Abstract
Mexico is still in crisis. Even if violent incidents have partly disappeared from the news since the PRI took power again in 2012, homicides have only been reduced slightly, and abductions are on the rise (Aristegui Noticias 2013). This security crisis invites us to pose new questions about Mexican state formation, and challenges what have until now been common grounds. This remarkable volume, edited by Wil G. Pansters, challenges accounts in transition studies according to which, by cleverly devised mechanisms, the Mexican governments achieved a largely peaceful transition from the authoritarian state party system of the PRI to democracy, albeit still remaining ‘flawed’. It is not only precisely the parallel movement towards party plurality and more visible insecurity (p. 9), but also the electoral return to a PRI government in 2012 that emphasise this critique.
Pansters aims to examine ‘the interconnections and historical roots of different dimensions, actors, and manifestations of violence, coercion, and insecurity in relation to broader processes of state-making’ (p. 6). Violence, thus, even if often dismissed from historical accounts of post-revolutionary Mexico as a ‘dark side’ (p. 8) or simply as marginal, is nonetheless essential for state formation processes in Mexico after 1910. In fact, Pansters suggests (p. 8), the emphasis on inclusive, co-opting mechanisms might have exaggerated Mexico’s role as a Latin American exception and hindered a systematic analysis of violence in Mexican state-making; ultimately, it tends to underestimate the role of violence during PRI times, and to overestimate the violence, illegal economy and conflict we observe today.
The so-called pax priísta – the relative stability during decades of PRI rule – therefore, might not have been all that peaceful. And by no means are forms of violence in Mexico such as torture, disappearances, and homicide new destructive practices produced solely from within the ‘narco’ sphere and clearly separated from the state. Partial overlaps between police and narco organisations are not entirely new, either.
Accordingly, the authors try to dismantle the mainstream depiction of the Mexican state as a unitary, corporatist ‘colossus’ (p. 29) and instead, based on a Gramscian understanding of the state, stress four fields of study: violence and coercion on a national and regional/local level, and hegemonic processes on both scales as well.
A body of nine texts divided into three sections is framed by an introductory essay (Part I) by the editor, and a concluding chapter by Koonings (Part V), who positions the Mexican case within a broader Latin American context. Each of the three main sections (Parts II-IV) contains three chapters. Part II focuses on three ‘pillars of state-making’ – borders, policing, and the army – covering large parts of the 20th century. Part III concerns a field that is usually neglected: the grey zone between state and non-state actors, state-crime relations and the production of illegalities following new accumulation strategies on a global scale. Part IV focuses on the state–society relation, including issues such as corporatist mechanisms and clientelism, but again looking at these from unusual angles.
Pansters offers a systematic analysis of violence and coercion framed by Gramscian concepts, and one aware of diverging theories on the state. The consequential historical perspective compels him to integrate historical peculiarities of Latin American state formation processes. A processual understanding of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony allows for relating historical dynamics of state and society, class and violence (p. 26). While Pansters differentiates analytically between ‘zones of coercion’ and ‘zones of hegemony/consent’ (p. 27), the term ‘zone’ allows for the inclusion of overlaps and unclear boundaries, and the distinction is gradual only. While not all contributions seem to fully embrace the proposed Gramscian concepts, they still open up a broad panorama on the relation of violence, state-making and power.
In Part II, Shirk connects a historical account of the changing border regimes between Mexico and the USA to transformations of economy, the liberalisation of legal and illegal trade, and the social implications of rising inequalities over the past decades. Davis argues that the military’s influence on the different policing institutions can be traced back to the aftermath of the 1910 revolution. Her historical narrative exposes the key role police played in the post-revolutionary Mexican state project, one which allowed near total impunity and frequently provided incentives for corruption. Gillingham, correspondingly, focuses on what he terms politics of decentralisation and informalisation of violence in midcentury rural Mexico, precisely the years that are usually depicted as those of the ‘Mexican miracle’ and a stable and flourishing PRI-rule.
In Part III, the notion of a ‘grey zone’ in which state and non-state actors secretly intertwine allows us to expose extraordinary coercion and violence as everyday parts of politics and state-making instead of taking them as indicators for crisis, deficient ‘governance’ or failure only. From the macro analysis it takes a closer look at these entanglements. This contribution alone is essential to studies of state and insecurity in Latin America and elsewhere – the thorough analysis exposes the ‘failed states’ paradigm once again as superficial and part of a clearly political agenda. From a historical perspective, Knight shows how the perfectly commonplace relation between drug production, export and the provision of protection in the post-revolutionary phase has changed: the entanglements between the state and narco-organisations aren’t new phenomena – while violence is now more intense. Serrano examines the relations between patterns of violence and the role of the state in the modified structure of illegal markets and mechanisms of regulation. As driving forces in what she terms the ‘privatisation of violence’ she identifies both criminal networks and the militarisation of the state’s anti-drug policy. Aguiar exposes how new regulation requirements on a global scale can actually produce new illegal economies and require punitive action by the state, in this case on digital products. This exemplifies the way the boundaries between legal and illegal production are indeed dynamic constructions.
Part IV is the section that perhaps most clearly shows how zones of consent and coercion overlap (following Gramsci). In it, the chapters by Aguila and Bortz and by Powell aim to take the analysis beyond institutional procedures, election processes and mechanisms of corporatism, to examine actual relations of domination in these areas. Gledhill addresses the linkage between state-making, new forms of violence and indigenous communities, which perform their reconstitution as ‘indigenous’ in contexts of external threats as well as internal contradictions.
Curiously, there is less focus on conflicting political and development projects within the ensemble of state apparatuses or on resistance by subaltern groups to the predominant state project and insecurity politics. Their claims could have been incorporated more extensively into the state–violence relation. Shifting accumulation strategies since the 1980s, the concomitant economic and state restructuring and their driving class forces are also less examined.
Nonetheless, even if some of the arguments made here might not be entirely new for those interested in critical studies on the Mexican state and Latin American state-making, the examination of current forms of violence by means of recounting historical phenomena, without neglecting the complex relation between the state, violence, and class, closes an important gap in scholarship on Mexico. These complex relations have received little systematic attention. Indeed, one finding of the book is that the institutionalisation and canalisation of conflicts on the national scale had been made possible in the long run only by ‘conjunctures of state repression’ (p. 9), shifted, as it were, to the local and regional scale.
This is an accessible, entirely readable book, with rigorous and detailed analysis. It is a necessary contribution, and a highly relevant book for those interested in Mexican state formation and its relation to violence.