At the mercy of the mob: lynching in Mexico

by El Profe for Borderland Beat

                   

Lynchings in Mexico have been increasing consistently over the past twenty years—with a spike in the last six months.

The definition of lynching is “to put to death by mob action without legal approval or permission.” In the context of mob violence in Mexico, lynching can be seen as a crude attempt at moral justice, due to lack of authority present in order to properly prosecute a criminal.



In this sense, it is not a "crime of passion" but rather an attempt to enact order in a community in disarray. 

Lynching or “justice by one’s own hand’’ reflects a society that enables a de-facto authority organized by criminal groups who enforce through violence. Instead of a just application of rule of law, the authority of both criminal groups and mobs is paradoxically exerted through lawless violence.

Though there are no official figures specific to lynching, a February 2018 report conducted by the Belisario Domínguez Insitute states that since 1992 there have been 366 recorded lynchings throughout Mexico, at least 142 of them occurring since the beginning of 2017. They occur mostly in central Mexico: Puebla and the State of Mexico. In the past six months there have been at least 20 lynchings or attempts to lynch in the state of Puebla alone.

It is important to note that lynchings are not exclusive to rural or urban areas, and the communities where they do occur have no "tradition’’ of mob violence or vigilante justice. This indicates that this rate of lynchings are a somewhat newly organized and manifested action.


The sociologist Raúl Rodríguez Guillén, UAM Azcapotzalco, looks at communal violence as a violence of "moral outrage." He states that “it is a desire to restore the principles of harmony, of peaceful coexistence...by groups of individuals aggrieved by the negligence of judges and the Public Ministry, as well as the abuse of local, state and federal police authorities."

Throughout towns and urban neighborhoods, signs are displayed as a warning to those who commit crimes. These signs are placed there by the community residents themselves, not the police. They warn of beatings and lynchings of ''rateros": declarations from a neighborhood watch that exerts a moral group violence, an execution of a communal desire for justice within a society where the authorities do not adequately punish crime.


This sentiment is evident in a recent account occurring on March 17th in San Miguel Canoa, Puebla. Residents decided to “take matters into their own hands” by dousing a man with gasoline and setting him on fire for theft, because police “always set him free despite committing serious crimes for which he is never charged."

According to René Jiménez Ornelas, member of the Institute of Social Investigations of UNAM, "people involved do [not report crimes] because they take justice into their own hands. The authorities, for their part, prefer to leave it like this, in secret, in such a way that not only are cases not recorded, but that they are not reported."


It is this complicity between authorities and residents that allow lynchings to continue and increase.


An article from The New York Times recounts an incident of lynching in Ajalpan, Puebla in which two pollsters were mistaken for someone who had been kidnapping minors. The case is an example of how extreme the distrust is between authorities and residents.

The police attempted to clear the men's names with witness testimony from a girl who had almost been kidnapped, but the mob had already formed. In this instance, the police were present, but for the people of the Ajalpan their presence was meaningless. It was commonly understood that the two men might be arrested, but if so, freed very quickly.



Guillén states, “We believe that the main cause of lynchings is the crisis of authority, expressed by the increase in crime without punishment or with insufficient punishment, or, as a result of corruption or negligence."

This is a large reason for the risings incidents of lynching. There are no proper authorities to prosecute criminals. And if there are, they are severely distrusted because they are not seen as a legitimate authority in many regions. Guillén says, “when lynching an offender, people lynch symbolically to authority."

Lynching occurs when people act out their very frustration with the authorities by violent means, metaphorically declaring that they are not needed nor wanted and, possibly even more strongly, that residents are capable of the very same violence as those who claim authority.

90% of crimes go unpunished in Mexico. An event like lynching reflects this and takes on a sense of a total collapse of all societal regulation—epitomizing a sort of feedback loop of impunity.


The police will not arrest those who carried out the lynching because in order to do so they would have to acknowledge the reason for the lynching to have occurred in the first place: the fact that there were no arrests to begin with, or that they are in fact severely distrusted and considered useless.



In most parts of Mexico, lynching is a crime that can be punished by 40 to 50 years in prison. It can also be interpreted as “localized social violence groups of organized settlers exerting violence against situations or conditions that put at risk the principles of peaceful coexistence."

Lynching, however, is in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as "presumption of innocence” of the suspected criminal is not respected.


In her analysis of lynch mob violence, Elisa Godinez concludes that lynchings occur:


 …in the peripheries, both territorial and symbolically, which in addition to being for a long time subjected to intense social, economic and cultural transformations...live in a permanent situation of joining the legal and the illegal, the formal and the informal, and where there are undeniable conflicts in the management of violence and justice and the mechanisms of mediation have been profoundly changed that contain, negotiate or resolve discontent. It is in this context of permanently aggrieved communities that violence erupts.


The environment in which these events occur is a no man’s land between law and lawlessness. This can be seen when organized crime groups enact their "authority" over a community even though said authority is in itself outside the law. One does not know who to trust or even who the correct authority to deal with is. 


Regions of Mexico are victim to the rising power of cartels exerting their influence over communities in an official and unofficial capacity. They infiltrate entire police agencies up to the federal government itself, extort businesses, and act as the de-facto authority of entire communities and states. Some government agencies are implicated in cases of torture and extrajudicial executions throughout the country and direct collusion with police cartels.

It is this lack of a delineation between the two that creates ambiguity and lawlessness, enabling mob violence to occur and this violence is a reflection of the lack of proper authority to arrest criminals. Where there is a lack of consistent authority, and where one doesn’t even know who the proper authority is, one can only rely on one’s self and community to enact justice.

In his analysis of CJNG's video of the recently abducted (and then executed) SEIDO agents in Nayarit, Jesús Pérez Caballero from the Colegio de la Frontera Norte states that "on the one hand, [the cartel] says they could always have done wrong, and if they stopped themselves from doing wrong, it was in order to follow rules that the uniformed men have broken: [As to say]: 'We are clear that we were always respected as authorities because it was the cartels' decision, not because they could not do us harm.'"

It is in this analysis that a much larger crisis of authority occurs. The cartels seem to exert their authority whenever they please and only exercise constraint if the official authorities follow ''the rules" the cartels establish. Once these rules are broken, the cartels exercise their power such as the execution of the agents. This can be viewed as a recreation of order from the perspective of the cartel. A rule was broken and now they must ''fix it."

Propaganda-like videos as well as narcomantas in towns and cities serve the purpose of exerting control and authority through fear and violence; to reclaim a sense of order of the territory. It is this dubiousness of authority, this ''no man's land'' that creates the conditions for mob violence.

In essence, the brutal ''justice'' carried out by the CJNG and other horrific violent acts can be seen as the same type of mob justice that occurs in lynch mobs: to exert control and authority within a town or region of the country, a contradictory attempt to piece together a chaotic society lacking authority through violence.

Sources:

Rodríguez Guillén, R. (2012):“Crisis de autoridad y violencia social: los linchamientos en
México” Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Unidad Iztapalapa Distrito Federal, México. Retrieved from http://www.scielo.org.mx/pdf/polis/v8n2/v8n2a3.pdf

Aguirre Quezada, Juan Pablo. Instituto Belisario Domínguez (2018). Linchamientos en México. Cuaderno de Investigación Núm. 39. Dirección General de Análisis Legislativo. retrieved from: Retrieved from http://bibliodigitalibd.senado.gob.mx/bitstream/handle/123456789/3856/CI_39.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Sáinz, Luis Carlos "Los mensajes del narco" Proceso 26 February 2018
http://zetatijuana.com/2018/02/los-mensajes-del-narco/

García, Emelda. "Mexico: Tierra de linchamientos" Reporte Indigo 14 March 2018
https://www.reporteindigo.com/reporte/linchamientos-en-mexico/

Godínez, Elisa. "Los linchamientos en México: más...escándalo" Horizontal 26 October 2015
https://horizontal.mx/los-linchamientos-en-mexico-mas-alla-del-escandalo/

Ávila Pérez, Edgar. "Linchan y queman a hombre..." El Universal 3 March 2018
http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/estados/linchan-y-queman-hombre-en-san-miguel-canoa-puebla

Flores, Claudia. "Linchamiento en México, crimen al alza" El Universal 10 February 2018
http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/nacion/seguridad/linchamiento-en-mexico-crimen-al-alza

Ahmed, Azam. "As Frustrations With...So Do Lynchings" NY Times 23 January 2016
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/world/americas/as-frustrations-with-mexicos-government-rise-so-do-lynchings.html