Mexico’s outsourced repression

Despite well-meaning talk, continuing violence shows the limits of the Mexican State.

It wasn’t just Donald Trump. The Biden administration has also been keen to make Mexico pay for a wall to stop migrants from reaching the US. It’s why the US President’s administration has pushed the Mexican government to hand over $1.5 billion dollars for border security. While, under Trump, president Andrés Manuel López Obrador mobilised the army to create a de facto human shield.

‘Mexico has become the wall’ has since been the refrain among critics of the Mexican government. They point at a Faustian bargain where the country dodged the ire of a superpower by allowing itself to be subcontracted to do its repression for it. It showcases the power wielded by the US, but also how dependent on Mexican acquiescence it is.

Jump down a level and a similar pattern is playing out within Mexico too. The government, even though not actively doing much of the repressing itself, has allowed repression to spread to lower levels of government or, worse, to non-state actors like paramilitaries and organised crime. The outcome is the same as it was before: Communities are still deprived of lands and rights, violence is still rampant, and the interests of the powerful continue to triumph over the rights of the weak.

The Mexican government argues that—at least when it comes to non-migrant citizens—repression is a thing of the past.

For some of the most historically vulnerable in Mexico, namely Indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities, the government has mainly focused on recognition, self-determination, and a degree of atonement. Just last week, a Commission charged by López Obrador with investigating State crimes committed by his predecessors (and political adversaries) from 1976 until 1990 released its findings. The 3,510-page report published by the Mecanismo para la Verdad y el Esclarecimiento Histórico is bleak in its conclusions. Through “assimilation, simulation, and repression” Mexico brutally cracked down on society’s most hard done by.

Additionally, a constitutional reform proposed earlier this year has sought to give Black and Indigenous peoples the legal means to govern themselves with recognition by the State but without its intermediation. 

It has not been enough.

These well-meaning non-interventionist policies have come at the expense of the Mexican State’s abdication of its responsibilities. Voices from the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (the Zapatistas) in Chiapas to the Afro-descendant activists in Guerrero to the very commissioners charged with compiling the history of the government’s past excesses, have come out against other forms of oppression conducted by lower levels of the State—or those simply not beholden by the power of the President.

Assimilation: Beat them or join them

Indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities are still at the receiving end of repression in Mexico. This is because even their very existence does not fit the way the Mexican State sees itself, said Aleida Violeta Vázquez Cisneros, an Afro-Mexican activist from the historically Black town of Cuajinicuilapa, in southern Mexico.

The policy of mestizaje (the fabled miscegenation of European and Indigenous people) has been detrimental to Indigenous Mexicans, who have faced ethnic cleansing for resisting assimilation into Mexican-ness for sticking to their traditions and language.

It has been particularly bad for Afro-Mexicans. They weren’t even conceived of within Mexico’s imagined ethnic mix under mestizaje. The result has been harassment by Mexican authorities, most recently those charged with stopping migrants from reaching the US border. Vázquez Cisneros told The Mexico Political Economist how she and other Black Mexicans are often stopped by migratory agents and asked to produce documentation proving their nationality.

The latest census shows that out of a population of 130 million in Mexico, 9.4% self-identifies as Indigenous and 1.2% as Afro-descendant. A much lower proportion than in any other moment of Mexican history, showing the brutal efficiency with which the policy of mestizaje worked.

Mestizaje might sound like a foregone Spanish colonial imposition, but it was most ruthlessly imposed by modern Mexico using modern tools. In the past century, as with most other organised social groups, the Mexican government under the PRI offered the option to be co-opted into its one-party rule or face repression. Today, though López Obrador has eschewed the threat of violence, he has not done away with the equally menacing threat of government by assimilation. This is according to the Zapatistas, who broke with López Obrador in 2006, considering him an offshoot of the PRI.

The facts have borne out these fears. Under the current administration, when local Black or Indigenous community land rights clash with the central government’s pet projects, the Mexican State tends to come out on top. Often the President will invoke the general will of the rest of Mexico to justify these incursions, like when a plebiscite in the central state of Morelos drew votes from far afield to overwhelm the local communities’ opposition to a hydroelectric dam on their lands.

The ‘people’s will’ was again invoked in southern Mexico when the construction of a tourist rail project called the Maya Train was pushed through. According to Indigenous groups, as the government argued that it was happy to keep talking to disaffected opponents, organised crime descended on their communities. The army (which is building the rail lines) makes sure to defend its tracks, but its incursion into Indigenous land has reconfigured the balance of power on the ground and is driving armed gangs into their less defended communities. Many have fled to Guatemala.

There have been some triumphs. In 2020, Mexicans of African descent were added to the national census for the first time. “But this wasn’t a loving concession,” clarified Vázquez Cisneros. Afro-Mexican organisations “forced the government through international pressure.”

The strength to fill a government-shaped hole

If the government is loath to look out for the weaker members of society, its own weakness shows when it is forced to work with more powerful actors. Realpolitik can be seen rearing its head as less than savoury actors impose their will on the State or simply act with impunity.  

In states like Sinaloa, López Obrador and his party, Morena, have opted to give governorships to experienced political operatives aligned with the PRI over more ideologically aligned choices. These seconded governors, in turn, leave a lot of the governing to others. Sinaloa cartel boss, ‘el Mayo’ Zambada, was allegedly kidnapped into US custody while on his way to mediate between the governor and a political rival. 

In places like Chiapas, the state government seems to have lost control altogether. Power has reverted to armed self-defence groups and organised crime. The latter carries out extortion, people smuggling, and illegal mining with impunity.

The damage done by the power vacuum left by the democratically elected government to non- or even anti-democratic forces is no more fittingly illustrated than in the showdown between the Mexican armed forces and the Commission created by the President to investigate the past crimes of the State.

“The Commission’s researchers were harassed at the Defence ministry’s archive to such a degree that we could no longer continue our investigation,” said Carlos Pérez-Ricart, a member of the Commission at a press conference while presenting their final report. “We were a presidential commission without presidential support.”

As talk of Morena’s unstoppable concentration of power after a landslide election builds, spare a thought for the parts of Mexico untroubled by the grip of the State.