The making of the punitive city

In June 2004, several hundred thousand Mexico City residents mobilized by civil society organizations like México Unido Contra la Delincuencia (Mexico United Against Delinquency), the country's most influential anti-crime NGOs, rallied to the streets of the nation's capital in order to protest against the inefficiency of the Mexican authorities in their efforts to confront the crime wave haunting the city, and the country in general, as well as the leniency of existing penal laws. In this regard, the protest was accompanied by widespread demands for retributive punishment and 'tough on crime' policies, including calls for indefinite prison terms and the death penalty for kidnappers and murderers (La Jornada 2004a, 2004b). Nearly three years later, in spring 2007, car drivers and pedestrians strolling down one of Mexico City's most trafficked streets, Insurgentes Avenue, were confronted with a huge billboard on top of a multi-storey building. The billboard, placed there by a private initiative, offered a reward of 250,000 Mexican Pesos (then about US$ 23,000) for the capture of a presumed kidnapper and murderer – a capture that was called a 'community service'. A year later, Mexico's Green Ecological Party distributed leaflets among urban households in Mexico City. The leaflet contained two photo stories. One story was about María, whose daughter had been kidnapped and who was threatened by Moncho, a prisoner, to pay the full ransom, otherwise her daughter would have to suffer the consequences. María, the story tells us, despite financial support from her mother, was unable to pay the complete ransom and she never heard from her daughter again. The other story is about Juan, presented as a 'repeat offender'. He was waiting at a street corner for his next victim. When a young boy and girl got off a bus, Juan tried to assault them, but the young man attempted to defend himself. A dramatic series of photos show how Juan stabbed the young man, who died in the arms of his girlfriend. Below the photos, and next to the ecological party's symbol, the leaflet reads: 'Death penalty for kidnappers and murderers. Let's make it real and live in peace.'

These episodes are snapshots of a larger punitive turn in urban politics that accompanied the democratization of the Mexican political system throughout the last two decades and which transformed Mexico City into a punitive city. This development, as this book demonstrates, is not primarily, nor exclusively, related to a real increase in urban crime and insecurity. Rather, it is inseparable from the imposition of a neoliberal vision of economic, social and political order, as well as a new regime of governing urban marginality that is driven by securitization processes that translate into the criminalization and penalization of those at urban society's margins (Wacquant 2009a). As this process is simultaneously overdetermined by the democratization of local politics, the punitive turn in Mexico City converts the city into a veritable punitive urban democracy. A democracy in which, notwithstanding the formal legal empowerment and growing political inclusion of urban residents, a growing number of the city's residents, in particular those at the urban margins, are confronted with a reverse process of punitive exclusion.

This chapter will outline the basic features of this process and highlight the ambivalent, and at first sight, contradictory relationship between the democratization of local politics and the growing penalization of urban marginality. In stressing how the intersection of these processes, and their embeddedness within the rolling-out of neoliberalism, contributed to the transformation of Mexico City into a punitive city, this chapter provides the general context for the subsequent parts of this book by indicating how the urbanization of neoliberalism in Mexico City and its intersection with idiosyncratic features of the local political situation led to the punitive turn in Mexico's capital city.

The punitive logic of urban neoliberalism in Mexico City

Like in most other Latin American countries during the last twenty years or so, Mexico's political economy shifted from a semi-peripheral version of Fordism – grounded in import-substituting industrialization and politically regulated by the corporatist state structures that defined the country's authoritarian regime under the seventy-one years (1929–2000) of uninterrupted one-party rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) – towards a neoliberal free-market economy under the auspices of an 'international competition state' that promotes 'pro-competition and pro-market policy' (Soederberg 2010: 77; see also Heigl 2011). Mexico City was severely affected by these macro-economical transformations. Not only did these processes contribute to a breakdown of the local manufacturing sector that had been central to the city's economy throughout most of the twentieth century, Mexico City also lost its national importance as the centre of economic decision making. Between 1982 and 1989, for instance, the number of Mexican top 500 companies located in the city declined from 287 to 145 (Parnreiter 2002). This development was accompanied by the broader decline of formal economic activities, 'the spread of micro businesses and the unprecedented expansion of the informal sector' (Vargas Hernández and Reza Noruzi 2011: 89). While the actual size of the city's informal economy is difficult to assess, it is widely assumed that around 50 per cent of all jobs in the city are in the informal sector (ILO 2014: 5), which is about 10 per cent below the national average of around 60 per cent (ibid.; OECD 2013: 52). In Mexico City, the informal economy is highly concentrated in the area of Mexico City's historic centre (Castillo Olea 2006: 1). Although the city's economy recovered throughout the second half of the 1990s, this process was obtained at the further expense of formal employment and social standards and accompanied by deteriorating/stagnating income levels. In turn, this left ever larger segments of the urban workforce few options for economic survival other than joining the informal economy, which became the fastest growing segment of the urban labour market (Parnreiter 2002: 148–154).

It is this growing informalization of the city's economy that triggered a punitive response from the local authorities. In order to understand this outcome, one has to take a closer look at the basis of the recovery of the city's economy. The latter was, more than anything else, the result of 'a deep tertiarization process, which for the urban region [of Mexico City] meant the shift from a national industrial metropolis to a transnational node for financial flows and specialized consumption' (Kanai and Ortega Alcazár 2009: 487). These processes continued well into the new millennium. In 2004, 73 per cent of all foreign companies operating in...