Neoliberalism in the Grey Area: Community Defense, the State, and Organized Crime in Guerrero and Michoacán

• Published date: 01 January 2021
• Date: 01 January 2021
• Author: Antonio Fuentes Díaz,Daniele Fini
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20975019
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X20975019

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 236, Vol. 48 No. 1, January 2021, 84–102

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20975019

© 2020 Latin American Perspectives

84

Neoliberalism in the Grey Area

Community Defense, the State, and Organized Crime in

Guerrero and Michoacán

by

Antonio Fuentes Díaz and Daniele Fini

Translated by

Victoria Furio

The various experiments in community defense of organized groups in Guerrero and

Michoacán, Mexico, to confront the insecurity produced by organized crime are occurring

in a social setting in which legality and illegality are blurred—a grey area— as a function

of regional economic reconfigurations that have fostered violence. The state uneasily toler-

ates the emergence of armed defense groups in the region by attempting to subject them to

the model of citizen participation in security matters. Understanding these groups calls

for supplementing current views about their various forms, which focus on their legality/

illegality, with an emphasis on the relationship between them and the society and its

dominant actors.

Los diversos experimentos en defensa comunitaria de grupos organizados en Guerrero

y Michoacán, México, para enfrentar la inseguridad producida por el crimen organizado

ocurren en un entorno social, un área gris en la que la legalidad y la ilegalidad se difumi-

nan en función de las reconfiguraciones económicas regionales que han fomentado la vio-

lencia. El Estado tolera con incertidumbre el surgimiento de grupos de defensa armados

en la región al tratar de someterlos a un modelo de participación ciudadana en asuntos de

seguridad. Para entender a estos grupos es necesario complementar los puntos de vista

actuales sobre las diversas formas que toman, centrados en su legalidad o ilegalidad, con

un énfasis en la relación entre ellos y la sociedad con sus actores dominantes.

Keywords: Self-defense, Community police, Violence, Insecurity, Coproduction of secu-

rity

Since the war on drug trafficking was implemented in late 2006 by Mexico’s

federal government (Calderón, 2006), there has been an increase in violence

and crime accompanied by the emergence of a context lacking a distinction

Antonio Fuentes Díaz is a postgraduate professor/researcher in sociology in the Instituto de

Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico.

His research areas are violence, biopolitics and subjectivity in Mexico, armed defensive move-

ments and organized crime, community appropriation of security and justice, and necropolitics

and the state of exception. Daniele Fini is a researcher at the Laboratorio de Innovación Económica

y Social of the Universidad Iberoamericana-Puebla researching indigenous movements and

socio-environmental struggles in Mexico and experiments in community defense in Guerrero.

Victoria Furio is a translator and conference interpreter based in Yonkers, NY.

975019LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X20975019Latin American PerspectivesFuentes Díaz and Fini / Community Defense, The State, And Crime

research-article2020

Fuentes Díaz and Fini / COMMUNITY DEFENSE, THE STATE, AND CRIME 85

between legal and illegal and between state and nonstate actors. In light of this

situation, citizen defense groups calling themselves community police and self-

defense groups have arisen in some regions to cope with public safety. In 2014

a press investigation reported the existence of at least 100 defense groups in 17

states around the country (Gil, 2014). The cases presented in this article refer to

defensive experiments in Guerrero and Michoacán, two states in which crime

has increased in recent years (Table 1) and that today contain the majority of the

nation’s community defense groups.

This research is a contribution to an approach that links neoliberal transfor-

mations in Mexico to the increase in insecurity and from this perspective seeks

to explain the emergence of community defense groups and discuss their work-

ings, their relationship to the state, and their involvement with new forms of

governability by nonstate actors. It also calls into question the categorization of

these defense groups that prevails in the international literature and in the

Mexican debate.

In the initial sections we introduce the theoretical concepts related to the

emergence of the security paradigm in the neoliberal era, the defense groups,

and a model of governability in public safety policy. Then, for each of the

regions researched, we describe the context and the operation of the various

community defense groups. Finally, we present our research results: (1)

Although community defense would seem to threaten one of pillars of state

sovereignty (the monopoly on legitimate violence), the state does not usually

respond to it with repression; rather, the relationship established between the

two develops in a special context of neoliberal governability characterized by

tension between community appropriation of public safety and the paradigm

of citizen participation in it. (2) To understand the particularity of the commu-

nity defense groups in Mexico and their relation to the environment of domina-

tion, it is necessary to adopt an approach that goes beyond dichotomous

depictions based on axiological assumptions.

VIOLENCE IN NEOLIBERALISM, THE STATE, AND COMMUNITY

DEFENSE GROUPS

Analyses of the social unrest of the 1980s and 1990s reveal a wave of demon-

strations against the gradual dismantling of social rights and protests against

TABLE 1

Numbers of Crimes in Guerrero and Michoacán, 2005–2006 and 2012–2013

Murder Kidnapping Extortion

Guerrero Michoacán Guerrero Michoacán Guerrero Michoacán

2005 755 427 19 13 31 106

2006 837 661 21 16 36 114

2012 2,310 755 165 135 523 342

2013 2,087 902 207 194 468 261

Source: Prepared by author from SESNSP (2017) data.