Violence: An International Journal

Since 2006 and the official fight against drug trafficking in Mexico which has left at least 116,000 people missing and 500,000 people dead, clandestine spaces and traces of violence left by mass disappearances have multiplied and with them the searches for missing persons. I describe here a specific clandestine space of disappearance in the north of Veracruz, called “La Gallera,” which was an “extermination camp” of the cruelest kind, created by Los Zetas Cartel. In February 2020, I joined the 5th National Brigade for the Search for Missing Persons with many collectives of family members from many states. But this “clandestine cemetery” saw multiple exhumation processes before we arrived in February 2020. I will cross-reference my ethnographic observations of these searches with journalistic and documentary sources, as well as elements from an interview with Maricel Torres, representative of the collective Familiares en Búsqueda María Herrera Poza Rica, to show the complexity of exhumations and the forensic, analytical and sensitive challenges. Then I will make a historical reconstruction of Los Zetas that expanded in northern Veracruz in order to propose a contextual analysis necessary to understand the criminal logics of the perpetrators and the repressive logics behind the human remains.

In Mexico, the phenomenon of disappearance resurfaced with the Drug War (2006) and in the state of Nuevo Leon it was mainly young men who disappeared the most between 2007 and 2012. However, since 2018, the disappearances of teenage girls increased. To analyze this situation, a study was undertaken in collaboration with the National Search Commission, whose methodology relies on analyzing the experiences of missing and found persons. With the support of the Local Search Commission in Nuevo León, a survey was sent to found persons between the ages of 0 and 29, interviews were conducted with missing and found persons, and files of the public child protection services were reviewed. This new methodology established the immediate and structural causes of disappearances and that the main factors of vulnerability are structural violence, mental health and addictions, gender violence and police abuse.

Current immigration policies of “prevention through deterrence” have been shown to increase fatalities at the US/Mexico border. These strategies are designed to remove access to safe areas of the border with the aim of reducing border crossings. One consequence of these deterrents is that they force undocumented border crossers into areas that are more desolate and treacherous. Such policies also come at a time when government officials have openly stated that its facilities to process and identify the remains of unidentified border crossers are overwhelmed. This paper discusses the current state of the identification and repatriation of the remains of undocumented border crossers in South Texas and the formation of the Center for the Study of Undocumented Border Crossers (CSUBC) at Texas A&M International University. CSUBC is a multidisciplinary, collaborative research and teaching center with the goal of assisting the community, academics, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in recording, reporting, and identifying border crosser remains. The hope is that this center will ultimately lead to the repatriation of decedents. This paper outlines the structure of the center, and aims for working with established NGOs and university centers, to bring together subject-matter experts and alleviate the pressures they face.

Despite systematic reviews calling for more research to determine which batterer intervention programs (BIPs) work, the Swedish Prison and Probation Service (SPPS) officially claims that their CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy)-based programs are successful. In order to find a plausible explanation for the discrepancy between what the service claims and what is reasonable to claim, a qualitative content analysis of the SPPSs’ use of evidence in the accreditation of BIPs and the treatment with these programs is conducted. The study first addresses the manifest content, which refers to the SPPS claims of scientific evidence that BIPs have a positive effect and the internal application of Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluations (GRADE) for the accreditation of their programs. The results show that despite the SPPSs’ efforts to keep up to date with research and public claims that treatment programs reduce recidivism, there is no independent scientific evidence that the treatment methods used are effective. The interpretative analysis of the latent content indicates that the concept of evidence is used rhetorically to convince the public that the activities are conducted successfully, scientifically and cost-effectively. The state of knowledge is uncertain, and a more realistic approach is required as the public has a right to know that treatment of IPV offenders is often based on uncertainty.

In this article we argue that terrorism should no longer be studied as a phenomenon completely exogenous to modern societies, but rather as endogenous, that is, as a part and product of symbiotic dynamics linking terrorism to particular “socio-state configurations.” This thesis leads us to propose a new research program focused on the central question of what governments do or don’t do to combat the terrorism(s) that strike human societies governed by these same public authorities. In other words, this article discusses “public anti-terrorism action” (PATA) and its variants. We conclude with a singular approach to the study of terrorism, a “state-centered” approach that departs from research focused solely on terrorist actors or groups that have emphasized the notion of “radicalization” or the narrow realities of official counter-terrorism or state terrorism.