Mexico, the Construction of Enemies through Social Protest: Some Reflections
Miguel Ángel Vite PérezNational Polytechnical Institute, Mexico
AbstractThe goal of this reflection is to develop an explanation about how social actors who express their discontent in street protests have come to be considered enemies of the rule of law and social stability, thereby justifying the repressive measures that state authorities take against them. This dynamic traces its legitimacy to the existence of a social representation of crime that elicits thoughts of danger and fear for a variety of social groups. In the context of this reflection, we will analyze the social protest of 1 December 2012 that took place in Mexico City on the occasion of the presidential inauguration of Enrique Peña Nieto.
Keywordscriminality, enemy, fear, social protest, social representation
Introduction
The goal of this article is to explore the link between the social representation of criminality, shared by government authorities and some groups in Mexican society, and the punitive actions taken against individuals who participate in social protests that involve or lead to physical altercations with the police as well as to damage of public and/or private property. When physical violence is involved, the particular demands that prompted the social protest become diluted in the social imaginary because public attention shifts, refocusing on the consequences of material destruction and the details of physical confrontations (such as the number of people wounded, arrested, etc.).
The social representation of criminality in Mexico has broadened to encompass individuals who make a living within the informal sector of the economy as well as those who deal in a variety of illegal markets. The result is widespread social apprehension and fear of these people, considered dangerous elements since illegality, or activities that fall outside the rule of law, are equated in the social imaginary with the origin and spread of criminal groups – never mind that such groups exist in complicity with law enforcement agencies (Alvarado, 2012: 384).
Corresponding author:Miguel Ángel Vite Pérez, Center for Economic Research, Administrative and Social, Lucio Tapia Mz. 95. Lte. 14. Zona Escolar. Gustavo A. Madero, DF. CP: 07230, México. Email: [email protected]
In fact, economic illegality, which encompasses all activities within the informal sector of the economy, has been a means of survival for a great number of social groups that are excluded from the formal economy. It has also given rise to a complex universe of intermediaries who have strong connections with the authorities, a working relationship so to speak, that has led to a distinct approach to regulating social practices (Alvarado, 2012: 512–513). The informal agreements or arrangements between the Mexican government and the intermediaries result in economic benefits and also aid in ensuring social stability. The dynamic of subordination between what is legal and what is illegal, legitimate vs. illegitimate, however, is a conflictive one, so when the subordinate part becomes independent it may do away with the agreement. As Mexico has moved from single-party authoritarianism to a democracy based on a plurality of political parties (Auyero, 2001: 165–196) over the past three decades, the tension between the two realms has become more pub-licly visible. While neither illegality nor the public or semi-covert agreements to regulate it have disappeared, the legitimization of the use of force by the government, however, is a new element that has come into play against those who do not accept the government’s regulations. Even though presidential authoritarianism has decreased in Mexico, it is still a significant element in the exer-cise of state power irrespective of political party, which was readily apparent during the past two six-year presidential terms when the National Action Party (PAN) was in power and is currently evident with the “return” of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to the presidency with Enrique Peña Nieto. Among other things, the conflictive relationship between the legal and illegal realms in the country is now shaping into a battle of might. Those who operate outside the realm of state law see no benefit in agreeing to abide by such regulations and thus opt to organize their own interests without state intervention. The reasoning is that there are greater advantages to oper-ating in a fully illegal realm than to do so in one subordinate to government institutions (Zárate, 2012: 120–131).
The enemies of social order derive from a process of loss of social attributes that unmoors them from institutions. This process is rooted in the crisis of the world of work and the state’s diminished ability to integrate individuals into society as a guarantor of citizen rights through the power of its institutions. The construction of a social representation of the enemies of social order, however, enables the state to define social actors within that unmoored realm, endowing them with particular identifiable features such as being poor, migrants, unemployed, terrorists, or involved in illegal businesses like drug trafficking. While the characterization may be ambiguous, it serves to legiti-mize the state’s use of force or violence. As a result, the use of force can be seen a means that enables the state to refashion its control mechanisms over social groups that, at a local and regional level, have organized their daily life within the realm of illegality imposed by parallel and illicit orders such as the drug trade.
The social protest that took place in Mexico City on 1 December 2012, on the occasion of Enrique Peña Nieto’s presidential inauguration ceremony, has been tied in the social imaginary with the illegal realm. On a symbolic plane, this has resulted in an association with fear of financial loss for private businesses because of the inability of local authorities, perceived as structural weakness, to prevent looting and the destruction of public property during the demonstration. The social representation of the Other as enemy has reinforced the belief that the role of the authorities is to keep social protests from degenerating into violence, which is achieved through the presence of the police force and the demarcation of the space through which the protest can move (specific streets and avenues), and/or can occupy (what parts of public squares) in the event that the protest-ers decide to camp out for an extended period of time.
The text is divided into four sections. Focusing on the events of 1 December 2012, in each sec-tion a theoretical reflection informs the discussion about how current social representations of
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criminality in Mexico have affected the perception of social protests. The article concludes with a series of reflections aimed at opening further lines of inquiry into the topic.
Mexican Criminality as Representation
The social representation of Mexican criminality is based, generally speaking, on the deployment of the armed forces against social groups that have been defined beforehand as enemies of the social order. The goal is not so much to penalize or punish certain social behaviors as to instead eliminate those who are considered to be the element that has fueled widespread social fear of criminality.1 The government’s use of institutional violence and the penalties or legal sanctions it imposes on certain social behaviors2 have had the effect of legitimizing the fear of criminality in the social imaginary. The prevailing social fear of criminality, in turn, has enabled so-called insti-tutional violence to become a legitimate means for the government to exercise power. The Mexican state has thus reaffirmed its social and territorial presence via punitive force. As a result, unlawful acts that were not punished in the past are now considered criminal (Maldonado, 2010). This is a meaningful change from the prior forms of organization between administrators of institutional violence and those who exercised informal violence – that which was outside the rule of law – but managed to generate sustainable governability through agreements and concessions established within a precarious democratic order in which the state held the monopoly over the public realm (Escalante, 1999: 56–57).
In the case of Mexico, there are a number of different conditions that enabled the transforma-tion of an authoritarian social state (De la Garza, 1988) into a neoliberal securitarian state (Foessel, 2011). Despite that change, the state’s monopoly over legitimate and symbolic violence persists and has led to the formulation of norms that establish the differentiation between, for instance, the public and private realms, what is true and what is false, fair and unfair, authorized and unauthor-ized (Charles, 2013: 9). In other words, the state creates meaning through social attributes insti-tutionally conferred to individuals as citizens or members of society, who are defined by their role in the reproduction of social order (Bourdieu, 2002: 57). There is evidence that so-called govern-ment deregulation, also associated with the diminished role of the state in the basic institutional framework of the social safety net, led to the increasing economic importance of the financial and business sectors in the organization of society. What really happened, however, was that it opened up new possibilities for illegal businesses to operate on a global scale, fostering uncertainty pack-aged as risk, which in the social imaginary was defined as the fear of loss of life and personal property in the light of economic crises. Furthermore, it led to the widespread growth of informal means of subsistence due to the prevalence of unemployment and underemployment (Altvater and Mahnkopf, 2008).
In developed countries, the end of institutional certainty has at its source the crisis of the world of work. Salaried work ceased to be the link to social benefits granted through state welfare poli-cies, which sought to reduce social inequality (Castel, 2004). The disappearance of social policies that provided a foundation for universal wellbeing and the economic destabilization ushered in by financial globalization have been interpreted in the social imaginary as a lack of security or public safety; this, in turn, has contributed to a perception of increased risk or exposure to danger (Beck, 2006: 1–28). The social representations of insecurity and risk have thus acquired new meaning in this context. From the state’s point of view, as well as that of some social groups, they are articu-lated as a fear of crime, leading to a situation that has proved favorable to the reactivation of puni-tive actions on the part of the authorities. Such an articulation has also contributed to the growth of defensive social isolation evident in the construction of walls around residences that are now also
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equipped with surveillance technology as a means to keep “strangers” at bay since they are consid-ered potential enemies ready to strike at any time (Pires, 2007: 257–309).
The social representation of the fear of crime is a construct that may find a point of reference in the social uncertainty and inequality that neoliberal economic policies and the recent financial crises generated. It finds its real and true meaning, however, when it aids in the definition of crimi-nalized enemies considered responsible for the alleged growth of public insecurity (Escalante, 2012: 21). Violence perpetrated against enemies that are portrayed as criminals is justified through an ideology of public safety. It does not, however, help to explain the changes that have occurred in the institutions in charge of crime control, which tend to reproduce a social order based on fear and the exercise of authority legitimized through its punitive policies (Garland, 2007).
The Social Construction of Danger
The concept of social representation refers to the view or idea of the world that individuals or groups have constructed. At the same time, social representations inform individual and/or group actions as well as interactions with others, which helps to understand the meaning of social prac-tices. These, in turn, serve to justify behaviors, shaping a system of interpretation of the relations that take place in physical and social environments (Abric, 2004: 12–13). But social representa-tions are also the result of a socialization process that institutions (such as school and family) effect in order to establish the mechanisms through which individuals become integral elements of soci-ety in terms of the positions they occupy as they perform specific tasks or functions. These posi-tions generate rights and entitlements guaranteed through state welfare policies (Dubet, 2011). The model associated with the equality of positions found itself in crisis as the welfare state was dis-mantled,3 giving way to a situation where inequality multiplied as it no longer stemmed from only one cause, such as income differences; rather, it was manifested in identities, religious beliefs, socioeconomic conditions, etc. (Dubet, 2000). This also meant the crisis of the social representa-tion of the concept of social justice achieved through the existence of state protections that guaran-teed the rights of a social citizenship when faced with negative events that resulted from the dynamics of a capitalist economy (Castel and Haroche, 2003; Pisarello, 2007). The equality of positions was displaced by the concept of equality of opportunities. Generally speaking, this meant that the responsibility for success or failure was transferred to the individual in a context dominated by the neoliberal economic model. In other words, in a society that ceased to be organized through salaried work, state institutions lost their ability to integrate the individual into society and thus their role in producing the basic conditions that enabled the development of potential in those indi-viduals (Laval and Dardot, 2013). As a result, the concept of society underwent a fundamental change. From being the basic framework of unity, it transformed into the notion of a frame of refer-ence because the institutions that supported its foundations no longer assumed responsibility over individuals’ welfare and the development of their capabilities; from there on, individuals were to rely on their own resources for their fulfillment. The reliance on singular experiences has led to the construction of fractured representations that are only tenuously linked to the idea of society as a whole (Dubet, 2010).
As Bartra points out (2010: 23–24), social representation does not mean that social action is a simple reflection of the organizations or structures that manipulate individuals, or that it is a sum of different individual behaviors. Rather, it is a product of the freedom of action and the need to achieve goals of change or stability regarding situations and expectations.4 Freedom and need therefore constitute imaginary networks that originate myths regarding a variety of situations. At present, these highlight the existence of a fragmented society that, according to Dubet (2013: 147), is characterized by a mismatch between the social structure and the actions of individuals. In other
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words, society defined as the institutions that integrate individuals into the whole has become a mere desire or ideal in the face of the myth of the individual who chooses freely among different ways of life within a social realm governed by the notion of cohesion. The difference between integration and cohesion is that the former “is defined as a cultural and social order located above the practices of actors, [while] cohesion designates an inverse mechanism of production of society: that of the agreements and coordinations that result from social practices” (Dubet, 2013: 148).
One of the consequences of the separation between structure and action or subjectivity is that it is entirely up to the individual to devise and construct his actions and personality. Society thus becomes a referent in the process of construction of particular singularities. Agreements and delib-erations compel individuals to define the ways in which they articulate their desires and interests as part of a larger group, albeit while protecting their privacy and autonomy (Dubet, 2013: 150). The concept of an individualized society refers to a group of individuals linked by reciprocal actions through ephemeral forms or modes of action where what is being represented is a product of their interactions based on their self-images and of life in common; all of these work together to maintain group cohesion (Gergen and Gergen, 2011: 12–13). The individual constructed via social cohesion, according to Dubet (2010: 228), has been defined as human capital, interpreted through the lens of equal opportunity; but also in reference to the individual’s characteristics such as self-ishness and narcissism, which are two categories derived from the market and ideologized by the neoliberal economic regime.
Social representations involve meanings that must be considered as ideologies. These have a firm grounding in reality, and due to their cognitive content, aid in the practical organization of individuals. That is, they are relations lived with reality that are susceptible to distortions and mys-tifications (Eagleton, 2005: 49–55). Ideology, as Guerrero observes, is not a utopia or an ideal reality, but rather a reflection of the material conditions within which social interactions occur that conceals the interests of a particular social group in the systematization of apparently disinterested thought (2009: 15–21). Ideology is thus viewed as a reflection of empirical representations and not the lived relations with reality.
From a different perspective, Laval and Dardot assert that neoliberalism is not so much an ideol-ogy but a rationale (2013: 15–17) that guides the actions of those who govern and are governed, and it utilizes competency as a behavioral norm and a business model to organize human subjectiv-ity. Government thus manages people’s behavior through techniques and procedures with the goal of creating social cohesion.5 That is, it seeks to integrate individuals into society through their discrete interests based on an ideology that places the onus of success or failure entirely and exclu-sively on the individual.
The scope of responsibility of state institutions in the neoliberal context has shrunk because it is the individual who now maps out or determines his own path, and it may lead to success if it is drawn in agreement with other individuals. This has given place to fractured images or representa-tions that have led individuals to conceptualize society as a fragmented entity rather than as a unit (Dubet, 2013). As a result, when we refer to a neoliberal reason we are actually speaking of a set of tools that are social regulations without immediate social intentions. What has happened in developing countries is that the coexistence of a legal order and of one outside the parameters of the law has given place to negotiations or unstable arrangements between the state and private actors in the interest of governability. Through a process of delegation and control, the authorities thus exert their power in an indirect manner (Hibou, 2013: 37). This fosters uncertainty because there is an
imprecision between what is suppressed and what is allowed, between what is authorized, tolerated, and what is condemned, between the legal and the illegal, and the dynamic surrounding the conflicts among
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the rules, [which] allow not only for the intrusion of politics and an arbitrary approach at any given time, but also for a permanent state of negotiations among the actors. (Hibou, 2013: 39)
Imprecision and instability have become, under certain conditions or circumstances, a necessity that requires agreements to be established with a differentiated universe of private intermediaries given that state institutions cannot offer guarantees because they are not strong enough to perform some of their control functions or exercise their political power. This weakness, furthermore, lays bare a real inability to respond to social demands in a formal and institutional manner. This is why loyalty trumps legality.
Institutional uncertainty, which became evident, for instance, in the United States, when social policies were dismantled in the wake of the economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s, resulted in the criminalization of poverty and misery through the exercise of institutional vio-lence; that is, the use of law enforcement officers to punish the illegal markets of the poor that were associated with the sale of drugs (Wacquant, 2000). At the same time, a social representa-tion that linked fear of the Other to the condition of poverty and misery began to take shape (Wacquant, 2005). The punitive focus of dealing with criminalized enemies went hand-in-hand with the proliferation of surveillance technology, which strengthened the control logic of a state that maintained that the enemy’s identity should be defined not only by his or her personal infor-mation but also by his or her biometric characteristics. The enemy’s social behaviors had to be supervised in light of his unpredictability – he could strike at any time with illegal or violent actions (About and Denis, 2010).
The growing use of institutional violence and the role that surveillance technology plays in sup-porting it is directly linked to the transformation of a state that used to base its legitimacy on a welfare system, to one that now builds legitimacy through the privatization of various state func-tions. Furthermore, and this brings me to my hypothesis, uncertainty has been turned into fear, and fear into the perception of imminent danger to existence or way of life. This, in turn, has reinforced the notion that in order to guarantee safety, the state must strengthen its surveillance and punish-ment capabilities (Lyon, 2003). The end of the Cold War brought to light new enemies such as drug traffickers and terrorist groups, which the US government, for example, has criminalized in the name of national security. The punitive approach to dealing with these enemies justifies the use of violence since criminals are stripped of their rights and social attributes (Garland, 2011). Interestingly, this approach has grown to encompass migrants, the poor, and the unemployed, espe-cially when they are not citizens of the country in which they live.
The surveillance or securitarian state has established a relationship with those it governs that is based on a complicity fed by the demand for security stemming from representations of fear of the Other – that is to say the enemies, who constitute a threat to life and personal property (Foessel, 2011: 43). According to Agamben (2006), the act of criminalizing the Other, especially when the government defines him as a criminal, has resulted in the social devaluation of the subject because he has no rights and hence is not regarded as a citizen. Living on the margins of society, the crimi-nalized subject is considered to be someone who does not belong since he inhabits an unmoored space where all sorts of illegal activities that are not regulated by any police force take place (Logiudice, 2007: 47–51). An individual devoid of any legal status, as Iglesias remarks (2013: 54–55), cannot be judged or condemned though he can be eliminated, his life terminated through violent means, since he occupies an exceptional space where the state can exercise its power to dispose of life without legal limitations. Hence, the collective fear of being in exceptional or uncer-tain situations grows because illegality generates social practices that the state may criminalize: as the state takes punitive measures to apply the rule of law, it may bring about collateral damage or consequences (Bauman, 2011).
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In short, collective fear emerged as social inequality expanded, a process that several economic and financial crises accelerated. State institutions have been unable to step in to provide or guaran-tee social safety nets, but have endeavored to maintain their punitive functions aimed at combatting the uncertainty allegedly created by the illegal or outlaw order.
The Criminalization of Dangerous Peoples
The neoliberal economic policy period in Mexico, which began after the 1982 economic crisis, triggered a process whereby state institutions were dismantled and the corporate social pact estab-lished with the PRI, the hegemonic political party representative of the armed movement of 1910, slowly withered away (Nacif, 2010: 46–47).6 Throughout the PRI’s long history in power – it held the office of the presidency continuously until the year 2000 – it concealed the shortcomings of state institutions through informal agreements and pacts effected with a variety of public and pri-vate intermediaries. This meant that loyalty translated into special privileges.7 That type of envi-ronment provided the intermediaries with ample autonomy to execute agreements without formal or institutional backing, which in turn fostered uncertainty and strengthened both formal and infor-mal local powers (Hernández, 2008). Some of the conflicts evidenced in the various dimensions of public life have been resolved through agreements. In the case of electoral processes, the demands of opposition parties consolidated the transition to democracy for a country that had been defined by single-party hegemony. New laws and institutions enabled the move to a plural party system with contested elections that made for greater plurality of political representation (Woldenberg, 2012: 13).
While a new political party, the PAN, won the presidential elections in the year 2000 in Mexico, and again in 2006, informal and illegal social practices continued as usual but in a fragmentary manner since there was no national agreement to ground them because the presidency was focused on maintaining social welfare programs and economic stability at the macroeconomic level (Puyana and Romero, 2009: 51–83). The transition to a multi-party democracy in Mexico did not eradicate social conflicts or the ties between the legal and illegal orders. These survived though they were deemed to be pernicious or negative for the country because the struggle against so-called organ-ized crime has shed light on alleged networks that involve politicians, drug traffickers, and corpo-rate police forces (Tuckman, 2012: 158–159).
The existence of the illegal realm is not limited to criminal activities. Rather, it encompasses a whole universe of activities that represent the ability to survive, to get along on a daily basis, for many families involved in informal employment (Duhau and Giglia, 2008). In order to govern, the Mexican state requires a careful equilibrium between the legal and illegal realms, using agree-ments and negotiated pacts yet also using violence when those pacts lose their functionality because of the conflicts they generate, which lay bare the corruption and impunity of intermediaries as well as of public functionaries. The state thus asserts its authority when it deploys the law or police forces to contain those who have been defined as enemies of social stability and peace (Covarrubias, 2013: 96–97). The government’s representation of criminal violence as something that requires combat or struggle for its eradication, and a system of high tech control and professional police forces for its prevention, responds to both international and national needs. On the international plane, there is the war on drugs, headed by the US government’s struggle against drug cartels. On the national level, state policies have surrendered or abandoned the countryside, a problem that the government attempted to remedy with the presence of armed forces in areas that were supposedly occupied by the enemy, which is to say drug traffickers (Maldonado, 2013). The presence of the armed forces in territories that are considered to be markets for illegal business has led the popula-tion to learn how to evade or negotiate with the violence of drug trafficking groups and of the
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armed forces – such is the case in Michoacán, for example (Maldonado, 2013: 101–112). Beginning in 2007, the Mexican government has used both the army and the navy to fight drug trafficking, a decision made by then-president Felipe Calderón. This move legitimized the use of violence and led some of the illegal orders to respond in kind as they deployed their own armed groups to com-bat the federal government’s forces, a clear indication that there is widespread access to the means that enable the practice of violence (Arteaga, 2013: 162). The use of legitimized state violence has fostered the emergence of legislative inflation; protest actions are thus penalized as soon as nego-tiations about demands fall through and events lead to violence against material property or the police (Foessel, 2011: 24). This is what happened in the social protest of 1 December 2012, in Mexico City, during Enrique Peña Nieto’s presidential inauguration ceremony.
Protest as a Method of Violence
The social representation of organized crime as the enemy of the nation, a definition set forth by the federal as well as local governments in Mexico, has legitimized the use of institutional violence embodied in the police aided by the army, because of the police forces’ lack of technology or adequate preparation to deal with the basic task of national security (García, 2011). From this per-spective, the fight against organized crime is an issue of lack of qualified personnel and adequate technology for prevention. In some cases the judicial and penal systems were faulted because they favored impunity and corruption (Enrique, 2009). What happened, however, was that the conflict – as part of the social relations – morphed into violence because there were new rules for an illegal order that organized itself according to territories where the state’s instruments for control were no longer effective, one of the consequences of dropping local welfare from public policy agendas (Herrera, 2010).
Social actors who have ties to public institutions, from which they derive their rights and also the legitimacy to negotiate their positions, organize social protests. Nevertheless, they have had only minor impact in finding solutions to problems and improving living conditions. The state is highly reluctant to draw up agreements due to the presidency’s authoritarian nature, especially when concessions are involved. This has led to an impasse of sorts whereby the response to social demands is limited by what the institutions can provide according to the financial resources they manage. There is thus no room for negotiation (Valenzuela, 2009: 267–276). Interestingly, social protests that involve social actors who lack institutional integration and whose subjectivity has been shaped by precariousness and neglect exhibit a tendency for non-negotiation as well. These actors have weak or non-existent ties with the formal sector and are therefore more willing to resort to violence against material property and the police as a means of expression. As for the police, for decades it has been more focused in its role of regulating criminal markets rather than in respond-ing to citizen demands for public safety. This context informs the events that took place during the social protest of 1 December 2012 in Mexico City on the occasion of the presidential inauguration of Peña Nieto. Among other things, that protest showcased the dynamic relationship between the legal and illegal orders. It also made the consequences thereof very clear, not the least of which was the reinforcement of a negative social representation of the young people who marched and whom the political authorities and economically powerful sectors classified as a threat to public order (Fischhoff and Kadvany, 2013: 140–147).
During his presidential campaign, Peña Nieto visited the Ibero-American University (Universidad Iberoamericana) in Mexico City, on 11 May 2012. He was greeted by a group of disaffected students critical about the abusive and repressive behavior of the police in the state of Mexico during a demonstration in the village of Atenco while Peña Nieto was governor of that state. When questioned about the incident, Peña Nieto reaffirmed his position and stood by how the situation had been handled at the time (Núñez, 2012: 255). His remarks further disgruntled the
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crowd. A group of students then proceeded to follow Peña Nieto through the university’s hallways, preventing the presidential candidate from fulfilling his agenda for the visit. At one point, he had to seek refuge in a bathroom from where he called for help to leave the premises. The following day, 40 newspapers ran the story about the visit, remarking on its success despite an attempted boycott organized by infiltrators (Núñez, 2012: 256). In response, 131 students of the Ibero-American University uploaded a video to YouTube in which they stated they were not infiltrators but legitimate students of the university, each identifying him or herself by name and showing his or her official and current student identification card. The video elicited dozens of expressions of support via the internet with hashtags such as “#YoSoy132” (I am 132), shaping a virtual social protest against the presidential candidate. This was possible because of almost instant mass com-munication via the internet that enables, as Castells observes, autonomous communication beyond the boundaries of institutional power (2012: 26–27). However, in order for the social protests that propagate via virtual networks to make the leap to real space, to become a social movement on the streets, there must be an interconnection between digital space and public space. In other words, the digital protest must be visible in a place where social life takes place, such as the streets and town squares, especially because some of these places have symbolic power associated with state or financial institutions (Castells, 2012: 28).
The social representation of social protests in Mexico has acquired a negative tonality in recent years as demonstrations are increasingly considered serious disruptions of social order. The eco-nomic and political élites have therefore gradually devised mechanisms to control them, which involve the use of the police and/or armed forces along with a growing reliance on surveillance technology. Individuals who participate in public protests may be criminalized, especially if there is violence involved affecting material property. When protesters target buildings or infrastructure that may symbolically represent the sphere of authority, violence acquires a diffuse character because the structures come to embody the power of that person, group of people or entity (Sofsky, 2006: 192–193). Thus, as Marramao remarks, power is no longer concentrated in a particular sub-ject (2013: 14–15) because it has been spread out or disseminated over various social subjects (Foucault, 1980). It is important to bear in mind that for many decades social protests in Mexico were controlled by subordinating their leaders to the political logic of an authoritarian social state, as well as through repressive measures aimed at destroying the organizational capabilities of dif-ferent organizations (Zermeño, 1996). Social protests nowadays are associated with the idea of a regressive modernity, or the dismantling of modernity; that is, as a negative element that manifests social fragmentation and marginalization, both of which are linked to the growth of poverty and illegal economic activities. These are dynamics that go against the drive toward solidarity that helps to strengthen citizenship (Zermeño, 2005: 19–29).
Marcelo Ebrard Casaubon, the head of government of Mexico City from 2000–2006, estab-lished a system of delinquency control that relied on the development of personnel capabilities as well as the use of cutting-edge technology. As he remarked:
There was a significant qualitative change: new recruits have attended high school, the number of women reached 32% among the new generations of recruits, and we have advanced on-the-ground experience in terms of how police officers approach the observation and evaluation of citizens. Another qualitative change is that the city has at its disposal a system of 15,000 video cameras that allow us to monitor and supervise police activity as well as that of all public entities. This has been a formidable instrument that has strengthened the police force’s investigative capabilities. (2013: 5)
Clearly, there was a coincidence between the federal government’s social representation of crime control and that of Mexico City’s since both revolved around the use of technology and the profes-sionalization of the police force. They also coincided in terms of methodology later on as both used
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the police force to punish the violent protesters who demonstrated on the day Peña Nieto was sworn in as President of Mexico.
On 1 December 2012, a group of students that supported “#YoSoy132” occupied the square of the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City, a location that students had occupied earlier in the year, in June, to publicly demonstrate their dismay at the media’s partial support of then presiden-tial candidate Peña Nieto. On the day of the presidential inauguration a number of students showed up wearing masks and dressed in black in order to protest the swearing in ceremony at the National Congress, a building that had been fenced off for the occasion and was heavily guarded by the Federal Police. The demonstration eventually degenerated into violence involving physical alterca-tions with city and federal police as well as material damage to public and private property in a commercial and touristic sector of historic downtown Mexico City.8 In an effort to quell the vio-lence, the police responded with heavy use of force and made arbitrary arrests. Police actions were later justified through negative portrayals of those involved in the disturbances, identifying them as anarchists (Jiménez, 2012: 8). Conversely, there were also allegations that the perpetrators were actually infiltrators, people not directly involved with the protest, planted by the government with the goal of instigating violence so that the authorities could justify the use of force to terminate the demonstration. This is a well-worn representation that some leftist intellectuals continue to hold onto because they always deem protesters’ demands to be legitimate. It also coincides with the old-time view of the corporate state paradigm in which government wielded its power to destroy the populations’ organizational capabilities (Gilly, 2012: 14).
In any case, this incident offers a glimpse of how the Mexican judicial system works: based on accusations that lack evidence and on the fabrication of perpetrators since police agents’ declara-tions were sufficient evidence to justify the incarceration of alleged guilty parties. Human Rights Commission of the Federal District (CDHDF) documented 32 cases of arbitrary arrests in this incident, including those of passersby not involved in the protest who were charged with disturbing the peace because they expressed their objection to the police’s use of force (León and Rodríguez, 2012: 5; López, 2012: 13). The individuals detained were subject to Article 362 of the Federal District Penal Code, which carries a sentence of between 5 and 30 years in prison as well as the suspension of political rights for a period of 10 years for disturbing the peace (Legislación Penal D.F., 2013: 141). However, due to the arbitrariness of the arrests and to the fact that among the detained there were militants of left-wing organizations linked to the political party that has been in power in the city’s government since the 1990s (the Party of the Democratic Revolution or PRD), the Commission of Law Enforcement and Administration of the Legislative Assembly, con-sisting of nine deputies – six of which represent the PRD – modified Article 362 of the Federal District Penal Code to reduce the sentence for disturbing the peace to two to seven years in prison. The modification was to be applied retroactively so that those processed would have the right to be released on bail (Herrera, 2012: 1).
The local deputies’ actions clearly demonstrated the ties between the legal and illegal orders, a relationship that in this case opened the door to custom arrangements when it came to sanctioning those allegedly responsible for disturbing the peace. At the same time, though, the negative social image of the protesters as enemies of social order was reinforced through a semantic operation: they were portrayed as delinquent and violent individuals whose manipulating agents or intellec-tual leaders were radical leftist organizations (anarchists) and in some cases even drug cartels (Reguillo, 2013: 355–356). The negative social representation that equated student protesters with anarchism was not the only construct that contributed to the violence that day. Another important aspect of that image is the widespread social feeling of fear or panic regarding the precariousness of public safety, which is also linked to a fear for life and property (Escalante, 2012: 15). There is also the idea that the most serious and impactful criminal activity is borne from individuals who
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come together in organized groups, which can bring about behaviors that may lead to terrorist activities, the production and trade of drugs, human trafficking, undocumented migrant trafficking, etc. (Escalante, 2012: 73). The image of deleterious group activity, derived from the Federal Law against Organized Crime, served as the basis for the publication on 23 March 2013 in the Official Gazette of the Federal District (Gaceta Oficial del Distrito Federal) of Agreement 16/2013 that backed a protocol for police conduct of the Secretariat of Public Safety of the Federal District for crown control, which authorizes the police to use firearms, irritating chemical substances, and violent means to break up the crowd when the level of aggression among the protesters has reached a point to justify such an approach (Rodríguez, 2013: 45). As a result of the escalation of events on 1 December 2012, anti-riot police now always accompany groups of students or young people who demonstrate in the historic downtown area of Mexico City in order to prevent violent disturbances. Additionally, storefronts and the facades of public buildings are protected with metal screens, and in some cases streets and avenues are closed off with makeshift metal fences to keep protesters from passing through them.9
The Voice behind #YoSoy 132 (#IAM132)
On 11 May 2012, a number of electronic and printed media outlets issued a sweeping negative opinion about the individuals who staged a demonstration against then presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto at an event held in the auditorium of the Ibero-American University in Mexico City. The protesters were denounced as outsiders, not students of the university, who had infiltrated the event. In response to this allegation, on 14 May, two days later, 131 students who had partici-pated in the protest against Peña Nieto uploaded a video to YouTube to set the record straight. Facing the camera while showing his or her student identification card, each student asserts that he/she is a currently enrolled student at the university and states his/her name and student ID number. The video inspired students from other universities to join in support of the original 131 students. Thus was born the #YoSoy 132 movement. According to Paulina García (2012: 127–129), who has gathered testimonial accounts from some of the students involved in the demonstration, the video was a response to the smear campaign waged against them in the media, which sourced its informa-tion from the team managing Peña Nieto’s presidential campaign.
The protest against Peña Nieto was initially organized via a Facebook invitation requesting that students wear masks representing the face of former president Carlos Salinas. When Peña Nieto was speaking in the auditorium some individuals in the audience decided to manifest their discon-tent by holding up posters with slogans signaling their disapproval of the presidential candidate while others disrupted the presentation by shouting (García, 2012: 131). Social networking sites such as Facebook and YouTube were used to organize the student protests at the Ibero-American University as well as to upload the video that clarified the fact that the protesters were not outside saboteurs but actual registered students at the university. The video was the idea of two students, Ana Rolón and Rodrigo Serrano, who recounted the students’ side of the story and showed the finished video on a Televisa news program (García, 2012: 131–132).
It is important to note that the original student protest was not a spontaneous event. During the presidential campaign the university had organized, in consultation with students, a series of talks under the theme of “The Good Citizen” with the goal of having the various candidates speak on campus. A few days before candidate Peña Nieto’s visit, a group of students majoring in Communications had planned a demonstration; however, as one of those students remarked,
[…] the big surprise that day was that there were too many students […] incredible, there were other groups from the University that we did not even know, we had seen them in the hallways but never greeted
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them, [and] they had [also] planned to protest against Peña Nieto. When these groups met up they were emotionally moved, they began to share blankets […] Two different factions took shape: those who united and started shouting, and the others, the ones who supported Peña Nieto. (García, 2012: 137)
After Peña Nieto was elected President of Mexico, a #YoSoy 132 supporter, Pablo Reyna, a student at the Ibero-American University, remarked that
[it was] an emotional hit [it was] disconcerting […] there was a group of people that was really enthused with the energy of the 132, that […] took to the street so that [… Enrique Peña Nieto] would not attain […the presidency of the country] and that did not happen. (Villegas, 2012: 14)
What did happen was that thereafter #YoSoy 132 disbanded into smaller cells that have since then supported a number of social protests with various goals. According to Iván Benumeo, a law student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), this signaled the end of collective indignation and discontent in a country where “[…] individualism prevails […] The key [… is] to spend less time on Facebook and more time in marches and public gatherings” (Villegas, 2012: 15).
The original cluster of 131 students became #YoSoy 132 when students from other institutions of higher education joined them; they hailed from the National Polytechnic Institute (Instituto Politécnico Nacional), the Metropolitan Autonomous University (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana), and the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Organizers readily use elec-tronic social networks, among others, to organize social protests, as was the case in the 1 December 2012 demonstration against Peña Nieto’s inauguration as president of the country.
The details of the various events that led to the demonstration that day offer insight into how the different forces at play may have led to the violence that characterized this particular social protest. Faced with popular outcry about the results of the presidential election, the Electoral Tribunal, the only institution with the power to annul them, upheld Peña Nieto as the legitimate winner of the process. A number of social organizations in the country rejected this institutional response, claim-ing it was unjust. Feeling thus disenfranchized, these organizations opted to express their discon-tent through confrontation and violence. Interestingly, the vandalism and destruction that ensued legitimized the decision of the Mexico City government to deploy, beforehand, the police in full force. This strategy has become the authorities’ routine response, which has managed to progres-sively weaken the robust fabric of social organizations that for decades had protested in the country (Zermeño, 1996: 42–44). A segment of the #YoSoy 132 movement supported the 1 December 2012 street protests in Mexico City. Activists groups with leftist and anarchist leanings were also involved in the organization of those protests (Nieto, 2013: 8). This information was obtained not only from postings that a number of the demonstration participants made on Facebook and YouTube, detailing some of their actions that day, but also, and more importantly, from police records that identify them as activists involved in social organizations focused on fighting the sys-tem (Cuevas, 2013: 6–7). For example, the lawyer defending Osvaldo Rigel Barreta, the only participant of the December 1st protests who was processed and then sentenced to a year in prison, remarked that his client was sentenced because of his political ideas and his appearance or dress. The sentencing judge, moreover, based his decision solely on the testimony of the policemen involved in Barreta’s arrest (Rodríguez, 2014: 32).
Because the arrests of some of the participants in the 1 December 2012 protest were arbitrary, their relatives staged further demonstrations that were supported by a cell of #YoSoy 132. Fifteen months later, on 5 May 2014, 14 of those who were arrested were freed – the only one who remained incarcerated was Barreta, as mentioned above. A number of those freed commented on
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their experience while incarcerated, making it clear, according to Sierra (2014: 11), that the Mexican penal justice system is inclined to penalize collective actions of protest. For instance, Alejandro Lugo, one of the 14 who were freed, stated that
from the moment of my arrest, I was threatened with rape […] first the [… riot police], then the police officers in charge of the investigation […] In truth, it was a problem that affected 15 months of my life […] there were blows, cruel, inhuman treatment, the guards would take pictures with us derisively, they stripped us and humiliated us.
In the case of Carlos Chávez, who was arrested for his rebuke of a riot officer, his confrontation with the police was captured on video that was later distributed to some television news outlets. Chávez remarked that the arrest not only affected him personally but also had a lasting impact on his family’s health, pointing out that: “I was really distressed that my mother had diabetes [and] my grandmother was in a dire state of health […].”
The CDHDF called for the city to provide compensation to those unjustly arrested on 1 December 2012. Former detainee Claudia Trejo, however, pointed out that “it is even schizo-phrenic to speak about a plan to compensate for damages when [Héctor] Serrano (the Secretary of Government of Mexico City) only speaks of financial compensation […] Financial compensation is just one aspect of reparation.”
Conclusions
Social representations are constructs that endow reality and certain social behaviors with particular meaning. Violence as a social representation derives from the need to ensure public safety in the face of the illegal realm, which has been portrayed in broad strokes as the criminal sector of soci-ety, comprising groups or individuals who have been defined a priori as a threat to social order. In its quest to ensure social safety, the state has legitimized its use of violence via the police and or armed forces as it endeavors to combat the enemies of public order and peace. These enemies are actors whose actions and business dealings are not subordinate to the legal realm as defined by state politics and policies, therefore their field of action is outside state control (Astorga, 2012: 54). In the 1990s, the Mexican political elite defined drug traffickers as enemies of public order and safety, which coincided with the point in time when traffickers enjoyed the greatest autonomy from state political power. This was because the process of democratic transition in Mexico, from a one-party monopoly to a multi-party system, reconfigured government power in the country in such a way that the old police apparatus fell apart since suppressing political dissidence was no longer its main objective.
The state’s approach to reestablishing control over illegal markets supported by criminal activ-ity has been twofold: on the one hand, it has invested in the professionalization of the police forces throughout the country and made use of sophisticated surveillance technology; on the other, it has deployed the armed forces to specific territories throughout the country in an attempt to reestablish State control as it combats crime in acutely affected regions. The government has thereby created the notion that military presence is necessary in order to “recover” the territories currently occu-pied and managed by criminals. This logic informs the use of self-defense armed guards that has proliferated of late in the states of Michoacán and Guerrero.
The creation of enemies identified with crime, however, has led to the criminalization of pro-testers who engage in acts of aggression or violence against the police and/or private property. The social representation that links social protests with criminality has found fertile ground in the popu-lation at large because it has come to view social mobilizations, such as the one discussed above,
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as a threat to social order. What is lost in such an interpretation is the fact that those protests are borne from the government’s inability to fulfill its primary social functions of meeting its citizens’ demands for social wellbeing. Uncertainty has taken hold of society as the state is no longer a guarantor of social integration, and this is manifested as a vulnerability that does not disappear even though the dynamic of illegal markets has created producers and consumers on the margins of the legal order.
I submit, as a hypothesis, that the state is currently to assert and reestablish its control through the criminalization of activities and individuals involved in the illegal realm, which encompasses a robust variety of activities within the informal economy, from small-scale everyday goods and services to large-scale networks of drug and human traffickers, among others. The state, however, has not sought to devise a practical strategy at the local level on how to deal with the power of the illegal realm of society, which also is autonomous. This has led to a situation that has fostered the fabrication of enemies. In some cases, the enemies turn out to be individuals who lack formal iden-tity as defined by state institutions. Since they lack institutional attributes, they do not enjoy the rights of a citizen as conferred by law that would enable them to find their rightful place amid the fragmentation of Mexican society.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
1. In Mexico, the government’s punitive focus was consolidated in 2007 when Felipe Calderón, then presi-dent of the country, decided to call the Army and the Navy to duty on local soil to combat drug traffickers in of the country’s regions. At every public event Calderón reiterated his monothematic speech about the war against drug trafficking (Nuñez, 2012: 56–59).
2. These social behaviors have been defined as intolerable because they allegedly lead to violence that then must be combatted with legitimate state violence. This dynamic reactivates the myth of the state as the “guardian” of legal order, which is equated with public safety (Ogilvie, 2013: 76–77).
3. In some developed countries the welfare state crisis began in the 1970s, while in other Latin American countries it did so the following decade, in the 1980s, as was Mexico’s case in 1982 with its foreign debt crisis (Sotelo, 2010: 44–50).
4. In this case, liberty is understood as a practice, that which is carried out or performed, whereas necessity springs from a desire (Foucault, 2010: 57).
5. This notion of guiding others’ conduct is termed governability and it is characterized by the govern-ment’s use of a variety of methods to shape and manage the behaviors of the governed (Foucault, 2006).
6. The hegemonic political party was the Revolutionary Institutional Party (abbreviation as PRI in Spanish). For more than 70 years it monopolized access to elected posts at the federal, state, and municipal levels. Moreover, it created an authoritarian regime because it allowed power to be concentrated in the presi-dency of the country.
7. The National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional, better known as PAN) won the presidential elec-tions for the first time in the year 2000, and again in 2006 amid claims of “electoral fraud” brought forth by the leftist opposition party.
8. Alameda Central, a public municipal park in downtown Mexico City, was remodeled and reopened on 26 November 2012. Funding was provided through mixed sources as the city government, private businesses and the federal government contributed to the project. The Alameda suffered damages in the protest of 1 December 2012, which angered Marcelo Ebrard’s office (Mendoza, 2012: 12).
9. The Anti-Terrorism Law was approved on 3 December 2013. It provides for the suspension of citizen rights and guarantees in public demonstrations that threat public peace. The Commission of the Federal
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District furthermore approved an initiative that outlines new crimes that carry jail sentences for those who obstruct free access to pedestrian and/or vehicular circulation as they go to and from their work-places, and also for those who disturb public peace during the course of a public demonstration or protest. The deputies stated that they did not seek to curtail citizens’ right to demonstrate, but instead to regulate such demonstrations. As a result, marches are now banned from the primary arteries in Mexico City and can only take place between 11 in the morning and 6 in the afternoon (Cervantes, 2013: 17–22).
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