El sentido de la omisión: sobre la impunidad en el México contemporáneo

• In Event: ¿Radical Politics and/or Rule of Law in Mexico?

Abstract

This essay grapples with the deeper significance of Mexico’s crisis of impunity, that is, the inability of the country’s judicial system to bring criminals to justice. Where some critics propose that Mexican political thinkers cannot escape the rule of law as their framework, I argue that the country’s business and political elites operate under no such constraint. Rather than seeing impunity as an aberration or a defect in the system, it should be seen as integral to the normal order of things. This paper will argue that massive violence has become “acceptable” in contemporary Mexico, and that the government sees this as a predictable by-product of the high-stakes global trade in drugs that flows through the country and that ultimately serves the interests of the country’s political and business class. Whether through the rhetorical operations of “active omission,” whereby the government simply keeps silent about the human cost to its policies, or the tacit condoning of violence against journalists and other watchdogs, or the refusal to investigate white-collar crime and corruption, the state has succeeded in normalizing the violence and indeed shaping it to its own ends. Impunity, in other words, is nothing other than the government’s strategy for fostering the growth of business, a strategy that operates by a moral discourse that differentiates those Mexicans who should be punished by the law, such as petty criminals, women, and indigenous people, and those who, such as political and financial elites, should not.

Author

• Yuri Herrera-Gutierrez, Tulane University