Penal Statecraft in the Latin American City

Abstract

This paper applies Loïc Wacquant’s work on penal statecraft to analyze the growing punitiveness of urban politics in contemporary Mexico City. It demonstrates that the intersection of the urbanization of neoliberalism and the democratization of local politics contributed to the emergence of a punitive regime of governing urban marginality in the city. This indicates the consolidation of a punitive urban democracy in which despite the formal legal empowerment of the city’s residents during the last two decades, those at the urban margins face a reverse process of punitive exclusion that takes the form of a criminalization of poverty. In taking a closer look at the situation within the local penal apparatus, the paper furthermore shows that these exclusionary tendencies are reinforced by informal institutional practices inside the local law enforcement bureaucracies.

Keywords

Democratization Latin America Mexico City neoliberalism penal state

In June 2004, several hundred thousand Mexico City residents mobilized by civil society organizations like Mexico United Against Delinquency, the country’s most influential anti-crime non-governmental organization, rallied to the streets of the nation’s capital in order to protest against the inefficiency of the Mexican authorities in their efforts to confront the perceived crime wave haunting the city, and the country in general, as well as the ‘leniency’ of existing penal laws. In this regard, the protest was accompanied by widespread demands for retributive punishment and ‘tough on crime’ politics, including calls for indefinite prison terms and the death penalty for kidnappers and murderers (La Jornada, 2004a, 2004b). Nearly 2 years later, in spring 2006, car drivers and pedestrians strolling down one of Mexico City’s most trafficked streets, Insurgentes Avenue, were confronted with a huge billboard on top of a multi-story building. The billboard, placed there by a private initiative, offered a reward of 250,000 Mexican Pesos (about US$ 23,000) for the capture of a presumed kidnapper and murderer; a capture that was called a ‘community service’. Two years later, Mexico’s Green Ecological Party distributed a leaflet among urban households in Mexico City. The leaflet contained two photo stories. One story was about Maria whose daughter has been kidnapped and who is threatened from ‘Moncho’, a prisoner, to pay the full ransom, otherwise her daughter would have to suffer the consequences. Maria, the story tells us, despite the financial support from her mother, is unable to pay the complete ransom and she never hears from her daughter again. The other story is about Juan, presented as a ‘repeated offender’. He is waiting at a street corner for his next victim. When a young boy and girl depart from a bus, Juan tries to assault them, but the young man attempts at defending himself. A dramatic series of photos shows how Juan stabs the young man, who dies in the arms of his girlfriend. Below the photos, and next to the ecological party’s symbol, the leaflet reads: ‘Death penalty for kidnappers and murderers. Let’s make it real and live in peace’.

These episodes are snapshots of a larger punitive turn in urban politics that accompanied the democratization of the Mexican political system throughout the last two decades. From the vantage point of Mexico City, the present paper argues that this punitive turn is not primarily, nor exclusively, related to a real increase in urban crime. Rather, it is inseparable from the imposition of a neoliberal vision of economic, social and political order as well as a new regime of governing urban marginality under the auspices of what Loïc Wacquant termed the ‘penal state’ (Wacquant, 2009a). As this process is simultaneously overdetermined by the democratization of local politics, the rolling out of the penal state in Mexico City, the paper furthermore claims, converts the city into a punitive urban democracy. A democracy in which notwithstanding the formal legal empowerment and growing political inclusion of urban residents, a growing number of the city’s residents, in particular those at the urban margins, are confronted with a reverse process of punitive exclusion. The latter is inseparable from the enacting of new laws that criminalize urban marginality, thereby converting the police, courts and prison system into core institutions of the local state’s efforts of the ‘neoliberal governing of poverty’ (Wacquant, 2009a).

In applying Wacquant’s analytical tools to explain the punitive turn in Mexico City, the article confronts two types of criticism frequently directed at his analysis. First, in providing an empirical case study that highlights the complex relationship between larger macrostructural developments and their political and legal repercussions at the subnational level, the paper addresses those critical commentators who feel uncomfortable with the ‘macro-generalizations’ of Wacquant’s assessment of penal statecraft. The former are said to leave little space for the analysis of ‘the connections betwixt the policy, national, and local scales of analysis’ (Jones, 2010: 394, original emphasis), and they are particularly criticized for failing to offer a closer analysis of the corresponding developments in the legal realm (Levi, 2011: 484–485; Valverde, 2010: 118).

Second, the article also challenges the argument that Wacquant’s work is overly US-centric and that ‘the phenomenon upon which Wacquant focuses, especially the rise of the penal state as a significant appendage to the more general neoliberal state, may be more particular to the United States than his theoretical framework allows him to see’ (Campbell, 2010: 70; see also Nelken, 2010: 338; Review Symposium, 2010: 594; Squires and Lea, 2012: 3–5). In offering an in-depth analysis of penal statecraft in Mexico City, the paper not only demonstrates the usefulness of Wacquant’s approach for the study of related developments outside the United States, moreover, it also aims at pushing the debate on the penal state beyond its usual geographic parameters: the United States and (Western) Europe. While acknowledging that some authors, including Wacquant himself, already glanced towards Latin America (Wacquant, 2003, 2004, 2008a, 2009b: 161–172) to assess the observable processes of the criminalization of poverty in the region (Müller, 2012a, 2012b; Garces, 2010; Jinkings, 2011; Squires, 2012) – thereby highlighting important differences with the experience of the penal state in the Global North, notably in terms of the more violent and informal character of the regional pattern of penal statecraft – these efforts remained largely focused on the macro-level of analysis. They have not yet produced empirically grounded case studies that could provide deeper insights into the everyday capillaries of penal statecraft in neoliberal urban Latin America.¹ In offering such more fine-tuned analysis, the paper thus offers an in-depth account of urban penal statecraft ‘beyond the West’ as an important step towards a more comprehensive comparative research agenda on the global spread of the punitive governing of marginality.

Neoliberalism, Urban Marginality and the Penal State in Wacquant

Wacquant argues that the consolidation of a new, punitive, regime of governing marginality in our contemporary world is inseparable from the rise of neoliberalism, which he grasps as a ‘transnational political project aiming to remake the nexus of market, state, and citizenship from above’ (Wacquant, 2010b: 213, original emphasis). In the urban realm, this remaking of the market–state–citizenship nexus contributed to the emergence of a new type of urban marginality that Wacquant calls ‘advanced marginality’ (Wacquant, 2008b), a form of ‘marginality spawned by the neoliberal revolution’ (Wacquant, 2008c: 115, original emphasis). The emergence of advanced marginality reflects four structural logics simultaneously at work in the neoliberal city: (i) a tendency towards growing inequality and urban polarization; (ii) the fragmentation of the urban workforce resulting from the deindustrialization of urban economies under neoliberalism as well the growing informalization and deproletarization of the former; (iii) the downsizing of the welfare state; and (iv) the spatial concentration and stigmatization of urban poverty (Wacquant, 2010a: 10). Most countries that witnessed the emergence of advanced marginality responded to this phenomenon by following the example of the United States and its punitive turn in social and penal policy, leading to the ‘punitive containment of the poor in the increasingly isolated and stigmatized neighbourhoods in which they are confined, on the one hand, and in jails and prisons which operate as their spillway, on the other’ (Wacquant, 2008b: 277). But even if the United States can thus be considered as a ‘living laboratory of the neoliberal future’ (Wacquant, 2009a: xi), it should be kept in mind that Wacquant himself warns against a simplistic overgeneralization of the US experience – a fact that is frequently overlooked by many of his critics. As he clarifies:

Joining the ‘Washington Consensus’ on proactive penality definitely does not imply the slavish imitation or mechanical replication of American policies and patterns. But, from a longer macropolitical perspective, the dominant trend is similar: a punitive revamping of public policy that weds the ‘invisible hand’ of the market to the ‘iron fist’ of the penal state. (Wacquant, 2011: 206)

Part and parcel of joining this penal Washington Consensus is the import of the ‘new law and order doxa’ in the guise of zero tolerance policing – and its underlying ‘theoretical’ underpinning, the broken windows concept – whose global dissemination thus ‘partakes of a broader international traffic in policy formulae that binds together market rule, social retrenchment and penal enlargement’ (Wacquant, 2009a: 171). In highlighting the connection between the import of zero tolerance policing – as well as contemporary penal enlargement and ‘tough on crime’ politics in general – and the neoliberal remaking of urban order, Wacquant demonstrates that the growing punitiveness of contemporary urban politics is not a ‘logical’ response to rising crime and criminal insecurity. Instead, neoliberal penal enlargement is above all a political response to a more general perception of, and experience with, urban social insecurity. The latter is discursively reframed as criminal insecurity, thereby leading to `a diversion from and a denegation of the generalization of the social and mental insecurity produced by the diffusion of desocialized wage labor against the backdrop of increased inequality' (Wacquant, 2008d: 12–13, original emphasis). The resulting punitive makeover of public policy materializes in what Wacquant in analogy to welfare calls ‘prisonfare’, a notion designating ‘the policy stream – encompassing categories, programs, and discourses – that confronts urban ills by rolling out the police, the courts, jails and prisons, and their extensions’ (Wacquant, 2011: 209). Prisonfare, however, does not displace welfare under neoliberalism. While the latter itself becomes increasingly more punitive, in particular, through reforms that transform welfare from a right-based conception of social assistance with potentially universalist claims into workfare (Wacquant, 2009b: chapter 3), both types of public policy ‘supervise the same dispossessed and dishonoured populations destabilised by the dissolution of the Fordist–Keynesian compact and concentrated in the disparaged districts of the polarising city’ (Wacquant, 2012a: 67). This produces a ‘paternalist penalization of poverty [that] aims to contain the urban disorders spawned by economic deregulation and to discipline the precarious fractions of the postindustrial working class’ (Wacquant, 2010b: 198). These developments, however, are not the result of a political ‘master plan’ but reflect the contingent outcome ‘of the gradual and partial convergence of battles, waged toward as well as within the bureaucratic field, over three streams of government action relating to the low-wage labor market, public aid and criminal justice’ (Wacquant, 2012b: 253). It is this convergence of policy struggles that transformed the Fordist welfare state into a neoliberal penal state; a state that by confronting the ‘urban ills’ of neoliberalism through penal enlargement becomes able to symbolically reaffirm its own legitimacy and sovereignty, increasingly put under pressure by transnational cross-border movements of people and capital in our globalized world (Wacquant, 2009a: 299).

To sum up, the causal pattern that emerges from Wacquant’s analysis explains the rise of the penal state as a policy response towards the negative socio-economic consequences of the post-Fordist restructuring of cities and the emergence of advanced marginality. The neoliberal response to this new type of urban marginality – and urban social insecurity in general – resulting from struggles within the policy areas of social welfare, criminal justice and labor market policies, contributed to a new form of governing marginality. The latter is marked by the emergence of prisonfare and the disciplinary transformation of welfare that stand at the centre of the neoliberal penal state. In addition to containing unruly elements of the urban workforce as well as confronting urban ‘disorder’ in general, penal statecraft in the neoliberal city also promises symbolic and political (including electoral) gains for neoliberal statemakers (politicians, bureaucrats, academics and security experts) as it enables them to reaffirm the authority of the state, as well as to demonstrate their own firm commitment to the citizens’ ‘right to security’ (Wacquant, 2008b: 16) in a polarizing urban environment. The remainder of this paper will demonstrate that notwithstanding their mediation by idiosyncratic features of the local context, urban politics in neoliberal Mexico City followed a similar trend towards the punitive governing of advanced marginality, contributing to the consolidation of a punitive urban democracy.

The Punitive Logic of Urban Renewal in Mexico City

Like most other Latin America countries during the last 20 years or so, Mexico’s political economy shifted from a semi-peripheral version of Fordism – grounded in import-substituting industrialization and politically regulated by the corporatist state structures that defined the country’s authoritarian regime under the 71 years (1929–2000) of uninterrupted one-party rule by the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) – towards a neoliberal free-market economy under the auspices of an ‘international competition state’ that promotes ‘pro-competition and pro-market policy’ (Soederberg, 2010: 77; see also Heigl, 2011). This shift had a negative impact on Mexico City’s economy, which throughout most of the 1990s suffered from heavy deindustrialization, accompanied by a general decline of formal economic activities, ‘the spread of micro businesses and the unprecedented expansion of the informal sector’ (Vargas Hernández and Reza Noruzi, 2011: 89). While the actual size of the city’s informal economy is difficult to assess, it is widely assumed that over 60% of all jobs in the city are in the informal sector, which is highly concentrated in the area of Mexico City’s historic centre (Castillo Olea, 2006: 1). Although the city’s economy recovered throughout the second half of the 1990s, this process was obtained at the further expense of formal employment, social standards and accompanied by deteriorating/stagnating income levels. In turn, this left ever larger segments of the urban workforce few options of economic survival other than joining the informal economy, which became the fastest growing segment of the urban labor market (Parnreiter, 2002: 148–154) and contributed to the emergence and consolidation of advanced marginality (see also Saporito, 2011: 4–6).

In order to understand why the emergence of advanced marginality triggered a punitive response from the local authorities, one has to return to the abovementioned economic recovery of the city’s economy, which was the result of the implementation of the ‘standard’ neoliberal urban development strategy of actively promoting ‘real estate and finance sectors as the leading forces in urban expansion and local revenue generation’ (Angotti, 2013: 63). This decision, on the one hand, reflects the local effort of repositioning the city’s economy in a globally competitive economic environment. On the other hand, it is also related to growing political tensions between Mexico City and the national administrations that accompanied the Mexican democratization process. Following constitutional changes in the mid-1990s, Mexico City regained large parts of its political autonomy, including the right of the city residents to directly elect the local mayor; a right that residents had lost with the abolition of the city’s municipal structure in 1928. The first democratic mayoral elections took place in 1997, leading to a victory by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas from the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which governs the city into the present. Notwithstanding democratization, the federal government still has substantial legal authority to intervene in local politics, in particular within the fiscal realm. As this authority has been frequently used for political purposes (Davis and Alvarado, 2000: 147–148), the local PRD administrations have been forced to enhance their own revenue generating capacity (see also Becker and Müller, 2013: 80–81). The economic success of the resulting urban development strategy becomes apparent when considering that in recent years Mexico City has been able to collect nearly 50% of all property taxes in Mexico. This pattern of fiscal concentration is also visible in the city itself, where four of Mexico City’s 16 boroughs account for nearly 60% of the locally collected property taxes. These boroughs are Cuauhtémoc, Miguel Hidalgo, Benito Júarez, and Álvaro Obregón (Bird and Slack, 2008: 251). The fact that Cuauhtémoc is at the top of this list points towards the spatial implications of the city’s urban development strategy. The borough comprises large parts of the city’s historic centre, which due to its colonial architecture and central location seems to be a more than promising area for attracting international capital in fields such as heritage tourism and real estate development – and for generating local tax revenue. However, due to the growing spatial concentration of advanced marginality in downtown Mexico City, both the local business community as well as the PRD administrations increasingly considered the historic centre as an ‘endangered’ urban area, most of all, because the spatial condensation of advanced marginality in this area ‘has prevented the city authorities from capitalizing on the area’s tourism potential. […] Consequently, some business groups in the area, as well as city authorities, have expressed serious concern about street vending. The Historic Center is said to be in crisis’ (Crossa, 2009: 47).

In order to confront this ‘crisis’, a public–private partnership emerged that brought zero tolerance policing in the guise of a contract with Giuliani Partners to town, a decision that was facilitated by the discursive arrival of zero tolerance during the first PRD administration and its efforts to symbolically demonstrate that the party is taking the local crime problems seriously (see below). Moreover, local think tanks and ‘philantrophic’ foundations like Mexico United Against Delinquency as well as the Cultural Institute Ludwig von Mises – founded in 1983 by economist Bettina Bien Greaves, an active promoter of neoliberal free-market ideals, in order to offer intellectual support for the neoliberal turn in Mexican politics (Plehwe, 2001) – actively participated in the diffusion of zero tolerance ideas. For instance, both organizations invited George Kelling to conferences in Mexico City in 2000. Kelling, a professor at Rutgers University and Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute is one of the ‘founding fathers’ of the broken windows ‘theory’, which argues ‘that the unchallenged presence of minor visible signs of social and physical disorder could lead to more serious crime problems’ (Vitale, 2008: 46), and that, as is well-known, serves as the ideological underpinning of zero tolerance policing. The Cultural Institute Ludwig von Mises even published a Spanish translation of Fixing Broken Windows, a book co-authored by Kelling and Catherine M. Coles in 2001 (see also Wacquant, 2009a: 169–170). As in other places, ‘the role of think tanks has been pivotal to the diffusion of aggressive penality “made in the USA”’ and the merging of a neoliberal political economy symbolized by the ‘Chicago Boys’ and an economy of ‘security’ expertise promoted by the ‘New York Boys’ most notably Rudolph Giuliani and his Police Chief William Bratton (Wacquant, 2009a: 167–168). This merging did not happen by accident, but was in fact the main objective of the Giuliani initiative ‘because it was tacitly understood [by the city administration and the private sector] that Giuliani would propose policies whose most tangible effect would be to help foster downtown real estate development and speed the “rescue” of historic Mexico City’ (Davis, 2013: 61). Related policy proposals were provided with the ‘Giuliani report’, which was presented to the public in August 2003 (on the Giuliani initiative, see Becker and Müller, 2013; Müller, 2009, 2012c: 138–148; Campesi, 2010: 458–460; Davis, 2013; Mitchell and Beckett, 2008; Mountz and Courran, 2009).

The report, unsurprisingly, promotes the security efforts ‘that have been successful in New York’, including ‘the Broken Windows approach of George Kelling’, as ‘the model for police action’ in Mexico City (SSPDF, 2003: 5). As ‘[c]rime is frequently a symptom of societal decay’, it is recommended that local policing should primarily ‘target the roots of crime problems (drugs, vagrancy, etc.) and seek long term efficient solutions’ (SSPDF, 2003: 46). In this regard, the strict enforcement and prosecution of public nuisance offences are presented as ‘decisive questions for the quality of life of the inhabitants’, in particular, because ‘the [policing] strategy adopted in this city during the last decade has been exactly the opposite of the “broken windows” doctrine’ (SSPDF, 2003: 36). In order to move local policing into the right direction, it is furthermore recommended that the local laws be subject to a revision, because they would often provide the police with insufficient authorization for effectively confronting the problems threatening the local ‘quality of life’ (SSPDF, 2003: 42). According to the report, the latter is most of all threatened by the city’s growing informal economy: ‘During the last years, the number of people that have converted public spaces into their work place has exceptionally multiplied. Be it “franeleros” who block parking spaces with objects in order to later charge for their use, or “limpia-parabrisas” [squeegee cleaners] who impose an unsolicited service. It is a fact that both cases represent a problem for the inhabitants of the city’ (SSPDF, 2003: 39). Other activities that threaten the ‘quality of life’ in Mexico City include graffiti – considered as an ‘aggression against the collective patrimony’ (SSPDF, 2003: 38) – sex work, the presence of street children, noise and public drinking (SSPDF, 2003: 39–40). As all of these practices are primarily visible in public spaces, the ‘recuperation of public spaces’ plays a central role in Giuliani report. Among other aspects, this includes a plea for the architectural ‘modification of public spaces in criminogenic areas’ (SSPDF, 2003: 11) as well as the massive implementation of closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance in areas particularly subject to the threat of crime and graffiti (SSPDF, 2003: 38).

Many of the report’s recommendations were integrated into a larger policing-centred safeguarding of the economic attractiveness of the historic centre, the so-called ‘rescue project’. The main objective of the project, according to official discourse, is to ‘reduce criminality in the Historic Center and to promote our city as a tourist location and to recover the confidence of the citizenry and the visitors by means of concrete and coordinated actions’ (SSPDF, 2006: 250). Regarding the influence of the Giuliani report on the rescue project, the latter, for instance, included the creation of the so-called Citizen Protection Units (CPUs), operating along a ‘proximity policing scheme’ (SSPDF, 2006: 147) evidently mixing zero tolerance policing with community policing, as recommended by the Giuliani report (SSPDF, 2003: 40). Three of the first four CPUs were installed in the Zócalo, Paseo de la Reforma and Alameda, all areas in the historic centre that attract most of the political, economic and tourist attention. The same holds true for the installation of CCTV cameras, another recommendation of the Giuliani report. The first cameras were installed in the so-called ‘Financial-Tourist Corridor’ of the historic centre in 2002, while since then the CCTV coverage of the area has been permanently expanded. In addition to these technological aspects, the recommendations of the Giuliani report have also been incorporated into the new urban design of public spaces in the historic centre, which was inspired by Barcelona’s urban renewal effort, specifically by the creation of ‘hard plazas’, that is concrete-based open public spaces that are austerely equipped and removed of trees, plants or green surfaces (Herzog, 2003: 293). In the adaptation of this concept to Mexico City, the topics of ‘visibility’ and ‘order’ became a central concern that directly linked urban design to security and surveillance objectives, implying the removal of all kinds of ‘disturbing’ signposts, the cutting down and reordering of trees and the planting of non-exuberant species with the aim of facilitating surveillance of the rescued ‘public’ urban spaces and the prevention of the presence of ‘undesired’ practices and people.² The implementation of these social control and surveillance efforts aiming at the spatial displacement of advanced marginality from downtown Mexico City, however, is inseparable from the invention of new legal instruments that criminalize urban marginality in the city.

Lawfare à la Mexicana

Following the Comaroffs, a central element of the punitive government of urban marginality in neoliberal Mexico City consists of a particular ‘mobilization of legalities’ that they call ‘lawfare’. With this term, they describe ‘the resort to legal instruments, to the violence inherent in the law, to commit acts of political coercion, even erasure’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2006: 30). The most important element within the arsenal of local lawfare tools is another outcome of the Giuliani report, the Civic Culture Law of the Federal District (LCC), enacted in 2004, and justified by the local administration with exactly the same arguments and objectives as those mentioned in the Giuliani report: the punishment of activities that ‘promote disorder’ in the city and ‘attack the quality of life’ (La Jornada, 2004c).

Irrespective of the partially emancipatory language of the law that emphasizes the recognition of cultural diversity and differences and that employs the term ‘citizen security’ instead of ‘public security’, while simultaneously understanding itself to be a contribution to a ‘harmonious cohabitation’ in the city (Article 2), the LCC’s inspiration by the broken windows theory and zero tolerance policing is clearly evident. The LCC presents a total of 43 minor offenses (administrative infractions) punishable by monetary fines of 1–30 days' earnings of the minimum wage or confinement between 6 and 36 hours. Examples of such minor offenses are ‘providing a service without it having been solicited’, ‘invitation to or performance of prostitution as well as soliciting this service’ or ‘to block the entrance to public buildings while offering to provide administrative services without official authorization’, all of which are considered to be ‘violations of the peace or privacy of persons’. In addition, the ‘consumption of alcoholic beverages in public spaces where the consumption of alcohol has not been authorized’ is classified as a violation of ‘citizen security’. Other activities, such as graffiti, or to be more precise, the ‘damaging, painting, besmirching or inappropriate use of the walls of public or private buildings, statues, monuments, signs, street lights’, are considered to be ‘infractions against the urban environment’ (Articles 23–26).

The enacting of the LCC had immediate consequence for the urban marginals struggling to make a living in the informal economy on the streets of downtown Mexico City. Just 1 week after the enacting of the law, the public was informed that there are up to 340 daily arrests of franeleros. One year later, a daily average of 231 persons were arrested in Mexico City due to infractions of the LLC, a number that by 2006 had already increased to a total of 408.6 persons, mostly franeleros and limpiaparabrisas, due to the obstruction and/or blocking public spaces (Becker and Müller, 2013: 83) – an arrest pattern that, as will be shown below, continues into the present. Additionally, the LCC also contributed to an increase in detentions of and police violence against local sex workers, another segment of the informal urban economy whose presence on the streets of Mexico City seems to be at odds with the creation of an investment friendly urban environment. Already in 2004, there were 2378 arrests based on violations of the LCC by sex workers (Becker and Müller, 2011: 66–67). Moreover, the LCC’s commitment to the ‘recuperation of public spaces’ and the improvement of the local ‘quality of life’ directly translated into the 14,331 arrests that accompanied the removal of street vendors in October 2007 from the 192 blocks of the historic centre (SSPDF, 2008).

Another element within the local arsenal of lawfare tools is the Extinction of Property Law of the Federal District (LEP). The origins of the LEP can be traced back to two expropriations of real estate properties in spring 2007. One of the properties was a low-income block located in the Tepito neighbourhood, whose residents were allegedly involved in organized criminal activities, such as kidnapping, drug trafficking and product piracy. While the fight against ‘organized crime’ featured prominently in the official discourse justifying the expropriation, it must be kept in mind that the expropriation was also related to a larger ‘pacification strategy’ that aimed at disciplining the neighbourhood’s informal economy, an important step towards the planned integration of the area into the urban renewal process in downtown Mexico City (Campesi, 2010: 461). The other expropriation took place in Iztapalapa, one of the most marginalized boroughs of the city. Here, the target was a property locally known as ‘predio Ford’, where car parts, frequently of illegal origin, could be purchased. Leaving aside the cases of police abuse that accompanied the expropriations – and which were widely covered by the local media – one particular problem for the local government was the weak legal basis of these actions and the accusation, for instance, by the Mexico City Human Rights Commission (CDHDF), that the expropriations were illegal (El Universal, 2007). In this regard, the local administration searched for international legal innovations that would legalize the expropriations, and, following the path of Colombian criminal politics, in December 2008, the LEP was enacted. The law permits the immediate intervention of judicial authorities in order to confiscate real estate property on the basis of ‘indications’ that a building is being used for activities classified as organized crime. The law was spectacularly ‘inaugurated’ in the historic centre in March 2009 with the expropriation of three buildings in the marginalized Merced neighbourhood, which due to its historical architecture became the focus of the expansion of the urban renewal project in downtown Mexico City under the administration of Marcelo Ebrard (2006–2012) (on urban renewal in the Merced neighbourhood see Becker and Müller, 2013).

The legal targeting of ‘undesirable’ informal economic activities – and advanced marginality in general – through the LCC and LEP created a punitive topography, clearly visible in the spatial bias of the resulting law enforcement measures. As the latter predominantly focus upon spaces of economic interest for real estate development and urban renewal projects in downtown Mexico City, these laws have converted many places in which the urban marginals live and struggle for economic survival into veritable ‘spatial containers for the ostracization of undesirable social categories and activities’ (Wacquant, 2008a: 11) – an undesirability largely derived from the obstacles the physical presence of the ‘urban outcasts’ is imagined to represent for the global competitiveness of the city’s economy. However, in contrast to what Wacquant observed for the rolling-out of the penal state in the United States and Western Europe, the ‘economic’ contribution of the punitive governing of urban marginality in Mexico City does not primarily consist in its capacity to discipline the lower segments of the local working class ‘by raising the cost of strategies of resistance to desocialized wage labor via ‘exit’ into the informal economy’ (Wacquant, 2009b: 80). Rather, in the near absence of any formal employment possibilities for the urban marginals, the criminalization of urban poverty serves the real and symbolic disciplining – including spatial displacement – of the informal economy in order to enhance the city’s attractiveness as an investment location within growing global inter-urban competition.

Although the local criminalization of poverty is in this regard inseparable from the neoliberal restructuring of the city’s economy, the former received an additional impetus from legal changes at the national level. Here, it must be recalled that Mexican penal legislation differentiates between local laws and federal laws. Federal laws, in general, relate to more serious criminal activities such as terrorism or organized crime. The perception of the ‘seriousness’ of particular criminal activities, however, was substantially altered during and after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) negotiation process, as can be seen within the realm of intellectual property rights. In order to comply with its NAFTA obligations and those from the World Intellectual Property Organization, Mexico’s first two post-PRI governments – those of Vicente Fox Quesada (2000–2006) and Felipe Calderón Hinojosa (2006–2012), both belonging to the National Action Party (PAN) – enacted a variety of legal instruments and strengthened existing ones in order to more thoroughly enforce intellectual copyright violations. Contemporary legislation defines the profit-oriented illegal reproduction of copyright protected products, such as movies, music or software, as a federal crime that is punishable by up to 10 years of prison or up to 10,000 days' earnings of the minimum wage (Aguiar, 2012: 168; Cross, 2007: 126). Considering that in all of its country reports on Mexico, the International Intellectual Copyright Alliance mentions Mexico City, in particular Tepito, as the most notorious place of the violation of intellectual property rights in the country, it is of little surprise that the neighbourhood has increasingly become the object of police raids (Müller, 2009: 93–95). However, as a growing segment of the urban workforce is increasingly excluded from the formal job market, producing and vending pirated DVDs and CDs on the streets of Mexico City is one of the few viable strategies for ensuring the socio-economic reproduction of entire families (Cross, 2007: 137). In this regard, national-level compliance with the prerogatives of the global neoliberal copyright regime added another dimension to the criminalization of poverty in urban Mexico, clearly visible in the fact that copyright-related police operations increased from only four in 2000 to 8753 in 2006 (Aguiar, 2012: 167), further contributing to the criminalization of neighbourhoods like Tepito and their residents by adding a ‘blemish of place’ (Wacquant, 2007: 67, original emphasis) to the already existing patterns of sociopolitical marginalization – and criminalization – that residents of these areas are confronted with in their daily lives.

Punitive Democratization

Following the implementation of NAFTA, and the economic crisis of 1994, Mexico City witnessed a hitherto unparalleled rise of street crime, in particular assaults, robberies and petty theft. According to official statistics, crime rates declined after the late 1990s, but they never returned to the pre-crisis levels (Pansters and Castillo Berthier, 2007: 43). However, even if crime in contemporary Mexico City is probably higher than before 1994, the widespread ‘climate of fear’ in the city cannot be reduced to criminal insecurity. Rather, it reflects ‘a general sense of helplessness’ that unfolded since the mid-1990s, in response to ‘frustration over elections that seemed to accomplish nothing, an ebbing of social movements throughout the country, and a dramatic decline in purchasing power following the financial crisis in 1994–95’ (Gutman, 2006: 141). Even if the widespread climate of fear in Mexico City cannot exclusively be explained with rising criminal insecurity, through its discursive reworking and amplification within the journalistic field and public opinion polls, this climate of anxiety increasingly defined the discursive parameters of local urban politics, which converted the fear of crime into the single most important issue on the urban political agenda (Castillo, 2008: 181).

This situation, on the one hand, threatens the legitimacy and symbolic authority of the local state as the ultimate authority in charge of providing security for its subjects. On the other hand, it also undermined the credibility of the PRD governments. While the blame for the security crisis of the mid-1990s could be placed on the authoritarian policing legacy that characterized the seven decades of PRI rule in Mexico City, in the eyes of many local residents, the PRD has yet to demonstrate how democratic urban politics actually make a difference in terms of improving local security. In order to respond to this dual challenge, the PRD adopted a political strategy that aimed at ‘the ritual reassertion of the sovereignty of the state in the narrow, theatricalized domain of law enforcement that it has prioritized for that very purpose’ (Wacquant, 2009a: 299, original emphasis).

It is frequently assumed that when in 1997 Cárdenas was democratically elected as the city’s first mayor since 1928, his administration struggled hard to improve the security situation in the city and to transform and democratize local law enforcement. However, at a closer look, the PRD’s security policies have, from the very start, been far more ambivalent than many observers suggest. For example, while the related literature discusses the import of zero tolerance policing nearly exclusively with reference to the López Obrador and Ebrard administrations (see the references above), it must be recalled that it was Cárdenas, who in the wake of the 1997 election, brought the punitive discourse of zero tolerance to Mexico City. For instance, in December of that year, the then-chief of the judicial police, Tornero Salinas, publicly declared that ‘the instructions of the head of government, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and Attorney General Samuel del Villar, are to prosecute delinquents under the principal of “zero tolerance,” but within the realm of legality and full respect for the human rights of both, victim and perpetrator’ (La Jornada, 2007). Del Villar even travelled to New York to get some first-hand advice on zero tolerance and how to implement it in Mexico City (Arteaga Botello, 2004: 195, fn. 41). This commitment to zero tolerance was also shared by Cárdenas’ police chief, Debernardi. Upon taking office, he publicly declared that he would reduce local crime rates within 3 months by adopting New York-style zero tolerance policing (López-Montiel, 2000: 88).

While the full-fledged implementation of zero tolerance policing still had to wait for a couple of years, the discursive arrival of zero tolerance coincided with the democratization of local politics under PRD rule, showing that, as elsewhere (Wacquant, 2009b: 23), leftist parties are not immune to the symbolic seduction of the zero tolerance ‘success story’, a story whose import by the Cárdenas administration served the purpose of symbolically assuring Mexico City residents (and voters) that the local government is in fact doing everything it can to improve the security situation. This symbolic strategy also included proposals to toughen existing laws along the lines of broken windows/zero tolerance, as the following public statement by del Villar demonstrates in a paradigmatic way:

Street crime breeds from antisocial behaviors that undermine public order and that are not vigorously defined in the Penal Code. […] The security of the population demands that the Penal Code recognizes order, respect and public spaces as legally protected goods and sanctions, for instance those who beat up persons; consume alcoholic beverages or narcotics in public spaces and get together for this purpose; operate a vehicle under the influence of alcohol or of narcotics; vandalize in public or in public transport without adequate permit or license. (DDLDB, 1999: 60–61)

Although the proposed legal reforms were only implemented with the enactment of the LCC in 2004, it is nonetheless remarkable that all PRD administrations, beginning with Cárdenas, while publicly declaring the fight against crime as being closely related to the fight against poverty (see also Arteaga Botello, 2004: 231–239), shared a punitive commitment that converted ‘democratic’ policing in Mexico City right from the start into an ambivalent affair. Driven by the double pressure of rebuilding the symbolic authority of the local state and demonstrating that the PRD is actually making a difference in terms of local policing, the PRD’s security policies converted the most marginalized segments of the population, which also represent the party’s main electoral constituency, into the principal targets of ‘democratic’ law enforcement. This outcome is also related to efforts of extending the PRD’s electoral base beyond the urban poor and the ideologically left-leaning members of the middle class through a publicly visible commitment to middle and upper class security concerns. As these concerns are largely centred on issues such as car theft or the ‘proper’ use of urban space, the PRD’s efforts of demonstrating that the party is taking these matters seriously translates into more police presence in middle class neighbourhoods as well as the surveillance and frequent expulsion of ‘undesired’ people – the urban poor – from such places (Müller, 2012c: 165–166). This has been accompanied by other theatrical police interventions like the expropriation of the ‘predio Ford’ in Iztapalapa referred to above.

This symbolic strengthening of state and party through a theatricalization of law enforcement, however, is not only related to a zero tolerance-oriented discursive criminalization of poverty. It has also been accompanied by a public celebration of punishment, a related toughening of local penal laws – culminating in a recent reform proposal of the penal code by mayor Ebrard, which includes a plea for up to 30 years of imprisonment for people disturbing the ‘social peace’ in the city (La Jornada, 2012) – the political discovery of the ‘crime victim’ (Wacquant, 2008b: 10) as well as the declaration of a ‘democratic’ right to punish. In regards to the latter, for instance, the 2000–2006 General Development Plan for the Federal District, the city’s main policy planning instrument, stated that the local democratic order is an order essentially based upon punishment: ‘The democratic order not only consists of the representative character of the public authorities and citizen participation, but also of the certainty that delinquent behavior will be sanctioned’ (PGDDF, 2000: 36).

As the most convincing way to demonstrate such certainty is the presentation of statistical evidence, it is hardly surprising that the local police introduced a detention quota in 2005, providing ‘efficient’ police officers with financial (and promotional) bonuses if they fulfil a certain number of detentions a year. In 2006, the local police aimed at an annual detention quota of 27,300 persons (Jiménez Ornelas and Moreno Alva, 2007: 198). This quota added another dimension to the criminalization of poverty in Mexico City as it converted the most vulnerable segments of the urban poor, particularly marginalized youth, into the principal victims of this strategy of symbolically legitimizing the local state and the PRD through a ‘policing by numbers’ effort. This went hand in with a ‘moral panic’ about street gangs in Mexico City, which are blamed for urban violence and social breakdown, in particular, in the more marginalized parts of the city. Convinced that gangs ‘kill, rob, rape and produce fear’, the local government tries to impede gang formation through so-called ‘Dispan’ police operations, which in Spanish stands for dispersión de pandillas (gang dispersion) (Castillo Berthier and Jones, 2009: 187). As elsewhere in Latin America, such tactics reflect a tendency to blame ‘gangs and other unsavory segments of the population’ for the social dislocations and insecurities that accompanied the unfolding of neoliberalism (Thomas et al., 2011: 2). As a result of this, aesthetics that could potentially indicate one’s belonging to a ‘deviant’ and dangerous youth culture, such as having a tattoo or wearing the ‘wrong’ clothes converts marginal youth immediately into suspects for the local police (Müller, 2012d: 329–330). In other words, and in similar ways as in the United States, the political preoccupation with gangs and juvenile delinquency also serves as a ‘convenient pretext for placing segregated neighbourhoods and their residents under reinforced police and penal surveillance’ (Wacquant, 2009b: 136). The resulting everyday punitive exposure of marginal youth in Mexico City is further aggravated by Mexico’s war on drugs and the related militarization of law enforcement. In contemporary Mexico City, the punitive character of the urban democracy in combination with the national anti-drug crusade created a context in which it is very likely that ‘when a young person is stopped with paints in a rucksack it will be by a municipal officer keen to demonstrate his grasp of “zero tolerance”; possession of fireworks will bring attention of the AFI [Federal Investigative Agency]; and antidrug raids at clubs are more likely to involve actual or former military personnel’ (Castillo Berthier and Jones, 2009: 198). Against this background, from the perspective of the penal experience of the urban poor, the democratization of Mexico City politics indicates a remarkable continuity with authoritarian practices under PRI rule (see also Campesi, 2010), with the important difference being that police repression has shifted from the ‘enemies of the revolution’ towards an enemy represented by the undesired urban ‘other’.

The Penal State in Practice: Prisonfare à la Mexicana

The remaining parts of this paper will turn to the everyday practices of the main institutions in charge of the punitive governing of urban marginality in contemporary Mexico City as well as the resulting consequences for the people subject to them. In focusing exclusively on prisonfare, the following sections take into account that one distinct feature of the neoliberal governing of marginality in Latin America consists in the fact that the disciplinary transformation of welfare into workfare, as well as a general cutting back of welfare services, both central to Wacquant’s analysis of penal statecraft, is largely absent in the region. On the contrary, throughout the last decade, many Latin American countries even witnessed an extension of welfare programs that accompanied the rolling-out of the penal state in the region (Müller, 2012a).³ Mexico City fits well into this pattern of a simultaneous expansion of welfare and prisonfare as social service provision has been constantly expanded under PRD rule. However, this expansion has been embedded within the makeover of clientelist relations that accompanied the transition from PRI to PRD dominance in the city (Hilgers, 2008, 2009). In this regard, the expansion of social assistance programs under PRD administrations did not imply an improvement regarding the urban poor’s access to right-based and impersonal social services. Rather the clientelist overdetermination of welfare provision consolidated another element within the techniques of governing urban marginality in the guise of what Auyero calls ‘clandestine kicks’. While he uses this notion to refer to the ‘illegal exercise of violence carried out by actors connected with established powerholders’ in their efforts to control the urban poor in Latin America (Auyero, 2012: 15), I would suggest to extend this notion beyond the realm of immediate physical violence and to include the intentional, and in my view equally coercive and punitive, withholding/politicized granting of social services on the calculation of the recipients’ political loyalty. In this regard, the extension of welfare through clientelist channels contains a strong punitive component that further contributes to the governing of urban marginality in the city. Notwithstanding the punitive potential of clientelist welfare provision, it is in and through the practices of the institutional manifestations of the penal sector of the local bureaucratic field – police, judges and prisons – where the punitive nature of Mexico City’s urban democracy shows itself most clearly.

Policing Advanced Marginality

The preceding sections already demonstrated that, as in other cities that witnessed the emergence of advanced marginality, the Mexico City police have been entrusted ‘with buttressing the new social order woven out of vertiginous inequalities and with checking the turbulences born of the explosive conjunction of rampant poverty and stupendous affluence engendered by neoliberal capitalism’ (Wacquant, 2008b: 12). As recent work on Latin American policing has shown throughout the region, the practices of urban police forces are marked by widespread corruption, abusive and violent behaviour – including extralegal killings – and collusion with criminal actors (e.g. Arias and Goldstein, 2010; Moreira Alves and Evanson, 2011; O’Neill and Thomas, 2011). Mexico City is no exception in this regard. Although the absence of military rule has probably spared the city from the militaristic self imagination of urban police forces that continues to haunt policing practices in countries of the Southern Cone – frequently leading to widespread extralegal police killings of urban marginals (Stanley, 2010) – routine, but rarely lethal, police violence, is a common feature of local law enforcement (Azaola and Ruiz Torres, 2011; Silva, 2007; Uildriks, 2010). According to a representative survey, in 2005, about 760,000 of a total of 1,680,000 cases of contact between Mexico City residents and the local police involved some form of police abuse. While the overwhelming majority of abuses were non-physical and involved some kind of extortion, the survey nonetheless indicates that some 70,000 cases of physical abuse were committed by the local law enforcement agencies in this period (Naval, 2006: 21). In light of these numbers, the criminalization of poverty in contemporary Mexico City increasingly exposes the urban poor to the threat of violent police behaviour. While it is true that through bribery as well as informal negotiations and clientelist exchanges, local law enforcement is – and has always been – a matter of negotiation (on this issue see Müller, 2012c), the rolling-out of the penal state has increasingly raised the costs for the affected people to bargain over the non-enforcement of laws and to engage in rule-bending practices with local brokers and police agents. On the one hand, the introduction of detention quotas and the related financial reward and promotion system for police officers (see above) have raised the financial stakes for the urban poor to bribe their way out of detention. On the other hand, due to the enactment of new laws that criminalize urban poverty, such as the LCC, the urban marginals have become increasingly dependent upon the help of brokers to protect them from the enforcement of these laws by the local authorities. However, as such protection frequently also involves financial payments (Becker and Müller, 2013: 88–89), those who cannot afford such monetary investments, or those without any connections to brokers at all, for instance, marginalized youth and street children, are the ones most likely suffer the full repressive weight of the local penal apparatus. To put it in other terms, neoliberal penal statecraft contributed to a marginalization of the most marginal segments of the local population. Having neither the economic nor political capital to negotiate over the non-enforcement of neoliberal legislation in their favour, those people are the ones who suffer most from the punches of the ‘visible fists’ of the neoliberal state in the guise of ‘repression, imprisonment, territorial sieges, and the like’ (Auyero, 2012: 15).

Civic Judges

As argued above, the LCC serves as the dominant legal tool for the punitive governing of urban marginality in contemporary Mexico City. As infractions of the LCC are defined as administrative offenses, the main institution responsible for punishing violations of the LCC are the civic judges (juzgados civicos), not the Attorney General. According to existing legislation, as soon as a person is arrested by the police for violating the LCC, the person must immediately be transferred to one of the city’s 59 civic judges who determines the sentences, ranging from the simple issuing of a warning, to community work, to paying a fine or arrest, although arrest and monetary fines are the predominant sanctions. Already in May 2001, the CDHDF issued a recommendation to the city administration requesting the improvement of the facilities and administrative routines of the civic judges, which in many ways violated the rights of arrested persons, notably due to widespread abuse of detainees, unhealthy arrest conditions and the lack of basic sanitary infrastructure (CDHDF, 2001). Four years later, following the enacting of the LCC, the CDHDF followed up on this recommendation and published a full report on the civic judges. The document provides ample evidence regarding ongoing human rights violations in this area of the local administration of justice, including, for instance, abuse and physical mistreatment of arrested persons, reported by 19% of the detainees (CDHDF, 2005: 25), the absence of an assigned counsel in 70% of all cases (CDHDF, 2005: 34) and not providing food (in 86% of all cases) and water (in 53% of all cases) for arrested persons (CDHDF, 2005: 50). The report furthermore stresses that in particular people living in a situation of high vulnerability, like minors – arrested in 17% of all cases for playing soccer on the streets – elderly persons or sick people, suffer disproportional under the abovementioned deficient infrastructure and arbitrary/abusive practices (CDHDF, 2005: 55–62). Reflecting the ‘quality of life’ focus of the LCC, the report also indicates that 56% of the arrested persons were detained because of drinking in public spaces, drug use (19%), urinating in public spaces (9%), illegal use of public spaces (8%), offenses against the ‘social cohabitation in public spaces’ (4%), violent behaviour (2%) and prostitution (1%) (CDHDF, 2005: 32).

When considering that the CDHDF had to admit in a more recent statement that most of these problems within the realm of civic justice continue to exist (El Universal, 2008), it must be assumed that the steady increase in the number of people arrested due to violations of the LCC has aggravated these problems. In fact, the number of persons brought before the civic judges nearly tripled between 2006 and 2011, rising from 49,205 to 134,731 (CJSL, 2011: 55). When unpacking these numbers, the correlation between the urbanization of neoliberalism and the criminalization of poverty in Mexico City becomes evident. Official statistics clearly demonstrate that the borough with the highest number of arrests due to infractions of the LCC is Cuauhtémoc, the borough in which the historic centre is located. In this borough, 56,719 arrested persons were brought before the civic judges between August 2010 and September 2011 due to LCC-related infractions, nearly half of all cases reported in Mexico City for this period (CJSL, 2011: 56). Moreover, official statistics also show that 30,701 of the cases brought before the civic judges were related to informal economic activities that ‘obstructed’ public spaces, and another 40,005 to public drinking (CJSL, 2011: 57). In light of this scenario, it becomes apparent that the civic judges have indeed complied with their official mission of ‘calling attention to behavior that is pernicious to society’ (CJSL, 2011: 57). This perniciousness is defined in the threat advanced marginality poses to the neoliberal vision of urban order and, as in the case of local policing, the punitive containment of the former through the activities of the civic judges exposes a growing number of the city’s most disadvantaged residents to arbitrary, unhealthy and illegal penal practices.

The Prison System

In 1991, Human Rights Watch after visiting Mexican prisons, including facilities in Mexico City, published a detailed report that identified a variety of structural problems of the local prison system, including massive overcrowding, corruption and abuse by prison personnel as well as a general lack of resources (HRW, 1991: 47). By that time, prisons in authoritarian PRI Mexico housed some 88,000 inmates (HRW, 1991: vii). This number increased to some 139,000 in 1999 (Azaola and Bergman, 2007: 100), the year before the electoral victory of Vicente Fox Quesada that marked the widely recognized democratic breakthrough at the national level. In June 2012, after more than a decade of democratization, the number of inmates has nearly doubled. Currently, some 237,566 people are imprisoned in Mexico (Presidencia de la República, 2012: 32). To put it in other terms, democratic Mexico has put more people behind bars than its authoritarian predecessor. A similar development can be observed in Mexico City. In 1993, the year before the ‘security crisis’ of 1994, Mexico City had a prison population of 8472 inmates. This number even decreased to 8361 in 1995. One year before the 1997 elections that brought the PRD to power, Mexico City’s prisons housed some 11,042 inmates. One year after the PRD’s electoral victory, this number had already increased to 16,989. In 2000, the inmate population had further grown to 21,857 persons (Ruiz Ortega, 2006: 4). This trend of a rising inmate population has continued into the present, with 42,297 people being held in one of Mexico City's 10 prison facilities in September 2012.⁴ As their national counterparts, the democratic governments in Mexico City, despite declining crime rates (see above) have put more people behind bars than their authoritarian PRI predecessors. When taking a closer look at the composition of the prison population, it becomes apparent that the overwhelming majority of inmates (84%) are imprisoned due to infractions of local laws, not federal ones combating organized crime and drug trafficking (CDHDF, 2011: 11). Moreover, the overwhelming majority of local inmates are imprisoned for minor property crimes that qualify as informal economic survival strategies, like robbery (nearly 70% of all inmates), in general below a value of 2000 Pesos (about US$200) (Bergman et al., 2006: 39). Simple robbery, due to the strengthening of existing penal laws, is currently punished with a prison sentence ranging from 3 to 10 years (Dammert and Zúñiga, 2008: 35) and the average sentence for a prisoner – excluding those who have committed a homicide – in Mexico City is 8.4 years (Bergman et al., 2006: 31). Reflecting the negative consequences of the rolling out of the penal state for the most disadvantaged segments of the local population, most inmates belong to the urban marginals whose life outside prison has been dominated by permanent conditions of ‘unemployment, informality and marginality’ (Bergman et al., 2006: 26). In this regard, in Mexico City, as well as in the country as a whole, ‘inmates are generally not the most dangerous criminals, but they are the poorest’ (Azaola and Bergman, 2007: 112).

As in the other institutions in charge of implementing prisonfare in Mexico City, and this brings us back to the Human Rights Watch report, the conditions under which inmates have to live inside the local prison system continue to violate basic human rights and existing legal standards. To begin with, all prison facilities in Mexico City suffer from massive overcrowding, which is openly acknowledged on the website of the Sub-secretariat for the Penitentiary System.⁵ In fact, Mexico City prisons are the most overpopulated correctional facilities in the entire country, with overpopulation rates reaching about 96% (Dammert and Zúñiga, 2008: 42). This overpopulation has increased the serious deficiencies inside the local prison system that, as academic studies as well as reports by CDHDF demonstrate, have not substantially improved since the Human Rights Watch visit in the early 1990s. Abuse and violence among inmates and by the prison guards is common, sanitary and health conditions are deficient, as is the provision of food and drinking water, leading to the fact that inmate families have to purchase food, clothes and other basic items, which frequently involves bribing the guards (Azaola and Bergman, 2007: 105–106; Bergman et al., 2006: 41–51; CDHDF, 2011, 2005). This is another indication that neoliberal democratization in Mexico City did not imply a rupture with those institutional problems that haunted the penal apparatus under authoritarian one-party rule. While the local prison population has undeniably not reached the levels observed by Wacquant for the case of the United States, the correlation between the neoliberal remaking of urban order, the criminalization of advanced marginality and a hitherto unparalleled increase in the local prison population is undeniable and reflects the exclusionary dimension of the consolidation of Mexico City’s punitive urban democracy.

Conclusion

This paper applied Wacquant’s work on the neoliberal penal state to explain the punitive turn in contemporary Mexican City. It was demonstrated that the main causal factors behind the emergence of the penal state identified by Wacquant – the neoliberal restructuring of urban economies, the resulting emergence of advanced marginality and the increasingly punitive regulation of the latter – are also at work in Mexico City. In this regard, and despite the existence of decisively local aspects of the rolling-out of the penal state – like, for instance, the different function of the neoliberal governing of advanced marginality in a predominantly informal urban economy or the mediating role of informal political practices – the unfolding of neoliberalism in Mexico City brought the penal state to town and contributed to the punitive remaking of the state–market–citizenship nexus, culminating in the consolidation of a punitive urban democracy. Not only does this democracy show a remarkable continuity with its authoritarian predecessor in the penal realm. Moreover, through the punitive governing of urban marginality through lawfare and prisonfare, it increasingly excludes the most marginalized segments of the urban population whose lives the local democratization process was expected to improve.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Marianne Braig and Ana Villarreal for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

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