Abstract
The current violence challenges the ability of the Mexican state to perform its regalian functions and is driving Mexico’s most vulnerable people to “take justice into their own hands” in times of war. These experiences reflect a deep-seated mistrust among society towards institutions. What meaning can be attributed to the autonomous expressions of justice, such as the Zapatista experience or the search for the disappeared nowadays? And how can we conceive of political utopia in a brutalised society on which the early years of the war on drugs have had a devastating impact? Drawing on ethnographic research in the state of Chiapas and new research on disappeared persons in the states of Guerrero and, more recently, Veracruz, this chapter examines different moments in which experiences of “taking justice into one’s own hands” have taken place. First, in the 1990s, demands for social justice focused on the recognition of the rights of Indian minorities and Indian autonomy, embodied by the Zapatistas in Chiapas, who created autonomous territories controlled by Indian representatives with no presence from the state and its institutions. Second, since 2006 the official war on drugs has led to new movements calling for justice in response to insecurity and violence, human rights violations and systematic impunity in the area of criminal justice, showing how experiences of community justice of a defensive, sometimes ambivalent nature have increased in recent years in a context of widespread violence. Finally, this chapter reorients the concept of social justice in times of war around the search for the disappeared and the pursuit of truth.
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Notes
- 1.
The official war on drugs, led by Felipe Calderón Hinojosa of the National Action Party (PAN), in office from 2006 to 2012, has altered the nature and forms of the violence. Over the last ten years, the target of the violence has shifted from a particular sector of the population (students, women, guerillas, journalists, etc.) to the entirety of the civil population, with social leaders, indigenous peoples, and Central American migrants being especially targeted. The violence is the work of organised crime and agents of the state, without it being clear who the perpetrators are and who they are targeting. In this context of widespread violence, the total and official numbers of the disappeared in Mexico have overtaken those of the Argentinian dictatorship (30,000 disappeared, 10,000 dead, and 1 million exiled in seven years, between 1976 and 1983), and the situation on the ground varies substantially between states.
- 2.
Translator’s note: Unless otherwise stated, all translations of cited foreign-language material in this article are our own.
- 3.
Mexico is a federal state made up of thirty-one federated states plus Mexico City, with three levels of government (municipal, regional and federal).
- 4.
For example, Chihuahua, Nayarit, Oaxaca, Quintana Roo and San Luis Potosí.
- 5.
The Mexican state endorsed a multicultural conception no longer in order to “integrate Indians” into the nation, as had been the case with the assimilationist indigenist policies of the second half of the twentieth century, but to guarantee their difference, though without actually reducing the inequalities and racism inherent to multicultural reforms in a neoliberal context (Gasparello and Guerrero 2009).
- 6.
The Mexican Left was divided prior to the election, with some supporting the electoral approach and the left-wing candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Party of the Democratic Revolution, PRD), and others declaring their lack of faith in the Mexican political system as a whole and abstaining from voting, like the Zapatistas of Chiapas. The PRD candidate ultimately lost the election by just 0.4% to the right-wing conservative candidate Felipe Calderón Hinojosa (National Action Party, PAN). Subcomandante Marcos was held responsible for the PRD candidate’s failure.
- 7.
Gatti argues that the figure of the victim has become central in the modern world. It occupies political, media and moral spaces, and produces international standards, protocols, situation analyses, norms, laws, social processes and identities that challenge and renew citizen practices.
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Melenotte, S. (2022). ‘México en llamas’: Political Utopia and ‘taking justice into one’s own hands’ in Times of War. In: Barozet, E., Sainsaulieu, I., Cortesero, R., Mélo, D. (eds) Where Has Social Justice Gone?. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93123-0_17
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