A Humanitarian Crisis

Violence, Secrecy, and Hope in México

Forensic Sciences Laboratory in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, México. Photo courtesy Ventura Pérez

Silence appears to be México’s answer to the ongoing humanitarian crisis brought about by organized crime. On December 1, 2012, Enrique Peña Nieto started his six-year term as president of México. He immediately set about shifting the focus from national security to education, immigration and the economy. During the former administration, national Mexican media outlets focused less on political strategies and more on results; images of captured drug traffickers (narcos) and tortured bodies hung with narco-mensajes made their way into newspapers, articles, books and social media sites. Prominent news channels featured captured narcos, handcuffed and standing with masked officers before tables full of money, drugs, and weapons. The public saw results. However, targeting important figures from Mexican drug cartels resulted in the murders and disappearances of thousands of people across México. President Peña Nieto is initiating an important change from former President Calderon’s public focus on organized crime and kingpin strategy. The kingpin strategy was characterized by unparalleled collaboration between security forces from the US and México. President Peña Nieto has been very public about his intention to change this relationship. In this commentary, we explore the ways in which political strategies and media blitzes inform how the public experiences, remembers, and, at times, engages with violence through projects of hope.

Language of Organized Crime

Violence is instructive; it informs us about our society. Bodies evidencing trauma become the parchment upon which the literal writing of violence codifies meaning and structure to the objective world they occupy. Politicians, activists and survivors explain and exploit violent events within and outside of México by reproducing this literal language of violence in written and oral forms. How someone died becomes infinitely more important than the fact that he is dead. Individuals lose their identity but continue to circulate through the language of violence in the media and politics. Similar to the shift in administrative approaches to organized crime, the media has made undeniable changes to its coverage of violence. Systemic forms of quiet violence (hunger, poverty, neglect, abuse) go unnoticed and ignored.

A media blitz on education reform, immigration and the economy replaced the heavy media focus on organized crime. The current administration argues improving these aspects of the country will alleviate the impacts of organized crime. These strategies are arguably recycled approaches to counternarcotics and public relations from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to lessening dissidence and cultivating an appearance of success by diverting public attention from the war on drugs to equally significant concerns. A recent InSight Crime report argues a new reality for México will not be won with a public relations blitz but with a coherent national security strategy.

Violence of Silence

Banner thanking President Calderon on the Costera Miguel Alemán in Acapulco, Guerrero, México. Photo courtesy Ashley Sherry

The administration’s public relations efforts to downplay the continued violence are unsurprising. More surprising is that this strategy extends to national media sources. A report from the Media Agreement Observatory revealed the Mexican media decreased its coverage of organized crime since President Peña Nieto took office in December. The media coverage of organized crime was replaced with coverage of the Pact for México, universal teacher evaluations, and the federal budget. Words like murder, organized crime and narcotrafficking appeared 50% less in México City’s media. Tierra del Narco, a news source started in 2010 to document the drug war, recently reported on the undeniable “zone of informational silence” across northern México. A recent report by Agora Guerrero, a news source that documents organized crime in the state of Guerrero, on a simultaneous protest across the country for the protection and justice for news reporters declared, “The worst crime that can exist today, is to contribute to the Silence.” According to the Mexican National Human Rights Commission, since 2000, 84 journalists have been murdered in México. Regional news reporters struggle to cover the drug war and are frequently targets of organized crime while current Mexican political strategies tout silence as the solution to rising violence.

In early April 2013, the Mexican government announced drug related murders dropped 17% compared with the same period a year earlier. The murder rates have not decreased. Harary Security Consulting International, a top private security and intelligence-gathering firm in México that serves corporate and wealthy clients, indicates murder rates during President Peña Nieto’s first four months in office exceeded the monthly murder tallies for ten of the past eleven months of the previous administration. Milenio, one of México’s largest news sources, reported there have been nearly 4,000 drug related murders since President Peña Nieto took office. La Jornada, a smaller leftist newspaper, estimated there were 2,800 murders and indicated executions were on the rise. Violence does not define México, and it should not be ignored. The national media and administration should discuss it publically as part of broader development plans along with education, immigration, and the economy.

Spillover Violence and Immigration

Positive press on education and immigration are central to politicians’ focus from México and the US. This focus appears to circumvent discussions of organized crime and the highly publicized alleged spillover violence and resource “stealing” attributed to immigrants to the US. President Barack Obama delivered a speech to students at the Museum of Anthropology in México City in April 2013. A CNN report on President Obama’s speech noted students were far more interested in discussing the drug war. This is because violence in México is often seen as an episodic event tied to the universal assumption that the victim must be “dirty” and got what he had coming to him. A focus on physical violence ignores the complexity of structural systems, culture and history of the communities in which they are produced.

Acts of performance violence perpetrated by drug cartels are often referenced or exploited by politicians, activists, and survivors. At times, it conveys a specific message or agenda at the expense of the victim. This is epitomized by the public testimony of Bill Stewart, Deputy Chief of Staff for the Florida Attorney General, regarding House Bill 287g Immigration Legislation on April 8, 2008. Stewart testified, “It is impossible to separate national security issues from illegal immigration, and one of the most important illegal immigration issues in Florida is the issue of human trafficking.” Stewart goes on tell a story of a group of girls trafficked in from México who were raped; his testimony emphasized one of the girls was beheaded.

The beheading cited in this public testimony never happened. Stewart received a threat assessment report from the Florida Fusion Center (FFC), a post 9/11 intelligence agency, prior to giving his testimony. That report cited a story that was published by the Bradenton Herald on March 11, 2008 entitled, “Task force to fight human trafficking” in which the reporter provides the aforementioned story of the beheading. The FFC failed to notice that, on March 19, 2008, the Bradenton Herald printed a retraction, because its reporter made the story up. Dr. Pérez, one of the authors, confronted Stewart and he admitted the mistake, but his office made no public retraction of the testimony. The story continued to gain traction and received a new dose of validity in 2010 when it was referenced in Bunker et al.’s paper “Torture, Beheadings, and Narcocultos,” which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Small Wars and Insurgencies. Invented stories of cartel violence in México, like this one, circulate widely throughout the world. They instill fear, support negative stereotypes, and inform policy. Political strategies of silence and positive media blitzes are unsurprising when confronted with the public and, at times, false circulation of a language of violence. México’s security situation has not fundamentally changed, yet public engagement with the language of violence has. In critically discussing political strategies and the significance of cartel violence, we lay the foundation to explore and understand the social structures of violence and their intersections with projects of hope.

Responding to Violence with Hope

Figure Three: Bumper sticker on a vehicle in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, México. Photo courtesy Ventura Pérez

Hope derives its meaning from engagement, possibility, and action. The subject of hope has been widely discussed in popular literature, theology, philosophy, education, the social sciences, nursing, and psychology. Hope has been theorized as something we do and can learn to do better; a way to build community and envision possibilities; the recognition of suffering and pursuit of “positive radical visions of tomorrow” (Wu 1972: 134); a part of collective action central to building community; a subjective attitude that cannot be studied empirically; and as something that emerges to transform despair into positive action. From our literary exploration of and personal experiences with hope, we argue the existence of violence is not a negation of hope and possibilities. A critical engagement with the violence that marks society opens up the possibility for the collective transformation of society.

What makes change possible is that positive change, like violence, can be studied and engaged with critically as individuals and groups respond from their unique spaces of struggle. Glittenberg (2007) argues positive social change, like violence, is patterned and transformable. Violence is rooted in and reinforced by societal structures and cultural beliefs that can be changed. In the face of increasing physical, cultural, and symbolic forms of violence, some communities, e.g., women’s organizations in Juárez and teachers unions in Guerrero, recognize the fluidity of violence and respond with hope. At their core, these protests and projects challenge dominant political strategies and are motivated by the belief that something can be other than what it is. Hope is an engagement with the past and present as well as a commitment to realizing something new. Those working to counter the violence of silence in the context of México’s humanitarian crisis challenge political strategies and media blitzes to generate a new vision for tomorrow.

Ventura R Pérez (vrperez@anthro.umass.edu) is assistant professor of biological anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst whose research focuses on interpersonal and institutional forms of violence and cultural representations of violence through inquiry of skeletal trauma. He currently researches performance violence in Ciudad Juárez and in the archaeological past in México.

Ashley E Sherry (asherry@anthro.umass.edu) is an anthropology PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst whose interests include interpersonal and institutional forms of violence, with a focus on hope and public education. Currently she is researching the impacts of social movements driven by educators and community members in Guerrero, México.

via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/04/a-humanitarian-crisis/