Since the debt crisis of the early 1980s, Mexico has lived through the slow disintegration of the corporate state created and controlled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), its gradual replacement by a multiparty neoliberal state, and the emergence of new sources of governance and power—national and transnational, private and public, criminal and legal. The country has also lived through the simultaneous opening of political and economic life and the erosion of that set of expectations and mutual obligations (weak, ambiguous, and frequently violated as they may have been under the PRI’s control) that constituted a “social compact” between state and society, as well as between citizens themselves.
As the discussion of that erosion proceeds, it has become clear that in Mexico, as elsewhere, the social compact has been repeatedly challenged by three enemies: impunity (the rule or contention for power by forces that place themselves above democratic accountability); imperialism (the intervention of foreign powers in ways that deny Mexico the right of sovereignty, and therefore any compact between state and society); and neoliberalism, the more savage, unregulated form of capitalism that places the right to do business above any obligations of solidarity. Impunity, imperialism, and neoliberalism are frequently intertwined, and the struggles against them naturally emerge from the struggle for a compact of social solidarity.
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. It entails the historical use of violence to settle political and economic conflicts and, more to the point of this report, the historical “privatization” of political force: the personalization of student repression in the 1960s and 1970s by presidents Díaz Ordaz and Echeverría, and the subsequent outsourcing of state violence to youth gangs during that repression (see the articles herein by Rosen, and Carey and Román Gaspar); the tyrannical rule of local strongmen, like the current governor of the state of Oaxaca, Ulises Ruiz, and his use of private enforcers (see Rénique and Poole); the tyranny of the official disregard of—verging on complicity with—the serial killings of young women in Ciudad Juárez (see Godínez Leal).
Impunity, on a less brutal but still problematic level, also refers to what Mexicans call protagonismo, the precedence of individual political personalities over the causes and institutions they represent. Castellanos discusses the not always helpful protagonismo of Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos. Rosen raises the same troublesome question in relation to the struggles for leadership of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).
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. In this report, Carey and Román Gaspar discuss the persistence of the student movement of the 1960s in the form of Comité 68, a group formed to memorialize the victims of the 1968 repression by continuing the struggle for human rights and solidarity in Mexico.
Rénique and Poole provide an overview of the “unstructured coalition of workers, students, peasants, women, youth, indigenous peoples, and urban poor [that] brought the government of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca to a virtual standstill” following a brutal police attack on an encampment of striking teachers.
Godínez Leal reports on the official indifference to the serial killings of young women in Ciudad Juárez: “These crimes, together with official indifference, have given rise to a new term in Mexico: femicide, the systematic murder of women.” And she reports on the powerful organization of victims’ mothers that has arisen to challenge the indifference that springs from 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.
