Porfirio Díaz’s old saying, “poor Mexico, so far from heaven, so close to the United States” comes to mind in reacting to Claudio Lomnitz’s book, Sovereignty and Extortion: A New State Form in Mexico. Mexico’s problems, Lomnitz suggests, are more endogenous than external. Perhaps Mexico is too close to itself. The author, a cultural anthropologist with deep knowledge of Mexican history and culture, characterizes Mexico as an “invertebrate state” — one which lacks the institutional capacity to establish the truth about its own actions. Indicative of this is the failure of the Mexican state to resolve the case of the 43 missing Ayotzinapa students, a case that galvanized the attention of the nation in 2014. More generally, the Mexican state has been unable to effectively investigate murders and disappearances—well over 100,000 since 2006. Mexico, as Lomnitz shows throughout the book, has been falling into greater levels of institutional entropy and disorder. In effect, the body of the state has become alienated from its brain, reducing the figure of the Mexican president into an increasingly empty facade, an expressive mask that has little capacity to coherently effect its own will.
In this sense, Lomnitz writes within the Weberian register of order as the central imperative of the state. Below, I suggest how a critique of Lomnitz might be developed by focusing on capital accumulation rather than order as the core concern of the neoliberal state. For now, it is instructive to locate Lomnitz within the Weberian analytical tradition. One might begin with Samuel Huntington’s Political Order in Developing Societies (1968) which lauded the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) state in Mexico for its capacity to institutionalize political participation (largely through the operation of patron-client relations), while establishing a stable political order, thereby avoiding the military coups that unfolded across almost all of Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s. In subsequent decades, historians and social scientists poked holes in the thesis of the strong Mexican state by showing how the state’s capacity to project power over its national territory operated through an overlapping set of non-state intermediaries such as caciques, economic elites, and criminal organizations. State formation was incomplete because Mexico could not establish — to cite Max Weber’s famous definition of the state — a monopoly over the use of legitimate force within its territory.
Lomnitz’s contribution to this analytical tradition is the deep insight he offers on the historical construction and transformation of Mexican political and social institutions. Central to his narrative about contemporary Mexico is the failure of both state and society to adapt successfully to the neoliberal transformation it embraced. As Lomnitz points out, there was little hint of state weakness or institutional failure during the sexenio of José López Portillo (1976 – 1982) when the PRI still claimed to embody the triumphant institutionalization of the Mexican Revolution.
But as the Mexican government and society became transformed by neoliberalism — starting with the debt crisis of 1982 — state weakness emerged as an existential concern. Lomnitz includes in his text a telling cartoon of Miguel de La Madrid, Lopez Portillo’s successor, solemnly declaring, “[w]e shall not repeat the ignominy of the past” offering a shift from a corporatist, protectionist petrostate to an austere, fiscally responsible neoliberal state. All of this impacted the police because of the way in which the neoliberal shock in Mexico unleashed crime waves, particularly in Mexico City.
Reformers sought the installation of a more predictable and rational legal order grounded in formal rights guaranteed by the state, with the aim of replacing a security apparatus negotiated through unequal relations of exchange between the police and Mexican citizens. The imagery that Lomnitz uses to describe this end state is evocative: reforms attempted to construct an island of rights in a Mexican sea of extortion, a project that might have successfully institutionalized the emerging neoliberal order within a functional and transparent legal order. “Rule of law depends,” remarks Lomnitz, “on a police force that does not rely on extortion as its main source of revenue.”
But, of course, this did not happen. Mexico’s turn to neoliberalism abetted the expansion of narco-trafficking networks, particularly transshipments of cocaine. This happened because neoliberalism expanded what sociologist Manuel Castells refers to as the space of flows, which, virtually everywhere around the world, has hollowed out and subverted the institutions of the nation state. In Mexico, this took the form of trafficking groups accumulating wealth — because they could readily incorporate cocaine into an exponentially larger volume of commercial traffic linking Mexico and the United States — and then converting that wealth into political power through intervening in municipal-level elections. Trafficking groups gained greater access to electoral politics as the political power of the PRI eroded under conditions of structural adjustment.
Observers, particularly in the United States, hailed these changes as political modernization, the necessary and beneficial complement to economic liberalization, a wholly optimistic reading of the situation. But instead of renovation, neoliberalization disarticulated the political and police institutions of Mexico. The failure of police reform led neoliberal reformers to double down on their efforts to construct “the island of rights” by deploying the military to attack organized crime groups.
Alongside deployment of the military, reformers launched a variety of public-private partnerships that aimed to incorporate Mexico’s dislocated working classes into the new pattern of neoliberal modernity: financial inclusion for the poor, construction of low-income housing, and the extension of subsidized health care to informal sector workers. All of these efforts were celebrated as neoliberal progress, but instead became new modes of neoliberal extraction from the poor. Military deployments, which at first targeted the drug cartels, were later implemented for the purpose of selectively weakening the opponents of the incumbent government. In any event, these deployments fragmented the cartels, set off violent succession struggles, and generated an even more complicated set of connections and fault lines that linked different sectors of the state to organized crime across Mexico.
Ultimately, Lomnitz concludes, Mexico is both a loser in the game of modernization and lost in the sense of being stranded between two worlds. Mexico could not conduct a war on drugs and, at the same time, extend the rule of law. Mexico simply did not have the means to do this. Thus, the Mexican state was composed of attempts to expand the rule of law, which coexisted alongside declared and undeclared states of exception to the rule of law.
For Lomnitz, the political ascendence of Morena in the 2018 presidential elections signals the backsliding of the state from mobilization of the military to consolidate the neoliberal legal order. Morena generated a new polarization between the Mexican working classes and its professional middle classes by claiming to govern in the interests of the former while de-prioritizing deep integration into the North American economy. That integration could hardly be dispensed with, but now it would be encumbered by the capacity of the state and informal actors to extract revenue from private investors. Lomnitz observes, in this regard, that “Mexico is littered with roadblocks organized by various social movements, rife with organized criminal groups that charge rent for protection.”
The existence of such protectionism alongside the structures of integration is, for the author, a decidedly negative outcome. Overlooked here is the possibility that Morena has found ways to creatively mediate the imperatives of capital accumulation with the need to reestablish the legitimacy of the Mexican state. For Lomnitz, this possibility does not exist because Mexico is too freighted with its political and institutional past to move forward in history. Instead, Mexico is stuck in a world of contingency where that state is unable to control violence and Mexicans die because, according to former President Felipe Calderón, they were “involved in something” or, according to Calderón’s nemesis and Morena leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador, because they failed to manifest the values that would otherwise unite them as a national political community. Both postures speak to the resounding failure of the Mexican state to establish a legal order that can hold state and non-state actors accountable for the violence they inflict on Mexicans.
Another interpretation of this situation is possible, though, if we step outside of the Weberian register of order. Rather than seeing Mexican state transformation in terms of failure and dysfunction, we might regard it as highly functional with regard to the goals of capital accumulation. Consider that one of the key aspects of Lomnitz’s analysis is that criminal state relations are a closed circle in which changes in criminal economies transform (or undermine) state institutions while further entrenching the criminal economy within Mexican society. Or put differently — and here Lomnitz’s argument can be understood in abstract terms — what transpires in Mexico is a positive feedback loop linking growth and diversification of the criminal economy to entropic disintegration of the body of the state, which leaves us with a circumstance in which the body and head of the state have become estranged from one another.
The critical intervention here would be to open the closed circle of criminal/state relations by considering how violence in Mexico serves as a means of dispossession, often inflicted by criminal groups because state actors don’t want to get their hands dirty when they have auxiliaries who will do this work for them. The role of the state is to recode dispossession into the form of a new legality. Here, the neoliberal project takes on a different hue. Instead of being about the establishment of a formal and impartial legal structure, it deploys violence in the service of dispossession and exploitation. This process operates transnationally, with the space of flows linking together local and transnational geographies to enable neoliberal processes of wealth extraction through complicated processes of asset transfer.
The dynamic is not all that different from the processes that Lomnitz describes. Still at stake is the way in which neoliberal spaces of flows disarticulate national political communities. In this reading, however, the disarticulation is not the result of Mexico’s deficiencies, but rather the political and economic networks that link Mexico to the United States. To see Mexico as failing to modernize is to misunderstand the historical function of violence in neoliberal governance. What appears, from Lomnitz’s Weberian perspective, to be state failure, is really a modality of governance suited to capital accumulation under neoliberalism.
Richard W. Coughlin is a Professor of Political Science at Florida Gulf Coast University whose work has appeared in Latin American Perspectives, Intervención y Coyuntura, Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture, and E-International Relations.