Rule of lore

Mexico’s state has abandoned public security to the myth of a moral crisis. Review: Sovereignty and Extortion, Claudio Lomnitz, by Gavin O'Toole

Sovereignty and Extortion: A New State Form in Mexico, Claudio Lomnitz, 2024, Duke University Press

What if the lawless violence that we assume lies at the root of Mexico’s many problems is not a symptom of a “failed” state, but in fact the reflection of an entirely new kind of state?

This bleak thought overshadows every page of Claudio Lomnitz’s Sovereignty and Extortion, a book that it can confidently be said anyone who cares about the country should read.

The esteemed anthropologist steps outside the confines of his discipline to present a series of essays—originally delivered in 2021 as a cycle of lectures at El Colegio Nacional—in which he challenges assumptions about statehood and sovereignty with striking originality.

Lomnitz’s point of departure for the study of violence—a “legitimate” monopoly over which, in classic Weberian terms, is the very definition of statehood—is the nebulous “war on drugs” and how this is attributed in so much contemporary thought to a damaged “social fabric”.

The violence has persisted in Mexico both openly and informally since 2006, despite the current administration’s insistence to the contrary, because, the author suggests, it is neither a war in which there is victor or vanquished, and has no end because of the multiple roles drugs play in society.

What this means is that the “war on drugs” and other manifestations of violence—military and police abuse, femicide, disappearances—play another role as Mexico’s new state struggles to define itself. That role is ritual, hence the ubiquitous references to moral collapse.  Drug cartels have become a convenient scapegoat for an ineffective state.

Put simply, this is not a war on crime that Mexico’s state can one day win—challenging what Lomnitz calls the two “master narratives” that dominate public debate and presume the emergence of a future state that has overcome the country’s fundamental problems: the story of the “democratic transition; and Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s so-called Fourth Transformation, painted as the culmination of a long struggle for sovereignty.

Both these narratives suggest that the Mexican state is capable of administering justice within the rule of law; that it is capable of regaining the monopoly of the legitimate use of force; and that the violence which plagues the country is, therefore, merely an interlude.

They confirm the easy reflex of political scientists that, as Mexico’s contemporary problems began with neoliberal reform in the 1980s and 1990s, so its slow, and painful transition will eventually resolve them.

The reforms were meant to have seeded a new state ruling according to ambitious criteria of legality and transparency in a rule-governed economic space—“the island of rights”.

This would serve the interests of capital and act as a “beachhead” for the development of the rule of law. The transnational formal economy would be the rock on which lawfulness would be built.

Yet far from the emergence of a butterfly from a chrysalis, suggests Lomnitz, policy errors, lack of foresight and Mexico’s own limitations sabotaged this dream. If it is characterised by anything at all, the new state has abandoned its role as a guarantor of public security.

Nafta did not enrich the country but only sections and sectors of it, while supercharging the informal economy beyond the state’s reach, and the massive investment in policing was something that state simply could not afford. By 2006, when Felipe Calderón launched his militarised assault on the cartels, the new state that we see today was all but consolidated.  

Lomnitz writes: “The so-called war on drugs allows Mexican society to set aside the many causes of its many ills … More than a war, Mexico’s current violence is a way of life, and it has as its counterpart a new state that still doesn’t know what to call itself or how to tell the story of its own origin.”

To explore this, and tracing the evolution of the drug war and its pathologies, Lomnitz explores the notions of moral collapse—the sense that cultural failings lie at the root of violence—and sovereignty as it relates to the Mexican state.

While the state has shed some of its “classical” attributes in the past few decades—hence the  belief that violence reflects a state on the way to becoming “failed”—this has gone hand in hand with the desire to “recover” sovereignty, AMLO’s signature tune.    

Far from having lost sovereignty, argues Lomnitz, the Mexican state enjoys far too much of it: “Indeed, today’s state is marked by an excess of sovereignty and a deficit of administrative capacity. This, in a nutshell, is the nature of Mexico’s new state.”

Lomnitz traces how, as insecurity has deepened, the state has become “estranged” from its notional arm of legitimate force, the police, turning instead to military deployment as the drug economy destabilised a model of policing that had prevailed for much of the twentieth century.

Sub-contracting filled the void, fuelling criminal violence against an economic backdrop in which the massive opportunities offered by the globalisation of trafficking have been irresistible to formal security agencies.

The outcome is the evolution of complex regional dynamics controlling the drug trade in Mexico and the US stretching from California through Sinaloa to Honduras and thence Colombia.

In these circumstances, and given the failure of Nafta, far from AMLO engineering a “Fourth Transformation”— alluding to a process of statebuilding comparable in significance to Mexico’s independence movement or the 1910 Revolution—he has merely politicised the informal economy against the formal actors celebrated by neoliberalism.

Lomnitz writes: “The Mexican state is now committed to re-politicizing the economy, against the ideal of the rule of law and self-regulating markets, in order to increase the political clout of the informal and illicit economies, as well as of a few allies among national entrepreneurs in the formal sector.”

To the extent that the project of mooring the rule of law in international regulations has failed, he suggests, Mexico’s institutional order has become structurally unstable and the state has embraced the “God of Contingency” as its ideological lodestar.  

The new zeitgeist represents a strategy of governance that appeals alternatively to principles central to the informal economy—trust and intimacy, familial loyalty—or to a rational-bureaucratic vision appealing to rank, chains of command, discipline and principles of legal equality, a constant oscillation between appeals to family and to rule of law.

This explains why the state legitimises itself daily by appealing to contingency whereby, when disaster strikes, it is the result of either bad luck or moral failure.

Lomnitz writes: “The government complains of a moral crisis in society, of a torn social fabric, when what is really happening is that the state has relinquished several of its classic functions … The idea that Mexico’s problems stem from a moral crisis—from a torn social fabric—is thus a key element of the ideology of a new state that has ceded key administrative responsibilities to the God of Contingency.”

It is a good time for Lomnitz’s essays to be published—judicial reform is likely to become the defining feature of Claudia Sheinbaum’s presidency and Morena’s plans are generating much hot air within the traditional enemy of Mexican sovereignty, the US.

The anthropologist makes a sagacious and eloquent contribution to questions about whither this troubled country is heading—while providing evidence of the creative power of anthropology to contemplate contemporary sociopolitical issues.