Citizens against Crime and Violence: Societal Responses in Mexico

By Trevor Stack, Irene Álvarez, Denisse Román and 7 more

Mexico has become notorious for crime-related violence, and the efforts of governments and national and international NGOs to counter this violence have proven largely futile. Citizens against Crime and Violence studies societal responses to crime and violence within one of Mexico’s most affected regions, the state of Michoacán. Based on comparative ethnography conducted over twelve months by a team of anthropologists and sociologists across six localities of Michoacán, ranging from the most rural to the most urban, the contributors consider five varieties of societal responses: local citizen security councils that define security and attempt to influence its policing, including by self-defense groups; cultural activists looking to create safe 'cultural' fields from which to transform their social environment; organizations in the state capital that combine legal and political strategies against less visible violence (forced disappearance, gender violence, anti-LGBT); church-linked initiatives bringing to bear the church’s institutionality, including to denounce 'state capture'; and women’s organizations creating 'safe' networks allowing to influence violence prevention.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jun 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781978827653

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

The Comparative Ethnography of Societal Responses to Crime and Violence in Mexico

Trevor Stack

Despite the mushrooming literature on crime and violence around the world and on state responses to them, there are far fewer studies of societal responses. Scholars’ concern with crime and violence may owe something to the penchant for drama that has inspired a deluge of Netflix series. In the Mexican state of Michoacán, on which this book focuses, it appears de rigueur for researchers to reproduce the grisly story of how severed heads were rolled across a dance floor in 2007 to announce a new criminal alliance. The same appetite for drama may explain the media’s and scholars’ attention to Michoacán’s armed autodefensa (self-defense) groups, often illustrated by images of men with guns striking theatrical poses. Throughout this volume, and especially in the final chapter, we draw on the more sophisticated attempts to rethink crime and violence published in recent years (for example, Arias 2018; Auyero and Sobering 2019; Dewey 2015; Felbab-Brown, Trinkunas, and Hamid 2017; Ley and Trejo 2020). Yet our focus is on the often modest and undramatic ways in which local organizations respond to the challenges as they understand them. The images in the volume are typically of council meetings, public forums, and cultural events, rather than of macho posing and bullet holes. Our main contribution, then, is to the small but growing literature on how citizens respond to crime and violence, whether independently or in collaboration with state actors (for example, Arias 2019; González 2016; Ley, Mattiace, and Trejo 2019; Moncada 2016 and 2020).

Our account of societal responses to crime and violence rests on an ethnographic project that we—an interdisciplinary team of ten researchers—carried out in Michoacán in the period 2017–2019. We focused on societal responses because Mexico’s institutional responses had proved to be of little effect and had even exacerbated crime and violence. When the Mexican government deployed the army to fight a so-called war on drug trafficking in 2007, it triggered a spiral of increasingly violent conflict that by 2017 had left over two hundred thousand people dead or disappeared. We chose the state of Michoacán in part because in 2013 it was the scene of an extreme form of societal response. The autodefensas were armed civilian groups that confronted the criminal organization that had monopolized crime in Michoacán and controlled parts of local and state government. Though we include some discussion of the autodefensa groups that in 2017 persisted in some rural areas, our focus in the volume is on other societal responses and other contexts, including urban ones. The initiatives highlighted in the volume include local citizen security councils, artist collectives, activist groups using legal strategies, church-linked initiatives, and women’s groups.

What kind of societal responses arise in the face of organized crime, and the violence and corruption that characterize it? What, if any, headway do they make against crime, violence, and related problems? To what extent are societal responses affected by issues such as violence and corruption? What other limitations do they experience? These were some of the questions addressed by our research. We conducted comparative ethnography across six localities in Michoacán to explore the effectiveness of different societal responses. By combining techniques such as structured interviews and direct observation at meetings and other events, we sought to understand and compare diverse initiatives.

Our comparative ethnography enabled us to generate insights that are both sensitive to local specifics and relevant to crime and violence experienced in other parts of the world. It also led us to study together forms of civilian participation that are not often combined by scholars, such as the community participation both in security and in art and cultural collectives, women’s groups, victims’ groups, and church-promoted responses. The volume highlights the facts that civic actors and their responses are far from homogeneous and that the responses vary across actors and contexts, even within a single state. Our assessment of them is sober, and we recognize that their effects are often modest. Yet we insist that even small changes can make a difference. We show, for example, that citizen councils may help restore trust in police; activists confronting less visible forms of violence may encounter institutional violence; activists in violent contexts find that art and culture are relatively safe causes, through which they can aspire to transform their social surroundings; the church’s institutional character is of special relevance when government institutions are compromised by crime; and societal responses can be differentiated by gender, while women’s groups may create safe spaces even when not engaging with institutions.

All authors in this volume were members of the original project team, but we each developed our own analytical perspectives that reflect, in part, our different disciplines, allowing us to engage with debates across anthropology, sociology, and political science. Of the ethnographers who authored or coauthored the five substantive chapters, Salvador Maldonado, Denisse Román, Catherine Whittaker, and I are anthropologists, while Irene Álvarez, Edgar Guerra, Iran Guerrero, and Ariadna Sánchez are sociologists. We were assisted throughout the project by two researchers who are also policy analysts—Pilar Domingo, a political scientist, and Sasha Jesperson, a criminologist—and who coauthored the first analytical chapter (chapter 7), which draws out the relevance of the findings for global policy debates. The volume ends with a second analytical chapter written by me (chapter 8), in which I draw on the work of political scientists and sociologists to reflect further on the conclusions of the substantive chapters. The volume is thus the work of a single team with expertise across several fields. This allowed us not only to bring different approaches to bear but also to address numerous debates.

THE MEXICAN STATE OF MICHOACÁN

I begin this chapter with a brief account of the context of Michoacán, both to set the scene for readers not familiar with Mexico and to explain our focus on societal responses to crime and violence in that context.

Mexico is a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that has a two-hundred-year tradition of constitutional democracy. It is also one of the few countries in the world that has signed nearly all human rights treaties, and this has helped its international standing. For seventy-one years, elections were almost always won by a single party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional; PRI), but in 2000, the conservative, business-friendly National Action Party (Partido de Acción Nacional; PAN) won the presidency, and since then there has been fierce electoral competition at all levels of government. Mexico is known for its pioneering social programs that target some of the poorest members of society, including people living in rural areas and working in informal sectors, although income inequality remains high. The country’s economy may be sluggish, but it is relatively stable, and there has been no currency collapse since 1994.

Despite Mexico’s economic stability and democratic credentials, since the mid-2000s it has been featured in global news with grisly stories of crime-related violence, especially since Felipe Calderón, the conservative president and member of PAN, launched the war on drugs in 2007. In spite of the fact that more than two hundred thousand people lost their lives or disappeared in the ensuing decade, Calderón’s successor, President Enrique Peña (PRI), made few major changes in strategy and continued to focus on arresting high-profile criminals such as Joaquín El Chapo Guzman. Even after the 2018 election of a left-wing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who promised to focus on building peace in the country, it has been hard to detect a coherent new policy line, beyond (paradoxically) giving more power to the military.

The violence since the 2000s has changed Mexico’s image in the world, but violence was not new to Mexico. The current news-grabbing violence should be understood within this longer history. Mexico entered the twentieth century with a revolution (1910–1917) that cost millions of lives, and it was followed by other conflicts including the Cristero rebellion (1926–1929), in which peasants armies fought to defend the Catholic Church from secularizing reforms. Notably, some former Cristero regions are now better known as drug-producing territories, reflecting the physical remoteness that harbored first the rebellion and since then drug producers, and that led to residents’ feeling of alienation from government before and after the rebellion—a feeling also echoed in high rates of migration to the United States. Government repression of the Cristeros, which continued into the 1930s, prefigured episodes of state repression, of which the Mexican Army’s 1968 massacre of unarmed student protestors in Mexico City was only the most salient. For a long time the southwestern border state of Chiapas was subject to especially intensive military control, some of which was justified in terms of countering drug production, but this was also intended to control the predominantly indigenous population. In 1994 indigenous peasants led by formerly Maoist revolutionaries staged a major rebellion. Though this was contained by the Mexican Army, foreign pressure led to a fitful series of peace talks, during which paramilitary groups linked to the state government and landowners waged a dirty war against the rebels and their supporters. In other parts of Mexico, indigenous communities created autodefensa armed groups—notably in Guerrero, where from the 1990s some of the autodefensa groups entered the struggle for control of the heroin trade. In states like Guerrero, the violence since 2007 can be understood only in that older context. Both before and after 2007, conflict between state and nonstate armed groups has been only part of the violence in Mexico. Gender violence (discussed in chapter 6) came to be emblematized in the killings of women in Ciudad Juárez in the 2000s, narrated in prize-winning documentaries and fueling the struggle to define such crimes as femicide. Some femicide is linked to organized crime groups, but gender violence is part of the chronic violence that has plagued Mexico historically (Abello Colak and Pearce 2009, 18n2).

Within Mexico, Michoacán is one of the states that was associated with crime and violence long before the start of the war on drugs, but it saw a dramatic escalation. The PRI lost the Michoacán governorship in 2002 to the center-left Revolutionary Democratic Party (Partido de la Revolución Democrática; PRD), after a decade of political violence against PRD supporters—which in turn followed years of electoral violence across the state. Michoacán has historically been among the poorest states in Mexico. Its economy remains dominated by agriculture, extractive industries such as mining, and trade through the Pacific port of Lázaro Cárdenas. Maldonado has shown that drug trafficking has had a long history in Michoacán, and that state and nonstate violence was essential to that history (2010, 2014, 2018, and 2020).

As in the rest of the country, the increase in violence from around 2005 onward was dramatic. One reason was the decision of a group of Michoacán drug traffickers to ally themselves with the Gulf Cartel and its armed group called Zetas, to break the hold of an extended family tied to the rival Sinaloa Cartel. This group of traffickers then broke with the Zetas in the mid-2000s and called itself first La Familia Michoacana and then, after a schism in 2011, the Knights Templar. The Zetas set the trend for the utterly ruthless use of violence to impose control—at one point, they hunted down anyone who shared the surname of the family that they sought to drive out of the region. Their successors followed suit, turning on the Zetas and then on each other, while also targeting politicians and officials at all levels of government (Maldonado 2018).

In this context, President Calderón chose Michoacán, his home state, to launch the war on drugs, deploying thousands of soldiers and federal paramilitary police in several operations. The federal operations were characterized by human rights abuses, including torture, arbitrary killings, and forced disappearances. These operations disrupted the traffickers’ work and their protection networks: for example, several mayors were arrested in 2010. In response, the Knights Templar sought to extend its hold on Michoacán’s state and municipal governments, in a bid to protect themselves from the federal campaigns. By 2013, it appeared that they had succeeded, as state and municipal governments came to terms with the Knights Templar. The organization sought legitimacy among the broader population, claiming to protect Michoacán from outsiders such as the Zetas and to provide them with security. Indeed, its leaders offered their services in mediating inheritance and domestic disputes. Their hold enabled them to extort money from businesses of every kind across the state and to profit from sectors such as mining and agriculture, where they engaged in price-fixing. It also allowed them to commit outrages, and there are abundant testimonies of how Knights Templar lieutenants were allowed to torture and kill, as well as to abuse women at will.

In 2011, residents of the town of Cherán, in Michoacán’s predominantly indigenous central highlands, mobilized to expel illegal loggers protected by the Knights Templar and their local political allies. They set up an autodefensa group that later became a police force and ousted the municipal government, establishing a town council that excluded political parties. Over the next three years, groups of farmers and others subject to extortion by the Knights Templar, including some drug producers and traffickers, liaised across the Tierra Caliente plain and coastal strip to buy arms and train members in their use. They staged a series of uprisings in 2013 and 2014, typically disarming the municipal police, running known criminals out of town, setting up barricades on the entrance roads, and establishing some kind of council to govern the local autodefensa. Regional autodefensa leaders emerged, serving as spokespeople for the movement while heading forays into new municipalities, where they called for locals to volunteer for autodefensas and establish their own local councils. Within a year, the movement had expanded to around thirty-four municipalities, covering more than half the territory of the state.

The autodefensa movement caught the imagination of Mexican and foreign news media, but it was represented in sweeping and often romantic terms, which often echoed regional leaders’ defiant pronouncements. In practice, different autodefensa groups mobilized in different ways and in relation to different economic, political, and social problems, while leaders and followers often had different motives. Some groups mobilized in moral outrage at Knights Templar atrocities and the evident complicity of municipal, state, and some federal officials. Others were concerned primarily at the extent of extortion, and businesses preferred to fund autodefensa weapons and wages in the hope of relieving themselves of the extortion. Drug producers and traffickers were also subject to extortion and control by the Knights Templar, and some of them saw an opportunity to break free from their hold, artfully manipulating the situation to gain the advantage.

In 2014, President Peña decided to appoint one of his trusted lieutenants, Alfredo Castillo, as federal security commissioner in Michoacán, which effectively meant that Castillo supplanted the Michoacán state governor in security matters. Castillo negotiated with the autodefensa groups and established a task force with some of their leaders, hunting down and killing or arresting most of the Knights Templar leaders. This is arguably the only occasion on which the Mexican government has managed to disband a criminal organization of that scale. Castillo made gestures toward combating corruption through canceling government contracts with companies linked to the Knights Templar, and he also secured federal investment in some social development projects intended to undercut recruitment to criminal organizations (Maldonado 2018).

In May of that year, Castillo issued a call to autodefensa group members in the state to apply to join a new statewide police force, the Rural Force. He threatened them with arrest if they did not comply. As a result, several autodefensa groups were incorporated into the Rural Force, but many others either refused to apply or had their applications rejected. The members of one autodefensa group—together with its charismatic leader, the obstetrician Manuel Mireles—were arrested for continuing to advance to new municipalities rather than applying to join the Rural Force. A criminal group known as Los Viagras deserted the Knights Templar to join the autodefensa movement, only to be deemed a drug-trafficking organization by the government. It remains a powerful criminal actor in the state. Even though the Michoacán state government has officially denied the persistence of autodefensa groups, some groups have continued to operate and even to collaborate on occasion with regular police and armed forces. This was the case in two of the localities discussed in chapter 2.

Castillo was transferred out of Michoacán by the president in early 2015, and in the state gubernatorial election that summer, Silvano Aureoles won the governorship back for the PRD. However, Aureoles allowed Castillo’s trusted lieutenant, Martín Godoy, to control much of the Michoacán security apparatus as state prosecutor. Godoy oversaw the reorganization of the prosecution service across the state—for example, by ensuring that prosecutors were trained in the reformed criminal justice system, which was rolled out across Mexico. At the same time, most municipal police forces were brought under the control of a new police force, the Michoacán Police, which also had the power to decide on the appointment of municipal police chiefs, ostensibly because mayors were under pressure to appoint chiefs acceptable to criminal factions. Regional commanders were appointed to facilitate coordination across municipalities, and regional police bases were constructed with surveillance centers linked to networks of cameras. Regional prosecutors were given jurisdictions matching the regional police commanders, to promote better coordination between prosecutors and the Michoacán Police. Regional prosecutors and police commanders held regular meetings with other security actors—notably army, navy, and federal police—and Security and Justice Working Groups were established across the state to bring security chiefs together with civil society leaders (chapter 2).

By the time we conceived of our project in 2016, it was looking less and less likely that the state government was adequate to the task of forestalling further crime and violence. Homicide rates had risen again. One reason was the turf war that had followed the dismantling of the Knights Templar, as different factions—including some autodefensa groups—sought to muscle in on the liberated territories, establishing their own protection rackets and illicit businesses while retaining some of the properties that they had expropriated from the Knights Templar. The reorganized Michoacán Police and security apparatus focused its energies on arresting the most visible criminals, but this appeared only to exacerbate the violence. Moreover, the Michoacán Police did not retain citizens’ confidence for long (chapter 2), and police were accused of extorting citizens through traffic stops and of favoring one criminal faction or another. There was also little further state action against corruption. Meanwhile, the state government invested heavily in subsidizing the local and state press, which printed daily reports of the governor’s claims that Michoacán was becoming more secure. The media reports contrasted with local perceptions and with the findings of the few Michoacán civil society organizations that tracked crime statistics.

Our project grew out of the need we identified to explore and understand responses to violence that came from outside government, given the lack of headway made by the government. We were especially interested in identifying societal responses that were less problematic than the autodefensas had become: by 2017, some autodefensa groups and alliances had been accused of having become cartels in their own right. In any case, the autodefensas were being studied by numerous researchers, who were publishing nuanced accounts of how the groups varied by locality (for example, Fuentes Díaz and Fini 2018; Guerra 2018; Guerra Manzo 2015; Maldonado 2018). Our aim, then, was to focus our attention on other societal responses that were often eclipsed by the dramatic (and masculine) muscle of the autodefensas but were at the same time potentially less problematic than them. However, we still intended to conduct most of our research within the contexts most affected by crime and violence, including those that had seen autodefensa uprisings, and thus go beyond the many studies of metropolitan responses in the literature up to 2017.

BEYOND AUTODEFENSAS: SOCIETAL RESPONSES IN THE MOST AFFECTED CONTEXTS

Despite the attention paid in Michoacán to the autodefensas, most studies of societal responses to crime and violence in Mexico had focused on city-based and often national organizations, typically of the variety commonly known as civil society organizations. Mexico’s Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, led by the poet Javier Sicilia, is a case in point (Collett 2013; Knox 2018; Maihold 2012; Scholl 2015). Another common focus was on the variety of societal responses in Ciudad Juárez, including those that emerged in the context of the 2010 federal intervention in that city (Staudt and Méndez 2015). Comparative research has tended to privilege strategies such as street protests, which are more common in state capitals and other large cities than elsewhere (for example, Ley 2015). Looking beyond Mexico, we found a similar pattern in the literature on civil society responses to organized crime (Cayli 2013; Ralchev 2004; Schneider and Schneider 2003). We draw on the insights of several important comparative studies, but for the most part the cases in these studies are large cities: examples are Yanilda González’s (2016) comparison of citizen-police forums in Buenos Aires, Sao Paolo, and Bogotá; Eduardo Moncada’s (2016) comparison of business interventions in Medellín, Bogotá, and Cali; and Enrique Arias’s (2018) study of Miami, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paolo, and Medellín. These metropolitan contexts are typically characterized by the presence of high-level government institutions interacting with well-resourced civil society organizations staffed by highly educated people living in conditions of relative security.

Although we have included a chapter on organizations in Morelia, the capital of Michoacán (chapter 4), our focus was on societal responses beyond the metropolis, ranging from those in provincial cities to those in remote rural areas. One reason for this focus was that national- and state-level organizations, whatever their influence on government policy, appeared to be having little impact on crime and violence beyond their metropolitan settings. Our intuition was that, at least in contexts as challenging as Michoacán, societal actors from within the most affected localities had an important role to play in responding to crime and violence.

From the outset, we kept an open mind about what societal responses we might encounter within these regions, and even as we developed criteria, we learned to apply them flexibly. The kinds of organizations that we describe in this volume—ranging from local citizen councils and church-linked initiatives to art and culture collectives and women’s groups—were not stipulated at the start of the project. Instead, they were chosen after the first stage of fieldwork, when we held extensive discussions about the criteria that we would use for focusing on some responses rather than others. Even then, we decided to be flexible in how we applied our criteria in the research, as we grew to understand the multiple dimensions of the problem being confronted and how it was variously understood by the actors in