SECURITIZATION, THE STATE AND CAPITALISM

Our government is as corrupt as ever, but obviously some things have got better for us. When did you ever see a campesino wearing a wrist watch? (Peasant farmer, Mexico, 1983)

It's fairly quiet around here. Well, we get the extortion calls on the phone, but there have only been a few cut-up bodies that they left in bags outside the cemetery and they weren't people from here. We have their protection. (Family in the same village, 2012)

This is a book about what states do to people when they define them as a threat to the security of the rest of society. It is also a book about why states so often not only fail to resolve the problems that the people themselves see as threats to their security, but actually compound them. My argument does not, however, suggest that the causes of these problems can be located simply in national or regional conditions and histories. Transnational and global processes are extremely important, and they are both geopolitical and economic in nature. This complicates the issue of thinking about politically feasible ways of making things better than they are now. For example, we might answer the assertion of the US Department of Homeland Security that it has a right to participate in the reinforcement of security at Mexico's southern border with Guatemala (Isacson et al. 2014) by saying that the conditions in Central America that have created a 'humanitarian crisis' of northwards migration are in part the result of past US intervention in that region. Yet the domestic politics of immigration inside the USA and the state of Central American societies are related to economic processes that are far broader in scope, and deeply anchored in a complex and interlocking chain of power relations. Although some of the corporate actors in these chains, such as mining companies, agro-food transnationals and hedge funds, may be susceptible to campaigns to clean up their acts in terms of social responsibility, what we have surely learned since the 2008 crisis is that it is a challenge to secure even modest reforms to the most scandalous aspects of contemporary capitalism. When it comes to what Latin America might expect in the future, the scenario, as reflected, for example, in the 'vulture' hedge funds' legalized predation on Argentina, remains discouraging.

There is, however, still a lot that Latin America can do for itself whatever the US imperial hegemon tries to do. This is a guiding assumption of a book that focuses principally on the countries with the two largest economies in the region, Brazil, a country that is itself of continental scale, and Mexico. In recent years, the Brazilian government has placed its bets on a heterodox economic strategy that allows real wages to rise, and become a major force on the world diplomatic stage that emphasizes its independence. Mexico has more or less done the opposite. But Mexico's destiny does not have to depend on its proximity to its gringo neighbour, even if the assumption that it does guides the thinking of its current government, headed by Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Returning to power in 2012 after twelve years in which the presidency was in the hands of the right-wing National Action Party (PAN), the PRI government outdid its pro-business predecessor in its plans for letting gringos profit from the nation's oil and opening the door to new foreign investment with a 'reform' of the country's labour laws that was not good news for workers. But both Brazil and Mexico have one thing in common. Whatever economic advances they have achieved in recent years, they both suffer from serious problems of violence, and it is this that makes them so central to any discussion of security issues in Latin America. As Arias and Goldstein (2010: 20) point out, Latin America presents 'an immense diversity of forms of violence', which I will unpack for these two particular countries in the course of my analysis. But as the title of the book suggests, I will do this with a particular focus.

Much of the violence I examine has the characteristics of 'new wars' as defined by Mary Kaldor (2012), in contrast to the 'old wars' based on military conflicts between states. Kaldor emphasizes a blurring between violence carried out by states and other political actors competing for power, and violence on the part of 'private' groups, such as criminals and paramilitaries. It is often difficult to separate out economic and political motives, 'private' and 'public', and, because of the significance of transnational connections, the 'local' and the 'global'. In referring to a 'new war on the poor', however, I am borrowing an expression used by anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer (2003). Farmer is known both for his personal humanitarian work and for his insistence on the need to understand 'structural violence', a term he borrows from Johan Galtung, the Norwegian sociologist who was one of the founders of peace studies. Structural violence is about the 'machinery of oppression' embedded in social orders, which includes racism and gender inequality (Farmer et al. 2004: 307). For Farmer, the concept is necessary not simply because it is not always possible to pin the blame for suffering on specific social actors, but also to avoid a romantic overestimation of how successfully 'oppression' can be 'resisted' by those at the receiving end of it.

I am sympathetic to Farmer's arguments, but I think it is important not to allow a diffuse account of structural violence to obscure the historical connections between specific situations and the actions of identifiable actors that I illustrated above in the case of the relationships between the United States and Central America. What I aim to do in the ethnographic parts of this book is avoid the dangers of excessive abstraction by exploring how large-scale processes and relations work themselves out in local contexts that are populated by people who are socially heterogeneous, often conflictive among themselves, and not necessarily agreed even on how to deal with a common enemy. It is important to explore actor subjectivities and what might shape them (which is seldom something that is directly 'visible' in ethnographic data), keep the plurality of 'violences' in view, and explore how multiple forms of violence intersect and what the effects of that intersection are. Nevertheless, although the anti-romanticism that Farmer advocates is salutary, it is important to recognize that 'the oppressed' do have some capacity for collective 'resistance' and self-organization, since, as we will see, state security interventions may not only refuse to build upon that capacity in a democratic way, but actively seek to undermine it as potentially threatening to the power relations that the state seeks to maintain or expand.

As a...