The Mexican political system, trapped in extreme violence and corruption

In the recent history of the country there is no doubt about the organized official protection that not only consented but even sponsored the advance of crime. There is abundant evidence, which will be described in these pages, of great corruption promoted by the authorities as a scheme ideally designed for the operation of six-year narco-governments. In that anomalous state, allowed as something normal, a leap into the void was made from a daily life devoid of content that nourished existence itself and today we can look, with astonishment, at a Mexico that was trapped in an even more disastrous situation, if this possible: necropolitics, as conceived and defined by the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe.

This African expert crudely explained this phenomenon in a conference he gave in Mexico. There are political contexts, he concluded, in which the state of exception “has become normal in many places in the world.” The genealogy of these emergencies does not come, as some think, from the 9/11 attacks when the world saw, stupefied, repeated to infinity on the screens, the air attack on the Twin Towers, but it has been brewing from further back, since governments and political systems have exercised a generalized instrumentalization of human existence and, consequently, The material destruction of bodies and populations that have already been judged as “disposable and superfluous” can be permitted.

These are contexts in which governments decide to continually appeal to the emergency, to a fictional or phantasmagoric notion of the enemy, to the need for “a job of death” to retain power. This is how Achille Mbembe discovers and describes necropolitics.

In the logic of necropolitics it is permissible for governments to analyze and decide who dies and who lives. Mbembe has managed to develop this theoretical-conceptual tool that helps reflect on a reality that occurs in more and more environments of psychosocial expulsion, exclusion of the other, incessant growth of the “waste population”, converted into pariahs by decree in contexts of normalization of war, of non-humanity, where life is reified until it loses its present and its future.

Extreme violence, encouraged or permitted by the State, generates spaces where death is diluted in life and life disappears due to the impossibility of individuals to be, to create, to exercise solidarity, subjected as they are to states of exception and war machines. The concept of necropolitics means politics with the work of death, orientation and immersion of life for the mass production of human disposability while seeking the public construction of the enemy, a scheme that in turn allows the death of those merely suspected of being so.

Death is administered in the name of a hypothetical supreme civilizational good: “reason makes many die on the altar of civilization, in the defense of democracy and the established order.” In necropolitics it is possible to consider that the death of these many is a “necessary condition” to sustain and nourish a constant and progressive movement of societies towards a civilizational end.

Necropolitics has managed to transform human beings into an interchangeable or disposable commodity as the markets dictate. There is a new way of understanding reality in which life loses all its density and becomes “a mere currency for dark, diffuse and unscrupulous powers.”

Mbembe’s analysis is applicable to the entire so-called third world, but it is extensive to the “fourth world”, that is: to that population belonging to what is known as the first world that, however, lives in a state of absolute precariousness; outcasts who have not been expelled from the welfare society but rather occupy the margins of it; “invisible beings that inhabit non-places (the street, airports, train stations, hospices, underbridges) and are in the hands of necropower.”

Initially inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics defines sovereignty as “the power to give life or death” available to governments. “A diffuse power, and not always exclusively state power, inserts the economy of death into its relations of production and power” and the authority, de facto, arrogates to itself the right to decide on the lives of the governed. If during the colonial era, for example in Africa, violence was a means to achieve profitability, today in necropolitics, violence is an end in itself. There are more and more current political regimes that obey the scheme of “make die and let live”, in a reification of the human being typical of capitalism, where the body is just another commodity, susceptible to being discarded.

From the city of the colonized we moved to the community of the marginalized: “it is like a city hungry for bread, for meat, for shoes, for coal, for light; it is a city crouched, a city on its knees, a city wallowing in the mud “. On top of these ruins an anomalous sovereignty is then installed that appropriates the ability to decide who is important and who is not, “who is devoid of value and can be easily replaced and who is not.” There is a discourse supported by the idea that the State has a divine right over existence.

For her part, from a Mexican perspective, when analyzing this same topic, teacher Helena Chávez Mac Gregor places this current of thought as a fundamental category to criticize recent devastating policies that force us as a society to place ourselves beyond fear, terror and stupor that have caused specific forms of this violence (clandestine graves with mass burials, hanging bodies, massacres, femicides, missing persons, extreme violations of all human rights) that disrupt the meanings of life as we had conceived it during decades and even for centuries.

In a text published in Errancia, Litorales, of the ENEP Iztacala, of the UNAM, the Mexican teacher Chávez Mac Gregor suggests, based on the findings of Achille Mbembe, that societies must propose to do deep and daily work of containment that allow “fissure, break and overflow the logic of death”; devise a form of coexistence that gives rise to other policies; to gain strength and seek resistance through art; oppose direct actions and the taking of spaces in order to be something other than “pure waste, abandonment and death.”

Necropolitics, in his opinion, is a category that allows us to problematize the foundation of contemporary politics from the ways in which, on the one hand, violence and law and, on the other, exception and sovereignty have been intertwined. This debate is present in all modern political philosophy, but what is interesting here is how Mbembe inserts a new interpretation, from historical and social criticism, to uncover a contemporary apologetic discourse that is dedicated to finding in war, in the enemy and in terror “the justification of the exception.”

It is necessary to raise, beyond the stupor and the effect that war and terror generate, a necessary criticism of violence per se. Because not only do they want to impose a neocolonialist vision of the State, but there is a war machine that capitalism imposes and in which it is entrenched in order to maintain the exploitation of resources and control of the populations, Mbembe insists.

In the case of Mexico, specifically, it is evident that the conditions of violence have become dizzyingly complex in recent years, maintains Professor Chávez Mac Gregor in her analysis. There has been a clear failure of the State (corruption, bad administration, impossibility of orderly party transition, nepotism, neoliberalism and increasingly ferocious monopolies), all of this mixed with the proliferation of drug trafficking groups (there have been important groups since the 1980s). , but at the same time the State has been losing power over them and they multiply and branch), which have determined very deplorable conditions, where politics in some areas of the country is increasingly approaching a mere administration of the war for a job of death.

In this context, one cannot underestimate what generates the privileged place that politics assigns to drug trafficking and organized crime, coupled with an official discourse that for years was activated about the “enemy” to justify and legitimize forms of control and repression of the State in all areas of social life.

The war machine has been characterized by having a diffuse and polymorphous organization: “Without a doubt, war and terror, in the midst of which it is difficult to differentiate military and police forces from drug trafficking groups, paramilitaries or even of self-defense groups, are the most fruitful field to legitimize the state of exception, to establish the right to kill. And the scenario where the most vulnerable population is that which does not possess weapons.

There are countries where the populations, as a political category, end up being disaggregated between rebels, child soldiers, victims, refugees, missing persons, “civilians made disabled by the mutilations suffered or simply massacred following the model of ancient sacrifices, while the ‘survivors’, after the horror of the exodus (the migrants and the displaced), are locked up in camps and areas of exception.”

For her part, the Spanish expert Clara Valverde, author of the book From neoliberal necropolitics to radical empathy, concludes that the concept of necropolitics developed by Achille Mbembe “is politics based on the idea that, for power, certain lives have value and others do not”; and it is no longer so much about killing those who do not serve power, “but rather letting them die; creating policies in which they die.”

These beings that are not profitable for power or for implementing its policies are finally excluded: they are those who do not produce or consume, those who somehow, without wanting to and without knowing it in most cases but only by existing, “put into shows the cruelty of neoliberalism and its inequalities.

All lives are objects of calculation for the powerful in neoliberalism. “Those who are profitable and those who consume, those have the right to live under neoliberalism if they follow certain laws and have certain attitudes favorable to the powerful. Or they are seen, at least, as those who do not question neoliberal capitalism and its policies. deadly.”

In an interview with Spain’s Diario.es, Clara Valverde recalled how the former president of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Cristina Lagarde (today president of the European Central Bank), once deplored out loud that people may now live too long and alerted governments to be careful with this threat. “And that seems to be creating problems for the IMF. Instead of being happy that life expectancy in some countries has increased, the IMF is not happy that we are living longer.”

Inextricably linked to necropolitics, there is another phenomenon that Mbembe calls indirect private government and which has become a historical movement of the elites that seeks, ultimately, to abolish the political; “destroy all space and all symbolic and material resources where it is possible to think and imagine what to do with the bond that unites us to others and to the generations that come after us.” That is to say, in practice solidarity, government for all, attention to the marginalized, and opportunities for children and young people are abolished.

For this purpose, logics of isolation and separation between countries, classes and individuals are promoted. At the same time, absurd concentrations of capital are developing in areas that escape all democratic control, with the expatriation of wealth and capital to deregulated tax havens (case of Mexican capital in Banca Andorra, in the Panama Papers, as reliable examples). If military power can also be added to ensure the success of these predatory policies, so much the better, since the protection of private property and militarization become correlative and in the end they become two sides of the same predatory phenomenon.

At least since 1970, capitalism has undergone a transformation that increasingly favors the presence of a private State as a replacement or as a superstructure of governments, where public power (in the classic sense that it does not belong to anyone because it is all) has been progressively hijacked for the benefit of private powers, maintains Achille Mbembe.

“Today it is possible to buy a State without causing a big scandal.” The United States is a good example: laws are bought by injecting capital into the legislative mechanism, positions in Congress are sold. This legitimization of corruption within Western States empties the rule of law of meaning and legitimizes crime within the institutions themselves. We no longer talk about corruption as a disease of the State: “Corruption is the State itself and, in that sense, there is no longer an outside of the law.”

In conclusion, within necropower “the deterioration of the rule of law is such that it ultimately produces exclusively predatory policies that invalidate any distinction between crime and institutions.”