Making Things Stick: Surveillance Technologies and Mexico's War on Crime

• In Event: The Changing Character of Global Violence and Innovative Justice Strategies

Abstract

This paper presents main points from a newly published book examining the Mexican government's use of surveillance technologies to combat crime. Blending law & society, science & technology, and surveillance literatures, the paper shares the histories of three programs launched during the Calderón Administration (2006-2012)—a mobile telephone registry, a national identity card, and an electronic vehicle registration program. More than tools to monitor people, the programs are imagined by authorities as a way to reform a national state weakened by organized crime and economic, political, and cultural liberalization. By providing the state a hold upon the materiality of social life (cellular phones, automobiles, and human bodies) and a way to merge the multiple state agencies responsible for its administration, these programs evidence an emergent form of governance—prohesion—built upon the functional power of surveillance technologies. Through interviews and observations of the programs in action, this study calls attention to the emergent nature of state formation by describing the diverse challenges facing administrators and the improvisational tactics they resort to when implementing the programs. Doing this, it presents surveillance technologies as a sign of state weakness rather than strength, and as an opportunity for civic engagement rather than retreat.

Author

• Keith Guzik, University of Colorado Denver