range. Use of lethal force is sanctioned as a defense against rock throwers, as agents claim fear for their lives as justification. None of the agents to date have faced any criminal charges; investigations remain open and unresolved. The names of the Border Patrol agents accused have not been made public.
José Antonio Rodríguez is a case in point. This unarmed 16-year-old youth was walking along Calle International, the street on the Nogales, Sonora, side that runs parallel to the border wall, at around 11 p.m. on October 10, 2012. He was felled by five shots to his back and two to his head by what the Border Patrol claims was a single agent shooting in defense of his life. The agent shot through the fence onto Mexican soil in defiance of U.S.-Mexico treaties. According to eyewitnesses, José Antonio was not throwing rocks, and if he had been he would have had to throw the rocks up and over the 18-foot wall that sits atop a 30-foot mound along that section. The events should have been caught on Border Patrol web cameras located at the site of the killing, but the tapes have not been made public. Almost three years later the secretive investigations are ongoing and unresolved.
Hope for a Future
The Rev. Alvaro Ramazzini, bishop of the Guatemalan province of San Marcos for 23 years and now bishop of neighboring province of Huehuetenango, two of the country’s largest migrant-sending regions, recently visited Tucson to say a mass in the desert on the Tohono O’odham reservation that forms a boundary with Mexico. This divide separates the Tohono O’odham people on the two sides of the border. The O’odham Nation is the site of much bloodshed over the past century; blood from the most recent wave of migrants from southern Mexico and Central America is now conjoined with the blood of indigenous people from southern Arizona and northern Mexico. The bishop spoke eloquently that day about the rights of people to freely migrate in search of a better life. A more radical version of his message is enshrined in David Bacon’s (2013) The Right to Stay Home, which includes demands by indigenous people of Oaxaca for the restructuring of economic relations but, more important, the practice of relations of trust and cooperation to build a just and sustainable world.
After the 1994 Zapatista uprising, in which over one-third of the total land area of Chiapas was “recovered” by the Zapatista bases of support, and after the Mexican state’s reneging on the promise of indigenous autonomy, the Zapatistas undertook the long, slow process of developing autonomous education, health, production, communications, and juridical systems in their territory without state aid or official recognition. The construction of Zapatista autonomy and self-governed territory, with its emphasis on the making of collective Zapatista subjects, is in sharp contrast to the proliferation of development schemes from multiple sites—states, international development institutions, and nongovernmental organizations—that foster, in some cases unwittingly, capitalist modes of exploitation and domination. The Zapatistas are putting in place the revolutionary socialism—revolutionary in the sense not of how power is taken but rather of how social relations are restructured—that Stavenhagen (1971) called for.
Stavenhagen has called upon anthropologists not only to take responsibility for our legacy as handmaidens to colonization and capitalism globally but to stand with and stand up for the people with whom we work. A historicized anthropology of violence intimately tied with social, political, and ethical concerns can make the case for what should be remembered and talked about and what should be condemned and actively resisted—bearing witness, if you will, not in the religious or even the humanitarian sense but in terms of accompaniment (Holthaus, 2012)— in what C. Wright Mills called linking private misery to public concerns.
Footnotes
Linda Green is an associate professor of anthropology and director of Latin American studies at the University of Arizona. This article consists of the remarks made in response to Rodolfo Stavenhagen’s Michael Kearney Memorial Lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on March 20, 2014.