by Tony Wood | External link

On 5 March, Mexican families searching for missing relatives made a grim discovery at a ranch in Teuchitlán, Jalisco: two hundred pairs of shoes, heaps of clothing and fragments of bone. The place had been raided by the National Guard last September and a handful of arrests made, but at the time the authorities had seemingly missed the horrors that lay just beneath the soil, which were quickly taken as evidence that the ranch had been used as a site for systematic slaughter.

The Teuchitlán case prompted renewed outrage in Mexico, both at the government’s handling of the investigation and at its inability to curb the rising toll of deaths and disappearances that has scarred Mexico since President Felipe Calderón launched his ‘war on drugs’ in 2006. Statistics can convey only a fraction of what this cataclysm has wrought, but they are staggering enough: over 400,000 homicides since 2006, the majority of them related to narco violence, and more than 127,000 people still missing, with many tens of thousands more internally displaced due to the violence. Two decades on, no end is in sight, and despite the dramatic political shifts occasioned by Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s victory in 2018 and that of his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, in 2024, here at least there has been a monstrous continuity.

The consequences will be working their way through Mexican society for decades to come. It may take longer still to get the full measure of the devastation. For Mexican anthropologist and prominent public intellectual Claudio Lomnitz, the state’s all too evident loss of the monopoly on violence is only one signal of a more fundamental shift. ‘More than a war’, he writes in Sovereignty and Extortion (2024), ‘Mexico’s current violence is a way of life, and has as its counterpart a new state that still doesn’t know what to call itself or how to tell the story of its own origin.’

Lomnitz has long been one of the most astute analysts of Mexican society and culture. Born in Chile in 1957, he and his family moved to Mexico in 1968, year of the student movement and the Tlatelolco massacre. He trained in anthropology at Stanford in the 1980s and has been based at Columbia since 2006. Through his columns for the Mexican newspapers Excélsior and La Jornada as well as Nexos magazine, he has consistently contributed to Mexican public debates and intellectual life. In books such as Exits from the Labyrinth (1992) and Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico (2000) he brilliantly dissected Mexican nationalism, while in Death and the Idea of Mexico (2005) he traced the totemic significance of death in the country’s culture through several centuries, from the founding violence of the Spanish conquest through to modern-day cults of La Santa Muerte. He has also produced richly textured historical works such as The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón (2014), exploring transnational connections between Mexican anarchists and US sympathizers on the eve of the Mexican Revolution. In a more personal key, Nuestra América (2021) movingly chronicled his family’s multiple exiles, from Germany and Bessarabia to Peru and Chile, and from there to Mexico.

In Sovereignty and Extortion, Lomnitz turns his attention to the present day, arguing that the violence of the ‘drug war’ has been intertwined with the emergence of a new kind of state. Based on a series of lectures given in 2021 to mark his entry into Mexico’s Colegio Nacional, the book seeks to offer more substantive, structural explanations for the country’s ongoing narco-crisis, rejecting the simplistic moral framings common in public discourse. The book’s original Spanish title was El tejido social rasgado – ‘the torn social fabric’, a recurrent trope which, Lomnitz argues, posits a lost social cohesion that might somehow be made whole by re-establishing older moral norms. Such appeals, in his view, offer little insight into the reasons for that loss of social cohesion, or into the mechanisms through which it functioned in the first place. Equipped with the tools of anthropological analysis, across the book’s half dozen chapters Lomnitz offers striking insights into a wide range of topics, from shifts in the nature of Mexican policing to changes in the social organization of cartels, and from the evolution of the illicit economy to alterations in local practices of bride-kidnapping in rural Mexico.

But Lomnitz’s core concern is to explain the transformation of the Mexican state since the 1980s. At the centre of his analysis is the neoliberal project, inaugurated under Miguel de la Madrid in the early 1980s but drastically accelerated under Carlos Salinas de Gortari, to integrate Mexico into global markets and, in particular, to deepen its ties with the US under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). For Lomnitz, the neoliberal transformation of Mexico involved not only rapid privatization and deregulation of the economy, but also legal and policing reforms that were nominally designed to extend the ‘rule of law’ and thus provide a level playing field for free market competition. While policing budgets swelled, salaries increased and officers received more training, Lomnitz argues that the reforms also undermined a system of patronage and informal ties. He describes how policing was previously a mechanism for the ‘regulation of informality’, consisting largely of cops extracting rents from local businesses and criminals. While ineffective at solving crimes or administering justice, this system nonetheless maintained a semblance of order. In his view, the neoliberal attempt to impose a new set of rules ran aground on the resistance of this informal system while also partially undoing it, leaving Mexico in a perilous no man’s land between rival legal architectures – an ‘island of rights’ surrounded by a ‘sea of extortion’.

The unravelling of the informal system coincided with two further crucial shifts. One was the dwindling hegemony of the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI, Institutional Revolutionary Party) which, having blatantly rigged the 1988 presidential election, was forced to yield to growing pressures for democratization. In 2000, these finally resulted in the party’s ouster at both the presidential and, increasingly, at the state and local levels too. Yet as Lomnitz observes, this pluralized political environment only increased the opportunities for corruption; moreover, successive governments each launched their own legal and policing reforms, none of which was fully implemented, amplifying the judicial confusion.

The second shift came in Mexico’s illicit economy. In the 1980s, after cocaine had joined marijuana and heroin as drugs of choice for US consumers, Mexican criminal organizations went from being intermediaries for Colombian providers to running operations themselves. The geography of criminal power also changed, as control over smuggling routes into the US – through Tijuana and Mexicali to California in the west; through Reynosa and Matamoros to Texas in the east – became as crucial an asset as command over poppy fields and cannabis farms. The later rise of methamphetamine and other synthetic drugs altered these patterns once more, with the import of chemical precursors from East Asia making Mexico’s Pacific ports and their hinterlands the objects of fierce competition.

Under the weight of these developments, the Mexican state has become incapable of fulfilling many of its basic functions; yet at the same time, its exercise of power has involved increasingly frequent violence and abuses of authority. The ‘war on drugs’ is the most glaring symptom of this dysfunction: while levels of violence had been rising before 2006, the deepening militarization of the state’s response to organized crime since then has brought only a steady escalation of casualties. Army operations have killed large numbers of civilians, while the splintering of many of the cartels has led to lethal turf wars.

Lomnitz sums up the Mexican state’s destructive combination of incapacity and violence in the phrase ‘much sovereignty, little administration of justice’. In his view, the two are interlinked: for example, it’s precisely because the state cannot effectively administer justice that the army carries out extrajudicial executions as an expression of sovereign will. According to Lomnitz, this ready recourse to violence is itself an indication that, contrary to the aspirations of López Obrador and many on the Mexican left to ‘recover’ national sovereignty, ‘one of the few attributes that the Mexican state has not shed is its demonstrated ability to perform sovereign acts’. Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of the new state form that has emerged in Mexico is precisely what he calls an ‘excess of sovereignty’.

How persuasive is this analysis? Lomnitz is certainly right that the Mexican state functions differently today compared to a few decades ago, though the character of the new state he identifies and the chronology of its emergence remain a little opaque. This is not unreasonable, given that the lectures assembled in Sovereignty and Extortion were offered as a first sally at the problem rather than a fully-fledged theorization. Even so, it’s worth pausing over Lomnitz’s diagnosis, both because some of his basic premises seem questionable, and because the questions they raise send us in a different direction from the one he takes.

Lomnitz pointedly sets his account apart from the two dominant political narratives of Mexico’s recent history. On the one hand there is the idea of the ‘democratic transition’ from PRI rule, which according to its proponents triumphantly ushered Mexico into the twenty-first century and was proceeding smoothly until 2018. On the other there is the ‘Fourth Transformation’ proclaimed by López Obrador in 2018, offering itself as the real democratization of Mexico and premised on a vision of national renewal on a par with three previous epochal transitions: independence from Spain, Benito Juárez’s liberal reforms of the mid-nineteenth century and the Mexican Revolution. For Lomnitz, both of these self-serving narratives overlook the more decisive emergence of a new state form, which began under the PRI and has continued under the administrations that have followed it, very much including that of López Obrador. The real difference either side of the apparent watershed of 2018, according to Lomnitz, is that AMLO’s administration marked an attempt to tilt the scale away from the neoliberal rule-of-law project back towards the ‘embedded’ or informal economy in which much of Mexico’s population lives and works.

Yet even by Lomnitz’s own account, the terms of the binaries he establishes – formal vs informal, rule-of-law vs embedded – in reality tend to overlap and blur. This is, of course, because they refer not to separate realms, but to interdependent parts of a single system that happen to be categorized and treated differently. The informal mechanisms of corruption through which policing in Mexico used to function (and still does, neoliberal reforms notwithstanding) are a good example: they worked as Lomnitz describes precisely because there was a formal structure of laws that could be applied selectively. The ‘rule of law’ that Mexico’s neoliberal reforms attempted to introduce was not new in its formality, but in its intention and aims; it was a particular kind of law, designed to further a particular set of interests.

From that angle, it’s curious that Lomnitz, while bitingly sceptical of López Obrador’s ‘Fourth Transformation’, seems to take the neoliberal self-presentation at face value – as if the reforms genuinely intended to bring the rule of law equally to everyone. But as the implementation of these measures made clear, the rule of law was in this case primarily for corporations and investors, and concerned large-scale property rights much more than, say, petty crime, let alone protections for labour or ensuring equal access to public goods. As a consequence of this lopsidedness – inherent in the class character of the neoliberal reforms themselves – in the 1990s Mexico experienced a surge in inequality and a steep degradation of labour conditions, especially in the maquiladoras. The ‘islands’ of property rights to which Lomnitz refers were distinct from the ‘sea’ of extortion around them only in the sense that they had been deliberately sequestered in order to protect private profits; and like the maquiladoras themselves, they still depended on labour and resources from their hinterlands to function. What appears in Lomnitz’s account as a sadly incomplete process of legal transformation was selective and partial by design. This matters because it affects how we characterize the outcomes: to what extent did the neoliberal reformers actually get what they wanted? And is Mexico’s current predicament ultimately a consequence of their failure, as Lomnitz implies, or of their success?

Another surprising feature of Lomnitz’s argument is its idiosyncratic definition of sovereignty. The word has multiple valences, of course, and covers a broad field of meanings and practices. As used in Sovereignty and Extortion, it refers mainly to the exercise of sovereign violence by the central government. There are any number of thinkers on whose work Lomnitz might have drawn in his explorations of this theme – from Hobbes to Schmitt – but his main theoretical inspiration is instead David Graeber’s and Marshall Sahlins’s essays On Kings (2017), in particular their focus on sovereignty’s origins in religious ritual. This is fascinating material in its own right, but surely inappropriate for the conceptual task at hand: Graeber and Sahlins were dealing with pre-modern and in many cases pre-state societies, rather than an industrialized country with a population of 130 million. Whatever has happened to the state in contemporary Mexico, it has not freshly evolved out of ritual practices but mutated from a large and complex pre-existing set of institutions and social relations.

The problem of historical perspective rears its head at other points in Lomnitz’s account. The ‘excess of sovereignty’ he diagnoses is held to be characteristic of the contemporary Mexican state – but seemingly not the state ruled by the PRI for most of the twentieth century. Even on his own terms this doesn’t hold water: if extrajudicial executions by the army are signs of an excess of sovereignty, then surely the government’s use of death squads to suppress leftist guerrillas in the 1960s and 1970s would also qualify? Indeed, by his criteria such deeds fit the definition better than present-day killings, since the chain of command connecting them to the central sovereign power – the president – was much clearer then than it is now.

To be sure, the scale of violence has increased tremendously since the days of the so-called Dirty War. But the repressive power exercised by PRI presidents was much more tightly coordinated than what AMLO or Sheinbaum have at their disposal. Many of Lomnitz’s own examples similarly point not to an excessive centralization of sovereignty, but the opposite: a loss of central control and a splintering of sovereign power. This could be described as an ‘excess’ only in the sense of multiplication: the number of actors exercising what looks like sovereign will has risen exponentially. From this perspective, AMLO’s ambitions to ‘restore sovereignty’ look like a different kind of delusion: rhetorical moves to compensate for an increasingly hollowed-out state.

Still, Lomnitz’s basic insight remains valid – something has changed about the way the state functions – and we are therefore left with the question of how to think about this new state form. Here it may help to place Mexico in the wider context of Latin America, where several other countries underwent a neoliberal transformation in the 1990s, and are likewise beset by escalating drug war violence and insecurity. In this crisis-ridden situation, governments across the region are ramping up the state’s repressive role and steadily militarizing law enforcement; Bukele’s brutal mass incarceration model in El Salvador and Noboa’s permanent state of emergency in Ecuador are only the most egregious examples. At the same time, in much of the region state provision of public goods has been steadily scaled back under the dictates of austerity – even as the state has continued to play its role of maintaining capital’s access to markets. Mexico stands out from these regional trends mainly because AMLO sought to combine austerity with increased public spending in select areas, and claimed to be prioritizing the country’s poor over the interests of investors. But it otherwise conforms to a broader pattern of escalating militarization and diminished state capacity.

Steady abandonment of social welfare provision, growing emphasis on coercive functions, maintenance of markets: doesn’t this describe the essence of the neoliberal state, rather than something entirely new? In which case, isn’t what we are seeing in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America the next stage in the evolution of the state produced by actually existing neoliberalism, as opposed to the fantasies of rule of law and transparent markets its ideologues once peddled? The neoliberal project may be in ruins, but its broken contours continue to shape Latin America’s path, and the state form it left behind – its legitimacy eroded, its sovereign powers scattered – is still presiding over the interregnum.

Read on: Tony Wood, ‘Mexico in Flux’, NLR 147.