devonpena@GMAIL.COM]
Colleagues: Please share this widely….
About three weeks ago, I was preparing an essay for the
46th anniversary of the Tlatelolco Massacre
a murderous October 2 during the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City when Mexican
federal troops and police killed hundreds of student protestors gathered en
masse at La Plaza de la Tres Culturas.
I was writing the essay as a way to emphasize the history
of state violence against students and youth in Mexico. This work is part of an
evolving blueprint for a book project on Mexican-origin peoples and the state
of exception in transborder context. I was going to trace accounts from
Tlatelolco (1968) to Oaxaca (2006) and the more recent paramilitary attacks
against Zapatista *caracoles* (2014) and similar base communities and their
schools. These rural schools rightfully seek to serve myriad campaigns for
indigenous autonomy that have unfolded across Mexico since the New Year’s
revolt of January 1994.
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--
Devon G. Peña, Ph.D.
"Memory is a moral obligation, all the time."
-J. Derrida
States of Exception | Tlatelolco Redux?
http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=2929126317185761970&postID=9043267854474633960&from=pencil
Photos of missing Ayotzinapa students. Source: CNN
PARTISAN VIOLENCE AND THE CRIMINAL STATE (OF EXCEPTION)
Devon G. Peña | Seattle, WA | October 19, 2014
About three weeks ago, I was preparing an essay for the
46th anniversary of the Tlatelolco Massacre
a murderous October 2 during the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City when Mexican
federal troops and police killed hundreds of student protestors gathered en
masse at La Plaza de la Tres Culturas.
I was writing the essay as a way to emphasize the history
of state violence against students and youth in Mexico. This work is part of an
evolving blueprint for a book project on Mexican-origin peoples and the state
of exception in transborder context. I was going to trace accounts from
Tlatelolco (1968) to Oaxaca (2006) and the more recent paramilitary attacks
against Zapatista *caracoles* (2014) and similar base communities and their
schools. These rural schools rightfully seek to serve myriad campaigns for
indigenous autonomy that have unfolded across Mexico since the New Year’s
revolt of January 1994.
I was going to commemorate Tlatelolco by analyzing
Mexico’s state of exception
and how it has repeatedly revealed itself as a late capitalist response to the
resurgence of indigenous and working class revolutionary subjectivities. The
state of exception in Mexico combines the suspension of the so-called rule of
law by an illegitimate sovereign that then proceeds to ‘criminalize’
pro-democracy protestors who are uniformly rendered as subjects without rights.
These rebel subjects are disciplined and punished through
direct military and indirect paramilitary actions. They are targets of partisan
militias comprised of members of criminal gangs waging their own ‘unauthorized’
attacks on indigenous and peasant communities. These
forces combine with state actors to produce systematic violent repression
through disappearances, targeted individual assassinations, and mass killings
like those at the Plaza de Las Tres Culturas in 1968.
Then history repeated itself on September 26 and many of
us active in transborder social movements were thrown into a state of great
emotional agony. I thought, why bother with theoretical and historical
reflections at such a tragic moment when more direct action is called for? I
realized one way to do our part north of the border is to better articulate a
critical understanding of the transborder apparatus of neoliberal domination so
we can launch more effective strategies of resistance and transformation.
The Ayotzinapa Disappeared
News broke slowly about the September 26 disappearance
and presumed mass murder of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa rural teachers’
college in the state of Guerrero, Mexico. I first read about the attack and
subsequent disappearance of the students in a brief report from the online BBC
news service posted on September 29
The BBC report noted that a group of the students had been traveling to a
fundraising event in the city of Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico.
News of the attack on the Ayotzinapa students finally
broke into the U.S. mainstream media
last week and has since sparked rather fevered international reporting and even
Mexican federal government inquiries and actions against the local police; not
that this matters, but it is indicative of the widespread recognition that a
horrific act of criminal violence against indigenous peoples has taken place
and was initiated by one of the local institutions, municipal police
authorities, supposedly charged with protecting the people from drug cartel
violence.
Still, I must note that our world is reeling from mass
murders committed by states and their partisan allies and much of this systemic
violence has become a *routine* feature of state of emergency powers used by
often illegitimate sovereign powers against grassroots social movements, many
of which are conveniently “criminalized” under the rubric of the eternal war on
terror [sic]. Across the entire planet, the national security state apparatus
of neoliberal globalism has unleashed murderous agents under the rubric of a
permanent state of emergency in which national security objectives trump civil
liberties and the right to be free from state directed and induced violence.
Police violence against young people is a pervasive
global phenomenon. From Gaza to Iraq; from Syria to Mexico; *and *across the
United States – national, municipal, and local police agencies, private
corporate military and paramilitary forces, and criminal gangs (including
groups like ISIS) have all been unleashed and feed off each other. These
violent forces are very busy slaughtering young people of color, all in the
name of an unending war-making machine that feeds the greedy corporate powers
of the transnational prison-detention-military industrial complex through
wanton criminal violence producing a repressive and precarious existence for
the people of the two-thirds world and leading to all manner of extremism in
response.
Everywhere we turn this is plainly visible: In the United
States – itself a failing state by neoliberal design – Ferguson represents our
version of the slow mass murder of mostly black men at the end of gun barrels
wielded by the police and partisan white vigilantes.
This is but the tip of the iceberg of state criminal
violence that involves the blurring of the lines between law and repression via
the highly selective ‘racialized’ meting out of violence: An innocent black man
shopping, with a BB gun held casually in his hands, gets shot and killed by
police inside a Walmart store in one city. A group of white men, enter a
Walmart store in another city, with fully-loaded semi-automatic rifles slung
across their backs in a brazen display of the right to unconcealed carry of
weapons, and they are celebrated as defenders of the Second Amendment.
In the meantime, the Border Patrol continues to do its
part via daily acts of violence against migrant workers and youth fleeing state
violence in the crime- and gang-ridden debris of the ‘dirty wars’ waged
by our government in Central America. The guards and administrators of the
private industrial prison and detention complex continue their part by
perpetuating a system that allows for frequent rape and death inside their
profit-making Panopticon cages.
Blackwater agents guarding Iraq administrator Paul Brenner. Source:
NBC
The same corporations that profit from the sales of
equipment, weapons, and munitions are making a literal and figurative killing
through state sponsorship of violence by privatized partisan forces whose
business it is, basically, to kill people in terror threat or social control
zones – places like the Walls in Palestine or the U.S.-Mexico border. Let us
also not forget the massacre of
civilians at Nisour Square in 2007 in Baghdad by Blackwater paramilitary
mercenaries; see The New York Times report of June 29, 2014
It must also be noted that the Israelis are partners in
crime to these horrors and sell their technologies and services, developed in
the occupation and dismantling of Palestine, to the eager police agencies
waiting to consume their goods and services to control the zones of exception
inside the U.S.
Ayotzinapa and the [criminal] state of exception
On October 17, Democracy Now! offered an insightful and
detailed report on the most recent act of violence against youth in Mexico. The
outstanding report can be found here – DN! on Ayotzinapa
Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman interviewed two activists
who provided invaluable background and detailed analysis of the directed state
violence against the student teachers: Valeria Hamel, a human rights activist,
student organizer and law student at ITAM University in Mexico City, and Tanalís
Padilla, an associate professor of Latin American history at Dartmouth College,
currently a visiting lecturer at University College London, and the author of
*Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata*.
Providing vital context our readers should know about,
Ms. Hamel noted how the student teachers are politically involved in their
communities and the crime must therefore be seen as a political act by the
municipal government and local police aligned with criminal narco-trafficking
gangs who share the view that the largely peasant and indigenous community
youth are a direct threat to a corrupt alliance that has gripped the state of
Guerrero in a ceaseless cycle of violence for more than four decades.
[This is evident in the fact that the search for the students
has so far led to the discovery of 10 mass graves, with more than 20 bodies,
none of which are the remains of the disappeared students. The slaughter of
innocents is so pervasive that follow-up reporting on the mass grave
discoveries has hardly registered in the media or public consciousness.]
Hamel explained how the teachers’ school at Ayotzinapa is
an example of the rural teachers’ colleges, called *escuelas normales* in
Mexico, and that the:
…students come from…peasant families and villages around
the area, really…rather poor people who go here to be teachers, because it
gives them a stable job opportunity. And these are kids who are good at school,
and they want to teach their communities. Most of them get also taught to be
bilingual teachers, indigenous—both indigenous and Spanish teachers, which is
also really interesting how this works.
Emblem, Rural Teachers’ College ‘Raúl Isidro Burgos’ -
Ayotzinapa.
Source: Blog Sí Paz
Hamel further explained how the Ayotzinapa school – given
centuries of political and ecological violence against indigenous and peasant
communities – has itself become “extreme” in its response by preparing people
for self-defense against drug cartels and their allies in the local, state and
federal police forces. One graduate of the school waged guerrilla war against
the state terrorist complex in Guerrero and this has apparently rendered anyone
associated with the school as an enemy of the state of exception and therefore
a “criminalized” suspect.
In the DN! interview, Professor Padilla addressed the
political and social history of the rural schools noting these are “really
significant for 20th century Mexico.” She explained how the schools “stem from
the social reforms implemented in the 1930s that resulted from the revolution
that took place between 1910 and 1920, and were one of the few avenues where
peasants could have an education.”
Padilla further noted that the rural normal schools teach
students “to cultivate the land and have all sorts of cooperative projects,
while at the same time receiving an education.” These schools have become “radical
hubs or radical hubs of political organizing” and must be understood as part of
the grassroots response to the neoliberal state and its abandonment of a
federal commitment to education, which is a constitutionally mandated
obligation.
Padilla made an explicit link between this history and
the most recent attack on the students from the Ayotzinapa normal school:
[T]hese latest attacks…are not a new attack on normales
rurales—they have been criminalized for decades—are basically the logical
culmination of, on the one hand, the criminalization of these schools, in which
their students are constantly seen not as students but as political
agitators—sometimes that’s the best case. Sometimes they’re just seen as people
who are kids who just want to destroy public property and sabotage the social
order, who are not committed to studying. That’s the way they’re portrayed in
the media. So, the fact that this creates a narrative under which they can be
attacked by impunity, whether it be the government or whether it be criminal
organization, so this particular attack, I think, reflects that logical
culmination of the decades of criminalization of these schools and a situation
in which the current Mexican government, it’s really hard to tell where the
state begins and where drug cartels end.
[The pedagogy of an increasing number of rural normal schools is inspired by or directly modeled on the Zapatista self-organization of *autonomous place-based *centers of good governance with community-based and -run schools in an organization known as *caracoles <http://www.enlacecivil.org.mx/caracoles.html>*. I have written about these vital forms of indigenous local democracy in the recent past; see the March 2014 report, AgriCulture: Zapatista Autonomy and Agroecology
http://ejfood.blogspot.com/2014/03/agriculture-autonomia-zapatista-and.html
Paramilitaries have already attacked the caracol in La
Realidad, including the oldest and most iconic of Zapatista schools, killing a
teacher and injuring others; see the report of May 23, 2014
The War of Basement and Penthouse Mexico
If there is a broader and deeper context for
understanding the forces that led to the assault on and disappearance of the
Ayotzinapa students, we need look no further than Zapatista narratives about
the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which the rebels declared a
“death sentence” for indigenous peoples. In a missive written shortly after the
start of the Zapatista Revolution in 1994, Subcommandante Marcos describes the
relationship between Basement and Penthouse Mexico:
One arrives on foot, either barefoot, or with
rubber-soled huaraches.
To arrive one must descend through history and ascend
through the indexes of marginalization.
Basement Mexico was first. When Mexico was not yet
Mexico, when it was all just beginning, the now Basement Mexico existed, it
lived. Basement Mexico is “Indigenous” Basement Mexico. It is indigenous...
however, for the rest of the country it does not count, produce, sell or buy;
that is, it does not exist...
Review the text of the Free Trade Agreement and you will
find that, for this government, the indigenous do not exist.
The indigenous of Mexico certainly do not exist as viable
political subjects – they are simply put a threat to the neoliberal order.
Their subversive qualities are rooted in their refusal of the state and
capital.
As Marcos has said before, indigenous dignity is close to
being the only thing in Mexico that is not for sale.
Marcos again:
Basement Mexico is the most dangerous for the Sale Season
that is being organized by Penthouse Mexico. Basement Mexico is the one that
has nothing to lose, and the one that has everything to win. Basement Mexico
does not give up, has no price, resists...
The war of Penthouse Mexico against Basement Mexico is
the progeny of NAFTA, which imposed a model best defined as a religion based on
blind faith in *free market fundamentalism*, with the narco-cartels as the
leading scions of this worldview. And like the fundamentalist crazies in Syria
and Iraq, these fundamentalists of the free market are also very good and
effective killers – and they too behead many of their victims.
Those who rob and kill for the sake of participation in
the transnational Church of the God of Neoliberal Profit are as destructive as
any crusading killers inspired to follow an given ideology based on the
distortion of religious tenets. Except in this case, the distorted religion is
the mired in the litany of free market capitalism and the belief in the
sanctity of the profit motive as ultimate arbiter of truth, freedom, and
well-being.
In Mexico, the primacy of this fundamentalist religion
has made it increasingly hard to tell where the state ends and the cartels and
criminal gangs begin since they blur into each other and use each other’s
existence to justify their own powers. They are both profit-driven machines of
death but the cartel heads are uniquely ‘cacique’ versions of the neoliberal
rational self-serving individual. We need to understand the criminality of this
alliance between cartels, the investor state, and the military in neoliberal
Mexico to take down their entire regime that spawns the free markets of death.
Mainstream interpretations of these events focus on the
idea that drug-cartel violence in Mexico is largely a matter of local
corruption, and a few rotten apples in the federal agencies. So, the focus is
on criminal activities including murders and assassinations. The dominant
perspective here is that the cartels are a threat not just to civil society but
the Mexican state. However, one recent anthropological study of “narco-propaganda”
(Campbell 2012
shows how drug cartels:
…control of the mass media rather than just [being] a
form of criminal behavior…is the quasi-ideological expression of criminal
organizations that, along with their police, military, and politician allies,
control vast territories and have taken on many functions of the state. These
organizations should therefore be treated analytically as political entities
and their narco-propaganda as a powerful new form of political discourse.
[Brackets added]
This criminal form of the state of exception is a novel
dimension in the exercise of state sovereignty – a form that perhaps emerged as
elites tried to avoid a ‘failed’ state. This means that the sovereign power may
not be so much withering as an authoritative power as it is sharing the
exercise of violent force by being differentiated between apparent ‘public’
(state) and privatized (cartel) actor domains. This is cacique-styled free
[drug] trade neoliberalism.
Mexico faces much more than a classic “legitimation”
crisis. Post-NAFTA neoliberal reforms did a lot of serious structural and
cultural damage to rural Mexico – land loss, displacement, forced labor and
migration all helped to create an environment that was conducive to the rise of
the criminal cartels. In this manner, Ayotzinapa is another echo of the
long-term effects of the ‘Dirty War’. And just like the Central American
version waged by men trained by the USA at Ft. Benning, this is another chapter
in the history of the American Empire in this case creating conditions that
have led to the disruption of Mexican civil society – and thereby suppressing
the radical democratic futures this represents.
Our task must be to assist in the securing of a safe and
autonomous space for Mexican civil society to take back its democratic
prospects from the alliance of military and police forces linked to the drug
cartels in a perversely destructive political formation we might even call the
criminal state of exception.
Posted 15 hours ago by Devon G. Peña
Labels: autonomia
Ayotzinapa
drug cartels
Drug War
Guerrero
Iguala
Mexico
neoliberalism
police
police violence
political violence
rural schools
State of exception
Subcomandante Marcos
Tlatelolco
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