Against Impunity: The Decline of the Mexican Social Compact, Part I

This report, “Against Impunity,” is the first of two devoted to an extended examination of the condition of the social compact, or the bonds of social solidarity, in Mexico. The second report, focused on the struggles against neoliberalism, will be published in September. As this issue makes clear, Mexico suffers from a long and resilient tradition of impunity. On the other, more hopeful side of the coin, Mexican history is replete with stories of the rekindling of resistance: the movements that have arisen to confront impunity. These movements, along with the continuing attempts to democratize Mexican politics at all levels, are all manifestations of social solidarity. They are attempts to construct and reconstruct a declining social compact. They are movements against impunity.

May/June
2008
Volume: 
41
Number: 
3

Taking Note

Kate Doyle
Guatemala took a small step toward justice on February 4, when an international genocide case charging eight former senior officials with crimes against humanity opened before Spain’s federal court, the Audiencia Nacional, in Madrid.

Updates

Guy Taylor
About two years ago, the global media discovered "paco," a cheap, highly addictive form of cocaine that was ravaging the impoverished neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. In explaining why paco had become so prevalent, most articles emphasized the widespread poverty that followed Argentina’s economic crisis beginning in 2001. But a NACLA investigation supported by the Samuel Chavkin Investigative Journalism Fund finds that the more important, if infrequently discussed, factor in the paco phenomenon is a shift in cocaine trafficking in the region—largely as a response to the U.S.-led War on Drugs.
Jo-Marie Burt
The trial of former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori for crimes against humanity, now under way in Lima, is truly historic. It marks the first time a former head of state has been extradited to his own country and put on trial for human rights violations.

Report

Fred Rosen
Mexico suffers from a resilient tradition of impunity: the propensity of rulers and contenders alike to place themselves above the law. The student movement of the 1960s and 1970s carried the torch against impunity, but was brutally repressed. In 1989 the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) was formed to carry on the struggle, but by 2008, as the party’s “tribes” vie for power, the PRD itself has reverted to the tradition of impunity within its own internal politics.
Elaine Carey and José Agustín Román Gaspar
Gerardo Rénique and Deborah Poole
Following a brutal attack on an encampment of striking schoolteachers in the city of Oaxaca, Oaxacans came together to demand the resignation of Ulises Ruiz Ortíz, the latest in a series of famously corrupt governors from the Institutional Revolutionary Party. Although Ruiz remains in power, the movement that took shape in the summer of 2006 continues to thrive in the form of recurring mobilizations, collective initiatives, and political debates.
Benjamín Alonso Rascón
Lourdes Godínez Leal
In the face of Mexican authorities’ indifference to the serial murders of young women in Ciudad Juárez, mothers of the victims have formed organizations devoted to recovering the bodies of their daughters and seeking just punishment for those responsible. Two of those organizations are Justice for Our Daughters and Our Daughters Return Home.
Laura Castellanos
After breaking with longtime allies, Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) no longer rally widespread support. The breach has grown since 2001, when the Mexican Congress, with support from the left, passed a law that stopped short of recognizing full indigenous autonomy. Marcos called leftist politicians “traitors” to the indigenous cause, while many on the left saw Marcos as suffering from “radical self-importance.”

Reviews

Keith John Richards
"Cocalero," by ALejandro Landes; "Evo Pueblo," by Tonchy Antezana
NACLA
"Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador," edited by A. Kim Clark and Marc Becker; "Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence," by Leigh A. Payne; "The Hidden History of Capoeira: A Collision of Cultures in the Brazilian Battle Dance," by Maya Talmon-Chvaicer
Elisabeth Jay Friedman
"Rethinking Venezuelan Politics: Class, Conflict, and the Chávez Phenomenon," by Steve Ellner