Violence in Mexico,Then,There,and Now: A Review Essay

The three books reviewed here document various types of extreme violence in Mexico over time, across space, and in specific places. While ordinary people engage in violence and while cartels specialize in it, all three indict the Mexican state—from the officials at or near the heart of state power to the local police forces forming the capillaries of its coercive apparatus.

The historian Carlos Illades’s book, Conflict, Domination, and Violence, examines protest movements and armed rebellions since the nineteenth century, among them the labor movement and the early agrarian rebellions, ethnic violence against Spanish shopkeepers and hacendados during the Mexican Revolution, and some protests since the mid-twentieth century. In documenting the making of the Mexican working class, Illades explains that while the authorities limited labor’s role in politics, workers’ protest still proved consequential. The early labor movement contributed to the secularization of public space and the expansion of civil society even though the state eventually directly organized labor into a corporatist association. His chapter on rural rebellions offers evidence that peasants mobilized in the nineteenth century on behalf of radical agrarianist ideals that sometimes justified demands for land reform in indigenist terms. Agrarianism and indigenism therefore have precursors in the nineteenth century. In addition, peasant ideas about justice combined with a “diverse mosaic of socialist ideas” and political identities in the Sierra Gorda well before the Bolshevik and Mexican revolutions. Poverty, inequality, and dispossession, Illades reminds us, are breeding grounds for armed struggle. The chapter on Mexico’s 1910 Revolution analyzes ethnic violence, which Illades calls “xenophobic.” Ethnic “resentments” created by colonialism resurfaced in this postcolonial revolution when popular armies targeted gachupínes, whether Spanish shopkeepers or hacendados. Ethnicity remained salient nearly a century after independence because of the legacy and weight of 300 years of colonialism justified by Spaniards in ethnic-supremacist terms. “Xenophobic” mobilization, Illades argues, helped to construct a Mexican national identity.

Illades then jumps to distinct episodes of conflict in the second half of the twentieth century. The fifth chapter, for example, is on socialist Acapulco as a precursor to the armed struggles of Genaro Vázquez, Lucio Cabañas, the Ejército Popular Revolucionario, and the autodefensas (vigilantes) in the state of Guerrero. Illades argues that Guerrero continues to be bronco (violently contentious) because of what he calls “the sequence of mobilization—repression—self-defense.” Thus, even if the recent autodefensas do not sound like the armed guerrilla groups of the mid-twentieth century, they nevertheless fit the twentieth-century pattern. He argues, therefore, that “instead of modernizing, politics in Guerrero re-energized its archaic mechanisms, meaning that violence (whether social, political, [or] criminal) surges and the three branches of the state lack a minimally credible strategy to confront it” (87).

Guerrero, moreover, crystallizes the broader pattern by which extreme inequality leads to armed movements that are then repressed by the Mexican state. Worse, violence radicalizes, and it does so in ways that perpetuate cycles of violence. As a result, the cycles display the state’s illegitimacy, even in the democratic era, because political society remains unresponsive to claims in civil society. Illades thus offers an explanation of the recent rise and geographic expansion of neo-anarchism: contemporary youth distrust public institutions and politicians, and this can lead to de-democratization.

While tracing the history of radical movements, including the recent rise of neo-anarchism, may be a thread linking the chapters, it would have helped if Illades had explained the selection of his cases. Doing so would have helped readers understand why they jump in time and space and why he mentions radical women without focusing a chapter on women’s contention (for example, against the disappearances of women or against feminicides). Despite these omissions, his conclusion is important: “Mexican democracy may have advanced in electoral matters, but . . . the relationship between governors and governed has certainly not altered substantially. . . . Social mobilization can contribute to both the democratization of the regime and to making explicit the unacceptable deficit in justice suffered by broad swathes of the population” (149).

The political scientist Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera looks specifically at cartel violence and the recent rise of the autodefensas (referring to them as “paramilitaries”). Her main argument is that Mexico is facing a new civil war and that the sale of hydrocarbons and other natural resources is an important, if often overlooked, explanation. The better-documented claims are in the second half of the book, focusing on how the discovery of new energy fields and Mexico’s recent energy reform have increased cartel violence. Because of these developments, transnational criminal organizations now also fight for control over territory rich in hydrocarbons and minerals in the northeastern part of the country. In other words, there is more at stake than drug routes. Because control of territory is now key, the Zetas and other transnational criminal organizations have driven peasants and small business people off their lands, making it easier for criminals to steal and then sell crude oil, gasoline, diesel, natural gas condensate, other refined oil products, coal, and other natural resources. The Mexican Association of Gasoline Entrepreneurs estimates that organized crime controls about 20 percent of the national fuel market, and Correa-Cabrera calculates that they lose billions of pesos as a result.

Correa-Cabrera further claims that the Zetas could not have diversified their illicit activities without help from corrupt politicians, local police, governors, union leaders, and unethical business people with legitimate firms. Indeed, she asks how some legal Mexican firms protected by the Mexican state could have expanded in this period of extreme violence. She also cites journalistic accounts to make a case that some foreign companies—including those owned by China and by Americans—benefit. She maintains, for example, that iron flows to China and oil and gas stolen from Pemex flow to transnational energy corporations, especially those in Texas. Transnational corporations that purchase minerals and hydrocarbons from transnational criminal organizations or their affiliates profit because they purchase at below-market prices. U.S. arms manufacturers, transnational financial firms, U.S. transportation companies, security businesses, import firms, pipeline operators, and refineries also profit from the violence. Foreign firms, she argues, launder money, and even the U.S. border-security/military-industrial complex benefits from cartel violence. Worse, there is no simple solution within sight, since northeastern Mexico is ripe for exploration of shale field development—something U.S. firms seem keen on doing.

The Zetas not only went beyond the drug trade, they did so earlier than other transnational criminal organizations and, because they controlled key areas, at some point they monopolized important human smuggling routes. Correa-Cabrera traces the Zetas’ emergence as a specialized military wing of the Gulf Cartel, their eventual achievement of autonomy, and their influence on the tactics of other such organizations. She argues that the fact that many Zetas were former military men who had deserted from the Mexican or the Guatemalan army made them especially efficient at violence. However, they also proved effective in business, innovating organizationally by allowing relatively autonomous subsidiaries and creating a highly specialized division of labor within their organization. Their “corporate” structure, their extreme violence, and their diverse goals became models for other transnational criminal organizations. It is for this reason that they can be credited with helping to plunge Mexico into what she insists on calling a new type of civil war.

Although some of Correa-Cabrera’s concepts—such as “civil war” and “paramilitaries”— are debatable, there is no arguing with the observation that the Zetas played an important role in escalating violence. More important, her claim that the illegal trade in hydrocarbons and other natural resources is crucial to understanding the escalation of violence in northeastern Mexico is important and new (at least to audiences outside of Mexico).

In contrast to Correa-Cabrera who seeks to develop an explanatory framework that goes beyond the “drug war” descriptor, in I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us John Gibler offers no conceptual framework or synthetic analysis. Rather, because he takes seriously the journalist’s responsibility to report only the facts, he offers a series of excerpts from his interviews with at least 25 Ayotzinapa survivors and testimony from other eyewitnesses (journalists, teachers, a clinic worker) and the perspective of some parents. The book consists of testimonials in which Ayotzinapa victims narrate their firsthand experiences with police terror on the night of September 26, 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero.

Gibler’s book consists of interview transcriptions carefully translated in the youths’ vernacular to as close to the English equivalents as possible and then organized to narrate events from different points of view—whether from inside or outside of a bus as it was being shot at or from the distinct hiding positions of individual students. Before narrating what they witnessed, the youths describe trial week at their Ayotzinapa rural teachers’ college, their thinking about whether to attend a political action on September 26, and their participation in the ritualized commandeering of buses. They describe playful exchanges with each other and with the bus drivers before the police ambush. Their accounts essentially persuade the reader that they were on an ordinary mission in which they were to take buses—as they had without incident on countless occasions—so that they could help to transport other students to the annual Tlatelolco commemoration.

The survivors then describe being shot at by police, how they responded with rocks, and when they realized that the police aimed to kill them. Many students described seeing a peer fall from a bullet to the head or hearing police callously refuse to help a student who was struggling for breath. They committed to memory that police aimed their weapons directly at them knowing that the youths were unarmed and that some were already seriously injured. They describe how police bullets struck a paisa’s knee or cut off a compa’s lips; they report on their efforts to take cover. Some students offer details about hiding in a clinic only to have a doctor and two of his staff refuse to offer first aid. They could not forget the anguish of the mother of one of their fallen mates or the stunned silence of a classmate upon learning that his cousin had been murdered.

The youths’ descriptions of battle scenes are shocking, since they were training to be teachers, not soldiers. Indeed, many reported having learned about the political action upon leaving a classroom, a field, or a dance class just before the commandeering of the buses. They had not anticipated, let alone provoked, the assaults, and they only had handfuls of rocks to defend themselves against automatic weaponry. Their pleas—“We are unarmed students”— were pointless, because the police intended to kill them. Except for a few, they are children of peasants, and at least one student identified himself as indigenous.

While many people offered refuge, students describe being turned away from some residences in ways that suggest that fear in Iguala was widespread. There is also evidence of an empathy gap in at least some citizens, who disparaged the youths by calling them “Ayotzinapos” and dehumanized them by arguing that they had provoked their own torture. For example, a woman who had denied students help went so far as to argue that they deserved their violent fates. When challenged on her views, she affirmed that even the skinning of one student’s face and excision of his eyes (while he was alive) was deserved. The students’ testimonials also speak to their solidarity, something that is carefully cultivated at their school. We learn, for example, of their courage in returning to dangerous scenes to help one another or, in one instance, to help a journalist whom they did not know who had frozen when others ran at the sound of machine-gun fire until a student pushed her to safety.

Gibler’s choice to report the survivors’ testimony scene-by-scene essentially forces the reader to adopt the first-person point of view and thus to identify with the students’ terror, courage, physical pain, and broken hearts. The way they describe their disillusionment with their government is consistent with the reports of Illades and other scholars that illegitimate state violence radicalizes youth. This dynamic, evident in many countries, was immediately apparent in 2014, as is seen in the posters at protests denouncing the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students. Many posters, for example, read “FueElEstado” and some said “NarcoEstado” (Illades, 137). My own work on collective memory further indicates that the consequences of unjustified state violence are long-lasting, with legitimacy deficits from the original violence manifesting themselves decades later (Trevizo, 2016). Thus, if the memory of Tlatelolco is any indication, Ayotzinapa will radicalize youth for decades to come.

However, as Illades observes, none of the state’s branches have historically responded productively to cycles of protest and violence in the past. Indeed, we learn from all three of these books that politicians are not infrequently complicit or even coconspirators in violence because they benefit financially or politically from it. Many authorities obstruct justice for the same reasons, and the prevailing impunity multiplies violent actors. Notwithstanding the fact that political and criminal violence have different motives, both create insecurity, and this is especially evident when civilian deaths reach civil-war levels.

The current crisis has led scholars to debate whether the Mexican state is “weak,” “complicit,” “failing,” or already a “failed state.” Guillermo O’Donnell’s (1993) theory of Latin American states is useful here. He argues that Latin American states do not look like the Weberian model but are disjointed entities whose official jurisdictions include “brown areas,” geographic places where the law is either absent or ineffective. O’Donnell also points out that parts of the state bureaucracy include such brown areas. This conceptualization fits the Mexican case, in which local police often work for the cartels and other authorities benefit from their crimes. His conceptualization, however, recognizes that state capacity is uneven and that officials themselves have diverse agendas. If, therefore, some bureaucracies and officials are more functional than others, there is a possibility that patterns of clientelism and corruption can be broken and professionalization can occur.

Yet the generalization and, indeed, normalization of extreme violence described in the books reviewed here suggests that, unless something changes quickly, the democratizing process could be completely derailed. The legitimacy crisis of the Mexican state is already apparent in the increasing number of mass protests, the expansion of the neo-anarchist movement traced by Illades, and the rise of self-defense movements in several states. The fragmentation of sovereignty is, as Diane Davis (2010) observes, tragic. Solutions, therefore, must come from all sectors—from the legislature, the judiciary, the National Human Rights Commission, the nongovernmental organizations, and the social movements. I stress all sectors because social movements are not a cure-all. First, collective demands rarely translate into policy details. Second, progressives are not the only actors with the potential for mobilization. There is no shortage of actors with ideas, even extreme ideas (for example, death squads), about how to confront insecurity or how to improve upon pseudo-citizenship. Finally, as Correa-Cabrera’s work demonstrates, the cartels themselves have agendas as well as the economic power and weaponry to enact them. Their economic, coercive, and corrupting powers have already contributed to de-democratization in some corners of the country, and they have the potential to undermine further the people’s right to elect their country’s leaders. Electoral democracy was never a panacea, but Mexico would be worse off without the ability to elect policy leaders in an uncompromised way.