Communal Responses to Structural Violence and Dispossession in Cherán, Mexico

• Date: 01 January 2021
• Published date: 01 January 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20975004
• Author: Giovanna Gasparello
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X20975004

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 236, Vol. 48 No. 1, January 2021, 42–62

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20975004

© 2020 Latin American Perspectives

42

Communal Responses to Structural Violence and

Dispossession in Cherán, Mexico

by

Giovanna Gasparello

Translated by

Mariana Ortega-Breña

Mexico is currently subject to generalized violence due to conflicts between drug car-

tels, the state, and resource-extraction companies jostling for territorial and economic

control. In 2011 and in this context, the inhabitants of the indigenous municipality of

Cherán confronted the criminal organization responsible for kidnappings, extortion, and

illegal logging in their communal territory. Study of this conflict and the communal

responses generated in the peace process reveals that the violence was founded on social

inequality and was both cause and effect of the indigenous population’s material and cul-

tural dispossession. The peace formation process involved the valorization of a collective

and territorially rooted identity, the strengthening of security and justice practices based

on the authority of assemblies, and an incipient interest in the construction of economic

alternatives for the local population.

Actualmente, México vive una situación de violencia generalizada debido a los

conflictos entre los cárteles de droga, el Estado y las empresas de extracción de recur-

sos que luchan por el control territorial y económico. En 2011 y en este contexto, los

habitantes del municipio indígena de Cherán se enfrentaron a una organización

criminal responsable de secuestros, extorsiones y tala ilegal en su territorio comunal.

El estudio de este conflicto y las respuestas comunitarias generadas en el proceso de

paz revela que la violencia se fundó sobre la desigualdad social y fue tanto causa como

efecto del despojo material y cultural de la población indígena. El proceso de paz

implicó la valorización de una identidad colectiva y territorialmente arraigada, el

fortalecimiento de las prácticas de seguridad y justicia basadas en la autoridad de las

asambleas, y un interés incipiente en la construcción de alternativas económicas para

la población local.

Keywords: Conflict, Criminal logging, Peace formation, Cherán, Communal govern-

ment

Giovanna Gasparello is an Italian anthropologist who has lived in Mexico since 2003 pursuing

ethnographic research in the indigenous regions of Chiapas, Guerrero, and Michoacán. She has a

Ph.D. in anthropological sciences from the Autonomous Metropolitan University and is a senior

researcher in the Department of Ethnology and Social Anthropology of the National Institute of

Anthropology and History and a member of the Center for Studies on Human Rights at the

Ca’Foscari University of Venice. This article is the product of the project “PEACEAUTONOMY,

Indigenous Autonomy in Mexico: Building Peace in Contexts of Violence” (2016–2017) developed

as part of postdoctoral work at the Center for Anthropological Studies of the College of Michoacán

and was funded by the Mexican government’s Excellence Scholarship for Foreigners. Mariana

Ortega-Breña is a freelance translator based in Mexico City.

975004LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X20975004Latin American PerspectivesGasparello / Communal Responses to Violence In Mexico

research-article2020

Gasparello / COMMUNAL RESPONSES TO VIOLENCE IN MEXICO 43

April 15, 2011, is a milestone in the recent history of Cherán, a Purépecha

indigenous municipality in the state of Michoacán in western Mexico. On that

day the inhabitants detained several members of the criminal organization

responsible for carrying out kidnappings, extortion, and criminal logging in

their communal territory. A short time later they formed their own communal

police and disowned their municipal president. This was the beginning of a

long process of reappropriation of local power and the reconstruction of the

social fabric that after nearly a decade is yielding important results. The system

of self-government, communal policing, and territorial protection implemented

by the people of Cherán has grown stronger, and there is an incipient thrust to

the local economy. These practices of self-organization have managed to reduce

the multiple forms of violence in the territory.

Cherán’s results are outstanding in the Mexican context, where conflict

among criminal, institutional, and business actors seeking control of territory,

resources, and legal and illegal sectors of the economy has led to a generalized

state of violence that since 2006 (when the Felipe Calderón government declared

“war” on organized crime) has claimed the lives of more than 250,000 people

(INEGI, 2017; SE-SNSP, 2018). On the national level, the internally displaced

number 345,000 (IDMC, 2018), while the number of officially recognized miss-

ing persons is 37,435 (RNPED, 2018). Despite their magnitude, these official

figures are not very representative: more than 93 percent of crimes in Mexico

go unreported or are never investigated (INEGI, 2018). This is also often the

case with violent deaths, which are either not reported as such by the victims’

relatives out of fear or are not registered and investigated because of the ram-

pant corruption and inefficiency of the police and ministerial bodies.

Most intentional homicides perpetrated in Mexico are related to this unac-

knowledged “war”: they occur in confrontations between cartels and between

cartels and the army, the navy, or the police or take the form of executions and

forced disappearances perpetrated by both “law enforcement” and criminal

groups, which often collude in illegal trafficking. That said, the increase in the

homicide rate is only one of the many manifestations of violence that affect

Mexican society: gender, domestic, environmental, racial, and generational,

among others. Some of these represent a “historical accumulation” (Bourgois,

2015), as do the patriarchal bias of social relations and the fierce institutional

racism; in any case, they have become more acute with the increasing neoliber-

alism of policy and the economy, in which the state is losing its legitimacy and

its regulatory power over territories and resources.

The responses of Mexican society to this reality include the creation of vic-

tims’ organizations looking for disappeared relatives in clandestine mass

graves and the financing of businesspeople’s self-defense groups, flows of dis-

placed migrants, and the formation of popular organizations that seek to resist

violence and generate social alternatives based on specific cultures and con-

texts. This paper undertakes a multidimensional analysis of the conflict in

Cherán and the closely tied and varied forms of violence that compose it (crim-

inal violence, dispossession of common goods, and political corruption). I

describe the main community responses to violence involved in the peace for-

mation process: community participation, reconstruction of territory, and com-

munal security. Finally, I analyze the actions directed toward a difficult