The Memory of 1968 in the Current Legitimacy Crisis of the Mexican State

• In Event: 4124 - State Repression, Human Rights and Terror

Abstract

On the basis of qualitative and quantitative evidence, I argue that the human rights violations that have occurred during the recent war on drug cartels are not comparable in scale, strategy or motive to those committed during the dirty war of the 1970s-1980s. Yet despite significant differences in political contexts, human rights activists from the 1970s draw on the collective memory of the dirty war to make sense of the humanitarian crisis of the last ten years (2006-2017). Their memory work is effective because the failure of transitional justice left dirty war crimes unpunished. Since the courts cleared President Luis Echeverría of the genocide charge against him for his role in the massacre of students in 1968, many human rights activists have sought to prosecute the authoritarianism of his former ruling party (the PRI) in public opinion. The very impunity of the PRI government for its role in politically motivated repression during the pre-democracy period makes plausible the depiction of what is currently a weak central state as a predatory leviathan. I argue that this view conflates local level police corruption—-itself a hallmark of state weakness and police decentralization—with the more centralized presidential authoritarianism of the past.

Author

• Dolores Trevizo, Occidental College