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Jul 5, 18
Filed under: Analysis, Mexico, Repression, The State
The following is a piece by Chaya Tlilli and translated by E. Rose. Despite much condemnation and protest, earlier this year the Mexican government passed a new Internal Security Law. The law gives the Mexican military increased domestic surveillance and policing powers, including legitimizing “the use of force” to “control, repel or neutralize acts of resistance.” It also allows for the suspension of “human rights protections” and ensures state forces may act with impunity. The below article analyzes and offers a historical context for this new law, arguing it is not an aberration but a continuation of the capitalist state’s need for repression and control.
The approval of the Internal Security Law (Ley de Seguridad Interior or ISL) in Mexico is a symptom of the need for global capitalism to renew its reserves of power and the expansion of its economic progress for the benefit of class society and its anthropocentric worldview. In order to repress expressions contrary to their interests or that do not favor global domination, which is accompanied by the dispossession and seizure of land, wind and water, and by the exploitation of “energy resources” and human and animal bodies, the State has been enacting the necessary legal changes to achieve its objectives. Although the ISL is an inherent manifestation at the legal level of industrial technological progress by way of totalitarianism and the militarization of society, from our anarchist perspective, its approval does not point to the beginning of the militarization of the country or strengthening of its activity against the resistance. In fact, the army has practically always been deployed in a social context, more specifically, often in times of political and economic tension in Mexico. Some historical examples that make this practice visible include the following:
- 1968, the historic massacre of Tlatelolco, where thousands of students were killed.
- The hunting of guerrillas and communists in the 60’s, consolidating torture practices.
- The militarization and armed combat in Chiapas in the 90’s against the indigenous and Zapatista insurrection.
- A little-known case in the wake of the earthquake that destroyed Mexico City in 1985, in which, for reasons of rescue, various clandestine prisons came out of the rubble of the Federal District Attorney’s Office, where they tortured and murdered people thought of as undesirable.[1]
- The Acteal massacre in 1997, where the military opened fire on indigenous Tzotzil people and opened the bellies of pregnant women, filling them with stones.
Presently, far from reducing this trend, violence perpetrated by state forces has increased, the security forces have been acquiring and updating their equipment and infrastructure, they have expanded their sophistication to other sectors of their forces of control, providing military training to the police and creating new police bodies like the gendarmerie, the civil force, the state police and the military police, deploying the Marines in certain areas and making agreements and alliances with narco-traffickers and with the United States government. Precisely one of the agreements that allowed for the quantitative and qualitative development of the apparatuses of state repression was the Mérida Initiative[2], a means of international cooperation against organized crime carried out during the presidencies of Felipe Calderón in Mexico and George W. Bush in the United States, a precedent that cannot be left aside if we want to draw a historical line to the current state of control and repression.
It should not be overlooked that narco-traffickers have been configured as the “enemy political subject” to justify militarization. However, from an anti-authoritarian perspective, and adding this to an anti-state criticism, narco-traffickers and so-called organized crime must not be seen as enemies as a result of adopting a citizenist and simplistic vision of insecurity, or because they are groups that act outside the law. Rather, they are enemies because these groups in fact seek power through the same tools, channels and objectives, contributing in the same way to social domination and the exploitation of the Earth. It is no coincidence that in order to maintain their power, these groups have to link up with and participate in governments, serving as a paramilitary or para-police arm to attack various struggles and imprisoning, disappearing or murdering participants in those struggles. One of the best-known government tactics in Mexico is to claim rebels have some connection with narco-traffickers in order to slander and discredit their struggles.
The brutality of state repression has never diminished. On the contrary, it has been maintained and sometimes it has increased, as the following more or less current examples show:
- In 2006, Mexico experienced the beginning of the so-called “war against narco-trafficking and organized crime” which has served as a pretext to repress, imprison or kill social activists of various kinds, with approximately 200,000 dead, 39,000 disappeared and 350,000 displaced to date, claiming that in many of these cases there was some link to “organized crime.”
- Also in 2006, during the popular uprising in Oaxaca, the disappearances and torture of insurgents were the order of the day. Many of the disappeared were transferred in helicopters and thrown from the air or taken to clandestine prisons where they were tortured and murdered.
- In 2014, the disappearance of the 43 students of Ayotzinapa, in Guerrero, a case in which the participation of the national army has been documented.
- In 2015, in Ostula, Michoacán, the military opened fire on a highway blockade carried out by community members in response to the arrest of a member of their self-defense group, killing a 12-year-old boy. This community has organized itself in self-defense and has recovered lands monopolized by caciques and narco-traffickers.[3]
- Also in 2015 was the Narvarte case, in which photojournalist activist Rubén Espinosa and social activist Nadia Vera were assassinated along with three other people, in unclear circumstances, where there were signs the women had been raped and there were bullet wounds in the heads of the victims. Veracruz Governor Javier Duarte has been held responsible for this event.[4]
- 2016 in Huajuapan, Oaxaca, anarcopunk compañero Salvador Olmos García was tortured, run over and finally killed by the police. Salvador Olmos García participated in the Tu Un Ñuu Savi community radio and was a long-standing contributor to various autonomous projects and in solidarity with various regional causes related to the punk / anarchist movements.[5]
- In 2018, it was reported that within a police academy in Veracruz, they practiced torture techniques with people abducted by elite police officers and who were later thrown into a space where they had tigers and crocodiles to be annihilated or buried under the facilities.[6]
- Also in February 2018, in Santa María Huatulco, Oaxaca, three members of the indigenous organization CODEDI were assassinated by a group of judicial police assassins while they were participating in a caravan. One of the members of this caravan, Abraham Rodriguez, had already been imprisoned for 7 years for his involvement in struggles and organizing. In this area of Oaxaca, resistance has continued for several years against the annihilation and cooptation of indigenous peoples, the destruction of their natural areas and hoarding of those areas by national and foreign companies to manage productive and industrial megaprojects.[7]
Technology Always Aims for Control
To the all of the above facts, we add the technological advances in matters of espionage and surveillance, which the State and corporate groups have been using against opponents, activists, journalists and anarchists. Evidence of this occurred in 2016, when some compas received spyware messages on their phones.[8] In 2011, Mexican federal agencies spent approximately 80 million dollars on an espionage program from the Israeli company Pegasus[9], which, through viruses and fake links, accesses computers and cell phones in order to monitor their activity and obtain information. The filtering of personal data by Facebook and the appearance of Mark Zuckerberg in front of the American courts should not go unnoticed, facts that show us the vulnerability of social media. On the streets, the exponential increase in CCTV surveillance cameras continues to give us indications of the future of technological control we are approaching. For the many benefits they offer us, these complex technologies are born from power, from capitalism and its needs, and therefore never stop aiming toward control and consumerism. That is why, since we are immersed in a reality of technological domination, it becomes very important for all those who dare to challenge the established order to update themselves on means of cybersecurity in this era of the digital Big Brother and / or limit the influence of this in our lives. Hopefully this message isn’t anything new for the compañerxs.
Against the State Itself
In conclusion, far from the reformist views that call for the State to maintain an optimal and uncorrupt use of the armed forces according to the law, claiming the unconstitutionality of the military in the streets, for its use only in matters of threats to national sovereignty, among other arguments of this type, anarchists must remain firm in our anti-authoritarian principle and therefore against the State and its military apparatus, whatever they may be. The fact that the ISL legally approves searches or judicial actions without the need of a specific judicial ruling is a fact that aggravates the totalitarian situation that Mexico is approaching, but which in reality has already been a historical practice of the Mexican State. It is important to emphasize that this situation, as we had previously expressed, is a local symptom of a global issue: a new turning of the screw of capitalism. This is not limited to merely an issue of administration, as to whether it is the left, the center or the right that is in power. Regardless of their own political and ideological agendas, the techno-industrial project has an unchangeable logic in which nation-states mobilize their armed military, paramilitary and police forces when the market demands it, always in favor of national and multinational corporations, legal or illegal, in order to implement extractive projects to generate more energy (“clean” or not) and the increased production of goods with which to continue the expansion of capitalism; technological advances aimed at the artificialization of life and to advance consumption by the masses and enrichment of the elite. And along with all this, to keep at bay the various opposition forces that hamper their plans for domination in a variety of ways.
To support these points, we base ourselves in the facts: the increasing and selective imprisonment, murder and torture of activists, indigenous people and peasants who defend the seas, forests, jungles, mountains, deserts and rivers and the selective repression of other social or anti-systemic movements; We could say that this is a worldwide trend that has been accompanied by an increase in racist, xenophobic, nationalist, sexist and other types of socially propagated authoritarianisms.
Speaking in general of activists and not just of anarchist compañeros does not mean that we support the forms and ideologies from which they undertake their forms of struggle, which are usually framed around the idea of the rule of law, human rights, constitutionality or good governments, and that are therefore many times managed and co-opted by the State, limiting revolt and possibilities for the self-management of struggle. We have to be clear that repression doesn’t just impact anarchists but any social disturbance. That is why we believe in a permanent stance against the dynamics of authority. Mentioning the various events and actors helps us to follow the state’s historical path that reaffirms and feeds our position and gives us real arguments and concrete facts to continue spreading and propagating anti-authoritarian critique and practice. It prepares us in facing these new conditions and to always keep in mind that regardless of changes to the State or legal reforms, these reforms are temporary and can be violated at any time, as they have always done. States have a congenital evil that is the hypocrisy between what they say and what they do. For us, freedom, autonomy, self-determination and respect for nature and the wild are not found in legal codes but in our own hands, in our conscience and our willingness to act. As they say here “Those who make the law, set the trap.”
Mexico, June 2018
Chaya Tlilli
Footnotes:
http://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias/2015/02/150213_mexico_eeuu_iniciativa_merida_narcotrafico_an
[4] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multihomicidio_de_la_colonia_Narvarte
http://www.laopinion.net/los-fieles-policia-elite-tortura-desaparece-veracruz/
[7] http://colectivoautonomomagonista.blogspot.com/2018/02/no-mas-muerte-y-miseria-para-nuestros.html
[8] https://es-contrainfo.espiv.net/2016/03/01/mexico-irreductibles-ante-el-poder-y-ante-su-represion/
[9] https://www.nytimes.com/es/2017/06/19/mexico-pegasus-nso-group-espionaje/
