Gregor Samsa in Mexico

In our September 19, 2024, issue, Claudio Lomnitz reviews Marcela Turati’s San Fernando, Last Stop, “arguably the most thorough and absorbing piece of investigative journalism yet produced about Mexico’s brutal political economy.” In the spring of 2011 Turati traveled to the northeastern city of San Fernando—where eight months earlier, Lomnitz writes, “the Zetas cartel had wantonly murdered seventy-two Central American migrants”—after authorities discovered almost two hundred corpses from another, even larger massacre there. When local and federal governments neglected to bring the killers to justice or even identify all the victims, Turati resolved to accomplish “what the country’s criminal justice system failed to do: explain how and why hundreds of young men traveling north by bus to the border cities of Reynosa and Matamoros were abducted and murdered.”

Over the course of his four-decade career as an anthropologist of Mexican politics and culture, Lomnitz has returned again and again to the country’s histories of violence, migration, and state crisis. In Death and the Idea of Mexico (2005), he traced a genealogy of “Mexican death totemism” from the Spanish imperial slaughter in the sixteenth century to the present; in The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón (2014), he assembled an admiring group biography of a transnational network of anarchists during the Mexican Revolution who “dared” to imagine a politics beyond “the cult of the state” on the one hand and “old-style liberalism” on the other. His new book, Sovereignty and Extortion: A New State Form in Mexico, which came out in July, examines the contemporary proliferation of violent, illicit economies and the state’s inability to contain them.  

This week Lomnitz and I corresponded over e-mail about the treatment of the dead, the assault on press freedom in Mexico, and what it means for a president to call his own state a “rheumatic elephant.”

Max Nelson: When and how did you start doing sustained research on the violence of contemporary Mexico’s illicit economies?

Claudio Lomnitz: For many years I had a regular column in Mexico City’s daily press, which forced me to read no end of newspapers. Happily, I quit a couple years ago, but I had the daily news swirling around in my head for a long time, which undoubtedly helped lead me into the subject of violence.

In 2014 I wrote a piece for La Jornada on a conflict that was raging in the state of Michoacán between the Knights Templar cartel and a community defense movement. I argued that in Mexico the crisis of the state went hand in hand with a crisis of the community and, especially, of the family. After that I started considering how violence reconfigures the connections between the state, the family, and various communitarian forms.

My first sustained foray into the subject, beyond occasional op-eds or academic papers, took the form of a play—a musical, in fact—that I wrote with my brother Alberto, who is a theater director in Mexico City, and the musician Leonardo Soqui. It was based on my research into a federal police raid on a youth hospice in Zamora, Michoacán. We called it La Gran Familia, and Mexico’s National Theater Company staged it in 2018. Shortly afterward, I was elected to Mexico’s El Colegio Nacional, an institution that was created in 1943 on the model of the College de France, and I decided to use that podium to develop ideas on violence, the crisis of communitarian social forms, and the rise of a new kind of Mexican state.

In your Review essay, you compare that state to Gregor Samsa, “an oversize insect…with too many uncoordinated extremities to count.” That line seemed to echo your argument, in your new book, that the Mexican state has grown “estranged from itself.” What form, in your account, does the estrangement take?

One of the scariest things about Kafka’s story is the thought of waking up one morning with more extremities than you could possibly know what to do with. Those long antennae, for instance, and those extra legs…plus the dreadful premonition that you even have other appendages on your back: some folding wings perhaps? The glorious divine proportion of the human body is no more, and you’re stuck instead in a contraption with too many moving parts.

When I say that the Mexican state is estranged from itself, I mean two different things. On the one hand, the sovereign doesn’t know how to recognize, address, or reform his own bureaucracy. So, for instance, shortly after entering office as president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador characterized Mexico’s public bureaucracy as a “rheumatic elephant.” The image invokes a separation between the president, who presumably is trying to guide the elephant, and the public administration, the rheumatic elephant. And their relationship is a bit like Gregor Samsa’s still human consciousness trying to guide his alien body.

In the face of his inability to reform the intractable “elephant,” President López Obrador relied on the military to take over numerous public projects. He tried to colonize the public administration’s functions directly, relying on his sovereignty as chief executive and commander-in-chief. That is one way the state is estranged from itself: the sovereign is estranged from the apparatus of administration.

The second sense in which one can say that Mexico’s state is estranged from itself is that, like the insect’s flailing body parts, the various “arms” of public administration find it impossible to coordinate their actions. The jurisdiction of each governmental institution is not entirely clear, and so they tend to come into conflict with one another. In the small wars that have been unfolding in Mexico over the past twenty years, sometimes municipal police have engaged in shootouts against the state or federal police, and sometimes the army has tortured police officers.

Your essay begins and ends with the state’s disgraceful treatment of the dead. Reading those passages, I thought of a line from the very start of your Death and the Idea of Mexico: “Mexico’s colonial and dependent heritage has made it difficult to draw a sharp line between the nation and its enemies, between inside and outside, between the dead who must be named and honored and those who are to remain uncounted and anonymous, in unmarked graves.” Looking back at that book, what would you consider some of the central questions you were hoping to answer? How has that work come to bear on your current research into violence and the cartels?

Death and the Idea of Mexico is the foundation for practically all of my thinking on this subject. Historically, Mexico has had acute anxieties concerning the definition of what is internal and what is external to the polity. Of course, this is not a peculiarly Mexican phenomenon. Defeated and humiliated nations often seek to identify internal enemies, as any history of antisemitism in France or Russia can handily illustrate. Even so, Mexico is an unusual case.

As in most Spanish American republics, the hierarchical relationship between the European and native populations was difficult to meld into an image of a national subject. Mexico struggled with this issue for the better part of the nineteenth century; with the Mexican Revolution, though, it finally settled on the idea of itself as a mestizo nation. Even so, the mestizo was still figured as the product of rape, as Octavio Paz keenly discussed in “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” his 1950 essay on the national subject. In short, the ideal or typical national subject of the twentieth century was represented as the offspring of enemies, and so the way that Mexican national history is narrated necessitates reconciling those enemies.

Another reason that in Mexico some corpses are treated like garbage is that, unlike, for example, in France—and perhaps a little more like in prerevolutionary Russia—Mexico’s state never fully became what Michel Foucault called a “pastoral state,” one that manages social reproduction through a network of public institutions. This form of modernity has been—and remains—an ideal that Mexican society, like so many others, still strives to achieve. One implication of the debility or insufficiency of Mexico’s state is that the direct use of violence is a more immediate temptation for those wishing to create order. And the people who become the objects of such violence fill the country’s morgues and unmarked graves.

Finally, there is a more recent cause for the multiplication of unmarked graves and clandestine makeshift crematoria. This is the Mexican state’s recent—and, to a considerable degree, failed—attempt to modernize. The one-party state’s default on its foreign debts in 1982 was met first by neoliberal reform and then with an ambitious but in many ways incomplete project of North Americanization by way of NAFTA. The various offices and departments that were developed to effect that transition proved insufficiently robust to manage Mexico’s vast informal and illicit economies, which are still being violently reorganized by the cartels and various governmental actors.

One of the central questions in Death and the Idea of Mexico is: What is the symbolic work of death in a nation that is built on the reconciliation of enemies? In my current work, that question is still important, though it is supplemented by an analysis of the economics and politics of violence itself.

Your review emphasizes how many obstacles stood in Turati’s way as she tried to piece together why and how so many young men were killed: evidence goes unacknowledged, leads go unfollowed, bodies get quietly moved or buried in mass graves. In your new book you make a broader point to this effect: “In Mexico’s new state, governments have forfeited their power to establish any credible version of the truth when it comes to criminal justice.” What have been some of the implications of that development?

In Mexico there are staggering rates of impunity for crimes committed, which means that crimes get reported to the police at a depressingly low rate. What is the point of reporting if the crime will not be investigated? But the fact is that such impunity coexists with a lot of incarceration, and the country’s prisons are packed.

The connection between crime and punishment is therefore a bit mysterious. Well over a third—almost half—of the people languishing in these overstocked prisons have been put there with no formal charges filed against them. And Mexico’s congress is now widening the government’s discretionary powers to indulge in an Orwellian practice called “preventive imprisonment.” We can now expect to see many more people being taken into custody with no formal charges. The combination of a lack of investigation, impunity, and the capricious administration of punishments proves how anemic the government’s commitment to justice has been.

And because there is no firm relationship between justice and truth, truth has become an uncomfortable and even dangerous pursuit. Mexico’s scores of murdered journalists testify to this fact. Indeed, since 2016, Marcela Turati herself has been under investigation for her research on the San Fernando massacres. As a result of the assault on journalism, the production of truth increasingly relies on rumor, social media, and a variety of small-scale social explosions: a roadblock here, a protest there. But truth—open, public truth—is under attack both by organized crime and by the state itself.

You wrote this piece before Mexico’s elections this past June, in the waning days of the AMLO presidency; now it’s being published a month before Claudia Scheinbaum takes power as Mexico’s new president. What do you make of her prospects? How might, or mightn’t, her approach to violence and the informal economy differ from AMLO’s?

My track record as an oracle is terrible. I sometimes fail even at predicting the past. But here goes: Mexico’s democratic transition creaked and eventually croaked under the weight of the violence that has wracked the country since the late 1990s and early 2000s. You can’t uphold a democracy when you have literally tens of thousands of unsolved and legally unprocessed assassinations every year. This crisis has little to do with “corruption,” which is a symptom rather than a cause, and much to do with shoddy and dramatically insufficient institutional infrastructure.

And yet Mexico still has not faced up to the scale of the problem. It has been easier for governments and the political class to use crime for various political purposes—for politicians, crime generally pays—than to attempt the serious economic and institutional reforms that might phase out Mexico’s robust illicit economies and bring peace. President Sheinbaum is a capable public servant, and I wish her the best, but she has yet to unveil a plan that could lead Mexico out of its deep humanitarian crisis.